The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Years later, as I read the FBI’s massive record of the investigation of the burglary, I discovered that when the bureau learned the Post had copies of the stolen files, FBI officials recommended to Hoover that Post editors be asked to hand over the copies I received. Of the five sets of files mailed by the burglars the previous Friday, four had been delivered to the FBI immediately. Hoover, reacting to the recommendation, ordered agents not to ask the Post for the files, at least not at that time. He said he was certain we would not turn them over. He was right.

  11

  Appropriate for the Secret Police of the Soviet Union

  REACTION TO the first stories about the Media files was swift and angry. Members of Congress who had never expressed anything but kind words for J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau now issued unprecedented calls for a congressional investigation of the FBI. Newspaper editorial boards that had consistently been full of praise for Hoover and the bureau now expressed shock at the revelations.

  In an editorial the day after the first story about the files was published, the Washington Post explained why the newspaper had decided to reveal the contents of the stolen Media documents:

  With due deliberation and with considerate regard for the Attorney General’s objections, this newspaper yesterday published the substance of some FBI records—stolen by unknown persons from the FBI office in Media, PA, and sent to The Washington Post anonymously by mail.…

  The records afford a glimpse, not often granted to the general public or even to committees of Congress, of some of the ways in which the FBI works and of some part of its concept of internal security. They indicate that the bureau focused a good deal of attention on college campuses and particularly on black student groups which, according to a memorandum issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, “pose a definite threat to the nation’s stability and security.”…Other documents indicated that students were used, sometimes on a paid basis, as informers.

  This lifting of a corner of the curtain on FBI activity in the name of internal security … suggests strongly that an appropriate committee of the United States Congress ought to look much more thoroughly at what the bureau is doing. Disorder on college campuses undoubtedly presents a problem to the colleges concerned and perhaps to the communities where they are situated as well. But it does not rise to the level of a threat to the internal security of the United States.

  Moreover, the intrusion of undercover operatives and student informers into the life of an institution which has the interchange of ideas and the conflict of opinion as its very raison d’etre introduces a disruptive element more deadly than disorder. The FBI has never shown much sensitivity to the poisonous effect which its surveillance, and especially its reliance on faceless informers, has upon the democratic process and upon the practice of free speech. But it must be self-evident that discussion and controversy respecting governmental policies and programs are bound to be inhibited if it is known that Big Brother, under disguise, is listening to them and reporting them.

  In regard to the document that called for enhancing paranoia and the bureau’s goal of conveying the sense that there is “an FBI agent behind every mailbox,” the editorial noted, “The FBI is not only insensitive on this score; it is shown by these records to be callous and, indeed, deliberately corrupting”:

  That is a concept of internal security appropriate, perhaps, for the secret police of the Soviet Union but wholly inconsonant with the idea of a Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States. A government of snoopers in a nation of informers was hardly the vision in the minds of those who established the American Republic.

  We believe the American public needs to know what the FBI is doing. We believe the American public needs to think long and hard about whether internal security rests essentially upon official surveillance and the suppression of dissent or upon the traditional freedom of every citizen to speak his mind on any subject, whether others consider what he says wise or foolish, patriotic or subversive, conservative or radical. That is why we published the substance of the stolen FBI records.

  After ignoring the burglary when local FBI officials initially told them that nothing important had been stolen, now the Philadelphia Inquirer and other news organizations in that region suddenly had a keen interest in every facet of the theft. The Inquirer ran the initial Washington Post story about the Media documents as a banner story across the top of its front page. There, on the turf where the burglary took place and where the general public soon realized a massive search for the burglars was under way, press and public interest became intense. The Inquirer, long a devoted admirer of Hoover on its editorial pages, now declared that the questions raised by the stolen documents “are questions too fundamental in a free society, with implications too suggestive of police state tactics, to be brushed lightly aside.” The documents were so shocking, the paper stated in an editorial, that more than anything they revealed “the massive public ignorance about this super-secret national investigative organization”:

  In nearly a half-century under the leadership of one man, who is somewhat of an enigma himself, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has become a legend in its own time—surrounded by an aura of romantic mysticism reminiscent of the best fiction that has been written about Scotland Yard and the Royal Mounted Police.

  There is no denying that the FBI very often gets its man—and sometimes in rather dramatic fashion, as people old enough to remember the Dillinger era will testify—but exactly what else the FBI does isn’t so clear.…

  It is in the national interest for Congress and the people to know more about the FBI—its assignments, its objectives, its methods of operation.…If the FBI is doing a good job, let credit be given where credit is due. And if it isn’t, let’s find out about that, too. Most important of all, we ought to know more than we do about the nature of the job itself.

  A committee of Congress should conduct a public inquiry into these matters, not for vindictive purposes but to be sure there are adequate safeguards to insure that the FBI will always act in the national interest, with due regard for the constitutional rights and freedoms of all.

