Forsyth decided that on his drive back to Philadelphia he would get rid of some things he thought the burglars should not have—bullets. The inside crew had grabbed a large brown leather briefcase from the FBI office closet and scooped into it assorted small items from the agents’ desk drawers, mostly paper clips and bullets. They packed the briefcase into one of the suitcases. Forsyth was perturbed when he discovered the bullets. A bunch of nonviolent antiwar activists, he thought, should not be caught with them. He also was mildly amused that agents kept bullets and paper clips side by side in their desk drawers, as if both were basic office supplies. Everyone agreed with Forsyth that they should get rid of the bullets immediately.
As the sun was starting to rise, Forsyth parked at the end of a bridge in a small village between the farm and the city. Once again making a proper appearance in his Brooks Brothers topcoat, but this time carrying an FBI agent’s briefcase instead of his own, he walked to the center of the bridge and deep-sixed the briefcase, unwanted bullets included, into a turbulent spot in the Schuylkill River. He watched the briefcase sink and then he drove home confident that the only dangerous items the burglars now possessed were J. Edgar Hoover’s secret files. Soon they would find out how dangerous they were.
IT WAS TIME to let the world know the burglary had taken place. The burglars hoped they would be ready to distribute copies of stolen files in about two weeks. Early this morning, though, they were ready to release a statement announcing what they had done and why they had done it. Everyone in the group had agreed to the statement, written a little more than a week earlier by Davidon and John Raines. It had been decided that John would call a reporter and read the release on the way home from the farmhouse the morning after the burglary.
The Raineses left for home and their special assignment at about six o’clock. They were eager to return before the children woke up. Bonnie was driving, and John was nervously reading the statement aloud, rehearsing the call he would make momentarily to the reporter. The reporter had been carefully chosen—Bill Wingell, a freelance reporter based in Philadelphia who wrote for the Reuters news service. Davidon had met Wingell at several antiwar events he covered, but John Raines had never met or talked with him, so his voice could not be recognized by Wingell.
As they got close to Chestnut Hill, a residential area in the far northwest corner of Philadelphia, they knew they couldn’t put off the call any longer. In an area where there were no homes or offices, they saw a phone booth outside a closed gas station. Bonnie parked a few feet from the booth. John fumbled for coins as he entered the booth, closed it, and then dialed Wingell’s number. It was a little before 6:30 a.m. The ringing phone wakened Wingell. John told him he wanted to read a statement to him and launched right into the rather lengthy statement. But Wingell stopped him. He needed a few moments to put paper in his typewriter and otherwise get prepared to take dictation, including clearing his mind of sleep and becoming fully alert. It was an awkward moment for both of them. Finally, Wingell said he was ready to take the statement. John started to read again, but now more slowly. This time his words jolted Wingell to full alertness:
On the night of March 8, 1971, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI removed files from the Media, PA, office of the FBI. These files will now be studied to determine:
• The nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on by this office of the FBI, particularly against groups and individuals working for a more just, humane and peaceful society;
• How much of the FBI’s efforts are spent on relatively minor crimes by the poor and powerless against whom they can get a more glamorous conviction rate, instead of investigating truly serious crimes by those with money and influence which cause great damage to the lives of many people; crimes such as war profiteering, monopolistic practices, institutional racism, organized crime, and the mass distribution of lethal drugs;
• The extent of illegal practices by the FBI, such as eavesdropping, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informers.
At this point in his slow reading, John noticed out of the corner of his eye that a police car was slowly driving by. Bonnie and John laugh as they recall the scene many years later. It was far from funny at the time. “John is sitting in the phone booth with his paper, reading away,” Bonnie recalls. The police officer slowed down and peered in a very obvious way at John. He kept reading, but he was very aware that he was being observed. The police officer circled and came around again, driving even more slowly this time. Again he stared directly at John as he read.
Bonnie may have been more frightened at this moment than she was at any point before or during the burglary. She leaned over the passenger seat and knocked nervously and as loudly as she could on the front passenger window of the car, motioning for John to stop reading and return to the car. She wanted to drive away before the police car returned again. “This is the closest we came to blowing the whole thing,” says John. “We didn’t know what to think. It was clear the cop was trying to figure out what we were doing.” It wasn’t normal to see a middle-aged couple at a phone booth at 6:30 a.m., with one of them reading a document into the phone. They had contingency plans for how to deal with police while casing, and for how to block the street in front of the burglarized building with a fake breakdown, but they had no contingency plan for this situation. Here was a police officer looking into John’s face from just a few yards away. In John’s hands was what amounted to an elaborately detailed confession of the burglary—a bonanza for an arresting officer. What would he say if the police officer got out of his car and asked, “What are you doing?” John had no idea what he would say.
But in this critical moment, John changed.
