The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  DAVIDON THOUGHT of silencing his own protest after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. He had moved to Haverford College the year before and was looking forward to life as a scholar and researcher. So determined was he to remove himself from the scene of protest that he accepted a position as a professor of physics in New Zealand, thinking that was the only way he could escape deep engagement in protest over U.S. nuclear and war policies would be to leave the country. When he realized that such a move would mean being unable to see his son Alan, who lived with Davidon’s first wife in the Chicago area, for extended periods of time, Davidon resolved to stay at Haverford College.

  Having made that decision, he threw himself into activism on campus and in the Philadelphia area. He often contemplated theoretical physics matters during his years when resistance dominated his life, but his physics research, started at the University of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies, and Argonne National Laboratory, was put aside until after the Vietnam War. Probably few, if any, of the activists he worked with closely knew that their pleasant physics professor companion spent some of their long silent waiting periods together doing challenging mathematics and physics problems in his head. “One of the nice things about theoretical work is that you can do it wherever you happen to be,” he says, smiling mischievously as he thinks of some of the places where he contemplated mathematical problems—in parked cars on side streets while monitoring late-night light patterns in the windows of federal buildings and in a closet while waiting for a security guard to walk by on his last round of the evening.

  After the Media burglary, it was as though Davidon could not stop his activism, despite the potential jeopardy he had accumulated. In both small and large ways, his resistance activities continued for a little more than a year. Perhaps because he had read the burglars’ initial statement of purpose at a public gathering just days after the burglary—remarks that led to the first story published about the burglars’ explanation of what they had done—journalists called him from time to time that spring to inquire about getting documents from the Media files. He never said he had the files, but he told them he would see what he could do. Invariably, they anonymously received what they wanted. Only once did a reporter ask him if he was involved in the burglary. It was a student reporter for the Haverford campus newspaper. Davidon remembers evading the question and advising the student to write only what he knew. He continued to anonymously mail packets of copies of previously unseen stolen files to journalists about every ten days through mid-May.

  Nothing Davidon did after the FBI burglary would have as much impact as the burglary had, but he continued to feel compelled to find new ways to oppose the war. He did so in two daring acts, neither of which involved other people from the Media group. In March 1972, a year after the Media burglary, Davidon was standing in an unlikely spot—by a railroad car filled with bombs in the middle of a field in the rich and gently rolling farmland of York County in southeastern Pennsylvania. This unusual circumstance was, of course, not an accident. Someone who lived in that farming community had told Davidon he had noticed that bombs destined for Vietnam were stored in open railroad cars that appeared to be accessible.

  Earlier, Davidon and others had made it more difficult for a few thousand men to be drafted by stealing draft records. Now he warmed to the idea of making the bombs inoperable and, in the process, drawing the attention of local people to the fact that their local economy depended in part on producing weapons used to kill Vietnamese people. The bombs had been manufactured at the nearby American Machine and Foundry Company (AMF) plant and were going to be shipped to Vietnam.

  Davidon and two other people went to the field a few times and walked along the tracks, surveying the surrounding area and examining the bombs. They developed a plan to damage as many of them as they could. Following Forsyth’s example at Media, in order to avoid having tools that could be traced to a hardware store, they made their own, including modified pliers designed to strip the threads on the bomb casings. New tools in hand, one evening they climbed into the dark railcars and worked for hours among the MK82 bombs, removing the caps and stripping the threads on the casings of hundreds of them. They carefully watched their surroundings inside and outside the railcars and talked softly and as little as necessary as they worked in the dark. Their concerns for security seemed to be unnecessary. They saw no guard—no one, in fact—near the plant or the railway cars during casing or as they worked inside the cars.

  A few days later, several reporters, including this one, received a small bulky manila envelope that contained a news release typed in the same italic font that appeared on the letters sent a year earlier with each new packet of stolen FBI documents sent to journalists. With the release was a copy of one of the documents that had been stolen from the Media office and a dark green threaded disk. The last item, as the news release explained, was the plastic cap of one of the 500-pound bombs that a group that called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Demilitarize Industry had removed when its members stripped bombs at the AMF plant and “rendered [the bombs] unusable.”

  In the news release prepared and sent anonymously by Davidon, he wrote that there were links between the FBI burglary and the damaging of the bombs. First, he noted the similarity of their names—the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI and the Citizens’ Commission to Demilitarize Industry. “Our two commissions,” he wrote, “are responsible for these actions,” the burglary of the FBI and the damaging of several hundred casings for MK82 bombs made for the U.S. Navy by the AMF Company. “In addition to objectives and methods, we also share the typewriter on which this and other statements have been typed.”

  That message must have infuriated the FBI agents who were still searching for the people who had burglarized the FBI office. Now, a year after the break-in, not only had the FBI not arrested the Media burglars or found the typewriter or copiers the burglars had used, but here were anonymous people publicly announcing that they had just used the typewriter the FBI had failed to find in connection with yet another invasion of government property.

