S2E5: G-Men Are Coming to Town

Last time on Snapoo.

We had picked the time to begin the actual action, timing it to begin with the Ali Fraser fight.

So I went to the door, mister confident, and there's a second lock on the door that wasn't there like two weeks before.

We got this far, and we're just not going to give up. And that's when I remembered the second door.

Who anonymous.

I was really jacked up. Can you believe it? We pulled it off without a single hitch?

Now, were you the first to a rhyme the morning?

Yes?

Yes, about seven seven thirty in the morning.

Frank McLaughlin was an FBI agent based in Media, Pennsylvania, in nineteen seventy one. On March ninth of that year, he was the first one to arrive for work, where his investigative acumen immediately told him is something wasn't right.

I could tell the lock had been tampered with. I could tell by looking at it. So then I automatically looked at the second door, and that was that.

You are.

What do you think I suspected that there was a Berkeley? I mean, yeah, I've been in this business a lot of years.

Inside, he astutely noted a few more telltale clues. For example, all of the documents in the entire office were missing.

The doors were open and the files were gone. And I walked into my office a destroyers were rifled. It's a place that was ramsacked.

From there, a series of bewildered g men passed the message up the chain of command. Before Whover even arrived at his office that morning, his underlings had already enlisted one of his most trusted agents, Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt. If that name sounds familiar, it's because a few years later, Felt would leak evidence about Watergate to the Washington Post. For that he's better known to the world as Deep Throat.

That was after a famous porn movie at the.

Time, Thanks Betty. Anyway, in nineteen seventy one, Felt was a highly respected g man, the kind the other g men turned to when the unthinkable happened.

Mark Felt was in New York and he was shaving in his hotel room when he got a call telling him that there was an emergency in the FBI.

Felt canceled his meetings in New York. He caught the next train down to Philadelphia. He hustled from Philly's thirtieth Street station to the FBI office at one Veteran Square in Media. He strode into the office, took charge, and immediately got to work covering his own ass.

So when Mark Felt arrived that morning, he immediately focused on the safe in the office.

That safe was the only unburgled thing in the whole office. It contained the agent's firearms, but no files.

He thought that this was ridiculous, this is where the papers should have been kept.

Yeah, funny thing about that the lead agent and media had put in a request for a larger safe just the year before. He specifically noted that not having one left his office vulnerable to burglars. That request landed on the desk of Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt.

The other thing that he asked Felt for was an alarm system, an alarm system that would be connected to the police. Felt had turned him down on both of these things. When he asked why they couldn't have an alarm system, he said that they were so close to the local police station that that just wasn't necessary.

You're close to a police station. If you get burgled, just scream, they'll hear you.

And instead of a very large safe, he provided them with a very small safe.

We'll never know. I Felt realized in that moment that this whole snapfoo was kind of his fault. But before he got to work searching for the culprits, he found something more important, someone to take the fall the lead agent in Media, who was sadly reassigned to Atlanta.

Hoover, urged by Mark Felt, had gotten rid of the person in the office who knew the most about the area and probably could have been most helpful in conducting the investigation. Instead of Deep Throat, they were considering a nickname that morning. It would be deep Scapegoader.

Suffice to to say, this was not the FBI's finest hour. A reporter later described Hoover as quote apoplectic when he heard about the burglary. Within hours, the director had assigned over two hundred agents to a new operation to track down and arrest the culprits. The secret code name for this operation medburgh medburg.

I mean it was just a combination of media, meed, and burglary.

What a cute portmanteau. For the first time in its history, classified Bureau documents had fallen into outside hands, but for now, at least those documents remained secret. Hoover's FBI was in a race against the clock, and the orders were clear, find these anonymous burglars before an embarrassment became a catastrophe. I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This is Season two Medburg the story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI snaffoo

Haof Hao.

In the dead of night, hours before Frank McLaughlin would even discover the crime scene. The burglars sat in a Quaker farmhouse in the Pennsylvania Woods with pages and pages of loot. As the adrenaline wore off, it was time to see what they had scored. They separated the documents into piles and dug in.

I think we all trusted each other to know what was important and what wasn't. Judy and I worked together. They had a little shed off of the main cabin. But I remember Judy and I spending a lot of time in that shed and holding hands and but working too.

