Read Online The Burglary by Betty Medsger - Free Book Online Page B

was a simple lock on the door. It looked like security might be minimal. He remembers thinking, “ ‘Man, these guys have lost their minds.’ The only thing you could think was that they didn’t think at all about security. They must have thought itwas just too crazy, that no one would ever break into an FBI office, so they didn’t have to worry about it.”
    As he left the FBI office that day, he thought maybe Davidon was right. Maybe that office could be burglarized. Still, despite what appeared to be very weak security at the Media FBI office, Forsyth had lots of doubts. He recognized such a burglary would require a lot of meticulous testing and planning. Finally, he concluded that the potential value of what the burglary might accomplish was substantial. “I felt as though my enemy had expanded. It was no longer just the military machine that was waging a war in Vietnam. It was the United States government … and what it was doing, not just in Vietnam, but also to its own citizens. I wanted people to know that.”
    He decided the burglary might well be worth the risk. He called Davidon and—unaware, as all the other burglars were, that he was talking to him on a phone that was being tapped by the FBI—he told Davidon he could count on him to participate. While preparing for a draft board raid, Forsyth had enrolled in a lock-picking course. Now he thought those skills might be useful again.
    LIKE FORSYTH , Bob Williamson, a state social worker, had dropped out of college to work against the war. Like many other young people in the antiwar movement, he had put his education and career goals on hold to focus, like a soldier, on what had become his self-imposed patriotic duty.
    He found it easy to answer Davidon immediately. He didn’t need time to consider it. “I think it’s a great idea,” he remembers telling him. It simply seemed like an important job that needed to be done.
    Bob Williamson was a social worker for the state of Pennsylvania. Like Forsyth, he had dropped out of college to spend more time as an antiwar activist.
    WHEN DAVIDON ASKED Susan Smith to meet to discuss an idea, she expected a challenge. Less than a year earlier, he had introduced her to the concept of raiding draft boards, something she had never imagined doing. By late 1970, she realized that if she wanted to engage in resistance against the war, Davidon was one of the best people to know. She was grateful for his leadership, but she did not expect it to lead to the question he posed to her now: “What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?”
    Smith eventually said yes to Davidon’s question, but she did so with considerable reluctance and fear. She didn’t like this sort of thing. It went against the core of her philosophy about political life. Engaging in clandestine acts, not taking public responsibility for them, was in opposition to her deepest ethical sense.
    But as she thought about Davidon’s question, she too regarded the official suppression of dissent as so important that she decided it was worth risking her freedom to search for the truth about such suppression. She had grown increasingly concerned about the destructive accusations that people were mentally ill if they expressed concern that the FBI was spying inside the peace movement. She thought the assumption that some people blithely expressed—“Of course our government would not do that”—was dangerous and should be challenged with evidence. Like Davidon, she thought this problem should not be ignored or left to fester.
    She told Davidon she would participate.
    RON DURST WAS a graduate student at the time, preparing for a career in a health profession. Recently divorced, he was willing to take risks he would not have been willing to shoulder just a couple years earlier.
    Durst’s first reaction to Davidon’s question was “Brilliant idea.” He respected