Kennedys and King Test host626

Blog

  • James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 1

    From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe

    “[I]f intelligence-gathering agencies are as necessary as I believe them to be, then they must repay our blind trust and acknowledge that there may always be moments in all secret organizations when tyranny manages to slip its leash. “This was one of those occasions.”1

    August 12, 1990, was a very big day for Susan Hendrickson. While looking at a cliff in South Dakota, she saw something no one else had noticed before. Where others had seen only a sheer wall of rock, she thought she saw something more special. In the wall of a cliff, she found the outline of a skeleton that proved to be of enormous importance. The skeleton this amateur paleontologist discovered now bears her name, Sue, in Chicago’s Field Museum, and is the largest and most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. From an outline, Sue helped reconstruct the past.

    After a succession of ever more interesting file releases from the National Archives regarding the Kennedy assassination, it’s time we started recognizing the outline of one of the biggest skeletons in our national closet, the outline of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each new release fits into one cohesive picture. And no single figure is more prominent in this outline than the man who headed the CIA’s counterintelligence unit for 25 years, James Jesus Angleton. It was in his realm that a secret, restricted file on a man named Lee Oswald was opened, long before the assassination. History professor and former intelligence analyst John Newman has deemed this curious item “the smoking file” because the lies related to it are so serious as to suggest the CIA had much to do with Oswald’s activities just prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, something the CIA has consistently denied. What was the nature of that involvement and how far did it reach? One cannot answer that without examining the near omnipresence of Angleton in all matters surrounding the assassination. Over this two-part series, we will explore how Angleton and his associates are present at every twist and turn in this case, both before the assassination and after.

    Background

    James Jesus Angleton was the son of James Hugh Angleton, an NCR executive who had once participated in General Pershing’s pursuit in Mexico of Pancho Villa, and Carmen Moreno, a Mexican woman. He grew up in Boise, Idaho and later Dayton, Ohio, where NCR was headquartered. At the age of fourteen, his family moved to Milan, Italy (where NCR manufactured cash registers). Angleton spent summers at British prep schools and Malvern College. He participated in international Boy Scout Jamboree events in Scotland, Hungary and Holland. Angleton biographer Tom Mangold indicates that when the Nazis took over the Boy Scouts in Germany, Angleton made friends with some anti-Nazi leaders and carried their letters back to the founder of the international Boy Scout movement in England. Both father and son would serve the OSS. Angleton’s father was described by Max Corvo, a top OSS officer in Italy, as “ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He certainly was not unfriendly with the Fascists.”2

    When he reached college age, Angleton attended Yale, where Angleton first showed a pension for staying up all night. Insomnia was to plague him most of his life. Although many who knew him described him as “brilliant,” Angleton’s record at Yale was undistinguished; during his junior and senior years he received two F’s and four D’s, and ended up withdrawing from another class relating to his major, English. But Angleton managed to impress teachers with his mysteriousness, his apparent maturity, and his self-assurance.

    Angleton took a serious interest in poetry and, with Reed Whittemore, co-edited the poetry magazine Furiouso, which included poems by e e cummings and Ezra Pound, among other notables. Because of his interest in this area, he was to be called by some the “Poet-Spy.”

    After graduating in the lowest 25% of his class, Angleton enrolled at Harvard Law School. According to Mangold, “Angleton’s move to Harvard was not the consequence of any strong ambition to study law. Rather, like many young men at the time, he was putting his future on hold.” During his Harvard period, Angleton met and married his wife, Cicely D’Autremont. The marriage took place a few weeks after Angleton had been drafted into the Army. Shortly thereafter, through the combined efforts of his OSS father, and his former Yale English professor Norman Pearson, then heading up the OSS Counterintelligence effort in London, Angleton was transferred to London to study Italian matters for X-2, the OSS counterintelligence component.

    It was during this period that Angleton met Kim Philby, the man who would become every counterintelligence officer’s nightmare. Philby rose to a position of great influence in the British intelligence service, until he was finally exposed as a Soviet agent and fled behind the Iron Curtain. Angleton was devastated by this, despite having been warned by Bill Harvey at an early time that Philby looked like a mole.

    In October of 1944, Angleton was transferred to Rome as commanding officer of Special Counterintelligence Unit Z, a joint American-British detachment. Less than half a year later, Angleton was made the Chief of X-2 in Italy. He was the youngest X-2 chief across OSS. His staff included Raymond G. Rocca, who would loyally serve by his side until Angleton’s ouster from the CIA in 1974.

    While he was clearly an accomplished counterintelligence expert by this time, there was another aspect which deserves mention. In his book The Real Spy World, longtime CIA officer Miles Copeland describes, through a slightly fictionalized veil in which he calls Angleton by the false nickname “Mother,” a different story. For background, SI, referenced within, was, according to Copeland, an OSS division which X-2 officers held in contempt. According to Copeland:

    In 1946, an X-2 officer known within the organization as “Mother” took a lot of information on Palestine from The New York Times; spooked it up a bit with fabricated details, places, and claims of supersecret sources; and sent it to the head of SI, Stephen Penrose, for appraisal. After studying it carefully, Penrose and his assistants decided that the material was “genuine,” that its source must be very deep inside secret Zionist and Arab terrorist groups, and that arrangements should be made for developing the sources into a regular espionage network. Mother then negotiated with Penrose for a budget, meanwhile leading the SI officers through a maze of fake names, fake background reports, and the like, and finally established that SI would be willing to pay as much as $100,000 a year out of what was left of OSS funds. Mother then confessed that the whole thing was a hoax and that the information could have been acquired for 25 cents through the purchase of five issues of The New York Times.3

    In other words, Angleton’s activities, however successful, were not limited to acts of loyalty to his fellow intelligence compatriots, but could occasionally be directed to more personal, vindictive measures. Copeland paints this as a jolly escapade. But in his footnotes, he admits that Penrose, against whom this operation was conducted, suffered a near-breakdown as a result, and was transferred to less stressful jobs. “[Penrose] and various other top people in SI (with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as Richard Helms, who defected to X-2 and went on to become the CIA’s director) were generally thought to be ëtoo Christ-like for the spy business,’ as Mother put it.”4 Copeland, by the way, was one of twenty-five OSS officers Angleton wanted to remember in his 1949 will. Others included Allen Dulles, “the operator, the patriot;” Richard Helms; and Ray Rocca.5

    After the war, Angleton did not wish to return to his new wife, nor his son, born in his absence, and chose instead to remain in action in Europe. X-2 was folded into the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), ostensibly a War Department unit and a temporary holding place for the then defunct OSS.

    Two years after the war, Angleton would return stateside to his wife and son to work for the amalgam of temporary intelligence agencies that would eventually become the CIA. There, he would achieve notoriety for his late hours, and for being, as his secretary Gloria Loomis related, “a terrible taskmaster.”6

    The SSU and other remaining intelligence units evolved over time into two separate pieces ñ the Office of Special Operations (OSO), and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Richard Helms served with Angleton and Rocca in the OSO. Stewart Alsop, in his book The Center, the “Prudent Professionals,” labeled the OSO people the “Prudent Professionals.” Alsop called the OPC crowd the “Bold Easterners.” The OPC included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Edward Lansdale, Desmond Fitzgerald and Tracy Barnes.

    In Italy, 1947, Angleton participated in an OSO operation given to a group called SPG, or Special Procedures Group, in which propaganda and other means were used to keep the Italians from voting any Communists into office.7 Other means included the Mafia. “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS, helped release “Lucky” Luciano and other Mafia criminals from jail in New York so they could return to Italy and provide not only contacts, but if necessary, the strong-arm tactics needed to win the war against incipient Communism in Italy. Angleton’s later reported contacts with the Mob may well stem back to this period.

    One of the groups most interested in defeating the communists in Italy was, not surprisingly, the Vatican. Angleton both gave and received intelligence to and from the Vatican. Among Angleton’s most famous agents in Italy was Mons Giovanni Montini. Montini would become famous in 1963 when he became Pope Paul VI.8 Angleton has been named as a source for funds which were used to defeat the Communists. In return, evidently, Angleton obtained access to the Ratlines the Vatican was using to move people out of Europe to safety abroad. Angleton and others from the State Department used the Ratlines to ferry Nazis to South America.9

    The OPC crowd held enormous sway in the early days of the CIA, but that changed in the wake of the spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs. Curiously, Richard Helms and Angleton both saw their careers rise by standing on the sidelines and keeping free of all dealings related to the Bay of Pigs.

    Angleton made an interesting comment about the Bay of Pigs episode. He told the HSCA that before the Bay of Pigs, he had asked Bissell, “Do you have an escape hatch?” He asked Bissell most plainly, “In case the thing falls flat on its face is there someone who goes to Castro and says, ëyou have won the battle. What is your price?’” Angleton explained to the HSCA that he was trying to say, “have you planned for the failure as much as planned for the success?” The implication was that this was Angleton’s own modus operandi in such matters.10 We would do well to remember that statement in the context of the Kennedy assassination and cover-up.

    During the period between the end of the war and the formation of the CIA, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the establishment lawyer who created the OSS, lobbied long and hard for a single intelligence agency to pick up where the OSS had left off, running secret operations and gathering human intelligence or “humint” in new and creative ways. In the end, although Donovan would not be a part of it, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA was ultimately formed through the National Security Act of 1947.

    Before the CIA was created, many in Congress feared that the creation of a new intelligence agency would lead to a police state similar to the one they had just defeated in Germany, and refused to back Donovan’s efforts. But the loudest protest came from J. Edgar Hoover, who feared a direct encroachment upon the FBI’s turf. One could argue that the OSS people won because they made the better case. But there is another possibility here.

    Angleton, Hoover and Blackmail

    In Tony Summers’ book about J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, Summers showed that Meyer Lansky, a top Mob figure, had blackmail power over Hoover through possession of photos that showed Hoover and his lifelong friend and close associate Clyde Tolson together sexually. In the paperback edition of the same book, Summers introduced another figure who evidently had possession of such photos: James Angleton. If Angleton had such photos, imagine how he could have used them to force the FBI’s hand during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

    Summers names two sources for this allegation: former OSS officer John Weitz, and the curious Gordon Novel. Weitz claimed he had been showed the picture by the host of a dinner party in the fifties. “It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson ….” Summers added in the 1994 version, “Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton.”11

    Novel’s account is even more interesting. Novel said that Angleton had shown him some photos of Hoover and Tolson in 1967, when Novel was involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. “I asked him if they were fakes, ” Novel recounted, “but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me ….” Novel’s explanation of why Angleton showed him the pictures is even more interesting:

    I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I’d been told I would incur Hoover’s wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I’d seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food.”12

    Now, Novel has been known to fell a few tall tales in his day. But he has on other occasions been forthcoming with interesting and sometimes self-incriminating material (such as his own participation in the Houma raid and the association between David Phillips and Guy Banister).13 Given Weitz’s corroboration, and given Angleton’s enormous power over many in high places, Novel’s account rings true. Novel added that Angleton claimed the photos had been taken around 1946.14 During the 1945-1947 timeframe, Hoover was battling hard to prevent the creation of any other intelligence organization separate from the FBI. And during this period, Angleton was involved with the Mafia in the Italian campaign. It’s certainly possible under such circumstances that Lansky or one of his associates may have shared the photos with Angleton. And the reverse case can also be considered.

