The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Hoover wanted written support and advice from the Department of Justice for the arrests, but he did not trust Robert Mardian, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Internal Security Division, to maintain security regarding Camden. Acknowledging Hoover’s concerns, Mardian assured the director in writing that he recognized “the need for the utmost secrecy in this case.” In his August 12 “Depredations of Government Buildings” message to Hoover, Mardian approved the planned Camden arrest operation and gave the director advice regarding procedures. In an indication of the importance the department placed on the Camden case, Mardian told Hoover he had assigned Guy Goodwin, the Internal Security Division’s well-known convener of antiwar grand juries, to be on the scene in Camden during the arrests. Mardian assured the director that he himself would be available by phone at any time that night. He continued to discuss arrest plans with the director on a regular basis.

  Mardian recommended that the bureau deal with Nixon-appointed federal judges “personally known” to Mardian when getting search warrants in New Jersey in connection with the case. He need not have worried about judges being cooperative. The first federal judge assigned to the case during preliminary proceedings was so helpful to the bureau that he may have been in violation of judicial ethics. The Philadelphia field office reported to Hoover on September 2 that “District Judge Mitchell H. Cohen in Camden is extremely well disposed toward the Bureau and has been most helpful with respect to matters coming before him in this case. He is most anxious that departmental attorney Guy Goodwin should be the trial attorney with respect to Camden Action.” He urged the bureau to ask to have the first prosecutor assigned to the case replaced because the judge thought the prosecutor was too inexperienced. The prosecutor was replaced, but not with Guy Goodwin. Later, Judge Cohen removed himself from the case because the FBI, with his permission, had used his chambers as a vantage point from which to monitor and photograph the defendants as they conducted dry runs. Another judge, also someone favored by Mardian, recused himself because he was a former FBI agent.

  AT FIRST the Camden operation, from the FBI’s perspective, looked like it would be easy. The bureau would essentially just stand by and watch the burglars fall into a trap of their own making. But it soon became evident that the arrests might be more difficult than expected. Not long after the surveillance started, with Hardy firmly in place as the FBI’s ears and eyes, agents learned rather startling news. Originally scheduled for mid-July, the raid was postponed by the burglars three times. The dry runs did not go well. At times the group even considered canceling the raid altogether.

  Some of the participants were ambivalent about proceeding because this raid involved unique problems. Unlike other draft boards that had been raided, this one was on an upper floor of a closely guarded building in the center of a city. The raid was complicated in other ways. It involved scaling a fire escape while not setting off an alarm at the base of the fire escape. And windows on the fifth floor had to be quietly and skillfully removed in order to enter the draft board from a narrow parapet outside the window. The raiders felt fortunate that the new member of the group, Hardy, had taught them how to do that and also had figured out how to avoid setting off the alarm, which none of the rest of them had even noticed.

  FBI officials, originally certain this raid would result in arrests that would amount to a huge victory for the bureau, were alarmed when they learned the raid might be canceled. Moore became so fearful the raid might never take place that he proposed a drastic change in FBI strategy in order to make sure arrests would take place even if the raid did not. Instead of assuming, as the bureau had from the outset, that the Camden burglars would be caught red-handed as they broke into the board and destroyed government property, Moore thought the bureau should be prepared to arrest them instead as they conducted a dry run or as they prepared to enter the building. This would mean charging them with a lesser crime, conspiracy to commit crimes, rather than with the actual commission of crimes. Making the case for conspiracy charges, Moore wrote Hoover:

  As Bureau is aware, the principal source [Hardy], Camden action, has been under direction and control of the Philadelphia and Newark offices since June 25 last. He has attended nightly meetings and participated in the on-the-street surveillances and quote dry runs unquote, has identified participants involved, and will be in key position during break-in and/or quote dry run unquote. Source is willing to testify. In corroboration of his testimony, agents can supply the following hard evidence:

  One. Have actually observed participants and surveillances.

  Two. Have photographed them.

  Three. Have recorded their conversations on transceivers.

  Four. Have obtained copies of their notes, plans, charts, photographs in furtherance of their plan to burglarize offices in the Camden Post Office Building, and can testify to identity of a large number of the participants and their cars.

