Orders to Kill Read online

  The next day (March 31) the paper stated in an article headed “Chicken à la King” that “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fled from the rioting and looting in the downtown area Thursday….” His efforts to climb aboard a meat truck were rebuffed but the motorist next in line picked him up.”

  On March 30 and 31 the Globe-Democrat, in an editorial supplied virtually verbatim by the FBI and headed “The Real Martin Luther King” stated that “King sprinted down a side street to an awaiting automobile and sped away.” Dr. King was termed a deceiver who would no longer be able to “hoodwink intelligent Americans.” It labeled him “one of the most menacing men in America.” On the opposite page was a cartoon caricature of Dr. King shooting a gun, with the caption, “I’m not firing it—I’m only pulling the trigger.” In fact, King was reluctant to leave the scene of the violence on March 28. He virtually had to be forced to leave.

  Then, as Dr. King prepared to go to Memphis for what would be his last visit, the Domestic Intelligence Division, in a memorandum issued on March 29, 1968, recommended that the following article be furnished to a “cooperative news source”:

  Martin Luther King, during the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, has urged Negroes to boycott downtown white merchants to achieve Negro demands. On 3/29/68 King led a march for the sanitation workers. Like Judas leading lambs to slaughter King led the marchers to violence, and when the violence broke out, King disappeared.

  The fine Hotel Lorraine in Memphis is owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes but King didn’t go there for his hasty exit. Instead King decided the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white owned, operated and almost exclusively patronized, was the place to “cool it.” There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers.

  Thus, five days before the assassination the bureau was looking to place an internally prepared article whose message was that Dr. King should stay at a black-owned hotel instead of a white establishment. In particular, “the fine Hotel Lorraine” was singled out.

  In volume four of the HSCA report,47 the committee stated that the “FBI did as a part of its propaganda campaign against Dr. King prepare a press release on March 29, taking him to task for staying at the Holiday Inn. In turn, this criticism was echoed in newspapers around the country, although the investigation was unable to determine concretely if the news stories were the direct result of the FBI release….”

  In its Saturday morning (March 30) edition the Commercial Appeal made a point of stating that Dr. King was “staying in a $29 a day room at the Holiday Inn Rivermont, also known as the Rivermont Hotel.” This of course was the hotel to which he was rushed and registered by the police after the march broke up.

  The HSCA accepted Ralph Abernathy’s recollection that Dr. King’s normal practice was to stay at the Lorraine, though reporter Kay Black’s memory differed. The contention that Dr. King normally stayed at the Lorraine made no sense in light of the active campaign of criticism aimed at him for staying at white-owned hotels. Such criticism would have been hollow if in fact the Lorraine was his usual motel in Memphis. The committee didn’t discuss or even refer to the changing of Dr. King’s room at the Lorraine.

  THE HSCA REPORTED that the bureau’s media efforts to discredit Dr. King even continued after he was killed. In March 1969, when it was learned that Congress was considering declaring Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday, the Crime Records Division recommended briefing the members of the House Committee on Internal Security, who had the power to keep the bill from being reported out of committee. A plan was developed, but Hoover was concerned that any efforts to discredit King posthumously be handled “very cautiously.”48

  Though not covered specifically by the HSCA report, one of the most blatant ways the bureau tried to tarnish Dr. King’s image after his death was by spreading the story to the media that he might well have been shot on the orders of a husband of a former lover. Jack Anderson, one of the columnists who was fed the FBI information, revealed in 1975 how he had been contacted by Hoover in 1968, when he was, in his words, “on good terms with the old FBI curmodgeon [sic]”:

  The FBI vendetta against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t end with his murder. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had tried to blacken King’s name while he was alive, also tried to tarnish it after his death.

  Not long after King was gunned down on the balcony of his Memphis motel on April 4, 1968, Hoover sent word to me that the motive behind the murder was cuckoldry, that the assassin apparently had been hired by a jealous husband … who had become enraged by the discovery that his wife had borne King’s child. The intermediary identified the Los Angeles couple and showed me supporting data, including an FBI report describing a passionate interlude between the wife and Dr. King in a New York City hotel….

  I flew to Los Angeles and did my damnedest to confirm the FBI leads…. I could find absolutely no evidence that contradicted the couple’s own explanation that Dr. King was an honored friend of the family, a frequent guest in their home and nothing more.

  I also discovered with deepening apprehension that there were no FBI agents on this trail that was supposed to be so hot. I returned to Washington satisfied that the FBI story was erroneous and half convinced that it was a deliberate hoax.49

  In 1968 Anderson was indeed on good terms with Hoover, receiving and publishing bureau information such as that appearing in his columns on May 6, 1968 (lauding the bureau’s search for Ray and pronouncing his guilt), and March 25, 1969 (denying the existence of either a conspiracy or the handler named Raul).

  Bureau Influence with Religious Leaders

  In his testimony before the HSCA in open hearing, bureau assistant director C. D. Brennan confirmed that the FBI also strove to discredit Dr. King in the eyes of prominent religious leaders. A number of confidential bureau memos substantiated this assertion.

