Snafu Season 2: Episode 1: The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI
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What is the historic FBI burglary that sparked this season’s story?
This is an IHR podcast. Guaranteed human.
Good morning or evening or whatever time you're listening to this. Uh, I am here to share this week's throwback release, Snafu Season 2, Episode 1, all about Medburg. I am insanely proud of this season of Snafu. It's about uh a little-known group of ragtag activists who in 1971 decided to burglarize an FBI office. In Media Pennsylvania. In so doing, they wound up revealing some incredibly shady wrongdoing at the highest levels of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Yes, they broke into an FBI office. I mean, it is incredibly thrilling and exciting. And what I loved about this season, I had a chance to talk to all of the living burglars involved in the burglary itself. These are amazing heroic people and yet incredibly humble.
And it was truly an honor to meet several of them and and help tell their magnificently brave tale. This is episode one of SNAFU season two, The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. It's March eighth, nineteen seventy-one. And just about every human being on planet Earth is completely consumed by one single event.
Heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Mohammed Ali meet in New York's Madison Square the richest fight of all time. Is that more words? At least 25 foreign countries that show the fight on TV.
Mohammed Ali versus Joe Frazier. Better known as the fight of the century.
Listen to the roar of this crowd. I want to tell you this is going to be a spectacular evening. The tension and the excitement here is monumental.
A lucky 20,000 have scored tickets to watch the fight at Madison Square Garden. Anyone who's anyone is there. The VIPs include a couple of Kennedys, foreign dignitaries, astronauts who'd just returned from the moon. Ringside is a who's who of 70s icons. Ed Sullivan, Hugh Hefner, Diana Ross, Barbara Streisand, all here to see this guy.
A beautiful, beautiful red and white robe.
Ali, the former heavyweight champ, is battling to reclaim his title from current champ Frasier.
Ladies and gentlemen. There seems to be a mingling of booms along
As the opening bell nears, time stops around the world. People rush to their TVs and radios, city streets completely empty out. In barracks across Vietnam, U.S. servicemen huddle around transistor radios. Inside an arena in Chicago, an actual riot erupts when the projector breaks down right before the fight starts.
Muhammad Ali in the red trunks. Joe Frazier in the green trunks. They appear very light.
Which all means that some one hundred miles south of New York City in a small Pennsylvania town called Media, the streets are even sleepier than usual. Downtown is deserted. There are no policemen on patrol, no locals out for an evening stroll, and no one keeping a close eye on the entrance of a four story brick building that sits at one veteran square. So when the doors to that building swing open and two men and two women walk out, nervously carrying bulging suitcases and loading them into a car out front,
How did the 1971 Ali‑Frazier fight create the perfect distraction for the heist?
No one takes notice. Those four folks with the suitcases? Well, they're not leaving for a trip. They're part of a team of burglars who decided this was the perfect night to do something unthinkable. Rob the FBI. Break into their offices, steal every document in sight, and zoom off into the night with a trunk full of secrets. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. Last season we told you all about Able Archer 83, the nuclear near miss which could have ended the world as we know it. This season, we bring you Medberg, the story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI Snafu it exposed.
Um, it was a Tuesday. That morning I I arrive and as usual I go to the mail room first and pick up my mail.
This is journalist Betty Medzker. That Tuesday was March twenty-third, nineteen seventy one, two weeks after the Ollie Fraser fight. It began like any other morning. Betty woke up in her apartment in Washington, D.C. She had her usual breakfast, a couple of pieces of toast, took the city bus to work, and arrived at the Washington Post offices at 10 o'clock.
I'd been off for two days and so there was a huge stack of of mail.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the historic FBI burglary that sparked this season’s story?
0:00–3:42
2
How did the 1971 Ali‑Frazier fight create the perfect distraction for the heist?
3:42–8:09
3
Who were the Citizens Commission members that broke into the Media, PA FBI office?
8:09–12:41
4
What explosive documents did Betty Metzger discover in the stolen FBI files?
12:41–17:01
5
How did the FBI react to the leaked surveillance files and try to intimidate the reporter?
17:01–21:10
6
Why did The Washington Post decide to publish the story despite government pressure?
21:10–25:44
7
What were the immediate national repercussions after the story hit the front page?
25:44–30:44
8
How did this burglary expose the FBI’s secret surveillance network and change public perception of Hoover’s bureau?
30:44–34:18