    Miles Copeland adds additional credibility to this scenario in his account of this period. “Penetration begins at home,” Copeland has Angleton/”Mother” saying, “and if we can’t find out what’s going on in the offices where our future is being planned, we don’t deserve to be in business.”15 Copeland presented this scenario:

    There are several stories in the CIA’s secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they “make better history,” as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true ones. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the anti-espionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the new management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring “humint” (i.e. intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systemized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had in his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization. Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency – including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Mr. Hoover didn’t have material for retaliation.16

    Is he saying what he appears to be saying? Copeland added, cryptically, “The success of the old SSU cadre (former OSS and future CIA officers) in perpetuating itself has been due in part to an extraordinary capacity for Byzantine intrigue ….” And in a footnote to this phrase, Copeland explains, still somewhat cryptically, “This intrigue was mainly to keep ëThe Hill’ off its back.” Copeland seems to be insinuating that more people than Hoover were blackmailed to ensure the creation and perpetuation of the CIA.

    David Wise also lends credence to such a scenario with this episode. Thomas Braden, a CIA media operative was confronted by Dulles over a remark Braden had about one of Dulles’ professional relationships. Wise recounted what followed:

    “You’d better watch out,” [Allen] Dulles warned him. “Jimmy’s got his eye on you.” Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town.17

    Braden described how Angleton would enter Dulles’s office “first thing in the morning” to report the take from the overnight taps:

    “He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people’s dinner parties … Jim used to come into Allen’s office and Allen would say, ëHow’s the fishing? And Jim would say, ëWell, I got a few nibbles last night.’ It was all done in the guise of fishing talk.”18

    More to the point, Braden was upset because “some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the Agency. I didn’t think that was right. I think Jim was amoral.”19 It would not be beyond belief that Angleton routinely used information gathered through clearly illegal taps to blackmail people into supporting his efforts. No wonder some of his Agency associates feared him.

    Indeed, just about everyone in the Agency who knew Angleton came to fear him and to avoid crossing his path. This extended from subordinates to some of the highest officials to serve the agency, including Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Angleton was called “no-knock” because he had unprecedented access to senior agency officials. Said Braden,

    “He always came alone and had this aura of secrecy about him, something that made him stand out – even among other secretive CIA officers. In those days, there was a general CIA camaraderie, but Jim made himself exempt from this. He was a loner who worked alone.”20

    Angleton knew that knowledge was power, so not only would he go to extraordinary lengths to obtain such, he would also lord his knowledge over others, especially incoming CIA directors. Said one Angleton contemporary,

    “He would put each new director through the embarrassment of having to beg him to indoctrinate them in important CIA matters. Jim was enormously clever, he relished his bureaucratic power and was expert at using it. He was utterly contemptuous of the chain of command. He had a keen sense of what the traffic would bear in relation to his own interests. It worked like this: when a new director came in, Jim would stay in his own office out of sight. If a top staff meeting were requested, he simply wouldn’t attend and would offer endless delays. He was a master at waiting to see the new director alone – on his own terms and with his own agenda.”21

    Angleton’s most powerful patrons were Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. As biographer Tom Mangold described it,

    He was extended such trust by his supervisors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities. The result was that his subsequent actions were performed without bureaucratic interference. The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done. He had the experience, the patronage, and the clout.22

    It wasn’t until William Colby, a longtime nemesis of Angleton’s, became the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) that Angleton’s power was dimmed, and eventually extinguished. But it was a long time coming.

    Angleton and the CIA

    Before examining Angleton’s relationship with Oswald, it would be useful to understand Angleton’s relationship with the CIA. Angleton ran the Counterintelligence unit. The primary role of Counterintelligence is to protect agents from a foreign intelligence organization from uncovering CIA assets and operations. Another important role is the ability to disseminate disinformation to foreign intelligence services in an effort to create for them a false picture of reality, causing them to act in ways that may be ultimately against their own interests. In other words, Counterintelligence was a unit that conducted operations, not just research. For that reason, the CI staff resided inside the Directorate of Plans (DDP) and not on the analytical side of the agency.

    In addition to owning counterintelligence, Angleton also had control over the FBI’s relationship with the Agency (he owned the liaison relationship between FBI and CIA), and sole control of the Israeli desk, which included liaison with their intelligence service, the Mossad.

    In the early days of the agency, units were given single-letter identifiers of (at least) A-D instead of names. Staff A later became Foreign Intelligence; Staff B became Operations; Staff C became Counterintelligence ; and Staff D, which dealt with NSA intercept material, among other more notorious activities, apparently was never called anything other than Staff D.23

    From the agency’s inception until 1954, Staff C was run by William Harvey, a former FBI man who was to one day be introduced to President Kennedy as “America’s James Bond.” During this same period, Staff A was run by Angleton.

    After the publication of the Doolittle Report in 195424, Staff C, which then became simply Counterintelligence, was handed to Angleton. Harvey was given the coveted Berlin station, a vortex point for operations against the USSR.

    CI/SIG and Oswald

    Angleton’s complete counterintelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton’s most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only “about four or five” people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O’Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and very few others. Miler was, as of 1955, “either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O’Neal,” according to Angleton.25 O’Neal, Egerter and Miler all play interesting roles in this case.

    SIG is all-important in the case of the Kennedy assassination because, for whatever reason, SIG held a 201 file on Lee Oswald prior to the assassination. Both the Church Committee and HSCA investigators fixated quickly on this point, because it made no sense under the CIA’s scenario of their relationship (or, as they professed, non-relationship) with Oswald. What did SIG really do, and why would Oswald’s file have been there? Why wasn’t it opened when this ex-Marine (who had knowledge of the CIA’s top secret U-2 program) defected in 1959, telling embassy personnel he might have something of special interest to share with the Soviets? Why didn’t that set off alarm bells all over the place? Why was a 201 file on Oswald not opened for another year after that event? And why, when he returned to the States, did the CIA not debrief him? Or did they? These questions and more were adequately raised, to the HSCA’s credit, but not adequately answered by CIA.

    Let’s start with the first issue. What did SIG do? Angleton described the primary task of SIG to the Church committee in this fashion:

    The primary task was the penetration of the Agency and the government and historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions, code clerks. It had a very tight filing system of its own, and it was the only component in counterintelligence that had access to the security files and the personnel maintained by the Office of Security.26

    The Office of Security’s primary role was to protect the CIA from harm. This involves monitoring the CIA’s own employees and assets to ensure that no one leaks data about the CIA, or betrays the CIA in any way. Because of the nature of what was done there, Office of Security files were the most closely guarded in the Agency. It is significant, therefore, that Angleton’s CI/SIG group had access to these files. It is also significant that the Office of Security also had a file on Oswald, and was running an operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was attaching himself visibly to that organization.

    To the HSCA, Angleton gave a slightly enlarged definition:

    …it had many duties that had to do with other categories of sensitive cases involving Americans and other things which were not being handled by anybody else or just falling between the stools and so on.27

    Asked whether SIG’s charter would elucidate its operational mandate, Angleton replied,

    It would probably be in fairly camoflauged terms, yes. It was not a unit, however, whose duties were in other words, explained to people. I mean, in training school and do on it was very much fuzzed over if anyone was laying out the CI staff.28

    According to Angleton’s close associate Raymond G. Rocca, SIG

    …was set up to handle especially sensitive cases in the area of security or personnel and in particular, cases involving security of personnel who were also of operational interest, as operators.

    In other words, it was an interface with the Office of Security.29

    When asked what would cause CI/SIG to open a 201 file on someone, Rocca gave this answer:

    I would imagine that they would have had that occasion whenever a question arose that concerned people that came within the purview of the mission that I have described, namely, the penetration of our operations or the advancement of our particular interests with respect to the security of those operations …. I mean, there were many sensitive areas that involved aspects, that involved sources and access to materials that were of higher classification than what you have shown me.30

    When the conversation is brought around to Oswald in particular, Rocca’s answer is even more interesting:

    Rocca: Let me go back and open a little parenthesis about this. What I regard now, in the light of what you said, is probably a too narrow view of what SIG was interested in.

    They were also concerned with Americans as a security threat in a community-wide sense, and they dealt with FBI cases, with the Office of Security cases, and with other cases on the same level, as they dealt with our own, basically …. It would be with respect to where and what had happened to DDP materials with respect to a defection in any of these places.

    Goldsmith: Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently.

    Rocca: I’m not saying that. You said it. [Emphasis added.]31

    Rocca’s answer hangs out there, teasing us with ambiguity. Did Oswald have something to do with the Directorate of Plans, the DDP?

    …

    The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.

    Notes

    1. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior / James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 10.

    2. Biographical data from Thomas Mangold, Cold Warrior, Chapter 2. This particular quote appears on page 33.

    3. Miles Copeland, The Real Spy War (London: First Sphere Books edition, 1978), pp. 41-42.

    4. Copeland, p. 42.

    5. Mangold, p. 45.

    6. Mangold, p. 44.

    7. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrtes: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York, Pocket Books ed., 1979), p. 35.

    8. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 89. There are several long passages about Angleton’s relationship with Montini, the ratlines, and the Vatican throughout the book. Montini became Pope after the 1963 death of the very liberal Pope John XXIII, about whom the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman was made.

    9. Aarons and Loftus, p. 237.

    10. Angleton, 10/5/78 HSCA deposition, p. 92.

    11. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1994), p. 280

    12. Summers, pp. 280-281

    13. Lisa Pease, “Novel & Company: Phillips, Banister, Arcacha and Ferrie,” Probe Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 32.

    14. Summers, p. 281

    15. Copeland, p. 44.

    16. Copeland, p. 41.

    17. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books ed., 1992), p. 31

    18. Wise, p. 32.

    19. Wise, p. 32.

    20. Mangold, p. 51

    21. Mangold, p. 52

    22. Mangold, p. 52

    23. Wise, p. 121.

    24. The Doolittle report contained this famous instruction: “If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ëfiar play’ must be reconsidered,” and “We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.” Quoted in David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 62.

    25. Angleton 9/17/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition), p. 16.

    26. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 17.

    27. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.

    28. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.

    29. HSCA Deposition of Raymond G. Rocca (hereafter Rocca HSCA Deposition), p. 206

    30. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 207.

    31. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 218

    32. HSCA Deposition of Ann Elizabeth Goldsborough Egerter (hereafter Egerter HSCA Deposition), p. 8.

    33. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 9.

    34. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 9-10.

    35. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 10.

    36. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 25.

    37. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 22-24.

    38. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 43-44.

    39. Angleton 2/6/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition), p. 21. Schweiker says, “We had a CIA employee who testified to us that he saw a contact report on Oswald over at Langley.”

    40. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 20-26

    41. The Eldon Henson story is documented in John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995). But a near identical episode is also described by David Atlee Phillips in his memoir, The Nightwatch (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). Compare Phillips’ account, pp. 162-164 (paperback version), with Newman’s account, pp. 362-362. Then look at the document of this episode, published on page 507 of Newman’s book. Note that “[redacted] witnessed meeting from nearby table.” In his account, Phillips describes watching the trap his agent was setting for Hensen from a nearby table in a restaurant. According to the document, Hensen was speaking with Maria Luisa Calderon, a woman who appeared to perhaps have some foreknowledge of the assassination. (See Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 163-164.) Curiouser and curiouser.

    42. Newman, p. 32.

    43. Rocca HSCA deposition, p. 230.

    44. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 30.

    45. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 33.

    46. Reproductions of these cards can be seen in Newman, p. 479.

    47. Rocca HSCA deposition, pp. 226-227.

    48. Newman, pp. 221-222.

    49. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 38 and p. 62. The project chief was John Mertz, and evidently Birch O’Neal was involved as well, (pp. 62, 64) but in Angleton’s words, “Mr. Miler … had the day to day work” and described Miler as the principal person to talk to about it. p. 120.

    50. Martin, p. 140.

    51. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 15

    52. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 30.

    53. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 31-38.

    54. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 210.

