Agent 500 returned from Vietnam at a critical moment in the rise of the surveillance state. As a cover for his activities, he had registered as a student at Memphis University but rarely visited the campus – he often claimed that prior to joining the Invaders he had been a warehouseman. From his modest rented home at 1445 Clementine Road, tucked away in obscurity near the faceless construction sites around Highway 240, McCollough travelled with the Invaders by day and drank with them at night. He would then sit up into the small hours, filing daily intelligence reports and feeding them into a bewildering array of agencies, ostensibly to the local MPD’s Red Squad, and through them to Military Intelligence, and then onwards to the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme – the pernicious and highly confidential response to the summer of inner city riots in 1967. ‘The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavour,’ the FBI’s own communiqué claimed, ‘is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or OTHERWISE NEUTRALIZE the activities of Black Nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.’ Responsibility for COINTELPRO’s successful implementation in the South was the Memphis police chief Frank Holloman, a former FBI operative who had worked for over twenty years for the Bureau, much of it in J. Edgar Hoover’s Washington office. Holloman had directly approved Agent 500’s assignment.
Hoover’s pathological hatred of Martin Luther King was an open secret in Washington. By the mid sixties he had poured substantial resources and manpower into a nationwide surveillance programme which probed into the lives of King’s political allies, the finances of his church, and, most scandalously, into the minister’s adventurous sex life. The FBI field office in King’s home town of Atlanta, Georgia, held voluminous paperwork on his activities filed under the codename ‘Zorro’ (taken from the popular television series of the late fifties), the secret identity most agents habitually used when they were discussing King. The surveillance had become personal and vindictive. Hoover was of the view that King was not only a threat to the established order but a hypocritical philanderer whose gospel exhortations were at odds with a string of sexual liaisons with married women. At a poisonous press conference as far back as November 1964, Hoover had lashed out at King’s criticism of the FBI by describing the civil rights leader as the ‘most notorious liar in the country’. The campaign against King degenerated into prurience when FBI officers installed microphones in a room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, and recorded King having sex with an unnamed woman. A few months later, in the days before King was due to be honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the FBI anonymously dispatched an edited copy of the surveillance tapes from a mailbox in Tampa to his wife. The intent was obvious: to ruin King’s marriage and undermine his reputation. The package contained a venomous letter proposing that King should consider suicide rather than risk the humiliation of his sexual secrets being made public.
Harry C. McPherson, a White House special counsel and Lyndon B. Johnson’s speechwriter, claimed that the aftermath of the summer of riots had created the perfect conditions for the FBI’s expansion. The words ‘law and order’, he wrote, were simply the new ‘code words for racism’.
Hoover had seized his chance to delve into the lives of black activists with the hypocritical zeal of a voyeuristic patriot. He once described Martin Luther King as ‘a tomcat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges’ and believed King was ‘an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation’. The FBI flooded the White House with daily intelligence reports on Black Power activists to the extent that President Johnson’s staff felt overwhelmed by the volume of evidence – much of it fanciful and questionable, and, according to historian Kenneth O’Reilly, ‘short on facts and long on rhetoric’. The tangled wires of surveillance and whispered evidence gathered in covert operations had exposed divisions within government, too, pitting Hoover’s FBI against the US attorney general Robert Kennedy. The Washington editor of the Nation, David Corn, described the ethics of law enforcement as a ‘titanic clash’ between Kennedy and Hoover, whose distrusting relationship had festered into one of the great power feuds of American politics. According to Corn, it went beyond personality or politics and was ‘in a way a fight over the meaning of justice in America’.
