The Burglary (58 page)

“Okay. Bring them in.”

The jurors filed in and took their seats. Kairys remembers searching jurors' faces for clues. Some of them established eye contact. A good sign, he thought. But, he realized, mostly they just looked wiped out.

The court clerk asked the jury foreman,
James Lomax, if the jurors had agreed on a verdict. “Yes,” said Lomax.

“How say you? How do you find the defendant,
Terry Edward Buckalew, on count one of the indictment?”

“We, your honor, find him not guilty.”

Asked about each of the other six counts as to Buckalew, Lomax responded “not guilty” six times.

The defendants, who were standing as the foreman read, some with their heads bowed at first, were now glancing at one another. Their faces were filled with surprise and hopeful could-it-be expressions.

Judge Fisher, apparently sensing a trend, interrupted the process. “Mr. Lomax,” he asked, “do you have any different verdicts than that on any count for any defendant?”

“None different, your honor.”

A slight smile creased the judge's face.

The courtroom was silent for a split second. Then there was an explosive gasp as the striking result was absorbed: all twenty-eight defendants had just been acquitted of all the crimes for which they had been tried.

Someone started to sing “Amazing Grace.” Neither the judge nor the prosecutor objected. It was clear neither of them considered it a disruption. People found it difficult, though, to sing through their tears, soon evident on faces throughout the courtroom.

The defendants moved, at first almost as if they were in a stupor. They could not believe what they had just heard. They hugged one another. Their faces were portraits of disbelief, relief, and, finally, overwhelming happiness.

As though in another universe, directly across from the defendants, the four prosecutors stood at their table, looking slightly out of place as they motionlessly watched the defendants' moving reactions to their unexpected triumph.
Carolyn Ellis, one of the assistant prosecutors, impulsively turned and hugged a spectator in the front row as she said, “Tell them congratulations for me.” And then she rushed from the courtroom.

Chief prosecutor
John Barry stood at his place at the prosecutors' table for a few minutes. Three defendants who were hugging one another realized, as they released their embrace, that Barry had approached and was standing in front of them. Most of the other defendants paused and watched in silence as this improbable scene unfolded. Barry, who had presented the case against them for five months, at first put his hand forward to one of the defendants and shook hands in what looked like a typical end-of-trial formal courtesy congratulatory gesture. But he and the defendant soon dropped this hesitant formal approach and warmly embraced. Awkwardly at first and then more easily, Barry moved from defendant to defendant, each time his handshake turning into an embrace. He had seemed testy at times during the trial and determined to get convictions. Now that had dissolved.

Barry returned to the prosecutors' table. There were tears in his eyes as he walked up to where I was standing in the first row, directly behind the prosecutors' table. We had never met, but he knew that, standing there with
pad and pencil, I was a journalist. He reached for my hand. As he shook it, he said, “It ended the way it should have ended.”

In numerous ways, the trial was historic. It was, said Supreme Court justice William Brennan, “one of the great trials of the twentieth century.”

LARGELY UNNOTICED
in the middle of this jubilant crowd celebrating this, the first acquittal of all defendants in any antiwar trial, were Media burglars John and Bonnie Raines. Like everyone else in the courtroom, they were radiant—smiling widely, thrilled, amazed at the verdicts, and shedding a few tears of joy. They had special reasons to be so happy.

This was the case that was supposed to have led to their arrest. These defendants had endured the threat of forty-seven years in prison for crimes the FBI had aided and abetted, all in order to find and arrest the Media burglars. John and Bonnie felt relief and joy for the Camden defendants. They also felt relief and joy for themselves. It was as though these defendants had been stand-ins for them—which, in a way, they had been.

As they quietly shared the warm spirit of the spontaneous courtroom celebration of the Camden defendants' victory and freedom, John and Bonnie couldn't help letting themselves wish, just briefly, that they might be arrested and have a similar trial in which their stealing and revealing FBI secrets would be on full display in a courtroom—their rationale for the burglary would be explained, their trove of important documents would be discussed. Their testimony, they dared to think, would change hearts and minds in the courtroom and in the public as news stories reported to the outside world what transpired during their trial. For people who had been keeping their involvement in the Media burglary a secret for more than two years by that time, and who expected to continue to keep it a secret the rest of their lives, as all of the Media burglars had promised one another they would, this was quite a fantasy.

John Raines let his fantasy of a great trial—a trial similar, he liked to think, to the Camden 28 trial—roll in his mind several times in the next few years. In his fantasy trial, he hoped the burglars would be represented by
John Doar, the distinguished lawyer who during John's summers in the South had played a powerful positive role there as an attorney for the
Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. As their attorney in the Media case, according to John's fantasy, Doar would help the burglars develop a defense that would make clear that they had burglarized the Media FBI office in order to reveal information to the public and Congress about FBI
practices that were illegal and dangerous to democracy—practices that suppressed dissent.

John Raines's fantasy was a mixture of hope moderated by fear: hope that if they were arrested they would have a good trial, and fear that they might actually be arrested. He thought he should prepare in case they were. He had gained weight in recent years and decided he should become a thin person. For about a year, he stayed on a strict diet of cottage cheese and fruit and lost sixty pounds. He is proud that he never gained weight again. He resumed playing tennis during that year of dieting and has played regularly ever since. Once he lost the weight, he bought a fine dark suit. If the need arose, he was ready to make a good appearance in court as a defendant.

