Burglars in 1971 FBI raid reveal their identities

Anti-war activists in Philadelphia who broke into an FBI office and stole thousands of documents in 1971 are revealing their identities and talking publicly for the first time about their bold protest.

The burglars were never caught, and the documents they sent anonymously to reporters kicked off a series of revelations about the extensive spying carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on protest groups.

They spoke with media Tuesday in honor of the release of Betty Medsger's book about them, "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI."

Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years poring over the FBI’s voluminous case file on the episode and finally persuaded five of the eight people who participated in the break-in to go public, The New York Times reported.

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the FBI was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, told the newspaper, finally revealing his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

The group cased the FBI office in the suburban town of Media, Penn. for months before picking a lock to get in on March 8, 1971. They filled suitcases full of government files that showed the agency targeting protesters, and they shared the documents with newspapers.

A lawyer says the group — which included college professors, a day-care director and a cab driver — don't risk prosecution now because of the statute of limitations.

Keith Forsyth, a 20-year-old cab driver at the time of the break-in, said they also kept quiet until now to avoid prosecution, but also because they wanted the public to pay attention to the revelations from the files.

"We wanted the focus to be on the documents we found and not on us," he said during a conference call Tuesday with reporters.

The raid was meticulously planned, with participant Bonnie Raines sent in prior to the burglary to ask about career opportunities in the FBI for women while noting the lack of locks on file drawers in the office. Meanwhile, Forsyth was learning to pick locks.

On a night when the nation was tuned in to a Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier championship boxing match, they carried out their plan, leaving the office with suitcases full of files.

One of the memos the group took and leaked called for FBI agents to increase questioning of campus leftists, saying the effort would "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

Group members said they sorted the documents and only sent to reporters the ones that showed the FBI targeting civilians — and not those that could have compromised national security.

The envelopes they sent out to journalists in early April of that year came from what they called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. One of them arrived on the desk at The Washington Post of Medsger, who reported then on the revelations and never gave up telling the story of the break-in and its meaning.

"The FBI was conducting a secret war on dissent," she said Tuesday, "particularly on anti-war activists and African Americans."

The most damning document was an internal routing slip from 1968 bearing the word “Cointelpro,” the meaning of which was revealed years later in a Freedom of Information Act request to be shorthand for Counterintelligence Program, the New York Times reported.

The FBI's program, it turned out, was to carry out an extensive spying campaign on civil rights leaders and other political organizers starting in the mid-1950s, which included mailing a letter to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., threatening to expose his marital infidelities unless he committed suicide, the Times said.

FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan told The Times that “a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press