The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  KEITH FORSYTH WAS PLEASED to get a call from Davidon in late 1970. He knew it would have something to do with protesting the war. Davidon was always looking for ways to oppose the war, and so was Forsyth. Since moving to Philadelphia a year earlier, he had come to respect Davidon a great deal.

  Their phone conversation went like this:

  DAVIDON: We’re thinking about having a party. Can you come?

  FORSYTH: Sure, I love parties. What time?

  Given the secrecy, Forsyth thought Davidon must have a very interesting idea to discuss. Little did he know.

  When they met at the appointed time, Davidon wasted no time in telling Forsyth the reason for the “party.” He laid out his concerns and asked Forsyth, “What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?”

  Forsyth remembers being somewhat nonplussed by Davidon’s proposal. “You know, somebody says to you, ‘Let’s go break into the FBI office.’ So you look at them and say, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s go break in. Then, after we finish that, let’s go down to Fort Knox and steal a few million.’ At first I thought, ‘Who are you kidding?’ ”

  Keith Forsyth was a part-time cabdriver when Davidon asked him to consider participating in the Media break-in. He had dropped out of college to devote more time to stopping the war.

  That’s what he thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead of saying that, Forsyth thinks he probably nervously cleared his throat and stalled for time until he, somewhat falteringly, said something like, “Aren’t these places, FBI offices, pretty tough to get access to?”

  He wondered how Davidon could think this would be possible. But he knew Davidon didn’t use dope and wasn’t careless. Forsyth was even more surprised when Davidon told him he had already checked out an FBI office, the one in Media, and he thought it looked like it might be possible to break into it. Davidon also said he had first checked out the large FBI office in downtown Philadelphia and decided it definitely would not be possible to break into. Too tall, too secure. At that point, Forsyth realized, “This guy is serious.”

  Forsyth thought it would be impossible to burglarize an FBI office. He told Davidon he wanted to check out the office himself. After getting more proper—read: less hippie—clothes at a local thrift shop, he walked by the Media FBI office. He couldn’t believe it. There was a simple lock on the door. It looked like security might be minimal. He remembers thinking, “ ‘Man, these guys have lost their minds.’ The only thing you could think was that they didn’t think at all about security. They must have thought it was just too crazy, that no one would ever break into an FBI office, so they didn’t have to worry about it.”

  As he left the FBI office that day, he thought maybe Davidon was right. Maybe that office could be burglarized. Still, despite what appeared to be very weak security at the Media FBI office, Forsyth had lots of doubts. He recognized such a burglary would require a lot of meticulous testing and planning. Finally, he concluded that the potential value of what the burglary might accomplish was substantial. “I felt as though my enemy had expanded. It was no longer just the military machine that was waging a war in Vietnam. It was the United States government … and what it was doing, not just in Vietnam, but also to its own citizens. I wanted people to know that.”

  He decided the burglary might well be worth the risk. He called Davidon and—unaware, as all the other burglars were, that he was talking to him on a phone that was being tapped by the FBI—he told Davidon he could count on him to participate. While preparing for a draft board raid, Forsyth had enrolled in a lock-picking course. Now he thought those skills might be useful again.

  LIKE FORSYTH, Bob Williamson, a state social worker, had dropped out of college to work against the war. Like many other young people in the antiwar movement, he had put his education and career goals on hold to focus, like a soldier, on what had become his self-imposed patriotic duty.

  He found it easy to answer Davidon immediately. He didn’t need time to consider it. “I think it’s a great idea,” he remembers telling him. It simply seemed like an important job that needed to be done.

  Bob Williamson was a social worker for the state of Pennsylvania. Like Forsyth, he had dropped out of college to spend more time as an antiwar activist.

  WHEN DAVIDON ASKED Susan Smith to meet to discuss an idea, she expected a challenge. Less than a year earlier, he had introduced her to the concept of raiding draft boards, something she had never imagined doing. By late 1970, she realized that if she wanted to engage in resistance against the war, Davidon was one of the best people to know. She was grateful for his leadership, but she did not expect it to lead to the question he posed to her now: “What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?”

  Smith eventually said yes to Davidon’s question, but she did so with considerable reluctance and fear. She didn’t like this sort of thing. It went against the core of her philosophy about political life. Engaging in clandestine acts, not taking public responsibility for them, was in opposition to her deepest ethical sense.

  But as she thought about Davidon’s question, she too regarded the official suppression of dissent as so important that she decided it was worth risking her freedom to search for the truth about such suppression. She had grown increasingly concerned about the destructive accusations that people were mentally ill if they expressed concern that the FBI was spying inside the peace movement. She thought the assumption that some people blithely expressed—“Of course our government would not do that”—was dangerous and should be challenged with evidence. Like Davidon, she thought this problem should not be ignored or left to fester.

  She told Davidon she would participate.

  RON DURST WAS a graduate student at the time, preparing for a career in a health profession. Recently divorced, he was willing to take risks he would not have been willing to shoulder just a couple years earlier.

