Authors: Betty Medsger
The FBI faced additional embarrassment in the Coplon cases. The historic convictions were overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In light of the court's explanation for the reversals, the defeat was considered not only significant but also needless.
In the unanimous opinion written by Judge
Learned Hand, the court declared that Coplon's “guilt was plain.” But the convictions must be overturned, the judges agreed, because of numerous illegal acts by the FBI in the course of the investigation that led to the charges.
The illegalities included how the FBI made the arrests, lies by an FBI agent under oath during one of the Coplon trials, and illegal wiretapping of various phones, including ones on which the bureau listened to the defendant's conversations with her attorney.
Despite Hoover's humiliation over losing this important case,
after the Coplon trial he provided more confirmation that he cared more about maintaining the secrecy of his files than about the outcome of prosecutions based on faulty FBI investigations. When the convictions were overturned, he successfully urged successive attorneys general not to retry the cases because to do so might require making public more illegal activity by the FBI. Though he didn't want Coplon to be tried again, he also did not want the failed charges against her to be dropped. For nearly twenty years after Coplon's conviction was overturned in December 1950, Hoover succeeded in keeping the charges against her from being dropped. With the charges hanging over her, her rights and movements were restricted. She was not allowed to vote, to drive, or to leave the New York City area, even to cross the Hudson River to view the unveiling of her father's tombstone.
Finally, in an unusual family symmetry, Ramsey Clark, attorney general under President Johnson and son of the attorney general at the time of the Coplon trials, dismissed the charges against her. Hoover protested strongly but unsuccessfully against the attorney general he later dismissively called a “jellyfish” and described as the worst of all the attorneys general he had worked with.
After the Coplon trial failures, Hoover focused on creating a filing system he thought would permanently block future exposure of FBI files. It was this post-Coplon, super-secure system that he thought was totally sealed that was cracked open by the Media burglars.
From the time he became director in 1924 until 1949, Hoover's files had remained secret.
But in light of the judicially forced exposure during the Coplon trial, he redesigned the bureau's filing system with more complex, deeper layers of secrecy. He ordered the chief agent in all field offices to keep “highly confidential” and “most secretive” sources and files isolated from general case files so they would not be “vulnerable to court-ordered discovery motions, congressional subpoenas, or requests from the Justice Department.” He did this in part by ordering agent reports to be divided into two categoriesâinvestigative and administrative. Any part of a sensitive file that could cause embarrassment if it became public was to be isolated from the file and placed in a file labeled “administrative.” Most, if not all, of the information he instructed to be placed in administrative files was in fact not administrative matter. Rather, these files included incriminating personal information regarding government witnesses; privileged medical records; sealed court documents; illegally obtained bank, telephone, and credit company records; and records of any form of technical surveillanceâmail openings, break-ins, wiretaps, microphone installations, and the theft and deciphering of codes and information gathered from taps, break-ins, and code deciphering. In other words, the bureau would continue to gather information illegally but would file it in ways that would make it inaccessible to authorities.
The most sensitive files would be kept in special files in field offices, in the special file room in the director's office, and in a special file he designated the “blackmail file” and kept in what was known as the FBI's print shop in the basement of FBI headquarters. The most sensitive were to be kept in the director's “Official/Confidential and Personal files.” Later, he continued to develop even deeper layers of secrecy in his file system, including one he labeled the “Do Not File” files.
Under Hoover's new and improved post-Coplon secrecy plan, sensitive materials were never to be seen by anyone outside the bureauânot even by Department of Justice attorneys, the people who prosecuted crimes based on FBI investigations. Hoover thought his new post-Coplon trial file system was so tightly sealed that it guaranteed the FBI's files would be beyond the reach of members of Congress, congressional committees, other federal
agencies, and judges. He also intended for the files to be kept secret from his bosses, the attorney general, and the president, except as he chose to reveal secrets to them to serve his purposes.
During the very rare times prior to 1971 when Congress examined any aspect of intelligence operations, Hoover succeeded, with relative ease, in having the FBI excluded from examination.
When the
National Lawyers Guild issued a rare call for an investigation of the bureau after the revelations at Coplon's trial and tried to convince the Truman administration to pursue it, the director smeared the organization and destroyed its effort. Though Truman made it known inside the White House that he disapproved of some of Hoover's tactics, he refused to investigate how the FBI operated.
The
Cold War was at a blazing point. People were afraid. Soon they forgot about the criticisms made against the FBI during Coplon's trials. Hoover did not forget. Protected by his sealed files and people's fears and forgetfulness, he continued his public roles as head of the country's most powerful law enforcement agency and leading fiery narrator of tales of the communist perils that faced Americans, as well as his private role as builder of secret files on organizations and on the personal and political lives of people he considered subversive.
It is believed that after Hoover locked his files in deeper secrecy in 1950, no journalist or official questioned him about FBI files, let alone sought access to them. Hoover's effort to maintain total secrecy succeeded. It went unchallenged.
Until the night of March 8, 1971.
FBI FILES
âwhat Hoover thought he had assured would be forever beyond the reach of even the highest officialsâwere now in the hands of unknown burglars. Despite his elaborately deceptive labeling and other methods of maintaining secrecy, now a simple burglary couldâif agents did not immediately find and arrest these burglars and seize and secure the documentsâviolate his secrecy in far more profound ways than he ever thought possible. Since creating the new filing procedures in 1950, he had put several large secret programs in place, programs he thought were necessary in order for the bureau to fulfill its mission. But he knew that if they ever became known, many people would criticize him.
How could it be that his elaborate secrecy system was protected from intrusions by federal judges, members of Congress and congressional committees, attorneys general, and even presidents, but it was not protected from
intrusions by, of all people, burglars? It had never occurred to the director that some people cared so much about the Constitution and the right to dissent it guaranteed that they would be willing to risk their freedom in order to get access to his secret files to determine if he and the FBI were destroying that right. Since the
Cold War, he had expected Americans to behave like lambs. The possibility that some Americans could be lions and break into his secret den was unimaginable.
Hoover realized that if the files stolen at Media became public, they were likely to have a much greater impact than the few that had become public at the time of the Coplon trial. His enemiesâdespite enjoying decades of nearly uninterrupted public adulation, he realized recently that he had acquired a few enemiesâwould be able to attack him with more than the rumors and speculation he had found easy to deny. If certain FBI files became public, people would be armed with official facts and policies rather than speculation.
The director wasted little time. He moved immediately to make that impossible. He and his top aides developed a two-pronged plan. First, he ordered an intensive investigation. He called it MEDBURG and gave it “major special” status. His daily memos to the key investigators and his top staff regarding MEDBURG usually were marked “urgent,” “top priority,” or “expedite.” Nearly two hundred agents were transferred to Philadelphia to work on the case. Other agents at FBI offices throughout the Northeast and Midwest worked on it. Tips came in from throughout the country, from places as diverse as Los Angeles and a farm in North Carolina.
Second, bracing for what he then considered the remote possibility that the burglars might not be found quickly and might attempt to distribute the stolen files to journalists, he asked his top aides to consult with Department of Justice officials about the possibility of drafting a law he hoped the Nixon administration would support and Congress would pass quicklyâa law similar to Great Britain's powerful Official Secrets Act. Such a bill would have made it a federal crime for anyone outside the bureau, including journalists, to possess or publish FBI documents.
Hoover wanted the burglars arrested and the documents seized and secured immediately. Speed was essential to achieving his chief goal: preventing the documents from becoming public. Operating under that sense of urgency, officials in FBI offices throughout the country were told to notify Philadelphia immediately by phone when they were ready to send photos of potential suspects “so arrangements can be made for transmittal by airplane.”
For nearly a decade, FBI agents and informers had photographed thousands of people at peace marches and demonstrations throughout the country. Beginning immediately after the burglary, agents scoured those surveillance photos. Anyone who had been photographed at an antiwar rally instantly became a potential suspect in the Media burglary. The files also included photos that had been taken surreptitiously by the bureau at trials of antiwar activists.
Agents were especially interested in photos taken in Rochester, New York, during the
Flower City Conspiracy trial, the trial of the people who were arrested in September 1970 as they broke into a suite of federal offices in Rochester that included an FBI office. It was at that trial, for the only previous break-in at an FBI office, that Davidon started to think it might be possible to do so successfully.
By late afternoon the day after the Media burglary, the agents working the case had touched many bases in and near Media. A late report they filed that day stated, “Interviews have been conducted with local police, Delaware County Courthouse Police station across from the resident agency, residents in apartments above the resident agency space, custodial personnel, and neighbors. All interviews unproductive to date. Space being processed for fingerprints and crime scene in and around resident agency space being conducted.”
It had been a long day. Then, at about 5:30, an agent in the Philadelphia office was surprised by a phone call from Bill Wingell, the
Reuters reporter John Raines had called early that morning. Wingell wanted to know if it was true that the Media office had been burglarized the previous evening. He was curious. Needless to say, so was the FBI agent who took his call. Until that moment, FBI officials had no reason to think anyoneâbesides the unknown burglars and the FBIâknew about the burglary. The agent confirmed that the office had been burglarized. Wingell told him about the early-morning anonymous caller who had dictated a statement about why a group had burglarized the office.
Agents were more than eager to learn everything Wingell knew. He explained the somewhat unusual circumstance that led to his not calling them earlier. After taking the caller's dictated message, he said, he had called Reuters' U.S. headquarters in New York and told an editor that he had a potentially important news story. Not the expansive news agency that it is now, at that time Reuters did not report a wide range of U.S. news. That probably was why the editor told Wingell he was not interested in a story about a burglary in a small FBI office in a small town in Pennsylvania. Later that afternoon, Wingell realized he had not heard or read any local
news about the burglary. He thought that was strange. While the British news agency might not be interested in an FBI office being burglarized, he thought, surely local news organizations would. He did not realize he was the only reporter who had been notified about the burglary.
The agent pressed Wingell for more details about his morning caller. Wingell said he had never heard the caller's voice before. He described him as a “male without any noticeable accent.” The agent asked Wingell to provide the FBI with his typed notes of the statement the caller had dictated. He also asked Wingell to provide the bureau with his fingerprints. Wingell provided the statement, but he later balked at providing fingerprints, saying his refusal was a matter of principle. The FBI report indicates that Wingell promised to give them any future messages he might receive from the anonymous burglars.
That call by John Raines to Wingell, the burglars had hoped, would inform the public that the burglary had taken place. But the effort had failed. The burglars probably would have achieved their goal if the statement had been read to a local news organization. Instead, by calling an international news agency whose editors apparently didn't understand the significance of J. Edgar Hoover's files being stolen, minimal coverage of the burglary took place during the first two weeks after the burglary. Instead of breaking the story about the burglary, as the burglars had hoped, Wingell became a suspect in the case. Immediately after talking with him, agents searched bureau files. Red flags went up when they discovered that for nearly a decade he had photographed and written about Quaker organizations and other antiwar organizations in the Philadelphia area. They regarded with suspicion the fact that Wingell had not called them soon after he had been told the office was burglarized. Why did he wait until late afternoon? In a memo to the director after Wingell's call, an agent in the Philadelphia office wrote, “Wingell's long delay in contacting Philadelphia office appears unusual.” They were skeptical that a journalist would wait several hours to confirm an anonymous caller's sensational claim that an FBI office had been burglarized. Eventually, they concluded he probably had no other role than the one he described, and they dropped him as a suspect.