Chapter 7: The Fight of the Century

From his office, j Edgar Hoover has placed on the entire organization his own rigid code of service, integrity, and morality. In a way that is true a few organizations. J Edgar Hoover is the FBI.

By November of nineteen seventy, FBI Director j Edgar Hoover had been serving in his role for forty six years. He had amassed so much power in the halls of Washington, DC that he basically used Congress as an atm for the bureaus. And by that I mean his priorities. His annual budget hearings were little more than rubber stamp sessions when senators fell all over themselves heaping praise on his record.

So anyways, I was housebound with using Chin.

Meanwhile in Boston, Marianne, a divorced welfare mother of two, and Patrick, a Roman Catholic freaking priest. We're dealing with the fallout from having made out in front of the fire in his doomed Beacon Street apartment.

You know the kind of whisker burn stuff you get. I thought I was bleeding on the way home in the car, I thought, oh my god, I think my chin's gone. This like oozing the chin.

I can confirm this. US Irish guys have some very sharp stubble. I've seen some shit.

I remember.

The next night he came over to my apartment. I couldn't leave the house, of course, because of the oozing chin. And he was mortified because like, if I went to the community with this, I mean, you only get that from one situation.

Right, Remember hickeys, the scandal of physical evidence. After two of your friends in high school hooked up over the weekend, turtlenecks on Mondays meant one thing, and one thing only when I was in school. Patrick spent the next day conducting his affairs like the Roman Catholic priest he still ostensibly was, and then drove his VW bus to Marianne's apartments in Dorchester.

The next night, he came over around ten o'clock. The kids are in.

Dead and.

I opened the door and we just looked at each other. Neither of us could believe what had happened. But it was so.

Total, like the giving over of ourselves to each other emotionally was so total, like having stepped over that line.

We can't know what kind of conversation Patrick was having with himself about having broken his vow of celibacy. What we do know is that A he fell in love with Mary Anne and their affair continued, and B he also continued to perform his duties as a priest and made no announcement to the team the way Floyd did.

But in terms of being in love with or something like that, he never spoke to me about that.

You know, did you ever pick up on any vibe?

I didn't. I did not, But I'm not that astute when it comes to some of those.

Things, and I didn't know anything about.

It Patrick's sister Joanne.

But for him, he was still a practicing priest and he's dating, I suppose you might say, and really falling in love.

You know, there was.

Still that element, you see, that he wanted so much in his life that somehow the priesthood refused to allow. And yet when he saw it and felt it, he knew that that's what he wanted and needed to really fulfill himself and to be in this relationship, this partnership. It just was going to happen no matter what.

If Patrick were in the market for a strong rationalization for his decision, he wouldn't have to look far. Strict celibacy for priests had only been around since eleven thirty nine AD, when the Church had grown tired of the widows of priests inheriting the land on which they had built their churches. So at the second latter in Council they eliminated the future existence of widows by decreeing priestly celibacy.

Patrick. We have to talk to you.

Sarah Tosey back from New.

Jersey, because you are afraid to love.

I am alone.

We schedule our days so that we can say to one another. I don't have time to know you, and we're all guilty.

How can people be so hard?

Sarah must have known things were different when she returned. The tricycles had come to depend on was now a bicycle.

Romance and the revolution. Don't mix. See, there's no time in your life. There's no time for that in your life.

And then when Marianne and Sarah's landlord on Florida Street saw their picture in the paper during the Kooming asylum, he showed up at their door and evicted them.

You kind of had to be there to believe it. Wake up to god, damn it, you're all evicted, goddamn kids. Goddamn mister Collins solo and attack on the front door. The sound of ripping and falling paper. This isn't happening. Goddamn goddamn outraged Chrissy, mister Collins, don't you rip down my mommy's door? Mama, where's my pone? Our sentiments exactly? Maybe we can move to the center.

Unsettled and on the move once more, Sarah picked up her pieces and refocused her energy away from her disintegrating trio and towards ending this goddamn war. Her dream of what the Paula Center could have been in her life was ending, but her dream of being a revolutionary had only just begun. Sarah TOSI was now determined to take part in a draft rate. Jay Edgar Hoover's testimony before the Appropriations Committee was only the first punch of a

Yeah, we were arrested, taken to the county jail.

Telling them they were no longer fit to live in society, and scaring the shit out of them with threats of life in prison.

