America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States

by Stuart Wexler

  These decisions become even less forgivable when one realizes that Ray had an assortment of talented investigators and attorneys already assisting his efforts to get out of prison. This group included noted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) attorney Jim Lesar, highly regarded New Left attorney Mark Lane, and diligent investigator Harold Weisberg, a legend in the field of JFK assassination research. Ray had no need for racist attorneys—unless perhaps they served another purpose.

  When Congress reinvestigated the King murder in the late 1970s, it considered J.B. Stoner a prime suspect, as it should have. But it encountered a serious obstacle in attempting to investigate Stoner: attorney–client privilege. Because he provided legal services to Ray, Stoner could not be compelled to help or assist the congressional investigation. Ray had graciously waived attorney–client privilege for every one of the many attorneys who had helped his case to that point, except J.B. Stoner.17 Ray spun the “Raul set me up” narrative in hopes of securing a new trial and an eventual acquittal. In the event that he succeeded (or escaped prison, as he did again in the early 1970s—only to be recaptured), Ray needed someone with access to the conspirators to get his bounty money. Was Stoner that man?

  The congressional committee that looked into issues like this—the HSCA—investigated Stoner, Bowers, Gale, and other white supremacists as suspects in King’s murder. It uncovered and analyzed some of the leads and failed plots discussed in the past several chapters but missed others. For instance, the committee did not report or was not told (by the FBI) that the Ben Chester White murder was connected to a 1966 King murder plot conceived by Bowers. Additionally, the HSCA never addressed information, provided by Donald Nissen to the FBI in June 1967, describing the King bounty. Moreover, Congress analyzed each murder attempt as a separate, independent conspiracy. It did not understand that the individuals who tried to kill King shared a common bond of religion. It did not explore Christian Identity theology as the driving force behind many different assassination attempts. Unbeknownst to Congress, several of the main suspects identified in previous plots belonged to a subculture of religious zealots, who by the late 1960s had formed a social network bent on fomenting a race war.

  Part of this oversight is forgivable in that it stems from the same limited worldview highlighted in this book and held by many—one that either ignores the anti-Jewish dimension to the violence of the 1960s or sees such violence as secular in nature rather than theological in motivation. Moreover, members of this subculture deliberately obscured their religious motivation to maximize their leverage over rank-and-file segregationists within their respective organizations, people who would never accept a radical view of Christianity but who could be manipulated for a common purpose.

  But the HSCA had access to witnesses who could or should have challenged the conventional narrative. In 1976, as the committee was forming, a series of articles published by investigative reporter Dan Christensen highlighted the potential role played by Tommy Tarrants and his associates in the King assassination. We now know that Tarrants, having converted from Christian Identity to mainstream evangelical Christianity, was interviewed by Congress as an anonymous source. But it now appears that Christensen’s articles touched off an FBI cover-up that prevented Congress from fully exploring Tarrants’s connections to the King murder, a line of inquiry that might have exposed Tarrants—and not Ray—as the original and intended patsy in the King murder. Such an inquiry would have exposed the Bureau to charges that it could have prevented King’s assassination.

  Christensen’s 1976 articles highlighted the importance of information developed by Miami police and FBI informant Willie Somersett in both the Kennedy and King murder investigations.18 The reader will recall Somersett secretly taped conversations with Sidney Barnes in 1964. In these conversations, Barnes described the September 14, 1963, meeting of Swift followers on the eve of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He also taped Swift devotee Joseph Milteer predicting John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, two months before the Dallas murder. In the same tape, Milteer described another plot on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. In fact, Somersett was one of law enforcement’s most coveted informants on white supremacist activities for years leading up to 1963. His record of cooperation and his access to key racists prompted the Miami Police Department to use Somersett to explore potential leads in the King assassination. Somersett’s tour of the Southeast in the summer of 1968, which brought him into contact with various white supremacists as well as labor leaders (Somersett worked for a labor union), became the focus of Christensen’s series. In one article, Christensen focused on a reunion between Somersett and Barnes in Mobile, Alabama.

  Somersett did not record the conversation this time, and Christensen protected the still-living Barnes’s identity, referring to him simply as X, a house painter. But what Barnes told Somersett in 1968 was no less shocking than what he told the informant in 1964. Barnes referred at first to an incident that earned Tarrants national attention two months after King’s murder. In June 1968, Mississippi police ambushed, shot, and wounded Tarrants in a sting operation. Tarrants and his fellow terrorist Kathy Ainsworth were attempting to blow up the home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum. Neither knew, however, that the men who had encouraged the attack, Alton Wayne and Raymond Roberts, had been turned by the FBI, using private money raised by the Anti-Defamation League. On a cue from an as-yet-unidentified informant in Jackson, Mississippi, law enforcement and the FBI lay in wait for Tarrants. They expected Danny Joe Hawkins to join him, but Hawkins pulled out at the last minute, with Ainsworth taking his place. Research by Jack Nelson makes it clear that the sting had one purpose and one purpose only—to kill Tarrants. Law enforcement’s war against the Klan in Mississippi had reached that point. Instead, Tarrants survived with serious injuries and wound up in prison on a thirty-year sentence for his bombing spree. Ainsworth died in the crossfire, becoming a martyr, which she remains to this day to racists across the country.19

  Barnes expressed great alarm to Somersett about the potential for Tarrants to expose white supremacists to legal justice. But then he added something else, as Christensen described in his article:

  X says that the car that was used to jam the police cars on relaying messages of the killing of King on Aug. 4 [sic] was a car used by Thomas Tarrants. X says that they have information from the police that Tarrants is talking to the FBI and it looks as if several people may be indicted by the federal government in connection with a bank robbery and murder in the state(s) of Mississippi and Tennessee, including himself, X, who allowed Tarrants to stay at his home a week or ten days after the killing of Martin Luther King.20

  What Christensen did not know was that this was not the only report placing Tarrants in Memphis on April 4. Independently, Somersett reported to the FBI on a separate visit that he made that summer: to the grieving mother of Kathy Ainsworth, Margaret Capomacchia. Capomacchia also told Somersett that Tarrants—as well as several other White Knights—had participated in a conspiracy on King’s life. She reinforced the story that Tarrants had participated in the CB radio diversion and that he had fled to Sidney Barnes’s mobile home before escaping to a Christian Identity stronghold in North Carolina.21 The FBI investigated the whereabouts of several of the people Capomacchia named in connection with the plot and concluded that most or all had alibis for April 4. The Bureau dismissed the story. But just as the Miami Police Department appeared to lack corroboration from Capomacchia, the FBI may never have learned about the information from Barnes.

  As it turned out, both Barnes and Capomacchia may have been using Somersett to plant false stories, for whatever reason, to sully Tarrants’s reputation. The two were very close. And the record makes it clear that by 1968, those in white supremacist circles had “made” Somersett and were using the informant, unwittingly, to send disinformation to law enforcement. J.B. Stoner circulated such speculation as early as 1962, and records make it clear that when the FBI followed up on Somersett’s surreptiti
ous taping of Barnes in 1964, it ruined Somersett’s cover. Not surprisingly, by 1965 Somersett had begun to provide increasingly unreliable information to the FBI, to the point where the FBI ceased using him as a source (though the Miami Police Department continued to trust Somersett). That Barnes would call Somersett and invite him to Mobile clearly points to another disinformation campaign; the decision by Capomacchia to invite Somersett to speak with her in Miami soon after his visit to Barnes only reinforces that impression.

