'Burglars' Revealed: Sixties Activists Who Stole FBI COINTELPRO Files

'On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.'

- Jon Queally, staff writer

In an exclusive with the New York Times on Tuesday, published to coincide with a new book about a fateful plan more than four decades ago that helped bring down J. Edgar Hoover and expose the dark nature of the FBI's obsessive targeting of the dissident and anti-war left, the original burglars who broke into a bureau field office in 1971 have now stepped forward to discuss the meticously planned theft that altered the course of modern history.