Betty Medsger : The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
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Speaker 1 (00:37):
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Report at gmail dot com and let me know what
you think of the show. Okay, tonight we have a

(01:19):
very special guest. This is the show I've been trying
to do for a while, very fascinating woman named Betty Medsker,
and she's written the book called The Burglary, The Discovery
of Ja Hoover's Secret FBI. She's written a couple other
books too. One is called the Winds of Change and
uh framed Winds of Change Framed, and another one is

(01:43):
Women at Work. And she's from New York I think Connecticut,
I believe the home of Donald Trump. We were just
talking up there about Donald Trulpy Cavalle. But I'm going
to have a heart attack here on here today. But Betty,
are you there, my friend?

Speaker 3 (02:00):
I am. I am so very glad to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Thank you so much. We've been trying to get this
for a while. I've ben go into your Facebook page
trying to book this. But finally in one of my producers,
Keith Davis, who was a great at recommending the interesting
hosts and guests and topics, finally able to run down
your information for me. So thank you very much, Keith. So, Betty,
wy don't you tell us a little about yourself and
then we'll get into this whole story about the burglary,

(02:26):
about these activists back who burglarized the FBI, headquarters and
so documents out of there and uncovered the old CO
and SOL program.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Well, I'm a journalist, and I'm my top journalism for
a while. Also, I started out as a daily reporter
a small paper Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the Tribune Democrat, which was
actually a republished and newspaper despite that, then I worked there,
and then I went to Philadelphia and I worked for

(03:00):
the Evening Bulletin. And that's interesting when you later see
how your contact early on led to things that you
did later. When I was in Philadelphia, mayer main assignment
was that I was supposed to become a religion but
many of the people in the anti war movements at

(03:24):
that time were from religious organizations Bergen Brothers among them,
but also other various groups from Jewish, Cartstan Catholic faith
were involved in leading the anti war movement. So was
at that time that I met some of the people

(03:44):
who later became significant in telling the story of the burgery.
And then after Philadelphia, I went to Washington. I arrived
there in the nineteenth the very beginning of nineteen seventy
as a reporter at the at the Washington Post, and
it was while I was there that the Burghers sent

(04:06):
me the files that they had toln from the FBI office.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Oh they sped you, you said, they.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
Sent me, Yeah, they sent me. They after the burglary
occurred on the night of March eighth, nineteen seventy one,
and they then went out. There were eight of them,
and they went out to a farmhouse on a quicker
conference ground that was about thirty miles from Philadelphia, quite remote.

(04:38):
And they would go there after their day jobs every
day and read the file. And then after they had
done that for about ten days and had collated them
and chosen the ones that they wanted to send out,
they had been organized in packets and they sent the
first packet to five different people. I was one of

(05:01):
those five people, and I was a reporter to Washington
Coat at the time.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Okay, wow, sometimes when did you get a call? First?
You just get an envelope in a mail?

Speaker 3 (05:12):
No. No, the Burners were very smart wise burgers. They
planned very carefully. And while the fact that they weren't caught,
despite the fact that two hundred FBI agents were immediately
trying to try to find them, h and an intense

(05:33):
search that went on for five years, one can say
that the incompetence of the FBI in that search was
very important to the fact that they were never caught.
But it's also true that that they were very smart.
They were people who were gloved at all times. Uh,
And they would have never called anybody to say anything

(05:54):
about this.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Okay, So you get like a brown envelope, I suppose no,
we're turning to dress on it, right.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
Well, they actually it said Liberty Publications Media, Pennsylvania, and
there was no explained. But I had no knowing that,
but it seemed it took me a little unusual. And
so when I arrived at work it was a Tuesday morning,
and I found that package. It stuck out from other

(06:29):
PR relationships that sold my mailbox, and so I did
open that end will right away, and there was a
color letters and the color letter said uh. And the
other four people had received the same cover letters that way,
And it was a color letter explaining that on the
night of Marching that they had a group of them

(06:50):
who called themselves It's a wonderful name. They called themselves
the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, and that the
Citizens Commission had of groping into this small FAI office
in Media Pennsylvania and removed every file in the office,
and that they had done this because they thought that

(07:13):
the death the eyes as an arm of the government
was possibly likely in their opinions, suppressing descent. They were
strong activists against the war, and of course that was
what was most on their mind. And also the civil
rights movement, has it turned out and then with them

(07:34):
have been involved in the civil rights movement going south
every summer. But they had no evidence, and this was
their motivation, and it's really important. I mean, people say, well,
how in the world could a group of people decide
to risk decades in prison, the whole life away from
their family, those who had children, and they were motivated

(07:58):
while with the leader of the group had described as
a crime that he thought was taking place, and that
that crime being the suppression of descent, which he thought
was so precious. Uh, And he thought that if Americans
knew that their descent was being suppressed by the government,

(08:19):
that they would be very upset. Now to understand that,
I think it's important to realize that jak Or Hub
was an iconic hero of Americans. While a lot of
activists at that time had suspicions about whether or not
he was spin he was spying, and the suppression descent.

(08:44):
The country as a whole adored him. He was one,
truly one of the most popular people in the country.
At one time he had even considered running for president.
And but Bill had done the leader of the group
of physics professors and Habr for College. Bill thought that

(09:06):
if this was happening, people would be upset about it
and they want something done. And that turned out to
be the case. And now back to that morning, it
was a very unusual thing to have something like this happened.
Another piece of context about the time was that report

(09:27):
This is the first time that journalists had ever been
sent secret government files that had been stolen by someone
outside of the government who then provided them. Now, in
other words, the whistle blowers are usually from inside the government,
but even at that time, up until that time, there

(09:49):
or even very few whistleblowers and inside the government. So
also with almost no coverage of intelligence intelligence agencies, as
far as journalists were concerned, kind of free path, there
was no almost no investigative reporting about the FBI, with

(10:10):
one exception, and we could come back to that later,
and that was the same with Congress. There was there
were no intelligence oversight committees. Uh, the Attorney General was
the official boss, the director of the FBI, but in fact,
almost all attorney general had left the FBI directors do

(10:35):
whatever he wanted to do. Cantion that just a few
years earlier had been an exception to that, and so
that Robert Kennedy but Jay who were in the FBI
did whatever they wanted to do and had enormous power,
and no one covered them except to do the kind
of coverage that his enormous pr operations made possible, sending

(10:59):
out constant positive for these So I just want to
set that background. That's how unusual the situation was.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
It's so true, it was. It was such a different
world back in those days. In seventy one, I guess
I was like in the fifth or sixth grade, but
I was following the mc governent Nixon campaign. But but
I just think back in those days, you had TV
shows like Dragnet, you know, where the cops were, you know,
were the heroes, you know? And then every Sunday Night, right, it.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
Was on every night, every Sunday night.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Every Sunday night.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Yeah, a very very popular show edited by the network ABC.
They it available for him to edit it. I was
part of the agreement of their joining the show.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
Right whole different world back in those days been so
go ahead continue.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
Well. So I was surprised, to say the least, when
I started reading the cover letters. But one thing. There
was no name attached to it, of course, and they
said that they were providing these files. There were fourteen

(12:12):
in that initial package. They were providing them to a
group of us in the hope that we would want
to make them public, and that I forget that they
had authors that they would make available. I had to
be a little concern that I was dealing with hopes

(12:34):
at that point, because it was so unusual, and especially
when I got to the first file. The first file
contained a phrase, an expression became emblematic of the media burgery.
It was a file that described instructions to agents to

(12:55):
behave in such a way that they would make American
was paranoid. That's the actual description, and that it enhanced
paranoia with how it's described and makes people think that
there was an fbiye agent behind every mailbox. And I realized,
of course that that was a pretty startling statement. So

(13:20):
I continued reading and the next file was a description
of a program that which in operating in Philadelphia and
was describing how it was operating, but also said that
it was part of a national program. And this was
something that also became a thread that ran through everything

(13:43):
we eventually learned about Hoover, and that was his obsession
with black Americans. And the program that was described in
that initial file was a program where every FBI agents
were supposed to hire informers to do full time informing

(14:07):
to them on black Americans. And when I say black Americans,
I don't mean people who were suspected of crime, of
people who had any kind of record of violence or crime,
but just black people in general. And there was a
list of the paper of the places where people black

(14:27):
people should come under surveillance the corner store, their schools,
their libraries, bars, restaurants, classrooms in high schools, and colleges.
I mean, when you read it, it was a description
of the places where the average person might go any

(14:51):
day of their life, and that's where the informers were
supposed to go and then write reports on black people.
And then it turned out there as another file style
out that, uh, every as I mentioned, every FBI agent
in the country was supposed to hire an informer to

(15:14):
report to him. They were all hymns at that point
on black people, except in Washington, d C. Where every
FBI agent was supposed to hire sit full time informers
to report to them on a regular basis on the
activities of black people, and black students were a particularly

(15:36):
significant target every campus. There were documents in the original
AUB that spelled out they were supposed to establish informers
on every campus in that area of Pennsylvania. So that
also was going on again elsewhere in the country. So

(15:58):
the racial aspect of it was knowing something to read.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Now, how old were you when you receive this document?