  All two hundred million of us in this country are in a bad way—and our freedoms may be in jeopardy—if we are dependent upon information from burglars to find out what the Federal Bureau of Investigation is doing.

  The Media documents provided evidence that the bureau’s mandate had been perverted, declared a New York Times editorial on March 29. “Little confidence is inspired by the security measures of a security agency whose files can be so easily burglarized.” But

  more disquieting than the bureau’s internal security is the evidence, provided via the stolen files, of FBI incursions into political surveillance which far exceed legitimate efforts to protect the national interest. One need not minimize the seriousness of certain violent and lawless episodes in the recent history of student unrest to be disturbed by the FBI’s measures of campus infiltration, especially its apparent stress on surveillance of black students and their organizations. Such procedures assume undertones of latent racial prejudice. With rare exceptions, the protests by Negro students have been concerned with their personal place in the academic community rather than with the revolutionary excesses of the white (or black) radical fringe.…

  Even more dangerous are the consequences—clearly intended—that flow from the widespread use of informers. These tactics, said an FBI newsletter, “will enhance the paranoia” among left-wing dissenters and “get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

  The dictionary definition of paranoia is “a mental disorder marked by delusions or irrational suspicions.” It is difficult to be paranoid over police surveillance which, far from being a delusion, is carried out with such plainly stated intent.…

  Assistant Attorney General William H. Rehnquist recently denied that political surveillance as currently practiced has a “chilling effect” on free expression of dissent. Apparently the F.B.I., the Justice
Department’s investigatory arm, disagrees. Could anything be more chilling than the knowledge that the Federal Government allows law enforcement to be perverted into a deliberate process of spreading fear and suspicion, on the campuses or anywhere else in a society that wants to remain free?

  Not everyone thought the Media files should have been published or that the revelations in them pointed to a crisis. Some readers, in published letters to the editor of the Washington Post, condemned the paper for reporting on the stolen documents. “How much more honorable would it have been,” wrote Ralph Ostrich, “if The Washington Post had disdained the role of a ‘fence’ for the stolen property. If not by deed, then certainly by effect, The Post has given moral justification to the participants of this and future criminal acts.”

  “I for one am glad that the FBI is keeping tabs on the activities of radical students,” wrote reader William E. Lynn Jr. “All of those who object to these security measures richly deserve the nasty little revolution that will doubtlessly be perpetrated on us.”

  Some readers praised the decision to write about the documents. William Hagen wrote that the Washington Post’s coverage of the documents “exemplifies the very highest ideal of journalism: to fearlessly inform the people.”

  The evidence in the documents emboldened some people who had been silent. Calls for a congressional investigation of the FBI were made repeatedly in editorials and by members of Congress in the month after the first story appeared. Such calls were unprecedented, for until now both reverential high regard and fear of Hoover’s power to retaliate had kept most of his critics silent. “The quick succession of revelations and charges regarding the FBI has prompted the first high-level discussion of a general Congressional review in the bureau’s history,” wrote Christopher Lydon in the April 19, 1971, New York Times. By then, more Media documents had become public. Senators who called for such investigation included Edward Muskie of Maine, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Mike Mansfield of Montana, and John V. Tunney of California.

  A communist threat was behind the stealing of the documents and behind their being made public by journalists, some Hoover supporters claimed as they adamantly opposed a congressional investigation of the FBI. Representative Roger H. Zion, Republican from Indiana, summed up that opposition: “A major Communist-front originated attack is taking place on America’s top law official. Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is now being subjected to relentless attack by the far left.”

  Most of the members of Congress who called for a congressional investigation urged Senator Sam Ervin and his Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights to conduct the hearings. The New York Times editorial board did so twice. In view of his publicly declared abhorrence of government spying, including comments he made during his recent hearings that investigated spying against citizens by the Army, Ervin was seen as the best-prepared official to conduct such an investigation. He had a reputation for being Congress’s fiercest defender of constitutional rights.

  As the pressure for Ervin to conduct an investigation increased, he announced in late April that he would not do so. He said there would be political obstacles to such an investigation, and the committee would be “very much divided on ideological lines.” Interestingly, he had not let that problem stop him from recently investigating the Army’s domestic spying operations. Ervin also said he had seen no evidence that the FBI had exceeded its authority. “I am under the impression that Mr. Hoover’s done a very good job,” he said. The senator who just four months earlier had declared that political spying by the military amounted to “warfare on the American people” now said no to investigating the FBI.