He lost the fear that had nearly paralyzed him in recent weeks, especially the previous evening. He, who had been so frightened before the burglary, now, in a moment of potential crisis, summoned more courage than he knew he had and, in a split second, decided not to abort the call He continued reading:
As this study proceeds, the results obtained, along with the FBI documents pertaining to them, will be sent to people in public life who have demonstrated the integrity, courage and commitment to democratic values which are necessary to effectively challenge the repressive policies of the FBI.
As long as the United States government wages war against Indochina in defiance of the vast majority who want all troops and weapons withdrawn this year, and extends that war and suffering under the guise of reducing it, as long as great economic and political power remains concentrated in the hands of small cliques not subject to democratic scrutiny and control, then repression, intimidation and entrapment are to be expected. We do not believe that this destruction of democratic society results simply from the evilness, egotism or senility of some leaders. Rather, this destruction is the result of certain undemocratic social, economic and political institutions.
The police car did not return a third time. As he read, John comforted himself with the possibility that the police officer may have thought he was reading numbers to his bookie in the aftermath of the great fight the night before. He kept dictating the statement to Wingell:
We have carried out this action in a way which does not physically threaten anyone. We intend no personal harassment of the people who work in the office from which files were taken. Indeed, we invite them and others to join with us in building a peaceful, just and open society; one which does not wage nor threaten war, which distributes human and material resources fairly, and which operates on the basis of justice rather than fear.
We have taken this action because:
• We believe that a law and order which depends on intimidation and repression to secure obedience can have but one name, and that name is tyranny;
• We believe that democracy can survive only in an order of justice, of an open society and public trust;
• We believe that citizens have the right to scrutinize and control their own government and its agencies;
• And because we believe that the FBI has betrayed its democratic trust and we wish to present evidence for this claim to the open and public judgment of our fellow citizens.
John thinks the timbre of his voice may have changed slightly at this point. Originally, the statement was to have ended here. A couple days before the burglary, John, feeling more and more concern about how heavy the impact of the burglary could be on the burglars’ families, especially their children, asked the other burglars to consider adding a paragraph that would acknowledge the risk to their families. Though none of them seemed to feel the need for the additional words as urgently as he did, they all readily agreed to such an addition. With the sweet faces and hoped-for happy futures of Lindsley, Mark, and Nathan much on his mind, he wrote the new last paragraph. This paragraph meant a great deal to John Raines. In addition to reflecting his growing fears, it also was a public acknowledgment that the decision to conduct the burglary was made with full awareness of the potentially enormous danger to their families, but that they believed the danger to society posed by a secret police state was so great that this extreme step—the burglary of an FBI office—justified the high price they and their families might pay. Now, through Wingell, he was telling that to the world on behalf of all the burglars:
In doing this, we know full well the legal jeopardy in which we place ourselves. We feel most keenly our responsibilities to those who daily depend upon us, and whom we put in jeopardy by our own jeopardy. But under present circumstances, this seems to us our best way of loving and serving them, and, in fact, all the people of this land.
Finally, he read, with pride and a powerful emphasis, as though signing off:
The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.
When John Raines returned to the car, mission accomplished, he and Bonnie remember, they saw both relief and concern in each other’s faces. They wondered if the police officer was watching them from a location they couldn’t see. Would he follow them as they pulled away? Bonnie drove home on a route that took them down Lincoln Drive, a graceful, undulating parkway that winds through a beautiful wooded part of Philadelphia. John remembers suddenly feeling great relief—that the burglary was done, that they already knew they had valuable FBI files in their possession, that the police officer had not stopped to question them, that the announcement of their deed was now in the hands of a reporter who would see that the world soon learned that an FBI office had been burglarized by unknown people. John let himself laugh and shout. He tore the long typed news release into small pieces, threw them out the window, and watched the wind carry them into the trees of Fairmount Park.
They laughed and laughed. It started as nervous laughter and became bold and happy laughter. It probably came from the enormous relief of not being arrested, from lack of sleep, and from the great sense of accomplishment they had started to feel a few hours earlier when they read some of the stolen files. Some of the files were important and might have an impact. All of it made them giddy the morning after the burglary on their way home to the children.
At their house, they unlocked the front door very quietly. Though they had not slept for twenty-four hours, they were not tired. The adrenaline produced by a burglary was a powerful stimulant. They showered, dressed for work, and—as though they had been there all night—woke the children and chatted with them over breakfast around the table where they had had such a good but also poignant time with them the previous evening.
Despite everything, life was still normal.
They were unbelievably happy to be there with the children. But they had no idea how long normal life would last. Over the next few intense months, the fear that they would lose their normal life ebbed and flowed, at times very forcefully. Each time a crisis threatened and then dissipated, the realization that their normal lives had not been disrupted was very precious. It was especially precious now, the morning after the burglary.
