Documentary filmmaker Johanna Hamilton
uncovers one of the greatest unsolved mysteries
in the history of the FBI.
She reveals that before Edward Snowden,
before the Pentagon Papers,
there was Media, Pennsylvania.
They risked everything.
In 1971, unknown activists decided to go beyond protesting.
Break into an FBI office,
remove files and mail them to newspapers.
I knew that we would find stuff in that office.
Documents expose a massive secret surveillance operation
that encompassed everything
from infiltrating women's liberation meetings
to spying on the Boy Scouts.
The fortress was under siege.
For more than 40 years,
the criminals remained at large...
until now.
1971, now, only on Independent Lens.
It's just, like, I don't know how to describe it
other than when you recall something
that was very intense for you.
You remember being 20 or 21 years old.
You remember being anxious.
You remember being angry.
You remember being frustrated.
You remember all the feelings
that went along with that-- with that time.
Being responsible for the consequences of your actions
was a big part of growing up.
You know, you have to decide what you think is right,
and that's what you're gonna do.
When I realized that so many things were so wrong,
there was no decision to be made.
You know, it was just-- you have to do something.
In other news, the FBI is reported preparing to shut down
some of the 500 small agencies it maintains around the country
because of security reasons.
Last month, more than 1,000 documents were stolen
from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.
They call themselves the Citizens Commission
to Investigate the FBI.
They went down this corridor, past the local draft board,
and somehow got through this door into the FBI office
and stole all the files, documents,
and correspondence there.
Recent events have given more indication
of the extent of government snooping on civilians.
Stolen FBI records which have made public include a letter...
Remember that we've got to go two by two.
The drummers and the caskets will lead.
But before anybody does anything else,
we should observe five minutes
in which we will simply be silent
with our own thoughts, with our prayers,
with our visions of the future.
When protests against the war in Vietnam were really taking off,
we moved from New York to Philadelphia.
Philadelphia was full of young families just like ourselves
who were very active politically.
And we found a community of war protest
and draft resistance.
We took our children to protests and rallies,
and people were arrested.
Well, let's talk about the year 1968.
I don't think our country has ever gotten over 1968.
'68 began with the Tet Offensive,
then My Lai was in March.
In April, oh, my God, Martin was gone.
And then Bobby got killed.
You could see things are very rapidly unwinding
inside of America.
We needed to find new ways of exposing that war
and opposing that war.
I was ready to make a transition
from nonviolent protest
to nonviolent disruption.
John and I began to learn about
people who were going into draft boards
and removing draft files and destroying them.
And at that time, there was only a paper system,
so if you destroyed the paper,
you disrupted the system in a major kind of way.
So we really became a central part
of that resistance movement in Philadelphia.
People would stay for the dinner,
and they'd play with the kids and read them bedtime stories
and then we'd go out and go casing at the draft board.
It was very empowering to know that ordinary people
could actually be smarter than the police and take action.
In the spring of 1970,
I'm thinking about the war a lot,
and I end up going to a meeting,
and the whole idea there was to sort of explore
the philosophical and ethical aspects
of nonviolent civil disobedience-type actions
like the ones that the Berrigans had taken in Catonsville.
By the end of it,
I knew that this was something I wanted to do.
There was an organization called the Philadelphia Resistance,
and I participated in demonstrations
in front of draft boards, but really,
I was much more invested in this idea
of breaking into draft boards and removing files.
So my first action was in Philadelphia,
I think in May of 1970,
and then there were a series of other actions after that.
We wanted to do as much damage to, you know,
what we thought of at the time as the war machine.
We wanted to do as much damage to it as we could
before we got caught.
You know I was reading all of these scholarly books
about the history of Vietnam and so on,
and there weren't that many, actually.
There was only a few.
I really didn't know what to think at first,
because the factual story about the history of our involvement
was just appalling, and it was completely contrary
to everything that everybody else was telling me.
I was like, "The whole society
has been lying to me up until now?"
I was angry that our country would do something like that.
I was angry that they would lie about it.
I was really angry they would try to send me over there.
I heard about the Jackson State killings
while we were, you know, in the planning stages
of a demonstration.
There was a face-off between the police and a bunch of students,
and the police alleged that somebody shot at them
from the window of the dormitory,
and two students were killed.
Kent State was big news everywhere,
but you didn't hear people talking about Jackson State
nearly as much.
I remember being in car, and they had the news on,
and they played a tape that a reporter on the scene
had made at Jackson State.
The gunfire sounded like machine-gunfire,
and it just went on and on and on and on and on.
And I, you know, I just-- I said,
"I have to do something about these bastards."
I was done talking at that point.
I mean, I'm, like, I really was not interested
in the conversational part of it anymore.
I was, like, time to be confrontational.
We're here because we think American lives
and American values as well as the lives
of other human beings are at stake in Vietnam.
I was very much opposed to the war in Vietnam,
as I was to preparations for war of any sort.
I've seen the cars go by here with the hate-filled faces of--
You blame people for hating this?
There will be people listening to program
with hate in their hearts.
I don't blame them.
And what I'm calling on the American people is to have
some compassion, some awareness of the problems
of human beings in this world.
We have the compassion and the awareness.
That's why we are in Vietnam
fighting for those people's freedoms.
Have some real awareness of U.S. traditions.
I remember meeting Bill Davidon,
who was at that time was a professor of physics
at Haverford College.
He was very involved in the anti-war movement.
Unfortunately, the Justice Department has been secretive.
It has used a whole range of devious means.
We who have tried...
Bill was a guy who was in your face.
He was a well-known activist.
He'd been in many demonstrations.
He was there sometimes with one of his little girls
on his back even.
I think Bill was a kind of guy that--
he was going to do what he was going to do.
The idea of not running away from the action,
don't just do it but stand up for doing it,
I liked that aspect of it.
The violence among the anti-war movement itself was increasing.
This was of great concern to Bill Davidon.
People were getting so frustrated,
and he was more and more concerned about people
abandoning nonviolence.
But at the same time, people in the anti-war movement
kept telling Bill they feared there were FBI informers
in their midst.
There were people who you could tell
were clearly agent provocateurs in some of the demonstrations.
