The Burglary (12 page)

The Raineses with their children on their way to their annual summer vacation in Glen Lake, Michigan. The family station wagon served as a getaway car the night of the burglary.

The group enjoyed planning her pending visit to the FBI office—what her appearance should be, what her tone should be, and what she needed to look for. The burglars thought she should seem a little naïve and not supersmart. They spent a lot of time one evening developing questions she would ask.

It was an intimidating assignment, but Bonnie took it on with enthusiasm. She was grateful to be given this important responsibility. In the past, in nearly everything she did she felt she had been supplemental to other people. She felt she had been treated with respect but had not been given much responsibility. The heavier responsibility she carried as part of the Media group gave her confidence that she was, as she put it years later, finally “making progress” in that new life she had started to create nearly a decade earlier in New York when she and John Raines moved there in 1962 right after they were married. In addition to being an earth mother preparing those big spaghetti dinners for the group each evening before they cased Media, she remembers having a feeling of great contentment, a sense that “I was as much a part of that team as everyone else was.”

As the burglars prepared Bonnie Raines for her walk-on, as it were, at the FBI office, they carefully considered how she should wear her long black hair. She often wore it in long pigtails that nearly reached her waist, making her look even younger than the college freshman she would pose as. It was decided that for her visit to the FBI office she would wear her hair pulled back in a barrette and tucked under an old wool stocking hat. She was sure she had never concealed her hair that way at any of the antiwar demonstrations, where, the burglars assumed, she and the rest of them had been photographed many times by FBI and other law enforcement officers. She decided to wear her horn-rimmed glasses because she didn't think she had ever worn them to a demonstration. The glasses would provide a good disguise, but they also posed a problem. They improved her distance vision but hampered her near vision while she took notes. Adding to the awkwardness, to avoid leaving fingerprints behind she would wear gloves throughout the time she wrote the notes that she would not be able to see as she wrote them.
All of the burglars thoroughly trained themselves in the habit of not leaving fingerprints behind at any point during planning, during the actual burglary, or when working with files. This was crucial to their success, including Bonnie Raines's casing visit in the office.

Following the group's advice, Bonnie dressed for the interview as a nerdish coed in a skirt, sweater, and long dark heavy winter coat. As planned, she arrived about fifteen minutes early. She apologized for that, telling the man seated at the reception desk right inside the open door that she had come on public transportation and that the bus had arrived earlier than she expected. Actually, John Raines had driven her to Media. She was invited to sit and wait until two o'clock, when Tom Lewis would be available to talk with her. That was just what she wanted. It meant she had time to sit quietly and survey the office slowly and carefully.

As her eyes scanned the rooms, she tried to mentally photograph as much detail as possible. After several minutes, she asked the man she thought was a receptionist, but who was actually one of the agents based at the office, if she could see an employment application form. That request was consistent with her request to interview an agent about hiring practices. The real purpose of her question about forms, though, was to observe whether he would have to unlock the file cabinet to retrieve a form for her. She was pleased that he obliged, and even more pleased that the file cabinet was not locked.

During the fifteen minutes she waited, seated across from an agent the entire time, she glanced around the room, trying to do so intensively while appearing to be casual and unengaged. She noted that in the office where she waited there were two desks, several file cabinets, one very tall cabinet with double doors, and a typical government-issue light khaki-green cabinet. From where she sat, she could see two other rooms in the office. She noticed that there were open venetian blinds on the windows. That meant the burglars would have to use flashlights very cautiously, if at all, during the burglary so no streams of light could be seen between the slats. By the time she left, she felt she would be able to draw a detailed sketch of the office.

When she was invited into the room where Lewis was waiting to talk with her, she had a choice of two chairs. She picked the one that provided the widest view of the room as well as a view through a window. She could see John and Nathan in the family's station wagon parked across the street. She could see that Nathan, small and rambunctious, wasn't very patient about waiting for his mother. Partway through her interview with the agent, she noticed that Nathan had calmed down and he and John were walking leisurely on the courthouse grounds.

As she talked with Lewis, she remembered the burglars' suggestion that she should seem a little naïve. She told him she was writing the paper for a class, but she hoped the local newspaper might publish it. “The guy acted as though he was flattered. I think he wanted to look like a newer breed of FBI agent, and I was able to play into that.” She asked him if, in the event that they started hiring women as agents (which they first did in 1972, just two months after Hoover died), if agents' work time could be flexible. He said agents worked nine to five, and there really wasn't much need for flexibility. “There was none of this romantic stuff that these guys are out there working day and night,” she recalled.

In response to several questions, she remembers that he repeated that “bureau guidelines” would have to be followed. She wondered at one point if the conversation had gone on too long and if he might be suspicious of her. She quickly dismissed that concern, confident that “he didn't have any antennae out for anything unusual.” She took notes throughout the conversation but made sure she established eye contact with him often. If the agent thought she looked a little odd—as she sat there writing with gloved hands—he gave no clue. “He was a nice guy. The kind of guy you might like having as a neighbor.” They chitchatted about college sports teams. He asked her where she had grown up. She lied and said she was from Hartford, Connecticut.

