"The FBI was getting out of hand": Ed Helms on big history fails – and the longevity of "The Office"

If you recognize Ed Helms' face — and let's be honest, nearly everyone does — it's most likely from the many seasons he spent playing paper salesman and a cappella superfan Andy Bernard on "The Office," without any serious doubt the most beloved sitcom of the post-"Seinfeld" TV era. It's also plausible that at some point you've inhaled Helms' presence in the somewhat raunchier "Hangover" movies, a smash-hit trilogy exactly coterminous with the latter years of "The Office." Both, in different ways, feel like products of a different time.

Well before that, longtime viewers of "The Daily Show" knew Helms as a regular contributor from 2002 to 2006, whose dry, affable and more than slightly nerdy persona (it's a word Helms embraces, people) often seemed to take the edge of his pointed political satire. In the years since he and fellow "Daily Show" alum Steve Carell closed down "The Office," Helms has appeared in numerous films and TV series without quite landing on a long-term project, and also become a regular on the bluegrass circuit playing banjo, guitar and piano with his band the Lonesome Trio. (He literally co-authors a bluegrass blog, and if that's not embracing nerdhood, then nothing is.) 

Helms visited Salon's New York studio recently to talk about — well, none of the above, actually, but a project that definitely fits his overall résumé in a bunch of different ways. His podcast "SNAFU," now in its second season, is broadly focused on what he calls "history's greatest screw-ups," and while he disavows any overtly partisan political intentions, let's just say a certain orientation is visible. The people who screwed up, in this season's narrative, were the FBI agents of the 1960s and '70s, who conducted massive spying operations on American citizens, mostly but not entirely in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

This enormous surveillance operation was first dragged before the public eye thanks to a remarkable Robin Hood escapade run by a group of young activists, who staged a break-in at a small FBI office in the outer suburbs of Philadelphia in 1971, stole a bunch of incriminating files and leaked them to the press — and most implausibly of all, never got caught. What they did would be literally impossible now, but they set an example echoed in more recent years by intelligence whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, among others. Helms' highly entertaining podcast focuses on the most remarkable and absurd aspects of this story but also, in its own way, offers a heartfelt tribute to these unknown heroes of democracy, coming at a moment when its peril is obvious.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

This season of your podcast “SNAFU” focuses on issues like the FBI and government surveillance and a relatively little-known, but very important event that happened in 1971. What's the source of your interest in that material?

I've been a big fan of podcasts for a long time, and I just was sort of like, "Do I fit into this space somewhere? Is there something I could be doing?" And then I started talking to our buddies at FilmNation, like, "Oh, let's do something together. Well, what is it?" And then the conversation just kind of went to like, "Well, what are my personal interests and hobbies and so on?" And so we just dug into, well, I've always just been a little bit of a closet history nerd.

But there's great history podcasts out there already. What's our take? And then we just landed on, well, what about history's greatest screw-ups? These are sort of the car crashes of history that you can't turn away from, and they're fascinating. There are lessons baked into them, or lessons that we may or may not have learned. A lot of times these epic stories are long forgotten, even though it's hard to believe. So that's sort of how we got started. We did Season 1, which was the story of Able Archer 83 and a NATO military exercise that almost caused a nuclear holocaust. Just a little end of the world for everybody, no big deal. That one was incredibly fun, lots of dark humor in that, and I think also lots of lessons in that that we're still trying to learn. 

So then it became, well, what's Season 2? Well, it just so happened that my aunt who lives here in New York City, in about 2014, I think, sent my whole family a book for Christmas. She said, "This is a book. My friend wrote it. It's a little dense, but enjoy." And so we all got this huge book, it's called “The Burglary,” and it's written by Betty Medsger, who was a Washington Post reporter, went on to become the dean of journalism at Berkeley, I believe. Really just a storied career, a remarkable woman. And she happens to also be good buddies with my aunt here in New York City. And so when her book came out, my aunt was like, "Check out this cool book." I don't think anyone in my family read it except me. And I got into it because it is dense. It is a very —

Does that speak more about you or about your family? I guess a little of both.

