SNAFU with Ed HelmsThe FBI tries to clean up its act, but will all those lessons learned later be… forgotten? Plus, the legacy of the Media Burglary.
Previously on SNAFU.
We were looking for.
We know, the documents proved for the first time that the FBI undertook a program to harris and destroy new left political organizations whose views.
We were very aware that the FBI surveillance and intimidation were everywhere.
There has never been a full public accounting of FBI domestic intelligence operations. Therefore, this committee has undertaken such an investigation.
It was a big deal what we did, and we promised each other. We made promises and they were really hard to keep.
Judy fine Gold had been part of the inside crew. On March eighth, nineteen seventy one, she'd personally removed FBI documents from the office at One Veteran Square. She and her accomplices then leaked some of those files to the public. In the weeks after, Judy was on edge, she was nineteen years old and everyone she knew was speculating about the burglary.
This was a big thing and everybody was talking about it, and I didn't want to be around.
Everyone was asking who did it. Everyone had a theory, and there were FBI agents everywhere hanging around, just waiting for someone to slip up.
You know, That's what I would usually see in the early morning, was them sitting in the cars on the corner watching me.
So Judy left. She had a life in Philadelphia and family on the East Coast, but she couldn't ignore her instincts to get out of town and go west.
I committed a federal crime, so I wasn't taking any chances. I changed fining and started my underground life.
Nobody, not her parents, not her friends, and none of the burglars knew what had happened to Judy fine Gold. She spent some time in New Mexico, eventually settling in Arizona. She made friends and found loving communities, but she still couldn't tell a soul who she was or what she'd done in March of nineteen seventy one.
It's very lonely to carry a secret, and I think it got to the point where I just I buried it so deep I didn't even think about it.
As far as she knew, the FBI could catch up with her at any moment and arrest her for treason, Hiding seemed like the surest way to stay safe.
You get so used to living undercover that that becomes the norm.
Still Judy couldn't help but check the news from time to time. She was deeply moved when she read about the church hearings, knowing they wouldn't have happened without her, But she couldn't celebrate with anyone, so she danced alone on a mountain side. As the years passed, Judy put down roots in the Southwest. All the while, the FBI never came knocking, but periodically Judy felt compelled to check in and see if anyone out there was still talking about Medburg.
It would occur to me now and then, and then I would go to the library to see, Wow, I wonder what happened with that? And so I just went to the computer and looked up the website that I would look up to find out, you know, just to kind of check in with my past.
For years, Judy always got the same two search results. One was about the Brandywine Peace Community's annual celebration of the burglary in Philadelphia. The other was a small story in a local paper. Until one day in twenty fourteen, more than forty years after she went on the run, Judy encountered a shocking headline, burglars go public.
When I pulled it up. Instead, I got like ten page with ten articles a page or something about what they were calling the burglary, and that there was a book.
A reporter named Betty Metzger had interviewed all of her fellow burglars on the record for an upcoming book.
I was horrified. I mean, the earth actually moved under my feet, you know, I felt emotionally, I could hardly agree. I just could not believe it. I just walked around by myself.
Judy spent the day in a haze. Later that evening, still feeling shocked and betrayed, she finally confided in a friend about what she'd done. She had kept the secret of the media burglary for forty three years, and now it was out. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snappo, a show about him History's greatest screw ups. This is season two Medburg, the story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI snaffoo it exposed. Today, the fallout from the Church hearings, lessons learned and maybe forgotten, and finally, the enduring legacy of Medburg. When the Church Committee hearings concluded in nineteen seventy five, Jay Aggar Hoover's secret FBI was no longer a secret. After the hearings exposed the bureaus decades long abuses of power to a shocked and horrified American public. The only remaining question was okay, so now, what was anything actually going to change? US Attorney General Edward Levy certainly hoped, so he pushed the new FBI Director, Clarence Kelly, to clean up all the bullshit. This meant reassessing thousands and thousands of domestic intelligence cases, most of which had been opened under the auspices of co intel pro not arouse.
Whatever committee says, come back up here with all those eight thousand cases and justify it.
That's Neil Welch, the lead FBI agent in Philadelphia at the time. Welch was a veteran agent who knew cleaning up the house of Hoover would be a tall order. The agency's old guard, Hoover's loyal army, resisted any oversight. When congressional committees requested information, agents hid files or just fed them false information. And as pressure mounted on Kelly, the director apparently crumbled, and with Kelly gone, someone had to deal with the mess at FBI headquarters.
This We're going to get the tough of zumb As reunify.
No, are you making that up?
At a sold together?
Our first CLASSSLB and here, get that guy and call out we all he hates his stuff, Get him in there.
