COINTELPRO burglars come forward in biggest FBI mystery-gctid102750

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COINTELPRO burglars come forward in biggest FBI mystery                  

                                                                           FBI



January 8, 2014
       
                     Members of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, a  burglary team, that liberated secret counterintelligence documents  code-named COINTELPRO came  forward after nearly 43 years of silence.  On Jan. 7, 2014, the biggest  mystery in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was  solved with the publication of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI by Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post reporter who first published stolen FBI documents two weeks after their theft.
 Medsger told NBC, "These documents were explosive....The FBI was never the same."
 In a scene worthy of a Hollywood thriller, on March 8, 1971, an  eight-member team wearing suits and carrying suitcases, broke into a  satellite FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and carted off hundreds of  pages of COINTELPRO documents revealing a lengthy list of dirty tricks  and surveillance by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under  orders from Director J. Edgar Hoover.
 Hoover was furious over the break-in and shut down dozens of  satellite offices as a result.  Hoover assigned his Inspector General,  Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, to investigate the theft.  Hoover was certain  that anti-war activists Daniel and Phillip Berrigan were responsible.   Over two hundred FBI agents were dispatched in a massive investigation,  the largest in Bureau history up to that time.  The investigation  spanned five years until the FBI moved on.  Until now the break-in was  never solved.
 One member of the Citizens' Commission was John Raines who told NBC  that they exposed ongoing crimes by the FBI.  Raines said, "We did  because somebody had to do it."
 The burglary was the idea of William C. Davidon, a professor of  physics at Haverford College. Davidon assembled a team over the summer  of 1970.  They spent months studying the office building, clocking the  activities of tenants and plotting getaways.   Davidon died in 2013.
 Bonnie Raines posed as a Swarthmore student and cased the inside of  the office two weeks before the break-in while visiting with the Special  Agent-in-Charge.  Raines told the agent she was studying employment  opportunities in the FBI for women.
 Keith Forsyth was the team lock-pick but was unable to open a new  office lock so he took a crowbar to another entrance.  Forsyth told NBC,  ""When you talked to people outside the movement about what the FBI.  was doing, nobody wanted to believe it. There was only one way to  convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their  handwriting."
 Bob Williamson was the fifth member of the team to go public.  Three  members of the Citizens' Commission have decided to remain unidentified.   All eight were anti-war activists.
 The team ransacked the FBI office like clockwork and quickly stuffed  their suitcases with confidential files, unaware of the full scope of  COINTELPRO and its wide sweep of individuals as targets for  counterintelligence measures.  Holed up for ten days in a farmhouse in  Pottstown, Pennsylvania, the team poured over the mass of documents  selecting material for release. Then the group dispersed never to meet  again.  It would take several years of litigation by NBC reporter Carl  Stern to pry out the details of COINTELPRO only hinted at in the Media  documents.
 J. Edgar Hoover launched COINTELPRO in 1956 against the Communist  Party.  By 1971 the clandestine counterintelligence operation consumed  vast amounts of FBI resources and targeted thounited snakesnds of individuals.   The most lethal operations of COINTELPRO were directed at the Black  Panthers.
 A spokesman for the FBI said that "a number of events during that  era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the FBI  identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform  of the FBI's intelligence policies and practices and the creation of  investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice."
 For further information see CRIME MAGAZINE
 Permission granted to reprint