Orders to Kill Page 12

  On November 17, 1978, the New York Times published a frontpage article by Wendel Rawls, Jr., stating that the results of a Times investigation agreed with the conclusions of a separate investigation by the HSCA that the Ray brothers, including Jerry, were guilty of robbing the Alton bank.

  On Wednesday, the 29th, the day before Jerry’s appearance before the HSCA, I placed a call to East Alton police lieutenant Walter Conrad. I advised him that in an effort to put to rest the continuing allegations that my client had been a participant in that robbery, I had counseled him to return once again to East Alton and offer to be charged and stand trial (Jerry had previously surrendered himself on August 18, 1978, offered to waive the statute of limitations, take a lie detector test, and, if charged, stand trial for the robbery). I then told Lieutenant Conrad about the New York Times article.

  Lt. Conrad said that he had told Jerry Ray during his August visit that neither he nor his brothers were suspects, nor had they ever been suspects in that crime. He told me explicitly that neither he nor any member of the Alton police department, nor, to the best of his knowledge, any employee or official of the Bank of Alton, had ever been questioned by the New York Times or any investigator of the HSCA. He said that he couldn’t imagine what the basis was for the Times’s claims or the committee’s allegations.

  Accordingly, he advised me that there would be no need for Jerry Ray or any of his brothers to return to Alton.

  I later acquired an FBI “airtel” of July 19, 1968, sent to the SAC of Memphis from director Hoover, which gave a report of an analysis of all fingerprint impressions relating to unsolved bank robberies at that time. The report concluded that a comparison of the prints of James Earl Ray didn’t match with any prints on the Alton bank robbery file.

  A further FBI teletype of August 1, 1968, to the director from the Springfield SAC, recited details of an interview conducted in Madison County Jail in Edwardsville, Illinois, with a suspect in the Alton robbery. The report of this interview states that the individual being questioned “meets physical description … in above bank robbery; has history of using automatic pistol similar to that used by op. sub. Number 1 and was employed part time for cab company which had stand directly across street from Bank … and invested heavily in cabs shortly after Bank robbery.”

  In my view, there was no question that on August 1, 1968, the FBI was on the trail of the suspects for the Alton robbery, and that those suspects didn’t include the Ray brothers. Yet in August 1978 the HSCA, through Counsel Blakey, contacted Philip Heymann, assistant attorney general of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, seeking the prosecution of John Ray for allegedly giving false testimony to the HSCA regarding the Alton bank robbery.

  Before formally referring this matter to the Department of Justice, Mr. Blakey met with U.S. Attorney Earl Silberg and a representative of the Criminal Division on May 24, 1978. Blakey admitted that the primary reason he wanted John Ray charged with perjury was to convince James Earl Ray to testify before the committee concerning his knowledge of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Blakey tried to persuade the Justice Department that John Ray had, in fact, committed perjury in denying his participation with his brothers in the robbery.

  In a letter reply to the HSCA (obtained through a Freedom of Information Act application years later), Assistant Attorney General Heymann and Alfred L. Brantman, chief of the General Crimes Section of the Criminal Division, forcefully declined to consider any prosecution, declaring that “there is no existing or anticipated or other evidence to link John Ray or James Earl Ray to that robbery.”

  He also stated that “returning an indictment against John Ray in order to pressure his brother James Earl Ray into cooperating could and should be viewed as an abuse of process. It is one thing to use the criminal laws to pressure an individual into cooperating with the government. It is another thing to use the criminal laws against someone to pressure another individual into cooperating with the Government. This is particularly true when the individuals involved are close family relatives such as brothers.”

  During Jerry Ray’s appearance on November 30, HSCA Counsel Mark Speiser did indeed focus one aspect of his questioning on the Alton bank robbery. I informed Speiser that Jerry was not and had never been a suspect in that case and that this had been confirmed to me by the Alton authorities as late as the previous day. I also put on the record Jerry’s willingness to waive the statute of limitations and stand trial for that crime if any authority was willing to try him.

  Jerry explicitly denied any participation in the robbery, pointing out that at the time of the Alton robbery he was working at the Sportsman’s Club in Northbrook, Illinois. His employment records would confirm that in the three years he worked there he never missed a day and that he frequently worked seven nights a week, making it impossible for him to have been in Alton at the time of the crime. Jerry’s factual responses fell on deaf ears.

  Throughout the hearing Flo and I frequently locked horns with the committee counsel. They continually attempted to tie Jerry and John to James during the time James was a fugitive. Any facts to the contrary would be ignored.

  Though Flo and I believed as counsel that we had taken some of the bite out of the HSCA’s persistent attack on the facts, we expected the HSCA report to confirm the committee’s predetermined conclusions.

  We were right.

  13

  The HSCA Report: January 1979

  BY THE END of the final set of public hearings, I felt convinced that the HSCA had already formed its conclusions and was probably well advanced in writing its final report. In fact, a first draft was finished by December 13, 1978, about two weeks after the hearings.

