The Burglary (34 page)

The memos in the files of the official investigation say little about results gained from FISUR. They indicate that it was frustrating and ultimately
unproductive. Whatever the people in charge of the investigation thought this technique would accomplish, for the agents in the cars it may simply have been a way to kill time away from the office in an investigation that seemed to stall every time it took a new and hopeful direction. Or perhaps this visible saturation surveillance from parked cars may simply have been the bureau engaging in a practice that echoed the prescription in one of the Media files: make people paranoid.

The residents of Powelton Village were not prone to becoming paranoid. From the beginning of the investigation, many of them were named as MEDBURG suspects or were believed to be connected to suspects. They did not know that, but most of them probably assumed as much, given the constant presence of agents near their homes. Residents of the neighborhood found the round-the-clock surveillance they were subjected to maddening. Being who they were—some were the same people who years earlier had put gags on the stone mouths of the statues of Ben Franklin and other historic figures in Philadelphia after the Boston trial where defendants, including renowned pediatrician Dr.
Benjamin Spock, were convicted for assisting young men who resisted the draft—they looked for the humor in having the streets outside their apartments lined with parked FBI cars, usually with two agents in each car. They found the seeds for a humorous response in the fact that agents often slept in their cars.

One response was to perform street skits with the agents as unwilling actors. In one of them, a resident stood beside an FBI car and blew a bullhorn while another resident stood on the other side of the car with a tray of cookies and milk ready for the agents as they jolted awake from their interrupted afternoon nap.

Sometimes an announcement was made on a megaphone for all to hear during the agents' afternoon naps:

“This is your FBI at work!”

Bumper stickers reading
THIS IS AN FBI CAR
were pasted onto the back bumpers of FBI cars as agents slept.

No FBI agent was ever observed laughing at the residents' attempts at humor.

On June 6, 1971, a Saturday, Powelton residents went all out in their effort to turn the massive surveillance on its head with humor. They held what they called “
Your FBI in Action Street Fair.” All of the entertainment was FBI-centered. People, including Davidon and his family, stood beside a life-size cardboard cutout of J. Edgar Hoover and were photographed as they affectionately draped their arms around the director's shoulders. Copies of
Media documents were nailed to trees, and so were large photos of agents who had been photographed sitting in cars in the neighborhood. Copies of enlarged Media files also were auctioned at the fair. Neighborhood children had fun putting together jigsaw puzzles that had been made from pictures taken of agents who seemed to be living in their cars, like homeless people, in the neighborhood. At the perimeters of the neighborhood the day of the fair, posted notices welcomed FBI agents to the fair but asked them to leave their pistols at the 16th Precinct Police Station at the edge of Powelton. Surveillance may have been called off that day, but a resident reported seeing one of the regular neighborhood agents drive by on a nearby street and gun the gas pedal when he realized he had been seen.

In addition to finding a way to laugh at this disruptive situation, Powelton Village residents also sued the FBI, asking a judge to order a halt to the blanket surveillance of the neighborhood. They eventually won, but the surveillance continued for many months before the case was resolved. In response to the residents' lawsuit, the bureau acknowledged that it used forty to fifty cars to conduct surveillance in the neighborhood and brought agents from as far away as Jackson, Mississippi, to conduct it.

A strong impetus for the lawsuit came from the FBI's attack on the home of Anne Flitcraft. She was upstairs having dinner with neighbors when she heard a loud noise coming from the direction of her apartment. She ran to her apartment, but by the time she got there, FBI agents already had broken down the door with a sledgehammer and were inside removing copies of Media documents and ransacking every drawer, cabinet, and closet. She was researching Media files about police training for articles that were published a short time later by the Quaker-sponsored organization she worked for,
NARMIC (National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex). NARMIC had anonymously received the files at its downtown office. When agents left her apartment that day, they took the documents, her typewriter, books, and assorted office supplies.

As word spread about the FBI raid on Flitcraft's apartment, neighbors gathered at her home, including
David Kairys, the lawyer who represented her and others in their successful lawsuit against the FBI surveillance of the neighborhood. He was just beginning a career in which he would successfully represent many people who had been treated unjustly by the government—including, in 1986,
Donald Rochon, an African American FBI agent who endured extreme acts of racial harassment and discrimination in the bureau. The lawsuit inspired by the raid of Flitcraft's home was intended to let the FBI know that it could not conduct such raids with impunity. Soon after
the raid, neighbors created what they called an anti-FBI alarm system. They distributed boat horns that could be heard for about two blocks. Residents agreed to use the horns in the event of another FBI raid so neighbors could call lawyers and run to the scene as quickly as possible to offer support to the resident being raided.

Davidon and his family with “Mr. Hoover” at the “Your FBI in Action Street Fair” held in June 1971 in the Powelton Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. Residents organized the fair to draw attention to the intense round-the-clock surveillance conducted by the FBI in the neighborhood for months after the burglary.
From left:
Ann Morrissett, Davidon's wife; “Hoover”; Davidon; and daughters Sarah and Ruth.

Kairys and other neighbors delivered Flitcraft's badly damaged door to the Philadelphia FBI field office the morning after agents broke in through the door. A speechless group of agents watched as the door was carried off the elevator into the FBI office and a demand for repairs was made. When Hoover was informed about this, he wrote a memorandum stating that the Philadelphia field office should pay for repairs to the door from the office's “Confidential Fund.”

