San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Marin man, 50 years later, tells of role in FBI breakin
Theft of files helped shake up agency
Ralph Daniel squeezed himself through the door and looked around the dark room. They had cased this small FBI office in the Philadelphia suburb of Media for months.
Now he was inside.
Rows of file cabinets beckoned. This was the moment the group of eight had planned. They had long suspected FBI malfeasance and were convinced these records would prove it.
Daniel, then 26, rolled out the first metal cabinet drawer, scooped up the files and threw them into a suitcase. His gloved hands shook. The burglars had to hurry.
They had chosen March 8, 1971, because Muhammad Ali’s title fight against Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden would keep most of the country and world — and most importantly, FBI agents and police — glued
“Something had to be done about the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover and their intrusiveness to peaceful groups trying to get justice in this country.” Ralph Daniel, San Rafael man with role in burglary
to closedcircuit screens and radios for a few hours. One of the intruders could hear the broadcast in nearby apartments.
They filled their cases and left.
Fifty years have passed since that night. The group of amateur bandits — antiwar activists ages 19 to 43, five men and three women — would anonymously leak the explosive records to three newspapers and two politicians, exposing J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI program that investigated and spied on citizens accused of nothing other than engaging in protected speech.
Not a single burglar was ever caught. And for 50 years, Daniel kept quiet about his role — until now.
Now 76 and living with his girlfriend in San Rafael, he decided to share his story publicly for the first time with The Chronicle, attaching his name to the historic event.
“I’m extremely proud of what we did as a small group of people,” he said. “Something had to be done about the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover and their intrusiveness to peaceful groups trying to get justice in this country.”
The breakin and the stories that followed marked the beginning of the end of Hoover’s decadeslong reign atop the bureau and helped expose the massive Cointelpro, or counterintelligence, operation that amassed files on antiwar activists, students, Black Panthers and Black citizens.
This was before the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. It would lead to a critical stress test of the free press and a pioneering challenge to the country’s early public records laws.
In recent years, Daniel has revealed his past to some close friends and family, gaining comfort by watching six of his colleagues come forward publicly starting in 2014 with the release of a book and documentary. But for the most part, he kept silent, abiding by the group’s vow to maintain secrecy.
“It’s really sort of staggering what they caused,” said Betty Medsger, the former Washington Post reporter who broke the story in 1971 and would later chair the San Francisco State journalism department. “The idea of these amateur people who were so dedicated … and their willingness to risk decades in prison.”
***
Born in Tel Aviv, Daniel immigrated to New York at age 5. His parents owned wire mesh factories.
He lost his grandparents to the Nazis during World War II, and in 1960, he watched with amazement as Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires and brought to trial for his role in the extermination of Jews. That “bold, assertive” thinking inspired him as a high school sophomore and sparked his activism. He wound up in graduate school at Temple University, where he studied experimental and physiological psychology. At the time, Philadelphia was a hub of antiwar activities and he lived in a Powelton Village commune.
Federal agents were a constant presence. If one fell asleep in his car during a surveillance operation, neighbors would slap a “This is an FBI car” sticker on the bumper.
The Vietnam War was raging, and Daniel took every opportunity to fight against it, from picketing draft boards to pouring cow’s blood outside a recruitment center. He took a leave of absence from school.
At one draft board demonstration, he recalled, a group of activists chained themselves to the door, but Daniel decided to pass out leaflets instead to avoid arrest. He was still arrested.
His short stint in a holding cell with a crowd of people — a mix of races and socioeconomic backgrounds — only emboldened him.
“That just radicalized me further,” he recalled. “It had the reverse effect.”
Around May 1970, he joined the group We, the People and hit two Philadelphia draft boards in largely poor Black neighborhoods, destroying the paper records. His reputation was growing when a physics professor from Haverford College outside Philadelphia noticed him.
***
William Davidon was looking for capable volunteers for a big job. The professor and antiwar activist recruited Daniel as he set his sights on a small FBI office in Media.
“I told Bill, ‘I think this is a fabulous idea,’ ” Daniel said. “J. Edgar Hoover ran a fiefdom that we thought was rife with oppression.”
They recruited more candidates, and the group began meeting at Bonnie and John Raines’ house in Germantown, Pa., sleeping in the attic and basement. They spent months driving in the area of the FBI office, mapping the movements on the block.
At one point, Bonnie Raines, who then worked at a day care center, disguised herself as a Swarthmore College student reporter and interviewed the lead agent inside the office about opportunities for women in the bureau. She jotted down notes on the office interior.
“We decided if we were going to become burglars,” Daniel said, “we’d be really good ones.”
On the night of the breakin, as Ali and Frazier traded blows in the “Fight of the Century” and the group arrived at the FBI office, the plan met with immediate obstacles. Keith Forsyth couldn’t pick a new lock on the front door.
The burglars took a quick vote and determined they’d come too far to turn back. Forsyth cracked a second door’s lock, but it was blocked by a heavy metal cabinet. Inch by inch, he pushed open the door until he could squeeze through.
They stuffed their suitcases, leaving behind a handful of revolvers they had found in the office, Daniel said. They were nonviolent. The group had worked to learn the lead agent’s birth date, but those numbers didn’t work on the office safe.
Watching for the night guard at a nearby courthouse, they jumped into their cars. They drove to Fellowship Farm in Pottstown, Pa., a retreat where one of Davidon’s friends owned a cabin that would become a safe house.
They did a quick survey of the files.
“It was clear we had a gold mine,” Daniel said.
***
The breakin barely made the news as the group spent day and night organizing the files. They all wore gloves. Davidon and John Raines, a religion professor at Temple University, made copies at their respective schools.
Daniel’s job was to guard the files. Night and day.
One day as he drove a member of the group to the safe house, Daniel recalled, he noticed they were being followed. So he took a turn and drove to a park, where they had a picnic, eating as men in suits stood outside their cars and watched.
The burglars sent the first copies of the files to two Democratic members of Congress and the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The politicians — Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and Rep. Parren Mitchell of Maryland — sat on the documents, while two of the newspapers turned them over to the FBI.
On March 23, 1971, Medsger received a package in the Post mailroom. There was a cover letter signed by the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI and 14 FBI documents. If she published the contents, more would be sent, the letter promised.
“It was so extreme I had to think whether or not it had been a hoax,” Medsger recalled in a phone interview with The Chronicle.
She walked to the Post’s national desk. The editors, including Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, were excited. She was 29 at the time.
Would the Post publish a story based off stolen records? Medsger said she returned to her desk and started writing. She was willing to go to jail over it.
Behind the scenes, a monumental journalism debate erupted. Attorney General John Mitchell, who would go to jail four years later for his role in the Watergate scandal, called Bradlee and Publisher Katharine Graham, demanding that they kill the story, Medsger said. This was months before the same characters would weigh how to handle the leaked Pentagon Papers.
At 10 p.m., Graham gave the goahead and the story ran the next morning. Medsger would receive new files every 10 days to two weeks over a twomonth period.
The burglary gang met one final time and made two promises as a group: Never associate with one another, and take the secret to their graves.