You know, you would see a guy with a crew cut, wing tips,
and a tie-dyed T-shirt on saying, "Kill the pigs,"
and you are like...
"I think you need to go back to acting school, dude,
because you're not pulling it off."
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon
the American people in general
and the black people in particular...
There were the groups the FBI investigated.
There were groups that were intent on tearing down
the government and causing disruption of the government.
The Weathermen were a violent element of this.
These people robbed banks.
They blew up university facilities
that dealt with the Defense Department.
So we had informants in there.
We also did some of these things against the Black Panther Party,
which wasn't just doing something for civil rights,
but they committed acts of violence.
Now it wouldn't be done, but in those days,
there really was no prohibition against it.
So if you're not doing anything wrong,
you have nothing to worry about.
It was simply trying to wreck the groups
that were trying to wreck the country.
We knew very, very definitely
that that kind of FBI surveillance
was going to come down on-- on a draft resistance movement.
It was clear that that was happening.
There were cameras everywhere.
Everywhere you went, there was somebody taking your picture.
And I saw how fear
within the resistance community
can break the spirit of that community.
That is, what happens when you begin to think,
"Maybe she's a double agent"?
That kind of thing, it shrinks the discourse.
It shrinks the possibility of resistance.
It makes you more afraid and more lonely.
Bill felt if the FBI was suppressing dissent,
it was as important to expose that
as it was to end the war.
But Bill knew hard evidence would be needed
to convince the public that the FBI was suppressing dissent.
So he tried to focus on what could be done.
The idea came to him from a trial that he attended.
There was a group in Rochester, New York,
called the Flower City Conspiracy.
They had broken into an FBI office,
and they were arrested.
In a courtroom super-charged with emotion,
Judge Harold Burke handed down jail sentences
for all eight of the defendants.
The terms ranged from 12...
Suddenly, he realized, "They actually broke in
"to an FBI office, and they didn't succeed,
but what if you could succeed?"
Bill immediately concluded
that this has to be approached differently.
He knew that for this to work,
it had to be totally secret.
So that meant that you had to work with people
who would be willing to come in and close the curtains.
Bill asked to meet with John and me
to talk about an idea that he had:
break into an FBI office, remove files,
and mail them to newspapers to try to bring to light
activities that had been going on in secret.
My first thought was, it would be impossible to do it.
And an act of that sort would be a felony,
and the legal jeopardy was so very, very different.
I was like, "Whoa, the FBI.
Okay."
I presumed Bill knew about my mechanical skills
when he invited me.
And if certain other people had asked me,
I would have run the other way as fast as I could go,
but I trusted Bill.
If Bill thinks it could be done, it could probably be done.
I don't believe I was ever asked to participate in an action
that I said no, so it wasn't a big thing.
But I was 20, 21 years old.
I was immortal.
I didn't even give any thought to what prison
was going to be like.
We began to meet, nine of us at first.
It would end up only eight.
Bill was clearly the leader.
And we knew that if we were going to undertake this break-in
into the FBI, we had to run a very tight ship.
If you asked me what my job was, part of my job was comic relief.
People like me and Keith, we were younger,
much younger than the rest of them.
And we kind of thought Bill was a little uptight.
We met at John and Bonnie's house.
You know, coming in, it was like,
"Whoa, there's little kids in this house."
That was, like, kind of a shocker.
I remember sizing up the people,
and there were a couple of people that I thought were
maybe not as solid as they should be.
If you are nervous in a meeting talking about it,
you're really going to be nervous
when you are inside the FBI office
in the middle of the night.
I felt two things at the same time.
I felt a little bit like I was the den mother for the group.
They were staying at our house,
and I was fixing meatballs and spaghetti.
But it was expected that I was going to play that role
almost exclusively, and I was not real happy
about being a little bit marginalized
in that kind of way.
We knew this was a very serious action,
and we knew if we got caught
we were gonna probably face very serious prison time.
Well, we looked at the FBI office downtown in Philadelphia.
That was impossible; that was in a federal building,
and a federal building was active 24 hours a day.
But back then, there were smaller FBI offices
kind of scattered different places.
So we looked up in the phone book "FBI,"
and sure enough, under "Media,"
there was an FBI office.
It was inside the second floor of an apartment house.
Media was a suburb of Philadelphia.
The FBI has field offices and resident agencies.
Resident agencies, at least in those days,
were smaller, generally maybe only 20 agents at most,
sometimes as few as 4 or 5 agents.
They were not operated around the clock.
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.
I wanted to see the layout myself.
I didn't want to, you know,
rely on anybody else's opinion about it.
And when I checked it out, there were certainly no alarms
on the street door of the building.
The office door was a regular old door
with a regular old pin tumbler lock.
I knew that we would find stuff in that office
that indicated that they were doing things
that were not only immoral but probably illegal.
And I'm like, "Okay, we might be able to actually do this."
He's got a bomb in that package.
Where is he?
Next aisle over.
Brice, FBI! Put yours hands up!
The F.B.I. television series
was at its peak of popularity.
It had been on since the early '60s.
That's sort of indicative of the popularity of the FBI.
Try it.
Well, I think it's interesting if you look at Hoover.
Hoover was appointed director in 1924.
He's 29 years old.
Clearly he was a brilliant bureaucrat.
That's part of the reason for his success.
He understood power,
and so he was willing to act as a servant,
but wasn't a loyal servant of presidents,
who gave him broad latitude.
It's almost unprecedented in the history of the western world
that one person would have been in charge of such an important,
potentially influential
and abusive agency for such a long time.
The America we live in today must awaken to the danger.
A tidal wave of lawless tyranny is now surging forth
from the criminal and subversive underworlds.
J. Edgar Hoover had a very particular conception
of the United States.
He was very suspicious of dissent
against the Vietnam War.
He was suspicious of people who wore beards or had long hair.
He couldn't imagine that it was legitimate
for people he would have regarded as hippies
to influence policy, war policy,
foreign policy by demonstrating in the streets.
The politicians in Washington
were almost uniformly afraid of the FBI.
The FBI was not under the control
of any government agency.
