The Burglary (29 page)

The day before the first documents were mailed, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI had a final meeting at the farm. By then—ten intense, work-filled days after the burglary—they were not as focused as a group as they had been. Forsyth remembers that he started to become disengaged just a few days after the burglary. He felt the older members of the group were more qualified for these post-burglary duties that involved strategic thinking about how news organizations and Congress should be informed. He was eager to move on to the next action that would help stop the war. After the documents were sorted, he didn't have any more responsibilities related to the Media burglary and its aftermath.

One of his main concerns when the documents were packaged and ready to be distributed was a missing document. It was a letter on FBI stationery to an official of the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing organization that was then fairly active. He has no idea how the document disappeared but holds himself responsible for its loss. The gist of the letter, he recalls, was “I want to thank you for your kind support of the FBI. The John Birch Society and the FBI are supporting the same American values.”

“It wasn't exactly a smoking gun,” Forsyth recalls, “but it was a friendly, good ol' boy, we-think-you're-great kind of letter. It really stuck in my memory, partly, I suppose, because it disappeared.…I felt bad about that because I thought it showed the informal networks that exist between a fascist group like the John Birch Society and the government. There's no legitimate reason why a government police agency should be buddy-buddy with a group like that.…To me it was an artifact, a little emblem of the kind of shadow government that can exist that people don't like to think is possible. I wanted people to see it.”

It was during that last time all the burglars were together—the day before the first set of documents was mailed—they agreed that now that their work was nearly done and the fruit of their efforts about to be given to the public, they would not meet with one another again, either as a group or as individuals.
Some of them had given this a lot of thought and decided isolation was important in order to avoid the arrest of one of them leading to the arrest of another one. Despite the bonds that had developed among some of them, they kept that agreement. That meant they never shared with one another either the fears that shadowed some of them in the months after the burglary, the agonies at least two of them would endure in a few years, or the great sense of accomplishment most of them would experience privately years later when the expanding impact of the burglary became clear in news stories, congressional hearings, and trials. The agreement not to meet also meant that over the years only the Raineses talked freely to anyone from the group—each other—about this profound shared experience.

Several weeks after that last meeting of the group, when the FBI search for the burglars became so intense that it directly touched hundreds of people in the Philadelphia peace movement, the Raineses suggested to Davidon that the burglars should get together to learn how each of them was enduring the pressure and whether the FBI had visited them. Under the circumstances, Davidon thought that was a bad idea. The Raineses regretted the emotional disconnect, but they accepted the need for it and did not attempt to get in touch with others in the group again, though they occasionally saw some of them at demonstrations and trials during the next two years. They were particularly concerned because they heard that a woman in the Philadelphia peace movement who looked very much like Bonnie Raines had come under great pressure from the FBI. Thinking she was Bonnie, agents broke into her home by busting down the door of her Powelton Village residence. They used this tactic with another resident of the neighborhood. Neither break-in led to information helpful to the investigation.

Before the burglars parted at that last meeting, they reached another important agreement: They would take the secret of the Media burglary to their graves. If they were not arrested, no one would ever know who found and revealed the first documentary evidence of how J. Edgar Hoover operated—the first evidence that there was a secret FBI that suppressed dissent.

IT WAS TIME
for the documents to be mailed. John Raines drove to Princeton the day after the burglars gathered for the last time. He dropped five packets of FBI documents into a mailbox. The return address on each was “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.” They were addressed to Senator George McGovern, Democrat from South Dakota; Representative Parren Mitchell, Democrat from Maryland; Tom Wicker, columnist at the
New York Times
; Jack Nelson, investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the
Los Angeles Times
; and this writer, then a reporter at the
Washington Post
.

The postmark, “Princeton,” that was stamped on the envelopes that afternoon at the Princeton post office, set off a new line of investigation as soon as the bureau was given those envelopes by four of the five recipients less than a week later. Newark FBI agents swarmed into Princeton to check out local people who had long hair, looked “hippie-ish,” or had ever spoken out against the Vietnam War. Soon, the official record shows, investigators focused on a young couple who operated a bookstore in Princeton. The FBI put them under twenty-four-hour surveillance and interviewed their friends and family members across the country. In the entire 33,698-page MEDBURG investigation, the only reported instance of an institution obeying the law or its internal regulations regarding privacy of records occurred during the investigation of this couple.
Stanford University, unlike other FBI-queried institutions, refused to turn over the student records of the young man, a Stanford graduate.

After John Raines dropped the packets into a mailbox on a side street in Princeton near the university, he drove home to Philadelphia knowing he had just ended one chapter in the life of the burglary and set the stage for the next. Some of the stolen documents were now out of the burglars' hands. They had no idea what would happen next. Soon other people would receive the documents and determine whether the burglars' enormous risk would have any meaning.

10

A
S JOHN RAINES DROVE
back to Philadelphia after mailing the first sets of Media files, agents working on the MEDBURG investigation at the Philadelphia FBI office got the best news—perhaps the only good news—they had received since starting the investigation. Jamieson, the agent in charge of the Philadelphia office, immediately informed the director about it in a memo: “[Blacked out] stated that Xerox Corporation would be most cooperative in assisting the bureau.…Bureau requested to direct Buffalo [FBI office] to contact Xerox at Webster, NY, with Xerox copy [of] press release, and request examination [of Citizens' Commission's] press release for all possible information to assist in solution of this case.”

A local Xerox official had told the investigators these crucial facts: Every Xerox copier's drum leaves unique markings on each copy produced on it. Some of those markings make it possible to determine which model of copier produced the copy, and other markings make it possible to trace a copy to the specific machine on which it was made. Most copiers at that time produced copies that contained visible odd marks, but few people understood that those marks were evidence of which copier produced a given page.

A Xerox official examined a copy of the statement Raines read to reporter Bill Wingell the morning after the burglary, a copy of which the FBI got from Wingell after he subsequently received a hard copy of it in the mail. The official said the marking indicated the document had been copied on a Xerox model number 660 desk-type copier.

The next step was obvious.
The bureau needed to collect sample
copies that had been made on model 660 copiers, as many as possible. Finally, agents had new trails to follow, ones that seemed certain to produce valuable evidence, something totally lacking until now in the MEDBURG investigation.

The hope held out by Xerox was especially welcome now nearly two weeks after the burglary. All efforts to find the burglars and the documents had led nowhere. None of the fingerprints or dozens of interviews had produced a productive lead.

The amount of information technicians could ferret out of a copy was impressive. In addition to tracing a copy to the machine on which it had been produced, they could, Jamieson wrote, also determine “the quality of paper … and possibly the source using this quality of paper … the quality of toner used and whether it is a Xerox toner or another commercial toner.”

Agents planned a new line of investigation, a search for suspect copiers. Now, “find that copier” became as strong a mantra as “find that woman.” For Xerox technicians to determine which copier had produced a given copy of a document, they needed samples of copies made on model 660 machines so they could be compared to copies sent by the burglars. Unfortunately for the FBI, in the Philadelphia area there were thousands of model 660 copiers. They seemed to be the copier of choice, as abundant as spring flowers in the city that April. On that Friday afternoon, the FBI was glad to have that challenge. The race was on to find Xerox 660 copiers and get sample copies from them throughout Philadelphia and New Jersey.

THREE DAYS LATER
, the spirits raised at the bureau by that good news from Xerox on Friday were severely dampened. On Monday, Hoover and the agents investigating the case received very bad news shortly after mail postmarked in Princeton was delivered in Washington. Hoover surely realized that afternoon that his major goal probably had been defeated—to prevent the stolen serials from becoming public. He was informed by the Washington field office (WFO) that at 3:30, “
Jack Israel Garvey, administrative assistant to George McGovern, phoned WFO that the
senator's office had that day received the first batch of stolen documents.” A short time later, the WFO report continued, a letter from the senator was delivered “to Mr. Hoover advising that he was sending the material he had received ‘purportedly' from the files of the Media FBI office.” The files, the envelope containing them postmarked Princeton, March 19, and the cover letter were all delivered to the FBI. Garvey called back, an agent reported, saying that the senator's office had “inadvertently furnished [FBI] a Xerox copy of a copy of the Citizens' Commission's letter and would furnish original copy [of a copy] to the FBI the next morning.” The WFO memo to the director ended, “All documents being handled carefully under separate communication to FBI laboratory for appropriate examination.”

Later that afternoon, the FBI headquarters office got a call from Harlington Wood Jr., an attorney in the Department of Justice. He said Representative Parren J. Mitchell, a Democratic member of Congress from Baltimore, had called him to report that an envelope containing stolen FBI documents had been left anonymously at his Baltimore home. Later that day, the legislator told the FBI the documents and the envelope they were in could be picked up at his office. Mitchell said he would retain a copy of everything he received. He also said he and his staff had handled all the documents, and consequently their fingerprints were on them. He was reluctant when asked for his staff to be fingerprinted.

McGovern immediately condemned the burglary in a statement his office issued that afternoon. He said he refused to be associated with “this illegal action by a private group.” He favored a full congressional investigation of the FBI. This burglary of an FBI office, he said, undermined “reasonable and constructive efforts to secure appropriate public review” of the bureau.

In a speech to a black police officers organization in Pittsburgh that evening, Mitchell, the first African American elected to Congress from Maryland, also emphasized that the files were the fruit of a criminal act. Unlike McGovern, though, he also commented indirectly on the nature of the stolen files. “I turned the information, which included a letter from the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI … admitting it stole the documents, over to the Justice Department,” said Mitchell. “The burglary was a crime and must be dealt with as such.…Surveillance of black student groups and peace groups, as indicated in the files, is equally criminal.” Because the content of the files had not been made public, people could not fully understand Mitchell's statement.

That afternoon the director notified all SACs around the country that “late today WFO received information from Senator George S. McGovern that indicated he had documents belonging to FBI. These documents are being obtained.” The director closed with this order:

“All offices make no comment if questioned by press or other sources. Advise bureau immediately of any information bearing upon this matter.”

In another message to all SACs, Hoover reviewed the information
about McGovern and Mitchell, and reminded the agents that if the documents became public, agents must immediately alert all “sources and informants … in view of current developments … additional disclosures may be made in future. Expedite and advise bureau by return teletype.”