That first class SOB was Neil Welch, the one speaking here. Welch had made a bit of a name for himself within the halls of the FBI. He once negotiated the surrender of a notorious killer holding five hostages for an hour. The man held a gun to Welch's chest. When a reporter asked how he managed to successfully negotiate the surrender, Welch replied very carefully. Instead of going after draft dodgers, activists and journalists, Welch went after you know, actual criminals. He investigated mobsters and corruption. He hated co intel pro tactics, and he kind of despised Hoover. The feeling was mutual. Apparently, Hoover once placed Welch on probation because Welch refused to let his agents participate in co intel pro In other words, Welch was the perfect de SOOB to clean up a post Hoover FBI Welch's task was to determine which of the thousands of FBI surveillance cases should stay open. The new Attorney General made it clear only cases that involved actual criminal conduct or presented evidence of clear and present danger should remain active. All others should be shut down immediately.
These are cases that they're going on, and there in some dark, bingy corner in the domestic Intelligence section, they were carry oors from prehistoric times, really, and they were still once just started these kinds of things.
They never saw.
What Welch means is that if anyone had been identified as a person of interest for any reason as far back as the Cold War, the FBI was still actively surveilling them and maintaining files on them.
But no more.
I said to the field losses, can you justify this? Have they committed any criminal offenses? I gave him on the outline of what they had to do to qualify, and they just.
Disappeared, one by one. Thousands of cases vanished practically overnight. Our old pal Carl Stern, who you may remember was the first one to get the real dirt on co Intel Pro, covered this astonishing development on NBC News.
Kelly brought some real news to the Committee, announcing a ninety seven percent cutback in domestic security investigations. That's a cutback from more than twenty thousand active investigation.
For the first time in decades, Jay Edgar Hoover's culture of fear, intimidation, and secrecy no longer defined the FBI. In the wake of the Church Committee hearings, new Director Clarence Kelly understood the old ways had to change. There would be no more threatening congressman with sex tapes or writing poison pen letters to ruin reputations. Moreover, it was time for the FBI to own up. On ABC News, Ted Copple reported on the new FBI director's historic apology.
FBI Director Clarence Kelly today for the first time publicly apologized for past FBI and mis conduct.
We are truly sorry, said Kelly, and.
He added we recognize errors and have learned from them.
Thanks Clarence. Better late than never, I guess, but let's be clear, serious damage had been done.
One of the most damaging accomplishments of Hoover's FBI, ironically, was the destruction of the FBI's law enforcement capacity.
This is Betty Medsker.
Everything it did was outside of the law, whether you're talking about surveillance without cause, physically harming individuals, and even assisting in murdering dissidents, usually black people. The generation's long quest by Black Americans to claim basic rights was delayed for decades by an FBI director who cautioned every president he served under not to support African Americans in their efforts to obtain their rights, because he said those efforts were promoted by communists, and that was all that needed to be said to make a president refuse to support civil rights. Imagine what an enormous roadblock it was for the FBI director to say, don't touch these movements. They're dangerous, they're supported by communist.
The harm it was done, the effect that that is still alive today.
That's Omar Barber, a former Black panther you heard in the last episode.
It simply was to criminize the whole black community, because it was a crimination of a people, a race of people, not just the organization that may be and represented those people. Cointelpro was a two of the ruling class to suppressed people who were aspiring to try to be free and try to find their freedom and liberation.
Levy Welch and others also acknowledged that, in addition to being racist, creepy, invasive, and downright or Wellian, blanket surveillance didn't work.
These mesthods are easy and often mindless, but they do not lead to greater safety. Instead, they lead to violations of basic civil rights of countless Americans. Levy's guidelines were good in that they could lead to to this kind of reform that made it impossible for informants to go after people without any intention of prosecution and only harm in mind.
It seemed like people were actually learning some lessons from Cointel pro To Neil Welch, the most important lesson was clear, and the.
Lessons is that the government can't be trusted to do this. It just proves that the government will be stupid and unresponsible in many instances.
And how they gather that intelligence.
They'll keep it going too long, It'll be a widespread net rather than a narrowly focused one. They won't use the least intrusive means, They'll use drag net procedures.
This is a very sensitive area.
I think the record.
Proves that they cannot be relied upon to do it without independent monitoring.
Some accountability.
I shouldn't be surprising to anybody that.
The FBI was doing those things.
Yeah, you can almost guarantee that it all happened. Again, the intentions of the most honorable, proper people can go astray.
The burglary led to a profound change at the FBI, something the burglars probably couldn't have even imagined when they first decided to break into that office. By the late seventies, they had reason to hope the abuses they'd uncovered would no longer be possible. The rule of law would finally apply to the FBI, But it wasn't long before there was new cause for concern.
