The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  The importance of recruiting people who would inform on black people was strongly and repeatedly emphasized. “It is essential,” wrote Philadelphia SAC Jamieson in a February 1968 file found at Media, “that this office develop a large number of additional racial informants at this time and that we continue to add and develop racial informants and exploit their potential during the months ahead. In the inspection just passed, the Inspector pointed out, as we all know, that this is a problem of the entire office in which every agent and every squad shares responsibility.”

  Officials in the Philadelphia office also recommended where Philadelphia informers should find black people to be spied on. To get “maximum productivity from the racial informants,” the agent in charge in Philadelphia advised informers to go to bars and cafés, bookstores, churches, and the headquarters of community organizations frequented by black people. At some restaurants and lounges, he wrote, “militant Negroes have been known to congregate.” He suggested specific places: Green’s Café, Wimpy’s Burgers, South Street taprooms and luncheonettes, a luncheonette in Germantown, Foo Foo’s Steak House, Mr. Silk’s Third Base Lounge, and a settlement house in South Philadelphia.

  Agents were told to monitor the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, then one of the most prominent churches in the city and known as a place where diverse opinions were welcome and where various community services, including free meals, were provided for poor people in the church’s largely black neighborhood. Its pastor, the Reverend Paul Washington, one of the most respected clergy in the city, was named in some of the Media files.

  As Greider wrote in his analysis, the files prescribing racial surveillance “sound like instructions for agents being sent to a foreign country.”

  Some of the assignments for agents and informers as they informed on black people in Philadelphia:

  • “Attend and report on open meetings of known or suspected black extremist organizations.…”

  • “Visit Afro-American type bookstores for the purpose of determining if militant extremist literature is available therein and, if so, to identify the owners, operators and clientele of such stores.”

  • “Identify black extremist militants who attempt to influence the Negro community and report on the effect of such efforts.”

  • “Report on changes in the attitude of the Negro community toward the white community which may lead to racial violence.”

  • “Report on all indications of efforts by foreign powers to take over the Negro militant movement. In those cases where you have an exceptionally intelligent and knowledgeable informant, such an informant may be given the assignment of reporting on the general mood of the Negro community concerning susceptibility to foreign influence whether this be from African nations in the form of Pan-Africanism, from the Soviet or Chinese communist bloc nations, or from other nations.”

  The suggestion of foreign influence in the black community undoubtedly came as a shock—or joke—to most, if not all, black Philadelphians. Their efforts for equality were rooted in their own experiences and needs, not inspired by “outsiders”—a term Hoover often used to express his lifelong perception that most protest by Americans was the result of foreign influence.

  In addition to the Media files revealing that the FBI had easy access to the personal bank and other records of Muhammad Kenyatta, a prominent young civil rights leader in the Philadelphia area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the files also revealed that the bureau maintained detailed reports on his daily activities. Kenyatta had campaigned the year before the Media burglary, as head of the National Black Economic Development Conference, for churches to contribute “reparations” to fund programs that served poor black people. He succeeded in getting such donations from, among other institutions, the local Episcopal diocese. A Baptist minister, he later graduated from Harvard Law School and was teaching constitutional law at the University of Buffalo Law School at the time of his death in 1992. FBI files on Kenyatta revealed that his bank records were handed over to FBI agents by a bank cashier as well as by the executive officer of Southeast National Bank. They provided access to copies of canceled checks and monthly statements of his personal account. When it was determined that the bank’s computer system did not furnish complete information about “the nature and source of deposits and credits to this account,” the bank provided the FBI with microfilms that contained full information about him. The phone company, equally obliging, provided the bureau with Kenyatta’s unlisted phone number and information about his calls.

  Kenyatta and his family moved to Philadelphia from Mississippi in 1968 because of a threatening letter that he thought at the time was written by a committee of students who purportedly were his rivals in a student organization at Tougaloo College near Jackson. He learned the truth about the letter in 1975: It had been fabricated by three FBI agents in a successful effort to force him to leave Mississippi.

  THE BLACK PEOPLE WHO may have been targeted most in the Philadelphia area were students. They were easy targets because they stood out as very small and visible populations on campuses, all of which in eastern Pennsylvania at that time were overwhelmingly white except for Lincoln University, a predominantly black campus. Whether or not black students were peaceful, they came under the bureau’s watchful eyes.

  The director regarded the need for black informers on campuses as urgent. In a November 4, 1970, memo, he declared that “increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the Nation’s stability and security and indicate a need for increase in both quality and quantity of intelligence information on Black Student Unions and similar groups which are targets for influence and control by violence-prone Black Panther Party and other extremists.”

  He required agents to investigate and, if possible, infiltrate every black student organization at two-year colleges as well as four-year colleges and universities, and to do so without regard for whether there had been disturbances on such campuses. “… We must develop network of discreet quality sources in a position to furnish required information. Bear in mind that absence of information regarding these groups in any area might be the fault of inadequate source coverage and efforts should be undertaken immediately to improve this coverage.”

