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<h1 itemprop="headline" class="articleHeadline"><nyt_headline
version="1.0" type=" ">Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows</nyt_headline></h1>
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<div id="articleSpanVideoByline" class="byline">By Retro Report<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-who-took-on-fbi-abandon-shadows.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-who-took-on-fbi-abandon-shadows.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&</a></small></small></small></b><br>
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<p id="articleSpanVideoCaption" class="caption noPhotoCredit"><strong
class="videoIcon video">Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets:</strong>
One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near
Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of
Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.</p>
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<h6 class="byline">By <span itemprop="author creator" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"
itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/mark_mazzetti/index.html">
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href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/mark_mazzetti/index.html"
rel="author" title="More Articles by MARK MAZZETTI"><span
itemprop="name">MARK MAZZETTI</span></a></span></h6>
</nyt_byline>
<h6 class="dateline">Published: January 7, 2014 <span
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<p itemprop="articleBody">PHILADELPHIA — The perfect crime is far
easier to pull off when nobody is watching. </p>
</nyt_text></div>
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<p class="caption">Afterward, they fled to a farmhouse, near Pottstown,
Pa., where they spent 10 days sorting through the documents. </p>
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<p itemprop="articleBody">
So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier
bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed
by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar
and broke into a <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More articles about the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
class="meta-org">Federal Bureau of Investigation</a> office in a
suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">They were never caught, and the stolen
documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the
first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about
extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against
dissident groups. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971,
is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National
Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another
unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate
about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had,
until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the
operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt
the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous
power and prestige during <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/j_edgar_hoover/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More articles about J. Edgar Hoover." class="meta-per">J. Edgar
Hoover</a>’s lengthy tenure as director. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“When you talked to people outside the
movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,”
said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public
about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that
it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the
group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and
they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of <a
title="About the book."
href="http://www.randomhouse.com/book/224642/the-burglary-by-betty-medsger">a
book</a> written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen
documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The
Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous
case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women
who participated in the break-in to end their silence. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds
of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the
Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the
F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into
suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the
operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar
causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the
risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam
War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.
</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“We didn’t need attention, because we had
done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his
wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children
if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to
hold on to what we did back then.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"><strong>A Meticulous Plan</strong> </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The burglary was the idea of William C.
Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of
antiwar protests in Philadelphia, a city that by the early 1970s had
become a white-hot center of the peace movement. Mr. Davidon was
frustrated that years of organized demonstrations seemed to have had
little impact. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">In the summer of 1970, months after President
Richard M. Nixon announced the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, Mr.
Davidon began assembling a team from a group of activists whose
commitment and discretion he had come to trust. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The group — originally nine, before one
member dropped out — concluded that it would be too risky to try to
break into the F.B.I. office in downtown Philadelphia, where security
was tight. They soon settled on the bureau’s satellite office in Media,
in an apartment building across the street from the county courthouse. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">That decision carried its own risks: Nobody
could be certain whether the satellite office would have any documents
about the F.B.I.’s surveillance of war protesters, or whether a
security alarm would trip as soon as the burglars opened the door. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The group spent months casing the building,
driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines
of its residents. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“We knew when people came home from work,
when their lights went out, when they went to bed, when they woke up in
the morning,” said Mr. Raines, who was a professor of religion at
Temple University at the time. “We were quite certain that we
understood the nightly activities in and around that building.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">But it wasn’t until Ms. Raines got inside the
office that the group grew confident that it did not have a security
system. Weeks before the burglary, she visited the office posing as a
Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women at
the F.B.I. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The burglary itself went off largely without
a hitch, except for when Mr. Forsyth, the designated lock-picker, had
to break into a different entrance than planned when he discovered that
the F.B.I. had installed a lock on the main door that he could not
pick. He used a crowbar to break the second lock, a deadbolt above the
doorknob. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">After packing the documents into suitcases,
the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to
sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon
discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.’s spying
on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens’ Commission
to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to
several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger
wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon
administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the
documents. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Other news organizations that had received
the documents, including The New York Times, followed with their own
reports. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Ms. Medsger’s article cited what was perhaps
the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that
offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent.
The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar
activists and members of dissident student groups. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in
these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is
an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I.
headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed
widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college
campuses. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">But the document that would have the biggest
impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an
internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word:
Cointelpro. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters
who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it
was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl
Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of
Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro — shorthand for
Counterintelligence Program — were revealed. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an
expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers
and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest
groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter
F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not
commit suicide. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said
Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the
University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat
of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin
reputations.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Senator Church’s investigation in the
mid-1970s revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I.
abuses, and led to greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and
other American intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final
report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have
been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much
information has been collected,” it read. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">By the time the committee released its
report, Hoover was dead and the empire he had built at the F.B.I. was
being steadily dismantled. The roughly 200 agents he had assigned to
investigate the Media burglary came back empty-handed, and the F.B.I.
closed the case on March 11, 1976 — three days after the statute of
limitations for burglary charges had expired. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the
F.B.I., said that “a number of events during that era, including the
Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and
addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s
intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative
guidelines by the Department of Justice.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">According to Ms. Medsger’s book, “The
Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” only one
of the burglars was on the F.B.I.’s final list of possible suspects
before the case was closed. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"><strong>A Retreat Into Silence</strong> </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The eight burglars rarely spoke to one
another while the F.B.I. investigation was proceeding and never again
met as a group. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Mr. Davidon died late last year from
complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had planned to speak publicly
about his role in the break-in, but three of the burglars have chosen
to remain anonymous. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Among those who have come forward — Mr.
Forsyth, the Raineses and a man named Bob Williamson — there is some
wariness of how their decision will be viewed. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The passage of years has worn some of the
edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines.
But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations
about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so
long ago. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">They know some people will criticize them for
having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and
convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But
they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they
not been convinced they would get away with it. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“It looks like we’re terribly reckless
people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in
Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold
J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said,
“that if we don’t do it, nobody will.” </p>
<p><nyt_author_id> </nyt_author_id></p>
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<p><em>The <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/booming/columns/retro_report/index.html?8qa">Retro
Report</a> video with this article is the 24th in a documentary series
presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a
grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists
and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former “60 Minutes”
producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to
provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.</em></p>
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