32

Military Hoax

Jowers and Raul were the two major breakthroughs trumpeted by the Ray defense team. However, quite separate from those matters, William Pepper, in Orders to Kill, developed another startling theory, and it was this one that originally captured the attention of the King family. It solved the King assassination without any necessity for Raul or Loyd Jowers. It was instead a convoluted hypothesis that centered on a covert team of Green Beret snipers from the 20th Special Forces Group that was supposedly in Memphis on the day King was killed. Two snipers, according to Pepper, had both King and his top aide, Andrew Young, in their gun sights at the very moment someone else, probably an unidentified military sniper, carried out the assassination.1

Pepper’s interest in the military and the assassination began in 1993 when Steve Tompkins, a reporter for The Commercial Appeal, wrote a controversial 6,000-word article charging that the Army had conducted extensive surveillance on three generations of the King family. The result of a sixteen-month investigation, the article mixed solidly sourced reporting with innuendo and speculation. By March 1968, Tompkins said, the “Army’s intelligence system was keenly focused on King and desperately searching for a way to stop him.” The most sensational charges were unattributed and buried at the end of the story. In Memphis, Tompkins wrote, the Atlanta-based 111th Military Intelligence Group “shadowed” King, using “a sedan crammed with electronic equipment.” Tompkins also used two anonymous sources to charge that “eight Green Beret soldiers from an ‘Operational Detachment Alpha 184 Team’ were also in Memphis carrying out an unknown mission” on the day of the assassination. The 20th Special Forces Group, according to more unnamed sources, used “Klan guys who hated niggers” as its intelligence-gathering network.*²

When Pepper became Ray’s lead counsel, and then received $140,000 payment for the Thames-HBO mock trial, he hired Tompkins as a consultant. Tompkins told Pepper he would not reveal his two secret sources, but he did disclose that they were living in Latin America. He offered to be the go-between. Pepper agreed, and never actually spoke to the two men, whom he code-named Warren and Murphy in his book.^†3 While Tompkins’s Commercial Appeal article was the starting point, Pepper eventually went much further, reprinting supposed White House orders to the Alpha 184 team and giving precise details about how a secret squad shadowed King with snipers.

When Pepper’s book was published, a friend of General William Yarborough, the father of the Green Berets, brought it to the attention of Yarborough’s former chief aide, retired major Rudi Gresham. “I thought it was just crazy,” recalls the fifty-two-year-old Gresham. “There were things in there that were impossible, that told me that Pepper did not understand how the military worked. I knew right away that he was either really careless with the facts, or someone had sold him a bill of goods.”⁴

Gresham was a former Special Forces officer who had served as Yarborough’s aide through the 1960s, before becoming the assistant to the Army’s chief of intelligence. In Pepper’s book, Yarborough was named as the officer in charge of military intelligence at the time the conspiracy against King supposedly gained momentum. Gresham was outraged at the accusations against the military, but particularly against Yarborough. When he spoke to Yarborough, the retired general wanted to sue Pepper. Gresham, however, concluded that Pepper had written the sections about Yarborough “right on the borderline, just as a good lawyer would,” and he advised Yarborough not to sue. “Let me handle this,” he told his former superior officer.5

Gresham was a member of the Special Forces Association, a group of retired and active Green Beret soldiers that Yarborough had founded. The association also asked the energetic Gresham to conduct a preliminary investigation of Pepper’s charges against the military.

Pepper had alleged that military snipers assigned to Memphis were part of the 20th Special Forces Group (SFG), a National Guard unit. “That seemed very odd,” says Gresham, “that you would have an operation of this sensitivity and assign weekend soldiers to it. Anyway, in the 1960s, the only way the federal government could take troops from the States was to federalize them [through a presidential directive].”⁶

Pepper charged that during 1967, Warren and Murphy were deployed with the 20th SFG in Los Angeles, Tampa, Detroit, Washington, and Chicago, always on “sensitive” surveillance missions.⁷ Gresham knew that all National Guard units have a seasoned combat veteran as an adviser. When he looked up the name of the adviser for the Birmingham-based 20th SFG, “it turned out to be an old friend, Colonel Lee Mize.”⁸ Mize, an Alabama native, was a decorated Vietnam veteran who had completed four tours of duty. He was the senior Army adviser for the 20th from 1967 through 1969.⁹ Gresham called him.

“Hey, Lee, was your unit ever activated and sent out of state?”

“No.”

“Was the 20th ever activated at all?”