  In addition to campus-by-campus surveillance of black students, the FBI sent informers to the first national convention of the then new Washington-based National Association of Black Students, a loosely knit group of students from across the country. Every field office in the country was assigned in 1970 to send some of its local informants to the first NABS convention in Detroit.

  If a black informer was about to enroll in college, that made him or her especially attractive to the FBI. Agents were ordered by headquarters officials to “immediately ascertain among all Negro informants, including ghetto informants, which informants are planning to enter college this fall and would be in a position to infiltrate black power groups on campuses.…Any agent who has a Negro informant who is contemplating college attendance should immediately report such.”

  The Black Student Union at Pennsylvania Military College in Chester was reported by school officials to be peaceful and loosely knit, but that did not discourage the FBI from placing its members under surveillance. An FBI file notes that after a months-long investigation by the bureau, it was evident that the union was “a somewhat disorganized group of students, possibly having a membership and/or following of no more than 30 students and possibly as few as a half dozen, who have not displayed radical or militant ideas, and do not appear to be aligned with any radical or black militant groups.” The report noted that the union’s purpose, in addition to encouraging black awareness, was to encourage black high school students to enroll at the college. Administrators at the college told an FBI representative that the Black Student Union “is a legitimate organization … that … is recognized by the school administration as a proper school activity.” Nevertheless, the bureau concluded that it would “open
cases” on the two leaders of what the bureau acknowledged was a “basically dormant” group.

  THOUGH THE PUBLIC did not realize it until the full history of the FBI started to emerge in the mid-1970s, campuses had always been a venue for clandestine FBI operations. In addition to documenting the blanket coverage of black students on campuses, the Media files documented that every college and university was to be investigated and infiltrated by agents and informers. A file labeled STAG—for Student Agitation—listed the sixty-seven such institutions in the area served by resident agencies in the counties immediately west of Philadelphia. Given how expansive the demands for university infiltration were, agents based in these offices must have spent a substantial portion of their time monitoring campuses.

  In a September 1970 memo, a supervising agent in the Philadelphia field office ordered “each Resident Agent” to inform the head of Squad 4 within a week of the following information in regard to every college or university in his area:

  • The number of “sources” the FBI had “on the academic or administrative staff” on each campus, including security officers”;

  • The number of “current student security informants, or PSIs,” on each campus;

  • Other “current sources” of information regarding student agitation on each campus;

  • The identity of any of the above—professor, police officer, student—“who can provide you with advance information on student agitation”;

  • A “listing of what information of Bureau interest cannot be obtained from the university or college”;

  • “Steps you propose to increase, strengthen and improve your coverage with respect to STAG”;

  • The cultivation of informers who could move into high levels of leadership in radical organizations on campuses and elsewhere.

  The director announced in the fall of 1970 that informers could be hired as young as age eighteen. Now not only would older informers from off-campus be hired to inform on campuses, but more students would be hired to spy on one another. This lowering of the age of informers was greeted as a positive step. “We have been blocked off from this critical age group in the past,” wrote one official. “Let us take advantage of this opportunity.”

  Stressing the importance of collecting information on campuses, Special Agent William B. Anderson Jr. of the Philadelphia field office sent this message to the agents in the small regional offices near Philadelphia:

  “I want facts, not double talk. This information is not for statistical purposes or to reassure RA accomplishments. We have a job to do and cannot get where we are going until we know where we are.” The promotion of paranoia must have been a major accomplishment of the campus operations. Agents and informers were a frequent presence on all of the campuses—known to those who supplied them with information, unknown to the professors and students on whom files were being developed.

  Some campus conferences prompted elaborate coverage by the bureau. One that involved saturation coverage was the August 1969 conference of War Resisters International at Haverford College. A file found at Media stated that “in view of current international situation and the Paris Peace talks [regarding the Vietnam War],” twenty-two “security informants” were assigned by the bureau to the conference and told to determine its scope and “whether or not there are any indications it will generate any anti-US propaganda.”

  Agents and informers who covered the conference were unaware that a then relatively unknown man FBI agents would be searching for in two years was present. Once a hawk who advised the Pentagon on the conduct of the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg attended the conference in the hope of learning from the pacifists there what he could do to help end the war. It turned out to be a pivotal point in his life. Inspired by participants’ commitment to nonviolence as a way of life and as a political tool, Ellsberg decided by the end of the conference that, having risked his life in Vietnam when he supported the war, he would now risk his freedom to oppose it. Soon after that conference he decided he would do that by making public the secret history of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, which he had helped write. He hoped public access to this official history of the war, which he released in June 1971, would convince more Americans that the war was a serious mistake and should end.