Even the presidents of the United States
were afraid of the FBI.
And when you begin to confront a system of power
that uses its power in unjust ways,
that kind of violence must be seen,
confronted, and resisted.
This is something I learned, by the way, in 1961,
when I flew to St. Louis and joined with three other people
on the second Freedom Ride.
The first Freedom Ride was terribly beaten up
in Anniston, Alabama.
You have those pictures of the flames
and the bus and so on.
We got to Little Rock,
and there was a mob outside the bus station.
That was not going to be the only time that my kind
down south wanted to kill me.
I was learning things I was never taught before.
I was learning what power looks like and acts like
when you are on the other side of power
rather than the inside of power.
Without that education, I don't think I would have ever
gotten to Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971.
It progressed pretty rapidly in a few months.
I took a correspondence course on locksmithing,
bought some spring steel and a grinding wheel,
made some tools, and started practicing.
It's not hard to do.
It's just a manual skill like anything else.
It's a hell of a lot easier than playing the guitar.
We had a perfectly calibrated plan and a schedule,
so we had time frames and maps and drawings of the area.
We tried to think of a name for ourselves,
and finally we thought of the Citizens Commission
to Investigate the FBI.
At that time, I was driving a cab part-time,
so my hours were really flexible.
So we did a lot of casing.
We would usually case in man-woman pairs.
That way, in case the cops thought the vehicle
was suspicious or whatever,
we could pretend that we were a couple.
You can't imagine anything more boring than casing.
But I had a terrible crush on Bonnie,
so that made it much more interesting
than if I'd been in the van with Keith.
We had to find out if there were electronic alarms.
In other words, we had to get inside.
I was 29 at the time,
but I was told all the time
that I still looked like a kid.
And so I was to become a Swarthmore student
and make an appointment to interview
the head of the office about opportunities for women
in the FBI.
So you said it was Brenda?
- Brenda, yes. - Brenda, pleasure to meet you.
This is Tom Lewis.
- Hi, how are you? I'm Brenda. - Hi.
Hi, Tom Lewis, nice to meet you, Brenda.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me.
I'm making a lot of small-talk at that point
trying to get him to relax, and actually,
I think he felt a little flattered.
And he gave me about a half an hour of time,
and he explained that opportunities
were opening up for women in the FBI.
I had to take notes with these glasses on
that were really only for distance,
so I couldn't really see what I was writing very well
in my notebook.
Do you mind if I have a copy of the application?
He went to the cabinet,
and I watched to see, you know,
what the interior of the cabinet was like.
It was full of file folders,
and those were the things that we were gonna be taking out.
It was one of those steel cabinets,
where you just flipped handle, and the door pops open.
They didn't have locks.
I think this is what you are looking for, actually.
Great. Thank you so much. This is perfect.
No alarms, nothing over the doors.
The front door of the building was just a small lobby
that was always open.
So I think at that point, we were really on track
to move ahead and do it.
Contracts were signed today for a heavyweight championship fight
between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier,
a match at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 8th.
We had to choose a night.
It was clear that there was a big night coming up
on March 8th.
It was the biggest fight night of the year, of the decade.
If Joe Frazier whoops me,
I'm getting on my hands and my knees.
And crawl across the ring.
I'll crawl across the ring, look up to you and say,
"You are the champion."
This was an incredibly big event.
Madison Square Garden was sold-out
as soon as the tickets went on sale.
All over the world, the rights were bought to show it.
I bet you they are gonna be watching that fight,
not listening for us, what we're doing downstairs
in that FBI office.
I really just thought of myself as, you know,
I'm the foot soldier; I'm here to get these guys in.
And one of the particular concerns
was that the county courthouse was right across the street
and was very well-lit
and the whole street area was very well-lit.
There was a guard that was on duty
at all times in the courthouse.
And they would have a clear view of the building
that the FBI office was in,
so blending in was important in that environment.
So those of us who needed them got haircuts.
Bill directed me to a very nice thrift shop in Bryn Mawr,
where I got a Brooks Brothers sport coat for $5.
Nobody in the group talked to anyone
outside of the group about this.
So there was no--
it seemed to me there was no possibility of a leak,
until the ninth person
in the group dropped out.
Well, the ninth person knew who we were,
knew our names,
knew how we put together the action.
He had information that if he used,
testified in court, it would put us in prison.
And I think he just got scared.
The truth was that Bonnie was much more enthusiastic
for the action than was I, probably from the beginning,
but certainly in the last week before the action,
I was getting some very strong feelings
about what would happen
if we had to spend years in prison.
My worry was that we, the mom and dad,
would put those three kids
in a terrible situation.
I remember having a discussion with John
late at night after the children were in bed.
We felt that just because we were parents
didn't mean that we could remove ourselves
from responsibility,
that that would have been kind of a cop-out.
And we decided that we weren't going to be content
when we continued to see things that really disturbed us.
Obviously, we had to think about the worst-case scenario,
which would be that we would be arrested,
tried, convicted, and sentenced to federal prison.
So we did talk to John's older brother Bob
and his wife about what would happen
to the children should we be put in prison.
We had to know for sure
that they would be cared for by family.
Heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali
meet in New York's Madison Square Garden tonight
in what one promoter calls the biggest fight
since Cain tangled with Abel.
The hour of truth has arrived.
The plan was that we would leave right after dinner
and drive to a hotel, a Holiday Inn,
I think it might have been, where we had reserved a room.
We went over every single detail that needed to be reviewed
and contingency plans that we had.
I drove to the office.
I had some lock picks and a small pry bar
inside my coat.
I went in the building, I went up the stairs,
and just about fainted.
The door had a circular lock on it,
the kind that nowadays you see on a Kryptonite bike locks.
I mean, that type of lock is extremely difficult to pick.
I was like, "Was there here, and I didn't see it?"
in which case, I'm completely incompetent,
"or was this not here, and now miraculously
"right before we're gonna break in,
it shows up, which means we've got a leak?"
Yeah, okay.
Yep.
There was certainly the sentiment at that point
that we can't make this happen.
I felt, "We got this far,
Let's figure out what we can do."
When the interview was over,
instead of going back to the first office,
I had to appear to be a little confused
in order to see into the third office.
