The Burglary (53 page)

This was not where Roseta Doyle, the priest's mother back in Ireland, expected to see her son in the United States—on the floor, trampled on by an FBI agent. Then again, though both she and her son knew well the concept of resistance as a result of living through the troubles in Ireland, she did not expect him to be resisting the American government, at least not by raiding a draft board.

Doyle himself had not expected this destiny in his adopted country. When he arrived in the United States in 1963 at age twenty-five, he was assigned to teach in a Catholic high school in Cape May, a beautiful seaside resort town on the southern tip of New Jersey where the streets are lined with pretty Victorian houses. A couple years after his arrival, he spoke openly in opposition to the war in Vietnam. His bishop did what many Catholic bishops did at that time. He punished Doyle for expressing views the bishop regarded as inappropriate by firing him from his teaching position and assigning him to work in a very poor inner-city church in Camden. Doyle, like many other Catholic priests who were punished by being sent to a “ghetto,” soon regarded the transfer as the opposite of punishment. In the inner city, he says, “I found my mission.” In that community, he worked to improve the circumstances that perpetuated poverty, and he became deeply committed to the welfare of the members of his congregation, most of them African American and Hispanic people. To this day, more than forty years after being arrested in Camden, Doyle has lived and worked in the very poor inner city of Camden, with time out only for an occasional trip to Ireland.

Doyle's opposition to the war grew stronger in the late 1960s. He saw connections between the deteriorating conditions in the city and the increased spending on the war. He also became aware of the disproportionate killing in Vietnam of young men from poor places like Camden.
Given his strong opposition to the war, it probably was inevitable that he would notice when, as he puts it, “Dan and Phil Berrigan began to make their moves in those years of the '60s. I was interested in what they were doing. The Sermon on the Mount, and turn the other cheek and all of that kind of thing.…I began to rethink my ideas.…And say, well, if the Christian truth is to be preached, it's got to be without guns, it has got to be without killing. And that Jesus would have died for the ones who killed him, and that would be the only solution. So that's how it kind of got going.” Eventually, he concluded that the usual forms of protest were having little or no effect.
Nonviolent resistance seemed to be the only avenue left to draw attention to the terrible impact of the war in both Vietnam and the United States. Two years after his arrest in the Camden draft board, when Doyle faced the jury, in his intense and lyrical Irish brogue he posed rhetorical questions that explained the dilemma that led to his becoming a resister:

“
What do you do when a child's on fire? We saw children on fire. What do you do when a child's on fire in a war that was a mistake? What do you do? Write a letter?”

THE ARRESTS AT CAMDEN
gave the FBI an enormous sense of satisfaction.
The bureau's sense of triumph was evident immediately. Just hours after the arrests, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell held an unprecedented joint press conference in Washington where they announced their victory at Camden. Hoover told journalists the people were apprehended at night in the Camden Selective Service office as they destroyed draft board records. He said they were carrying binoculars, radio transceivers, pry bars, and “flashlights with the lenses taped to emit a thin beam of light.” He did not mention the unusual source of that equipment. That would be revealed at the trial. The charges against them, the director said, included committing a crime on a government reservation, breaking and entering, destruction of government property, removal and mutilation of public records, theft of government property, unlawful interference with the administration of the Selective Service Act, and conspiracy to commit the crimes listed. If convicted on those charges, he said, they “could receive sentences ranging up to 40 years imprisonment.” Actually, the potential sentence for each defendant was forty-seven years.

“Raids and arrests impressive and successful,” Moore wrote Hoover soon after the arrests. “Widespread national radio, TV and press coverage … continuing. Highly favorable and complimentary to FBI.”

