Snafu Season 2: Episode 2: Want to come to a party?

This week, we’ve got Episode 2 of our Second season of SNAFU: MEDBURG. It’s about the citizen activist burglary in Media Pennsylvania. Get it? MEDBURG is a little portmanteau. Love those things. On this episode, we hear about the team behind this courageous act. How did it all come together? And how did they stay anonymous for decades afterward? Listen to the full season wherever you get your podcasts. This is SNAFU Season 2, Episode 2: "Want to come to a party?" See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:32Speaker 05

  The official case name in the FBI. In this episode, we hear about the team behind this courageous act. How did it all come together? And how did they stay anonymous for decades afterwards? The opening scene of this episode is one of my favorite moments in the entire Snafu series. It's when the great Washington Post journalist Betty Medsger finds out, at a casual dinner party, that the people who perpetrated this insane burglary are actually her dear friends. It's an incredible reveal. This is Snafu, Season Two, Episode Two. Want to come to a party? Last time on Snafu.

• 2:16Speaker 06

  Heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali meet in New York's Madison Square Garden Monday night.

• 2:22Speaker 07

  There was a huge stack of mail, but this one stood out because of the return address, which was Liberty Publications Media, Pennsylvania. As long as I am Director of the FBI, it will continue to maintain its high and impartial standards of investigation.

• 2:45Speaker 06

  Last month, burglars hit an FBI resident office and took files which subsequently have been made public.

• 2:51Speaker 07

  The FBI entered my life very soon after that.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Reporter Betty Medsger now lived in San Francisco. Two decades had passed since she first received an envelope from a mysterious group called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. That envelope contained 14 top-secret FBI files showing America's beloved G-men were surveilling American citizens with the goal of, quote, "enhancing paranoia." She still had no idea who sent her those files that led to her bombshell reporting. She had no idea about the incredible heist that pried them out of the FBI's hands. And she might not have ever known these things were it not for one fateful evening in 1989.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Betty was taking a trip back to her old stomping grounds, Philadelphia.

• 3:54Speaker 07

  There were a number of people professionally and personally who were very important to me, and I hadn't seen them in a long time.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Like John and Bonnie Rains, a young couple she'd known from her days reporting on religion for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

• 4:11Speaker 07

  And I called and said I was going to be in town. Could we get together? And they immediately invited me to come to their home for dinner that Friday night. And I was very much looking forward to it.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  When Betty first met them, Bonnie was a young mother, juggling her grad school studies and education, her job running a daycare, and her three children. Her husband, John, was a young Methodist minister who taught religion at Temple University. He was a gifted speaker, and he knew it. Some might say he talked a little too much. Betty would soon learn how true that was.

• 4:47Speaker 07

  We hadn't seen each other in a very long time. We talked for quite a while and had a couple glasses of wine, catching each other up on the last decade of our lives. And at some point in the middle of dinner, their youngest child came in. She had a question for John. Then John said, when he was done answering her question, he said, "Mary, this is Betty Medsger. We want you to know Betty. Because many years ago, when your dad and mother had information about the FBI that we wanted to give to the public, we gave it to Betty."

• 5:33Speaker 07

  And I was just absolutely stunned.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would think. Oh, my gosh.

• 5:42Speaker 07

  Mary was sort of lingering a little bit, but you could just tell from the expression on her face that this meant absolutely nothing.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Sure. She's like, "What are you talking about, Dad?"

• 5:54Speaker 07

  And then when she left the room, I said, you know, "Are you telling me that you were, you broke into the FBI?" And they had these wonderful wide smiles on their faces and said, "Yes." It just, it just...

• 6:13Speaker 05

  It popped out.

• 6:13Speaker 07

  Popped out. I think it was a combination of the fact that we were, we were so happy to see each other and we were telling each other tales from the...

• 6:21Speaker 05

  A little bit of wine.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  A little bit of wine. Here we are, sitting in their beautiful suburban home, you know, four children, nice black dog named Jezebel, and a station wagon, which they've always had. But also, I just simply know them. I had no idea how radical they were. That night, I'm just asking one question after another and finding it all pretty unbelievable.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is Season Two, Medburg. The story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI Snafu it exposed.

