The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Ray made his way by bus out of the United States into Canada, reaching Toronto on April 6. He went to a local newspaper to check birth announcements of people who would have been slightly younger than him since he thought he looked younger than he was. He picked out some names, including Ramon George Sneyd and Paul E. Bridgeman. He called each to find out whether either had applied for a passport, pretending that it was an official inquiry. Sneyd hadn’t applied for a passport, but Bridgeman had, so Ray decided not to use Bridgeman’s name for the passport, only for local use.

  On April 8 he registered as Paul Bridgeman at a rooming house on Ossington Street. He would leave the house every morning at 8:30, returning each evening around 5:30. (He subsequently stated that he took another room in a second rooming house on Dundas Street, where he would spend most of the day, pretending that he had a night job. He registered there under the Sneyd name.)

  Ray flew to England on May 8 and from there he made a quick trip to Portugal to try to get to one of the Portuguese overseas territories—Angola or Mozambique. Unsuccessful, he returned to England, planning to go eventually to Belgium to explore the possibilities of taking another route. As we know, he was apprehended at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the United States on July 19, 1968.

  We asked Ray why he had pleaded guilty. He insisted that he had been greatly pressured and coerced. I would later learn the details of the extent of the pressure on him and the history of his extraordinary legal representation that even involved his lawyer paying him to take a plea (see Appendix C). This is more fully discussed in Chapter 17. We finished our session with Ray around 4:00 p.m., some five hours after we began.

  Dr. Berens and I agreed that during the interview Ray displayed a vagueness and apprehensive equivocation relating to any connection with persons or places in Louisiana. There was also a curious general change in tone and manner when we began to probe about why he went for psychological and hypnotic counseling. Only during this experience did he use his real name (for fear of it coming out during hypnosis). He has dismissed that experience as a kind of extracurricular preoccupation that he undertook while awaiting instructions from Raul. The possibility of Ray being subjected to mind control occurred to me.

  As for Raul, the extensive details that Ray provided convinced us that such a person did indeed exist, despite the authorities’ consistent public statements to the contrary. Though Ray did not mention it during our interview, I subsequently learned that in early 1978 he said that his brother Jerry had anonymously been sent a photograph of an individual whom Ray positively identified as Raul. This identification was reported by the local media at the time. On the back of the photograph was written the name Carlos Hernandez Rumbaut. James said that he sent the photograph to his brother John in St. Louis and asked him to check it against picture archives at the main library. In particular he asked him to compare it with photographs of alleged drug dealers. John made a copy of the photo and sent the original back in a package with other materials. Ray said that when he opened the package the photo was missing. A few days later federal marshals arrested John Ray on a parole violation. When he was released, he found that his house had been rifled and numerous things taken, including the photograph. (Years later I would learn that Rumbaut was an asset of the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] and that he had also been implicated in drug dealing. I obtained his photograph—it was clear that Rumbaut was not the man whom James had identified in 1978 as Raul. In hindsight, it appeared possible that by putting his name on the back of the real Raul’s picture, someone could have been trying to set James up to wrongly identify Rumbaut as Raul.)

  Abernathy and I later agreed with Dr. Beren’s assessment that Ray was basically telling the truth. However, I believe that James Earl Ray never revealed all that he knew. He had been the target of at least one murder attempt in prison and has probably decided that to say more was dangerous. We didn’t know what, if any, role he had played, but we thought he was an unlikely candidate for the assassin.

  Ralph Abernathy felt that Ray didn’t show any signs of the compulsive hatred of blacks common in the South. Ralph was, like the rest of us, I believe, genuinely surprised at this. We had all heard and read the mass media’s reports about Ray’s motivation for the murder.

  As we left the prison, a phalanx of television and print journalists was waiting. Ralph’s statement left no doubt as to his conclusions following the interrogation: “James Earl Ray’s answers to my questions convinced me more than ever that it was a conspiracy that took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and that James Earl Ray should get a new trial.”

  The session left me intrigued and troubled. The James Earl Ray I had read and heard about was not the man I saw in that tiny room. The man I saw was not a nut, nor was he a flaming racist. In fact, there was gentleness about him that I didn’t think could have been feigned. Could an innocent man have spent nearly nine years in prison with the truth never having been revealed?

  I decided to continue my investigation.

  PART II

  Chapter 6

  THE DEEPENING PLOT

  To see through a glass, though darkly

  Reveals an image which becomes magnetic

  Eyes to truth ever so starkly,

  Compels commitment no less frenetic.

