DISINFORMATION
Truth smothered with lies
Suffocates and dies
In our midst injustice reigns
And despite our plea liberty wanes
Ignorance abounds throughout the land
Programmed well by a hidden hand
But a glimmer survives, a forlorn light
To harbor truth in darkest night.
As noted earlier, in the thirty-seven years I have been involved with this case, there has been one effort after another to dis-inform the public about what really happened. Though, uniformly, this has involved collaboration between government and the mainstream media, those activities have taken on a number of forms.
Books and articles have been written at various stages. Television documentaries have been produced and shown repeatedly by mainstream media. Radio and television interviews have been aired focusing on the official story. In contrast, our work was suppressed. For example, there was the use of blackouts or mainstream news embargoes of events associated with our work, such as the 1999 civil trial of the King Family v. Jowers. Another such example was the failure of my first two books on the case, Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003) to be reviewed by the mainstream media. The 1995 book was almost reviewed in The New York Times, whose chief reviewer told the publisher’s representative that he was ordered by his editor—for the first time in twenty-five years—to pull the review.
The disinformation efforts took on more sinister activity when, as set out in an earlier work, there was clearly an official effort in 1996 to infiltrate our investigation by someone claiming to be Colonel John Downie, who offered to provide us with inside information about his role. The real Colonel Downie, it turned out, had died some years prior to the contact, requiring the agent to claim he had been given a new identity. We came to believe that efforts like this one were undertaken often for the purpose of leading us astray or planting false information that could potentially undermine the credibility of our investigation.
All of the above tactics were employed by the docile, compliant, mainstream publishing houses, national television stations, and print media. With these consistent practices and policies, actually dating back to the assassination itself, manifesting their presence down to the present time or over a period of forty-six years, it is impossible to accept coincidental good faith or naïveté as being the moving force.
I have too often been advised that the truths uncovered by our work were “not worth [losing] the job” by one or another media figure. Then, there is the well-known (thanks to Carl Bernstein) presence of intelligence agency operatives in every aspect of media, including The New York Times, which, he contended, agreed to take twelve agents in 1959 in a variety of positions from the very senior to stringer. What emerges is a compulsive systemic media policy of protecting the consumer-driven economy and masses from any anxiety that could conceivably interfere with the flow of retail and wholesale commercial activity. This works hand in glove with the desire of government to protect the credibility and integrity of its agencies and their budgets. The revolving door of the corporate and official world mutually benefit from the preservation of an undisturbed status quo.
Over the last half-century, the consolidation of these tactics has become ever more evident. I remember that this was not always the case. For its significance in terms of how government deals with dissent, it is worth repeating the Look magazine story, when, in 1967, my Ramparts article was published with gruesome photographs. Bill Atwood of Look (mainstream as one could find) was interested in running the piece. When we met, his first words were to inform me that the previous week he had a visit from Averill Harriman (former governor of New York, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and senior wiseman of the Democratic Party).
Bill told me that Harriman carried greetings from the president and a request for a favor. The favor was that Look would never publish anything that Bill Pepper wrote. Atwood said, “How does that make you feel? You’re not yet thirty years old and the president has taken on such concern about your work.”
I smiled and said, “I am much more interested in what you told him.”
Bill said, “I told him that we were going to meet with you, and if we liked what we heard and saw, we were going to publish, and by the way give the president my best regards.”
The rest, of course, is history. Shortly thereafter, Bill Atwood had a heart attack and left the magazine. Chandler Brossard, the associate working editor who had set up the meeting between Atwood and me, was let go, and the article never ran.
Such journalistic independence and persona/character as displayed by Chandler Brossard and Bill Atwood disappeared. In 1978 to 1979, Rolling Stone magazine bought an article written with Ralph Abernathy on my initial work on the case. They paid for it, read it, and buried it.
It may be instructive to look at some examples of disinformation, which have been aimed at shaping and perpetuating mass public opinion with respect to the assassination of Dr. King.
The 1979 official report of the house select committee (HSCA) must stand out as the primary government sanctioned account of the assassination. The HSCA assassination began in 1976 about eight years after the event. As we shall see, during those eight years, the official story was nourished by the mainstream media.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)
The momentum in support of the official story, with a nuance, was continued in 1979 with the release of the HSCA’s multimillion-dollar investigative report.
I suggest that with these critical instances of malfeasance, and by not, dealing with, ignoring, or distorting the evidence related to these events and issues, the HSCA officially set the format for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case.
Richard Sprague, the first general council, proved to be too uncooperative and was summarily replaced by professor Robert Blakey, who went about the business closing doors rather than following leads.
As was the case with many others far more knowledgeable than I was at the time about the facts of the case, I felt let down and was greatly disappointed by the result. It was small solace that the lone gunman, found to be James Earl Ray, might have been part of a wider, vague conspiracy in respect of which no hard evidence was presented.
As has always been the case, the HSCA had to eliminate the involvement of the shadowy figure, Raul, who James said provided him with directions and funds, after they met at the Neptune Bar in Montréal.
Raul and the Alton, Illinois Bank Robbery
Simply put, Raul could not exist if the official story was to hold up. The HSCA concluded that he was a figment of James’s imagination and that his funds came from the robbery of the Alton Bank on July 13, 1967, pulled off by James end his brother John.
In late 1978, around the time of the final HSCA hearings, Mark Lane had been disqualified by the committee for representing Jerry Ray who had been subpoenaed to testify. Mark asked me to jump in for this one-off representation of Jerry, and I brought my New York associate Florynce “Flo” Kennedy. Anticipating questions about the Alton bank robbery, I called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion. They believed that they knew who the perpetrators were. Shortly afterward these individuals bought a taxicab company. But there was not enough hard evidence. Furthermore, contrary to the New York Times article, no one from the HSCA or the FBI had ever interviewed them.
Precisely around the time of Jerry’s scheduled testimony before the committee, The New York Times ran a front-page, column one article by Wendell Rawls Jr. announcing the results of the Times investigation of the Alton bank robbery.
It stated that the Times had interviewed police and bank officials in Alton and stated that the results of their investigation matched those of the FBI and the HSCA. The conclusion was that James and one of his brothers pulled off the robbery.
As my telephone queries established, the Times article was complete fiction published by the media which disinformed the public.
When the committee began to deal with the robbery during the questioning of Jerry, I told them of these conversations and wondered why no relevant interviews had been undertaken.
Counsel moved the committee from the Alton bank robbery and on to something else.
Nevertheless, in terms of funding Ray, there seemed to be nowhere else to go and the final report concluded, ignoring the available facts, that James got his money from this robbery, not from a nonexistent Raul.
This conclusion by the HSCA, along with the allegation that one of his brothers was Raul, gave credence to the official story throughout the mainstream media.
The St. Louis Conspiracy
Engaging in pure speculation, though putting it out for the media to promote, the HSCA concluded that there was a “likelihood” that James had heard about a standing offer on Dr. King’s life by some individuals in St. Louis. The fact that he was never seen with the alleged perpetrators or that he never made any effort to collect the money is, of course, not mentioned.
