The Burglary (42 page)

At the bottom of the routing slip attached to the article, in the handwriting of someone from the Philadelphia FBI office, is this note to Tom Lewis, the resident agent at the Media office: “Tom: Can you handle Swarthmore, Haverford, Villanova.”

A term at the top of that routing slip, COINTELPRO, set off a state of near panic inside FBI headquarters when officials realized this file had been
distributed by the burglars. It would be more than two years until the significance of the term would be even partially understood outside the bureau.

THE ARRAY OF EMPLOYEES
at Swarthmore College who were des- cribed in Media files as “established” sources who had worked with the FBI in the past made people on other campuses wonder who was invading their privacy and reporting their conversations and actions to the bureau. The FBI sources at Swarthmore included a campus security officer, a switchboard operator, the town's chief of police, and the postmaster. In one instance, they had been engaged to spy on a philosophy professor who agents thought might have been visited by suspects in a violent Boston crime. The professor, never contacted by the FBI, said he had no knowledge of the suspects.

According to FBI records of their collaboration with the Swarthmore switchboard operator, at the bureau's request she checked the records of his calls and found none related to the suspects. Agents noted in the professor's FBI file, however, that the operator said the professor was not highly regarded on campus. The police chief, contacted by the bureau because he lived near the professor, said he knew nothing about the suspects ever visiting the professor but expressed concern that hippies visited the professor's home. He told agents he was also concerned about the fact that the professor had converted his garage into a print shop with equipment sufficient to publish a newspaper. Agents noted all of that information in a file, plus the fact that the police chief would keep a close eye on what happened at the professor's house.

The Swarthmore College student daughter of a member of Congress, Representative
Henry S. Reuss, Democrat from Wisconsin, also was under FBI surveillance at Swarthmore—apparently because she was his daughter and because she, like her parents, opposed the Vietnam War. The records gathered on
Jacqueline Reuss included her grades and details of her travels when she was a student in France. When the Media file about her became public, her father protested the surveillance of his daughter and others. The FBI, he said in a public statement, had no business compiling dossiers on “Americans who are accused of no wrongdoing.” According to the Media file on Reuss, information from her college records was provided confidentially to the FBI by the secretary to the registrar at Swarthmore College. The secretary, like other campus workers named in the FBI files, was described as an “established” FBI source.

Campus-related files found at Media suggest it may have been routine
for campus administrators to readily give FBI agents student information that was supposed to be private and that had no connection with potential criminal activity:

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania came under FBI surveillance after an investigation of his fourteen-year-old son was closed. At first, according to a Media file,
Herbert L. Shore's son was the main subject of the surveillance. Phone conversations between Shore, director of performing arts at the Annenberg School of Communications at the university, and his son were tapped while the boy attended summer camp in East Germany. The FBI files on the case include transcripts of father and son discussing a family member's health. Guessing who they were discussing, an agent wrote in the report on the taped phone conversation that they talked about “Mom, who presumably is the subject's mother.” Military intelligence agents also intercepted and read letters exchanged between Shore and his son that summer.

The FBI investigation of this junior high school student continued for several months. Then an FBI agent wrote, “The case on Norman Jon Shore should be closed inasmuch as the individual is only 14 years old.” But, the agent added, the investigation would now turn instead to the father. A file was opened on him. It grew easily, thanks to an “established” employee in the university's personnel records department who, when contacted by an FBI agent, told the agent that because Professor Shore held a high university post, he had an extensive personnel record. She made that record available to the FBI. “I think it's a sad commentary on this country … that there is this paranoia because a kid goes to camp in a socialist country,” Shore told a reporter when the document about him and his son became public after the Media burglary. When Shore died in 2004, he was described as an expert on
African theater who “worked his entire life for peace and democracy in the United States and in Africa.”

AMERICANS WHO PARTICIPATED
in academic and cross-cultural exchanges with counterparts in other countries, including communist countries, found themselves in a contradictory situation: to spy or not to spy on their exchange colleagues. To participate in these programs, even ones organized by the State Department or other U.S. government agencies, meant Americans, including even teenagers, risked being targeted by the FBI. For instance, Americans who visited the Soviet Union for at least a month were questioned by the bureau upon their return to the United States. The purpose of such investigations, according to a file found at Media, was to “determine whether any of them were approached for recruitment by the Soviet Intelligence Services” either in the USSR or in the United States after they returned. But they were also questioned by the FBI to determine if they could be turned into spies for the bureau. Agents were instructed to assess people returning from Sino-Soviet bloc countries, especially those who were employed in the news media, entertainment, religious organizations, and education, and also people who were public officials, “labor leader or prominent person,” for their potential to work as informers for the bureau during their travels. Such requests were carried out as part of a special program, DESECO—Development of Selected Contacts. Attached to the memo about this program was a long list of potential informers—Americans, mostly scientists, scheduled to attend various upcoming international conventions, including the Twelfth International Conference on Low Temperature Physics in Kyoto, Japan; the Third International Symposium on Fresh Water from the Sea at Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia; the Seventh World Congress of Sociology; the International Iron and Steel Conference in Japan; and the International Astronautical Federation and Aerospace Conference in Constance, West Germany. They were asked to spy on their fellow scientists while at these conferences.