Harrisburg were people charged with planning to kidnap Henry Kissinger

Remember Boyd Douglas, the incarcerated man who helped plan the Flower City conspiracy with Ted Glick and spirited messages to phil Berrigan on the inside, Well, he was showing every one of those letters to the FBI.

Those letters were the basis of the charges brought against eight people, including the Berrigans, charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. They weren't going to kidnap Henry Kissinger. They were going to make a citizens arrest. That's the way they talked about it.

Vover's indictment was an important experiment. He was looking for a new playbook for crushing descent in the US, and he felt like if this grand jury could drain the movement's resources in an endless court proceeding, he could all but immunize the government to unrest. And those in the movement now knew they had to respond, and they began trading blows with the most powerful man in Washington, DC.

And there was some talk locally here about doing a smaller draft board, just making things happen so that they were constantly happening. So there was a plan to do the Summerville draft board.

Sarah, Paul, Marianne and a few others planned a little action to keep the government off balance.

Me.

I think there was a fairly small group.

I don't think there was more than eight of us or nine of us all together that we're doing it.

They chose a draft board in Powderhouse Square Park, right next to Tufts University. It was the oldest stone building in Massachusetts, used by the British as a gunpowder magazine and the run up to the Revolutionary War.

Yeah, I can remember casing it and saying, my god, I've never seen such a simple building. You know, it's just one floor. I mean, anybody can draw our three dimensional picture of it.

Sarah, Paul and some of the others would sneak in through the first floor window in the back while Marianne sat in a parked car a block away acting as a lookout.

I mean it would never go inside a draft board for fear of getting arrested and of what would happen to the kids.

So I would support in many, many other ways.

Marianne's job was to watch for passing police cars and alert the raiders she saw if anything.

Happened, flashing her lights twice or something like that in the car if somebody was coming, you know, like a cop, cow was coming by or something.

They were lest we forget the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

So I was in a car, I had my walkie talkie, and all of a sudden I picked up some wine, some radio Cebe channel, and this couple are having Cebe Channel sex.

She stap there.

I didn't dare shut it off because I well, I didn't know what would happen if I ever had a use.

Well, Marianne became more and more engrossed in a steamy dialogue on her radio. Sarah and Paul in black painted sneakers and hockey team flashlights, broke into the powder house.

They got in through some windows in the back and they went right to the files, got all the files. I mean, they were in and out and no time at all, and it was done.

Back in Dorchester, Sarah and Marianne took their cue from Paul's Newhaven action and mailed back the one A file to the draftees until they ran out of postage.

And then we went to Miles Standish Park and had a bonfire.

With the rest of them.

Miles Standish, the British Navy captain who once said war is a terrible trade, but when the cause is just the smell of gunpowder is sweet.

So as we're driving, we're all in the car and we have all the files in the trunk.

And Joe and I were in the back seat, Chrissy, Marianne's daughter, Call and my mom were in the front seat, and in the trunk which was in the front, they.

Had a beetle.

Of course, there were draft cards that had been stolen.

And we're driving to burn the files and these car pull us over.

Every heart in the whole car just stopped.

I think my mom drank a sip. She had like a coke, a can of something, and they thought it was beer or something and pulled us over. And it wasn't.

The cops that we were drinking, and that's why they pulled us over.

If that cop inspected the vehicle. Given Hoover's declared war on the Catholic left in the recent timing of the Harrisburg indictment, they would go away for a long time. But the gods smiled that night and the cop let them go with a warning.

We drove away just oh my god.

I just remember being anxious a lot like that something was going to happen, like people were getting arrested, like people were going to jail, and my mom was doing stuff.

That might get hurt.

Like I was like, wait, they can just come and take the people that you love out of your house.

It made me very anxious.

Deeply spooked. Sarah, Paul, Marianne, and the kids continued to mile Standish Park, where, despite their pounding hearts, the burning one a files smelled sweet. Sarah, after the Somerville raid, decided she could no longer linger in Boston as Patrick and mary Anne fell deeper in love.

What are we saying goodbye to to a phase, to Patrick, to our mission at the center, to what there's a piece of me I don't give away the wayfaring stranger part that doesn't want to say we, that won't fall off any cliffs.

That is alone.

Sarah soon left Boston. She left Marianne to her secret affair with Patrick, and Patrick to his devolving mess at the Paulit Center. She brought Paul coming home with her to New Jersey, where her father lay dying from cancer.