In the third office, there was another door
that entered from the hallway,
and in front of that door was this huge cabinet.
I said I thought that if they pushed the cabinet
very slowly and carefully across the carpet,
they could make enough space to squeeze in that door.
There was something blocking it just above the knob level,
clearly a deadbolt.
All right, this is the final round of the fight,
and what a fight...
I could hear the building manager
watching the Ali-Frazier fight directly underneath me.
So I was listening to the TV,
and I hoping for something like a swell.
Time is important here.
And this time, it went about an inch before it stopped.
He takes the mandatory eight-count,
the only knockdown of the fight.
Muhammad Ali was flat on his back,
but he's a well-conditioned athlete.
However, he is real tired.
Frazier smartly goes to the body
when Muhammad Ali covers up.
Two minutes to go in the fight, two minutes.
The crowd, needless to say, is in a bedlam.
Oh, what a shot.
It took me more than five minutes,
just pushing a very small amount,
much less than an inch each time.
It was very nerve-racking.
Muhammad Ali has never taken such a battering.
I didn't want to take forever either,
but I knew if I knocked that over, that was the end.
Frazier is just potshotting him now.
I got it moved enough that I could get through the door.
I pulled the door too, packed up my stuff, and left.
The guard at the courthouse came to the door
and just stood there watching the street.
And we got in and drove away, and that was it.
I was driving, and I think at that point,
we could hardly breathe; we were so panicked
and so relieved at the same time.
We didn't get on the highway.
We drove kind of the back way,
and we headed for the place we were all going to meet.
There's so much material.
I mean, it was a lot of stuff.
People would take a couple files and start looking.
But it didn't take very long before I remember
somebody hollering in one of the rooms where we were sorting,
"You've got to come and look at this."
I kind of assumed that all the illegal stuff would be,
you know, nobody in their right mind
would keep a written record of that.
Apparently, I was mistaken about that.
A big, big proportion of what we had
dealt with surveillance of people engaged
in protected First Amendment activity.
As soon as we saw how many of those files
had nothing to do with crime and everything to do
with political activity,
we knew that the FBI wasn't doing the things
we thought they were doing.
They have the FBI agents in all the colleges...
Crazy stuff:
sending investigators to a Boy Scout troop
out in Oregon because they were corresponding
with some Boy Scout troop behind the iron curtain,
hiring of one of the telephone operators
at Swarthmore College to keep the tabs
on progressive teachers and students.
Okay, "black student groups on college campuses."
These are plans to infiltrate colleges with FBI agents
to keep tabs on all the different groups
that they consider anti-American.
An FBI agent had infiltrated this anti-war group
on a campus, a college campus.
There was a married couple, and this agent started a rumor
that the wife was cheating on the husband,
and he broke the marriage up.
And that was in the file.
He was proud of it.
We knew it was going to take several days
of sorting the files before we could even begin to mail them.
We all had gloves on.
We never took gloves off.
Any time you are around the documents,
you have gloves on.
Bill and I had access to a photocopy machine,
he at Haverford and myself at Temple.
And the first mailing was my responsibility.
I decided to drive up to Princeton
and mail them from the Princeton post office,
because that would send some agents up there, I guess.
The morning that the documents arrived was a Tuesday morning.
There hadn't been much publicity about the burglary.
I think that the Post covered an AP story
that was maybe two paragraphs.
So I didn't expect to be receiving
the stolen FBI documents.
What I was reading was surreal.
There were postal carriers who were giving information
about professors' homes,
mailroom people on campuses who were opening mail.
I was particularly struck by one document
advising agents to behave in such a way that people
would think that there was an FBI agent
behind every mailbox.
It really didn't seem possible
that that would be an FBI document.
I mean, even if something like that was happening,
would there be a record of it?
I talked with the editors about it.
The first thing we needed to do
was to confirm their authenticity.
It turned out that that was the easiest thing for us to do,
because the Justice Department was quite eager to confirm
that they were authentic, and therefore,
they should never see the light of day.
The documents had gone to two members of Congress,
and both of them had held press conferences
and announced that this was a crime
and that they didn't want to have anything to do with it,
and they were giving the documents back to the FBI.
Congressman Mitchell was critical but said,
"I read these documents,
"and these documents reveal illegal activity by the FBI,
and something--there should be an investigation."
On the same day that I received the files,
The New York Times' Washington bureau
and the LA Times' Washington bureau
also received them and did the same thing
as the two members of Congress.
They immediately hand-delivered them to the FBI.
At The Washington Post, it was a struggle.
It was a struggle.
At that time, no news organization had dealt with,
what do you do when you are handed stolen documents?
And so that day, in just a few hours,
they had to confront those issues.
The attorney general was on the phone
repeatedly urging them not to publish.
Katharine Graham had a very difficult time
making these decisions.
If those struggles had not taken place,
the decisions later on on Watergate
probably would have been much more difficult.
The editors took the very strong stance
that the fact that this was going to reveal something
about the most powerful agency in the government,
that was an extremely important story.
By 10:00 that night, they did decide to publish,
and the story ran the next day
on the front page above the fold.
It was huge news.
The blunt fact is that for millions of decent
and loyal Americans,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation
has become the Federal Bureau of Intimidation.
I spy for the FBI
Newspapers that had never done anything except praise the FBI
wrote very critical editorials,
and there also were those
who were strongly condemning the burglary.
What we have here is a deliberate effort
to turn the FBI in the eyes of the American people
into an American version of the Gestapo.
This is not a police state.
I've been to police states.
I know what they are.
I spy for the FBI
This was really a frightening set of developments
for a lot of the American public.
"You mean you can't have faith
"in our government, in the FBI?
How could this be?"
This is the government.
The government can do whatever it wants.
Don't you know that?
Archie, he's violating the Bill of Rights.
It's against the Constitution.
Don't be bothering the U.S. government
with the Constitution.
People were now--
when you went and talked to somebody confidentially,
they said, "Well, we just saw in the Philadelphia Inquirer
"that an FBI agent was talking to so and so
at the registrar's office,"
and so it certainly made it more difficult
obtaining sources of information.
