The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Hoover announced a radical decision to his top officials: To protect files, he would close all 538 of the bureau’s small offices. His top aides shared his concern about the safety of these offices, many of them isolated, but they were aghast at this desperate suggestion. They strongly urged the director not to take that extreme step. They pointed out that closing all of the small offices would leave vast swaths of the nation virtually beyond the reach of the FBI, especially in the middle of the country and the West, where the distance between FBI offices in many places was already more than a hundred miles.

  Reluctantly, the director agreed to a compromise. Instead of closing all 538 small offices, he would close the smallest ones, the 103 resident agencies. He imposed stringent conditions on the offices he left open. He ordered that all small offices that remained open be protected by security guards twenty-four hours a day. This unusual arrangement had unexpected consequences for agents in those offices. Because Hoover trusted no one outside the bureau to provide security for these FBI offices, he required that the security guards be FBI agents. In order to have agents on duty as agents during the day and as guards at night, the hours each agent worked increased substantially. It also meant a considerable reduction in time available for them to conduct investigations and arrests. So be it. In the aftermath of the Media burglary, the security of FBI offices was more important than law enforcement.

  This unusual security arrangement led to special benefits for agents in those offices. Suddenly, they were earning a lot more money. Agents throughout the bureau had for many years been required by the director to submit phony statements of how much overtime they worked each month, for which they were not paid. The director used the cumulative phony overtime records when he annually asked Congress for a budget increase to help meet the bureau’s critical need, as evidenced by the overtime hours, to hire more agents. He always got the increase, sometimes even more than he asked for. That overtime was fake. This overtime was real. Within a few months of the Media burglary, the agents at these offices were earning so much from overtime hours that some of them bought sports cars and better clothes for themselves and their families. They were living much better than they did on a typical agent’s salary. An agent who worked in one of the small offices said the change was so obvious that people around town noticed that some agents had recently acquired spiffier wardrobes. Some even expanded their shoe supply beyond the Hoover-required wingtips.

  Despite the increased security he put in place at small FBI offices throughout the country, Hoover continued to be afraid the bureau could not protect itself against more burglaries and more revelations. The investigation was taking much more time than he had expected. Increased protection at every office was absolutely necessary.

  AFTER THE BURGLARS COPIED, collated, and packaged copies of stolen files, they had one more very important task: mailing them. John Raines agreed to mail the first set. Davidon would mail the second set and later arrange to place all the documents in the hands of Resist, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, organization that had agreed, without knowing who the burglars were, to send sets of the documents to a variety of people and organizations that Davidon and the Resist staff thought would give them wide public distribution. This arrangement resulted in nearly everyone who worked for Resist or served on its board becoming a MEDBURG suspect, including scholars Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and poet Grace Paley.

  The day before the first documents were mailed, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI had a final meeting at the farm. By then—ten intense, work-filled days after the burglary—they were not as focused as a group as they had been. Forsyth remembers that he started to become disengaged just a few days after the burglary. He felt the older members of the group were more qualified for these post-burglary duties that involved strategic thinking about how news organizations and Congress should be informed. He was eager to move on to the next action that would help stop the war. After the documents were sorted, he didn’t have any more responsibilities related to the Media burglary and its aftermath.

  One of his main concerns when the documents were packaged and ready to be distributed was a missing document. It was a letter on FBI stationery to an official of the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing organization that was then fairly active. He has no idea how the document disappeared but holds himself responsible for its loss. The gist of the letter, he recalls, was “I want to thank you for your kind support of the FBI. The John Birch Society and the FBI are supporting the same American values.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a smoking gun,” Forsyth recalls, “but it was a friendly, good ol’ boy, we-think-you’re-great kind of letter. It really stuck in my memory, partly, I suppose, because it disappeared.…I felt bad about that because I thought it showed the informal networks that exist between a fascist group like the John Birch Society and the government. There’s no legitimate reason why a government police agency should be buddy-buddy with a group like that.…To me it was an artifact, a little emblem of the kind of shadow government that can exist that people don’t like to think is possible. I wanted people to see it.”

  It was during that last time all the burglars were together—the day before the first set of documents was mailed—they agreed that now that their work was nearly done and the fruit of their efforts about to be given to the public, they would not meet with one another again, either as a group or as individuals. Some of them had given this a lot of thought and decided isolation was important in order to avoid the arrest of one of them leading to the arrest of another one. Despite the bonds that had developed among some of them, they kept that agreement. That meant they never shared with one another either the fears that shadowed some of them in the months after the burglary, the agonies at least two of them would endure in a few years, or the great sense of accomplishment most of them would experience privately years later when the expanding impact of the burglary became clear in news stories, congressional hearings, and trials. The agreement not to meet also meant that over the years only the Raineses talked freely to anyone from the group—each other—about this profound shared experience.

