S2E6: Tin, Rubber, and Oil

A mole, a raid, and a war on trial. The Camden 28 make national headlines. But will their trial jeopardize the identities of the Media burglars?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Previously on SNAFU.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
FBI record stolen from the media Pennsylvania office showed that
one goal of the bureau was to spread that very
impression among left wing organizations that there was an agent
behind every male box.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
We just knew that Hoover was beside himself that this
had happened. He dispatched two hundred agents to flood the
Philadelphia area to find us.

Speaker 4 (00:25):
Who decided, We're not getting together as a group ever again.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
We really parted ways.

Speaker 5 (00:31):
I knew that the only way that they could find
us was through somebody talk.

Speaker 6 (00:45):
It had been three and a half months since the
media burglary, and the FBI's hunt for the burglars was
going nowhere. They'd interviewed hundreds of suspects but failed to
turn up anything useful. All the fingerprints they could identify
from the crime scene turned out to belong to FBIA Jens.
The g men even hired a quote unquote staple expert
to examine the packets of stolen documents distributed by the burglars,

(01:07):
but shockingly, his conclusion that at least five different types
of staples had been used did not lead to a
major breakthrough. The FBI was grasping at Staples. But all
that changed on June twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, three
and a half months after the Media burglary. On that day,

(01:29):
a contractor named Bob Hardy walked into an FBI office
in Camden, New Jersey, just a stone's throw from Media, Pennsylvania,
and handed the FBI exactly the break they'd been looking for.
Hardy was fair haired, with a square jaw and big ears.
He told the agents that he knew some people who
were planning on burglarising the local draft board office in Camden.

(01:53):
Here's Betty Medzger.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
He had just learned that some friends were planning on
raiding a draft board, the Camden draft Board, and that
he liked them and he would like to help protect
him from doing that. But they thought the FBI ought
to know that some people were thinking of this, and.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Not just any random people.

Speaker 6 (02:17):
The leaders of wait for it, the Catholic Peace Movement. Suddenly,
out of nowhere, the Medburg investigation had a promising lead
that they hadn't found an ounce of evidence to prove it.
The FBI had been assuming, literally since day one, that

(02:37):
those dastardly pastors and parishioners in the Catholic Peace Movement
were responsible for the media burglary.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
The FBI agents were thrilled, absolutely thrilled, because they just
assumed that people in this group might be related to
the media burglary, and so on the spot, he was
hired as an informer.

Speaker 6 (03:03):
Hardy's FBI handlers instructed him to infiltrate the group planning
the draft board raid and to do everything he could
to keep the plot moving forward. Hoover monitored the situation closely,
maybe even obsessively. He poured agents and resources into Camden,
totally convinced that the media burglars were influential members of
the Catholic Peace Movement. This was his chance to catch

(03:25):
the people who'd embarrassed him red handed in the middle
of another break in. Here's the thing, the Catholic Peace
Movement and the citizens commissioned to investigate the FBI were
not the same thing. Bill Davidon, architect of the media
break in, had nothing to do with the Camden draft
Board raid. In fact, he purposely excluded one of the

(03:48):
Camden leaders from his plans in media because he knew
the FBI was keeping close tabs on the guy. Hoover
was taking a big swing based entirely on a hunch.
But even a sumptuous, conniving, paranoid, racist, old broken clock
is right twice a day, because, as it turns out,
two of the media burglars were involved in Camden. And

(04:11):
that's how Keith Forsyth and Bob Williamson fell right into
the clutches of Jade Gar Hoover. I'm met Helms and
this is Snaffo, A show about history's greatest screw ups.
Season two medburg the story of a daring heist and
the colossal FBI snaffoo. It exposed this week a failed raid,

(04:35):
a triple cross, and the trial of the Camden twenty eight.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
In the wake of the media.

Speaker 6 (04:57):
Burglary, most of the participants laid John and Bonnie Rains
swore off criminal activity for good. Judy Feinegeld left the
East Coast all together and started a new life out west.
But Bob Williamson wasn't quite ready to stop. Just a
few months after the media action, he got a call
from a friend telling him the usual suspects from the

(05:17):
Catholic Peace Movement were planning a draft board raid in Camden,
New Jersey.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Bob wanted in.

Speaker 4 (05:26):
I said, Oh, Camden, that's my draft board. That was
the draft board that I was registered in. I had
gone to high school in Camden. I knew the city
pretty well. There were large numbers of minority people and
they were the ones that were getting drafted and sent
to fight.

Speaker 6 (05:42):
Keith, fresh off his heroic pride barring of the media
FBI office door, also got involved. He was determined to
strike another blow against the war machine, even though he
had some reservations about the size of the team.

Speaker 5 (05:57):
It just seemed like to me, there was like too
many people, and an awful lot of brand new people
that I wasn't quite sure exactly what they were doing.

