April 22, 2025 • 51 mins
J. Edgar Hoover declares war on the Catholic Left. Paul, Marianne and Sarah pull another heist. The Catholic Left strikes a major blow to Hoover, but then Hoover unleashes the full might of the DOJ onto the Catholic Resistance.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From his office, j Edgar Hoover has placed on the
entire organization his own rigid code of service, integrity, and morality.
In a way that is true a few organizations. J
Edgar Hoover is the FBI.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
By November of nineteen seventy, FBI Director j Edgar Hoover
had been serving in his role for forty six years.
He had amassed so much power in the halls of Washington,
DC that he basically used Congress as an atm for
the bureaus. And by that I mean his priorities. His
annual budget hearings were little more than rubber stamp sessions
(00:35):
when senators fell all over themselves heaping praise on his record.
In the nineteen seventy hearing, testifying before two senators in
a Capitol Hill conference room, he asked for an additional
fourteen million dollars because of the growing menace of the
New Left. He told the senators of an incipient plot
(00:56):
on the part of an anarchist group called the East
Coast Conspiracy to Save lives. This is a militant group
of Catholic priests and nuns, he said, who have manifested
opposition to the war in Vietnam by acts of violence
against government agencies. The principal leaders of this group, he said,
are Philip and Daniel Berrigan. Then he dropped a bomb.
(01:21):
This group, he alleged, plans to blow up underground electrical
conduits serving the Washington, DC area. The plotters are also,
he closed, concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed
government official. Hoover had arranged for reporters to wait outside
the closed door testimony and immediately distributed copies of his report.
(01:45):
It was the first time in FBI history that the
director had publicly made unproven allegations against specific citizens that
had not been charged. There comes a point in any
protracted conflict, and each side starts to try and prove
what they're capable of. Hoover had crossed the rubicon. He
(02:07):
had declared war on the Catholic left. I'm Brendan Patrick Hughes.
This is Divine Intervention, Chapter seven, The Fight of the Century.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
So anyways, I was housebound with using Chin.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Meanwhile in Boston, Marianne, a divorced welfare mother of two,
and Patrick, a Roman Catholic freaking priest. We're dealing with
the fallout from having made out in front of the
fire in his doomed Beacon Street apartment.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
You know the kind of whisker burn stuff you get.
I thought I was bleeding on the way home in
the car, I thought, oh my god, I think my
chin's gone. This like oozing the chin.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I can confirm this. US Irish guys have some very
sharp stubble. I've seen some shit.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I remember.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
The next night he came over to my apartment. I
couldn't leave the house, of course, because of the oozing chin.
And he was mortified because like, if I went to
the community with this, I mean, you only get that
from one situation.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Right, Remember hickeys, the scandal of physical evidence. After two
of your friends in high school hooked up over the weekend,
turtlenecks on Mondays meant one thing, and one thing only
when I was in school. Patrick spent the next day
conducting his affairs like the Roman Catholic priest he still
ostensibly was, and then drove his VW bus to Marianne's
(04:02):
apartments in Dorchester.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
The next night, he came over around ten o'clock. The
kids are in.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Dead and.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
I opened the door and we just looked at each other.
Neither of us could believe what had happened. But it
was so.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
Total, like the giving over of ourselves to each other
emotionally was so total, like having stepped over that line.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We can't know what kind of conversation Patrick was having
with himself about having broken his vow of celibacy. What
we do know is that A he fell in love
with Mary Anne and their affair continued, and B he
also continued to perform his duties as a priest and
made no announcement to the team the way Floyd did.
Speaker 6 (04:49):
But in terms of being in love with or something
like that, he never spoke to me about that.
Speaker 7 (04:56):
You know, did you ever pick up on any vibe?
Speaker 6 (05:02):
I didn't. I did not, But I'm not that astute
when it comes to some of those.
Speaker 8 (05:10):
Things, and I didn't know anything about.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
It Patrick's sister Joanne.
Speaker 8 (05:14):
But for him, he was still a practicing priest and
he's dating, I suppose you might say, and really falling
in love.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
You know, there was.
Speaker 8 (05:24):
Still that element, you see, that he wanted so much
in his life that somehow the priesthood refused to allow.
And yet when he saw it and felt it, he
knew that that's what he wanted and needed to really
(05:45):
fulfill himself and to be in this relationship, this partnership.
It just was going to happen no matter what.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
If Patrick were in the market for a strong rationalization
for his decision, he wouldn't have to look far. Strict
celibacy for priests had only been around since eleven thirty
nine AD, when the Church had grown tired of the
widows of priests inheriting the land on which they had
built their churches. So at the second latter in Council
they eliminated the future existence of widows by decreeing priestly celibacy.
(06:20):
Patrick might have told himself that the church's real concern
with sex had more to do with real estate than
anything holy or sacred, but the fact remained. He was
now sailing and the part of the old world maps
marked here be dragons.
Speaker 9 (06:37):
Patrick. We have to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Sarah Tosey back from New.
Speaker 9 (06:41):
Jersey, because you are afraid to love.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
I am alone.
Speaker 9 (06:45):
We schedule our days so that we can say to
one another. I don't have time to know you, and
we're all guilty.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
How can people be so hard?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Sarah must have known things were different when she returned.
The tricycles had come to depend on was now a bicycle.
Speaker 9 (07:02):
Romance and the revolution. Don't mix. See, there's no time
in your life. There's no time for that in your life.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
And then when Marianne and Sarah's landlord on Florida Street
saw their picture in the paper during the Kooming asylum,
he showed up at their door and evicted them.
Speaker 9 (07:21):
You kind of had to be there to believe it.
Wake up to god, damn it, you're all evicted, goddamn kids.
Goddamn mister Collins solo and attack on the front door.
The sound of ripping and falling paper. This isn't happening.
Goddamn goddamn outraged Chrissy, mister Collins, don't you rip down
(07:41):
my mommy's door? Mama, where's my pone? Our sentiments exactly?
Maybe we can move to the center.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Unsettled and on the move once more, Sarah picked up
her pieces and refocused her energy away from her disintegrating
trio and towards ending this goddamn war. Her dream of
what the Paula Center could have been in her life
was ending, but her dream of being a revolutionary had
only just begun. Sarah TOSI was now determined to take
(08:12):
part in a draft rate. Jay Edgar Hoover's testimony before
the Appropriations Committee was only the first punch of a
one to two combination. The second punch came when his
Department of Justice delivered a preliminary indictment of Catholic left
movement leaders in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. FBI agents fanned out with
(08:36):
subpoenas up and down the Eastern Seaboard, serving hundreds of
activists like Anne Walsh, Paul Cooming, and Bob Kinnane. They
arrested eight, including Ted Glick and Phil Berrigan, for conspiracy.
Speaker 10 (08:47):
Yeah, we were arrested, taken to the county jail.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Telling them they were no longer fit to live in society,
and scaring the shit out of them with threats of
life in prison.
Speaker 11 (08:55):
Harrisburg were people charged with planning to kidnap Henry Kissinger
and blow up the steam pipes under the Pentagon. This
is Jim Carroll, which were ideas put forth in wild, irresponsible,
somewhat mad brainstorming sessions of Catholic peacenicks sitting around the
living room late at night having had a few, and
(09:16):
there was in the crowd, an FBI plant, an informant,
and one of the piece knicks was describing some of
these sessions in letters to Philip Beregon, who was in prison,
and the letters were intercepted by the government.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Remember Boyd Douglas, the incarcerated man who helped plan the
Flower City conspiracy with Ted Glick and spirited messages to
phil Berrigan on the inside, Well, he was showing every
one of those letters to the FBI.
Speaker 11 (09:45):
Those letters were the basis of the charges brought against
eight people, including the Berrigans, charges of conspiracy to kidnap
Henry Kissinger. They weren't going to kidnap Henry Kissinger. They
were going to make a citizens arrest. That's the way
they talked about it.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Vover's indictment was an important experiment. He was looking for
a new playbook for crushing descent in the US, and
he felt like if this grand jury could drain the
movement's resources in an endless court proceeding, he could all
but immunize the government to unrest. And those in the
movement now knew they had to respond, and they began
trading blows with the most powerful man in Washington, DC.
(10:26):
In Boston. Sarah's wish for a draft board to raid
was granted when Paul Cooming returned triumphantly to the gang
after only three weeks in jail following his sanctuary. Now
on probation, he crashed once again with Marianne and Sarah
in their new Dorchester digs on Bowden Street. And he
was ready for more action, lunatic that he was.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
And there was some talk locally here about doing a
smaller draft board, just making things happen so that they
were constantly happening. So there was a plan to do
the Summerville draft board.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Sarah, Paul, Marianne and a few others planned a little
action to keep the government off balance.
Speaker 11 (11:16):
Me.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
I think there was a fairly small group.
Speaker 7 (11:17):
I don't think there was more than eight of us
or nine of us all together that we're doing it.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
They chose a draft board in Powderhouse Square Park, right
next to Tufts University. It was the oldest stone building
in Massachusetts, used by the British as a gunpowder magazine
and the run up to the Revolutionary War.
Speaker 7 (11:33):
Yeah, I can remember casing it and saying, my god,
I've never seen such a simple building. You know, it's
just one floor. I mean, anybody can draw our three
dimensional picture of it.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Sarah, Paul and some of the others would sneak in
through the first floor window in the back while Marianne
sat in a parked car a block away acting as
a lookout.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
I mean it would never go inside a draft board
for fear of getting arrested and of what would happen
to the kids.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So I would support in many, many other ways.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Marianne's job was to watch for passing police cars and
alert the raiders she saw if anything.
Speaker 7 (12:04):
Happened, flashing her lights twice or something like that in
the car if somebody was coming, you know, like a cop,
cow was coming by or something.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
They were lest we forget the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
So I was in a car, I had my walkie talkie,
and all of a sudden I picked up some wine,
some radio Cebe channel, and this couple are having Cebe
Channel sex.
Speaker 8 (12:45):
She stap there.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
I didn't dare shut it off because I well, I
didn't know what would happen if I ever had a use.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, Marianne became more and more engrossed in a steamy
dialogue on her radio. Sarah and Paul in black painted
sneakers and hockey team flashlights, broke into the powder house.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
They got in through some windows in the back and
they went right to the files, got all the files.