  Several weeks after that last meeting of the group, when the FBI search for the burglars became so intense that it directly touched hundreds of people in the Philadelphia peace movement, the Raineses suggested to Davidon that the burglars should get together to learn how each of them was enduring the pressure and whether the FBI had visited them. Under the circumstances, Davidon thought that was a bad idea. The Raineses regretted the emotional disconnect, but they accepted the need for it and did not attempt to get in touch with others in the group again, though they occasionally saw some of them at demonstrations and trials during the next two years. They were particularly concerned because they heard that a woman in the Philadelphia peace movement who looked very much like Bonnie Raines had come under great pressure from the FBI. Thinking she was Bonnie, agents broke into her home by busting down the door of her Powelton Village residence. They used this tactic with another resident of the neighborhood. Neither break-in led to information helpful to the investigation.

  Before the burglars parted at that last meeting, they reached another important agreement: They would take the secret of the Media burglary to their graves. If they were not arrested, no one would ever know who found and revealed the first documentary evidence of how J. Edgar Hoover operated—the first evidence that there was a secret FBI that suppressed dissent.

  IT WAS TIME for the documents to be mailed. John Raines drove to Princeton the day after the burglars gathered for the last time. He dropped five packets of FBI documents into a mailbox. The return address on each was “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.” They were addressed to Senator George McGovern, Democrat from South Dakota; Representative Parren Mitchell, Democrat from Maryland; Tom Wicker, columnist at the New York Times; Jack Nelson, investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times; and this writer, then a reporter at the Washington Post.

 
; The postmark, “Princeton,” that was stamped on the envelopes that afternoon at the Princeton post office, set off a new line of investigation as soon as the bureau was given those envelopes by four of the five recipients less than a week later. Newark FBI agents swarmed into Princeton to check out local people who had long hair, looked “hippie-ish,” or had ever spoken out against the Vietnam War. Soon, the official record shows, investigators focused on a young couple who operated a bookstore in Princeton. The FBI put them under twenty-four-hour surveillance and interviewed their friends and family members across the country. In the entire 33,698-page MEDBURG investigation, the only reported instance of an institution obeying the law or its internal regulations regarding privacy of records occurred during the investigation of this couple. Stanford University, unlike other FBI-queried institutions, refused to turn over the student records of the young man, a Stanford graduate.

  After John Raines dropped the packets into a mailbox on a side street in Princeton near the university, he drove home to Philadelphia knowing he had just ended one chapter in the life of the burglary and set the stage for the next. Some of the stolen documents were now out of the burglars’ hands. They had no idea what would happen next. Soon other people would receive the documents and determine whether the burglars’ enormous risk would have any meaning.

  10

  To Publish or Not to Publish

  AS JOHN RAINES DROVE back to Philadelphia after mailing the first sets of Media files, agents working on the MEDBURG investigation at the Philadelphia FBI office got the best news—perhaps the only good news—they had received since starting the investigation. Jamieson, the agent in charge of the Philadelphia office, immediately informed the director about it in a memo: “[Blacked out] stated that Xerox Corporation would be most cooperative in assisting the bureau.…Bureau requested to direct Buffalo [FBI office] to contact Xerox at Webster, NY, with Xerox copy [of] press release, and request examination [of Citizens’ Commission’s] press release for all possible information to assist in solution of this case.”

  A local Xerox official had told the investigators these crucial facts: Every Xerox copier’s drum leaves unique markings on each copy produced on it. Some of those markings make it possible to determine which model of copier produced the copy, and other markings make it possible to trace a copy to the specific machine on which it was made. Most copiers at that time produced copies that contained visible odd marks, but few people understood that those marks were evidence of which copier produced a given page.

  A Xerox official examined a copy of the statement Raines read to reporter Bill Wingell the morning after the burglary, a copy of which the FBI got from Wingell after he subsequently received a hard copy of it in the mail. The official said the marking indicated the document had been copied on a Xerox model number 660 desk-type copier.

  The next step was obvious. The bureau needed to collect sample copies that had been made on model 660 copiers, as many as possible. Finally, agents had new trails to follow, ones that seemed certain to produce valuable evidence, something totally lacking until now in the MEDBURG investigation.

  The hope held out by Xerox was especially welcome now nearly two weeks after the burglary. All efforts to find the burglars and the documents had led nowhere. None of the fingerprints or dozens of interviews had produced a productive lead.

  The amount of information technicians could ferret out of a copy was impressive. In addition to tracing a copy to the machine on which it had been produced, they could, Jamieson wrote, also determine “the quality of paper … and possibly the source using this quality of paper … the quality of toner used and whether it is a Xerox toner or another commercial toner.”