Speaker 3 (16:06):
Okay? How old? Nineteen seventy one, nineteen seventy one, I
was twenty nine years old.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Okay, Now, now you pulled this document and you're reading
about a police state. Were you in shock? Or was
this because when I'm hearing this, I'm terrified I'm hearing this. Now.
What was your emotion when you're reading this?

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Well? Was I was shocked. I did keep speaking until
I got to later doctor. I remember I've been a
reporter in Philadelphia, and so I started seeing named of
people that I had covered or until I realized this
probably is real. So I was in shock. I went

(16:51):
out to I had there was a culture of it
who covered specialties off the corner office, off the newsroom,
and I was as soon as I was done reading them,
I went out into the to the National Jet and
I told him what I had received, and they had
just had a call from the UH ken man named

(17:14):
Ken Cloth and who was the national UH staff reporter
who covered the FBI and the Justice Department, and he
had called from UH the desk up there in the
press room outside the Justice Department asking if we had
achieved any of those falls, and people on the desk
that said no. But as soon as I walked out,

(17:35):
they were like, that's probably how that he was talking about.
And reason he placed that call was that he knew
from his.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Okay, yeah, we just lost Betty again. That's time the
quote has totally dropped UH. And we might have said
FBI so many times calling again now, oh my goodness,
or maybe there was something on her and that would
be terrible, because this is a fascinating story, is incredible
we have with us tonight's Betty metzter H And it's

(18:05):
the story of the burglary. Uh, the discovery of Jhggar
Hoover's secret FBI and let's see it. We're calling again
here and now so we can get her back. I
hope her phone didn't just die out altogether over there.
Let's see Betty Metster. Coming up next week, we have

(18:27):
Tom Secker. We're gonna be talking about the the FBI
bombing at the World Trade Center, the first one back
in like ninety three, man about his theories about that.
Coming up after that, we have Donald Kessler. And what
I'm gonna be talking to Donald Kestler about is his
book about the US Secret Service. And whilstome we talking

(18:51):
about Adnaka Shog. He wrote a book about ad Nacha
Shogi as well. He's a fueld surprised one in a
New York Times best selling author and he just wrote
that story about how, oh, you know what I have
to say, glad we here and do it. And uh,

(19:12):
we're gonna be talking to him he wants to about. Yeah,
we're gonna be talking to him about his new book
that just came out where he interviewed the you know
what's going on, I'm not getting through it or all
type of range maybe of my internet's now I would think, yeah,
something or something. Something's wrong here, guys, something is wrong,

(19:34):
that's for sure, because they ain't. You're getting through that
all at the contact it's added, try again, something very
very wrong, unusual. I don't know what to do with me.
Have to just play it. I'm not getting through it, Betty.
Something that is very strange here, h you go to

(19:54):
that plus try that that shouldn't be there. Okay. Oh,
we're not getting through at all, man, and I'm only
getting nervous about this. Okay, let me check this number again, wanted. Okay,

(20:15):
she's in the context. This is the number here. Okay,
we're calling her. It's bouncing again.

Speaker 4 (20:22):
Ah boy, sir, that she's not on over there. I
don't think to be able to get through. There's something
very stranger. Maybe she can call me. It's like a
message her on Facebook and she can try and get
through to me here. Okay, let's try and getting through
over here.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Sorry about this, guys, Just we totally lost the call
on skype here. I'm not getting through and very unusual
because my skyboard's pretty darn good and I don't have
these problems. Ok Hey, she's calling me. I's be great.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Hey Betty, I lost her on the phone. I'm trying.
I called back on Skype. Is this good? No?

Speaker 1 (21:03):
This is great? But like twenty times I was trying
to get through, I couldn't get through.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
I didn't get a ring.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Sorry, Well, you want to know what you sell off?
Better not tell you audio sounds Hunt.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Okay, we'll stick with Spike.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
Take great off. Thank you Lord, Thank you Jack. Because
I hate talking for two hours. Let me tell you I'm.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Pretty low text here. I'm glad we between the two
of us we managed.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
But what appened. I was getting worried there because we were
just talking about the statement. Next thing, you know, we
lose Betty. So where do we leave off about that?
You knew some of the people that were in the.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Sky I was going to the question of authenticity, and
the Post reporters knew that these two members of Congress
from McGovern and Para Mitchell had gotten the same files
that I had just received, and that they had turned
them into the FBI ball Some of them had held

(22:01):
put out announcements saying we think that there should be
questions raised about the FBI, but we don't want to
have anything to do with this crime, and therefore we're
giving the FBI these files. So the FBI when they
when Ken described the files I received, they said, yes,

(22:22):
they are FBI files and you must not publish them.
So we had our confirmation at that point that they
were authentic, and from that point on, I'm off working
on the story. But what I didn't realize as I
worked on the story was that throughout the afternoon of

(22:46):
the Justice Department, John Mitchell. John Mitchell was the Attorney General,
and some of your viewers may remember John Mitchell. This
is a Nixon administration we're talking about, and John Mitchell
later went to prison because of his involvement with another burgery,
of the Watergate burgery. But this day in seventy one,

(23:08):
just a couple of years before that, he's desperately trying
to prevent the Washington Post from writing a story about
these Stone files. What we didn't know, and I didn't
find out until many years later when I got the
thirty four thousand page investigation of the burgery under the
Tree of Information Act, was that the New York Times

(23:32):
and the Los Angeles Times were the other two people
who had gotten a file, and they too had turned
them in, not with any public announcement like the member
of Congress, but they had turned them into the FBI
and not written about them. And that also, all of
that goes to show again what the culture of the

(23:54):
time was like, that everybody who received and realized that
they were very important, but was so intimidated by the
power of Hoover and the FBI. I just thought that
this was none of the press's business to be writing
on anything like this. So, although you asked me how

(24:15):
I felt, I was shocked, But I also was naive
because of One of the things that comes out of
how young I was at the time was that I
didn't fully realize the enormous power of the FBI. But
more than that, I was too young and too new
to Washington to be part of that culture of protecting

(24:37):
intelligence agencies. So to me, it's simply seemed like this
is very important information that the public needs to know.
And again, what was happening while I was doing that
was such the Attorney General was calling Ben Bradley, the
executive editor of the paper, Ben Begdicky and the national

(24:58):
editor of the paper, and Catherine, the publisher of the paper,
actually calling each of them more than once throughout that
afternoon trying to convince them not to publish the file,
and he said, as we've come to note since then repeatedly,

(25:18):
what is said when officials are trying to get people
not to publish is that you will in danger national security,
but then even stronger than that, that you will gage
your lives if you publish this. Unfortunately, it was possible
to read all of these files and to know that
that was that was not likely, not possible. There were

(25:42):
not the kind of files that were going to danger
national security. They were going to reveal operations against Americans
who were not the object of law enforcement and who
had done nothing wrong, and it showed the behavior instead
of the FBI. But what I also didn't know until

(26:02):
I had it in my story at six o'clock that night,
was that as of that moment, they assumed the story
was not going to be published. Katherine Graham did not
want to publish, and the legal counsel for the paper,
who had been part of the discussions all afternoon and evening,

(26:23):
also believed that they should not be published. And the
good luck that I had was that Ben Bradley felt
very strongly that they should be published and continued making
the case through the evening, and finally at ten o'clock,

(26:45):
the latest time when they could make a decision for
the next day's paper. At ten o'clock, Katherine Graham reversed
her decision and said that they should be published, and
it was published the next day on the front page
of the Washington Post and on other front pages of
paper that was received the Post wires. And that was

(27:05):
the first time that Americans had information about how the
FBI was operating. And one of the very strong reactions
that was almost immediate was from some members of Congress
who had never said anything against Jade Hoover, but also

(27:28):
editorial writers comparing it to the Stasse. That information about
the surveillance of black neighborhoods throughout the country, and also
the use of government informers on campus switchboard operators and
others that did cause people to think, this is like

(27:50):
a police state, and editorials were written that raised that question,
you know, how can this be in a democratic society
and we would have a law enforcement agency behaving like this.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
Yeah, let me interrupt you because we've got to take
a little commercial break. But people should know that the
Stasi was the East German Secret Police. That was why
it's happened. Everybody all over right, Yeah, well you know,
not everybody's all right, you know, watch everybody, but we
ared tonight. We're here with Betty metzger uh fascinating. Well,
thank you so much. She's the author of The Burglary

(28:28):
as well as Winds Have Changed, Change Frame and Women
at Work. And there's a link to each of these
books on the Opperman Report blogs. You can go there
right now. Sput on these books and read a little
descriptions on them and stuff like that. We'll be back
with more of a Betty Minster right after these messages.
And now a word from our sponsors, don't forget. The

(28:49):
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their Skype is a n U s h A s
ub A s H. Hey, welcome back to the Opera

(30:39):
and Report. I'm your host, proud investigator at Opera. We're
here tonight with Betty Metster, the author of The Burglary,
as well as Winds of Change, Framed and Women at
Work and the final links all those books on the
Operaman Report blog. Oh boy, now what first? I got
a couple questions for you. First of all, are all

(31:01):
these FBI documents? Are they available in the book?