I mean, they were in and out and no time
at all, and it was done.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Back in Dorchester, Sarah and Marianne took their cue from
Paul's Newhaven action and mailed back the one A file
to the draftees until they ran out of postage.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
And then we went to Miles Standish Park and had
a bonfire.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
With the rest of them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Miles Standish, the British Navy captain who once said war
is a terrible trade, but when the cause is just
the smell of gunpowder is sweet.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
So as we're driving, we're all in the car and
we have all the files in the trunk.
Speaker 12 (13:43):
And Joe and I were in the back seat, Chrissy,
Marianne's daughter, Call and my mom were in the front seat,
and in the trunk which was in the front, they.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Had a beetle.
Speaker 12 (13:51):
Of course, there were draft cards that had been stolen.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
And we're driving to burn the files and these car
pull us over.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Every heart in the whole car just stopped.
Speaker 12 (14:20):
I think my mom drank a sip. She had like
a coke, a can of something, and they thought it
was beer or something and pulled us over. And it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
The cops that we were drinking, and that's why they
pulled us over.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
If that cop inspected the vehicle. Given Hoover's declared war
on the Catholic left in the recent timing of the
Harrisburg indictment, they would go away for a long time.
But the gods smiled that night and the cop let
them go with a warning.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
We drove away just oh my god.
Speaker 12 (14:56):
I just remember being anxious a lot like that something
was going to happen, like people were getting arrested, like
people were going to jail, and my mom was doing stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
That might get hurt.
Speaker 12 (15:08):
Like I was like, wait, they can just come and
take the people that you love out of your house.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
It made me very anxious.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Deeply spooked. Sarah, Paul, Marianne, and the kids continued to
mile Standish Park, where, despite their pounding hearts, the burning
one a files smelled sweet. Sarah, after the Somerville raid,
(15:39):
decided she could no longer linger in Boston as Patrick
and mary Anne fell deeper in love.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
What are we saying goodbye to to a phase, to Patrick,
to our mission at the center, to what there's a
piece of me I don't give away the wayfaring stranger
part that doesn't want to say we, that won't fall
off any cliffs.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
That is alone.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Sarah soon left Boston. She left Marianne to her secret
affair with Patrick, and Patrick to his devolving mess at
the Paulit Center. She brought Paul coming home with her
to New Jersey, where her father lay dying from cancer.
Speaker 7 (16:18):
I had gone to Sarah's house with her when her
father was very ill with cancer. The night were there,
her father died during that night that we happened to
be there, so I stayed around for the funeral, and
siblings all came back to the house.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
The war between the Catholic Left and the FBI was
complicated for Sarah Tosi in particular. As LeeAnne Mosha tells us, you.
Speaker 13 (16:42):
Know, Sarah Tosi's brother was an FBI agent, and most
of the FBI agents were Irish Catholic.
Speaker 9 (16:48):
I'm still reacting from seeing my brother. It is so strange.
I barely know him now. We get along, but that
is all I want so badly to talk to him,
my brother, not to his job, but the person.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
She wrote letters back to Marianne and Patrick from Jersey.
Speaker 9 (17:06):
I think my FBI brother is coming to visit next week.
I'm dying to find out what he knows about Barrigan,
but I don't think he'll tell me. I'm trying to
think of something vaguely safe to talk about.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I haven't thought of anything yet.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
This cultural divide among siblings was very common in households
at the time, with older siblings born before World War
Two baffled by their crazy younger sisters and brothers.
Speaker 9 (17:30):
Last time he was here, he threw my friends out
of the house and said they were a disgrace.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
To the family. Wonder if I'm next. And it was
what cleaved the generations.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Siblings three or five years older than you were completely
on the other side of the divide, so your parents
and siblings would be here and those of us who
had actually been caught up and part of this, what
we were experiencing is an incredible awakening and liberation and
(18:04):
understanding or over here, and there could have been one
hundred years, a century could have passed as between us.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
So Sarah, the newly minted draft board raider and her
FBI brother are navigating their differences, and here was her guest,
Paul cooming very much a person of interest with the FBI,
sharing a roof with a g.
Speaker 7 (18:28):
Man and her brother came back. I'm realizing that he
doesn't know who I am, at least I believe he
doesn't know. So it was a little bit uneasy. But
got up one morning and he was cooking breakfast for everybody.
So I pitched in and I said, here, I'll help.
So he taught me how to make omelets and nice
and neat. We hit it off great and talked and
(18:52):
joked as we served breakfast to everybody.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
The FBI were everywhere.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
At this point, Hoover's FBI had surrounded the Catholic left.
Speaker 14 (19:02):
So yes, the FBI kept tabs on me and so
many other people.
Speaker 13 (19:07):
I kept a record, and I think I still have
a piece of paper with all the people who told
me that they were visited by the FBI because they
were in my you know, my paper address book.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
I started to be followed very heavily by the FBI,
and we knew it, but you kind of don't believe it.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
In a certain way.
Speaker 10 (19:24):
I assume that my telephones were tapped. See what here,
somebody saying something in the background. Actually, when you're talking
on the phone.
Speaker 7 (19:33):
They encouraged people to believe in their own paranoia. So
they encouraged people to believe that there was an FBI
agent lurking somewhere in the background everywhere.
Speaker 15 (19:44):
Now I'm being watched closely. I mean, I have FBI
around me all the time. They've become to my house,
my mother's house.
Speaker 10 (19:50):
Every week.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
If you were in the movement, FBI agents would follow
you wherever you went and make sure you knew it.
They would visit your parents twice a week, sometimes for
a year at a time. They would conspicuously dig through
the trash of your parents' neighbors to create a sense
of scandal. The FBI even followed Marianne's sister in law's
brother in case they could get any information out of him.
(20:14):
Hoover's testimony to the Appropriations Committee had granted him a
thousand new agents whose sole job was to crush descent,
which it could be argued, is a bit undemocratic. But
the resistance was about to deal a very decisive blow
to j Edgar Hoover himself.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
I can't tell you anything about it, because I'm still
of the mind that I don't know who did it,
and I can't tell you that I did it or
didn't do it, So I can't tell you anything about
that break in. That was an agreement made a long
time ago that I haven't officially heard it. It has been
called off so agreement not to say, not even to
(21:00):
whether that you didn't participate, because to say you didn't participate,
then they'd have a smaller group of people to look
at and be able to find them easier.
Speaker 6 (21:09):
And I have.
Speaker 7 (21:10):
Never been told officially otherwise, so I stick to that story.
It was a great action.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I recorded this interview with Paul Cooming in August of
two thousand and nine. And for those of you keeping
score at home, yes, this show has been in production
for a very long time. Media Pennsylvania media action subroup
called Media Pennsylvania.
Speaker 16 (21:35):
That Media rate Media Pennsylvania.
Speaker 17 (21:37):
The Media Pennsylvania experience was a really interesting Media.
Speaker 14 (21:40):
Pennsylvania, very dramatic breaking in Media Pennsylvania.
Speaker 17 (21:44):
Oh, it's always been a secret. I have a little
suspicion who did it, you know, It was always like
nobody say anything.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
But then in twenty thirteen, Betty Medsger of The Washington
posted a book about this particular action in Media Pennsylvania.
Her book finally revealed the identities of the people who
pulled off the craziest break in perhaps in American history.
Media Pennsylvania was where the resistance broke into an FBI office.
Speaker 18 (22:17):
And here's where the Catholic left does its counter attack
on the FBI.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Historian Charles M.
Speaker 18 (22:24):
Konez, now, they're getting to a point where they're suppressing
dissent before it happens. That's the beginning of the end,
not beyond the war. That's the beginning of the end
of democracy in this country. That's what authoritatian redictatorial powers do.
It's the first thing they do is they crushed descent.
Then they can do whatever the hell they want. That's
(22:47):
where the idea of we got a counter attack against
the FBI.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
With Hoover loaded for bear, it was the movement's turn
to give him a decisive poke.
Speaker 19 (22:56):
Everybody who was active in the movement knew that the
FBI was trying to intimidate, suppress, and spy on the movement.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
This is Keith forsythe.
Speaker 19 (23:07):
They weren't out there trying to put the mafia in jail.
They were spending their time hassling movement people. It wasn't
the kind of thing that the person on the street
necessarily was aware of, but everybody who was active not.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Keith was radicalized against the government's suppression of dissent when
he heard an audio recording of the massacre at Jackson State,
an HBCU, where police opened fire on protesters, killing two students.
He dropped out of college to devote himself full time
to opposing the war in Vietnam. He was driving a
cab in Philly when he got a phone call from
(23:42):
a prominent fellow activist and professor.
Speaker 19 (23:44):
He called me up on the phone and said, you
want to go to a party, which was code for
do you want to be involved in an action? And
I said, yeah, I'm always up for a party. We
made an appointment to meet someplace to talk, and if
you went for a walk in the woods, that made
it really hard for them to record you.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
When they met, the professor shared his dismay over Hoover's
undemocratic crushing of dissent and asked Keith if he'd consider
breaking into an FBI office to prove Hoover's wrongdoing.
Speaker 19 (24:11):
If we can get evidence of this and publicize it
through the newspapers, you know that's going to back them off,
at least to some extent.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
In Flower City, ted Glick and his crew had hoped
to just vandalize the FBI office that happened to be
next to the draft board, But in this case they
were specifically targeting an FBI office and most importantly, planning
to steal all the files inside top secret documents that
would mean a lot more to the government than the
(24:40):
addresses of would be inductees.
Speaker 19 (24:42):
This was going to be different. For one thing, the
risks were a lot higher. Potential jail time we assumed
was going to be much greater when you're breaking into
a draft board. At least in those days, you didn't
have any expectation. A nobody's going to be in there,
and b if they are in there, they're not going
to be armed. But with the FBI, they're definitely always armed,
(25:05):
and we're going to try to find a time when
we're not in there. But suppose we make a mistake.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
And they called themselves the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI.
Speaker 19 (25:14):
Now we knew that if we were successful, they would
really put on the heat, so we had to be
very careful about not inviting anybody who had loose lips.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The FBI Field office in downtown Media was on the
second floor of a mixed use building at one Veterans Square.
It had office spaces on the first two floors and
two floors of apartments above. The first thing Keith Forsyth
did was a walk by of the FBI office door.
He went to Goodwill to buy a cheap suit so
his hippie clothes didn't make him conspicuous. Then he casually
(25:56):
strolled down the second floor corridor past the bureau office.
Speaker 19 (26:00):
My verdict was, it doesn't get any better than this
because you walk into the building off the street, there's
no restrictions. The doors are open all the time because
there's people living in the building. You walk up to
the second floor, take a left, and there's the front
door to the FBI office.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
One look at the lock on the door, and Keith
knew it was possible, and.
