SNAFU with Ed HelmsIt’s 1970 when John and Bonnie Raines get a call from their friend and fellow activist, Bill Davidon. He suspects something is very wrong with the FBI, and plans to do the unthinkable: break into an FBI office to prove it.
Last time on SNAFU.
Heavyweight boxers Joe Praise You'er and Mihamed Atli meet in New York's Madison Square Garden Monday night.
There was a huge stack of mail, but this one stood out because of the return address, which was Liberty Publications Media, Pennsylvania.
As long as I am Director of the FBI, it will continue to maintain its high and impartial standards of investigation.
Last month, Burglars had an FBI a resident office and took files which subsequently have been made public.
The FBI entered my life very soon after that.
Reporter Betty Medsker now lived in San Francisco. Two decades had passed since she first received an envelope from a mysterious group called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. That envelope contained fourteen top secret FBI files showing America's beloved g men were surveilling American citizens with the goal of quote enhancing paranoia. She still had no idea who sent her those files that led to her bombshell reporting. She had no idea about the incredible heist that pried them out of the FBI's hands, and she might not have ever known these things were it not for one faithful evening in nineteen eighty nine, Betty was taking a trip back to her old stomping grounds, Philadelphia.
There were a number of people professionally and personally who were very important to me, and I hadn't seen them in a long time.
Like John and Bonnie Rains, a young couple she'd known from her days reporting on religion for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
And I called and said I was going to be a town could we get together? And they immediately invited me to come to their home for dinner that Friday night, and I was very much looking forward to it.
When Betty first met them, Bonnie was a young mother, juggling her grad school studies and education, her job running a daycare, and her three children. Her husband, John was a young Methodist minister who taught religion at Temple University. He was a gifted speaker, and he knew it. Some might say he talked a little too much. Betty would soon learn how true that was.
We hadn't seen each other in a very long time. We talked for quite a while and had a couple classes of wine, catching each other up. On the last decade of our lives. And at some point in the middle of dinner, their youngest child came in. She had a question for John. Then John said when he was done answering her question, he said, Mary, this is Betty Metzker. We want you to know Betty because many years ago, when your dad and mother had information about the FBI that we wanted to give to the public, we gave it to Betty. And I was just absolutely stunned.
Yeah, I would think, oh my gosh.
Mary was sort of lingering a little bit, but you could just tell from the expression on her face that this meant absolutely nothing.
Sure, and she's like, what are you talking about?
Dad?
And then when she left the room, I said, you know, are you telling me that you were you broke into the FBI. And they had these wonderful white smiles on their faces and said, yes. It just it just it popped out, popped out. I think it was a combination of the fact that we were so happy to see each other and we were telling each other tales at a little bit of wine. Here we are sitting in their beautiful suburban home, you know, four children, nice black dog named Jezebel, and the station wagon, which they've always had. But also I just simply know them. I had no idea how radical they were that night. I'm just asking one question after another and finding it all pretty unbelievable.
I'm at Helms and this is Snapoo, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This is season two Medburgh, the story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI Snapoo. It exposed today a young couple's decision to put everything on the line.
Super testing one, two, three, four, five six.
That's Betty Metzger interviewing John and Bonnie Rains.
When the idea introduced you, well, let's see, I think it was something like September or October.
In September or October of nineteen seventy, John and Bonnie Rains got a phone call from a friend, a man by the name of Bill Davidan. Bill was a Navy veteran, a physicist, a father of two. He was a noun assuming man, calm, thoughtful, and deeply practical. Oh and a dedicated anti war activist, just like John and Bonnie.
I think he just initially, he just called John and me from his home in Haverford and asked us if we would we want to come to a party.
That's Bonnie. Again, there was no actual party for activists.
This was code for thinking about an action, and would you want to come and talk about it?
A protest action? That is Bonnie and John accepted the invitation.
So we met with him at his home and we walked outside in the field behind his home to talk about it. And that's when he floated the idea to John and me.
It was casual, you know, in the way that someone today might propose starting a fantasy football league. Bill simply asked, hey, what do you guys think about burglarizing an FBI office?
And it took us back a bit crazy. That's crazy.
Yeah, you're not wrong, Bonnie.
Is this crazy or is this something we ought to really take seriously?
You had it right the first time. It's definitely crazy. The FBI was the biggest baddest law enforcement agency in the biggest baddest nation on earth. And who were John and Bonnie Rains Uh, not professional burglars, not spies, just a nice young couple with three children in a station wagon. How the hell were they supposed to break into an FBI office? And if the FBI caught them.
No, they'll lock you in a room, and.