Speaker 3 (31:05):
No, they're not all available in the In the book,
I do quote from from some of them, but the
you can google online and find quite a bit now
about them. Trying to win. Uh, there's a a publication,

(31:27):
Win Magazine. A little over a year after the Burglary.
Win Magazine put out an anniversary issue that had all
of the media files that have been distributed and that
is online. Uh. And it's a it's a very valuable resource. Uh.
And and I recommend it to people. And we haven't

(31:49):
gotten the co Intel Pro yet, but there also can
learn quite a bit about co and Tael profiles. Uh
that were for the most important discovery. And again I
guess that came out of the media files and you'll
find quite a bit about Cointelpro online. Now, can I
just come in on something you did? And I really

(32:09):
appreciate describing what Stosy was. I should have done that.
Stasi was this awful secret police of the East German
government and there were informers everywhere, family members spying on
family member's friend against friends. And what's interesting to me

(32:31):
is that that was so widely known in our society
and the fact that people immediately made that connection. You
mean that could be happening here when you describe what
was happening to black people, what was happening on campuses,
And then years later when we learned much more about
the vast array of people that it was happening to, that,

(32:55):
more than anything, making that connection with Stossy was propelled
the calls for the FBI to be investigated.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Yeah, there's a great movie in black and white. It's
a German movie with subtitles. I don't know the name
of it. Off the top of my head. But if
you could find it, it's a classic. I think it's
a Hulu all the time.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
Well, are you thinking of the lives of others?

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah, that's probably it.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's a beautiful movie. It came out
less than a decade ago, and as far as surveillance
is concerned, I think it's probably the best movie you
can find. It's truly excellent. It's a German made film,
and I think it won the Academy Awards. Very chilling,

(33:43):
very very chilling, very chilling. Okay, so continue with the story,
Go ahead. Where would you like for me to over
there a number of directions.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
You know, what I'd like to hear about the burglary
itself and how they pull that off and the details.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, it's pretty much by the way. I mean, maybe
I should describe also how I came to know who
they were, because they did invade Discovery forever, they didn't.
They were not known until January seventh of last year,

(34:21):
when the day that my book was published and Joanna
Hamilton's documentary nineteen seventy one, The Story of the February
came out. At a private showing that night in New York,
and then a few months later premiered at a Tribeca
Film Festival, but until then they were publicly not known.

(34:42):
What I discovered them was that many years later living there,
working there, and I hadn't been back for many years,
and so I filled up my schedule with appointments with
old friends and and acquaintances that I had known all
those years earlier. And the first night I was at

(35:08):
John and Bonnie Rayn's home. John and Bonnie Rains are
two of the eight Burgners, and when I had called
and said I was coming to town, they said, come
to dinner, and so we had a lot of catching
up to We weren't close friends then, but we've been
acquaintances and people who liked and respected each other during
those years. I'd been in Philadelphia in the late sixties,

(35:30):
and so we were catching up with each other. And
when we went to the dining room table a short
time later, the youngest of their four children, who had
not yet been born at the time of the Birdery, Mary,
came into the room to ask them a question. And
when she did, John said, Mary, this is Betty Metzger.

(35:53):
We want you to know Betty because many years ago,
when your dad and mother had information about the FBI
that we wanted to give to the American public. We
gave it to Betty and I was absolutely stunned. I
had never had any idea who the Burgers were, and

(36:15):
I certainly never would have thought that it would been
John and Bonnie Raynes, couple by that time living in
the suburbs. John was a professor of religion at Temple
University and Bonnie was an advocate for children's issues and
had been an executive at various public interests children's agencies.

(36:38):
And so we talked about little else the rest of
the evening, and that was the beginning of my desire
to write books. And they then went to the leader
of the group and told him that I wanted to
do that, and they had revealed the connection, and then
he got in touch with everybody else, and that was
the beginning of my project. And through all the years

(37:04):
that I've worked with them, even to this day, now
that they're out there speaking publicly and everybody, I am
still just amazed at what they did. The goal of
the entire thing was the public interest. It's sort of
an expression that lost its power. These were people who

(37:26):
decided that they were willing to risk decades in prison
for the public interest. And it was built Avid On
who'd gotten the idea, and he then got in touch
with the Reines and all the other people involved Peace
for Sights. Part time cab driver at the time who

(37:49):
had dropped out of college in Ohio, I worked full
time against the war. Bob Williamson, at st. Student at
Saint Joseph's Jesuit School in the city, who by that
time was working as a social worker to the state
of Pennsylvania, were also working as much as he could
against the war. Excuse me. Two people whose names who

(38:15):
told their stories but their names are not in the book.
Well won an academic, another one who was in graduate
school preparing to be in a health profession. And then
there was an eighth Burger who I never found, and
she's emerged in the past year, which is she has
a very different story from the rest of them, quite

(38:38):
remarkable story. I hope we can get to that. So
what happened was that everybody he asked, there was a
ninth Burger, by the way, somebody who dropped out right
before the burgery and who knew everything they were going
to do and never revealed them, but just interesting because
it certainly was frightening to think about the possibilities of

(39:01):
how he could have made it impossible. But they worked
from late December until March eighth, first planning strategy and
then casing, casing night after night in the neighborhood in

(39:21):
this old suburban town Media Pennsylvania County, seat of Delaware County,
and the FBI office was on the second floor of
a residential building. Of all things. It was a small
drick building where the first two floors in the basement
were office buildings some other government buildings like a draft

(39:45):
board office, and then on the two floors above were apartments,
and people lived in these apartments, and the building with
the front door was open and well lit at all times,
and you went up a central staircase that people in
these apartments went up and down at any time. So

(40:07):
there was no way that they could plan for what
might what those people might decide to do when they
were going to burgerize an FBI office. So for months
they watched the patterns when people came and went from
the building. And there was a courthouse. The county courthouse
was diagonally across the street. There was a guard twenty

(40:29):
four hours a day in the glass opening front door
of that courthouse, looking right out where they would park,
get out of their cars and go into the building.
There was no way they could guard against that. They
just had to hope that maybe he is his attention
would be diverted. They also watched the patterns of traffic,

(40:52):
the police patterns, when did the police do rounds, and
the people who lived across the street. They did that systematically,
beginning in early January until right before the birdery. One
of the first things that they did was choose a
night for the birdery, and that turned out to be

(41:15):
very important. At first, you know, it seemed as though
one night might be just as same as any other night.
But one of them, and they can't remember which one
it was, one of them remembered that they had read
that there was going to be an incredible boxing match

(41:35):
the night of March eighth, and it was going to
be boxing met between Muhammad Ali and Joe Fraser. Remember
that it was just an amazing event and it's still
considered the fight of the century, and it was big
for several reasons. First, Ali had been convicted for draftic page.

(42:02):
I believe it was six years earlier, and the boxing
commissions around the country had immediately cut him off, even
though that wasn't required that they do that. What they
had and he was very political and so a lot
of a lot of people in the sports world. I
loved him as a boxer, but they hated him politically,

(42:23):
and he in the meantime had spoken quite a bit
really around the world. Was it internationally known figure and
much loved figure. Nelson Mandela remembers waiting for news of
this boxing mesh from his prison in Robin's Island.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
This is the first one.