Speaker 19 (26:22):
They got one lock on the door. That's the same
as the lock on my front door. It'll take me
two minutes to get through that door. That's how it
looked at that.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Point, so a group of nine Raiders, handpicked by the
professor for their discretion, began meeting regularly.
Speaker 19 (26:36):
I'm going to say probably at least a couple months,
because we would meet periodically, you know, to go over
maps and talk about casing observations.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Keith Forsyth took a correspondence course on locksmithing and spent
those months practicing and getting his time down so that
when he picked the lock in a public hallway he
could do it quickly. Then, to get a sense of
the inside of the FBI office, the Raiders posed as
a Swarthmore student writing an article about opportunities for women
in the bureau. She went into the office and interviewed
(27:08):
an agent, writing notes with gloves on and clocking the environment.
No locks on the filing cabinets, no alarms on the
doors or windows. As she was leaving, she pretended to
be confused about the exit and stumbled deeper into the office,
catching a glimpse of its alcove spaces plan in place.
(27:28):
The Raiders chose the night of March eighth, nineteen seventy
one because that was the night of the boxing match
between Joe Fraser and Muhammad Ali, a fight that had
basically become a referendum on the Vietnam War in popular culture,
dubbed the Fight of the Century. Literally everyone in the
world would be tuning in and no one would notice
a group of business people entering the building at one
(27:50):
Veteran Square in Media, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 19 (27:54):
You know, I got a haircut. I was wearing a
white shirt and a tie, and a sport coat and
a trench coat and some nice leather driving gloves, so
I wouldn't leave any fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
On fight night, they staged themselves at a nearby holiday inn.
Speaker 10 (28:07):
Somebody rented a motel room, and that's where that's where
he stayed. Sort of all met together and then came
and went as our assignments dictated.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
That's Bob Williamson. Like Keith Forsyth, Bob had also dropped
out of college to oppose the war full time. He
was known back then to his friends as weed X.
Bob had already done some raids with Paul Cooming and
Anne Walsh. He joined them in a draft board raid
in Delaware, where, just like in Philly, they hid in
janitor's closets. Bob was a card.
Speaker 10 (28:40):
I felt nervous, so I figured everybody else might feel
nervous too. So I decided that I was going to
tell a.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Joke and tonight he was part of the inside team
that would go in and retrieve the files.
Speaker 10 (28:50):
Keith goes in first because he's got to get the
door open.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Keith walked into the building with his lock picking tools
and a crowbar up his sleeve.
Speaker 19 (28:58):
And I go into the building. I go up to
the door. I go over to the lock and just
about had a heart attack because there was a second
lock added to the door that hadn't been there two
weeks earlier. It was not a standard lock, it was
a high security lock.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
It was one of those circular keyholes like on a
Kryptonite bike lock.
Speaker 19 (29:16):
So I'm like, what the hell has going on here?
All of a sudden, on the night of the action,
there's a brand new lock on the front door, and
I'm trying to figure out how this happened. Is this
a coincidence, which generally I don't believe in. Is there
some kind of a leak and they knew we were coming?
But if they knew we were coming, why would they
put a lock on the door. Why wouldn't they just
(29:36):
put twenty agents inside? And wait for us to come inside.
Nothing made sense.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Keith went back to the holiday inn with bad news
for the crew.
Speaker 19 (29:44):
Said I can't pick this lock tonight.
Speaker 10 (29:46):
He held it together and just had the presence of mind
to say, Okay, I'm gonna need to talk to people
and see what planned he's going to because plant ain't
gonna work.
Speaker 19 (29:54):
And so people were saying, well, like what can we
do to salvage it? And somebody said what about the
second door?
Speaker 2 (30:00):
When the other raider had gone into the office incognito
as a Swarthmore student, she had noticed a second door
to the corridor was blocked with a massive filing cabinet.
Speaker 19 (30:09):
And I'm like, oh yeah, the second door. Sure enough,
there was just one standard lock on that.
Speaker 10 (30:15):
And i gotta say, man, I take my hat off.
He has stones.
Speaker 19 (30:19):
So I picked that in no time. But then there
was a dead bolt on the other side. So meanwhile,
I'm hearing the building manager underneath me listening to the radio.
He's like, his living room is right underneath me. So
I'm like, how much noise can I make before he
hears me? So figured, well, we'll find out.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
He could hear the building supervisor's radio downstairs and he
waited for a swell of crowd sounds during the fight.
Speaker 19 (30:46):
So I put the pride bar in there and broke
the dead bolt off and tried to do it as
fast as possible so it didn't like make a creaking sound,
It just went bang. And so now I could open
the door a whole inch. And then and there was
a giant filing cabinet full of papers up against the
door behind that, so I had to move that out
(31:06):
of the way. And the office floor was carpeted, and
this giant thing was super top heavy, so if he
started to push the doorknob just started to tip it.
The building manager was directly below us the room, right
underneath where I was, so I couldn't drop that thing down.
(31:27):
So I went back to the car, got the jackpost
out of the trunk, stuffed it up underneath my trench
coat so you couldn't see it, walk back into the
building using the Pride boy, I finally got the door
open enough that I could at least get the tip
of the jackpost in there, and then started slowly moving
that file cabinet a fraction of an inch at a time.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
And don't forget Keith was doing all this in a
public hallway in an apartment building.
Speaker 19 (31:53):
I'm laying down on my back on the floor of
the hallway with my legs braced against one side of
the hall a hall pulling on this four foot steel
pole with two hands, but nobody came into the hallway.
Finally got it open enough I could squeeze in so that,
you know, it would be easy for people to get
in and out. And then I taped the lock, you know,
(32:15):
put a piece of tape over the latch so wouldn't relatch.
Pushed the door to and left, and went out and
called the motel room and told them that it was
a go, that it was ready for the inside team.
Speaker 10 (32:32):
I was the flashlight guy that night. It was all
taped up with electrical tape except for a pinhole in
the center.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Bob Williamson and three others pulled up to the building
and their business attire and filed in carrying empty suitcases.
They pushed the second door open and shimmy past the
filing cabinet, turned.
Speaker 10 (32:49):
The flashlight on to shine it on the file drawer
so that they could see what they were looking at.
But other than that, there were no lights in the office.
While we were working. Everybody goes to their file, or
isn't They just started opening them and going through them.
I think most of the files that were in there
were files that we glanced at quickly and thought we
should take so as quickly as we could, we just
(33:11):
loaded the suitcases up and got out of there. I
don't think we were in there for more than twenty minutes.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Keith was parked outside waiting for the inside team to
file out of the building.
Speaker 19 (33:21):
And they come out carrying these suitcases and load them
into the back of the car.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
But here's the thing. The County courthouse also sits on
Veteran Square, just like the office building. And there was
a security guard pacing in front of the courthouse.
Speaker 19 (33:36):
And the security guard in the County Courthouse is standing
there watching us through the glass door.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
On his watch. Four business people filed into the building
carrying four suitcases and filed out twenty minutes later.
Speaker 19 (33:48):
We didn't stand out, you know, we're a bunch of
white people wearing suits in downtown media across from the courthouse.
And then what could be more.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Normal sweating bullets. They drove the files to a remote
farmhouse owned by sympathetic Quakers, they popped champagne and got
to work sorting the resistance had hit back at Hoover's FBI.
Speaker 10 (34:19):
I think the total number of documents that came out
of that burglary was about a thousand documents.
Speaker 19 (34:26):
The first thing we did was to sort everything into
two piles, the political pile and the criminal pile. Very
roughly speaking, the piles were of the same size. So basically,
from that sample, you could say the FBI was spending
half of their time spying on Americans who weren't doing
anything illegal and trying to prevent them from speaking out.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
And it really didn't take them long to find some
seriously fudged up shizz, like the FBI harassing a boy
Scout troop in Oregon for becoming pen pals with some
Russian kids, or agents keeping tabs on black student unions
on college campuses across the United States, or an FBI
agent starting rumors of infidelity about an activist couple and
successfully breaking them up, or the FBI intending to enhance
(35:13):
paranoia and activist groups and encouraging the sense that there
was an agent behind every mailbox. But the piece de
resistance was the revelation of Hoover's co Intel Pro.
Speaker 14 (35:27):
These people made off with huge amounts of documents, FBI documents.
It was an amazing you might say, a bit of revenge.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Historian Howard Zinn.
Speaker 14 (35:38):
The FBI had been collecting information on Americans. You know,
now information was being collected about the FBI, and now
what the FBI was up to was revealed. And what
was revealed was that the FBI had broken the law.
They were revealing a secret program of the government of
the FBI called co intel pro the counter intelligence. This program,
(36:00):
which involved break ins into people's homes and offices, secret
letters sent to members of the anti war movement, though
supposedly anonymous, letters trying to stir up conflict among different
parts of the anti war movement.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI then did something
rather ingenious. They took their stolen documents and placed them
in pre addressed envelopes. Then they put those envelopes inside
of larger envelopes and mailed them to accomplices around the country.
That way, when the pre addressed documents finally arrived in
the hands of intended congressmen and press outlets, they appeared
(36:39):
postmarked from around the country. Several Congressmen immediately turned the
files back over to the FBI. The New York Times
and the LA Times immediately did so as well, but
The Washington Post decided it was too important. The FBI
was conducting illegal surveillance of American citizens based on their
political opinion, and as turn of the century Supreme Court
(37:03):
Justice Lewis Brandeis once said, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
The co Intel propapers, as they came to be called,
created a massive scandal for the previously revered Federal Bureau
and its director.
Speaker 14 (37:17):
The FBI had sent a letter, sort anonymous letter to
Martin Luther King suggesting that he commits suicide. These papers
that were stolen from the FBI in the break in, well,
they became published very great embarrashment to the FBI. If
I think by the had the romantic idea of how
smart the FBI is, they learned differently.
Speaker 7 (37:39):
JF. Hoover was pretty insulted that some of us somehow
got it away with that and released it to the press.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
The papers also confirmed to the Catholic anti war movement that,
just as they'd suspected, the FBI was trying to perpetuate
a kind of psychological warfare to discourage ordinary citizens from
proto testing the war.
Speaker 7 (38:01):
But that they encouraged that paranoia, and that they had infarmas,
and that the farmers encouraged that kind of paranoia to
think that there, you know, the wire the phones were
tapped all over the place, and some were some were.
Speaker 17 (38:14):
They were programmed to think that they could like intimidate us.