Marrell McCollough had become a secret agent as much by chance as ambition. On his demobilisation from Vietnam, like many before him he had moved from the military police to a civilian role, but during his interviews he had emerged as a strong candidate for the needs of the time. It was not simply that he was black, he was also an affable man with streetwise instincts and extremely good communication skills. The MPD had come under pressure to demonstrate that it was an employer open to black recruits and one willing to promote talent from the African-American community. It was a time of minority recruitment and one when young people had become fascinated by a wave of popular culture that glamorised the role of undercover agents – an era of secrecy and suspicion. Network television had struck a rich vein of success with themed television shows featuring spies and secret agents. FBI detectives starred in movies and primetime shows, among them The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series (1964–1968), the James Bond franchise, Mission Impossible (1966–1973) and the comedy parody show Get Smart (1965–1970). Those shows in turn begat a wide range of theme tunes – the Ventures’ ‘Hawaii Five-0’ (Liberty), ‘Mission Impossible’ by Lalo Schifrin (Dot) and the Detroit instrumental ‘Undercover’ by Bongalis (MS Records) – that gave instrumental credence to a world of disguise, subterfuge and undercover operations. Ironically, the Invaders had taken their name from an ABC science-fiction series in which a young architect turns secret agent to fight a secretive group of alien invaders. Throughout the sixties a rash of pop and soul songs glorified the undercover cop, many of them major hits in the ghettos: Edwin Starr’s ‘Agent Double-O Soul’ (Ric-Tic Records), Little Hank’s ‘Mister Bang Bang Man’ (Sound Stage 7), Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ ‘Come Spy With Me’ (Tamla Motown) and Gene Faith’s ‘Call The FBI (My Baby’s Missing)’ (Power Exchange). One soul record stood out from the crowd and led inevitably back to Memphis. Luther Ingram & the G-Men’s original version of ‘I Spy (For The F.B.I.)’ (Smash) was recorded in New York City in the mid sixties and was unfairly trumped in the charts by a cover version of the same song, an international modernist anthem recorded by Jamo Thomas, an aggressive Chicago-based soul singer. Despite seeing his original recording usurped by Thomas, the talented Ingram, an elegant gospel-trained singer from Jackson, Mississippi, found himself sucked into the dark criminal subculture of sixties soul when he encountered two formidable and physically intimidating men – Johnny Baylor and Dino Woodard – who within weeks would arrive in Memphis in a blaze of both guns and questionable glory.
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Even within a few hours of King’s death, McCollough was distancing himself from the aftermath of the assassination and being economical about what he told others. He was soon back among the low-income apartments, arcade stores and community centres where the Invaders hung out, saying nothing. He spent some of his days casually calling in at soul shops across the city, including Satellite Records at Stax and the Mack at 883 Porter, an emporium for Black Power paraphernalia, fashion accessories and the latest soul vinyl. It was in late July, on one of his regular visits to the ‘black arcades’, that McCollough began to hatch a plan to entrap the Memphis Invaders militants in a carefully orchestrated drugs bust.
He planned the bust with one of his closest allies in the world of Memphis surveillance, Lieutenant Eli Arkin of the MPD’s Red Squad, a dark-haired schemer with a heavy moustache and darting eyes, along with another police lieutenant Tom Hall, a man with a cropped military haircut, jowly chin and the look of better days. McCollough knew in advance that on 2 August there would be a Friday night drugs party at two adjacent brown-brick apartments in a low-income housing project at 1644 Hanauer, near Carver High School. McCo
llough knew in advance that John Burl Smith, the key target, would be there, and that there would be drugs on the premises. On the day, three syringes, a number of marijuana joints, a bottle of Luminal, forty-six phenobarbital pills and an item described by the police report as ‘an oriental water pipe’ were seized. On a simultaneous raid on the premises of Smith’s neighbour Lizzie Jones the police found a gallon jug of liquid barbiturate, phenobarbital and two .22 calibre pistols. Four Invaders were taken into custody, including Charles ‘Izzy’ Harrington (20), who was described as an area co-ordinator of the Afro-American Brotherhood and was one of the delegation of Invaders who met with Martin Luther King at the Rivermont Hotel in the aftermath of the abortive rally that had led to the death of Larry Payne. McCollough was arrested along with Smith and three others – Oree McKenzie (18), the cousin of Mad Lads singer John Gary Williams, Verdell Brooks (20), and a woman, Jewell Davis (18). To protect McCollough’s cover, he was taken to the station and charged with disorderly conduct and possession of legend drugs (those that can only be dispensed with the permission of a licensed physician) without a valid prescription. Conveniently, in a Memphis police press briefing, McCollough’s Christian name was given as Marion and his surname erroneously misspelled. He was described coyly as an ‘affiliate’ of the Invaders, but the press were briefed that he was not on the payroll of their umbrella group, the Neighborhood Organizing Project. The charges against him were eventually dropped and his identity as an undercover officer carefully protected. In a court appearance of some bravado, Smith denied the charges, claiming he did not smoke tobacco let alone marijuana, and that he had never used a syringe. Smith normally wore a denim jacket with Invaders emblazoned on the back, but on trial he showed up in a razor-sharp grey suit and blue tie. The Vietnam veteran, who had served four years in the air force, rose up in the dock to protest his innocence and rolled up his sleeve to demonstrate to the jury that he had no needle marks, no collapsed veins and no obvious signs of intravenous drug abuse. After four and a half hours of deliberation the jury found Smith guilty and he was jailed for eleven months and twenty-nine days in the Shelby County Penal Farm.