  Another Media file illustrated the bureau’s attempts to convince college administrators that they should exert more control over student protesters. This memorandum from Hoover instructed agents throughout the country to deliver the article attached to it, “Campus or Battleground? Columbia Is a Warning to All American Universities,” an article from Barron’s, to campus administrations. It was to be delivered personally to administrators who were “established” sources of the FBI, and it was to be mailed “anonymously to college administrators who have a reluctance to take decisive action against the ‘New Left.’ ” In his handwriting at the end of the memorandum, Hoover wrote, “Let me know of disposition, and any results.” The article was written by Robert Hessen, then a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of Business and later an economic and business historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a think tank named after the late president Herbert Hoover.

  At the bottom of the routing slip attached to the article, in the handwriting of someone from the Philadelphia FBI office, is this note to Tom Lewis, the resident agent at the Media office: “Tom: Can you handle Swarthmore, Haverford, Villanova.”

  A term at the top of that routing slip, COINTELPRO, set off a state of near panic inside FBI headquarters when officials realized this file had been distributed by the burglars. It would be more than two years until the significance of the term would be even partially understood outside the bureau.

  THE ARRAY OF EMPLOYEES at Swarthmore College who were des- cribed in Media files as “established” sources who had worked with the FBI in the past made people on other campuses wonder who was invading their privacy and reporting their conversations and actions to the bureau. The FBI sources at Swarthmore included a campus security officer, a switchboard operator, the town’s chief of police, and the postmaster. In one instance, they had been engaged to spy on a philosophy professor who agents thought might have been visited by suspects in a violent Boston crime. The professor, never contacted by the FBI, said he had no knowledge of the suspects.

  According to FBI records of their collaboration with the Swarthmore switchboard operator, at the bureau’s request she checked the records of his calls and found none related to the suspects. Agents noted in the professor’s FBI file, however, that the operator said the professor was not highly regarded on campus. The police chief, contacted by the bureau because he lived near the professor, said he knew nothing about the suspects ever visiting the professor but expressed concern that hippies visited the professor’s home. He told agents he was also concerned about the fact that the professor had converted his garage into a print shop with equipment sufficient to publish a newspaper. Agents noted all of that information in a file, plus the fact that the police chief would keep a close eye on what happened at the professor’s house.

  The Swarthmore College student daughter of a member of Congress, Representative Henry S. Reuss, Democrat from Wisconsin, also was under FBI surveillance at Swarthmore—apparently because she was his daughter and because she, like her parents, opposed the Vietnam War. The records gathered on Jacqueline Reuss included her grades and details of her travels when she was a student in France. When the Media file about her became public, her father protested the surveillance of his daughter and others. The FBI, he said in a public statement, had no business compiling dossiers on “Americans who are accused of no wrongdoing.” According to the Media file on Reuss, information from her college records was provided confidentially to the FBI by the secretary to the registrar at Swarthmore College. The secretary, like other campus workers named in the FBI files, was described as an “established” FBI source.

  Campus-related files found at Media suggest it may have been routine f
or campus administrators to readily give FBI agents student information that was supposed to be private and that had no connection with potential criminal activity:

  • The acting chancellor of the Eastern Shore campus of the University of Maryland gave the FBI extensive information about the president of the student government association, none of it related to potential criminal action.

  • An administrator at Rutgers University provided the FBI with information about students that was unrelated to potential criminal activity.

  • The dean of student affairs at Lincoln University, a black campus in eastern Pennsylvania, provided the FBI with information about students who had engaged in no wrongdoing.

  A professor at the University of Pennsylvania came under FBI surveillance after an investigation of his fourteen-year-old son was closed. At first, according to a Media file, Herbert L. Shore’s son was the main subject of the surveillance. Phone conversations between Shore, director of performing arts at the Annenberg School of Communications at the university, and his son were tapped while the boy attended summer camp in East Germany. The FBI files on the case include transcripts of father and son discussing a family member’s health. Guessing who they were discussing, an agent wrote in the report on the taped phone conversation that they talked about “Mom, who presumably is the subject’s mother.” Military intelligence agents also intercepted and read letters exchanged between Shore and his son that summer.

  The FBI investigation of this junior high school student continued for several months. Then an FBI agent wrote, “The case on Norman Jon Shore should be closed inasmuch as the individual is only 14 years old.” But, the agent added, the investigation would now turn instead to the father. A file was opened on him. It grew easily, thanks to an “established” employee in the university’s personnel records department who, when contacted by an FBI agent, told the agent that because Professor Shore held a high university post, he had an extensive personnel record. She made that record available to the FBI. “I think it’s a sad commentary on this country … that there is this paranoia because a kid goes to camp in a socialist country,” Shore told a reporter when the document about him and his son became public after the Media burglary. When Shore died in 2004, he was described as an expert on African theater who “worked his entire life for peace and democracy in the United States and in Africa.”