Bob Kanaane, they just look at an ordinary citizens who
objected to the government, you know, and it was really
very disappointing.
Speaker 19 (38:28):
God, they were a mean loss the media.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Pennsylvania raid would lead to the first congressional investigation of
US intelligence agencies in United States history.
Speaker 15 (38:38):
Hoover was apoplectic for the first time cookie these anti
war people who he always you know, was after we
had the most popular support.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Now Hoover was now more motivated than ever to grind
the Catholic left into dust under the heel of his
wing tipped shoe. The raiders in media, Bob Williamson, Keith Forsyth,
and six of the Americans agreed to never speak of
it again.
Speaker 10 (39:03):
We had agreed because of the efforts that the FBI
was making to try and find out who had done
it that we just wouldn't. We wouldn't meet again as
a group.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
And they remained anonymous for over forty years.
Speaker 18 (39:15):
After media the Harrisburg trial came crashing in or at
least all the pre trial stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Hoover was now out for blood. The following month, in
April of nineteen seventy one, Paul Cooming, Cookie Ridolphe, and
Anne Walsh were among one hundred witnesses subpoenaed to appear
before Hoover's grand jury in Harrisburg, the one that initially
was set up to investigate the bombing of the steam
(39:43):
tunnels and Kissinger's would be citizens' arrest, but since those
were weak cases to begin with, based merely on brainstorming sessions,
in the wake of media the grand jury hearing had
evolved into what many movement lawyers felt was a fishing expedition.
The government was hoping that subpoena testimony would yield some
more offenses and defendants would be caught up in a
(40:06):
giant dragnet that would spell the end of the movement
and maybe all movements.
Speaker 16 (40:12):
They really wanted to send us to prison. It was
becoming too much of a popular movement. Too many people
were doing this, so they took one hundred people. They
called one hundred people to a grand jury in Harrisburg.
Speaker 15 (40:25):
I had been subpeded to the grand jury for the
Harrisburg case.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Cookie the indictment came.
Speaker 15 (40:30):
Out naming those I think it was eight people of Harrisburg.
Eight and then there was a list of other people
who they considered unindicted co conspirators.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
The first witness called was Paul Koming. Paul, Smiling, refused
to testify. Instead, he passed around a statement in which
he vowed non cooperation with any branch of the US
government prior to a war crimes tribunal holding it accountable
for its inhumane use of power to crush the population
of Vietnam. The government then offered Paul immunity, and he
(41:01):
still refused, so they promptly indicted him with criminal contempt.
When Anne Walsh was called, she sat in the courtroom
during a recess and pulled out four photographs from her
pocketbook and stared at them. The pictures were of North
Vietnamese civilians killed in Hanoi by American bombers. Then she
(41:22):
stood up marched over to the chief prosecutor of the
DOJ held the photos up to his face and said,
this is what the movement is all about. One of
the pictures was of a twenty eight year old pregnant
woman sprawled on the ground. She said, this woman is
the same age I am, only she is dead. Her
(41:44):
eyes filled up as she continued. She said, I want
to talk to you as a human being, one human
being to another. Anne and the prosecutor were two of
the only people in the courtroom during this recess. Finally,
the chief prosecutor responded saying, I don't have any special
insights into the problems of the war, of the ghetto
(42:08):
of the country, but we have laws and we have
to uphold them, and we have to keep dissent in
legal limits. Finally, he said to her, you hold the
key to the jail. All you have to do is testify,
to tell the truth. She shook her head. I can't,
she said, my conscience won't allow me. Shortly after this exchange,
(42:35):
it was Anne's turn to take the stand, and.
Speaker 16 (42:38):
They showed us pictures of virtually are really good friends
and saying do you know this person? And you had
to keep saying I refuse to answer this on the
grounds that it may incriminate me, which made you look
like a coward or something. It put you in a
really weird position.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Hoover's DOJ had dragged one hundred witnesses to Central PA
and the hopes that just one would crack.
Speaker 16 (42:58):
But a one hundred people did not break set. They
refused to betray their friends.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Everyone, and I mean everyone in the whole Catholic left
pled the fifth without talking to each other beforehand, because
Catholics can be kind of like a pail of fish hooks.
You can't pick up one without it being in a
tangled mess with a bunch of others. With this crowd
of do gooders and hell raisers, the DOJ was going
(43:29):
to have its hands full. The government, however, was not
quite done with Anne Walsh.
Speaker 16 (43:46):
And out of the hundred, they chose a fifty five
year old non named sister Joe Ziegan, who was president
of Marymount College, and me to say, if you don't
tell us, we're going to send you to jail for
an inja term in time.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
So you know that's what I was prepared to do.
Speaker 16 (44:03):
Anyway, it sounded very much like the convent in some ways,
you know, like a red brick building was grass, isolated,
boring in some ways, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
And started living out her days as if she was
on borrowed time.
Speaker 16 (44:18):
So I kept going to lunch, and my last lunch
was always like a tune or fish sandwich in a
vanilla frapp. Every time I was in court, I was ready.
I had given my clothes away, my only possessions.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
I said goodbye.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I said goodbye.
Speaker 16 (44:30):
I mean a million times I said goodbye to people
because I thought I was okay now that I had
to go pay the dues right here.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
An Walsh's lawyer launched an appeal, which started winding its
way through the legal system. While the threat of arrest
hung over her head like a sword of Damocles. And
as prison gets you thinking long term, Ann began to
wonder about the rest of her life, and her thoughts
landed on her old father, confessor from the convent, Bob
(44:57):
Canane from the Milwaukee fourteen.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
So at the time Bob was just coming back from Milwaukee.
Speaker 16 (45:03):
Weren't you or you just back? Are you just back
from prison? It's the most sweetly embarrassing.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
Tale thing to tell.
Speaker 16 (45:13):
Once we started working together, because I really really attracted
to him and thought it was like really possible that.
Speaker 19 (45:19):
He might like me back.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
A mutual friend who lived with Bob on a commune
outside Boston pulled Anne aside one day and.
Speaker 16 (45:27):
She said, of course, Bob Kane's in love with you.
You know, he talks about you all the time. So
I said, well, I think I'm going to write a letter. Okay,
now all our friends are friends in common now, so
that if he doesn't love.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Me back, I'm going to be like a fool.
Speaker 16 (45:43):
So I'm going to have to move to some English
speaking island because I won't be here to be able
to be in his company.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
I'll feel like a fool. So I wrote the letter.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
But this was a complicated thing for Ann to do.
The future in the past or all at war inside
a progressive Catholic's heart.
Speaker 16 (46:02):
But I was a traditional to the core girl, right,
and a girl didn't say you do you want to date?
Let alone?
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Do you want to spend the rest of your life
with me?
Speaker 16 (46:12):
Because I got a big, wicked crush on you, So
it was like, really, Chancy.
Speaker 17 (46:21):
It pushed me, I must say, to make a decision
that point. I mean I had thought about it. If
I hadn't really kind of made a decise. So I
sat down for a good afternoon and just thought about it,
thought about what it would mean, everything decided, Yeah, I
think I'd go along with that.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
But we're talking about a priest and a next nun.
So when it came to romance, they're both kind of rookies.
Speaker 7 (46:49):
You know.
Speaker 16 (46:49):
And it was like a little tough going because we
didn't eat that now how to do relationships like, we
didn't have a big dating history.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Perhaps Anne was doomed to prison, but she and Bob
were in love and headed into an uncertain future together.
Jim Carroll was among many people who traveled to Harrisburg
during this time. He went to support Anne Walsh, whom
(47:19):
he worked with at BU, and to participate in some demonstrations.
Speaker 11 (47:23):
The Harrisburg trial was an occasion of great celebrations of
resistance and many many people showing up in Harrisburg to
protest the government intrusions against the peace movement.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Jim's father was a general in the Air Force and
his brother was in the FBI, so he also carried
the extra burden of scandalizing his family with his anti
war activities.
Speaker 11 (47:46):
And I was in a crowd at one point and
this foul smelling vagrant fellow sidled up to me and
he whispered, I won't tell on you if you don't
tell on me. And it was my brother who's there undercover,
watching all of us, and he didn't tell on me,
and I didn't tell on him until years later.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Of course, Sarah Tosi had a fed brother, Jim Carroll
had a fed brother. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this
for one big Catholic planet of lawbreakers and lawmen driving
each other crazy. And now Hoover was about to make
good on his wish to publicly destroy the Catholic Left.
(48:31):
Despite the uncooperative witnesses, the Harrisburg Grand Jury delivered a
new superseding indictment of seven movement leaders, including Phil Berrigan.
A massive trial was scheduled for the following February. A
giant mobilization and defense committee would soon begin, which would
inevitably drain the movement of all of its resources and energy.
(48:55):
Hoover had zeroed in on exactly how to crush unrest.
This would be the movement's waterloo. The Catholic Left, as
they knew it was dead.
Speaker 7 (49:12):
Until the call came from Believe Cookie Ridolphie she said,
look at we're doing on board down here in Camaden,
New Jersey, and we need some help.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Hoover hadn't counted on the indomitable spirit of the Catholic resistance,
A big pail of fish hooks with a lot of sticktuitiveness.
Speaker 7 (49:30):
And I said, sure, I can do it. And she
asked if we could bring any other out. So Sarahtosi
was there.
Speaker 6 (49:37):
We drove down and.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Hidden in an East Coast federal building was a draft board,
an FBI office, and an office of military intelligence. Camden,
New Jersey, just over the bridge from Philly, was a
perfect place for a showdown with j Edgar Hoover, Paul Cooming,
Sarah Toosi, Cookie Radolphie, Leeann Mosha, Keith Forsyth, Bob Williamson,
(50:02):
and about twenty two others would descend on Camden for
the biggest raid they would ever attempt to pull. But
this time they were walking into a trap. They had
a plant.
Speaker 10 (50:16):
You know about this, don't you.
Speaker 13 (50:17):
He came to one or two meetings and decided this
didn't sit right with him, so he went immediately to
the FBI to tell us what we were doing, and
they said, great.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Hang in there. Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
It's produced by Wonder Media Network and it was created
and written by me, your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our
(50:49):
outlandishly nimble producers are Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk, Palomo Moreno, Jimenez,
Grace Lynch, and myself. Our editor is the inestimable Grace Lynch.
Scoring production from Adrian Bain for Wonder Media Network. Our
executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan for iHeart Podcasts.
