The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  In his official report, Felt was silent on his refusal to increase security at Media. He accused Lewis of being negligent about security, but omitted the fact that Lewis had attempted to increase security at the office. In his memoir, Felt writes a misleading account of his own role, making it appear that he increased security at the office. His official conclusion, as stated in his memoir, was “The senior resident agent in charge had failed to protect Bureau documents by putting them in the safe.”

  Before Felt arrived at Media that morning, he promised Hoover he would have a recommendation on his desk by the next morning, and he did. He wrote to Hoover, “I recommend stern disciplinary action.”

  Hoover accepted Felt’s recommendation and suspended Lewis without pay for a month and transferred him to the Atlanta field office. That meant that shortly after the burglary the agent who knew the most about the office and the area, Tom Lewis—who had been in charge of the office for fifteen years, first in Chester and since 1967 in Media—was forced to leave the area and not assist in the investigation. In the local community and among many FBI agents, the harsh treatment of Lewis was considered inappropriate and excessive. His transfer to Atlanta was a hardship for Lewis and his family. He and his wife, Catherine, and their six children had deep roots in the community near Media and did not want to leave. Local law enforcement officers respected him and even made entreaties to bureau officials not to transfer him. Their pleas were ignored. They organized a dinner in Lewis’s honor, but he was forced to leave before it was held. His banishment was seen as such a great injustice that one of the first things L. Patrick Gray did when he was appointed acting director of the FBI on May 3, 1972, the day after Hoover died, was to quietly assign Lewis back to the Philadelphia area, where he and his family longed to be.

  Given Felt’s role as a key confidential source in the Watergate stories that revealed President Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate crimes and contributed to bringing down the president, it is striking to realize that just a year earlier Felt covered up his own major role in contributing to the Media FBI office’s being vulnerable to burglary. That there was no alarm system in the office was central to the Media burglars’ decision to burglarize it. It is unknown if Felt ever acknowledged to himself the central role his misjudgment played in making possible the burglary that he later wrote “damaged the FBI’s image, possibly forever, in the minds of many Americans.”

  THERE IS NO RECORD of Hoover’s initial reaction when he was told the Media office had been burglarized and all serials had been removed. Given Felt’s very close working relationship with Hoover, his account of the director’s reaction undoubtedly is accurate. He reported that “Hoover was enraged, and so was I.” This description matches a report in the Washington Star by Jeremiah O’Leary, one of the director’s favorite reporters. He wrote at the time that when Hoover learned of the Media burglary he was “apoplectic.”

  Hoover’s anger and concern about the potential impact of the Media burglary is not surprising. To him, the bureau’s files were both secret and sacred. He had spent more effort than people outside the FBI knew creating what he thought would keep the bureau’s files sealed and protected from outside scrutiny. His goal of being held accountable to no one but himself depended on his maintaining total control of his files. He knew that if they were exposed, the mythic legends he had created about both himself and the bureau over a lifetime would be endangered.

  In the forty-seven years he had been director, as of 1971, even officials in the Department of Justice, technically his supervisors, and in the two houses of Congress had not seen his files. Only a very few select people outside the bureau knew anything about FBI files. They were the handful of people who occasionally were invited by the director to listen privately with him to salacious recordings his agents or informers had made of members of Congress or of other well-known people whom he could, through his files, blackmail. Over the years, few, if any, of these selected listeners revealed what they heard in the director’s office. After all, an invitation to hear these private recordings, mostly of sexual indiscretions, was at least as much a threat of what the director could do to his guests as it was an invitation to share perverse amusement with a man who ironically had built a reputation as a straitlaced religious person who demanded that everyone who worked for the FBI reflect that same quality. He, and later his successors, would claim there were no FBI files on the personal lives of government officials or other prominent people. The few who knew with certainty that that was a lie didn’t reveal the truth. Now Hoover was afraid the stolen files would reveal to the public what he had long protected and assumed would be secret forever.

  Prior to March 1971, the only time internal FBI files had become public was during the March 1949 trial of Judith Coplon, a Department of Justice employee charged with stealing FBI secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union. Few documents became public then, but Hoover considered their exposure an outrageous and unacceptable intrusion into his power to totally control his secret operations.

  Coplon’s defense attorney, Archibald Palmer, succeeded in getting the Washington federal judge who presided over one of Coplon’s two trials to order the federal prosecutor trying the case to submit FBI files in court. Because the prosecutor had described the files as a significant part of its case against Coplon, her lawyer argued that the government should reveal the documents in court.

  J. Edgar Hoover did not see it that way, but the judge did. The court order that forced the FBI to show some of its files in open court rankled Hoover more than anything that happened to him prior to the 1971 burglary. He told Attorney General Tom Clark that never before in its history had the bureau publicly revealed any raw files, and it never would. He regarded the secrecy of the files as so important that he urged Clark—the future Supreme Court justice and the father of Ramsey Clark, appointed attorney general in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson—to seek a mistrial. He even suggested that the prosecutor should seek a contempt citation against the defendant’s attorney for making the request. The files, if revealed, he said, would endanger national security and would expose confidential informants, the Department of Justice, Attorney General Clark, and the bureau to embarrassment. That word, “embarrassment,” was heard often in the bureau. “Don’t embarrass the bureau” was the director’s mantra throughout his tenure, easily outranking the bureau’s official motto, “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.” It was taken very seriously. In the culture of the FBI, there was little if anything agents could do that would be considered worse.

