The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  The director wasted little time. He moved immediately to make that impossible. He and his top aides developed a two-pronged plan. First, he ordered an intensive investigation. He called it MEDBURG and gave it “major special” status. His daily memos to the key investigators and his top staff regarding MEDBURG usually were marked “urgent,” “top priority,” or “expedite.” Nearly two hundred agents were transferred to Philadelphia to work on the case. Other agents at FBI offices throughout the Northeast and Midwest worked on it. Tips came in from throughout the country, from places as diverse as Los Angeles and a farm in North Carolina.

  Second, bracing for what he then considered the remote possibility that the burglars might not be found quickly and might attempt to distribute the stolen files to journalists, he asked his top aides to consult with Department of Justice officials about the possibility of drafting a law he hoped the Nixon administration would support and Congress would pass quickly—a law similar to Great Britain’s powerful Official Secrets Act. Such a bill would have made it a federal crime for anyone outside the bureau, including journalists, to possess or publish FBI documents.

  Hoover wanted the burglars arrested and the documents seized and secured immediately. Speed was essential to achieving his chief goal: preventing the documents from becoming public. Operating under that sense of urgency, officials in FBI offices throughout the country were told to notify Philadelphia immediately by phone when they were ready to send photos of potential suspects “so arrangements can be made for transmittal by airplane.”

  For nearly a decade, FBI agents and informers had photographed thousands of people at peace marches and demonstrations throughout the country. Beginning immediately after the burglary, agents scoured those surveillance photos. Anyone who had been photographed at an antiwar rally instantly became a potential suspect in the Media burglary. The files also included photos that had been taken surreptitiously by the bureau at trials of antiwar activists. Agents were especially interested in photos taken in Rochester, New York, during the Flower City Conspiracy trial, the trial of the people who were arrested in September 1970 as they broke into a suite of federal offices in Rochester that included an FBI office. It was at that trial, for the only previous break-in at an FBI office, that Davidon started to think it might be possible to do so successfully.

  By late afternoon the day after the Media burglary, the agents working the case had touched many bases in and near Media. A late report they filed that day stated, “Interviews have been conducted with local police, Delaware County Courthouse Police station across from the resident agency, residents in apartments above the resident agency space, custodial personnel, and neighbors. All interviews unproductive to date. Space being processed for fingerprints and crime scene in and around resident agency space being conducted.”

  It had been a long day. Then, at about 5:30, an agent in the Philadelphia office was surprised by a phone call from Bill Wingell, the Reuters reporter John Raines had called early that morning. Wingell wanted to know if it was true that the Media office had been burglarized the previous evening. He was curious. Needless to say, so was the FBI agent who took his call. Until that moment, FBI officials had no reason to think anyone—besides the unknown burglars and the FBI—knew about the burglary. The agent confirmed that the office had been burglarized. Wingell told him about the early-morning anonymous caller who had dictated a statement about why a group had burglarized the office.

  Agents were more than eager to learn everything Wingell knew. He explained the somewhat unusual circumstance that led to his not calling them earlier. After taking the caller’s dictated message, he said, he had called Reuters’ U.S. headquarters in New York and told an editor that he had a potentially important news story. Not the expansive news agency that it is now, at that time Reuters did not report a wide range of U.S. news. That probably was why the editor told Wingell he was not interested in a story about a burglary in a small FBI office in a small town in Pennsylvania. Later that afternoon, Wingell realized he had not heard or read any local news about the burglary. He thought that was strange. While the British news agency might not be interested in an FBI office being burglarized, he thought, surely local news organizations would. He did not realize he was the only reporter who had been notified about the burglary.

  The agent pressed Wingell for more details about his morning caller. Wingell said he had never heard the caller’s voice before. He described him as a “male without any noticeable accent.” The agent asked Wingell to provide the FBI with his typed notes of the statement the caller had dictated. He also asked Wingell to provide the bureau with his fingerprints. Wingell provided the statement, but he later balked at providing fingerprints, saying his refusal was a matter of principle. The FBI report indicates that Wingell promised to give them any future messages he might receive from the anonymous burglars.

  That call by John Raines to Wingell, the burglars had hoped, would inform the public that the burglary had taken place. But the effort had failed. The burglars probably would have achieved their goal if the statement had been read to a local news organization. Instead, by calling an international news agency whose editors apparently didn’t understand the significance of J. Edgar Hoover’s files being stolen, minimal coverage of the burglary took place during the first two weeks after the burglary. Instead of breaking the story about the burglary, as the burglars had hoped, Wingell became a suspect in the case. Immediately after talking with him, agents searched bureau files. Red flags went up when they discovered that for nearly a decade he had photographed and written about Quaker organizations and other antiwar organizations in the Philadelphia area. They regarded with suspicion the fact that Wingell had not called them soon after he had been told the office was burglarized. Why did he wait until late afternoon? In a memo to the director after Wingell’s call, an agent in the Philadelphia office wrote, “Wingell’s long delay in contacting Philadelphia office appears unusual.” They were skeptical that a journalist would wait several hours to confirm an anonymous caller’s sensational claim that an FBI office had been burglarized. Eventually, they concluded he probably had no other role than the one he described, and they dropped him as a suspect.