Speaker 6 (06:06):
Keith had a point. The Camden crew was more than
three times the size of the media group. There's a
direct correlation between the number of people involved in your
criminal plot and the chances of getting busted. In other words,
there's a reason it was Oceans eleven and not Ocean's
thirty eight ten.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Ou to do it anything?

Speaker 7 (06:25):
Do you think we need one more?

Speaker 1 (06:27):
All right, we'll get one more.

Speaker 6 (06:29):
But then again, this was a much more complex job
than the media break in.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
In order to get up on the fire escape, you
had to pull down this ladder and some kind of
alarm on it, so we cut the wire to that.
There were a couple of tools that we needed to
be able to get into the building.

Speaker 6 (06:48):
And maybe that's why the team was so quick to
welcome a friendly neighborhood contractor named Bob Hardy.

Speaker 4 (06:54):
And walkie Talkies was one of them.

Speaker 6 (06:56):
They were a little expensive, but Hardy you always managed
to come up with the tools the team needed.

Speaker 4 (07:02):
And gave us the impression that he'd paid for it
with his own money.

Speaker 6 (07:06):
Hardy's handiness and extensive tool collection apparently made up for
his lack of anti war credentials.

Speaker 4 (07:13):
Bob Hardy was not a pacifist. There wasn't anything about
him that seemed that way. So in that sense, he
just didn't seem to fit.

Speaker 5 (07:23):
Somebody had to go out and make a grocery run,
and somehow or other it ended up being me and
Hardy in his van and he said, well, if there
is a problem with the guard, I got something for you,
and he said it's in the glove compartment. So I
opened the glove compartment and there's a revolver in there,
and I'm like, are you nuts? You think I'm going

(07:45):
to shoot a minimum wage guard to keep from going
to jail for breaking into a draft board. What the
hell is wrong with you? And I really should have
told everybody about that.

Speaker 6 (07:57):
What Geek didn't know was that the van radio was
bugged and the entire conversation was being broadcast directly to
the FBI.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
The Feds had.

Speaker 6 (08:10):
Been watching the entire operation like hawks. In their minds.
This had to be the same group that embarrassed them
in media just a few months earlier, and this time
the FBI was going to catch them in the act.
As Bob Keith and the others prepared to break into
the federal building, at least eighty g men and dozens

(08:30):
of other federal agents took up positions nearby. Many waited
within the building itself, but others had to hide inside
a local funeral home, spending the evening in eerie silence
with corpses for company in Washington. Hoover was up all
night with Attorney General John Mitchell monitoring the situation in Camden.

(08:51):
Throughout the evening, they exchanged calls with President Nixon, who
was following along closely from his house in Orange County, California.
Forget I'll leaversus Frasier for the President and his highest
law enforcement officials. This was the fight of the century.
After a delay of roughly two hours, they forgot their

(09:12):
ladder and had to go back for it. The burglars
entered the Camden Federal Building, home of the Camden Draft Board.
This was an enormous and well guarded office building, equipped
with an alarm system, and located right in the middle
of the city, precisely the kind of target build Davidon
wouldn't have touched with a ten foot pole.

Speaker 4 (09:33):
It was on one of the top floors, eighth floor,
something like that of that Federal building.

Speaker 6 (09:39):
Bob and a few others scaled the fire escape and
disconnected the alarm using a glass cutter. They made a
hole in the office window. Now that they were in
the inside crew removed draft files and placed them in sacks,
passing them out the window to Bob. For about two hours,
they quietly went about their work. Then just after four
point thirty in the morning, the Feds swooped in.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
And then I hear this guy yelled freeze. I look
around and he's got a gun pointed at me.

Speaker 6 (10:11):
Keith was at a secondary location with a few other
members of the team. As soon as he heard a
car pull up outside, it all clicked. Bob Hardy had
sold them out.

Speaker 5 (10:22):
I mean, I realized it as soon as I heard
his tire screech. I'm like, I was right. I'm a
dumb ass. I should have said something. They came through
the doors, guns drawn and put us up against the wall.
One of them had a shotgun, so he pushes my
face back up against the wall with the business end

(10:43):
of the shotgun, which really pissed me off.

Speaker 4 (10:46):
And the FBI agent. Everybody's in a good mood among
the FBI agents.

Speaker 6 (10:51):
And even though the Feds have just gotten one over
on him, Bob can't resist the opportunity to wipe the
smiles off their faces.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
And they had a cheer that went like this, am
I allowed to say four letter words, go for it, man, Okay?

Speaker 1 (11:07):
So I said what do we eat?

Speaker 4 (11:09):
And they all yelled back eagle me and I said
what do they eat?

Speaker 1 (11:15):
And they said, shit, what do we what do they sure?

Speaker 6 (11:24):
What do we? They Soon a young Dan Rather was
announcing the dramatic arrests on CBS. The FBI arrested twenty
persons in Camden, New Jersey, early today and charged them
with trying.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
To steal draft records from the federal building there.

