The Burglary Read online

  “In one fell swoop FBI surveillance of dissidents was exposed and the Bureau’s carefully nurtured mystique destroyed,” wrote Max Holland about the Media burglary in his 2012 book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat. “Far from being invincible, the FBI appeared merely petty, obsessed with monitoring what seemed to be, in many cases, lawful dissent.”

  Historian Richard Gid Powers, in his 2004 book Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI, described the burglary’s impact:

  Hoover’s power to conduct secret operations … depended on the absolute freedom he had won from any inquiry into the internal operations of the Bureau.…Except for a remarkably few breaches of security … Hoover had been able to pick and choose what the public would learn about the Bureau. He had never suffered the indignity of having an outside, unsympathetic investigator look into what he had been doing, what the Bureau had become, and what it looked like from the inside. And it had been that luxury of freedom that let him indulge himself with such abuses of power as his persecution of King, the…COINTELPROs, and his harassment of Bureau critics.

  On the night of March 8, 1971, that changed forever. A group calling itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania. The burglars were never caught.

  As two hundred FBI agents searched for the burglars throughout the country in 1971, most intensively in Philadelphia, even people in the large peace movement there, where all of the burglars were activists, could not imagine that any of their fellow activists had had the courage or audacity to burglarize an FBI office. Many people feared then that the FBI might be stifling dissent, but most people found it difficult to imagine that anyone would risk their freedom—risk sacrificing years away from their children and other loved ones—to break into an FBI office to get evidence of whether that was true. People wondered:

  Who would go to prison to save dissent?

  That question will now be answered. For more than forty years, the Media burglars have been silent about what they did on the night of March 8, 1971. Seven of the eight burglars have been found by this writer, the first journalist to anonymously receive and then write about the files two weeks after the burglary. In the more than forty years since they were among the most hunted people in the country as they eluded FBI agents during the intensive investigation ordered by Hoover, they have lived rather quiet lives as law-abiding, good citizens who moved from youth to middle age and, for some, now to their senior years. They kept the promise they made to one another as they met for the last time immediately before they released copies of the stolen files to the public—that they would take their secret, the Media burglary, to their graves.

  The seven burglars who have been found have agreed to break their silence so that the story of their act of resistance that uncovered the secret FBI can be told. Their inside account, as well as the FBI’s account of its search for the burglars—as told by agents in interviews and as drawn from the 33,698-page official record of the FBI’s investigation of the burglary obtained under the Freedom of Information Act—and the powerful impact of this historic act of resistance are all told here for the first time. It is a story about the destructive power of excessive government secrecy. It is a story about the potential power of nonviolent resistance, even when used against the most powerful law enforcement agency in the nation. It also is a story about courage and patriotism.

  2

  Choosing Burglary

  THE STORY OF the Media burglary begins with William Davidon. It was his idea. He recruited people to consider the merit and feasibility of the idea. And then he led the planning and execution of the burglary. He was also responsible for developing and carrying out the plan to distribute copies of the stolen files to journalists and members of Congress so the public would have access to them.

  All this from a person so unassuming that the act of protesting—let alone leading a group in planning and carrying out a burglary of an office of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency—seemed to be almost antithetical to his personality.

  How was it possible for Davidon, who hated burglary, to think of becoming a burglar? And how was it possible for seven other people to agree to participate in this radical action?

  The answer to those questions is found, in part, in the evolution of Davidon’s protest of the war and of the use of nuclear weapons. The answer also is found in the very unusual moral and political dynamics that played out in the United States the year before the burglary—a period of extreme actions by the government and by diverse segments of the public. The accumulated impact of those actions, some of them profoundly violent, upped the ante, even for people who normally would never have considered doing anything as extreme as burglarizing an FBI office.

  It was natural for Davidon to care strongly about protecting dissent. By 1970, dissent had been part of the essential fabric of his life for more than two decades. He had spoken out against the use and continued development of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. He thought he had a responsibility to speak out forcefully against the world’s most powerful armaments. He had opposed the war in Vietnam from the beginning on multiple grounds, but his deepest concern was that the United States might use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Throughout the war, the administrations of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon refused to remove the nuclear option from the table.

  In pursuit of his goals, Davidon moved during the 1960s from simple dissent to active protest to civil disobedience to nonviolent resistance. Many people moved through some or all of those phases in those years as their assumptions about the wisdom of their government’s decisions and actions were shaken, but few did so with the mix of qualities that marked Davidon’s activism—a combination of clear goals, the ability to solve problems, fortitude in the face of the peace movement’s repeated failure to stop the war, a deep and enduring commitment to nonviolence, a modest ego, and a fierce reliance on evidence and refusal to accept speculation or conspiracy theories. He had the capacity to convince not only himself but also other people to consider stepping outside their secure lives to risk their freedom when normal means of petitioning the government were ignored or, even worse—as he feared in late 1970—were being suppressed.

