Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI and CIA for the records of Cynthia Lennon, who died in April after a short battle with cancer, yielded exactly two pages of results, yet still somehow spoke volumes.
The FBI, which hosted voluminous files on John, replied that it had nothing on Cynthia, and refused to confirm (or deny) if she was on any sort of watch list before she died.
On the other hand, a response from the CIA said the agency “can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records,” citing an exemption that allows them to withhold anything that would otherwise expose “intelligence sources and methods information.”
It seemed odd that Cynthia Lennon would be tied to any national security matters, so The DCNF reached out to a ranking Department of Defense official who works in special operations.
“The range of options for what that could mean are that she was doing intelligence collection or worked for the CIA; she was the subject of collection; or she could have been present at events that were being collected on in which her name is mentioned,” he said.
“Probably due to her celebrity status, she would have been around senior people, and the fact that we were doing collection either on her or networks she knew is probably still highly sensitive. So she’s either an innocent bystander, a Commie, or a spook — but she gets one of those titles.”
Read the agencies’ full responses here:
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