  Disinformation was produced at a high cost to the taxpayers (the total cost of the King and Kennedy investigations was $5.5 million). Clearly, the committee could have done a proper job. Counsel Blakey reported that in conducting both investigations staff completed 562 trips to 1,463 destinations—including Mexico, Canada, Portugal, and Cuba—during a total of 4,758 days. Three hundred and thirty-five witnesses were heard in public or private sessions, and some 4,924 interviews were conducted.

  The last official act of the committee, in December 1978, was to approve its findings and recommendations. The final report was published in January 1979. It is essential to distinguish between the report itself—which was widely disseminated, even published commercially—and the material contained in the accompanying thirteen volumes, which had a very limited print run and distribution. One frequently finds information buried in the volumes that conflicts with conclusions in the report itself.

  Among the most valuable historical information was the account of the FBI’s wide-ranging legal and illegal communist infiltration investigation (COMINFIL) and counterintelligence programs and activities (COINTELPRO) conducted before and after the assassination. These were designed to tie Dr. King and the SCLC to the influence of the Communist Party and to discredit Dr. King.

  As early as 1957, at the time of the founding of the SCLC, FBI supervisor J. K. Kelly stated in a memo that the group was “a likely target for communist infiltration.”27 As the SCLC mounted an increasingly high-profile challenge to segregation and the denial of voting rights to blacks across the South, the bureau began actively infiltrating meetings and conferences.28

  On October 23, 1962, Hoover sent a memo authorizing the Atlanta and New York field offices to conduct a general COMINFIL investigation of the SCLC. The memo also inquired about whether the SCLC had any branches in New Orleans and asked the New Orleans office to explore COMINFIL possibilities in that city.29

  As for the COINTELPRO activities specifically aimed at Dr. King which began in late October, 1962, the HSCA report noted that a 1976 Justice Department report explicitly stated that the bureau’s campaign embodied a number of felonies. The HSCA report only summarized these activities, with the full scope of the illegal activity only being revealed by the documents contained in Volume six.

  I
n December 1963, less than a month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, bureau officials attended a Washington conference to analyze the avenues of approach aimed at “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.”30 The conference focused on how to “produce the best results without embarrassment to the Bureau.”31 Those present discussed the possibility of using Dr. King’s housekeeper, Mrs. King, or selective plants in the SCLC. From then on, agents in the field were challenged to come up with proposals for humiliating, discrediting, or even merely inconveniencing Dr. King and the SCLC.

  Officials at the meeting agreed with domestic intelligence chief William C. Sullivan’s suggestion that microphones be placed surreptitiously in Dr. King’s hotel rooms as he traveled. These would complement the wiretaps already in place at his home and office in Atlanta. The bureau hoped to pick up information about extramarital sexual activity, which could then be used to tarnish his reputation or even blackmail him.

  The bureau carried out this surveillance at numerous hotels nationwide from late 1963 through the end of 1965. Documents reveal that the wiretaps on the SCLC’s Atlanta offices ran from October 24, 1963, to June 21, 1966;32 Dr. King’s home was tapped from November 8, 1963, to April 30, 1965, when he moved.33

  In 1966 FBI director Hoover, becoming fearful of a congressional inquiry into electronic surveillance, ordered this monitoring of Dr. King discontinued—but in such a way that it could be reinstalled at short notice.34

  When in 1967 the SCLC and Dr. King turned their attention to Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, the bureau asked Attorney General Clark to approve renewed telephone surveillance. He refused.35 I was skeptical that electronic surveillance on King ceased, but thought it unlikely that evidence of such rogue activity would ever surface.

  The bureau also engaged in surreptitious activities and burglaries directed against Dr. King and the SCLC. The HSCA estimated that twenty such events took place between 1959 and 1964.36 These illegal operations began at least three years prior to any security file being officially opened.

  The bureau would maintain that Dr. King was not officially a COINTELPRO target until late 1967 or early 1968. In fact, a massive campaign was underway from 1964 with the purpose of destroying him and even, at one point, apparently trying to induce him to commit suicide. In its campaign the bureau left few areas untouched.

  Bureau Contacts with Political Leaders

  The FBI, often with direct personal contact of an agent or SAC in the relevant area, met with a number of political leaders to advise them about information it had obtained on Dr. King’s allegedly indiscreet personal life and the communist influence on him. Those approached included, among others, the following:

  U.K. prime minister Harold Wilson (whom Dr. King was to visit on his return trip from Oslo, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize)

  New York governor Nelson Rockefeller

  Former Florida governor LeRoy Collins, then director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service

  Massachusetts governor John A. Volpe (Dr. King was to be honored in Massachusetts in 1965)

  Speaker of the House of Representatives John McCormack (briefed on August 14, 1965)

  Director of the CIA; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Maj. Gen. Carl C. Turner, Provost Marshal, U.S. Army; and Gen. Leonard E. Chapman, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps (all of these leaders received a bureau-prepared monograph on March 19, 1968, entitled “Martin Luther King Jr., A Current Analysis”; it contained carefully selected discrediting material on Dr. King that the bureau had compiled by that time, about two weeks before his death37

  Bureau Manipulation of the Media

  By late 1964 the bureau began to put out the word to news-people that Dr. King’s personal life was unsavory. A whisper campaign was aimed at the media in general, and trusted reporters were offered an opportunity to read the transcripts of the surveillance or to listen to the allegedly damaging tape recordings. The HSCA confirmed a number of approaches Hoover made to the media through Crime Records Division head Cartha DeLoach.