I thought it was very romantic to go through the files and decide, you know, which ones you weren't gonna copy.

Yeah, some files were boring and some were strange, like the memo that informed overweight agents they'd be subject to weekly weigh ins until they lost the extra pounds, or the one that instructed agents on the proper protocol for observing j Edgar Hoover's birthday. Who would have guessed this guy was more of a birthday diva than my five year old niece. An hour passed, and the burglars were undoubtedly feeling nervous that they had just risked everything to steal a bunch of nothing.

And then.

I remember someone in the other room said, you've got to come and see this.

The whole team stopped what they were doing and gathered around one document. Hearts pounding, they took turns reading. It was a memo from headquarters to all FBI agents. The memo instructed agents to conduct interviews with anti war activists, not for the purpose of investigating any illegal activity, but rather in.

Order to enhance the paranoia. They were to give the impression that there was an FBI agent behind every mailbox.

And it was like, at last something, That's what they wanted. They wanted people to think that there was a boogeyman behind every mailbox.

We had some idea that this was pretty explosive.

They kept reading, and soon the floodgates opened.

It was just a constant stream of people saying, oh, man, look at this, and then everybody would stop and look up and they would read something, you know, and then a couple of minutes later somebody would say, holy Macro, you're not going to believe this.

One file detailed the movements and grades of a congressman's daughter.

The records indicated that during the spring semester of nineteen sixty nine, she attended the AutoMac.

Who was being surveilled because she, like her parents, opposed the Vietnam War.

Where major is fringe and as many courses.

Another conversation was picked up by a phone tap on the Black Panther Party's Philadelphia office. The tap didn't appear to have picked up anything illegal, but agents had taken scrupulous notes. As one panther phoned his mom to ask for bus fare, he.

Asked his mother to send him seventeen dollars to get home.

They'd also intercepted a letter from a Boy Scout troop leader asking the Soviet embassy about the possibility of taking his troop to Russia for a camping trip next summer.

We would like very much to go to the Soviet Union to travel through your country and meet our counterparts in the USSR, if possible.

Another file alleged quote communist infiltration of a local women's.

Group, Martin Luther King Junior, who will address the fiftieth anniversary banquet?

Be the nature of that infiltration. Martin Luther King Junior had been invited to speak at their upcoming banquet.

Copies of the names and biographical data are attached here too.

A local civil rights leader, Mohammad Kanyata, was also being surveiled.

There are two persons authorized to sign checks on this account, and they are Mohammed Kanyata and Mary Kenyata.

Again, there was zero evidence of criminal activity in his file, but the FBI had obtained records of his phone calls and bank transactions.

The Peltan's account was forty four dollars and thirty two cents.

As they kept reading, the burglars realized banks, employers, landlords, utility companies, local police, and individual busybodies had all happily collaborated with the FBI to surveil their friends and associates, no subpoenas, no warrants, and absolutely zero consideration for privacy.

Will continue to monitor bank account of National Black Economic Development Conference in Southeast National Bank, followed by copies of bank statements.

Kiseled chicks and While the targets ranged from women's lib groups to boy Scout troops, the FBI was clearly preoccupied with black activists. They weren't just tapping the phones of the Black Panthers and leaders like Kenyata. Every single black student at Swafmore College was under surveillance. When they finally got through all the files, the burglars tallied up what they'd found. Forty percent of the cases in the Media

Oh, it was all horrifying. It was horrifying, but.

It was clear that the mandates were being sent to FBI offices nationwide.

I think we all felt disgusted.

One memo came directly from Hoover, directing all offices to surveil black student unions on every single college campus in the country.

I had no particular admiration for the FBI at that point, but that was a new low not even I had imagined.

And Hoover said their activity posed a quote definite threat to the nation's stability and security. They didn't realize it yet, but the single most important document the burglars had stolen was a simple routing slip at the top in big block letters was a code word, which at the time

I must have been about what six point thirty in the morning, and I stopped to a paypall on at Chestnut Hill at a gas station. The whole place was empty.

