How 8 People Burglarized The FBI Without Getting Caught
It's weird to me that we've landed on “-gate” as the suffix of choice when naming a new scandal. I mean, Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to this nonsense. I know it's because of Watergate, which is widely considered to be one of the largest political scandals in US history, but I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that it wasn't – not by a long shot. And definitely not compared to what eight people uncovered when they burglarized an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 1971.
If you've never heard of COINTELPRO, don't worry; many people haven't. And I'm not going to go into great detail about it here, partly because it's some really depressing stuff to cover in a comedy article, but mostly because it's better to go read the actual documents right on the FBI's website. In summary, it was a years-long operation conducted by the FBI that saw the agency spying on, vilifying, oppressing, and sometimes straight-up assassinating US citizens who were being too dissident. They sent Martin Luther King Jr. a suicide letter, if that gives you any idea of what they were up to.
Anyway, this very wrong, very illegal program was brought to light by eight people calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Now, a problem with investigating the investigators, as you might suspect, is that they don't like being investigated. Which is why a more appropriate name for the group probably would have been the Citizens' Commission to Burglarize the FBI, because that's what was really going on here — their plan was to break into the FBI and thieve some documents, because you couldn't exactly expect the Bureau to comply with a request for documents on "all the illegal stuff you've been doing," Freedom of Information Act be damned.
They weren't going for the main headquarters, mind you. You see, at the time, the FBI had way more than the 56 field offices they have now. There were hundreds, and several of the smaller “resident agencies” weren't quite as secure as one would think an FBI office should be. Some were just a regular office in a regular office building where, as one former agent put it, “We didn't have the same type of security. You locked the door when you left; you came back in the morning, unlocked the door.”
The activists didn't know this initially, of course. Hell, they didn't even know where to find an FBI office at the time. There was no internet, and all you had were freaking phone books to try to look anything up … which, incidentally, is exactly what they did. Just thumbed through the goddamn Yellow Pages seeking an FBI office to break into, which they found listed on the second floor of an apartment building in Media, Pennsylvania.
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A phone book they probably stole from a pay phone.
They cased the place for some time before the actual break-in, always traveling in male/female pairs so they could pass themselves off as couples and not raise suspicion. One of the activists, Bonnie Raines, even posed as a college student who wanted to interview an agent about “opportunities for women in the FBI” as part of a school assignment, which got her inside the office itself where she could see, and make real-time notes about, the layout of everything. To be clear, the 29-year-old Raines conned her way into an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by giving them a false identity and then sketched details about the place she was going to break into while asking an actual agent a bunch of BS questions.
Meanwhile, one of the other members, Keith Forsyth, taught himself lock-picking by correspondence course. If you're not familiar, a correspondence course was like an online course is now, but being pre-internet, your instruction was provided by regular mail. I can't imagine anything so frustratingly slow, but this was the ‘70s, when I'm sure most people were still getting up and walking to their television to change the channel to something annoyingly-live and not-bingeable.
Of course, when they were going to break in was extremely important, and obviously they were going to do it at night when the office was closed. But this was an apartment building occupied by other people, including the building manager. Oh, and there was a well-lit, always-patrolled courthouse directly adjacent to where this was going down, so the committee members also had to get haircuts and buy new clothes so they would look like the other business people if they were seen leaving and entering the building.
Especially because the whole thing was in danger of falling apart at any moment. You see, I said there were eight burglars — but initially there were nine. Before the actual heist took place, one of the members got cold feet and bailed, and he knew everything. They pleaded with him to see the plan through, but he refused; yet they moved forward anyway, knowing he was capable of sending them all to prison at any moment, and desperately hoping that he actually wouldn't, without much in the way of assurances.
So, given these confounding factors, what they needed to figure out was: When would the absolute fewest people possibly be paying attention to what they were doing? Fortunately, right around the corner, there was, in fact, something that would be grabbing the attention of the entire planet: the Fight of the Century.
The group chose March 8, 1971, when Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali met in the ring for what is still regarded as one of the most popular sporting events in history. That evening, everybody was either tuned into the broadcast or wished they were — perhaps yelling loudly and drunkenly because they weren't, or maybe they were on the phone with their friend who had it on, trying to offer play-by-play or punch-by-punch or whatever. The point is, the committee counted on this giant, worldwide distraction and fortunately for them, it worked.
The night of the burglary did present a number of problems, not the least of which was the lock that Forsyth found when he arrived at the FBI office door: it was a tubular lock, not the pin tumbler type he had been practicing on. Fortunately, Raines's earlier recon paid off; she knew they could access the office from another door, but that one had a huge filing cabinet in front of it. So Forsyth went back, picked the lock and busted a separate deadbolt on that door, then spent five minutes moving the cabinet bit by bit, as quietly as possible, until he could squeeze through and unlock the original door.
After that, the rest of the crew filed in and stole around 1,000 documents from the completely unlocked filing cabinets. It really was crazy how little security these offices had — especially so, given what they were housing. Which … even if the FBI hadn't been expecting an activist-led burglary, weren't they the least bit concerned about the building's other residents? Evidently not; there weren’t even any Kevin McAllister-style booby traps to thwart the random snooper. And as I mentioned, these files revealed a massive, illegal, FBI operation against its own citizens, with detailed records about how they would smear reputations and just generally violate the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments with impunity.
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Not a single guard tarantula?
The burglars escaped with the files, read and copied them all, then sent them off to newspapers for publication. It was one of the key revelations of the illegal activities the government's intelligence agencies were up to, and helped establish the Church Committee in 1975 to combat such illegalities.
Oh, and the activists were never caught.
Quite embarrassingly, the FBI never figured out who did it despite devoting hundreds of agents to the task, and they eventually closed the case after the statute of limitations expired, five years later. But understandably, the group's members didn't come forward to claim responsibility right away, still fearing repercussions from defying a powerful government agency. Especially Bonnie Raines and her husband John, who were parents to young children at the time.
Some of them finally did own up in 2014, though, when both a book and a documentary were released that detailed their story, which both confuses and delights me. It's confusing because I have no idea why, after 40 years, they'd finally choose to come clean about this monstrous secret now. But at the same time, I'm absolutely tickled, because I got to write an article about it.
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