The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  When she was invited into the room where Lewis was waiting to talk with her, she had a choice of two chairs. She picked the one that provided the widest view of the room as well as a view through a window. She could see John and Nathan in the family’s station wagon parked across the street. She could see that Nathan, small and rambunctious, wasn’t very patient about waiting for his mother. Partway through her interview with the agent, she noticed that Nathan had calmed down and he and John were walking leisurely on the courthouse grounds.

  As she talked with Lewis, she remembered the burglars’ suggestion that she should seem a little naïve. She told him she was writing the paper for a class, but she hoped the local newspaper might publish it. “The guy acted as though he was flattered. I think he wanted to look like a newer breed of FBI agent, and I was able to play into that.” She asked him if, in the event that they started hiring women as agents (which they first did in 1972, just two months after Hoover died), if agents’ work time could be flexible. He said agents worked nine to five, and there really wasn’t much need for flexibility. “There was none of this romantic stuff that these guys are out there working day and night,” she recalled.

  In response to several questions, she remembers that he repeated that “bureau guidelines” would have to be followed. She wondered at one point if the conversation had gone on too long and if he might be suspicious of her. She quickly dismissed that concern, confident that “he didn’t have any antennae out for anything unusual.” She took notes throughout the conversation but made sure she established eye contact with him often. If the agent thought she looked a little odd—as she sat there writing with gloved hands—he gave no clue. “He was a nice guy. The kind of guy you might like having as a neighbor.” They chitchatted about college sports teams. He asked her where she had grown up. She lied and said she was from Hartford, Connecticut.

  The office was very quiet, not a place where there were any signs of urgency or excitement. “I felt like I was in a CPA’s office. I remember being struck by that. I felt as though they were drones. It was a rather nice office. It had wall-to-wall carpet.” That was a welcome discovery. Carpet would help muffle burglary noises. The desks were made of wood. There was no art on the wall, unless the framed photographs of J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon hanging in the entry room counted as art. In Lewis’s office there was a framed photograph of Hoover standing beside the agent. It had been autographed by Hoover. There also were framed commendations from the director on the wall and photographs of Lewis’s family on his desk.

  When Bonnie Raines stood to leave, she thanked Lewis and walked toward the room where she had waited. But then she changed course and entered another room, one she had not been in before. An agent apparently thought she was confused and told her she could not leave from that room. She paused, looked around just long enough to take in as much as she could in that third room, and then returned to the first room, apologizing for getting lost and saying she had thought there might be a restroom off that room. No, the agent said, the restrooms were outside the bureau office. He gave her a key to the restroom and pointed to it down the hall. This was important information. The burglars wanted to know if there was an unlocked restroom where they could hide, if necessary, on the night of the burglary. Now that she knew a key was necessary to enter the restroom, she realized that was not going to be possible.

  By the time she left, she had been in the office about an hour, longer than she had expected and much, much longer than any of the agents in the office would admit to bureau investigators shortly after the burglary. She thought she had accomplished her mission. Her biggest assignment was to determine if there was an alarm system in the office. She observed that some electrical cords were covered with old cracked paint. She had tracked the cords by eye and concluded they were phone lines and the cords of the old window air conditioners. She was confident she had traced and figured out the function of every cord. By the process of elimination, she concluded there was no alarm system. She knew the group would be excited to hear that.

  As she left after returning the restroom key, the last thing she did was check again the lock on the front door, as Forsyth had prepared her to. She thought his description was correct: one simple lock that could be picked easily.

  Almost as important as establishing that there was no alarm system was Bonnie’s next discovery that the second door that opened from the FBI office to the external hall was blocked by a large cabinet. The inside crew, she told the burglars that night, would have to enter through the door she had entered—the main entrance, the door that opened into the reception room. She was insistent that the second external door, which she observed from the room she pretended to wander into to find a restroom, should not be broken into the night of the burglary. She remembers feeling relief that she had made that discovery. She assumed—correctly, it turned out—that this tall cabinet that barricaded that door was filled, like all the other cabinets in the office, with paper and therefore was very heavy. If Forsyth broke in through that door and in the process of pushing it open toppled the tall, heavy cabinet, the thud it would make as it hit the floor would be so loud that it could not be concealed, even if the broadcast of the Ali-Frazier fight was turned to the highest volume in every apartment in the building.

  To her surprise, she felt at ease in the FBI office. Except for a few moments of doubt about whether Lewis was suspicious, she thought the interview went very well. She had collected important information the burglars needed. When she left, she felt sure she had not been regarded with suspicion.

  The Raineses had agreed that about an hour after she arrived at the office, John would drive to a prearranged point a few blocks away so she would not be seen leaving in a car. She didn’t want agents to wonder about her claim that she had come by public transportation.