Neither Mr. Hoover's friends nor foes here on Capitol Hill
expect him to retreat or retire
under the heaviest political shelling
of his half century at the helm of the FBI.
Is there any response on your part
to the suggestions that you resign?
I have no comment to make on that.
Hoover wasn't saying anything publicly at the time.
One of his favored reporters wrote an article soon after this
saying that Hoover's reaction was apoplectic.
I think he must have been beside himself,
and it was nice to think that we could yank his chain
like that, because I really hated the man very, very much.
On the very first day after the burglary,
the FBI decided who had been in charge of this burglary
and that it had been John Peter Grady,
who had been a leader in the draft board raids.
John Grady was a very well-known outsized personality,
and there were many rumors flying around
that it was John that had led the Media burglary.
He was a wonderful person,
but discretion was not his strong point.
There were a number of people who told me that in confidence
that it was John Grady,
and it was quite hard not to crack up at that one,
but that was a widespread assumption
on both sides of the fence.
So thousands of people
who had been at anti-war rallies
were the first group of people who were viewed
as potential suspects in the case.
A flock of agents was rushed into the area
to question suspects, workers, housewives, anybody.
He put a folder down on the table,
which very quickly, it became evident to me
that it was a folder on me,
because as he opened it, there was a picture of me.
They asked if we had ever discussed the FBI
at any of our Women's Liberation meetings,
and I said, "You've got to be kidding."
When Hoover had discovered that this woman
had come into the office and interviewed the agent in charge,
he was extremely upset.
They had a Philadelphia police artist draw a sketch,
and that sketch was distributed to FBI agents
all over the country.
The FBI threw the whole East Coast contingency--
150 agents were looking for us,
150 agents.
They were flooding Philadelphia.
Powelton is heavily populated by college students, liberals,
Berrigan sympathizers, radicals, and activists,
and now it seems by hoards of FBI agents.
According to people in Powelton,
these are FBI agents attempting to blend in to the neighborhood.
This is how one resident described the newcomers.
All the agents were dressed in hippie-to-be,
which means they were letting their hair grow,
they were letting their beards grow,
but they stood out like sore thumbs in the neighborhood.
One night at suppertime,
a number of agents went to a Powelton address
executing what the bureau said was a duly authorized warrant
in a lawful manner.
Sunday night about 7:00,
I was upstairs having dinner with a friend,
and we heard tremendous commotion
and someone trying to break into
one of the apartments in the building.
I yelled down what was going on, and somebody yelled back, "FBI."
When they left, they took, however,
the notes that I was using to write articles from,
the copies of copies of Media FBI files
as well as my typewriter, stapler, books...
It was not a great area of town,
and there were lots of different break-ins,
but you certainly didn't need an ax to get into my door.
I basically was a low-level journalist,
and we had the documents pretty quickly after the break-in.
So I was an easy target.
This was a physical threat,
a show of force to the whole community,
and it was meant to scare people.
And I think the FBI had broken into a lot of peoples' houses.
I think the Panthers knew this stuff
up one side and down the other.
I think it was the first time that white,
middle-class people...
I think that was the first.
You know, you tell Billy not to poke the bear,
and it isn't until Billy pokes the bear
that he knows why he's not supposed to do that, right?
So, I mean, they were pissed off,
and they were just everywhere.
And I was working for the state of Pennsylvania.
I was a caseworker.
I was in my office, and I went downstairs,
and there was a couple of FBI agents waiting to talk to me.
They escorted me to their car,
and they are just sort of peppering me with questions.
I basically said, "You know, fellas,
"I'm not going to tell you anything you want to hear.
You might as well take me home," and they did.
They drove me...
They drove me right to my apartment.
They wanted me to know that, you know,
they knew where I lived.
There were a lot of likely suspects.
I mean, we saw that in Powelton Village
when they were calling on people at random.
But the longer that went on, the funnier it actually got.
This neighborhood has a history of having street fairs,
and we're just using a different kind of content this time.
We are going to be auctioning off Media files.
We are going to be selling full, life-size portraits
of the FBI agents who have been infiltrating our neighborhood,
and just in general having a good time.
And behind every mailbox
There's a seedy tweedy man
Who reads your cards and letters
And throws you in the can
You better not frown, you better not smile
You better not steal the Media files
The FBI is coming to town
You're made to feel like an outlaw
from the American society just for living here.
You can't walk down the street without somebody watching you
and trying to figure out who you're related to,
where you are going, what you are all about,
and putting you into a little pigeonhole.
There was a part of Bill that really liked risk.
He almost enjoyed what was going on.
He was in churches and schools talking about these FBI files.
He was not a guy that was gonna be frightened.
But for those first few weeks
after the publication,
and the FBI was everywhere...
We were scared.
So we went underground metaphorically.
That is, we talked to no one about what we had done.
I didn't use the phone in our house.
I would go to the payphone at the corner.
We had to instruct the children that if strange men
came to the front door and asked to speak to their mother
or their father that they were to tell them, "No, you can't."
A couple of times, they said there were would be
a car behind us with two men in it,
and they wondered whether they were FBI men.
It really did sort of permeate our fears to a great extent.
I had of course heard of the event.
Nothing else was going on like that in those days.
The draft board raids-- there were over 350 of them.
Lots of actions aimed at the draft and at the war,
but this was new.
I was approached by two members of the group,
and the way I understand it, they all kind of knew
if they got busted, they could call me.
It wasn't like a mystery of what crimes
they could be charged with, right?
It was all--nothing subtle,
and I certainly couldn't think of any constitutional right
to break into an FBI office,
so this was quite substantial
a risk they took.
Well, I didn't know-- no one knew--
that every photocopying machine has its own signature
and that Xerox knew exactly which machine made that copy.
J. Edgar Hoover demanded that they reveal
which machines these were.
I was in my office at Temple,
and I heard our department secretary
talking to somebody about our Xerox machine.
I looked outside the window, and saw a white car
with a Xerox logo on it,
and I saw him leave with the drum.
And I called Bill.
"You better do something about your drum out there."
He scratched the drum, but we knew that that was one path
that could lead to our door.