(51:12):
Our executive producer is Christina Everett. The late Sarah Tosi
was voiced by Carly Pope. Our theme and end credit
music was composed and performed by Perfect Human Tanya Donnelly
and mastered by the also perfect Ben Aarons. This is
Brendan Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.
From his office, j Edgar Hoover has placed on the
entire organization his own rigid code of service, integrity, and morality.
In a way that is true a few organizations. J
Edgar Hoover is the FBI.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
By November of nineteen seventy, FBI Director j Edgar Hoover
had been serving in his role for forty six years.
He had amassed so much power in the halls of Washington,
DC that he basically used Congress as an atm for
the bureaus. And by that I mean his priorities. His
annual budget hearings were little more than rubber stamp sessions
(00:35):
when senators fell all over themselves heaping praise on his record.
In the nineteen seventy hearing, testifying before two senators in
a Capitol Hill conference room, he asked for an additional
fourteen million dollars because of the growing menace of the
New Left. He told the senators of an incipient plot
(00:56):
on the part of an anarchist group called the East
Coast Conspiracy to Save lives. This is a militant group
of Catholic priests and nuns, he said, who have manifested
opposition to the war in Vietnam by acts of violence
against government agencies. The principal leaders of this group, he said,
are Philip and Daniel Berrigan. Then he dropped a bomb.
(01:21):
This group, he alleged, plans to blow up underground electrical
conduits serving the Washington, DC area. The plotters are also,
he closed, concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed
government official. Hoover had arranged for reporters to wait outside
the closed door testimony and immediately distributed copies of his report.
(01:45):
It was the first time in FBI history that the
director had publicly made unproven allegations against specific citizens that
had not been charged. There comes a point in any
protracted conflict, and each side starts to try and prove
what they're capable of. Hoover had crossed the rubicon. He
(02:07):
had declared war on the Catholic left. I'm Brendan Patrick Hughes.
This is Divine Intervention, Chapter seven, The Fight of the Century.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
So anyways, I was housebound with using Chin.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Meanwhile in Boston, Marianne, a divorced welfare mother of two,
and Patrick, a Roman Catholic freaking priest. We're dealing with
the fallout from having made out in front of the
fire in his doomed Beacon Street apartment.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
You know the kind of whisker burn stuff you get.
I thought I was bleeding on the way home in
the car, I thought, oh my god, I think my
chin's gone. This like oozing the chin.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I can confirm this. US Irish guys have some very
sharp stubble. I've seen some shit.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I remember.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
The next night he came over to my apartment. I
couldn't leave the house, of course, because of the oozing chin.
And he was mortified because like, if I went to
the community with this, I mean, you only get that
from one situation.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Right, Remember hickeys, the scandal of physical evidence. After two
of your friends in high school hooked up over the weekend,
turtlenecks on Mondays meant one thing, and one thing only
when I was in school. Patrick spent the next day
conducting his affairs like the Roman Catholic priest he still
ostensibly was, and then drove his VW bus to Marianne's
(04:02):
apartments in Dorchester.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
The next night, he came over around ten o'clock. The
kids are in.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Dead and.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
I opened the door and we just looked at each other.
Neither of us could believe what had happened. But it
was so.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
Total, like the giving over of ourselves to each other
emotionally was so total, like having stepped over that line.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We can't know what kind of conversation Patrick was having
with himself about having broken his vow of celibacy. What
we do know is that A he fell in love
with Mary Anne and their affair continued, and B he
also continued to perform his duties as a priest and
made no announcement to the team the way Floyd did.
Speaker 6 (04:49):
But in terms of being in love with or something
like that, he never spoke to me about that.
Speaker 7 (04:56):
You know, did you ever pick up on any vibe?
Speaker 6 (05:02):
I didn't. I did not, But I'm not that astute
when it comes to some of those.
Speaker 8 (05:10):
Things, and I didn't know anything about.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
It Patrick's sister Joanne.
Speaker 8 (05:14):
But for him, he was still a practicing priest and
he's dating, I suppose you might say, and really falling
in love.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
You know, there was.
Speaker 8 (05:24):
Still that element, you see, that he wanted so much
in his life that somehow the priesthood refused to allow.
And yet when he saw it and felt it, he
knew that that's what he wanted and needed to really
(05:45):
fulfill himself and to be in this relationship, this partnership.
It just was going to happen no matter what.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
If Patrick were in the market for a strong rationalization
for his decision, he wouldn't have to look far. Strict
celibacy for priests had only been around since eleven thirty
nine AD, when the Church had grown tired of the
widows of priests inheriting the land on which they had
built their churches. So at the second latter in Council
they eliminated the future existence of widows by decreeing priestly celibacy.
(06:20):
Patrick might have told himself that the church's real concern
with sex had more to do with real estate than
anything holy or sacred, but the fact remained. He was
now sailing and the part of the old world maps
marked here be dragons.
Speaker 9 (06:37):
Patrick. We have to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Sarah Tosey back from New.
Speaker 9 (06:41):
Jersey, because you are afraid to love.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
I am alone.
Speaker 9 (06:45):
We schedule our days so that we can say to
one another. I don't have time to know you, and
we're all guilty.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
How can people be so hard?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Sarah must have known things were different when she returned.
The tricycles had come to depend on was now a bicycle.
Speaker 9 (07:02):
Romance and the revolution. Don't mix. See, there's no time
in your life. There's no time for that in your life.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
And then when Marianne and Sarah's landlord on Florida Street
saw their picture in the paper during the Kooming asylum,
he showed up at their door and evicted them.
Speaker 9 (07:21):
You kind of had to be there to believe it.
Wake up to god, damn it, you're all evicted, goddamn kids.
Goddamn mister Collins solo and attack on the front door.
The sound of ripping and falling paper. This isn't happening.
Goddamn goddamn outraged Chrissy, mister Collins, don't you rip down
(07:41):
my mommy's door? Mama, where's my pone? Our sentiments exactly?
Maybe we can move to the center.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Unsettled and on the move once more, Sarah picked up
her pieces and refocused her energy away from her disintegrating
trio and towards ending this goddamn war. Her dream of
what the Paula Center could have been in her life
was ending, but her dream of being a revolutionary had
only just begun. Sarah TOSI was now determined to take
(08:12):
part in a draft rate. Jay Edgar Hoover's testimony before
the Appropriations Committee was only the first punch of a
one to two combination. The second punch came when his
Department of Justice delivered a preliminary indictment of Catholic left
movement leaders in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. FBI agents fanned out with
(08:36):
subpoenas up and down the Eastern Seaboard, serving hundreds of
activists like Anne Walsh, Paul Cooming, and Bob Kinnane. They
arrested eight, including Ted Glick and Phil Berrigan, for conspiracy.
Speaker 10 (08:47):
Yeah, we were arrested, taken to the county jail.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Telling them they were no longer fit to live in society,
and scaring the shit out of them with threats of
life in prison.
Speaker 11 (08:55):
Harrisburg were people charged with planning to kidnap Henry Kissinger
and blow up the steam pipes under the Pentagon. This
is Jim Carroll, which were ideas put forth in wild, irresponsible,
somewhat mad brainstorming sessions of Catholic peacenicks sitting around the
living room late at night having had a few, and
(09:16):
there was in the crowd, an FBI plant, an informant,
and one of the piece knicks was describing some of
these sessions in letters to Philip Beregon, who was in prison,
and the letters were intercepted by the government.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Remember Boyd Douglas, the incarcerated man who helped plan the
Flower City conspiracy with Ted Glick and spirited messages to
phil Berrigan on the inside, Well, he was showing every
one of those letters to the FBI.
Speaker 11 (09:45):
Those letters were the basis of the charges brought against
eight people, including the Berrigans, charges of conspiracy to kidnap
Henry Kissinger. They weren't going to kidnap Henry Kissinger. They
were going to make a citizens arrest. That's the way
they talked about it.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Vover's indictment was an important experiment. He was looking for
a new playbook for crushing descent in the US, and
he felt like if this grand jury could drain the
movement's resources in an endless court proceeding, he could all
but immunize the government to unrest. And those in the
movement now knew they had to respond, and they began
trading blows with the most powerful man in Washington, DC.
(10:26):
In Boston. Sarah's wish for a draft board to raid
was granted when Paul Cooming returned triumphantly to the gang
after only three weeks in jail following his sanctuary. Now
on probation, he crashed once again with Marianne and Sarah
in their new Dorchester digs on Bowden Street. And he
was ready for more action, lunatic that he was.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
And there was some talk locally here about doing a
smaller draft board, just making things happen so that they
were constantly happening. So there was a plan to do
the Summerville draft board.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Sarah, Paul, Marianne and a few others planned a little
action to keep the government off balance.
Speaker 11 (11:16):
Me.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
I think there was a fairly small group.
Speaker 7 (11:17):
I don't think there was more than eight of us
or nine of us all together that we're doing it.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
They chose a draft board in Powderhouse Square Park, right
next to Tufts University. It was the oldest stone building
in Massachusetts, used by the British as a gunpowder magazine
and the run up to the Revolutionary War.
Speaker 7 (11:33):
Yeah, I can remember casing it and saying, my god,
I've never seen such a simple building. You know, it's
just one floor. I mean, anybody can draw our three
dimensional picture of it.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Sarah, Paul and some of the others would sneak in
through the first floor window in the back while Marianne
sat in a parked car a block away acting as
a lookout.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
I mean it would never go inside a draft board
for fear of getting arrested and of what would happen
to the kids.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So I would support in many, many other ways.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Marianne's job was to watch for passing police cars and
alert the raiders she saw if anything.
Speaker 7 (12:04):
Happened, flashing her lights twice or something like that in
the car if somebody was coming, you know, like a cop,
cow was coming by or something.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
They were lest we forget the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
So I was in a car, I had my walkie talkie,
and all of a sudden I picked up some wine,
some radio Cebe channel, and this couple are having Cebe
Channel sex.
Speaker 8 (12:45):
She stap there.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
I didn't dare shut it off because I well, I
didn't know what would happen if I ever had a use.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, Marianne became more and more engrossed in a steamy
dialogue on her radio. Sarah and Paul in black painted
sneakers and hockey team flashlights, broke into the powder house.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
They got in through some windows in the back and
they went right to the files, got all the files.
I mean, they were in and out and no time
at all, and it was done.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Back in Dorchester, Sarah and Marianne took their cue from
Paul's Newhaven action and mailed back the one A file
to the draftees until they ran out of postage.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
And then we went to Miles Standish Park and had
a bonfire.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
With the rest of them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Miles Standish, the British Navy captain who once said war
is a terrible trade, but when the cause is just
the smell of gunpowder is sweet.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
So as we're driving, we're all in the car and
we have all the files in the trunk.