It's more about books you get for Christmas, right? Does anybody read those, really?

Who knows? But I got into it, and it just is this incredible story of these citizens in 1971 who were feeling harassed or feeling like the FBI was getting out of hand and starting to maybe harass citizens, particularly activists in both the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

But this story just was so riveting, and it stuck with me. So that was 10 years ago. Cut to now, we are doing this podcast, and Season 2 comes up, and I'm just thinking, "How do we work this incredible story about these citizen activists that broke into the FBI, stole a bunch of documents, and began leaking them to a reporter at the Washington Post?" That's Betty Medsger, and that's why she wound up writing the book about it. Our premise is, history's greatest screw-ups, this was actually an act of heroism on the part of these activists, so how does that fit? Can we somehow make this fit our premise? And then we kind of landed on, well, what these activists did is kind of unravel a terrible snafu within the FBI at the time, which was J. Edgar Hoover's very pernicious activity. So that's our framing device, the FBI was sort of in the midst of this epic cultural snafu within itself that was affecting so many Americans, and these activists kind of swooped in.

It's like the band of Robin Hood people broke into this basically podunk office of the FBI, right? Media, Pennsylvania. Where is that even?

Yeah, it's a suburb of Philadelphia. And you're right, it was also a time when there were lots of branch offices of the FBI. But every office of the FBI had every file of the FBI.

That's a snafu, possibly.

Right? And they also, some of these smaller offices, like this one in Media, just didn't have a lot of security. What a lot of people I think also forget is that Philadelphia was a hotbed of activism in both the civil rights and the antiwar movement. We got a number of the actual burglars in the podcast, so they talk about the decision to, first they wanted to rob, maybe break into the Philadelphia FBI office, which is of course an impenetrable citadel. So they quickly ruled that out and then realized, "Oh, there's this little office in Media, right outside Philadelphia," which is where they all lived. They all lived kind of around there. And so that's what they did, and they uncovered a lot of crazy stuff.

They uncovered the operation that was known inside the FBI as COINTELPRO, which was spying on a whole range of, broadly speaking, left-wing or liberal or, as they would have said, radical causes across the political spectrum. And virtually none of this was known, right? Until they did this. 

Yeah, and even COINTELPRO was not immediately exposed by the break in, but that became the work of another intrepid reporter, Carl Stern of NBC, who really dug into COINTELPRO. It's mentioned in the documents that they found, but they didn't quite know what they had in that. It was Carl Stern who looked at that and thought, "Let's really dig into this." And then of course, that led to the Frank Church hearings in Congress. And it's the reason why we have any oversight over these intelligence operations, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, all of them. The only reason that we have any congressional oversight of those institutions is because of these burglars and everything that happened afterwards.

There's a long tradition of people in comedy talking about politics. Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory and George Carlin are legends of the form, but you're of a different generation. You’ve worked with Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Trevor Noah.

I sort of cut my teeth at "The Daily Show," very much more in the political sphere, but I've always just been a sort of news and culture junkie, and this podcast has become my outlet for that, and that's why it's so fun. And it's also funny. We really are very deliberate in the writing and in the execution to give it sort of a cheeky, fun tone. That said, especially this season, there's also a lot of very poignant content, and we talked to some people that have really went through a lot in their lives and their families through this whole episode. And so it's a really fun ride. I think we're now two seasons in, we've really dialed in tone, and we're starting to work on Season 3.

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Oh, fantastic. You want to give us a hint?

Not yet. But Season 3 is about something that everyone thinks they know a little about already, and I certainly did, but then we kind of get into this very, very curious side angle on it, and I'm just thrilled. It's been incredibly fun to work on, so we'll talk about that when that one comes out.

The Media break-in was more than 50 years ago at this point. How many of the people are still with us and able to participate and talk about this? I know Betty Medsger participated, but who else was involved?