Speaker 6 (11:45):
The following morning, Hoover took a victory lap. He and
Attorney General John Mitchell held a triumphant press conference to
announce the arrests. This was a highly unorthodox, one might
even say, petty thing to do, but hey, Hoover was
feling himself. The FBI was about to turn a huge
embarrassment into a massive victory. Hoover even wrote a letter

(12:07):
to Henry Kissinger bragging about his success. He just caught
the media burglars. It was only a matter of time
before one of them confessed.

Speaker 4 (12:16):
I was in that room by myself, with handcuffed to
the desk until about noon the next day.

Speaker 5 (12:24):
One of the FBI agents has a copy of I
don't know Time or Newsweek or one of those.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
The cover story.

Speaker 5 (12:32):
The headliner on the cover story was America's prisons. How
bad are they really? So the FBI agents going like
this with the cover over like, pretending to read it,
making sure we all see it, you know, I'm like, jeez,
you guys are lame.

Speaker 6 (12:50):
Out of the group that came to be known as
the Camden twenty eight Bob and Keith were the only
ones with any knowledge of what happened in media.

Speaker 5 (12:58):
I wasn't worried because I knew Bob was going to talk,
and I knew I wasn't going to talk, So you know,
I'm like, okay, send me to jail.

Speaker 6 (13:09):
Internal FBI memos, which Betty Medzger later unearthed, show that
Hoover and his cronies were very pleased with the press
coverage of the arrests, but increasingly concerned as the days
wore on and nobody confessed to the media burglary hit
him hard and turn the spotlight of public opinion against them.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Now.

Speaker 6 (13:29):
One of Hoover's deputies recommended in a memo, heavy pressure,
he wrote, will likely serve as the means to obtain
admissions regarding the FBI media burglary. That pressure came when
the charges against the Camden twenty eight were announced seven
felonies per person, meaning the possibility of decades in prison.

Speaker 4 (13:50):
Forty seven years would have been the maximum, And that
was true for I think most of us in the
twenty eight were facing forty seven. There were a few
that were facing a little bit less.

Speaker 6 (14:02):
Eventually, the camped in twenty eight made bail and convened
to strategize. They knew they had an easy way out
plead guilty and they'd avoid the maximum sentence, maybe even
avoid prison altogether. But as they conferred, they reached a
surprising conclusion.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
We wanted to trial. By that time, we had time
to get over the shock of the addressed and I was,
for one, I was ready. I wanted to do it.

Speaker 5 (14:29):
I think it started with Father Doyle, and you know,
he said that he thought that part of our witness
against Vietnam was our willingness to suffer for our beliefs,
and he thought it was important. The suffering was important,
just like Jesus's suffering was important to him in religious terms,
and so we should try to put the war on trial.

(14:52):
That was also, you know, everybody agreed with that. That
was unanimous.

Speaker 4 (14:57):
It was virtually inevitable that you are, we're going to
get caught. That was not the end of the opportunity
to further the cause of ending the war. That was
another opportunity to persuade people that the war was wrong.

Speaker 6 (15:13):
They wanted a jury to hear their case, not just
what they did, but why they did it.

Speaker 4 (15:19):
What we wanted was to persuade the jury that the
war was wrong and that it had to be stopped,
and that our action was an attempt to find a
jury who would set us free and end the war.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
The Camden twenty eight was going to put the war
on trial.

Speaker 4 (15:42):
Our idea was what's called jury nullification, where the jury says, yeah,
you broke the law, but we think you did the
right thing.

Speaker 6 (15:51):
Jury nullification means a jury can find a defendant not
guilty even if they totally did the crime in question.
The jury can rule that the law deserved to be broken.
In other words, the morality of the situation trumps the legality.
But jury nullification is a long shot, to say the least.

(16:12):
It basically never happens. For this to work, the Camden
twenty eight would need a hard break with traditional courtroom strategy.
They'd have to connect with the jury on a human level.
So contrary to what any reasonable defense attorney would advise,
they decided they'd testify and explain in their own words
why they broke the law. Some of them, Bob included,

(16:35):
even chose to represent themselves in a typical criminal trial.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
This is a terrible idea because well, you're not a lawyer.

Speaker 6 (16:44):
But then again, this was not shaping up to be
a typical criminal trial, and before it even began, there
was one more tragic twist.

Speaker 8 (17:00):
Slowly began to realize that Bob Hardy, who had been
working with us, had indeed been an informer.

Speaker 6 (17:11):
This is father Michael Doyle in an old interview. He
was Bob Hardy's priest and one of the Camden twenty eight.

Speaker 8 (17:17):
I had known him for some years and his family,
and I felt had been helpful to him, and indeed
he to me.

Speaker 6 (17:27):
Father Doyle, an Irish immigrant, had recently guided Hardy through
his conversion to Catholicism. After that, he'd been the one
to invite Hardy into the group planning the Camden raid.

Speaker 8 (17:38):
So realizing that he had been the informer all along
was hard for me, and I felt angry and upset
and basically betrayed.

