The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  “What do you do when a child’s on fire? We saw children on fire. What do you do when a child’s on fire in a war that was a mistake? What do you do? Write a letter?”

  THE ARRESTS AT CAMDEN gave the FBI an enormous sense of satisfaction. The bureau’s sense of triumph was evident immediately. Just hours after the arrests, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell held an unprecedented joint press conference in Washington where they announced their victory at Camden. Hoover told journalists the people were apprehended at night in the Camden Selective Service office as they destroyed draft board records. He said they were carrying binoculars, radio transceivers, pry bars, and “flashlights with the lenses taped to emit a thin beam of light.” He did not mention the unusual source of that equipment. That would be revealed at the trial. The charges against them, the director said, included committing a crime on a government reservation, breaking and entering, destruction of government property, removal and mutilation of public records, theft of government property, unlawful interference with the administration of the Selective Service Act, and conspiracy to commit the crimes listed. If convicted on those charges, he said, they “could receive sentences ranging up to 40 years imprisonment.” Actually, the potential sentence for each defendant was forty-seven years.

  “Raids and arrests impressive and successful,” Moore wrote Hoover soon after the arrests. “Widespread national radio, TV and press coverage … continuing. Highly favorable and complimentary to FBI.”

  About the same time the high-level press conference was taking place in Washington, the defendants were being arraigned in Camden on the third floor of the building where they had been arrested. The government asked for high bail for John Peter Grady because he was the “ringleader and mastermind” of the group. Bail for the defendants totaled $605,000, ranging from $5,000 for some to $150,000 for Grady. A lawyer asked U.S. magistrate Charles L. Rudd, who presided, for lower bail for Grady because he was the father of five children. Judge Rudd angrily responded, “I’ll set the bail. I don’t want to see my country destroyed.” He praised the FBI then, as he did several times during the hearing: “God bless them. They’ve done a wonderful job.”

  Exuberant about the advance in the Media case that FBI officials thought the Camden arrests represented, assistant FBI director Al Rosen sent this message to Sullivan two days after the Camden arrests:

  “We now have key subjects in custody and must keep pressure on them to obtain admissions.…There is no physical evidence or witnesses to FBI-Media burglary—Matter can only be resolved by admissions.” Moore later proposed plans for getting them to confess to participating in the Media break-in.

  In his post-Camden arrest memo to Sullivan, Rosen emphasized the significance of finally arresting Grady, whom they had wanted to arrest ever since the morning of March 9. He wrote, “Grady, according to several sources … is directly responsible for the Media Resident Agency break-in.” The arrest of “Grady, avowed instigator of many of the raids on draft boards in the last two years by Berrigan supporters and East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives members, is an irreparable loss to this segment of the New Left.”

  Hoover personally informed high-level Nixon administration officials about the Camden arrests the day after they occurred. He sent letters to the attorney general; H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff; and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser, drawing attention to the bureau’s success at Camden. In a September 2 letter, Kissinger thanked Hoover for keeping him informed: “I appreciate having additional background on this very effective operation.”

  THE TWENTY-EIGHT PEOPLE arrested at Camden had no clue that their arrests were scripted to serve grand purposes. To the FBI, the arrests were finally a chance for victory in the MEDBURG case. In Moore’s strategy, the arrests also offered a chance to solve several of the other draft board cases, in addition to solving MEDBURG. But to the Camden defendants the arrests were a very depressing matter. Few other draft board raiders had sat in holding cells contemplating many years in prison. Most had walked away from draft boards and never been caught. Worse, from the perspective of some of them, now they had been arrested for a raid they thought never should have happened and in which they regretted participating.

  Both before and after the raid, the problems were obvious to many of the raiders. Hardy reported to his handlers that “members of the group say that this action will be the most difficult one that they have ever performed.” The group was too big and too disorganized. Making matters even more complicated, veteran draft board raiders were brought in from New York to help shortly before the day of the raid, allowing little or no time for them to participate in dry runs. Two women, responding to a last-minute call for more participants, tried to get a bus from New York to Camden, but they discovered that because of the riot taking place in Camden, bus service to the city had been canceled. Determined to get there to help their friends, they hitchhiked from New York. When they arrived during the riot, they couldn’t find the group and had to search for them in the midst of what one of them, Joan Reilly, later described as “violence and chaos.”

  The FBI agents who endured the long lead-up to the arrests also had complaints. In a memo written soon after the raid, SAC Moore expressed a mixture of lament and praise for what his agents endured throughout the operation. From the day Hardy walked into their office, Moore informed the director, agents conducted surveillance of “Grady and associates” seven days a week. They kept track of—photographed and recorded—the raiders at a command post and at twenty fixed locations during dry runs. It was necessary, he wrote, to overcome many difficult obstacles—“conducting investigation and surveillance in hippie neighborhoods dominated by communes … in ghetto type area.” Because the raiders kept postponing the event, he wrote, it was necessary to assemble the eighty arresting agents on three different weekends, only to have two of the raids canceled mid-raid. They “were moved into Camden area early in the afternoon each Saturday and held their positions in hot, humid and close quarters from approximately 2 p.m. to 6 a.m. the following morning. Outstanding performance.”

  As the arrested men sat in a crowded holding cell in the basement of the federal building while they waited to be taken to their arraignment, they looked at one another. They knew something had gone terribly wrong. They soon agreed that someone in their midst these last months had been an informer. It did not take long for them to realize that one member of the group was not there: Bob Hardy. In the two years Catholic antiwar activists had been raiding draft boards, no group was known to have had an informer in its midst. Facing the fact that Hardy had informed on them was especially difficult for the two men who had known him for years, Giocondo and Doyle. They found it nearly impossible to believe that their good friend had turned them in.

  Hoover was grateful for what Hardy had done. A short time after the arrests, Hardy got a letter from the director. Hardy reported what he wrote: “He said, ‘Dear Mr. Hardy, I wish to take the time to thank you for what you’ve done. You’ve done in ten weeks what would have taken 200 agents a year to accomplish. Our country is very grateful.’ And in it was 50 one hundred dollar bills. I took the money. I thought it was a reward. Well, it was.”

  There was strong agreement among FBI officials that they could not have pulled off the arrests without Hardy. “To a large degree, the success was attributed to Hardy,” Moore wrote to headquarters. The informer had done the work for the bureau, he wrote, at “great personal inconvenience.…He suffered great financial loss … serious and detrimental effect on his ability to secure necessary contracts for continuous income purposes.”

  At a bail reduction hearing not long after the arrests, according to a report by an agent, “one of the women subjects [a Camden defendant] suspects Hardy is the informer and gave him an obscene gesture, which he returned.” After this, the report notes, the possibility of relocating Hardy to protect him was suggested to him by FBI agents, and he responded, “Run f
rom these bastards? Not on your life.”

  AS THE DEFENDANTS ABSORBED the shock of having been turned in by an informer and having their arrests announced at a major press conference by none other than the attorney general of the United States and the director of the FBI, they tried to focus on how to move forward, as individuals and as a group. Some of them had assumed that eventually one of the draft board raids might go wrong, but they never thought one would go quite this wrong.

  As the Camden defendants contemplated how to deal with their new status as criminal defendants, they were shaken by tragic news just a few weeks after their arrests. For a few of them, it challenged the deeply humane instincts at the heart of their philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Bob Hardy’s nine-year-old son Billy was critically injured. One day Sandy Grady, a reporter from the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia, dropped by to chat with Hardy at his Camden home. Billy had been waiting to go out with his dad. When Grady arrived, Hardy asked Billy to wait. Billy went out to play and, as Doyle put it, being a boy, climbed a tree. He fell from the tree and was impaled on the sharp-pointed top of a metal fence. An older boy who lived next door ran to Billy and lifted him off the fence and screamed for help. Hardy and Grady came running from the house.

  For three weeks, Billy was unconscious in the intensive care unit at Cooper Hospital in Camden. By this time, Doyle had partially, though reluctantly, removed the large wedge that Hardy’s role as informer had brought between them. When the Camden defendants first got out of jail, Swinglish, the Navy veteran, had challenged the priest to put into action his belief in love and forgiveness and to be willing to “go see the man who had betrayed us.” Doyle had to push himself hard to do what normally would have come naturally to him, but he did it. He walked the one block from his rectory to Hardy’s home. They had an awkward conversation, but at least they talked, and, by doing so, they crossed a barrier. They talked a couple more times, in fact, before Billy was injured. At no point, though, in the few conversations Doyle and Hardy had before Billy’s accident did Doyle and Hardy discuss what Hardy had done to the group. It was as though they could have a connection now only if they detoured around that awful shared experience. Doyle wondered if their friendship could ever be restored.

  Doyle considered little Billy a friend. He remembers him, as others do, with great fondness. “He was a wonderful boy, and I knew him very well.” So it was natural that Doyle would visit Billy at the hospital. The first time he went to see Billy, “sitting there in the waiting room outside the intensive care unit were Bob Hardy and Michael Reimer, the FBI agent who was one of Hardy’s contacts for the Camden 28 surveillance. He was there to support Bob Hardy, and I, as the priest of the parish, was there, too, to support him.

  “And I remember the three of us sitting on a couch. Somehow my mind was twisting in some kind of unreality. There was only one thing that was real and that was that a child was dying. But the situation of our relationships on that couch.…I just felt I was in Twilight Zone. And I remember walking out of that hospital that day and banging on the front of my car and trying to feel, to feel something that was there and real.”

  Some of the surreal nature of the relationships vanished for Doyle as he focused on the acute needs of the Hardys as their son suffered. He was particularly concerned about Peg Hardy. Fear nearly paralyzed her and kept her from visiting her unconscious son. Doyle implored her to go see him. “I told her that if he died and she had never fixed his hair or rubbed his face that she might forever regret it.” Finally, she agreed, and Doyle took her to see Billy. They stood beside his bed, “and I got her to talk to him.”

  “It was a time of enormous emotional upheaval. Billy slowly died. They couldn’t save him because infection set in. He died October third.”

  Three days later, Doyle conducted Billy’s funeral at St. Joseph’s Cathedral Church in Camden. A funeral for a sweet nine-year-old child is always an unspeakably sad occasion. Certainly this one was. Doyle remembers looking into the faces of the people sitting in the pews in front of him. “The family was there, and the Camden 28 and their supporters were there.…Maybe twenty FBI agents also were there showing support for the family.” The FBI agents and the people they had arrested were sitting near each other. Each group grieving. Each group looking slightly awkward. Each group managing to put their concern for the Hardys above their antipathy for each other.

  “I don’t remember what I said that night,” said Doyle, “something, I’m sure, like, ‘What can I say about a nine-year-old boy who died?’ I tried to talk about the sadness of it all and the tragedy of it all. It was a bewildering, roller-coaster situation of reality and unreality, tragedy. It was a terrible tragedy. Relationships that were not reality. I found it extremely tearing inside. Just twisting without adequate expression.”

  After the funeral, Peg and Bob Hardy showed Doyle two pieces of wood they had found in Billy’s dresser drawer. With a nail and hammer Billy had chiseled the word “peace” in one and “love” in the other. Doyle had the pieces of wood mounted as a hanging for the Hardys “as a remembrance of Billy and his two great words for his world.”

  For some of the defendants, perhaps especially Giocondo, the defendant who had known Hardy longest, it was very difficult to think of forgiving Hardy for being an informer against him and the others. How could someone so close to you do that? The idea of linking Hardy with trust now felt like an oxymoron. Nevertheless, the bond had been so strong when Hardy worked with them that the desire to support him and his family in some way at the time of their extreme loss rose above their overarching anger. It was impossible, though, for most of the defendants to erase the thought that someday soon at their trial Hardy would testify against them and help send them to prison.

  17

  Defeat at Camden

  THE FBI WAS EAGER to use the Camden arrests to keep the momentum moving toward the arrest of the Media burglars. But that was impossible. The public didn’t know it, but the triumphant announcements by the FBI after the arrests were hollow. What had appeared in June to be a great opportunity for the bureau to establish that John Peter Grady was what the FBI had thought he was since the day after the Media break-in—the leader of the Media burglars—never materialized.

  By the time the Camden burglars were sitting in jail the morning of August 22, 1971, after they were arrested—at the same time that J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell were jointly announcing the arrests at a news conference in Washington—the FBI had no more evidence of who burglarized the Media FBI office than it did when agents jumped with joy when the Camden informer, Robert Hardy, showed up on their doorstep in June 1971.

  The promise of Camden had vanished. The FBI had no evidence linking Grady—or anybody else from the Camden group, or anyone at all—to the Media burglary. This was true despite the fact that agents had listened to and transcribed hundreds of hours of the informer’s conversations with Grady, including responses to the questions they had primed Hardy to ask Grady about his involvement in the Media burglary. They had photographed and analyzed the large cache of personal possessions that Grady had entrusted to the informer for a few days, including his extensive personal notebook, address book, and business records. From coast to coast, agents were given contact information for the people listed in Grady’s address book and told to interview them. His name was not known to some of the people. Others thought they might have ordered books from him, but they did not remember ever meeting him. Most important, none of them knew anything about a connection between Grady and a place called Media. Not even a conversation with a brother from whom Grady was somewhat estranged produced any valuable information. The brother lamented to the FBI that their mother had always loved John Peter more than she loved him, but he seemed to know little if anything about Grady’s activities.

  Still, the investigators continued to think Grady was responsible for Media and that the other Media burglars were among those arrested at Camden. Roy Moore, the star investigator in charge o
f the MEDBURG investigation, insisted in a memo to Hoover four days after the arrests, “These people were involved in FBI-Media break-in and later distribution of FBI records.”

  But, contrary to Moore’s claim, there was no certainty, only a belief. Investigators and bureau officials expressed frustration to one another soon after the initial glow produced by the Camden arrests. They did so while expressing contradictory assessments of the MEDBURG case. In internal memos, they repeatedly stated their belief that they knew who the Media burglars were. But, remarkably, at the same time they repeatedly acknowledged that they had no evidence pointing to any of the Media burglars. They were deeply disappointed that their entire Camden effort had reaped no evidence related to Media—despite accumulating an astounding 25,000 pieces of evidence from the Camden defendants, including Grady’s records and a mountain of debris they collected from other defendants, even perfume bottles and chewing gum wrappers.