So Betty Medsger is the reporter. She was a young reporter at the Washington Post when she first started receiving these mysterious envelopes with FBI files in them. She tells her own story of opening these envelopes and just being like, "What do I do with this?" Which is amazing. And then there are a number, only a few are still with us, but they were incredibly gracious and spoke with us in the podcast, and told some very personal and at times harrowing personal stories about the heist itself, which is riveting. But then of course, there's all this aftermath for them individually that you don't really think about [when] doing something like that. One of the most incredible parts about what they did is that none of them were professional criminals, but they perpetrated this highly professional break-in and robbery. Then they did something that's arguably more professional than most burglars, which is they kept their secret for decades, decades and decades until the FBI dropped the investigation. It wasn't until then that they started to come forward, and Medsger didn't even know who they were until they told her. A couple of them had been friends with her for a long time and kept the secret from her. So what does keeping a secret like that do to your soul? Well, we get into that in the podcast. It turns out it's pretty fraught.

How does this story make you think about the situation we are in now? We've had drips of revelations with cases from the last decade or so, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, a CIA whistleblower like John Kiriakou, and then it fades for a while. Right now we're in the middle of this very dramatic presidential campaign, and that issue of how much privacy we gave away after 9/11, which I know is something you address, is not on the table.

We could go on for hours here. I sort of love this part of it because this feels like an isolated story in a moment in history, but it could not be more prescient now. And really always, it's kind of this ongoing question: what's the balance between our civil liberties and the need for some level of surveillance for law enforcement and for public safety? Where's the right line? How much do you trust these investigative institutions? In one of our bonus episodes this season I spoke to Loch Johnson, who was Sen. Frank Church's special assistant during the Church committee hearings, and since then, he's become a scholar devoted entirely to these questions. That was a really fun, fascinating conversation. He talks a lot about what you just mentioned, which is the sort of sine curve of public interest in surveillance. In [the 1970s], a lot of the activist community was starting to feel like, "Hey, is the FBI actually harassing us? We're seeing these weird guys at our rallies. They're listening to our phone calls." Martin Luther King was getting these poison pen letters trying to get him to kill himself. What the hell is going on? 

Then this break-in happens, there's this huge exposé and it blows up. The Frank Church hearings happened, and Congress says, "Whoa, FBI, you guys were way out of line. It's time to rein it in a little bit. Here's some fresh regulations. We're going to have a regular oversight." J. Edgar Hoover had decades of just total freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted, and of course, he abused the hell out of that by blackmailing everybody and surveilling everybody. So that was a moment of heightened interest and a heightened response from Congress. 

Things kind of petered out, and then all of a sudden the Cold War is ramping up, and we're scared again, and the CIA needs a little more leverage and a little more power, maybe a little more freedom of movement. And so Reagan starts to loosen up some of those regulations. Then they start to actually vilify the regulations, and Frank Church becomes persona non grata, and all of a sudden it's like, "Wait, what? Didn't we learn something?" So then there's a little bit of a backlash to that, and things kind of even out maybe a little bit more. 

Then of course, as you mentioned, 9/11 happens and the Patriot Act, and all of a sudden we've just given up a lot more of our civil liberties, a lot more of our freedom. And you're right. What I also kind of love about this is, because I'm fascinated by partisanship and division, is that this really does feel like something that most people agree on: we shouldn't be spied on relentlessly by our government. I just think it's always an important conversation, and as Loch Johnson points out, it is always fluctuating.

That's a good way to put it. Personally, I had a hard time taking Robert Mueller seriously as the guy who was going to investigate Donald Trump. I knew too much about that guy's past. He was director of the FBI right after 9/11. We still only know a little bit about what happened to Muslim people and communities in this country who got rolled up into conspiracies that maybe were not real. I didn't feel like I could turn my back on that guy, honestly.

Well, you probably know a lot more about Mueller than I do, but I do think you're speaking to something that's incredibly important and that we don't think about enough: what was the motivation for a lot of that anti-Muslim sentiment or some of those investigations that probably, in some cases, were well-meaning on the parts of some FBI people, if you give them the benefit of the doubt.