  Beginning in 1978, as time and my legal practice allowed, I gradually became immersed in the case. In early 1978, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Morton Halperin of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, I discovered the interest that the CIA’s little-known Office of Security (OS) had in Dr. King during the 1960s. Some of the Agency’s most covert operations were mounted from the OS. Through an elaborate network of assets (independent contract agents whose acts may be officially denied), it coordinated a wide range of operations, including assassination efforts, the most infamous being the collaboration with organized crime through Sam Giancana and John Roselli in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s.

  I learned that some of the key personnel of the OS were former FBI agents, and that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had a good working relationship with the OS. Incredibly, OS consultant Lee Pennington prepared Hoover’s personal income tax returns. Also, the OS had run a little-known program called Project RESISTANCE, which, along with Operation CHOA (mounted in 1967 at President Johnson’s request), was responsible for domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering on thousands of Americans who opposed the Vietnam War. During this period, CIA agents were also infiltrating protest and antiwar groups, and were providing training programs, services, and equipment to local police departments in exchange for surveillance and break-ins on the agency’s behalf. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the OS coordinated this activity, often in conjunction with the FBI and army intelligence, which had similar operations.

  Documents reflected the Agency’s fear that Dr. King was influenced by a “Peking line” of communist thinking, and it was considering how derogatory information could be used to discredit him. Dr. King had been under Operation CHAOS, Project RESISTANCE, and other agency surveillance programs for a number of years. The Agency had also recruited assets in the 1960s to infiltrate, spy on, and subvert civil rights groups.

  One such infiltrator was informant A, mentioned often in memos issued by OS director Howard Osborn and OS Security Research Staff (SRS) chief Paul Gaynor. Informant A was subsequently identified as Jay Richard Kennedy, who referred to Dr. King as a “Maoist.” In a memo dated October 5, 1967 (released to the public on March 13, 1978), Kennedy also referred to the National Conference New Politics (NCNP). In a gross misinterpretation of the events, he reported that the Black Caucus and the Communist Party “virtually wrecked the convention” but failed to get support for a King-Spock presidential ticket. The government’s reliance on such an out-of-touch informant is frightening.

  In a memorandum for the SRS chief dated November 29, 1975, the following disclaimer was put on the re
cord: “A thorough review of cited Office of Security files disclosed no evidence that the Office of Security has ever conducted any investigation, including wiretaps, surveillance, mail cover, or field investigations regarding listed subjects (one of whom was Dr. King). No inquiry was made outside the Office of Security and no DOD records were reviewed or checked.” (DOD [Domestic Operations Division] coordinates the agency’s operations inside that United States.)

  In fact, the OS intercepted Dr. King’s mail and probably entered his hotel rooms illegally to obtain photocopies of credit card receipts, business cards, and telephone messages, which were included in the documents released. Even though Operation CHAOS was supposedly begun in 1967, many of the Freedom of Information Act documents on Dr. King were dated in the spring and summer of 1965, and purloined receipts and telephone messages were dated from the spring of 1966.

  Finally, from the memos that the OS sent the FBI, it’s obvious that at least during the last year of Dr. King’s life they worked jointly against him. An OS memo dated March 15, 1968, issued within three weeks of Dr. King’s assassination, closed with the statement: “… FBI liaison has been most cooperative and effective in providing the office with timely information about the various domestic militants and protest groups.”

  Throughout the 1960s and in particular for the two years following the appointment of Richard Helms as CIA director in June 30, 1966, the congressional and the executive branches of government, supported on national security grounds by the Supreme Court whenever necessary (following the 1959 5–4 decision in the case of Barr v. Matteo), generally abdicated their responsibility to check the agency and effectively gave the green light for its conduct of convert special operations (SOG activity) inside the United States.

  As a result of the agency’s interest in and surveillance of Dr. King in the mid-1960s, I was interested in learning as much as possible about its domestic activity during the critical period leading up to the assassination. Much of the history was well known and fairly widely published, since there had been in previous years the occasional exposure of covert domestic activity.

  The agency was established by the National Security Act, passed on September 18, 1947. In proposing the creation of the CIA, President Harry Truman emphasized the nation’s unawareness leading up to the raid on Pearl Harbor, which he thought illustrated the need for a central intelligence entity capable of providing prompt and effective warning about any such enemy attack. Administration witnesses continually stressed the position that the CIA was to be strictly limited to overseas operations. To meet certain congressional apprehension, the bill was amended to provide that “the agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions” (emphasis added).

  Nevertheless, in the 1960s the agency became increasingly involved in domestic affairs. The list of distinguished persons and entities that came to be used in covert activities reads like a roster of the American establishment. More than one analyst has noted that the coalition of lawyers, businessmen, and financiers, which constituted the “establishment” during those years, consolidated silent control over the course of US public policy.