  It was a plea from Moore for arrests before this group slipped away, the FBI’s opportunity to arrest them perhaps gone forever.

  Rosen was assigned to consider Moore’s proposal. In an August 5 memo to Sullivan supporting Moore, Rosen wrote that he agreed with Moore: “While it would be desirable to arrest these individuals red-handed in the act, the possibility of additional delays exists. Rather than risk the possibility conditions will change, requiring Grady and his group to postpone their planned break-in, SAC Moore’s recommendation appears to have merit and we recommend it be followed.”

  To support Moore’s conspiracy proposal, Rosen described how frustrating the repeated postponements by the Camden burglars were for the FBI:

  “We have observed through our intensive investigation of Grady and associates … that because of the perversity of these people they are inclined to procrastinate. In fact, it has been reported by our informant that should the break-in fail to take place this weekend, the actual ‘hit’ could be delayed until some time in the fall.”

  Crime prevention definitely was not the FBI’s goal in regard to this burglary.

  Mardian agreed with Moore’s conclusion that if the crime itself didn’t take place, the mountain of recordings and photographs gathered by the FBI demonstrated “solid evidence of conspiracy,” but he had serious problems with settling for conspiracy charges. In a memo to Hoover he urged him to consider “the anti-Government position which we can expect from the press” if the raiders were charged with conspiracy rather than with actual commission of a crime. Hoover wrote this tart observation on Mardian’s memo: “If this is going to be the controlling factor at all times, our work and efforts are futile.”

  Finally, in that same memo to Hoover, Mardian ordered that “no arrests should be effected absent an actual unlawful entry by one or more members of the group.” Only criminal charges, he said, would be acceptable to the Department of Justice.

  The burglars’ reluctance to move ahead would bedevil the FBI until the moment the break-in took place. Just two days before the raid, Grady expressed doubts. Hardy reported that Grady had said that evening, “We’re tooling up for Saturday night. If it doesn’t go Saturday, we’re all leaving town.” A bulletin from Moore to Hoover marked “urgent” reported Grady’s ambivalence. Even the Friday night before the Saturday night raid some of the burglars thought it should be canceled. Everyone—burglars and FBI officials and arresting agents—was extremely insecure about whether the raid would take place. The FBI agents were ready and eager. The burglars were reluctant and fearful.

  LOGISTICALLY, it seemed the FBI could not have been better prepared. Numerous bureau clerks were brought to Camden the day of the raid to prepare papers on each defendant to be used at the arraignment the next morning. Twenty-five interview rooms were set up in the federal building for agents to interview each person after they had been searched following arrest. Thanks to agents’ surveillance and Hardy’s reports, they had precise information about plans: a map drawn by Hardy showed the time and place where each of the twenty-e
ight burglars would be stationed at the time the raid was to begin; where each of the group’s two vans and eight cars would be positioned on streets near the federal building, some of them faking intersection accidents; when and where Grady would be standing when he gave the “go” hand signal for the ladder to be placed against the federal building.

  Early that afternoon, more than eighty FBI agents from throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, plus more than a dozen federal marshals, arrived in Camden. Sullivan wrote later that agents hid in a nearby funeral home from early afternoon until the time they got in position to make the arrests. Like the burglars, the agents also planned to move to locations near the federal building without being noticed. “So as not to attract attention,” Sullivan wrote, “we took the agents in and out in a hearse.…The men were forced to wait for the break-in among the corpses.”

  As FBI agents were arriving in the city, the burglars started stage one of their plan. According to a minute-by-minute log maintained by the FBI, the burglars started casing the federal building at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. With the FBI listening in as the burglars arrived, the burglars gathered at a downtown apartment to finalize plans at 6 p.m. They left the apartment at 10:50, and by 11:15, according to the FBI log, “all break-in units observed in place.”

  The break-in was scheduled to begin at 11:50. In Washington, Sullivan was seated at his desk at FBI headquarters with an open phone line to Moore in Philadelphia. In Camden, all FBI personnel were in place and ready to move in.