So with a room.
Thank you, Steven Soderberg. Anyway, unlike most sane people, the Rainses would actually consider Bill Davidan's proposition because for months they'd been suspicious that there was something very wrong with the FBI, and this might be an opportunity to prove it well.
Astar I was born in ran Rapids, Michigan, met waitressing tables in the resort, and there in Michigan with family summer.
Cottage, long before they would consider breaking into an FBI office. Bonnie and Clyde excuse me. Bonnie and John were just two young people meeting by chance on a beautiful summer evening. Bonnie was a waitress at the Homestead, a resort that overlooked Lake Michigan. And John was a young Methodist minister, tall, handsome and dining alone.
And he was at one of my tables, and he was this absolutely gorgeous man in a blue sport coat and these brilliant blue eyes. Part of our job description was to kind of chat up the guests, so I proceeded to start a chat with him, I guess. So we found some things to talk about.
They sure did, Bonnie asked John how his day was, and John told Bonnie that he just arrived. Literally, this was his first dinner since getting back from the Deep South, where he'd been jailed for participating in the nineteen sixty one Freedom Rides.
It was the experience for the first time in my life, the fact that things were not okay with this country, that.
There were very deep things that were not okay with this country.
The Freedom Rides were a courageous civil rights protest action. Black and white passengers alike boarded greyhound buses headed into the Jim Crow South. It was a few months after the Supreme Court had ruled that interstate travel facilities be desegregated, but before most of the South had accepted the new reality of this ruling.
A mob had gathered as our bus came into a little Rock, Arkansas, and.
There was confrontation of a mob that, as John said, they wanted to kill me. They really would have killed me if they gotten their hands on me.
The Freedom Riders, including John, were arrested for breaching the peace. They were fined, found guilty, and told to get out of the state.
But sure we did, going south deeper into the balance, it was a very powerful experience for me, and it exposed me to the power of the African American Southern community of resistance.
It had great moral authority, It acted under conditions of great danger. It exposed itself to that danger. I began to see law and order as a system which controls other folks, oftentimes the black majority who.
Could not vote.
Bonnie hears this story, which is fresh off the press, and I think she was intrigued by. Oh, yeah, I think what I had for me. Maybe my blue eyes.
I'm not sure they don't hurt John, they don't hurt.
I really admired him and thought this is a special kind of man, and he he was very interested in me. I guess he thought I was pretty and funny. I had goals, I had ambition, I had spunk, and I was willing to not just settle for the comfortable life that I could have settled for.
I wanted an adventure.
I wanted my life to be an adventure.
And he liked joke.
He said it took him eight glasses of iced tea to work up to asking me out on a date.
Less than a year later, John and Bonnie were married. Three kids quickly followed but they made a promise to each other that they wouldn't allow family to stand in the way of fighting injustice, and there was plenty of injustice to fight.
I signed it up.
About eight poumes from a US started on a mighty role from so Alabama, the workers there who are striking for a decent way, for decent working conditions.
At the time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious makes you so sick and marked that unless you're framed the machine wing, I.
Didn't come working at all.
There was so much at risk at that time in our democracy that you were either an activist or you went along with things.
That were wrong.
You had a choice you had to make, and we made the choice to be activists. And if it meant some risks that were involved, well that's what citizens sometimes have to do.
John and Vonnie Rain spent the nineteen sixties protesting for civil rights, for women's rights, for labor rights. By nineteen sixty nine, they were living in Philadelphia and becoming entrenched in the fight against America's war in Vietnam.
Asafia, the NAZE official, the military chief of Kuang Nai Province, today denied charges that American soldiers on the ground executed several hundred villagers. The villagers version of the incident was given by survivors yesterday. They said a patrol of one hundred Americans stormed into the hamlet, drove all the residents out of their huts, and then opened fire with automatic weapons.
On November twelfth, nineteen sixty nine, almost fifteen years after American involvement in Vietnam began, report surface that US troops had raided the Vietnamese village of Meli. The Americans had burned huts, killed hundreds of civilians, including children, and committed other atrocities. The army initially claimed that Meli was a quote fierce firefight where one hundred and twenty eight enemy troops and twenty civilians had been killed. But that was a lie. It wasn't a battle, It was a slaughter.
I might killed about ten to fifteen.
Men, women and children, men, women, shure, babies and movies.
Why did you do it?
Why did I do it?
Because I feel like I was ordered to do it.
Two days after these news reports, half a million Americans marched in Washington. It was the largest anti war protest in history.
Be about today.
People were hopeful at the beginning.
