The Burglary (22 page)

The article noted that the four agents who worked in the Media office at that time were almost precise prototypes of the kind of men Director Hoover had told a congressional committee the previous year he wanted FBI agents to be: “I am not looking for ‘collar ad types,' but I am looking for agents who are clean cut, mature and will measure up to the image which I think the American people feel an FBI man should be.”

“They measure up in Media,” the reporter wrote, also noting that a recent crime investigated by Media agents was typical of the work in the office: the robbery of furs, jewelry, and other items valued at $11,000 that belonged to Mrs. Ora Taylor of nearby Yeadon.

On the morning of March 9, 1971, the agents stationed at the Media office had to deal with a very different type of crime. It was a simple burglary—how it was described in the major Philadelphia newspapers in the first news stories about the break-in—that was not so simple. Unlike any other burglary, the one discovered in Media early that morning immediately consumed J. Edgar Hoover and his aides at FBI headquarters in Washington, and eventually attracted the attention of Attorney General
John Mitchell. Agents from throughout the country were immediately put on alert to find the burglars and the files they had stolen. This definitely was not just a simple burglary.

By 8 a.m., the Media agents had thoroughly processed the five rooms in the office for latent fingerprints. They were pleased to find “what appeared to be an imprint of a right hand on the right side of the cabinet” that had been pushed when the door was forced open. This gave them hope for a fast arrest.

When McLaughlin discovered that the Speed Graphic camera had not been stolen, he grabbed it and photographed the crime scene, documenting each room in great detail. His photos corroborated the damage reported in the summary agents wrote that morning:

None of the office furniture had been damaged, according to the report. The supply cabinet, which contained blank office forms, had not been disturbed. Agents also noted that the burglars had left desk surfaces in neat condition.

McLaughlin immediately thought of the safe. He was relieved to discover that it was still there and that it had not been opened. There wasn't even any sign anyone had tried to open it. He remembers thinking that the burglars must have not taken it because it was heavy. That meant the firearms, handcuffs, and administrative manuals agents kept in the safe had not been stolen. He was especially relieved to know that the firearms were not missing. Agents kept their smaller pistols, called “detective specials,” in the safe. That's what Davidon would have found if he had come to the office early that morning and succeeded in opening the safe. Pistols definitely were not what he had hoped to find.

IN A REPORT
to Washington headquarters that morning, Media agents also described this missing item:

For most of Hoover's tenure as director, nearly all agents prominently displayed such pictures in their offices. They were photos of an agent standing beside Hoover on a day when the agent had visited FBI headquarters in Washington and had a brief meeting with the director. Hoover had the photos taken, and later he sent a signed copy to the agent so that the agent would have a memento of what Hoover assumed was a special occasion in his life—meeting Hoover. The near-reverential respect some agents felt for Hoover was evident in the home of a retired agent who for several months led the investigation of the Media burglary. Nearly the entire fireplace mantel and several other flat surfaces in his living room were lined with photos of the agent standing beside Hoover and other photos of Hoover with the agent's wife and children.

McLaughlin was that kind of agent—the kind who deeply admired the director. Meeting the director was indeed a very special occasion in his life. He told me he “met Mr. Hoover on a couple occasions. I was never so impressed by any other man in my life, other than my father.” Like many devoted agents at that time, McLaughlin remembers the date he became an FBI agent with the same precision he remembers his birthday: “It was April 23, 1951.” In retirement, he spoke warmly of the many years he worked in the bureau. “I really liked the bureau. I liked the bureau work. I liked the people. I liked everything.”

McLaughlin was transferred from the New York office of the FBI to the downtown Philadelphia office in 1968. At first, he worked on the hijacking squad, a part of general criminal investigations. Soon he was sent to the Media office. He developed a special affection for the office. Often, when his workload was heavy, he would take two of his four children to the Media office after mass on Sundays at his nearby Catholic church. They would play—pretend they were writing documents on the typewriters and make up other office games—while he dictated reports on cases he had covered the previous week but had not had time to complete. “It was a busy place. But it was fun. I loved it. I really did.” He would not work in the Media office after what he discovered the morning of March 9. It was now a crime scene and would not be an FBI office again. Like the other agents there, McLaughlin was soon transferred to Philadelphia and other offices in the area.