  The bureau was particularly incensed over the possibility of Dr. King meeting with the pope in late September 1964. In an effort to prevent this audience, Assistant Director John Malone provided an extensive briefing to one of the bureau’s most reliable friends—Francis Cardinal Spellman of the New York diocese. His Eminence was long known to be one of the Roman Catholic Church’s most virulent anticommunists and a long-term supporter of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He reportedly “immediately advised” the Vatican secretary of state that no audience be given to Dr. King in light of “very serious, but highly confidential information which had come to his attention but which he could not discuss in detail over the telephone.”50 For whatever reason, the effort failed, and Dr. King did meet with the pope on September 18, 1964.

  The bureau had more luck in its contact with the Baptist World Alliance, which had scheduled Dr. King to speak at its congress in Miami Beach, Florida, in June 1965. After the alliance was presented with certain “facts” about Dr. King, his speech was canceled.

  The FBI mounted similar campaigns in late 1964 and early 1965 designed to damage Dr. King’s relations with the National Council of Churches and Archbishop Cody of the archdiocese of Chicago.

  Campaign to Prevent the Award of Honorary Degrees to Dr. King

  Every time the bureau learned that a university was planning to award Dr. King an honorary degree, it strove to dissuade senior officials from making the award. Usually these efforts failed. One notable success apparently involved Marquette University in 1964. Hoover had himself received an honorary award from Marquette in 1950 and considered the prospect of King getting the same award a personal insult. The bureau pulled out all stops, and the award was canceled.

  Attempts to Neutralize Dr. King’s Leadership and Replace Him

  In 1964 the bureau undertook a plan to promote an alternative figure as a black leader. A moderate, acceptable replacement was to emerge after the discrediting and destruction of Dr. King was complete. A memo dated December 1, 1964, proposed that Cartha DeLoach organize a meeting of a number of the more amenable civil rights leaders. These leaders would be positiv
ely informed about the bureau’s civil rights activity as well as about the negative aspects of Dr. King. In effect, the so-called potential replacements would treat King like a pariah.

  The “Suicide Project”

  One of the bureau’s most venal actions against King took place in October 1964 after it was announced that he was going to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. U.S. ambassadors in London, Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen were briefed about his personal life and communist associations, in case any of them contemplated receiving him. In addition, the FBI made a tape that allegedly contained ribald remarks made by Dr. King, and sounds of people apparently engaging in sexual activity. An agent flew the tape to Tampa, Florida, and mailed it anonymously to the SCLC from that city, along with a letter threatening to expose the alleged sexual indiscretions.

  The letter, mailed in late November, was designed to drive King to despair:

  King look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a greater liability to all of us Negroes…. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that…. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins [,] a man of character [,] and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done….

  The HSCA concluded that the final paragraph “clearly implied that suicide would be a suitable course of action for Dr. King”:51

  King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is…. There is but one way out for you. You had better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.52

  As a result of this action by the bureau, Dr. King and his colleagues became aware for the first time of the extensive surveillance of them. From then on, they had no doubt about the lengths to which Hoover would go to silence King.

  SCLC Infiltration

  Former agent Arthur Murtagh testified before the HSCA that he himself had many informants whom he used to gather information about the SCLC. They were part of the “black probe” operation. He noted that the field office’s primary informant was a member of the SCLC’s executive staff controlled by agent Al Sentinella, who sat directly across from him in the Atlanta field office. In addition to the monthly bureau payment, this informant further supplemented his income by embezzling organization funds. Sentinella warned him about this but took no other action. The informant informed on the SCLC and Dr. King, sometimes daily, right up to the day of the assassination. Among other information, details of Dr. King’s itinerary and travel plans were provided.

  The official abuses, though orchestrated by Hoover, were supported and carried out by bureau and field office personnel in every section of the country. Murtagh said that in Atlanta 90 percent of their time was spent on investigating and attempting to denigrate Dr. King. This focus reflected a hatred that seemed to permeate the bureau from top to bottom.

  Murtagh’s HSCA testimony revealed that on April 4, 1968, as he left the Atlanta field office around 6:30 p.m. with Special Agent Jim Rose, his fellow agent virtually “jumped for joy,” exclaiming, “We [or “They”—Murtagh’s recollection here is hazy] finally got the son of a bitch!”

  (In his testimony before the HSCA, Rose couldn’t recall any words that he uttered at the time. When asked whether it was possible that he made the statement alleged by Murtagh, he said, “It is possible.”)53

  As horrendous as this campaign was in the HSCA’s view, the committee didn’t view it as indicative of the bureau’s involvement in the assassination itself, but as appearing to create an atmosphere in which the assassination could take place. Summarizing the HSCA conclusions, Counsel Blakey declared that, “as it turned out, the House Select Committee found no evidence of complicity of the CIA, FBI or any government agency in either assassination.” (emphasis added.)