“No. If they were federalized, I would have been the first to know of it.”*¹⁰

Gresham sent Mize a copy of the book in late 1995. “It’s the biggest horseshit I’ve ever seen” were his first words when he called Gresham after reading it. In the book, Pepper named Captain Billy R. Eidson as the leader of the eight-person Alpha 184 covert team that went to Memphis on April 4, 1968. Pepper claimed that, once in Memphis, Eidson introduced the two snipers, Warren and Murphy, to Lieutenant Eli Arkin of the police intelligence unit.11 And Eidson was the one that gave the snipers their targets—King and Andrew Young—telling them “they were enemies of the United States who were determined to bring down the government.”¹² Eidson could not be questioned, however, said Pepper, since he was dead. Pepper quoted Warren as saying that after the assassination the “clean-up process had begun”; Warren and Murphy fled the country, but Eidson likely ended up with a bullet in the back of his head.¹³

“Hell, that’s just crazy,” Mize told Gresham. “Billy Eidson ain’t dead. Eidson has a daughter in Birmingham and he visits me about every six months.”

Gresham next called Ian Sutherland, the colonel who had been in charge of the gunnery training at Fort Bragg. Pepper had alleged that Warren and Murphy had undergone sniper training. Sutherland laughed when he heard the charge. “I would have known about any sniper training,” he told Gresham. “That’s ridiculous. I was the gunnery officer and even if TDY [“temporary duty,” being sent elsewhere for training], I would have known about it.”¹⁴

Pepper claimed that Warren and Murphy had been transferred from the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam to the 20th SFG in Mississippi.¹⁵ A friend in the Army ran a computer check for Gresham to determine whether there had been any such transfers. There were none until 1971.¹⁶

Around this time, Gresham had also started checking on the military order to “recon riot site Memphis prior to King, Martin L. arrival,” that Pepper reproduced prominently in his book. It purported to be a “secret/crypto” order from Special Operations to the 20th SFG, Alpha 184 team.¹⁷ If authentic, the order would prove the existence of the military units about which Pepper was writing, and that they were involved in a covert operation against King. At a party, Gresham ran into an old acquaintance, Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in the 1970s. When Ellsberg had worked as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, “one of my jobs was to winnow through cables and see which ones he should see. I saw everything from Vietnam. There were usually two piles, almost six feet tall, and this was a daily intake. It is hard to overestimate how many cables I have read.”¹⁸

Ellsberg had previously seen the order and told Gresham that “at first glance, it looks real,” but after inspecting it closer he had noticed problems that indicated it was “a deliberately constructed fraud.”¹⁹ The most disturbing error was that the date was wrong, indicating that the cable was sent on April 30, twenty-six days after King had been killed. “It might have been a typo,” says Ellsberg, “but it would have been very unusual. It is so critical to get the date and time group right in the military. It is a very serious question about the document. In the tens of thousands I have seen, I have seen typos, but never a date-time group error, since the cables are filed by that. If that were a typo, there would certainly be a follow-up correcting it. On its own, it indicates the cable is almost surely a fake.”20

Other problems included a zero at the front of the date line. “I have never seen anything like that,” remarks Ellsberg. The name of the originating unit for the cable is listed as “Lantcomn.” “That is actually Atlantic Command,” says Ellsberg, “and would have no second n in it.” Also, the cable showed that it came from “Cincspecops” (Central Command for Special Operations) but Special Operations was not even in existence in 1968.*²¹

In February 1997, Pepper appeared on Montel Williams and repeated the charges about a covert military team at the center of the King assassination. Again, Yarborough wanted to sue, but Gresham counseled patience. He had dealt with the media when he worked as Yarborough’s aide. “What do we do?” Yarborough asked him. “Nothing,” replied Gresham. “The Montel show is a secondary media market. We just ignore it.”²²

Pepper next appeared on Court TV with celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran and Dexter King. Then he reappeared on Montel Williams in March. “Pepper went the whole nine yards,” recalls Gresham. “He had gotten the King family involved, and Dexter was there saying what a great book it was, and how powerful the facts were. This made me feel very uncomfortable. Everybody wanted to do something, and I had to restrain them.”²³

But instead of merely fading away, as Gresham had hoped, Pepper began to get more publicity because he now had Dexter King in tow. On CNN’s Larry King Live, Dexter again endorsed the book, saying it was the source for the new information that had been uncovered. “When it went on Larry King, I knew it was a different ball game,” recalls Gresham. Returning to his Florida home, he had a message from Yarborough that a producer from ABC, Courtney Bullock, had telephoned. When Gresham returned the call, Bullock said she was a producer with the newsmagazine Turning Point and they had completed 70 percent of a show on the King assassination and Pepper’s new charges. “We can help you with lots of information,” Gresham assured her. But he was afraid that he did not know enough about the 20th Special Forces Group to go on television and defend them—he needed extra time for more research. “We won’t do the interviews yet,” he told Bullock, “but we’ll work with you and then see where we are at in a few weeks.” She agreed.

