On March 8, 1971, a group of unknown activists broke into an FBI office and stole more than a thousand FBI documents. Those documents made it clear that the FBI was systematically wiretapping, infiltrating, and manipulating the media in an effort to suppress dissent. The documents even went so far as to provide evidence that the FBI actually tried to convince Martin Luther King, Jr. to commit suicide.
Many of the groups 'under investigation' were actually peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and anti-war groups, but the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found them offensive or threatening.
The documents began to show up in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. They were in manila envelopes with no return address. Of course, Attorney General John N. Mitchell asked executive editors not to publish them because their disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.
Despite the effort to keep them under wraps, many of them were published. They revealed that the government had manipulated the fears of it's citizens to strengthen federal power.
One of these was the document that revealed agents trying to convince Martin Luther King, Jr. to commit suicide just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a tape put together from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining 'other' women. The agents threatened to make this tape public.
"King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," the FBI agents wrote in the anonymous letter.
