The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Other reports from investigating agents in the first week:

  • “Members of Farkle Farm commune primarily engaged in drug and sex activities with little direct involvement in active resistance movement. Contacting Pennsylvania State Police and state narcotics officers regarding this commune is not sufficient. Possibility exists that members of the commune may have received information regarding this case. Immediately initiate direct contacts with members of this and other communes in your area to determine if information regarding burglary can be developed.”

  • “Locksmiths Philadelphia area being canvassed for clues … possible information regarding persons skilled in surreptitious entry.”

  • “Preliminary research under way for ex-servicemen similarly trained. Looking for those possibly associated with new left groups, having shown anti-Army bias after discharge.”

  • A commune of “unknown affinity” was interviewed. “Serious nature of burglary explained to them. They displayed extremely hostile attitude toward FBI.”

  • “Attempts being made to secure identity of unknown male who left nearby apartment at critical hour during early morning March nine last. He appears involved in illicit relationship and not related to this burglary. Further investigation required to identify him now being conducted.”

  • A resident of the Media building where the FBI office was located (her name was blacked out) “advised that she has been residing at this address with her husband since Feb. 28, 1971. She stated that she and her husband on the night of March 8, 1971, stayed up late and listened to the Frazier-Ali fight on the radio. They heard nothing downstairs. [Blacked out] advised that she is employed by the hardware store which is located to the rear of the resident agency, and that at no time has she ever observed any unusual activist in the parking lot in back of the resident agency.”

  The frequent summaries by agents in the early weeks of the probe often ended with this notation: “investigation continuing intensively.”

  At the end of a March 12 report on the unknown woman, Bonnie Raines, sent by Jamieson to the director and SACs throughout the country, Hoover, in his characteristic broad handwriting, expressed a concern that he voiced repeatedly: “I don’t understand why our resident agent at Media didn’t get this person’s name.”

  On March 17, when Hoover still thought the burglars would be apprehended and the documents found and secured at any time, he appeared before the House Appropriations Subcommittee. As usual, Hoover biographer Gentry wrote, “behind these closed doors, J. Edgar Hoover was treated like visiting royalty.” He did acknowledge, though, that unusual criticism was in the air. Consistent with his past unproven assumptions, he told the members of the committee that student unrest was due to pro-Soviet and China-oriented dissident groups on the campuses, not the Vietnam War. “I think if the war in Vietnam ended today,” he said, “they would find something else.” As Hoover ended his presentation that day, the chairman of the committee, Representative Frank T. Bow, Republican from Ohio, told him, “It is a pleasure to have you here. We have great confidence in you and your associates. I think we sleep a little better at night because of your efforts.” A short time later, Hoover learned that, as usual, he had received the increase he had asked for. Neither Hoover nor any member of the subcommittee said anything that day about the brief news reports that an FBI office had been burglarized.

  IN ADDITION to the unknown female walk-in, the agents in the Media office also remembered Susan Smith. Unlike Raines, Smith was identified by Media agents soon after the burglary. They recalled that she had visited the office unannounced in January, used her real name, and said she was there to ask if one of the agents would be willing to speak to one of her classes. Agents remembered that she didn’t tell them where she taught, but after the burglary, they quickly figured that out. They had her name and remembered her face. They scoured local college yearbooks and found her photo in one of them. Before they called her for an appointment, they searched their files and found a long roster of her activities and arrests at antiwar and civil rights demonstrations in various parts of the country, going back to the early 1960s. They found a report of an event where an agent had followed her and reported on her participation in a demonstration.

  Smith was the first Media burglar contacted by FBI agents after the burglary. An agent called her at her campus office on March 17, the day before the burglars met for the last time, just as they completed copying the files and preparing them to be mailed. She didn’t tell the others about the call, and she can’t remember why she didn’t. As she unfolds the tale, it seems evident that profound fear probably caused her to keep the visit a secret from everyone except two colleagues.

  In a report on the call to Smith, she was described by an agent as “uncooperative and evasive.” She refused during the phone conversation to make an appointment to meet with agents, “stating she had full schedule, and she inquired about reason for interview … asked agents not to contact her in person without first contacting her by telephone and was unwilling to give any assurance that she would then consent to interview in the future.…In view of uncooperative attitude, further background will be developed prior to further attempts to interview.”

  When Hoover was informed of her reaction, he ordered agents to go to Smith’s office without prior notice. He gave them this advice: “This is a criminal investigation and unless some reason exists, it is not necessary to contact a suspect or a person who may have information on this case by telephone prior to conducting an interview. If interviewee is uncooperative upon initial contact, insure individual is aggressively advised on the criminal penalties involved in this case.” That was a reference to Hoover’s hope that people arrested in the case would be charged with espionage, not simply burglary. Agents working on the case had been informed two days earlier that because some of the stolen files were believed to be about foreign matters—one of the documents, for example, was about a visit to the United States by the Soviet Circus on Ice—the burglars could be charged with espionage, a serious accusation that could lead to many years in prison.