THE NEWS THAT
FBI serials were missing registered as a Richter-magnitude earthquake when it reached FBI headquarters that morning. The serials were the heart of the bureau. They were the bureau's recorded history. They were the records of all communications—written accounts of exchanges between agents, exchanges between agents and informants, reports from informants, communications between and among high-level FBI officials in Washington and agents in the field, communications between the director and top officials in the field and at headquarters. Each office kept in its files locally generated serials, as well as those distributed by the headquarters office and other local bureau offices. Some of the serials were mundane, some were explosive, and, as agents knew, all were regarded as secret documents that should be protected and never be seen by anyone outside the bureau. Officials at headquarters immediately realized that morning that the possibility of any serials becoming public would consume the director.

Before Hoover arrived at his office that morning, his top aides agreed that W. Mark Felt should be asked to go to Media immediately. One of the people Hoover trusted most, Felt had been head of the bureau's Inspection Division since 1964. In that capacity, he enforced Hoover's stringent requirements for how field offices should be evaluated during what agents and many officials in the field regarded as dreaded periodic inspections. Part of his responsibility involved making sure the local offices carried out the secret political programs that would be revealed for the first time in the Media documents.
That morning he was tasked to determine how this bureau tragedy, the burglary in Media, could have happened. Headquarters officials realized Hoover would be somewhat comforted at this very uncomfortable time by knowing that Felt would soon be at the scene of the crime. By then, Felt had been a close confidant of Hoover for many years. Just four months later, on July 1, 1971, Hoover would promote Felt to deputy associate director, the third-highest position in the bureau, with only Hoover and
Clyde Tolson above him. Tolson was very ill by then, making Felt by default the second most powerful person in the FBI. By the fall of 1972, a few months after Hoover's death in May 1972, Felt would become Deep Throat, the most famous confidential source in history, for his role as source to
Washington Post
reporter
Bob Woodward about Watergate crimes. Like Hoover, Felt regarded the Media burglary as a very serious crime against the
bureau. He later wrote, in his 1979 and 2006 memoirs, that it was “the biggest blemish on the FBI's image.”

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1924–72.

As he shaved in his New York hotel room early that March 1971 morning, Felt wrote, the phone rang. “It was the night supervisor at the New York office: ‘The bureau wants you to call as soon as possible,' he said. ‘And they want you to call on the secure line.' I dressed, rushed to the office and picked up the phone.” Felt was in New York that morning because he was in charge of the inspection then taking place at this, the bureau's largest field office and, it would be learned later, the FBI office that had long been most involved in political spying and dirty tricks.

“The bureau switchboard operator put me through to
Edward S. Miller, my top assistant in the Inspection Division. He told me that burglars had broken into the FBI's resident agency at Media, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. ‘Apparently they got away with a lot of serials,' Miller said. Within thirty minutes I was on the Metroliner for Philadelphia.” Important as the New York inspection was, it was placed on hold while Felt rushed to Media.

HOOVER'S INITIAL ANGER
focused on the fact that Tom Lewis, the agent in charge of the Media office, did not get the name of the woman who had interviewed him two weeks earlier, but Felt immediately focused on
the safe in the Media office. He wrote in 1979 that his first thought when Miller called him that morning was to ask Miller to check whether Felt had purchased a large safe for the Media office the previous fall. He waited on the phone as Miller checked the records. “When Ed Miller assured me that I had, I breathed a sigh of relief.”

Felt's official and unofficial writings about the safe provide contradictory accounts on the important point of the size of the safe in the Media office. His attitude regarding the safe when he arrived at the Media office the morning after the burglary angered agents in the office. If they had assigned him a nickname that morning, it would not have been Deep Throat, the nickname
Washington Post
managing editor
Howard Simons gave
Bob Woodward's anonymous source in 1972, after the title of a porn movie popular at that time. The Media agents might have named him Deep Scapegoater. That morning in Media Felt was covering up secrets, not revealing them as he did a little more than a year later to Woodward.

In his memoir, Felt wrote that he had played a pivotal role just a few months before the Media burglary in increasing security at the Media office after the director asked him to assess security at the bureau's 536 small FBI offices, including Media. “A midnight raid was not unexpected,” he wrote, noting that draft board raids had stirred concern about a possible raid of an FBI office. Actually, an FBI office had been entered by burglars that September in Rochester, New York, but the burglars there were promptly arrested in the office, which was part of a suite of federal offices. Because 475 of the bureau's smallest offices were located in commercial offices where minimal or no protection existed, Felt said he told Hoover those offices should be provided “a good burglar-proof cabinet safe.” But such safes cost $1,000 each, more than the FBI could afford, Felt wrote. Therefore, the “only workable solution,” according to him, was to provide the few offices “close to college and universities with a great deal of activist ferment” with such safes. Because Media was close to several campuses—Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, Swarthmore College, Villanova University—Felt said he ordered a large file drawer–type safe for Media.