  Writing for himself and the others, Davidon said the new commission members were not grandiose in their assumptions about the potential impact of their sabotage:

  We realize all too well how small our accomplishments are when measured against what must be done to free our society from the forces that sponsor repression and mass murder. We have made public a few secret files and have neutralized a few bombs. But for every FBI file we have made public there are thousands that remain secret. For every bomb we have sabotaged there are tens of thousands yet to be assembled. In themselves, our actions will neither stop governmental repression nor the terror it rains on the people of Indochina. But we have acted and, within the limits imposed upon us, we have succeeded: files have been made public, bombs have been damaged, and the government has been stymied in its efforts to find us, let alone stop us. Our success, we hope, contributes to a new kind of resistance movement in this country—a movement that rejects terror and violence yet is not afraid to deny forcefully the instruments of terror and violence to others.

  Like Albert Camus before us, we have chosen to be “neither victims nor executioners.”

  In his continuing acts of resistance, Davidon wanted officials and the public to know that despite the government’s power, it could be confronted in ways that embarrassed it and diminished that power, even if just a little. He wanted people to see that the giant Goliath was vulnerable to small Davids, especially when Davids joined together. He and some other Davids surprised Goliath one more time before Davidon ended his resistance.

  A HEADLINE IN the Wednesday, May 31, 1972, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin—“3 Air Force Jets Are Sabotaged at Willow Grove”—topped a story that was prominently played in all local news media that day. The previous day had not been a routine Memorial Day at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station. In the wee hours of the morning, three U.S. Air Force Hercules C-130 transport planes,
each large enough to carry ninety-two people or up to thirteen tons of cargo, were sabotaged at the station, eighteen miles north of Philadelphia along a main highway. Such planes were routinely used in Vietnam for carrying a wide variety of missiles, and the planes on the station grounds were ready to be sent there.

  Electrical and hydraulic lines were cut on the four-engine turboprop transports and some parts were removed sometime after 11 p.m. on May 30. Officials were shocked when they discovered the sabotage at about 6 a.m. when ground crews tried to run routine preflight checks of the planes. They were inoperable. A tool compartment in one plane was open. Hydraulic hose lines to the brake systems and electrical wiring exposed around the undercarriage had been cut. On the exterior of one of the planes, someone had painted in bold red letters BREAD NOT BOMBS along with a large peace symbol.

  The public information officer at the base told reporters the next day that whoever the saboteurs were, they knew how to cripple the planes. He said officials feared the sabotage might have been an inside job. An inspection of the two-mile perimeter fence showed no evidence, he said, that anyone had broken through or climbed over the fence. Officials were perplexed about how anyone could have entered and left the field undetected. “It is not known how these people got aboard the base or managed to elude Navy and Air Force security patrols,” the PI officer said. “I am certain they did not come through the main gate,” he told a reporter. “Visitors at night must be cleared by a telephone call from the person they wish to see.” He also said there was “no evidence that the saboteurs broke through or went over the fence.” The damaged green-camouflaged planes were parked that night on a concrete ramp about half a mile from the busy north-south highway that was the eastern border of the fenced field. They had returned from flights at 11 p.m. that night. When the sabotage was discovered, security was tripled immediately at the base.

  Yet another Citizens’ Commission anonymously took responsibility for this sabotage. This one, the Citizens’ Commission to Interdict War Materiel, anonymously announced that it had damaged planes at Willow Grove as a protest of the Vietnam War. A person who said he spoke for that group called the Evening Bulletin, as well as other Philadelphia-area news media outlets, and described the damage the group had done. The details he provided matched the damage described by the Navy public information officer when he was contacted a short time later.

  The anonymous caller, Davidon, read a statement that later was mailed to news organizations:

  Our Citizens’ Commission to Interdict War Materiel has carefully chosen ways which endanger no one for grounding these planes.…This action occurs appropriately on traditional Memorial Day, for we best remember those killed in war by protecting the lives and rights of those who are not yet its victims. If we had not acted now, these planes would have continued to supply the current U.S. war machine which is devastating four countries in Indochina. The way we chose was carefully done so no one would be injured. There was no fire or explosion, in sharp contrast to the daily murder of hundreds of people by the Nixon Administration in its desperate effort to impose the Thieu regime on South Vietnam.

  Group members had spent several evenings at the field developing their plan. Their first and most important discovery was that the Navy used only a standard padlock on the gate in the chain-link fence near the planes. They hacked off the old padlock and replaced it with one exactly like the one in place but with a key only they possessed. After repeated observation of the field, they established the precise timing of the frequent patrol rounds made by security guards in a jeep that passed very close to the parked planes on each patrol. They decided they needed two cycles of rounds by the security guards to accomplish their goals. That night, they waited for the jeep to pass, unlocked the gate, and ran to the planes, one of them armed with a can of red paint, the others ready to use the tools inside the planes. They hunkered down inside the cockpits so they couldn’t be seen as the jeep passed. After the second time it passed, they jumped out of the planes, ran to the gate, locked the padlock, and ran to their cars. All was done, of course, while wearing gloves.

