The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  A strong impetus for the lawsuit came from the FBI’s attack on the home of Anne Flitcraft. She was upstairs having dinner with neighbors when she heard a loud noise coming from the direction of her apartment. She ran to her apartment, but by the time she got there, FBI agents already had broken down the door with a sledgehammer and were inside removing copies of Media documents and ransacking every drawer, cabinet, and closet. She was researching Media files about police training for articles that were published a short time later by the Quaker-sponsored organization she worked for, NARMIC (National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex). NARMIC had anonymously received the files at its downtown office. When agents left her apartment that day, they took the documents, her typewriter, books, and assorted office supplies.

  As word spread about the FBI raid on Flitcraft’s apartment, neighbors gathered at her home, including David Kairys, the lawyer who represented her and others in their successful lawsuit against the FBI surveillance of the neighborhood. He was just beginning a career in which he would successfully represent many people who had been treated unjustly by the government—including, in 1986, Donald Rochon, an African American FBI agent who endured extreme acts of racial harassment and discrimination in the bureau. The lawsuit inspired by the raid of Flitcraft’s home was intended to let the FBI know that it could not conduct such raids with impunity. Soon after the raid, neighbors created what they called an anti-FBI alarm system. They distributed boat horns that could be heard for about two blocks. Residents agreed to use the horns in the event of another FBI raid so neighbors could call lawyers and run to the scene as quickly as possible to offer support to the resident being raided.

  Davidon and his family with “Mr. Hoover” at the “Your FBI in Action Street Fair” held in June 1971 in the Powelton Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. Residents organized the fair to draw attention to the intense round-the-clock surveillance conducted by the FBI in the neighborhood for months after the burglary. From left: Ann Morrissett, Davidon’s wife; “Hoover”; Davidon; and daughters Sarah and Ruth.

  Kairys and other neighbors delivered Flitcraft’s badly damaged door to the Philadelphia FBI field office the morning after agents broke in through the door. A speechless group of agents watched as the door was carried off the elevator into the FBI office and a demand for repairs was made. When Hoover was informed about this, he wrote a memorandum stating that the Philadelphia field office should pay for repairs to the door from the office’s “Confidential Fund.”

  MEANWHILE, the FBI’s search for suspect Xerox model 660 copiers, once a source of great hope for the investigators, was at times even more intense and more demoralizing than the search for human suspects. At first, local Xerox officials cooperated fully with the FBI. The company’s maintenance personnel were instructed to visit the many offices that leased a model 660 and make sample copies for the FBI on each of those machines. Because collecting sample 660 copies took a lot of time, Xerox soon said it would collect the samples only during regular maintenance visits. They were collected surreptitiously at offices the FBI told Xerox were most likely to employ people who would break into an FBI office—campuses, nonprofit organizations, libraries, and also a surprising number of corporations. Copies were collected from thousands of copiers leased throughout eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England, and the Midwest. At Xerox labs, the sample copies were compared with copies of FBI files and the cover letters distributed by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. Eventually, overloaded by the volume of copies it was analyzing for the FBI, Xerox trained some staff members at the FBI lab to do the comparative analysis. Still the work taxed the company’s offices on the East Coast.

  The cooperative relationship between Xerox and the FBI came to a screeching halt a couple weeks into the effort. In interviews with two journalists—syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and Vin McLellan, a freelance writer whose story was published on April 15 in the Washington Post—Gerald A. Mulligan, manager of public relations operations for Xerox Corporation, at its Rochester, New York, headquarters, acknowledged that the corporation had complied with the bureau’s request for a list of customers who leased the 660 copiers. But, Mulligan said, Xerox had recently “… decided at the very highest level” not to cooperate further with the bureau in the investigation. “What it came down to,” Mulligan told Anderson, “was the ethical responsibilities of the business. If we were to do this, we had a responsibility to inform our customers it was being done, and this would have defeated the FBI’s whole purpose.” In addition to revealing the type of copier the FBI was looking for and reporting the company’s decision not to cooperate further with the bureau in the investigation, the stories also disclosed that markings on copies could help the bureau track copies of the stolen files to the copiers used by the burglars.

  Hoover was furious at Xerox for stopping its cooperation and for making public remarks. In a handwritten note on a copy of the Anderson column placed in the files of the investigation of the burglary, he scrawled, “This shows what happens when we issue inadequate & ill-considered instructions [underlines are his]. Certainly we should not have contacted a loud mouth like Mulligan. The approaches should have been properly evaluated as to security.” Actually, it is unlikely that FBI agents had contacted Mulligan. The reporters had. Hoover was angrily lashing out, as his next move made clear.

