Here is your solitary, wild, honest and true Lone American Hero, my friends. Cast aside your Maine Hermits, your Thoreau acolytes, your friend who spends half the year in a cabin that used to belong to his grandfather, and cluster round Judi Feingold, who was betrayed by unworthy men (and another unworthy woman).

It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:

Get out of town.

She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack.

There were eight people involved in the Media Burglary; after they successfully escaped with the evidence, they formed a pact:

The last time the burglars were together, shortly after the burglary, they had made two promises to each other: that they would take the secret of the burglary to their graves and that they would not associate with each other. They feared that if they continued to associate, the arrest of one might lead to the arrest of others. The seven who continued living as they had before the burglary were silent about what they had done, but they made no attempt to hide or escape.

Throughout the decades since the Media burglary, Feingold kept the pledge the burglars made to each other never to reveal they were the Media burglars. She always assumed no one in the group would break that promise. She never uttered a word about the burglary to anyone.

Just like all the other ones, right? They all…they all kept the promise that they made to Judi, right? They didn’t leave the youngest member of the break-in (SHE WAS NINETEEN) hanging out to dry just to prioritize their own safety and convenience, RIGHT?

That’s why she was shocked—angered, even sickened at first—in January when she discovered, by chance, that the other members of the group recently had publicly told the story of how and why they decided in 1971 to risk their freedom for many years to break into an FBI office in search of evidence of whether the FBI was engaged in efforts to suppress dissent.

Until discovering, in news articles about my book, that seven of the eight Media burglars went public, she thought perhaps other Media burglars might also have decided to go underground. Instead, they had lived in plain sight.

“Oh, God, Judi, you took that seriously? Oh my God…I’m so sorry! How was…how was living life on the run for forty-three years? I’m a tenured professor now and have profited enormously from selling our story. You remember that story! The one we swore we’d never tell? That one.”

(It is ENORMOUSLY worth reading the entire piece; Judi actually ended up having an amazing life as a lesbian landscape architect and hospice nurse and is made entirely of compassion and quiet inner strength and in their defense, the other burglars also sort of totally contributed to the dismantling of a horrifyingly corrupt surveillance network [we have a new one now, but that doesn’t mean what they did didn’t matter!] and also I can’t keep a secret either, I can’t pretend I would have been Judi in this situation.)

Feingold’s first home in the underground was on a goat farm north of Taos. Like several other places she would stay, this farm was owned by a woman and was part of an informal network of rural properties in the West known as “women’s land”—places where lesbians built alternative communities that were intentionally free of patriarchy.

Feingold thought it was the ideal place for her at that time. As she points out, she could have hidden anywhere, but she welcomed the chance to live underground in the country instead of in a city. She loved the outdoors and the physical work required in such places. Growing up in New York City, she had yearned to live in those wide-open spaces she saw as a child on countless television Westerns. Now she had that life. She dug irrigation ditches and learned how to make goat cheese and gather eggs. She remembers living happily in those old cowboy landscapes that recently had been reclaimed by women.

Teach me how to live, Judi. Teach me how to milk goats and keep secrets and thrive.

She thinks she talked to Bouzoun for a couple hours, somewhat incoherently. She kept repeating herself. Finally, she said goodbye. She did so without stating what she and the others had done. She did not do so despite the fact that she now knew that anyone in the world could learn the burglars’ secret on the Internet.

You don’t know what integrity is and I hate you and I hate myself. Only a woman can keep a secret. She’ll bury the secret in her own heart, and she’ll bury herself in the desert, and you will betray her a thousand times before she betrays you.