No one can be certain about the circumstances that brought Marrell McCollough to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on 4 April. He had spent the morning ferrying two SCLC officials around town – James Orange and James Bevel, who found him personable enough – and then drove them back to the motel where he rejoined the Invaders in their room. What is strange, and remains unexplained to this day, is Agent 500’s curious activity on the day in question. During the afternoon of King’s assassination, he was with a group of Invaders at the motel thrashing out a marshalling plan that would ensure that the civil rights march planned for the following day would be non-violent. After King’s executives discovered that the Invaders were armed – and putting room service on the SCLC tab – they were asked to leave the premises. The Invaders dispersed. But by 5 p.m. McCollough was back in the immediate area, this time, incredulously, at an MPD meeting at Jim’s Grill on Main Street, below the shabby rooming house where the fatal shot came from. With McCollough were two other police officers, one of whom was Lieutenant Earl Clark, the MPD expert sniper. Agent 500 had moved unobtrusively around the motel building, surveying the pool and glancing up and down Mulberry. Soon after the furtive meeting with his police colleagues, McCollough returned to the Lorraine Motel and hung out in the busy car park. He was there when the shot rang out. McCollough stayed with the MPD for a few unsettled months after the assassination, and then disappeared back into the murky world of military intelligence, returning to Fort McPherson. In 1974 he joined the CIA and may have been deployed in the African republic of Zaire to track down black militants, including the honorary Black Panther and former student leader Stokely Carmichael, once described by the FBI as having the ‘necessary charisma to be a real threat’. Carmichael had recently married the African singer Miriam Makeba and travelled with her to Africa to see Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight title fight against George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. Among the claims and counterclaims whirling around King’s assassination, what is indisputable is that Agent 500 was a first-hand witness to the assassination of Martin Luther King and a key player in the subterfuge that enveloped Memphis in 1968. McCollough’s presence in the area around the Lorraine Motel is just one among many unexplained occurrences, leaving open the prospect that either strange things happen, or that a full-blown conspiracy reaching into the most secret corners of the surveillance state was in place.
With the benefit of hindsight, the movements of Agent 500 are at best extraordinary; they have since formed part of a civic case brought by King’s widow accusing the MPD of being involved in a conspiracy to kill her husband. In summary, what is now accepted as fact is that sometime in the afternoon of 4 April, Marrell McCollough had driven a small contingent of Invaders to a prearranged meeting with executives of the SCLC. A room had been booked at the Lorraine Motel, on the balcony to the south of Dr King’s room, number 306. The meeting was ostensibly to secure the Invaders’ agreement that they would join a marshalling group that would guarantee a peaceful march through downtown Memphis, to help re-establish King’s status as a leader of non-violent protest. Just after 4.30 p.m. McCollough made his excuses and briefly left the motel, crossing Mulberry Street on foot and emerging near the entrance to Jim’s Grill, a bar on South Main Street, which was a regular haunt of off-duty Memphis police officers. According to eye-witness reports, McCollough regularly joined a small group of up to five men, including police officer Lieutenant John Barger and MPD sharpshooter Lieutenant Earl Clark. This small cadre of officers, and their meetings at Jim’s Grill, have featured consistently in conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. Whatever the true sequence of events, by 5.45 p.m. McCollough had returned to the Invaders’ room at the motel and rejoined discussions. Only a few minutes later, there was a bang on the door and a motel staff member informed the group that they would have to vacate the premises, as their bill was no longer being underwritten by the SCLC. These instructions have become the subject of significant disagreement. Some have claimed that the orders came from Jesse Jackson, who was in the area near the swimming pool pacing around, irritated by the presence of the Black Power radicals. Others believe it was Andrew Young who pulled the plug on the subsidised room. Others claim the instruction came from King himself. He supposedly felt betrayed and undermined and was incensed that the Invaders were heavily armed, bringing guns to a meeting that was supposedly about guaranteeing non-violence. Rather than argue or cause a disturbance, the Invaders, including Charles Cabbage, Coby Smith and, behind them, their Minister of Transport McCollough, aka Max, aka Agent 500, walked down the stairs towards the forecourt. They were still on the motel premises when the fatal shot struck. Instinctively, Agent 500 rushed back up the stairs to assist King. Some have since claimed it was a human reaction to a tragedy; others that it was what a serving police officer would be expected to do. Many more have rushed to the more sinister interpretation that Agent 500 was somehow implicated. A favourite theory is that he had gone to give a silent signal to a sniper squad, who were hidden in a bushy area opposite the motel. The mysterious sniper squad, if they ever really existed, then vanished from sight.
