The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  It was impossible to be sure, but some of the contacts initiated by agents seemed more like stabs in the dark than indications that the bureau had any evidence, let alone certainty, about any one individual’s involvement in the burglary. It remains unclear whether the contact with Bob Williamson was a stab in the dark. He got an unexpected and unexplained ride home by two FBI agents one day, a trip that was one of two somewhat mysterious experiences he had soon after the burglary. Several months before the Media burglary, Williamson moved from a commune in a condemned house in North Philadelphia to Powelton Village. He lived near one of the Powelton streets where the presence of FBI agents was dense and constant. Every day, Williamson, like other residents of this friendly neighborhood, saw the very visible FBI presence on the streets near his home. But there was no indication that he was regarded any more suspiciously than any of his neighbors.

  Until one day. He was sitting at his desk in the state building in South Philadelphia where he worked as a social worker. It was a very large room lined with many rows of employees at desks. Suddenly the public announcement system filled the room with this booming message: “Bob Williamson wanted at the front desk.” He was being paged to go to the guard’s desk on the first floor. It was nearly the end of the workday, so he cleared his desk and prepared to go home after he met with the person who wanted to talk with him.

  At the guard’s desk, two FBI agents were waiting for him. They flashed their badges, introduced themselves, and ordered Williamson to get in their car. “I took the ride. They said it in such a way that I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  He can’t remember years later what they said about the Media burglary, but he feels sure that it was mentioned. He also feels certain they didn’t directly ask him if he was involved. He thinks he would remember that very well. He does remember that they talked about making progress in breaking the Media case. During that time, he thinks they tried to get him to talk about people who might have been involved. He remembers not saying much during the drive across the city from South Philadelphia to West Philadelphia. “I was scared,” he says, more certain of his memory of the emotions he felt then than he is of the words spoken by either him or the agents. “Sometime during the ride their demeanor was almost friendly.…I may have even joked with them a little bit.”

  The intended message from the FBI for Williamson that day seemed to come from this: Without asking for his address, the agents drove directly to his apartment building and dropped him off. It felt like a fairly strong dose of the paranoia he and his fellow burglars had revealed as an FBI modus operandi. They wanted him to know they knew something, but it was impossible for him to know exactly how much they knew. Or did they just want him to think they knew something? He was never sure, not even after he questioned one of them in court two years later.

  Not long after that lift home courtesy of the FBI, Williamson got a mysterious phone call at home. The caller “introduced himself, said he was new in town and was an ‘old friend’ of Dan Dougherty.” Dan, the caller said, had told him to call Bob because “I would know what was happening in the movement in Philadelphia right now.”

  “My first clue,” said Williamson, “was that he pronounced Dan’s name wrong. He had pronounced it Doe-er-ty, but Dan pronounces it Dock-er-ty.” Williamson’s caution kicked in. When the stranger asked him if they could get together, Williamson said, “Sure, but why don’t you call me tomorrow? I’m real busy right now.” The caller agreed to call back.

  As soon as he hung up, Williamson walked to a pay phone and called Dan Dougherty. He regarded him as “a real neat guy,” someone who had never been involved in resistance actions but was very supportive of people who were involved in such actions. He lived in New Jersey and worked in a crisis center at Glassboro State College. “He was a friend of mine,” says Williamson. “I didn’t see him a whole lot, but I definitely considered him a friend. I knew he would not send me somebody like this, just off the wall.”

  He reached Dougherty and told him what had just happened. “Dan was an imaginative kind of guy, always a little bit adventurous,” says Williamson. After telling Williamson he had never heard of the guy, he said, “Why don’t we have a little fun with this?” Williamson agreed and followed Dougherty’s instructions.

  When the stranger called the next day, Williamson said he’d be happy to meet with him. They agreed to meet downtown at the Philadelphia Public Library. Then Williamson said, “I just happened to be talking to Dan, and he’d like to see you, too, ’cause it’s been so long since you two have seen each other. So he’ll be with me.”

  There was an awkward silence. The stranger quickly recovered by saying, “Sure, that would be great,” and asked Williamson how he would recognize him. “I’ll be wearing a yellow dashiki,” he said. “And of course you know Dan, so you’ll recognize him. See you tomorrow.”

  “Dan picks me up in his Volkswagen and we drive to the library,” Williamson recalled. “We park at a parking meter and sit at the area in the library where the guy has agreed to meet us.…We talk a long time and then realize it’s way past the time he was supposed to meet us. We wait a little longer, and then go out to the car. Dan’s car wouldn’t start.” They opened the hood and found that someone had opened it and had stripped the distributor wires.

  “So,” says Williamson, “I guess we found out they have a sense of humor, too.”

  GIVEN HOW MUCH William Davidon spoke publicly about the burglary, it seemed remarkable that the FBI never got in touch with him. Even the press conference he held that spring to discuss the stolen documents didn’t provoke a call or visit. He speculates the FBI did not get in touch with him because they viewed him in the way he hoped they would: as a person interested in the burglary but not involved in it. He was wrong. He was named a prime suspect within days of the break-in.