For the next three weeks, from 6:00 A.M. to midnight, Gresham, spending thousands of dollars of his own money, worked to find the holes in Pepper’s contentions.

First he called Lee Mize: “It’s not enough to know that Billy Eidson is alive. We need to find him.”

Then he located General Henry Cobb, who had been the commanding officer (then a colonel) of the 20th for thirteen years, including 1967 and 1968. “I had never heard of any of those charges before Gresham called me,” recalls Cobb. “At first I was shocked. We never went to Memphis. Never went to L.A., or Fort Shelby, or Bobby Kennedy’s house, or any of those places Pepper mentioned. We were federalized once by JFK in 1963, and never again. You couldn’t get into my unit unless I knew about it, and those guys [Warren and Murphy] just didn’t exist.”24

Cobb also knew Eidson and that he was alive, but “I had never heard of either one of those other names,” he says.²⁵ “General, your word is fine,” Gresham told him, “but I need proof for ABC, I need rosters. I need backup for everything, General.”²⁶

At Cobb’s suggestion, Gresham called Major General Clyde Hennies, the adjutant general of Alabama, and immediately obtained the rosters for the 20th Special Forces Group. They proved the unit was never in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Memphis, or anywhere else Pepper had placed it.*²⁷ Gresham asked for the personnel lists for 1967 and 1968. He was interested in another contention by Pepper: Besides naming Billy Eidson as the commanding officer of the sniper unit, Pepper had also named a Lieutenant Robert Worley and a buck sergeant, J. D. Hill, as other members. Both Worley and Hill were dead, contended Pepper. Hill had been shot by his wife, although Pepper implied there might have been something more sinister behind that murder.²⁸

“And guess what,” says Gresham. “When I got the personnel lists for April 1968, there was Colonel Henry Cobb and Major Billy Eidson, but no Robert Worley or J. D. Hill.”29

Cobb and Mize had raised another puzzling issue. Neither had even heard of a unit called the Alpha 184, the supposed moniker for the eight-man covert team that was in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Did Tompkins make it up and Pepper just repeat the mistake? Gresham pored through the history of the 20th, from its inception as a rangers unit in 1959, until he discovered that a group 184 had indeed existed, for only one year in 1960.³⁰ It was disbanded eight years before King was killed.

Meanwhile, the effort to find Billy Eidson continued. Somebody remembered that he had worked at the Birmingham fire department. Gresham called and wanted to know where they sent Eidson’s pension check, but the young clerk initially would not give out any information. After a half-hour lecture about the Martin Luther King assassination, she relented and gave the telephone number of Eidson’s daughter in Birmingham. Gresham called the next day and told her about Pepper’s charges. “She almost had a heart attack,” he recalls. Her father was living in Costa Rica, having married a young woman there.* She gave Gresham the telephone number. On his first call, he reached Eidson, who said he had never heard of Tompkins or Pepper or an Alpha 184 unit. Then Gresham, without explaining the reason, started asking him questions.

“Was your unit ever deployed in Memphis?”

“No.”

“Ever in California?”

“No way.” He laughed.

“Did you ever have a second in command named Robert Worley?”

“No.”

“What about a J. D. Hill?”

“Nope.”

“Did you ever have two Vietnam vets from SOG in your unit?”

“Hell, no. If I had two like that I would have been tickled pink. But why would two SOG fellows ever come over to the National Guard?”³¹

After finishing those questions, Gresham told Eidson, “Look, I’m about to tell you a story you won’t believe.” When he finished, Eidson laughed. “Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing in the world,” he said. “People don’t believe that, do they?”³²

“They do,” Gresham said. “Martin Luther King’s own son believes it.”33

“Well, it’s crazy, I was on duty at the fire department in Birmingham. Anyone can check it. Hell, I’ve never been in Memphis.”*

The next morning Gresham called Eidson again. By this time, the enormity of the charges against him had sunk in. He was angry with Pepper. “He’s crazy,” he shouted. “What did I ever do to him? I can’t believe that King’s son thinks I killed his daddy.” Eidson was also a little worried. “What if some fool reads that book and goes after me or my family?”³⁴ Gresham had no answer.

