The burglary : the discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 579-590) and index.

An account of the 1971 break-in of the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists cites their roles in triggering major changes in the FBI and confirming that J. Edgar Hoover had run a personal shadow-FBI. Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and, with the utmost deliberation, released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public's perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. At the heart of the heist--and the book--the contents of the FBI files revealing J. Edgar Hoover's "secret counterintelligence program "COINTELPRO, set up in 1956 to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States in order "to enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles, "to make clear to all Americans that an FBI agent was "behind every mailbox, "a plan that would discredit, destabilize, and demoralize groups, many of them legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups that Hoover found offensive--as well as black power groups, student activists, antidraft protestors, conscientious objectors.