How regular citizens on a secret mission broke in and stole the FBI’s dark secrets

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — One day in early 1971, a young woman in glasses showed up at a regional office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations in Media, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles outside of Philadelphia. She had made an appointment with the head of the office, introducing herself as a Swarthmore College student doing research on opportunities for women in the FBI. The agents welcomed her in.

The visitor wore a winter hat that covered her hair. If any agent found it odd that she kept her gloves on the whole time she was there, they apparently didn’t mention it. She asked her questions and took her notes. When it was time to go, she bumbled her way into another part of the building, and the agents had to steer her back the way she’d come in.

The inquisitive student was not a student at all, but a woman from Philadelphia named Bonnie Raines. And while asking about women’s law-enforcement careers, she was learning about other things: the lax security in the Media office. Unlocked filing cabinets. The absence of any visible cameras or alarms. And, on her rambling way out of the building, a glimpse of a room with a second exit, though that door was barricaded by a large cabinet.

“They were very gracious, and I think kind of flattered that I was interested in them,” Raines recalled.

Raines was not any sort of trained covert operative. She was a day care director. Her husband, John, was a religion professor at Temple University. But in late 1970, another professor named William Davidon, who taught physics and mathematics at Haverford College and was a nuclear disarmament activist, approached the Rainses with a bold request: Would they consider breaking into an FBI office?

Had anyone other than Davidon asked, Bonnie Raines said, they probably would have dismissed the idea. They were already involved in antiwar activism, but getting caught in an FBI burglary would likely mean life in prison, leaving their three kids to grow up without their parents. Still, Davidon was viewed as a brilliant tactician in Philadelphia’s antiwar circles. If he was proposing they burglarize the FBI, Raines said, he had to believe they could pull it off.

Plus, Raines was angry. The FBI was everywhere in Philadelphia, a nexus of organizing against the Vietnam War — and activists sensed the agency was working against them. “I was just so pissed off but also not feeling helpless,” she said. “I felt like there were things that just regular people like me and other people in Philadelphia could do to make a difference, and particularly to tell the truth about what the FBI was really doing and that the government was supporting.”

Keith Forsyth, who had recently dropped out of college to devote himself to protesting the war, also got a call from Davidon. “He didn’t have to do any selling to convince me,” Forsyth said. “I said, ‘As long as it’s the right group of people who know how to get down to business and keep their mouth shut, yeah.’ And that was that.”

On March 8, 1971, eight people — Davidon, the Raineses and Forsyth among them — broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and made off with more than 1,000 documents. The actions of the group that called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI changed the course of US history.

The break-in set off a chain of events that exposed then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive, illegal campaign to suppress dissent, and eventually led to the discovery of the bureau’s covert surveillance program COINTELPRO. It tarnished mainstream America’s image of the FBI as an upstanding law enforcement organization, and inspired congressional hearings that ushered in reforms of the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Astonishingly, despite the FBI’s extensive efforts, none of the burglars were ever caught. Their identities remained a mystery until 2014, when Betty Medsger, one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents, published the definitive account of the raid in “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”

‘We weren’t Batman and Robin’

The eight burglars weren’t criminal masterminds, but they were serious about their political convictions. “We weren’t Batman and Robin,” Forsyth said. “We were pretty regular people who decided this sh*t has got to stop, and we’re going to try to do our part to make that happen.”

As part of the Catholic peace movement, some of them were experienced in breaking into draft boards and stealing Selective Service records of poor men in an attempt to prevent them from being conscripted. But breaking into the FBI was a riskier endeavor than any of them had ever attempted, and there was a lot to lose. Livelihoods and children were on the line.

“I think some people will say: How could you be so foolish? How could you have put them in that kind of jeopardy?” John Raines, who died in 2017, said in the 2014 documentary “1971.” “The answer I have to that is if all of us simply did what we thought was safe, that would let the people who want to take our government away from us get away.”

The group set its sights on the small, regional FBI office in the suburban town of Media, figuring it’d be easier to breach than the one in Philadelphia, which was guarded by federal agents around the clock.