The committee dismissed John McFerren’s account of what he heard, maintaining that his credibility was questionable since he had, at one point, believed that he saw James working at Liberto’s produce warehouse and this was clearly not sustainable. Moreover, committee investigators not only accepted Liberto’s denials but incredibly failed to find any evidence of his connection to Carlos Marcello or organized crime. Since I was able very quickly to establish that relationship (which was well-known locally), and Liberto’s clear involvement and admission of involvement was discussed elsewhere, the disinformation of the HSCA was transparent.
Clifton Baird
Former Louisville police officer Clifton Baird’s information, along with McFerren’s statement was made part of a section in the report that dealt with conspiracy allegations. Most of these allegations collapsed early on of their own weight of incredulity. Others were discarded after the HSCA, and subsequently, my own, examination. As noted elsewhere, I met Clifton Baird in Louisville and found this former local police officer to be very credible as he set out the details he learned about a proposed assassination attempt in Louisville (where Dr. King’s brother AD lived). He named FBI and local police officers, which he was able to confirm by an illicit tape recording of a conversation he had with one of the plotters.
Though the committee found Baird to be “highly credible,” they chose to accept the denials of fourteen of the named FBI agents and the explanation of the named Louisville police officers that it was a practical joke.
The committee similarly dismissed the relevance of the following:
• The MPD’s failure to assign the small group of black officers who normally provided security for Dr. King when he was in Memphis (focusing instead on the pullback of the substituted white security team).
• The removal of black detective Ed Redditt from his surveillance post in the fire station. (Ostensibly, word of a threat on his life had been called in from a federal official.)
• The removal of the only two black firemen scheduled to be on duty in the fire station that afternoon. (Supposedly they posed a threat to the surveillance being conducted by Redditt—and Richmond—who thought no such thing.)
Basically, this multimillion-dollar investigation and report ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent, allowing only for the concession that it was likely that he had assistance. With respect to the latter however, the committee explicitly rejected the idea that there was official complicity at any level of government.
It should be noted that while most of the information and conclusions being examined in this chapter of disinformation are contained in non-official publications and productions, that this HSCA report published in 1979 sought to confirm the official story, setting the foundation for much of the disinformation which followed over the succeeding thirty years. While it is true that considerable evidence that I have been able to unearth was probably not available to HSCA investigators between 1976 and 1978, there is no doubt that much of it was in front of their noses, for example:
• Evidence of the two Mustangs, one with Arkansas plates.
• Evidence that the cutting-down of the bushes was ordered by the MPD the morning after the crime and greatly altered the crime scene.
• The existence of the footprints leading into the alley toward the entrance to the cellar, between the wings of the rooming house.
• The failure to match the throw-down gun with the death slug, though ample striations were present, and the failure to explain why the sight on the rifle was off.
• The cutting-down of the large hedge between the fire station and the vacant lot which would have blocked the view of someone in James’s location as he purportedly “fled,” thus making it impossible that he panicked at seeing a police car pulled up to the sidewalk.
• The fact that the MPD car was actually parked well back on the Fire Department property next to a side door nearer to the middle or rear of the fire station.
• The indisputable fact that the main witness, Charlie Stephens, was dead-drunk.
• The fact that the rooming house bathroom was empty and the door was open, minutes before the shooting.
• The fact that Dr. King’s room was changed from a protected one, 202, to an exposed balcony room, 306.
• The relationship of Frank Liberto to organized crime.
• The failure to form the all-black police security unit which had previously always protected Dr. King in Memphis.
• The presence, seen by eyewitnesses, of individuals in the bushes behind the rooming house at the time of the killing.
• The disappearance of the Yellow Cab driver, “Buddy,” who called in a report about seeing a man come down over the wall right after the shooting, and who confirmed that observation to fellow cab driver Louie Ward.
• The reason why James Earl Ray bought, returned, and exchanged one rifle for another on the same day.
• The failure to locate and interview two eyewitnesses who saw James Earl Ray drive away in his white Mustang some twenty minutes before the shooting.
• The failure to interview Betty Spates and her sister Bobbi in an effort to learn what they observed or heard.
• The failure to interview the captain in charge of the fire station on that day regarding who assisted the army Psy-Ops photographers in getting on the roof of his station that afternoon.
• The failure to interrogate Reverend Billy Kyles as to why, in light of Officer Richmond’s surveillance notes, he had lied about being with Dr. King before the shooting.
• The failure to interview New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell, the Reverend James Orange, and Solomon Jones about what they saw in the bushes behind the rooming house.
• The failure to interview patrolman J. B. Hodges, about the density of the bushes he encountered right after the shooting.
• The failure to interview everyone present in St. Joseph’s Hospital when Dr. King was brought in, which might have revealed the extraordinary presence of military intelligence officers well prior to the shooting, and the fact that they knew everyone’s name and responsibility.
It will be now useful to examine the range of media reports beginning shortly after the killing.
William Bradford Huie
First off the mark, in terms of any detailed writings of the story, was William Bradford Huie. He entered into deals, first with Arthur Hanes—James’s first lawyer—and then with Percy Foreman, who took over after James was convinced to dismiss Hanes.
Huie sold his articles to Look magazine. By then, of course, Bill Atwood was gone, and the first two were published on November 12, 1968, and November 26, 1968. Huie, initially, was inclined to find a conspiracy but reversed this idea in his third article, both of which were published after the guilty plea hearing in 1969, which another writer, Gerold Frank, calls a “trial.”
I know that James came to distrust Huie fairly early on because he told me that witnesses whose names he gave to the writer began to be visited by the FBI. It became clear to him that Huie was working with the FBI and not for him. Huie realized on which side his bread was buttered. Huie concluded: Ray did it and he did it alone.
Gerold Frank
The first major book published on the case was Gerold Frank’s An American Death. Frank was given complete access to the FBI-controlled investigative reports and, thus, became the first writer to establish the official mainstream history and to credit the FBI for conducting the “greatest manhunt of our time.”
On pages 80–83 he describes in seemingly meticulous detail the actions and observations of New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell, who was in Lorraine Motel ground floor room 215. In his narrative, however, he conveniently omits the most significant observation of Caldwell. It was his sighting of a man in the bushes behind Jim’s Grill. This terribly important observation has been publicly recounted again and again by Caldwell, but left out of Frank’s narrative. For him to have included it would, of course, provide potentially hard evidence that the shooter might not have been in the second-floor bathroom window (which the prosecution contended was James’s lair) but in the bushes. He notes, on page 83, the departure of the Invaders at 5:51 p.m. Even a cursory conversation with any of them would have raised serious questions as to why they were quickly ordered to leave on the instructions of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was not involved in working with them in planning the march. He describes police-intelligence officer Willie B. Richmond’s binocular surveillance of the balcony and Dr. King’s room with his eyes glued to his glasses, but somehow neglects Richmond’s written report that has the Reverend Billy Kyles knocking on Martin’s 306 room door, having a brief word, and then moving down the balcony as the door is closed. Instead, he confirms the lie of Kyles that he was in the room with Dr. King before Martin came out on the balcony. On page 84 he states factually that Kyles came out of room 306. In a later section of his book Frank compounds the lie. Recounting the guilty plea hearing, he sets out Kyles’s testimony in which he states that on April 4, 1968, at six o’clock in the evening—“I was at the Lorraine Motel in room 306.” This obviously enhances Kyles’s statement but is an untrue account.
