`The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover's FBI and the King Assassination'--Part 5

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

As Downtown (12/16/92) has previously noted, The Murkin Conspiracy: An Investigation Into The Assassination Of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Professor Philip Melanson also argued that “the truth of the King assassination is that it was a…sophisticated conspiracy executed by persons possessing the kind of expertise generally found within intelligence circles” and “there is now overwhelming evidence that the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not possibly have been the work of one man.” In addition to apparently being located near the Tennessee naval base where the FBI’s Division Five maintained a headquarters, Memphis also possessed a public safety director, Frank Holloman, who had served as Hoover’s appointments secretary and personnel director during his 25 years as an FBI agent prior to being named to control Memphis’s police department.

As Downtown (3/31/93) has also previously noted, prior to King’s assassination, Hoover’s FBI had been spying on King since September, 1958, wiretapping his phone calls, spreading false news stories about him through its friendly media contacts and hiring SCLC staff members to act as FBI informants; and The COINTELPRO Papers asserted that “there are serious questions concerning the possibility that the FBI might have been involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King.”

As James Early Ray noted in his 1992 book, Who Killed Martin Luther King? The True Story By The Alleged Assassin, the 1960s “FBI files on the activities of Dr. King…including audio tapes, occupy 58 cubic feet of storage space at the National Archives, sealed from public examination until the year 2027.” Coincidentally, at least 134 pages of CIA documents related to Dr. Martin Luther King are also still locked away in the CIA file room, according to The Murkin Conspiracy, as Downtown (12/16/92) has previously reported.

According to a March 1979 supplementary staff report, “An Analysis Of The Assassination Investigation Of The Department Of Justice And The Federal Bureau Of Investigation,” that was published by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, there were “serious defects in both the focus, and the methods of the overall conspiracy investigation” conducted by the FBI following King’s murder.

The same supplementary staff report also noted that “the day following Ray’s guilty plea, Assistant to the [FBI] Director Cartha De Loach proposed a…cooperative effort, with a friendly, capable author, to produce a carefully written, factual book on the investigation” of King’s assassination and “it is…clear that portions of [Gerald] Frank’s 1971 book, An American Death, bears striking similarities to the FBI reports covering the same subject matter.”

FBI officials have, predictably, always denied all reports that people linked to J. Edgar Hoover’s Division Five unit or any other part of the FBI secret police apparatus were responsible for Martin Luther King’s assassination. And the House Select Committee’s 1979 report following its investigation of the King assassination did not, in fact, charge Hoover’s FBI with King’s murder. But, according to Plausible Denial by Mark Lane, “when the evidence regarding the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began to demonstrate the likelihood of intelligence coverup in that crime, and allow for the possibility of intelligence complicity in the murder, the CIA and the FBI were concerned and moved to stifle discussion of the subject.” After it was announced in the 1970s, for instance, that a congressional committee was preparing to investigate King’s assassination, the mayor of Memphis ordered the Memphis police “to burn all of the files—180 boxes of them—that composed the entire history of the domestic intelligence division of the Memphis police,” according to Code Name `Zorro’.

During the final years of his 39 years on earth, Martin Luther King was apparently nicknamed “Zorro”—the Spanish word for “fox”—by Hoover’s FBI. Given the possibility that Division Five of Hoover’s FBI may have been involved in organizing the “fox-hunt” which took the life of its “Zorro” target, perhaps the time has come for a televised “Hoovergate” congressional investigation—to determine what role J. Edgar Hoover played relative to the Dallas events of Nov. 22, 1963 and the events in Memphis on April 4, 1968. (end of article)

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: Should The Clintons Get A Third Term In The White House?

`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

`The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover's FBI and the King Assassination'--Part 3

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

As early as 1970, at least one analyst, William Torbitt, was arguing that Division Five of Hoover’s FBI—not Ray—actually organized and carried out the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis.

