WASHINGTON (AFP) -- Master investigative reporter Jack Anderson was in the FBI's crosshairs most of his life, and six months after his death his family is fighting the agency's bid to get his personal papers.

"We would oppose the efforts of the government to review dad's papers, even to the point of going to prison," the late reporter's son Kevin Anderson told a recent U.S. Senate committee.

Anderson said the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to "whitewash the record of history," which his father set straight several times.

A precocious writer who began working for the Deseret News, in Salt Lake City, Utah, when just 12, Anderson blew the lid off the story of the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement with the mafia in an attempt to poison Cuba's Fidel Castro in 1960.

Co-author of the "Washington merry-go-round," a widely-read scandal column about Washington insiders, Jack Anderson was on a blacklist kept by president Richard Nixon.

He revealed the U.S.-Pakistani alignment during Bangladesh's 1972 war of independence, and several corruption scandals in Congress. Six weeks after his death in December, said Kevin Anderson, the FBI telephoned his 79-year-old widow, Olivia, saying they wanted to consult her husband's documents for classified information "that would help the government with a criminal investigation involving a Middle Eastern country."

The FBI later said Anderson's records were needed for an espionage investigation involving the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israeli lobby group.

A federal agent visited the widow, who, according to police, agreed to an FBI search of her husband's papers, stored in some 200 cardboard boxes for 20 years after Parkinsons disease stopped him working, the son told the committee.

The boxes a year ago had been turned over to the custody of George Washington University with the aim of eventually making them available to the public.

Alerted by his mother, Kevin Anderson, a lawyer and executor of his father's estate, learned that the FBI intended to "remove any and all material they suspected might be 'classified' and either permanently retain them or return them in some redacted or edited form.

"This would destroy the historic, political and cultural value of Dad's papers," Kevin Anderson told lawmakers.

"Dad often said that documents would come across his desk classified as a 'national security' secrets, but which really involved what he called 'political security' secrets.

"They showed the misdeeds and manipulations of government employees who had abused the public trust and then tried to sweep the evidence under the secrecy stamp. Such information should not be hidden from the people," he stressed.

A Department of Justice official at the hearing refused to comment on the accusations and was criticized by lawmakers for not doing so.

University researcher Mark Feldstein, who consults the Anderson archives for his upcoming biography of the reporter, questioned the FBI's motives. "After I thought about it, I could recall seeing only one set of papers that might once have been classified: The FBI's own documents on Jack Anderson. But our version of those papers was heavily censored, unlike the original FBI file already in their own office."