On March 8th, 1971, eight young peace activists broke into a small, ancillary FBI office in the town of Media, Pennsylvania, and removed all the files. They held out little hope that the files would reveal the massive, illegal surveillance program, or the criminal dirty tricks operations they were certain were taking place. They held out even less hope that they would not be arrested and serve lengthy prison sentences.
J. Edgar Hoover unleashed the most intensive manhunt in FBI history to find the perpetrators. But even this was secondary to retrieving the files before they could be released.
By the time that the Attorney General closed the Media burglary case, called MEDBURG, five years after the crime (the statute of limitations ran out after five years), and four years after Hoover's death, the file would contain over thirty-three THOUSAND pages.
This case is the premise for the 2014 book, The Burglary, by Betty Medsger. Ms. Medsger was one of the journalists who received copies of the stolen documents when she was a young reporter for The Washington Post.
A chance meeting in 2010 with a married couple of retirement age, reignited her interest in the case when the couple admitted that they were two of the Media burglars. She would learn that the couple had made arrangements before the burglary for relatives to raise their young children, should they be apprehended.
Ms. Medsger tracked down seven of the eight non-violent resistance fighters, who risked their careers, their relationships, and their liberty to expose FBI corruption. All seven of the burglars agreed to speak openly for the book.
The burglars emphasized that they accepted the risks because of their commitment to righting the terrible wrongs that they witnessed around them.
While talking with Medsger for the book, one of the Media burglars reflected that, "Deciding when to break the law is not a trivial decision or a light decision. I hope that if I was presented today with the same issues, I would have the courage to make the decision I made when I was a child of twenty-one. I hope the young people out there listening will try to make the right decision today. It's one of the few decisions I made, one of the few things I ever did, that I feel unconditionally positive about."
The book is long, but painstakingly researched, and eminently readable.
In the aftermath of the break-in, the burglars realized that they did indeed hold the "smoking gun" that the FBI was conducting surveillance on millions of Americans, and even more importantly that the documents spoke of a program code-named COINTELPRO.
The Counter-Intelligence Program was conducting covert operations targeting persons and organizations that were critical of Hoover with a network of tens of thousands of informers, infiltrators and agents.
The files, for the first time in its history, opened the door to the secret FBI which operated above and outside the law and the U.S. Constitution, under its unrestrained and unaccountable director.
Agents assigned to COINTELPRO operations used smear campaigns of innuendo and outright lies to destroy the reputations of community leaders; physically threatened employers into firing employees the FBI did not like; pressured publishers to not publish writers that Hoover thought were subversive; demanded (and received) approval of all Hollywood scripts that mentioned the FBI (Hoover himself vetted all scripts for the hit television show, The F.B.I., starring Efram Zimbalist, Jr. who became a lifelong friend of Hoover's); conducted break-ins of private homes and offices; in several cases shot at targets for purposes of intimidation; provided intel and diagrams of the residence of a Black Panther leader to Chicago police who executed him in his bed; caused an actress to miscarry and commit suicide; and planned the kidnapping of the grandchild of a Congressman to coerce him into voting against legislation Hoover wanted defeated.
The FBI hid evidence that would have exonerated people falsely accused of crimes, suborned perjury of witnesses, and coached agents on how to lie under oath.
For fifty years, Hoover ran the FBI as his personal fiefdom to advance his own political agenda, and to suppress dissent and the exercise of free speech.
Hoover, as early as the 1920's, established a "Security Index," basically an extensive list of individuals who would be detained indefinitely and without warrant in case of civil unrest or national emergency. He oversaw the building of secret prisons where these detainees would be held incommunicado, denied of legal representation.
Hoover also held a strong dislike for "intellectuals" such as educators, artists, scientists, clergy, and especially writers. Extensive files were kept on Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Carl Sandburg, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Robert Frost, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur Miller, just to name a few.
The Bureau also targeted alternative publications. One of their most aggressive campaigns was waged against the Liberation News Service, where plans were called off at the last minute to burn down their Washington D.C. offices while staff members slept upstairs.
The Media burglary took place in the turbulent era of the Vietnam war, the peace movement, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., desegregation, conscientious objectors, long hair, the My Lai Massacre, outdoor rock concerts, the murders of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the political firestorm of Watergate.
Youth burned flags, women burned bras, and white men wearing sheets, many of them law enforcement officers, burned negro children alive in churches.
Hoover's fear and hatred of blacks, and especially black student organizations, knew no bounds. Two of the documents sent to Ms. Medsger were titled, "Black Student Groups on College Campuses" and "Racial Matters." The advisories, written by Hoover, stated:
Effective immediately, all Black Student Unions and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students, are to be subjects of inquiries to determine the size, aims, purposes, activities, leadership, and key activists in each group.
Initiate inquiries immediately. I cannot overemphasize the importance of expeditious, thorough, and discreet handling of these cases. The violence, destruction, confrontation and disruptions on campuses make it mandatory that we utilize to its capacity our intelligence-gathering capacity.
Increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the Nation's stability and security and indicate need for increase in both quality and quantity of intelligence information on black student unions and similar groups which are targeted for influence and control by violence-prone Black Panther Party and other extremists.
Another file revealed that every black student at Swarthmore College was a target of active investigation.