    55. Rocca HSCA Depostion, p. 212.

    56. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam Books, 1989 ed.), p. 49.

    57. Letter from Sullivan to Belmont, dated May 13, 1964.

    58. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 34-38

    59. Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), p. 397.

    60. Smith, p. 397.

    61. Harvey’s notes were uncovered by the Church Committee. Quotes here come from Martin, pp. 121-123.

    62. Wise, p. 121.

    63. Wise, p. 176.

    64. Powers, p. 107.

    65. Agee, p. 358.

    66. Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done (Reston: Jordan Publishing, 1999), pp. 88-89 and Davy, “File Update”, Probe, Jan-Feb 2000, pp. 4-5.

    67. Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 88.

    68. For an example, read about the Loginov episode in Cold Warrior, Chapter 1.

    69. Wise, p. 69.

    70. HSCA Deposition of Scelso (John Whitten), p. 71.

    71. “Hunt says C.I.A. Had Assassin Unit,” New York Times 12/26/75, page 9, column 1.

    72. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), p. 164.

    73. Martin, p. 34.

    74. Martin, p. 144.

    75. Angleton Deposition to the Church Committee, 6/19/75 (hereafter Angleton 6/19/76 Deposition), p. 87.

    76. Peter Wright, Spycatcher (New York: Dell, 1987), pp. 201-205.

    77. Angleton 6/19/75 Deposition, p. 84.

    78. Scelso/Whitten Deposition, p. 168-169.

    79. Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 8-9.

    80. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 9.

    81. RIF 104-10086-10003, date not readable, cable apparently from JMWAVE to the Mexico City Station.

    82. Cable 57610, from DIRECTOR to Mexico [ ] JMWAVE, dated 12 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.

    83. Agee, p. 319.

    84. Cable 58683, from DIRECTOR to MEXI, dated 16 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.

  • Oliver Stone vs. The Historical Establishment

    From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe

    Nearly a decade later, the vibrations and echoes of Oliver Stone’s film on the Kennedy assassination are still being heard and felt. When JFK first came out in late 1991, the media had prepared the public with a six-month propaganda barrage to doubt the factual accuracy of the film. That barrage began in both the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post with articles by Jon Margolis and George Lardner respectively. The attacks on the film kept up throughout its tenure in the theaters and into the Academy Awards ceremonies where, as researcher Richard Goad revealed, David Belin took out an ad in Variety to deliberately hurt the film’s chances at Oscar time. Looked at in retrospect, this campaign was clearly unprecedented in the history of movies. And Stone himself has admitted that the first attacks totally surprised him. Perhaps they should not have. In his film, Stone took up two issues that the establishment media does not wish to be touched upon in any serious or truthful way, i.e. the Kennedy assassination, and the investigation into that murder by the late Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans who, four years later, launched the only criminal prosecution ever into the murder of President Kennedy. Stone’s film advocated a conspiracy, and a high level one, into the JFK murder. His film portrayed Jim Garrison and his inquiry in a favorable light. Therefore, the big guns of the media pummeled him for months. The barrage was designed to assassinate both Stone, and the film’s message. The week the film opened both Time and Newsweek featured the film as a major story, the latter placed it on the cover. The idea was to massage the collective public mentality into not accepting the film’s message, or at least to create doubts about both the message and the messenger. Many people in the general public, although convinced the official story was not correct, had doubts about the film’s accuracy and total content.

    The debate over Stone’s film went on for about a year in public. Not everything about it was negative. There were many programs on television that featured a measured debate about the facts of the film and the case in a careful and balanced way. Unfortunately, these programs were not the widely seen ones like a 48 Hours Dan Rather special, which was an awful one-sided attack on Stone and the critics. The following year, in 1993, the media brought out its savior. In the year of the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Gerald Posner jumped out at the public on the newsstands and their TV sets. The man became the darling of the media. It didn’t matter that his book was unbelievably shallow, and in some cases absolutely ersatz. Posner can be considered the second wave of the propaganda blitz against Oliver Stone and his heretic film. Another attempt at playing to the crowd, creating seeds of doubt about Stone and his movie. Posner’s appearance also signaled the beginning of the simplistic, cheap labeling of Stone and his companions as the “conspiracy cabal.” On national television, Posner called Stone’s scenario the “everything but the kitchen sink theory” to the JFK assassination. Thus began the canard that Stone’s movie postulated a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that included the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Mob, the Pentagon, Lyndon Johnson etc. This, of course, is a wild exaggeration of what the movie actually says, but it tells us a lot about what Posner’s mission was and what his devotion to the truth really consisted of. Ever since, Stone and the critics have been saddled with the rubric that they are paranoid fantasists who see conspiracies in every major crime ever committed. Or when used even more cheaply by people like Noam Chomsky, the critics can be grouped with those who believe in space aliens and Elvis sightings.

    Now comes the third wave. This one is for posterity. As the mass media continues to grow in size, concentration, and power, its outreach into the academic establishment has slowly become more marked. That is, the number of academics and/or historians featured on television has gotten more select and familiar. Also, the publishing industry has gotten to be monopolized also. Today, according to Publisher’s Weekly, approximately 70% of all new books are published by ten houses. This is an amazing shrinkage of the number of outlets and a great increase in control of the number of publishers who can give a book a serious launch in the marketplace. In fact, the original publisher of Jim Garrison’s original hardcover book which Stone based his film on, no longer exists.

    The above information is a way of explaining the response of the historical and academic establishment to Stone and his films. For the debate about those subjects has now reached into that arena. For not only the media, but also academia has generally bought into the Warren Commission myth about the lone gunman scenario as a solution to the Kennedy assassination. There are very few textbooks or historical books in general which give a balanced view of any of the assassinations of the sixties. And most “talking head” historians who pop up on television won’t delve into any conspiracy scenarios in any of these historically significant murders, e.g. David Garrow on the Martin Luther King case. What this says about America is that the rather unexamined world of academia can be seen to serve as an adjunct to the Establishment. Any cursory examination of the rosters of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will show a large amount of memberships devoted to two rather surprising institutions: the media and academia.

    As both Michael Kurtz and Robert Toplin write in an interesting new book, Stone lobbed a bomb at this establishment. And it has had an extraordinarily long reaction time. Toplin has edited a new book of essays on both Stone and his films entitled Oliver Stone’s USA. In it nine of his films are examined. Also, Toplin has allowed Stone to respond to the critiques in three long sections. The book is well worth reading for both the controversy and some new information it contains. For example, how many readers knew that Stone was born and raised a conservative Republican and that he backed Barry Goldwater in 1964. Also, Stone reveals here that his proposed film on Martin Luther King was turned down by the studios based in part on the criticism it got in the press when word of the proposal leaked out.

    The general plan of the book is to introduce the topic of Stone’s historical films in general first. So the first part of the book features overviews of Stone and his films by Robert Toplin, Robert Rosenstone, and a co-authored essay by Randy Roberts and David Welky. Stone then responds to these three essays on his image. In the second part of the book, there are nine essays on individual films: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon. The final section of the book gives Stone an opportunity to respond to these critiques which he does in two parts. The first one is entitled “On Seven Films” and the last essay is devoted to the two most controversial, JFK and Nixon.

    Before getting on to a discussion of the book, let me make a few cogent points first. The entire discipline of history is under debate itself. This debate is raging in the confines of those ivory towers today. That debate is going on with two issues. First, on methodology. Up until this century, most historians believed in the, let’s call it, top-down method of historical reportage. That is, if you told the story of an epoch with what happened at the top levels – presidents, governors, the rich etc. – that would neatly sum up an era and tell you the important events which occurred. With the advent of the so-called New History of the 1950’s, that has changed. Many younger historians are trying to be sociologists too in order to try and depict what life was like for the average American. To bring about that more inclusive picture, the historian has had to avail himself of more tools also. He has had to delve into economics, demographics, statistics etc. And with this new digging has come a second debate: synthesizers versus data-crunchers. Or, is it more important to tell what you can with a limited amount of material or is crucial to concentrate on a small area and dump out every last drop of data you can possibly muster. Some argue for the former by saying that history without any trends or curves becomes formless, meaningless. Historians who side with the latter group say that it is of utmost importance to marshal as many relevant facts as possible before denoting a curve or trend. At the same time these debates are going on, the debate over whether or not history should be studied as an undergraduate requirement at all is also ongoing.

    This is the background that Stone lobbed his bomb into. And with it, whether he knew it or not, he was entering the above debate. Stone clearly entered on the side of the data-collectors against the synthesizers. Few aspects of American history had been so generalized about – erroneously – as the JFK murder. In fact, as many have stated, it is an absolute disgrace what the historians have done with this crucial event. When the debate was raging in the media, Stone would always argue that the problem with the JFK murder is that no one wants to argue the evidence. Which was true since very few journalists or historians had looked at it. That is probably even more true today since the Assassination Records Review Board has now declassified millions of pages of new documents which have been relatively ignored by the press. Nearly all of this new material backs up the contentions of Stone’s film. And in this new book, the only discussion of this new record is by Stone and Professor Michael Kurtz. Clearly, by getting the Review Board created Stone was trying to do the work that historians have always complained about, solving the problem of declassification.

    By making more records available, the historian can now be more accurate in his judgments about the Kennedy assassination. Unfortunately, to be kind, and with the exceptions noted above, that does not happen here. In theory, facts are supposed to be like sunshine, the more there are the brighter the picture. Yet it tells us something about the Kennedy assassination when most of these historians continue to work in the dark.

    Finally, there is one other historical notion that needs to be addressed as background and that is the so-called “mystique of conspiracy”. Excepting for the rare luminary like Carroll Quigley of Georgetown – Bill Clinton’s favorite professor – very few illustrious historians have dealt with the question of conspiracy in history. For instance, even where conspiracy is an accomplished fact e.g. the Lincoln assassination, few mainstream historians address that important event with honesty or thoroughness. In fact, many ignore it completely. So even before Oliver Stone got labeled a conspiracy nut, the academic community was predisposed against him. Of course, if one grants the omnipresence of conspiracies in American history, one could not synthesize very easily at all. One would have to explain deep, dark forces lurking in the shadows which every so often sprung forward and captured an important moment for its own purpose. It would take a lot of work and effort to thoroughly explain these phenomena. It would also then ipso facto be a confession that much of what had been written previously in both the media and in history books about certain events was wrong. This was another bomb lobbed by Stone at the cozy nest of historians’ societies.

    Having said all of this, I think Stone was treated fairly well in this book. The very fact that the editor, Toplin, allowed him ample room to respond is evidence of that. Also, some of the discussions of Stone’s films are appreciative. For example, the esteemed Walter LaFeber – who has written the best overview of American foreign policy in Central America – does a fair and informative job on Stone’s Salvador. David Halberstam is enthusiastic about Platoon. Toplin even let the writer of the book Heaven and Earth do the discussion of that film. David Courtwright writes an interesting essay on that fascinating, extraordinary, towering film Natural Born Killers, perhaps the finest satirical look at a serious American subject since Stanley Kubrick’s great Dr. Strangelove. There is an essay by Randy Roberts and David Welky entitled “A Sacred Mission: Oliver Stone and Vietnam” which is quite interesting. In it, the authors trace Stone’s childhood and young adulthood and seemingly try to portray him as some kind of malcontent. They then describe his tours of duty in Vietnam and his early attempts at getting Platoon made. They then discuss Born of the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth then conclude with a discussion of JFK focusing on the film’s thesis of Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. They cogently write, “JFK was a mortar lobbed at the establishment, and it set off a firestorm of controversy.” They then add that the thesis, Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam, “though passionately and eloquently argued … does not stand up to scrutiny.” They argue the rather ancient banality that there was no real difference between NSAMs 263 and 273 and that 263 was only meant as a warning to President Ngo Dinh Diem to shape up and allow for more democracy in South Vietnam or Kennedy would weaken U.S. commitment. This brings one of the issues about the historical debate mentioned above into the forefront. If one is supposed to be writing a scholarly and serious review of a controversial artist and his films for the purpose of examining the historical record he has highlighted, one would think that the writers would acquaint themselves with the latest declassified records on the subject. The documents that the Review Board has declassified on this subject are now definitive. Just two issues ago in this publication, I discussed at length the record of the May, 1963 SECDEF Conference in Hawaii. That record seems to me as definitive as one can get about this subject and it is absolutely clear on this point. (The Review Board tried to get the record of the November, 1963 Honolulu conference, which would have been just as valuable if not more so, but they could not.) So, on this issue, Stone actually comes out looking better than the supposed scholars.