Meanwhile, Gresham continued faxing updates and talking daily with ABC producer Bullock. Once she learned that Eidson was alive, she immediately wanted to fly to Costa Rica to film him. Gresham, who was now the only person with Eidson’s trust, said no.

Forrest Sawyer, one of Turning Point’s hosts, called Pepper. They had already interviewed him for the program, but now asked for another. Pepper was wary, but agreed. Meanwhile, Gresham kept digging. By this time, he had buttressed Daniel Ellsberg’s opinion about the military order Pepper reproduced in his book: General Ray Davis, a four-star Medal of Honor recipient; Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, former chief of Naval Operations; and Colonel Harry Summers, a syndicated columnist and a military college instructor, had all chimed in with opinions that it was a fake.³⁵

In early June, Gresham decided it was time to officially become part of the ABC program, which was scheduled to air on June 19. He agreed to visit New York with Billy Eidson, Lee Mize, Henry Cobb, and Jimmy Dean, the administrator of the Special Forces Association.³⁶ Just before they all left for New York, Courtney Bullock telephoned. She had tracked down J. D. Hill, the soldier Pepper claimed had been part of the sniper’s team. He had been in the 20th Special Forces Group but had left the unit on May 7, 1966, and did not return to duty until May 7, 1968. He had not even been in the service at the time of the King assassination.^†

The group of former soldiers arrived in New York on Thursday, June 5, 1997. The following day their interviews were taped. They were then taken to a room adjoining a studio where Forrest Sawyer was taping an interview with Pepper, who had also flown into New York. They listened on headphones as Pepper admitted that prior to printing his charge about the 20th Special Forces Group being involved in the King assassination, he had never spoken to anyone at the 20th, or tried to get a comment from the unit. “If I had done that,” Pepper offered weakly in his defense, “all types of doors would have closed to me.”37

Reporter Steve Tompkins, whose original article in The Commercial Appeal had kicked off Pepper’s interest in the military and King’s murder, was also interviewed for the program. Sensing that things were turning against Pepper, he had started backing away from the story that he helped create. Sawyer played for Pepper a tape on which Tompkins now said that he did not believe the military was involved in any assassination plot. “I find that very interesting,” said Pepper, looking quite uncomfortable. “I find that very interesting because he was the one who carried information back to me with respect to the assassination.”*

Finally, Sawyer got around to Billy Eidson. “I believe Eidson, one was killed in New Orleans,” said Pepper.

Sawyer then played a videotape of Eidson and informed Pepper that he was still alive. Pepper was visibly shaken and his lower lip twitched. “That’s what you say, and that’s what he says,” Pepper contended. Sawyer did not hesitate. “Would you like to meet him?” “Would it serve any purpose?” Pepper asked, now squirming in his chair. “O.K., fine, I’ll be glad to talk to them.”

Sawyer gave a signal and Eidson and the other men walked onto the set as the cameras rolled. Pepper stood up and went to shake Eidson’s hand. “I don’t want to shake your hand,” Eidson said to him. “I just want to look at you.”

Sawyer told Pepper, “I think you may owe the American people an apology.” Pepper kept saying he needed time to gather documents and proof that would change ABC’s mind before the scheduled air date of June 19. Claiming that his publisher had checked his facts, and that Tompkins could provide written statements from Warren and Murphy, he dodged the questions from the five veterans for nearly two hours. Meanwhile, he kept telling Eidson, “I would never have written about you if I had any idea you were alive.”³⁸ When told the military order he reproduced was a fake, he said he was not surprised—“What do you expect them to do, acknowledge it?” But Gresham did not let him off the hook so easily. “Who authenticated the order for you?”

“Oliver Stone had some military person check it, and it was fine,” Pepper told the slack-jawed group.39

“I was starting to get real mad around this time,” recalls Gresham, “and I told him that he had it all mixed up. It wasn’t possible for Warren and Murphy to have come from the 5th in Vietnam and ended up in the National Guard. Pepper admitted that they had never served in Vietnam.”*⁴⁰

Pepper finally mentioned some names, saying that a Joe Stone, a former military officer who was now living somewhere in Latin America, was one of his sources. He also claimed to meet regularly with John W. Downie, of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, and said he would produce him. Sawyer reminded Pepper that the show was scheduled to air on June 19, and that he had until then—two weeks—to develop new information.

