THE DEEPENING PLOT
To see through a glass, though darkly
Reveals an image which becomes magnetic
Eyes to truth ever so starkly,
Compels commitment no less frenetic.
Beginning in 1978, as time and my legal practice allowed, I gradually became immersed in the case. In early 1978, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Morton Halperin of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, I discovered the interest that the CIA’s little-known Office of Security (OS) had in Dr. King during the 1960s. Some of the Agency’s most covert operations were mounted from the OS. Through an elaborate network of assets (independent contract agents whose acts may be officially denied), it coordinated a wide range of operations, including assassination efforts, the most infamous being the collaboration with organized crime through Sam Giancana and John Roselli in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s.
I learned that some of the key personnel of the OS were former FBI agents, and that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had a good working relationship with the OS. Incredibly, OS consultant Lee Pennington prepared Hoover’s personal income tax returns. Also, the OS had run a little-known program called Project RESISTANCE, which, along with Operation CHOA (mounted in 1967 at President Johnson’s request), was responsible for domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering on thousands of Americans who opposed the Vietnam War. During this period, CIA agents were also infiltrating protest and antiwar groups, and were providing training programs, services, and equipment to local police departments in exchange for surveillance and break-ins on the agency’s behalf. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the OS coordinated this activity, often in conjunction with the FBI and army intelligence, which had similar operations.
Documents reflected the Agency’s fear that Dr. King was influenced by a “Peking line” of communist thinking, and it was considering how derogatory information could be used to discredit him. Dr. King had been under Operation CHAOS, Project RESISTANCE, and other agency surveillance programs for a number of years. The Agency had also recruited assets in the 1960s to infiltrate, spy on, and subvert civil rights groups.
One such infiltrator was informant A, mentioned often in memos issued by OS director Howard Osborn and OS Security Research Staff (SRS) chief Paul Gaynor. Informant A was subsequently identified as Jay Richard Kennedy, who referred to Dr. King as a “Maoist.” In a memo dated October 5, 1967 (released to the public on March 13, 1978), Kennedy also referred to the National Conference New Politics (NCNP). In a gross misinterpretation of the events, he reported that the Black Caucus and the Communist Party “virtually wrecked the convention” but failed to get support for a King-Spock presidential ticket. The government’s reliance on such an out-of-touch informant is frightening.
In a memorandum for the SRS chief dated November 29, 1975, the following disclaimer was put on the record: “A thorough review of cited Office of Security files disclosed no evidence that the Office of Security has ever conducted any investigation, including wiretaps, surveillance, mail cover, or field investigations regarding listed subjects (one of whom was Dr. King). No inquiry was made outside the Office of Security and no DOD records were reviewed or checked.” (DOD [Domestic Operations Division] coordinates the agency’s operations inside that United States.)
In fact, the OS intercepted Dr. King’s mail and probably entered his hotel rooms illegally to obtain photocopies of credit card receipts, business cards, and telephone messages, which were included in the documents released. Even though Operation CHAOS was supposedly begun in 1967, many of the Freedom of Information Act documents on Dr. King were dated in the spring and summer of 1965, and purloined receipts and telephone messages were dated from the spring of 1966.
Finally, from the memos that the OS sent the FBI, it’s obvious that at least during the last year of Dr. King’s life they worked jointly against him. An OS memo dated March 15, 1968, issued within three weeks of Dr. King’s assassination, closed with the statement: “… FBI liaison has been most cooperative and effective in providing the office with timely information about the various domestic militants and protest groups.”
Throughout the 1960s and in particular for the two years following the appointment of Richard Helms as CIA director in June 30, 1966, the congressional and the executive branches of government, supported on national security grounds by the Supreme Court whenever necessary (following the 1959 5–4 decision in the case of Barr v. Matteo), generally abdicated their responsibility to check the agency and effectively gave the green light for its conduct of convert special operations (SOG activity) inside the United States.
As a result of the agency’s interest in and surveillance of Dr. King in the mid-1960s, I was interested in learning as much as possible about its domestic activity during the critical period leading up to the assassination. Much of the history was well known and fairly widely published, since there had been in previous years the occasional exposure of covert domestic activity.
The agency was established by the National Security Act, passed on September 18, 1947. In proposing the creation of the CIA, President Harry Truman emphasized the nation’s unawareness leading up to the raid on Pearl Harbor, which he thought illustrated the need for a central intelligence entity capable of providing prompt and effective warning about any such enemy attack. Administration witnesses continually stressed the position that the CIA was to be strictly limited to overseas operations. To meet certain congressional apprehension, the bill was amended to provide that “the agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions” (emphasis added).
