Six months after Dean wrote that memo, US senator Strom Thurmond answers with one of his own. On February 4, 1972, in his capacity as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Thurmond—a Nixon loyalist who represents South Carolina, one of the Bible Belt states caught up in the August 1966 “Beatles bonfires” controversy—forwards to Attorney General John Mitchell a report he’s overseen for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

“This appears to me to be an important matter, and I think it would be well for it to be considered at the highest level,” the senator writes. “As I can see, many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action can be taken in time.”

The report’s chief finding: that John Lennon qualifies as one of said political enemies and that his association with “New Left leaders” links him to these “strong advocates of the program to ‘dump Nixon.’”

And the “political machinery” available to “screw” him? “If Lennon’s visa is terminated, it would be a strategy counter-measure,” Thurmond recommends.

John and Yoko’s original six-month visas are set to expire on February 29, 1972. They are granted a two-week extension, but Yoko hasn’t been able to reunite with her daughter. Even though on March 3 yet another court determines that Yoko has custody, Kyoko’s father, Tony Cox, has once again taken the girl and vanished. “It was terrible. I didn’t know where she was. It was a kidnapping and a very difficult situation,” Yoko recalls.

On March 6, Thurmond is notified that his “previous inquiry concerning the former member of the Beatles, John Lennon” has been looked into, and “the Immigration and Naturalization Service has served notice on him that he is to leave this country no later than March 15.”

At the urging of John’s business manager, Allen Klein, Leon Wildes, the thirty-nine-year-old president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, takes on the case. Though he has “never heard of John Lennon, much less Yoko Ono,” Wildes is confident that he can reverse the canceled extension of his clients’ visas, and on March 16 the US immigration authorities grant them four additional weeks.

But Wildes has the sense that “they were out to get John and Yoko from the first moment I got into the case.”

Ever since Nixon first opened it, in 1969, John’s FBI file has been growing. When John spoke on the 6:00 p.m. edition of WABC-TV’s Eyewitness News on January 11 about a press conference where he, Yoko, and Jerry Rubin appeared, a special agent amended his event report to the special agent in charge of the New York FBI office with the urgent notation “All extremists should be considered dangerous.”