  U.S. News & World Report was one of the bureau’s favorite media outlets. Like some select others, it was provided with the full text of an extraordinary three-hour meeting between Hoover and a group of women reporters, at which Hoover declared, “I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country.” A summary report of this comment also found its way to the first page of the New York Times, on November 19, 1964.38

  In November 1966 the bureau also successfully used the media to cause Dr. King to cancel a meeting with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. (At this time Hoffa was in the final stages of appealing his conviction and sentence on a charge of jury tampering, stemming from his earlier trial in Nashville. His appeal was finally denied in January 1967, and he entered prison on March 7.) Any alliance between Dr. King and the powerful labor leader would have greatly concerned the bureau and the federal government because Hoffa had an enormous work force and a virtually unlimited treasury. His support of King would have greatly enhanced the SCLC’s effectiveness. Consequently, the Crime Records Division prepared an article for public release and also recommended that “a Bureau official be designated now to alert friendly news media of the meeting once the meeting date is learned so that arrangements can be made for appropriate press coverage of the planned meeting to expose and disrupt it.”39 Hoover’s “OK” appeared below that recommendation.

  Upon learning of the imminent date of the meeting, the Crime Records Division notified a national columnist for the New York Daily News as well as selected news photographers and wire service reporters, to ensure maximum publicity. The Daily News broke the story, causing Dr. King to decide not to meet Hoffa. The bureau then tipped off a number of reporters that King was traveling to Washington. As he came off the plane, he was besieged by reporters asking about the proposed meeting. The Crime Records Division reported that it had been successful in thwarting the SCLC receiving any funds from the Teamsters. Hoover scribbled “Excellent” at the bottom of the memo.40

  In March 1967, Hoover approved a recommendation by the Domestic Intelligence Division to furnish “friendly” reporters with questions designed to exploit King’s growing opposition to the war in Vietnam. Reporters were also furnished with off-the-record embarrassing questions they might put to Dr. King at press conferences.41

  Following the UN rally on April 15, 1967, newspapers began to speculate on the possibility of a third-party King-Spock presidential ticket. We had no doubt that this ticket would be a matter of serious concern to the sitting president, who would be concerned about the split liberal vote resulting in Nixon being elected. Such a ticket would also be a matter of concern to the FBI and the intelligence community because of the resulting debate about the war and their roles in support of it. (This was subsequently confirmed by Freedom of Information Act materials and other researchers.)42 However, we never anticipated the degree of fear that Dr. King’s activities and plans in 1967–1968 instilled in the intelligence, defense, and federal law enforcement apparatus.

  The bureau’s concern was heightened when it learned that we had scheduled a convention in Chicago for September. Its field office recommended that flyers, leaflets, cards, and bumper stickers be used in conjunction with the voices of a number of political columnists or reporters, to discredit the ticket.43 The Chicago memo stressed that “this person … [the journalist chosen] … should be respected for his balance and fair mindedness. An article by an established conservative would not adequately serve our purposes.” (We would later learn of the existence of a heavily deleted CIA memo dated October 5, 1967, which noted that the communists had been blocked in their efforts to obtain a King-Spock peace and freedom ticket. The deletions were justified on the grounds of protecting “intelligence activities, sources or methods.”44)

  In October 1967, the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division recommended that an editorial be placed in a “Negro magazine” to re
veal King as “a traitor to his country and his race” and thus reduce his chances of gaining much income from a series of SCLC fund-raising shows scheduled around that time by Harry Belafonte. This recommendation was also approved by Hoover and marked “Handled 10/28/67.”45

  In early March 1968 the bureau began to disseminate information to the press aimed specifically at hurting the SCLC’s fund-raising for the Poor People’s Campaign. One such story the bureau circulated was “that King does not need contributions from the 70,000 people he solicited. Since the churches have offered support, no more money is needed and any contributed would only be used by King for other purposes.”46

  On March 28, 1968, the day the Memphis demonstration broke up in violence (which I have come to believe was caused by agents provocateur), a Domestic Intelligence Division memo detailed the outbreak of violence and had attached to it an unattributable memo that it was suggested could be made available by the Crime Records Division to “cooperative media sources.” It also carried Hoover’s “OK” and the notation “handled on 3/28/68.” This effort resulted in the widely published articles depicting Dr. King as a coward for fleeing the scene of the violence.

  For example, five days before King’s death, the Memphis Commercial Appeal (March 30, 1968) asserted in an editorial that “Dr. King is suffering from one of those awesome credibility gaps. Furthermore, he wrecked his reputation as a leader as he took off at high speed when violence occurred.”