  Though Hoover insisted national security would be endangered if his files became public, actually it was his plan for permanent secrecy, not national security, that he feared would be endangered. His considerable influence over his immediate superior, the attorney general, was evident in the decision of the prosecutor, at first, to comply with Hoover’s demand. The prosecutor told the court the continued secrecy of FBI files was so important that the government would drop all charges against Coplon rather than risk the exposure of the files. When that threat did not work and the judge again ordered the files be made public, Hoover took the extreme step of telling the attorney general he would resign as FBI director if the secret files were made public. It is believed to be the only time in his long career that he submitted his resignation. Clark convinced Hoover to stay. The prosecutor complied with the order and submitted the FBI files to the court. As Hoover bitterly regretted the exposure, he started planning how he could prevent such exposure from ever happening again.

  Compared to the Media files that would become public twenty-two years later, those the bureau was forced to make public during the Coplon trial were relatively insignificant. Unlike the Media files, the files released at the Coplon trial did not include descriptions of secret bureau programs or guidelines. As Hoover predicted, though, the Coplon trial FBI files embarrassed the bureau, providing the first glimpse of the shoddy investigative methods it used. As such, they attracted considerable interest and criticism.
One file labeled as “Reds” actors Fredric March, Helen Hayes, John Garfield, Canada Lee, and Paul Muni. The reports showed the bureau’s disregard for verification and its interest in collecting salacious but irrelevant material about citizens. Various people, prominent and not prominent, were slandered without evidence. One file stamped “secret” was a report given to the bureau by an unknown Bronx man who told an FBI agent he had watched his neighbor walking around naked inside his own home, a fact that had no connection to national security or to suspicion of crime but was nevertheless placed in a permanent bureau file.

  The result of “dossiers being laid out for public inspection,” wrote New York Times reporter Cabell Phillips at the time, was that the FBI, which “has enjoyed an immunity from high-level criticism almost unparalleled among Government agents, found itself this week in a state of acute embarrassment as a result of public disclosure of some of its investigative techniques” that were made “over its strenuous, almost frantic, protests.…No one can recall a time in all that period of growth when the FBI has been subjected to a Congressional investigation, not an instance in which any appropriations committee has failed to give it all the money it requested.…The FBI enjoys an unusual autonomy.…It is a monolithic, tightly disciplined and intensely loyal hierarchy responsible solely to the director.”

  Coplon was convicted in both trials. Her convictions were historic, for they marked the first conviction of an American accused of spying for the Soviets. She was tried along with Valentin Gubitchev, a Soviet member of the United Nations Secretariat to whom she was accused of passing documents. As Hoover biographer Curt Gentry has written, the convictions also made the case for what Hoover had long been claiming: that the Soviets used United Nations employees to conduct espionage on its behalf. But Hoover was so angry about a few of his files being exposed that he took no pride in being proven right on that point. In fact, his reactions demonstrate Hoover priorities that would have surprised the public. He was a leading cold warrior, a fact well known to the public through his speeches, articles, and books. But faced with a choice between convicting the first person charged with handing secrets to the Soviet Union and keeping a few FBI files secret, Hoover stood firmly for protecting his files even if it meant charges against Coplon would have to be dropped.

  The FBI faced additional embarrassment in the Coplon cases. The historic convictions were overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In light of the court’s explanation for the reversals, the defeat was considered not only significant but also needless. In the unanimous opinion written by Judge Learned Hand, the court declared that Coplon’s “guilt was plain.” But the convictions must be overturned, the judges agreed, because of numerous illegal acts by the FBI in the course of the investigation that led to the charges. The illegalities included how the FBI made the arrests, lies by an FBI agent under oath during one of the Coplon trials, and illegal wiretapping of various phones, including ones on which the bureau listened to the defendant’s conversations with her attorney.

  Despite Hoover’s humiliation over losing this important case, after the Coplon trial he provided more confirmation that he cared more about maintaining the secrecy of his files than about the outcome of prosecutions based on faulty FBI investigations. When the convictions were overturned, he successfully urged successive attorneys general not to retry the cases because to do so might require making public more illegal activity by the FBI. Though he didn’t want Coplon to be tried again, he also did not want the failed charges against her to be dropped. For nearly twenty years after Coplon’s conviction was overturned in December 1950, Hoover succeeded in keeping the charges against her from being dropped. With the charges hanging over her, her rights and movements were restricted. She was not allowed to vote, to drive, or to leave the New York City area, even to cross the Hudson River to view the unveiling of her father’s tombstone. Finally, in an unusual family symmetry, Ramsey Clark, attorney general under President Johnson and son of the attorney general at the time of the Coplon trials, dismissed the charges against her. Hoover protested strongly but unsuccessfully against the attorney general he later dismissively called a “jellyfish” and described as the worst of all the attorneys general he had worked with.

