`The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover's FBI and the King Assassination'--Part 4

(The following article appeared in the April 19, 1995 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper Downtown).

In his 1977 book Code Name `Zorro’, Mark Lane also argued that “the present available and known evidence leads inexorably to the conclusion, I believe, that persons employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1968 must be considered to be prime suspects in the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King.” In his 1991 book Plausible Denial, Lane also claimed that a member of the late 1970s House Committee which investigated the King Assassination, Walter Fauntroy, told Dick Gregory privately—in Lane’s apartment—the following:

“We know the FBI killed Martin. We have the proof. But Dick, the FBI is bugging my home, my congressional office, even my church. We can’t report that they did it. It’s too dangerous.”

An Oct. 20, 1978 affidavit signed by Daniel Ellsberg also indicated that there is possibly some evidence existing that Division Five of Hoover’s FBI may have organized the assassination of King. During the Vietnam War Era, Ellsberg had shared his copy of the previously-classified Pentagon Papers with anti-war people, thus revealing that the Pentagon was waging covert warfare against North Vietnam months before an alleged Vietnamese attack on a U.S. ship (in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964) provided the pretext for the Pentagon’s 1960s bombing campaign against North Vietnam. In his Oct. 20, 1978 affidavit, Ellsberg described a June 19, 1978 conversation he had with an assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Brady Tyson, in Midtown Manhattan:

“Just as we were leaving the Mission at the UN Plaza, we got on the subject which we discussed during the walk over…We discussed the subject which was the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, for at least half an hour…

“One of us, either Tyson or I, raised the subject of the killing, and I asked Tyson whether he thought there had been a conspiracy and who he thought might have done it. He said very flatly to me, `We know there was a conspiracy and we know who did it’…After a pause, I asked him who it was…and he said again in a way that was very surprising to me in its lack of equivocation or reservation: `It was a gang of off-duty and retired FBI officers working under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover.’ He said further that this was a group working secretly and known to almost no one else in the FBI…

“…He said:…`We’re 80 percent sure that we know the names of all the people who were involved…’”

In his autobiography, From Yale To Jail, Dave Dellinger also pointed out that “In 1988 a British filmmaker produced a film Who Killed Martin Luther King?, funded by BBC Television, which raises questions about U.S. government complicity in the assassination” and “he and his associate, John Sergeant, provide a lot of evidence for government complicity while arguing the case in the Summer 1990 issue of Covert Action.” (end of part 4)

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover’s FBI and the King Assassination—Part 5