Nevertheless, in the 1960s the agency became increasingly involved in domestic affairs. The list of distinguished persons and entities that came to be used in covert activities reads like a roster of the American establishment. More than one analyst has noted that the coalition of lawyers, businessmen, and financiers, which constituted the “establishment” during those years, consolidated silent control over the course of US public policy.
Though the nation was publicly assured, and it was commonly believed, that CIA activities were confined to international operations, by 1964 its domestic activity had become so extensive that a special section—the Domestic Operations Division—was secretly created to handle it. Its office at 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue was one block from the White House. The division’s purpose, as reflected by its very name, belied the official line that the agency was not engaged in any domestic activity.
As this growth developed, former President Truman, who sponsored the original establishment of the agency, declared in 1963, “I never had any thought … when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role…. I … would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. We have grown up as a nation respected for our free society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
As happened with President Eisenhower’s final warning about the danger to American democracy of the burgeoning “military industrial” complex, Harry Truman’s words went unheeded.
On June 30, 1966, Richard McGarrah Helms, a career intelligence professional, was appointed director of the CIA by Lyndon Johnson. As director, he succeeded Vice Admiral William P. “Red” Raborn, who had previously been vice president for project management at the defense industry contractor Aerojet-General Corporation of California.
By 1967 the CIA had offices and installations all over America. It even publicly listed them in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Miami, Pittsburgh, Houston, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and Minneapolis. Many others existed under front companies and names. Gradually, a number of domestic activities and operations began to surface, and American taxpayers became aware of the range of activities that they had been unwittingly financing.
In February 1967 (the month following my piece on Vietnam), Ramparts published an article by Mike Wood (who later became NCNP’s on-site convention coordinator in Chicago) that revealed the extensive relationship between the CIA and the American academic community through a plethora of contracts and grant arrangements with American colleges, universities, and research institutes. Wood’s article focused on the infiltration of the National Student Association, but that liaison was only the tip of the iceberg, which extended to faculty members and departments in dozens of institutions. Peripheral to these revelations was the occasional reference to even more deeply covert army involvement in such activity.
After Wood’s disclosures, it gradually emerged that during this period the agency was involved in virtually every segment of US domestic life: business and labor; local, state, and national law enforcement and government; universities; charities; the print and press media; lawyers; teachers; artists; women’s organizations and cultural groups. The publicly known list alone was staggeringly extensive. Grants were given, projects were funded, covers were provided, studies were commissioned, projects were mounted, training programs were run, and books were published. The arrangements were wide and varied. In its 1976 report the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities said that by 1967 the agency had sponsored, subsidized, or produced over one thousand books, with two hundred being turned out in 1967 alone. Analysts have noted the practice whereby one CIA operative or asset would write a book and others review it for selected newspapers and magazines.
By 1967 the CIA was spending 1.5 billion dollars a year without any effective fiscal control over individual expenditures on operations. Covert domestic activities and operations were paid for by “unvouchered funds” (expenditures without purchase orders or receipts). As a result of the 1949 Central Intelligence Act, Director Helms had the authority to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.” Helms’s signature on any check, no matter how large, drawn on any CIA bank account, was deemed to be sufficient. Interagency cooperation, particularly with the army and/or the State Department, was frequently necessary and this was accomplished through the establishment of Special Operations Groups (SOG) created for particular projects or missions. SOG activity inside the United States against “Willie” (blacks and dissidents) was not publicized or known.
On October 17, 1978, just before we had left Knoxville to interview Ray, Mark Lane had given me a copy of an affidavit issued by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and thus revealed to the American public some harsh truths about the war in Vietnam. The affidavit detailed a conversation Ellsberg had had four months earlier with Brady Tyson, then an aide to UN ambassador Andrew Young.
On June 16, 1978, while at the United Nations to talk with members and staff of the UN Special Assembly on Disarmament, Ellsberg became quite friendly with Tyson. As they left Tyson’s office one day, the subject of King’s assassination came up.
In the affidavit Ellsberg stated, “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.’ … I asked him who it was, if he would feel free to say, and he said again in a way that was very surprising to me in its lack of equivocation or reservation, ‘It was a group 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. This group Tyson said included ‘a sharpshooter,’ who had actually done the shooting.”
Ellsberg was startled; he pressed Tyson to tell him his source. Reluctantly, Tyson said, “That has turned up in Walter Fauntroy’s (HSCA) investigation and he’s told us.” “Us,” Ellsberg emphasized, included Ambassador Young, another aide, Stoney Cooks, and Tyson himself.
The affidavit continued: “I got the impression from things he subsequently said that Ambassador Young and his associates had actually gone over a good deal of the evidence directly and had not simply been told this in general terms.”
He quoted Tyson as saying, “We are eighty percent sure that we know who they are. We’re eighty percent sure that we know the names of all the people who were involved, and … it’s all circumstantial but very detailed.”