    But, of course, for our audience and this publication, the discussions of JFK and Nixon must take center stage. As they do in the book. Michael Kurtz wrote the discussion of the former film. There are three critiques of the latter. They are by Stephen Ambrose, George McGovern, and Arthur Schlesinger. In a separate concluding section, Stone takes almost 50 pages to respond to these writers. Michael Kurtz is one of the few historians who has actually studied the JFK assassination and he has published a decent book on the subject, Crime of the Century. Kurtz notes the storm of controversy Stone’s film provoked and he adds that many commentators had no qualifications to discuss the Kennedy murder. Which is correct. But yet, Kurtz then seems to repeat the Vietnam canard when he writes that Stone remains vulnerable to criticism on the thesis that “an unidentified cabal of military-industrial-intelligence movers and shakers ordered Kennedy’s assassination because he intended to withdraw all American troops from Vietnam.” Kurtz may be right about the first part of the dual-edged sentence – the identity of the conspirators – but on the withdrawal part Stone was right on. On this part of the film, Kurtz attaches another familiar distortion that the “film intimates that [Lyndon] Johnson himself was in on the plot to kill the president.” Only if one is not watching too closely.

    Kurtz has never been a fan of Jim Garrison, and he continues his attack in this volume. Like most Garrison-bashers, Kurtz deflates the DA at the same time he exonerates Clay Shaw. But Kurtz goes further. He writes, “The movie’s implication that Shaw indeed participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy simply has no substantial evidence to support it.” Kurtz now seems to be going beyond the confines of the film into the newly declassified record. There have been thousands of pages of new documents pertaining to Shaw that the Review Board has released. Much of that record has been put together into an invaluable book by Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done. Kurtz knows of the book since he mentions it in his footnotes (along with my book which he mistitles). Whether he read it is another matter of course. But if he did, he must discount the information in it since Davy makes a fine case for Shaw’s complicity in the New Orleans part of the conspiracy. Also, Kurtz says that Stone “branded” Shaw a CIA-collaborator when Davy has now unearthed documents which clinch the idea that he was much more than that.

    Kurtz also states that Stone’s portrayal of JFK himself is too one-sided and saintly. Granted that Stone’s portrait of Kennedy is not full dimensional, but he is not a main character in the story. He is only referred to. As the editors of this journal have mentioned, we realize the legion of Kennedy bashers out there and between the bashers and Oliver Stone’s version, we think Stone’s is closer to the truth. Also, Kurtz faults Stone for presenting the conspiracy-side of the debate only and not giving the Warren Commission defenders their due. This is silly. How can one make a film of the Garrison story without accenting the DA’s beliefs first? Also, the Warren Commission defenders have their way all the time in the mainstream press (and thanks to people like Alec Cockburn, in the alternative press too). Why not give the critics a well-deserved platform? Also, Kurtz states that no witness who heard shots from the Texas School Book Depository is portrayed, yet there is a witness who points there early in the film.

    Kurtz is the only writer in the volume to give any attention to the discoveries made by the Review Board. Yet, he states that no smoking gun has emerged from these records. This is a matter of interpretation and we beg to disagree. There is a lot in the medical investigation by former Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn that can be classified as such. Also, Noel Twyman’s book shows that there is powerful evidence that the Dallas Police only found two shells at the crime scene and not three. That is a smoking gun if true.

    Kurtz does make some nice comments about the film. He writes that, in the field of historical drama, only Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has had a greater impact on the public imagination. And he concludes with the following statement, “For all of JFK’s faults and shortcomings, few producers and directors can claim such an impact from their movies, and few historians can claim such an impact from their works.” Yet at the beginning of the essay, he states that Oliver Stone “crossed the line between artist and scholar by combining film with history, by projecting onto the silver screen his highly subjective version of actual persons and events … ” Kurtz would have been on safer ground if he would have added that all artists do this when depicting an historical event. From Sergei Eisenstein in Potemkin to Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde to Brian dePalma in The Untouchables to James Cameron in Titanic artists take liberties with the documentary record. This is called dramatic license. Yet none of these directors was attacked with anywhere near the force that Stone was. As we know, historians and investigators also do the same or academics and journalists would not have backed that great piece of dramatic fiction called the Warren Commission Report. Since Stone is an artist working in a tradition, his liberties are much more excusable than a team of professional investigators supposedly searching without restraint for the truth to be presented as such to the American public. No writer in this volume brought out this important point.

    The two other essays which will be of most interest to our readers are those by Stephen Ambrose and Arthur Schlesinger. Ambrose is the current conservative anchorman for the academic and journalistic establishment. Schlesinger is his liberal counterpart. It is not odd that both agree on the subject of Stone and his two films JFK and Nixon. Ambrose is slightly more virulent than Schlesinger, although not by much. In his opening crescendo words like “fraudulent” and “lies” spill off his pen easily. He even discounts the fact that in Nixon, Stone prefaced the film with a disclaimer which noted that some scenes were “conjectured”. What more clear device could Stone use to show that he was using dramatic license? Yet Ambrose ignores this issue almost completely and hones in on Stone because he is not “factually accurate” throughout. What is surprising about Ambrose is that he then begins his assault on the film with issues that most would consider minor and arguable. Namely the depiction of Nixon as a drinker and pill-popper during the height of the Watergate crisis. The problem with this assault, as even Bob Woodward noted to Ambrose long ago, is that Stone can mount evidence for it from Nixon’s own camp. For instance, in his memoir about his years with Nixon, John Ehrlichman noted that Nixon had a drinking problem in two senses. First he liked the stuff and second, he could not handle it. Before he agreed to work on his campaign, he made Nixon promise to lay off the booze. So to say that Nixon would relapse into an old bad habit under the tremendous pressures of Watergate is eminently probable. As to the pills, in their book The Final Days, Woodward and Carl Bernstein interviewed Alexander Haig, Nixon’s Chief of Staff during Watergate. He told them, during Watergate, he was so worried about Nixon’s mental balance that he gave orders to clear the White House of pills and other things that Nixon could use in a potentially rash act. Again Woodward reminded Ambrose of this fact on national television and asked why such an order would be given if the pills were not there. Ambrose either forgot the exchange or ignored it.

    From here, Ambrose moves on to another rather mild and arguable point: Nixon’s use of profanity. When the film first broke, Ambrose tried to argue that the whole issue of profanity was exaggerated and abused by the film. He was reminded that if that was so, then why were so many words deleted from the Watergate tapes under the rubric of “expletive deleted”? Furthermore, Stanley Kutler’s book Abuse of Power, featuring more declassified tapes, shows this point in more detail. It also shows that Nixon had a penchant for using ethnic slurs. So today Ambrose has resorted to the fallback position of arguing exactly what words Nixon used in his swearing. He also argues that whatever the profanities, they were the same or less than other presidents like Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. As anyone who has read the Kennedy transcripts knows, he is wrong on at least that president.

    Ambrose then admits that these might be minor character points. He calls them peccadilloes. He quickly adds that: “The central piece of fiction is not. It is the creation of a Nixon-Fidel Castro-Kennedy connection. Stone has Nixon involved in a CIA assassination plot against Castro, which somehow played a part in the Kennedy assassination and left Nixon with a terrible secret and guilt about Kennedy’s death.” Ambrose then goes on to argue against almost every contention Stone makes in postulating this scenario. To do so, he ignores, discounts, or misreports evidence. And, of course, he allows for no extension for what has not been revealed yet.

    First, let us note the jumping off point for this thesis and Ambrose’s disagreement. It is the Bay of Pigs operation. Today, with the release of two important reports by the Assassination Records Review Board and other organizations, it can now be stated with certainty that almost every examination of that operation has been incomplete. It can now be stated that at least part of the agenda for the Bay of Pigs was hidden or, at least, not written down. John Newman’s upcoming book, Kennedy and Cuba, will be the most accurate portrait to date on the subject. It will make all previous depictions obsolete and from what Newman has told me it will make all of Ambrose’s writing on the subject seem elementary at best and will do a lot to bolster Stone. Richard Bissell himself, who commanded the operation at CIA, admitted that assassination had been a part of the operation. Howard Hunt has written that Nixon was the officer in charge at the White House. The operation was planned during the Eisenhower administration (and Newman’s work will show that a similar operation was tried at that time). Newman’s previous work has shown that it was Nixon himself who suggested the use of the Mob as agents for the CIA in the Castro murder plots. And when Ambrose writes that no attempts were made on Castro during Eisenhower’s tenure, he is artfully phrasing a nebulous point. Because the CIA report on those Castro murder attempts shows that they began at least in August of 1960 and probably before then. As for actual “attempts” that is something that can never be fully shown. For example, the CIA says they made eight attempts on Castro’s life. Castro’s security forces say it is much higher than that.

    But to continue with the main point of Stone’s credibility and Ambrose’s scholarship, the above mentioned declassified CIA reports on both the Bay of Pigs and the Castro plots reveal that Kennedy was deliberately kept in the dark about both the plots and large parts of the invasion plan. Is it a coincidence that both were in operation at the same time during Eisenhower’s administration and that both went into a kind of remission during JFK’s administration? Bissell admitted in the 1980’s that he had hoped that the Mob assassination plots would make the Bay of Pigs invasion easier for the CIA. Now, if Nixon suggested the use of the Mob at the outset, and those plots were shielded from JFK, this already backs up much of what Stone is theorizing. Trying to prove that the CIA-Mob plots “blew back” and killed Kennedy is more difficult of course. But even Robert Blakey’s House Select Committee wrote that their construction placed all the elements in place for an assassination plot against JFK. And that includes a motive. For as most students of the Bay of Pigs conclude – including me – the operation, as planned, was virtually hopeless. Lyman Kirkpatrick who reviewed the operation at CIA thought this also. Even if the second bombing run had gone off perfectly as CIA wished, Castro had managed to get too much artillery and armor to the beach too fast. This is because there was no surprise, a platoon was in training near the bay, and the bridges to the beach had not been blown. When one adds in simple arithmetic, namely, as Kirkpatrick notes, how the invasion force could surmount being outnumbered by a margin of over fifty to one, one wonders what Bissell was really thinking. Kennedy wondered about it also. He came to the conclusion, as others have, that the CIA thought Kennedy would send in American forces to save the mission, which is precisely what Nixon told Kennedy he would have done. The CIA tried to cloud the fact that the invasion was ruinously planned and to shift the blame to Kennedy himself for his alleged cancellation of the second air strike as the reason for failure. Certainly many Cuban exiles believed this canard and it may have encouraged a role in his murder on their part. It’s hard to imagine that Nixon who – according to Ehrlichman – was trying to get the secret report of the Bay of Pigs, was not aware of a good deal of this.

