The second season of Helms’s podcast, SNAFU, covers the 1971 break-in at an FBI building in Media, Pa., and the Washington Post reporter who broke the story.
Bill Davidon, center, one of the Media burglars, with his family and a cardboard cutout of J. Edgar Hoover at the Powelton Village FBI in Action Street Fair in Philadelphia in 1971. When Ed Helms received a book from his aunt as a Christmas gift in 2014, it didn’t just sit on his shelf.
Helms said that years after he read Medsger’s book, the burglary came up as a potential podcast topic. He and the podcast’s team met with Medsger in February 2023, and she joined as an executive producer. “It was a fully collaborative effort from the beginning, and I felt deeply engaged with it,” said Medsger, now 82.
To get the real story, the team had hoped to target the FBI office in Philadelphia, but it was downtown near City Hall, so they picked the FBI office in Media, which housed fewer than five agents. The team spent months canvassing the area. “We learned that J. Edgar Hoover had a secret FBI within the FBI that was engaged in unlawful activity,” Medsger said. “It was extremely important that it become known, and shocking that it could go on without the public knowing.”Medsger believes she was surveilled for a year and a half to two years after her story came out.
“I think that fear makes it possible for people to not care whether they’re under surveillance or their basic rights are being trampled,” Medsger says in one episode of “SNAFU.”Helms said government agencies need transparency to keep from infringing on civil liberties.
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