I had gone to Sarah's house with her when her father was very ill with cancer. The night were there, her father died during that night that we happened to be there, so I stayed around for the funeral, and siblings all came back to the house.

The war between the Catholic Left and the FBI was complicated for Sarah Tosi in particular. As LeeAnne Mosha tells us, you.

Know, Sarah Tosi's brother was an FBI agent, and most of the FBI agents were Irish Catholic.

I'm still reacting from seeing my brother. It is so strange. I barely know him now. We get along, but that is all I want so badly to talk to him, my brother, not to his job, but the person.

She wrote letters back to Marianne and Patrick from Jersey.

I think my FBI brother is coming to visit next week. I'm dying to find out what he knows about Barrigan, but I don't think he'll tell me. I'm trying to think of something vaguely safe to talk about.

I haven't thought of anything yet.

This cultural divide among siblings was very common in households at the time, with older siblings born before World War Two baffled by their crazy younger sisters and brothers.

Last time he was here, he threw my friends out of the house and said they were a disgrace.

To the family. Wonder if I'm next. And it was what cleaved the generations.

Siblings three or five years older than you were completely on the other side of the divide, so your parents and siblings would be here and those of us who had actually been caught up and part of this, what we were experiencing is an incredible awakening and liberation and understanding or over here, and there could have been one hundred years, a century could have passed as between us.

So Sarah, the newly minted draft board raider and her FBI brother are navigating their differences, and here was her guest, Paul cooming very much a person of interest with the FBI, sharing a roof with a g.

Man and her brother came back. I'm realizing that he doesn't know who I am, at least I believe he doesn't know. So it was a little bit uneasy. But got up one morning and he was cooking breakfast for everybody. So I pitched in and I said, here, I'll help. So he taught me how to make omelets and nice and neat. We hit it off great and talked and joked as we served breakfast to everybody.

The FBI were everywhere.

At this point, Hoover's FBI had surrounded the Catholic left.

So yes, the FBI kept tabs on me and so many other people.

I kept a record, and I think I still have a piece of paper with all the people who told me that they were visited by the FBI because they were in my you know, my paper address book.

I started to be followed very heavily by the FBI, and we knew it, but you kind of don't believe it.

In a certain way.

I assume that my telephones were tapped. See what here, somebody saying something in the background. Actually, when you're talking on the phone.

They encouraged people to believe in their own paranoia. So they encouraged people to believe that there was an FBI agent lurking somewhere in the background everywhere.

Now I'm being watched closely. I mean, I have FBI around me all the time. They've become to my house, my mother's house.

Every week.

If you were in the movement, FBI agents would follow you wherever you went and make sure you knew it. They would visit your parents twice a week, sometimes for a year at a time. They would conspicuously dig through the trash of your parents' neighbors to create a sense of scandal. The FBI even followed Marianne's sister in law's brother in case they could get any information out of him.

I can't tell you anything about it, because I'm still of the mind that I don't know who did it, and I can't tell you that I did it or didn't do it, So I can't tell you anything about that break in. That was an agreement made a long time ago that I haven't officially heard it. It has been called off so agreement not to say, not even to whether that you didn't participate, because to say you didn't participate, then they'd have a smaller group of people to look at and be able to find them easier.

And I have.

Never been told officially otherwise, so I stick to that story. It was a great action.

I recorded this interview with Paul Cooming in August of two thousand and nine. And for those of you keeping score at home, yes, this show has been in production for a very long time. Media Pennsylvania media action subroup called Media Pennsylvania.

That Media rate Media Pennsylvania.

The Media Pennsylvania experience was a really interesting Media.

Pennsylvania, very dramatic breaking in Media Pennsylvania.

Oh, it's always been a secret. I have a little suspicion who did it, you know, It was always like nobody say anything.

But then in twenty thirteen, Betty Medsger of The Washington posted a book about this particular action in Media Pennsylvania. Her book finally revealed the identities of the people who pulled off the craziest break in perhaps in American history. Media Pennsylvania was where the resistance broke into an FBI office.

And here's where the Catholic left does its counter attack on the FBI.

Historian Charles M.

Konez, now, they're getting to a point where they're suppressing dissent before it happens. That's the beginning of the end, not beyond the war. That's the beginning of the end of democracy in this country. That's what authoritatian redictatorial powers do. It's the first thing they do is they crushed descent. Then they can do whatever the hell they want. That's where the idea of we got a counter attack against the FBI.

With Hoover loaded for bear, it was the movement's turn to give him a decisive poke.

Everybody who was active in the movement knew that the FBI was trying to intimidate, suppress, and spy on the movement.

This is Keith forsythe.

They weren't out there trying to put the mafia in jail. They were spending their time hassling movement people. It wasn't the kind of thing that the person on the street necessarily was aware of, but everybody who was active not.

Keith was radicalized against the government's suppression of dissent when he heard an audio recording of the massacre at Jackson State, an HBCU, where police opened fire on protesters, killing two students. He dropped out of college to devote himself full time to opposing the war in Vietnam. He was driving a cab in Philly when he got a phone call from a prominent fellow activist and professor.

He called me up on the phone and said, you want to go to a party, which was code for do you want to be involved in an action? And I said, yeah, I'm always up for a party. We made an appointment to meet someplace to talk, and if you went for a walk in the woods, that made it really hard for them to record you.

When they met, the professor shared his dismay over Hoover's undemocratic crushing of dissent and asked Keith if he'd consider breaking into an FBI office to prove Hoover's wrongdoing.

If we can get evidence of this and publicize it through the newspapers, you know that's going to back them off, at least to some extent.

In Flower City, ted Glick and his crew had hoped to just vandalize the FBI office that happened to be next to the draft board, But in this case they were specifically targeting an FBI office and most importantly, planning to steal all the files inside top secret documents that would mean a lot more to the government than the addresses of would be inductees.

This was going to be different. For one thing, the risks were a lot higher. Potential jail time we assumed was going to be much greater when you're breaking into a draft board. At least in those days, you didn't have any expectation. A nobody's going to be in there, and b if they are in there, they're not going to be armed. But with the FBI, they're definitely always armed, and we're going to try to find a time when we're not in there. But suppose we make a mistake.

And they called themselves the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI.

Now we knew that if we were successful, they would really put on the heat, so we had to be very careful about not inviting anybody who had loose lips.

The FBI Field office in downtown Media was on the second floor of a mixed use building at one Veterans Square. It had office spaces on the first two floors and two floors of apartments above. The first thing Keith Forsyth did was a walk by of the FBI office door. He went to Goodwill to buy a cheap suit so his hippie clothes didn't make him conspicuous. Then he casually strolled down the second floor corridor past the bureau office.

My verdict was, it doesn't get any better than this because you walk into the building off the street, there's no restrictions. The doors are open all the time because there's people living in the building. You walk up to the second floor, take a left, and there's the front door to the FBI office.

One look at the lock on the door, and Keith knew it was possible, and.

They got one lock on the door. That's the same as the lock on my front door. It'll take me two minutes to get through that door. That's how it looked at that.

Point, so a group of nine Raiders, handpicked by the professor for their discretion, began meeting regularly.

I'm going to say probably at least a couple months, because we would meet periodically, you know, to go over maps and talk about casing observations.

Keith Forsyth took a correspondence course on locksmithing and spent those months practicing and getting his time down so that when he picked the lock in a public hallway he could do it quickly. Then, to get a sense of the inside of the FBI office, the Raiders posed as a Swarthmore student writing an article about opportunities for women in the bureau. She went into the office and interviewed an agent, writing notes with gloves on and clocking the environment.

You know, I got a haircut. I was wearing a white shirt and a tie, and a sport coat and a trench coat and some nice leather driving gloves, so I wouldn't leave any fingerprints.

On fight night, they staged themselves at a nearby holiday inn.

Somebody rented a motel room, and that's where that's where he stayed. Sort of all met together and then came and went as our assignments dictated.

That's Bob Williamson. Like Keith Forsyth, Bob had also dropped out of college to oppose the war full time. He was known back then to his friends as weed X. Bob had already done some raids with Paul Cooming and Anne Walsh. He joined them in a draft board raid in Delaware, where, just like in Philly, they hid in janitor's closets. Bob was a card.

I felt nervous, so I figured everybody else might feel nervous too. So I decided that I was going to tell a.

Joke and tonight he was part of the inside team that would go in and retrieve the files.

Keith goes in first because he's got to get the door open.

Keith walked into the building with his lock picking tools and a crowbar up his sleeve.