Speaker 6 (17:48):
A few weeks after the arrests, Bob Hardy was inside
his house talking to a reporter. He told his son
Billy to go play outside.

Speaker 8 (17:56):
Billy, who was nine years old, went out and, having
nothing better to do, climbed a tree. But he fell,
and he fell on a fence and tragically was impaled
on the fence and he was a wonderful boy and
I knew him very well. I remember particularly going down
to see him in Cooper Hospital and sitting in the

(18:20):
waiting room was Bob Hardie and Michael Rymer, FBI agent
who was the Hardy contact for the CAMT in twenty
eight uh, and I remember the three of us sitting
on a couch. Somehow my mind was uh twisting in
some kind of unreality. There was only one thing that

(18:43):
was real, and that was a child was dying. And
I remember driving out of that hospital that day and
and banging on my no the h in front of
my car, and just time on to feel the the
feel of of something that was there and real. And

(19:03):
he died on the third of October nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 6 (19:12):
Father Doyle conducted the funeral mass at his church in Camden.

Speaker 8 (19:17):
It was an extraordinary funeral in the sense that the
family was there, and the Camden twenty eight was there,
and some of its more active supporters were there, all
of them supporting Bob Hardy and sympathizing with the family

(19:37):
and their tragedy.

Speaker 6 (19:40):
So even facing decades in prison from Hardy's betrayal, the
Camden twenty eight showed up anyway to support Hardy in
his darkest hour. Meanwhile, just across the aisle sat a
crowd of clean cut federal agents, some of whom Hardy
had never even seen before.

Speaker 8 (20:00):
It would be hard to believe that a host of
FBI agents who really didn't know Bob Hardy were there
out of genuine human sympathy. He just had the feeling
they were there to make sure of their man that
he held up for their agenda, which was to convict

(20:26):
the Canon twenty eight for j Edgar Hoover.

Speaker 6 (20:30):
In the aftermath of the funeral, Hardy talked to his
wife about the upcoming trial.

Speaker 4 (20:35):
I think he just had an attack of conscience and
he I think was touched by Michael's christian like behavior.

Speaker 6 (20:46):
Hardy decided he had to tell the truth, the whole truth,
that he hadn't just been an informant, but also a
provocateur helping the FBI make the break in happen. Hardy
was still going to testify, but not as a witness
for the prosecution. He was going to testify as a
witness for the Camden twenty eight. On February fifth, nineteen

(21:21):
seventy three, the trial of the Camden twenty eight began,
and the same federal building where they'd been arrested. Betty Medsger,
the journalists who had published the contents of the files
stolen from media, was assigned to cover it. The lead
prosecutor was John Berry.

Speaker 7 (21:37):
My principal concern going in was that it was going
to be the swactive Clow.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
Was it a frustrating situation?

Speaker 7 (21:43):
Not at all, Not at all. I really didn't care,
because the one thing we had in this case was
substantial abinism was not.

Speaker 6 (21:51):
On the surface. Barry's task looked pretty straightforward. After all,
the defendants weren't even pretending they hadn't done the crime. Plus,
the judge, the Honorable clarks And S. Fisher, was conservative,
an Army veteran who had been appointed by Richard Dixon.
In the defense's opening statement, Father Doyle asked the jury
who had really gone too far, the military that had

(22:13):
waged a brutal war in Vietnam for twelve years, or
the civilians simply trying to end it. He painted a vivid,
shocking picture of the brutality of war, referencing the violence,
bombs and bodies torn apart. But then it was time
for the prosecution to call its witnesses. John Berry asked

(22:34):
a long line of FBI agents the same questions. Did
you see people break into the office?

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Did they destroy draft board files? Yep?

Speaker 6 (22:44):
Are the perpetrators in this room? You betcha, there's a
couple dozen of them right there. Agent after agent testified
to the same basic facts. This went on for weeks,
so it must have been a nice break in the
monotony whenever Bob Williamson got up to cross examine the
very agents who'd arrested him. This was Bob's chance. He

(23:08):
stood in front of the court holding copies of the
stolen media files.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
We weren't allowed to admit those documents as evidence because
it couldn't be established, you know, what their provenance was.

Speaker 6 (23:24):
But he could still use them as he questioned the
FBI agents. We don't have an exact record of what
he asked, but you can probably imagine what the questions were, like,
why was the bureau spying on college kids? Why were
they tapping the phones of the local black panther office. Oh,
and why did the FBI want Americans to feel like
there was quote an agent behind every mailbox?

Speaker 4 (23:48):
The jury was paying attention to the questions that I
was asking, and they were noting that the FBI agents
were claiming that they had never seen or heard of
that anywhere. Those FBI agents must have been exposed to

(24:09):
some mysterious agent that destroys memories because they couldn't recall anything.

Speaker 6 (24:16):
The point of this wasn't to force some kind of
confession out of the FBI agents. The point was to
undermine them by reminding the jury of the abuses of
power described in the files. Abuses of power that violated
the constitutional right of American citizens to protest a war
they felt was unjust. So compared to what the FBI

(24:37):
had done, how bad was it really to tear up
some draft files?