According to Torbitt’s Nomenclature Of An Assassination Cabal, “the real assassin of King entered the naval base near Memphis, TN where” the FBI’s “Division Five maintains a headquarters, only minutes after King’s assassination”; and “on August 14, 1969, James Earl Ray confirmed that Division Five of the FBI was used in the slaying of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” when Ray “stated that Dr. King was killed by federal agents and that they used him to be a fall guy” in the Memphis assassination.

According to Ray, his gun-running supervisor “Raoul” had ordered him to rent a room in the rooming house from whose bathroom King was allegedly shot, three hours before the assassination. Then—about one hour before King was shot—“Raoul” suggested that Ray go by foot to a nearby movie theater and return to the Memphis rooming house in two hours.

In this same Nomenclature Of An Assassination Cabal document, Torbitt asserted that, like Ray, “the fall guy” in the JFK assassination, Lee Oswald, was also apparently handled in Memphis by Division Five of the FBI (around the same time other writers have asserted that Oswald was being simultaneously trained by the CIA). According to Torbitt, “Oswald was taken to Memphis, TN by Division Five of the FBI while in the Marine Corps” and “there he received the highest level of covert espionage activities training during June, July and August of 1957 at the Naval Intelligence School located on the Memphis Naval Base.”

Downtown (5/26/93) also has previously noted that, according to Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case by James Di Eugenio, “Michael Levy has unearthed a Navy document which reports” that “Ruth Paine was requesting information about the family of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1957.” Ruth Paine was the person who arranged for Oswald to just happen to be working in the Texas School Book Depository when JFK was assassinated in 1963.

If James Earl Ray was, in fact, funded by Hoover’s FBI in the months prior to Martin Luther King’s assassination, this would resemble the way Oswald may have been treated by Hoover’s FBI in the months prior to JFK’s assassination. According to Torbitt, prior to JFK’s assassination “Lee Harvey Oswald was paid by J.Edgar Hoover through a subterfuge account with the Department of Immigration and Naturalization…at the Dallas office of the Immigration Department” whose “address in the Rio Grande Building was found in Oswald’s notebook.”

Torbitt noted that “Dallas Chief Deputy Allan Sweatt said in a Secret Service document that Oswald was being paid $200 per month by the FBI” prior to the JFK assassination and that Sweatt “furnished Oswald’s informant number, S-172.”

Act of Treason: The Role of J.Edgar Hoover In The Assassination Of President Kennedy by Mark North also recalled that after JFK was assassinated, “Hoover’s first priority” was apparently “to contain news of Oswald’s relationship to the FBI” because “an initial examination of his file” revealed Oswald’s “connection” to Guy Bannister and Dave Ferrie. So according to Act of Treason, on Nov. 24, 1963 Hoover instructed the Special Agent In Charge of the Dallas FBI Office—J.Gordon Shanklin—“to sanitize Oswald’s file,” although “this amounted to wholesale destruction of evidence and nothing less than obstruction of justice.”

In Plausible Denial, Mark Lane also noted that he was told by an FBI informant in New Orleans, Crest Pena, that Oswald had also worked for the FBI in New Orleans, prior to JFK’s assassination, under the supervision of FBI Special Agent Warren DeBrueys. According to Lane, Pena told him that FBI Special Agent DeBrueys “had introduced Oswald to contacts known by Pena to be CIA” prior to JFK’s assassination.

Coincidentally, in his 1970 Nomenclature Of An Assassination Cabal, William Torbitt described FBI Special Agent DeBrueys as “the FBI’s Division Five Resident Agent in New Orleans;” and noted that another person mentioned by many writers as possibly being involved in a CIA-linked plot that apparently eliminated JFK—Guy Bannister—“had been in charge of the Midwestern FBI Division Five operation with headquarters in Chicago up until 1955.” Torbitt claimed that at that time J.Edgar Hoover “shifted Bannister from an official basis with Division Five to a retainer and contractual basis and moved him to New Orleans,” where “Bannister had close contacts with all the armed service intelligence agencies.”