Speaker 12 (13:43):
And Joe and I were in the back seat, Chrissy,
Marianne's daughter, Call and my mom were in the front seat,
and in the trunk which was in the front, they.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Had a beetle.
Speaker 12 (13:51):
Of course, there were draft cards that had been stolen.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
And we're driving to burn the files and these car
pull us over.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Every heart in the whole car just stopped.
Speaker 12 (14:20):
I think my mom drank a sip. She had like
a coke, a can of something, and they thought it
was beer or something and pulled us over. And it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
The cops that we were drinking, and that's why they
pulled us over.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
If that cop inspected the vehicle. Given Hoover's declared war
on the Catholic left in the recent timing of the
Harrisburg indictment, they would go away for a long time.
But the gods smiled that night and the cop let
them go with a warning.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
We drove away just oh my god.
Speaker 12 (14:56):
I just remember being anxious a lot like that something
was going to happen, like people were getting arrested, like
people were going to jail, and my mom was doing stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
That might get hurt.
Speaker 12 (15:08):
Like I was like, wait, they can just come and
take the people that you love out of your house.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
It made me very anxious.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Deeply spooked. Sarah, Paul, Marianne, and the kids continued to
mile Standish Park, where, despite their pounding hearts, the burning
one a files smelled sweet. Sarah, after the Somerville raid,
(15:39):
decided she could no longer linger in Boston as Patrick
and mary Anne fell deeper in love.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
What are we saying goodbye to to a phase, to Patrick,
to our mission at the center, to what there's a
piece of me I don't give away the wayfaring stranger
part that doesn't want to say we, that won't fall
off any cliffs.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
That is alone.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Sarah soon left Boston. She left Marianne to her secret
affair with Patrick, and Patrick to his devolving mess at
the Paulit Center. She brought Paul coming home with her
to New Jersey, where her father lay dying from cancer.
Speaker 7 (16:18):
I had gone to Sarah's house with her when her
father was very ill with cancer. The night were there,
her father died during that night that we happened to
be there, so I stayed around for the funeral, and
siblings all came back to the house.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
The war between the Catholic Left and the FBI was
complicated for Sarah Tosi in particular. As LeeAnne Mosha tells us, you.
Speaker 13 (16:42):
Know, Sarah Tosi's brother was an FBI agent, and most
of the FBI agents were Irish Catholic.
Speaker 9 (16:48):
I'm still reacting from seeing my brother. It is so strange.
I barely know him now. We get along, but that
is all I want so badly to talk to him,
my brother, not to his job, but the person.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
She wrote letters back to Marianne and Patrick from Jersey.
Speaker 9 (17:06):
I think my FBI brother is coming to visit next week.
I'm dying to find out what he knows about Barrigan,
but I don't think he'll tell me. I'm trying to
think of something vaguely safe to talk about.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I haven't thought of anything yet.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
This cultural divide among siblings was very common in households
at the time, with older siblings born before World War
Two baffled by their crazy younger sisters and brothers.
Speaker 9 (17:30):
Last time he was here, he threw my friends out
of the house and said they were a disgrace.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
To the family. Wonder if I'm next. And it was
what cleaved the generations.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Siblings three or five years older than you were completely
on the other side of the divide, so your parents
and siblings would be here and those of us who
had actually been caught up and part of this, what
we were experiencing is an incredible awakening and liberation and
(18:04):
understanding or over here, and there could have been one
hundred years, a century could have passed as between us.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
So Sarah, the newly minted draft board raider and her
FBI brother are navigating their differences, and here was her guest,
Paul cooming very much a person of interest with the FBI,
sharing a roof with a g.
Speaker 7 (18:28):
Man and her brother came back. I'm realizing that he
doesn't know who I am, at least I believe he
doesn't know. So it was a little bit uneasy. But
got up one morning and he was cooking breakfast for everybody.
So I pitched in and I said, here, I'll help.
So he taught me how to make omelets and nice
and neat. We hit it off great and talked and
(18:52):
joked as we served breakfast to everybody.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
The FBI were everywhere.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
At this point, Hoover's FBI had surrounded the Catholic left.
Speaker 14 (19:02):
So yes, the FBI kept tabs on me and so
many other people.
Speaker 13 (19:07):
I kept a record, and I think I still have
a piece of paper with all the people who told
me that they were visited by the FBI because they
were in my you know, my paper address book.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
I started to be followed very heavily by the FBI,
and we knew it, but you kind of don't believe it.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
In a certain way.
Speaker 10 (19:24):
I assume that my telephones were tapped. See what here,
somebody saying something in the background. Actually, when you're talking
on the phone.
Speaker 7 (19:33):
They encouraged people to believe in their own paranoia. So
they encouraged people to believe that there was an FBI
agent lurking somewhere in the background everywhere.
Speaker 15 (19:44):
Now I'm being watched closely. I mean, I have FBI
around me all the time. They've become to my house,
my mother's house.
Speaker 10 (19:50):
Every week.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
If you were in the movement, FBI agents would follow
you wherever you went and make sure you knew it.
They would visit your parents twice a week, sometimes for
a year at a time. They would conspicuously dig through
the trash of your parents' neighbors to create a sense
of scandal. The FBI even followed Marianne's sister in law's
brother in case they could get any information out of him.
(20:14):
Hoover's testimony to the Appropriations Committee had granted him a
thousand new agents whose sole job was to crush descent,
which it could be argued, is a bit undemocratic. But
the resistance was about to deal a very decisive blow
to j Edgar Hoover himself.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
I can't tell you anything about it, because I'm still
of the mind that I don't know who did it,
and I can't tell you that I did it or
didn't do it, So I can't tell you anything about
that break in. That was an agreement made a long
time ago that I haven't officially heard it. It has been
called off so agreement not to say, not even to
(21:00):
whether that you didn't participate, because to say you didn't participate,
then they'd have a smaller group of people to look
at and be able to find them easier.
Speaker 6 (21:09):
And I have.
Speaker 7 (21:10):
Never been told officially otherwise, so I stick to that story.
It was a great action.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I recorded this interview with Paul Cooming in August of
two thousand and nine. And for those of you keeping
score at home, yes, this show has been in production
for a very long time. Media Pennsylvania media action subroup
called Media Pennsylvania.
Speaker 16 (21:35):
That Media rate Media Pennsylvania.
Speaker 17 (21:37):
The Media Pennsylvania experience was a really interesting Media.
Speaker 14 (21:40):
Pennsylvania, very dramatic breaking in Media Pennsylvania.
Speaker 17 (21:44):
Oh, it's always been a secret. I have a little
suspicion who did it, you know, It was always like
nobody say anything.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
But then in twenty thirteen, Betty Medsger of The Washington
posted a book about this particular action in Media Pennsylvania.
Her book finally revealed the identities of the people who
pulled off the craziest break in perhaps in American history.
Media Pennsylvania was where the resistance broke into an FBI office.
Speaker 18 (22:17):
And here's where the Catholic left does its counter attack
on the FBI.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Historian Charles M.
Speaker 18 (22:24):
Konez, now, they're getting to a point where they're suppressing
dissent before it happens. That's the beginning of the end,
not beyond the war. That's the beginning of the end
of democracy in this country. That's what authoritatian redictatorial powers do.
It's the first thing they do is they crushed descent.
Then they can do whatever the hell they want. That's
(22:47):
where the idea of we got a counter attack against
the FBI.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
With Hoover loaded for bear, it was the movement's turn
to give him a decisive poke.
Speaker 19 (22:56):
Everybody who was active in the movement knew that the
FBI was trying to intimidate, suppress, and spy on the movement.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
This is Keith forsythe.
Speaker 19 (23:07):
They weren't out there trying to put the mafia in jail.
They were spending their time hassling movement people. It wasn't
the kind of thing that the person on the street
necessarily was aware of, but everybody who was active not.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Keith was radicalized against the government's suppression of dissent when
he heard an audio recording of the massacre at Jackson State,
an HBCU, where police opened fire on protesters, killing two students.
He dropped out of college to devote himself full time
to opposing the war in Vietnam. He was driving a
cab in Philly when he got a phone call from
(23:42):
a prominent fellow activist and professor.
Speaker 19 (23:44):
He called me up on the phone and said, you
want to go to a party, which was code for
do you want to be involved in an action? And
I said, yeah, I'm always up for a party. We
made an appointment to meet someplace to talk, and if
you went for a walk in the woods, that made
it really hard for them to record you.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
When they met, the professor shared his dismay over Hoover's
undemocratic crushing of dissent and asked Keith if he'd consider
breaking into an FBI office to prove Hoover's wrongdoing.
Speaker 19 (24:11):
If we can get evidence of this and publicize it
through the newspapers, you know that's going to back them off,
at least to some extent.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
In Flower City, ted Glick and his crew had hoped
to just vandalize the FBI office that happened to be
next to the draft board, But in this case they
were specifically targeting an FBI office and most importantly, planning
to steal all the files inside top secret documents that
would mean a lot more to the government than the
(24:40):
addresses of would be inductees.
Speaker 19 (24:42):
This was going to be different. For one thing, the
risks were a lot higher. Potential jail time we assumed
was going to be much greater when you're breaking into
a draft board. At least in those days, you didn't
have any expectation. A nobody's going to be in there,
and b if they are in there, they're not going
to be armed. But with the FBI, they're definitely always armed,
(25:05):
and we're going to try to find a time when
we're not in there. But suppose we make a mistake.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
And they called themselves the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI.
Speaker 19 (25:14):
Now we knew that if we were successful, they would
really put on the heat, so we had to be
very careful about not inviting anybody who had loose lips.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The FBI Field office in downtown Media was on the
second floor of a mixed use building at one Veterans Square.
It had office spaces on the first two floors and
two floors of apartments above. The first thing Keith Forsyth
did was a walk by of the FBI office door.
He went to Goodwill to buy a cheap suit so
his hippie clothes didn't make him conspicuous. Then he casually
(25:56):
strolled down the second floor corridor past the bureau office.
Speaker 19 (26:00):
My verdict was, it doesn't get any better than this
because you walk into the building off the street, there's
no restrictions. The doors are open all the time because
there's people living in the building. You walk up to
the second floor, take a left, and there's the front
door to the FBI office.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
One look at the lock on the door, and Keith
knew it was possible, and.