Well, it was only a few weeks after the break-in,
and the doorbell rings, and it's the number nine guy,
the guy who dropped out, and he's there.
And he wants to come, and we invite him in.
And he says, "I'm thinking about turning you in."
Oh, my God.
I mean, he said that.
And he said, "The reason is, I've been told that there's
"some secret files that are very sensitive,
"bearing upon national security
"and that you haven't sent those to the newspapers yet,
but you can do it any time you decide to."
And I assured him that was not the case.
"I'm telling you the truth.
"There's nothing in those documents,
national security stuff."
And he seemed to accept that, but he left,
and our lives, our futures left with him.
It's been over two months now, and the FBI hasn't been able
to nab the thieves who stole the FBI's own documents
in Pennsylvania.
One day they will, but in the meantime,
those in-basket burglars keep publicizing
choice bits from the documents, thinking of themselves,
obviously, as Robin Hoods mocking
the blundering sheriff of Nottingham.
We haven't touch this...
I tried to sort of keep my distance a little bit
from anything associated with Media.
By that point in time, I was pretty sure that there was
no chance they were gonna catch all of us,
and if they were gonna catch anybody,
it would be because of some kind of a leak.
'Cause if there had been any physical evidence
and we'd screwed up by leaving somebody's fingerprint behind
or something, you know, that would have been--
we would have known about that pretty quickly.
I was very anxious to do something again.
So now that we've broken into an FBI office
and stolen documents showing that they are doing stuff
that's against the law, how do you top that one?
A few months after that, I got a call to participate
in the Camden action.
The thing to remember in my case about Media
is that Media led directly to Camden,
and Camden turned out to be a much more
emotionally intense experience.
Camden was where I got caught.
The FBI earlier today caught an anti-war group in the act
as it was trying to steal records
from the draft board in Camden, New Jersey.
20 persons were arrested,
including two Catholic priests and a Protestant minister.
I was not terribly enamored with Camden
when it was first presented to me.
Some of the people that were involved
made me extremely nervous 30 seconds after I met them.
But it was one of those circumstances where,
"Well, you can either join this one,
"or you can join none,
because that's the only one on offer at the moment."
The only person in the group who knew that I was involved
in Media was Bob, and I knew Bob wasn't gonna talk.
That would be the last thing that you would do,
would be to give up somebody else
in order to save yourself.
Did I think I was gonna go to jail? Yeah.
Did I think it was gonna be uncomfortable
and so on and so forth?
Yes, I-- all of that was clear to me.
But things like how it affects your family
or how it's going to affect the rest of your life
in some ways, no, I didn't really think
about that kind of stuff.
My parents felt like they were being shamed,
banished from the polite company of thee community.
My mother was embarrassed by the whole thing.
You can actually make her cry if you ask her about that
still to this day.
You look at the way they went after the Camden 28:
they wouldn't let them out on bail.
They sought 47 years.
They were just vicious.
The trial lasted for three months.
Our goal was to tell our story,
to explain why we had done what we had done,
and to call on the jury as an act of conscience
to make a statement about this war
by finding us not guilty.
We did use the Media papers to cross-examine
the FBI witnesses quite effectively, you know.
What does it mean that you wanted to create paranoia
and have the New Left think
there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox?
What did you do to further that?
The Camden jury heard questions like that
and the lack of a good explanation from the FBI.
The government today lost yet another of its cases
against anti-war activists.
We've been having a guilty, guilty, guilty for five years
for opposing this war, and we finally got a not guilty.
People understood.
It was such an incredible shock
to be found not guilty by these people.
And then all of a sudden, I am finding myself
with a life ahead of me that I have done
absolutely no thinking about.
I mean, I thought my days were gonna be planned
by the federal government.
My friends, to them, it was like,
"Okay, we just won a battle.
It's on to the next battle."
For me, I wanted the war to be over.
Finally, I began to think, "Okay, we're gonna be safe."
I don't think they ever got close.
And the reason they didn't is because they thought
they caught us when they caught the Camden 28.
But they had five years to bring indictments,
and that was a long period.
It was the end of the '60s for us.
This was our signing out.
We were exhausted emotionally and felt, I think,
that we had done our share,
and now we need to get on with other things.
The FBI watches people and activities in this country,
but who watches the FBI?
We have never been kept in the dark
as to activities of the FBI.
It's not too long ago that a certain member of the House
inquired of me, "To what extent
"does Mr. Hoover level with you
with regard to these wiretaps?"
I said, "I think he levels all the way.
"I never knew him to be anyone except to put everything
right there on the table."
Well, he says, "Suppose you..."
Media is a real problem for the FBI.
Media is open sesame.
It was like a hole had opened in the dam
and water was pouring out.
It was--the fortress was under siege.
There's not the immediate sense in '71
that we have to abandon completely our past.
There is a greater sense of caution,
but there is a sense that maybe we can continue.
The thing that most concerned them
was whether or not COINTELPRO would be revealed.
Only one of the documents I received
contained the term COINTELPRO.
Now, that meant nothing to me,
and apparently not to anybody else
who received it at the time and wrote about it.
But of all the stolen files,
that one would have the most far-reaching impact.
One man was prosecuted two years ago...
I started covering the Justice Department in 1967.
Part of my job was to cover the FBI.
In early spring of 1972,
as part of the general inquiry into how the FBI
was handling its investigations of anti-war activities,
anti-Vietnam War activities, I went to an office,
a Senate office, where I thought I could pick up a copy
of a document or a report,
and the staff member said they would get it to me,
but I would have to wait a few minutes,
things were backed up at the photocopy machine,
and handed me some papers that she thought
I might care about.
I was not aware of the Media break-in,
and I didn't know where this document had come from,
but to my astonishment,
there was a piece of paper in there instructing agents
to write and to mail anonymous letters
to campus educators
to take a stronger stand against the New Left.
And I wondered, "What is this?
Do FBI agents write anonymous letters of this sort?"
There was a caption that said,
"COINTELPRO - New Left."
I filed within several days
a formal, written Freedom of Information Act request.
"Tell me what this is,
"and I want to see what documents
"established this program.
And what are its dimensions?"