And I go into the building. I go up to the door. I go over to the lock and just about had a heart attack because there was a second lock added to the door that hadn't been there two weeks earlier. It was not a standard lock, it was a high security lock.

It was one of those circular keyholes like on a Kryptonite bike lock.

So I'm like, what the hell has going on here? All of a sudden, on the night of the action, there's a brand new lock on the front door, and I'm trying to figure out how this happened. Is this a coincidence, which generally I don't believe in. Is there some kind of a leak and they knew we were coming? But if they knew we were coming, why would they put a lock on the door. Why wouldn't they just put twenty agents inside? And wait for us to come inside. Nothing made sense.

Keith went back to the holiday inn with bad news for the crew.

Said I can't pick this lock tonight.

He held it together and just had the presence of mind to say, Okay, I'm gonna need to talk to people and see what planned he's going to because plant ain't gonna work.

And so people were saying, well, like what can we do to salvage it? And somebody said what about the second door?

When the other raider had gone into the office incognito as a Swarthmore student, she had noticed a second door to the corridor was blocked with a massive filing cabinet.

And I'm like, oh yeah, the second door. Sure enough, there was just one standard lock on that.

And i gotta say, man, I take my hat off. He has stones.

So I picked that in no time. But then there was a dead bolt on the other side. So meanwhile, I'm hearing the building manager underneath me listening to the radio. He's like, his living room is right underneath me. So I'm like, how much noise can I make before he hears me? So figured, well, we'll find out.

He could hear the building supervisor's radio downstairs and he waited for a swell of crowd sounds during the fight.

So I put the pride bar in there and broke the dead bolt off and tried to do it as fast as possible so it didn't like make a creaking sound, It just went bang. And so now I could open the door a whole inch. And then and there was a giant filing cabinet full of papers up against the door behind that, so I had to move that out of the way. And the office floor was carpeted, and this giant thing was super top heavy, so if he started to push the doorknob just started to tip it.

And don't forget Keith was doing all this in a public hallway in an apartment building.

I'm laying down on my back on the floor of the hallway with my legs braced against one side of the hall a hall pulling on this four foot steel pole with two hands, but nobody came into the hallway. Finally got it open enough I could squeeze in so that, you know, it would be easy for people to get in and out. And then I taped the lock, you know, put a piece of tape over the latch so wouldn't relatch.

I was the flashlight guy that night. It was all taped up with electrical tape except for a pinhole in the center.

Bob Williamson and three others pulled up to the building and their business attire and filed in carrying empty suitcases. They pushed the second door open and shimmy past the filing cabinet, turned.

The flashlight on to shine it on the file drawer so that they could see what they were looking at. But other than that, there were no lights in the office. While we were working. Everybody goes to their file, or isn't They just started opening them and going through them. I think most of the files that were in there were files that we glanced at quickly and thought we should take so as quickly as we could, we just

Keith was parked outside waiting for the inside team to file out of the building.

And they come out carrying these suitcases and load them into the back of the car.

But here's the thing. The County courthouse also sits on Veteran Square, just like the office building. And there was a security guard pacing in front of the courthouse.

And the security guard in the County Courthouse is standing there watching us through the glass door.

On his watch. Four business people filed into the building carrying four suitcases and filed out twenty minutes later.

We didn't stand out, you know, we're a bunch of white people wearing suits in downtown media across from the courthouse. And then what could be more.

Normal sweating bullets. They drove the files to a remote farmhouse owned by sympathetic Quakers, they popped champagne and got to work sorting the resistance had hit back at Hoover's FBI.

I think the total number of documents that came out of that burglary was about a thousand documents.

The first thing we did was to sort everything into two piles, the political pile and the criminal pile. Very roughly speaking, the piles were of the same size. So basically, from that sample, you could say the FBI was spending half of their time spying on Americans who weren't doing anything illegal and trying to prevent them from speaking out.

And it really didn't take them long to find some seriously fudged up shizz, like the FBI harassing a boy Scout troop in Oregon for becoming pen pals with some Russian kids, or agents keeping tabs on black student unions on college campuses across the United States, or an FBI agent starting rumors of infidelity about an activist couple and successfully breaking them up, or the FBI intending to enhance paranoia and activist groups and encouraging the sense that there

These people made off with huge amounts of documents, FBI documents. It was an amazing you might say, a bit of revenge.