It is now the settled conclusion that it was lone gunman James Earl Ray, a racist criminal from Alton, Illinois, who killed Martin Luther King. Ray had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in April and, in a bizarre journey across America, snaked his way to Memphis where he fired the fatal shot. Like the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, the conspiracy theories have yet to subside, but if they have even the thinnest vestige of credibility then officers from the MPD, agents of the FBI and shady operatives from Military Intelligence colluded in the killing. In that murky scenario Agent 500 had a front-row seat.
Memphis photographer Ernest Withers.
Courtesy of author
ERNEST WITHERS’ BLOOD VIAL
4 April
Erne
st Withers had known Martin Luther King most of his adult life. It was a moment of compulsion that took him up the external stairs of the Lorraine Motel to the exposed corner where King had been shot. Congealed blood still lay thick on the concrete floor. Withers crouched down and, using a small shard of glass, scooped some of King’s spilt blood into an old photography vial that he had found amongst his camera equipment. It was to stay in his refrigerator at home for decades to come.
Withers was a native of Memphis. He had attended Manassas High School beneath the soaring white smokestack of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company and briefly considered working there during the war, when the plant produced rubber life rafts and gas masks for the military. But a much better opportunity opened up when, leveraging his interest in amateur photography, he secured a traineeship at the Army School of Photography. Withers was a keen sports enthusiast who followed Negro League baseball and heavyweight boxing bouts and often took his camera along with him. On his demobilisation from his unit at Fort Bliss, Texas, he followed advice from boxing legend Joe Louis, who in the post-war period ran a ghetto recruitment campaign on behalf of the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, an organisation set up to support returning military personnel. In days of heightened paranoia, the organisation was labelled as subversive, and Withers was suspected of being a communist. Ironically, Withers was already showing an interest in small-scale capitalism and had begun selling photography services to new mothers and married couples in the side streets along Chelsea Boulevard, often going door to door with his portfolio. He briefly became one of the first black officers of the MPD, but it was a distraction from his real passion and he left to set up the Withers Photography Studio on Beale Street, a Memphis institution which provided wedding and graduation services to the local black community. Even as a young man, Withers’ distinctive frizzy hair, his cumbersome kit strapped across his chest, and the gargantuan Graflex camera he carried with him, made him a familiar figure around Beale Street. By the early sixties he had became the photographer of choice for Stax Records and he took instructions from Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton to provide standard studio shots of the label’s first generation of stars: Carla Thomas and her father Rufus, local saxophonist Floyd Newman, and the self-styled ‘happiest man in the world’ R&B pianist Ivory Joe Hunter. It was local and low-cost, but with time the commissions took on a more pressing and glamorous urgency, and the studio opened early in the morning and often closed long after midnight. Otis Redding needed new photographs but was due to fly to Europe; the Mad Lads had a new release but they were playing that night in Birmingham, Alabama, and singer William Bell had to be photographed in his army uniform then in casual dress. Withers juggled all the requests for Stax but also stayed in touch with the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta as the caravan of civil rights unfolded.
Memphis 68 Page 13