  Between stripping threads on bombs in York and sabotaging planes in Willow Grove, on April 24, 1972, Davidon went for a canoe ride on Sandy Hook Bay in northern New Jersey. Not surprisingly, it was not just a pleasant outing. He and forty-four other Philadelphia antiwar activists in seventeen aluminum canoes and light rowboats rowed out to conduct what they called a blockade of the munitions ship USS Nitro, which was departing for the Atlantic to transfer ammunition to aircraft carriers bound for Vietnam.

  From their tiny canoes, they yelled to the many sailors looking down at them from the Nitro and urged them to jump ship and refuse to go to Vietnam. It was just a symbolic action, but seven of the sailors accepted the invitation and jumped over the side of the ship and swam to the boats. All the Navy men were captured and returned to the Nitro, and some of the demonstrators were arrested.

  The day after the sabotage at Willow Grove, the commanding officer of the 913th Tactical Air Lift Command, which operated the planes, said a joint investigation of the sabotage was under way by the FBI and the Air Force Special Investigation Division. Once again, Davidon was never questioned by investigators. No arrests were ever made.

  By the time the sabotage at Willow Grove was being investigated, Davidon had been avoiding arrest for break-ins and sabotage for three years. The only time the FBI got in touch with him and questioned him during the entire period of his protest was in July 1970, when they queried him regarding a surprise appearance by Daniel Berrigan when the poet-priest briefly emerged out of the underground, with help from Davidon, and gave a sermon at a Methodist church in Philadelphia. It took place just weeks before he was found by FBI agents on Block Island, Rhode Island, and taken to prison to begin serving his sentence for his Catonsville conviction. Davidon willingly talked with agents then, but he told them only what was already publicly known about Berrigan’s appearance.

  Beginning in 1977, however, the FBI was in touch with Davidon regularly—on his initiative. He took advantage, as any citizen could by then, of Congress’s 1974 strengthening of the FOIA, one of the transparency reforms set in motion after the burglary. He submitted a written request for his FBI file. Letters were exchanged between him and officials in the FOIA office of the FBI for at least four years.

  He received only a few files initially, and they were not very revealing. He suggested there might be more. More trickled out to him. One of the documents he received noted that he was on the FBI’s Security Index, the existence of which had been revealed in the stolen files. In a January 26, 1978, letter to Allen H. McCreight, chief of the Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts Branch of the FBI, Davidon wrote, “The material you sent me on January 5 indicates that I was placed on a ‘Security Index’ by the F.B.I., and I would like to know if such an Index is still maintained, what its significance is, and whether I am still listed on it. Thank you for your help.” Davidon does not remember receiving answers to those questions, and a search of the files he received does not include any.

  On February 1, 1979, a letter to Davidon from Thomas H. Bresson, the acting chief of the bureau’s FOIA office, noted that pursuant to a phone conversation a few days earlier between Davidon and someone in the FOIA office, the investigative file of the burglary of the Media FBI office, the MEDBURG file, would be processed and eventually would be available for his perusal at FBI headquarters. Sometime later, he was notified that it was taking more time than expected to process the very large MEDBURG file—nearly 34,000 pages. The official apologized to Davidon for the delay and assured him he would be notified when the file was available. That the MEDBURG file had not been processed until Davidon requested it suggests that the first person who asked to see the MEDBURG file must have been none other than the mastermind of the burglary.

  DAVIDON SEEMED to be almost surprised by his realization years later that during his years of intense antiwar activity he “never thought through the implica
tions” of his actions on his family. “In some vague sense I knew what the implications might be, but I did not give much weight to the possibility of getting caught or of having my life disrupted. I never made plans with regard to Ann and the kids in terms of anything long-lasting happening to me. I knew it was a possibility. I knew that was one of the things that could occur, but I did not plan on it.” Without thinking about it very much, he compartmentalized his life in ways that made it easy for him not to think much about how his actions might affect his family.

  By the time he moved to Haverford, he and his first wife, the mother of his oldest child, Alan, a future prosecutor in Phoenix, had been divorced several years. In 1963 he married Ann Morrissett, who, like him, was active in the peace movement. She served on boards of various peace organizations and often attended rallies with Davidon and their young daughters—Ruth, who was born in 1964, and Sarah, who was born in 1967.

  In recent years, Davidon has thought often, and sometimes with great sadness, about how he handled the potential impact of his resistance on his family. He finds it a perplexing dilemma, a balancing act, even many years later. On the one hand, he thinks it is very important for people who risk arrest in resistance to think about how their actions may affect the people closest to them. On the other hand, he thinks, as he did then, that perhaps they should not do so too much. He worries that too much time spent contemplating the possible painful impact of one’s resistance on others could lead to refusing to take a risk. “In some sense,” he said, “it’s like walking across a very narrow walkway over a high place. You don’t want to spend too much time looking down at the ground twenty stories below. If you do, you won’t go.” He recalls that he seldom looked down during his resistance years.