Speaker 3 (42:43):
This is the first when he had done some sort
of practice matches in Atlanta. This was the first one after.
It was the first one after he was convicted.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
It was huge, and it also it was played in
movie theaters.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
Well that's a yes, that's a very interesting point.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
First time.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
Well, there were promoters were making a lot of money
on this issue. Can imagine when the tickets became available
in Madison Square Garden. They were sold out within hours.
It was a capacity crowd. But the people who were
promoting it not an agreement that no American television network

(43:28):
or radio network could broadcast it. In the meantime, they
were selling the broadcast rights overseas so that people in
other countries were able to see it on their local networks.
But in the United States, the only way that people
could see it was if they happened to live near

(43:49):
any of the few theaters in the country where the
promoters were broadcasting it live. One of those was in Pittsburgh.
Brought the way and it was outside, it was driving,
and it happened to be a very cold night. But
people wanted to see this fight, and they were willing
to endure anything. But again, people were upset about that.
But the Burgers had decided that they would the fight

(44:13):
the Burglery should take place this night because they thought
there would be white noise from people watching listening on
their radios and televisions. And even though people couldn't see
it in the United States on their home, they were
still glued to their televisions and their radios. You know.
What happened was that they had full reporters who would

(44:35):
report between the bouts on the action that had just happened,
and you still had some of the sound of the fight,
and certainly the sound of the people talking about the fight.
So Keith forsythe was the person in the group who
was volunteered to do the actual break in. The rest

(44:59):
of them were wa at a motel about two miles away,
and the plan was that he was supposed to go
to the motel and do the break in and then
go back to the motel and tell, okay, the coast
is clear. So he had been teaching himself in the

(45:21):
brains add it how to break in from the locks.
He had gone and looked out at the outside of
the FBI door, saw what kind of lock it was,
went to a hardware store and bought two duplicates of
that lock, and one to take a part so he
could understand it, and then the other to break in.

(45:42):
And he thought he had it down so they could
break in in thirty seconds. But when he arrived at
the door that night, there were two locks, not one lock,
and the second lock was much more complicated and one
that he could not break in. And this was extremely upsetting,

(46:02):
as you can imagine. So he called back to the
motel and built Aviadun said come back, And so they decided,
in some very tense minutes that that Bonnie Rains had
done inside casing when she posed a couple of weeks

(46:24):
earlier as a college student writing a paper on the
hiring of women, and she had interviewed the agent in
charge of the office, and she was really in there,
of course, to scope out the entire area. And so
she said, you know, there is that other door that
opens into the hall, and it has this very large

(46:46):
filled cabinet in front of it, but it doesn't They
thought it probably didn't have a double log, and it didn't,
and they decided that despite the great risk of knocking
over that cabinet and the like the time that it
would take, that that's what he should do. So he
went back, but this time, instead of just having his

(47:08):
simple break in tools, he had a crow and he
it was a very slow, meticulous process. It was a
dead boat at top of the door he had to
break and it made a loud noise, and then he
had to stretch out of the floor and very slowly

(47:28):
break open the door. And while he was doing that
he heard this loud clank at some point sounded like
metal against metal. I thoroughly thought set a gun, somebody
cocking a gun. And finally he talked himself down and
said okay, I just got to do it. Finished, went

(47:51):
inside in the dark and there was nobody inside, clothed,
made the door look like it was closed, went back,
and then the rest of them came, four people in
the dark, each of them carrying two large suitcases, and
in the dark they took out every file from following
cabinets of deaths and put them in the suitcases, and

(48:15):
then came down and called called from an FPI phone
back to the hotel. Hotel said okay. Then the Burgers
who were driving the getaway cars came parked in front,
and they loaded the cars and they drove off to

(48:36):
the farm where they sorted the files over the next
ten days.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Wow, what an operation, man, It's.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
Still it seems just amazing that it could be planned.
And oh and by the way, I left out the
fact that while Keith was down there on the floor
with a program, he did hear the sounds of the
fight from radio televisions upstairs. And in fact, within the

(49:09):
next couple of weeks, as FBI agents interviewed people, including
in upstairs in that building, they said that they did
remember that evening, but that they were watching the fight
and that they weren't aware of anything else happening. So
the fact that they chose that night turned out to
be very helpful.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
I think, now, what about is there a statute of
limitations on his crime? Then?

Speaker 3 (49:33):
Yeah, Well, when Hoover had announced publicly shortly after the
files became public that he thought that they should be
charged with espionis, which is we know from recent cases
it was quite serious and on some Espian statutes there
is no limit on this on the statute. But Hoover

(49:58):
died when over a year later, and I'm not sure
who's responsible for it. But in the end, the charges
under which the statutes under which they would have been
charged were as statutes, and that expired five years after
the burgery, and the case was closed at that point.

(50:20):
But that's not publicly announced, so they had no idea
whether the statutes of limitation had had had run. But
they had made a promise to each other, and this
is a very important point we haven't mentioned. On the
last day that they met, ten days after the parigury

(50:43):
out of debt at that farmhouse. On that day, they
agreed to two things. First of all, that they wouldn't
associate with each other after that because they're concern that
the one could lead to rest of another. And the
other thing that they agreed to was that each of

(51:07):
them would take the secret of the burglary to their graves.
And when I met the Rains all those years later
and they told me this is the secret, they also
told me that that this agreement exists. And so when
I got back in touch with them a few weeks later,
I said, you know, will you talk to the others

(51:30):
about that promise you made and reconsider it and be
willing I hope to recognize that this is an important story,
an important piece of American history that's missing, and that
I would like to tell your story.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
Yeah, these people are heroes.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
Well, I think so we should say that also what
this led to, and it was the files themselves were
very important. But those kinds of things have a way
of dying down, especially at a time like the early
nineteen seventies when you moved from one big thing to another.

(52:14):
But for instance, three months later, the Pentagon Papers came out.
Daniel Ellsberg gave the Times in the post Pentagon Papers,
and that sort of overtook. There's the media files had
come out like every ten days to two weeks until
sometime in May, and then the Pentagon papers came out,
and there were many aspects of that that riveted public attention.

(52:40):
And then we had Watergate. But as it turns out,
there were a number of the efforts continued to move
in a quiet way to do something about what they
had what they had revealed. I mean, the first thing
that happened was the call by some members of Congress

(53:04):
and by leading editorial writers for an investigation of the FBI,
and everybody who called for an investigation, nearly everybody who
called for an investigation thought that Sam Irvin, Senator Sam
Irvin from North Carolina should be the person to lead
such a committee in an investigation. And he didn't respond

(53:28):
for quite some time. He's someone that went on to
great praise just a few years later as the chair
of the Senate Watergate Committee. But even back then and earlier,
he was considered the person who loved and defended the
Constitution more than anyone else in Congress, and so he

(53:50):
was urged over and over to do this, and finally
in late April he publicly announced, I'm not going to
do this. I think mister Hoover is doing a fine job,
and discus in stark contrast to the things that he
had said earlier about surveillance and what a terrible thing
it was in a democratic society. So what happened after that?

(54:17):
About a year later, a journalist named Carl Stern. He
was an NBC television reporter who covered criminal justice. And
Carl happened to be in the office of the Senate
Judiciary Committee. And while he was waiting for someone to
get a file copied for him, some person he had

(54:41):
met in the office said, look at this, and it
was one of the media files, and it was a
file that ended up probably being the most important file.
And all it was was a form to uh go

(55:01):
bit to be attached to a far label and at
the very top and big block letters was the word
Cohen kelpro And that meant nothing to Carl, and it
certainly didn't mean anything to me when I saw and
wrote about the child that was attached to it. And

(55:22):
at the bottom of this cover sheet.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
You know, let's stop there, because Cohen self and with
to take a break for another three minutes and forty seconds.
Uh So we'll get into that when we get back
from the commercial. Okay, but great stuff, man, h you're
my hero nors you my hero. Okay, we are here
with Betty Metzker, the author of The Burglary as well

(55:48):
as Winds of Change Framed and Women at Work. You
can get a copy of these books to go to
my website oppos dot com and uh click on the
link there and go straight to Amazon. Picked it up tonight.
We'll be back right after these messages. And now a
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(57:14):
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Speaker 2 (58:31):
Join Digital Forensic Investigator in PI at Opperman for an
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Speaker 1 (59:00):
Okay, welcome back to the Opperaman Report. I'm your host,
private investigator at Opperman. Don't forget the shows brought to
you by Audible dot Com. Go to Audibletrial front slash
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(59:21):
do this kind of work every time, every week. These
are kind of shows we do every week. Please visit
my website Operamanreport dot com and send us some feedback
if you like the show, suggestions for future guests at
Opperman Report at gmail dot com. We are here tonight
with Betty Medster, the author of The Burglary The Discovery
of Jaeger Hoover's Secret FBI. She's written a couple other

(59:43):
books too, uh Winds of Change, Framed and Women at
Work and uh, Betty's a very We're gonna thank people
like Betty for sticking their next out for us here
and and educating us by this kind of stuff. Everybody
throws the word intel pro around these days, but these
are the people that really did the hard work to