I before they could finally return home to their children. John and Bonnie Rains had one more task. They pulled up to a gas station and Bonnie waited in the car as John made a phone call. In his hand was a statement announcing what the Citizens Commissioned to Investigate the FBI had just done.

We'd written a common statement and this was to be read to the writer's fellow.

Well, I was dead the phone.

That's Bill Winzel, the reuters fella, Yeah, the phone.

And the voice said, this is a Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI. I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting. Good Bill.

On the night of March eighth, nineteen seventy one, the Citizens Commissioned to Investigate the FBI removed files from the media Pennsylvania Office of the FBI. These files will now be studied to determine the nature and extent of surveillance.

John was on the phone with the reporter reading the statement, and I was waiting in the car and a police car pulls up into the gas station. He was curious, I guess about what we were doing at that time of the night on a public phone.

The police car crept by. The officer peered at John. John spotted the car, but he kept reading. His hand trembled holding a piece of paper that contained his confession to a federal.

Crime, and we just absolutely freaked out.

The police car kept moving and slowly drove away. John continued reading, we have taken this action because we believe that democracy can survive only in an order of justice, of an open society and public trust. And then the police car returned, driving even more slowly this time.

I was really afraid at that point, because John had that piece of paper right there in front of him in the phone booth.

She leaned over and banged on the window to get John's attention, her expression clearly conveying a message every spouse understands, hurry the up. But even with the cops checking him out and Bonnie glaring at him, John dictated the entire letter. He had a cover story just in case if the police bothered him, he'd just pretend he was on the phone with his bookie. He catched the fight last night.

We tore the statement up and threw it out the window and went home to our kids.

As the scraps of paper fluttered to the ground, John and Bonnie laughed with glee or perhaps sleep deprivation. Meanwhile, Bill, the Reuter's fellow, was wide awake. He just had a bombshell dropped right into his hands.

I knew I was going to have to call the FBI to tell them I had gotten the call, and I needed confirmation that all your files had been stole.

Bill expected the FBI to give him the run around, or a simple no comment.

You know, they could have said what not answering questions, but they didn't. They confirmed it, and trustfully, at this point they're looking pretty bad.

He laughs now. But Bill would soon realize this phone call made him a suspect. In the coming weeks, he'd be stalked by FBI agents. According to him, one actually punched him in the stomach. Bill could only corroborate basic details with the FBI. His story ran in The New York Times the next day, around fifty words in total, buried on page seven. The story acknowledged that a burglary had taken place, but said nothing about the nature of the records that were stolen. Hoover still had time to

We had to depend on courageous journalists and editors to do their job. Then that was just one more thing to be anxious about. Would they So we just had to hope, and we had to wait and see what the reaction of the general public would be to the truth about the FBI.

The burglars would later learn that the congressmen and who'd received the files had immediately turned them right back over to the FBI, but not Betty Metzker. She retrieved her mail at the Washington Post, found a mysterious envelope, and met the moment head on.

FBI records stolen from the media Pennsylvania office showed that one goal of a bureau was to spread that very impression among left wing organizations that there was an agent behind every mail box.

The FBI was falling out of public favor for pretty much the first time ever, not only for its questionable ethics, but also for its questionable effectiveness. A New York Times editorial read quote, little confidence is inspired by the security measures of a security agency whose files can be so easily burglarized. Here's burglar. Ralph Daniel I was also real excited, because we did have some concern that this funky little outpost for the fbi't wasn't going to have much.

But we knew, we knew this was dynamite stuff.

After we mailed the documents, our job was done.

This was moving along unbelievably well. When the Citizens commissioned to investigate the FBI met at the farmhouse for the last time. They renewed the vow they had made at the start they would never tell a living soul what they had done.

We decided we're not getting together as a group ever again. We really parted ways.

Apart from John and Bonnie, who continued to be married, the rest of the crew knew their best chance of staying safe was to stay apart. No more dinners, no more phone calls, no returning to media every March for a reunion barbecue.

We absolutely could not be in contact with each other at all. I'm sure that bothered me to some extent, but that's the way it had to be. It's just the way it had to be.

