The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  SAC Jamieson telephonically advised that some time during the night the RA at Media, PA, had been broken into. Initial reports to Jamieson were that the file cabinets and desks were broken into but it does not appear that the unknown subject or unknown subjects got into the safe.…Media RA is located in the County Building, Room 203, Front Street and South Street, Media, PA. The building is privately owned.

  ACTION: Agents of the Philadelphia office have instituted an immediate investigation. SAC Jamieson will keep the Bureau advised.

  So they could fully inform the director about the burglary as soon as he arrived at the office that morning, Hoover’s top aides prepared a memorandum based on all the information that agents in the Media and Philadelphia offices had phoned and telegraphed to headquarters. In the hour before he arrived, a sense of crisis grew among his aides. They sent a bulletin to all FBI offices in the country:

  At 7:45 a.m., March nine, instant, forceful entry and burglary discovered at Media, PA. This RA located second floor … Front and South Avenue, Media. Office consists of five interconnecting rooms with three doors opening on to public hallway. Two of these doors locked permanently. One door used for normal entrance to office. Examination reveals entry made by jimmying one of two permanently locked doors and moving two supply cabinets immediately inside this door. Also evidence located of attempt to punch lock on one of two other doors.

  Preliminary inspection reveals all agents’ desks and locked file cabinets pried open. All serials [a term used by the FBI for files] and notes in these cabinets are missing. Total number and identity of serials being ascertained through review of pertinent Philadelphia files.…

  Wire on radio console transmitter severed preventing all radio transmission from RA.…

  …All offices promptly alert appropriate sources and informants. Furnish any positive information by most expeditious means to Philadelphia office … SAC affording on-scene supervision. End.

  This was not how the workday usually started at the Media FBI office. Until this morning, the office was usually a quiet, calm working environment. Agents in Media spent most of their time on what they considered typical and preferred cases: bank robberies, stolen cars, and other stolen goods. The office seldom was in the news, which was the way the agents liked it. The last time the Media office was in the news prior to the events that started unfolding the evening of March 8, 1971, was exactly four years earlier on March 9, 1967, when the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a light feature story that reported that the FBI office that served Chester and Delaware Counties had been moved from Chester to Media.

  The article noted that the four agents who worked in the Media office at that time were almost precise prototypes of the kind of men Director Hoover had told a congressional committee the previous year he wanted FBI agents to be: “I am not looking for ‘collar ad types,’ but I am looking for agents who are clean cut, mature and will measure up to the image which I think the American people feel an FBI man should be.”

  “They measure up in Media,” the reporter wrote, also noting that a recent crime investigated by Media agents was typical of the work in the office: the robbery of furs, jewelry, and other items valued at $11,000 that belonged to Mrs. Ora Taylor of nearby Yeadon.

  On the morning of March 9, 1971, the agents stationed at the Media office had to deal with a very different type of crime. It was a simple burglary—how it was described in the major Philadelphia newspapers in the first news stories about the break-in—that was not so simple. Unlike any other burglary, the one discovered in Media early that morning immediately consumed J. Edgar Hoover and his aides at FBI headquarters in Washington, and eventually attracted the attention of Attorney General John Mitchell. Agents from throughout the country were immediately put on alert to find the burglars and the files they had stolen. This definitely was not just a simple burglary.

  By 8 a.m., the Media agents had thoroughly processed the five rooms in the office for latent fingerprints. They were pleased to find “what appeared to be an imprint of a right hand on the right side of the cabinet” that had been pushed when the door was forced open. This gave them hope for a fast arrest.

  When McLaughlin discovered that the Speed Graphic camera had not been stolen, he grabbed it and photographed the crime scene, documenting each room in great detail. His photos corroborated the damage reported in the summary agents wrote that morning:

  …Examination of the door frame reflected that the wood had been splintered indicating the lock and or bolt had been broken away from the wooden door frame.…In each of the five rooms in the RA the cabinets and desks … had been broken into.…Lower lock on the door to room 203 (main entrance) had been damaged and was inoperable.…The door to room 204 had been broken open and the door jamb extensively damaged.…In room 205 … the five-drawer file cabinet had been ransacked and the serials and investigative notes maintained in the first three drawers were missing. In addition to serials and notes relating to these serials, it was reported the following items were missing from the third drawer in this file cabinet: Philadelphia office personnel list, law enforcement mailing list, list of staff of U.S. Attorney’s office and U.S. Marshal’s office, Philadelphia, and pamphlet entitled Correspondence with the FBI … missing from drawer of [another agent, named blacked out] his personal telephone directory.…It was noted that the only Directory of Students (for Swarthmore College) missing was that for the current school year.…

  None of the office furniture had been damaged, according to the report. The supply cabinet, which contained blank office forms, had not been disturbed. Agents also noted that the burglars had left desk surfaces in neat condition.