(01:00:07):
let us know about it. And so Benny would tell
us about cointelpro.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
Yeah, about the accident that uncovered it. I mean the
accident beyond the burgery itself. I was mentioning the fact
that Carl Stern, NBC reporter, was in the office of
the Senate Judiciary Committee when someone handed him that file

(01:00:33):
from the media file that said cointelpro and asked, Kim,
do you know what this is? And he said, no,
I've never heard of it. And at the bottom of
this color shaded said that it was a memo instructing
FBI agents to distribute the attached article, which was about

(01:00:55):
how college administrators should exert more control over anti work protesters,
how they should delivered it in through anonymous letters to
college administrators who are not friends of the FBI, and
that really struck Carl as unusual. He didn't realize that
the FBI was in the business of writing anonymous letters,

(01:01:19):
and so he decided to find out what co intel
pro was, and he wrote to the acting Director of
the FBI, Pat Gray, and to climb the Institute, then
the Athlete, the acting Attorney General Waterbate was having a
big impact at that point in creating a lot of
acting rather than permanent officials, and they turned him down

(01:01:43):
and again said, as they had said to the Washington
Post the day we received the files, that they co
Intel Pro must not be revealed because it would to
do so would in danger national security. And never explained
what that was, what that would mean. And so Carl

(01:02:04):
kept asking, and they kept setting you on. Finally the
attorney acting Attorney General said this is the end. I
will not deal with this any further. And at that
point and I think we're in nineteen late nineteen seventy two,
Carl sued under the Freeder of Information Act. The Freedom
of Information Nation had been passed in nineteen sixty six,

(01:02:24):
and no one had ever gotten anything out of the
FBI under the Freedom of Information Act because Hoover had
instructed FI officials to ignore any request that came in
under the Freeder of Information Act. So Carl sued, and
a judge ordered the FBI by the summer of nineteen

(01:02:49):
seventy three. I believe it was to hand over and
all Carl was asking for was the document of the
founding of co intail probe that would define what it was.
He wasn't asking for the files of the program itself,

(01:03:09):
and finally a judge ordered them to do that, and
they refused, and the Justice Department prepared to appeal, and
another emergency event took place in Watergate history, and it
was the night that was called the Saturday Night massacre,

(01:03:31):
when Nixon fired a series of attorney generals and their
successors one after the other because they refused to fire
the Watergate prosecutor. And by midnight, the person who was
Attorney General was a person who had just been Solicitor general,
and that was a Robert Burke. And Robert Borke is

(01:03:52):
known in history primarily for the fact that Democrats in
the Senate fought fiercely during the regular administration and successfully
to keep him from being on the Supreme Court because
of how conservatives they thought he was, and in fact
he was as an appeals Coriat judge. But during these months,

(01:04:15):
right after he became acting Attorney General, he decided that
co Intaeil should become public and he ordered the FBI
to provide the documentation to Carl and this was the
beginning of what you could call an avalanche of what

(01:04:36):
we came to learn about the FBI as what those
founding papers documented was that co Intel pro was a
series of operations, each guided against a specific community of people.
The first one against a communist, one against the Socialist

(01:04:57):
Workers Party, others again black activists, and they became more
and more nebulous. Or the last one was against the
New Left, which was just about any liberal that he
realized was out there being an activist and organizations, so

(01:05:18):
it was against It was directed against organizations and activists
as individuals. What was one of the things that was
important about COINTELPROW was that it was not the gathering
of intelligence for law enforcement purposes or for any constructive purposes.

(01:05:41):
It was putting informers in place to harass people. And
that harassment took many different forms. I described it as
going from crude to cruel to murderers. Involved doing such
things as breaking up having as a goal to break

(01:06:05):
up marriages by sending false letters to a partner about
the husband or wife and they're never finding out the truth.
And then it had more serious aspects to it, more
physically harmful aspects to it of setting group against group.

(01:06:28):
And this was especially true in the black community, and
it was most powerful in the Black Panthers, but also
in groups that were who were completely non violent. I mean,
in Hoover's mind, Martin Luther King's organization, Southern Christian Leadership
Conference was just as much of an enemy as the

(01:06:49):
Black Panthers were, and he paid equal attention to them.
So the idea was to destroy individuals, destroy organizations that
he thought had had bad ideas, ideas that he disagreed with,
and that included the women's movement, included the gay movement,
as small as it was at the time. And the

(01:07:13):
thing that was discovered that probably is most remembered was
his long and ugly campaign against Martin Luther King that
involved sending tapes in which he tried to convince him
that he should commit suicide uh. Because this was done

(01:07:36):
just a short amount of time before he was to
go to UH to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
He had made recordings of King's hotel conversations with women
he had met and sent the recordings to both King
and to Coretta King, his wife, and that was not

(01:07:58):
known until on the co Intel pro information started coming
out and once again, just as when the files first
came out, when this was learned, there were cries now,
were the FBI to be investigated? Now? Hoover did, and

(01:08:20):
many people will tell you who were involved back then
to say that the investigations never would have taken place
if who were been alive at the time. And I
think that's probably true because of the power was just
the threat was so great. The files that we've been
learned that he had on members of Congress and other people.

(01:08:41):
So what we learned came out gradually, beginning with what
Carl started revealing in nineteen to late nineteen seventy three,
and then actual co Intel profiles started to emerge little
by little, and then there was a tipping point. And

(01:09:03):
the tipping point was a story that cy Hirsch wrote
in The New York Times in December nineteen seventy four
that revealed that the CIA, in violation of its charter,
had massive domestic surveillance projects that had been going on

(01:09:24):
for more than a decade, and that also increased the anger.
The CIA was not supposed to be joined any kind
of domestic spine except as it related to objects of
their surveillance overseas. With enemy countries. So when that happened,

(01:09:44):
it truly was a tipping point. And within whek before
the end of January, both houses of Congress had passed
resolutions to create committees that would conduct investigations of all
intelligence agencies, and the one that became best, better known

(01:10:06):
and had the most impact was the Church Committee, named
for Senator of Frank Church from Idaho, and did very
significant investigations of all intelligence agencies and that led to
recommendations from those committees to Congress, and some of the

(01:10:30):
most important ones were the establishment of permanent oversight committees.
Oversight committees had never existed before oversight of intelligence, and
these investigations led to the terminent oversight by the House
and the Senate. Also led the Attorney General to make

(01:10:54):
a number of guidelines for intelligence for the FBI, which
came to the Attorney General, they ended up being much
less meaningful because every new Attorney General could change them
in whatever way or she wished to do so. And
maybe the one of the most important things that happened

(01:11:16):
as a result of the burglary was that in nineteen
seventy four, as we were learning more and more about
the activities the Dirty tricks and the violence things that
were done. Was the strength that Congress strengthened the Freedom
of Information Act. It hadn't been very very weak and

(01:11:37):
strengthened it so that agencies had to respond to be
They could still prolong it and make it very difficult.
It cause you to have to go to court to
actually get anything, but it did strengthen it quite a bit,
and that was a very meaningful reform that came out
of all of this.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
We make a couple of questions because that people on
here who felt that the Church Committee hearings were pretty
much like a whitewash as well, you have a lot
of good faith in them.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Now, the Church Committee was not a whitewash the church.
We had never had anything like that. Maybe what the
question was thinking about is what happened afterwards we were talking.
The Church Committee hearing started at seventy five and then
the final recommendations were seventy six, and so there was
a period there in the right in the middle of

(01:12:32):
the seventies where there was a lot of action, a
lot of reform taking place. But maybe what the listeners
is thinking about is what happened as of the election
of Ronald Reagan as president. After the reforms that had

(01:12:54):
taken place, even the removal of co intel, not just
going profiles, but political surveillance files at the order of
the FBI director, then we entered into a different kind
of period. It was the first presidential campaign where intelligence

(01:13:16):
agencies became part of the campaign. And one of the
things that Reagan said in his campaign was that if elected,
that he would unleash the FBI and give it back
with the power that the Church Committee and members of
Congress had taken away. And that did start to happen.

(01:13:40):
His first Attorney General, William French Smith, immediately diluted the
Attorney General guidelines and that the FBI at times then
started doing some of the same kinds of theory tricks,
never as bad as it had under Hoover, but some

(01:14:01):
that were very bad. And the pattern that started then
was that this would go on for a while, nobody
know about it. Then it would become public or there
would be a story and there would be a call
for an investigation, there would be a hearing, and the

(01:14:22):
information would become public of what the FBI was doing,
For instance, for the solidarity organizations in connection with el Salvador,
and then the FBI would apologize and there would just
be a mild slap on the slap of the wrist,
and no one was ever punished. And that was in

(01:14:46):
contrast to some of things that did happen in the
mid to nineteen seventies where some people were punished. Three
top officials, including the man who became Deep Throat Mark
Some but who, in fact, what people know is history
as much less heroic than we think from Deep Throat,
he was one of who was top aids, had proved

(01:15:09):
absolutely despicable co intel pro projects and was in fact,
along with another top aid, convicted for his unlawful activities.
And again one of the first things that Reagan did,
which had a very symbolic, important, symbolic and actual impact,

(01:15:32):
was to pardon those those two high high FBI officials
for what they have done.