  The FBI did not buy Capomacchia’s story (and never learned about Barnes’s similar tale), but it may have had other motives in ignoring the Tarrants lead. For one thing, the FBI does not appear to have even interviewed Tarrants about the allegation. Nor did it make any effort to retrace other leads on Tarrants—equally as tantalizing—in it own files, from earlier in the MURKIN investigation. For example, on April 5, 1968, with the investigation just starting, the FBI did something inexplicable given what we know about the information available to it at the time. Having traced the GameMaster rifle in the green blanket to a gun store in Alabama, the agents showed a handful of pictures—including one of Tommy Tarrants—to staffers at the store.22 The problem with this, as noted by former Jackson FBI agent Jim Ingram, was that on April 5, 1968, Tommy Tarrants was not on “our radar.”23 The bombings in Mississippi for which Tarrants would soon become famous had not yet been linked to any individual; the perpetrator was simply known as The Man. The FBI connected Tarrants only to the wave of violence against black and Jewish targets at the end of May 1968.

  One need only consider the individuals whose pictures were not shown at the gun store on April 5 to fully understand the oddness of this investigative effort. It took days before the FBI showed a picture of Byron de la Beckwith, the man it firmly believed had assassinated Medgar Evers in 1963, at the gun store. Agents did not show pictures of Jimmy George Robinson, a Birmingham-based NSRP member who had assaulted King in 1965, for another week.24 Indeed, virtually all of the Cahaba Boys, directly responsible for the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, remained at large in Birmingham—and none of their pictures were shown at the gun store. Yet the FBI showed Tarrants’s picture right away, when at that point Tarrants was only a fugitive from Mobile on an illegal firearms charge.

  As it turns out, the gun store incident was not even the earliest sign of the FBI’s suspicions of Tarrants. The Mobile Field Office removed one of its agents, Gerard Robinson, from his normal assignment routine to visit Tarrants’s Alabama home on the evening of April 4. In an interview with the author, the agent remembered the odd nature of the request: He was asked, in violation of strict FBI protocol, to visit Tarrants’s residence without his partner. Robinson can’t recall another solo visit in his career, and he still does not know why his superiors sent him to Tarrants’s residence alone.25 Furthermore, additional records—in the files of Wesley Swift but not in the FBI’s MURKIN files—show that the FBI’s Los Angeles field office continued to show pictures of Tarrants in California, again on the possibility that Tarrants was the man who used the alias Eric Galt.26 The reasons for Robinson’s visit, and the reasons for showing Tarrants’s picture in the days that followed, are not evident in any available records.

  A full search of all MLK records by the National Archives and Research Administration failed to reveal anything justifying the early interest in Tarrants. The author’s FOIA request for the Mobile Field Office file from which the Tarrants pictures came revealed that this specific file had been destroyed by the FBI in November 1977,27 at the height of Congress’s renewed inquiry into the case, a year after senior FBI officials had forbidden field offices to destroy any record related to the King crime.28 Tarrants admits that he became a witness for the new investigation, and the record makes it obvious that he was one of two anonymous sources cited by Congress in its final report on the King murder. To destroy a record of a living individual, much less one who was important to a congressional investigation, defies federal regulations.

  The file destruction occurred one year after Christensen published his article linking Tarrants to the King murder, a piece that raised questions about other Floridians—notably former Miami native Joseph Milteer—and their connections to the crime. As it turns out, the FBI told researcher Ernie Lazar that it had also destroyed its field office file on Joseph Milteer, also in 1977. In fact, the FBI told the author that it had also destroyed the Miami MURKIN file—or at least elements of it—at the same time, in 1977, although this is presently unresolved, as the National Archives claims to have some, and possibly all of the Miami file. In short, it appears that the FBI was removing records that would cast doubt on Tarrants at the very moment that it was vouching for the recently released Tarrants as a source to Congress. What explains the FBI’s early interest in Tarrants and its decision to hide that interest from congressional investigators? The answer may have less to do with Tarrants than with a much more valuable secret the FBI was protecting, and continues to protect to this day.