It has been well established that rooming house tenant Charlie Stephens was dead drunk that afternoon. One of those confirming his condition was James McCraw, the taxi driver who, minutes before 6:00 p.m., refused to carry him as a passenger because he was passed out drunk. McCraw also noticed the bathroom door open, the light on, and the bathroom empty during the few minutes he was there, contrary to Frank’s narrative on page 100. Subsequently, on pages 282–283, when considering attorney Arthur Hanes case, he has to note in passing McCraw’s statement about Stephens, but it pales into insignificance in light of his main statement of facts in the early sections and the huge credibility he gives to Stephens. Frank describes him (pp. 100–101) as sober as a judge, alert, and a reliable eyewitness to, allegedly, James Earl Ray’s departure from the rooming house. In so doing, the author ignores two statements by eyewitnesses who observed James driving away in his white Mustang around 5:45 p.m., some twenty minutes before the shooting.
Frank’s narrative is most disingenuous when he deals with John McFerrin’s account of overhearing Frank Liberto’s telephone conversation late in the afternoon of April 4. I have covered this in detail elsewhere, so suffice it to say here that John overheard Liberto telling someone to shoot the SOB when he was on the balcony, to stay away from the market (where Liberto had his warehouse) and finally, to go to New Orleans and collect his money ($5,000) from his brother.
After being grilled for hours, John refused to be tripped up or alter the story. The FBI finally formally announced that if the call was really overheard, it had nothing to do with the assassination.
Frank simply accepts this finding as the truth, despite the readily available information that Liberto was a lieutenant working under the Mafia godfather Gene Luchese who ran the city for Carlos Marcello.
Aside from ignoring exculpatory evidence available but not introduced by James’s counsel, Gerold Frank’s book focused mainly on the “Hunt” and the “Trial,” which was not at all a trial.
The reader is left with no doubt that Mr. Frank, as was the case with Mr. Huie before him, was convinced that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr. and that he acted alone.
These two writers created the template for others who followed to put forward “nonfiction” works that would confirm the official story.
If some facts, events, or individuals did not support the official story, then they were to be ignored, distorted, or discredited.
This effort continued in the 1970s and 1980s through the disinformational use of the work by author George McMillan, whose wife, it should be remembered, was cleared by the relevant intelligence decision makers to befriend and write about Marina Oswold after the assassination of John Kennedy. Her husband, George, came on the scene in the early 1970s and produced a work entitled The Making of an Assassin.
George McMillan set out to write a biography of James Earl Ray assuming that he was the assassin of Dr. King. In his book he goes to great lengths to show that James’s family was dysfunctional He paints a picture of James as a petty—though lifelong—criminal, in and out of prison. As an inmate, he notes that he was basically quiet and withdrawn, although involved in dealing in contraband including amphetamines.
In depicting some hostility by Ray against Dr. King, he relies on a notorious snitch/informant named Ray Curtis. Curtis—largely discredited as a reliable informant—went on to tell McMillan that Ray was, in fact, interested in killing Dr. King and was committed to do the deed.
Over twenty-five years ago, being aware that Ray Curtis—a notorious informant—would say anything if he thought he could get some alleviation from the various charges against him, I disregarded his stories. While McMillan tries to paint a picture of Ray being a man on a mission, determined—for some reason—to kill Dr. King, he provides no plausible motive. In fact, in a footnote, he is compelled to report that the FBI investigation, revealing no racist motivation, dismisses the absence of a motive by blaming Ray’s unconscious, a motive hidden deep within the recesses of his psyche. He goes on to incredibly psychoanalyze James, contrasting Dr. King’s offering of love and warmth to thousands with his own emotional deprivation.
McMillan describes Ray’s escape as involving his brother John. He was, obviously, totally unaware of the actual escape scenario, discussed in detail previously, which included Warden Swenson’s profiling and facilitation at the request of J. Edgar Hoover, who (as we have learned) also provided the funds.
McMillan, presumably quoting Jerry Ray, states that James, after his escape, articulated a desire to kill Dr. King. I have spent hours with Jerry, who vehemently denies that he ever heard such a commitment from James. James, he said, had only one thought—how to get out of the United States.
Jerry, actually to his shame, told me that he was playing McMillan for money from the beginning, telling him what he thought he wanted to hear. Starting with page 238, McMillan just unleashes a narration of conclusions, beginning with the statement that “Jimmy” knew what he was going to do. It was only a question of “… working out the details.” He pretends to know what he is thinking and how he was going to be somebody. The fact that James went to Canada to seek a way out of North America, not as a part of a grand scheme which would take him back to the United States, is ignored even as a possibility.
In order to get money from McMillan, Jerry played along and continued to feed him disinformation. Jerry denies making any statements that would have incriminated James. He said such an act was the furthest thing from his mind. He said McMillan had a political agenda and used him.
McMillan disregards the Raul meeting in Montréal and summarizes James’s movements back in the United States and Mexico. He follows James to Los Angeles and admits that move made no sense—since McMillan had earlier said that James was determined to kill Dr. King in the South. Never mind—he then says one could not assume that Ray was operating on rational lines.
He puts his irrational behavior down due to psychological reasons and an obsession with the Wallace campaign. His stalking theory—and that of others—suffers a problem when Dr. King arrived in Los Angeles on March 16 and James left on March 17. He continues to focus on James’s thoughts, as though he were inside his head.
He ends up in Birmingham and details James buying one rifle and then exchanging it without providing a reasonable explanation. James, of course, has always insisted that Raul scolded him for not buying a 30.06 instead of a .223.
Next stop, Memphis
When discussing the scene, he ignores the Charles Hurley identification of the second Mustang, accepts Billy Kyles’s fraudulent story and the myth of the bathroom not being available because James was allegedly inside, from where, McMillan asserts, confirming the official story, that he fired the fatal shot and then fled—back to Canada.
True to form, McMillan ignores critical evidence on his way to confirm the official story. His outrageous effort to advise the reader of James’s inner thoughts is a different approach, and it is sad that my old friend Julian Bond was, at the time, taken in by this glaring work of disinformation.
Knowing what we do today, I doubt if Julian (who recently died), if alive, would now believe that McMillan had put doubts to rest. Myth, fiction, and imagination characterized this work by the husband of Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the woman assigned to work with Marina Oswald after the Kennedy assassination. Such assignments are rarely accidental, being controlled or cleared by official intelligence. George McMillan gave his wife great credit for his book, saying it would not have been done without her assistance.
One may draw one’s own conclusions about the origin of this frightful affront to truth and justice.
Lamar Waldron / Legacy of Secrecy
Lamar Waldron engages in pure speculation about how James obtained his aliases in Canada. With no evidence, the speculation leads the author to tie James to a drug trafficking ring.
We know that the alias Eric S. Galt—which became his identity while on the run—was the name of a real person, who, by nature of his job running the Union Carbide warehouse in Canada, had national security clearance, and who was also working on clandestine operations with the 902nd Military Intelligence Group.
This information was published many years prior to the release of Waldron’s book. If aware, he elected not to refute but to ignore it.
The author continues to speculate about Raul, saying that he was likely a composite of more than one person, invented by James. He notes that James’s descriptions often varied.