  When she opened the station wagon door, her calm veneer disappeared and she was visibly shaking as she sat in the passenger seat. John had been quite nervous about her visit to the office, so he was somewhat alarmed when he saw her. But her shaking stopped as quickly as it had started. She felt great relief. In fact, she was ecstatic. Now, she said, she was sure the burglary could be done. Until now, she had had many doubts. She couldn’t stop telling John, as they drove toward home, how easy—how very easy—it was going to be to burglarize that office. John remembers that her certainty and her enthusiasm were infectious. Despite the deep foreboding he felt about the burglary, he couldn’t help sharing her enthusiasm that afternoon. He remembers her excitement as she listed the reasons why the burglary was going to be easy. There was no alarm system. There were no surveillance cameras. The lock looked like it could be picked. There was carpet on the floor. As far as she could tell, there were no locks on the file cabinets. How lucky could they be, she asked, with the delightful certainty of the schoolgirl she had just posed as. “There was no sign of security. Nope, nothing.”

  She abruptly halted her hyper-elated recall and removed her gloves. She felt an urgency to write notes about what she had seen while her memory was fresh. She wrote during the ride home to Germantown and continued after they arrived there. She could hardly wait to tell the other burglars what she learned that day inside the FBI office. Thinking like a smart burglar, later that night she destroyed the notes she had written during and after the interview.

  That night was a turning point.

  After Bonnie Raines reported on what she had observed at the office, the other burglars felt relieved. They shared her optimism. For the first time, Davidon remembers, “We knew we could do it.” As the person who had proposed the burglary, he was delighted to hear her positive assessment. It was very good news. Doubts about whether the break-in could be done faded away that night for all of the burglars.

  Even John Raines regarded Bonnie’s discoveries as good news, but, beginning that day, his concerns grew much deeper. “Until then, we didn’t know we could do it. Then Bonnie got in there and discovered there was no alarm system. After that,
we knew we had a going project. At that point I, more than Bonnie, began to have real worries about what might happen.…Once it became clear that this was in fact something we were going to do, it became clear to me that the FBI was going to be very, very angry about this. They were really going to come after us.”

  From then on, he found himself thinking—almost constantly—about the fact that he and Bonnie were moving into “very deep waters of jeopardy that we had not faced in the draft boards.…We were putting our families in jeopardy. I was aware that this was a much more dangerous undertaking, in terms of our parenting responsibilities, than anything we had undertaken before.” No one else in the group, including Bonnie, seems to have focused as much as John did on the possible danger ahead. “We had faced danger and responsibility earlier, when I went south, but never as powerfully as we faced it in that last month before the action at Media.”

  When he was gripped by worry in those days leading up to the burglary, he’d think again about the children and how much he longed to be a part of their daily lives as they grew up. Sometimes the thought of the future they might be about to sacrifice was almost too painful to contemplate. His fear had not been great when they raided a draft board. Then they had had a community they were with before and after the raid. Whether they failed or succeeded, they had that solidarity with one another. They met afterwards and talked with the large community of resisters about what they had done. It was not going to be that way if they burglarized the FBI office. They were going to try to be completely silent about what they had done. He feared that might mean having a “sense of nothingness after the Media break-in and its aftermath were over. No community would be there for us. I remember thinking that we would have a great deal to worry about afterward—about whether they were going to find us and, also, whether we would have any community of solidarity. I didn’t think we would. We would be alone.” He found that a painful thing to contemplate. Smith felt the same concern. She realized that the aftermath of this burglary would be so much lonelier than working in Mississippi in 1964 was. There, even under the most dangerous conditions, you knew supporters would be waiting for you. By plan, that could not happen after Media.

  Bonnie Raines had a chilling thought late the night after she visited the FBI office. She kept it to herself. That night, she understood deep in her bones for the first time what one of the other burglars had said the night she agreed to case inside. At the time, she had not fully absorbed the meaning of the comment. Now she did: As of her visit to the office today, FBI agents had a specific person to whom they later would tie the burglary—her.

  Despite now thinking she was indeed a marked woman, she recalls that her strongest feeling that night was excitement about the possibility that the break-in could be accomplished. Originally doubtful that an FBI office could be burglarized, now she thought the action “was almost inviting. I almost felt, ‘What is there to lose?’ There was so little security. It was in this sleepy little town. We were going to do it the night of the boxing match. It just seemed there were a lot of things working in our favor.” Given all the casing that had been done, including her time in the office that day, “We felt we had cased so completely that there could not be any surprises,” she recalls thinking that night. “I was very up for it.”

  She was wrong about no surprises. There would be a big one.

  But the night after she visited the office, she couldn’t help smiling to herself as she thought about the deception she had pulled off. She enjoyed the irony then and years later. Her Michigan cheerleader good looks and earth mother qualities had turned out to be useful to the group. She had been able to use her all-American girl-next-door looks, still intact at twenty-nine, to move the burglary forward. Though there still was much work and possible danger ahead, she felt satisfied with her role and grateful that her fellow burglars had had enough confidence in her to ask her to case the office.