  Just as chilling as the HSCA’s efforts to deflect attention from government involvement in King’s death were its efforts to sidestep questions about a conspiracy by putting forward a highly questionable theory of its own. The HSCA firmly rejected the FBI’s conclusion that Ray was a racist and that his racism was the motive for the assassination. It would be difficult to construct a more convoluted scenario than the one the HSCA advanced: Two alleged conspirators, St. Louis racists named John Sutherland and John Kauffmann—both dead by the time the HSCA was formed, and whose supposed involvement was raised for the first time in the final report—were alleged to have offered a bounty on Dr. King, which Ray somehow heard about, taking it upon himself to earn it. It was acknowledged, however, that Ray had never met the two men. No explanation was provided as to why he never collected nor tried to collect his payment, nor even how he imagined he would be paid.

  The HSCA suggested possible ways James Earl Ray could have learned about the alleged offer. They tried, for example, to show that he could have heard about it from another prisoner or even a medical officer with whom he had had contact during his Missouri incarceration. Finally the committee admitted that its investigation failed to confirm any such connection. In fact, both the prisoner, John Paul Spica, and the doctor, Hugh Maxey, denied ever having heard of the alleged Sutherland-Kauffmann offer.

  The committee then attempted to establish that John Ray, at his Grapevine Tavern in St. Louis, passed information to James about the contract. Since John Ray had in late 1967 and early 1968 allegedly been a supporter of the presidential campaign of Alabama governor George Wallace and his American Independence Party, and both Sutherland and Kauffmann also supported the party, the HSCA believed there was a link. The Grapevine, according to the committee, was a source of Wallace literature. The committee also claimed that brothers John and Jerry were quite active in Wallace campaign activity. John Ray denied under oath knowing either Sutherland or Kauffmann and further denied ever hearing or participating in conversations at the Grapevine about the offer.

  Though the committee admitted that its extensive investigation of the St. Louis conspiracy proved frustrating and that it could produce no direct evidence that Ray had ever even heard of the money offer to kill Dr. King, or even that such an offer existed, it alleged that through his participation in the Alton bank robbery Ray was physically present in the St. Louis area around July 1967.

  The HSCA concluded that Ray was a lone gunman, acting with full knowledge of what he was doing, probably stalking Dr. King for a period immediately preceding the assassination. Raul, as described by Ray, didn’t exist, so Ray couldn’t have been a fall guy manipulated by others. However, if there was a Raul he was likely either or both of Ray’s brothers, with whom he had ongoing contact and assistance. The HSCA stated that strong circumstantial evidence existed about the consultative role of one of the brothers in the purchase of the weapon itself. (The only scintilla of evidence provided was Aeromarine store manager Donald Wood’s comment that when he bought the rifle Ray said he was going hunting with his brother. In fact Ray has said that his cover story for the purchase was that he was going hunting with his brother-in-law.)

  To shore up the committee’s conclusions about the involvement of the Ray brothers, Counsel Blakey continued to press for a prosecution of John Ray for perjury for denying that he participated in the Alton bank robbery. As noted earlier, the U.S. attorney general’s office summarily refused, citing a lack of evidence.

  The HSCA then sealed, for fifty years, all the investigative files and information it elected not to publish. This included all field investigative reports, interviews, documents, and data. Counsel Blakey also invited the CIA, the FBI, and the MPD intelligence division to place their files on the case under congressional cover so that they would be protected from any Freedom of Information Act requests. This they did.

  With all of its speciousness and shortcomings, the HSCA report raised a number of questions and identified a number of witnesses
who had varying types of involvement and stories to tell. In most cases the committee prepared brief explanations and summaries to implement its door-closing objective.

  The committee accepted the MPD’s official explanation for the removal of Detective Redditt from his surveillance post at the fire station. Under cross-examination, however, Redditt admitted that his role was not to provide security for Dr. King, as he had previously maintained, but rather to surveil him and provide intelligence reports. The report noted that upon being removed from his post Redditt was personally brought by MPD intelligence officer Lt. E. H. Arkin to a meeting in police headquarters where he was informed by Director Holloman of a threat on his life. However, the report also revealed, without explanation, the presence at that meeting of one Phillip Manuel, an investigator for the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Arkansas senator John McClellan. Supposedly, Manuel had told Redditt’s superiors about the threat on Redditt’s life.

  The HSCA discussed the removal of the two black firemen, which early investigators had found curious, but passed it off as being motivated by the MPD’s concern with the security of their surveillance posts and having nothing to do with the existence of a conspiracy.

  The report also dealt with rumors surrounding the removal of a personal security detail assigned to Dr. King and accepted Inspector Don Smith’s explanation that since the SCLC party wasn’t willing to cooperate with the detail it was disbanded late in the afternoon of April 3.

  As to Solomon Jones’s insistence that he saw someone in the bushes right after the shooting, the HSCA concluded that it was unlikely that what Solomon saw was a person but that if it were a man it was likely to have been a quick-responding MPD policeman, already on the scene.54 (This appears incredible considering Solomon had described the man as wearing a jacket and plaid shirt.)