Byrd got FBI files on civil rights groups

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Sen. Robert C. Byrd obtained secret FBI documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the CIA and triggered an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released FBI records.

Byrd, who died in June 2010 at age 92, had sought the FBI intelligence hoping to confirm his suspicions that communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show.

Decades before he became history's longest-serving member of Congress, the West Virginia Democrat had stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan while a young man in the 1940s, which the FBI cited while weighing his requests for classified information, the records show.

"He eventually had a change of heart about a lot of that stuff," said Ray Smock, a former historian for Congress who now oversees Byrd's archives. Smock said Byrd's hard line belief in law and order played a role in his view of the civil rights movement. Byrd also repeatedly called his time with the violent hate group a serious mistake, Smock noted.

The FBI released more than 750 pages from its files -- many of them with words, sentences or entire paragraphs redacted -- in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press. The records date to the mid-1950s, when Byrd served in the House. He was elected to the first of his record nine terms in the Senate in 1958.

The documents that reveal the September 1966 leak also describe how it sparked outrage among top FBI officials and prompted an internal CIA probe that singled out two agency employees as the culprits.

The FBI had provided Byrd only with publicly available information about three unidentified individuals involved in civil rights matters when he revealed the leaked documents to an FBI agent during a September 1966 meeting, a memo to FBI Deputy Director C.D. DeLoach said.

"Why can't a United States senator, the best friend the FBI has in the Senate, get information directly from the FBI which he has already received from a third party?" Byrd was quoted as saying.