BETTY MEDSGER
Knopf, 2014, 596 pages, $46.95 (hb)
As far as burglaries go, this one was pretty audacious. On 8 March, 1971, nine anti-Vietnam-war activists
in Pennsylvania burgled the FBI, stealing the secret files in the regional FBI office
in the small town of Media. With careful
planning, a little luck and plenty of pluck, the amateur burglars exposed, for
the first time, the FBI’s political spying and suppression of democratic dissent.
Uncaptured for four decades, and with an FBI not keen to
revisit the scene of their acute embarrassment, the previously unidentified
burglars have now identified themselves and told their story to Betty Medsger,
the first journalist to be leaked the stolen files.
With immense daring, the burglars challenged the power of
the FBI’s Director, J. Edgar Hoover, which came from his role as a “fiery
narrator of tales of the communist perils that faced Americans”, his collection
of dirt on politicians to use as blackmail against any threats of reform, and a
glamorous reputation as a crime-fighting champion (a hollow one, however – only
1% of the Media files concerned serious
crime, which the FBI fought more on the large and small celluloid screen than
in the actual criminal world).
With successive Presidents and Attorneys-General giving him
license to operate outside the law with no regard to civil liberties, Hoover’s
mission was to “harass and destroy” progressive movements which, as well as
Marxists, housed mild liberals, intellectuals, religious pacifists, feminists,
gays and African-Americans (“Black Americans fell into two categories – black
people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on
other black people for the FBI”).
The stolen Media files, and subsequent revelations,
documented this, in irrefutable black and white. The FBI used illegal spying practices (with
neither subpoena nor concern with privacy), infiltration, entrapment, provocateurs
and informers to intimidate critics into silence and passivity - to, as one
Hoover directive to agents put it, “enhance the paranoia … get the point across
there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox”.
To disrupt, discredit and disable his targets, Hoover’s bag
of dirty tricks, some lethal, ranged from lacing activists’ oranges with strong
laxatives and spreading venereal disease to student leaders through infected
prostitutes, to fabricated documents and false rumours to sow or exacerbate
movement differences.
The FBI also maintained a Security Index of 26,000 activists
for arrest and indefinite detention without trial during ‘national emergencies’. Over one thousand ideologically ‘suspect’
professors at American universities were dismissed because of FBI information
provided to campus authorities, whilst FBI material provided to Senator
McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee condemned thousands more
Americans to sackings and blacklists.
The burglary destroyed the mystique of the FBI, led to its
oversight by Congress, and forced a formal apology to the American people for
its lawless and anti-democratic behaviour.
With, as Medgers notes, the National Security Agency now putting a
digital snooper behind every electronic mailbox, “such people” as the Media
burglars, who “thought long and hard” about their dangerous act of resistance before
deciding to risk all, “are going to be called upon again”. Like Snowden and Manning, they will continue
to answer that call.
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