    Ambrose rejects all of the above. But yet it is Ambrose who also condemns Stone for suggesting that Kennedy was killed for his attempt to remove the U.S. from Vietnam. Yet, that removal, as the Review Board has shown is now not open to debate. As Stone notes, one of Ambrose’s functions, like his journalistic counterpart Chris Mathews, seems to be to elevate and whitewash Nixon and to denigrate and deflate Kennedy. Ambrose, that supposed careful scholar, actually said on a biography show about Nixon, that the late president was quite fair to Alger Hiss. Yet, as Robert Parry discovered, on the newly declassified tapes, Nixon admits that he deliberately leaked all sorts of hazy material on that case to the press so that Hiss would be sure to be indicted by a grand jury in New York and have to stand trial. When the first trial ended with no verdict rendered, Nixon took to the stump and railed against the judge in the case to get him removed from a second trial. How could Ambrose ignore these facts? They are not in doubt and not arguable.

    Schlesinger blasts the “high cabal” thesis of Stone’s film on the assassination. Like so many others, he deliberately distorts it by expanding it beyond the facts of the film. According to Arthur Schlesinger, the conspiracy included the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, the FBI, the military-industrial complex, anti-Castro Cubans, homosexuals, and the Mafia. As I have argued before, this is not what the film depicts. He then goes in for character assassination. He smears Fletcher Prouty as a fantasist. This is poppycock. Prouty’s two published books, as well as his essays, have contributed as much or more to the secret history of this country as almost any author I can think of. There are many things in his work about the Kennedy administration that do not appear in Schlesinger’s book and are invaluable to any accurate portrait of his presidency and his murder. Jim Garrison is termed a “con man”. Some con artist. A man who blows his career in pursuit of justice – with no help from Kennedy’s pals, of which Schlesinger is supposed to be one.

    Schlesinger concludes his discussion of JFK with a puzzling sentence, “Still, except for supreme artists like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Verdi, and Delacroix, dramatic license should not be corrupted by ideology, as it certainly has been in JFK.” My question is this: Where is the ideology? People of the left, right, and center can all agree that a high-level plot killed Kennedy and that plot was probably based on policy disputes. For many reasons, all the blanks can’t be filled in (but both Prouty and Garrison were trying to do so.) This very fact justifies and necessitates the use of dramatic license. And the importance of the issue as a historical puzzle further justifies that usage. The public deserves to know everything our government did and did not do about and before this murder. Stone’s film helped in that area to an immense degree. I wish Ambrose and Schlesinger had read the Review Board’s declassified files. Further, that they had used them for their work in this volume. Until they do, Stone is completely justified in making these films and therefore keeping the historical establishment honest. Let’s hope, in that regard, the King project is completed and it helps release the government files on that murder.

  • Jerry Ray Sounds Off

    From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe

    (Click here to open in a separate page.)

  • The Two-Brain Memorandum

    From the May-June 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 4) of Probe

    (Click here to open in a new page.)

  • Mind-Control Part 1: Canadian and U.S. Survivors Seek Justice

    From the March-April 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 3) of Probe

    “Curiously, often a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real and the covert nature of the involvement is not contested.”

    Orlikow v. United States (1988)1

    Gripping survivor-centered accounts of medical atrocities committed by CIA-funded mind-control (MC) researchers during the Cold War are rarely found in traditional U.S. media.2 Neither are they the subject of emotionally powerful TV docu-dramas commonly produced for broadcast and cable television. In January 1998, the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) courageously filled this void, although the blackout on government MC history is near-total in the U.S.

    The Sleep Room, a gut-wrenching four-hour miniseries, depicts the true story of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s secret MKULTRA brainwashing experiments carried out in the late 50s and early 60s at Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Widespread publicity accompanying this major TV event has empowered many other Canadian survivors of nonconsensual brainwashing experiments in hospitals and prisons to come forward and seek justice in the courts.3

    In Part I of the miniseries, gifted actors dramatize how vulnerable, trusting hospital patients were transformed into virtual vegetables through doses of “electroconvulsive therapy” 30-40 times more powerful than usual, sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic and paralytic drugs, and other psychological and physical tortures. Part II grippingly depicts the successful eight-year U.S. lawsuit of nine survivors, who overcame fear to confront the humiliations and frustrating delay tactics of the CIA lawyers. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a legendary Washington civil rights attorney, and his partner James C. Turner eventually prevailed for their clients. In 1988, the U.S. “national security” establishment agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $750,000.4

    This extraordinary CBC drama was based on Anne Collins’ prize-winning 1989 book In the Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada. Collins exposed Cameron’s 1930s-1940s history of ethically unsupportable experiments on psychiatric patients. Many of the people methodically abused by Cameron had entered the Institute suffering only from mild disorders such as anxiety and post-partum depression. By the time they were released from the Sleep Room torture chamber, many had decades of memory completely wiped out. Some did not remember their children and even had to relearn bladder and bowel control.

    A U.S. citizen since 1941, the Scottish-born Cameron resided in Albany, New York, from which he commuted to Montreal each week. Before taking on the directorship at Allan Memorial, which is associated with McGill University, Cameron was chair of psychiatry and neurology at a medical school in Albany. He worked closely with Alan Gregg, medical-sciences director of the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided grants to found the Institute in 1943.5 As director from 1943 to 1964, Cameron achieved a worldwide reputation, serving as the first chair of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations.

    In one barely watchable scene of institutional cruelty, Cameron is filmed delivering a speech to psychiatrists about his successes in “curing” mental illness. As he drones on, the camera switches to scenes of terrified resisting patients being captured and restrained by doctors and nurses, forcibly being dosed with drugs and high-voltage electroshock, then put to sleep for weeks at a time in a room full of beds equipped with tape recorders and football helmets.

    Winner in 1998 of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s Gemini Awards in best picture and other categories, The Sleep Room touched the raw nerves of Canadian citizens. Not only did they learn their government had been the CIA’s junior consort during the Cold War against Communism, they also discovered it had secretly granted $500,000 to fund the Allan Memorial experiments. The CIA had only given Cameron $69,000 from 1957 to 1964. As the lawsuit dragged on through the Reagan presidency, Rauh was forced to expose the Canadian government’s role in helping the CIA derail the lawsuit, in complete disregard for pain and lifelong suffering of its own citizens.6 In 1992 the Canadian government coughed up $100,000 for 76 Cameron victims. To date 127 of his patients have come forward with their horror stories to seek compensation.

    CIA psychologist John Gittinger initiated contact with Cameron after reading his article on “Psychic Driving” in the January 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry. Gittinger persuaded Cameron to apply to the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front set up in 1955 to disburse funding for what became a huge MKULTRA network in the U.S., Canada and overseas (in collaboration with branches of the U.S. Armed Forces). The Human Ecology Fund (its name was changed in 1961) operated secretly out of Cornell University in New York City.

    Cameron’s brainwashing grant application proposed to “depattern” patient behavior through the use of mega-doses of electroshock, to reprogram patients’ minds with repetitious verbal messages 16 hours a day for six or seven days, during which time the patient would be kept in partial sensory deprivation. Cameron called this technique “psychic driving.” Brainwashing would be completed by subjecting patients to drug-enforced continuous sleep, sometimes as long as weeks or even months.7

    The Sleep Room portrays two generations of CIA personnel as equally deadly, i.e., the 1950s Human Ecology bureaucrats who approved the funding for what were considered “terminal” experiments on non-U.S. nationals, and the 1980s CIA legal lords who maneuvered on grounds of “national security” to withhold evidence of the agency’s negligence and failure to adhere to the Nuremberg Code. The callousness of the CIA scientists is aptly captured in this fictitious dialog, where the scientists are discussing whether to fund Cameron’s proposal:

    #1: He’s going to fry his patients. I can tell you that.

    #2: Well, we won’t worry about the patients. That’s his problem. I just want to know if he can brainwash them.

    #1: He just might, you know. He’s right about the memory loss with a shock like that. You couldn’t do that to volunteers.

    #2: Well, should we give him the money?

    #1: What have we got to lose? It’s not like he’s doing it to Americans.

    While the tone is apt, the misleading impression that neither the CIA nor Cameron were experimenting on U.S. citizens (witting or unwitting) during this era is the miniseries’ biggest flaw. According to the March 15, 1995 testimony of Claudia Mullen before the President’s Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), Ewen Cameron was the high-voltage expert in a secret team of CIA doctor-brainwashers. Mullen and Chris DiNicola Ebner told a visibly shaken group of scientists that memory-erasing electroshock, among other horrors, was regularly used on physically healthy American children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.8 Unlucky enough to be delivered into CIA/military custody by abusive or uncaring parents, children as young as eight years old were subjected to trauma-based mind control (MC) programming to mold them into “Manchurian Candidate” spies, assassins and sexual blackmailers.9 ACHRE’s final report documented more than 4000 experiments, and anywhere from 16,000 to 23,000 unwitting victims!10 The numbers run past 200,000 when if one includes the GIs deliberately exposed to radiation from atomic bomb testing.11

    During this same era, U.S. psychiatric patients were also victimized. Harold Blauer, a patient in the New York Psychiatric Institute, died in 1953 shortly after being injected with a highly toxic dose of methyl-diamphetamine (MDA), a derivative of mescaline. Blauer had entered the hospital suffering from depression after a divorce. He had made progress solely with the talking cure. Blauer did not know that his psychiatrist, Paul Hoch, was a CIA consultant secretly under contract with the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal chemical/biological warfare lab. This contract was negotiated through the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, which allowed trusting hospital patients to be used as part of the Army’s search for “potential chemical warfare agents.”

    The MDA was not administered for any therapeutic reason. Blauer was scheduled to be released from the hospital in a few weeks. His objections to the series of injections, which were causing him great pain and discomfort, were overridden by manipulative hospital personnel. Blauer was threatened before the fourth nonfatal dose that if he didn’t give his consent, he would be moved out of the Institute to hospital settings that displeased him. The fourth dose caused a violent reaction. The fifth killed him. The Army began its cover-up immediately, the sordid details of which are recounted in the 1987 court decision awarding the Blauer estate $707,044. The court affixed blame for Blauer’s needless death totally on the U.S. government.12

    The Blauer case reveals a direct lineage between Nazi research projects and the MKULTRA program. Mescaline was tested on concentration camp inmates during the Third Reich’s search for a “truth serum.”13 These and other Nazi experiments were intensively studied by U.S. military scientists in occupied Germany. Under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip, 1600 German and Austrian scientists were secretly brought to the U.S. Some had worked for I.G. Farben perfecting Zyclon-B gas for the extermination of Jews and other doomed prisoners. Many were being investigated for war crimes when they were rescued by a government intent on using their knowledge and expertise in the Cold War against the Communist Eastern Bloc. Hundreds of chemists and other scientists were given jobs at Edgewood Arsenal, which supplied the drugs, chemicals and poisons for the CIA’s counterespionage and assassination programs during the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as covert interventions in the affairs of many Third World nations.14

    Though the Cold War is over, the U.S. military/CIA bureaucracies still invoke “national security” and “plausible deniability” to hide a vast arsenal of sophisticated mind-control and psychological warfare technology.15 All of these weapons had to be perfected by means of human experimentation. Psychiatrist Colin Ross found that many areas of brain research heading in the direction of MC suddenly went “black” in the 1960s.16 His long-awaited book, Building the Manchurian Candidate: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, will soon be published.