The concern about whether these guidelines could have lasting impact was verified as soon as Reagan became president.
Recently, we've passed through a painful era in American history when it seemed that many of our proudest values and most important institutions were called into question.
During his run for president in nineteen eighty, Ronald Reagan vowed to undo Attorney General Levy's guidelines on surveillance that had come out of the church hearings.
He had campaigned in part on his wish to unleash the FBI and as soon as he became president that started to happen.
Reagan ordered his Attorney general to loosen controls. He lowered the bar for launching investigations, and he diminished the Attorney general's powers of oversight. What do you call it when you reform a reform? I guess a return to form. Yeah, that works. The FBI once again had an unnerving amount of power, and it would stay that way for decades. Then September eleventh, two thousand and one, our ability.
To prevent another catastrophic attack on American soil would be more difficult, if not impossible, without the Patriot Act. It has been the key weapon used across America in successful counter terrorist operations.
When we come to nine to eleven, we just see a very extreme version of that, where with the passage of the Patriot Act and the demand from the Attorney General and the President that you know, stop thinking in terms of prosecutions. Your goal now is to prevent another nine to eleven. And so the FBI went through this radical change again that you're not aiming to prosecute, you're aiming to prevent another major crime like nine to eleven against the American people.
For the Bureau. Oh, it was a radical change in the moment, but also I returned to the old way of doing things once again.
Racial profiling came back with a vengeance, and Muslims became what Black people had been under j Edgar Hoover, a danger. People were told that Muslims were danger to society.
And something else came back with a vengeance, blanket surveillance.
The FBI treated Muslims just as they had treated Black people all over the country with surveillance of mosque and surveillance of Arab American organizations and opera sting operations. What the FBI did and other intelligence agencies too, we.
Must and did not.
Lead to helpful information, and great harm was done as a result of that. As things went into high gear, they create a massive electronic haste acts and without the capacity to search those hast acts for information that might have been helpful, so that the surveillance was done of millions of Americans without the capacity to find out whether there was valuable information. I think that fear makes it possible for people to not care whether they're under surveillance or whether their basic rights are being trampled, and especially it makes it possible for them to not care about needless harm being done to others, if in fact that harm may help protect them Americans.
If it was so incredibly easy the FBI to trample on fundamental American rights back in the days of rotary phones and eight track cassettes, then what about today? These days, surveillance technology that would have been unimaginable to hoover is everywhere, and governments, corporations, even individuals can use predictive algorithms, facial recognition, and a whole bunch of other frankly terrifying technologies to create staggeringly detailed profiles on all of us. In twenty thirteen, Edward Snowden exposed that the NSA was gathering massive amounts of personal data on Americans without warrants. During the twenty sixteen election, a private firm called Cambridge Analytica acquired in depth data from tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent, and used it to covertly manipulate public opinion. And during the Black Lives Matter protests in twenty twenty, the New York City Police Department used facial recognition software to surveil and track down demonstrators back In the Hoover era, the FBI weaponized information they dug up on activists. Today, our own personal data can also be easily weaponized to intimidate, so misinformation, create deep fakes, even incite civil unrest. There's a lot more to be said about technology, surveillance and the need for oversight, which is why we went and recorded an entire bonus episode about it. You might remember Locke Johnson from our last episode. He was Frank Church's special assistant. He and I had a pretty good chat. Look for that bonus episode soon. For now, suffice to say, it's more important than ever to learn as much as we can from the story of Hoover, co, Intel pro and the courageous burglars of Media Pennsylvania.
The most important thing is that the law enforcement agency should obey the law and not have as a motivation going after people because of their religious or their political beliefs. The opening page of the FBI's website announces we protect the American people and uphold the US Constitution throughout Jangar Hoover's half century as director of the Bureau. Too often since then, the Bureau has protected some types of people much more than its protected others. One of the lessons learned from revelations of that history were for transparency and accountability. That's essential for the FBI to continue to operate as it should. The Bureer should have a deep respect for the expression of dissent, a basic right that is crucial to keeping democracy alive.