Tyson said he didn’t know what was going to be done because “we don’t have courtroom proof of this, of the names.”
Ellsberg was struck by Tyson’s lack of caution. “Tyson himself did not at any time caution me either to be silent about this or even so much as show discretion by what I did with it…. I even inferred to some degree that he might want me to pass it along, using discretion, to people who in my judgment ought to know it. His (Tyson’s) actual position impressed me: his closeness to Young, to King, his concern for the subject, and the fact that he was an official of the US government—the first friendly one I had seen in some seven years. A story that would have been a run-of-the-mill assertion in the mouths of the myriad of conspiracy theorists had enormous weight coming from him.”
Tyson left Ellsberg with the impression that they all hoped it would come out in the hearings. Tyson also said that when the HSCA was being formed, Fauntroy informed Carl Albert, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, that he wanted to be on a committee to investigate Dr. King’s death or even, if possible, to head the committee. Albert said to him, “Walter, you don’t want that job.”
To which Fauntroy replied, “But I do want it; why not?”
Albert whispered, “Walter, they will kill you …, the FBI.”
When the facts revealed to Ellsberg failed to come out in the 1978 summer hearings and the committee began to move in a different direction, Ellsberg decided to make his information known to James Earl Ray’s lawyer; hence the affidavit.
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After the Ray interview I spoke with Ellsberg, who confirmed the statement. Jim Lawson, who had a long-established relationship with Andy Young, Stoney Cooks, and Brady Tyson, agreed to seek confirmation from them. When he telephoned Stoney Cooks about the allegations, Cooks said, “Andy and I had hoped that the House Select Committee would release these matters and open them up.”
“As I listened to him,” Lawson told me, “I realized that he was confirming Ellsberg’s affidavit. He clearly indicated that there were names not released, information related to the death that the public did not know and that was not consistent with the theory that James Earl Ray was the lone assassin.” Lawson had no doubt that this information had privately been relayed to Andy Young and his staff aides by Walter Fauntroy.
When Jim Lawson subsequently asked Tyson about Ellsberg’s statements, Tyson replied that he didn’t remember all he had told Ellsberg but that he believed that he was an honest and significant witness. He even suggested that Ellsberg was “unimpeachable.”
As we reviewed this series of events, Lawson also recalled that many months earlier Dr. Joseph Lowery, Abernathy’s successor as president of the SCLC, had described to him a discussion with Fauntroy that appeared to confirm the Ellsberg account. At a subsequent meeting in Los Angeles, Lowery repeated the story with both Lawson and Mark Lane present. Later that fall, in a telephone conversation primarily concerned with my upcoming address at SCLC’s national convention, Lowery also confirmed to me that Lawson was telling the truth. He said that he still hoped that the HSCA would eventually uncover all the facts.
I became convinced that there was enough basic substantiation for the Ellsberg affidavit to warrant submitting it to the HSCA. In retrospect, I suppose we couldn’t have expected the committee to confirm Ellsberg’s allegations, but we were curious as to how they would explain them away. So on the morning of October 27, Abernathy, Reverend Lawson, activist/comedian Dick Gregory, and I joined Mark Lane for a private session in Walter Fauntroy’s office to present the new information to the committee leadership and senior staff. As we arrived, we saw, to our surprise, an assemblage of reporters and photographers standing just outside the doorway of his office suite.
We were never sure how the media had found out about the meeting. It wouldn’t serve the committee’s purpose to publicize it in any way. It was also contrary to counsel Robert Blakey’s style. He always preferred simply to disclose carefully prepared information. Although he never acknowledged it, we intuited that Mark Lane had tipped off the media. I felt this was unfortunate. The untimely public disclosure of information could close some doors that had partially opened for us.
We were ushered into Fauntroy’s inner office. Chairman Stokes, Blakey, and two members were waiting for us. In his introductory statement, Lane tore into the committee, its staff, and its leadership. He accused them of not following up leads and ignoring significant facts, and then he attacked Blakey personally and professionally. Blakey angrily objected and left the meeting, not returning until he was certain that Lane had finished.
As the Ellsberg revelations were set out for the committee, I noticed Fauntroy squirming in his chair. He denied ever having expressed any of the opinions attributed to him by any of the people mentioned. Fauntroy said he couldn’t understand how Tyson and Cooks, nor surely Andy Young, could ever attribute the statements in question to him. He said that it was his job to investigate every fact and allegation brought before the committee, and that he was determined to do this to the best of his ability. He said that because of his admiration for Dr. King, and all the years they had served together in the struggle for civil rights, he could never participate in anything but a full and complete investigation.
Fauntroy was clearly stressed. He said he “had no idea how anyone could believe that he had any knowledge of the allegations.”