    A hint about mind-control research first surfaced in the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When J. Edgar Hoover testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, he raised the possibility President Kennedy had been killed by a programmed assassin dispatched by the Soviet Union. Alarmed, the Commission requested the CIA to produce information on Soviet brainwashing. The resultant CIA memo (so controversial it wasn’t declassified until 1974) cryptically asserted the Soviets did not have any MC techniques or drugs “not available in the West.”17 However, neither Hoover nor the CIA told the Commission that the U.S. had an operational program of Manchurian Candidates up and running since World War II!18

    The term “brainwashing” was first coined in 1950 by Edward Hunter, a CIA employee operating undercover as a journalist, purportedly to explain how American POWs in Korea were being coerced into confessing they used biological weapons.19 Newspapers played up fears that the Soviets, the Chinese and North Koreans were using a secret psychological weapon against allied soldiers. This “brainwashing” scare was a successful CIA disinformation strategy used to build support for an unpopular war.20 It also helped insulate military and university researchers from accountability for violating medical ethics and criminal laws.

    The prevailing anticommunist hysteria that grew to justify the MKULTRA program and its unambiguous violations of the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code and many international human-rights covenants was aptly summarized in 1954 by former President Herbert Hoover:

    It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination…. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply…. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered… We must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, more effective methods than those used against us.21

    The MKULTRA program began with a proposal by Richard Helms, then the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, to fund “highly sensitive” research and development using chemical/ biological substances to alter human behavior. It was approved by CIA Director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953 and was overseen by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). The first MC programs, called Bluebird and Artichoke, were subsumed under the MKULTRA umbrella. This program came to embrace an octopus-like network with names like MK-Search (1963-1973), MK-Delta and MK-Naomi (assassination programs carried out by the Army 1953-1970).22 Between 1953 and 1963 the TSD operated 149 subprojects in 80 U.S. and Canadian universities and medical centers, and three prisons, involving 185 private researchers, 15 foundations and numerous pharmaceutical companies.23

    In 1973, with the Watergate scandal looming, outgoing CIA Director Helms ordered all MKULTRA records destroyed. He testified before the Senate’s Church Committee two years later that Gottlieb:

    “…came to me and said that he was retiring and I was retiring and he thought it would be a good idea if these files were destroyed. And I also believe part of the reason for our thinking this was advisable was there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and these would be sensitive in this kind of thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of the files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will.”24

    Fortunately, 8,000 pages of mainly financial data escaped the CIA shredder, and were declassified pursuant to a Freedom of Information lawsuit in the 1970s filed by the Center for National Security Studies. Though woefully incomplete, these documents nevertheless became the bedrock of John Marks’ groundbreaking 1978 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control.25

    All branches of the military sponsored MC research in collaboration with the CIA.26 Most civilian subjects were unwitting; even CIA employees and Army recruits who consented to drug and hypnosis experiments were not properly informed as to their dangers. MKULTRA clearly violated the Nuremberg Code requirement that subjects give “informed consent” to participate in scientific research: “This means that the person involved should have the legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other form of constraint or coercion.” This Code was established in 1948 by the same U.S. Military Tribunal that tried 24 Nazi doctors for deadly experiments on concentration camp inmates. It was binding on the U.S. as of February 26, 1953.27

    How do we explain the hundreds of thousands of human guinea pigs callously sacrificed during the Cold War?28 As Paperclip researcher Linda Hunt concluded, “…we used Nazi science to kill our own people.”29 Perhaps survivor stories can help us understand what went wrong and why our secular democracy allows huge bureaucracies of unsupervised, supersecret warriors guided only by the cult-like religion of “national security” and the obsessive search for “enemies of the state.” The death of communism as a military threat has not dented the religious zeal that still inspires the military/intelligence establishment.

    James Stanley, a career soldier, suffered soul murder as an Army lab rat. He was given LSD in 1958 without being warned of its dangers, as were 1000 other “volunteer” soldiers. Stanley suffered hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and a negative personality change. Fits of uncontrollable violence destroyed his family, and restricted his ability to earn a living. And he never knew why until 1975, when the Army invited him to participate in a follow-up study on “volunteers who participated” in LSD testing. In United States vs. Stanley,30 the Supreme Court majority decided against Stanley’s claim for damages. However, Justices Brennan, Marshall and O’Connor dissented, asserting their belief that the Nuremberg Code’s standard of informed consent applies to soldiers as well as civilians. In 1996 James Stanley finally wrangled a $400,000 settlement from the government, but no apology for having ruined his life.31

    Unacknowledged civilian wreckage from unimaginably cruel brainwashing experiments continues to bob to the surface from a vast sea of still-classified, cold-war experiments. Survivors of ghoulish medical tortures or the families of deceased victims are turning up in Canadian and U.S. courtrooms today demanding compensation for a lifetime of suffering. Some Canadian plaintiffs appear to have a slight advantage over their U.S. cousins, who are severely hampered by the 1973 Helms/Gottlieb destruction of MKULTRA records. Fortunately for these survivors, paper trails are being unearthed in government, hospital and prison archives. The eminently freer Canadian press also helps build public support for MC survivors’ lawsuits.32

    Gail Kastner, now in her 60s, did not discover Ewen Cameron’s experiments were the cause of her “wasted life” until reading a newspaper story in the Montreal Gazette in 1992. She sued the Canadian government and Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital in 1999 after the government rejected her claim for damages. A “brilliant student whose domineering father checked her into the institute for depression,” Kastner says that Cameron’s electroconvulsive “depatterning” treatments and insulin-induced comas for five weeks at a time are responsible for a life of screaming nightmares, recurring seizures, loss of memory, and long-term regression to an infantile state. Her husband, son and twin sister could not tolerate her bizarre behavior, i.e. “wetting the living-room carpet, thumb-sucking, babytalk and wanting to be bottlefed.” Abandoned by her own family, she was rescued from homelessness by the Jewish Family Service.33

    During the era of Cameron’s brainwashing regimens, psychiatrists and psychologists in other Canadian institutions were using similar methods to “treat” people haphazardly diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia or, in prisons, what was perceived as “antisocial” conduct. Dorothy Proctor was a rebellious 17-year-old when she entered the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario on a three-year term for robbery. Primed first with sensory deprivation and electroshock, she was administered LSD in 1961 by a prison psychologist, then locked into “The Hole” to endure what for her was “Dante’s Inferno.”

    Proctor, a Native and Black Canadian from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, calls this “mind rape.” She says she was singled out for such “Nazi-style science” because she had twice escaped from the prison, bringing unfavorable publicity to the authorities there. Proctor asserts that the steady prison diet of LSD and other experimental drugs led her down the path to drug addiction for 24 years. After publishing Chameleon: The Life of Dorothy Proctor in 1994, this articulate and determined woman launched a complaint with the Corrections Service of Canada (CSC), saying she suffered permanent brain damage and hallucinations haunting her to the present day.

    “I was reduced to a lab rat, a monkey in a cage,” she told the Ottawa Citizen (7/21/98), which has been covering the Proctor and other Canadian human experimentation cases for a number of years. A government inquiry turned up documentation (including clinical notes) that Proctor was not the only victim of involuntary prison experimentation 1960-1963. At least 23 other women prisoners were also used as human guinea pigs. Only four of these women have been found to date. And instead of complying with the CSC’s recommendation of an apology and financial compensation to Proctor, the Canadian government commissioned an “ethics study” at McGill University. Meanwhile Proctor hired lawyer James Newland and filed suit for $5 million in damages from the Canadian government, George Scott, MD, the prison psychiatrist, and Mark Eveson, a psychologist affiliated with Queen’s University.34

    While the emotional shock of The Sleep Room still electrified Canadian airways, the Ottawa Citizen published an expose drawn from interviews, archives, scientific journals and correspondence between doctors and prison officials. It found that hundreds of federal prisoners throughout Canada were used for pharmaceutical trials of untested drugs, sensory deprivation, and pain and electroshock studies. It uncovered a 1968 trial during which defendant Christine Bauman claimed that she suffered terrifying personality changes after being given LSD in 1961 at the Institute for Psychotherapy, not far from Kingston Prison where she had been incarcerated.35 Furthermore, archival materials released through the Proctor lawsuit indicate that some abuses may have begun as early as March 24, 1949, when a new electroshock machine arrived at Kingston Penitentiary. Electroshock has a history of being used as punishment in Nazi Germany and against Blacks in apartheid South Africa.36

    By late 1999, additional Canadian women and men came forward to claim they were used in prison and hospital experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. A class-action suit against the prison system was filed anonymously by “Jane Doe,” a 75-year-old grandmother who realized after reading newspaper stories that she was one of the 23 women who were given LSD and other terrifying “treatments” without their consent while in prison . Her lawsuit charges Scott and Eveson with assault, intentional affliction of mental suffering, and negligence. Her access to the Eveson’s clinical notes, released as a result of the Proctor suit, helped her recognize what had been done to her 38 years ago.37

    Less documented, however, are the connections of these prison experiments to U.S. mind-control funding sources. Canadian newspaper stories usually include the caveat that although prison use of LSD and “shock therapy” coincided with CIA “brainwashing” experiments at Allan Memorial Institute, no evidence has been found to link the programs. However, Allen Hornblum, author of Acres of Skin: The Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, said on a 1998 CBC radio show that some of the experiments conducted in U.S. prisons during this era were sponsored by the U.S. Army and the CIA. And he pointed out that shortly after seven Nazi doctors were hung at Nuremberg for horrific experiments on inmates at Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz and Ravensbruk, U.S. doctors were injecting plutonium and uranium into unwitting hospital patients.38

    Activist Lynne Moss-Sharman does not rule out a hidden connection between the Canadian prison experiments and CIA/military brainwashing research. Moss-Sharman is the Canadian contact for ACHES-MC (Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors – Mind Control), and is herself a survivor of brainwashing experimentation during her childhood.39 The Canadian military had a close relationship with Edgewood Arsenal during the years it funded MC experiments in hospitals and prisons.40

    Moss-Sharman has been organizing support for federal prisoner Richard Carlson, who filed a civil claim in October 1998. Carlson says his use in covert brainwashing experiments from 1968 to 1974 in several Kingston-area prisons caused a lifelong psychiatric disability. According to Moss-Sharman, the authorities retaliated against Carlson going public about the prison brainwashing experiments. They unsuccessfully tried to change his status to “dangerous offender,” which would have carried a mandatory life sentence for the bank robbery charge, which he is also appealing.

    Three people connected to Carlson have died under mysterious circumstances since he launched his brainwashing claim. They include Tony Vaitelis, the second male inmate to make claims similar to Carlson’s, an unnamed former hospital orderly and potential witness to prison brainwashing, and Carlson’s 30-year-old son. Moss-Sharman says Carlson is dangerous to Correctional Services Canada because he can name the inmates who died during the prison experiments and can describe what happened in the experimental units.41

    “Insulin shock therapy” was frequently used on Ewen Cameron’s patients at Allan Memorial. In 1999 the widow of Yuan Woo (Jean-Paul Martineau), a former Royal Canadian Air Force radar technician, went public with the story of how her deceased husband had been the unwitting subject of “insulin shock therapy” experiments in Queen Mary’s Veterans Hospital in 1953. Martineau curiously changed his name to “Juan Woo” after being discharged. As a result of medical mistreatment, Ms. Woo says, her husband developed such a morbid fear of physicians, he postponed going to the doctor until he was near death from cancer in 1996.42

    In the U.S., MC survivors and their families are hard-pressed to secure files documenting their claims, if indeed such records escaped the shredder years ago. Since 1985 all litigants have been hampered by C.I.A. vs. Sims,43 a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that undergirds the CIA’s refusal to name its contract institutions and individual researchers on grounds of “national security.”44 Only 59 CIA/military contract institutions and a handful of researchers consented to be publicly named in the 1970s when the MKULTRA program was exposed.