The Raineses’ home in Philadelphia became the planning headquarters for the break-in. The group spent months casing the area, studying the daily rhythms and routines of those who lived and worked nearby. They memorized the comings and goings of FBI employees, the police patrol schedule and the movements of the courthouse guard across the street. Maps of Media hung on their walls, and Raines recalled telling her children not to mention them to anyone at school. Still, they needed to know more about the inside of the building: What kind of locks were on the front door? Would they trip up any security alarms? Were the files easily obtainable?

That was when Raines’ undercover mission, with her long hair hidden in her hat and the glasses disguising her face, came in.

Armed with her observations of the inside of the office, she and the others felt confident that they would be able to break in, Medsger wrote in her book. Soon, they set a date.

A locked door and a crowbar

The eight activists chose March 8, 1971, as the night of their raid.

The world was gearing up to watch Muhammad Ali face off against Joe Frazier at New York’s Madison Square Garden — a matchup that, given Ali’s years of vocal opposition to the war, had itself become a proxy fight between the antiwar camp and the establishment.

“We just figured that everybody would be watching that match or listening to it on the radio and maybe be a little bit distracted,” Raines said. “We thought maybe even the police would not be quite as vigilant, because they’d been listening to the fight. And it turned out to be a very, very good decision.”

That night, four members of the group would burglarize the office, while the others waited in another location nearby. The first task was for Forsyth, who had taken a locksmithing course while working on draft board raids, to get through the front door. “I knew what kind of locks they had on the door of the FBI office, and I had no doubt that it would take me 30 seconds or less to get through that lock,” he remembered thinking.

When he arrived, though, there were two locks, not the single lock he had expected, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to pick the second one easily. “It freaked me out for a minute there,” he said.

Fortunately, Raines’ earlier discovery of the other door paid off. On her advice, Forsyth abandoned the main door and tried the alternative. He picked the lock and used a crowbar to pop the deadbolt open. When he opened the door, he found a heavy file cabinet pushed up against it — someone would surely hear it if it fell, and it would all be over.

Somehow, Forsyth managed to shift the file cabinet over a few inches, enough for four group members to get inside. They stuffed documents from file cabinets into suitcases, carried them out of the building and loaded them into getaway cars.

The group met up at a farmhouse about an hour north to read over the stolen documents. It didn’t take long to confirm that the FBI indeed had an active program to suppress dissent. Determined to make their findings public, they anonymously sent copies of the files to two members of Congress and journalists at three national newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

After the documents were mailed out, the group agreed to tell no one and go their separate ways. “Once we accomplished that, we felt that we had accomplished what we wanted to, and we all went back to our regular lives,” Raines said.

The FBI’s secrets go public

About two weeks after the burglary, Betty Medsger, then a religion reporter at The Washington Post, checked her office mail and found a manilla envelope with the return address “Liberty Publications,” she wrote in her book.

Inside was a packet of the stolen files with a cover letter from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI — the first of several such packages. One of the documents was a 1970 memo from FBI Director Hoover encouraging agents working against leftist movements to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles,” and “get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

Another document revealed that Hoover had ordered agents to discreetly investigate every Black student union at every college and university in the country, Medsger wrote. Yet another reported that every Black student at Swarthmore College was being surveilled.

Medsger said she immediately recognized these revelations as newsworthy, but they seemed so extreme that she questioned whether they were authentic. The FBI quickly cleared up any doubts she had. A Post reporter received a call from the bureau, informing him that members of Congress received stolen files in the mail. The FBI wanted to know: Had anyone at the newspaper gotten a similar package?

“They assumed that because they had confirmed that they were authentic, that that would automatically mean that we wouldn’t publish them,” Medsger said. “That we would go along with what was very much the culture of Washington … that you don’t reveal the secrets of the FBI or the CIA or other intelligence agencies.”

The next day, on March 24, 1971, the story ran on the front page of The Washington Post with the headline: “Stolen Documents Describe FBI Surveillance Activities.” Medsger shared the byline with Ken Clawson, the reporter on the FBI beat (Clawson would go on to become President Richard Nixon’s spokesperson during the Watergate scandal).