Gresham also used that time to clear up loose ends. The Pentagon finally provided written confirmation that Pepper’s military order was a hoax. “We continued checking on other things that Pepper had thrown out in that meeting,” recalls Gresham. Mainly, he looked for Joe Stone and John Downie, the two sources Pepper had mentioned.^†

Downie turned out to be a colonel who had been subpoenaed in 1973 before Congress and testified that the Army had surveillance on King. He had died in June 1987 and was buried in Arlington.

When Gresham informed ABC, and they in turn told Pepper, he did not miss a beat. “He’s assumed another identity,” contended Pepper.⁴¹ (Pepper now denies giving the name Downie, but at least five people in the ABC room at the time have told the author they heard it.) Gresham, not one to be dissuaded by a mere contention, kept digging and found Downie’s daughter. “She was flabbergasted,” he recalls. “Yes, she confirmed, he was definitely dead.”

Joe Stone turned out to be an active warrant officer in the Alabama National Guard. “I know nothing about it,” Stone told Gresham when the two finally spoke. “I don’t know Pepper, don’t know Tompkins, know nothing about them. I don’t know why the hell they would have named me, but I can assure you that you have the wrong guy.”42

By this time, only days before the show was due to air, Tompkins had even backed off further, saying that while he had provided the military order to Pepper, he had told him not to use it as he had questions about its authenticity. “We [The Commercial Appeal] didn’t print it because we didn’t believe it,” he said.⁴³ Oliver Stone, when contacted, told ABC he had not verified the military order for Pepper.

“After realizing what a liar Pepper was,” says Gresham, “I wanted to warn the Kings.” So he talked to an old Army buddy, Major Harold Sims, a former executive director of the Urban League, who had served on the board of directors at the King Center in Atlanta for twenty-five years. Sims sent a fax to Dexter urging him to talk to Gresham. “He never called me,” says a clearly disappointed Gresham.

The Turning Point program aired on June 19, 1997. Dexter and other members of the King family were on the show.

“Who do the Kings hold responsible for his assassination?” asked Forrest Sawyer.

“Army intelligence, CIA, FBI,” Dexter answered immediately.

“Do you believe that Lyndon Johnson was part of the plot to kill your father?”

“I do.”

With Dexter were his mother, Coretta; his brother, Martin III; and his sisters, Yolanda and Bernice. When Sawyer asked, “Is everybody united in the belief that James Earl Ray not only did not pull the trigger, he didn’t know there was going to be a murder that day?” the group all nodded their agreement. Sawyer wanted to make sure there was no dissent. “Everybody?” “Absolutely,” declared Martin III.

Turning Point only aired a fraction of what their producers and Gresham uncovered, primarily focusing on the error over the living Billy Eidson. However, following the show, the Kings held an emergency meeting the next night. They decided to adopt a lower public profile in the coming months, but the general consensus, incredibly, was that Pepper was still on the right track, and the fact that a major television network aired a program discrediting him confirmed to the Kings that the cover-up was alive and well.

Six days after the program, Billy Eidson filed a libel suit against Pepper and his publishers, Carroll & Graf, for $15 million. Meanwhile, Pepper, in conversations with journalists, began raising the possibility that the man ABC presented as Billy Eidson was a phony, intended only to discredit him, and that the real Eidson was dead. Gresham worked for the CIA, he charged, and was out to destroy him.44 He complained that his sources had “gone underground” since the program, hindering his investigation.⁴⁵ But Pepper’s protestations of an ever widening conspiracy, now directed at him, sounded increasingly hollow. By his high-profile hijinks, he somehow had converted the assassination more into a battle over his theories and credibility than a battle to free his increasingly forgotten client, James Earl Ray.

* Actually, Tompkins’s article was rooted in fact. Senate hearings in 1971 had examined abuses in an Army surveillance program established under President Johnson after riots in 1965 and 1967. The program, designed to provide the Pentagon with “early warning” of civil disturbances that might require federal troops, involved sending Army observers to antiwar demonstrations, civil rights rallies, and other political gatherings. Senate investigators found the Army sometimes exceeded its authority, crossing into improper political surveillance that included keeping dossiers on civilians. General William Yarborough, who helped direct the intelligence program, told the author, “I can’t give the Army a clean bill of health from that time. But we were not enthusiastic about being soldiers assigned to correct a civilian problem. We did not want it.”