  Durst’s first reaction to Davidon’s question was “Brilliant idea.” He respected Davidon as leader and as friend. He still marvels at the simplicity of the idea: get files that document what the FBI is doing, give those files to the public. Only an impressive mind, braced with great courage, could envision carrying out that obvious but frightening and challenging plan to get evidence. Durst thought the idea should be tested as soon as possible. He told Davidon he wanted to be part of the group.

  Smith and Durst agreed to be interviewed for this book but not to be named. They and Janet Fessenden, the only member of the group who has not been found, will be referred to by fictitious names. The other five burglars have agreed to be identified.

  DAVIDON FINISHED his recruitment shortly before the December holidays. He rarely shows pride, but he did years later when he thought about the people who had said yes to his invitation. He smiled as he remembered their good qualities. From the beginning, he was sure he had assembled a fine team. Together they deepened their skills as amateur burglars and after research decided the break-in should be attempted.

  They were in many ways ordinary but at the same time extraordinary. They were part of that group of acutely aware people who during the Vietnam War took to heart and mind their belief that war was the most powerful act their government carried out on behalf of the public using citizens’ money and lives. Therefore, they thought they had a responsibility to study and understand the war and to engage with fellow citizens and government officials regarding this monumentally important thing, war. In recent years, after many years of participating in rallies, demonstrations, and letter writing, they had engaged in acts of resistance, not with enthusiasm, but because to them doing so was a necessity in the face of government officials’ continued refusal to consider arguments that the war was an unjust one and should stop.

  The war was on their minds daily. They did not know how to be indifferent. They had a keen sense of empathy that led them to identify with the agony of American troops and the agony of the Vietnamese people. The numbers alone were enough to propel such people to think, in frustration, “How long can this go on? Wha
t else can we do?” For nearly a decade, Americans woke up hearing daily news reports about “yesterday in Vietnam,” followed by the number of American troops, the number of South Vietnamese, and the number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong who had been killed. This regular roll call of the dead was an ongoing marker of the dimensions of the war and, in the minds of many activists, a depressing reminder of their failure to stop it.

  The downward spiral toward hopelessness in 1970 that Davidon wanted to stem was a reflection, in part, of those growing numbers. In some months, more than five hundred American soldiers were killed. In the end, the totals were: 58,152 Americans killed; 2 million Vietnamese civilians and 1.1 million Vietnamese military killed. For Americans, the losses were enormous. For the Vietnamese, they were simply staggering. Vietnam lost 12 to 13 percent of its population in the war. To put that loss in perspective, if the United States had lost the same portion of its 1970 population, 28 million people would have died—a number that would have represented the killing of every man, woman, and child who lived in California, Arizona, and Michigan at the time.

  Other statistics reflect the amount of dissent that took place. Between 1965 and 1970, more than 170,000 young men were officially recognized as conscientious objectors who refused to fight for religious or moral reasons. Later in the war, others refused to serve because of their opposition to this particular war and sought recognition as selective conscientious objectors, a category of refusal to serve that was recognized as valid late in the war by the U.S. Supreme Court. Formal charges were brought against 209,517 young men for violating draft laws. An additional 360,000 were investigated but not charged. Opposition to the war among active-duty troops was unprecedented, but it was not widely reported. Americans were aware of veterans who opposed the war, such as Secretary of State John Kerry of Massachusetts, who with others formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But few Americans were aware that the antiwar movement was active in barracks, on aircraft carriers, and on the battlefields of Vietnam. According to Pentagon records, 503,926 troops deserted between 1966 and 1971. By 1972, there were reports of entire units refusing to go into battle. One group of soldiers, based at Fort Hood in Texas, refused to report for riot-control duty at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. They knew their assignment would be to control antiwar activists. Because they agreed with those activists, they refused the duty and served time in a military prison.

  THE MEDIA BURGLARS HOPED that if they were successful their effort would demonstrate that it was possible not to be powerless in the face of massive power. They hoped their aggressive nonviolent resistance would make it clear that to fight injustice it wasn’t necessary to match the government’s violence with violence. They also hoped their action would help defeat what they believed were the rampant enemies of dissent at that time—fear, apathy, hopelessness, and now the FBI.

  They found the courage needed for this high-risk venture from diverse sources. Their consciences had been set on fire—by the Holocaust in Europe, by racial injustice in America, by the use of atomic bombs against Japan in 1945, and, for all of them, especially the youngest members of the group, by the Vietnam War. They were determined—as was German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who heroically resisted the Nazis during the Holocaust, was—not to be silent, not to be passive. They rejected silence in the face of injustice. They regarded silence as collaboration with injustice.

  They realized people would be shocked if they knew what they were about to do. Though the country was born as an act of resistance, many Americans had long ago become timid citizens, ready to accept whatever government officials told them, especially about war. Until the war in Vietnam, few Americans had raised questions about an American war, let alone engaged in acts of resistance against one. In recent years, though, more and more people had raised questions about the war in Vietnam. Consequently, as the burglars prepared to test the possibility of breaking into the FBI office in Media, resistance was not the totally strange and forbidding concept it had been just fifteen years earlier.