Speaker 4 (24:42):
It made our whole case of what the FBI was
up to, that they wanted to enhance the paranoia of
the civil rights movement and the anti war movement.

Speaker 6 (24:54):
After more than two months of testimony from the prosecution's witnesses,
it was time for the defense to call theirs.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
Now.

Speaker 6 (25:05):
In order to really make their case, they were going
to need Judge Fisher to agree to some unusual motions.
The defense was planning to call a number of people
who technically had nothing at all to do with the
Camden case. They weren't really there to testify about Camden.
They were there to testify about Vietnam. This is from

(25:26):
a private letter which Bob wrote to Judge Fisher two
months into the trial.

Speaker 4 (25:30):
All of us need courage. Now you the defendants, the prosecutors,
the jury, but perhaps right now you do most of all.

Speaker 6 (25:43):
He framed the trial and the judge's role in it,
as a matter of personal courage. He told the judge
that he was undertaking a fast, a tactic he'd learned
from Gandhi. But Bob's fast wasn't a public spectacle. It
was intended as a personal message to the judge, a
demonstration of courage which he hoped the judge would reciprocate.

Speaker 4 (26:04):
I would not have undertaken this if I did not
believe that you are capable of demonstrating this kind of courage.
I will continue to fast until my sisters and brothers
and I are free.

Speaker 6 (26:18):
Bob says the judge checked in with him frequently throughout
the trial, that he seemed genuinely concerned for his well being,
and while will never really know exactly what the judge
was thinking, his actions were encouraging to Bob and the
Camden twenty eight.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
As the case moved forward, he started ruling more in
favor of them, and as it turned out, he started
reading books about the Vietnam War who became genuinely interested
in what was happening.

Speaker 6 (26:49):
It helped that the defendants presented themselves as respectable, conscientious citizens.
If the judge had been expecting a rabble of pot smoking,
foul mouthed hippies, what he got instead was a group
of normal people expressing reasonable, principled opposition to the Vietnam War.
Even John Barry, whose job was to put the Camden
twenty eight in prison, seems to have liked them on

(27:11):
a personal level.

Speaker 5 (27:13):
Mays, people were.

Speaker 7 (27:13):
Very hard to really dislike. I think that carry rot
away from century.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
But Barry had a job to do.

Speaker 6 (27:21):
He needed to convict the Camden twenty eight, and the
federal government needed him to prove the link between Camden
and the media burglary. Soon he'd have his chance. It
came when Bob Williamson called himself to the stand. He
wanted to tell the jury his story, but his decision

(27:41):
to do this came with enormous risk.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
We all knew that this would at least potentially open
the door for the prosecution to start asking me, as
they had with other defendants who had taken the stand,
asked questions about my a prior involvement in other illegal activities.

Speaker 6 (28:05):
Bob told his story how Gandhi and Martin Luther King
Junior had inspired him to work with the poor and
to oppose all forms of violence. It was inspiring stuff.
But then, of course came the cross examination, and John
Barry wasn't interested in Gandhi, he was interested in media.

Speaker 4 (28:24):
So John Barry started immediately in asking me questions about
other actions. And I said, I'm not gonna I'm not
gonna talk about that. I'm not gonna help you prosecute
my friends. So then all the lawyers are standing up,
you know, trying to get the judge's attention.

Speaker 6 (28:42):
Was At this point, Judge Fisher had every right to
tell Bob answer the question or you'll be held in
contempt of court. If he did, Bob would have three choices.
He could tell the truth, he could commit perjury, or
he could refuse to answer and spend the rest of
the trial in jail. But Judge Fisher didn't do that. Instead,

(29:05):
he addressed John Barry, and the.

Speaker 4 (29:08):
Judge just looks at the prosecutor John Barry and says,
mister Barry, it's clear he's not going to answer the question.

Speaker 6 (29:16):
Move on.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Bob was off the hook, at least for now.

Speaker 6 (29:22):
Soon it was time for the other Bob, Bob Hardy,
the handyman turned criminal turned FBI informant, turned tool supplier
turned witness for the defense. Initially, the camp in twenty
eight had considered an entrapment defense, arguing that the government
had essentially baited them into their crime. The problem with
that was, of course, they hadn't needed much baiting. They

(29:44):
totally wanted to commit this crime, and.

Speaker 4 (29:47):
Trapman would not have applied in our case because none
of us were reluctant to break into that draft board.
But certainly they did everything they could to make sure
that that action, you know, happened.