• 7:08Speaker 05

  Today, a young couple's decision to put everything on the line.

• 7:25Speaker 07

  Testing. One, two, three, four, five, six.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  That's Betty Medsger interviewing John and Bonnie Rains.

• 7:34Speaker 07

  When was the idea introduced to you?

• 7:38Speaker 06

  Well, let's see. I think it was something like September or October.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  In September or October of 1970, John and Bonnie Rains got a phone call from a friend, a man by the name of Bill Davedon. Bill was a Navy veteran, a physicist, a father of two. He was a non-assuming man, calm, thoughtful, and deeply practical. Oh, and a dedicated anti-war activist, just like John and Bonnie.

• 8:07Speaker 07

  I think he just, initially, he just called John and me from his home in Haverford and asked us if we, would we want to come to a party?

• 8:15Speaker 05

  That's Bonnie again. There was no actual party. For activists, this was code.

• 8:21Speaker 07

  For thinking about an action and would you want to come and talk about it?

• 8:26Speaker 05

  A protest action, that is. Bonnie and John accepted the invitation.

• 8:31Speaker 07

  So we met with him at his home, and we walked outside in the field behind his home to talk about it. And that's when he floated the idea to John and me.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  It was casual, you know, in the way that someone today might propose starting a fantasy football league. Bill simply asked, "Hey, what do you guys think about burglarizing an FBI office?"

• 8:56Speaker 07

  And it took us back a bit. Crazy, that's crazy.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're not wrong, Bonnie.

• 9:05Speaker 07

  Is this crazy, or is this something we ought to really take seriously?

• 9:09Speaker 05

  You had it right the first time. It's definitely crazy.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  The FBI was the biggest, baddest law enforcement agency in the biggest, baddest nation on Earth. And who were John and Bonnie Rains? Uh, not professional burglars, not spies, just a nice young couple with three children and a station wagon. How the hell were they supposed to break into an FBI office? And if the FBI caught them?

• 9:37Speaker 05

  No, they'll lock you in a room and throw away the room. Thank you, Steven Soderbergh. Anyway, unlike most sane people, the Rainses would actually consider Bill Davedon's proposition. Because for months, they'd been suspicious that there was something very wrong with the FBI, and this might be an opportunity to prove it.

• 9:59Speaker 07

  Well, I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You met me in...

• 10:04Speaker 05

  Waitressing tables in the resort near the Michigan way. Family's summer cottage. Long before they would consider breaking into an FBI office, Bonnie and Clyde, excuse me, Bonnie and John, were just two young people meeting by chance on a beautiful summer evening.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  Bonnie was a waitress at the Homestead, a resort that overlooked Lake Michigan, and John was a young Methodist minister, tall, handsome, and dining alone.

• 10:31Speaker 07

  And he was at one of my tables, and he was this absolutely gorgeous man in a blue sport coat and these brilliant blue eyes. Part of our job description was to kind of chat up the guests, so I proceeded to start a chat with him, I guess. So we found some things to talk about.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  They sure did. Bonnie asked John how his day was, and John told Bonnie that he'd just arrived. Literally, this was his first dinner since getting back from the deep South, where he'd been jailed for participating in the 1961 Freedom Rides.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  It was the experience for the first time in my life, the fact that things were not okay with this country, that there were very deep things that were not okay with this country.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  The Freedom Rides were a courageous civil rights protest action. Black and white passengers alike boarded Greyhound buses headed into the Jim Crow South. It was a few months after the Supreme Court had ruled that interstate travel facilities be desegregated, but before most of the South had accepted the new reality of this ruling.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  A mob had gathered as our bus came into Little Rock, Arkansas.

• 11:49Speaker 07

  And it was a confrontation of a mob that, as John said, they wanted to kill me. They really would have killed me if they'd gotten their hands on me.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  The Freedom Riders, including John, were arrested for breaching the peace. They were fined, found guilty, and told to get out of the state.