  Suddenly, FBI observers watched and listened in shock as each cluster of burglars broke up and left the scene. In that moment, Moore must have deeply regretted that Mardian had not approved his suggestion that the burglars be arrested for conspiracy instead of breaking and entering. Had the last chance to arrest these people just evaporated? Hardy soon reported to his handlers that the burglars discovered at the last minute, as they were in place and waiting for Grady’s hand signal, that the entry crew had forgotten to bring the ladder needed to start the climb to the fire escape. Back at the Anderson apartment, Grady severely reprimanded the people who’d forgotten the ladder.

  At 2:30 a.m., the burglars returned to the federal building area, this time with a ladder. Grady roamed the area in a camper-type truck. He gave his hand signal, and the entry team went into action. They placed the ladder against the building, climbed up to the fire escape, and then swiftly and quietly ran up the fire escape, gently removed the window to the fifth-floor Selective Service office, in the way Hardy had taught them, and stepped over the windowsill and into the dark office.

  The agents were ready. It was time for their signal. But they received a signal to stay in place, not to move ahead. Sullivan later wrote that the agents had to be held back.

  The agents surrounding the federal building, like Hardy, thought the arrests would take place as soon as the burglars went inside the draft board office. “ ‘No, not yet,’ ” Sullivan said he ordered. “ ‘If we move in now, all we’d have against them is trespassing in a federal building. Let’s give them time and get them for destroying federal property.’…The men were edgy, ready to move in at once, but I made them wait almost two hours before I gave the signal to go.” As they waited, in the distance they could hear the sounds of a riot that had been taking place since two nights earlier in response to the shooting death of a Puerto Rican man from the community by a local police officer at a traffic stop.

  Sullivan was as eager for the arrests to take place as the agents were. In fact, he had wanted to be at the scene to direct the operation, but Mark Felt, by then more powerful than Sullivan as Hoover’s close adviser, recommended that the director reject Sullivan’s request to be on the scene the night of the raid. He told Hoover, “SAC Moore is eminently qualified to handle on the scene supervision, and Sullivan should be here to coordinate at the Seat of Government.” Reluctantly, Sullivan directed operations from Washington, occasionally receiving instructions from Department of Justice officials and passing them on to Moore. He wrote about the experience in his memoir, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, which was published posthumously in 1979 after he was killed early one morning in November 1977 near his home in New Hampshire by a young hunter who said he mistook Sullivan for a deer.

  “We didn’t interfere with their new plan,” Sullivan wrote, “because we wanted to catch them red-handed.” That decision not to arrest the burglars immediately and to give them time to destroy draft records—a decision made at the highest levels of the federal government right before the raid that evening—had powerful unintended consequences later on the case against the Camden defendants.

  Finally, it was time. Sullivan’s order to make the arrests was issued by him through Moore at 4:31 a.m. on Sunday, August 22, 1971. By that time, the eighty-plus FBI agents had been waiting in place for more than five hours. When the signal was given, agents ran up the five-story fire escape and stepped through the dark opening where the burglars had removed the window. “There were agents everywhere,” Sullivan said. “They found Grady’s friends busily smashing file cabinets and promptly arrested them.”

  Simultaneously, agents ran into the courtyard of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, as other agents entered a nearby Lutheran minister’s home. At these three locations in downtown Camden the FBI arrested twenty people by 4:36. Eight others were arrested in Camden hours later. The people arrested early that Sunday morning would become known as the Camden 28. The people arrested in the fifth-floor draft board office vividly remember the moment. Six of them were quietly removing Selective Service files from drawers, tearing them, and stuffing them into large canvas mailing bags, while two other people were lifting the filled bags to the ledge outside the window they had entered.

  Suddenly, Giocondo recalls, someone outside the open draft board window shouted, “Freeze, it’s the FBI!”