Once again, with the barest research the author would have learned about Sid Carthew’s identification and also that James positively identified Raul from a photograph in 1978 and then again in 1996 to 1997 when shown the same Immigration and Naturalization Service photograph. He, of course, also ignored other independent identifications. Waldron refers to Phil Melanson’s work which, as good as it was, had been conducted also before my research was completed.
Because he completely rejects the existence of Raul, he speculates that everything James does is related to him working with a drug-smuggling operation rather than following instructions from a handler.
Waldron speculates that James became involved with the Marcello organization, which he further speculates was aligned with one Joseph Milteer, a virulent Louisiana racist, in the King assassination. Drugs and gun smuggling were criminal activities by which James earned money and the syndicate gave him the money for the Mustang.
The primary difficulty with his thesis from the outset is that he opines without producing any hard evidence. The narrative of his version of events is overrun with conjectural words and phrases such as, among others, “could have,” “likely,” “possible,” “might,” “should have,” “probably,” “would have,” and “apparently.” A reference to a key witness will not allow for the identification of the source.
The curious result is that he is correct about the involvement of Carlos Marcello and Frank Liberto and is also correct that, as we now know, racist elements of the Dixie Mafia/KKK were also involved in the conspiracy. Accordingly, he gives credibility to John McFerren’s story and the accounts of LaVada Addison and her son Nathan Whitlock.
Where he is wrong and responsible for putting out serious disinformation is with respect to naming James as the shooter and denying Raul’s existence, thus confirming the official story.
Waldron contends that James stalked Dr. King, but neglects to explain the many instances where he was in a different city. One striking example is his statement that on March 28, 1968, James remained in Atlanta when Dr. King was in Memphis leading the sanitation workers strike. Then, when Dr. King returned to Atlanta, his “stalker” went to Birmingham.
He blithely accepts the HSCA conclusion that Dr. King had stayed at the Lorraine many times on previous visits and that when he checked in he went to his “usual room.” In fact, as one of his four black police officer bodyguards confirmed, when he had come to Memphis previously, he usually stayed overnight at the Holiday Inn in midtown and the last time he stayed at the Rivermont, where we know every inch of his room was wired. He did receive local people at the Lorraine; usually in room 309, during the day where they were more comfortable, but he did not stay overnight. Parenthetically, because of this I was always concerned with Ralph Abernathy’s statement about arriving at the motel on April 3 and having to wait until their “usual room” was vacated. First, this was not their usual room, and second the register of the hotel revealed that the room was empty when they arrived.
Next, Waldron rejects the official story that James returned from buying the binoculars and parked his car, not again in front of Jim’s Grill, but further south on Main Street below Canipe’s store. This contention requires him to ignore Hurley’s testimony about the second Mustang with Arkansas plates. It also requires him to ignore the statements given by Hendrix and Reid who inspected James’s Mustang parked in front of Jim’s Grill around 5:40 p.m.
He goes on to accept Billy Kyles’s false account of being with Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy in room 306 sometime just after their return around 5:40 p.m. This means that he had to ignore officer Richmond’s surveillance notes which had Reverend Kyles knocking on the door, having a brief word, and then walking away down the balcony. Ignoring previous statements and testimony under oath, Waldron unquestioningly accepts the abrupt decisions to remove black detective Redditt from the surveillance detail, as well as the only two black firemen in the nearby fire station from their posts.
In order for the author to accept the official position that James fired the fatal shot from the bathroom, he had to ignore the sworn statement of taxi driver James McCraw that Charlie Stephens—the State’s key witness—was dead-drunk and not fit to carry and that the bathroom was empty, the door open, and the light on minutes before the shooting.
In contending that the shot came from the bathroom, in accordance with the official story, author Waldron discounts Loyd Jowers’s admission—corroborating Betty Spates’s testimony—that he was out in the bushes with the spotter (Earl Clark) and the shooter, and that he did take the rifle back into the Grill after the shooting.
As detailed elsewhere in this book, Carlos Marcello did have a long-standing, close relationship with a Dixie Mafia family (the family of Russell Adkins) and that family also had a similarly close relationship with J. Edgar Hoover and his Deputy Clyde Tolson. The fact is that James Earl Ray would have been in touch with some of that crowd through his handler, Raul, but is it not surprising that the role of Joseph Milteer, in particular, in no way appears in any of the records? Waldron states that James called an associate of Milteer when he returned to Georgia, but attributes this revelation to the word of an anonymous source. That raises the most serious doubt about the veracity of the allegation.
Like all of the others before him, Lamar Waldron speculates and opines. To be fair, with respect to his confirmation of the involvement of Marcello and Liberto, he is correct. But that is where his accuracy ends. Like the other writers before, he has not interviewed a single material witness we uncovered. There were about seventy witnesses at the trial. Each one had a piece of the puzzle to put in place.
One would’ve thought that it might have been useful and responsible to speak, or attempt to speak, with the long list of people who had facts to reveal about the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the assassination.
When a researcher refuses to conduct himself in this professional manner, one must ask why.
However, the failure to do so enables the writer to engage in speculation, and yes, selective disinformation.
David Garrow
Next on the scene was historian David Garrow. Garrow won the Pulitzer Prize for his work Bearing the Cross, which focused on the official governmental surveillance of Dr. King. In order to reveal the sins of J. Edgar Hoover—long dead—the FBI activities against Dr. King were revealed. Garrow was given access to files and information not ordinarily available, and he set out a horrifying piece of history, documenting Bureau activities against Dr. King and the civil rights movement, which most people surmised were going on.
Without speculating as to why he was selected to out Hoover’s Bureau, though, in retrospect, I have my own view, the revelations of the record are clearly significant.
He may, however, have some regrets. For example, he reveals how moved Maltin was by my Ramparts piece, which led him to me and to formally oppose the war. (See Appendix B.)
Irrespective of the merit of this work, however, Garrow did no research or investigation on the assassination. In spite of this he was trotted out—in the pre-Posner days—as a spokesperson for the official story. It was ludicrous to the extent that he would not appear on any stage with me. Poor chap, he was placed in an impossible position by his masters. He knew little or nothing about the killing and yet he was being asked to defend the indefensible.
Gerald Posner
This didn’t work. Enter Gerald Posner and Killing the Dream. His work was designed to end all debate on the King case as his book, Case Closed, was designed to end the controversy on the assassination of John Kennedy.
He failed, to the point of being ridiculed in the first instance by scholars and researchers familiar with the evidence. You, dear reader, can draw your own conclusions as to how his effort confirms an endorsement of the official story concerning the assassination of Dr. King.
Billy Kyles has always stated that he knocked on Dr. King’s room 306 door shortly after 5:30 p.m. on the day of the assassination and went in and chatted until nearly 6:00 p.m. when they walked out of the room together and stood side-by-side on the balcony.
Abernathy told me that nothing of the sort happened. “Billy Kyles is a liar,” he said. This was the first indication I had that the oft-repeated story was untrue. Posner, of course, was not privy to that conversation, so one could not fault him for choosing to believe Kyles, except for the existence of proof to the contrary. Patrolman Willie B. Richmond’s surveillance notes clearly described Kyles knocking on Dr. King’s room 306 door at 5:50 p.m.—not 5:30 p.m.—and described the door being opened briefly and then closed, with Kyles walking away, down the balcony, where he stood some thirty to forty feet away from Dr. King, who came out at around 6:00 p.m. Richmond’s report and his testimony at the civil trial made it clear that Dr. King stood alone on the balcony. Kyles never approached him but remained that distance away—a fact that had always puzzled me since he was ordinarily not one to miss a photo opportunity.