The office was very quiet, not a place where there were any signs of urgency or excitement. “I felt like I was in a CPA's office. I remember being struck by that. I felt as though they were drones. It was a rather nice office. It had wall-to-wall carpet.” That was a welcome discovery. Carpet would help muffle burglary noises. The desks were made of wood. There was no art on the wall, unless the framed photographs of J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon hanging in the entry room counted as art. In Lewis's office there was a framed photograph of Hoover standing beside the agent. It had been autographed by Hoover. There also were framed commendations from the director on the wall and photographs of Lewis's family on his desk.

When Bonnie Raines stood to leave, she thanked Lewis and walked toward the room where she had waited. But then she changed course and entered another room, one she had not been in before. An agent apparently thought she was confused and told her she could not leave from that room. She paused, looked around just long enough to take in as much as she could in that third room, and then returned to the first room, apologizing for getting lost and saying she had thought there might be a restroom off that
room. No, the agent said, the restrooms were outside the bureau office. He gave her a key to the restroom and pointed to it down the hall. This was important information. The burglars wanted to know if there was an unlocked restroom where they could hide, if necessary, on the night of the burglary. Now that she knew a key was necessary to enter the restroom, she realized that was not going to be possible.

By the time she left, she had been in the office about an hour, longer than she had expected and much, much longer than any of the agents in the office would admit to bureau investigators shortly after the burglary. She thought she had accomplished her mission. Her biggest assignment was to determine if there was an alarm system in the office. She observed that some electrical cords were covered with old cracked paint. She had tracked the cords by eye and concluded they were phone lines and the cords of the old window air conditioners. She was confident she had traced and figured out the function of every cord. By the process of elimination, she concluded there was no alarm system. She knew the group would be excited to hear that.

As she left after returning the restroom key, the last thing she did was check again the lock on the front door, as Forsyth had prepared her to. She thought his description was correct: one simple lock that could be picked easily.

Almost as important as establishing that there was no alarm system was Bonnie's next discovery that the second door that opened from the FBI office to the external hall was blocked by a large cabinet. The inside crew, she told the burglars that night, would have to enter through the door she had entered—the main entrance, the door that opened into the reception room. She was insistent that the second external door, which she observed from the room she pretended to wander into to find a restroom, should not be broken into the night of the burglary. She remembers feeling relief that she had made that discovery. She assumed—correctly, it turned out—that this tall cabinet that barricaded that door was filled, like all the other cabinets in the office, with paper and therefore was very heavy. If Forsyth broke in through that door and in the process of pushing it open toppled the tall, heavy cabinet, the thud it would make as it hit the floor would be so loud that it could not be concealed, even if the broadcast of the Ali-Frazier fight was turned to the highest volume in every apartment in the building.

To her surprise, she felt at ease in the FBI office. Except for a few moments of doubt about whether Lewis was suspicious, she thought the
interview went very well. She had collected important information the burglars needed. When she left, she felt sure she had not been regarded with suspicion.

The Raineses had agreed that about an hour after she arrived at the office, John would drive to a prearranged point a few blocks away so she would not be seen leaving in a car. She didn't want agents to wonder about her claim that she had come by public transportation.

When she opened the station wagon door, her calm veneer disappeared and she was visibly shaking as she sat in the passenger seat. John had been quite nervous about her visit to the office, so he was somewhat alarmed when he saw her. But her shaking stopped as quickly as it had started. She felt great relief. In fact, she was ecstatic. Now, she said, she was sure the burglary could be done. Until now, she had had many doubts. She couldn't stop telling John, as they drove toward home, how easy—how
very
easy—it was going to be to burglarize that office. John remembers that her certainty and her enthusiasm were infectious. Despite the deep foreboding he felt about the burglary, he couldn't help sharing her enthusiasm that afternoon. He remembers her excitement as she listed the reasons why the burglary was going to be easy. There was no alarm system. There were no surveillance cameras. The lock looked like it could be picked. There was carpet on the floor. As far as she could tell, there were no locks on the file cabinets. How lucky could they be, she asked, with the delightful certainty of the schoolgirl she had just posed as. “There was no sign of security. Nope, nothing.”

She abruptly halted her hyper-elated recall and removed her gloves. She felt an urgency to write notes about what she had seen while her memory was fresh. She wrote during the ride home to Germantown and continued after they arrived there. She could hardly wait to tell the other burglars what she learned that day inside the FBI office. Thinking like a smart burglar, later that night she destroyed the notes she had written during and after the interview.

That night was a turning point.

After Bonnie Raines reported on what she had observed at the office, the other burglars felt relieved. They shared her optimism. For the first time, Davidon remembers, “We knew we could do it.” As the person who had proposed the burglary, he was delighted to hear her positive assessment. It was very good news. Doubts about whether the break-in could be done faded away that night for all of the burglars.

Even John Raines regarded Bonnie's discoveries as good news, but, beginning that day, his concerns grew much deeper. “Until then, we didn't
know we could do it. Then Bonnie got in there and discovered there was no alarm system. After that, we knew we had a going project. At that point I, more than Bonnie, began to have real worries about what might happen.…Once it became clear that this was in fact something we were going to do, it became clear to me that the FBI was going to be very, very angry about this. They were really going to come after us.”