Speaker 1 (01:15:38):
Oh really, I wasn't aware of that.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
Yeah, yeah, So that a lot of investigations took place,
even from not just in the in Congress, but also
uh in the Justice Department during during the late seventies,
and at times they were going For instance, the New
York FBI office had become just like the Philadelphia office

(01:16:02):
and some other major cities, it becomes so focused on
political surveillance co intel pro activities that other forms of
crime were hardly being followed, and this was when the
investigations went on. Then that became a focus on going

(01:16:24):
after those people in those offices and for whether they
had engaged in criminal activity, and there was pretty much
general agreement that many had. But then it finally focused on, Okay,
let's go only for the people at the top, and
then Reagan destroyed what had happened when that approach was

(01:16:44):
temporarily successful. And by the way, I mean one very
important co intel pro project that I should mention everybody
I think knows about Martin King. There's also something else
that was very extreme, and that was Fred Hampton, right

(01:17:07):
black panther leader in Chicago, who was murdered by Chicago
police officer. But the FBI was involved in the planning
of that to the point of having an informer in
the apartment ingratiating and stuff, and then drawing a map

(01:17:29):
to where the shooters should go, drawing an arrow Fred's
bid pointing out the side of the bid that he
slept on. They were directly involved in that, and then
the shooter I'm not the shooter, but the FBI informer
who made it possible had a letter of praise and
a financial reward for his role in making it possible

(01:17:52):
for Fred Hampton to be killed and then on a
lesser but incredibly awful level also or UH, an example
would be the false testimony planned by the FBI informers
being trained to give false testimonying that led to convictions

(01:18:16):
of people for for for a murder, including one person
in Los Angeles who served twenty seven years in prison
for a murder that he did not commit, all because
of the FBI. Uh, simply wanted to get rid of
him and didn't have truthful information, so made up information.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
And who was that? You remember?

Speaker 3 (01:18:42):
I'm sitting here trying to remember, like Geronimo Pratt, of course,
germ prowt.

Speaker 1 (01:18:50):
Ah boy, you know I had a Mark wrote on
the show, Yeah, former Weather Underground, and he said that
one of the is why he wasn't his charge to
be thrown out was because of cointel, pro FBI misbehavior
of kidnappings and stuff like that. Uh, do you have

(01:19:11):
any specific information on it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:14):
You're talking about the Chicago sermon case.

Speaker 1 (01:19:17):
Now I'm talking about the weather underground bombings in New
York City, he stated almost charges. He said because of that,
they were thrown out because of FBI misbehavior and kidnappings
and such a.

Speaker 3 (01:19:33):
Well, I certainly I cannot speak directly directly to his case.
That's for sure. One of the sleep it's interesting I
mentioned earlier. I mean, what he said is possible. I
just I just don't know. One of the things that
is interesting to note is that the being this kind

(01:19:58):
of agency, and remember we're talking really about a half century.
We're talking about from nineteen twenty four until Hoover died
at seventy two, where he was from the beginning forming
an agency that was built around his political hatreds is
one way to say it. But one of the most

(01:20:20):
important results of that, in addition to what did to
destroy dissent among many Americans, is that it prevented the
FBI from accomplishing its mission as a law enforcement agency.
I mean, for instance, there were many bombings in this

(01:20:42):
country in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies.
There isn't an instance of the FBI, despite all of
these informers that they had out there getting information that
led to the prevention of any of that crime. And

(01:21:02):
I find that rather remarkable. I mean, you would think
that that would be the goal if you're if you
have an army of informers here, that your goal would
be to prevent crime. Uh, and that was that was
not the goal.

Speaker 1 (01:21:19):
Well, do you think that they had enough agents in
there that they were just allowing these things to go on?

Speaker 3 (01:21:26):
I think that they were so that the mission was
so distorted, that the mission was so based on his
hatreds and a desire to destroy individuals and organizations that
people weren't trained in how to get actual information that

(01:21:47):
could have led to to arrest, but more importantly to
the stopping of violent actions that led to deaths.

Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
So do you think that even though they were so
entrench h it's all these leftist groups, right, and had
so many informants in there, so much agitators in there,
and that still they weren't aware of these I.

Speaker 3 (01:22:10):
Don't forget We're talking about them being entrenched mostly in
groups that were not doing anything, not doing anything violent.
They were people who were uh using their their right
to dissent, uh perfectly within their within their rights. So

(01:22:33):
the emphasis was just in going after anyone who had liberal,
let alone radical ideas, and in the end that the
meant that they sacrificed being a law enforcement agency, a
good law enforcement agency.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
Do you have any specific information on the infiltration with
the Chicago Seven?

Speaker 3 (01:23:01):
I don't. I don't. I mean, I've read h over
the years much about that. At the time of the
convention of the FBI, uh and the Chicago Police too,
certainly were infiltrating many of the of the groups that
were coming to Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
Yeah, NY come from New York, you know, as I
guess you picked that up right, But uh NYPD at
the time also had their own red squad you know.

Speaker 3 (01:23:35):
Uh so did the Los Angeles where you are now. Well, actually,
I think I think almost every every major city did.

Speaker 1 (01:23:47):
And did any of those documents come out the in
your work? They didn't come out in my work.

Speaker 3 (01:23:53):
I mean, my work is his focus completely on on
the FBI, and I was not researching what those police
departments we're doing. Well, I have read about it through
the years. I'm interested in the same way that any
other citizens might. I know that that was going on extensively.

Speaker 1 (01:24:14):
Okay, we'll come up to another half hour break here,
So we're here with Betty Metster, she walks through a burglary.
She's also written Winds of Change framed and Women at Work.
And we'll be right back with more of this after
these messages, and now a word from our sponsors, don't forget.

(01:24:36):
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(01:28:34):
I also want to thank William Ramsey who helps us
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the Opperaman Report. I am your host, private investigator at
Opperman Shure. Brought to you by audible dot Com. Go
to audibletrial dot com front slash Opperman Report get yourself
a free audiobook. We're here tonight with Betty Metzker, the

(01:28:58):
author of The Burglary as well as Winds of Change
Frames and Women at Work. And I got to tell
you we have been treated tonight to a real education,
you know, like a real valuable lesson in American history,
of the FBI and at a controversial time in our history.

(01:29:21):
And Betty, I can't thank you enough. Your presentation tonight
has been outstanding and I cannot thank you enough. I'd
like to ask you that where we are today, right,
how do you feel? Do you feel like the you know,

(01:29:46):
like we're in deep trouble now it's one hundred times
worse or that's where at the same level, or do
you think things have gotten better?

Speaker 3 (01:29:59):
Well? I don't feel so good, you know. I always
feel so good about working with these people who took
the little concept of citizen responsibility. So seriously, I know,

(01:30:21):
I always like to think that their story says so
much about the importance of asking questions. I mean, most
of us can never engage in a serious active resistance,
I mean don't have the courage, but at least we
can keep asking questions of all kinds, and we speak

(01:30:43):
or show Joanna's film nineteen seventy one, people ask say
what can I do? Sometimes for me it really comes
down basically so that asks questions and demand answers. When
I was working in the last few months of my

(01:31:04):
book on when Edward Snowden's files started coming out, and
Joanna and I both were keenly interested and were just
sort of amaze that here we had another person, this
one inside rather than somebody from outside government. But the

(01:31:24):
only way that we were learning all of this important
information was because somebody was willing to risk the rest
of their years to make the information public. And we've
learned a lot. I think many attitudes of polls, that

(01:31:46):
many attitudes have changed. I often think about what's the difference.
I think that the congressional action too uh peel back
on the essays ability to retain the records it's significant,

(01:32:11):
but there's so much that we learned that's not had
anything done to it by Congress or the Obama administration. Uh.
Surveillance of of Americans, but also surveillance of of our allies,
not just our also our allies overseas in massive numbers. UH.