  Wingell was not the only person who was surprised there were no news stories about the burglary by that afternoon. Davidon was surprised and disappointed. Most of the burglars were busy at their day jobs that day, but as Davidon sat in his campus office trying to act normal, he kept checking radio news reports, and he went out to buy copies of the regional afternoon newspaper, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He found no news about an FBI office being burglarized. Frustrated, he found it impossible to maintain his silence. About the same time Wingell called the FBI, Davidon anonymously called a suburban editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to the FBI report of a call received from the editor a few minutes later, the anonymous caller had asked the editor if he “had heard anything about ransacking of FBI office in Media.” The editor told the FBI that the anonymous caller sounded as if he was “in his early 20s with a well modulated and educated voice.” These two calls caused FBI officials to worry about press coverage. They assumed that if a long statement explaining the burglary had been given to Wingell by someone claiming to speak for the burglars, the same statement probably would be given to other news organizations and would prompt coverage. As it turned out, the bureau’s worries were not justified. Not yet.

  The next day, the two major local newspapers, the Evening Bulletin and the Inquirer, each published three-inch stories about the burglary. They were buried inside the papers and attracted very little attention, for they reported little more than the fact that the burglary had taken place: “Jamieson said something was stolen but refused to identify it.” For two weeks, local news organizations showed little or no curiosity about the burglary. They accepted the FBI’s statement that nothing important had been stolen. That was what the FBI wanted. The lack of interest by the Philadelphia news media in the burglary gave th
e FBI reason to be optimistic, to believe that without the spotlight of intense coverage the documents and burglars could be found quickly.

  After the bureau learned from Wingell the content of the message John Raines had dictated to Wingell, Jamieson sent the director a memo that warned that the Media burglars might be part of a plan that endangered FBI offices everywhere: “It appears this group has instituted a program which to fulfill may involve similar break-ins and burglaries of other resident agencies or field offices. It is recommended by the Philadelphia office that the director alert all offices to the possibility that this may occur within their respective territories.”

  By the end of the day after the burglary, agents in the Philadelphia office had decided that in addition to the wide net they would cast to search for suspects among the thousands of people photographed at antiwar events by the FBI, the investigation should focus on the people associated with the Catholic peace movement who were identified in FBI files as the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, or Eastcon. Because of the draft board raids, the FBI knew this large, amorphous group was capable of burglary. That fact elevated those believed to be part of that group in the hierarchy of likely suspects. In addition to questioning people in the Media area that first day about any unusual activity they may have seen or heard Monday evening, the agents closest to the investigation decided it would be crucial to establish the whereabouts Monday evening of the hundreds of people known by the FBI to be in the Eastcon group.

  On the second day after the burglary, investigators named three people as key suspects: an “unknown woman” and two other people—Peter, the man who had abandoned the group just days before the burglary, and John Grady, the Catholic peace movement leader from the Bronx, the person all of the Media burglars had agreed must not be part of the Media group. The “unknown woman” was Bonnie Raines, but they did not know her name—only that a woman had interviewed Tom Lewis. These three people would remain prime suspects throughout the investigation.

  The focus on Grady and the man who dropped out became intense very quickly. The New York field office was ordered to establish Grady’s whereabouts the night of the burglary. Agents expressed certainty that he had not only participated in the Media burglary but was the leader of the group. They reasoned that if he had led several draft board raids where documents had been stolen, he must have led this FBI office raid where documents had been stolen. From the start, the director and the agents investigating the Media burglary let this important conclusion—and others—get ahead of their evidence. Their mistaken belief that Grady was the leader of the Media burglary led them down a path that, in the end, was destructive to the FBI—not only because it did not result in the arrest of the burglars, but also because it led agents to fund and direct a crime that would in the end humiliate the bureau and bring respect to the Catholic peace movement.

  Hoover followed the details of the MEDBURG investigation closely. Indeed, he was directly involved in the case daily. He ordered agents to find out why the man who had abondoned the group had left the weekly Monday Resistance dinner early on the night of March 8. This suggested that Resistance dinners were covered regularly by an FBI informer—and with an eye for details, such as who left early. How else would the bureau have known that this suspect was at the dinner the night of the burglary? Interestingly, though, the absence of two Media burglars, Williamson and Durst, who usually attended the dinners, was apparently not noted by the FBI’s source.

