The Burglary (23 page)

But did he?

“When I arrived at the Media office,” Felt wrote in his memoir, “the experts [FBI agents from the Media office] were looking for evidence to help identify the burglars”:

In contrast, Media agents and the burglars—and also Felt's own official report written immediately after the burglary—described the safe as very small. In that official report, Felt criticized Lewis for not asking headquarters for a large safe. If he had done so, Felt concluded, the documents could not have been stolen.

One of Felt's accounts—the official one or the one in his memoir—has to be false. The safe could not have been a big “monster,” as he described it in his memoir, and also too small to hold files, as he wrote in his official report.

A retired agent who worked in the office recalls that the safe Felt purchased for the office was so small that agents considered it useless. He remembers what happened in the fall of 1970 quite differently from the way Felt remembers it.
He says Lewis, with the agreement of the agents in the office, thought there was an urgent need for security in the office, which essentially had no security. In September he asked the bureau for a large cabinet safe with lockable file drawers—similar to the type of safe Felt later claimed he provided for the office. But according to the Media agent, Felt refused to provide a large safe for the office. Instead, he approved the purchase of the very small one. At the same time, the agent said, Felt also refused to approve another important item Lewis asked the bureau to purchase: an alarm system. Felt refused that request, saying that because the Media office was relatively close to a local police station, a burglar alarm was not needed. Those details were not in Felt's official report on the burglary.

Felt's goals at the time of the burglary, as well as eight years later when he wrote his memoir, seemed to be to scapegoat Lewis and to conceal his own role in failing to provide security for the Media office. Remarkably, in both accounts he reached the same conclusion—Lewis was responsible for the burglary—yet with diametrically different claims about the size of the
safe. In 1971, he wrote in his official report that Lewis had a small safe and was responsible for the burglary because he had failed to ask for a large one, where all the files could have been securely stored; in 1979, he wrote in his memoir that Lewis had a large safe and was responsible for the burglary because he did not store the files in it.

In his official report, Felt was silent on his refusal to increase security at Media. He accused Lewis of being negligent about security, but omitted the fact that Lewis had attempted to increase security at the office. In his memoir, Felt writes a misleading account of his own role, making it appear that he increased security at the office. His official conclusion, as stated in his memoir, was “The senior resident agent in charge had failed to protect Bureau documents by putting them in the safe.”

Before Felt arrived at Media that morning, he promised Hoover he would have a recommendation on his desk by the next morning, and he did. He wrote to Hoover, “I recommend stern disciplinary action.”

Hoover accepted Felt's recommendation and suspended Lewis without pay for a month and transferred him to the Atlanta field office. That meant that shortly after the burglary the agent who knew the most about the office and the area, Tom Lewis—who had been in charge of the office for fifteen years, first in Chester and since 1967 in Media—was forced to leave the area and not assist in the investigation. In the local community and among many FBI agents, the harsh treatment of Lewis was considered inappropriate and excessive. His transfer to Atlanta was a hardship for Lewis and his family. He and his wife, Catherine, and their six children had deep roots in the community near Media and did not want to leave. Local law enforcement officers respected him and even made entreaties to bureau officials not to transfer him. Their pleas were ignored.
They organized a dinner in Lewis's honor, but he was forced to leave before it was held. His banishment was seen as such a great injustice that one of the first things
L. Patrick Gray did when he was appointed acting director of the FBI on May 3, 1972, the day after Hoover died, was to quietly assign Lewis back to the Philadelphia area, where he and his family longed to be.

Given Felt's role as a key confidential source in the Watergate stories that revealed President Nixon's cover-up of Watergate crimes and contributed to bringing down the president, it is striking to realize that just a year earlier Felt covered up his own major role in contributing to the Media FBI office's being vulnerable to burglary. That there was no alarm system in the office was central to the Media burglars' decision to burglarize it. It is unknown if Felt ever acknowledged to himself the central role his misjudgment played
in making possible the burglary that he later wrote “damaged the FBI's image, possibly forever, in the minds of many Americans.”

THERE IS NO RECORD
of Hoover's initial reaction when he was told the Media office had been burglarized and all serials had been removed. Given Felt's very close working relationship with Hoover, his account of the director's reaction undoubtedly is accurate. He reported that “
Hoover was enraged, and so was I.” This description matches a report in the
Washington Star
by
Jeremiah O'Leary, one of the director's favorite reporters. He wrote at the time that
when Hoover learned of the Media burglary he was “apoplectic.”

Hoover's anger and concern about the potential impact of the Media burglary is not surprising. To him, the bureau's files were both secret and sacred. He had spent more effort than people outside the FBI knew creating what he thought would keep the bureau's files sealed and protected from outside scrutiny. His goal of being held accountable to no one but himself depended on his maintaining total control of his files. He knew that if they were exposed, the mythic legends he had created about both himself and the bureau over a lifetime would be endangered.

In the forty-seven years he had been director, as of 1971, even officials in the Department of Justice, technically his supervisors, and in the two houses of Congress had not seen his files.
Only a very few select people outside the bureau knew anything about FBI files. They were the handful of people who occasionally were invited by the director to listen privately with him to salacious recordings his agents or informers had made of members of Congress or of other well-known people whom he could, through his files, blackmail. Over the years, few, if any, of these selected listeners revealed what they heard in the director's office. After all, an invitation to hear these private recordings, mostly of sexual indiscretions, was at least as much a threat of what the director could do to his guests as it was an invitation to share perverse amusement with a man who ironically had built a reputation as a straitlaced religious person who demanded that everyone who worked for the FBI reflect that same quality. He, and later his successors, would claim there were no FBI files on the personal lives of government officials or other prominent people. The few who knew with certainty that that was a lie didn't reveal the truth. Now Hoover was afraid the stolen files would reveal to the public what he had long protected and assumed would be secret forever.

Prior to March 1971, the only time internal FBI files had become public
was during the March 1949 trial of Judith Coplon, a Department of Justice employee charged with stealing FBI secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union. Few documents became public then, but Hoover considered their exposure an outrageous and unacceptable intrusion into his power to totally control his secret operations.

Coplon's defense attorney, Archibald Palmer, succeeded in getting the Washington federal judge who presided over one of Coplon's two trials to order the federal prosecutor trying the case to submit FBI files in court. Because the prosecutor had described the files as a significant part of its case against Coplon, her lawyer argued that the government should reveal the documents in court.

J. Edgar Hoover did not see it that way, but the judge did. The court order that forced the FBI to show some of its files in open court rankled Hoover more than anything that happened to him prior to the 1971 burglary. He told Attorney General
Tom Clark that never before in its history had the bureau publicly revealed any raw files, and it never would. He regarded the secrecy of the files as so important that he urged Clark—the future Supreme Court justice and the father of Ramsey Clark, appointed attorney general in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson—to seek a mistrial.
He even suggested that the prosecutor should seek a contempt citation against the defendant's attorney for making the request. The files, if revealed, he said, would endanger national security and would expose confidential informants, the Department of Justice, Attorney General Clark, and the bureau to embarrassment. That word, “embarrassment,” was heard often in the bureau. “Don't embarrass the bureau” was the director's mantra throughout his tenure, easily outranking the bureau's official motto, “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.” It was taken very seriously. In the culture of the FBI, there was little if anything agents could do that would be considered worse.

Though Hoover insisted national security would be endangered if his files became public, actually it was his plan for permanent secrecy, not national security, that he feared would be endangered. His considerable influence over his immediate superior, the attorney general, was evident in the decision of the prosecutor, at first, to comply with Hoover's demand. The prosecutor told the court the continued secrecy of FBI files was so important that the government would drop all charges against Coplon rather than risk the exposure of the files.
When that threat did not work and the judge again ordered the files be made public, Hoover took the extreme step of telling the attorney general he would resign as FBI director if the secret files were made
public.
It is believed to be the only time in his long career that he submitted his resignation. Clark convinced Hoover to stay.
The prosecutor complied with the order and submitted the FBI files to the court. As Hoover bitterly regretted the exposure, he started planning how he could prevent such exposure from ever happening again.

Compared to the Media files that would become public twenty-two years later, those the bureau was forced to make public during the Coplon trial were relatively insignificant. Unlike the Media files, the files released at the Coplon trial did not include descriptions of secret bureau programs or guidelines. As Hoover predicted, though, the Coplon trial FBI files embarrassed the bureau, providing the first glimpse of the shoddy investigative methods it used. As such, they attracted considerable interest and criticism. One file labeled as “Reds” actors
Fredric March,
Helen Hayes,
John Garfield,
Canada Lee, and
Paul Muni. The reports showed the bureau's disregard for verification and its interest in collecting salacious but irrelevant material about citizens. Various people, prominent and not prominent, were slandered without evidence. One file stamped “secret” was a report given to the bureau by an unknown Bronx man who told an FBI agent he had watched his neighbor walking around naked inside his own home, a fact that had no connection to national security or to suspicion of crime but was nevertheless placed in a permanent bureau file.

The result of “
dossiers being laid out for public inspection,” wrote
New York Times
reporter Cabell Phillips at the time, was that the FBI, which “has enjoyed an immunity from high-level criticism almost unparalleled among Government agents, found itself this week in a state of acute embarrassment as a result of public disclosure of some of its investigative techniques” that were made “over its strenuous, almost frantic, protests.…No one can recall a time in all that period of growth when the FBI has been subjected to a Congressional investigation, not an instance in which any appropriations committee has failed to give it all the money it requested.…The FBI enjoys an unusual autonomy.…It is a monolithic, tightly disciplined and intensely loyal hierarchy responsible solely to the director.”

Coplon was convicted in both trials. Her convictions were historic, for they marked the first conviction of an American accused of spying for the Soviets. She was tried along with
Valentin Gubitchev, a Soviet member of the United Nations Secretariat to whom she was accused of passing documents. As Hoover biographer Curt Gentry has written, the convictions also made the case for what Hoover had long been claiming: that the Soviets used
United Nations employees to conduct espionage on its behalf. But Hoover was so angry about a few of his files being exposed that he took no pride in being proven right on that point. In fact, his reactions demonstrate Hoover priorities that would have surprised the public. He was a leading cold warrior, a fact well known to the public through his speeches, articles, and books. But faced with a choice between convicting the first person charged with handing secrets to the Soviet Union and keeping a few FBI files secret, Hoover stood firmly for protecting his files even if it meant charges against Coplon would have to be dropped.