The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  In the front pews at Hoover’s funeral at National Presbyterian Church in northwest Washington on May 4 were Chief Justice Warren Burger; Mamie Eisenhower, whose husband had been buried from the same church just two years earlier; John Mitchell, who recently had resigned as attorney general to become the director of the Committee to Re-elect the President; and Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would be forced out of office the next year and charged with political corruption and income tax evasion. Agnew released a statement saying Hoover was dear to Americans because of “his total dedication to principle and his complete incorruptibility.” Among the other dignitaries seated near the front of the church were two new Supreme Court justices, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell, and Frank Rizzo, then the mayor of Philadelphia, formerly the police commissioner, and a longtime admirer of the director.

  Among the couple thousand attendees were hundreds of FBI agents. Seated in the midst of them was Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the actor selected years earlier by Hoover to be the star of The F.B.I. Mark Felt, Hoover’s man at Media the morning after the burglary, was seated among the agents and was an honorary pallbearer. As of the previous day he had become the second-highest-ranking person in the bureau, taking the place of Tolson, who retired within hours of Hoover’s death. Felt, very disappointed that he was not appointed to succeed Hoover, would soon expand his power over day-to-day operations of the bureau while Gray was acting director. Felt also took over Hoover’s responsibility for editing and giving final approval to scripts of The F.B.I., sometimes spending several hours a day writing multipage single-spaced elaborate edits and critiques. He did this throughout the time he served as a high administrator at the bureau, including, beginning the following fall, during the period when he met Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward occasionally late at night in a dark garage in Arlington, Virginia, complicating the life of the man who gave the eulogy at Hoover’s funeral.

  In his eulogy, Nixon expressed the highest praise for his longtime friend. “America has revered this man not only as the Director of an institution,” he said,

  but as an institution in his own right. For nearly half a century, nearly one-fourth of the whole history of this Republic, J. Edgar Hoover has exerted a great influence for good in our national life. While eight presidents came and went, while other leaders of morals and manners and opinion rose and fell, the Director stayed at his post … helped to keep steel in America’s backbone, and the flame of freedom in America’s soul.

  He personified integrity; he personified honor; he personified principle; he personified courage; he personified discipline; he personified dedication; he personified loyalty; he personified patriotism.…

  The United States is a better country because this good man lived his long life among us these past 77 years. Each of us stands forever in his debt. In the years ahead, let us cherish his memory. Let us be true to his legacy.

  The president concluded, “He loved the law of this country.”

  Within the next two years, Americans would learn that neither of these two very powerful leaders, the president at the podium or the FBI director in the coffin, seemed to love the law very much.

  16

  Victory at Camden

  FOR TWO MONTHS in the summer of 1971, the FBI prepared to arrest the Media burglars. Bureau officials were sure they were going to raid a draft board in Camden, New Jersey. Kept informed by a local building contractor who infiltrated the group planning the raid, FBI officials secured the approval of the Nixon administration’s Department of Justice and planned for the arrests with meticulous care, seeming to leave nothing to chance.

  As preparations for the arrests were under way, William C. Sullivan, the third-highest official in the bureau, expressed certainty that the Camden burglars were the Media burglars. In a July 1971 memorandum to assistant director Al Rosen, he wrote:

  …We found out that the same group of dissenters who broke into our Media office was planning an entry into another federal office building nearby. We knew who the members of the group were—and we knew their leader, John Grady.

  It is evident that this is an extremely important case for the Bureau. If successful, it will do an enormous amount toward offsetting some of the difficulties we have had in the past. It could have national impact.…It will be a very complex sensitive operation.…We cannot be too careful or take too many precautions, or plan too thoroughly in order to make this successful.

  Because of the extreme importance of this action to the Bureau and to this country, I conclude that no stone should be left unturned in order to make this operation successful.

  For Hoover, the elaborately planned Camden arrests promised victory in a case that so far seemed impossible to solve. He had expected the Media burglars to be arrested soon after the burglary and the documents secured. Even with the bureau’s highly regarded Roy Moore in charge of the investigation, no progress had been made. Now, at last, victory seemed to be at hand. It looked like Hoover might restore his half-century legacy to the well-burnished gloss it had before the Media burglary, to the prestige he had long assumed he would hold forever in history books: the country’s greatest crime fighter, the country’s greatest defender against enemies both internal and external.

  Before the summer of 1971, Camden probably was not a place where Hoover would have expected to retrieve his legacy. In 1971, as now, the small, blighted city across the Delaware River from downtown Philadelphia via the Ben Franklin Bridge was one of the poorest, most damaged, and most dangerous in the nation. It was second only to Newark as the most likely place in the nation to be mugged or killed. It was a city where industries, stores, and schools had closed and where the people who could not leave struggled to survive.

