When I confronted an FBI agent, called him duplicitous, and sided with the priests

When I confronted an FBI agent, called him duplicitous, and sided with the priests

The corrupt case of the Harrisburg Seven and “Molly’

Never in my life could I have such a great opportunity to confront a person whom I abhorred.

And never could I express my animus toward the FBI agent whose code name was Molly, who saw his 20+ year career with the FBI careening off the rails because he hated two anti-war Catholic priests.

I was able to tell him what I thought of him since I was ending my short career with the federal government. And he made the mistake of not knowing that this was coming.

Allenwood Federal Prison — 1974

While I was in the process of securing my final certification for teaching in the early 1970s, I took a bureaucratic job in a federal prison camp in Eastern Pennsylvania that became famous for having Watergate criminals — and other famous people — incarcerated there.

The work was boring since I had no desire for a career in that area, but the people were fascinating from top mafia figures to some Watergate criminals and even the author of a fake Howard Hughes biography.

The inmates who were my assistants included a millionaire who was an administrative to a U.S. Senator, a lawyer who served as a chief of staff to a member of the US House, a lawyer who somehow became involved in defending a counterfeiting ring.

And I learned a great deal about organized crime from the nephew of Vito Genovese, one of the major crime families in New York City.

However, as I was in my final week of work there, I confronted Mayfield who was attempting to influence me with his exploits that some alleged bordered on the criminal.

And it involved a fake case that became known as “The Harrisburg Seven.”

Fathers Dan and Philip Berrigan

When Jesus Christ was quoted in the Sermon on the Mount, he said this, in part,

1 When he saw the crowds,* he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.

2 He began to teach them, saying …:

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they will be called children of God.

Book of Matthew, Chapter 5

Daniel and Philip Berrigan became children of God in the 1960s and 70s when they attempted to end the Vietnam War through peaceful nonviolent resistance.

Here is a short snippet of the life of Daniel Berrigan, who fought for social justice and was sent to prison in numerous cases because of his religious beliefs,

Philip Berrigan was no stranger to the prison system, having spent eleven years of his life in jail.  At one time, Berrigan and his brother Daniel were on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for destruction of government property and other acts of vandalism committed in protest of the Vietnam War.

An internationally renowned American peace activist, Christian anarchist and former Roman Catholic priest, Berrigan devoted his life to breaking down “prison walls,” in order to expose and oppose American militarism, the use of nuclear weapons, social inequalities, avarice, and police brutality.

In 1943, after one semester at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, Berrigan was drafted to fight in World War II. After the war, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Deeply affected by his exposure to the violence of war and the racism of boot camp in the South, he entered the Josephite Fathers’ seminary, in Newburgh, New York.  A religious society of priests, the Josephites are dedicated to serving Americans of African descent, dealing with the repercussions of slavery and segregation. Berrigan became active in the civil rights movement, marching for desegregation and participating in sit-ins and bus boycotts.

He was ordained a priest in 1955. In 1973 Berrigan married Elizabeth McAlister, a nun. As a result of this, the Pope excommunicated the couple, and Berrigan left the priesthood.

In the 1960s, the Reverend Berrigan took radical steps to bring attention to the anti-war movement. In 1967, he and three others—called the Baltimore Four—poured blood on Baltimore Selective Service records at the Customs House. As they waited for the police to arrive and arrest them, the group passed out Bibles. Berrigan calmly lectured draft board employees, saying, “This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina.” He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Americans who tell the truth.org

During this time, Molly became the FBI agent in Lewisburg, Pa. and Williamsport, where he oversaw the Allenwood prison. He developed tremendous antipathy for priests who engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience as espoused by Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King.

Here is also where his law-enforcement led him to the courtroom and he had to admit that he had conspired with a Lewisburg inmate to befriend and entrap Father Berrigan.

