The Burglary by Betty Medsger

Author:Betty Medsger [Medsger, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-96296-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

AS THE MEDIA INVESTIGATION continued, some of the investigators’ techniques, as in the earliest months, seemed more like either make-work or incompetence than sophisticated criminal investigative methods. For instance, hundreds of staples were removed from copies of Media files that had been sent to journalists and others. With assistance from a staple expert, agents established that approximately twenty different types of staplers had been used to staple the five different types of staples they removed from the copies. Scores of pages of detailed reports on the staples were prepared, consuming considerable time. But because the earlier search to find the Xerox 660 copier that had been used by the burglars had failed to link the files to a particular copier and therefore failed to link them to any individual—after collecting sample copies from more than 4,000 such copiers—there was no way to use the staple evidence.

A wild-goose chase at Yale Law School was halted by the New Haven FBI field office. In October 1971, the director asked that field office to break into the Yale Law School office of civil liberties attorney Frank Donner. The effort concerned a stolen Media document that Hoover thought might not be authentic and may have come from Donner’s office and therefore might be a lead to whether he was involved in MEDBURG. The agent in charge at New Haven reported to Hoover that employees in the administrative offices at Yale Law School were not acquainted with Donner. The agent told the director that New Haven agents did not believe the file in question originated with Donner and that “it is not believed feasible to make an attempt to enter the office of Donner … to secure typewriter samples or make any further open or discreet inquiries.” Two months later, Hoover was back with the same request. This time the New Haven field office responded even more forcefully:

“Any attempted investigation of Donner’s material at Yale … in his office would be extremely inadvisable due to the potential for embarrassment to the Bureau.”

At the time, Donner was conducting a massive study, based at Yale, of government surveillance of citizens for the American Civil Liberties Union. Then as later, he was widely regarded as the leading scholar on government surveillance of citizens. He later wrote the leading books on the subject, including his 1981 landmark book The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. Donner had no connection to the Media burglary, but the stolen files and the information that later flowed from them during and after congressional investigations of intelligence agencies expanded the scope of his scholarly work on government surveillance. Just a month after the Media burglary, on April 22, 1971, he wrote a major article in the New York Review of Books in which he said the documents stolen at Media were evidence of a relatively new and “formidable way of responding to political and social movements—a system of political intelligence” as a means of controlling dissent. That public

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