  McLaughlin immediately thought of the safe. He was relieved to discover that it was still there and that it had not been opened. There wasn’t even any sign anyone had tried to open it. He remembers thinking that the burglars must have not taken it because it was heavy. That meant the firearms, handcuffs, and administrative manuals agents kept in the safe had not been stolen. He was especially relieved to know that the firearms were not missing. Agents kept their smaller pistols, called “detective specials,” in the safe. That’s what Davidon would have found if he had come to the office early that morning and succeeded in opening the safe. Pistols definitely were not what he had hoped to find.

  IN A REPORT to Washington headquarters that morning, Media agents also described this missing item:

  The personal autographed photograph of Director J. Edgar Hoover belonging to Special Agent [blacked out] was in a frame affixed to the wall in room 203 occupied by Special Agent [blacked out]. The photograph of Mr. Hoover had been removed from this frame and taken by unknown subjects. It should be noted that the glass of this picture was not broken but was found with the frame on a table approximately 30 feet from where it was hanging on the wall.

  For most of Hoover’s tenure as director, nearly all agents prominently displayed such pictures in their offices. They were photos of an agent standing beside Hoover on a day when the agent had visited FBI headquarters in Washington and had a brief meeting with the director. Hoover had the photos taken, and later he sent a signed copy to the agent so that the agent would have a memento of what Hoover assumed was a special occasion in his life—meeting Hoover. The near-reverential respect some agents felt for Hoover was evident in the home of a retired agent who for several months led the investigation of the Media burglary. Nearly the entire fireplace mantel and several other flat surfaces in his living room were lined with photos of the agent standing beside Hoover and other photos of Hoover with the agent’s wife and children.

  McLaughlin was that kind of agent—the kind who deeply admired the director. Meeting the director was indeed a very special occasion in his life. He told me he “met Mr. Hoover on a couple occasions. I was never so impressed by any other man in my life, other than my father.” Like many devoted agents at that time, McLaughlin remembers the date he became an FBI agent with the same precision he remembers his birthday: “It was April 2
3, 1951.” In retirement, he spoke warmly of the many years he worked in the bureau. “I really liked the bureau. I liked the bureau work. I liked the people. I liked everything.”

  McLaughlin was transferred from the New York office of the FBI to the downtown Philadelphia office in 1968. At first, he worked on the hijacking squad, a part of general criminal investigations. Soon he was sent to the Media office. He developed a special affection for the office. Often, when his workload was heavy, he would take two of his four children to the Media office after mass on Sundays at his nearby Catholic church. They would play—pretend they were writing documents on the typewriters and make up other office games—while he dictated reports on cases he had covered the previous week but had not had time to complete. “It was a busy place. But it was fun. I loved it. I really did.” He would not work in the Media office after what he discovered the morning of March 9. It was now a crime scene and would not be an FBI office again. Like the other agents there, McLaughlin was soon transferred to Philadelphia and other offices in the area.

  THE NEWS THAT FBI serials were missing registered as a Richter-magnitude earthquake when it reached FBI headquarters that morning. The serials were the heart of the bureau. They were the bureau’s recorded history. They were the records of all communications—written accounts of exchanges between agents, exchanges between agents and informants, reports from informants, communications between and among high-level FBI officials in Washington and agents in the field, communications between the director and top officials in the field and at headquarters. Each office kept in its files locally generated serials, as well as those distributed by the headquarters office and other local bureau offices. Some of the serials were mundane, some were explosive, and, as agents knew, all were regarded as secret documents that should be protected and never be seen by anyone outside the bureau. Officials at headquarters immediately realized that morning that the possibility of any serials becoming public would consume the director.

  Before Hoover arrived at his office that morning, his top aides agreed that W. Mark Felt should be asked to go to Media immediately. One of the people Hoover trusted most, Felt had been head of the bureau’s Inspection Division since 1964. In that capacity, he enforced Hoover’s stringent requirements for how field offices should be evaluated during what agents and many officials in the field regarded as dreaded periodic inspections. Part of his responsibility involved making sure the local offices carried out the secret political programs that would be revealed for the first time in the Media documents. That morning he was tasked to determine how this bureau tragedy, the burglary in Media, could have happened. Headquarters officials realized Hoover would be somewhat comforted at this very uncomfortable time by knowing that Felt would soon be at the scene of the crime. By then, Felt had been a close confidant of Hoover for many years. Just four months later, on July 1, 1971, Hoover would promote Felt to deputy associate director, the third-highest position in the bureau, with only Hoover and Clyde Tolson above him. Tolson was very ill by then, making Felt by default the second most powerful person in the FBI. By the fall of 1972, a few months after Hoover’s death in May 1972, Felt would become Deep Throat, the most famous confidential source in history, for his role as source to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about Watergate crimes. Like Hoover, Felt regarded the Media burglary as a very serious crime against the bureau. He later wrote, in his 1979 and 2006 memoirs, that it was “the biggest blemish on the FBI’s image.”

  J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1924–72.

  As he shaved in his New York hotel room early that March 1971 morning, Felt wrote, the phone rang. “It was the night supervisor at the New York office: ‘The bureau wants you to call as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘And they want you to call on the secure line.’ I dressed, rushed to the office and picked up the phone.” Felt was in New York that morning because he was in charge of the inspection then taking place at this, the bureau’s largest field office and, it would be learned later, the FBI office that had long been most involved in political spying and dirty tricks.