    The most well-publicized U.S. victim of the MKULTRA experiments is Frank Olson, a biochemist who worked at the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. On November 18, 1953, Olson was given a drink of Cointreau secretly laced with LSD. He immediately became agitated and severely paranoid, a condition that lasted for days. Olson was said to have committed suicide nine days later by jumping 13-stories to his death through the closed window of a New York hotel. Members of his family did not learn he had been drugged until 1975 when the MKULTRA behavior-control program was exposed. They later received an apology from President Gerald Ford and a $750,000 settlement.

    However, after studying documents declassified in later years, Eric Olson believed his father may have been pushed out the window. He had the body exhumed in 1994. A group of private forensic researchers announced on the 41th anniversary of Olson’s death that both forensic and other evidence were “starkly suggestive of homicide.”45 A second skull fracture (missed in the initial autopsy) means Olson may have been hit on the head before his body went through the window. Also the lack of cuts on Olson’s body would appear to rule out the official CIA story of his “suicide.”46 Armond Pastore, the hotel night manager who kneeled beside the dying Olson back in 1953, said, “I never heard of anybody jumping through a closed window with the blind down.”47 Last year a New York grand jury was looking at this new evidence.48

    The first CIA brainwashing case to go before a jury took place in 1999. I learned about this civil trial through two articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer.49 This civil trial centered on the tragic life of up-and-coming artist Stanley Glickman, who says that in 1952 in a Paris cafe, MKULTRA czar Sidney Gottlieb had brought him a drink laced with LSD. Gottlieb denied doing this, despite admitting he had spiked the drinks of other unsuspecting people in the 1950s. Glickman suffered a psychological breakdown from which he never recovered. After collapsing he was rushed to American Hospital where he claimed doctors there administered electroshock therapy “via a catheter up his penis” as well as more hallucinogenic drugs.50

    After learning about the CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects in the 1970s, Glickman sued in 1983. His identification of Gottlieb was based on remembering that the strange man in the bar had a club foot. Using the same delay-and-attrition tactics heaped on the nine elderly Canadians in Orlikow, the CIA was able to delay the trial for 16 years. Glickman died in 1992 but his sister Gloria Kronisch continued the lawsuit. Dominick L. DiCarlo, a conservative chief judge “on loan” from the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York City, presided.

    What happened next will some day be the stuff of high drama in a Sleep Room-type teleplay exposing the CIA’s 50-year history of crimes against humanity. Finally being called to account in a courtroom for overseeing a quarter-century of U.S.-style Nazi science, Gottlieb becomes ill, causing postponement of the February trial. On the eve of the March date, he unexpectedly dies. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times obituaries report that the Gottlieb family refuses to disclose the cause of his death. The online WorldNet Daily, however, reports that Gottlieb, 80, died after a “month-long bout with pneumonia.” According to this story, he was admitted to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesburg on February 14, and “lapsed into a coma” on March 5 “from which he never recovered.”51

    Are we overly paranoid to suspect the CIA of foul play here? Did life boomerang on the aged Dr. Strangelove? Was this enthusiastic harvester of exotic poisons and inventor of bizarre assassination delivery systems somehow silenced by same to prevent his spilling the CIA’s dirty secrets in a court of law?52

    Anyway, the trial goes forward in late March, with the Glickman estate suing the Gottlieb estate (the claims against Helms and the CIA had been thrown out). As the lawyers near their final summations, Judge DiCarlo, 71, suddenly drops dead of a heart attack while exercising in a federal gym located next to the court. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of the controversial CIA trial (nor does the Times even cover the trial).53 However, the New York Daily News, with more guts and pizzazz, reports that DiCarlo’s death “created a surreal scene as paramedics and a priest called to give last rites mingled with jurors preparing to decide one of the strangest cases being heard in the city.”54 Goosebumps and paranoia strike again. Was this Reagan-appointed judge a victim of the CIA’s long-rumored, untraceable method of inducing heart attacks? Or was it the stress of a CIA trial that killed him?

    Almost on cue, Federal Judge Kimba Wood was assigned to take DiCarlo’s place, a move prejudicial to the plaintiff since she had thrown out this case in 1997. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit in 1998.55 After closing arguments, the jury deliberated for seven hours before ruling against the Glickman estate.

    But the evidence of foul play goes way beyond the spiking of Glickman’s drink. His Paris hospital records show that two of his doctors had been engaged in LSD research at the time. Also, CIA files from 1952 reveal a special interest in the heightened effect of LSD on people with hepatitis. One of Glickman’s American Hospital doctors had previously treated him for hepatitis, making this once-promising young artist “the ideal guinea pig.”56

    I would like to thank Lynne Moss-Sharman, Kathy Kasten, Eleanor White and Blanche Chavoustie for providing news articles and other research materials for this series.

    Endnotes

    1. 682 F. Supp. 77, 94 (D.C. 1988) (Civ. No. 80-3153). For a summary of the federal court cases cited in this article , see “The Law and Mind Control: A Look at the Law and Government Mind Control Through Five Cases”” by Attorney Helen McGonigle (http://members.aol.com/smartnews/fivecases.htm)

    2. Survivor testimonies, however, can be found on the Internet: (http://morethanconquerors.simplenet.com/MCF/)

    3. MacLean’s, 4/21/97 (p. A3) and 1/12/98 (P. 66); The Gazette (Montreal), 3/13/97 (p. A3) and 1/11/98 (p. C9); Toronto Star, 1/10/98 (p. SW10) and 1/11/98 (p. B7); Toronto Sun, 1/11/98 (TV 3); Ottawa Citizen, 1/10/98 (p. H4); CBC broadcast, “Fifth Estate,” 1/6/98

    4. For a history of Orlikow, see “Anatomy of a Public Interest Case Against the CIA,” by Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. and James C. Turner, Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, Vol. II (2), Fall 1990. (http://www.radix.net/~jcturner/anat-tofc.html)

    5. Collins, In the Sleep Room (Key Porter Books, 1998), pp. 94, 101-104.

    6. Joe Rauh’s lifelong history of defending victims of government abuse was postumously rewarded in 1994 when President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rauh had died in 1992, the Canadian case against the CIA having been his last hurrah.

    7. Rauh and Turner, op. cit.

    8. A videotape of the ACHRE hearing is available from Missoulians for a Clean Environment, P.O. Box 2885, Missoula, MT 59806 (Phone: 406-543-7210). A transcript is posted at http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln07.htm. Tape 14: “Giving testimony regarding survival as a government mind-control victim: My testimony and the backlash,” Mullen’s presentation to the 1997 Believe the Children (BTC) Conference can be ordered from BTC Repeat Performance, 2911 Crabapple Lane, Hobart, IN 46342. This tape also includes the BTC presentation by therapist Valerie Wolf, BCSW, ACSW, BCD, “Assessment and treatment of survivors of sadistic abuse.”

    9. Rappaport, Jon, Mind Control Experiments on Children, self-published book containing the supporting documentation produced by legal and medical professionals for the 1995 ACHRE hearings. (http://home.earthlink.net/~alto/index.html)

    10. Final Report of President’s Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), 1996 (http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/index.html)

    11. ACHRE Report, ibid., Chapter 10.

    12. Barrett v. U.S., 660 F.Supp. 1291 (S.D.N.Y. 1987). See Hunt, op. cit., pp. 170, 235 for details on the Blauer case.

    13 Lifton, R.J., The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), pp. 289-290.

    14 See generally, Hunt, L., Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

    15 “Wonder Weapons: the Pentagon’s quest for nonlethal arms is amazing. But is it smart?” U.S. News and World Report, July 7, 1997.

    16 Ross, Colin, “The CIA and Military Mind Control Research: Building the Manchurian Candidate.” A lecture given at the 9th Annual Western Clinical Conference on Trauma and Dissociation, April 18, 1996, Orange County, California. Transcript and/or audiotape can be ordered from CKLN-FM, 380 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 1W7 (phone 416-595-1477; fax 416-595-0226). Transcript is posted at http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln01.htm.

    17. Russell, D. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992), pp. 673-674.

    18. Ross, op. cit. See also George H. Estabrooks, PhD, “Hypnosis comes of age,” Science Digest, April 1971, pp. 44-50.

    19. Russell, Dick, op. cit., pp. 193-194. According to historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Indiana University Press, 1999), the U.S. did use germ weapons in Korea.

    20. Scheflin, A. & Opton, Jr., E.M., The Mind Manipulators. (Paddington Press, 1978), p. 107.

    21. Secret report to the Eisenhower White House, quoted in Hunt, Linda, op. cit., p. 263.

    22. “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins,” New York Times, February 9, 1978, p. 17.

    23. New York Times, August 2, 1977, pp. 1, 16.

    24. Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities [the “Church Committee” report], U.S. Senate (April 26, 1976), pp. 403-404. Quoted in Russell, op. cit. p. 775 (Note 12).

    25 Online version of Marks’ book: http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm

    25. Ross, op. cit.

    27. Orlikow, op. cit., at 82.

    28 Sea, G., “The Radiation Story No One Would Touch,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994 (http://www.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp)

    29. Hunt, op. cit., p. 268.

    30. 483 U.S. 669 (1987)

    31. March 6, 1996 article provided by Lynne Moss-Sharman (newspaper not identified)

    32. Some examples from the Ottawa Citizen: “Debate over prison experimentation emerges from shadows,” 9/28/98; “Minister demands answers on prison experiments: Solicitor general upset by Citizen account of inmates used as guinea pigs,” 10/1/98; “LSD trials on inmates ‘unethical’: Ignore proposal for compensation, McGill study says,” 10/31/98; “Military tested LSD on civilians: Canada funded Cold War probe into mind control,” 12/7/98. From CBC Radio, “Secret experiments on Canada’s convicts,” 11/9/98. From the Toronto Star: “Prisoners used for ‘frightening’ tests, new papers show,” 12/18/99.

    33. CBC Montreal (Ivan Slobod), 1/5/00; “Woman suing over CIA experiments,” Globe and Mail, 1/6/00; ‘Hell for my family,’ Montreal Gazette, 1/11/00; “Shock treatment victim supports suit,” The Daily Miner (Kenora), 1/21/00.

    34. CKLN Radio (Toronto) “Shrinkrap” interviews Dorothy Proctor and lawyer James Newland, August 1998; “Inmates subdued with drugs, shock therapy, report says,” Globe and Mail, 10/31/98; Ottawa Citizen: “Burden of proof on LSD inmates: Government won’t compensate women without more proof that tests caused harm,” 2/3/98; “LSD tested on female prisoners,” 2/28/98; “The case for prison’s LSD tests,” 3/1/98; “Pay LSD victims: Reform (Party): Law and Order Party calls experiments on inmates ‘sickening’,” 3/2/98; “Privacy an issue in LSD probe,” 3/20/98; “LSD experiments ‘good research back then’,” 7/10/98; “MPs demand inquiry into prison tests,” 9/29/98; “Minister demands answers on Citizen account of inmates used as guinea pigs,” 10/1/98; “Scott stalling LSD report, critics charge,” 10/15/98; “LSD trials on inmates ‘unethical’,” 10/31/98); “Government accused of withholding files on prison LSD testing,” 12/8/99;

    35. ” ‘I was in a very bad state’- LSD guinea pig says form inmate underwent dramatic personality changes,” Ottawa Citizen, 9/26/98.

    36. Eastgate, J., “The Case Against Electroshock Treatment,” USA Today (Magazine), November 1998, p. 28.

    37. “75-year-old guinea pig wants to sue,” Ottawa Citizen, 12/9/99.

    38. “This Morning,” CBC Radio, Nov. 9, 1998. Interviewers: Avril Benoit and Rosie Rowbotham.