John and Bonnie enjoyed thinking that if the Media Eight—what they assumed their group would become known as if they were arrested—went to trial, there surely would be a great concluding moment when they, too, would be acquitted for what they had done. They hoped a jury would recognize that the burglary they had carried out should be regarded not as a crime but as a service to their country.

WHEN THE CAMDEN TRIAL ENDED
, the Philadelphia FBI office was still investigating the Media burglary. In this third year of the MEDBURG investigation, FBI officials still claimed they were certain Grady was the leader of the burglars and that evidence would be found to link him to the Media break-in. After Hoover's death in May 1972, acting FBI directors had tried to keep the MEDBURG investigation on track, but bureau officials' attention inevitably was diverted by other crimes that were center stage in Washington by the time the Camden defendants were acquitted. In addition to the Watergate burglars facing trials, the top Department of Justice officials who played major roles in both the MEDBURG and Camden cases—Attorney General John Mitchell, Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, and Attorney General
Richard Kleindienst—had resigned their government positions and soon would be charged and eventually most would be convicted in connection with their roles in Watergate-related crimes.

As the Watergate investigations led to convictions of high-level officials in Washington, other officials in Congress and in the Department of Justice, informed by the Media revelations, were preparing for the next big Washington investigation: the first-ever investigation of the FBI.

18

T
HE MEDIA FILES
were the essential beginning—the opening of the door to the secret FBI. To the immense frustration of J. Edgar Hoover's closest bureau allies who assumed responsibility after his May 1972 death for protecting his secrets and keeping the bureau as it had always been, the door the Media burglars opened in March 1971 could not be closed. As it opened more, at first in small increments, the impact of the burglary expanded. FBI officials kept trying to push it shut, but that became impossible as more truth about the FBI's past—the secret FBI—became known.

When the bureau's secret
COINTELPRO programs were first revealed, it was clear why Hoover and his successors feared the bureau's reputation would be seriously damaged if those operations became known. From the Media files, people had learned that the FBI purposely encouraged the growth of paranoia, was consumed by a perceived need to monitor black people, and had spied on people for years without justification. Later, as a judge and then other officials ordered the FBI to open COINTELPRO files, Americans learned that some FBI operations aimed at dissenters went far beyond spying. Some were designed to hurt people physically and to destroy reputations by planting derogatory information that had been fabricated by the bureau.

How the records of the secret FBI were forced open after the Media files became known is a story of the persistence and dedication of numerous people in the face of strong resistance from the FBI. They included a journalist, members of both houses of Congress, members of the Socialist
Workers Party, and, ultimately, two attorneys general and a few FBI officials. A remarkable chain of events was in play in this effort. It was a rare, perhaps unprecedented, instance of an act of resistance by people willing to lose their freedom empowering government officials to do what generations of public officials had failed to do: exercise oversight of the FBI.

At first, Department of Justice officials worked shoulder to shoulder with the bureau, standing together as a united bulwark against efforts to expose Hoover's deepest secrets. But by late 1973, some officials in the department thought it might not be wise, or even possible, for them to continue to protect Hoover's secrets. They realized they could no longer blindly defend the FBI. They too wanted to know what was in those files that earlier Justice officials had ignored for decades despite the fact that the FBI was part of the department and, as such, came under the authority of the attorney general.

As interest in investigating the FBI grew, the relationships among the key players were uneasy at best. Relationships were uneasy between the FBI and Justice officials. They were uneasy between the top officials in the bureau and Clarence Kelley, who became Hoover's successor in July 1973. Kelley was pushed and pulled by three groups: the Hoover loyalists who wanted him, their boss, to join them in protecting Hoover's secrets from scrutiny by anyone outside the bureau, successive attorneys general who urged him to open the Hoover files, and some members of Congress who were edging toward accepting responsibility for oversight of the FBI.

For Kelley, those years were torturous. A person who didn't like conflict, Kelley was in the center of it constantly. He went along with the Hoover loyalists' defense of the past most of his first year as director. He publicly stated that Hoover had done nothing wrong. He defended
COINTELPRO, saying it was necessary during what he called a revolutionary time. Under pressure from the Hoover loyalists, he even asked an attorney general to seek a presidential directive empowering the FBI to continue conducting COINTELPRO-like operations. The attorney general refused. When compelled by members of Congress and Justice officials to open secret files, Kelley refused at first, and then did so, but very reluctantly, knowing the Hoover phalanx would, to say the least, make his life miserable. They did.
Occasionally, for instance, they gave him false or misleading information to use in remarks he made at congressional hearings. Later, embarrassed, he retracted such comments. Eventually, when he had more fully absorbed how Hoover had misused the bureau, Kelley, a former FBI agent and former chief of police in Kansas City, stopped being Hoover's protector. Eventually, he formally apologized to the American people for the FBI's past.

Even in death, at first Hoover seemed to win the battle for no more disclosure after the Media files were disclosed. Some members of Congress, as well as newspaper editorial boards, called for an investigation of the bureau immediately after the Media files were released, but most members of Congress were not yet willing to investigate or oversee the FBI. For instance, in April 1971, a few weeks after the first Media revelations, Senator
Gaylord Nelson, Democrat from Wisconsin, proposed the creation of a joint congressional FBI oversight committee. His resolution failed to muster support then and each of two more times he proposed it.