  Resistance had not been embraced by the masses, but it had been seeping into the American conscience during the last decade. Courage had been made visible repeatedly by civil rights activists in the South. They had set examples. After hundreds of lynchings, and after being excluded from equality for nearly a century after the Civil War, more and more African Americans found the courage to say no to the suppression of their rights. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as they stepped forward to claim their right to vote and other basic rights they had been guaranteed but denied, they faced arrest, imprisonment, even death. As they did so, Americans saw a new vision of courage on the evening news.

  The faces of courage were no longer only faces from the past etched in history books. Courage was not just brave soldiers going ashore at Normandy. It was not just Harriet Tubman leading hundreds of slaves in the dark of night, helping them flee from slavery in the South to freedom in the North as she passed through the Underground Railroad station in the town the burglars soon would make famous again—Media, Pennsylvania. Courage was not just Mahatma Gandhi fasting as he led a massive movement of people in India seeking independence from the British.

  Courage, as people had often seen since 1955 on the evening news on the televisions in their living rooms, was alive today. Courage was Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus. It was hundreds of black students quietly refusing to obey orders to leave segregated lunch counters in Nashville. It was black children walking through club-wielding mobs of spitting, screaming, face-scratching white people in Little Rock who didn’t want black children to go to school with white children. Courage was Martin Luther King writing a “Letter from Birmingham Jail” urging people to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against unjust laws, and then insisting, despite scars from being beaten, that “one who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly.” Courage was Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Michael Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two of them white and one of them black, who were savagely lynched, murdered, and buried in a dam in Mississippi in the summer of 1964—Freedom Summer it was called, but it was not freedom for them.

  Because courage had become more visible, more people found it. If it hadn’t, thousands of young men probably would not have refused to serve in the Vietnam War. If courage had not become more visible, the Berrigan brothers and others in the Catholic peace movement probably never would have raided draft boards. If courage had not become more visible, Davidon and the other burglars probably never would have even thought of doing what they were about to do in Media.

  Still, even in the context of the courage that had become visible in that era, an act of resistance as extreme as burglarizing an FBI office was something very few people would have been willing to do. Resistance this extreme was so rare that it seemed like something only fools or saints would attempt. However laudable the goals might have been, normal people did not train themselves to become amateur burglars in order to break into an FBI office. But these people, who were neither saints nor fools, agreed to do just that.

  In the end, their decision to engage in this extraordinary act of resistance came down—as such decisions had for historic leaders of nonviolent resistance, including Gandhi and King—to this:

  Fully aware that what they planned to do could, whether or not they achieved their goal, take away their freedom, perhaps even endanger their lives, they decided that their desire to stop injustice—the destruction of dissent by the FBI—was more important to them than their desire to lead a normal, uninterrupted life.

  They moved forward.

  4

  The Burglars in the Attic

  FROM THE BEGINNING, the Media burglars worked in total secrecy. “We pulled the curtains around us,” Bonnie Raines recalls. As they closed the curtains, they recognized that the break-in they were about to plan might be more dangerous than anything any of them, or anybody they knew, had ever done. They intended to keep the curtains drawn before, d
uring, and after the burglary.

  Closely maintained security was new to all of them. Security had been loose, almost casual, in the draft board break-ins. Unlike the draft board raiders, the Media burglars would be silent and the group would be small. At their first meeting as a group in late December 1970, when they chose their name—the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI—they all agreed that no one else would be invited to be part of the group. It would be only as large as necessary to accomplish their goals: get inside the Media FBI office, take as many files as possible, review the files, and, assuming they contained information the public needed, distribute them to the public.

  The strict secrecy rules were not easy to maintain, especially about something they knew their friends in the antiwar movement would find riveting. Secrecy was against their nature. They enjoyed talking with friends about politics and about what they were doing as activists. Suddenly, such conversations had to stop. They realized that given what they planned to raid, an FBI office, they were likely to fail if any information about their plan leaked. If they were going to be arrested, they wanted it to be for something they actually did, not something they planned to do. There was no room for casual talk now.

  With those conditions agreed to, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI started to plan. The first item on their agenda: pick a night for the burglary. In the annals of burglary, this surely was the only time a group of burglars purposely chose the night of a boxing match for their break-in.

  They had to establish the day and time of the burglary at the outset so they could case the area during that time. As they discussed possible dates, it did not seem any one night would be any better or any worse than any other. But one of the burglars—none of them remembers who it was—made the case for scheduling the burglary on the night of the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, March 8. For the first time, two undefeated heavyweight champions were going to compete against each other for the title. Ali would return to the ring that night for the first time since he was convicted in 1967 for refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army. Frazier, a Philadelphia fighter who supported the war, had won the heavyweight title while Ali was kept out of the ring.