When Ed Helms received a book from his aunt as a Christmas gift in 2014, it didn’t just sit on his shelf. The actor, writer and comedian was captivated by the book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI,” by former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who was friends with Helms’s aunt.
“It was a heart-stopping thriller of this beautifully executed, high-stakes heist, and these citizens who realized that the only way to hold this government institution accountable was to break the law and put themselves at great risk,” Helms said in an interview. “There’s enormous passion and sacrifice in their actions, and it was deeply moving the more you know about this moment in American history.”
That moment, a heist in Media, Pa., on the night of March 8, 1971, was executed by eight members of the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI — a group of antiwar activists who stole documents from an FBI building. The documents revealed the extent of the FBI’s surveillance on citizens and exposed COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) to Americans.
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Tangled in this web was Medsger, who was 29 when she broke the story in The Post.
Helms, known for his roles on TV shows such as “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Office,” and in films such as “The Hangover” trilogy, covers the story on the second season on his iHeartPodcast, “SNAFU,” a “show about history’s greatest screw-ups.”
More than half a century after the heist, the revelations of the FBI’s surveillance of Americans remain relevant, Helms said. In April, Congress reauthorized the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which grants U.S. spy agencies the ability to collect, without a warrant, the communications of noncitizens abroad who are suspected of threatening national security. Helms also cited the rise of artificial intelligence and how Big Tech sites collect data to market to users, regardless of whether they want their information sold.
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“We wouldn’t know about COINTELPRO if not for this burglary,” Helms said. “To the extent that there is oversight of our surveillance institutions, a lot of it can be traced back to this moment.”
Helms said that years after he read Medsger’s book, the burglary came up as a potential podcast topic. He and the podcast’s team met with Medsger in February 2023, and she joined as an executive producer.
“This story had its talons in me,” Helms said. “With Betty on the team, this is when we realized that this is going to be wonderful.”
In an interview, Medsger said she found it “very gratifying” to see the team research the story and solicit her feedback.
“It was a fully collaborative effort from the beginning, and I felt deeply engaged with it,” said Medsger, now 82.
The first season of the podcast — a production of iHeartPodcasts, FilmNation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company, in association with Gilded Audio — premiered in September 2022 and covered the story of Able Archer 83, the NATO military exercise that almost caused a nuclear war in 1983. The second season, about the media heist, premieres July 10; a trailer for it was released Wednesday.
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‘An FBI agent behind every mailbox’
The new season, which will have eight episodes and two bonus episodes, begins with the “Fight of the Century” in Madison Square Garden between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
As the match unfolded, the commission orchestrated a plan months in the making: break into the building at 1 Veterans Square. The activists opposed the Vietnam War and were wary of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but they had no proof that the United States was acting as a police state.
To get the real story, the team had hoped to target the FBI office in Philadelphia, but it was downtown near City Hall, so they picked the FBI office in Media, which housed fewer than five agents. The team spent months canvassing the area.
The documents they stole in Media included a memo instructing agents to interview antiwar activists to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
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Helms said the heist and the revelations in Medsger’s story astounded him.
“It seemed like there was no end to the petty retribution or harassment of political enemies,” Helms said. “Every time we would learn about how much the FBI was phone-tapping people and orchestrating an effort to intimidate law-abiding citizens, that kept surprising me.”
In talking to the six surviving burglars, Helms said, he grew to respect their “deeply moving stories of personal sacrifice.” Included in several episodes are interviews with one of the burglars, Sara Shumer, who is being identified by her real name for the first time.
“I was blown away by their courage,” Helms said.
The commission sent two copies of the documents to members of Congress, and three to reporters. Four of the five forwarded the contents to the FBI.
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Betty Medsger did not.
‘The danger involved’
Two weeks after the break-in, Medsger arrived at The Post’s headquarters and received an envelope with a return address of Liberty Publications in Media, Pa. In the envelope was a letter that read: “Dear friend: enclosed you will find copies of certain files from the Media, Pa. office of the FBI which were removed by our commission for public scrutiny.”
Medsger said she was “shocked” when she read the documents.
“Every agent in the country was supposed to hire an informer that would work full time on creating files on Black people without regard to suspicion of crime,” Medsger said in an interview. “This was like a Black Stasi, and that was one of the biggest shocks.”
Post publisher Katharine Graham was “very frightened by the situation,” Medsger said, and Attorney General John Mitchell called Graham and Executive Editor Ben Bradlee to demand that The Post not publish Medsger’s story on the grounds that the documents could damage national security.
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Medsger said she did not have second thoughts about writing the story, but Post leadership was in uncharted territory. Helms explains in one episode that, until this point, no American newspaper had published government documents stolen by sources outside the government.
“I started to confront, within myself, the significance and the danger involved,” Medsger said.
Medsger turned in her story at 6 p.m. that day. The next morning, she said, the published piece gave Americans a new perception of the FBI.
“We learned that J. Edgar Hoover had a secret FBI within the FBI that was engaged in unlawful activity,” Medsger said. “It was extremely important that it become known, and shocking that it could go on without the public knowing.”
‘Surveillance is becoming so prevalent’
Medsger said she believes she was surveilled for a year and a half to two years after her story came out. The morning it appeared, when she picked up the phone to call a friend, she heard a harsh voice asking, “What are you doing?” Medsger never figured out who it was but assumed it was an FBI agent.
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“I didn’t realize surveillance could be that direct, and it must have been designed to make me paranoid,” Medsger said.
The revelations from the documents and subsequent congressional hearings had an impact. On May 8, 1976, the new FBI director, Clarence Kelley, publicly apologized for past FBI misconduct.
But Ronald Reagan campaigned in 1980 to undo new guidelines on surveillance, and as president, he removed many of the restrictions on national security inquiries, notably revoking an executive order by President Jimmy Carter that banned CIA surveillance in the United States. The passage of the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks led to more surveillance from intelligence agencies.
“I think that fear makes it possible for people to not care whether they’re under surveillance or their basic rights are being trampled,” Medsger says in one episode of “SNAFU.”
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Helms said government agencies need transparency to keep from infringing on civil liberties.
“Where is the line in protecting civil liberties versus allowing a government to operate in secrecy when it needs to keep a country running and protect national security?” Helms said. “It boils down to the public holding its institutions accountable and staying vigilant against overreach.”
Medsger said recent debates about the extension of warrantless government surveillance through FISA have kept the story relevant. “Intelligence agencies will always push for having an easier ability to conduct mass surveillance of Americans,” she said.
“Surveillance is becoming so prevalent, whether it’s the cameras on the street corner or in the grocery store,” Helms said. “The reality is that surveillance is something we should all be paying more attention to, and I hope people start think about that.”
