Sunshine, the saying goes, is the best disinfectant. But sometimes letting the sunshine in takes extraordinary measures. Bringing the cleansing rays to bear on the rotten state of the FBI in 1971 took nothing less than forcefully breaking and entering. Betty Medsger’s new book, The Burglary, the Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (Knopf 2014) is a thriller of a tale, begging to be made into a movie, about an extraordinary group of young anti-war activists who pulled off one of the most successful heists of all time: the burglary of the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971.
These were terrible times. The government was spilling rivers of blood in Vietnam while trampling on the civil rights of black Americans. Millions of Americans became aroused politically and, to one degree or another, went into opposition. One of the hot spots was the peace movement in Philadelphia. Frustrated by the apparent futility of lawful dissent, as were many others all over the country, groups of activists had been engaged in breaking into draft board offices and destroying their files. Out of this movement, which found inspiration in Catholic liberation theology, came the project to penetrate the FBI.
William Davidon (no “s”), a mild-mannered young physics lecturer at Haverford College, was the organizer. His quiet, undemonstrative demeanor and his technical, pragmatic mind were among the keys to the success of the mission. Acting without fanfare, he recruited eight other activist friends and formed a “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI.” Their target: the small local FBI office in Media, PA, a western suburb of Philadelphia.
There were good reasons to target the FBI. It had become apparent to people active in all off the movements of the time that the FBI had penetrated every organization and was spying on perfectly legitimate free speech and free assembly activities, and acting to chill and repress Americans’ constitutional right to express their dissent. The press, long in thrall to J. Edgar Hoover, had done virtually nothing about it. A few questions had been raised, but there was little in the way of proof. Davidon and his group figured that the proof would be in the FBI’s internal files, and they determined to get them.
Medsger spins the story of the plot like the thriller it was. She was able to interview all but one of the participants, including Davidon himself, before his death in late 2013. The group members’ diverse personalities and backgrounds stand out in vivid profiles within the panorama of those times. Medsger explains at length the mental and emotional processes that led them to agree to participate. All faced long terms in prison if caught, and for some of them this would have meant separation from their young children. Under Davidon’s guidance they tackled the practical details of the heist as if they had been professional burglars: casing the office and the neighborhood for many long hours, learning how to pick locks, figuring out escape routes, finding a depot for the papers, reviewing, copying, and releasing the relevant documents — and all of this in their spare time, without telltale absences from their regular commitments.
And of course, despite meticulous planning and rehearsals, things went badly wrong. One member of the group dropped out the night before the action, saying he was thinking of turning them all in. The door to the FBI office turned out to be protected by two locks, not one, and the second lock was unpickable, so they broke in through a door in the hallway that was protected by a huge file cabinet. Nonetheless, they succeeded in relieving the office of all of its files, carrying them out in suitcases, and got away. Their document depot was never found. They released significant batches of documents to members of Congress and the press (Including Medsger, who was then working for the Washington Post), with spectacular results. What Snowden has done to the NSA and Ellsberg did to the Pentagon, the Media burglars did to the FBI.
The scope of Medsger’s book widens to encompass the history of the FBI and of its despotic ruler for nearly 50 years. J. Edgar Hoover went ballistic when informed of the burglary. The documents that first saw the light of day thanks to the Media break-in shredded the FBI’s pretense of lawfulness and exposed the ugly face of Hoover behind the iconic mask. The papers showed that the FBI was deliberately sowing paranoia and that it was systematically breaking the law and violating the Constitution. These revelations drove Hoover to his grave and made his name synonymous with infamy. Wide-ranging upheavals shook the organization from top to bottom.
One of the hidden truths about the FBI is that it was not very good at solving crimes. It was excellent at smearing people’s reputations, feeding slander and libel to McCarthyite demagogues, and blackmailing potential opponents. But it stunk at police work. The humiliating proof was that the FBI never found out who did the Media burglary. After five years of one of the most intensive man hunts in its history, the statute of limitations expired and it was forced to close its file. As Medsger points out, the burglars were not perfect; they left some fairly obvious clues, but the FBI never picked them up, and consistently chased after the wrong people.
The burglars had vowed to take the secret of their action to the grave with them, but Medsger was able to find them and persuade most of them to surface and tell their stories. The result is this important book, a high-intensity thriller featuring quiet young Americans playing David against a monstrous Goliath, and getting away with it. Into the bargain we get a good history of the FBI and a vivid picture of the turbulent sixties and seventies, all put together by a professional journalist. Highly recommended. I repeat, this has got “movie” written all over it.
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