The Burglary (2 page)

Agreeing to break in only if it could be done without violating their deep commitment to nonviolent resistance, they concentrated on developing the skills necessary to conduct an unarmed burglary of the office. Beginning in January 1971, most weekday evenings, after they meticulously cased the area near the targeted FBI office for at least three hours, they drove to the Germantown
neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia to the home of John and Bonnie Raines, a young couple who had agreed to participate. There, late at night in a room in the back of the Raines' third-floor attic, they trained themselves as amateur burglars and planned the break-in. They discussed the discoveries they had made during casing and how to work around serious obstacles they had determined could not be eliminated, such as the fact that security guards stood twenty-four hours a day behind the glass front door of the
Delaware County Courthouse constantly monitoring an area that included the nearby entrance to the building the burglars would enter, as well as the windows of the FBI office. Just a few days before the burglary, another critical problem developed over which they had no control: One of the burglars abandoned the group, with full knowledge of what they were going to do. He later threatened to turn them in.

ON THE NIGHT
of March 8, 1971, the eight burglars carried out their plan. Under the cover of darkness and the crackling sounds in nearly every home and bar of continuous news about the
Muhammad Ali–
Joe Frazier world heavyweight championship boxing match taking place that evening at New York's Madison Square Garden and being watched on television throughout the world, the burglars broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a sleepy town southwest of Philadelphia. At first, their break-in plan failed. The locks were much more difficult to pick than expected. Frustrated, the newly minted locksmith in the group found a pay phone, called the other burglars as they waited at the nearby motel room that served as the group's staging area, and told them the burglary might have to be called off.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who conducted undercover FBI operations for sixteen years before joining the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union in 2006, said he has often wondered how the Media burglars knew which files to take. “
How did they know,” for instance, he asked, “where the political spying files would be?” German said he has always assumed—and has talked to other agents who made the same assumption—that because it would have been impossible for an outsider to know where particular files were, the Media burglary must have been an inside job carried out by disgruntled FBI agents familiar with the files. But the burglars had found a foolproof solution to the problem of which files to take: They removed
every
file in the office. That's why, as they drove away from Media in their getaway cars late that night, they had no idea what they had stolen.
For all they knew, they might have just risked spending many years in prison for a trove of blank bureaucratic forms.

Within an hour of opening the suitcases they had stuffed with FBI files, they knew their risk was not in vain. They found a document that would shock even hardened Washington observers when it became public two weeks later.

The files stolen by the burglars that night in Media revealed the truth and destroyed the myths about Hoover and the institution he had built since he became its director in 1924.
Contrary to the official propaganda that had been released continuously for decades by the FBI's Crime Records Division—the bureau's purposely misnamed public relations operation—Hoover had distorted the mission of one of the most powerful and most venerated institutions in the country.

The Media files revealed that there were two FBIs—the public FBI Americans revered as their protector from crime, arbiter of values, and defender of citizens' liberties, and the secret FBI. This FBI, known until the Media burglary only to people inside the bureau, usurped citizens' liberties, treated black citizens as if they were a danger to society, and used deception, disinformation, and violence as tools to harass, damage, and—most important—silence people whose political opinions the director opposed.

Instead of being a paragon of law and order and integrity, Hoover's secret FBI was a lawless and unprincipled arm of the bureau that, as Davidon had feared, suppressed the dissent of Americans. To the embarrassment and frustration of agents who privately opposed this interpretation of the bureau's mission, agents and informers were required to be outlaws. Blackmail and burglary were favorite tools in the secret FBI. Agents and informers were ordered to spy on—and create ongoing files on—the private lives, including the sexual activities, of the nation's highest officials and other powerful people.

Electoral politics were manipulated to defeat candidates the director did not like. Even mild dissent, in the eyes of the FBI, could make an American worthy of being spied on and placed in an ongoing FBI file, sometimes for decades. As the authors of
The Lawless State
wrote in 1976, the FBI “
has operated on a theory of subversion that assumes that people cannot be trusted to choose among political ideas. The FBI has assumed the duty to protect the public by placing it under surveillance.”

Until the Media burglary, this extraordinary situation—a secret FBI operating under principles that were the antithesis of both democracy and
good law enforcement—thrived near the top of the federal government for nearly half a century, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. The few officials who were aware of some aspects of the secret FBI silently tolerated the situation for various reasons, including fear of the director's power to destroy the reputation of anyone who raised questions about his operations.

When these operations became known as a result of the burglary, the foundations of the FBI were shaken. The significant impact of the burglary was both long-term and immediate. As soon as the files became public, Americans' views of the FBI started to change.
Mark Felt—the future Deep Throat of Watergate fame, who at the time of the burglary was chief of bureau inspections and very close to Hoover—wrote in 1979 that the Media burglars' disclosures “damaged the FBI's image, possibly forever, in the minds of many Americans.”
Ironically, the burglary would not have been possible if Felt had not refused in the fall of 1970 a request to increase security at the Media office.