  Agents planned a new line of investigation, a search for suspect copiers. Now, “find that copier” became as strong a mantra as “find that woman.” For Xerox technicians to determine which copier had produced a given copy of a document, they needed samples of copies made on model 660 machines so they could be compared to copies sent by the burglars. Unfortunately for the FBI, in the Philadelphia area there were thousands of model 660 copiers. They seemed to be the copier of choice, as abundant as spring flowers in the city that April. On that Friday afternoon, the FBI was glad to have that challenge. The race was on to find Xerox 660 copiers and get sample copies from them throughout Philadelphia and New Jersey.

  THREE DAYS LATER, the spirits raised at the bureau by that good news from Xerox on Friday were severely dampened. On Monday, Hoover and the agents investigating the case received very bad news shortly after mail postmarked in Princeton was delivered in Washington. Hoover surely realized that afternoon that his major goal probably had been defeated—to prevent the stolen serials from becoming public. He was informed by the Washington field office (WFO) that at 3:30, “Jack Israel Garvey, administrative assistant to George McGovern, phoned WFO that the senator’s office had that day received the first batch of stolen documents.” A short time later, the WFO report continued, a letter from the senator was delivered “to Mr. Hoover advising that he was sending the material he had received ‘purportedly’ from the files of the Media FBI office.” The files, the envelope containing them postmarked Princeton, March 19, and the cover letter were all delivered to the FBI. Garvey called back, an agent reported, saying that the senator’s office had “inadvertently furnished [FBI] a Xerox copy of a copy of the Citizens’ Commission’s letter and would furnish original copy [of a copy] to the FBI the next morning.” The WFO memo to the director ended, “All documents being handled carefully under separate communication to FBI laboratory for appropriate examination.”

  Later that afternoon, the FBI headquarters office got a call from Harlington Wood Jr., an attorney in the Department of Justice. He said Representative Parren J. Mitchell, a Democratic member of Congress from Baltimore, had called him to report that an envelope containing stolen FBI documents had been left anonymously at his Baltimore home. Later that day, the legislator told the FBI the documents and the envelope they were in could be picked up at his office. Mitchell said he would retain a copy of everything he received. He also said he and his staff had handled all the documents, and consequently their fingerprints were on them. He was reluctant when asked for his staff to be fingerprinted.

  McGovern immediately condemned the burglary in a statement his office issued that afternoon. He said he refused to be associated with “this illegal action by a private group.” He favored a full congressional investigation of the FBI. This burglary of an FBI office, he said, undermined “reasonable and constructive efforts to secure appropriate public review” of the bureau.

  In a speech to a black police officers organization in Pittsburgh that evening, Mitchell, the first African American elected to Congress from Maryland, also emphasized that the files were the fruit of a criminal act. Unlike McGovern, though, he also commented indirectly on the nature of the stolen files. “I turned the information, which included a letter from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI … admitting it stole the documents, over to the Justice Department,” said Mitchell. “The burglary was a crime and must be dealt with as such.…Surveillance of black student groups and peace groups, as indicated in the files, is equally criminal.” Because the content of the files had not been made public, people could not fully understand Mitchell’s statement.

  That afternoon the director notified all SACs around the country that “late today WFO received information from Senator George S. McGovern that indicated he had documents belonging to FBI. These documents are being obtained.” The director closed with this order:

  “All offices make no comment if questioned by press or other sources. Advise bureau immediately of any information bearing upon this matter.”

  In another message to all SACs, Hoover reviewed the information about McGovern and Mitchell, and reminded the agents that if the documents became public, agents must immediately alert all “sources and informants … in view of current developments … additional disclosures may be
made in future. Expedite and advise bureau by return teletype.”

  That Mitchell and McGovern, two of the most liberal members of Congress and among the very few members who had criticized him, immediately gave the copies of stolen documents they received to the FBI and quickly criticized the unknown burglars for their crime may have led Hoover to think he might have at least a reprieve from his greatest fears. Some FBI officials dared to think that if those two men—especially McGovern, then Hoover’s strongest public critic—had refused to reveal the contents of the stolen documents, perhaps all members of Congress could be trusted to do the same. Perhaps this bit of magical thinking was caused by fear that the other shoe would soon drop and the hope that it could be prevented from dropping. Whatever the inspiration, William Sullivan, then associate director, dared to propose to Hoover, via a memo to Clyde Tolson, that the FBI ask a select group of members of Congress to help the FBI solve this important crime. The FBI, he proposed, would ask them to give the bureau any stolen documents they received, and in the event they were contacted at their homes or offices by people associated with the burglary or distribution of documents, report the people to the FBI. Such a request would likely lead to adverse comment from some members of Congress, Sullivan wrote. “Nevertheless, we have an obligation to seek their assistance as a criminal violation has occurred. If any members of the Congress should cooperate, it would afford us an opportunity to obtain information which might lead to the solution of the case.”