  The person who worked most closely with Senator Ervin at that time, Lawrence M. Baskir, his chief of staff on the subcommittee and since 1998 a judge on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, privately encouraged the senator in the spring of 1971 to investigate the FBI. In those conversations, Baskir said, the senator adamantly refused. It was not until after Ervin chaired the Senate investigation of Watergate that he expressed his first concerns about the FBI. But again he expressed great respect for Hoover, by then dead, and once again balked at investigating the bureau. Ervin’s refusal demonstrated the enduring power of Hoover and perhaps also the timidity of most members of Congress regarding intelligence matters, which they had long avoided. Ervin realized that his investigation of the Army had not resulted in the legislation he had hoped to achieve. Perhaps he thought it would be even more difficult to achieve anything beyond public awareness as the outcome of an investigation of the FBI. Whatever the causes of his hesitancy, such reluctance in Congress did not disappear until 1975. By then the public was so outraged by the accumulated information it had learned about the FBI and other intelligence agencies that a critical mass in Congress was willing to conduct the investigation that some members had called for when the Media documents first became public.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER PUBLICATION of the first stories about the contents of the files, the investigation of the burglary became much more intense. Investigators placed the man who dropped out of the group and the woman who looked like Bonnie Raines under what the FBI called FISUR, or physical surveillance. The most visible FISUR techniques used in the investigation were ones that involved agents sitting in parked cars along the tree-lined streets of the Powelton Village neighborhood in West Philadelphia, not far from the University of Pennsylvania. They sat there in several cars for many hours every day for weeks in front of these old brick row houses converted to apartments, physically surveilling people and street life in general. It was a strange technique. It was difficult to imagine how they thought such practices would lead to discoveries about Media suspects. The beards that some of them were growing failed to help them blend into the community. They continued to look like what they were: FBI agents sitting in cars.

  The memos in the files of the official investigation say little about results gained from FISUR. They indicate that it was frustrating and ultimately unproductive. Whatever the people in charge of the investigation thought this technique would accomplish, for the agents in the cars it may simply have been a way to kill time away from the office in an investigation that seemed to stall every time it took a new and hopeful direction. Or perhaps this visible saturation surveillance from parked cars may simply have been the bureau engaging in a practice that echoed the prescription in one of the Media files: make people paranoid.

  The residents of Powelton Village were not prone to becoming paranoid. From the beginning of the investigation, many of them were named as MEDBURG suspects or were believed to be connected to suspects. They did not know that, but most of them probably assumed as much, given the constant presence of agents near their homes. Residents of the neighborhood found the round-the-clock surveillance they were subjected to maddening. Being who they were—some were the same people who years earlier had put gags on the stone mouths of the statues of Ben Franklin and other historic figures in Philadelphia after the Boston trial where defendants, including renowned pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, were convicted for assisting young men who resisted the draft—they looked for the humor in having the streets outside their apartments lined with parked FBI cars, usually with two agents in each car. They found the seeds for a humorous response in the fact that agents often slept in their cars.

  One response was to perform street skits with the agents as unwilling actors. In one of them, a resident stood beside an FBI car and blew a bullhorn while another resident stood on the other side of the car with a tray of cookies and milk ready for the agents as they jolted awake from their interrupted afternoon nap.

  Sometimes an announcement was made on a megaphone for all to hear during the agents’ afternoon naps:

  “This is your FBI at work!”

  Bumper stickers reading THIS IS AN FBI CAR were pasted onto the back bumpers of FBI cars as agents slept.

  No FBI agent was ever observed laughing at the residents’ attempts at humor.

 
On June 6, 1971, a Saturday, Powelton residents went all out in their effort to turn the massive surveillance on its head with humor. They held what they called “Your FBI in Action Street Fair.” All of the entertainment was FBI-centered. People, including Davidon and his family, stood beside a life-size cardboard cutout of J. Edgar Hoover and were photographed as they affectionately draped their arms around the director’s shoulders. Copies of Media documents were nailed to trees, and so were large photos of agents who had been photographed sitting in cars in the neighborhood. Copies of enlarged Media files also were auctioned at the fair. Neighborhood children had fun putting together jigsaw puzzles that had been made from pictures taken of agents who seemed to be living in their cars, like homeless people, in the neighborhood. At the perimeters of the neighborhood the day of the fair, posted notices welcomed FBI agents to the fair but asked them to leave their pistols at the 16th Precinct Police Station at the edge of Powelton. Surveillance may have been called off that day, but a resident reported seeing one of the regular neighborhood agents drive by on a nearby street and gun the gas pedal when he realized he had been seen.

  In addition to finding a way to laugh at this disruptive situation, Powelton Village residents also sued the FBI, asking a judge to order a halt to the blanket surveillance of the neighborhood. They eventually won, but the surveillance continued for many months before the case was resolved. In response to the residents’ lawsuit, the bureau acknowledged that it used forty to fifty cars to conduct surveillance in the neighborhood and brought agents from as far away as Jackson, Mississippi, to conduct it.