And some of them were entrapment, I would say.

Sure, and some of them were just outright awful or racist or mean-spirited. But what are the stories that if someone's engaging in that kind of activity, those kinds of investigations, where's that coming from in them? What are they projecting onto, in that case, the Muslim community, and assuming about them? What narratives are they sort of rolling with? And how accurate are those narratives that are sort of justifying this behavior? You look back at J. Edgar Hoover, how he felt about the Civil Rights Movement or the Anti-Vietnam Movement.

Or the labor movement or a bunch of other things.

It was insane. It was so irrational, and we all do this I think. We're not actually mad at or scared of real people or real things a lot of the time, sometimes yes, but a lot of the time we're just scared of these apparitions that we've created and these narratives that we've foisted upon other people. That is certainly the case when you look back at J. Edgar Hoover and look at all of his paranoia and rage. Does anybody actually resemble what he thought they were? And vice versa, I think conservatives do it to liberals, liberals do it to conservatives.

It certainly can cut both ways.

It's just such an object lesson in checking our assumptions about each other and realizing and humanizing the other people we disagree with, because we can't just cling to these narratives that Fox News is telling us or CNN is telling us. I don't know, I'm starting to veer into tropes and babbling.

I'm in possession of a document personally signed by J. Edgar Hoover authorizing electronic surveillance on my mother's apartment in Baltimore in 1950. She was a labor union activist, in her 20s at the time. She and her then-husband were members of the Communist Party, which was not uncommon for people involved in the labor movement, but the specific reason given for surveilling their apartment, in this document signed by Hoover, was that they lived in a white neighborhood, and Black people had been seen going in and out of their apartment. What other thing could be happening there other than seditious, anti-American behavior?

Good God. It's heartbreaking. That's wild. So you have the original authorization of surveillance of your mother? How old was she at the time?

Something like 27.

Be honest: Was she seditious? [Laughter.]

In an extremely idealistic vein, probably so. OK so “SNAFU”, Season 2. It's called “MEDBURG,” right? What the heck is that?

OK, that is a very creative portmanteau of [the Pennsylvania borough] “Media” and “burglary.”

Was that the FBI's, like, code phrase or whatever?

That was the case name that the FBI came up with to investigate the Media burglary, “MEDBURG.” Available every single place you can get podcasts from.

One last question, and I must do this: We've had many of your former castmates from “The Office” over the years visit this space. And the wonderful fact is that that show, which went off the air more than a decade ago now, continues to generate enthusiasm among younger viewers who weren't old enough to watch it when it was on TV and have never worked in an office.

Or weren't even born when it was on TV.

So why do you think that is?

I think it's just my magnetism, right?

That's definitely where I was heading.

Is there any other reasonable explanation? People ask this a lot, and it's forced me to think about it a lot. I think that that workspace was so comfortable, not just Dunder Mifflin as a fictional workspace, but the actual set in Van Nuys, California, where all of us showed up to every day was an incredibly rare, beautiful working environment where you had a lot of creative people.

Any film or TV set is this amazing mash-up of expertise in lots of different trades. You have set builders and set decorators and hair, makeup, all kinds of things. Then you also have the writers and the directors, gaffers, actors. So it's this kind of beautiful symphony of trade expertise and creative expertise. I've been a part of so many things and sometimes, it's very rare, the music of that symphony is just gorgeous, and it was gorgeous for all of us there, really. 

Every day you felt part of something special. There was genuine warmth on that set and love between all of the cast. We still have a text chain that has carried on for 15 years. I think that warmth and the pride that everyone took in making a great show, it just came through, and I really do think it's the warmth that has grabbed later generations. Because we're in a fraught time, we're in a fraught moment, and young kids are coming up in a time where their parents are anxious about what's going on. But here's this little calm place where there's a lot of conflict, but it's really funny conflict. It's mostly pretty harmless conflict. And it's the same every time. It's the same place. These characters are predictable, and there are really poignant stories mixed in with the comedy. That's the best I can do to make sense of it.