Lawson was to note later, however, that Fauntroy equivocated considerably in the way he dismissed Ellsberg’s contentions. He would glance sideways at Abernathy, only to look quickly away. He never once looked directly at Jim Lawson.
Throughout the rest of the meeting, the staff and chairman insisted that nothing was worth considering in the Ellsberg allegations. They tried to put our group on the defensive by asserting that our promise of new information was a ruse to call the press. However, there was no effort to discredit Ellsberg’s version of Tyson’s remarks, nor was there any attempt to refute Jim Lawson’s corroboration. Instead we simply met a stone wall.
After the meeting, an argument erupted between Blakey and Lane. I stepped between them as Blakey was telling Lane that if he kept it up there was no question that he’d be taken care of once and for all. I was shocked.
We left Fauntroy’s offices and were met by a barrage of photographers and television journalists. Lane and Abernathy made brief statements. Abernathy, in his offhand manner, informed them that, yes, we had had a very productive meeting with the staff and leadership of the committee, we hoped that they would go on and complete their work, and we had given them certain information implicating the FBI in the killing of Dr. King. I was amazed that none of the press picked this up: there was virtually no response.
The next morning, I left a copy of the Ellsberg affidavit at former Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s law office. Ramsey agreed to have a word with Brady Tyson. After he spoke to Tyson, it was evident that something had changed. He told me that Tyson hadn’t repudiated Ellsberg’s comments but indicated that he didn’t recall saying the specific things alleged. I would learn more about this Fauntroy-Tyson story later.
In October of 1978, I went from New York to Memphis to study the scene of the crime and talk with some of the people who were close to the tragic events.
There was no doubt that Dr. King was standing on the second-story balcony in front of room 306 when he was shot. Mark Lane was skeptical about the MPD and the FBI official conclusion that the shot had been fired from the bathroom window on the second floor of the rooming house. Author/investigator Harold Weisberg also disputed this finding, saying that the shot most likely came from the area of the parking lot that bordered the fire station on one side and the rear yard of the rooming house on the other.
At the time of the shooting, a row of brush trees, a larger tree, and apparently other bushes provided a type of screen between the rooming house, the parking lot, and the motel on the other side of the street. This backyard area sloped upward about five or six feet from an eight-foot retaining wall on Mulberry Street, and was actually higher than the balcony on which Dr. King was standing at the time he was shot, though this fact appeared to have been largely overlooked.
I thought that an analysis of the trajectory of the shot might help, but at that time I couldn’t carry this out. There was also the problem of Dr. King’s posture at the time he was hit. Just prior to the shot he was observed to be leaning slightly on the rail, but there was disagreement as to whether he had actually straightened up before being hit.
The state’s chief witness in 1968 was Charlie Stephens. He and his common-law wife, Grace Walden, were both in their room (6-B, which adjoined the bathroom) at the time of the shooting. Stephens had provided the affidavit used for extradition, which had tentatively identified Ray’s profile as being that of a man he saw going down the front stairs after the shooting. When I talked with Walden, she said Charlie didn’t see anyone or anything. However, she said that when she was lying in bed around the time of the shot she saw a small man with “salt and pepper” hair wearing an open army jacket and a plaid sports shirt hurrying down the rear stairway leading to the back door. The description didn’t fit Ray in any way. Her story would vary significantly from time to time over the years (on one occasion she described the man as being black) except regarding the fact that Charlie Stephens didn’t see anything.
Wayne Chastain agreed. As a reporter for the Memphis Press-Scimitar, Chastain had been one of the first people on the scene on April 4. He told me that minutes after the shooting he saw an excited Solomon Jones, who said that shot came from the bushes “over there,” pointing across Mulberry Street to the thick brush behind the rooming house. “Catch me later at the hospital,” Solomon said.
Chastain then went around the front of the building and had a brief word with Judson “Bud” Ghormley, the deputy sheriff who was in charge of TACT 10, the emergency unit on break at the fire station when the shooting happened, and who apparently found the bundle in front of Canipe’s. He then entered the rooming house from the front and climbed to the second floor and went to the rear to try to get a view of the brush area below.
When he stuck his head in the door of room 6-B, he saw Walden lying on a sofa off to the right and asked her if he could look out of her rear window. She asked what the commotion was all about, and he told her that Dr. King had been shot. She said, “Oh, that was what I heard. I thought it was a firecracker.” She took him into the kitchen area of the rundown suite, where the rear windows overlooked the Lorraine and the brush below. As he entered this part of the room, he saw Charlie Stephens sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with a radio. He said Charlie may have mumbled a word or two but basically he and Charlie—who appeared to be in a stupor—didn’t speak.