  But on June 25, 1971, Camden became J. Edgar Hoover’s source of hope. It was then that FBI officials thought that, at last, they would finally be able to arrest the Media perpetrators. It was on that day Robert Hardy first went to the Camden FBI office and told an agent he had learned about plans for a draft board raid being planned there. Agent Terry Neist remembers the moment Hardy walked in. “I have some friends,” Hardy said, speaking rather hesitantly. “Some people I know … want me to get involved in something. And I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Well, what is it?” Neist recalls asking. Hardy told the agent his friends were planning to break into a draft board.

  Neist made a crucial decision immediately. He hired Hardy as an informer within minutes of meeting him and, as he recalls, told him, “What we’d like you to do is tell them you’re going to join the group, and then I will meet with you regularly, myself and someone else, so we can keep track of what they’re doing.”

  For Hoover and the agents investigating the Media burglary, Hardy’s news was like Christmas morning and winning the lottery wrapped into one grand occasion.

  Hardy made that first fateful visit to the FBI the day after his close friend Mike Giocondo, forty-two and a former priest, had told him about the group’s plans and about their deep frustrations about how difficult the raid would be. Because he regarded Hardy as a good manager of small construction projects, Giocondo thought Hardy might be able to help the group solve some of the problems they were having with plans for the break-in. When Hardy first talked to Neist, he knew the names of only two members of the group, Giocondo and the Reverend Michael Doyle, a thirty-three-year-old Camden priest who had emigrated from Ireland eight years earlier. Doyle was a friend of Giocondo and also of Hardy and his wife, Peg, and their children. Just a year earlier Doyle had guided Hardy through his decision to convert to Catholicism.

  Hardy strongly opposed the war in Vietnam, but he rejected protest that involved breaking into government offices. In an interview with filmmaker Anthony Giacchino, Hardy recalled being at the U.S. naval docks in Philadelphia when refrigerated ships arrived from Vietnam with the bodies of dead troops. “This one day they had 440 caskets they were unloading. I remember longshoremen and myself and other
men and women who were there greeting the caskets and putting them into hearses. How we wept. At that time, I said I would do whatever I could to stop that war.”

  At their first meeting, Neist asked Hardy, an ex-Marine and an officer in the local Junior Chamber of Commerce, who the leader of the group was. He said he didn’t know but he would find out. They agreed Neist would meet Hardy at a carnival that evening on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where he would be staffing a booth. When Neist approached the booth, Hardy handed him a small piece of paper.

  On it he had written, “The group’s leader is John Peter Grady.”

  Grady. The man believed to be the mastermind of countless draft board raids. The man FBI officials believed, from nearly the moment agents discovered the Media office had been burglarized, was the mastermind of the Media burglary.

  “Well, when we heard this,” Neist recalled years later, “I mean, Mr. Grady was someone who … the FBI was aware of and thought might be involved in some of these draft board break-ins.…So, with this we realized that maybe this group will lead us to the individuals who broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.”

  This news was greeted as a golden break in the MEDBURG case. Despite investigators’ certainty that Grady was the leader of the Media group, after enormous effort by agents they still had no evidence of his—or anyone else’s—involvement in Media. Nevertheless, they were still confident of their original assumption, and now, thanks to Hardy, they thought they would be able to arrest Grady and the other Media burglars. Bureau officials were so certain that Grady and other people in the Camden group were the people who had burglarized the Media FBI office that during this time they merged the two cases into one: MEDBURG-CAMDEN.

  Hardy’s news that Grady was leading a group that planned to raid the draft board in Camden infused the investigation with renewed optimism. In a July 7, 1971, memorandum to William Sullivan, headquarters official Al Rosen wrote, “It is our intention that by careful planning we may be in a position to apprehend those participating in this new break-in—15 to 25 individuals—during the actual attempt. We hope to link many of these individuals with the Media break-in.”

  Rosen noted that the bureau had discontinued electronic surveillance plans at a cabin in the Pennsylvania mountains where they thought Grady was supposed to appear recently, but, to MEDBURG investigators’ disappointment, he had not. In a recommendation that was accepted, Rosen suggested that plans to take the Media case before a grand jury should be shelved because “any grand jury action would obviously adversely influence Grady’s plans for his newest actions.” The bureau’s plans for successful arrests of Media burglars at Camden were so important, Rosen advised, that no information about the plans should be disseminated outside the bureau and only on a very limited basis inside the bureau.

  Among headquarters officials and with Roy Moore and his large team of MEDBURG investigators, there was a this-must-not-go-wrong attitude about the pending Camden arrests. Hoover was determined that the arrests would be a source of pride, not embarrassment. By the time the Camden arrests were being planned, he had felt a powerful sting from a series of deeply embarrassing episodes. It was an embarrassment that an FBI office could be burglarized. It was an embarrassment—and disaster, in the director’s opinion—that the stolen files distributed by the burglars had uncovered, for the first time, his secret political spying operations. It was an embarrassment that the hundreds of FBI agents assigned to the investigation of the case, MEDBURG, had not found either the burglars or the files they stole. It was an embarrassment that countless draft board burglars, who had stolen thousands of Selective Service files in the last two years, had eluded arrest. The bureau had also endured significant embarrassment as a result of the criticism directed at the director after his sensational public accusations in November 1970 that Philip Berrigan and seven other people in the Catholic peace movement were conspiring to kidnap President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and to bomb tunnels under Washington.

