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 civilians. 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. "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 concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.
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. Filmmaker Johanna Hamilton also made a documentary titled 1971 (2014).
Members
On March 11, 1976, the FBI closed their investigation of the group's burglary without conclusively identifying any of the perpetrators. The members' identities remained a secret until early 2014, when all seven of the eight who could be found agreed to be interviewed by journalist Betty Medsger, who was writing a nonfiction book on the event: The Burglary.
Of these seven, five agreed to be publicly identified: Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines, Bonnie's husband John C. Raines (who, 10 years prior to the burglary, was a member of the Freedom Riders), and Robert "Bob" Williamson; the mastermind and recruiter, William C. Davidon, died in 2013 before the book was published but had planned to reveal his involvement, as well. The other two burglars who were interviewed for the hardcover edition chose to be identified by the pseudonyms "Susan Smith" and "Ron Durst". On March 7, 2021, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the burglary, Ralph Daniel of San Rafael, Calif., revealed himself to be one of the burglars.
The final burglar, Judi Feingold, had, unlike the others, fled across the country in 1971 and could not be found for 43 years. When she discovered that the other burglars were breaking their silence, she contacted Robert Williamson and eventually was interviewed by Medsger as well, which was included in the epilogue to the paperback edition of The Burglary.
Several months after the burglary, Forsyth and Williamson were also members of The Camden 28, a separate activist group which broke into a draft board to destroy documents, in order to impede the war draft and make an anti-war statement.