• 12:08Speaker 06

  Which we did, going south, deeper into the violence. It was a very powerful experience for me, and it exposed me to the power of the African-American Southern community of resistance. It had great moral authority. It acted under conditions of great danger. It exposed itself to that danger. I began to see law and order as a system which controls other folks, oftentimes the black majority who could not vote.

• 12:44Speaker 06

  Bonnie hears this story, which is fresh off the press.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  And I think she was intrigued by it.

• 12:52Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. That's clear.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  I think it's what I had going for me. Maybe my blue eyes, I'm not sure.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  They don't hurt, John. They don't hurt.

• 13:04Speaker 07

  I really admired him and thought, this is a special kind of man. And he was very interested in me. I guess he thought I was pretty and funny. I had goals. I had ambition. I had spunk. And I was willing to not just settle for the comfortable life that I could have settled for. I wanted an adventure. I wanted my life to be an adventure. And he liked to joke. He said it took him eight glasses of iced tea to work up to asking me out on a date.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  Less than a year later, John and Bonnie were married. Three kids quickly followed. But they made a promise to each other that they wouldn't allow family to stand in the way of fighting injustice. And there was plenty of injustice to fight.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Last Sunday, more than 8,000 of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama. The workers here who are striking for a decent wage, for decent working conditions. There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

• 14:28Speaker 07

  There was so much at risk at that time in our democracy that you were either an activist or you went along with things that were wrong. You had a choice you had to make. And we made the choice to be activists. And if it meant some risks that were involved, well, that's what citizens sometimes have to do.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  John and Bonnie Rains spent the 1960s protesting for civil rights, for women's rights, for labor rights. By 1969, they were living in Philadelphia and becoming entrenched in the fight against America's war in Vietnam.

• 15:08Speaker 06

  A South Vietnamese official, the military chief of Quang Ngai Province, today denied charges that American soldiers on the ground executed several hundred villagers. The villagers' version of the incident was given by survivors yesterday. They said a patrol of 100 Americans stormed into the hamlet, drove all the residents out of their huts, then opened fire with automatic weapons.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  On November 12, 1969, almost 15 years after American involvement in Vietnam began, reports surfaced that US troops had raided the Vietnamese village of Mela. The Americans had burned huts, killed hundreds of civilians, including children, and committed other atrocities. The Army initially claimed that Mela was a, quote, "fierce firefight", where 128 enemy troops and 20 civilians had been killed. But that was a lie. It wasn't a battle. It was a slaughter.

• 16:04Speaker 06

  I might have killed about 10, 15 of them.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Men, women, and children?

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Men, women, and children.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  And babies?

• 16:12Speaker 06

  And babies. Why did you do it? Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it.

• 16:21Speaker 05

  Two days after these news reports, half a million Americans marched in Washington. It was the largest anti-war protest in history.

• 16:30Speaker 06

  Look behind you. See the thousands marching today.

• 16:36Speaker 07

  People were hopeful at the beginning.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Here's Betty Medsker. When she was a young reporter in Philly, she sometimes covered the peace movement.

• 16:44Speaker 07

  In order for protests to happen, there has to be a deep feeling that there can be a result because of what we're doing. And people really did feel that way.

• 16:58Speaker 06

  We come out of the streets, pour out with our visions and our dreams and the beauty that is within us. We will come as a new nation. Can you honestly say I don't love my country? Can you say it just because I want to find a better solution than killing and hate?

• 17:18Speaker 05

  But despite the massive protests, the administration just wasn't interested, like, not even a bit. While half a million Americans marched in protest right outside the White House, President Nixon sat inside and watched a football game on TV.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  People like John and Bonnie had seen firsthand how protests can affect change. But as the war dragged on, even they had to acknowledge a sobering truth. Marching and demonstrating didn't seem like it was going to stop this war. Here's John.

• 17:50Speaker 06

  It was a time in which we had a growing feeling that the moral authority of the country was with we, the people, and was not in the administration in Washington.