What followed was months and months of my asking
and their sending me letters of denial.
Finally, I sued.
And the judge to whom this case was assigned
reviewed these documents privately
and ordered the documents released to me.
Initially, the department provided four pieces of paper
in response to my request.
But those pieces of paper themselves
referenced other communications
and listed not one COINTELPRO program
being ended but seven.
Ultimately, that led to their release of 50,000 pages,
Went from 4; we got to 50,000.
The FBI once considered installing an informant
as Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan
and distributed a Black Panther coloring book
that depicted the police as saber-toothed pigs.
These and many other dirty tricks carried out by the bureau
were revealed by the FBI itself yesterday
when it released more than 50,000 pages
from files on its counterintelligence program
code-named COINTELPRO.
The papers tell of a 15-year campaign of dirty..."
COINTELPRO had started back, actually,
in 1956 with a program
that J. Edgar Hoover initiated involving the Communist Party.
But it had expanded over the years.
So then we know that roughly-- I don't know--
2,200, 2300 of these programs aimed at specific individuals
and organizations were undertaken.
Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general when it started,
called the program "deplorable" and said in his judgment,
those who took part are indictable,
Carl Stern, NBC News...
Stern's request was for COINTELPRO,
and he could make that request,
because this pilfered document
contained the caption COINTELPRO.
Because if you didn't know about COINTELPRO,
how can you ask for the COINTELPRO file?
So the Media break-in, if one looks at it
in the long-term sense, it's a major event.
It opens up the possibility of understanding
what FBI officials had been doing for decades.
And then it comes at this really critical time,
where people are beginning to question the role
of the intelligence agencies.
You have this inquiry into the Watergate break-in,
and COINTELPRO suggested that it's not simply a Nixon problem.
For the first time, they have access to FBI records,
unrestricted access, and it's a different ball game.
Today we are here to review the major findings
of our full investigation of FBI domestic intelligence,
including the COINTELPRO program.
By 1975 Congress was willing to investigate,
and the Church Committee hearings were held
in the Senate.
It was the first time that a legislative body
in the United States investigated
its intelligence agencies.
In the area of what they characterize
as the New Left, an example...
COINTELPRO was infinitely worse
than people knew before all the information came out.
I mean, the hints of how bad it was were there,
but the hints are not the same as getting
the rich and extensive detail that we obtained.
In the area of women's liberation,
report after report about meetings of women
who got together to talk about their problems.
Now, how the bureau got this information
is not entirely clear,
but it's apparently by informants.
Reports on particular women,
who said why they had come to the meeting
and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise.
Nothing to do with violence,
nothing to do with these labels of subversion and extremism.
And what's the conclusion on the document?
"Will continue follow and report the activities
of the Women's Liberation Movement.
In the area of labor...
In any event, the most dramatic testimony today
involved the surveillance of Martin Luther King.
The committee staffers described in detail
attempts to discredit and to destroy King.
The bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters
to Dr. King and his wife,
which were mailed shortly before
he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
and finishes with this suggestion:
"King, there is one thing left for you to do.
"You know what it is.
"You have just 34 days in which to do it.
"This exact number has been selected for a specific reason.
It has definite practical significance."
It was 34 days before the award.
"You are done."
If I can interrupt.
That was taken by Dr. King to mean
a suggestion for suicide, was it not?
That's our understanding, Senator.
It was bad stuff.
It was un-American.
It was harmful.
It was a disgrace to our country.
It hurt the reputation of the FBI.
I think a government program with secrecy and no oversight
is bound to have mission creep and go from the wrong
but understandable to the horrible and un-understandable.
I've been told for years
by some of my own family
that this is exactly what the bureau was doing all the time.
And in my great wisdom,
I assured them that they were on pot.
This just wasn't true.
Couldn't happen. They wouldn't do it.
What you've described was a series of illegal actions
intended squarely to deny First Amendment rights
to some Americans.
And that's what my children have told me was going on.
The trick now as I see it, Mr. Chairman,
is for this committee to be able to figure out
how to persuade the people of this country
that indeed it did go on.
And how shall we ensure that it never happen again?
My impression at the time was,
that never would have happened without us.
Now, that could be wrong, but that's how I felt at the time.
You know, I never thought it would be permanent,
which history has shown that it wasn't,
but at least it backed them off for a while.
Yeah, these are pins, never used.
You know, new ones
for when you are changing the combination
of a lock for somebody.
Just some miscellaneous lock parts.
It's a long time ago, and a lot's happened.
The country has changed a lot in the intervening periods.
I really kind of stopped being active when the kids were born.
And we didn't talk about it much.
I mean, it wasn't the kind of thing we discussed
at the dinner table.
I didn't regale them with war stories
or anything like that.
In our case, a lot of stuff that happened in the '60s and '70s,
you know, we're getting older.
We're not going to be around a lot longer.
And I was very concerned, you know,
when I saw that Bill's health was failing.
You know, I was just another participant.
There was hundreds of thousands of people like me.
But there weren't hundreds of thousands of people like Bill.
He made some really tremendous contributions
and took some big risks and made some big sacrifices.
And I really wanted to see this story come out
before it was too late.
Rena, do you want ribs or chicken, hon?
- Ribs. - Ribs, please?
Today I would definitely describe myself as being
much more conservative than I was in my 20s.
What happened there is,
a bunch of ordinary people got together,
did an extraordinary thing,
which I believe had mostly positive consequences.
I certainly believe we all meant well.
And at the same time, I am aware now in retrospect
that there were any number of unintended consequences
that flowed from those actions.
One of the effects of what we did was to raise
the level of cynicism in this country.
And so the power of unintended consequences
has caused me to want to make smaller waves.
I am about little pebble here, a little pebble there.
"In the sky."
We do think about what we were involved in back then
as leading up to some of the things
that are happening today, and there are certain parallels.
As the years passed, and we began to see it
sort of receding in terms of interest
in nailing these people, I think we just felt,
"Oh, well.
"That was then, and this is now.
And there's a story to be told."
To me it was like hearing about
some sort of World War II spy novel.
And somewhere along the line,
I told my best friend about the story,
'cause I knew I could trust him.