  The burglars were surprised when they saw Guy Goodwin, the attorney from the Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice, standing above them. Staring down into their faces, he gloated. “Hello, Ro-Ro,” Goodwin casually said to Rosemary Reilly, and “Hi, Cookie,” to Kathleen Ridolfi. He seemed to take pleasure in letting them know he knew their nicknames. By then, Goodwin was widely considered in antiwar circles to be a sort of circuit-riding prosecutor of antiwar activists. His specialty was convening grand juries that indicted antiwar activists, often as a result of subpoenas many thought were fishing expeditions that substituted for weak FBI investigations. He seldom, if ever, tried the cases. After indictments were issued, Goodwin left town and local prosecutors took over. Knowing that background, some of the Camden raiders were surprised that morning that they merited the attention of this nationally known antiwar prosecutor.

  John Swinglish, a Navy veteran from Washington, D.C., and one of the burglars, remembered noticing from his off-site lookout location that the lights were on in the draft board office. “And I thought, why are they turning the lights on. This is crazy.”

  Father Michael Doyle, one of the people arrested inside the office, also thought what was happening was crazy: “Three guys jumped me, and they were just miserable. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. They just threw me to the ground. One guy jumped with his two knees into my chest.…I looked up at them, and I said, ‘So this is the FBI?’ ” Some agents pointed guns at the burglars as they ordered them down. Neist denied later that guns were used, but defendants, including Ridolfi, a professor now at Santa Clara University Law School in California, insist the agents used guns.

  One agent must have been embarrassed when, after pressing Father Doyle to the floor as if he were dangerous, he was reduced to explaining to the priest that because the agents forgot to bring enough handcuffs he wanted the priest’s belt so he could restrain him with makeshift fetters. Like all the other defendants, Doyle had been trained, in the revered tradition of nonviolent resistance, not to resist arrest. Now he was not only not resisting arrest—he was asked to provide the means of his restraint. He obediently
removed his belt and handed it to the agent so it could be used to restrain him despite his passive reaction to being arrested, thrown to the floor, and stepped on.

  This was not where Roseta Doyle, the priest’s mother back in Ireland, expected to see her son in the United States—on the floor, trampled on by an FBI agent. Then again, though both she and her son knew well the concept of resistance as a result of living through the troubles in Ireland, she did not expect him to be resisting the American government, at least not by raiding a draft board.

  Doyle himself had not expected this destiny in his adopted country. When he arrived in the United States in 1963 at age twenty-five, he was assigned to teach in a Catholic high school in Cape May, a beautiful seaside resort town on the southern tip of New Jersey where the streets are lined with pretty Victorian houses. A couple years after his arrival, he spoke openly in opposition to the war in Vietnam. His bishop did what many Catholic bishops did at that time. He punished Doyle for expressing views the bishop regarded as inappropriate by firing him from his teaching position and assigning him to work in a very poor inner-city church in Camden. Doyle, like many other Catholic priests who were punished by being sent to a “ghetto,” soon regarded the transfer as the opposite of punishment. In the inner city, he says, “I found my mission.” In that community, he worked to improve the circumstances that perpetuated poverty, and he became deeply committed to the welfare of the members of his congregation, most of them African American and Hispanic people. To this day, more than forty years after being arrested in Camden, Doyle has lived and worked in the very poor inner city of Camden, with time out only for an occasional trip to Ireland.

  Doyle’s opposition to the war grew stronger in the late 1960s. He saw connections between the deteriorating conditions in the city and the increased spending on the war. He also became aware of the disproportionate killing in Vietnam of young men from poor places like Camden. Given his strong opposition to the war, it probably was inevitable that he would notice when, as he puts it, “Dan and Phil Berrigan began to make their moves in those years of the ’60s. I was interested in what they were doing. The Sermon on the Mount, and turn the other cheek and all of that kind of thing.…I began to rethink my ideas.…And say, well, if the Christian truth is to be preached, it’s got to be without guns, it has got to be without killing. And that Jesus would have died for the ones who killed him, and that would be the only solution. So that’s how it kind of got going.” Eventually, he concluded that the usual forms of protest were having little or no effect. Nonviolent resistance seemed to be the only avenue left to draw attention to the terrible impact of the war in both Vietnam and the United States. Two years after his arrest in the Camden draft board, when Doyle faced the jury, in his intense and lyrical Irish brogue he posed rhetorical questions that explained the dilemma that led to his becoming a resister: