Media FBI Office Break-In

On the evening of March 8, 1971 - while the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight was broadcasting and FBI agents were expected to be watching - a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI's resident agency (a small field office staffed by two agents) at 1 West Front Street, Media, Pennsylvania, and removed approximately 1,000 documents. The burglary and the distribution of the stolen files to the press constituted the first public revelation of COINTELPRO and triggered J. Edgar Hoover's formal termination of that program on April 27, 1971.¹

The Citizens' Commission

The Citizens' Commission was a group of eight people, primarily antiwar activists affiliated with a Catholic peace movement and the surrounding milieu of early 1970s American left-wing activism. They spent months planning the break-in, conducting surveillance on the office, learning lockpicking, and preparing escape routes. No members were ever arrested or charged; the statute of limitations expired after five years without identifications being made.

The group's identities remained unknown until 2014, when five members went public to journalist Betty Medsger, who had been one of the reporters who received the documents in 1971. Medsger's "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI" (Knopf, 2014) is the primary account of the break-in and the participants, based on direct interviews.¹

The Documents and Their Distribution

The group mailed packets of documents to multiple journalists and to Representative Parren Mitchell (D-Maryland). Several major newspapers, including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, received the documents. Most held them initially. The Los Angeles Times published a story within days. The Washington Post's Ben Bagdikian received and published documents, working with reporters including Betty Medsger; the Justice Department requested the Post not publish, and the Post ultimately decided to publish.¹

The documents included bureaucratic records with the word "COINTELPRO" in their headers - the program had never been publicly named and its existence was not known outside the FBI. The documents revealed that the FBI had been infiltrating and disrupting legal political organizations, opening mail, maintaining informants in campus and civil rights organizations, and preparing regular reports on the political views of American citizens.¹

Hoover's Response

Hoover was furious at the break-in. He initiated a massive investigation that ultimately cost an estimated $30 million and involved assigning over 200 agents to the case without result. He formally terminated COINTELPRO by directive on April 27, 1971, instructing that such programs would henceforth require his personal written approval for "any counterintelligence operation" - an effectively prohibitive threshold for field operations. The termination was a defensive measure to limit exposure rather than a repudiation of the program's methods.¹

Hoover died in office on May 2, 1972, thirteen months after COINTELPRO's formal termination and before the program's full scope was publicly established through congressional investigation.

Church Committee and Legacy

The Media documents seeded subsequent journalistic and congressional investigations. The Church Committee's investigation of COINTELPRO (1975-1976) used FBI records to document the full scope of what the Media documents had first revealed. Betty Medsger described the Media break-in as "the most significant act of political activism since the Boston Tea Party."¹