To carry out these investigations, the Bureau established "Racial Squads" consisting of agents and "ghetto informants." In fact, any agent who neglected to engage in surveillance of blacks or recruit negro informers, could be penalized. An FBI memo instructed that "If an individual Resident Agency covers only a county which does not encompass any municipality containing a ghetto, so specify by memorandum form 170-6 with a copy for the RA's error folder, so that he will not be charged with failure to perform."
Hoover ordered his agents to withhold information regarding threats made against Dr. King's life, and did nothing to stop them.
One egregious statement by then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, clearly sums up what war protesters were up against: "If it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators, let's get it over with."
I sincerely hope that you will read the book, but in case you do not, I must include this passage:
The Friday after the killings at Kent State, scores of students were bludgeoned in New York's financial district by hundreds of construction workers [who ironically were working on the Twin Towers] who rampaged through the streets attacking students with crowbars and other heavy tools wrapped in American flags. They did so as the students sang at a peaceful noon vigil at a day of mourning called for by New York mayor John Lindsay to honor the slain Kent State students. To prevent the people they injured from receiving medical care, the construction workers yanked down a Red Cross banner outside an emergency clinic that had been hastily set up at Trinity Church by New York University doctors.
The Wall Street Journal reported that financial district workers threw streams of ticker tape from their windows in celebration of the violence taking place in the streets below.
Twenty-two of those New York construction workers were honored at the White House a few weeks later by President Nixon. He thanked them for showing their patriotism the day they beat students. He gave them flag lapel pins, and they gave him a yellow hard hat like the ones they wore the day they assaulted students, seventy of whom were seriously injured.
Vice President Spiro Agnew wrote a letter of thanks to the union official who organized the attacks on the students. He congratulated him for his "impressive display of patriotism" the day of the attacks. When Nixon was reelected in 1972, the president rewarded [the union official] by appointing him Secretary of Labor.
No arrests were made by the NYPD or the FBI.
The burglary itself was planned for the night of the nationally televised boxing match between Joe Frazier, a vocal supporter of the war, and Muhammad Ali in his first fight since being banned from the ring for refusing to enlist on religious grounds. The burglars rightly figured that security would be lax and potential witnesses distracted by the bout.
Hoover had no interest in the fight, only in the outcome, and he took Ali's loss as vindication that he (Hoover) was on the side of right.
Ms. Medsger spends the first half of the book describing the planning, execution, and immediate aftermath of the burglary, which reads like the stuff of the best fiction thriller. She introduces us to the key players, eight ordinary men and women, including parents, a professor of religion, a daycare director, a physicist, a cab driver, and a graduate student who lost members of her family in the Holocaust.
The second half of the book deals with the ramifications of the released information, the attempts to investigate and reform the Bureau, and the parallels for today's revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA.
Against strong resistance, reporters, scholars and groups such as the ACLU sued the FBI in federal court for release of files under the Freedom of Information Act. The files revealed that the COINTELPRO operation was so vast that fully ninety percent of FBI agents were assigned to the program, with the other ten percent dedicated to such easily solved crimes as car theft and bank robberies in order to keep closed case statistics up. Virtually no agents were investigating organized crime, which Hoover denied existed, or government corruption which Hoover tacitly approved of so as to hold blackmail power over politicians.
One of the most shocking documents discovered by the burglars as they sorted through the mountain of stolen files was a memorandum which advised agents to "enhance the paranoia [of peace activists] and get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
This instruction to field officers must be taken in the context of the Bureau's sweeping wire-tapping, bugging, and mail-opening activities, again without the benefit of court order.
Surveillance of the New Left was so intensive that at some meetings, agents and informers outnumbered the legitimate attendees.
In the final analysis, The Burglar, by Betty Medsger, begs the question, how far have we really come?
In 1970, NASA was on everyone's mind. Today it's the NSA.
Senator Frank Church (D-ID) warned:
The National Security Agency's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.
In response to NSA revelations, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) stated:
We find ourselves at a truly unique time in our constitutional history. The growth of digital technology, dramatic changes in the nature of warfare and the definition of the battlefield, and novel courts that run counter to everything the Founding Fathers imagined, make for a combustible mix. If we don't take this opportunity to change course now, we will all live to regret it.
We are still a deeply divided country, embroiled in a controversial war. Segregation is more entrenched than ever before. The government maintains a massive surveillance infrastructure that intercepts and stores every public and private communication on the planet. Secret lists contain the names of people to be indefinitely detained in the event of "civil unrest" or "national emergency" without due process.
Wall Street workers, representing the "one-percent," shower disdain on protesters beneath their windows. Police employ a policy or intimidation and indoctrination. Peaceful demonstrators are prosecuted and reporters are threatened and jailed. Dissent is suppressed. And these attacks on civil liberties are still being brought to light by brave men and women willing to risk all.
After the Media break-in, as if anticipating the use of drones, another of the burglars wrote:
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. We have made public a few secret files. But for every FBI file we have made public there are thousands that remain secret. In themselves, our actions will neither stop governmental repression nor the terror it rains on the people. But we have acted and, within the limits imposed upon us, we have succeeded: files have been made public, and the government has been stymied in its efforts to find 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.
Prior to that break-in on a cold, dark night forty-three years ago, the burglars were so certain of being caught, that they had approached civil rights attorney and professor at Temple University School of Law, David Kairys, to represent them.
Kairys said:
There are certain points in history where a society goes so wrong, and there are certain people who will say, 'I won't stand for that. I will risk career, life, limb, family, freedom. And I will take this risk, and I will go and do it.'
And it certainly is not something that's over. People are going to be called upon again.
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