Since Posner referred to the Shelby County District Attorney General’s office as being like his “second home” it is difficult to understand how he could have missed Richmond’s surveillance report in the file. It is obvious that he either missed it or ignored it.
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS
In a note describing what eyewitnesses saw, Posner spends a good deal of time attempting to discredit limousine driver Solomon Jones. He even quotes Reverend Kyles as saying Jones was not in a position to have seen anyone in the bushes. Attorney Wayne Chastain, who Posner credits with being generous with his time and extensive knowledge of the case, told me that Solomon Jones told him that he saw a man come down over the wall and run up Mulberry Street. Once again, it is difficult to believe that Wayne—longtime associate counsel in the case—would not have given the same account to Posner. Also missing from Posner’s narrative about witnesses who provided statements in the aftermath of the shooting are the observations of the Reverend James Orange who stated that he saw “smoke” rising from the bushes right after the shot. (We came to believe that the “smoke” was actually dust kicked up from the brush.) Jim said he instinctively dropped to the ground and turned in the direction of the bushes. Posner, ignoring or disregarding the fact that Jim told the story at the time, had the audacity to call it “a new story,” thus relying on his readers’ unfamiliarity with the details.
In an effort to dismiss New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell’s story, Posner does not interview Caldwell but refers to Gerold Frank’s conclusion that he could not possibly have seen a man in the bushes as he has consistently maintained.
One might have expected that a Random House editor would, at least, have required that he interview Caldwell himself rather than relying on quotes of an old report which was secondhand information even then and which omitted any discussion of what Caldwell stated he saw.
These omissions, of course, weigh heavily against his regurgitation of the official story, contending that the shot came, not from the bushes, but from the second-floor rooming house bathroom window.
The Cutting Down of the Bushes
We established, beyond any doubt, that the bushes behind the rooming house were cut down the next morning. Maynard Stiles of the Public Works Department confirmed under oath, six years before Posner published, that he was called by inspector Sam Evans of the MPD and asked to get a team down there to work with the assigned police officers on the morning of April 5 to cut and clean up the crime scene. We also interviewed one of the Public Works workers assigned to the job. Posner ignores this evidence and did not interview Stiles, who is not even mentioned in the index of his book. Then, he blithely contends that the cutting took place the following August.
Shamelessly, Posner states that the House Select Committee could find no records from the Public Works Department that a cleanup took place. Presumably, Posner was also unable to locate any such documentation.
It is a shame he did not find the time to interview Maynard Stiles, the Public Works official who organized the cleanup and who confirmed it under oath years before Posner published.
The brush was worked even in August, but as an afterthought—perhaps deliberately. It had nothing to do with the cleanup four months earlier, which, by the way, is reflected in most photographs of the scene taken at the time, including one in Posner’s book.
It is ironic that the photograph reproduced by Posner shows the area of the bushes scraped clean with a thin covering of grass. Among others, Earl Caldwell and J. A. Hodges, one of the MPD officers who went into the bushes shortly after the killing, said, as I noted in An Act of State that he had to fight his way through a dense thicket of bushes, which went almost all the way back to the kitchen door back entrance to Jim’s Grill.
MPD Homicide Lieutenant Tommy Smith (although his role has been thrown into question by Ron Tyler Adkins’s firsthand recollections), also omitted from Posner’s interview list in the index in his book, would have—if he had been asked—confirmed that Charlie Stephens, the State’s key witness, was dead-drunk when he talked to him right after the shooting. Tommy said they had to take him to headquarters and fill him with black coffee before he was even partially coherent. Posner neglects to include this information—as well as Chastain’s similar recollection, Stephen’s roommate Grace Walden who insisted that he saw nothing, Loyd Jowers’s observations when he came down to the Grill earlier that afternoon, and taxi driver James McCraw, who saw him minutes before the killing, too drunk to carry in his cab, and left him in a stupor in his room. Posner, while focusing on other information about McCraw, does not discuss his observations about Stephens. Instead, what he does do is recount his interview with MPD officer Roy Davis who saw Stephens some hours later at MFD Headquarters after—as Tommy Smith stated—he had been filled with black coffee.
Even then, Posner quotes Davis as saying that when he took a statement from Stephens at Headquarters he was “… not real drunk but he was not sober, even then. I distinctly remember that he could not identify the man (leaving the second floor of the rooming house). I would not like to rely on him as my only witness.”
So much for Charlie Stephens and Posner’s treatment of the state’s key witness.
The Bathroom
A primary aspect of the official story that had to be supported by its adherents is the proposition that the fatal shot was fired from the second-floor bathroom window of the rooming house.
Aside from the references of individuals like Billy Kyles to that site, the allegation principally rests upon the statement coaxed out of drunken Charlie Stephens, who claimed to see someone running down the hall carrying a bundle.
Such a conclusion ignores taxicab driver McCraw’s sworn statement that not only was Stephens dead drunk and incapable of reliably seeing anything, but also his observation within minutes of the shooting when he was leaving Stephen’s room—deciding not to carry him—that the bathroom door was open and the bathroom was empty.
To embrace this official scenario, one would have to discount the statements set out earlier of Reverend Orange, Solomon Jones, and Earl Caldwell, and eventually, Betty Spates, Loyd Jowers himself, Olivia Catling, and Louie Ward, all of whom independently confirmed that the shot came from the bushes.
I have set out these observations in detail elsewhere and so it is not necessary to repeat them here.
I suggest that the proposition that the shot came from the bathroom window is beyond any reasonable consideration.
Betty Spates
One of the real victims of my investigation was Betty Spates, who I believe without a doubt told the truth when she gave me a detailed sworn statement of seeing Loyd Dowers run past her into the kitchen of Jim’s Grill looking “white as a ghost” carrying a still-smoking rifle. Betty was not only a victim of harassment and pressure by state and city investigators but, I am sorry to say, of my own investigators and a television producer who tried to get her to alter her story and name an innocent black man—Frank Holt—as the killer. In addition, at that time in 1993–1994, she had a developing brain tumor. She harbored a dreadful secret for twenty-five years both out of fear of, and concern for, Loyd Jowers, with whom she had an affair from the time she was seventeen and with whom she had a child. She also feared Jowers might kill her, and this was mixed with concern because she believed he had been the shooter.
Intimidated into recanting her story, she ultimately confirmed to me (as did Jowers) that her original story as I have set it out in earlier works was the truth.
Posner discounts it as unreliable and tainted with the rogue efforts of people around me to make money on the revelation.
In fairness, one cannot fault Posner for taking this position even as he was unaware that subsequent to his book, Loyd Jowers would confirm to me and his lawyer that Betty Spates had been telling the truth.
John McFerren and Frank Liberto
Posner and the advocates of the official lone “nut” assassin story had a more difficult time in dismissing the story of John McFerren that he overheard local Mafia operative Frank Liberto shout into a telephone in his produce warehouse where John shopped every Thursday, buying goods for his small gas station and general store in Somerville. At the time he thought nothing of the exclamation that said, “Shoot the son of a bitch when he comes on the balcony.” Only later, when he learned the details of the assassination, did he realize the significance of what he heard.
