Criminal - Breaking into the F.B.I.

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

In 1971, a woman visited an F.B.I. office in Pennsylvania. She identified herself as a college student interested in learning about opportunities for women in the F.B.I. None of that was true. She was there “to see whether there were security alarms before we could decide if we could break in.” Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Well, I was 29 years old at the time, but I was told by everybody that I looked really young. So the idea was that I would call the FBI office and say that I was a Swarthmore College student who I was doing research on opportunities for women in the FBI and could I interview the head of the office. And they were very nice and agreed to give me an appointment and that I had to prepare how I was going to conduct that interview to try to learn what we needed to learn about the inside of the office. We knew that we had to disguise my appearance as

much as possible. And it was February, so I had long hippie hair at that time in my life. So I put all my hair up inside of a winter hat. And I tried to dress as a co-ed. And I wore glasses for the interview, which I never, I didn't wear glasses at the present time. And they never noticed that I never took my gloves off the whole time I was taking notes in my notebook. But I was not nervous. I think I transformed myself into some sort of an actress. When Bonnie Rains was 29 years old, back in 1971, she cased an FBI building in Media, Pennsylvania, in order to prepare to rob it. We were very meticulous and careful. We gathered information over several months. It was also an apartment building. There were people living in apartments in the building as well as the FBI office. So we had to watch the patterns of people going in and out of that building,

the patrols of the police around that building to just get as much information about the logistics of it all. But there was one missing piece of our casing, and that was to get inside of the office during the day, during office hours, to see whether there were security alarms and to get a layout of the office. We needed that last piece of information before we could decide if we could attempt to break in. And that was my job.

So the interview, it went well. They didn't seem to suspect anything whatsoever. They never even asked me my name. Before I left, at the end of the interview, I asked if I was ready to leave, and I had to pretend that I was confused about which door I was supposed to go out. And it gave me an opportunity to get into another room in the office, other than the entrance area, to see that there was a second door into that other room. And I also was able to see that there were no security alarms whatsoever, that the file cabinets were not even locked, and that there was carpeting

on the floor of the office and Venetian blinds on the windows. So that gave us enough information to plan the actual break-in. There were eight of them. Each person had a job to do. They chose a date, March 8, 1971, because that was the night Joe Frazier would fight Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden for the heavyweight championship. Both boxers were undefeated, and it was being advertised as the fight of the century.

It was a night that a lot of people would be distracted. Bonnie Raines and her associates thought it would be a perfect night to break into the FBI. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Bonnie Raines ran a daycare center. Her husband, John Raines, had been a Methodist minister and later became a professor of religion at Temple University. John and Bonnie had three children, all under the age of ten. Their home became the headquarters as the group planned the break-in. Bonnie would serve spaghetti, and then after dinner, a babysitter would arrive, and the adults would disperse, two at a time, to go stake out the FBI building.

The leader was a man named Bill Davidon. It was his idea, and he'd handpicked each member of the group. He was a physics professor at Haverford College and had been influenced by Catholic anti-war activists who were making use of an unusual tool of resistance, burglary, breaking into draft boards, and just stealing the records. Because it was just a paper system at that time, and if you destroyed the paper,

it meant that those young men most likely would not be drafted. Or you would create havoc and a delay. Exactly, exactly, right. Bill Davidon and his associates would case draft board offices, sometimes secretly replacing padlocks with their own locks, so they could easily open them later. In one case, they simply left a note that said, please don't lock this door tonight.

And when they arrived late that night, the door was unlocked. They walked out with all the draft records they could. And it was done surreptitiously. We went in in the middle of the night, and we did not reveal our identities. So that was kind of our basic training, I guess you could say, in nonviolent civil disobedience. The more involved Bill Davidoff became in anti-war activism,

the more convinced he became that the FBI was spying on them. Bill Davidoff approached eight people he admired, quiet people, three women and five men. They knew each other, but not very well. He talked with them about his concerns that the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, was spying on anti-war activists, civil rights organizers, anyone critical of the U.S. government. And he asked them if they would consider burglarizing an FBI office to get proof. The first people

he asked were Bonnie and John Raines. So he proposed the idea, and at first we all kind of fell off our chairs with the idea that we might actually try to attempt something like that. This was at Bill Davidon's house. His wife apparently got up and left the room. She said, leave me out. She thought the whole thing was macho. But John and Bonnie were listening. A week later, they called and said they would participate. They started to prepare.

They went to family members and swore them to secrecy before asking if they would raise their three children in the event that John and Bonnie went to prison. Next, Bill Davidon called a man named Keith Forsyth and asked him if he'd like to go to a party. Keith Forsyth knew that was a code, and when the two men met, Bill Davidon explained his idea. And, you know, asked me what I thought about the idea of breaking into an FBI office. And I'm pretty sure I was surprised. It certainly wouldn't have been the kind of thing I would have thought of. Keith Forsythe.

And tell me a little bit about Bill. Tell me. Yeah, I'll try if I can. It's hard to talk about Bill without getting a little choked up. He was quite a guy. His resume was that he was a professor of physics and mathematics at Haverford College, a real creative thinker and kind of a fearless guy. And so, you know, Bill's thing was they're doing all this stuff that's, you know, illegal. Let's try to see if we can get some evidence and release it to the press. So the idea was that you would break into an FBI office, gather as many documents as you could and then put them out there so that, okay, here's the actual, this isn't our opinion, here's the proof, here's what the FBI is doing.

Exactly. They first looked at the FBI office in Philadelphia, but the security seemed like more than they could handle. So they began to study an FBI office in a small town outside of Philadelphia, the town of media. You know, you would spend time on the street at various times of the day and at night looking for traffic in and out of the building, traffic on the sidewalk near the building, car traffic in the vicinity. Where are the police? How often do they come by? Do they come by on foot? Do they come by in cars? Where are they coming from? Where are they going? What else is in the building

besides the FBI office? Where are those people at night? This is not a jazz jam session. You don't make it up as you go along. So my job from very early on was going to be to get through the doors. And I think that's probably why Bill asked me in the beginning because I was pretty young and pretty inexperienced, but he knew that I knew how to pick locks. How did you know how to pick locks? I took a correspondence course for locksmiths, and then I practiced a lot.

My early experience with the draft board raid movement was that getting through the door quietly and quickly was very often a major problem so i figured well heck let's just learn to pick the locks so that's what i did did you go to an actual class did you send away for books did you pick how did you practice you just well so i i don know how old you are, so you may not be aware of this, but in those days you would see like in the backs of magazines like Popular Mechanics or the backs of comic books inside matchbook covers, there would be all these advertisements for correspondence courses.

So you could take a course on welding or flower arranging or locksmithing by mail. So you would send them a check. They would send you some study materials and a test, and you would send the test back, and then they'd send you some more materials and another test, and you would go back and forth through the U.S. mail for a while, and at the end, they would send you a certificate. So obviously with something like locksmithing, you have to have some hands-on experience, but that wasn't hard to acquire. So you got really good at picking locks.

Good enough. And that was going to be your job. Yes. Keith is going to get us through the doors. Bingo. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials.

This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future. In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS.

Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. On March 8, 1971, as the Ali-Fraser boxing match was starting, the group calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI was prepared to execute their plan. They'd been preparing for months. Keith Forsyth was ready to pick the locks. He'd gotten a haircut. I went to a thrift store and got some, you know, some nice, a nice suit jacket and some other stuff for a very reasonable price. So when I went up to the building that night, I was wearing a jacket and a tie and a trench coat. Just that I had lock picks and a crowbar inside the jacket and the coat. So I went up to the floor where the FBI office was located and

spent some time listening. Didn't hear anything out of the ordinary. And then I turned to the main door to pick the lock and immediately got quite a shock because there was a new second lock added to the door. And I was just absolutely stunned because I had been there and looked at that door not very long before. So I immediately started to wonder, why is this here? Did they just add it? Why did they add it right now, right before we're going to break in? Is there some kind of leak? I mean, I was just freaked out. I didn't know what to do. So I left and went back to the motel room, which we were using as a temporary headquarters. It was a big, scary glitch. And it was a much more difficult lock. He didn't, he finally realized he

didn't think he could pick that lock. And that scared him greatly because he thought, why is this lock suddenly, why has it appeared on the door suddenly? So we sort of had to regroup. I said, you know, I'm sure that I can learn to get through that lock, but it's going to take a while because first I'm going to have to make my own pick because I'm not going to a store and buy one and then I'm going to have to learn to use it but that's going to take a while. So what do we do? And then I had to remind Keith that there was a second door

that went into another room in the office and that he might be able to get through that door. And I said, well, let's give it a shot. So I went back and went to the second door. I picked the lock very quickly. And then there was a deadbolt on the other side. So I decided that rather than try to gradually get it open and make a lot of prolonged creaking noises, it would be better to make one short loud noise than a lot of long, less loud noises.

So I could hear something being played below in the apartment below, which is where the building superintendent lived. It was like a building manager, caretaker, whatever. And his apartment was directly underneath the FBI office. It sounded to me like he was watching the Ali Frazier fight. So in any case, I tried to wait for like a surge in the volume of the sound from the radio or the TV, whatever it was. And when it surged up kind of loud, I hit the deadbolt and broke it off the inside of the door. And then I just waited to see if I heard any sounds, anybody coming out of the door downstairs and going up the steps to investigate.

And a little time went by and nothing happened. So then I pushed the door further and it only moved a very short distance and banged up against this file cabinet. A huge metal cabinet pushed up against the door, blocking the door, and I told Keith that if he got the door open he had to be extremely careful not to have that file cabinet tip over and crash to the floor because that would have been the end of it. So I went back out to my car and because this was 1971 and not 2021, I had an old-fashioned jack in there. And I thought, you know, that'll make a good lever. So I put that under my coat and went back into the building and laid down on the floor with my feet against the

wall for leverage and started working that jack stand, slowly moving that cabinet away from the door. It was really nerve-wracking. He was so brave. He continued to inch, inch, inch the door open, push the file cabinet to make enough room for the other four people to get into the office. That meant a big delay in the break-in, but it really was advantageous because the fight was actually delayed and didn't start until later than we had originally thought. And finally I got it moved away from the door enough that I could squeeze inside, and then I taped the lock so that it wouldn't relatch.

When I pulled the door closed, pulled the door closed, and left the building. And my job was done. Tell me what else was going on. What were your friends, the others working on this, what were they doing? We used to use blocking cars. So if something happened and all of a sudden you heard the police rushing towards the scene of the crime with their sirens, you could pull out across the street and pop the hood and pretend to be having car trouble and block the way. So there were people staged around in various spots

for that. And the crew that was going to go inside was waiting and they were all dressed nicely and had large Samsonite suitcases ready to carry the files out. So when I went out, they went in. How long were they in there? How much stuff was gathered? They were in there for about an hour, I think. They had to be very careful because there were Venetian blinds on the windows and they could only use their flashlights in a certain kind of way to get into the file cabinets. But they were successful and they removed every document. They just grabbed everything, dumped it into suitcases, came out the door. And I think the last thing that they did when they were leaving the office, there was a photograph of Hoover on the wall by the door,

Hoover with Nixon, and they removed the photograph from the frame and took it with them. There was a car that pulled up in front to pick them up, and they put their suitcases in the car. The other piece of it that we were nervous about is that the office building was right across the street from the Montgomery County Courthouse building. And it was all a well-lighted area. And there was a guard 24 hours a day outside of that door of that courtyard building. And he could

look right at the front of the apartment building. So we weren't sure if he would be able to see anything or be suspicious. But we also hoped that maybe he would be able to see anything or be suspicious, but we also hoped that maybe he would be listening to the boxing match. So they put the suitcases in the trunk and drove the car to the Swarthmore College parking lot where my husband had been waiting in our station wagon, and they transferred the suitcases to our station wagon, and then then we all took off. Thank you. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh.

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The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings, and it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Once Bonnie Raines, her husband John Raines, Keith Forsythe, and the rest of the group had the suitcases full of stolen FBI documents, they drove about an hour outside of town to a farmhouse.

They were there for days, working in shifts, reading every single piece of paper, sorting them into piles. Bonnie says they wore gloves the entire time. Was there a headline saying, big break-in at the FBI office? Oh, no, no, no. The FBI wanted to keep it as quiet and inconsequential as they could. So there was just a little article maybe in the second section of the Philadelphia newspaper saying, yes, there had been a break-in and nothing of any real consequence. So it was to be played down, and then hopefully Hoover thought maybe never heard about again. Embarrassing for them.

Oh, Hoover was apoplectic. He ordered 200 agents to the Philadelphia area to try to find us. Were you nervous? No, well, a little, but we knew, we didn't leave any evidence, physical evidence in the office, no fingerprints. There was no evidence there that they could build a case on. And, and the other factor that made it so difficult for them to look for us was that there were literally thousands of activists in the Philadelphia area who would be on a list of potential suspects, and they had to go through all of those names without any clue as to who might be a likely suspect.

So they had their work cut out for them, I guess you could say. Had you told anybody about this plan? No, because we made a pledge, the eight of us, that we would never talk about it with anybody, that we had no reason to ever gather together again, and that we would go back to resuming our regular lives. And we didn't even know what the statute of limitations might have been on criminal charges. But we just, we knew that it wasn't in our self-interest to talk about it with anybody, anybody whatsoever. If you had a significant other who was not in the room, you were not going to tell them. Not now, not next week, not next year. You know, that was an early conversation. In fact, even before I joined the group,

you know, I told Bill, quite frankly, I said, it has to be people who do not feel the need to brag about their accomplishments. What was the plan with all these documents? So the plan was to vet them and to release copies of the stuff that we thought was, you know, was most significant to Congress and to the press. Of course, we couldn't know what we would collect. We had a pretty sure idea that because the FBI was this enormous bureaucracy, that they would keep files on

everything, even the most minor kinds of investigations. So we had a feeling that we would, if we could remove every document in that office and then sort them, that we might find the evidence that we were looking for. And we did, in fact. The documents that we collected, we learned that only 40% of the cases were real criminal cases that deserved to be investigated, like bank robberies. And 60% of the cases were political, political surveillance and infiltration. Agents were opening professors' mail, tapping people's phones, placing informants into groups organized against the war.

And what we learned that was quite surprising to us was the extensive, intense surveillance of black communities and black organizations. They had agents everywhere in the black communities, everywhere people would be, in barbershops, in churches, everywhere. That was a new revelation. Not that we didn't think that they were watching the organizers of black empowerment movements, but just the general population, the intense surveillance was pretty shocking. One reporter later wrote that the stolen documents offered a, quote,

unprecedented glimpse of how the U.S. government watched its citizens, particularly black citizens. The documents describe specific places where FBI agents were required to find and cultivate black informants, even specifying restaurants in Philadelphia by name. Agents were instructed to approach janitors of apartment buildings, people who delivered newspapers, and taxi drivers. One of the documents signed by J. Edgar Hoover focused on black students on college campuses, especially black student unions. Hoover wrote, quote, I cannot overemphasize the importance of expeditious, thorough, and discreet handling of these cases.

Increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the nation's stability and security. The documents also referred to techniques for creating a sense of fear, a sense that someone was always watching you. For instance, FBI agents conducted frequent interviews with activists. As one document reads, quote, it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across

there's an FBI agent behind every mailbox. So we did, we had then some very specific documents that we could photocopy and send to the press and to members of Congress. And we decided we would send photocopy and send to the press and to members of Congress. And we decided we would send photocopies of the most relevant incriminating documents to three newspapers and two members of Congress with a cover letter identifying ourselves as the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI and our reasons for doing what we did.

So once we mailed those packets, to investigate the FBI and our reasons for doing what we did. So once we mailed those packets, I mean, my husband took one packet up to Princeton, mailed it from Princeton so the FBI agents would go charging up to Princeton to try to find us up there. But they were sent to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and two members of Congress. And all of them, except the Washington Post, returned the documents to the FBI. No one published anything? The Washington Post did, finally. We sent them to a reporter at the Washington Post that we had known previously when she worked for a newspaper in Philadelphia.

Betty Metzger is her name. I'm Betty Metzger. I was a Washington Post reporter back in the early 70s. What do you remember thinking when you opened this package? Well, I read the cover letter. There are no names involved, of course. And then I started reading the files. And I thought that it might be a hoax. of the culture of protection that existed among older journalists in Washington toward the FBI and toward intelligence agencies, a culture that's hard for people to imagine today, probably, when we do often get government secrets in stories. But that was not yet the case. So I was surprised.

I was shocked. But I knew that the most important thing was to know whether the documents were authentic. Betty Metzger got to work vetting the documents. And work traveled to the attorney general, who began calling the publisher of the Washington Post, Catherine Graham, and the executive editor, Ben Bradley, and telling them not to publish. They had a very tough day. I didn't know that until the end of the day. I was just off in my corner

writing, calling people who were named in the files, confirming information. But I had no idea that there was a struggle taking place until I left at six o'clock and handed in my story and was told that it might never run because there was a great disagreement at the top of publishing government secrets that the government is begging you, instructing you not to publish. And Katherine Graham's inclination was to not

publish, and so was the in-house legal counsel. He was saying, don't publish. They were concerned about the fact that they were government secrets, and they were also concerned about the fact that they had been stolen from an FBI office by people unknown to us, that our sources were unknown. Fortunately, Ben Bradley felt otherwise, and he felt that this was an important story of public needs, and we all need to know. And one of the things that the Attorney General said was that lives would be endangered, military secrets would be endangered. Unfortunately, I mean, we could tell from the documents that that wasn't true. They were enormously embarrassing, if not worse, to the FBI because of the nature of the files, particularly the ones about Black Americans. But there was no danger to lives of people. So a decision was not made until the very last minute at 10 o'clock that night, Catherine Graham made the decision to publish.

And my story was on the front page the next day and also went out on the post wire. What was the reaction to the story? The immediate reaction from some members of Congress was there must be an investigation of the FBI, something that had never happened before. I mean, not only not an investigation, but not calls for an investigation. The same thing happened at newspaper editorial offices, including at newspaper editorial offices such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, where nothing but words of praise had ever been published about J. Edgar Hoover. One of the most important and influential discoveries from the burglary was just a word on a routing slip.

COINTELPRO. That turned out to be the most important single document because of what it led to. We had no idea what it was. They didn't know what it was, and it took two years of digging to find out. An NBC News reporter named Carl Stern filed several Freedom of Information Act requests to make the COINTELPRO documents public. The FBI refused. But then the Attorney General required the Bureau to make the files available. This was in 1973. J. Edgar Hoover died the year before. And then, in 1975, lawmakers formally began to investigate the FBI.

And that's when we really learned about the nature of COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO operations sort of ranged from what I consider crude to cruel to torture to murderous. When they first came out, they were really regarded as beyond belief. The public could not believe what we were learning. When I say crude, I mean such things as injecting oranges with high-power laxatives and then giving those oranges to activists. And in other instances, hiring prostitutes known to have venereal disease, hiring them to seduce various activists, and then move on to utterly terrible, utterly devastating things, such as a campaign that the FBI conducted to try to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide. Something that happened with a fair amount of frequency was having FBI informers and agents falsely accused people that Hoover didn't like, accused them falsely of murder in a number of instances. One example of this is Geronimo Pratt. He was a much-decorated

Vietnam veteran who lived in Los Angeles, was a Black Panther, and he was falsely accused, charged on the basis of false accusations from an FBI informer with a murder that informer then testified falsely at his trial. And Geronimo Pratt, as a result of this, was convicted and spent 27 years in federal prison for the crime that he didn't commit. He kept trying to get another day in court. And finally, that happened after 27 years, eight of which were in solitary confinement. The FBI was forced to provide evidence that they had suppressed a trial that showed that he was innocent, and he finally got his freedom, died a few years later. So that gives you some idea of the power of COINTELPRO. Of course, the worst instance, the most devastating instance, is now fairly well known to many people because of Judas and the Black Messiah, which is the story of Fred Hampton being murdered. an informer working for the FBI, ingratiated himself in the Chicago Black Panthers,

of which Hampton was leader, and then provided detailed description when the time came that the Chicago police wanted to kill him. And the FBI informer, with the approval of the FBI, provided great detail about Hampton's apartment, where he slept, and how they could easily murder him. And then the FBI informer was given a reward and thank you from J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was personally involved in the worst of these operations. So this is going to poorly sum up what the intention here of Hoover's FBI in this program, but it's basically stay in line. And if you don't stay in line in whatever realm that might be, we're going to try to stop you. Be you an activist of any different category, stay in line. You don't ask questions. You don't fight

back. We're your government. We know what's best. Don't make trouble. That's right. But I think it's also important to understand how very widespread the spectrum of FBI involvement was. I mean, it could be from the mildest possible thing, like someone writing a letter to the editor of their newspaper that raised a fairly mild question about the conduct of the Vietnam War. And that could cause, and often did cause, the FBI to visit your neighbors, open a file on you, and a file that would continue forever. And this was true, for instance, of almost all writers, any writer of any note, any artist of any note.

They had files, and they were monitored on a continuous basis. There is a file on the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. One report from an informant read, the general aim of these science fiction writers is to frighten the people into a state of paralysis or psychological incompetence bordering on hysteria. There were files on Picasso, Truman Capote, Georgia O'Keeffe, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck. Many of these files are now public. James Baldwin's file is 1,884 pages long. The FBI watched him very closely.

How well his books sold, things he said at dinners, his credit card applications. Even his television appearances were recorded. A 1969 report describes Baldwin's creative process. It reads, quote, He writes continuously for 24 hours, without food and drink. Afterwards, he lies down and sleeps. How did anyone find out? Or when?

Did you tell your children when they were older? We only told them when they became teenagers and we thought that they could understand it, put it in context of history. We also told them that they were not to talk about it with anybody, even after several years. But we did talk with them about it. And the story came out totally accidentally.

I think it was 1989 when the reporter Betty Medsker, who had been the reporter at the Washington Post and wrote the article for the front page, we'd stayed in touch with her because she had been a friend when she was in Philadelphia. And she had by that time moved to the West Coast, but she was back on the East Coast to go to a conference and visit friends on the East Coast. And she had dinner with us. And after dinner, our daughter, Mary, walked through the dining room and my husband said, Mary, we'd like you to meet Betty because when we had some important information about the FBI, we sent it to Betty. And Betty just about fell off her chair because she had no idea.

I mean, she had wondered all those years, you know, who in Philadelphia had been responsible. But that was how the story accidentally came out of my husband's mouth. I could not imagine that these people had done this. And we talked for hours. And I had all kinds of questions. I was preoccupied by what I had learned from them and just amazed at how it had happened and the risk that they had taken. And two weeks later, I got in touch with them and said, I know that you've all decided back then to keep this secret

until you die, but I think that's an incredibly important story about what that era was like. And then the history of the FBI, and I'd like to write a book about it. And I asked them if they would try to find the other members of a group and ask them if they would cooperate with this. Because they had kept the promise of not being in touch with each other, too. And that all came about over a period of, say, the next month or so. Initially, seven of the eight burglars agreed to be interviewed for Betty's book. The statute of limitations had expired. She filed a FOIA request for the FBI's file on the burglary. It was more than 33,000 pages.

She didn't publish her research until 2014, and then the eighth burglar agreed to talk with her. 43 years after the break-in, all of their names became public. I still find myself, as I touch down and review the story for various purposes, I still find myself just shocked that they took the risk that they took in order to find documentary evidence. They had such belief that documentary evidence would make all the difference. And it did.

What we learned about what the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country was doing against black Americans, that is an overwhelming set of evidence. And it was a program that involved the entire Bureau, every FBI agent in the country, to disrupt the lives of individuals, disrupt and destroy organizations. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our producer. This episode was produced with Kara Ehlenfeld. Our technical director is Rob Byers.

Engineering by Russ Henry. Special thanks to Lily Clark. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can find out more about Betty Metzger's book, The Burglary, The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults? Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition.

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