The Burglary (68 page)

“I suppose I knew it was a thankless job, one that would incur a lifetime of enemies,” Welch said years later about his special assignment to clean up the intelligence files of J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI in 1976, “but, nevertheless, one that needed doing and one I probably was uniquely qualified for.” He says he thought at the time that taking this assignment “will ensure they never bring me into this headquarters again.”

Just a year later, though, a blue-ribbon search committee appointed by President
Jimmy Carter wanted Welch to come back to headquarters—as the next director of the FBI. They recommended three finalists, but he was their unanimous choice. Among the qualifications the committee established was that the new director must not have had connections with or approve of the bureau's COINTELPRO operations. In a sign of how the FBI was regarded then, the committee decided it could not trust the FBI to run checks on the candidates and did not ask them to do so despite the
usual practice of relying on FBI checks on candidates for high-level federal appointments.

Welch, characteristically, was blunt with the committee. They seemed to like that and also that he was a favorite of agents on the street, many of whom had longed for years for leadership that focused on real crime and not on useless intelligence gathering and secret dirty tricks.
The committee members were very aware that he was openly critical of headquarters, having recently told a reporter that “you could put sandbags around the building and shut off the phones and the bureau's criminal investigative work would be better off for it.”

J. Edgar Hoover understood the problem, Welch wrote in a book assessing his experience in the FBI, “but not the solution. He strove for efficiency and was near genius in devising methods to measure individual and group effort, time and productivity.…The result was a bureaucratic stalemate which generated bushels of statistics without much meaning.”

In the letter of application the committee asked candidates for director to write, Welch told the committee, “I feel that what has developed at our FBI headquarters over the years is a ponderous, ineffectual, costly bureaucracy which does not contribute substantially or materially to the essential work of the FBI.” That attitude may have endeared him to Carter's committee, but it did not win applause at FBI headquarters.

As the selection process was unwinding, Welch heard that one of the intelligence supervisors he had unceremoniously transferred out of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the outset of his evaluation of intelligence files a year earlier “tried to undo my candidacy for FBI director by ordering a search for any writings I may have made … thinking they might show me to be some kind of secret communist sympathizer.…The domestic intelligence old boy network was working on the [Capitol] Hill to torpedo me.”

“I'm quite sure that the only writings they found,” said Welch, “over 5,000 strong, were: ‘Close this file permanently. NJW for Dir. C. Kelley.' ”

Carter didn't choose any of the five people recommended by his blue-ribbon search committee. Instead, he appointed William H. Webster of St. Louis, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, as FBI director in February 1978. That year Webster appointed Welch to be in charge of the New York field office.

When he accepted the New York job, Welch said he planned “to take this office apart brick by brick and reassemble it.” He had in mind what he knew he would find in New York. Over the years, that office, like the Philadelphia office prior to his arrival, had diverted its workforce from organized
crime investigations to intelligence investigations of radical organizations. When Welch arrived in New York, agent
Paul Cummings, an old friend who was about to retire, told him, “When I leave, Chief, you can turn out the lights.” He was the only FBI agent then doing organized crime investigations in New York City.

As he settled into the New York field office, Welch discovered that the FBI's “war against the Weatherman Underground had been won by La Cosa Nostra.” Responding to headquarters' demands, the New York office had transferred its best undercover agents from the organized crime unit, Squad 47, to investigate the Weather Underground. The result, he said, was a triple failure: members of the FBI squad were indicted for their alleged illegal tactics, “FBI penetration of New York's crime families had disappeared,” and the Weather Underground people were still at large.

WHEN THE MEDIA FBI OFFICE
was burglarized, Welch, as someone who detested the intelligence operations the stolen files revealed, was intrigued. When J. Edgar Hoover complained that the published Media files presented a distorted picture of FBI activities, Welch thought instead that the documents showed that the FBI's priorities were distorted. “The burglars probably have no idea what they caused,” he said. “The fallout was immense.…They spent millions to transfer agents from those offices and spent millions on the unproductive work of agents guarding FBI offices day and night” when they were afraid another burglary would occur. “It was insane.”

When Welch became SAC in Philadelphia, the Media case was under his authority. Actually, by that time, 1975, the FBI was not paying much attention to the case. The last entry in the investigative file was made on January 14, 1975. But entries had started to be made less frequently much earlier, shortly after the Camden trial ended in May 1973.

By September 22, 1972, MEDBURG investigators reported that “more than 400 suspects had been developed and individual files opened on each during the investigation of the MEDBURG case. Most were eliminated as MEDBURG suspects by establishing their whereabouts during the pertinent period, or by interview.” That memorandum included the last list of prime MEDBURG suspects prepared by the FBI—the seven people they had concluded probably were the Media burglars. Only one of the people on that last list of suspects, Bob Williamson, was actually a Media burglar. What six of them, including Williamson, seemed to have in common was that
they were close friends of the seventh person on the list, John Peter Grady, the person FBI investigators thought, beginning the day after the burglary, was the leader of the Media group. That makes it difficult to know if investigators had any more reason to think Williamson was a Media burglar than they did any of the other six. In addition to Grady, the final Media suspects were
Paul Couming,
Peter Fordi,
Edward J. McGowan, and Cookie Ridolfi, all of them Camden defendants, and
Joseph O'Rourke.

All of the Media burglars, except Bonnie Raines—the person in the group on whom the investigators focused most attention, though they never knew her name and, therefore, could not name her as a suspect—were listed as suspects at various times during the investigation. The other six burglars had been eliminated sometime before this final list was prepared.

In December 1972, agents interviewed a key person, the man who abandoned the Media burglary group just days before the burglary, but they didn't seem to realize he had been part of the group. Immediately after the burglary, he had become a key MEDBURG suspect and was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance. In the report of their 1972 interview with him, agents wrote that they did not think he “knows who the MEDBURG subjects are.” Actually, he knew everything about who they were and what they had done. A few weeks after the burglary, he had told the Raineses he was considering turning the burglars in. But when he talked to agents he did not indicate he had any direct knowledge about the Media burglars.

In the aftermath of the failed investigation, some FBI agents gave the impression they knew much more about the burglars than they did. Strangely, an FBI source told at least one journalist an account of the burglary that was a complete fabrication. Speaking to Sanford Ungar, in an interview for his 1976 book
FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls,
an FBI agent stated these “facts” he claimed to know were true: that there were twenty Media burglars; that they modeled their group on modern revolutionary groups in Latin America and knowledge of what each knew about the other was kept as limited as possible; that not all of them lived in the Philadelphia area; that they were divided into three groups—the thieves, the sorters, and the distributors. The initial operation, he said, went smoothly, but there was a personal crisis and the person who was supposed to provide storage space the first night withdrew the offer. The sorting took place in New York and Boston. The files were copied over a period of weeks. Investigators identified as implicated in the burglary a sister of one FBI agent assigned to Philadelphia and the priest brother of another agent.

Not a single fact in that list of claims about the Media burglary is
accurate. And none of those claims appears in the official investigation of the burglary. The reason for passing on such a detailed fabrication is inexplicable. Perhaps an agent did so only because he thought the truth about who the burglars were would never emerge, and, therefore, he could tell a tale that would never be discovered to be false. Still, why did they spin it?

The MEDBURG investigation was closed by Neil Welch in 1976 with this memorandum to Director Kelley.

One mystery was cleared up when the
Philadelphia Inquirer
published an article on the thirtieth anniversary of the burglary. Throughout the investigation, investigators continued to think John Peter Grady was a member of and leader of the Media burglars. Grady often was noncommittal with friends about whether he participated in the break-in. In an interview with an
Inquirer
reporter for that 2001 story, Grady for the first time publicly stated emphatically that he had nothing to do with the Media burglary.

The five-year anniversary of the burglary, the date on which the statute of limitations on burglary charges expired, was March 8, 1976. Three days later, Welch, in his capacity as SAC of the Philadelphia office, closed the MEDBURG case. In a memorandum to Director Kelley on that day, with the subject MEDBURG, Welch wrote, “All logical investigation in this matter has been conducted. Since the break in of the Media Resident Agency occurred on 3/8/71, the statute of limitations has run relative to any
prosecution being initiated against the perpetrators of the criminal act. Accordingly, this case is being placed in a closed status.”

And that was it. After five years, the investigation was closed. Despite all the fierce efforts of Hoover until he died, the Media burglary was closed and remained an unsolved crime. The Department of Justice had long before told FBI officials it could not take the case to a grand jury because there was insufficient evidence. Actually, as FBI investigators repeatedly admitted in internal memos, they never found any physical evidence related to the break-in or any person who had any direct or indirect knowledge of it.

In an interview years after he closed the case, Welch said he thought that if the Media burglary had not taken place, COINTELPRO might never have been revealed. He expressed frustration over the situation that prompted the burglary, and he also made the extraordinary assertion that the break-in may have been necessary in order for the truth about FBI operations to emerge.

“The problem was,” he said sadly, “there weren't any checks and balances. The government wasn't accountable.” Of the burglary, he says, “There wasn't any other means to know what the government was doing. Probably—not probably, unquestionably—all of these people were aware of things that had happened. People had lost their jobs, or some unfortunate circumstances had mysteriously overcome them in their activities, or they came to know that they were being infiltrated, or informants were spying on them.…Most of them probably were very intelligent people. They had to know the government was probably doing something with them.

“The system ought to provide for some other mechanism,” he said, “so people don't have to resort to these extraordinary—to criminal acts! There ought to be other avenues available to them. We had people taking acts of civil disobedience. They had to resort to this kind of activity—criminal acts against the government—in order to get some exposure of the government's wrongdoing. What I'm saying is that they wouldn't have to do that if there were some proper method of accountability on the part of the government.”

Welch became slightly gruff. He wanted to make it clear that despite his sympathetic statements about civil disobedience as related to the burglary, he doesn't believe in burglary as an investigative tool. If they had done it on his watch, he insists, and they had been caught, he would have “locked every one of them up.…Tell it to the court. You're not justified … to burglarize a government office.”

As I left his Sarasota home after the interview, he added another thought: “If they had been convicted, I would have recommended that they should
be given suspended sentences because of the major contribution they made to their country.”