Here's Betty Metzker. When she was a young reporter in Philly, she sometimes covered the peace movement.
In order for protest to happen, there has to be a deep feeling that there can be a result because of what we're doing, and people really did feel that way.
We come out of the street, pour out with our visions and our dreams and.
The beauty that is within us.
We will come as a new nation.
You want us to stay.
I don't love my country.
I entered on with a final better solution that joined and.
Hey, but despite the massive protests, the administration just wasn't interested, like, not even a bit. While half a million Americans marched in protest right outside the White House, President Nixon sat inside and watched a football game on TV. People like John and Bonnie had seen firsthand how protests can affect change, but as the war dragged on, even they had to acknowledge a sobering truth. Marching and demonstrating didn't seem like it was going to stop this war. Here's John.
It was a time in which we had a growing feeling that the moral authority of the country was with we the people, and was not in the administration in Washington.
Nixon later wrote in his memoirs that these protests quote destroyed whatever small possibility may still have existed of ending the war in nineteen sixty nine, which makes about as much sense as smoking six packs a day and then blaming your inphysema on the doctor who told you to quit. Whoever's fault it was. And I happened to blame the commander in chief of the United States Military, But that's just me. The war did not end in nineteen sixty nine. Instead, as the year came to a close, Nixon drafted a whole new generation of men into the military to kill and be killed in Vietnam.
Everybody, literally everybody knew a young man who was going to Vietnam. You thought about your boyfriend, you thought about your husband or your brother.
Christmas time, nineteen sixty nine, every family that included a draft eligible young man crowded around their television set.
Pursue into the executive order, the Director's Sellective Service is going to establish tonight random selection sekuch for induction for nineteen.
Seven eight teenagers just barely men perched on the edge of their living room sofas nervously bouncing their knees and drumming their fingers. Their parents hovered as the lottery unfolded on the TV. Representatives in stiff suits reached their arms into a fish bowl of blue plastic capsules, and the young men at home prayed their birthdays wouldn't be called September fourteen.
September fourteen zero zero one, April twenty four.
April twenty four is zero zero two.
December thirty, December thirty zero zero three.
In March, you rally, you write letters to members of Congress, and none of it was making any difference whatsoever. In fact, the war was worsening. Our voices were not being heard. So there was a lot of anger and frustration, and we decided to pursue a different kind of civil disobedience.
John and Bonnie's activism was about to get hardcore. Their pursuit of civil disobedience brought them into contact with the Catholic Peace Movement. To be clear, America's Catholic leadership were not peacenicks. In fact, in nineteen sixty eight, the Archbishop of New York counter protested at a peace rally, but at the local level, many parish priests and their parishioners felt the war contradicted their religious beliefs. They thought the draft was wrong, and some of them were even willing to violate earthly laws to fight it.
Strategy was to go into draft boards in the middle of the night, to break into draft boards and remove draft files and destroy them.
All American men aged eighteen to twenty five were required to register with their local draft boards. These small offices would store their draft files, which were necessary for actually calling these men up to serve, but there were no digital copies. Of course, everything ran on paper, which meant that if someone broke into those draft boards and removed or destroyed the files, the men in those files couldn't be called up. It wasn't only the Catholic Peace movement planning these raids, but many prominent draft board raiders were priests or people close to them.
We love to say that we learned our burglary skills from nuns and priests.
The draft board raids were strategic targeting offices specifically located in poor neighborhoods.
The men that they were drafting were all low income, disadvantaged men who were just caught up in the draft and sent over there to be slaughtered or to slaughter.
Rich people were more likely to be able to hire attorneys that would be able to get them out of serving, get doctors to find either valid or invalid reasons why they shouldn't serve. There was learning how to fake mental illness.
So Bonnie John and a gaggle of nuns and priests broke into federal draft board offices and made off with draft files in the dead of night. Then they mailed the files to the young men, along with a letter explaining that they believed the war in Vietnam was unjust, and now these men had a choice. They could report to their Draft board office and offer to serve if they wished, or they could keep their file and sleep a little better at night knowing they would never be called.
Well, we were triumphant. I mean we felt pretty good about it. So I think we felt at least that was one very concrete thing that we could do, that we could accomplish.
But they weren't naive. These raids weren't slowing the war. Young men were still going to Vietnam at alarming rates, many of them never to come home.
There was such a feeling of deep despair and less hopefulness. People really came to feel like we're having no impact. This war is not going to end. People were debating whether or not violence is appropriate.