About the same time the high-level press conference was taking place in Washington, the defendants were being arraigned in Camden on the third floor of the building where they had been arrested. The government asked for high bail for John Peter Grady because he was the “ringleader and mastermind” of the group. Bail for the defendants totaled $605,000, ranging from $5,000 for some to $150,000 for Grady. A lawyer asked U.S. magistrate
Charles L. Rudd, who presided, for lower bail for Grady because he was the father of five children. Judge Rudd angrily responded, “I'll set the bail. I don't want to see my country destroyed.” He praised the FBI then, as
he did several times during the hearing: “God bless them. They've done a wonderful job.”

Exuberant about the advance in the Media case that FBI officials thought the Camden arrests represented, assistant FBI director Al Rosen sent this message to Sullivan two days after the Camden arrests:

“We now have key subjects in custody and must keep pressure on them to obtain admissions.…There is no physical evidence or witnesses to FBI-Media burglary—Matter can only be resolved by admissions.” Moore later proposed plans for getting them to confess to participating in the Media break-in.

In his post-Camden arrest memo to Sullivan, Rosen emphasized the significance of finally arresting Grady, whom they had wanted to arrest ever since the morning of March 9. He wrote, “Grady, according to several sources … is directly responsible for the Media Resident Agency break-in.” The arrest of “Grady, avowed instigator of many of the raids on draft boards in the last two years by Berrigan supporters and
East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives members, is an irreparable loss to this segment of the New Left.”

Hoover personally informed high-level Nixon administration officials about the Camden arrests the day after they occurred.
He sent letters to the attorney general;
H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff; and
Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security adviser, drawing attention to the bureau's success at Camden. In a September 2 letter, Kissinger thanked Hoover for keeping him informed: “I appreciate having additional background on this very effective operation.”

THE TWENTY-EIGHT PEOPLE
arrested at Camden had no clue that their arrests were scripted to serve grand purposes. To the FBI, the arrests were finally a chance for victory in the MEDBURG case. In Moore's strategy, the arrests also offered a chance to solve several of the other draft board cases, in addition to solving MEDBURG. But to the Camden defendants the arrests were a very depressing matter. Few other draft board raiders had sat in holding cells contemplating many years in prison. Most had walked away from draft boards and never been caught. Worse, from the perspective of some of them, now they had been arrested for a raid they thought never should have happened and in which they regretted participating.

Both before and after the raid, the problems were obvious to many of the raiders. Hardy reported to his handlers that “members of the group say that this action will be the most difficult one that they have ever performed.”
The group was too big and too disorganized. Making matters even more complicated, veteran draft board raiders were brought in from New York to help shortly before the day of the raid, allowing little or no time for them to participate in dry runs. Two women, responding to a last-minute call for more participants, tried to get a bus from New York to Camden, but they discovered that because of the riot taking place in Camden, bus service to the city had been canceled. Determined to get there to help their friends, they hitchhiked from New York.
When they arrived during the riot, they couldn't find the group and had to search for them in the midst of what one of them,
Joan Reilly, later described as “violence and chaos.”

The FBI agents who endured the long lead-up to the arrests also had complaints. In a memo written soon after the raid, SAC Moore expressed a mixture of lament and praise for what his agents endured throughout the operation. From the day Hardy walked into their office, Moore informed the director, agents conducted surveillance of “Grady and associates” seven days a week. They kept track of—photographed and recorded—the raiders at a command post and at twenty fixed locations during dry runs. It was necessary, he wrote, to overcome many difficult obstacles—“conducting investigation and surveillance in hippie neighborhoods dominated by communes … in ghetto type area.” Because the raiders kept postponing the event, he wrote, it was necessary to assemble the eighty arresting agents on three different weekends, only to have two of the raids canceled mid-raid. They “were moved into Camden area early in the afternoon each Saturday and held their positions in hot, humid and close quarters from approximately 2 p.m. to 6 a.m. the following morning. Outstanding performance.”