The statement he heard was indeed evidence of the existence of a conspiracy. As such it had to be neglected or discounted by the Select Committee, MPD, and FBI investigations, not to mention the official story tellers like Gerald Posner.
Posner, like the others, dismissed John McFerren’s story and questioned credibility based on John’s mistaken identification of Ray as a former employee of Liberto. John’s understandable paranoia developed over the years. Both Baxter Bryant and Reverend Lawson recall the statement exactly as John has always told it to me. After becoming aware of the harassment, attacks, and threats John has faced, it is little wonder that this pioneering civil rights leader in the most racist county in Tennessee is nervous and suspicious of strangers.
Posner has equal disdain for Nathan Whitlock who knew Frank Liberto. Liberto used to frequent his mother’s small restaurant on his way home from the Scott Street Market and one day, when the Select Committee Hearings were on the television in the cafe, he blurted to Mrs. Addison that he had King killed. This upset her greatly, and subsequently Nate confronted Liberto who confirmed it. Posner says it stretches credibility that Liberto, would make such an admission. Unfortunately, Posner never bothered to interview Whitlock or his mother, both of whom testified under oath to having heard this admission.
With respect to the mafia involvement, Posner also elected to ignore my October 15, 1994, interview with Memphis mafia associate Art Baldwin. He confirmed that he had become an FBI informant as a result of working closely with the Marcello organization and its chief representative in Memphis, the local godfather Gene Luchese. He told me about being present when Liberto talked with Luchese and was treated like a “puppy dog” by the godfather, who complained to Liberto that Ray was supposed to have been killed in Memphis, but the job was botched.
This hard information from a mafia insider is deplorable, but given the damage the involvement of Liberto does to the official story, it is understandable as to why Posner and his like, would also not be interested in interviewing either Art Baldwin or Nathan Whitlock. Nor would they be interested in interviewing LaVada Whitlock, who testified under oath about Frank Liberto telling her about his involvement
Glenda Grabow and Raul
Since I have covered the story of Glenda Grabow in considerable detail elsewhere it is not necessary to go into it here. As with other inconvenient witnesses, Posner attempts to discredit her accounts and capitalize on her fear, vacillation, and less-than-precise recollection of everything Raul said to her, as well as ridiculing her connecting him to the JFK assassination. Ultimately, Posner supports the conclusion of the Shelby County DA’s investigations that the person we believed to be Raul was an innocent immigrant autoworker who never traveled, rarely missed work, and was being unfairly maligned. In order to reach this conclusion, he had to discount or ignore the following:
• A photograph of this Raul was picked out from a spread instantly by Glenda Grabow, her brother, Loyd Jowers (having seen him in the Grill), James Earl Ray (who had previously refused to identify anyone from the hundreds of photographs shown to him, but who had finally identified him in a photo—covered by a newspaper report this same photo in 1978—but refused to use the name on the back which he thought might be a set up), and Sid Carthew, the UK merchant seaman who had met him at the Neptune Bar in Montreal around the time that Ray was there.
• This same photograph was identified by Raul’s own daughter at their front door when she said on tape (heard on tape and part of the record of the Civil Trial in 1999), “Anyone could get that picture of my father.”
• Glenda had a telephone conversation with him which lasted—as the phone bill shows—for several minutes.
• This conversation was obviously not between strangers. When she told him who she was he called her by the name he used for her, “Olinda.” Thus, she had no doubt as to who he was.
• In some papers which FBI Agent Donald Wilson obtained from James’s Mustang when they found it in Atlanta was a slip of paper with the name “Raul” on it. Another piece of paper had the phone number of one of Jack Ruby’s places in Dallas.
• Portuguese newspaper reporter Barbara Reiss’s interview with Raul’s wife who confirmed that this difficult situation had been made better by the assistance of the US government who had sent agents and technicians to see them to monitor their phones and advise them how to respond to queries.
Imagine that extensive concern being taken by US federal agents over the problems caused by an alleged mistaken identity to a retired automobile plant worker. In fairness to Posner, this incongruous revelation emerged in testimony at the 1999 civil trial after his relatively short research period was over and his book was published. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, he has not commented on this strange, extensive concern and involvement in the troubles of a working-class family.
The Two Mustangs
Posner maintains—and the official story requires—that there was only one Mustang. He says that on the afternoon of April 4, James drove to the York Arms Company, not very far from the rooming house, bought a pair of binoculars, and returned to the rooming house. Posner maintains that the spot he had in front of Jim’s Grill was taken so he parked further south, just below Canipe’s store which was on the corner of the building, and on the edge of an uncut lot, which was used for parking of some vehicles. The official story, embraced by Posner, was that as a result of seeing a parked MPD Tact Unit station wagon, James panicked and dropped the bundle in Canipe’s doorway.
James told me that on his first try he had difficulty finding the York Arms Store and so he returned to check the directions again with Raul. He then went out, as instructed by Raul, found the store, bought the binoculars, and brought them back to the room where he threw them on the bed. He could not buy the infrared type and informed Raul of such. He told me that he returned to park in the same spot in front of Jim’s Grill, not further south on Main Street.
For the official story, there is ample independent evidence—ignored or overlooked by Posner. The statements of witnesses William Reed and Roy Hendrix, in the MPD file, have them examining the car parked in front of the Grill, as James said, upon leaving Jim’s Grill around twenty minutes before the shooting. Posner also ignores the statement of Charles Hurley, who parked behind the second Mustang, waiting to pick up his wife when she left work at the Seabrook Wallpaper Company sometime before 5:00 p.m. Hurley has consistently said that the Mustang behind which he parked had Arkansas plates. James’s Mustang, of course, had Alabama plates.
As I have noted elsewhere, Gerold Frank, at least, recognized the problem and tried to pass it off on both states having red and white plates. Arkansas plates, however, had red letters on white background, and began with three letters (Hurley was even able to remember two of the three letters) while Alabama plates had a red background with white letters.
Frank ignored the color discrepancy.
Posner ignored the entire issue.
Loyd Jowers
As set out elsewhere and in evidentiary detail in the 1999 civil trial, Loyd Jowers’s role in the assassination is remarkably clear. Jowers himself, near the end of his life, told Dexter King and me, and then separately Dexter and Andrew Young, of what his attorney Lewis Garrison correctly termed the small (though critical) role he played initially at the request of Frank Liberto. In the earlier work I discuss Posner’s attempt to discredit Jowers. Suffice it to say that Jowers did initially lie about his involvement in the assassination and perpetuated the lie until nearly the end of his life when he revealed his role and confirmed the innocence of James Earl Ray.
It is unfortunately true that a couple of investigators working with me along with a television producer developed a money-making orientation to the case and muddied the waters. Their actions were reprehensible and certainly served the purpose of giving a means of distracting people from the truth. At the end of the day, the truth has won out and the official story and its proponents have been swept away.
The Role of the Military
Posner refers to our findings about the role of the military as a “hoax.” My rogue local investigators—who I deliberately kept out of the loop—stressed that I was naïve and would likely believe anything with a conspiratorial ring to it.
