While millions of Americans were watching the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, a small group of radicals snuck into a FBI office in Media, pocketing reams of classified documents.
Their goal was not to blackmail the government or sell its secrets to a foreign adversary. It was instead to expose mass abuses of power and coordinated spying on ordinary citizens, a scandal that would sully the bureau’s reputation for years to come.
This piece of Pennsylvania history is the subject of the new season of “Snafu,” the iHeartMedia podcast dedicated to “history’s greatest screw-ups.” In the show’s first two episodes, which aired Wednesday, host Ed Helms begins retelling the story of this information heist with the help of Betty Medsger, the Washington Post reporter who broke the story.
Medsger received copies of some of the stolen documents from the thieves themselves, though she didn’t know who they were at the time. The members of the group, which called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, concealed their identities by mailing the files directly to her under the return address “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.” (Medsger, who had just left the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin for Washington, was intrigued by the mysterious Pennsylvania “publisher.”) The first batch, which Medsger received on March 23, 1971, contained 14 documents, which revealed efforts to sow paranoia among Vietnam War dissenters and conduct mass surveillance on Black college students. One document reported that every Black student at Swarthmore College was being watched.
“The FBI was operating something that was very much like the Stasi was operating in East Germany,” Medsger says on the podcast. “What became clear was every document was telling a story about FBI power that was unknown to anyone outside the FBI.”
After verifying the files were indeed stolen from the FBI, Medsger filed a story, which ran on the front page of the next day’s paper. Many other outlets covered the story and continued to do so as more files circulated. The cache of 1,000 documents laid out the bureau’s now-infamous COINTELPRO program, which targeted civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin and Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by law enforcement in 1969. The program was a special project of the bureau’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, a man considered so untouchable that presidents refused to fire or forcibly retire him. John F. Kennedy reportedly explained it this way: “You don’t fire God.”
In the wake of the document dump, the FBI — and undoubtedly Hoover, who died in office the next year — was furious. According to Medsger, the bureau tried to suppress her story prior to publication and as the damning details poured out, agents scrambled to locate the source. But the thieves were never identified, until most of them went public in Medsger’s 2014 book “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI” and the documentary “1971.”
The mastermind behind the operation, it turned out, was a Haverford College physics professor named William Davidon. Davidon, who died one year prior to the book’s release, was an antiwar protester who believed the government was spying on activists like him and his friends. He convinced seven of them to burglarize the FBI office in Delaware County to prove it. They chose the night of the Ali-Frazier fight because they assumed “a lot of people, including the cops, would be listening to that fight,” co-conspirator Keith Forsyth later told the Washington Post.
Other burglars included Philadelphia community organizer Bob Williamson, Temple professor John Raines, his activist wife Bonnie Raines and Judi Feingold, a teenage counselor for a Quaker group. The sixth member, Ralph Daniel, went public to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021. The final thief went on the record for “Snafu.” Her story, which the podcast has not yet explored, will be divulged in greater detail as the episodes unfold Wednesdays.
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