Historian Howard Zinn.

The FBI had been collecting information on Americans. You know, now information was being collected about the FBI, and now what the FBI was up to was revealed. And what was revealed was that the FBI had broken the law. They were revealing a secret program of the government of

The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI then did something rather ingenious. They took their stolen documents and placed them in pre addressed envelopes. Then they put those envelopes inside of larger envelopes and mailed them to accomplices around the country. That way, when the pre addressed documents finally arrived in the hands of intended congressmen and press outlets, they appeared postmarked from around the country. Several Congressmen immediately turned the

The FBI had sent a letter, sort anonymous letter to Martin Luther King suggesting that he commits suicide. These papers that were stolen from the FBI in the break in, well, they became published very great embarrashment to the FBI. If I think by the had the romantic idea of how smart the FBI is, they learned differently.

JF. Hoover was pretty insulted that some of us somehow got it away with that and released it to the press.

The papers also confirmed to the Catholic anti war movement that, just as they'd suspected, the FBI was trying to perpetuate a kind of psychological warfare to discourage ordinary citizens from proto testing the war.

But that they encouraged that paranoia, and that they had infarmas, and that the farmers encouraged that kind of paranoia to think that there, you know, the wire the phones were tapped all over the place, and some were some were.

They were programmed to think that they could like intimidate us. Bob Kanaane, they just look at an ordinary citizens who objected to the government, you know, and it was really very disappointing.

God, they were a mean loss the media.

Pennsylvania raid would lead to the first congressional investigation of US intelligence agencies in United States history.

Hoover was apoplectic for the first time cookie these anti war people who he always you know, was after we had the most popular support.

Now Hoover was now more motivated than ever to grind the Catholic left into dust under the heel of his wing tipped shoe. The raiders in media, Bob Williamson, Keith Forsyth, and six of the Americans agreed to never speak of it again.

We had agreed because of the efforts that the FBI was making to try and find out who had done it that we just wouldn't. We wouldn't meet again as a group.

And they remained anonymous for over forty years.

After media the Harrisburg trial came crashing in or at least all the pre trial stuff.

Hoover was now out for blood. The following month, in April of nineteen seventy one, Paul Cooming, Cookie Ridolphe, and Anne Walsh were among one hundred witnesses subpoenaed to appear before Hoover's grand jury in Harrisburg, the one that initially was set up to investigate the bombing of the steam tunnels and Kissinger's would be citizens' arrest, but since those were weak cases to begin with, based merely on brainstorming sessions, in the wake of media the grand jury hearing had

They really wanted to send us to prison. It was becoming too much of a popular movement. Too many people were doing this, so they took one hundred people. They called one hundred people to a grand jury in Harrisburg.

I had been subpeded to the grand jury for the Harrisburg case.

Cookie the indictment came.

Out naming those I think it was eight people of Harrisburg. Eight and then there was a list of other people who they considered unindicted co conspirators.

The first witness called was Paul Koming. Paul, Smiling, refused to testify. Instead, he passed around a statement in which he vowed non cooperation with any branch of the US government prior to a war crimes tribunal holding it accountable for its inhumane use of power to crush the population of Vietnam. The government then offered Paul immunity, and he still refused, so they promptly indicted him with criminal contempt.

They showed us pictures of virtually are really good friends and saying do you know this person? And you had to keep saying I refuse to answer this on the grounds that it may incriminate me, which made you look like a coward or something. It put you in a really weird position.

Hoover's DOJ had dragged one hundred witnesses to Central PA and the hopes that just one would crack.

But a one hundred people did not break set. They refused to betray their friends.

Everyone, and I mean everyone in the whole Catholic left pled the fifth without talking to each other beforehand, because Catholics can be kind of like a pail of fish hooks. You can't pick up one without it being in a tangled mess with a bunch of others. With this crowd of do gooders and hell raisers, the DOJ was going to have its hands full. The government, however, was not quite done with Anne Walsh.

And out of the hundred, they chose a fifty five year old non named sister Joe Ziegan, who was president of Marymount College, and me to say, if you don't tell us, we're going to send you to jail for an inja term in time.

So you know that's what I was prepared to do.

Anyway, it sounded very much like the convent in some ways, you know, like a red brick building was grass, isolated, boring in some ways, you know.

And started living out her days as if she was on borrowed time.