  The decision by Xerox to halt cooperation was considered a major blow for the FBI. This part of the investigation had seemed to be working very efficiently and there were high hopes it would lead to arrests. Just as Hoover’s immediate response after the burglary was to punish Tom Lewis, despite Lewis’s efforts to make the office more secure, now Hoover decided to punish Xerox. He immediately issued an order that every FBI office must cancel its lease with the company. Managers at FBI headquarters pointed out that this would be nearly impossible, not to mention very expensive. The process of getting a new contract with another company would be long and cumbersome. Immediate cancellation, they said, would impede work throughout the bureau. Hoover was unmoved by their rationale. As his officials proceeded with the initial stages of preparing to cancel the Xerox contracts, the problem was solved when the CEO of Xerox returned from a vacation out of the country and was upset when he learned that one of his officials had withdrawn cooperation from the FBI. Concerns about spying on customers on behalf of the FBI vanished. He ordered Xerox employees to resume cooperating with the FBI and wrote a deeply apologetic letter to Hoover assuring him that Xerox was on board again and always would be at the service of the bureau. At that point, Hoover rescinded his order, all Xerox copiers remained in place in FBI offices, and, most important, copies produced on 660 copiers once again streamed into the FBI lab to be compared with copies of the Media documents.

  The burglars had read the newspaper reports that Xerox had helped the FBI discover the model number of the copier they had used and that Xerox had indicated it was possible to match marks on the copies of the Media files with marks on the drums of Xerox copiers of that model. That was very frightening news.

  John Raines discovered how frightening it was. Not long after the first stories about the documents were published and were being widely discussed in news stories, he was seated at his campus desk when he overheard a discussion in the hallway outside his office that might have seemed routine to anyone else. He quickly realized it was a discussion in which he did not want to participate. A man was telling the department secretary, “There’s something wrong with your copier’s drum, so I’m going to take it and replace it with a new one.”

  It was another one of those brick-in-the-stomach moments that Raines had experienced occasionally ever since Bonnie’s visit to the FBI office made the burglars confident they should move ahead with their plans. Today’s experience qualified as two bricks. He listened to the conversation in stunned silence as he stared out his street-level office window and saw a small white Ford car marked with a Xerox logo parked on the street at
the end of the sidewalk that led to the door outside his office. A few minutes later he watched the man carry the drum of the Xerox 660 copier on which Raines had made hundreds of copies, perhaps even more, of stolen FBI documents. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, there it goes,’ ” he remembers. The man carried the drum down the sidewalk and placed it in the trunk of the Xerox car. There was no doubt in Raines’s mind that the drum had been moved because the FBI wanted to examine it in connection with the files that had been mailed, most of which were by then in the hands of the FBI in Washington, thanks to the news organizations that had forwarded the files they received to the FBI. The drum could, of course, have been removed and replaced by Xerox because it simply needed to be repaired or replaced. But under the circumstances, it was impossible for Raines to assume that.

  The burglars had been very strict about being sure to wear gloves during the burglary and as they worked for days with the documents at the farm. It never occurred to them that they needed to protect against more than their own fingerprints—that the documents they copied had their own telltale markings that could reveal on which machine they had been copied. Not that they could have done anything about that. The documents had to be copied. But if they had known, perhaps they would not have made the copies on machines in their own offices.

  As Raines listened to the sounds of the Xerox maintenance man replacing the drum in the outer office, he wondered why the man was taking the drum and not just making sample copies. Did that mean they already knew this machine was the culprit, and they were taking it away because they needed the drum as evidence? Was it all going to come to this—being unmasked by a Xerox copier? In that moment, Raines felt sure the drum on his department’s copier, the drum carried down the sidewalk by the Xerox maintenance man, had become a smoking gun.

  He called Davidon right away. Davidon acted quickly. He found a sharp metal object and made a bold scratch on the drum of his department’s Xerox copier. This, he assumed, would change the footprint left by that machine and make it more difficult to match the many documents he had made on this copier. To decrease even more the chances of the copier being detected, the afternoon Davidon heard from Raines, he and another professor—the one person who had turned down Davidon’s invitation to participate in the Media group—after the president of Haverford College and his staff had left for the day, removed the drum from Davidon’s department’s copier and exchanged it with that of the copier in the president’s outer office. Sure enough, Xerox workers came to Davidon’s department a couple days later and made sample documents on the Xerox copier.

  EXACTLY ONE MONTH AFTER the burglary, Hoover assigned Roy K. Moore to be in charge of the MEDBURG investigation. The appointment signaled Hoover’s increased sense of urgency and the very high priority he gave the case. Hoover considered Moore one of the bureau’s best investigators. Moore also was highly regarded by many of his peers. He had been in charge of several earlier high-profile investigations, including the 1964 murder of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi; the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four young girls; and the 1955 midair explosion of an airplane over Colorado that killed all forty-four people aboard. After he had settled into Philadelphia, Moore reviewed MEDBURG and immediately endorsed the continued search for the suspect copiers as crucial to the investigation.

  The results of that search continued to be very frustrating, especially given the huge effort put into collecting thousands of sample copies. Like the search for human suspects, the one for suspect copiers went nowhere. None of the marks on the thousands of copies that were collected matched those on any of the documents released by the burglars. This seems strange, especially in light of the evidence presumably obtained from the copier Raines used. Either his department’s copier actually was due to have its drum replaced—a striking coincidence of timing—or one or more Xerox officials had engaged in their own act of resistance and not reported that a match had been established between the markings on copies of stolen Media FBI documents and those on the machine Raines used to make hundreds of those copies. Or perhaps the matching test might simply have failed.