  As Davidon’s concerns about the use of nuclear warfare in Vietnam deepened, he studied the war and kept track of its daily developments. He traveled to Vietnam in April 1966 with five other American peace activists, including the Reverend A. J. Muste, a New York pacifist who had been a leading antiwar and civil rights activist since World War I. As planned, they met with people whose positions were little known in the United States—Vietnamese people who opposed any outside interference in the country, whether by the Soviet Union, China, or the United States. Many of them were serving prison terms by that time. Davidon remembers acquiring a sad and ironic insight about dissent while he was in Vietnam: the leaders of all of the countries involved in the conflict—South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the United States—had a profound dislike of dissent being expressed against the war by their own citizens, the people whose blood and money they were expending in the war. On this one matter, they were in agreement.

  The Americans had congenial visits with Buddhists, Catholics, and other Vietnamese people who opposed the war, but their trip had a complex ending. Police and students broke up a press conference they held in their Saigon hotel the day before they left the country. As Davidon and the other Americans commented on the mutual interest of Americans and the Vietnamese in ending the war, students in the audience shouted and threw eggs at them and police banged their fists on tables and then rushed the stage, shouting, “Either you are our friends or our enemies!” After the journalists left, the scene changed dramatically as the students and police approached the Americans and calmly apologized, telling them they had been ordered by the South Vietnamese military police to disrupt the conference.

  William Davidon (far left) with five other American pacifists, (left to right) B
radford Lyttle, Voluntown, CT; the Rev. A. J. Mustic, New York; Karl Meyer, Chicago; Charlotte Thurber, Greenwich, CT; and Barbara Deming Willflut, MA; Vietnam, 1966. They met with Buddhists, Catholics, and other Vietnamese who opposed the war; two weeks later they were expelled by South Vietnamese officials. (AP Photo)

  Like other reports on the press conference debacle, the New York Times story by R. W. Apple Jr. missed that part of the story. But the Times headline two days later accurately captured what happened the day after the press conference: “Vietnamese Seize Six U.S. Pacifists and Expel Them.” The group’s morning meeting with the American ambassador was canceled. Instead, they were grabbed by waiting Vietnamese police officers as they left their hotel, thrown into a patrol wagon, and driven to Tan Son Nhat Airport, where they were forced to wait inside the locked and sweltering patrol wagon for four hours.

  After Davidon returned from Vietnam in 1966, he was determined to work against the war as much as possible. He carefully organized his life so he could increase the amount of time he gave to the effort. He never missed a class or office hours. And he continued to share with his wife the work involved in raising two small daughters. Beyond those key obligations, he filled nearly all his other waking hours with antiwar activities.

  There were countless opportunities to be a peace activist in Philadelphia. The peace movement there was one of the largest—if not the largest—most active, and most diverse peace movements in the nation during the Vietnam War. In all, it included about fifty organizations. Active in several of the organizations, Davidon worked, beginning in 1968, primarily with the Resistance, a new organization that offered support to men who refused to be drafted into the military. Its members also counseled active-duty soldiers who had turned against the war and wanted to leave the military. The Resistance, wrote historian Paul Lyons in his history of the Philadelphia peace movement during that era, was “the most significant antiwar organization in the city.” Its members, he wrote, often pointed out “the contradiction between American ideals and American practice and demanded that those contradictions be resolved.” Davidon, he wrote, was an “inspirational leader,” one of the most effective in the organization.

  Often, after Davidon taught his last class of the day, he drove to a GI coffeehouse the Resistance operated near Fort Dix in nearby central New Jersey. Resistance members hung out there with GIs, talking with them about the war, conscientious objection, and life in general. Davidon recalls that these exchanges were one of the most gratifying aspects of his antiwar activism. In contrast to the widespread assumption then and now that there was a hostile relationship between the antiwar movement and the troops during the Vietnam War, members of the Philadelphia Resistance, like many antiwar activists elsewhere, regarded active-duty troops with respect, showed empathy for their plight, and offered moral and legal support to those who decided to resist military service. Davidon and his wife, Ann Morrissett, also aided troops by making their home on the Haverford campus available to service members who went AWOL and needed a place to stay while they considered their next steps: turn themselves in and face arrest and imprisonment or flee to Canada, Sweden, or France, three countries that welcomed many Americans who refused to serve in the military during the Vietnam War. Davidon and Morrissett did this as part of the vast national underground railroad that was organized to support soldiers who decided to become conscientious objectors after they entered the military.

  William Davidon being arrested at a peace demonstration, 1965 (Photo from Theodore Brinton Hetzel Collection, Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

  In addition to its serious efforts, the Resistance also had a sense of humor, something Davidon appreciated. This was evident one autumn day when Resistance members attended one of the biggest annual events enjoyed by the Philadelphia establishment, the Army-Navy football game. From seats high in the stadium, Resistance members raised a large banner: “Beat Army, Beat Navy, Resist the Draft.” Not all the fans were amused, but many were.