I'd known him since fifth grade.
He was like, "Come on."
You know, "What are you gonna tell us next,
they are art thieves or something?"
There was, I think, a time after which they first told me
I was like, "How could they put all of us at risk?
"How would I have been raised by my Uncle Bob?
How different would I be?"
Well, they could have gone to prison for life,
you know, and then, you know,
I can't image have someone else raise my children.
I don't know how you gone on.
Like, how do you live a normal life
without thinking every day,
"They could come in the middle of the night,
you know, and take me away"?
And that's the end of everything that you've built as a family.
I think some people will say, "How could you be so foolish?
And how could you have put them in that kind of jeopardy?"
The answer I have to that is,
if all of us simply did
what we thought was safe,
that would let people who want to take our government
away from us get away.
They would be safe.
We wouldn't be safe.
They risked everything.
But I don't think my parents ever thought
that what they did was a crime.
They saw injustice
and decided that they were gonna act on it
in an American citizens' way.
Stay tuned for a conversation with 1971 filmmaker
Johanna Hamilton.
I'm Johanna Hamilton, director of 1971,
and I'm here with my colleague, Betty Medsger,
journalist at the Washington Post in 1971
and author of The Burglary:
The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI.
And Laura Poitras, co-executive producer on 1971,
and now Oscar-winning director of Citizenfour.
We came to work together in late 2009.
Tell me, at the time, you had been researching the book
for a very long time.
What were you doing in terms of protection of sources?
I didn't really think that there was any chance
that the burglars would be criminally charged
if they became public, as we plan to do,
but I wasn't sure.
And so from the beginning,
I kept their names out of all of my papers
and in our communications with each other,
and in fact, in the manuscript,
when I submitted it to the publisher originally
there were numbers instead of names,
and I didn't use the names in the manuscript
until the last possible time before it went to press.
And, Laura, when I first came to see you,
which was also late 2009, early 2010,
you and I sat down over coffee,
and I told you the story.
You were familiar with it,
both familiar, and you also had concerns, didn't you?
I mean...
Yeah, I mean,
I had know the story about the burglary
and I was-- I thought it was incredible
that they were coming forward.
I mean, this was--they had managed to stay anonymous
for so many years,
and they had made the bold decision to come forward.
And I knew the story because I was already working
on a project about the NSA,
and, you know, obviously the Church Committee
and what we learned from the burglary
and what was going on with the FBI
and spying on civil rights organizations
was--I mean, this was kind of the bedrock
or understanding the sort of--
the government overstepping its boundaries
and what happened, you know, in a positive sense
in terms of the reforms.
So then in mid-2013
I was in the edit studio finishing the film--
at least we were approaching the end of the edit--
Betty, you were approaching the end of the book,
and, lo and behold,
the Snowden revelations start coming.
Betty, can you talk a little bit about your process
and the impact that the Snowden revelations had on the book?
Well, my first reaction
after I read the first story was,
"I can't believe this is happening again,
separated by 40-some years."
I did feel it might be construed
as a quaint piece of history,
and here we are, you were the one
putting it on the front pages.
Well, I mean, I think the answer to the question
is clearly in your film.
I mean, when you have the government
with this kind of power,
doing these kinds of things in secret,
and then also how it can be used to target people
who are engaged in legitimate political activities.
I mean, you have the spying on Martin Luther King,
for instance, that was revealed ultimately
by the COINTELPRO and the burglaries.
So, I mean, these kinds of things are really threats
to our democratic system,
and I'm really curious what your, you know,
what your response was when you first received these documents.
How--what did you do?
How did you respond?
I mean, one of, I think, the most shocking things
in the film is that some news organizations
returned the files.
As I read the files,
some of it seemed so bizarre
that I thought maybe it was a hoax,
but then after they were confirmed by the FBI
as being authentic and the editor of the paper,
Ben Bradlee, and the reason they confirmed them very quickly
was that they thought that by telling us they were authentic
that we would then readily go along
with their saying, "Don't publish."
And of course that was not the position that we took,
or at least the editors and I took.
And what I had to worry about was something
that seemed quite quaint now,
which were fingerprints,
but also, as I soon learned,
the markings on the paper
that copiers in those days left markings
that could lead to finding the machine
on which the copy had been made.
I decided that if subpoenaed to testify about the files,
that I would refuse to do so
and if that led to contempt and going to jail
that this information was so important
that that was a worthwhile thing to do.
Physically, did you maintain possession of the files?
Or were they--did you share them with Bradlee?
I think almost at the end of the two-month period
that the files kept coming in
Bradlee said I ought to have a copy of them.
I found out that If you make multiple generations of files
that the things I feared could be retained on them
and be helpful to law enforcement
in searching for the burglars would disappear.
And so I went out to a distant copy machine
and I made multiple copies,
destroyed the original copies I received,
plus the early generation,
kept a set for myself,
and then gave Bradlee a set,
and the agreement that we had
was that they would be in a big envelope
and that the envelope would be sealed,
his signature would be across the seal,
and that no one could open that file
or have any kind of access to it.
It was placed in the safe
across from Katharine Graham's office.
But a year later, when someone went to get the package,
it was gone
and never had an explanation for it.
I think what's so extraordinary about your film,
I mean, here, you know, we have sources
who had managed to remain anonymous for 40 years,
and to be able to not just learn their names
but actually to meet them and see who they are.
The archival footage is extraordinary.
And how was it for you?
Like, when you first met with them
and what did it mean for you to be able to document?
Oh, it was incredible,I mean,
and I was, you know, very struck
by simultaneously how they had kept this secret for 40 years,
how simultaneously relaxed they were.
You know, I felt much more nervous for them,
Betty and I both did,
and how they still, 40 years on,
had these very passionate beliefs.
As a print journalist,
I would like to say something about the importance
of what your films add.
I mean, it's not just the emotion
but also the original knowledge that you create a record of,
but also adding credibility to the story.
So far I've been incredibly gratified
to see that we've had a really good mix in the crowd,
people who were politically active in the '70s
who remember that era so well,
and then there's a younger generation
walking away inspired by the story,
making the connections between then and now.