The Burglary

Betty Medsger, author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, talked about the events of March 8, 1971, when a group of people broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document in the building. Ms. Medsger talked about four members of the group: John Raines, Bonnie Raines, Keith Forsyth, and Bill Davidon. She explained how they mailed her copies of the stolen documents when she was a reporter for the Washington Post in July of 1971, and how her article about the documents revealed a wide-ranging FBI program of illegal surveillance on numerous ordinary Americans. The burglary also exposed an FBI program known as COINTELPRO, in which the Bureau illegally targeted groups such as the Black Panthers.