  EXACTLY ONE MONTH BEFORE the day the burglary was scheduled to take place, an unprecedented public plea was made for an investigation of the FBI. How timely. The burglars were so busy, with their double schedules of day jobs and burglary preparation at night, that they were unaware that a prominent academic, H. H. Wilson, a professor of political science at Princeton University, issued a call for such an investigation in the Nation magazine on February 8, 1971. It was titled “The FBI Today: The Case for Effective Control.” At that time, the Nation was the only publication where such a call would have been published. For years, it was nearly the only publication that published either reporting or analysis of the FBI. It would later be learned that the Nation articles about the FBI led to investigations not only of Fred Cook, the person who wrote most of the articles, but also of those who wrote letters to the magazine about the articles, as well as the neighbors of those letter writers. When Cook got his FBI file in 1986, he learned that his book and the Nation series that was the basis of the book had set off multipronged bureau investigations of him and the magazine. Hoover ordered the Internal Revenue Service to check Cook’s sources of income. The bureau’s Liaison Section proposed that agents should try to prove that Cyrus Eaton, a Cleveland industrialist who had criticized the bureau, had “bought” the Nation. Evidence of this sort “could completely destroy The Nation as an allegedly independent, impartial publication.” Hoover approved the proposal: “We should try to find out who is behind it. Yes.” Cook’s FBI file also contained documentation that “week after week, the Bureau’s New York office sent the Seat of Government [FBI headquarters] a synopsis of what the Nation was running.”

  Hoover did not like Wilson’s article any more than he had liked Cook’s earlier ones.

  Venturing where no analyst had gone before, in his February 1971 article Professor Wilson called for an independent investigation of the FBI that would lead to oversight and controls over the bureau. “If these controls are to be implemented,” he wrote, “the public must be alert, informed and genuinely concerned. Instead, Mr. Hoover has cultivated over the last 46 years an uncritical, mindless adulation. The Director and the Bureau have become folk heroes, an atmosphere has been created wherein even to suggest that the Bureau is a legitimate subject for analysis and political discussion is enough to bring charges that one is subversive, un-American and probably godless.”

  The FBI’s “strong ideological bias,” Wilson wrote, “and lack of sophistication render it eminently unfit for the delicate task of conducting anti-subversion inquiries in a democracy.” A “concerned public must demand change. This is no partisan political issue, but one that ought to arouse the most dedicated, tough-minded conservatives as much as convinced liberals or radicals. At stake is the preservation of personal liberty in any present or future conflict with the bureaucratic state.

  “It is of tremendous importance,” Wilson concluded, “that some independent organization takes the lead in stimulating a public discussion of the issues at stake.”

  There was no groundswell of response to Professor Wilson’s article. He could not have imagined that, as he wrote his call for an independent investigation of the FBI, a very independent organization, a small dedicated group of amateur burglars who called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, was working feverishly on plans to find the evidence that would make his claims believable and his call compelling far beyond the small readership of the Nation. As the burglars sat in cars late at night on dark Media streets, they too thought “the public must be alert, informed and genuinely concerned” about the FBI.

  Even before Professor Wilson’s call for an investigation, Hoover’s 1971 had started off badly. On January 3, Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times reported that each year the government spent $30,000 to purchase a new limousine for Hoover, in contrast to the $5,000 spent annually to lease a limousine for the president. On January 17, Nelson reported the case of Jack Shaw, an agent in the bureau’s New York office who had mildly criticized the bureau in a letter to a professor in a course in which he was enrolled at John J
ay College of Criminal Justice. Shaw’s letter had been typed by someone in the typing pool at the FBI office in New York. Scraps of a copy of it were found during a wastebasket inspection and pieced together. Within hours, Hoover was informed about the letter. He expressed outrage at what Shaw had written and at his failure to report that his professor had criticized the bureau in class. The director fired Shaw “with prejudice” and ordered him and the other fifteen FBI agents enrolled at John Jay to withdraw from their classes. A short time later, FBI clerical employees enrolled at American University were required to drop out of classes there when the director learned that one of their professors had criticized the action he had taken against Shaw.

  On February 1, Senator George McGovern spoke of the Shaw case on the floor of the U.S. Senate, calling it “an injustice that cries out for remedy.” A few days later, McGovern announced that he had received an anonymous letter, claimed to have been written by ten current FBI agents, stating that morale was at an all-time low at the bureau and asking for a congressional investigation of the bureau’s “cult of personality.”

  Hoover’s response was swift and extreme, not to mention irrational. He said the letter was written by the Soviet Union’s KGB and that McGovern had been duped by Soviet agents. Associate Director Tolson asked each of the twenty top executives at bureau headquarters to write letters to McGovern attacking him for making the ten agents’ letter public. In various indignant ways, each of them accused McGovern of using the anonymous letter to buoy his political career. One of the executives was criticized for writing a letter that was not sufficiently indignant.