Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI was an activist group operational in the US during the early 1970s. Their only known action was breaking into a two-man Media, Pennsylvania, office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and stealing over 1,000 classified documents. They then mailed these documents anonymously to several US newspapers to expose numerous illegal FBI operations which were infringing on the First Amendment rights of American citizens. Most news outlets initially refused to publish the information, saying it related to ongoing operations and that disclosure might have threatened the lives of agents or informants. However, The Washington Post, after affirming the veracity of the files which the Commission sent them, ran a front-page story on March 24, 1971, at which point other media organizations followed suit.

External videos
One Veteran's Square, Media, PA
video icon Stealing J. Edgar Hoover's Secrets, Retro Report, 13:36, January 7, 2014

"The complete collection of political documents ripped off from the F.B.I. office in Media, Pa., March 8, 1971" was published for the first time as the March 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, a journal associated with the War Resisters League. The documents revealed the COINTELPRO operation, and led to the Church Committee and the cessation of this operation by the FBI. Noam Chomsky has stated:

According to its analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1 percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were "manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter"; 40 percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and "leaving the military without government permission." The remainder [about 15 percent] concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.[1]

The theft resulted in the exposure of some of the FBI's most self-incriminating documents, including several documents detailing the FBI's use of postal workers, switchboard operators, etc., in order to spy on black college students and various non-violent black activist groups.

Some 40 years after their successful infiltration, some of the perpetrators decided to go public. In 2014, Betty Medsger's book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret F.B.I. was released, which contains the burglars' description of the burglary and revealed the identities of five of the eight burglars.[2] Filmmaker Johanna Hamilton also made a documentary titled 1971 (2014).

  1. ^ Chomsky, Noam (September 1999). "Domestic Terrorism: Notes on the State System of Oppression". New Political Science. 21 (3): 303–324. doi:10.1080/07393149908429874. DOI 10.1080/07393149908429874
  2. ^ Medsger, Betty (2014). The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret F.B.I.. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-96295-9.