In Memphis the local 1l1th Military Intelligence Group closely monitored the 1968 sanitation strike. Five agents watched public gatherings and used civilian, police, and FBI sources to report on King and others. However, some reporters criticized Tompkins’s article for going too far afield in its conclusions, and it prompted a scathing reply from General Yarborough. Shortly after that article, Tompkins, who had resigned in 1984 from The Wichita Eagle-Beacon after an internal investigation into a discrepancy about a critical date in a story he wrote, also resigned from The Commercial Appeal. He says his departure from the Memphis paper was not connected to his military story, but rather because he “wanted to pursue other goals.”

^† Pepper later added yet a third source to his story, a man he code-named Gardner, who he claimed had been legally dead for years, then appeared and confirmed details of Warren and Murphy’s story, before again disappearing.

* Although Gresham shared with the author the results of his investigation, the author obtained documents that independently corroborated anything cited to Gresham in this chapter. For instance, the author checked the records for the 20th unit and confirmed that the unit was not federalized at any time during 1967 and 1968. While the 20th was never activated, the unit did go out of state for training sessions to Atlanta, as well as remote areas in Florida and Idaho. Additionally, it did some unconventional warfare training at Fort McClellan, Alabama. The records for the 20th show it was never in the places Pepper put it in 1967, namely Los Angeles, Tampa, Detroit, Washington, Chicago, and Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

* Pepper had actually sent the order to Ellsberg, through an intermediary. Ellsberg conveyed his doubts to Pepper, who replied that he had checked with his source, “Warren,” and now thought it possible that the date might actually be a subsequent rerouting for filing or some other purpose. Ellsberg, however, says, “This explanation doesn’t make sense to me.” If it were a rerouting then the original date would show in the cable’s heading. “Why, also,” asks Ellsberg, “would anyone send a highly secret order around for filing, twenty-six days after King was assassinated?” If real, this cable would never have seen the light of day after King’s death. Pepper reproduced the order in his book without any caveats. Both Ellsberg and Gresham agreed that Pepper’s silence was “disingenuous at best.”

* The author has reviewed the rosters for the 20th SFG for 1967 and 1968 and they show that the unit, as Gresham said, was never in any of the cities cited by Pepper.

* Eidson had left the country shortly after having trouble with the law in Birmingham. He killed a man in a bar brawl, and a jury held him responsible for criminally negligent homicide. He received twelve months probation instead of a jail sentence.

* After much wrangling with the personnel office in the Birmingham fire department, Gresham finally obtained copies of rosters that showed Eidson was on active call on April 4, and that he worked the following day. He was not back with the National Guard until July 10. Eidson, who worked part-time with a house-painting crew, was on a job in Birmingham, with other workers, on April 4.

^† The author has reviewed the personnel records that show Hill’s departure from and return to the 20th. Hill was buried in Mississippi in 1976. “We finally got a copy of the police report on his death,” says Gresham, “and he was a real son of a bitch who kept beating his wife until she finally killed him one day. She did not get charged with any crime.” It would not be until after his visit to New York that Gresham found a Worley who had served in the National Guard, but he also was not on duty in 1968. He was actually a full-time pharmacist in Louisiana, and died in a car accident.

* Tompkins actually signed a September 11, 1995, affidavit drafted by Pepper, in which he endorsed the accuracy of the draft manuscript Pepper had shown him about the military and the two snipers, Warren and Murphy. When asked about that affidavit, Tompkins claimed that he had not read it carefully, and in any case had seen only one chapter from the entire book. He later said, “Pepper took my series and embellished the hell out of it.”

* If Warren and Murphy are fictitious characters, there may be an indication of where Tompkins and Pepper obtained the names. The Phoenix Program, a 1990 book by Douglas Valentine, is about a government campaign against the antiwar movement. Valentine wrote, without citing any sources, that as part of the campaign, the 111th Military Intelligence Group in Memphis kept Martin Luther King under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance and took photos at the moment he was assassinated. In the book, two military men with the names Warren and Murphy appear. Excerpts from The Phoenix Program were found in Tompkins papers at The Commercial Appeal after he left.

^† Peter Bull, another producer at ABC, talked to Tompkins, who denied that Joe Stone was one of his deep sources, but did admit to having spoken with Downie. Tompkins told the author that “Joe Stone” was simply a pseudonym he happened to have given one of his deep sources.