Who TookThe Files

The plan belonged to William Davidon, a physics professor at Haverford College and a longtime antiwar activist. He was convinced the FBI was spying on peaceful protest groups. He was also convinced nobody would believe it without proof, and the proof was sitting in filing cabinets.

Somebody had to see the inside first. That job went to Bonnie Raines, 29, a mother of three children ages 8, 6 and 2. She called the FBI office in Media and asked for an interview, saying she was a Swarthmore College student researching careers for women in the FBI. She showed up in big glasses with her hair pinned up under a hat, and she never took off her gloves.

They were very gracious, and I think kind of flattered that I was interested in them.

Bonnie Raines, remembering the visit, 2014

She left with a map of the office in her head. There was no alarm and no guard. The filing cabinets were unlocked. A side door was blocked from the inside by a heavy cabinet.

They picked the date on purpose. Ali and Frazier would be on the radio in every bar and living room, and the group hoped the building manager and the people in the upstairs apartments would be listening too.

Keith Forsyth, 21, was the lock picker. That evening he went to the main door and found a lock he had not expected, a kind he could not open.

I just about had a heart attack.

Keith Forsyth, on seeing the lock, 2014

The group talked about calling it off and voted to keep going. Forsyth moved to the side door, the one with the cabinet behind it. He picked its lock, snapped the deadbolt with a short crowbar and shoved the cabinet back far enough for a person to squeeze through. The others emptied the drawers into suitcases. They found revolvers in the office and left them where they lay.

Getaway cars carried four heavy suitcases to a Quaker farmhouse outside town. Around a table with sandwiches and beer, still wearing gloves, the eight of them started reading. Ralph Daniel, who pulled files out of the cabinets that night, remembered the moment fifty years later.

It was clear we had a gold mine.

Ralph Daniel, 2021

In New York, Frazier knocked Ali down in the fifteenth round and won a unanimous decision. The next day a caller read a statement to the Reuters news agency on behalf of a group nobody had ever heard of: the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI.

The suitcases held about 1,000 documents. Most of them were boring. One was an internal newsletter from the FBI's Philadelphia office, dated September 16, 1970, about how agents should deal with antiwar students and activists. Part of it is blacked out below. Guess what the reason was before you open it.

Another document, signed by Director J. Edgar Hoover on November 4, 1970, ordered agents to begin investigating Black student groups on college campuses.

Increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the nation's stability and security and indicate need for an increase in both quality and quantity of intelligence information on Black Student Union (BSU) and similar groups...

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, November 4, 1970

Keep one limit in mind. Media was one small office outside Philadelphia. These numbers describe what agents in that office were doing, and they cannot tell you what every FBI office in the country was doing.

The burglars kept the originals hidden and mailed copies to five people. Three were reporters, at the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Two were members of Congress: Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and Representative Parren Mitchell of Maryland. Every one of them was now holding stolen government documents.

At the Post, reporter Betty Medsger opened her envelope and showed it to her editors. The FBI confirmed the papers were real. Then Attorney General John Mitchell, the top law enforcement officer in the country, called two of the paper's editors and told them not to print a word. He warned that publishing

could endanger the lives or cause serious harm to persons engaged in investigative activities.

Attorney General John N. Mitchell, March 1971

One document in the pile was a routing slip, the small form that tells a clerk where to send a file. Typed on it was a word nobody outside the FBI had ever seen.

Carl Stern, who covered the Justice Department for NBC News, wanted to know what it meant. Officials refused to tell him. So he used the Freedom of Information Act, a 1966 law that lets any citizen request government records. The FBI refused again, and Stern sued. Judge Barrington Parker ruled in his favor, and on December 6, 1973, the Bureau handed over the files. That night NBC anchor John Chancellor told the country what the word meant.

Secret FBI memos made public today show the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left.

John Chancellor, NBC Nightly News, December 6, 1973

The burglary produced the word. It took almost three more years, a reporter and a federal judge to find out what it meant.

Hoover named the case MEDBURG and put about 200 agents on it. They had a sketch of the young woman who had come in for a research interview. They questioned John Raines, Bonnie's husband. They questioned Bob Williamson and Sara Shumer. They never questioned Bonnie. They left Davidon alone entirely, because he was already tied up in a separate federal case.

The Raineses had planned for the worst. If they went to prison, John's older brother and Bonnie's parents had agreed to raise the children.

Inside the Bureau, Hoover moved fast. He shut down 103 of the FBI's 538 small resident offices. On April 28, 1971, seven weeks after the burglary, the FBI formally ended every operation running under the name COINTELPRO. Ending the program on paper did not mean every kind of domestic spying stopped.

In January 1975 the Senate created a special committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, to investigate the country's intelligence agencies. Its report on the FBI came out April 29, 1976. Using the Bureau's own paperwork, it found that between 1956 and 1971 the FBI approved 2,370 separate COINTELPRO actions against American groups and citizens.

The documents also showed what an action looked like on paper. In April 1970 the Los Angeles office asked headquarters for permission to mail a letter from a made up person to Hollywood gossip columnists about the actress Jean Seberg, who gave money to the Black Panther Party. Headquarters wrote back that the plan had merit, and told agents to wait about two more months.

In November 1964 the Bureau had also mailed Dr. King an anonymous package with a letter and a recording. The committee confirmed the FBI sent it. King and the people closest to him read the letter as an attempt to push him toward taking his own life.

In May 1976 the new FBI Director, Clarence Kelley, said something no FBI director had said before.

We are truly sorry we were responsible for instances which are now subject to such criticism.

Clarence M. Kelley, FBI Director, May 1976

In July 1970 President Nixon approved a secret plan, written by a young aide named Tom Huston, that would have let intelligence agencies open private mail and break into homes and offices. Hoover objected, and Nixon withdrew the plan within weeks.

A year later, after a government analyst leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in June 1971, the White House put together its own secret team to stop leaks. Its members called themselves the Plumbers. On June 17, 1972, six weeks after Hoover died, five men connected to that team and to Nixon's reelection committee were arrested inside the Democratic Party offices at the Watergate building. A security guard named Frank Wills had noticed tape holding a door latch open.

The Media burglars were never caught. The Watergate burglars were arrested before dawn, and the investigation that followed ended with Nixon resigning on August 9, 1974.

One more twist. The second in command at the FBI during Watergate was Mark Felt. In 2005 he revealed that he was Deep Throat, the secret source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein expose the cover up. In 1980 a federal jury had convicted Felt of approving FBI break ins, without warrants, at the homes of relatives and friends of antiwar radicals in 1972 and 1973. President Reagan pardoned him in 1981.