  In a strange twist of fate, the Department of Justice immunized Davidon from being interviewed by the FBI about MEDBURG. During the first week after the burglary, an agent wrote in a report that Davidon’s “possible connection with case being vigorously pursued.” When his name came up as a likely suspect soon after the burglary, agents remembered, of course, that he was one of the unindicted coconspirators in the case that was still before a grand jury in Harrisburg, the case involving the kidnap and bombing conspiracy charges Hoover had made in November despite investigators having decided the accusations were groundless and should not be pursued. Soon after the Media burglary, Department of Justice lawyers told the director that MEDBURG investigators should not question Davidon because he was likely to be charged in a new grand jury indictment as a defendant in the Harrisburg case. The decision that Davidon must not be interviewed by FBI agents was made, Hoover told agents, by the chief prosecutor in the Harrisburg case, William Lynch, a department lawyer who usually worked on organized crime cases. However, when a new, superseding indictment was issued by a grand jury in late April 1971, Davidon was not indicted. He was again named an unindicted coconspirator, as he had been in January in the first Harrisburg indictment. Presumably, the department’s prohibition against interviewing Davidon would have been lifted then, but the FBI never attempted to interview him then or at any other time in connection with MEDBURG, not even after the Harrisburg trial ended in April 1972 in a hung jury and prosecutors decided not to retry the case.

  Though Davidon never was questioned by the FBI regarding MEDBURG and was not indicted in the Harrisburg case, he continued to be regarded by the FBI not only as a prime suspect in the Media case but also as a dangerous person. During the MEDBURG investigation, he was elevated to a higher level of danger status on the bureau’s Security Index, the secret list of dangerous people the FBI planned to detain and incarcerate in the event of a national emergency—the existence of which was revealed in the Media files.

  Davidon enjoyed drawing attention to the burglary. One of his boldest public efforts was distributing copies of the stolen files at the Conference on the FBI held at Princeton Universit
y in late October 1971. Two organizations, the Committee for Public Justice and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, sponsored the event. In the invitation to selected constitutional scholars, lawyers, and journalists, three former FBI agents, and top officials who had served in high positions in the Department of Justice during John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s administrations, the sponsors said the conference was planned “as a scholarly effort to understand the structure of the FBI and its powers and role in American society. Apparently, no private or public body has before attempted such a study. This fact, we think, provides sufficient reason to do so now.”

  The organizers invited Hoover to send a representative to the conference. In a lengthy angry letter that was reported widely in the press, including on the front page of the New York Times, Hoover blasted the critical premise of the conference and refused to send a representative. Davidon learned about the conference when he read about Hoover’s reaction. In his letter, Hoover wrote, “We are declining in view of our serious doubt that any worthwhile purpose could be served by an FBI representative attending an inquiry casting him in the role of defendant before even the first fact is brought out, and condemned by the ‘judges’ before trial begins.

  “Basically, our position is that the FBI need tailor no special ‘defense’ of its own for this occasion,” Hoover wrote. “The basic facts on how the FBI is organized and how it discharges its duties have been so well known for so long, and to so many responsible persons, that they are obvious to all except those who are so blind that they do not wish to see.” This claim was predictable, but now, as a result of what had been learned about the bureau from the Media burglary six months earlier, it was not believable. It no longer was possible to expect people to believe something was true simply because Hoover said it was.

  Scholarly papers were presented at the unprecedented conference by Aryeh Neier, then the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and others on these subjects—“Backgrounding the Bureau,” “Less Than Perfect Performance,” “Controversial Methods and Procedures,” and “Question of Balance: Protection of Society, Protection of Individual Rights.” Formal papers written for the conference and the papers presented during panel discussions contained the proper attributions and footnotes expected at scholarly gatherings. The invitation to the conference had said its overriding goal was “to explore the structure, role and powers of the FBI.” But, the invitation stated, “Since we’re private citizens, without access to all relevant information, this goal is difficult, but not impossible.”

  Access to FBI records was difficult, but, the planners might have noted, a few months earlier they had had some help obtaining access to original FBI files.

  An event unusual in the annals of scholarly research—the burglary—provided the presenters with some information that otherwise would not have been available to them. Thanks to the Media burglary, the presenters had access for the first time to official FBI files that contained firsthand documented evidence of how the bureau worked, not just speculation and hearsay. Inside the ivied Princeton hall where the conference convened, several of the speakers, including eminent scholars, cited evidence from the Media files—and properly referenced them in their comments, in footnotes in their papers, and in the book on the conference, Investigating the FBI, that was published later—as they analyzed problems in the bureau and made the case for its reform. It was probably the first time burglars were the source of information discussed in such an august Ivy League setting, or in any academic setting, and also the first time stolen files were the basis of footnotes in academic papers.