  “If person refuses interview,” Hoover continued, “develop names of relatives and associates and attempt to develop [as sources].…Avoid harassment but do not hesitate to re-contact uncooperative suspects.…It will result in the solution of this case.…Locate and interview Susan Smith regarding her knowledge of this burglary.”

  Immediately after the message from Hoover, agents went to Smith’s campus office and, following Hoover’s advice, did so without calling in advance. “Bureau agents contacted Smith by surprise,” according to the report on the visit. “She called in other staff, turned on tape recorder and refused to be interviewed.”

  Any of the burglars would have been very concerned if an FBI agent had come to interview them, as happened to three others over the next several weeks. But Smith had a unique problem. By outward appearances, she was her usual self-possessed, businesslike self before and after the burglary. She arrived at the farm each evening after the burglary and studiously read and commented on scores of pages of stolen files and made recommendations about how they should be categorized. Her calm appearance was a front. Actually, she was in a state of perpetual, intense fear. She couldn’t sleep. Some days it was difficult for her to eat. She had no appetite. Her nerves went on alert every time she saw a police car. That instinct—Are they following me?—had been part of her life occasionally ever since she worked in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer in 1964, but it had pretty much disappeared. Now it was back and it was worse than it had ever been. That was true because of a question she could not answer. She was haunted by the question:

  Did I take my gloves off inside the FBI office?

  Two days after the burglary, the question arrived with such force and persistence that it felt like an interrogator had taken up residence in her head. She continued to be unable to answer the question. She tried repeatedly. She put herself through an exercise. In search of an accurate memor
y, she would try to relive every minute that she had been in the office the night of the burglary: I touched the doorknob, I opened file cabinet drawers, I removed paper from drawers, I touched the side of file cabinets, I handled paper on top of desks, I opened desk drawers, moved chairs.

  There was no doubt about it. Given her role in the burglary, if she had removed a glove, her fingerprints would be found throughout the Media office.

  Sometimes this replay of her time in the office went well, and she would start to feel that she had answered the question and resolved the problem that obsessed her. At such times, she would experience a period of calmness. She would remember herself wearing gloves the whole time she was inside the office. Near the end of this replay of crucial moments of the burglary, she would welcome a sense of relief and tell herself, I’m sure I didn’t take the gloves off. But nearly every time she went through this scenario, the doubt returned, even before she had a chance to have the pleasure of a relaxing sigh of relief. The painful cycle would start again: But did I, just before going through the door, take the gloves off? I remember pressing my hand on the door, just so, as I was leaving. Were my gloves on then?

  She never finished the exercise with certainty. Always, just as she was about to feel at ease, the painful uncertainty would return full force. Always a sound sleeper, she now spent hours staring into the darkness. Whether driving through the bucolic countryside between her home and the distant farmhouse or teaching one of her classes, her mind was often on two competing tracks—the things she would have preferred to be thinking about and the fear caused by the question that haunted her.

  Years later, she remembers clearly how her fear intensified when an FBI agent called her and said he wanted to talk to her:

  “About what?”

  “About the Media burglary.”

  “It was terrifying,” she remembers. Immediately the question was there as the agent was finishing his first sentence: Did I remove my gloves?

  While he continued to talk, she was frantically thinking, I can’t remember whether I took my gloves off. She was reassuring herself: I’m sure I didn’t take my gloves off. She was asking herself again, Did I take my gloves off just before going through the door, as we left? I remember I pressed my hand on the door just so. Many years later, though her voice is calm, even soft, as she recalls this frightening moment, her brow furrows deeply and her eyes reflect the pain of her memory.

  “It was like that feeling you have when you’re thirty minutes away from home: Did I turn the burner off under the teakettle? Or, did I unplug the iron? But I couldn’t go back to do anything about it.”

  When the agents showed up at her office the next day, Smith asked two other professors to be present. The agents were a mixture of cocky and angry. They were cocky about the fact that they had found her and, in doing so, had caught her in a lie. Why had she lied to them two months earlier, they wanted to know, when she came to the office? One of them seemed to relish describing how an agent at the Media office remembered the day after the burglary that a woman from one of the local colleges had come to the office, said she was a professor—Smith now thinks she said Temple University, though she’s not sure—and asked if the FBI would send someone to campus to discuss the bureau’s role in reacting to antiwar protests. She thinks she said, “We like to hear both sides of issues, and we are aware of a lot of accusations being made against the FBI, and we’d like to know what they have to say.” The agent she met in the Media office was “very congenial,” she recalls, and said the bureau would be happy to send someone from its speakers’ bureau. Just let them know when. Her visit was, of course, a ruse. Smith was in the office that January day to case the inside of the office, though for considerably less time and in less detail than Bonnie Raines would case it a month later.

  Now, in her campus office just days after the burglary, one of the agents was explaining to her, with pride, how they had managed to find her despite the fact that she had lied about where she taught. Taking pleasure in having blown her ill-disguised cover, he asked, “Why did you visit us? Why didn’t you just call to ask if we would provide speakers?”

  The agents’ cockiness turned to anger when Smith told them she was going to tape-record the interview. They said they would not permit that. No interview then, she said. “We didn’t tape-record you when you came to set up a speaker. Why would you want to tape-record us?” one of the agents asked. She recalls responding, “ ‘I don’t trust you guys.’ He said, ‘Well, we’re not going to talk if there’s a tape recorder.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ ” And the agents left.

