Cointelpro Burglars Used Brilliant Trick In Previous Robbery

In 1971, a group of burglars broke in to an FBI office in Pennsylvania, stole reams of documents, and uncovered a vast intelligence program known as Cointelpro. The covert spying operation had for years targeted politicians, anti-war advocates, and civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., among others -- all under the watchful eye of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The Cointelpro burglars had never been identified until this week, when some of them came forward to the media to coincide with a new book about the break-in and its fallout.

In a section of that book, author Betty Medsger writes that the year before the Cointelpro job, the burglars had devised an ingenious way to break in to a locked section of the draft-board office in Delaware. The passage was highlighted on Twitter by the writer Jon Schwarz. Check it out below: