Moore confessed to Hoover the total lack of progress in MEDBURG while simultaneously expressing certainty that the bureau could take advantage of the momentum set in motion by the Camden arrests. “There is no physical evidence or witnesses to FBI-Media burglary,” he wrote, just four days after the Camden arrests and after he had written to Hoover about the great public relations benefit of the arrests for the bureau. Apparently deeply frustrated, Moore wrote, “Matter can only be resolved by admissions. We now have key subjects in custody and must keep pressure on them to obtain admissions.”
He described his new strategy to the director:
“Direct, positive and prompt action is the best way to defeat the group—hit them hard and turn the spotlight of public opinion against them now and stop future offenses. This action should also hinder them from recruiting new personnel.” And, he noted, it would deplete their money by requiring them to “put up huge sums of money for bail and attorneys.”
Moore recommended two new approaches, both involving pressing Camden defendants to confess to their involvement in Media. First, agents should conduct pointed interviews with the Camden defendants, and second, they should put them under oath in the closed confines of a grand jury and press them with questions about the burglary. Moore wanted the Department of Justice to empanel a grand jury soon for this purpose.
He summed up for Hoover what he thought would be necessary to arrest the people he was sure were the Media burglars. He was confident they were among thirty-nine people who had been targeted by agents and could be smoked out now by bringing indictments against them for three draft board raids that were unsolved crimes. The thirty-nine people he thought should be indicted had been winnowed down from four hundred “New Left activists” the MEDBURG squad had investigated in the Northeast in their search for the Media burglars, beginning the day after the burglary. He described the dimensions of the herculean effort that had taken place. For each of those four hundred people, agents had developed complete backgrounds, information about their associates and activities. “Informants were developed and directed seven days per week.…Voluminous files developed.”
By the time of the arrests at Camden, he told the director, the people believed to have conducted the Media burglary had been winnowed down to thirty-nine suspects, most of whom had been arrested at Camden. A focus now on these thirty-nine people, Moore told the director, would unlock Media.
The fact that the Camden defendants were now facing sentences of up to forty-seven years in prison, Moore thought, meant that if they were forced to testify in secret before a grand jury it was likely they would be intimidated into revealing what they knew about their own or others’ involvement in Media—presumably because they would be willing to exchange information about their own or other people’s roles in Media for reduced sentences for their roles in Camden. Pointed interviews, plus “prompt additional indictments,” Moore predicted, “will bring heavy pressure on entire Berrigan movement and … will likely serve as the means to obtain admissions regarding the FBI-Media burglary.”
Hoover liked Moore’s plan. In a memorandum to his four highest aides—Tolson, Felt, Sullivan, and Rosen—shortly after the Camden arrests, he wrote, “Moore feels as I do. If we proceed with … Selective Service cases, we could break the Media case.…Mr. Moore stated that nothing would make him happier than to make the arrests this week.” The grand jury would be disguised as an investigation of draft board break-ins, but its real purpose would be to smoke out the Media burglars. If subpoenaed witnesses refused to testify, Hoover said, “the judge could fine them for contempt,” bringing even more pressure.
To Hoover and Moore’s great disappointment, Department of Justice officials refused to convene a grand jury now in response to their request. Use of the subpoena power of secret grand juries by the department to compensate for weak or failed FBI investigations had been strongly criticized in the past year. The MEDBURG investigative files reveal how this strategy that had been used repeatedly in the recent past haunted the bureau in this case. It wasn’t that department officials had scruples about using grand juries as fishing expeditions when bureau investigations failed; the Nixon Department of Justice had in fact convened several such grand juries and based prosecutions on the results. But Justice officials expressed concern that doing so now might generate so much criticism that it would jeopardize the bombing–kidnap–draft board conspiracy case, which was scheduled to go to trial in January 1972 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This case, designed to rescue Hoover from his embarrassing November 1970 accusations against the Berrigan brothers and others, rested nearly entirely on very slender evidence that had been brought before a grand jury. Moore’s grand jury proposal targeted at the thirty-nine people was tabled until after the Harrisburg trial.
With this decision by Justice officials, Hoover found himself in the unusual situation of not being permitted to move forward in his preferred way on this case that was most important to him—the Media burglary—because of a case that had been created to defend baseless claims his top aides had pleaded with him not to make in November 1970. To all other causes of failure to solve the MEDBURG case, add Hoover being hoist by his own petard.
Now, as throughout the MEDBURG investigation, the official record indicates that investigators and headquarters officials did not confront their failures and reassess their strategies. Instead, Moore and other investigators, with Hoover’s approval, remained wedded to their original assumptions about who had committed the crime, and stayed focused on that track. Even when they explored what could be learned from the behavior of Camden defendants that might point to similar behavior by the Media burglars, they stuck with their original assumptions. They had observed that the Camden burglars usually drank in local bars late at night after they finished casing duties. That prompted visits by agents to every bar in Media and its environs in the fall of 1971, armed with photos of possible suspects. Bartenders did not recognize any of them. They also examined local apartments near the FBI office that had been either vacant at the time of the burglary or vacated soon afterward. Fingerprints lifted from surfaces, cigarette butts, and an empty beer can found in those apartments were sent to the FBI lab with no positive results.
In an attempt to uncover new evidence in Media, a team of agents who had not participated previously in the investigation was assigned to survey the community. When they were done, their work, combined with work by earlier agents, meant that eighteen hundred local people who lived or worked in thirty-five square blocks, an area that must have included nearly the entire town, had been interviewed. Result: “No information of value was developed.”
Following Moore’s advice to press Camden defendants for information about Media, agents arranged for two women who worked in the Selective Service Board office next door to the Media FBI office to observe the Camden defendants when they were arraigned. As the women tried to discreetly survey the defendants and their supporters in the courtroom, Cookie Ridolfi’s facial features attracted their attention. They moved close to her. They looked at her eyes, facial structure, hair coloring, and overall stature and told agents that her features precisely matched those of the woman who had come to their office and asked when the FBI office was open. MEDBURG investigators had already assumed Ridolfi was one of the Media burglars. The assertion of the Selective Service staff workers reinforced that assumption.
After Ridolfi was selected by the women, two agents went to interview her at her South Philadelphia home, where she lived with her mother. In a memorandum to the director marked “urgent”—for unclear reasons, given the lack of information agents got from Ridolfi—agents reported that they told Ridolfi immediately that they were there to discuss Media, not Camden, because they thought there was a connection between the two burglaries. They informed the director that she “made no verbal response to this assertion but did indicate by her general demeanor that the statement had some effect on her. Cookie then stated that she had to take a bath and wash her ha
ir” and accompanied the agents to the door. As they left, they reported, one of them told her he had been reading the writings of the Berrigan brothers, and he thought she didn’t adhere well to their teachings.
A few other Camden defendants were interviewed about Media. Contrary to what Moore had predicted, none of them confessed to breaking into the Media office. In fact, all of them said they knew nothing about Media beyond what they had read in newspapers. When FBI agents interviewed Father Michael Doyle about Media, the priest told them he knew nothing about it and was glad he didn’t. He told them he thought their use of informers was abhorrent. He also used the occasion to ask them if he would be deported to Ireland if he was convicted on the Camden charges. They said they didn’t know.
Now, as before, agents persisted in assuming that the people they interviewed about Media were lying when they said they did not know who broke into the FBI office. They could not imagine that the Media burglars had not bragged to other people—people the FBI hoped would now snitch on them—about what they had done.
Consistent with that assumption, one MEDBURG investigator predicted that in addition to the pressure brought by the Camden arrests, “it is almost a certainty that there is a wide circle of individuals in the various New left groups and among the Berrigan adherents who have some direct or hear-say knowledge about Medburg. It is highly likely that others among the Camden 28 were Medburg participants. Well-handled interviews of these people and their associates should eventually lead to someone with first-hand knowledge who is willing to testify for one reason or another.”
Investigators continued to apply Moore’s strategy after he left the investigation in October 1971 when he was assigned to be in charge of the Chicago FBI field office. It is not known if he asked to be removed from MEDBURG, but it is known that he was very frustrated by the case. Many years later he told me the investigators knew who the burglars were, but “we could not get their friends to talk.” Files he gave me indicated he was wrong—at the end of the investigation only one of the Media burglars was a suspect.
AS THE MEDIA INVESTIGATION continued, some of the investigators’ techniques, as in the earliest months, seemed more like either make-work or incompetence than sophisticated criminal investigative methods. For instance, hundreds of staples were removed from copies of Media files that had been sent to journalists and others. With assistance from a staple expert, agents established that approximately twenty different types of staplers had been used to staple the five different types of staples they removed from the copies. Scores of pages of detailed reports on the staples were prepared, consuming considerable time. But because the earlier search to find the Xerox 660 copier that had been used by the burglars had failed to link the files to a particular copier and therefore failed to link them to any individual—after collecting sample copies from more than 4,000 such copiers—there was no way to use the staple evidence.
A wild-goose chase at Yale Law School was halted by the New Haven FBI field office. In October 1971, the director asked that field office to break into the Yale Law School office of civil liberties attorney Frank Donner. The effort concerned a stolen Media document that Hoover thought might not be authentic and may have come from Donner’s office and therefore might be a lead to whether he was involved in MEDBURG. The agent in charge at New Haven reported to Hoover that employees in the administrative offices at Yale Law School were not acquainted with Donner. The agent told the director that New Haven agents did not believe the file in question originated with Donner and that “it is not believed feasible to make an attempt to enter the office of Donner … to secure typewriter samples or make any further open or discreet inquiries.” Two months later, Hoover was back with the same request. This time the New Haven field office responded even more forcefully:
“Any attempted investigation of Donner’s material at Yale … in his office would be extremely inadvisable due to the potential for embarrassment to the Bureau.”
At the time, Donner was conducting a massive study, based at Yale, of government surveillance of citizens for the American Civil Liberties Union. Then as later, he was widely regarded as the leading scholar on government surveillance of citizens. He later wrote the leading books on the subject, including his 1981 landmark book The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. Donner had no connection to the Media burglary, but the stolen files and the information that later flowed from them during and after congressional investigations of intelligence agencies expanded the scope of his scholarly work on government surveillance. Just a month after the Media burglary, on April 22, 1971, he wrote a major article in the New York Review of Books in which he said the documents stolen at Media were evidence of a relatively new and “formidable way of responding to political and social movements—a system of political intelligence” as a means of controlling dissent. That public statement was probably more than enough to prompt Hoover to think Donner should be viewed as a potential suspect in the Media burglary.
There were signs that agents in other FBI field offices also were growing weary of being asked to conduct MEDBURG investigations that seemed more likely to be foolish than fruitful in the search for the burglars. In Louisville, agents, at the director’s request right after the burglary, had instructed the warden at the Federal Youth Center in Ashland, Kentucky, to read and copy all incoming and outgoing mail and monitor the visits and phone conversations of a young pacifist whose wife the bureau mistakenly assumed for months was the “UNSUB,” Bonnie Raines. The man, a conscientious objector, had been convicted in the fall of 1970 for a break-in at federal offices in Rochester, New York. The daily reports on him had been forwarded to the bureau since March 26, 1971. In November, the agent in charge of the Louisville field office reported that because nothing from the excessive coverage of this prisoner had been developed “pertinent to the break-in of the Media” office, “it is not felt that a current report … would be meaningful or necessary. Consequently, no report is being submitted by Louisville.”
In Washington, that message generated this fierce underlined, bold, all-caps response from Hoover:
ALL INDIVIDUALS INVOLVED IN NEW LEFT EXTREMIST ACTIVITY SHOULD BE CONSIDERED DANGEROUS BECAUSE OF THEIR KNOWN ADVOCACY AND USE OF EXPLOSIVES, REPORTED ACQUISITION OF FIREARMS AND INCENDIARY DEVICES AND KNOWN PROPENSITY FOR VIOLENCE.
However maddening and frustrating the burglaries by the Catholic peace movement were to the FBI, Hoover had much evidence that these activists were strong advocates of nonviolence. It was at the root of their dissent. Recently, in fact, the informer in the Camden case, Hardy, had “tested” some Camden defendants’ commitment to nonviolence, even offering one of them a pistol. He refused to touch it. None of them were willing to consider possessing a gun when the informer offered them one for their protection. They went to great lengths to avoid encounters that could provoke violence and to train themselves to react passively if they were confronted by law enforcement officers, as the Camden defendants did. Hoover’s assumption that the Catholic peace movement activists—or all New Leftists, to use his broader term—should be assumed to be armed and violent starkly illustrates his refusal throughout his tenure as director to differentiate between various types of dissenters. In his mind, all dissenters were equally dangerous whether they advocated violence or nonviolence.
The Chicago field office was reluctant to follow up on a request from the Philadelphia field office that agents there find a man believed to be affiliated with Bethany Theological Seminary in nearby Oak Brook, Illinois, and ask him how he had disposed of his nametag in 1969 when he attended the War Resisters International Conference at Haverford College. A facsimile of his nametag was on one of the stolen Media files. It was clear that agents did not appreciate being told in advance of interviewing him that “his cooperation could be elicited by concentrating on both his anti-communism and zealous religious emotional feelings” and “best chance of success … is in isolating him and implanting in
his mind the thought that … his problems were the result of actions on the part of godless communists, that the FBI was not responsible for his problems.” When found, the man was running a Baptist organization that was a precursor of Jews for Jesus. The interview produced no helpful information. He did not know how his nametag had ended up in an FBI file three years earlier. The most likely possibility, of course, was that he had lost the tag and its sticky back had accidentally adhered to papers carried by one of the twenty FBI informers who covered the conference for the bureau.
The Philadelphia field office realized by December 1971 that the MEDBURG case was taking over the office. Literally. “In view of the intensive investigation given this case and the number of reports submitted, much file space is consumed by material pertinent to this case,” wrote J. Clifford Ousley, who supervised MEDBURG after Moore was reassigned. To conserve filing space, he ordered, in FBI bureaucratese, that “informant channelizing memoranda are destroyed after pertinent information has been incorporated in report form.” Ensure, he urged, that “no material is destroyed which would be pertinent to your future prosecutive needs.” Given what emerged at the Camden trial, it seems likely that order was issued more to save face rather than to save space. The bureau had files about its Camden investigation that, if they had become public, would have been damaging to the FBI. They included transcripts of the many hours of conversations between the informer and the defendants and conversations between the informer and agents, all of which the FBI refused to produce in court.
THE CAMDEN TRIAL OPENED on February 5, 1973, in a third-floor courtroom in the downtown Camden federal building where the burglary had taken place. By that time, much had changed. The Harrisburg trial had ended in April 1972 in a hung jury. Once determined to win this case designed to protect Hoover’s reputation, Department of Justice officials decided not to retry the defendants when, even in deeply conservative Dauphin County, they did not get convictions.
The Burglary Page 40
