The Burglary (28 page)

There was no doubt about it. Given her role in the burglary, if she had removed a glove, her fingerprints would be found throughout the Media office.

Sometimes this replay of her time in the office went well, and she would start to feel that she had answered the question and resolved the problem that obsessed her. At such times, she would experience a period of calmness. She would remember herself wearing gloves the whole time she was inside the office. Near the end of this replay of crucial moments of the burglary, she would welcome a sense of relief and tell herself,
I'm sure I didn't take the gloves off
. But nearly every time she went through this scenario, the doubt returned, even before she had a chance to have the pleasure of a relaxing sigh of relief. The painful cycle would start again:
But did I, just before going
through the door, take the gloves off? I remember pressing my hand on the door, just so, as I was leaving. Were my gloves on then?

She never finished the exercise with certainty. Always, just as she was about to feel at ease, the painful uncertainty would return full force. Always a sound sleeper, she now spent hours staring into the darkness. Whether driving through the bucolic countryside between her home and the distant farmhouse or teaching one of her classes, her mind was often on two competing tracks—the things she would have preferred to be thinking about and the fear caused by the question that haunted her.

Years later, she remembers clearly how her fear intensified when an FBI agent called her and said he wanted to talk to her:

“About what?”

“About the Media burglary.”

“It was terrifying,” she remembers. Immediately the question was there as the agent was finishing his first sentence:
Did I remove my gloves?

While he continued to talk, she was frantically thinking,
I can't remember whether I took my gloves off
. She was reassuring herself:
I'm sure I didn't take my gloves off
. She was asking herself again,
Did I take my gloves off just before going through the door, as we left? I remember I pressed my hand on the door just so
. Many years later, though her voice is calm, even soft, as she recalls this frightening moment, her brow furrows deeply and her eyes reflect the pain of her memory.

“It was like that feeling you have when you're thirty minutes away from home: Did I turn the burner off under the teakettle? Or, did I unplug the iron? But I couldn't go back to do anything about it.”

When the agents showed up at her office the next day, Smith asked two other professors to be present. The agents were a mixture of cocky and angry. They were cocky about the fact that they had found her and, in doing so, had caught her in a lie. Why had she lied to them two months earlier, they wanted to know, when she came to the office? One of them seemed to relish describing how an agent at the Media office remembered the day after the burglary that a woman from one of the local colleges had come to the office, said she was a professor—Smith now thinks she said Temple University, though she's not sure—and asked if the FBI would send someone to campus to discuss the bureau's role in reacting to antiwar protests. She thinks she said, “We like to hear both sides of issues, and we are aware of a lot of accusations being made against the FBI, and we'd like to know what they have to say.” The agent she met in the Media office was “very congenial,” she
recalls, and said the bureau would be happy to send someone from its speakers' bureau. Just let them know when. Her visit was, of course, a ruse. Smith was in the office that January day to case the inside of the office, though for considerably less time and in less detail than Bonnie Raines would case it a month later.

Now, in her campus office just days after the burglary, one of the agents was explaining to her, with pride, how they had managed to find her despite the fact that she had lied about where she taught. Taking pleasure in having blown her ill-disguised cover, he asked, “Why did you visit us? Why didn't you just call to ask if we would provide speakers?”

The agents' cockiness turned to anger when Smith told them she was going to tape-record the interview. They said they would not permit that. No interview then, she said. “We didn't tape-record you when you came to set up a speaker. Why would you want to tape-record us?” one of the agents asked. She recalls responding, “ ‘I don't trust you guys.' He said, ‘Well, we're not going to talk if there's a tape recorder.' I said, ‘Fine.' ” And the agents left.

“But they got what they wanted,” says Smith. As she tells the story of the meeting years later, she sounds like someone who has just confessed and fears the sheriff will arrive soon with handcuffs. “They had gotten across their message—they wanted me to know that they had figured out who I was.…And I had behaved very badly. I had panic in my voice.…Instead of seeing me as a self-righteous citizen, they saw somebody who was scared.…I think that was why they left so easily. That was all they wanted to know—my reaction, my emotions. I don't think they thought they were going to get any actual information from me.”

She was right. In their report that day, the agents wrote that she was “visibly shaken during interview attempt.”

From the wisdom of years of hindsight, she looks back on her “visit” to the bureau and regrets choosing “a ruse that was close to reality. I wasn't worried at the time I went in there. In fact, I thought I was clever.…I was pissed at myself that they had blown my cover, that I hadn't pulled that off.”

As she faced them that day in her office, she felt certain they had her fingerprints. She felt sure then that the answer to the question that haunted her was yes, that she had removed her gloves. She had no way of knowing that no burglar's fingerprints had been found in the office and that she must have worn her gloves the entire time. She continued to toss and turn fitfully every night for months, waking and asking herself the question again and again:
Did I remove my gloves?
Because the burglary was a secret, she could
not share this agonizing concern with close friends. During that time, the burglary was a heavy burden for Smith. Eventually, she would be proud of the accomplishment, but not then.

Surprisingly, she found comfort in something the FBI did shortly after they tried to interview her. A short time later, she heard from her parents. Retired and living in the South, they had been visited by the FBI. Then her brother told her he had been visited by the FBI. An aunt was visited by agents. Old friends in the West, including an attorney who represented her once many years earlier after she was arrested at a sit-in, were visited by the FBI. “They asked them all the same questions: What kind of person I was. What my politics were. Whether I'm the kind of person that would break the law like this. Would I break into an FBI office?”

As friends and family members called, one by one, and told her that FBI agents had attempted to interview them about her, Smith started to feel relieved. “That actually reassured me a little bit.…It seemed so dumb. If they really had evidence, why would they interview my parents? What's a friend on the West Coast going to know? It seemed that what they were doing was intended more as intimidation than as information gathering.…By that time I had read enough FBI documents that I knew they wasted their time on diddley squat a lot, so I thought that must be what they are doing to me. I figured if they had anything solid, they would have moved. The fear, or paranoia, continued, but their actions did reassure me.”

She continued to puzzle over whether she had removed her gloves for a long time, but she asked the question of herself less often as she heard more about the kinds of questions the FBI agents were asking about her. “I always hated gloves,” she says, either as normal attire or as burglar attire. She wishes she could have dismissed the question as flippantly after the agents came to her office.

BECAUSE EXPERTS TOLD
investigators that the quality of the effort to pick the locks on the doors was superior, agents assumed a trained locksmith must have been involved. In an effort to determine if any of the people on the growing list of suspects had taken courses in lock picking, every locksmith training school in the country was contacted. The task was difficult. Some of the schools had very long lists of graduates. For instance, the
Locksmithing Institution, a correspondence school, had 14,000 students in 1970. In this pre-computer age, it was extremely difficult to cross-reference hundreds of suspects with such large lists. Nevertheless, agents wanted the list.
Records show that officials at the school were reluctant to fulfill the FBI's request. They said they thought performing this function for the bureau would place them in a bad light with their graduates. In the end, though, they said they would do the research if the FBI provided a letter that set forth the reasons for providing the list and assured the school the list would not fall into the hands of its competitors. In the end, no suspects' names were found on the lists of graduates of any of the schools.

One name, Keith Forsyth, must have been missed. Forsyth was on the FBI's list of suspects for several weeks, but apparently his presence on the list of students enrolled in one of the schools was not noticed.

Faced with no progress one week after the burglary in the search for either burglars or stolen files, Jamieson suggested to the director that the bureau should attempt to forestall public disclosure by asking a judge for an order that would require judicial review of any “purported” stolen FBI documents that were made available to journalists or anyone else. This idea was proposed at the same time the burglars were frantically finding other ways to copy the documents. Jamieson thought requiring judicial review would “preclude the publishing, dissemination or disclosure of any data.” His idea was welcomed at FBI headquarters. Al Rosen, a high official in the FBI, recommended to William Sullivan, the number three official in the bureau, that there probably was no precedent for such an order, but because of the significant potential “ramifications involved, it is felt we should explore the suggestion further.” If approved, Rosen wrote Sullivan, representatives of both the bureau's Office of Legal Counsel and its General Investigative Division “will discuss this matter with appropriate Department of Justice officials.” It was approved by Hoover, and was discussed at the Department of Justice, though not at high levels. This was an ironic step by Hoover. Years earlier during and after the Coplon trial, the director took steps to prevent judges from seeing FBI files. Now, in desperation, he wanted a judge to review stolen FBI files and order that they not be disclosed.

Hoover announced a radical decision to his top officials: To protect files, he would close all 538 of the bureau's small offices. His top aides shared his concern about the safety of these offices, many of them isolated, but they were aghast at this desperate suggestion. They strongly urged the director not to take that extreme step. They pointed out that closing all of the small offices would leave vast swaths of the nation virtually beyond the reach of the FBI, especially in the middle of the country and the West, where the distance between FBI offices in many places was already more than a hundred miles.

Reluctantly, the director agreed to a compromise. Instead of closing all 538 small offices, he would close the smallest ones, the 103 resident agencies. He imposed stringent conditions on the offices he left open. He ordered that all small offices that remained open be protected by security guards twenty-four hours a day. This unusual arrangement had unexpected consequences for agents in those offices. Because Hoover trusted no one outside the bureau to provide security for these FBI offices, he required that the security guards be FBI agents. In order to have agents on duty as agents during the day and as guards at night, the hours each agent worked increased substantially. It also meant a considerable reduction in time available for them to conduct investigations and arrests. So be it. In the aftermath of the Media burglary, the security of FBI offices was more important than law enforcement.

This unusual security arrangement led to special benefits for agents in those offices. Suddenly, they were earning a lot more money. Agents throughout the bureau had for many years been required by the director to submit phony statements of how much overtime they worked each month, for which they were not paid. The director used the cumulative phony overtime records when he annually asked Congress for a budget increase to help meet the bureau's critical need, as evidenced by the overtime hours, to hire more agents. He always got the increase, sometimes even more than he asked for. That overtime was fake. This overtime was real. Within a few months of the Media burglary, the agents at these offices were earning so much from overtime hours that some of them bought sports cars and better clothes for themselves and their families. They were living much better than they did on a typical agent's salary. An agent who worked in one of the small offices said the change was so obvious that people around town noticed that some agents had recently acquired spiffier wardrobes. Some even expanded their shoe supply beyond the Hoover-required wingtips.

Despite the increased security he put in place at small FBI offices throughout the country, Hoover continued to be afraid the bureau could not protect itself against more burglaries and more revelations. The investigation was taking much more time than he had expected. Increased protection at every office was absolutely necessary.

AFTER THE BURGLARS COPIED
, collated, and packaged copies of stolen files, they had one more very important task: mailing them. John Raines agreed to mail the first set. Davidon would mail the second set and later arrange to place all the documents in the hands of
Resist, a Cambridge,
Massachusetts, organization that had agreed, without knowing who the burglars were, to send sets of the documents to a variety of people and organizations that Davidon and the Resist staff thought would give them wide public distribution. This arrangement resulted in nearly everyone who worked for Resist or served on its board becoming a MEDBURG suspect, including scholars
Noam Chomsky and
Howard Zinn and poet
Grace Paley.