The Burglary (38 page)

JOHN RAINES HAD
turned down Davidon's invitation to go with him to the Princeton conference. He and Bonnie did not think that was a good idea. They had experienced too many close calls since the burglary. Distributing copies of the stolen documents at such a high-profile event did not seem wise. They had been living in what one of them remembers as “a sustained period of worry and concern” ever since the burglary. Though the level of intensity varied, it was always there, not disappearing completely until about five years later.

Given the pressure they felt, the Raineses decided to stay away from peace demonstrations for an indefinite period. Beginning immediately after the burglary, they realized that agents were looking for the woman who had visited the office. So they decided that woman would not be seen at events where they knew FBI agents and informers were likely to be a constant presence.

A few key events made them think that their arrest, and possibly the arrest of all the burglars, was imminent. They first feared that the day John watched the Xerox maintenance person walk away from his office with the drum of the copier he had used to copy hundreds of the Media documents. Subsequent experiences felt even more threatening.

In early April 1971, they responded one evening to a knock at their front door and were both surprised and shaken, even before the visitor's threat. There stood the man who had abandoned the group shortly before the burglary. They liked him, but under these circumstances they were anything but happy to see him. They had no idea why he had left the group or what he thought now that the burglary had been done, but they invited him in. He had not come to congratulate them on a job well done. He was full of foreboding. He nervously told them he “was dealing with immense pressure.”
He told them he was very troubled about what he should do.

He said he was thinking of turning them in.

The Raineses were stunned. This was even worse than watching the Xerox repairman carry away the copier drum.

He told them someone had told him the Media files included defense secrets that, if revealed, would be disastrous to national security. When the Raineses told him they were sure such documents were not in the files, they could not tell if he believed them. After he left, the Raineses were very troubled about what they could do about what felt like a looming crisis. They thought he might hold the future of all the burglars in his hands. Given that they had not been arrested, they were convinced he had not revealed their plans to authorities before the burglary. But here he was, less than a month later, and he was telling them he was thinking of turning them in. The investigative record of the burglary contains no information about his visit to the Raineses despite the fact that the record includes considerable detail about the bureau's surveillance of him and investigators' belief that he was one of the Media burglars.

Bonnie and John Raines struggled with how to deal with this situation. When the man left that night, they were not confident they had convinced him not to turn them in. Sometime later that evening or the next day, they got an idea. Their kitchen did not really need a new coat of paint, but they thought painting it all day with him might give John Raines an opportunity to have a long and rambling conversation that would convince him not to turn the burglars in. Given the possible consequences of his threat, they felt something had to be done. This was all they could think of. They called him and asked him if they could hire him to help John paint the kitchen. He agreed and arrived for the job early Saturday morning.

Standing on ladders across from each other, the man and John Raines talked nearly all day. As they covered the kitchen walls with a coat of warm yellow paint, he revealed more about the source of his concern. He said he had no problem with the documents that had been released so far, the revelations about how the bureau operated, the spying on Americans. He thought those documents might even have a positive impact. But he was very worried about what his girlfriend had told him. It wasn't clear from what he said whether she knew he had once been part of the group, but John was left with the impression that she suspected he was close to the group, if not part of it. He told John she had convinced him that documents stolen at the Media office that had not yet been made public would reveal national defense secrets, including the location of missile defense systems. National security, she had told him, was now about to be seriously endangered because of the stolen documents.

John insisted this was not true. He told him he thought his girlfriend was working for the FBI and that she had gotten that idea from them. John
emphasized that he had seen all of the stolen documents, and that none of them revealed defense secrets or posed a danger in any way to national security.

“I think he was on the verge of giving us up,” said John Raines years later. “His girlfriend was really pushing him. He was very frightened.” By the end of that Saturday, the kitchen looked fresh and new and John hoped he had convinced him not to turn them in. The Raineses convinced themselves that they had “quieted him down, cooled him down.” That's what they hoped, but they were not sure and remained afraid he would turn them in. They never heard from him again, nor did any of the other Media burglars. According to the FBI's investigative files on the burglary, the man who dropped out of the group talked to the FBI about the burglary, but he did not do so until near the end of the investigation.

The Raineses were still worried about whether he was considering turning them in when two unwanted guests showed up on a warm afternoon in early May. John was dropped off in front of their home by a friend after a tennis game. As he said goodbye to his tennis partner and walked toward his front door, he was greeted by two men who were waiting for him on the porch. He recognized them immediately before they introduced themselves. They were FBI agents straight from central casting—short hair, white shirts, suits, ties, wingtip shoes—everything you would expect from watching Inspector Lewis Erskine, played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr. on
The F.B.I.
Sunday evenings. The agents showed John their badges and said they wanted to talk to him.

The burglars had agreed that they would refuse to talk with FBI agents unless a lawyer was present. That was the typical stance taken at that time by antiwar activists regarding contact with the bureau. For reasons John can't remember many years later—overwhelming fear being perhaps the most likely explanation—he violated that agreement and talked with the agents that day, but under rather unusual circumstances. He recalls welcoming them and telling them he would be glad to talk to them. He unlocked the front door and motioned for them to be seated in the living room. He apologized for being so sweaty from playing tennis and invited them to make themselves at home while he freshened up. He thinks he may have given them a cold drink of water or iced tea before he went upstairs. Once he was upstairs, he decided to shower.

His decision to welcome them and then let them wait while he showered was a split-second one. The shower gave him time to compose his thoughts. He thought hard about how he would respond. He thinks he may have
decided as soon as he saw them that it might be more trouble not to talk than to talk. As he showered, he decided he would filibuster the interview.