And so the burglars left the Quaker Farmhouse in the Woods one last time. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI was effectively dissolved, but the FBI's hunt for them, code named Medburg, was just getting started, and soon the g men would come a knocking. When the Washington Post published the contents of those first media files, j Edgar Hoover was livid. His only consolation was that the story

Find me that.

The agents who saw Bonnie in the office that day worked with a Philadelphia sketch artist to drop a picture to distribute to agents nationwide. The quality of the sketch was well, just imagine someone handed you a picture of an oval and said, go find this egg.

I laughed. I just laughed and laughed. It was pretty funny. It's almost like a cartoon.

Accompanying the sketch was a written description apparently Bonnie's coat was quote soiled and in need of cleaning and pressing, and her hair was quote apparently not well combed or well kept. Were you offended by their description?

Yeah, I was a little offended. We just knew that Hoover was beside himself that this had happened.

Well, I mean, that was no surprise. I mean, two seconds after Bill suggested the idea, I'm like, they really gonna be pissed if we pull this off.

He dispatched two hundred agents to flood the Philadelphia area to find us.

Powelton Village is a neighborhood in West Philadelphia filled with red brick townhouses. In nineteen seventy one, it was a hotbed of anti war activism. Hoover was certain that if the burglars were to be found, they'd be found here, and he was actually right. More than half of the burglars did live in Powelton Village at the time. Judy was one of them.

We knew that we were poking the hornet's nest.

I mean we knew it.

We had a lot of heat, you know, everybody was being intimidated.

Mostly the g men just sat in their cars for weeks on end, equipped with long lens cameras watching, and whether or not somebody was actively involved in anti war protests didn't really seem to matter to these agents. At least one resident learned that the heart Way, I.

Haven't been active in resistance politics or anything, and yet you know, twelve armed agents broke into my house.

Throughout that time, very seldom did they figure out actual information that could lead to arrest. They really lost their ability to be sharp at solving crimes, and they did outrageous things instead. And this kind of just massive surveillance. By sitting in the cars, it's very unlikely you're going to get information that tells you anything about who broke into that FBI office.

This approach was classic Hoover. It was more or less the same tactic that had been revealed in the media files. Surveil everyone all the time in what's known as blanket surveillance. It was exhaustive, time consuming, and generated so much information that it became impossible to suss out which bits actually mattered. Blanket surveillance is great for intimidation, but for crime solving not so much.

So.

There were so many agents hanging around village that somebody in the community decided the way to fight back was to make fun of them.

For example, when agents inevitably fell asleep in their cars, a.

Local resident would stand beside an FBI car and blow a bullhorn as another residence stood on the other side of the FBI car with a tray of freshly baked cookies and milk ready for the agents as they jolded awake after the bullhorns sound. I don't know if any agents ever accepted the cookies into milk.

Somebody also had the brilliant idea to go around and slap bumper stickers on all the surveillance cars that said this is an FBI car. And then there was the street fair.

They called it Your FBI in Action Street Fair.

The fair was a spectacle planned by the residents of Powellton Village to make a mockery of Hoover's FBI. Copies of the stolen media files, which by now had gotten around, were nailed to trees. You could get your picture taken with a life sized cardboard cutout of j Edgar Hoover. There were skits too, yes open up FBI wa kids assembled jigsaw puzzles depicting FBI agents sleeping in their cars.

They know it you are, They know if you are streets, they know if you.

Are land all right, And if you plan to smash the state.

Better are not crown.

You better not smiled, You better.

Not see love me while Edgar Hoover's hanging. Oh no, no, no, you know. I never really thought about the similarities between Hoover and Santa before, but I guess they were both surveillance experts, both pretty demanding bosses. But then again, no one's ever accused the g men of being jolly.

I've never heard anybody say that an FBI agent was observed laughing at any feings.

My experience was that FBI agents did not have a sense of humor. At least they didn't think my jokes were funny.

It may have been silly, but the residents of Palellton Village were making a point. They now knew every tactic in the FBI's paranoia playbook, and it wasn't going to work on them. And at that fair, posing for a picture with his family. Alongside the cardboard cutout j Edgar Hoover was none other than Bill Davidan, the mastermind of the burglary. As the FBI bumbled its way through the investigation, Bill created a new role for himself the unofficial burglary spokesperson.