  Now that Hoover believed the Media burglars were within reach, he was determined the arrests at Camden would be carried out perfectly. The FBI would not be subjected to criticism or embarrassment for what it was about to do in Camden.

  BEGINNING THE DAY Hardy appeared in their Camden office, headquarters officials, including Hoover, agreed that agents would closely watch as plans for the Camden draft board raid unfolded before hidden FBI eyes. Moore assured Hoover that agents were monitoring Grady and “his associates” seven days a week and developing plans to “neutralize Grady’s activity at critical time.” The “associates” were typical of the mix of people who had raided other draft boards—Jesuit priests from New York City, a local Irish-born Catholic parish priest, a local Lutheran minister, elementary school teachers, a Navy veteran, a sociologist, and a local doctor. Most of them were working-class Catholics in their twenties and thirties from Philadelphia and other northeastern cities, some of whom had dropped out of college to protest the war in Vietnam, and others who had a variety of jobs and were raising young families.

  Hardy easily moved into his role as an informer. He was accepted immediately as a member of the group and worked with them every day for the next two months. According to Hardy and official FBI records, the FBI paid him an amount equal to his usual daily earnings as a self-employed construction worker. He became a leader in the group and reported the details of the evolving plans for the raid to his FBI handlers at least once a day for two months. “Usually I met them in the morning in diners or parking lots,” Hardy said later. “Each day I collected my thoughts on everything that had happened and had been said, and then dictated it into my contact’s tape recorder. It was transcribed daily by two stenographers at the FBI. Also, a radio was installed in my van so whenever the ignition was on, the conversations would be directly broadcast to the FBI. The FBI recorded these conversations and had them transcribed. I saw to it that many conversations took place in my van.”

  As agents listened to the conversations between Hardy and Grady, they collected extensive documentary information about the Catholic antiwar movement. They listened as Grady bragged about his accomplishments, describing one draft board raid after another he claimed he had been involved in. Grady told Hardy that as a longtime friend and supporter of the Berrigans, he was personally responsible for moving the Catholic peace movement away from the Berrigans’ “jail-term martyr kind of situation to a strike force action group,” such as what he now was planning at Camden.

  Agents must have been particularly interested when Grady talked about Media in one of his first conversations with Hardy. He told him the FBI office in Media “was unguarded and that the files were there in sort of a home-type atmosphere. He implied that it was very simple.” Such comments led the listening FBI agents to think Grady was indeed what they thought he was, the leader of the Media burglars.

  In recorded conversations between the two men, Grady told Hardy he thought Hardy was bright and that he hoped he would continue working with the group after the Camden raid because he “had the type of talent that was needed in the underground.” Grady told him there were “very few people in the movement who could think and work at the same time, and that Hardy was one of those people.” Because Hardy knew Camden well, and most of the burglars did not, Grady asked him to establish where getaway and blocking vehicles would park the night of the raid and to teach some of the burglars how to quietly and quickly remove glass from the window that would be the burglars’ entrance into the draft board office. Grady was protective of Hardy. He warned him not to park his van in an alley the night of the raid because he did not want to see Hardy “get busted” during his first movement action.

  Hardy’s FBI handlers must have realized that Grady thought of Hardy as a leader of the group when they heard the code name Grady gave him. He called Hardy Moses. If the agents and officials at headquarters had a sense of irony, a sense of humor, or recall of Old Testament history as they watch
ed the relationship evolve between the informer and the leader of the group, perhaps they thought about the wilderness they hoped “Moses” was leading the FBI out of, and the wilderness they hoped he would lead the Camden burglars into.

  Three weeks before the burglary, Grady unintentionally gave the FBI what it regarded as a treasure trove of evidence. As he prepared to move from one Camden apartment to another, Grady asked Hardy to remove and temporarily store his personal possessions, including all of the photos, maps, and slides related to the Camden plan, plus material about other raids and his book business. He asked Hardy to keep his belongings until a few days later when Grady and his wife and children had moved into another apartment. Hardy readily obliged and immediately drove Grady’s possessions directly from Grady’s apartment to the FBI field office in Philadelphia, where agents promptly photographed every item, including every page of Grady’s personal notebook.

  As more and more invaluable evidence accumulated, officials at FBI headquarters established unusually tight security regarding all information related to Camden. Orders went out that there must be no leaks. The usual way of distributing internal memos was forbidden. Communication security was made so tight that memos about Camden could be distributed only by one official handing a memorandum to another official. Only a few officials at the highest levels of headquarters had access to Camden information—Hoover, Clyde Tolson, William Sullivan, and Al Rosen, an assistant director, and D. J. Dalbey, head of the bureau’s Office of Legal Counsel. Secrecy was recognized as “imperative” from the outset, Rosen wrote, “both from the standpoint of protecting our source who has successfully associated himself to a very close degree with Grady and, more important, insuring there be no leak which would scare off Grady and his group.”