The story was distributed on the Post’s wire service, which meant that it was published in newspapers around the country. Medsger said political leaders and the public alike were shocked to learn about the FBI’s surveillance of Black Americans, likening the bureau to the East German Stasi.

“Members of Congress who had never expressed anything but kind words for J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau now issued unprecedented calls for a congressional investigation of the FBI,” she wrote in her book. “Newspaper editorial boards that had consistently been full of praise for Hoover and the bureau now expressed shock at the revelations.”

Meanwhile, the FBI was hard at work trying to catch the burglars, though the sheer size of the antiwar movement in Philadelphia made it difficult to narrow in on likely suspects. The investigation ultimately yielded little information. Hoover died a year after the break-in, and the case was closed on March 11, 1976 without any conclusions about who was responsible.

Outrage over the FBI revelations was overshadowed by the release of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. Then in March 1972, a congressional staffer handed NBC reporter Carl Stern a cover sheet from the batch of documents stolen in the raid. On it was a mysterious phrase: “COINTELPRO – New Left.”

Stern filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the founding documents on COINTELPRO, but was denied, leading him to file a lawsuit that he ultimately won. In 1973, the FBI turned over four documents about the program, which revealed a secret counterintelligence operation that aimed to “disrupt, misdirect and otherwise neutralize” Black activist organizations.

“COINTELPRO were probably the worst of the worst of J. Edgar Hoover’s illegal operations,” Medger said. “And they involved clear crimes.”

Among the most famous of these revelations was the so-called “suicide letter” sent to Martin Luther King Jr., which threatened to expose his sexual activities and warned the civil rights activist that there was “only one thing left for you to do.”

A setback to mass surveillance — for a while

The exposure of COINTELPRO led to the formation of congressional committees to investigate intelligence abuses by the FBI and other agencies, resulting in multi-volume reports and hearings that revealed the depths of Hoover’s illegal activities, said Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in national security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute.

It also resulted in the creation of permanent House and Senate Intelligence Committees and kicked off a wave of accountability reforms, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Inspector General Act.

“One step after another, just beginning with the burglary made all of this possible,” Medsger added.

But as time went on, the FBI and other intelligence agencies would again engage in campaigns of mass surveillance against dissenting citizens. During Ronald Reagan’s administration, the FBI conducted widespread surveillance of civil society organizations opposed to Reagan’s policies in Central America, as well as of AIDS advocacy groups, Eddington said.

Six weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the federal government’s authority to conduct domestic surveillance. Then in 2004, a New York Times story revealed that the George W. Bush administration had authorized a warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection program known as Stellarwind.

Shortly before Medsger published her account of the 1971 FBI break-in, whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked documents showing that the National Security Agency under Barack Obama was collecting phone and email records of millions of Americans.

Today, under Donald Trump’s administration, dissenting US citizens are once again under threat, as campus protests over Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and anti-ICE demonstrations in Minneapolis have shown. Raines said the circumstances are beyond what she could have imagined. “Our entire system of government has been eroded, and people seem helpless in the face of that,” she said.

Fifty-five years on, plenty of Americans might look back on the eight burglars who broke into the FBI and exposed its campaign to suppress dissent as heroes. Eddington said the group stands out for its “courage in the face of seeming tyranny.”

“Whether it’s the Citizens’ Commission eight people there or an entire city of Americans in the case of Minneapolis revolting essentially against state-sponsored political oppression,” he said, “It tells me that there are still people in this country that give a damn about the Bill of Rights, about the Constitution, about the foundations, essentially, of our Republic.”

And even at the time, Forsyth said, the individual daring of the burglars only made a difference because of all the other people who had mobilized to fight for a better society. Without all of those efforts, he said, their break-in might not have had the impact it did.

“I think sometimes people mythologize actions like this because it was risky. It was bold. Through a combination of good work and luck, we were successful,” he said. “But most political organizing is boring and drudgery. If you wanted to change the world, it’s mostly one very tiny step at a time. But you can do it.”

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