So I kept going to lunch, and my last lunch was always like a tune or fish sandwich in a vanilla frapp. Every time I was in court, I was ready. I had given my clothes away, my only possessions.

I said goodbye.

I said goodbye.

I mean a million times I said goodbye to people because I thought I was okay now that I had to go pay the dues right here.

An Walsh's lawyer launched an appeal, which started winding its way through the legal system. While the threat of arrest hung over her head like a sword of Damocles. And as prison gets you thinking long term, Ann began to wonder about the rest of her life, and her thoughts landed on her old father, confessor from the convent, Bob Canane from the Milwaukee fourteen.

So at the time Bob was just coming back from Milwaukee.

Weren't you or you just back? Are you just back from prison? It's the most sweetly embarrassing.

Tale thing to tell.

Once we started working together, because I really really attracted to him and thought it was like really possible that.

He might like me back.

A mutual friend who lived with Bob on a commune outside Boston pulled Anne aside one day and.

She said, of course, Bob Kane's in love with you. You know, he talks about you all the time. So I said, well, I think I'm going to write a letter. Okay, now all our friends are friends in common now, so that if he doesn't love.

Me back, I'm going to be like a fool.

So I'm going to have to move to some English speaking island because I won't be here to be able to be in his company.

I'll feel like a fool. So I wrote the letter.

But this was a complicated thing for Ann to do. The future in the past or all at war inside a progressive Catholic's heart.

But I was a traditional to the core girl, right, and a girl didn't say you do you want to date? Let alone?

Do you want to spend the rest of your life with me?

Because I got a big, wicked crush on you, So it was like, really, Chancy.

It pushed me, I must say, to make a decision that point. I mean I had thought about it. If I hadn't really kind of made a decise. So I sat down for a good afternoon and just thought about it, thought about what it would mean, everything decided, Yeah, I think I'd go along with that.

But we're talking about a priest and a next nun. So when it came to romance, they're both kind of rookies.

You know.

And it was like a little tough going because we didn't eat that now how to do relationships like, we didn't have a big dating history.

Perhaps Anne was doomed to prison, but she and Bob were in love and headed into an uncertain future together. Jim Carroll was among many people who traveled to Harrisburg during this time. He went to support Anne Walsh, whom he worked with at BU, and to participate in some demonstrations.

The Harrisburg trial was an occasion of great celebrations of resistance and many many people showing up in Harrisburg to protest the government intrusions against the peace movement.

Jim's father was a general in the Air Force and his brother was in the FBI, so he also carried the extra burden of scandalizing his family with his anti war activities.

And I was in a crowd at one point and this foul smelling vagrant fellow sidled up to me and he whispered, I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me. And it was my brother who's there undercover, watching all of us, and he didn't tell on me, and I didn't tell on him until years later.

Of course, Sarah Tosi had a fed brother, Jim Carroll had a fed brother. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this for one big Catholic planet of lawbreakers and lawmen driving each other crazy. And now Hoover was about to make good on his wish to publicly destroy the Catholic Left. Despite the uncooperative witnesses, the Harrisburg Grand Jury delivered a new superseding indictment of seven movement leaders, including Phil Berrigan.

Until the call came from Believe Cookie Ridolphie she said, look at we're doing on board down here in Camaden, New Jersey, and we need some help.

Hoover hadn't counted on the indomitable spirit of the Catholic resistance, A big pail of fish hooks with a lot of sticktuitiveness.

And I said, sure, I can do it. And she asked if we could bring any other out. So Sarahtosi was there.

We drove down and.

Hidden in an East Coast federal building was a draft board, an FBI office, and an office of military intelligence. Camden, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Philly, was a perfect place for a showdown with j Edgar Hoover, Paul Cooming, Sarah Toosi, Cookie Radolphie, Leeann Mosha, Keith Forsyth, Bob Williamson, and about twenty two others would descend on Camden for the biggest raid they would ever attempt to pull. But this time they were walking into a trap. They had a plant.

You know about this, don't you.

He came to one or two meetings and decided this didn't sit right with him, so he went immediately to the FBI to tell us what we were doing, and they said, great.

Hang in there. Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced by Wonder Media Network and it was created and written by me, your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our outlandishly nimble producers are Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk, Palomo Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch, and myself. Our editor is the inestimable Grace Lynch. Scoring production from Adrian Bain for Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan for iHeart Podcasts.