A Special Relationship

For a part-time, night-shift copy editor who rarely did any reporting, Jacque Srouji, 31, had remarkably good sources at the FBI. Hardly had she rejoined the Nashville Tennessean last fall after five years as a housewife and freelance writer when she was able to give its editors late-night details about a statewide FBI strike against illegal betting parlors and tip them off about a raid on a local business suspected of fraud.

Last week the secret of Srouji's success was out--and so was Srouji. For more than a decade she had been acting as an FBI informer, receiving bureau leaks in return for information on black activists, student radicals, dissident groups and, possibly, her professional colleagues. Srouji thus became the first journalist to be identified as an FBI informant since the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently disclosed that the bureau has for years been using reporters and editors in various collaborative roles. And she became the first journalist to be fired for such activity when Tennessean Publisher John Seigenthaler summarily dismissed her.

Srouji's ties to the FBI might have gone undetected if she had not been involved in another sensitive matter: the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood (TIME, Jan. 20, 1975). An Oklahoma plutonium worker active in her union, Silkwood was killed in a 1974 auto accident while on the way to tell a reporter about alleged health and nuclear safety violations in the plant where she worked. Just before returning to the Tennessean, Srouji finished writing Critical Mass, a paean to the nuclear industry to be released this summer by Aurora Publishers Inc., a small Nashville concern. The book casts Silkwood in an unflattering light, raising questions about drug usage and her sex habits. Called last month to testify before a House subcommittee investigating nuclear safeguards, Srouji disclosed that the FBI had shown her nearly 1,000 pages of bureau documents on the Silkwood case for use in her book. When Agent Lawrence J. Olson Sr., 43, was called before the sub-committee staff, he disclosed the FBI had a "special relationship" with Srouji.

Free Ride. That relationship apparently began in 1964, when Srouji joined the Nashville Banner as a reporter soon after graduating from high school. In 1971 Srouji told a journalist neighbor that the late James Stahlman, president and publisher of the Banner, had encouraged her to turn over her notes on civil rights demonstrations to the FBI. Her contact was Agent Olson, with whom she developed a close personal relationship. Though it is believed she was never paid for being an informant, she has said the FBI underwrote a 1964 trip to Michigan, where she spied on a meeting of New Left activists.

Srouji joined the Tennessean in 1969 as a copy editor but left a year later because her husband, S.H. Srouji, a state highway engineer, did not like her working at night. A year and a half ago, she sold two articles about the nuclear safety controversy to Nashville! magazine. It was when Aurora asked her to write a book on the subject that she reestablished her contact with Olson, now assigned to the FBI's Oklahoma City office, where he helped conduct the bureau's Silkwood investigation. Over a two-month period, Srouji testified, she was allowed to photocopy bureau summaries of the inquiry. Some months before Srouji rejoined the Tennessean last fall, she began passing information to the FBI. This included details of interviews for her book that she conducted at the Soviet embassy with a Russian nuclear physicist. One chapter title: "My Friend, the Russian."

After Srouji's cover was blown last month by her own congressional testimony, Publisher Seigenthaler questioned her and learned that the FBI recently had asked her about the political views of two Tennessean staff members: Columnist Dolph Honicker, an outspoken critic of nuclear power; and Jerry Hornsby, a copy editor who was until recently a member of the Socialist Party, U.S.A. Srouji insisted that she had defended the pair, but Seigenthaler dismissed her on the spot. "The moment it appears that the FBI is using any member of this staff as a conduit to check on any other member, then I have to cut off that conduit," he said.

By week's end it was beginning to look like Srouji might have been more than a conduit--even an agent provocateur. Hornsby recalled she was conspicuously active in left-wing politics, and recently delivered a bitter diatribe at a public meeting against police surveillance of left-wingers. Honicker said that this spring she suggested that the two of them tear down a Gerald Ford photograph in the Nashville Federal Office Building as a protest act. They went to do it at midnight and found the building, customarily locked at 5:30 p.m., wide-open. Suddenly suspicious, Honicker said he quickly departed.

What motivated Srouji to become an FBI spy? "Back in the 1960s the FBI had a better image," suggests Dominic de Loranzo, publisher of her book. "You take an 18-year-old reporter and tell her you're going to hook her up with the FBI --is she going to say no?" And colleagues at the Tennessean suspect that Srouji was trying to impress her editors with her FBI sources last fall in order to be made a full-time reporter. The one person who knows the answers was not around to offer them. Two days after she was fired, Jacque Srouji bundled up two of her three children and drove off: destination unknown.

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