In fact, we kept the military aspect of our work very close to the vest and away from the investigative team. The key liaison to the military informants was Steve Tompkins. Steve was not hired by me. He was given expenses and expense money for the ex-special forces officers who had fled to Mexico and whom he extensively interviewed with questions I provided over many months.
I have total confidence that Steve provided me with the best information he could, and I remain profoundly grateful. He is a man of integrity and a true patriot. He did not give me the correct names of the soldiers in order to protect his sources and this is, of course, acceptable practice, but I do wish he had told me that he was following this policy. Nevertheless, I deeply regret the harassment Steve faced as a result of trying to help me. Steve’s frustration and harrassment is reflected in his alleged claim that I embellished his series when, in fact, he was only allowed to have one article and his work for me brought him nothing but grief. In fact, his one article and the reference to the Alpha 184 Sniper Unit, which caught my eye, was stated in only a few lines. It was this reference that caused me to meet with Steve and plead with him to help, which he reluctantly agreed to do. He was not hired as a “consultant” as Posner states, and only paid expenses for himself and the soldiers. Neither was a copy of the cablegram orders obtained by subpoena, as Posner states, but was given to Steve by one of the soldiers. He then gave it to me. Neither of us could imagine one of these grunts living in rural Mexico fabricating an official cable order document with such sophistication.
In the updated chapter on the military, in this work, I consider this issue in some detail, as well as a piece of disinformation contained in an affidavit by Daniel Ellsberg which he gave to Mark Lane in 1978.
I have, to this day, no doubt that there was an Alpha 184 Unit in Memphis at the time of the assassination, but they were a back-up unit which was not used. The cable message that Steve gave to me could never have been fabricated by the grunts with whom Steve was meeting.
I prefer to leave Posner’s work at this point, having, I believe, amply demonstrated the wide range of fatal flaws in his effort to support the official story.
I believe that Judge Arthur Hanes’s experience with Posner best reflects the writer’s real orientation and purpose. Hanes said that when Posner called him, he invited him to come down and he would show him the evidence that proved James Earl Ray was not guilty of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.—in fact, that he was innocent of the crime.
Judge Hanes said he never heard from Posner again.
Enough said about Mr. Posner’s investigation, or lack of one, and the negligent sloppiness at best of his Random House editor and publisher, and the gullibility (if that is what it was) of Tina Brown and Harold Evans, his publishing supporters and sponsors.
More recently, Gerald Posner seems to have put forward another foot wrong that will likely fatally destroy any remaining credibility.
This has resulted from the multiple incidents of plagiarism that are attributed to his pen and which resulted in his being dropped or resigning from writing for the Daily Beast, which had published a piece plagiarized from the Miami Herald.
It appears that this was not the only such incident. Slate writer Jack Shafer reported on February 8, 2010, that he and a colleague uncovered additional examples of Posner’s plagiarism in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a number of other Miami Herald articles, and a healthcare journalism blog.
Then, on May 20, 2010, the Miami New Times alleged that in two books, Why America Slept and Secrets of the Kingdom, Posner lifted a total of thirty-five passages from the works of others. This latest evidence was apparently provided to his publisher, Random House. They are investigating.
In response, Posner claimed that New Times was part of a “coordinated” effort (conspiracy?) to destroy his book, but he did not dispute any of the reports in the story.
I suppose I should consider myself fortunate. Harold Evans, then president of Random House, told my agent at the time, Dick Marek, for Orders to Kill that they would not be interested in seeing that book. Harold Evans’s wife, Tina Brown, was then the editor of the Daily Beast.
Hellbound on His Trail, Hampton Sides
Sides is one of the most recent writers (before Tavis Smiley, whose work I cover at the beginning of this book) who has come on to support the official story. He begins with James’s last days in prison and he immediately puts himself inside James’s head. With full-blown speculation and no evidence, he sets out what he (Sides) believes James must have been thinking. He covers the escape, step-by-step, as though he were there, even describing James’s anxiety as a guard checked the breadbox on the bench leaving the prison. His work is not only pure fiction but despicable to the memory of an innocent man.
The author, of course, does not know what we have learned (covered elsewhere in detail), that James’s escape was blessedly organized and paid for by J. Edgar Hoover, and that his number-two, Clyde Tolson, carried the money to their Dixie Mafia operative, who took it to the warden at the prison.
Incredibly, the author goes from James’s escape to his time in Puerto Vallarta. He omits any discussion of his earning money working on his way to Canada, which was to be his gateway out of North America and where he met Raul. Given author Sides’s disinformation orientation, any discussion of the Canadian experience would not fit. But to leave out this entire period, including his assumption of a new identity and his decision to return to the United States, travel to Birmingham and somehow come up with the money to buy a car, is bizarre.
Also strange is his quick and unreal focus on J. Edgar Hoover. While earlier he took it upon his own self to pronounce Dr. King’s marriage as “crumbling,” something I—who knew him and Coretta during that time—never noticed; he only gives the most peripheral reference to Edgar’s homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson, or his control by the mob. He appears never to have read my friend Tony Summe’s exhaustive treatment, or for that matter any other which dealt honestly with this despicable hypocrite. He, who tried to impose his public morality on the nation while living a totally contradictory life, was, in my view, Mr. Roosevelt’s biggest mistake. It was not, as Sides pretends, that he was archaic, with values out of place. He was a murderer using tax dollars to carry out his killings and the destruction of lives and careers, while he lived a life he publicly condemned. How can such an evil person be excused, as does Sides—as simply being a “living anachronism”?
We subpoenaed Sides for a deposition in order to deal with his contentions. He refused to appear.
Soledad O’Brien
More recently, in the television documentary arena, we have seen the CNN documentary narrated and put forward by Soledad O’Brien.
The first half of the program was dedicated to James and his background and history. Whilst the program notably failed to provide a motive as to why this escaped convict would even consider such an act, and racism had been excluded by the HSCA investigation, it was hinted at by a reference to his refusal to go to a work farm attached to the Missouri prison because of the number of blacks in that facility. In fact, James was afraid of being tied into drug activity that was going on there and end up having his term extended. He would regularly roll dice with black coworkers when he worked in a shoe factory.
The program went on to allege that he and his brother robbed a bank in Alton, Illinois, on July 12, 1967. This allegedly was the source of his funds, so he did not need the handler he identified as Raul, whom we would eventually identify. As discussed earlier, closer to the time in 1978, I spoke with the president of the bank as well as the chief of police, and both told me that the Ray brothers had never been suspects. In fact, they believed that they knew who committed the robbery, but did not have enough proof to charge them. Further, they confirmed that, despite mainstream published reports, they had never been interviewed by the congressional investigators, the FBI, or the reporting media’s (New York Times) investigative reporter, Wendell Rawls Jr.
In the second half of the program, the disinformation ran rampant; just a few examples illustrate this point. Since this evidence has been discussed in detail elsewhere, the reader’s sufferance is requested as I repeat it in order to contrast the litany of facts with CNN’s disgraceful distortion.
The failure to match the throw-down rifle to the death slug became “inconclusive.” What does that mean? There was no ballistics match. The gun was not and could not be regarded as the murder weapon, and was introduced into evidence as such. Yet it remains mounted in the Civil Rights Museum as precisely that—now with CNN’s blessing.
