By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
(CNN) — One day in early 1971, a young woman in glasses showed up at a regional office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations in Media, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles outside of Philadelphia. She had made an appointment with the head of the office, introducing herself as a Swarthmore College student doing research on opportunities for women in the FBI. The agents welcomed her in.
The visitor wore a winter hat that covered her hair. If any agent found it odd that she kept her gloves on the whole time she was there, they apparently didn’t mention it. She asked her questions and took her notes. When it was time to go, she bumbled her way into another part of the building, and the agents had to steer her back the way she’d come in.
The inquisitive student was not a student at all, but a woman from Philadelphia named Bonnie Raines. And while asking about women’s law-enforcement careers, she was learning about other things: the lax security in the Media office. Unlocked filing cabinets. The absence of any visible cameras or alarms. And, on her rambling way out of the building, a glimpse of a room with a second exit, though that door was barricaded by a large cabinet.
“They were very gracious, and I think kind of flattered that I was interested in them,” Raines recalled.
Raines was not any sort of trained covert operative. She was a day care director. Her husband, John, was a religion professor at Temple University. But in late 1970, another professor named William Davidon, who taught physics and mathematics at Haverford College and was a nuclear disarmament activist, approached the Rainses with a bold request: Would they consider breaking into an FBI office?
Had anyone other than Davidon asked, Bonnie Raines said, they probably would have dismissed the idea. They were already involved in antiwar activism, but getting caught in an FBI burglary would likely mean life in prison, leaving their three kids to grow up without their parents. Still, Davidon was viewed as a brilliant tactician in Philadelphia’s antiwar circles. If he was proposing they burglarize the FBI, Raines said, he had to believe they could pull it off.
Plus, Raines was angry. The FBI was everywhere in Philadelphia, a nexus of organizing against the Vietnam War — and activists sensed the agency was working against them. “I was just so pissed off but also not feeling helpless,” she said. “I felt like there were things that just regular people like me and other people in Philadelphia could do to make a difference, and particularly to tell the truth about what the FBI was really doing and that the government was supporting.”
Keith Forsyth, who had recently dropped out of college to devote himself to protesting the war, also got a call from Davidon. “He didn’t have to do any selling to convince me,” Forsyth said. “I said, ‘As long as it’s the right group of people who know how to get down to business and keep their mouth shut, yeah.’ And that was that.”
On March 8, 1971, eight people — Davidon, the Raineses and Forsyth among them — broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and made off with more than 1,000 documents. The actions of the group that called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI changed the course of US history.
The break-in set off a chain of events that exposed then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive, illegal campaign to suppress dissent, and eventually led to the discovery of the bureau