The agency's squirrelly approach to Anderson's widow and children to gain access to his archive and to strip it of any classified materials - though likely decades old - is as disturbing as it is unprecedented.

But even more troubling is the broader context of the FBI's fishing expedition. The Bush administration is waging a campaign of intimidation and possible prosecution of government leakers of classified information and the reporters who use the material in news stories. Anderson, who died in December, spent 40 years reporting such leaks, including details of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, and U.S. efforts in the 1960s to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Anderson's family says FBI agents told them they were seeking evidence in the case of two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of receiving classified information, but would confiscate any classified materials they ran across. The family, to its credit, refused access.

The Bush administration has used national security as a murky catch-all for classifying more documents than any previous administration. Its zealous effort to stamp out leaks, except those orchestrated by the White House, follows exposure of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency and of CIA-run secret jails abroad, two deplorable and possibly illegal ventures.

In the same vein, the National Archives and Records Administration announced Monday it would no longer participate in a secret government program in which the CIA and other agencies gathered up and reclassified more than 55,000 pages of documents, most of them dating from the 1940s and '50s.

We believe government secrecy is essential to our national security. But the Bush administration has made too free use of the secrecy stamp and, in general, mocked the ideal of open government.

The FBI's demand to comb the files of a celebrated columnist of years gone by is just such a mockery, the sort of government excess that Jack Anderson spent his life exposing.