  One of the people who presented a paper at the conference, Thomas I. Emerson, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of The System of Freedom of Expression, began his formal remarks with this stark observation: “The inescapable message of much of the material we have covered is that the FBI jeopardizes the whole system of freedom of expression which is the cornerstone of an open society. The philosophy and much of the activity of the Bureau is in direct conflict with the fundamental principles underlying that system.”

  As the conference participants vigorously discussed new evidence about how the FBI operated, surely none of them knew the identity of the quiet man with the warm smile who sat at a table in the hall outside a door open to the conference room, listening very carefully to the proceedings. Eager, as usual, to promote maximum awareness of the important information in the Media files, Davidon—their unknown footnote source!—sat there throughout the two-day conference with stacks of copies of some of the stolen Media files. As people approached his table during breaks, he greeted them with his gentle smile and offered them copies of the FBI files. Many of them had already seen the documents, and those who had not seemed to appreciate the chance to receive them.

  JOHN RAINES HAD turned down Davidon’s invitation to go with him to the Princeton conference. He and Bonnie did not think that was a good idea. They had experienced too many close calls since the burglary. Distributing copies of the stolen documents at such a high-profile event did not seem wise. They had been living in what one of them remembers as “a sustained period of worry and concern” ever since the burglary. Though the level of intensity varied, it was always there, not disappearing completely until about five years later.

  Given the pressure they felt, the Raineses decided to stay away from peace demonstrations for an indefinite period. Beginning immediately after the burglary, they realized that agents were looking for the woman who had visited the office. So they decided that woman would not be seen at events where they knew FBI agents and informers were likely to be a constant presence.

  A few key events made them think that their arrest, and possibly the arrest of all the burglars, was imminent. They first feared that the day John watched the Xerox maintenance person walk away from his office with the drum of the copier he had used to copy hundreds of the Media documents. Subsequent experiences felt even more threatening.

  In early April 1971, they responded one evening to a knock at their front door and were both surprised and shaken, even before the visitor’s threat. There stood the man who had abandoned the group shortly before the burglary. They liked him, but under these circumstances they were anything but happy to see him. They had no idea why he had left the group or what he thought now that the burglary had been done, but they invited him in. He had not come to congratulate them on a job well done. He was full of foreboding. He nervously told them he “was dealing with immense pressure.” He told them he was very troubled about what he should do.

  He said he was thinking of turning them in.

  The Raineses were stunned. This was even worse than watching the Xerox repairman carry away the copier drum.

  He told them someone had told him the Media files included defense secrets that, if revealed, would be disastrous to national security. When the Raineses told him they were sure such documents were not in the files, they could not tell if he believed them. After he left, the Raineses were very troubled about what they could do about what felt like a looming crisis. They thought he might hold the future of all the burglars in his hands. Given that they had not been arrested, they were convinced he had not revealed their plans to authorities before the burglary. But here he was, less than a month later, and he was telling them he was thinking of turning them in. The investigative record of the burglary contains no information about his visit to the Raineses despite the fact that the record includes considerable detail about the bureau’s surveillance of him and investigators’ belief that he was one of the Media burglars.

  Bonnie and John Raines struggled with how to deal with this situation. When the man left that night, they were not confident they had convinced him not to turn them in. Sometime later that evening or the next day, they got an idea. Their kitchen did not really need a new coat of paint, but they thought painting it all day with him might give John Raines an opportunity to have a long and rambling conversation that w
ould convince him not to turn the burglars in. Given the possible consequences of his threat, they felt something had to be done. This was all they could think of. They called him and asked him if they could hire him to help John paint the kitchen. He agreed and arrived for the job early Saturday morning.

  Standing on ladders across from each other, the man and John Raines talked nearly all day. As they covered the kitchen walls with a coat of warm yellow paint, he revealed more about the source of his concern. He said he had no problem with the documents that had been released so far, the revelations about how the bureau operated, the spying on Americans. He thought those documents might even have a positive impact. But he was very worried about what his girlfriend had told him. It wasn’t clear from what he said whether she knew he had once been part of the group, but John was left with the impression that she suspected he was close to the group, if not part of it. He told John she had convinced him that documents stolen at the Media office that had not yet been made public would reveal national defense secrets, including the location of missile defense systems. National security, she had told him, was now about to be seriously endangered because of the stolen documents.

  John insisted this was not true. He told him he thought his girlfriend was working for the FBI and that she had gotten that idea from them. John emphasized that he had seen all of the stolen documents, and that none of them revealed defense secrets or posed a danger in any way to national security.

  “I think he was on the verge of giving us up,” said John Raines years later. “His girlfriend was really pushing him. He was very frightened.” By the end of that Saturday, the kitchen looked fresh and new and John hoped he had convinced him not to turn them in. The Raineses convinced themselves that they had “quieted him down, cooled him down.” That’s what they hoped, but they were not sure and remained afraid he would turn them in. They never heard from him again, nor did any of the other Media burglars. According to the FBI’s investigative files on the burglary, the man who dropped out of the group talked to the FBI about the burglary, but he did not do so until near the end of the investigation.