MEDIA RECORDS REVEALED
that FBI files on some people spanned decades, even if nothing was ever discovered about the person that indicated even a hint of wrongdoing. One man's ongoing file started with a five-dollar fine for breach of the peace in 1954, a minor law enforcement issue that usually would not concern the FBI. The man was still being monitored by
the bureau at the time of the burglary in 1971. He had come to the attention of the FBI in 1967 because he was a conscientious objector. The bureau investigated his past extensively. As they did, agents discovered the fine and built his file beginning at that point. In the course of their investigation, agents placed in his file statements from unnamed informers who worked with him at Bellevue Medical Center in New York City in 1957. Into the file went statements that he was “described as ‘queer fish,' ‘screwball,' ‘smarty pants' ”; a report that he volunteered for risky research experiments and was described by the psychiatrist who was in charge of the research as “altruistic, sincere, believer in God, but not in conventional religion”; reports from police intelligence files in Haverford, Pennsylvania, that he distributed antiwar leaflets in 1968; and a report that he was present at a rally at which
other
people said the war in Vietnam was “unconstitutional” and “illegal.” Item after item was added to his FBI file, none of them indicating that the man ever was a suspect in any crime.

The mindless nature of how FBI surveillance files were initiated is illustrated in a file found at Media that was based on an informer's report about an evening he spent productively, from his and the bureau's view, at what the FBI called the
Bernheim Commune in Philadelphia. The informer had been assigned to clandestinely observe a political meeting at the commune. When the informer arrived for the meeting, he learned that it was scheduled for another day. While there, though, the informer noticed that a women's liberation meeting was taking place in another room. Having struck out with the political meeting, the informer, being entrepreneurial and wishing to be paid for an evening's work, saw the women's meeting as an opportunity not to return to his agent handler empty-handed.

In the report he submitted, the informer referred to the people in the commune as intellectual revolutionaries who were not part of organizations. Among the observations he regarded as worth reporting to the FBI—and that his handling agent thought worth memorializing in FBI files—was that one of the women “kept going in and out of the meeting to attend her small child in the kitchen” and that a number of other “rather hippie-type individuals were observed coming and going from the upper floors and it would appear that the three-story house is being operated as a commune.”

As a result of the informer going to the commune for a meeting that did not take place and attending a meeting of women where, as he reported, little took place, an FBI file was nevertheless opened on every member of the commune who was at the house that evening.

Detailed reports were prepared by informers and agents about
demonstrations, even if very few people attended. An FBI report about a peaceful demonstration in Philadelphia noted that it was attended by “100 demonstrators and no spectators.” They had gathered to protest research on chemical weapons used in Vietnam. The official report notes that the demonstration—organized by none other than William Davidon, future Media burglar—was covered by eighteen Philadelphia police officers, plus a group of police photographers, and police in seven cruising police cars.

In another Media file, officials expressed concern about informers who went too far. The subject was discussed in the same bureau newsletter in which agents were advised to increase paranoia.

“There have been a few instances where security informants in the New Left got carried away during a demonstration, assaulted police, etc.” The key word in this area, the official wrote, was “control.” “The [bureau headquarters officials] define this to mean that while our informants should be privy to everything going on and should rise to the maximum level of their ability in the New Left Movement, they should not become the person who carries the gun, throws the bomb, does the robbery or by some specific violative, overt act becomes a deeply involved participant. This is a judgment area and any actions which seem to border on it should be discussed.” The statement was far from a clear rejection of such behavior.

One Media file recounts a bureau correspondence with Canadian counterparts that must have left the FBI disappointed, or perhaps perplexed. According to an official response from the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police found in the Media files, when asked by the FBI in 1969 to locate Americans believed to be in the
Union of American Exiles in Canada, the RCMP intelligence office responded, “At the present time, we do not have a source in the position of positively identifying the individuals mentioned.”

Most reports in the Media files were about clandestine investigations with harassment as the goal. The only files that were about developing evidence for prosecution were investigations of antidraft organizations and people who were engaged in “counseling, aiding and abetting in the anti-draft movement.” Hoover wrote in 1967 that he “cannot stress too strongly for prompt expeditious handling of these cases.” He assured agents that journalists would be sources of information when developing evidence in these cases. “If it is ascertained that the news media has obtained items of an evidentiary nature, such as photographs or statements,” he instructed agents, they “must be contacted promptly in order that the evidence may be securely maintained for possible future use.”

Advice in a file on recruiting future agents emphasized that military
veterans were especially valuable recruits. “Catch the veteran almost before he is home,” advised an official in a file on recruitment. The Philadelphia office, he wrote, had excellent success with approaching such people as soon as they were discharged. Veterans were prized as FBI employees because they “are mature, have already been relocated certainly at least once and have no fear of Washington, DC. They have been subject to discipline and order.” But there were some drawbacks with veterans. “Because the discharged veteran is several years further along than the current high school graduate, some may have had a ‘wild oats' period.” Because of this, the investigations of veterans should be “more demanding” than the investigations of other applicants.

The physical appearance of FBI agents—at the time they were hired and throughout their employment—was extraordinarily important to the director. This preoccupation was evident in the smallest details, not to mention the oddest ones.