Helped expose the FBI's secret COINTELPRO spying program that targeted civil rights and antiwar protesters. He was part of a group of eight activists that called themselves "the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI" that on March 8, 1971 broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, stealing a thousand files and delivering them anonymously to journalists and congressmen. The documents prompted a groundbreaking congressional investigation in 1975 revealing COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram), secret operations conducted by United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which included illegal surveillance, infiltration, discrediting, and disrupting of a variety of dissident groups and individuals across the country, including civil rights activists, antiwar organizers, feminist organizations, and independence movements. None of the burglars were ever caught, but the public debated over whether they were traitors who wantonly exposed official secrets or heroic whistle-blowers who preserved civil liberties. Their identities remained a secret until 2014, when Raines, his wife Bonnie, and others came forward to take credit for the caper that changed history.