MEANWHILE,
the FBI's search for suspect Xerox model 660 copiers, once a source of great hope for the investigators, was at times even more intense and more demoralizing than the search for human suspects. At first, local
Xerox officials cooperated fully with the FBI. The company's maintenance personnel were instructed to visit the many offices that leased a model 660 and make sample copies for the FBI on each of those machines. Because collecting sample 660 copies took a lot of time, Xerox soon said it would collect the samples only during regular maintenance visits. They were collected surreptitiously at offices the FBI told Xerox were most likely to employ people who would break into an FBI office—campuses, nonprofit organizations, libraries, and also a surprising number of corporations. Copies were collected from thousands of copiers leased throughout eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England, and the Midwest. At Xerox labs, the sample copies were compared with copies of FBI files and the cover letters distributed by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Eventually, overloaded by the volume of copies it was analyzing for the FBI, Xerox trained some staff members at the FBI lab to do the comparative analysis. Still the work taxed the company's offices on the East Coast.

The cooperative relationship between Xerox and the FBI came to a screeching halt a couple weeks into the effort. In interviews with two journalists—syndicated columnist
Jack Anderson and
Vin McLellan, a freelance writer whose story was published on April 15 in the
Washington Post
—
Gerald A. Mulligan, manager of public relations operations for Xerox Corporation, at its Rochester, New York, headquarters, acknowledged that the corporation had complied with the bureau's request for a list of customers who leased the 660 copiers. But, Mulligan said, Xerox had recently “…  decided at the very highest level” not to cooperate further with the bureau in the investigation. “What it came down to,” Mulligan told Anderson, “was the ethical responsibilities of the business. If we were to do this, we had a responsibility to inform our customers it was being done, and this would have defeated the FBI's whole purpose.” In addition to revealing the type of copier the FBI was looking for and reporting the company's decision not to cooperate further with the bureau in the investigation, the stories also disclosed that markings on copies could help the bureau track copies of the stolen files to the copiers used by the burglars.

Hoover was furious at Xerox for stopping its cooperation and for making public remarks. In a handwritten note on a copy of the Anderson column placed in the files of the investigation of the burglary, he scrawled, “This shows what happens when we issue
inadequate & ill-considered
instructions [underlines are his]. Certainly we should
not
have contacted a loud mouth like Mulligan. The approaches should have been properly evaluated as to security.” Actually, it is unlikely that FBI agents had contacted Mulligan.
The reporters had. Hoover was angrily lashing out, as his next move made clear.

The decision by Xerox to halt cooperation was considered a major blow for the FBI. This part of the investigation had seemed to be working very efficiently and there were high hopes it would lead to arrests. Just as Hoover's immediate response after the burglary was to punish Tom Lewis, despite Lewis's efforts to make the office more secure, now Hoover decided to punish Xerox. He immediately issued an order that every FBI office must cancel its lease with the company. Managers at FBI headquarters pointed out that this would be nearly impossible, not to mention very expensive. The process of getting a new contract with another company would be long and cumbersome. Immediate cancellation, they said, would impede work throughout the bureau. Hoover was unmoved by their rationale. As his officials proceeded with the initial stages of preparing to cancel the Xerox contracts, the problem was solved when the CEO of Xerox returned from a vacation out of the country and was upset when he learned that one of his officials had withdrawn cooperation from the FBI. Concerns about spying on customers on behalf of the FBI vanished. He ordered Xerox employees to resume cooperating with the FBI and wrote a deeply apologetic letter to Hoover assuring him that Xerox was on board again and always would be at the service of the bureau. At that point, Hoover rescinded his order, all Xerox copiers remained in place in FBI offices, and, most important, copies produced on 660 copiers once again streamed into the FBI lab to be compared with copies of the Media documents.

The burglars had read the newspaper reports that Xerox had helped the FBI discover the model number of the copier they had used and that Xerox had indicated it was possible to match marks on the copies of the Media files with marks on the drums of Xerox copiers of that model. That was very frightening news.

John Raines discovered how frightening it was. Not long after the first stories about the documents were published and were being widely discussed in news stories, he was seated at his campus desk when he overheard a discussion in the hallway outside his office that might have seemed routine to anyone else. He quickly realized it was a discussion in which he did not want to participate. A man was telling the department secretary, “There's something wrong with your copier's drum, so I'm going to take it and replace it with a new one.”

It was another one of those brick-in-the-stomach moments that Raines had experienced occasionally ever since Bonnie's visit to the FBI office
made the burglars confident they should move ahead with their plans. Today's experience qualified as two bricks. He listened to the conversation in stunned silence as he stared out his street-level office window and saw a small white Ford car marked with a Xerox logo parked on the street at the end of the sidewalk that led to the door outside his office. A few minutes later he watched the man carry the drum of the Xerox 660 copier on which Raines had made hundreds of copies, perhaps even more, of stolen FBI documents. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, there it goes,' ” he remembers. The man carried the drum down the sidewalk and placed it in the trunk of the Xerox car. There was no doubt in Raines's mind that the drum had been moved because the FBI wanted to examine it in connection with the files that had been mailed, most of which were by then in the hands of the FBI in Washington, thanks to the news organizations that had forwarded the files they received to the FBI. The drum could, of course, have been removed and replaced by Xerox because it simply needed to be repaired or replaced. But under the circumstances, it was impossible for Raines to assume that.