I thought it was important to have outreach, and John was very opposed to that. You know, he was very uneasy about sort of being publicly involved in discendating information about media. And I guess my feeling is something illegal about doing that, so why not?

Yeah, but it also seems as though it might attract it's important to avoid this cloak and dagger atmosphere.

But for the rest of the burglars. The heat of the Medburg investigation was more menacing, and soon some of them would come to face the agents hunting them.

We were trying to go back to our normal lives, but it was just it was the elephant in the room. As they say, there were things to be scared about. You don't know for sure, you don't know one hundred percent, so you worry about that.

But I'm at home. I thought I never loved that I had started with.

The Day after the burglary, Sarah Schumer realized she had lost one of her gloves.

Did that mean that I had put my hand on door jams and whatnot? Without it on the head fingerprints?

For weeks, Sarah couldn't think of anything else. Day by day, hour by hour, she retraced her steps in her head, again and again. At what point that night did she lose that glove? She couldn't sleep. Some days, she couldn't eat. Sarah describes it like the feeling you have when you're far from home and suddenly start wondering if you left the oven on. But this time she couldn't go back and check. Sarah didn't yet know that the FBI had recovered a partial palm print from the office.

And then the next morning, I got a phone call from the FBI that they wanted to interview me, and I called two faculty friends to come down to my office.

Sarah told the agents she talked to them, but only in the presence of her friends, and only if they let her use a tape recorder.

And I said no, that would not be acceptable. They said, well, then you don't have any questions for you.

So yeah, they clearly weren't the world's best burglar catchers, but when it came to sewing fear, the FBI was the best in the game.

So I'm at my job and I get page downstairs.

Bobby have two visitors. They have crew cuts and wingtip shoes.

So I went downstairs and my visitors were these two FBI agents, and you know, they suggested that we go outside and talk, and they escorted me to a car that was parked right outside the office.

They asked Bob to get in the car. Then the agent stirred to him and asked, Bob, do you know anything about this burglary and media?

You know, I'd read all those documents. I knew what they were doing. If they're going to arrest you. They're going to arrest you right away. And if they're not going to arrest you, they just want to see if they can get information out of you. And your best strategy is to refuse to say anything. That's another one of those pesky constitutional rights. You don't have to talk to them in this case, I said, Fellas, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm just not going to say

Bob waited for the agent to ask for directions, but instead the agent merely nodded to the driver. He drove right up to the spot.

They knew exactly where I lived, and I hope we've lived there for a couple of weeks.

One day, not long after the burglary, John and Bonnie Rains had an unexpected visitor.

The ninth member of the group who dropped out showed up at our front door nine and so we invited him in and he said that he wanted to talk to us because he had heard from someone that there were documents that had to do with missile silos and he was very concerned about that.

John and Bonnie promised him there was nothing about missile silos in the media files, but the ninth Burglar was convinced. He said he was worried the group would leak sensitive files that would threaten national security. And then he said, I'm thinking of turning you in.

Didn't want him to see us freak out, but we were freaking out.

I don't know what you'd do in this situation, but I can pretty much guarantee you would not do what John did hire the guy to come back the next weekend to paint his kitchen.

The kitchen didn't need painting, it.

Was, in fact a ruse. The ninth Burglar returned the following weekend, and as they spent the afternoon rolling on a fresh coat of yellow, John tried to find out where Number nine's paranoia was really coming from.

So, John, how did you hear this? And he said that his girlfriend told him that. And John said, well, how long has she been your girlfriend? And he said, oh, I don't know, three or four months. And John said, have you thought about the fact that she might be an FBI informant? And his eyes sort of popped wide open like that, and John said, I can assure you that there were no documents of that nature whatsoever.

Number nine left covered in paint and seeming to trust that his friends wouldn't endanger the safety of the nation. At least for now. John and Bonnie's nerves were fried. They weren't out of the woods. There was still the possibility they could be caught, that their children might be left without parents over the coming weeks. They worried that Number nine might still turn them in. And then there was a knock on the door.

There were two of them, you know, the nice guy on the mean guy, And it was exactly at the game.