Given the possible involvement of people connected to Division Five of Hoover’s FBI to the JFK assassination, it also might be possible that people connected to Division Five of Hoover’s FBI were involved in the Martin Luther King assassination less than five years later. (end of part 3)

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover’s FBI and the King Assassination—Part 4

`The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover's FBI and the King Assassination'--Part 2

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

Frame-Up: The Martin Luther King/James Earl Ray Case by Harold Weisberg also argued that “conspicuously missing is any promise of fingerprints lifted from…the bathroom from which the crime, allegedly, was committed” and “in all the evidence, real or narrated, where the fingerprints are required to be to connect Ray with the crime rather than the locale, there are none.” According to Weisberg, there was no evidence “that Ray, in person, was at the scene of the crime, particularly at the moment it was committed,” since neither a “single credible eyewitness” nor any fingerprint evidence ever placed Ray at the alleged scene of the crime.

In Code Name `Zorro’, Mark Lane also asserted that prior to Ray’s agreement to plead guilty the State did not even allege that Ray “had left behind a fingerprint…in the bathroom from which the State alleged the shot had been fired”; and, according to Lane, the State couldn’t prove that the rifle Ray had purchased “fired the bullet that killed Dr. King.” Although Lane thought the prosecutor could prove that Ray had purchased the rifle that allegedly was used to murder King, he reminded his readers that “proof of ownership of a weapon employed in a murder case does not establish the owner as a criminal.”

The only witness who identified Ray as fleeing from the rooming house’s second floor bathroom after the shot which killed King was fired “was evidently too drunk to observe the culprit and could not have seen him from his position on the bed in one of the rooms of the rooming house,” according to Code Name `Zorro’. Ray, himself, claims that at the time King was assassinated he was getting air in the spare tire of his white Mustang car at a gas station and that, prior to King’s assassination, he “didn’t even know that the Lorraine Motel was behind the rooming house,” “didn’t know that King was staying there” and “didn’t even know that King was in town,” according to Code Name `Zorro’.

As Downtown (12/16/92) has previously observed, A Case Of Conspiracy by Michael Newton revealed that “Willie Green, a black attendant at some unspecified service station in the vicinity of the murder…recalled waiting on the driver of a white Mustang at approximately the time King was shot.”

According to Code Name `Zorro’, Ray pled guilty to King’s murder in 1969 for the following reason:

“Ray had purchased a rifle illegally, and transported it across state lines in order to participate in the illegal sale of arms abroad. If anyone died as a result of that effort, Ray was led to believe, he was legally guilty of murder. At least Ray began to believe he might be legally guilty even if he had not known of the conspiracy to kill Dr. King and even if he had not fired the fatal shot, as long as there actually was a conspiracy.”

The Yankee And Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate by Carl Oglesby also pointed out other reasons many analysts have never believed any theory of how Martin Luther King was assassinated which argues that Ray acted alone:

“The problems with the lone-Ray theory are much the same as the problems with the lone-Oswald. Four eyewitnesses to the April 4 (1968) killing, including two police detectives spying on King, said they saw the gunman in bushes on the ground, not in the second story window…The angle of the mortal wound is consistent with a shot fired from the ground, inconsistent with a shot fired from the second story. For the alleged murder weapon, a rifle, to be aimed at the correct angle from the bathroom window alleged to have been Ray’s nest, the butt would have had to project into the wall…”

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover’s FBI and the King Assassination—Part 3

`The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover's FBI and the King Assassination'--Part 1

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

“The essence of Mr. Lane’s charge is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated by a squad of off-duty FBI agents, under the direction of FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover, that this committee has in its possession evidence that proves such an FBI plot including the names of the agents, and that I informed Ambassador Andrew Young that this committee had such evidence in its possession, but that I am afraid to make that information public…

“…The only new evidence that Mr. Lane submitted to us at the meeting bearing on FBI complicity consisted of an affidavit by Daniel Ellsberg, the individual who attained national prominence by leaking the Pentagon Papers…”

Former D.C. Congressional Rep. Walter Fauntroy on Nov. 17, 1978

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was mysteriously murdered shortly after 6 p.m., as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Not until over two months later—on June 8, 1968—was the alleged killer of Martin Luther King—James Earl Ray—taken into custody at Heathrow Airport in London. Ray was then eventually extradited back to the United States, where he entered a prearranged plea of guilty in a Tennessee courtroom on March 10, 1969. Despite this plea, [the now-deceased] Ray always maintained, during his many years of imprisonment, that he was not the person who shot Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968.