When he looked out the window, Chastain could see the Lorraine balcony, but the combination of brush and trees below was so thick that he didn’t have a clear view of the motel parking area or driveway. As he turned to leave he noticed that Charlie had passed out with his head on the table.
After leaving the rooming house that evening, Chastain went to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where they had taken Dr. King. There, along with a battery of media people, he listened to Solomon Jones describe what he had seen. Jones maintained that he was standing by the car, having just told Dr. King that he would need a coat that evening, when the shot came. Jones ducked down and turned to look in the direction of the sound, and he saw a man in the bushes with a white sheet or hood over or around his face. Jones said at that time that this man rose up from the bushes, appeared to throw something to the side, walked to the wall, jumped down, and began to mingle with the crowd. He was wearing a jacket and a plaid shirt and came within about twenty-five feet of Jones, who was shocked and frightened. As the man began to walk away, Jones got into his car and tried to follow him but was frustrated by the growing crowd of people and cars. In a short time the ambulance arrived.
Chastain returned to the rooming house the next morning between 7:30 and 8:00 to see Bessie Brewer, the manager. She said that the FBI had told her not to talk to anyone. Chastain was approached by an old “codger” he knew only as Major, who was drunk even at that hour, but he asked Chastain to come back to his room. He told Chastain that he saw who had done it. He said, “It was a nigger,” but that he would never testify against him. His room was in the southern section of the rooming house where the Brewers also lived and where the office was located. Stephens and Walden lived on the other side; a four-foot alleyway separated the two sections. Chastain didn’t take Major very seriously because his window looked out into the alley (although it also allowed one to look directly into room 5-B on the other side—the room rented by Ray).
Around 11:00 a.m., Chastain’s editor sent him back to the rooming house to interview Charlie Stephens. Charlie had sobered up, and as they were talking the Major came up to them and told Charlie that he had told Chastain it was a nigger who did it. “Yeah, it was a nigger,” Charlie agreed. Chastain gave no credence to either man. Bessie Brewer said that they were both drunk and didn’t see anything.
Sometime later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, told Chastain that he had refused to serve Stephens in the Grill after 4:00 p.m. on the day of the killing because he was too drunk. He did, however, sell him two quarts of beer to take upstairs to his room.
The day after the shooting, Grace Walden told Chastain the same story she told me ten years later about the small man with the salt-and-pepper hair whom she saw, from her bed, going down the back stairs. It was not clear to Chastain, however, that she could have seen anything from where her bed was located.
Chastain was astounded when in the following months Stephens emerged as the state’s main witness against James Earl Ray. In light of Stephens’s condition, which must have been apparent to any police investigator, he couldn’t have testified to anything. Assistant District Attorney James Beasley’s representation at the guilty plea hearing of what Charlie Stephens would have testified, had there been a trial, made no sense to Chastain. Beasley had told this to the court:
In the meantime, back upstairs at 422 1/2 South Main, Charles Quitman Stephens, who occupied these two rooms adjacent to a bathroom here (indicating), Mr. Stephens, who earlier in the afternoon had observed Mrs. Brewer as she talked to the Defendant … heard movements over in the apartment 5-B rented to the defendant…. At approximately 6:00 p.m., Mr. Stephens heard the shot coming apparently through this wall from the bathroom (indication). He then got up, went through this room out into the corridor in time to see the left profile of the defendant as he turned down this passageway….
I would learn that Charlie Stephens was placed under close control by the MPD right after the murder; apparently he hoped to receive the reward being offered by the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the city of Memphis. After Ray was brought back to the United States, Stephens was held in protective custody by the MPD, and Grace Walden was placed in a mental hospital. Bessie Brewer was removed as manager of the rooming house and left the scene. The rooming house itself was put under lock and key.
Chastain also referred me to an interview of Stephens conducted by CBS correspondent Bill Stout shortly after the killing, which, curiously enough, didn’t air until 1976. Stout showed Stephens a picture of James Earl Ray that the authorities were circulating:
Bill Stout: Mr. Stephens, what do you think of that picture? Does it look like the man?
Charles Stephens: Well—(clears throat)—excuse me—from the glimpse that I—that I got of his profile, it doesn’t.
Stout: It doesn’t?
Stephens: Certainly—no, sir, it certainly doesn’t. For one thing, he’s too heavy. His face is too full. He has too much hair, and his nose is too wide—from the glimpse that, as I said, that I got of his profile. But that definitely, I would say, is not the—the guy.
Chastain raised the question of Dr. King’s last-minute room change at the Lorraine. He recounted a Saturday night conversation with the owner of the Lorraine, Walter Bailey. Bailey said that on April 2, the day before Dr. King was to arrive, his wife had been visited by an SCLC “advance man,” who insisted that the ground-level, courtyard room wouldn’t do, and that Dr. King had to have a second-floor balcony room overlooking the swimming pool (even though it was empty). Bailey said that his wife described the visitor as being about six feet tall, built like a football player, and “Indian” in appearance, with high cheekbones. As discussed, we would eventually learn with certainty who it was who organized the room change.