After his shower, John joined his guests in the living room about twenty minutes after he had left them. As he looked at the two men he thought, “It's true. Just like everyone says, they do look like Mutt and Jeff.” Their first comment as he sat down in a comfortable chair across from them must have stopped him from continuing to see them as comic figures.

“We're investigating the Media break-in, and we want to talk to you about it,” one of them said. “Do you know anything about it?”

At that point, John recalls, he launched into the plan he had settled on while showering. He told them he thought he had read just about everything that had been written about the burglary and that he was appalled by what he had learned about the contents of the stolen documents. He described the documents. “That one about an FBI agent behind every mailbox … shocking.…Using campus switchboard operators.…Trying to scare politicians.…That was terrible.”

After a rather lengthy rhetorical tour of the leading documents he had “read about in the newspapers,” John recalls, he then tried to ask them questions. “All this time you folks are spending on political surveillance, aren't you kind of ashamed of your priorities?” The agents took it as a rhetorical question and answered with silence. John continued lecturing them. “Shouldn't you be out there looking at major crimes, like organized crime?” This was a touchy subject in the bureau, given the growing awareness outside the FBI of what had long been known inside the bureau—that the FBI director cared far more about conducting surveillance of civil rights and antiwar activists than he did about fighting organized crime.

John's spirited Socratic approach produced a mixed response. One of the agents frowned and looked somewhat angry as John lectured them. Occasionally, the irritated agent made a comment that made it clear he did not agree with John's assessment of the bureau. The other agent “was kind of apologetic.” It was difficult, even under the pressure of this moment, for John not to see them as Mutt and Jeff, as the good cop and the bad cop. The good-cop agent would interrupt once in a while and say, “He [the bad cop] is actually a nice guy.” In fact, the agent who was playing good cop seemed at one point about to confess that he agreed with John's opinion. Under the unusual circumstances, though, John may have been hearing more than the agent intended to convey. “As a matter of fact,” the good-cop agent said, giving the impression that he was searching for the right words, “well, you know, we all have to work.”

John Raines felt that he, rather than the agents, was in control of the conversation. In the shower, that had become his goal. He tried not to let silences develop. Every time one did, he filled it. After a while, he decided it was time for the conversation to end and announced that he would have to leave soon. The agents looked at each other and seemed to be preparing to leave when the agent playing the good cop looked directly at John and pointedly asked,

“By the way, did you have anything to do with this Media break-in?”

Though John had been willing to break the law and burglarize an FBI office, he recalls telling himself at that moment, “Remember, it's a crime to lie to an FBI agent.” He thinks he may have missed only a very small beat before he returned to filibuster mode and replied indirectly, forcefully, and, in line with his goal, at length. “I feel so angry about what I found out from those stories about the documents about what you, the FBI, have been doing that I don't want to answer that. I don't want to make your search for people any easier, so I'm not going to say whether or not I was involved.” He continued his lecture on the importance of what was revealed in the documents and how upset he was about the activities of the bureau.

For whatever reason—not liking being lectured, being bored by John's filibustering, or not really thinking he was a very likely suspect, or at least not likely to answer directly any question they posed—the agents thanked him and stood up to leave. There were no more questions and no suggestion there would be another visit.

From the living room window, a somewhat relieved but also puzzled John Raines watched the two agents walk to their car and drive away. They were gone. Thank goodness. Even now, he is not sure if he was wise or foolish that day. There was no mention of this meeting in the massive FBI record of the investigation.

He soon realized that one aspect of his drawn-out filibuster had been very foolish, perhaps nearly disastrous. While the agents were there, he did not pay attention to the time and did not think about the fact that Bonnie was likely to come home any minute. Only about five minutes after the agents left, she arrived. She was stunned to learn that FBI agents had just been there. Both of them briefly felt paralyzed when they realized what had almost happened—what almost certainly would have happened if she had come home just a few minutes earlier. The Raineses did not know, of course, that a very recognizable sketch of her, as she was remembered by the Media agents, had been distributed to agents throughout the country and that agents, especially the ones investigating the case, were constantly looking for
her. Not finding her, in fact, was by then one of the most frustrating aspects of the case for Hoover and the investigators. Along with the women of the Weather Underground who had escaped the 1970 bomb factory explosion in Greenwich Village, where three members of the Weather Underground were killed and others went into hiding, she was one of the few women FBI agents were looking for at that time. The director had repeatedly expressed frustration and irritation that she had not been found.

The agents did not ask Raines anything about his wife. They did not mention her name. But if she had walked in while they were there, they surely would have recognized her as the woman in the police artist's sketch. The Raineses knew that the search for the woman who had visited the office was intense, because they had heard about what happened to a woman peace activist in Powelton Village who looked remarkably like Bonnie and apparently was believed by the FBI to be “that woman.” They knew that the door to her home had been knocked down by the FBI. Because they were aware of that, Bonnie Raines's narrow escape that May afternoon—more than the visit itself and even more than the direct question to John Raines: “By the way, did you have anything to do with this Media break-in?”—shocked them as they reviewed everything that had been said by the agents. They were very relieved that she had not been seen, but the frightening thought of what might have happened was hard to shake. Bonnie sat in the living room where the FBI agents had sat. She was nearly transfixed, wondering what would have happened in that living room minutes earlier if she had not been stuck longer than usual in traffic at a stoplight, if she had not talked a few extra minutes with friends at the daycare center where she worked.