  Though the nation was publicly assured, and it was commonly believed, that CIA activities were confined to international operations, by 1964 its domestic activity had become so extensive that a special section—the Domestic Operations Division—was secretly created to handle it. Its office at 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue was one block from the White House. The division’s purpose, as reflected by its very name, belied the official line that the agency was not engaged in any domestic activity.

  As this growth developed, former President Truman, who sponsored the original establishment of the agency, declared in 1963, “I never had any thought … when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role…. I … would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. We have grown up as a nation respected for our free society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

  As happened with President Eisenhower’s final warning about the danger to American democracy of the burgeoning “military industrial” complex, Harry Truman’s words went unheeded.

  On June 30, 1966, Richard McGarrah Helms, a career intelligence professional, was appointed director of the CIA by Lyndon Johnson. As director, he succeeded Vice Admiral William P. “Red” Raborn, who had previously been vice president for project management at the defense industry contractor Aerojet-General Corporation of California.

  By 1967 the CIA had offices and installations all over America. It even publicly listed them in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Miami, Pittsburgh, Houston, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and Minneapolis. Many others existed under front companies and names. Gradually, a number of domestic activities and operations began to surface, and American taxpayers became aware of the range of activities that they had been unwittingly financing.

  In February 1967 (the month following my piece on Vietnam), Ramparts published an article by Mike Wood (who later became NCNP’s on-site convention coordinator in Chicago) that revealed the extensive relationship between the CIA and the American academic community through a plethora of contracts and grant arrangements with American colleges, universities, and research institutes. Wood’s article focused on the infiltration of the National Student Association, but that liaison was only the tip of the iceberg, which extended to faculty members and departments in dozens of institutions. Peripheral to these revelations was the occasional reference to even more deeply covert army involvement in such activity.

  After Wood’s disclosures, it gradually emerged that during this period the agency was involved in virtually every segment of US domestic life: business and labor; local, state, and national law enforcement and government; universities; charities; the print and press media; lawyers; teachers; artists; women’s organizations and cultural groups. The publicly known list alone was staggeringly extensive. Grants were given, projects were funded, covers were provided, studies were commissioned, projects were mounted, training programs were run, and books were published. The arrangements were wide and varied. In its 1976 report the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities said that by 1967 the agency had sponsored, subsidized, or produced over one thousand books, with two hundred being turned out in 1967 alone. Analysts have noted the practice whereby one CIA operative or asset would write a book and others review it for selected newspapers and magazines.

  By 1967 the CIA was spending 1.5 billion dollars a year without any effective fiscal control over individual expenditures on operations. Covert domestic activities and operations were paid for by “unvouchered funds” (expenditures without purchase orders or receipts). As a result of the 1949 Central Intelligence Act, Director Helms had the authority to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.” Helms’s signature on any check, no matter how large, drawn on any CIA bank account, was deemed to be sufficient. Interagency cooperation, particularly with the army and/or the State Department, was frequently necessary and this was accomplished through the establishment of Special Operations Groups (SOG) created for particular projects or missions. SOG activity inside the United States against “Willie” (blacks and dissidents) was not publicized or known.

  On October 17, 1978, just before we had left Knoxville to interview Ray, Mark Lane had given me a copy of an affidavit issued by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and thus revealed
to the American public some harsh truths about the war in Vietnam. The affidavit detailed a conversation Ellsberg had had four months earlier with Brady Tyson, then an aide to UN ambassador Andrew Young.

  On June 16, 1978, while at the United Nations to talk with members and staff of the UN Special Assembly on Disarmament, Ellsberg became quite friendly with Tyson. As they left Tyson’s office one day, the subject of King’s assassination came up.

  In the affidavit Ellsberg stated, “I asked Tyson whether he thought there had been a conspiracy and who he thought might have done it. He said very flatly to me, ‘We know there was a conspiracy and we know who did it.’ … I asked him who it was, if he would feel free to say, and he said again in a way that was very surprising to me in its lack of equivocation or reservation, ‘It was a group of off-duty and retired FBI officers working under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover.’ He said further that this was a group working secretly and known to almost no one else in the FBI. This group Tyson said included ‘a sharpshooter,’ who had actually done the shooting.”

  Ellsberg was startled; he pressed Tyson to tell him his source. Reluctantly, Tyson said, “That has turned up in Walter Fauntroy’s (HSCA) investigation and he’s told us.” “Us,” Ellsberg emphasized, included Ambassador Young, another aide, Stoney Cooks, and Tyson himself.

  The affidavit continued: “I got the impression from things he subsequently said that Ambassador Young and his associates had actually gone over a good deal of the evidence directly and had not simply been told this in general terms.”

  He quoted Tyson as saying, “We are eighty percent sure that we know who they are. We’re eighty percent sure that we know the names of all the people who were involved, and … it’s all circumstantial but very detailed.”