The evidence that Ray actually shot Martin Luther King through the bathroom window of a nearby rooming house was apparently not very conclusive. In the 1977 book Code Name `Zorro’: The Murder of Martin Luther King, for instance, Mark Lane argued that “the essential case against Ray was so flawed that it would have been difficult for the jury to have returned a verdict of guilty…due to the paucity of evidence linking Ray to the crime.”

Shortly after King was shot, Memphis police had alleged that “the killer had left scuff marks in the bathroom and a palm print on the wall over the tub,” but, after the Memphis chief of homicide dusted and examined the palm print, the state concluded that it wasn’t made by James Earl Ray, according to Mark Lane. In the back pages of Volume 13 of the March 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ investigation of the murder of Martin Luther King is contained a “Scientific Report On The Subject Of Analysis Of Fingerprint Evidence” which also drew the following conclusion:

“Two impressions from an unnumbered latent lift card, taken from the second floor bathroom…were also examined. One latent palm impression from the bathtub, was of no value for comparison. The other palm impression from the bathroom windowsill was compared to the palm print of James Earl Ray and found not to match.”

Ray’s fingerprints were also apparently not discovered inside the second floor rooming house bathroom from which King was allegedly shot, according to the “Scientific Report On The Subject Of Analysis Of Fingerprint Evidence.” But a fingerprint of FBI Special Agent Frank Johnson was, apparently, found on the windowsill of this bathroom. As this report noted in 1979:

“Dr. King’s killer apparently fled the scene after firing the fatal shot from a second story bathroom window at the rear of a rooming house…This bathroom window provided a view of Dr. King’s room at the Lorraine Motel…

“The windowsill from the second-floor bathroom at the rear of Bessie Brewer’s Memphis rooming house was sent to the FBI Laboratory and Identification Division, Washington, D.C. The FBI found one latent fingerprint on the sill, but determined it belonged to FBI Special Agent Frank Johnson…”
(end of part 1)

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover’s FBI and the King Assassination—Part 2

Did CIA Play Role In Che Guevara's 1967 Execution?

The CIA apparently played a key role in arranging the execution of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia [40 years ago] in 1967. As The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John Marks noted in 1974:

“…Agency `advisers,’ including Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs adventure, were…dispatched to Bolivia to assist in the tracking down of Guevara…

“The Clandestine Services were obsessed with Guevara, and even somewhat fearful of him. He was…a reminder of their failure in the Cuban operation…Incapable of gaining direct retribution by destroying Fidel himself…the CIA’s Clandestine Services were left to brood over their failure—until Guevara exposed himself. In doing so he presented himself to the CIA as an inviting target: his capture or death would provide some measure of revenge…

“During the Summer of 1967…the agency’s special ops experts were assisting the Bolivian army in hunting down Guevara…

“…On Oct. 8 [1967], Guevara…was wounded and captured near the small mountain village of La Higuera…

“…The senior CIA operative at La Higuera…attempted to question Che. The revolutionary, however, would not cooperate…

“Antonio Arguedas…as Minister of the Interior, was in charge of the Bolivian intelligence service, with which the agency had many close connections. And Arguedas himself was an agent of the CIA…

“Arguedas…identified some of the agency’s contract officers who had assisted in the tracking down of Guevara: Jolio Gabriel Garcia [Cuban] and Eddie and Mario Gonzales [Bolivians]…”

The same book also noted that, after he identified some of the CIA contract officers who were involved in tracking down Che, “Antonio Arguedas…was shot to death in a street in La Paz…”

(Downtown 12/13/95)

Next: The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover’s FBI and the King Assassination—Part 1

FBI Created `Get Carmichael Squad' After King's Assassination

In the 1960s, the [now-deceased] Kwame Ture’ was apparently targeted for special persecution by the FBI after he became prominent as the chairperson of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and as a popular, charismatic orator who was then known as Stokely Carmichael. As a former FBI agent named Robert Wall revealed in an essay entitled “Why I Got Out Of It,” which appeared in the book Investigating The FBI in 1971:

“In the case of Stokely Carmichael the FBI was particularly determined and vicious. When he moved to Washington, D.C. in December, 1967, our squad kept him under surveillance 24-hours a day, following him about the city from lookouts and cars, and on foot. The investigation became even more intense a few days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. When blacks in Washington, D.C., as well as in many other cities, outraged by the murder, rioted for a day and a half, in the Washington Field Office a 50-man special squad was assembled to get Carmichael for inciting to riot. We were directed to gather evidence showing that Carmichael had plotted, planned and directed the rioting, burning and pillage that took place in Washington, D.C. Fifty agents spent their full-time for over a month on this one case.

“…Carmichael had urged the crowd not to dishonor Dr. King’s memory by rioting and had politely asked shop owners to close their shops in his memory. Lacking any substantial evidence on which to base a charge, the Bureau nevertheless submitted voluminous reports on the minute-by-minute activities of Carmichael that were heavily weighted to imply that he had actually incited the mobs. Had Carmichael not decided to leave the country and go to Africa, the FBI, I am confident, would eventually have found something, with which to bring an indictment against him.”

According to The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent:

“In Sepember of 1958, a personal file had been opened on King…By October 1960, as the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC] call for desegregation and black voting rights in the south gained increasing attention…the Bureau began actively infiltrating organizational meetings and conferences…Actual counterintelligence operations against King and the SCLC more generally seem to have begun with a January 8, 1962 letter from Hoover to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy…SCLC was targeted within the Bureau’s ongoing COINTELPRO-CP,USA beginning with the planting of 5 disinformational `news stories’ concerning the organization’s `communist connections’ on October 24, 1962…Attorney General Kennedy had also authorized round-the-clock…surveillance of all SCLC offices, as well as King’s home. Hence, by November 8, 1963, comprehensive telephone tapes had been installed at all organizational offices, and King’s residence."

The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. by David Garrow described how Hoover’s FBI also hired a staff employee of King’s SCLC Atlanta office, named Harrison, to work as an FBI informant:

“`AT 1387-S,’ as Harrison was called in Bureau communications, soon eclipsed the wiretaps on the SCLC office as the bureau’s most valuable source of information on Dr. King’s organization. Weekly he would meet with Atlanta agent Alan G. Sentinella…

“Initially Harrison was paid in cash for his information each time he and Sentinella met. Eventually, though, as Harrison’s tenure lengthened and his stipend increased, the payments were made monthly…

“The major subjects of the conversations were SCLC finances and demonstration plans, with a heavy smattering of office politics and personnel matters.”

By 1964, according to The COINTELPRO Papers, “the Bureau’s intent had crystallized into an unvarnished intervention into the domestic political process, with the goal of bringing about King’s replacement with someone acceptable to the FBI” and “the means employed in the attempt to accomplish this centered in continued efforts to discredit King, maintaining a drumbeat of mass media-distributed propaganda concerning his supposed `communist influences’ and sexual proclivities…” The same book also asserted that “there are serious questions concerning the possibility that the FBI might have been involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King…”

Although people who spy on their fellow-citizens for the U.S. government have never been too popular with most people in the United States, the FBI apparently used our tax money in the 1960s to hire a lot of people to spy on African-American political activists. According to The COINTELPRO Papers:

“By the fall of 1967, every FBI field office was assigned at least one, and in some cases as many as four, agents devoted exclusively to development of `quality nonorganizational sources…for the purpose of expeditiously infiltrating militant black nationalist organizations.’ The Ghetto Informant Program, also called `Ghetto Listening Post,’ was launched at this time and, by the Summer of 1968, employed some 3,248 snitches…Hoover described this small army of contract spies as being `inadequate’ and demanded a major expansion of its ranks during the Fall of 1968…”

(Downtown 3/31/93)

Next: Did CIA Play Role In Che Guevara’s 1967 Execution?