  “The bureau switchboard operator put me through to Edward S. Miller, my top assistant in the Inspection Division. He told me that burglars had broken into the FBI’s resident agency at Media, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. ‘Apparently they got away with a lot of serials,’ Miller said. Within thirty minutes I was on the Metroliner for Philadelphia.” Important as the New York inspection was, it was placed on hold while Felt rushed to Media.

  HOOVER’S INITIAL ANGER focused on the fact that Tom Lewis, the agent in charge of the Media office, did not get the name of the woman who had interviewed him two weeks earlier, but Felt immediately focused on the safe in the Media office. He wrote in 1979 that his first thought when Miller called him that morning was to ask Miller to check whether Felt had purchased a large safe for the Media office the previous fall. He waited on the phone as Miller checked the records. “When Ed Miller assured me that I had, I breathed a sigh of relief.”

  Felt’s official and unofficial writings about the safe provide contradictory accounts on the important point of the size of the safe in the Media office. His attitude regarding the safe when he arrived at the Media office the morning after the burglary angered agents in the office. If they had assigned him a nickname that morning, it would not have been Deep Throat, the nickname Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons gave Bob Woodward’s anonymous source in 1972, after the title of a porn movie popular at that time. The Media agents might have named him Deep Scapegoater. That morning in Media Felt was covering up secrets, not revealing them as he did a little more than a year later to Woodward.

  In his memoir, Felt wrote that he had played a pivotal role just a few months before the Media burglary in increasing security at the Media office after the director asked him to assess security at the bureau’s 536 small FBI offices, including Media. “A midnight raid was not unexpected,” he wrote, noting that draft board raids had stirred concern about a possible raid of an FBI office. Actually, an FBI office had been entered by burglars that September in Rochester, New York, but the burglars there were promptly arrested in the office, which was part of a suite of federal offices. Because 475 of the bureau’s smallest offices were located in commercial offices where minimal or no protection existed, Felt said he told Hoover those offices should be provided “a good burglar-proof cabinet safe.” But such safes cost $1,000 each, more than the FBI could afford, Felt wrote. Therefore, the “only workable solution,” according to him, was to provide the few offices “close to college and universities with a great deal of activist ferment” with such safes. Because Media was close to several campuses—Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, Swarthmore College, Villanova University—Felt said he ordered a large file drawer–type safe for Media.

  But did he?

  “When I arrived at the Media office,” Felt wrote in his memoir, “the experts [FBI agents from the Media office] were looking for evidence to help identify the burglars”:

  What I wanted to see, though, was the safe, and there it was—the biggest type of two-door, burglar-proof, fireproof cabinet safe that money could buy—untouched and unscratched in the middle of the office.…I began my inquiry by asking Lewis to open the safe. Inside, where sensitive documents should have been stored, were several two-way radios, assorted Bureau firearms, handcuffs, a blackjack, and a copy of the National Crime Information Center operations manual, a public document.…The burglars did not even attempt to jimmy this monster. I suspect they stole away thinking that they had failed in their mission, that the really secret documents were locked away in the big safe.…The resident agents at Media completely missed the point, but the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI did not miss a single important document.

  In contrast, Media agents and the burglars—and also Felt’s own official report written immediately after the burglary—described the safe as very small. In that official report, Felt criticized Lewis for not a
sking headquarters for a large safe. If he had done so, Felt concluded, the documents could not have been stolen.

  One of Felt’s accounts—the official one or the one in his memoir—has to be false. The safe could not have been a big “monster,” as he described it in his memoir, and also too small to hold files, as he wrote in his official report.

  A retired agent who worked in the office recalls that the safe Felt purchased for the office was so small that agents considered it useless. He remembers what happened in the fall of 1970 quite differently from the way Felt remembers it. He says Lewis, with the agreement of the agents in the office, thought there was an urgent need for security in the office, which essentially had no security. In September he asked the bureau for a large cabinet safe with lockable file drawers—similar to the type of safe Felt later claimed he provided for the office. But according to the Media agent, Felt refused to provide a large safe for the office. Instead, he approved the purchase of the very small one. At the same time, the agent said, Felt also refused to approve another important item Lewis asked the bureau to purchase: an alarm system. Felt refused that request, saying that because the Media office was relatively close to a local police station, a burglar alarm was not needed. Those details were not in Felt’s official report on the burglary.

  Felt’s goals at the time of the burglary, as well as eight years later when he wrote his memoir, seemed to be to scapegoat Lewis and to conceal his own role in failing to provide security for the Media office. Remarkably, in both accounts he reached the same conclusion—Lewis was responsible for the burglary—yet with diametrically different claims about the size of the safe. In 1971, he wrote in his official report that Lewis had a small safe and was responsible for the burglary because he had failed to ask for a large one, where all the files could have been securely stored; in 1979, he wrote in his memoir that Lewis had a large safe and was responsible for the burglary because he did not store the files in it.