Speaker 19 (26:22):
They got one lock on the door. That's the same
as the lock on my front door. It'll take me
two minutes to get through that door. That's how it
looked at that.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Point, so a group of nine Raiders, handpicked by the
professor for their discretion, began meeting regularly.
Speaker 19 (26:36):
I'm going to say probably at least a couple months,
because we would meet periodically, you know, to go over
maps and talk about casing observations.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Keith Forsyth took a correspondence course on locksmithing and spent
those months practicing and getting his time down so that
when he picked the lock in a public hallway he
could do it quickly. Then, to get a sense of
the inside of the FBI office, the Raiders posed as
a Swarthmore student writing an article about opportunities for women
in the bureau. She went into the office and interviewed
(27:08):
an agent, writing notes with gloves on and clocking the environment.
No locks on the filing cabinets, no alarms on the
doors or windows. As she was leaving, she pretended to
be confused about the exit and stumbled deeper into the office,
catching a glimpse of its alcove spaces plan in place.
(27:28):
The Raiders chose the night of March eighth, nineteen seventy
one because that was the night of the boxing match
between Joe Fraser and Muhammad Ali, a fight that had
basically become a referendum on the Vietnam War in popular culture,
dubbed the Fight of the Century. Literally everyone in the
world would be tuning in and no one would notice
a group of business people entering the building at one
(27:50):
Veteran Square in Media, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 19 (27:54):
You know, I got a haircut. I was wearing a
white shirt and a tie, and a sport coat and
a trench coat and some nice leather driving gloves, so
I wouldn't leave any fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
On fight night, they staged themselves at a nearby holiday inn.
Speaker 10 (28:07):
Somebody rented a motel room, and that's where that's where
he stayed. Sort of all met together and then came
and went as our assignments dictated.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
That's Bob Williamson. Like Keith Forsyth, Bob had also dropped
out of college to oppose the war full time. He
was known back then to his friends as weed X.
Bob had already done some raids with Paul Cooming and
Anne Walsh. He joined them in a draft board raid
in Delaware, where, just like in Philly, they hid in
janitor's closets. Bob was a card.
Speaker 10 (28:40):
I felt nervous, so I figured everybody else might feel
nervous too. So I decided that I was going to
tell a.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Joke and tonight he was part of the inside team
that would go in and retrieve the files.
Speaker 10 (28:50):
Keith goes in first because he's got to get the
door open.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Keith walked into the building with his lock picking tools
and a crowbar up his sleeve.
Speaker 19 (28:58):
And I go into the building. I go up to
the door. I go over to the lock and just
about had a heart attack because there was a second
lock added to the door that hadn't been there two
weeks earlier. It was not a standard lock, it was
a high security lock.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
It was one of those circular keyholes like on a
Kryptonite bike lock.
Speaker 19 (29:16):
So I'm like, what the hell has going on here?
All of a sudden, on the night of the action,
there's a brand new lock on the front door, and
I'm trying to figure out how this happened. Is this
a coincidence, which generally I don't believe in. Is there
some kind of a leak and they knew we were coming?
But if they knew we were coming, why would they
put a lock on the door. Why wouldn't they just
(29:36):
put twenty agents inside? And wait for us to come inside.
Nothing made sense.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Keith went back to the holiday inn with bad news
for the crew.
Speaker 19 (29:44):
Said I can't pick this lock tonight.
Speaker 10 (29:46):
He held it together and just had the presence of mind
to say, Okay, I'm gonna need to talk to people
and see what planned he's going to because plant ain't
gonna work.
Speaker 19 (29:54):
And so people were saying, well, like what can we
do to salvage it? And somebody said what about the
second door?
Speaker 2 (30:00):
When the other raider had gone into the office incognito
as a Swarthmore student, she had noticed a second door
to the corridor was blocked with a massive filing cabinet.
Speaker 19 (30:09):
And I'm like, oh yeah, the second door. Sure enough,
there was just one standard lock on that.
Speaker 10 (30:15):
And i gotta say, man, I take my hat off.
He has stones.
Speaker 19 (30:19):
So I picked that in no time. But then there
was a dead bolt on the other side. So meanwhile,
I'm hearing the building manager underneath me listening to the radio.
He's like, his living room is right underneath me. So
I'm like, how much noise can I make before he
hears me? So figured, well, we'll find out.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
He could hear the building supervisor's radio downstairs and he
waited for a swell of crowd sounds during the fight.
Speaker 19 (30:46):
So I put the pride bar in there and broke
the dead bolt off and tried to do it as
fast as possible so it didn't like make a creaking sound,
It just went bang. And so now I could open
the door a whole inch. And then and there was
a giant filing cabinet full of papers up against the
door behind that, so I had to move that out
(31:06):
of the way. And the office floor was carpeted, and
this giant thing was super top heavy, so if he
started to push the doorknob just started to tip it.
The building manager was directly below us the room, right
underneath where I was, so I couldn't drop that thing down.
(31:27):
So I went back to the car, got the jackpost
out of the trunk, stuffed it up underneath my trench
coat so you couldn't see it, walk back into the
building using the Pride boy, I finally got the door
open enough that I could at least get the tip
of the jackpost in there, and then started slowly moving
that file cabinet a fraction of an inch at a time.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
And don't forget Keith was doing all this in a
public hallway in an apartment building.
Speaker 19 (31:53):
I'm laying down on my back on the floor of
the hallway with my legs braced against one side of
the hall a hall pulling on this four foot steel
pole with two hands, but nobody came into the hallway.
Finally got it open enough I could squeeze in so that,
you know, it would be easy for people to get
in and out. And then I taped the lock, you know,
(32:15):
put a piece of tape over the latch so wouldn't relatch.
Pushed the door to and left, and went out and
called the motel room and told them that it was
a go, that it was ready for the inside team.
Speaker 10 (32:32):
I was the flashlight guy that night. It was all
taped up with electrical tape except for a pinhole in
the center.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Bob Williamson and three others pulled up to the building
and their business attire and filed in carrying empty suitcases.
They pushed the second door open and shimmy past the
filing cabinet, turned.
Speaker 10 (32:49):
The flashlight on to shine it on the file drawer
so that they could see what they were looking at.
But other than that, there were no lights in the office.
While we were working. Everybody goes to their file, or
isn't They just started opening them and going through them.
I think most of the files that were in there
were files that we glanced at quickly and thought we
should take so as quickly as we could, we just
(33:11):
loaded the suitcases up and got out of there. I
don't think we were in there for more than twenty minutes.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Keith was parked outside waiting for the inside team to
file out of the building.
Speaker 19 (33:21):
And they come out carrying these suitcases and load them
into the back of the car.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
But here's the thing. The County courthouse also sits on
Veteran Square, just like the office building. And there was
a security guard pacing in front of the courthouse.
Speaker 19 (33:36):
And the security guard in the County Courthouse is standing
there watching us through the glass door.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
On his watch. Four business people filed into the building
carrying four suitcases and filed out twenty minutes later.
Speaker 19 (33:48):
We didn't stand out, you know, we're a bunch of
white people wearing suits in downtown media across from the courthouse.
And then what could be more.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Normal sweating bullets. They drove the files to a remote
farmhouse owned by sympathetic Quakers, they popped champagne and got
to work sorting the resistance had hit back at Hoover's FBI.
Speaker 10 (34:19):
I think the total number of documents that came out
of that burglary was about a thousand documents.
Speaker 19 (34:26):
The first thing we did was to sort everything into
two piles, the political pile and the criminal pile. Very
roughly speaking, the piles were of the same size. So basically,
from that sample, you could say the FBI was spending
half of their time spying on Americans who weren't doing
anything illegal and trying to prevent them from speaking out.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
And it really didn't take them long to find some
seriously fudged up shizz, like the FBI harassing a boy
Scout troop in Oregon for becoming pen pals with some
Russian kids, or agents keeping tabs on black student unions
on college campuses across the United States, or an FBI
agent starting rumors of infidelity about an activist couple and
successfully breaking them up, or the FBI intending to enhance
(35:13):
paranoia and activist groups and encouraging the sense that there
was an agent behind every mailbox. But the piece de
resistance was the revelation of Hoover's co Intel Pro.
Speaker 14 (35:27):
These people made off with huge amounts of documents, FBI documents.
It was an amazing you might say, a bit of revenge.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Historian Howard Zinn.
Speaker 14 (35:38):
The FBI had been collecting information on Americans. You know,
now information was being collected about the FBI, and now
what the FBI was up to was revealed. And what
was revealed was that the FBI had broken the law.
They were revealing a secret program of the government of
the FBI called co intel pro the counter intelligence. This program,
(36:00):
which involved break ins into people's homes and offices, secret
letters sent to members of the anti war movement, though
supposedly anonymous, letters trying to stir up conflict among different
parts of the anti war movement.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI then did something
rather ingenious. They took their stolen documents and placed them
in pre addressed envelopes. Then they put those envelopes inside
of larger envelopes and mailed them to accomplices around the country.
That way, when the pre addressed documents finally arrived in
the hands of intended congressmen and press outlets, they appeared
(36:39):
postmarked from around the country. Several Congressmen immediately turned the
files back over to the FBI. The New York Times
and the LA Times immediately did so as well, but
The Washington Post decided it was too important. The FBI
was conducting illegal surveillance of American citizens based on their
political opinion, and as turn of the century Supreme Court
(37:03):
Justice Lewis Brandeis once said, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
The co Intel propapers, as they came to be called,
created a massive scandal for the previously revered Federal Bureau
and its director.
Speaker 14 (37:17):
The FBI had sent a letter, sort anonymous letter to
Martin Luther King suggesting that he commits suicide. These papers
that were stolen from the FBI in the break in, well,
they became published very great embarrashment to the FBI. If
I think by the had the romantic idea of how
smart the FBI is, they learned differently.
Speaker 7 (37:39):
JF. Hoover was pretty insulted that some of us somehow
got it away with that and released it to the press.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
The papers also confirmed to the Catholic anti war movement that,
just as they'd suspected, the FBI was trying to perpetuate
a kind of psychological warfare to discourage ordinary citizens from
proto testing the war.
Speaker 7 (38:01):
But that they encouraged that paranoia, and that they had infarmas,
and that the farmers encouraged that kind of paranoia to
think that there, you know, the wire the phones were
tapped all over the place, and some were some were.
Speaker 17 (38:14):
They were programmed to think that they could like intimidate us.
Bob Kanaane, they just look at an ordinary citizens who
objected to the government, you know, and it was really
very disappointing.