• 18:04Speaker 05

  Nixon later wrote in his memoirs that these protests, quote, "destroyed whatever small possibility may still have existed of ending the war in 1969", which makes about as much sense as smoking six packs a day and then blaming your emphysema on the doctor who told you to quit. Whoever's fault it was, and I happen to blame the commander in chief of the United States military, but that's just me, the war did not end in 1969. Instead, as the year came to a close, Nixon drafted a whole new generation of men into the military to kill and be killed in Vietnam.

• 18:42Speaker 07

  Everybody, literally everybody, knew a young man who was going to Vietnam. You thought about your boyfriend. You thought about your husband or your brother.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  Christmas time, 1969, every family that included a draft-eligible young man crowded around their television set. Pursuant to the executive order, the Director Selective Service is going to establish tonight a random...

• 19:10Speaker 06

  Selection of sequence for induction for 1970.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Teenagers, just barely men, perched on the edge of their living room sofas, nervously bouncing their knees and drumming their fingers. Their parents hovered as the lottery unfolded. On the TV, representatives in stiff suits reached their arms into a fishbowl of blue plastic capsules, and the young men at home prayed their birthdays wouldn't be called.

• 19:37Speaker 06

  September 14th. September 14th, 001. April 24th. April 24th is 002. December 30th. December 30th, 003.

• 20:06Speaker 05

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• 22:25Speaker 04

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• 22:32Speaker 06

  What's a homicide detective doing here? Three bodies on the ground.

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• 22:56Speaker 07

  You march, you rally, you write letters to members of Congress, and none of it was making any difference whatsoever. In fact, the war was worsening. Our voices were not being heard. So there was a lot of anger and frustration. And we decided to pursue a different kind of civil disobedience.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  John and Bonnie's activism was about to get hardcore. Their pursuit of civil disobedience brought them into contact with? The Catholic Peace Movement. To be clear, America's Catholic leadership were not peaceniks. In fact, in 1968, the Archbishop of New York counter-protested a peace rally. But at the local level, many parish priests and their parishioners felt the war contradicted their religious beliefs. They thought the draft was wrong. And some of them were even willing to violate earthly laws to fight it.

• 23:56Speaker 07

  So the strategy was to go into draft boards in the middle of the night, to break into draft boards and remove draft files and destroy them.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  All American men aged 18 to 25 were required to register with their local draft boards. These small offices would store their draft files, which were necessary for actually calling these men up to serve. But there were no digital copies, of course. Everything ran on paper, which meant that if someone broke into those draft boards and removed or destroyed the files, the men in those files couldn't be called up. It wasn't only the Catholic Peace Movement planning these raids, but many prominent draft board raiders were priests or people close to them.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  We love to say that we learned our burglary skills from nuns and priests.

• 24:45Speaker 05

  The draft board raids were strategic, targeting offices specifically located in poor neighborhoods.

• 24:52Speaker 07

  The men that they were drafting were all low-income, disadvantaged men who were just caught up in the draft and sent over there to be slaughtered, or to slaughter. Rich people were more likely to be able to hire attorneys that would be able to get them out of serving, get doctors to find either valid or invalid reasons why they shouldn't serve. There was learning how to fake mental illness.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  So Bonnie, John, and a gaggle of nuns and priests broke into federal draft board offices and made off with draft files in the dead of night. Then they mailed the files to the young men, along with a letter, explaining that they believed the war in Vietnam was unjust. And now these men had a choice. They could report to their draft board office and offer to serve if they wished, or they could keep their file and sleep a little better at night, knowing they would never be called.

• 25:51Speaker 07

  Well, we were triumphant. I mean, we were, we felt pretty good about it. So I think we felt, at least, that was one very concrete thing that we could do, that we could accomplish.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  But they weren't naive. These raids weren't slowing the war. Young men were still going to Vietnam at alarming rates, many of them never to come home.

• 26:23Speaker 07

  There was such a feeling of deep despair and less hopefulness. People really came to feel like we're having no impact. This war is not going to end. People were debating whether or not violence is appropriate.