  The group tried to maintain a sense of humor and stay on the high moral ground, even when tensions were high, as they often were then in Philadelphia in regard to the war and racial issues. They were able to do so, for instance, when Mayor Frank Rizzo dropped by the induction center near the University of Pennsylvania campus and, for no apparent reason other than that he supported the war and did not like people who opposed it, punched Resistance leader Tony Avirgan in the face as Avirgan distributed leaflets about the draft.

  IN THE LATE 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War touched the lives of more and more Americans in profound ways. Nearly everyone had family members, neighbors, or friends who had been called—or expected to be called—to serve in the military and be sent to Vietnam ready to kill or be killed. Many Americans’ lives were shaped by the war in fundamental ways—those who died there, those who lost loved ones there, those who thought the United States must be victorious in Vietnam, those who refused to be drafted, and others who opposed the war, including people in military service who wanted to abandon their duty.

  A sense of urgency about the war permeated the society. The country felt electric. It was a time when everything seemed to intensify—in the war, in the peace movement, among those who supported the war, among those who opposed it, and in actions against people who opposed it. The war seemed to be on everybody’s mind. It was in new music. It was in daily conversations, sometimes even in conversations with strangers. In public places, while waiting in lines or flying on planes, it was not unusual for a stranger to turn to the person beside them and ask what they thought of the war. The war was part of daily discourse on campuses, in the streets of major cities, and in village squares. A person’s opinion about the war often was seen as a test of how to judge that person. The war became our national personal litmus test of one another.

  As the war continued relentlessly, by late 1969 Davidon was asking himself and others, as he had throughout the Vietnam War: What else can be done? He asked the question now with a deeper sense of urgency. After nearly a decade of failing to stop the war, people in the peace movement felt more hopeless than at any previous time. They searched for more effective nonviolent ways to make the case that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam. Davidon was generally an optimistic person, but even he found it difficult to remain so. He had to reach deeper now to retrieve his optimism.

  He felt driven to find hope and to help others find it—especially people who by late 1969 had a sense of futility about whether any form of protest could be effective. In the early days of the war it was easier to feel hopeful. It seemed reasonable then to think the government would listen seriously to diverse opinions about the war. Given widespread analysis that indicated many mistakes had driven both the start and the continuation of the war, it was hoped the war policy would be reevaluated. When this did not happen, year after year in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations, hope became more scarce. There was a growing sense that young Americans’ lives were being wasted both in Vietnam and on the streets of the country’s increasingly violent poor neighborhoods, where hope of a better life was so absent that serving in Vietnam seemed like the best option for many poor young men.

  Davidon realized futility could be disastrous. He was concerned about the people who were discouraged to the point of wondering if protest would ever be effective. He was also concerned about the small number of people who had turned to violent protest. Sometimes it felt as though the officials who were escalating the war and the few antiwar activists who had turned to violence as a strategy were engaged in a parallel group psychosis. He worried about how to keep hope alive—how to stop the spiral downward to hopelessness, to anger, and, for some, to rage. He pushed himself to find new ways to protest the war effectively and to keep hope alive. He wanted to find more aggressive ways to protest nonviolently. The methods of protest used by Quaker, academic, antidraft, and other antiwar networks no longer seemed to be enough at a time when the stakes were getting higher in both the war and
the peace movement.

  In his search for hope, Davidon found it where he had never expected—among Catholics. If he and the people who worked with him on the Media burglary had not become involved in 1970 with the Catholic peace movement, there would have been no burglary. People in that movement had invented the concept of burglary as a resistance method.

  As a boy growing up in Newark, Davidon had never known a Catholic well, and did not until he worked with the activists in the Catholic peace movement. He never would have predicted that some of his closest allies—even his teachers—in finding and creating new ways to oppose the war would be Catholics. His surprise at finding Catholics who actively opposed the war was understandable. The leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States—especially key leaders Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia—strongly supported the war. But at the Vatican in the 1960s, new ideas that opened the minds of Catholics on both religious and secular matters were propagated, thanks to a much-liked pope, John XXIII, and the international enclave of bishops, the Second Vatican Council, that he convened each year from 1962 through 1965. The transformative Catholic thinking that emerged from the council included condemnation of anti-Semitism and a mandate for Catholics to join in the search for world peace. In 1963, Pope John emphasized the mandate to work for peace by issuing an encyclical, Pacem in Terris, that called on Catholics to work actively with one another and with non-Catholics to create world peace. He advocated pacifism as an acceptable stance for Catholics, a concept relatively radical among American Catholics, for whom patriotism and religion were so intertwined that refusing to serve in the military was regarded as nearly heretical.