Speaker 19 (38:28):
God, they were a mean loss the media.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Pennsylvania raid would lead to the first congressional investigation of
US intelligence agencies in United States history.
Speaker 15 (38:38):
Hoover was apoplectic for the first time cookie these anti
war people who he always you know, was after we
had the most popular support.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Now Hoover was now more motivated than ever to grind
the Catholic left into dust under the heel of his
wing tipped shoe. The raiders in media, Bob Williamson, Keith Forsyth,
and six of the Americans agreed to never speak of
it again.
Speaker 10 (39:03):
We had agreed because of the efforts that the FBI
was making to try and find out who had done
it that we just wouldn't. We wouldn't meet again as
a group.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
And they remained anonymous for over forty years.
Speaker 18 (39:15):
After media the Harrisburg trial came crashing in or at
least all the pre trial stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Hoover was now out for blood. The following month, in
April of nineteen seventy one, Paul Cooming, Cookie Ridolphe, and
Anne Walsh were among one hundred witnesses subpoenaed to appear
before Hoover's grand jury in Harrisburg, the one that initially
was set up to investigate the bombing of the steam
(39:43):
tunnels and Kissinger's would be citizens' arrest, but since those
were weak cases to begin with, based merely on brainstorming sessions,
in the wake of media the grand jury hearing had
evolved into what many movement lawyers felt was a fishing expedition.
The government was hoping that subpoena testimony would yield some
more offenses and defendants would be caught up in a
(40:06):
giant dragnet that would spell the end of the movement
and maybe all movements.
Speaker 16 (40:12):
They really wanted to send us to prison. It was
becoming too much of a popular movement. Too many people
were doing this, so they took one hundred people. They
called one hundred people to a grand jury in Harrisburg.
Speaker 15 (40:25):
I had been subpeded to the grand jury for the
Harrisburg case.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Cookie the indictment came.
Speaker 15 (40:30):
Out naming those I think it was eight people of Harrisburg.
Eight and then there was a list of other people
who they considered unindicted co conspirators.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
The first witness called was Paul Koming. Paul, Smiling, refused
to testify. Instead, he passed around a statement in which
he vowed non cooperation with any branch of the US
government prior to a war crimes tribunal holding it accountable
for its inhumane use of power to crush the population
of Vietnam. The government then offered Paul immunity, and he
(41:01):
still refused, so they promptly indicted him with criminal contempt.
When Anne Walsh was called, she sat in the courtroom
during a recess and pulled out four photographs from her
pocketbook and stared at them. The pictures were of North
Vietnamese civilians killed in Hanoi by American bombers. Then she
(41:22):
stood up marched over to the chief prosecutor of the
DOJ held the photos up to his face and said,
this is what the movement is all about. One of
the pictures was of a twenty eight year old pregnant
woman sprawled on the ground. She said, this woman is
the same age I am, only she is dead. Her
(41:44):
eyes filled up as she continued. She said, I want
to talk to you as a human being, one human
being to another. Anne and the prosecutor were two of
the only people in the courtroom during this recess. Finally,
the chief prosecutor responded saying, I don't have any special
insights into the problems of the war, of the ghetto
(42:08):
of the country, but we have laws and we have
to uphold them, and we have to keep dissent in
legal limits. Finally, he said to her, you hold the
key to the jail. All you have to do is testify,
to tell the truth. She shook her head. I can't,
she said, my conscience won't allow me. Shortly after this exchange,
(42:35):
it was Anne's turn to take the stand, and.
Speaker 16 (42:38):
They showed us pictures of virtually are really good friends
and saying do you know this person? And you had
to keep saying I refuse to answer this on the
grounds that it may incriminate me, which made you look
like a coward or something. It put you in a
really weird position.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Hoover's DOJ had dragged one hundred witnesses to Central PA
and the hopes that just one would crack.
Speaker 16 (42:58):
But a one hundred people did not break set. They
refused to betray their friends.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Everyone, and I mean everyone in the whole Catholic left
pled the fifth without talking to each other beforehand, because
Catholics can be kind of like a pail of fish hooks.
You can't pick up one without it being in a
tangled mess with a bunch of others. With this crowd
of do gooders and hell raisers, the DOJ was going
(43:29):
to have its hands full. The government, however, was not
quite done with Anne Walsh.
Speaker 16 (43:46):
And out of the hundred, they chose a fifty five
year old non named sister Joe Ziegan, who was president
of Marymount College, and me to say, if you don't
tell us, we're going to send you to jail for
an inja term in time.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
So you know that's what I was prepared to do.
Speaker 16 (44:03):
Anyway, it sounded very much like the convent in some ways,
you know, like a red brick building was grass, isolated,
boring in some ways, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
And started living out her days as if she was
on borrowed time.
Speaker 16 (44:18):
So I kept going to lunch, and my last lunch
was always like a tune or fish sandwich in a
vanilla frapp. Every time I was in court, I was ready.
I had given my clothes away, my only possessions.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
I said goodbye.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I said goodbye.
Speaker 16 (44:30):
I mean a million times I said goodbye to people
because I thought I was okay now that I had
to go pay the dues right here.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
An Walsh's lawyer launched an appeal, which started winding its
way through the legal system. While the threat of arrest
hung over her head like a sword of Damocles. And
as prison gets you thinking long term, Ann began to
wonder about the rest of her life, and her thoughts
landed on her old father, confessor from the convent, Bob
(44:57):
Canane from the Milwaukee fourteen.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
So at the time Bob was just coming back from Milwaukee.
Speaker 16 (45:03):
Weren't you or you just back? Are you just back
from prison? It's the most sweetly embarrassing.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
Tale thing to tell.
Speaker 16 (45:13):
Once we started working together, because I really really attracted
to him and thought it was like really possible that.
Speaker 19 (45:19):
He might like me back.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
A mutual friend who lived with Bob on a commune
outside Boston pulled Anne aside one day and.
Speaker 16 (45:27):
She said, of course, Bob Kane's in love with you.
You know, he talks about you all the time. So
I said, well, I think I'm going to write a letter. Okay,
now all our friends are friends in common now, so
that if he doesn't love.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Me back, I'm going to be like a fool.
Speaker 16 (45:43):
So I'm going to have to move to some English
speaking island because I won't be here to be able
to be in his company.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
I'll feel like a fool. So I wrote the letter.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
But this was a complicated thing for Ann to do.
The future in the past or all at war inside
a progressive Catholic's heart.
Speaker 16 (46:02):
But I was a traditional to the core girl, right,
and a girl didn't say you do you want to date?
Let alone?
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Do you want to spend the rest of your life
with me?
Speaker 16 (46:12):
Because I got a big, wicked crush on you, So
it was like, really, Chancy.
Speaker 17 (46:21):
It pushed me, I must say, to make a decision
that point. I mean I had thought about it. If
I hadn't really kind of made a decise. So I
sat down for a good afternoon and just thought about it,
thought about what it would mean, everything decided, Yeah, I
think I'd go along with that.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
But we're talking about a priest and a next nun.
So when it came to romance, they're both kind of rookies.
Speaker 7 (46:49):
You know.
Speaker 16 (46:49):
And it was like a little tough going because we
didn't eat that now how to do relationships like, we
didn't have a big dating history.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Perhaps Anne was doomed to prison, but she and Bob
were in love and headed into an uncertain future together.
Jim Carroll was among many people who traveled to Harrisburg
during this time. He went to support Anne Walsh, whom
(47:19):
he worked with at BU, and to participate in some demonstrations.
Speaker 11 (47:23):
The Harrisburg trial was an occasion of great celebrations of
resistance and many many people showing up in Harrisburg to
protest the government intrusions against the peace movement.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Jim's father was a general in the Air Force and
his brother was in the FBI, so he also carried
the extra burden of scandalizing his family with his anti
war activities.
Speaker 11 (47:46):
And I was in a crowd at one point and
this foul smelling vagrant fellow sidled up to me and
he whispered, I won't tell on you if you don't
tell on me. And it was my brother who's there undercover,
watching all of us, and he didn't tell on me,
and I didn't tell on him until years later.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Of course, Sarah Tosi had a fed brother, Jim Carroll
had a fed brother. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this
for one big Catholic planet of lawbreakers and lawmen driving
each other crazy. And now Hoover was about to make
good on his wish to publicly destroy the Catholic Left.
(48:31):
Despite the uncooperative witnesses, the Harrisburg Grand Jury delivered a
new superseding indictment of seven movement leaders, including Phil Berrigan.
A massive trial was scheduled for the following February. A
giant mobilization and defense committee would soon begin, which would
inevitably drain the movement of all of its resources and energy.
(48:55):
Hoover had zeroed in on exactly how to crush unrest.
This would be the movement's waterloo. The Catholic Left, as
they knew it was dead.
Speaker 7 (49:12):
Until the call came from Believe Cookie Ridolphie she said,
look at we're doing on board down here in Camaden,
New Jersey, and we need some help.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Hoover hadn't counted on the indomitable spirit of the Catholic resistance,
A big pail of fish hooks with a lot of sticktuitiveness.
Speaker 7 (49:30):
And I said, sure, I can do it. And she
asked if we could bring any other out. So Sarahtosi
was there.
Speaker 6 (49:37):
We drove down and.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Hidden in an East Coast federal building was a draft board,
an FBI office, and an office of military intelligence. Camden,
New Jersey, just over the bridge from Philly, was a
perfect place for a showdown with j Edgar Hoover, Paul Cooming,
Sarah Toosi, Cookie Radolphie, Leeann Mosha, Keith Forsyth, Bob Williamson,
(50:02):
and about twenty two others would descend on Camden for
the biggest raid they would ever attempt to pull. But
this time they were walking into a trap. They had
a plant.
Speaker 10 (50:16):
You know about this, don't you.
Speaker 13 (50:17):
He came to one or two meetings and decided this
didn't sit right with him, so he went immediately to
the FBI to tell us what we were doing, and
they said, great.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Hang in there. Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
It's produced by Wonder Media Network and it was created
and written by me, your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our
(50:49):
outlandishly nimble producers are Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk, Palomo Moreno, Jimenez,
Grace Lynch, and myself. Our editor is the inestimable Grace Lynch.
Scoring production from Adrian Bain for Wonder Media Network. Our
executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan for iHeart Podcasts.
(51:12):
Our executive producer is Christina Everett. The late Sarah Tosi
was voiced by Carly Pope. Our theme and end credit
music was composed and performed by Perfect Human Tanya Donnelly
and mastered by the also perfect Ben Aarons. This is
Brendan Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.
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