  Of course, there was a very good reason for the FBI to hunt for Tommy Tarrants in connection with the King assassination, but it is a reason the FBI should not have been privy to if the available records are complete. Tarrants’s own account has him visiting Wesley Swift two weeks before the King murder. There he obtained a rifle with the express purpose of killing Martin Luther King Jr. Tarrants then went underground as part of a guerrilla campaign against the government. Nothing in the records suggests that the FBI knew this information before June of 1968. Yet, if the FBI did somehow know about Tarrants’s visit with Swift, it would go a long way toward explaining the Bureau’s early fascination with Tarrants as a suspect in the King murder. Perhaps the absence of these records is deliberate. For it now appears that the FBI had developed a source who could have informed agents about the Tarrants–Swift episode and warned them about Tarrants’s plan to launch a guerrilla campaign. But, as this book alludes to in earlier chapters, the FBI remains reluctant to disclose sources and methods, even decades after an informant was utilized and even after the informant’s death. The likely source for the information may well have been one of the FBI’s all-time most valuable informants: Sam Bowers’s successor, L.E. Matthews.

  This book is the first to suggest that Matthews worked as a deep-cover source for the FBI. But the author is not the only person to believe this to be the case. Award-winning investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, one of the leading experts on the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, also believes that Matthews was an informant. Several different pieces of information support this contention. First, despite his being the head of the WKKKKOM, and despite the fact that he was the chief bomb maker for the group in the years before 1968, Matthews was never once charged or indicted for any crime by federal law enforcement after 1968. One could pass this fact off as simply good luck or skillful evasion on the part of Matthews, but that explanation does not hold water. When the FBI finally convicted Byron de la Beckwith, in the early 1970s, for conspiracy to bomb the New Orleans office of Jewish lawyer Al Binder, the main evidence against Beckwith was the testimony of law enforcement agents who saw L.E. Matthews provide Beckwith with a bomb (uncovered in Beckwith’s trunk, according to the state). But even though the FBI arrested and convicted Beckwith for the crime, nothing happened to Matthews, the head of one of the FBI’s most despised racist organizations.29 Indeed, Matthews’s tenure as head of the WKKKKOM from the late 1960s through the 1970s was remarkable for the sheer lack of violence perpetrated by his group. Once considered the most violent white supremacist organization in the country, the group did almost nothing while Sam Bowers remained behind bars.

  But more than anything, it is what we do not have on Matthews that cinches the case that he was an informant. When Congress reinvestigated the King murder, and included among its host of suspects J.B. Stoner, Sam Bowers, and Sidney Barnes, the obvious person to call as a witness was Matthews, who was associated with all of these individuals. But the available rec
ord—the final report from Congress—makes no mention of Matthews. It does, however, refer to two unnamed informants with intimate connections to all parties whose identities the FBI wanted to protect. We now know that Tarrants was one of these individuals. It seems likely that Matthews was the other.

  Failed attempts to verify the identity of this second informant ironically corroborate this hypothesis. The sheer lack of material on Matthews is too suspicious. When the author requested Matthews’s file by way of FOIA, the FBI provided him with five total pages of material, two of them duplicates and all of them from 1983.30 It is worth noting that files on individuals of similar significance run into thousands of pages. Deavours Nix, who ranked below Matthews in the WKKKKOM, has an eleven-thousand-page FBI headquarter file. Tarrants’s file is of similar length. When he asked if the FBI had destroyed Matthews’s records or transferred them to the National Archives, the author was told no. According to leading FOIA attorneys, the FBI often simply pretends that highly confidential and sensitive material does not exist rather than provide it to citizens in a FOIA request. The FBI is under no obligation for full disclosure in response to FOIA requests when national security—or sources and methods—are at stake. Process of elimination shows that either the FBI had an unbelievable lack of interest in a key KKK figure or that it continues to withhold information on Matthews, a practice almost always reserved for its most valued informants.

  If Matthews was an FBI informant, it raises an alarming possibility for the King assassination investigation. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Matthews himself could have participated, in some way, in plotting the assassination. Recall that in March of 1968, Matthews offered his home to Eugene Mansfield, the former Grand Dragon who, suddenly and without warning, quit his job in Louisiana and moved in with Matthews. The records show Matthews discussing a hit with Mansfield that month, and law enforcement could not find Mansfield on April 4.