• 26:43Speaker 05

  Some fringe groups formed, like the infamous Weather Underground. They began building bombs and blowing up public buildings. They issued warnings in advance and usually struck at night when offices were empty. But they wouldn't avoid casualties. On one tragic occasion, a Weather Underground bomb accidentally detonated inside a townhouse in New York City in the West Village, killing two members of the group. The peace movement was worried that all this escalation would discredit the movement. And soon, that escalation would be brutally answered by the government.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  On May 4th, 1970, at Kent State University, more than 2,000 students gathered to protest the war. The scene was tense. The National Guard fired tear gas into the crowd, then protesters threw rocks, then the National Guard fired 67 shots into the crowd. Nine unarmed students were injured, and four were killed. The war was coming home in a horrifying way, which Neil Young eloquently captured in "Ohio," a song he wrote in the immediate aftermath of Kent State.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  It was the first time American citizens were killed while protesting the war. In a Gallup poll, 58% of Americans blamed the students for the shooting. The peace movement was growing tired and exasperated. And on top of all that, there was a growing paranoia amongst activists in John and Bonnie's community, a lingering feeling that a very powerful force was watching from the shadows.

• 28:35Speaker 07

  We were very aware that the FBI was everywhere in Philadelphia. Surveillance, surveillance, and intimidation were everywhere. Most of us were acutely aware that that was happening.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  According to Bonnie, it was easy to suss out the spies. The peace movement had a certain fashion sense: long hair, secondhand clothing, leather fringe, tie-dye. But occasionally, one would spot somebody in the corner, wearing all that stuff with a crew cut and wingtip shoes, also wielding a camera.

• 29:10Speaker 07

  It was pretty apparent that they were just everywhere.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  Everywhere: marches, meetings, you know, peaceful, legal, constitutionally-protected assemblies. And worse...

• 29:24Speaker 07

  I would take the children to school in the carpool, and there'd be a car behind us with two men in it. And one of my kids would say, "Do you think that's the FBI?" I mean, that's how pervasive it was, that even my children wondered whether we were being followed and watched. It's intimidating. It's really, it is intimidating.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  To be fair, if this surveillance focused only on the people who were illegally breaking into draft boards, well, that would be one thing. But all sorts of protesters felt they were being watched, surveilled, simply for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. Here's John Rains.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  There was a feeling that the FBI worked for the other side. The feeling that, uh, that the FBI was used as not simply an instrument of investigation, but an instrument of intimidation, that was using its power to pursue what we felt to be highly unjust policies in southwest Ozil.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  There's a term for this: when a government starts keeping tabs on people not because they're breaking the law, but because they're criticizing the government, it's called a police state. John and Bonnie had the nagging feeling that America was becoming one, but they had no way of knowing for sure. That is, until they got a call from Bill Davedon, inviting them to a party. Pumpkin carving sounds fun, until you're elbow-deep in pumpkin guts. There's an easier pumpkin tradition: Reese's Pumpkins. No seeds, no giant kitchen knife, no pressure to create a masterpiece that's just gonna

• 31:11Speaker 05

  shrivel up on the front porch three days later. And if something goes wrong, just eat it. Every mistake is still pretty delicious. So this Halloween, skip the mess of pumpkin carving and stock up on Reese's Pumpkins.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Being a receptionist is one of the hardest jobs out there. You have to be an expert for hundreds of people every day, and you have to do a million things at once. No wonder more small businesses are saving costs by outsourcing their front desk. But replacing them with an AI answering service? That's one giant step in the wrong direction. We're Ruby, and we believe in the lost art of the overachieving receptionist. We answer every call live. We schedule, take messages, call to confirm details, and so much more. Because only a human can connect with another human.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  And instead of turning our back on AI, we customized our own: automating tasks, pulling up relevant information instantly, and so much more. So we can spend all of our time making connections. Experience Ruby for yourself right now. Call 866-GET-Ruby or visit ruby.com. Halloween's almost here, and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share, and I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, be 21.

• 32:42Speaker 04

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• 33:23Speaker 06

  There's a homicide detective down here.