Speaker 6 (30:01):
Nevertheless, the government had done just about everything in its
power to make sure the Camden twenty eight broke the law.
In fact, there had been two occasions when the team
had seriously considered calling it off until Bob Hardy came
through with the tools they needed to keep going. Hardy
had also given them crucial advice like teaching them how

(30:21):
to use a glass cutter. That glass cutter and other
tools that Hardy supplied had all been entered as evidence,
so the Camden twenty eight brought them into the courtroom
to prove that the FBI had been instrumental to the
break in. One by one, Defense attorney David Carris picked
up the tools and asked Hardy where they came from.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
They made a pile of all of the stuff that
the government had paid for that we used in the
brake in, and then another pile of the stuff that
we had brought.

Speaker 6 (30:53):
To our own one pair of bolt cutters, FBI pile,
one hammer FBI, one roll duct tape. Well, actually that
came from Hardy's personal toolbox, but the walkie talkies the
team used during the break in those had been supplied
by the FBI.

Speaker 4 (31:11):
I think they bought a ladder so that we could
practice ladder climbing, which cracked me up. They thought we
needed to practice out of climb a ladder.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
When the crew needed a portable drill.

Speaker 6 (31:27):
One FBI agent had actually gone to his own house,
gotten his own drill and given it to Hardy. It
was starting to look like the FBI had been the
driving force behind the whole operation.

Speaker 4 (31:39):
The government's pile was way bigger.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
It was a nice visual point.

Speaker 6 (31:45):
The defendants pile ultimately consisted of just four things, two
drill bits, a quote small flat piece of metal, and
a single can of V eight juice. I have to
assume that they threw that in there for comedic effect.
Next to that, in the middle of the courtroom for
all to see, was the proverbial mountain of evidence that
the FBI had facilitated a federal crime.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
In a trial this.

Speaker 6 (32:16):
Long, you have to do something to break the monotony.
The Camden twenty eight often began the morning by asking
to commemorate some unusual event or anniversary.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
With a moment of silence.

Speaker 6 (32:27):
On March eighth, nineteen seventy three, they asked the judge
if they could begin the day by observing the second
anniversary of the media burglary.

Speaker 7 (32:35):
I said, you are you know I must respectfully persist
on this wise, I said, somehow seems to me to
be totally inappropriate for a federal court to be commemorating
the anniversary of an unsolved federal crime. So I judge
looked at me, and he goes strike much recon and

(32:57):
the defense glad like, yeah, you flying won.

Speaker 6 (33:05):
One thing was clear, things were happening in this courtroom
that don't usually happen in courtrooms.

Speaker 7 (33:11):
A woman who was testifying, and basically she said, well,
I can't express I can't express my views and words
that have to do with music, and he allows for
playing this good plot for about ten minutes.

Speaker 6 (33:25):
Yeah, that one might have been a little overboard, putting
aside the occasional guitar player. Other unconventional witnesses were much
more substantive. A psychiatric specialist testified about the effects of
war on the people experiencing at firsthand. The defense also
called Major Clement Saint Martin, a former draft board administrator,

(33:47):
which may seem like an odd choice, but he'd.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
Actually seen enough to realize that the system was racist
because he could see the people getting drafted were poor
and of color, and disproportionate to the you know, their
percentage of the population, wildly disproportioned in some cases.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
And so he quit.

Speaker 4 (34:12):
Somebody asked him, you know what he thought of people
breaking into draft ws. He says, if they do it again,
I think I might join him.

Speaker 6 (34:19):
Another witness for the defense was Tron Hongtoyet, a woman
who had emigrated from Vietnam. She took the stand and
described life in her homeland before the American invasion and after.
In the name of liberty, she told a silent court room,
you have destroyed my country. Then came the defensive star witness,

(34:41):
Howard zen Zen hadn't yet written his famous People's History
of the United States, but he had helped publish the
Pentagon Papers, newly leaked documents which showed the American government's
true rationale for the war. That made him the perfect
person to explain to a Camden, New Jersey jury that
the US war machine was guilty and the Camden twenty

(35:03):
eight were innocent.

Speaker 4 (35:06):
So he went into a lot of significant detail and
just hammered home the point that while the government was
telling our government was telling us, the American people, that
this war was being fought to fight communism and to
keep Vietnam Southeast Asia free, the actual motivation for the

(35:31):
war and the reason why it was being continued at
such great cost, had to do with the natural resources
of the region, primarily tin, rubber, and oil.

Speaker 6 (35:45):
By this point, the Vietnam Wars toll was staggering. More
than fifty eight thousand Americans had lost their lives between
the armies of the North and the South. A million
Vietnamese soldiers had died. We'll never know exactly how many
pavillions were killed, but by nineteen seventy three the total
was almost certainly higher than one million. In Zen's mind,

(36:08):
there was no doubt millions of lives had been cut
short and a nation burned for the sake of tin,
rubber and oil.

Speaker 4 (36:19):
And he kept saying that over and over again, tin
rubber and oil. It made a big impact on the jury.

Speaker 6 (36:28):
Betty Good, mother of one of the defendants, was in
the audience that day, even though she didn't approve of
what the Camden twenty eight had done. Missus Good had
lost her younger son, Paul, when he was killed in
action on June nineteenth, nineteen sixty seven. He was three
months shy of his twentieth birthday.

