Before the leak of the Pentagon Papers Vietnam War report and the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, eight anti-Vietnam War figures stole files from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and handed them over to the media, including one who went public with his role after half a century of silence.
The “San Francisco Chronicle” (San Francisco Chronicle) reported that on March 8, 1971, 26-year-old Ralph Daniel (Daniel) and his companions infiltrated an FBI office in the Pennsylvania suburb of Media (Media), after breaking through the door lock barrier Inch by inch, they pushed the door blocked by a metal filing cabinet, wore gloves, dug out documents, filled suitcases and left.
They chose the night of March 8 because Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier were fighting in the “fight of the century” at Madison Square Garden in New York, an event that had boxing fans across the United States and around the world glued to their TVs or radios. Boxing fans across the United States and around the world stood by their television sets or radios for hours, including FBI agents and police officers.
The five men and three women amateur thieves, aged 19 to 43, were all civil war activists. They were able to anonymously reveal to three U.S. newspapers and two political figures that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was conducting secret investigations and espionage missions against Americans.
The document thieves remained at large, and 50 years later, Daniel, who lives in San Rafael, California, is speaking out for the first Time under his real name about his involvement in that historic event.
“I’m very proud of what a small group of us did,” he said, adding that the FBI, Hoover and their peace-violation groups “should be taught a lesson” about their efforts to maintain national justice.
The theft of the documents and subsequent reports brought to light the FBI’s massive covert program from 1956 to 1971, shaking Hoover’s 37-year reign as FBI director. He also wrote anonymously to civil rights activist Martin Luther King. The FBI also wrote anonymously to civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. threatening to expose his extramarital affairs.
The aftermath of the discovery of the documents tarnished Hoover’s reputation, and he died of a heart attack in May of the following year at the age of 77.
The theft of the documents preceded major leaks of U.S. government secrets, including the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, and created a major stress test for press freedom, spearheading a challenge to U.S. public records laws.
The Pentagon Papers are a secret report on the U.S. Department of Defense’s assessment of the Vietnam War between 1945 and 1967. The WikiLeaks website has published anonymously sourced and network-leaked documents since 2006, including classified documents on the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, among others.
Daniels’ involvement in the document theft is linked to his anti-war activism. He was in graduate school at Temple University in Pennsylvania during the Vietnam War, and Philadelphia was a center of anti-war activism. He took time off from school and participated in demonstrations, for which he was arrested and briefly imprisoned.
In May 1970, he was recruited as a volunteer by anti-war professor William Davidon. Davidon kept a close eye on the FBI’s small office in Middia, convinced that the relevant paper trail would prove FBI malfeasance.
“Clearly we had struck a Gold mine,” Daniel said. The first document was mailed to two Democratic congressmen and the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times; the congressmen shelved it, and two of the major newspapers turned the information over to the FBI, except the Washington Post, which did not.
Would the Washington Post have written a news story based on the stolen information? Betty Medsger, a 29-year-old reporter at the time, received the package on March 23, 1971, and feared it was a hoax. She ended up writing the story, and she said she was willing to go to jail if she did.
At the same time, a major debate was underway. Attorney General John Mitchell called Washington Post managing editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham to ask that the story, based on documents provided by Daniels and others, not be published.
Graham agreed at 10 p.m. to let the story go to press the next day. For the next two months, as promised, Metzger received new information every 10 days to two weeks.
A few months later, the Washington Post had the same debate over whether to cover the contents of the Pentagon Papers, which was featured in the 2017 film “The Post: Secret Wars. Mitchell was imprisoned in 1975 in connection with the Watergate scandal.
When Daniel and the seven other document thieves met for the last time, they promised not to contact each other and to take the secret to their graves, and they kept quiet as the FBI pursued them everywhere.
Three days after the expiration of the five-year prosecution period in the United States for domestic burglaries, on March 11, 1976, the FBI closed its investigation into the unsolved case.
Daniel went to San Francisco to earn his doctorate in clinical psychology, then moved and practiced on both the East and West coasts for many years before settling in Northern California in 2013.
The case could have remained a secret forever, but Bonnie and John Raines, a husband-and-wife team of eight, met Metzger, a Pennsylvania newsman, for church and spilled the beans at a dinner party in 1988.
Six people were involved in the documentary “1971” directed by Johanna Hamilton. Daniels and another woman kept it a secret. Mastermind Professor David East and Pastor Renzi died in 2013 and 2017, respectively.
Former Washington Post reporter Metzger published “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.” in 2014. The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.” is a book by Daniel, who was interviewed anonymously and only confessed to his girlfriend, who is also a psychologist, after the book was published. Daniel’s first public interview under his real name was published on the San Francisco Chronicle website on the 7th.
The FBI has no comment on the 50th anniversary of the Mitya document theft case, which turns today. When Metzger’s book was published, an FBI spokesman told the New York Times that many things from that era, including the Mitya document theft, influenced the FBI’s handling of U.S. Security issues, reforming intelligence policy and execution, and the Justice Department’s approach to investigations.
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