  Ironically, the man who dropped out was the only member of the original Media group named a suspect during the earliest stages of the investigation. Beginning the first day after the burglary, he was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance that continued for months. Philadelphia agents parked in front of his home for endless hours. They followed him from city to city, watching him closely wherever he went, noting in their reports his frequent association with people who opposed the war and with “hippie type” people.

  And then there was the “unknown woman.”

  Agents at the Media office immediately remembered the woman who called and said she was a college student and wanted to interview someone in the FBI office about hiring practices. Suddenly her February 24 interview with Tom Lewis came into sharp focus. Hoover was informed about her at once. In the early days of the investigation, he repeatedly emphasized the need to find her—at various times he referred to her as “that woman,” “the girl,” “the unknown walk-in,” or “UNSUB,” a bureau term for “subject with unknown name.” He made clear in his early MEDBURG memos that he thought finding her was “imperative” to breaking the case. He was furious with Lewis for not getting her name. It didn’t seem to occur to him that, given what they assumed was her purpose—to get information to help in burglarizing the office—if she had provided a name, it probably would have been a fictitious one. The agents who saw Bonnie Raines in the office that day prepared a written description based on what they remembered about her. Using their memories of her appearance, a Philadelphia Police Department sketch artist drew a likeness of her. Anyone seeing her could have easily matched Bonnie Raines with the drawing. The artist’s sketch of her, along with this written description of her was shown to hundreds of people:

  She is white female, age 25, five-feet five-inches, approximately 120 pounds, dark brown hair parted in the middle, slender build, fair complexion, smooth fine facial features, high cheek bones, wearing black horn-rimmed prescription glasses, a crocheted tam, multi-designed, basically green in color, dark green overcoat extend below the knee, high leather or plastic knee length boots.…Both the tam and the overcoat appeared somewhat soiled … from what appeared to be long wear or use and were in need of cleaning and pressing. Her hair around the sides and back of her head were protruding from underneath the tam, the ends of which hair were somewhat wavy and curled but apparently were not well combed or well kept.

  While the search of the bureau’s thousands of photo files had turned countless antiwar activists into potential suspects in the Media burglary case, the search for the nameless woman made a special target of every woman with long dark hair who had ever attended an antiwar rally, plus an armed robber who probably never attended a peace rally but had hair matching the description.

  In a final memo late the day after the burglary to the director and heads of field offices, Jamieson wrote:

  Press inquiries being answered by confirming burglary and theft of government property but not specifying nature thereof.

  Vigorous investigation being undertaken to identify individual or individuals involved.

  Each office is requested to give preferred investigative attention to this matter, and matter being handled as a special.

  In an earlier memo to headquarters, it was noted that the doorjamb and the lock that had tool marks on it would be forwarded promptly to the FBI laboratory, along with fingerprints that had been lifted throughout the Media office.

  IN WASHINGTON that morning, as if arranged by the gods of irony, about the same time J. Edgar Hoover and his top officials were learning that all the files, including secret surveillance files, had been stolen overnight from the Media office, a very good friend of the FBI was about to testify at a congressional hearing. Assistant Attorney General William H. Rehnquist, the future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was taking a seat in a Senate hearing room and was about to testify under oath that the government engaged in virtually no surveillance of Americans, and that the surveillance that did take place, he would assure his listeners, did not have a chilling effect.

  The FBI had helped prepare the testimony of Rehnquist, who would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon six months later. He testified that although virtually no surveillance was being done, it was nevertheless essential that the government retain the power to do such surveillance. Rehnquist of course had no way of knowing that within two weeks the fruits of a burglary that had taken place in a small Pennsylvania town less than twelve hours before he testified would put the lie
to his testimony.

  Rehnquist’s defense of surveillance was made that morning before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which was chaired by Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., Democrat from North Carolina. The committee had been in the limelight for several weeks as it heard testimony that revealed large-scale spying in the 1960s by U.S. Army intelligence operations against American activists. The Army hearings had been made possible largely through the substantial research of Christopher Pyle, a young Army captain, who revealed in 1970 after he left the Army that thousands of plainclothes Army agents surreptitiously collected information about American activists daily and filed it in databases at three hundred Army offices around the country. It was the first time evidence had been presented to the public about spying on civilians by any government agency.

  The morning after the Media burglary, Senator Ervin, who would become renowned three years later as the tough chair of what became known as the Senate Watergate Committee, wanted the Department of Justice to agree to support legislation that would guarantee that citizens would not be abused by the collection of information by federal government agencies about their political opinions and private lives. Ervin was deeply concerned about political surveillance. As the use of computers by the government for collecting and storing data was about to become standard practice, the senator thought it was essential to anticipate the harm that could be done by such record-keeping and impose strong strictures that would prevent the abuse of citizens’ rights. In public comments, Senator Ervin referred to the combination of spying on citizens and the use of what he called “electronic dossiers” as “warfare on the American people.”