NEW YORK, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Activists who stole documents from a Pennsylvania FBI office in 1971 that revealed domestic spying by the agency say they did it because no one else would.
Five of the eight burglars involved have revealed themselves in advance of the publication of a book by a former Washington Post reporter about the episode, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
The documents taken from the FBI office in Media, Pa., disclosed large-scale operations by the agency designed to engender paranoia and sow mistrust among anti-war groups and civil rights groups. Publication of the documents in major U.S. newspapers created a debate about limits of government surveillance similar to the current controversy stirred by documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
For the group, the break-in was a protest against the war in Vietnam and the FBI's attempts to suppress dissent.
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"When you talked to people outside the movement about what the FBI was doing, nobody wanted to believe it," said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, now 63. "There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting."
"It became pretty obvious to us," he added, "that if we don't do it, nobody will."
The group, organized by William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College, cased the office for months. One of them, Bonnie Raines, worked her way into the office by pretending to be a Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women in the FBI. Davidon died in 2013.
Among the documents taken that night was a 1970 memorandum from then-Director J. Edgar Hoover. It urged agents to increase their interviews of anti-war activists and members of dissident student groups, the Times said.
"It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox," the memo said. Another document revealed widespread surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.
The burglary and later revelations about FBI covert activities prompted "changes to how the FBI identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the FBI's intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice," said Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the agency.
