The Burglary (13 page)

From then on, he found himself thinking—almost constantly—about the fact that he and Bonnie were moving into “very deep waters of jeopardy that we had not faced in the draft boards.…We were putting our families in jeopardy. I was aware that this was a much more dangerous undertaking, in terms of our parenting responsibilities, than anything we had undertaken before.” No one else in the group, including Bonnie, seems to have focused as much as John did on the possible danger ahead. “We had faced danger and responsibility earlier, when I went south, but never as powerfully as we faced it in that last month before the action at Media.”

When he was gripped by worry in those days leading up to the burglary, he'd think again about the children and how much he longed to be a part of their daily lives as they grew up. Sometimes the thought of the future they might be about to sacrifice was almost too painful to contemplate. His fear had not been great when they raided a draft board. Then they had had a community they were with before and after the raid. Whether they failed or succeeded, they had that solidarity with one another. They met afterwards and talked with the large community of resisters about what they had done. It was not going to be that way if they burglarized the FBI office. They were going to try to be completely silent about what they had done. He feared that might mean having a “sense of nothingness after the Media break-in and its aftermath were over. No community would be there for us. I remember thinking that we would have a great deal to worry about afterward—about whether they were going to find us and, also, whether we would have any community of solidarity. I didn't think we would. We would be alone.” He found that a painful thing to contemplate. Smith felt the same concern. She realized that the aftermath of this burglary would be so much lonelier than working in Mississippi in 1964 was. There, even under the most dangerous conditions, you knew supporters would be waiting for you. By plan, that could not happen after Media.

Bonnie Raines had a chilling thought late the night after she visited the FBI office. She kept it to herself. That night, she understood deep in her bones for the first time what one of the other burglars had said the night she agreed to case inside. At the time, she had not fully absorbed the meaning
of the comment. Now she did: As of her visit to the office today, FBI agents had a specific person to whom they later would tie the burglary—her.

Despite now thinking she was indeed a marked woman, she recalls that her strongest feeling that night was excitement about the possibility that the break-in could be accomplished. Originally doubtful that an FBI office could be burglarized, now she thought the action “was almost inviting. I almost felt, ‘What is there to lose?' There was so little security. It was in this sleepy little town. We were going to do it the night of the boxing match. It just seemed there were a lot of things working in our favor.” Given all the casing that had been done, including her time in the office that day, “We felt we had cased so completely that there could not be any surprises,” she recalls thinking that night. “I was very up for it.”

She was wrong about no surprises. There would be a big one.

But the night after she visited the office, she couldn't help smiling to herself as she thought about the deception she had pulled off. She enjoyed the irony then and years later. Her Michigan cheerleader good looks and earth mother qualities had turned out to be useful to the group. She had been able to use her all-American girl-next-door looks, still intact at twenty-nine, to move the burglary forward. Though there still was much work and possible danger ahead, she felt satisfied with her role and grateful that her fellow burglars had had enough confidence in her to ask her to case the office.

EXACTLY ONE MONTH BEFORE
the day the burglary was scheduled to take place, an unprecedented public plea was made for an investigation of the FBI. How timely. The burglars were so busy, with their double schedules of day jobs and burglary preparation at night, that they were unaware that a prominent academic,
H. H. Wilson, a professor of political science at Princeton University, issued a call for such an investigation in the
Nation
magazine on February 8, 1971. It was titled “The FBI Today: The Case for Effective Control.” At that time, the
Nation
was the only publication where such a call would have been published. For years, it was nearly the only publication that published either reporting or analysis of the FBI.
It would later be learned that the
Nation
articles about the FBI led to investigations not only of Fred Cook, the person who wrote most of the articles, but also of those who wrote letters to the magazine about the articles, as well as the neighbors of those letter writers. When Cook got his FBI file in 1986, he learned that his book and the
Nation
series that was the basis of the book had set off multipronged bureau investigations of him and the magazine.
Hoover ordered the Internal Revenue Service to check Cook's sources of income. The bureau's Liaison Section proposed that agents should try to prove that
Cyrus Eaton, a Cleveland industrialist who had criticized the bureau, had “bought” the
Nation
. Evidence of this sort “could completely destroy
The Nation
as an allegedly independent, impartial publication.” Hoover approved the proposal: “We should try to find out who is behind it. Yes.” Cook's FBI file also contained documentation that “week after week, the Bureau's New York office sent the Seat of Government [FBI headquarters] a synopsis of what the
Nation
was running.”

Hoover did not like Wilson's article any more than he had liked Cook's earlier ones.

Venturing where no analyst had gone before, in his February 1971 article Professor Wilson called for an independent investigation of the FBI that would lead to oversight and controls over the bureau. “If these controls are to be implemented,” he wrote, “the public must be alert, informed and genuinely concerned. Instead, Mr. Hoover has cultivated over the last 46 years an uncritical, mindless adulation. The Director and the Bureau have become folk heroes, an atmosphere has been created wherein even to suggest that the Bureau is a legitimate subject for analysis and political discussion is enough to bring charges that one is subversive, un-American and probably godless.”

The FBI's “strong ideological bias,” Wilson wrote, “and lack of sophistication render it eminently unfit for the delicate task of conducting anti-subversion inquiries in a democracy.” A “concerned public must demand change. This is no partisan political issue, but one that ought to arouse the most dedicated, tough-minded conservatives as much as convinced liberals or radicals. At stake is the preservation of personal liberty in any present or future conflict with the bureaucratic state.

“It is of tremendous importance,” Wilson concluded, “that some independent organization takes the lead in stimulating a public discussion of the issues at stake.”

There was no groundswell of response to Professor Wilson's article. He could not have imagined that, as he wrote his call for an independent investigation of the FBI, a very independent organization, a small dedicated group of amateur burglars who called themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, was working feverishly on plans to find the evidence that would make his claims believable and his call compelling far beyond the small readership of the
Nation
. As the burglars sat in cars late at night on dark Media streets, they too thought “the public must be alert, informed and genuinely concerned” about the FBI.

Even before Professor Wilson's call for an investigation, Hoover's 1971 had started off badly. On January 3,
Jack Nelson of the
Los Angeles Times
reported that each year the government spent $30,000 to purchase a new limousine for Hoover, in contrast to the $5,000 spent annually to lease a limousine for the president. On January 17, Nelson reported the case of Jack Shaw, an agent in the bureau's New York office who had mildly criticized the bureau in a letter to a professor in a course in which he was enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Shaw's letter had been typed by someone in the typing pool at the FBI office in New York. Scraps of a copy of it were found during a wastebasket inspection and pieced together. Within hours, Hoover was informed about the letter. He expressed outrage at what Shaw had written and at his failure to report that his professor had criticized the bureau in class.
The director fired Shaw “with prejudice” and ordered him and the other fifteen FBI agents enrolled at John Jay to withdraw from their classes. A short time later, FBI clerical employees enrolled at American University were required to drop out of classes there when the director learned that one of their professors had criticized the action he had taken against Shaw.

On February 1, Senator
George McGovern spoke of the Shaw case on the floor of the U.S. Senate, calling it “an injustice that cries out for remedy.” A few days later, McGovern announced that he had received an anonymous letter, claimed to have been written by ten current FBI agents, stating that morale was at an all-time low at the bureau and asking for a congressional investigation of the bureau's “cult of personality.”

Hoover's response was swift and extreme, not to mention irrational.
He said the letter was written by the Soviet Union's KGB and that McGovern had been duped by Soviet agents. Associate Director Tolson asked each of the twenty top executives at bureau headquarters to write letters to McGovern attacking him for making the ten agents' letter public. In various indignant ways, each of them accused McGovern of using the anonymous letter to buoy his political career. One of the executives was criticized for writing a letter that was not sufficiently indignant.

AS THE DAY
the burglary was to take place grew close, there were logistical challenges
the burglars could not remove. First, residents of the building, all of whom used the same door and open interior stairwell the burglars would have to use, might come and go at any time during the evening. These spontaneous actions could not be avoided; they could only be endured, and the burglars could not be sure they could be endured securely. The burglars' greatest protection against this problem would be Forsyth breaking in so quickly the night of the burglary that any burglar, including him, would be seen in the hallway only fleetingly. That's why they cheered him on each night in the attic as he repeatedly picked the lock, continuing to reduce the time it would take to break in.

Another unsolvable challenge was huge: County courthouse guards stood twenty-four hours a day across the street from the FBI office at a guard station immediately inside the clear glass front door of the Delaware County Courthouse. The burglars carefully observed the movements of the courthouse guards for weeks. Finally, they reached a certain and unwelcome conclusion: It would be possible for the courthouse guard to see the burglars when they arrived and when they left. Not only was the front door of the FBI building visible to these officers, but at least one of the rooms in the FBI office, the corner room, also was visible from the courthouse guard's observation station.

They could do nothing to avoid being within the line of sight of the courthouse guard who would be on duty that night. There was no time when they could be certain they could rush in or out of the building when the guard would not be watching them. They realized they should expect him to be watching them, from just yards away—as they entered the building, as they left the building with overhead lights shining on them both inside and outside the door, as they loaded the getaway cars, and as they drove away.

The best the burglars could hope for was that the guard on duty the night of the burglary would look at them in a mindless, distracted way and would not think about whether it was odd that four people were walking out of this small apartment/office building late at night, each of them carrying suitcases so heavy they strained to carry them and lift them into the trunks of waiting cars. Surely average burglars would have refused to bet their success on whether a guard would be mindless as he watched them. Not these people. The certainty of having their crime observed by a trained government county guard did not prompt them to question moving ahead.

MEANWHILE
, the burglars' plans progressed. Then, just a few days before the burglary was to take place, they were confronted with what could have been a fatal threat to their plans. A person who had been part of the group from the beginning arrived at a regular working session one evening and
announced that he no longer would be part of the group. This was stunning information. He was a man of few words, and if the burglars' memories are accurate, he offered few, if any, words of explanation that night as he told them he was quitting and then left. Perhaps even more remarkable is that none of the burglars expressed their shock to him that evening. None of them remembers asking him why he was leaving. Nor do they remember asking him to agree not to reveal the group's secret plans. He had been with them since that first meeting in December. He knew every detail of what they were about to do. And now he was gone. Only two of them, the Raineses, saw him again.

As with the other threats the burglars faced—Davidon being named recently in an indictment in a sensational antiwar case; the likelihood of a courthouse guard watching them as they arrived and left the FBI building; the possibility that people who lived in the building could see them at any time that night in the hallway outside the FBI office—they seemed to absorb this news and convince themselves that his leaving the group was just another problem to endure. Though they realized that he now had the power to destroy the burglary—not to mention their lives—the burglars don't remember discussing his departure with one another after he left. That puzzles some of them now. By leaving, he ripped open that curtain they had intended to keep securely closed forever to protect them and their secrets. He now stood outside their curtain with full knowledge of what they were planning to do. They had no idea what he might do with that knowledge.