Speaker 4 (36:45):
She went out into the hallway and the other women
were there supporting her shoes, just bawling her eyes out
because it had just dawned on her that the government
had been lying to her too about why we were there,
and she just felt so betrayed.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
She lost a son over tin, rubber and oil.

Speaker 6 (37:10):
Zinn's testimony concluded on a Friday. Over the weekend, missus
Good asked her son if she could testify. She didn't
tell him what she planned to say, so on Monday,
her son called her to the stand and simply asked
her about her life. Missus Good described herself as a conservative,
someone who'd supported the war even after it claimed the
life of her son, but that had finally changed. The

(37:33):
following is an excerpt from Betty Good's testimony at the
Camden trial, read by Betty Metzger.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
And I still, even until last Friday, I still tried
to hang on to the theory that my boy died
for his country. I realized, you know, it was pretty
stupid of us. It was pretty stupid of us just
wallow all that business about America being over in South

(38:04):
Vietnam to save it from the Communist I really feel guilty.
I feel guilty that we have satisfide and let them
take our boys. Mister Zinn said it so beautifully when
he said that they were kidnapped literally and taken ten

(38:27):
thousand miles away from home. Why should these lives be
cut down for tin rubber and oil.

Speaker 6 (38:43):
To his credit, John Barry decided there was really no
benefit in the prosecution cross examining missus Good. She returned
to the gallery. It was time for closing arguments. In

(39:06):
his closing statement, Bob Williamson asked the jury what had
more significance pieces of paper torn up in a draft
board office or the bodies of soldiers and civilians torn
to pieces and the countless families torn apart by the
Vietnam War. And what was more offensive the Camden twenty
eight's nonviolent crime or the government's tireless work behind the

(39:29):
scenes to make it happen. In other words, Bob was
simply asking whose motives offend you more hours or theirs.
Judge Fisher told the jurors that if they decided there
had been a quote intolerable degree of overreaching government participation,
they could find the defendants not guilty. The trial had

(39:53):
already lasted over one hundred days by the time the
jury began its deliberations.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Probably more than anything else numb, you know, because it
had been such an exhausting experience. The jury was out
deliberating for I think two three days seemed like it
took forever. Nobody else wanted to say, Hey, I think
they're going to find us not guilty. I didn't say
it either, but I know that I felt hopeful. And

(40:21):
then we get a phone call to go to the
courtroom because the jury had reached a verdict.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
It was on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The word went
out through a telephone tree that a verdict was about
to come in, and so we all started driving to
the Camden Courthouse. The courthouse was starting to fill up
by the time I got there, and certainly all the

(40:47):
defendants had arrived. Some of them had their children there,
and the children were walking along the railings. I'm talking
about very small children.

Speaker 6 (40:56):
As we waited, two hundred supporters of the Camden twenty
eight packed the courtroom. Every seat was taken. People even
stood shoulder to shoulder along the perimeter of the room.
Judge Fisher entered and addressed the audience.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
He was concerned. He was concerned how the audience might react.
He saw how big it was, and he said, we
have to go through a lot of defendants and ask
the jury foreman about each one on each count.

Speaker 6 (41:30):
Judge Fisher asked that there'd be no interruptions or outbursts.
As the verdicts were read, he called the jurors in.
They took their seats.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
They'd looked very, very tired, and so he called on
the jury foreman and said, do you have verdicts? And
he said he did.

Speaker 6 (41:50):
The accused sat shoulder to shoulder at long tables near
the front of the room. They were two floors below
the very draft board offices they had raided.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Twenty one months earlier.

Speaker 4 (42:01):
So of course we're all very nervous in everything, but
of course the adrenaline was just going crazy in my body.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
The judge began alphabetically with defendant Terry Buccaloo, and he
asked the jury foreman what the verdict was on count
one for Terry Bucaloo, and he said, not guilty.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
There was this sort of.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
Stunned feeling, and then the judge went through each of
the of the counts and ask him the same question,
and each time the jury foreman said, uh, not guilty.

Speaker 4 (42:47):
There was a kind of a murmur in the courtroom,
and the judge says, to the four person, do you
have any other verdicts on any of the other defendants
that are different? On any of these counts. Foreman said no,
your honor. So at that point it was bedlam.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
First, it was like people were sort of gasping, almost.
The defendants were looking at each other in these at
first puzzled ways, and then very happy, very grateful prase,
I'm sorry, and they started embracing each other. And the

(43:34):
people in the in the audience were also stunned, and
they started singing Amazing Grace, and it was a little
difficult for them because many of them the tears were
streaming down their faces as they were trying to sing.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
It just sounded beautiful.