Some fringe groups formed, like the infamous Weather Underground. They began building bombs and blowing up public buildings. They issued warnings in advance and usually struck at night when offices were empty, but they wouldn't avoid casualties. On one tragic occasion, a Weather Underground bomb accidentally detonated inside a townhouse in New York City in the West Village, killing two members of the group. The peace movement was worried that all this escalation would discredit the movement, and soon that escalation would be brutally answered by the government. On May fourth, nineteen seventy, at Kent State University, more than two thousand students gathered to protest the war. The scene was tense. The National Guard fired tear gas into the crowd, then protesters through rocks. Then the National Guard fired sixty seven shots into the crowd. Nine unarmed students were injured and four were killed. The war was coming home in a horrifying way, which Neil Young eloquently captured in Ohio, a song he wrote in the immediate aftermath of Kent State as Summari. It was the first time American citizens were killed while protesting the war in a gallup pole. Fifty eight percent of Americans blamed the students for the shooting. The peace movement was growing tired and exasperated, and on top of all that, there was a growing paranoia amongst activists in John and Bonnie's community, a lingering feeling that a very powerful force was watching from the shadows.
We were very aware that the FBI was everywhere in Philadelphia. Surveillance, surveillance, and intimidation were everywhere. Most of us were acutely aware that that was happening.
According to Bonnie, it was easy to suss out the spies. The peace movement had a certain fashion sense, long hair, secondhand clothing, leather, fringe tied eye. But occasionally one would spot somebody in the corner wearing all that stuff, with a crew cut and wingtip shoes, also wielding a camera.
Pretty apparent that they were just everywhere everywhere.
March is meetings, you know, peaceful, legal, constitutionally protected assemblies, and worse.
I would take the children to school in a carpool and there would be a car behind us with two men in it, and one of my kids would say, do you think that's the FBI. I mean, that's how pervasive it was that even my children wondered whether we were being followed and watched. It's intimidating. It's really it is intimidating.
To be fair, if this surveillance focused only on the people who were illegally breaking into draft boards, well that would be one thing, but all sorts of protesters felt they were being watched, surveiled simply for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. Here's John Rains.
There was a feeling that the FBI worked for the other side, the feeling that the FBI was used as not simply an instrument of investigation, but an instrument of intimidation that was using its power to pursue what we felt to be highly unjust policies in Southeast Asil.
There's a term for this when a government starts keeping tabs on people not because they're breaking the law, but because they're criticizing the government. It's called a police state. John and Bonnie had the nagging feeling that America was becoming one, but they had no way of knowing for sure, that is until they got a call from Bill Davidon inviting them to a party. By nineteen seventy, peace activists in Philadelphia had the eerie feeling that they were being watched by the FBI. But what could be done about it? It was incredibly hard to prove this was actually happening, so people resigned themselves to this new reality, but not everyone.
I was becoming increasingly involved in things like peace marches and giving talks against government policy.
This is Bill Davidan.
Another whole part of the movement.
I've had to do with draft resistance and sort of actions which many people consider illegal.
Bill has passed away, but here he is in an interview from twenty twelve.
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. My childhood was not somewhat unconventional one. I got interested in some aspects of politics.
Bill's activism started early. When he was only eleven years old, he heard the mayor of Jersey City had banned a socialist from speaking there, so he boarded a bus all by himself to protest, supporting a stranger's First Amendment rights. When I was eleven, I spent weekends trading baseball cards and picking up fart jokes. But Bill Daviadon was already going miles out of his way to stand up for free speech in the face of government repression. I mean, I guess he could have also traded a few baseball cards while he was there, But the point is when he saw injustice, Bill took a stand.
I was concerned about political matters, but my energies were more directed towards the threat of nuclear weapons.
Bill was studying to become a theoretical physicist. When the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was devastated that the science he loved was being corrupted for mass human casualty. Decades later, he was afraid that his country would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He began protesting in Philadelphia, and it wasn't long before he was rubbing shoulders with the Catholic peace movement. Bill was a scientist and as such, a methodical and practical problem solver. He often preferred simple solutions. Breaking into draft boards was dangerous, but that didn't necessarily mean it always had to be complicated.
There are a number of different ways to open the doors to draft boards. One of the simplest is that in a couplifications we just put up a little sign that said, please don't lock the door, and generally people didn't lock the door.
He was a brilliant person. I think he had a lot of motivation and determination and drive.
This is Sarah davidan Bill's daughter.