Bonnie Raines took Lindsley and Mark to school and Nathan to daycare that morning. As they would later say about themselves, Ozzie and Harriet, the quintessential American television sitcom couple of that era, were back to normal life—as much as they could be the morning after they had burglarized an FBI office. They had dinner that evening with the children and then left for the farm. That would be their pattern every day for a little more than a week: eat dinner with the children, welcome the babysitter, head to the farm, read and analyze FBI files, come home late, get a few hours of sleep, go to work.
In New York early that morning, Muhammad Ali, his face distorted dramatically and full of pain from Joe Frazier’s hammerlike left hook to his jaw the night before, held a press conference in his room at the New Yorker Hotel, a short distance from Madison Square Garden. Dave Kindred wrote that “the good grace of commonsense fell into his oratory” that morning as he told reporters, “I’ve never thought about losing.…We all have to take defeats in life.…We lose loved ones.…All kinds of things set us back, but life goes on. You don’t shoot yourself. Soon this will be old news. People got lives to live, bills to pay, mouths to feed. Maybe a plane will go down with ninety people on it. Or a great man will be assassinated. That will be more important than Ali losing. I never wanted to lose, never thought I would, but the thing that matters is how you lose. I’m not crying. My friends should not cry.”
Someone interrupted, and said, “Champ …”
“Don’t call me champ,” Ali said. “Joe’s the champ now.”
In Washington early that morning, J. Edgar Hoover did not yet know that he had been hit. When he found out, unlike Ali, he was not philosophical.
8
J. Edgar Hoover’s Worst Nightmare
IT WAS 7:40 A.M. Tuesday, March 9, at the Media FBI office. As usual, Frank McLaughlin was the first agent to arrive. There had been a burglary the night before—at a bank in nearby Glenolden. It was a failed burglary. Nevertheless, he had worked on it until 2 a.m. He went home after he was done rather than return to the office to file a report, and slept very little before he left for work.
McLaughlin was tired, but he was not too tired to notice, as he approached the office entrance, that something looked different. “It looked to me like somebody had tried to force something in the lock.” He tried to open the door. As he wrote later in an official report, when he inserted his key, “it turned completely around as though it was in putty.”
He “automatically looked at the second door, and I could see that it was ajar. I suspected that there was a burglary. I mean I’ve been in this business a lot of years.…About this time, another agent came up, and I said, ‘I think we’ve got a burglary.’ ”
One of them very cautiously pushed the door open as far as it would go. The two agents squeezed through the narrow opening. McLaughlin remembers scanning the scene:
“The place was ransacked. The doors of cabinets were open and files were gone. I walked into my office, and the desk drawers were rifled.”
Soon all five agents who worked in the office had arrived and were taking in the unprecedented scene: an FBI office emptied of its files, apparently by burglars. One of the agents “immediately and quickly searched the Resident Agency [what small regional FBI offices like this one in Media were called] to determine that no one was in the RA.” They moved from room to room and soon discovered that all drawers and file cabinets had been emptied. Locked desk drawers had been pried open. The extension cord to a radio transmitter was cut.
At 7:50 a.m., McLaughlin called supervisor J. Clifford Ousley at the Philadelphia office and told him the Media office “has been broken into and all the files are gone. Nobody’s hurt. Nobody’s injured.” At this time, he told Ousley, the resident agency “was secured and a neighborhood investigation was instituted.” According to the investigative record, he gave Ousley these details:
Immediate exhaustive search of the Resident Agency and surrounding area for evidence of burglary tools pertinent to this case … included a complete search of the trash cans located in the r
ear of the Resident Agency building and the recesses and culverts at the base of the surrounding buildings and at the curb line in front of the building.…No physical evidence of burglary tools were found.
McLaughlin’s call to Ousley set in motion one of the most intensive investigations in the history of the FBI, one that would consume the director, beginning the moment he arrived at his office in Washington about an hour later.
Ousley, the supervisor in Philadelphia, immediately alerted Joe D. Jamieson, the special agent in charge (SAC) in Philadelphia. It fell to Jamieson to notify the director’s office that the Media office had been burglarized. When Jamieson had been transferred from the Savannah, Georgia, office to Philadelphia as SAC in March 1964, he had told a reporter that FBI work, including his job as SAC in Philadelphia, would be “mainly a sales job.” Given how the FBI was managed under Hoover, with constant attention to building a positive public image of the bureau and the director, there was a lot of truth to that statement. Salesmanship was a central part of the FBI. But a sales approach would not do the job this morning. Jamieson soon would be placed on probation because the burglary happened on his watch. That was minor compared with the punishment Tom Lewis, the agent in charge of the Media office, would receive.
Beginning that morning and continuing for a month, Jamieson headed the investigation. He called Washington headquarters before Hoover arrived. A memo based on that phone call was prepared for Hoover by a member of the director’s staff:
The Burglary Page 15