• 33:25Speaker 04

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• 33:45Speaker 05

  By 1970, peace activists in Philadelphia had the eerie feeling that they were being watched by the FBI. But what could be done about it? It was incredibly hard to prove this was actually happening. So people resigned themselves to this new reality, but not everyone.

• 34:02Speaker 06

  I was becoming increasingly involved in things like peace marches and giving talks against government policy.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  This is Bill Davedon.

• 34:13Speaker 06

  Another whole part of the movement had to do with draft resistance and sort of actions which many people consider illegal.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  Bill has passed away, but here he is in an interview from 2012.

• 34:28Speaker 06

  I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. My childhood was somewhat unconventional one. I got interested in some aspects of politics.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  Bill's activism started early. When he was only 11 years old, he heard the mayor of Jersey City had banned a socialist from speaking there. So he boarded a bus, all by himself, to protest, supporting a stranger's First Amendment rights. When I was 11, I spent weekends trading baseball cards and thinking up fart jokes. But Bill Davedon was already going miles out of his way to stand up for free speech in the face of government repression. I mean, I guess he could have also traded a few baseball cards while he was there, but the point is, when he saw injustice, Bill took a stand.

• 35:17Speaker 06

  I was concerned about political matters, but my energies were more directed towards the threat of nuclear weapons.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  Bill was studying to become a theoretical physicist when the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was devastated that the science he loved was being corrupted for mass human casualty. Several decades later, he was afraid that his country would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He began protesting in Philadelphia, and it wasn't long before he was rubbing shoulders with the Catholic peace movement. Bill was a scientist, and as such, a methodical and practical problem solver. He often preferred simple solutions. Breaking into draft boards was dangerous, but that didn't necessarily mean it always had to be complicated.

• 36:09Speaker 06

  There are a number of different ways to open doors to draft boards. One of the simplest is that on a couple of occasions, we just put up a little sign that said, "Please don't lock the door." And generally, people didn't lock the door.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  He was a brilliant person. I think he had a lot of motivation and determination and drive.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  This is Sarah Davedon, Bill's daughter.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  So we lived in a little town called Haverford, and there was a TV appliance store in Bryn Mar, which was the next town over, maybe like a three- or four-mile walk. And so he bought a TV and thought that he could just walk back to his apartment with this TV. And he's carrying this huge box down Lancaster Avenue, and, you know, that was pre-cell phones, so he couldn't, like, you know, call an Uber and say, "Yeah, I was wrong." So he did the whole walk, with this TV stopping like every half a block. And by the time he got there, I mean, he was just like pouring sweat, and he was like, you know, wiping the sweat off of his face.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  But he got that TV back to his apartment, and he said, "Well..." It ended up being a little bit heavier than I thought it was. And I don't know why that story in particular is sort of like, you know, reminds me of who my dad is, but I think it was just sort of like, "This needs to be done, so I'm gonna do it." Like, he just wanted to get things done. Like, he wanted to get shit done, you know?

• 37:50Speaker 05

  Bill was a doer, and the kind of person his community trusted. The kind of person you might come to if you thought Big Brother was spying on you.

• 37:59Speaker 06

  A lot of people felt they were being watched. Perfectly legitimate organizations suspected FBI surveillance.

• 38:10Speaker 06

  People to look over their shoulder and to constantly worry about whether they're being watched or not, and to create an atmosphere of fear.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  If it was true that the FBI was surveilling peace activists simply because of their protest activity, that would be a violation of the First Amendment rights of the very citizens the FBI was sworn to protect. But Bill also worried that all of this surveillance might have another effect.

• 38:38Speaker 07

  He felt that if activists had this feeling that there was FBI agent in their midst, it would build cynicism and probably would lead to activists dropping out and to other people just not coming into activism. For Bill, dissent was at the heart of democracy. If the FBI was spying on people, he regarded it as a crime and a crime that needed to be solved.