As the arrested men sat in a crowded holding cell in the basement of the federal building while they waited to be taken to their arraignment, they looked at one another. They knew something had gone terribly wrong. They soon agreed that someone in their midst these last months had been an informer.
It did not take long for them to realize that one member of the group was not there: Bob Hardy. In the two years Catholic antiwar activists had been raiding draft boards, no group was known to have had an informer in its midst. Facing the fact that Hardy had informed on them was especially difficult for the two men who had known him for years, Giocondo and Doyle. They found it nearly impossible to believe that their good friend had turned them in.

Hoover was grateful for what Hardy had done. A short time after the arrests, Hardy got a letter from the director.
Hardy reported what he wrote: “He said, ‘Dear Mr. Hardy, I wish to take the time to thank you for what
you've done. You've done in ten weeks what would have taken 200 agents a year to accomplish. Our country is very grateful.' And in it was 50 one hundred dollar bills. I took the money. I thought it was a reward. Well, it was.”

There was strong agreement among FBI officials that they could not have pulled off the arrests without Hardy. “To a large degree, the success was attributed to Hardy,” Moore wrote to headquarters. The informer had done the work for the bureau, he wrote, at “great personal inconvenience.…He suffered great financial loss … serious and detrimental effect on his ability to secure necessary contracts for continuous income purposes.”

At a bail reduction hearing not long after the arrests, according to a report by an agent, “one of the women subjects [a Camden defendant] suspects Hardy is the informer and gave him an obscene gesture, which he returned.” After this, the report notes, the possibility of relocating Hardy to protect him was suggested to him by FBI agents, and he responded, “Run from these bastards? Not on your life.”

AS THE DEFENDANTS ABSORBED
the shock of having been turned in by an informer and having their arrests announced at a major press conference by none other than the attorney general of the United States and the director of the FBI, they tried to focus on how to move forward, as individuals and as a group. Some of them had assumed that eventually one of the draft board raids might go wrong, but they never thought one would go quite this wrong.

As the Camden defendants contemplated how to deal with their new status as criminal defendants, they were shaken by tragic news just a few weeks after their arrests. For a few of them, it challenged the deeply humane instincts at the heart of their philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Bob Hardy's nine-year-old son Billy was critically injured.
One day
Sandy Grady, a reporter from the
Evening Bulletin
in Philadelphia, dropped by to chat with Hardy at his Camden home. Billy had been waiting to go out with his dad. When Grady arrived, Hardy asked Billy to wait. Billy went out to play and, as Doyle put it, being a boy, climbed a tree. He fell from the tree and was impaled on the sharp-pointed top of a metal fence. An older boy who lived next door ran to Billy and lifted him off the fence and screamed for help. Hardy and Grady came running from the house.

For three weeks, Billy was unconscious in the intensive care unit at Cooper Hospital in Camden. By this time, Doyle had partially, though reluctantly, removed the large wedge that Hardy's role as informer had brought
between them.
When the Camden defendants first got out of jail, Swinglish, the Navy veteran, had challenged the priest to put into action his belief in love and forgiveness and to be willing to “go see the man who had betrayed us.” Doyle had to push himself hard to do what normally would have come naturally to him, but he did it. He walked the one block from his rectory to Hardy's home. They had an awkward conversation, but at least they talked, and, by doing so, they crossed a barrier. They talked a couple more times, in fact, before Billy was injured. At no point, though, in the few conversations Doyle and Hardy had before Billy's accident did Doyle and Hardy discuss what Hardy had done to the group. It was as though they could have a connection now only if they detoured around that awful shared experience. Doyle wondered if their friendship could ever be restored.

Doyle considered little Billy a friend. He remembers him, as others do, with great fondness. “He was a wonderful boy, and I knew him very well.” So it was natural that Doyle would visit Billy at the hospital. The first time he went to see Billy, “sitting there in the waiting room outside the intensive care unit were Bob Hardy and
Michael Reimer, the FBI agent who was one of Hardy's contacts for the Camden 28 surveillance. He was there to support Bob Hardy, and I, as the priest of the parish, was there, too, to support him.