On March eighth, nineteen seventy six, the statute of limitations on the burglary expired. This would have been a great moment for the burglars to get together and pop some champagne, but none of them knew about it. For all they knew, the g men were still waiting behind the next mailbox to arrest them. Three days later, Special Agent Neil Welch filed a memo to FBI Director Clarence Kelly on the subject of Medburg. Quote, all logical investigation in this matter has been conducted, Welch wrote, accordingly, this case is being placed in a closed status, and that was it. After five years, Medburg was closed. The FBI was never even close to catching the burglar. At one point they had four hundred suspects. That group included all of our media burglars except Bonnie Rains. But after subsequent rounds of elimination based on interviews. Seven suspects remained and only one was an actual media burglar, Bob Williamson, and there was never enough evidence to charge any of them. The partial palm print found in the FBI office was never matched to Sarah Schumer. Investigators never found her. Glove agents had interviewed burglar number nine and placed him under twenty four hour surveillance, but they ultimately decided he knew nothing, and despite Bill Davidon's role as the unofficial spokesperson for the media burglars, he was cleared in nineteen seventy two, just a year in change after the burglary. The following headline appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Three Air Force jets are sabotaged at Willow Grove. It seemed on Memorial Day that the crew at Willow Grove Naval Air Station had discovered that three of its cargo planes had been rendered inoperable. Some no good nick had tampered with them just before they were scheduled to fly missiles over to Vietnam. On the exterior of one of the planes, someone had painted a peace symbol as well as the words bred not bombs in big red letters the vandals who took credit the Citizens Commission to Interdict War material. In another incident around the same time, reporters received envelopes full of bomb casings and caps. An accompanying letter was signed the Citizens Commission to Demilitarize Industry. Our old friend Bill Davidan, the mastermind of the original Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, was up to his usual tricks.
I think not just the media, but I think a lot of these kinds of actions were important to me in just building that that sense that the struggle isn't futile.
Bill david On never stopped acting out against the war. He wanted the public to know that despite the government's power, Goliath was vulnerable to david especially if a lot of David's banded together. His activist spirit stayed with him until he passed away in twenty thirteen.
I think this was this quote of cameu of.
To keep alive the living society within Michelle of the dying On when you sort of generally feel that not only in the case of the prosecution of the Vietnam War, but other things are involved forces that are so huge in comparison to what we can actually influence, how do you keep alive? And the struggle to influence them media, No, I think we accomplished more than we had reason to expect to go into a small field office.
The following year, Betty finally published her book, The Burglary, The Discovery of j Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI. Every living member of the burglary crew spoke to Betty except Judy. Neither Betty nor the other burglars could figure out what had happened to her. When Judy read that her accomplices had come forward and confessed to the burglary, she was stunned and hurt.
We promised each other. That was the devastation, we promised each other.
It took a while for her to forgive the others and come to grips with the story getting out.
You get so used to living undercover that that becomes the norm.
And so.
I can tell you that I still carry trauma with me. I mean, I just kept going, That's all I mean, that's all we're doing. We just keep going. You go through experiences you don't think you're going to live through, and you live through them. So you have to figure out how to keep going. I mean, I don't know. I can't think of anything to regret.
As Judy recovered, she reconnected with her past life for the first time. She met up with Keith in Philadelphia, and she reunited with Bob, who was just one stayed over in New Mexico. It felt like no time had passed.
It all like three years was like forty three minutes.
Bob fell in love with New Mexico around the time of the Camden trial, and after the acquittal he moved there for good. I was not interested in being an activist. I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Today, Bob's feelings about the burglary are complicated. On the one hand, he felt his actions had sown distrust, maybe even and contributed to the paranoia the FBI had set out to foster in the first place.
On the other hand, I feel privileged to have been a part of it, because I know it was significant.
But I wouldn't ever presume.
To tell a generation of people that this is some kind of model for how they should behave I have two granddaughters.
My granddaughters know my story.
They think it's kind of cool.
You know, the last time we needed to change the key on my front door, I did it myself.
Keith forsythe stayed busy. He ended up suing the Attorney General over Medburgh.
I sued John Mitchell Forsyth v. Mitchell for illegally recording my conversation without a search warrant.
Keith's case went all the way to the Supreme Court and he won, but it left him underwhelmed.
The court said that we were right, but nothing's going to happen to anybody at the Justice Department.
So after Camden, Keith Forsyth put away his lock picking tools for good. He stayed in the Philadelphia area, got married and raised two sons. Today, Keith plays guitar and a few jazz bands, one called the jazz Heads populated with other seventy year olds, but they're looking for a new name after losing a founding member. I suggested the hip replacements.
So I had a party this weekend and one of my friends said referred to us as amateur burglars, and I said we weren't amateur.
I said, we were really were studied how to do it.
After his days as a well, let's call him a pro burglar, Ralph still kept his past under wraps. In Betty's book, he went by the pseudonym Ron Durst, but in twenty twenty one Ralph Daniel came clean and admitted his role in the burglary.