(01:32:37):
And I find it, I find it discouraging that there's
been so little what feels to me like so little
reaction in this country. Fridge Schwartz, who was the legal
counsel to the Church Committee and was in charge of
the investigations, has written a book recently called Democracy in

(01:33:02):
the Dark, and he has called for a congressional investigation
of the NSA. And I think that you would readily
say that again, it should be all intelligence agencies. There's
no there seems to be no appetite for that kind

(01:33:25):
of thing now, no interest in Congress and saying, okay,
let's find out what is happening in each of these agencies.
We found out about torture in the CIA, there's probably
a lot more for us to learn about in the CIA,

(01:33:48):
the FBI, and NSA, and I don't feel an appetite
for that. And mister Schwartz believes that it will happen,
but it's going to take much much more time. I
think that it's a different time. And when the media

(01:34:11):
files came out, even though this went against the culture
of protection of intelligence agencies, there also was a culture,
a strong culture among a significant minority of people that
we should speak out against the war and raise questions

(01:34:33):
about the war, which was a new thing for Americans
to do. So that fueled part of the public and
also Congress to be willing to take the step to
say something needs to happen. This should not be going
on in a democratic society. I think also the fact

(01:34:56):
that the war was going on far away, and despite
some extremist rhetoric, there wasn't a sense among many Americans
that they thought endangered by the way. They didn't think
that the war was going to come home, and so
that also wasn't a factor in people being willing to

(01:35:21):
show more courage about investigating intelligence agencies. But now, I think,
despite the number of years that we are away from
nine to eleven, I think that there is the straw
and there certainly being told this continuously that the war
can come home at any minute. I think that that

(01:35:44):
is the existence of that fear among a significant number
of people also makes us less likely to say to
Congress something to be needs to be done. Off this
and I just have to say I don't I don't
have I don't have enough knowledge for understanding to know

(01:36:11):
what what's likely to have. Are we likely to become
more concerned and say that we do not believe in
massive political surveillance rather than targeted surveillance, uh, the endless
expansion that technology makes possible. Or are we going to

(01:36:36):
say this must change? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:36:40):
Okay, A couple of questions. Well, first of all, who's
going to call for this? Who's going to call for this? Uh?
You know, who's going to object to this? Uh? Surveillance
state we willn to now Uh. And even if people
people do object, But the media doesn't object at all,
and the Congress certainly doesn't object. You know here some
little looks service by Rampole the other night. You know

(01:37:02):
what I'm saying. It seems like that even the media
now and Congress, it's oversights, all this kind of it's
all rigged.

Speaker 3 (01:37:11):
Well, they're more reporters covering this than ever before, and
major major news media have multiple people covering theasing. But
that's also changed in very what I consider dangerous ways.

(01:37:33):
The the technology that is now focused on people inside
the government. Insider Threat is a large program that we
still do not understand the full dimensions of. But uh,
if it's believed that someone is in touch with the

(01:37:53):
news media, uh, they are there at any time. The
government has the capacity with federal employees to monitor their
their phone calls. I don't just I don't mean to
listen in, although they could do that, but I just
keep a rec careful record of everything that who they're calling,

(01:38:15):
who's calling them, how long they're talking. They federal employees
in Washington, Uh, where those tags that register when they
when they enter and leave their their their buildings. And
the same with the press in Washington. So for the
journalists who are paying close attention to this, uh, the

(01:38:38):
surround is it feels like a very tight circle and
makes this kind of kind of coverage increasingly difficult. And
there there are quite a few people that are quite
dedicated to doing it and do do very significant stories.
But the it is, it's the pressure on the journalist

(01:39:04):
and the sources inside is enormous, and the Obama administration
has increased it and brought charges against more whistle blowers,
I mean more un whistleblowers. Sounds like an extreme thing,
but I think if you were a potential whistle blower
right now in the federal government, you would indeed feel

(01:39:26):
as though there's a war on whistle blowers because it's
extremely difficult to figure out how you can get the
information out. You almost are you are placed in a
position where you have to take an enormous risk, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:39:41):
You know, it's interesting because the irony of it is,
you know, I had Richard Lambert, the FBI agent who
was in charge of the anthrax investigation. I had him
on the show. He's just recently proud of lawsuit against
the FBI and that he had written a memo criticizing
the FBI investigation to anthrax. And he left the FBI

(01:40:01):
went to work for the Department of Energy as in security,
and they took a lobbyist law. We're not allowed to
contact your old employers, you know, but he's in security,
he has to contact the FBI, is part of a
security job with the Department of Energy. They took that
fired him and raided his offices. So it's kind of
ironic that they would go after an FBI agent himself

(01:40:25):
who was normally on the other side. Yeah, but you're
absolutely right, it's terrible. Yeah. But now I have a
question for you when you see these cases today, right
when you see with these local plots, these terror plots,
and they arrest the guy for plotting terrorism, and then

(01:40:46):
it turns out that the people he was plotting with
were all FBI agents and they were supplying him with
a fake bomb. It seems like the whole thing was
an operation.

Speaker 3 (01:40:57):
Yeah, and there are quite a few of those. Is
a book it's called The Terror Factory, which is about
these plots that are largely manufactured. They authored has pretty
strong evidence by the FBI and informers. I come back

(01:41:18):
again to a large amount of inconfidence. One of the
things that I fear in what's come out of nine
to eleven is that the fear and the motivation to
stop anything everything was so great and the technology had

(01:41:42):
changed so much that law enforcement solved that they would
choose whatever technology they had to the max and surveil,
surveil everyone, and just suck in as much as possible,

(01:42:04):
whether you're talking about phone calls, mail, email, whatever. And
that that in itself has turned out to be the
creation of incompetence instead of instead of taking new technology
and figuring out how to shape it very well so

(01:42:27):
that it can target rather than take in massive everything
that it's turned law enforcement agencies into incompetent agencies, and
they in turn go back to lean on in order

(01:42:49):
to have an accomplishment. In the end, they lean on
informers too much justice as JEdgar Hoover did. And also
it leads to the creation of the kind of false
cases we're talking about, where the testimony comes out gradually

(01:43:12):
and we find that people were led into becoming something
that many, if not most of them, did not want
to want to become, and then they're arrested in the
process of being supposedly about to commit a terrorist crime.
There have been some documentaries that even included the video

(01:43:36):
in the cars as the informers were talking with the
people that they wanted to participate in the crime, and
where you saw that the people clearly were not interested,
and over days and days they were convinced by the
FBI agents that there would be a better life ahead
for them if they committed these crimes. Feel like you're

(01:44:00):
watching the mob at work.

Speaker 1 (01:44:03):
Yeah, I would agree with you. Now we're coming towards
the end of the show. Okay, it's six forty nights.
We got about ten minutes left and then we're going
to drop a couple of stations, but I do go
another hour. Would you like to stay and try and
take some phone calls and continue this because I know
you wanted to tell me also too about one of
the the burglars who had left the group and something

(01:44:24):
about that.

Speaker 3 (01:44:26):
The one who's left a group, and then the eightes
burglar would be found. I'd be happy to talk about
if you feel as interested in going ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
Sure, you kidding me. I'm loving this, Okay, I'm like
at the Edgeway. This is normally I'm interrupted all the time.
Let me tell you, I'm really really enjoying the story,
enjoying it. It's kind of.

Speaker 3 (01:44:48):
A that's a pretty awful start.

Speaker 1 (01:44:51):
But this is the kind of stuff that we're fascinated with,
and I know my audience is love. But we're going
to lose a couple of stations that were on in
about ten minutes. So okay, what would you want to
leave us within this last ten minutes?

Speaker 3 (01:45:04):
Yeah, I guess the most important thing is the citizens
being aware. The thing I worry about the most is
people sleeping, and either people being sleeping is because of
the culture that numbs them or just having developed a

(01:45:25):
lack of interest. I'm at a twenty year older said
I don't think I'll ever vote, and it wasn't an
angry statement, It's just a you know, like I don't
have any responsibility. And I think that the message of
the Burgers is that people can make it incredible difference
by asking questions and sometimes going far beyond asking questions.

Speaker 1 (01:45:52):
You think so still today because I get a lot
of people on here.

Speaker 3 (01:45:56):
Don't you think Slowdan's made a different no? Right?

Speaker 1 (01:46:00):
And even Cynthia McKinnie, you know, she she came on here.
I get a lot of people come on and they say, oh, yeah,
we can vote out the rascals, you know, that kind
of optimistic kind of attitude, which I love, you know,
and and there's a side of me that that would
love to But let's look at the election we have
right now. We're going to vote out the rascals. We're

(01:46:22):
going to vote in even Bernie Sanders, Uh, do you
really trust him and endorse what he's saying?