We had four witnesses who saw figures in the bushes (one a New York Times reporter, Earl Caldwell), two observed the shooter coming down over the wall, another (Reverend James Orange) saw smoke kicked up and rising from the bushes, and another who saw the owner of the Grill which backed onto the Lorraine Motel, rush from the bushes past her into his kitchen, still carrying the smoking gun he took from the shooter. CNN convened all of this evidence into one “unreliable” witness.
The next morning that crime scene was cut down and cleaned. The CNN report supported the official story that the shot came from the bathroom window, so whatever happened to the bushes was deemed unimportant. It was well-known that we had a reliable witness who saw the bathroom door open with the light on, minutes before the shooting, and no one inside. It was empty, of course, because the shot came from the bushes. A clip from a CBS interview with a roomer who saw someone running down the hall was cut off just before the reporter showed him a photo of James and he said that was not the man he saw. The man carrying the throw-down bundle of items that James was told to leave in the room (which also contained the throw-down gun) dropped them in a doorway and got into the second Mustang and drove away.
We had a witness who identified that Mustang as having Arkansas plates. It was parked south of James’s Mustang. We had two witnesses (one from the Corps of Engineers) and signed statements, evidencing that James drove away from the rooming house about twenty minutes before the shooting. All of this was known and put under oath, and ignored by CNN.
Perhaps the most egregious action involved the use of the aged captain of the fire station, diagonally opposite the motel. When I learned from the military source that a Psy-Ops unit of two photographers was on the roof of the station, and one of my investigators interviewed both army photographers, I sought out the captain of the fire station, ten years before the documentary. At that earlier time he testified under oath that he put them on the roof, watched them unpack their still cameras, and then left them there. He never saw them again. Then nine years later, CNN puts on this old man who is clearly confused about what he did back then and may not even have remembered his courtroom testimony. They use that interview along with a photograph of the roof taken at a time when the soldiers would have had ample time to disappear to assert that they were never there.
It gets worse. When, during my interview, I suggested to the CNN reporter that they interview the captain about the presence of these Psy-Ops photographers, I was told that he had died. They obviously did not want me to speak with him. He was still alive. There was more of the same, but surely, this is enough to constitute an insult to the memory and legacy of Dr. King, an injustice to James Earl Ray, and a violation of every tenet of fair and objective reporting.
At this point, it appears entirely reasonable, in light of this sordid history, of disinformation with collaboration between mainstream media and the government, to conclude that the more we learn about contemporary publishing and news reporting in the United States, the more accurate does it appear was Carl Bernstein’s conclusion in Rolling Stone in October 1977 about the extraordinary degree of influence and control over—and actual working presence in all aspects of print, audio, and visual media by the intelligence community and its assigned agents. The willingness of corporate media to collaborate and the consolidation of that collaboration has, for the most part, made it impossible for a free and independent press to operate in this Republic.
The remaining, missing point of this picture of disinformation and information control is the cooperative activity of a number of seemingly progressive, investigative journalists and researchers. These are a coterie of establishment liberal professionals who come on to assist the government’s position in cases and extremely sensitive issues like political assassination. These individuals have usually developed respect and credibility within the progressive community over a period of time as activist opponents of official government positions and actions. They have this developed credibility; thus, when they elect to support—or just ignore—the official government position on a particular issue or action, they have the ability to undercut dissent.
Specifically, how does a new untold history ignore the evidence of official involvement in a wide range of political assassinations at home and abroad, along with a wide range of corporate domination of the public life of the Republic, and governmental involvement in crimes against humanity across the globe?
A well-known and respected Boston–area professor, who is highly regarded for his well-informed criticism of US government foreign policy, has always minimized the significance of our history of political assassinations. He told me that he had no idea that anyone had done the work I had undertaken on the Dr. King assassination. By that time, I had published two books on the case, setting out the evidence of Ray’s innocence and the existence of a conspiracy.
And he said he was not aware.
Another investigative journalist well up on the ladder of credibility in the progressive community, also commented, factually incorrectly, on why and how Dr. King decided to oppose the war.
Another, a patron saint of opposition to the Vietnam War, took it upon himself to issue a misleading affidavit in the case and, subsequently, to question the authenticity of the cable given to Steve Tompkins by the grunt members of the Alpha 184 Unit. In this last instance I was warned long ago by Colonel Fletcher Prouty to be wary of this person as a result of Fletcher’s analysis of his earlier high profile revelations.
Finally, it is a matter of public record that, over the years, I have been canceled by a number of liberal/progressive-hosted NPR programs and not invited to countless others. One of the latter, supported, I understand, by the Ford Foundation, regularly gives a forum to Jesse Jackson around the anniversary time of the assassination, while I have never been interviewed. Regarding Reverend Jackson, Dexter King and I were scheduled to appear on the Larry King Show and he showed up to join us. His presence was apparently mandated from above.
In the event that the misinformation and omissions discussed above were simply produced by oversight, neglect, or naiveté and not the result of sinister governmental collaboration, I have not used the names of the actors. It is also important to note that many of the small, selected sample of progressive commentators and programs to which I have referred do cover issues and events not available anywhere else. In this respect they provide a genuine public service.
Nevertheless, there are lines they will not cross and political assassinations are a no-go area, as is 9/11.
Assassins and their masters come and go, live and die, but their agencies and corporate masters live on in a world where the media image makers and information providers of the day are confronted with mortgage payments, tuition and medical bills, loans and credit ratings, all geared to treasured lifestyles and status.
Considering the previous existence of some independence in mainstream media entities, the current consolidation of control and suppression of ideas, facts, and events, virtually across the board, is lamentable and one more major indication of the death of democracy in the American Republic.
For example, as noted earlier I recall in early 1967, the willingness of Look magazine, under Bill Atwood, to publish my Ramparts article and photographs: “The Children of Vietnam.”
As noted elsewhere, though I believe it worth repeating, as an example of the lengths those in power will go to enhance their interests, when I went to Look’s offices for a lengthy meeting, I was greeted by Bill with the statement, “You may be interested in knowing that I had a visitor last week.” I asked who it was, and he said, “Averill Harriman” (former New York governor and Democratic Party leader). Bill said, “He brought me greetings from President Johnson, along with a request for a favor from the president.” I asked what was the president’s request, and he said, “The president would like you not to publish anything Bill Pepper writes.” Bill continued, “Now how does that make you feel? You are not yet thirty years old and the President of the United States is worried about what you are writing.”
I said, “I’m more interested in how you responded.”
He said, “I told him that I was going to meet with you next week, and if we were convinced with what you had to say, we were going to publish—and give the President my best regards.”
Look decided to publish my work, but in the interim, Bill met with New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, and was shaken by Garrison’s evidence of the involvement of the CIA in the assassination of John Kennedy.
Right after the Garrison meeting, he called Bob Kennedy around 1:00 a.m., and Bob confirmed the conclusion, but said he would have to get to the White House in order to open up the case.
Bill Atwood had a heart attack about three hours later, around 4:00 a.m., and left Look.
Needless to say, neither my piece nor Garrison’s were published, and the associate editor, Chandler Brossard, who brought us to Atwood, was let go.
People with courage and independence like Atwood increasingly became rare in the corporate, mainstream media world, and now, nearly half a century later, are virtually nonexistent.
The Oligarchy’s media ascendency has been witness to Democracy’s demise.