I certainly hope that the example that we set will encourage other people to take calculated risks for the things that they think are really important, and that there are things people won't take risks and perhaps make themselves uncomfortable in the service of something that they believe is really valuable. I think that it's a really good lesson in the value of civil disobedience for the benefit of people.
The nation, our culture, political participation, and genuine and healthy democracy goes way beyond something like voting.
In the nineteen sixties, Sarah Schumer had risked her life during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, but she calls the act of resistance in media the most difficult, not because of the night of the burglary itself, but the years after. Sarah was never able to remember where she left that glove or convince herself that she hadn't left fingerprints in the FBI office, and she's been looking over her shoulder ever since. When Betty approached her about doing the book, Sarah agreed to tell her story, but only under a pseudonym. This podcast is the first time she's speaking under her own name. Our producer, Sarah Joyner asked her how it felt.
I wonder what it means to you now to be able to say, yes, I am Sarah Schumer, and I did that.
Who knows may turn on that I shouldn't be doing this, shouldn't be using my name.
Turns out, committing a major federal crime has life altering consequence winces even if you don't get caught. After the burglary, Bonnie Rains had recurring nightmares of the FBI surrounding her house because the personal toll was so heavy. Bonnie and John swore off illegal acts of resistance. They viewed the burglary as an aberration in an otherwise normal, law abiding life, but they never lost their sense of urgency about injustice. Bonnie and John hid in plain sight as parents then grandparents. In twenty fourteen, when Betty's book revealed their secret for the first time, they appeared on the front page of the New York Times, John, looking solemn and professorial Bonnie beaming with pride and a grand kid on either side of them, both looking at screens. John Rains, Bonnie's partner in crime, passed away in twenty seventeen.
Regular people can confront the abuse of power that that really could happened.
You can't just be a passive citizen.
I was convinced about that, and what it meant was that I was determined that as my life evolved, I was going to find ways to continue to be vigilant. And there have been a lot of reasons to do that in our history.
Okay, so.
I'm going to ninety five from here, and then basically we're going to West Front Street, right Veterans Square.
I guess you remember the address fairly well, well, I think so. Last fall, our producer Stephen Wood took a little field trip to the scene of the crime Bonnie sat shotgun.
Turn right after Wells Fargo Bank on the right onto South Orange Street. I see the courthouse right there, Wells Fargo Bank. This is the main drags return turn right onto West Front Street. Then you will arrive at your destination. There's Keith.
There.
You are, right, ma'am, Yeah, thank you.
No, I'm meeting somebody, thanks a lot, Thank you, so fancy meeting you here.
Stevens looking for a parking place.
Good, good, good, trying to stay upright.
Yeah, it's a good goal. Who had ever thought it would come to this?
I know.
The State of Pennsylvania commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the burglary with the unveiling of an historical marker that sits just outside the building where it all went down.
I mean, the building looks exactly the same.
I don't see any any new construction or you know, anything torn down. I don't think the courthouse has changed at all.
No, and there are law offices now in the space was the FBI off upstairs?
If you can that, because.
I won't swear it's the same carpets for.
Fifty years, though.
I don't think I'd be surprised, but you could be right now, maybe it's a very durable carpet.
Fifty two years ago, the Media burglar has just walked through the front doors of one veteran Square in Media, Pennsylvania, without anyone stopping them. They walked out carrying bulging suitcases, not knowing that their actions were about to change the country they loved democracy enough that they felt a sense of duty to protect it. They valued their fellow citizens' freedom so much that they risked their own.
The eight Burglars, what they did was just enormously important in opening people's eyes. It's important to realize that even when movements are successful, even when great success happens and reforms come out of them, that it's very likely that there's also going to be defeat, not far behind success. But even more important, we should understand that must keep going back and trying to defeat those forces that suppress democracy, and that this is something that never ends.
Still, it shouldn't have been that goddamn easy for them to just walk into the office of the greatest law enforcement agency in the land and steal its secrets. As it turns out fifty two years later, Yeah, it was a little harder for Bonnie and Keith help you guys. Well, yeah, we are you familiar with the history of this building, Ben, I mean I read here.
Oh I'm not a master in the history.
We're doing a documentary about the event that's commemorated on that historical marker, so we were hoping to actually get it. But thank you, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Maybe into the office where happened.
We've been there before, probably should have brought those laws picks. 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 The Burglary The Discovery of Jay Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chugg, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is Stephen Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen, Sarah Joyner, and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Nevin Calla Poly is our production assistant. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Sensitivity consult from Oloa Kemi Ala de Sui, editing, sound design and original music by Ben Chubg, Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny and Jimma Castelli. Foley theme music by Dan Rosatto. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Rizak. Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary nineteen seventy one. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Finegold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer, and Bob Williamson.