  “But they got what they wanted,” says Smith. As she tells the story of the meeting years later, she sounds like someone who has just confessed and fears the sheriff will arrive soon with handcuffs. “They had gotten across their message—they wanted me to know that they had figured out who I was.…And I had behaved very badly. I had panic in my voice.…Instead of seeing me as a self-righteous citizen, they saw somebody who was scared.…I think that was why they left so easily. That was all they wanted to know—my reaction, my emotions. I don’t think they thought they were going to get any actual information from me.”

  She was right. In their report that day, the agents wrote that she was “visibly shaken during interview attempt.”

  From the wisdom of years of hindsight, she looks back on her “visit” to the bureau and regrets choosing “a ruse that was close to reality. I wasn’t worried at the time I went in there. In fact, I thought I was clever.…I was pissed at myself that they had blown my cover, that I hadn’t pulled that off.”

  As she faced them that day in her office, she felt certain they had her fingerprints. She felt sure then that the answer to the question that haunted her was yes, that she had removed her gloves. She had no way of knowing that no burglar’s fingerprints had been found in the office and that she must have worn her gloves the entire time. She continued to toss and turn fitfully every night for months, waking and asking herself the question again and again: Did I remove my gloves? Because the burglary was a secret, she could not share this agonizing concern with close friends. During that time, the burglary was a heavy burden for Smith. Eventually, she would be proud of the accomplishment, but not then.

  Surprisingly, she found comfort in something the FBI did shortly after they tried to interview her. A short time later, she heard from her parents. Retired and living in the South, they had been visited by the FBI. Then her brother told her he had been visited by the FBI. An aunt was visited by agents. Old friends in the West, including an attorney who represented her once many years earlier after she was arrested at a sit-in, were visited by the FBI. “They asked them all the same questions: What kind of person I was. What my politics were. Whether I’m the kind of person that would break the law like this. Would I break into an FBI office?”

  As friends and family members called, one by one, and told her that FBI agents had attempted to interview them about her, Smith started to feel relieved. “That actually reassured me a little bit.…It seemed so dumb. If they really had evidence, why would they interview my parents? What’s a friend on the West Coast going to know? It seemed that what they were doing was intended more as intimidation than as information gathering.…By that time I had read enough FBI documents that I knew they wasted their time on diddley squat a lot, so I thought that must be what they are doing to me. I figured if they had anything solid, they would have moved. The fear, or paranoia, continued, but their actions did reassure me.”

  She continued to puzzle over whether she had removed her gloves for a long time, but she asked the question of herself less often as she heard more about the kinds of questions the FBI agents were asking about her. “I always hated gloves,” she says, either as normal attire or as burglar attire. She wishes she could have dismissed the question as flippantly after the agents came to her office.

  BECAUSE EXPERTS TOLD investigators that the quality of the effort to pick the locks on the doors was superior, agents assu
med a trained locksmith must have been involved. In an effort to determine if any of the people on the growing list of suspects had taken courses in lock picking, every locksmith training school in the country was contacted. The task was difficult. Some of the schools had very long lists of graduates. For instance, the Locksmithing Institution, a correspondence school, had 14,000 students in 1970. In this pre-computer age, it was extremely difficult to cross-reference hundreds of suspects with such large lists. Nevertheless, agents wanted the list. Records show that officials at the school were reluctant to fulfill the FBI’s request. They said they thought performing this function for the bureau would place them in a bad light with their graduates. In the end, though, they said they would do the research if the FBI provided a letter that set forth the reasons for providing the list and assured the school the list would not fall into the hands of its competitors. In the end, no suspects’ names were found on the lists of graduates of any of the schools.

  One name, Keith Forsyth, must have been missed. Forsyth was on the FBI’s list of suspects for several weeks, but apparently his presence on the list of students enrolled in one of the schools was not noticed.

  Faced with no progress one week after the burglary in the search for either burglars or stolen files, Jamieson suggested to the director that the bureau should attempt to forestall public disclosure by asking a judge for an order that would require judicial review of any “purported” stolen FBI documents that were made available to journalists or anyone else. This idea was proposed at the same time the burglars were frantically finding other ways to copy the documents. Jamieson thought requiring judicial review would “preclude the publishing, dissemination or disclosure of any data.” His idea was welcomed at FBI headquarters. Al Rosen, a high official in the FBI, recommended to William Sullivan, the number three official in the bureau, that there probably was no precedent for such an order, but because of the significant potential “ramifications involved, it is felt we should explore the suggestion further.” If approved, Rosen wrote Sullivan, representatives of both the bureau’s Office of Legal Counsel and its General Investigative Division “will discuss this matter with appropriate Department of Justice officials.” It was approved by Hoover, and was discussed at the Department of Justice, though not at high levels. This was an ironic step by Hoover. Years earlier during and after the Coplon trial, the director took steps to prevent judges from seeing FBI files. Now, in desperation, he wanted a judge to review stolen FBI files and order that they not be disclosed.