• 39:11Speaker 05

  But Bill knew it would be no use accusing the FBI of such a crime unless he had cold, hard proof.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  It's frustrating, partly because it's hard to get people to be actively concerned with threats that are not visible.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  Bill was a walking set of contradictions. Born to Jewish parents, he was an atheist, yet actively involved in the Catholic peace movement. Bill was quiet, but still a natural leader. He had a rare gift for comprehending the mysteries of the physical universe, and yet also purchased a big-ass TV with no plan for how to get it home. By the early 1970s, Bill and other activists started hearing strange noises when they picked up their phones. Guys in unconvincing hippie garb were showing up at protests and taking photos. People who protested the war were being followed and intimidated. So Bill looked at this evidence and formed a hypothesis.

• 40:12Speaker 05

  Some organization, a federal law enforcement agency to be precise, must be surveilling the anti-war movement. Like any good scientist, Bill knew the next step: test the hypothesis.

• 40:25Speaker 07

  And so he finds himself thinking about, would you dare break into an FBI office? How complicated would it be to go into the office? I'd know it. So find what?

• 40:38Speaker 05

  Records on what kinds of surveillance or disruption. If Bill was right about the FBI surveilling the peace movement, then that meant they were probably keeping files documenting that surveillance. Find the files, and he'd have proof that the government was suppressing free speech. He didn't know anything for certain, but even the possibility that this was going on was intolerable to Bill Davison. So Bill decided to throw a party. He invited John and Bonnie Rains.

• 41:12Speaker 07

  We stayed up late, a lot, talking about it. Of course, we had more at risk because we had three children under the age of 10.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  John and Bonnie had already decided that if they said yes, they'd take this action together, which made the decision that much more serious. This wasn't like breaking into a draft board. People who'd been caught for that usually served a year, two at most, but breaking into an FBI office and stealing confidential documents? That was the kind of crime that came with decades of prison time. Their kids would lose their mom and their dad.

• 41:56Speaker 07

  I mean, you really can't use the fact that you're a parent as an excuse to step back and not be engaged. It just seemed that that was the one and only way to reveal the truth. I mean, basically, what it came down to were threats to our democracy. I was raised with those kinds of values and the idea that you have an individual responsibility to protect our fragile democracy and to tell the truth. I was just really angry. I was really... And I was feeling so helpless and frustrated.

• 42:38Speaker 07

  And I thought, here's something that might just make a great, big difference, and maybe we can make it happen.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  They called Bill. They said, we're in. But they had no idea what they were about to unleash. No way of knowing that their action would fundamentally change the way Americans thought about their country, their government, and the people who were supposed to be keeping them safe. Oh, yeah. One more thing I should mention. At this very moment that Bonnie and John called Bill and agreed to be part of his plot to burgle an FBI office, the FBI was tapping Bill Davison's phone. Next time on Snafu, David plans his attack on Goliath.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  There is nothing mysterious about the manner in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation works.

• 43:35Speaker 06

  He called me and asked me if I was interested in going to a party, which was, you know, code.

• 43:42Speaker 07

  I said, sign me on. There were no alarms over the doors. I couldn't see any security measures whatsoever. It's really not hard, and you can get through almost any door in 20 seconds if you are any good. I just felt like I was living in the heart of the dragon, and it was just my job to stop the fire. And this seemed like a way to do it.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snafu is based on the book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is Stephen Wood.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  This episode was written by Albert Chen, Sarah Joyner, and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Nevin Kalapali is our production assistant. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Sensitivity consult from Oloakemi Aladusui. Editing, sound design, and original music by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny, and Gemma Costelli-Foley. Theme music by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak. Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary, 1971.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI: Bill Davison, Ralph Daniel, Judy Feingold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer, and Bob Williamson.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Pumpkin carving sounds fun, until you're elbow-deep in pumpkin guts. There's an easier pumpkin tradition: Reese's Pumpkins. No seeds, no giant kitchen knife, no pressure to create a masterpiece that's just gonna shrivel up on the front porch three days later. And if something goes wrong, just eat it. Every mistake is still pretty delicious. So this Halloween, skip the mess of pumpkin carving and stock up on Reese's Pumpkins.

• 46:27Speaker 02

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• 46:59Speaker 07

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• 47:27Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.