Another Press-Scimitar reporter, Kay Black, told me in two interviews that early on the morning of April 5, she received a call from former mayor William Ingram, who told her that some trees or brush behind the rooming house from which Dr. King was supposed to have been shot were being cut down. He suggested that she go over and take a look. When she got to the rooming house later in the day she found that the brush had indeed been cut. An official at the Public Works Department told her it was a routine cleanup. A “routine cleanup” that totally compromised the crime scene made no sense.
Reverend James Orange, who had been in the parking area of the Lorraine at the time of the shooting, told me that the memory of the brush area stuck in his mind because immediately after Dr. King was shot he saw smoke rise from “a row of bushes right by the fire station.” (I thought he must have been mistaken about the exact location of the smoke since the angle of the shot appeared to be wrong and the bushes extended all the way to the northern end of the rooming house rear yard.) “It could not have been more than five or ten seconds after the shot,” he said. Just prior to the shot he and Jim Bevel arrived back at the Lorraine, driven by Invaders member Marrell McCollough. Exiting McCollough’s car, they began to “tussle” just below the balcony where Dr. King was standing when he was shot. The next morning Reverend Orange noticed that the bushes were gone.
Increasingly, I viewed the early-morning alteration of this area as sinister. It was inexplicable to me that the MPD, the FBI, and the HSCA investigations didn’t follow up on this lead begging for attention. James Orange told me that no one connected with any enforcement or investigative body had asked him about what he saw. When he tried to alert the police officers on the scene they told him to stay out of the way.
In early November 1978, shortly after our HSCA meeting in Walter Fauntroy’s office, Dan Ellsberg told me that he had recently met Fauntroy at an ACLU affair. He said Fauntroy still denied mentioning the FBI to Tyson, Cooks, and Young, but when pressed, he expressed his opinion that the FBI “not only set the tone for Dr. King’s assassination through their harassment but, in fact, played a role in carrying out the conspiracy,” and that “it would not have been beyond J. Edgar Hoover to have personally approved, if not ultimately directed, the operation.”
On Friday, November 17, 1978, Walter Fauntroy, Brady Tyson, Andy Young, and Stoney Cooks, all testifying before the HSCA, denied any knowledge of FBI involvement and refuted Daniel Ellsberg’s statement. Their testimony was in response to a front-page article in the Knoxville News Sentinel on November 11, in which Mark Lane and Anna Ray released the contents of the Ellsberg affidavit, alleging that the Ellsberg-Lowery statements proved “without a doubt” that FBI director Hoover ordered the assassination. I felt that Lane had gone too far in his interpretation of the information.
Fauntroy categorically denied having received any evidence of FBI involvement, and Young denied receiving such information from Fauntroy. However, Young did at one point admit that “there were strange connections that we were all concerned about, and it was one of the things we wanted this Committee to look into.” He also acknowledged having a concern about official involvement in a conspiracy. Since no member followed up on those remarks, they were simply left hanging, and Young’s testimony was summarized as being a denial of Ellsberg’s allegations.
Brady Tyson testified that he and Ellsberg had at first spoken generally about assassinations and then, when the conversation turned to the King killing, he told Dan Ellsberg about his “pet theory”—that a clandestine group within the FBI, though not an official or authorized operation, might have carried out the plot.
Following suit, Stoney Cooks also denied knowledge of any FBI involvement. In response to a question from Congressman Harold Ford about Tyson’s reputation at the UN, Cooks stated that his colleague was kind of a “missionary,” and in seeking to provide Dan Ellsberg with the warmest possible welcome he probably “was a bit overzealous in his conversations.”
I believed that Brady Tyson had probably been loose-tongued but truthful in his remarks to Dan Ellsberg. Fauntroy had probably shared his information in-house with Young and his aides, without any expectation that an outsider would hear the story and repeat it. When it came out after Ellsberg became convinced that the HSCA wasn’t going to act, the wheels were set in motion to deny it ever happened. Under pressure, Young and his aides denied hearing the story of Hoover’s possible involvement and Fauntroy himself (since he was a senior member of the committee and had to maintain the appearance of loyalty) had no choice, unless he was willing to resign.
Dan Ellsberg’s revelation constituted not only the first real indication of FBI involvement in Dr. King’s murder but, even more ominous, it was an initial indication that the HSCA was not prepared to allow such evidence to become public or even to acknowledge what appeared to be its own information.
More determined than ever to examine the official story, I went back to Memphis and turned my attention to Jim’s Grill. In 1968, Loyd Jowers told Chastain about a mysterious stranger who was in the Grill on the afternoon of April 4 and again the following morning, ordering eggs and sausage both times. Jowers described him as well-dressed and definitely out of place. Following police orders, when the man appeared on the 5th, Jowers called the police, who arrived and took the man in, only to release him soon afterward.
Wayne Chastain maintained that many of the black people who had been in the Grill at the time of the shooting had never been identified. He has tried unsuccessfully to locate and interview each of the black waitresses on duty that afternoon, one of whom, Betty, he had heard had particular significance. Jowers seemed unable to assist him in finding Betty and one other waitress but arranged for him to interview a third waitress, Rosie Lee Dabney, who had waited on the stranger on the afternoon of April 4.
Chastain had become aware, as a result of the activities of writer William Sartor, a stringer for Time magazine, and investigator Renfro Hays, that both Jowers and Rosie Lee Dabney had identified the “eggs and sausage” man from photographs that Sartor had shown them. The photographs depicted a government intelligence asset with ties to army intelligence and the CIA; his name was Walter Alfred “Jack” Youngblood. Chastain told me, however, that five years later, when he and reporter Jeff Cohen showed the same photographs to Jowers in a diner one night, Jowers changed his mind. He said that he didn’t think that was the man after all. When reminded about his earlier identification, he simply said he thought it wasn’t the man.
Chastain said that MPD Assistant Chief Henry Lux denied taking Youngblood in, but Frank Holloman acknowledged that a man was detained, as did FBI special agent in charge (SAC) Robert Jensen. Jensen insisted that the man was a gun collector and that his presence had nothing to do with the killing.
Chastain believed that this “egg and sausage” man was Jack Youngblood, and was the same mysterious person who he heard had visited attorney Russell X. Thompson and local ministers James M. Latimer and John Baltensprager a week or so after the killing. Reverend Latimer identified Youngblood as his mysterious visitor from a photograph Chastain showed him, and attorney Walter Buford (a college classmate and friend of Youngblood) said that Youngblood had called him while in town during that time. I resolved to pursue the story myself.
I located and interviewed Loyd Jowers, a thin, almost anemic man, in his late sixties. Puffing on a cigarette, Jowers confirmed Chastain’s account of the arrest. I showed him photographs of Jack Youngblood and he said, “Yup, that’s him all right.”
Attorney Russell Thompson told me that around 10:00 p.m. on April 10, 1968, he received a call from a man with a western accent. The caller said that he had just flown into Memphis from his home in Chicago, had heard of Thompson from some friends, and needed to talk to him immediately but that it was important to speak with him alone. They agreed to meet early the next morning.
He described his visitor as being about six feet tall, about thirty-five years old, with light hair and wearing a sombrero. He also had a tattoo of the letters “T” over “S” on his arm, which Thompson recalled he could make disappear. He didn’t give his name (although he later used the alias Tony Benavites) and maintained that a Denver roommate of his, a professional gun (as was he) whom he called Pete, shot Dr. King. He said that only a fool would attempt to carry out the killing from a second-floor bathroom window at the end of a corridor because the trees could so easily have deflected a bullet. He said that Pete fired from the bushes, broke the rifle down, putting the barrel down his back, jumped from the wall, and disappeared in the confusion. Thompson was struck by the precise description of the brush and the trees behind the rooming house. This led him to believe that the man knew the area well and could even have been there when it happened.
In an offhand way, he asked Thompson to represent his friend should he be charged. Benavites said that he himself had been picked up “last Friday” (the day the stranger in Jim’s Grill was arrested) and was turned loose after being taken up to the rooming house.
Thompson heard from this man only once more in a brief phone call in which he said it didn’t appear that legal assistance would be required after all. Thompson gave a full report to MPD inspector N. E. Zachary and William Lawrence of the FBI.
Less than four hours after the mysterious stranger left Thompson’s office on April 11, Reverend James Latimer, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church at the time, received a telephone call just as he was heading off to lunch with his friend Reverend John Baltensprager. The caller said he needed some “spiritual guidance” or else he was going to “commit suicide.”
The two ministers went to a steak house called Jim’s Place and met a rather smartly dressed man wearing tinted sunglasses, a blue sports coat, dark trousers, and boots. He was described as having dark wavy hair, long sideburns, and a dark complexion. He was about six feet tall and had an athletic build. At Latimer’s suggestion they went to Robilio’s Cafeteria in South Memphis, where there was more privacy. The man identified himself as J. Christ Bonnevecche and said that on the afternoon that Dr. King was killed he was employed as a runner for the Mafia.
