On March 24, 1971, I became the first reporter to inform readers that the FBI wanted the American people to think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.” That rather alarming alert came from stolen FBI files I had found in my own mailbox at The Washington Post when I arrived at work the previous morning. ¶ It was the return address on the big tan envelope that prompted me to open it first: “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.”

I had worked at the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia before coming to The Post in January 1970, so I knew of Media, a small town southwest of Philadelphia. ¶ The letter inside the envelope informed me that on the night of March 8, 1971, my anonymous correspondents — they called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI — had broken into the Media FBI office and stolen every file. They did so, I learned later, in the dark and as the sounds of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match filled the streets.

“Enclosed you will find,” the letter said, “copies of certain files from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI which were removed by our commission for public scrutiny. We are making these copies available to you and to several other persons in public life because we feel that you have shown concern and courage as regards issues which are, in part, documented in the enclosed materials.”

I wasn’t aware of having shown any courage, but I was, to put it mildly, eager to read those files — 14, as it turned out, of 1,000 files that they had taken.

For 43 years the people who sent those files to me then have remained unknown to the general public. This week, five of the Media FBI burglars — a group that pulled off an act that led to congressional investigations of all intelligence agencies, congressional oversight and significant reforms in the FBI — are coming forward for the first time.

In a book I have written and in “1971,” a documentary film by Johanna Hamilton, the burglars tell their story — the ultimate result of a chance encounter I had at a dinner party in 1989 with acquaintances in Philadelphia, who told me they were involved in the Media burglary.

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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which represents a population greater than a number of states, has voted 3-2 to restore the cross to the San Gabriel Mission church on the L.A. County seal to accurately depict the Mission, which now appears on the county seal without its cross.

The motion, filed by Supervisor Michael Antonovich, a U.S. Army veteran and a member of the American Legion, and Supervisor Don Knabe (both Republicans) was supported by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, a political liberal who once headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in L.A. and was once a member of the Board of the ACLU of Southern California. Supervisors Zev Zarovslosky and Gloria Molina, the other two liberal Democrats on the five-member board, voted against the motion, as reported by the L.A. Times.

Attorney Peter Eliasberg of the ACLU, which reacts like Dracula to the sight of a cross and has become the intolerant Taliban of American progressive liberal secularism, immediately threatened to sue, to no one’s surprise.

Eliasberg is the ACLU attorney who spent 10 years fanatically suing to destroy the Mojave Desert Veterans Memorial cross. One has to drive to that remote desert cross honoring veterans to be offended by it – the cross is bolted atop a rock outcrop some 12 miles off the highway on a two-lane desert road. But that didn’t deter Eliasberg and the ACLU secular extremists from a decade of litigation trying to destroy it, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Alas, the cross-destroying crusader Eliasberg then made a fool of himself before the Supreme Court when he made a misleading misrepresentation about the memorial in response to a question from Chief Justice Roberts. Eliasberg was later embarrassingly admonished by Roberts during oral argument for Eliasberg’s misrepresentation to the Court when staff presented the chief justice with the true facts pertaining to his question.

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