This historic act of resistance—perhaps
the
most powerful single act of nonviolent resistance in American history—ignited the first public debate on the proper role of intelligence agencies in a democratic society. Perceptions of the bureau evolved from adulation to criticism and then to a consensus that the FBI and other intelligence agencies must never again be permitted to be lawless and unaccountable. By 1975, the revelations led to the first
congressional investigations of the FBI and other intelligence agencies and then to the establishment of congressional oversight of those agencies.

The writers of every history of Hoover or the bureau since the burglary have noted its significant impact.
Sanford J. Ungar, author in 1976 of the first history of the bureau published after the burglary,
FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls
, wrote, “
The Media documents … gave an extraordinary picture of some of the Bureau's domestic intelligence activities.…Judged by any standard, the documents … show an almost incredible preoccupation with the activities of black organizations and leaders, both on campuses and in the cities.…The overall impact of the documents could not be denied or explained away. They seemed to show a government agency, once the object of almost universal respect and awe, reaching out with tentacles to get a grasp on, or lead into, virtually every part of American society.”

“
In one fell swoop FBI surveillance of dissidents was exposed and the Bureau's carefully nurtured mystique destroyed,” wrote
Max Holland about the Media burglary in his 2012 book
Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat
.
“Far from being invincible, the FBI appeared merely petty, obsessed with monitoring what seemed to be, in many cases, lawful dissent.”

Historian
Richard Gid Powers, in his 2004 book
Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI,
described the burglary's impact:

As two hundred FBI agents searched for the burglars throughout the country in 1971, most intensively in Philadelphia, even people in the large peace movement there, where all of the burglars were activists, could not imagine that any of their fellow activists had had the courage or audacity to burglarize an FBI office. Many people feared then that the FBI might be stifling dissent, but most people found it difficult to imagine that anyone would risk their freedom—risk sacrificing years away from their children and other loved ones—to break into an FBI office to get evidence of whether that was true. People wondered:

Who would go to prison to save dissent?

That question will now be answered. For more than forty years, the Media burglars have been silent about what they did on the night of March 8, 1971. Seven of the eight burglars have been found by this writer, the first journalist to anonymously receive and then write about the files two weeks after the burglary. In the more than forty years since they were among the most hunted people in the country as they eluded FBI agents during the intensive investigation ordered by Hoover, they have lived rather quiet lives as law-abiding, good citizens who moved from youth to middle age and, for
some, now to their senior years. They kept the promise they made to one another as they met for the last time immediately before they released copies of the stolen files to the public—that they would take their secret, the Media burglary, to their graves.

The seven burglars who have been found have agreed to break their silence so that the story of their act of resistance that uncovered the secret FBI can be told. Their inside account, as well as the FBI's account of its search for the burglars—as told by agents in interviews and as drawn from the 33,698-page official record of the FBI's investigation of the burglary obtained under the Freedom of Information Act—and the powerful impact of this historic act of resistance are all told here for the first time. It is a story about the destructive power of excessive government secrecy. It is a story about the potential power of
nonviolent resistance, even when used against the most powerful law enforcement agency in the nation. It also is a story about courage and patriotism.

2

T
HE STORY OF
the Media burglary begins with William Davidon. It was his idea. He recruited people to consider the merit and feasibility of the idea. And then he led the planning and execution of the burglary. He was also responsible for developing and carrying out the plan to distribute copies of the stolen files to journalists and members of Congress so the public would have access to them.

All this from a person so unassuming that the act of protesting—let alone leading a group in planning and carrying out a burglary of an office of the country's most powerful law enforcement agency—seemed to be almost antithetical to his personality.

How was it possible for Davidon, who hated burglary, to think of becoming a burglar? And how was it possible for seven other people to agree to participate in this radical action?

The answer to those questions is found, in part, in the evolution of Davidon's protest of the war and of the use of nuclear weapons. The answer also is found in the very unusual moral and political dynamics that played out in the United States the year before the burglary—a period of extreme actions by the government and by diverse segments of the public. The accumulated impact of those actions, some of them profoundly violent, upped the ante, even for people who normally would never have considered doing anything as extreme as burglarizing an FBI office.

It was natural for Davidon to care strongly about protecting dissent. By 1970, dissent had been part of the essential fabric of his life for more than two decades. He had spoken out against the use and continued development of
ever more powerful nuclear weapons. He thought he had a responsibility to speak out forcefully against the world's most powerful armaments. He had opposed the war in Vietnam from the beginning on multiple grounds, but his deepest concern was that the United States might use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Throughout the war, the administrations of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon refused to remove the nuclear option from the table.