  There were other frustrations inside the FBI. Just two weeks after the first Media documents became public, Hoover even offered to “step aside” if at any time the president or the attorney general felt that he might be “a burden or handicap to the re-election” of Nixon. The director described his offer to resign in a memorandum in which he summarized an April 6 phone conversation with Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. The conversation took place the day after Representative Hale Boggs, Democrat from Louisiana, claimed on the floor of the House that the FBI had tapped his phone. Boggs’s public accusation, never proven, led to an announcement from the attorney general that the FBI had never wiretapped the phone of any member of the House or Senate.

  Kleindienst reassured Hoover in their conversation that he was “a good American” and that “the thing is going to subside.” But Kleindienst infuriated Hoover the next day when he announced, in an interview the deputy attorney general had sought on the CBS morning television news, that the Department of Justice would welcome an investigation of the FBI. He said he thought “the only way public confidence in the FBI can be restored is through a congressional investigation.” To Hoover this was extraordinary. No member of any administration had ever called for an investigation of the FBI.

  The impact was explosive, especially to Kleindienst’s ears. Shortly after he returned to his office after the interview, he took a call from Hoover. The director denounced Kleindienst’s public call for an investigation of the bureau so loudly that Kleindienst had to hold the phone away from his ear. Colleagues in his office could hear every word across the room as the director issued a threat:

  “If I am called upon to testify before Congress, I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.”

  Kleindienst did not fully grasp what Hoover meant. He soon would. The director was alluding to the illegal wiretapping of phones that Henry Kissinger, supported by President Nixon, had asked Hoover to conduct beginning in May 1969.

  It had all started when Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, was beside himself the morning of May 9, 1969, when he read a story in the New York Times that revealed that the United States was secretly conducting bombing raids in Cambodia. He called Hoover immediately that morning to ask what could be done to discover who had leaked the secret. FBI records indicate he called the director two more times that day, pressing him urgently. By the end of the afternoon, a tap had been placed on the home phone of Morton Halperin, a senior staff member with responsibility for national security in Kissinger’s office, and would remain on it for a year and a half, long after he stopped working for Kissinger.

  As Colonel Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s top aide, put it to an FBI official a short time later, Kissinger “considered the entire policy would be ruined unless these leaks could be stopped, and that damage to the country would be irreparable.” In the end, seventeen people were tapped as part of this secret operation conducted by the FBI for Kissinger and the president. Besides Halperin, those who were tapped included six other members of Kissinger’s staff, four journalists, two White House advisers, a deputy assistant secretary of state, an ambassador, a brigadier general with the Defense Department, and one of the president’s speechwriters. Hoover wrote in a May 9 memorandum about a conversation he had with Kissinger that Kissinger “appreciated this very much, and he hoped I would follow it up as far as we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we find him, no matter where he is.”

  Hoover had entered into this illegal arrangement on behalf of the president and Kissinger with great reluctance from the moment Kissinger’s request was made. At first, the White House insisted there be no paper records of the project. Hoover, extremely fearful of being discovered carrying out this high-level illegal project, insisted that paper trails be kept. He ordered William Sullivan, then assistant director in
charge of domestic intelligence, to make sure that each tap was authorized in writing by the attorney general. The whereabouts of the highly secret wiretap transcripts—kept at first in Sullivan’s office under lock and key, then transferred to an office at the Department of Justice when Sullivan fell out of favor with Hoover in 1971, and ultimately placed in the office of presidential adviser John Ehrlichman at the White House—later became a major issue during the Watergate investigations.

  When the taps were first put in place, both Kissinger and his top aide, Colonel Alexander Haig, went regularly to Sullivan’s office to read the transcripts. They seemed to enjoy perusing the personal and political conversations that had been transcribed by FBI listeners who worked secretly in the heart of the bureau’s electronic surveillance operations in the Old Post Office Building. The operations had been placed there years earlier rather than at FBI headquarters in the Department of Justice Building to make it unlikely an attorney general would accidentally walk in and discover them. Though Hoover required the attorney general to sign off on this high-level illegal operation being conducted for Kissinger and Nixon, he usually conducted such surveillance without the approval or knowledge of the attorney general. In the end, despite many months of daily transcripts of the conversations of seventeen highly placed government officials and journalists recorded around the clock, not a single clue emerged from the tapped phones about anyone leaking stories.

  To Hoover, this project was fire, and he was determined it would not burn him. In his time of crisis in early April 1971, provoked first by the Media burglary revelations and then by Kleindienst’s public call for an investigation of the FBI, he immediately realized he could use the Kissinger taps as blackmail against the White House. If there was an investigation of the FBI, he told the president, as he repeated to him the threat he had just made to Kleindienst: “I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.” Unlike Kleindienst, the president knew exactly what Hoover was talking about.