Speaker 4 (43:56):
I mean, it was just it was just such the
the perfect thought of, the perfect way to show our
appreciation for what had just happened.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
The judge was smiling as he left the room. I
was standing right behind the prosecutors, and then I realized
that the Chief Prosecutor, John Barry, had walked from his
position at the prosecutor's table over to the defendants. Everybody
had that look of and what do I do on

(44:30):
their faces, and he put out his hand to one
of them, and as he shook hands, the handshake turned
into an embrace of the defendant, and then he just
kept moving from defendant to defendant, and then he walked
back to his seat, and he turned around and he

(44:50):
said to me, it ended the way it should have ended.
I certainly don't think that any prosecutor in any anti
war trial, and perhaps any case that I've ever known of,
has said such a thing.

Speaker 4 (45:08):
I had to go to the bathroom, and so I
went into the men's room, and there was like four stalls,
and three of them were occupied, and one in the
center was open. So I went to that one, and
on either side of me was an FBI agent, And
after we all finished our business, they both shook my

(45:29):
hand and congratulated me and wished me luck.

Speaker 6 (45:34):
The defendants started to gather in the halls outside the courtroom,
where they were welcomed by singing supporters and a throng
of TV cameras.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
This was the scene in the courthouse lobby minutes after
the not guilty verdicts were announced. More than one hundred
relatives and friends were present as the defendant's two year
ordeal ended.

Speaker 6 (45:58):
Betty Good, who had lost one son in Vietnam and
had another son amongst the Camden twenty eight, couldn't believe
the outcome.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
She was practically giddy with relief. I thought it would
be a hung jury.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
But I didn't know any of the people accept my
son and know the most beautiful.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
People in the world.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
I had to go back and convert my husband, not
only my husband, but might family.

Speaker 6 (46:19):
But a husband's a good fellow.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
But you know he was, so he was who's afraid
to come today?

Speaker 3 (46:23):
Because he was afraid, you know, that verdict would be bad,
so he didn't come.

Speaker 6 (46:28):
It was clear to anyone watching this wasn't just a
victory for the Camden twenty eight. It was a victory
for every American who had fought to end the war
in Vietnam.

Speaker 8 (46:37):
We did it.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
After five years.

Speaker 6 (46:40):
We finally made sense to them.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
We've been having a guilty, guilty, guilty for five years
for proposing this war, and we finally got not guilty.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
The people understood.

Speaker 5 (46:50):
I was surprised, pleasantly, but still surprised. It was Sue
was really intense. This group of twelve regular people were
saying that we were right and the government was wrong.
Far as I knew, none of these people had ever
participated even you know, they hadn't even written a letter
to the editor against Vietnam, let alone done anything else,

(47:13):
and I'm like, damn, we are getting somewhere. It was
a great victory for the movement.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
I remember turning around and seeing John and Vonnie Rains
and they were all smiles and they were just very,
very happy. There were some tears on their faces.

Speaker 6 (47:37):
John Rains would later say that at that very moment
he decided he needed to go on a diet. He
wanted to look good in a suit in case he
was eventually arrested for the media burglary and went to trial,
because the Camden verdict gave him hope that a potential
trial might not send him straight to prison, but rather
give him a platform to tell the world that his

(47:58):
cause had been just and that the FBI's was not.
The Camden twenty eight were free, and it wasn't just
a victory for the defendants. It was also a massive
embarrassment for the FBI. When the trial began, the bureau
thought not only was this a slam dunk, but it
would also be an end to the media saga, a

(48:19):
satisfying conclusion where the g men put a whole bunch
of bad guys behind bars, just like they did on
that corny FBI TV show. Instead, the cracks originally exposed
in the media, burglary had only split wider and the
story still wasn't over.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
The whole damn dam was about to burst.

Speaker 6 (48:44):
Next week on SNAFU and flipping through the pages, I
noticed one.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
It said Cohen Telpro new List.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
As for the records at FBI headquarters, they were put
in a special file called the.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
Do not file.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Subsequently, we learned to find a lot of those people
where in fact not only agent Provoca tools but undercover officers.

Speaker 5 (49:07):
It's a very sad spectacle and that's just you know,
one of probably two Salzaners.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
So cases like throughout the country.

Speaker 8 (49:16):
There has never been a full public accounting of FBI
domestic intelligence operations. Therefore, this committee has undertaken such an investigation.

Speaker 6 (49:26):
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This
season of Snaffoo is based on the book of the Burglary,
The Discovery of j Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by
Betty Metzger.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan.

Speaker 6 (49:45):
Papelka, Mike Walbo, Whitney, Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and
Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martine.
Producer is Stephen Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen,
Sarah Joyner and Stephen Wood, with the dish writing and
story editing from Melissa Martino and Ed Helms. Tory Smith
is our associate producer. Nevin Callapoly is our production assistant.

(50:08):
Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.
Sensitivity consult from Olowa Kemi, Ala de Suiy, editing, sound
design and original music by Ben Chugg, Engineering and technical
direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia
Canny and Jimma Castelli Foley. Theme music by Dan Rosatto.

(50:29):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Rizak.
Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use
some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary nineteen
seventy one. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens
Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Finegold,

(50:49):
Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer and Bob
Williamson

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Co