John had just returned from playing tennis, which was lucky because he needed a minute to think.

When I first came in, I was assuming that my tennis clothes.

I was all swear.

I'd gone upstairs to shower and left them alone downstairs for fifteen times WHI I was shower.

He came downstairs, fresh as a daisy and ready to bluff.

They were investigating the media break yet, and they want to know, do I know anything about that?

John being? John launched into a filibuster. Did he know about the files? Of course he did. Everybody knew about him. He turned the interrogation into a lecture, you gm in ought to be ashamed of yourselves, and you need to be out.

There, you know, looking at major crimes.

And at the end of the interview, they said, by the way, you didn't have anything to do with this, didue? But my answer was I said, well, I feel so angry.

About what I found out from the papers that I don't want to make your search for people any easier, So I'm not going to say what I was or not.

Just minutes after the agents left, probably regretting talking to John in the first place, Bonnie rains the unknown walk in walked in. If John had kept the agents even longer, they would have run right into their number one target, the Get Me That Woman woman. She and John spent the next twenty minutes making sure the agents hadn't left any secret recording devices. As the weeks passed and the FBI continued to circle, John and Bonnie decided to take

I didn't know whether anybody else was being questioned by the FBI or whether I was the only one that they were tracking down, and if I was the only one, why was that? And as was it because I left Prince and nobody else did so is isolating.

The burglar's secret and their fear of it getting out created a special kind of isolation. There was simply no one for them to turn to to process this intense experience. This isolation, and the ever present threat of the FBI led Judy Finegold to make the most drastic choice of all. She left Philadelphia forever. She and her new love interest, sorry Bob, simply packed up and headed west.

I just wanted to get out of town.

I didn't have a plot or a plan.

We just went wes.

Judy found her way to New Mexico and began living under an assumed name, severing connections to everyone she knew, even her parents. After everything that had gone down, she says she just had a feeling that sooner or later someone might slip up.

I really didn't trust that. After a while, like people would start getting relax and say, oh, yeah, you know, You're at some party and somebody'll say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, you know, Bob said, you know, and they got the media files, you know, so I just decided to leave, and it was absolutely terribly painful, you know.

It was.

After a few months, the media files were no longer making news. By May, the burglars had released all of the relevant stolen documents. Betty Metzger had nothing new to report on, and to make matters worse.

Senator Dole, the Republican chairman, accused the Democrats of trying to make the FBI look like an American guestapo.

Congress declined to investigate. Hoover had avoided a congressional investigation for now, but President Nixon had started to view him as a liability. So one day in late nineteen seventy one, Nixon decided he'd had enough. He was finally going to fire J. Edgar Hoover. Here's Professor Daniel Chard.

He arranged his whole special breakfast with Hoover where he was going to try to break the news.

Hmm, you smell that. That's just the scent of waffles and bacon and me finally getting rid of your ass. Nixon didn't actually tell Hoover he was fired. He offered him the opportunity to retire with dignity and let a new FBI director make a fresh start. But even at the age of seventy six, coming off the worst scandal of his career, Hoover called Nixon's bluff.

And Hoover was just too slick. Hoover said, I would be happy to go into retirement if you would put in that you would like me to do that, And Nixon realizes he's not going to do that. He doesn't want to put that in writing because Hoover is so popular, especially among the conservative base.

When the breakfast ended, Hoover was still the director of the FBI. Nixon had even agreed to increase the bureau's personnel budget. Even now fighting for his job, as his men flailed around desperately interrogating every hippie in the greater Philadelphia area. Hoover was a force to be reckoned with. And even though his g mens blanket surveillance tactics had allowed most of the culprits to slip right through their fingers undetected, they still had some tricks up their sleeves.

And then I hear this guy yelled.

Freeze coming up on snappho.

They came to the doors, guns drawn and put us up against the wall.

The FBI arrested twenty persons in Camden.

New Jersey, early today and charged them with trying to steal draftra and the federal building there.

Forty seven years would have been the maximum.

There was this feeling that nothing actually would happen in terms of Hoover having to face the music. It felt like the end at that time, but it wasn't the end.

Snafoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snafoo is based on the book of the Burglary, The Discovery of j Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer