THE BURGLARY
The Discovery of J Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI
Betty Medsger
Alfred A Knopf; 596 pages; $29.95
On a March evening in 1971, eight antiwar protesters burglarised a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Media, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, with astonishing ease. A few weeks of elementary surveillance had shown them the vulnerability of the target: there were no cameras to elude, no alarms to disconnect. Because the building contained residential apartments, the group chose the night of the first Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali heavyweight championship fight, an ideal distraction. It turned out that the Pennsylvania office, like so many others across the country, had almost no physical protection. Security was largely symbolic, resting on the bureau's carefully buffed reputation for efficiency in tracking down America's "most wanted" criminals. Put simply, no one messed with J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
That fantasy ended with the break-in. Calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, the burglars not only stole every file in the office, they also circulated the worst of them to journalists across the country. The reporter Betty Medsger received a batch in her mailbox at The Washington Post. Though nothing she read even remotely compromised national security, there was plenty of material guaranteed to embarrass the FBI. At The Post, the executive editor Ben Bradlee insisted the information be disclosed as a matter of journalistic responsibility. A few days later, the piece ("Stolen documents describe FBI surveillance activities") appeared under Ms Medsger's byline on Page 1.
But public interest soon faded. The headlines grew smaller - partly because the burglars were never caught, and partly because the story was pushed aside by larger ones. While the impact of the break-in is widely recognised by scholars today, the vanishing act of the participants made the full story impossible to tell. Who were they? How did they so easily disappear?
At 596 pages, The Burglary answers these questions in meticulous detail. One of Ms Medsger's early reporting jobs had been in Philadelphia. Returning there several years ago, she dined with two old acquaintances who told her, without prompting, of their role in the burglary. With their aid, Ms Medsger found and interviewed all but one of the other burglars. There was no legal danger; the statute of limitations on their crimes had run out decades before.
The group, ranging in age from 20 to 44 at the time of the break-in, had included three women and five men, four of them parents of small children. Two were professors, two more worked in social services, and one was a graduate student. The others were recent college dropouts. All had deep roots in the anti-Vietnam War movement. The plan they concocted was loosely modelled on the draft board raids of the radical Catholic peace movement led by Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, though the group itself consisted of four Jews, three Protestants and only one Catholic. By burglarising an FBI office, they hoped to find evidence of their worst fears: "That the government, through the FBI, was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent."
The stolen material included the secret case histories of thousands of Americans. Much of it was malicious gossip about things like sexual deviance and race mixing, two of Hoover's favourite subjects.
There was more. As Ms Medsger shows, the most important stolen document was a routine routing slip containing the word "Cointelpro". The term meant nothing to the burglars. Cointelpro was among the FBI's most carefully guarded secrets, a huge programme of dirty tricks and illegal activities designed to "expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralise" groups deemed subversive by the director. It would take several years for other journalists to piece together the scope of Cointelpro, whose targets ranged from the Ku Klux Klan to the Black Panther Party.
Enraged by the burglary, Hoover ordered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, with 200 agents descending on the Philadelphia area. Ms Medsger's account of what followed superbly reinforces the point that the bureau hadn't the faintest idea of how to penetrate a culture vastly different from its own. The burglars went about their lives, hiding in plain sight. And some were contacted by the FBI before being crossed off as suspects.
These personal stories, impeccably researched and elegantly presented in The Burglary, are the best parts of an engaging but overstuffed book. Ms Medsger spends hundreds of pages drawing a familiar and relentlessly hostile portrait of the FBI (though it's still fun to recall Hoover's ban against hiring agents with "pear-shaped heads" and his puzzled response to a list of names that included a much-heralded French Nobel Prize winner: "Find out who Sartre is," he demanded). Ms Medsger's frequent hyperbole - describing the burglary, for example, as "perhaps the most powerful single act of nonviolent resistance in American history" - is also unsettling. (Move over, Martin Luther King Jr.) And her concluding remarks, in which Edward Snowden imitates the Pennsylvania burglars by blowing the lid off the National Security Agency's mass surveillance programme, may strike some as imprecise.
The problem is that, unlike Mr Snowden, these burglars committed a serious felony on the suspicion that a government bureau was engaging in nefarious activities; they had no evidence in hand. Where Mr Snowden and the Pennsylvania burglars do converge, however, is in their decision to evade capture. Throughout the book, the burglars are portrayed as devoted followers of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. But one of the tenets of such behaviour is to take responsibility for the act. I don't recall Thoreau adding: "Catch me if you can."
©2014 The New York Times News Service