  After the Coplon trial failures, Hoover focused on creating a filing system he thought would permanently block future exposure of FBI files. It was this post-Coplon, super-secure system that he thought was totally sealed that was cracked open by the Media burglars.

  From the time he became director in 1924 until 1949, Hoover’s files had remained secret. But in light of the judicially forced exposure during the Coplon trial, he redesigned the bureau’s filing system with more complex, deeper layers of secrecy. He ordered the chief agent in all field offices to keep “highly confidential” and “most secretive” sources and files isolated from general case files so they would not be “vulnerable to court-ordered discovery motions, congressional subpoenas, or requests from the Justice Department.” He did this in part by ordering agent reports to be divided into two categories—investigative and administrative. Any part of a sensitive file that could cause embarrassment if it became public was to be isolated from the file and placed in a file labeled “administrative.” Most, if not all, of the information he instructed to be placed in administrative files was in fact not administrative matter. Rather, these files included incriminating personal information regarding government witnesses; privileged medical records; sealed court documents; illegally obtained bank, telephone, and credit company records; and records of any form of technical surveillance—mail openings, break-ins, wiretaps, microphone installations, and the theft and deciphering of codes and information gathered from taps, break-ins, and code deciphering. In other words, the bureau would continue to gather information illegally but would file it in ways that would make it inaccessible to authorities.

  The most sensitive files would be kept in special files in field offices, in the special file room in the director’s office, and in a special file he designated the “blackmail file” and kept in what was known as the FBI’s print shop in the basement of FBI headquarters. The most sensitive were to be kept in the director’s “Official/Confidential and Personal files.” Later, he continued to develop even deeper layers of secrecy in his file system, including one he labeled the “Do Not File” files.

  Under Hoover’s new and improved post-Coplon secrecy plan, sensitive materials were never to be seen by anyone outside the bureau—not even by Department of Justice attorneys, the people who prosecuted crimes based on FBI investigations. Hoover thought his new post-Coplon trial file system was so tightly sealed that it guaranteed the FBI’s files would be beyond the reach of members of Congress, congressional committees, other federal agencies, and judges. He also intended for the files to be kept secret from his bosses, the attorney general, and the president, except as he chose to reveal secrets to them to serve his purposes.

  During the very rare times prior to 1971 when Congress examined any aspect of intelligence operations, Hoover succeeded, with relative ease, in having the FBI excluded from examination. When the National Lawyers Guild issued a rare call for an investigation of the bureau after the revelations at Coplon’s trial and tried to convince the Truman administration to pursue it, the director smeared the organization and destroyed its effort. Though Truman made it known inside the White House that he disapproved of some of Hoover’s tactics, he refused to investigate how the FBI operated.

  The Cold War was at a blazing point. People were afraid. Soon they forgot about the criticisms made against the FBI during Coplon’s trials. Hoover did not forget. Protected by his sealed files and people’s fears and forgetfulness, he continued his public roles as head of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency and leading fiery narrator of tales of the communist perils that faced Americans, as well as his private role as builder of secret files on organizations and on the personal and political lives of people he considered subversive.

  It
is believed that after Hoover locked his files in deeper secrecy in 1950, no journalist or official questioned him about FBI files, let alone sought access to them. Hoover’s effort to maintain total secrecy succeeded. It went unchallenged.

  Until the night of March 8, 1971.

  FBI FILES—what Hoover thought he had assured would be forever beyond the reach of even the highest officials—were now in the hands of unknown burglars. Despite his elaborately deceptive labeling and other methods of maintaining secrecy, now a simple burglary could—if agents did not immediately find and arrest these burglars and seize and secure the documents—violate his secrecy in far more profound ways than he ever thought possible. Since creating the new filing procedures in 1950, he had put several large secret programs in place, programs he thought were necessary in order for the bureau to fulfill its mission. But he knew that if they ever became known, many people would criticize him.

  How could it be that his elaborate secrecy system was protected from intrusions by federal judges, members of Congress and congressional committees, attorneys general, and even presidents, but it was not protected from intrusions by, of all people, burglars? It had never occurred to the director that some people cared so much about the Constitution and the right to dissent it guaranteed that they would be willing to risk their freedom in order to get access to his secret files to determine if he and the FBI were destroying that right. Since the Cold War, he had expected Americans to behave like lambs. The possibility that some Americans could be lions and break into his secret den was unimaginable.

  Hoover realized that if the files stolen at Media became public, they were likely to have a much greater impact than the few that had become public at the time of the Coplon trial. His enemies—despite enjoying decades of nearly uninterrupted public adulation, he realized recently that he had acquired a few enemies—would be able to attack him with more than the rumors and speculation he had found easy to deny. If certain FBI files became public, people would be armed with official facts and policies rather than speculation.