Speaker 3 (01:46:31):
Well, I want to know what he thinks about more
more issues. For one thing. I mean, I respect what
he's saying, and I like what he's saying. I don't
have much idea what he thinks about racial issues, and
that's that's a very important issue to me, and I
think that this society should be. But look, I'm old,

(01:46:51):
I've spent a lot, I've voted a lot of times,
and uh, most of the time I wasn't voting enthusiastically.
But right now I'm voting the same way, for instance,
that I voted. I imagine this will be true the same
way that I voted in nineteen sixty eight when most

(01:47:11):
of my friends were determined not to vote for Hubert
Humphrey because of how angry they were about his not
having more courage and opposing Johnson within the White House
on the war. But my chief concern then, and it's
a big concern now as far as whose president is concerned,

(01:47:35):
is the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court makes a
huge difference in whatever direction you care about. And so
I think that we be half as far as voting
is concerned, we have to have the Supreme Court in mind.

Speaker 1 (01:47:54):
Well, okay, so then what did you support Obama.

Speaker 3 (01:47:59):
I'm I'm talking personally now, Yeah, I supported Obama personally.

Speaker 1 (01:48:03):
Okay, but when okay, we put Obama in, But did
anything really change? It's the same policy because we had
on the book. Do you think there was any any
difference said that we benefited from Obama over Bush.

Speaker 3 (01:48:14):
Looking back, I think the things I think that things
would have been much worse with a with a Republican administration.
I mean, I don't like what's happened with the wars now,
but I think that that a Republican administration, back by
a Republican House and the Senate, that the wars would

(01:48:36):
have been would have been even even worse. I think
that in the last few months that Obama has been
a much stronger person in regard to some of the
issues that some of us cared about back then. But
I would to say, I don't have much for instance

(01:48:58):
right now. This is not my area of expertise right now,
by the way, and I'm talking, I'm speaking about my
personal opinions, But I I don't have much hope about
what will happen with in the in the in the
in the next election. I think that as it's going
right now, that whoever is elected is likely to be

(01:49:22):
a pretty strong hawk. So in that sense, I don't
approach this with a sense of hope, but I believe
it's terrible to drop out and that we need to
work in whatever ways we can. And uh as I said,

(01:49:43):
as far as my vote is concerned, my vote has
the Supreme Court uh as its as its goal. And
I guess that's my name is thinking right now. It's
on this.

Speaker 1 (01:49:58):
Yeah, I think I can. It does seem like our
vote does have some effect on these kind of social issues,
you know, not any kind of economic issues or foreign
policy doesn't seem to me. But I guess some of
these other issues we do have some effect well.

Speaker 3 (01:50:18):
And one of the things that concerns me is that
because Democrats in the House and the Senate after Obama
was elected didn't stand up and fight about issues that
if he had been a Republican they would have stirred up.

(01:50:38):
They're now in a week in position if they have
a Republican who engages in some of the same activities,
especially concerning civil liberties and very loss issue.

Speaker 1 (01:50:50):
Yeah, but don't you find like a lot of times
I think that they want to put a Democrat face
in there, and they steal more of our civil liberties
under the guise of this smiling face looking at us
like they would Bill Clinton, and even I hate to
say it, even Jimmy Carter. You know, we lost a
lot of our freedoms under Jimmy Carter as well. You know,

(01:51:12):
not that I would ever endorse you know, Reagan or
Bush or any of those characters.

Speaker 3 (01:51:16):
Yea. Well, it's very clear though that because Jimmy Carter
wasn't election that a lot of things happened under under
Reagan that would not have happened under Carter, very including
the reforms that were on pretty good path under under
Carter as far as as as surveillance was concerned.

Speaker 1 (01:51:38):
I love to get Carter in there now. I love
the way. Let's bring them back, man, this is the
Carter we need. Boy. Yeah, but even Carter doesn't seem
to be very optimistic about our situation in this country.

Speaker 3 (01:51:52):
No, pretty pessimistic from what I've been reading you.

Speaker 1 (01:51:56):
Oh boy, Okay, we'll come to the end of our
show here. Well, I'd like to take some calls two six, five, four,
eight nine four. We're with Betty Metster, the author of
the Burglary She's also written Wins of Change, Framed and
Women at Work, And I just have once again to
say that that if this is the first time you've

(01:52:16):
ever listened to this show and you're enjoying the show,
I really want to thank you and send me a
message at operaman Report at gmail dot com and let
me know what you think of the show. And also
visit the website Operamanreport dot com because we have a
members section there with all kinds of content in there
that doesn't make it on the air. It's all like

(01:52:38):
private content that I do. We interviews during the week
for members only, so I'd really appreciate you taking a
look at that and tell me what you think of that,
because we really want to welcome all the new people listening.
I'm very excited to have you on board. And Betty's books,
and Betty, we'll put these other books real quick. We
got about a minute before we addropt these in the

(01:52:58):
Stations and Women at Work and Winds Have Change. I
mean I did what I was well.

Speaker 3 (01:53:04):
The first book with Women at Work and Women at
Work is actually a photo book with text block. I
left the Washington Post to do freelance work. I left
in later in nineteen seventy three, and I spent a
year traveling all around the country taking photographs of women

(01:53:28):
in traditional and non traditional work roles. Women's movement was
very much alive at the time, and to my surprise,
I couldn't find any body of photographs that showed women
at work, and so that the only images that people

(01:53:50):
had were traditional work roles. And I particularly had children
in mind, although the book is not specifically a children's book.
So the message I wanted to convey was that women
can do all kinds of things. That I wasn't pushing
just the idea that women should go into non traditional things,

(01:54:13):
but that all of these roles were valid if people
wanted to do them. So you'll find a woman in
the lobster that I went to see with in Maine,
and a school teacher in Washington, d C. A nurse,
and also a surgeon. I mean, it's just a thorough
combination of women at work. And then that was an

(01:54:36):
exhibit that traveled around the country and other countries quite
a bit in nineteen seventy five nineteen seventy six.

Speaker 1 (01:54:44):
And you could for pictures yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:54:46):
I took the pictures myself. Yeah, yeah, I have a
bit of a career also as a photographer and mostly
photo my photography with that book for a couple of
years after that, before I returned primarily to teaching and
to writing. Was undealing on breaking down stereotypes and disability

(01:55:08):
was also an area that I worked with, taking photographs
of physically disabled people who lead independent lives, which was
a relatively new thing at that at that time. And
the other the next book.

Speaker 1 (01:55:28):
Let's take a break and we'll get through the other
books when we get back. Okay, great, But also two people,
it's a three minute forty minute break, the same thing
as this, okay, And also two people can call in
seven or two, six oh five, four, eight nine four.
Will be back with Betty Menster, author of the Burglary
Winds of Change frame and a photo book Women at
Work where she took all the pictures of stuff. And

(01:55:49):
we'll be right back after these messages. And now a
word from our sponsors. Remember all these shows on a
wake brought to you by Email Revealer dot You can
go to email revealer dot com and get a copy
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(01:57:16):
at Opperman Investigations at gmail dot com. Archival Revival, the
Christian Film Archive, is currently paying for vintage Christian films.
They are dedicated to preserving and restoring classic Christian films
and media. So if you have original prints, negatives, or
other film elements of classic Christian films, or you have

(01:57:38):
audio recording masters for classic Christian record albums, they want
to buy them from you. So email Archival dot Revival
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(01:58:00):
Their staff has decades of experience in handling and preserving
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know has these prints, negatives, recording masters, or other materials
from vintage Christian films, you can check out their blog

(01:58:21):
at Archival Revival dot blogspot dot com. Now, just so
you understand, Archival Revival wants to pay you for these films.
So you can look in your church addict in the
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these old films and those big metal containers sixteen milimeter

(01:58:41):
and thirty five milimeter. Archylo Revival wants to buy them
from you. So this is a sponsor that actually wants
to give you money and all you have to do
is contact them, tell them what you have. If you're
in the UK, or Island or Africa with these films
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they're going to deteriorate if they don't get into the
hands of Archibal Revival. So that's Archival dot revival at

(01:59:04):
gmail dot com, or the blog spot is Archibal Revival
dot blogspot dot com. Don't free. You can have your
ad played here at Oppermanreport dot com every Friday night
five pm and Saturday night five pm to seven pm
specific standard time, and on Friday nights too, we do
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(01:59:25):
a live monologue. The ads are very very inexpensive, and
they're also played in the Oppermanreport Member section. In the
member section, you can find all kinds of exclusive content
that you won't find anywhere else. It's as cheap as
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(01:59:47):
if you paypound me directly and you can get to
copy my book. I want to thank Sean Duff at
Straumanmusic dot com is an excellent musician, and I also
want to thank William Ramsey, who helps us produce the
show and book guests, who's an excellent author at William
Ramsay investigates on YouTube.

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