During my college years, I read the New York Times almost every day. The Penn State libraries had many copies of it on hand. That is where I first heard of “Molly,”, his code name — and ultimately “The Harrisburg Seven.”

Tbe “alleged’ conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger

The case that ultimately injured his reputation was one that he hatched with the help of a paid informant who was an inmate at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

The Times reported on Molly's testimony about his involvement in this conspiracy, which was ultimately dismissed,

["Molly,] an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, testified today that he supplied explosives manuals to a paid informer who “lent” them to one of the defendants in the Berrigan conspiracy case.

But [Molly] insisted that he never told the informer, Boyd F. Douglas Jr., to provoke the alleged conspirators or abet an alleged plot to blow up heating tunnels in Washington and kidnap Henry A. Kissinger, President Nixon's adviser on national security affairs.

The agent denied ever telling Douglas to suggest to the Rev. Philip F. Berrigan, one of the defendants, that a gun might be necessary for the kidnapping of Mr. Kissinger. He denied authorizing a Douglas letter to Sister Elizabeth McAlister, another defendant, in which the informer told the nun that he could produce a gun that could not be traced.

Also unauthorized by the F.B.I., [Molly] said, were letters in which Douglas seemed to be recruiting members of the peace movement for criminal acts. He said that Douglas never showed him a letter to a girl indicted in a draft board raid in Rochester in 1970.

Homer Bigart, “F.B.I. Agent Says He Supplied Explosives Manuals

to Informer,” New York Times, March 23, 1972

He had to deny a great deal in this trial.

There was no conspiracy to kidnap Kissinger and no plan to blow up the tunnels in Washington, D.C. The case was a major black eye for the FBI, and Molly was at the center of the conspiracy theory.

The Berrigans (specifically Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister) were not convicted on the main conspiracy charges in the 1972 Harrisburg Seven trial. The jury remained deadlocked, largely in favor of acquittal, on the major counts of conspiring to kidnap National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and blow up federal building steam tunnels. 

However, Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister were found guilty on lesser counts of smuggling letters in and out of prison. This was a minor offense related to their communication while Berrigan was incarcerated on unrelated charges. Most of these minor convictions were later overturned on appeal. 

The outcome was widely considered a major failure for the government's prosecution, as it had invested significant resources (millions of dollars and thousands of FBI hours) into proving the serious conspiracy charges, but ultimately failed to secure a guilty verdict on those counts. The government subsequently dropped all the remaining serious conspiracy charges against the defendants. 

Time Magazine, 1972

The prosecutors tried to make this stick, to no avail. Time noted that the jury deliberated 59 and a half hours, a record in a federal criminal case.

My statement to Molly

We met that day in the records office at Allenwood as he was digging up more evidence about some case. I had told him that I was leaving my job in a few days, which gave me leeway to tell him what I thought about the Berrigans.

After he had told me his narrative about the case, much of which could be taken lightly, I asked him a question that surprised him,

“Are you a Christian?”

He told me that he was a fervent Presbyterian. I then asked him this question,

“Have you ever read the Sermon on the Mount?”

He gazed at me with a faraway look in his eye as he knew that this conversation was not going in the direction that he had intended.

“Of course.”

“So, you are familiar with the part where Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers?”

Again, that strange faraway look.

I told him that the Berrigans were people who followed the words of Jesus Christ very fervently, and their civil disobedience was based on morality, whether or not a war was indeed justified.

I further said that I knew about the informant that Molly used, how sleazy he was, and that he was the reason that the case was dismissed as only two of the jurors voted for conviction,

Juror Vera Thompson, a Carlisle, Pa., stock clerk, allowed that Boyd Douglas, the Government’s star witness, was “the reason you had a hung jury.” She explained that several jurors simply did not believe Informer Douglas, the ex-convict who shuttled the Berrigan-McAlister letters in and out of prison and later turned copies over to the FBI.

Time Magazine, April 1972

So, seldom do people have the opportunity to confront an FBI agent. This was mine.