Latimer asked Bonnevecche whether he had killed Dr. King. The man said, “No, but I know who did.” He seemed to be implying that there was an organized-crime connection with the killing, but it didn’t really make much sense to the ministers. He said that he was a drug addict and rolled up his sleeves to show the ministers a scar on the inside of his elbow. As he did so, they noticed an intertwined tattoo, “T” over “J,” similar to the “T” over “S” that attorney Thompson had noticed. Bonnevecche reportedly also said that his friend “Nick” killed Dr. King. He said that Nick was very much like himself in personality and interests. He told them that Nick had entered and left town on a motorcycle and that when he exited he had the murder weapon strapped onto his back, having previously discarded the rifle stock.
Reverend Latimer indicated, however, that a good deal of the discussion focused on the Kennedy assassination, which he said Bonnevecche maintained was a Mafia hit. His mysterious visitor also said that Robert Kennedy was next, and that he would definitely be assassinated if he won the California primary.
This, of course, is exactly what happened. Reverend Latimer reported this conversation to Inspector Zachary, who promised, as he had with Thompson, to “check it out.”
I wouldn’t be able to speak with Reverend Latimer for a number of years, but Russell Thompson talked with him about the incident. Thompson said that he had no doubt that the man who visited him was the same person who spoke with the ministers. Thompson said he never received a satisfactory explanation or a report back from Inspector Zachary or the FBI, and when I showed him Jack Youngblood’s picture, he seemed uncertain but thought that he could have been the man. Though his visitor was about the right age, Thompson had described him as being light-haired. All the photographs I had of Youngblood were of a dark-haired man. If Youngblood had been his visitor, he must have been in disguise.
Youngblood did appear to match the description of a man who appeared at the St. Francis Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after the assassination. This man was with a James Earl Ray look-alike who appeared to have a great deal of money to throw around and who openly spoke of a second killing that was soon to take place. (Remember that during his stay in Los Angeles in late 1967 to early 1968, Ray had lived for some time at the St. Francis Hotel and was known there.)
Months later I would meet Jack Youngblood on two occasions. He said that he knew some people who had direct information about the killing. They were living outside of the country and for a sum of money he might be able to get them to tell their story.
When pressed as to why these overseas contacts would be willing to sit down and reveal what they knew about this case, considering that there is no statute of limitations for murder, he said the main reason was because they were disenchanted after having provided long and effective service to their government. They now felt that they were being sold down the river, forgotten. He claimed that he had an oil-company plane at his disposal.
Because of his intelligence connections and activity, it was possible that he knew people who were involved. At the end of the day I came to believe it was unlikely that he had any direct involvement in the case. It seemed that either he was acting on behalf of the government, spreading false information (disinformation) in order to confuse and divert the investigation away from the truth, or he was holding out the promise of information in an effort to hustle money. Though I arranged some funds for him, he never produced the mysterious expatriate government operatives.
I eventually came to believe that the “people” to whom he was referring were the same two military operatives known to have met with Steve Tompkins in Mexico over a period of time, at a much later date.
Of all the indications of government involvement I encountered during my first investigatory period, none was more bizarre than the actions of William Bradford Huie. In 1978 Jerry Ray had told me that in 1976, as the HSCA was being formed, James Earl Ray’s Nashville attorney Jack Kershaw was invited to attend a meeting in Nashville with author William Bradford Huie and two other persons.
Huie asked him to take an offer to his client: a payment of $220,000, a pardon from the governor of Tennessee, a waiver of the outstanding detainer (escape warrant) from the Missouri Department of Corrections, and a new identity, in exchange for unequivocal admission of guilt in the murder of Dr. King. Kershaw delivered the offer to his client, who rejected it out of hand.
A short time later, when Mark Lane had replaced Kershaw, Huie repeated the offer to Jerry Ray in the course of two telephone conversations which Jerry tape recorded. Ray’s response was the same.
Not long afterward I obtained copies of the transcript of the tape. In the October 29, 1977, 12:15 a.m. conversation, the following exchange took place:
Jerry Ray: “So when this deal came up with James and Kershaw said you’d pay so much money if he’d, you know, plea guilty and confess.”
William Bradford Huie: “Yeah, that’s right. But let me tell you one thing clearly. I’m not talking about just a statement. I’m talking about something that James has never done in his life before. I’m talking about a story that says how and why. And he explains….”
Nine and a half hours later, a second conversation took place:
Huie: “You’re talking about $200,000 here, Jerry. The only thing that will be of any value for both a book and film and put this right in your mind—Why and How I Killed Dr. King, by James Earl Ray, with the help of William Bradford Huie.”
From the account of his contacts it is clear that Huie was acting as an intermediary in an effort to get James to confess in detail and thus, once and for all, close the case.
Mark Lane had Jerry Ray tape record the offer and draw out Huie so the attempt was clear.