So we lived in a little town called Haverford, and there was a TV appliant store in Brinmar, which was the next town over, maybe like a three or four mile walk, And so he bought a TV and thought that he could just walk back to his apartment with this TV. And he's carrying this huge box down Lancaster Avenue, and you know, that was pre cell phone, so he couldn't like, you know, call an uber and say, yeah, I was wrong. So he did the whole walk with this TV, stopping like every half a block. And by the time he got there, I mean, he was just like pouring sweat and he was like, you know, wiping the sweat off of his face. But he got that TV back to his apartment and he said, oh, it ended up being a little bit heavier than I thought it was, and I don't know why. That story in particular is sort of like, you know, reminds me of who my dad is. But I think it was just sort of like this needs to be done, I'm going to do it, like he just wanted to get things done, like he wanted to get shit done. You know.
Bill was a doer and the kind of person his community trusted, the kind of person you might come to if you thought big Brother was spying on you.
A lot of people felt they're being watched. Perfectly legitimate organizations suspected FBI surveillance getting people to look over their shoulder and to constantly worry about whether they're being watched or not, and should create an atmosphere of fear.
If it was true that the FBI was surveilling peace activists simply because of their protest activity, that would be a violation of the First Amendment rights of the very citizens the FBI was sworn to protect. But Bill also worried that all of this surveillance might have another effect.
He felt that if act had this feeling that there was FBI agent in their midst, it would build cynicism and probably would lead to activists dropping out and to other people just not coming into activism. For Bill, dissent was at the heart of democracy. If the FBI was spying on people, he regarded it as a crime, and a crime that needed to be solved.
But Bill knew it would be no use accusing the FBI of such a crime unless he had cold, hard proof.
As frustrating party, because it's hard to get people to be actively concerned with threats that are not visible.
Bill was a walking set of contradictions. Born to Jewish parents, he was an atheist, yet actively involved in the Catholic peace movement. Bill was quiet but still a natural leader, had a rare gift for comprehending the mysteries of the physical universe, and yet also purchased a big ass TV with no plan for how to get it home. By the early nineteen seventies, Bill and other activists started hearing strange noises when they picked up their phones. Guys in unconvincing hippie garb were showing up at protests and taking photos. People who protested the war were being followed and intimidated. So Bill looked at this evidence and formed a hypothesis some organization, a federal law enforcement agency, to be precise must be surveilling the anti war movement. Like any good scientists, Bill knew the next step test the hypothesis.
And so he finds himself thinking about, would you dare break into an FBI office?
How complicated would it be to go into the office.
Yeah, you know, I've no.
Records on what kinds of disruption.
If Bill was right about the FBI surveiling the peace movement, then that meant they were probably keeping files documenting that surveillance. Find the files and he'd have proof that the government was suppressing free speech. He didn't know anything for certain, but even the possibility that this was going on was intolerable to Bill Davidan. So Bill decided to throw a party. He invited John and Bonnie Rains.
We stayed up late a lot talking about it.
Of course, we had more at risk because we had three children under the age of ten.
John and Bonnie had already decided that if they said yes, they'd take this action together, which made the decision that much more serious. This wasn't like breaking into a draft board. People who'd been caught for that usually served a year two at most, But breaking into an FBI office and stealing confidential documents. That was the kind of crime that came with decades of prison time. Their kids would lose their mom and their dad.
I mean, you really can't use the fact that you're a parent as an excuse to step back and not be engaged. It just seemed that that was the one and only way to reveal the truth. I mean, basically, what it came down to were threats to our democracy. I was raised with those kinds of values and the idea that you have an individual responsibility to protect our fragile democracy and to tell the truth.
I was just really angry.
Really, and I was feeling so helpless and frustrated, and I thought, here's something that might just make a great, big difference, and maybe we can make it happen.
They called Bill, they said we're in. But they had no idea what they were about to unleash, no way of knowing that their action would fundamentally change the way Americans thought about their country, their government, and the people who were supposed to be keeping them safe. Oh yeah, one more thing I should mention at this very moment that Bonnie and John called Bill and agreed to be part of his plot to burgle an FBI office. The FBI was tapping Bill Davidan's phone. Next time on SNAFU, david plans his attack on Goliath.
There is nothing mysterious about the meta which the Federal Bureau of Investigation works.
He called me and asked me if I was interested in going to a party, which was you know code, I said, sign me on.
There were no alarms over the doors. I couldn't see any security measures whatsoever.
It's really not hard and you can get through almost any door in twenty seconds if you are any good.
I just felt like I was living in the heart of the dragon and it was just my job to stop the fire, and this seemed like a way to do it.
Snapfoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snapfoo is based on the book 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 Walbo, 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 Olowa 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 well shand Ben Rizak. Additional thanks to director Johanna 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 Fine Gold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John n Rains, Sarah Schumer and Bob Williamson.
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