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Before Watergate, there was Media 5
0 years ago, on the evening of March 8, 1971, while most of the world was transfixed by the heavyweight championship bout, the “Fight of the Century,” featuring the undefeated world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier and the indomitable Muhammad Ali, a group of eight Philadelphiaarea activists broke into the Media FBI office, located on the second floor of The County Court Apartment building located on the corner of Veterans Square and Front Street, in Media, PA. The burglars, of which there were eight, took just about every document from inside and made history.
writing her book. These included 35,000 files the received from a Freedom of Information Act request. This detailed how the FBI used illegal surveillance techniques to suppress dissenting speech and activities by people and organizations the agency viewed as subversive.
Media FBI Break-In Commemoration Event, September 1, 2021
The Media FBI office was one of more than 500 resident agencies located throughout the country. In these offices were files that circulated from the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., by then-director J. Edgar Hoover, who was then the first and only head of the agency since his appointment to the role in the mid-1920s. The burglars found the evidence they needed in the bureau office located in Media to support the widespread surveillance of Hoover’s FBI on American citizens. They copied the documents and mailed them to a senator, a congressman and major newspapers. Betty Medsger, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post at the time, was one recipient and The Post was the first newspaper to publish the documents. The documents sent to the public opened up a new chapter in the country’s history, as, a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the FBI identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the FBI’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice. On March 11, 1976, the FBI closed their investigation of the group’s burglary without conclusively identifying any of the perpetrators. The members’ identities remained a secret until early 2014, when seven of the eight who could be found agreed to be interviewed by journalist Betty Medsger, who authored a nonfiction book on the event, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. The Peace Collection at Swarthmore’s McCabe Library received the approximate 70,000 documents Medsger used when
26 | Winter 2021/22
Now, 50 years later, as the remnants of Hurricane Ida battered the region with one of the most dramatic and severe storms in regional history, the “burglars” reunited and returned to Media, PA, to participate in a commemorative event entitled “Medburg”, at the former FBI building, 1-7 Veterans Square, where the Fbi’s Counter Intelligence Program, better known as COINTELPRO, had been exposed in 1971. The evening kicked off with the unveiling of the Pennsylvania Historical Marker (pictured) commemorating the FBI office burglary outside 1-6 Veterans Square, Media, PA, and included speeches by Bob McMahon, Media Borough Mayor, and PA Historical & Museum Commission officials. Following, activists Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth, Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, who broke into