    39. In a 1997 interview on CKLN radio, Moss-Sharman recounts her own nightmare as a child victim of CIA/military brainwashing experiments. (http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln16.htm). Also see “Mind Games: Another woman comes forward to claim the CIA used her as a guinea pig in hideous experiments,” Ottawa Citizen, 9/13/97 (posted at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~alb/misc/ ottawaMindControl.html)

    40. “Military tested LSD on civilians: Canada funded Cold War probe into mind control,” Ottawa Citizen, 12/7/98.

    41. Chronical Journal (Thunder Bay, Ontario): “Carlson gets access to prison file,” 5/1/99; “Carlson case adjourns,” 10/27/99; “Convicted bank robber Carlson launches appeal bid,” 2/2/00. Two letters to the Canadian Human Rights Commission re: Carlson (11/9/99 from Moss-Sharman and 12/30/99 from Patty Rehn, U.S. contact for ACHES-MC) are available from the author upon request.

    42. ” ‘The nightmares are real’: Widow blames military for man’s suffering,” Ottawa Citizen, 10/11/99; “Was Canuck in CIA experiments? Widow wants to know why hubby suffered,” Sun Media, 10/12/99.

    43. C.I.A. vs. Sims., 471 U.S. 159, 85 L.Ed.2d, 105 S.Ct. 1881 (1985).

    44. A revealing account of the difficulties U.S. citizens encounter in making claims against the government can be found in Budiansky, Goode, Gast, “The Cold War Experiments,” U.S. News and World Report, January 24, 1994.

    45. Philadelphia Inquirer, November 29, 1994, B6.

    46. Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1994, A4

    47. The Independent (London), June 4, 1994, p. 8.

    48. Baker, R., “Conspiracy: In 1952, Stanley Glickman was a promising young painter studying in Paris. Then one night he shared a drink with some fellow Americans, and his life fell apart. Did the CIA spike his drink with LSD? The Observer (Guardian Newspapers Ltd.), February 14, 1999.

    49. “Case against CIA that began with ’52 encounter winds down,” 4/30/99, and “Jury rejects suit alleging ’52 drugging,” 5/1/99.

    50. Baker, op. cit.

    51. New York Times, 3/10/99 and Los Angeles Times, 4/4/99. See http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/ gottlieb.htm for the 3/11/99 WorldNet Daily obituary.

    52. Regarding Gottlieb’s bizarre plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, see Impact International, April 1999 (http://www.africa2000.com/IMPACT/gottlieb.jpg)

    53. “Judge Dominick L. DiCarlo, 71, Narcotics Fighter Under Reagan,” New York Times, 4/30/99, C21. A 3/10/99 Gottlieb obituary written by Tim Weiner also makes no mention of the Glickman trial.

    54. Daily News, April 28, 1999, p. 2.

    55. Kronisch v. U.S., 150 F.3d 112 (2d Cir. 1988). Posted on New Jersey Law Journal website: http://www.nylj.com/nyljcontent/072298dd.htm.

    56. Baker, op. cit.

  • The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis

    From the May-June 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 4) of Probe

    Reprinted in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease

    According to a Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers “and other unknown co-conspirators,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

    I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”

    What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to amazement at the government’s carefully interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968.

    In the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies — particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

    I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”

    Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

    But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government’s “sovereign immunity,” it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.

    We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.

    Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper’s progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police “wouldn’t be there that night.”

    In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

    As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement in King’s slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.”

    Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970’s, testified that Liberto had told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” Addison’s son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.

    “[Liberto] said, `I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done.’ I said, `What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, `Ahh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . . a setup man.’”

    The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

    Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King’s body on the balcony in a famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was “the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin.”

    Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn’t actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD’s best marksman.

    Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging, ailing Jowers “wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it.” Jowers denied, however, that he knew the plot’s purpose was to kill King — a claim that seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn’t know the target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.

    Loyd Jowers’s story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:

    1. Background to the assassination;
    2. Local conspiracy;
    3. The crime scene;
    4. The rifle;
    5. Raul;
    6. Broader conspiracy;
    7. Cover-up.

    Background to the assassination

    James Lawson, King’s friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King’s stands on Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King’s speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.

    Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.

    “I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

    Coretta Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the sanitation workers’ march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned violent — subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.

    Local conspiracy

    On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31. Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he was needed at his old station because his departure left it “out of service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead.” After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been transferred by request of the police department.

    The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace, testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been threatened.

    Wallace guessed it was because “I was putting out fires,” he told the jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his transfer Wallace answered, “No. Never did. Not to this day.”

    In the March-April Probe, Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King’s murder.

    To understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse across the street. Redditt testified that when King’s party and the police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he “noticed something that was unusual.” When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told Redditt he could leave, Redditt “noticed there was nobody else there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did.” Given Redditt’s concerns for King’s safety, his particular watch on the Lorraine may not have fit into others’ plans.

    Redditt testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar Hoover’s office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his life had been threatened.

    In an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978 testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. “It was a farce,” he said, “a total farce.”

    Redditt had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt’s surveiling King (as he was doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal. Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt finally said late in the afternoon, “I came here as a friend of the investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don’t want to deal with the truth.” He told the committee angrily that if the secret purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, “to protect the country, just tell the American people! They’ll be happy! And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes.”

    When the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a friend in the White House who said, “Man, your life isn’t worth a wooden nickel.”

    Redditt said his public testimony the next day “was a set-up”: “The bottom line on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn’t go into this open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to look at the questions and answers.”

    “So in essence what they were saying was: `This is what you’re going to answer to, and this is how you’re going to answer.’ It was all made up — all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce.”

    Former MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to stay at the Lorraine “because we couldn’t furnish proper security there.” (“It was just an open view,” he explained to me later, “Anybody could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from the very beginning.”)

    Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income. “I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

    For King’s April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the planning meetings at Jim’s Grill) that the change occurred because somebody in King’s entourage had asked specifically for no black security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the omission “even to this day.”

    Leon Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968 he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel’s owner and manager, Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King’s murder, Cohen spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine. Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change King’s room to the location where he was shot.

    Bailey explained that the night before King’s arrival he had received a call “from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta.” The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun “he”) wanted the motel owner to change King’s room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to public view.

    “If they had listened to me,” Bailey said, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

    Philip Melanson, author of the Martin Luther King Assassination (1991), described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased), commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April 4, in effect making an assassin’s escape much easier. Evans said he gave the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King’s party, Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor’s request made no sense whatsoever.

    Olivia Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street. Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that when she heard the shot a little after six o’clock, she said, “Oh, my God, Dr. King is at that hotel!” She ran with her two children to the corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965 Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling’s house moving her to exclaim, “It’s going to take us six months to pay for the rubber he’s burning up!!” The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.

    I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen running was not James Earl Ray. “I will go into my grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray.”

    “The police,” she told me, “asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine], `What did you see?’ Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that, because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?”

    Catling also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, “The shot came from that clump of bushes,” indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.

    The crime scene

    Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine’s balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities.

    In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read into the record, Orange said that on April 4, “James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency . . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King’s leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn’t have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King’s life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings.

    “I also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.

    “I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o’clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared . . .

    “I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.

    “When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.

    “I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968.”

    Also read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI and to the Memphis police. Jones was King’s chauffeur in Memphis. The FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, “he got a quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . . This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood or parka.” In his 11:30 p.m., April 4, 1968 police interview, Jones provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the brushy area hurriedly.

    Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination.” Stiles called another superintendent of sanitation, who assembled a crew. “They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes across from the Lorraine Motel.

    Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.

    The rifle

    Probe readers will again recall from Mike Vinson’s article three key witnesses in the Memphis trial who offered evidence counter to James Earl Ray’s rifle being the murder weapon:

    1. Judge Joe Brown;
    2. Judge Arthur Hanes Jr.;
    3. William Hamblin.

    Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings on the rifle, testified that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle.” He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from King’s body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle’s scope had not been sited, Brown said, “this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn.” Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown told the jury, “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”

    Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama, had been Ray’s attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his trial, Ray replaced Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by Percy Foreman, a decision Ray told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.) Hanes testified that in the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe, owner of the Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the dropping in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio with Ray’s prison identification number on it. This dropped bundle, heaven (or otherwise) sent for the State’s case against Ray, can be accepted as credible evidence through a willing suspension of disbelief. As Judge Hanes summarized the State’s lone-assassin theory (with reference to an exhibit depicting the scene), “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe entryway.” Then Ray presumably got in his car seconds before the police’s arrival, driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged in his white Mustang.

    Concerning his interview with the witness who was the cornerstone of this theory, Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy Canipe (now deceased) provided “terrific evidence”: “He said that the package was dropped in his doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot, and that this happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired [emphasis added].”

    Hanes thought Canipe’s witnessing the bundle-dropping ten minutes before the shot was very credible for another reason. It so happened (as confirmed by Philip Melanson’s research) that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical units that had been withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had returned briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse brimming with police, some already watching King across the street, “when they saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In addition to the time involved [in Ray’s presumed odyssey from the bathroom to the car], it was circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had been able to throw that [rifle] down and leaave right in the face of that erupting fire station.”

    When I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence he had received from Canipe, he commented, “That’s what I’ve been saying for 30 years.”

    William Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown down in the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd Jowers said he received at his back door from Earl Clark right after the shooting. Hamblin recounted a story he was told many times by his friend James McCraw, who had died.

    James McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the taxi driver who arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before 6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up, so McCraw turned out the light and left without him — minutes before Stephens, according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to Stephen’s room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the bathroom — where again, according to the State, Ray was then balancing on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.

    William Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver McCraw were close friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking and had his defenses down.

    In that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him the rifle right after the shooting. According to Hamblin, “Jowers told him to get the [rifle] and get it out of here now. [McCraw] said that he grabbed his beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth, and he leapt out the door and did away with it.” McCraw told Hamblin he threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

    Hamblin said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of the rifle because, like Jowers, he was afraid of being indicted: “He really wanted to come out with it, but he was involved in it. And he couldn’t really tell the truth.”

    William Pepper accepted Hamblin’s testimony about McCraw’s disposal of the rifle over Jowers’s claim to Dexter King that he gave the rifle to Raul. Pepper said in his closing argument that the actual murder weapon had been lying “at the bottom of the Mississippi River for over thirty-one years.”

    Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination. . . . They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” . . . Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.  

    Raul

    One of the most significant developments in the Memphis trial was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through the testimony of a series of witnesses.

    In a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided Ray’s movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and used both to set him up in Memphis.

    Andrew Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to hold at Jim’s Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)

    The additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul’s included: British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition from England said he had met Raul (who offered to sell him guns) and a man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the `60s and `70s and who told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce Wilburn, Glenda’s brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the person who had guided him.

    Saltman and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in 1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico, working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul’s family who, after first denying any connection to Ray’s Raul, said “they” had visited them. “Who?” Reis asked. “The government,” said the woman. She said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.

    In his closing argument Pepper said of Raul: “Now, as I understand it, the defense had invited Raul to appear here. He is outside this jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But he was asked to appear here. In earlier proceedings there were attempts to depose him, and he resisted them. So he has not attempted to come forward at all and tell his side of the story or to defend himself.”

    A broader conspiracy

    Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station. He left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall. From there the Army officers had a bird’s-eye view of Dr. King’s balcony doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the fire station.

    The testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the men Carthel Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While Valentine was researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement. They told him that in 1968 the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis April 4. As Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they “reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away.”

    Testimony which juror David Morphy later described as “awesome” was that of former CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra scandal. Terrell, who was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by videotape that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot “an unknown target” on April 4. After training for a triangular shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up positions in a watertower and two buildings when their mission was suddenly cancelled. Hill said he realized, when he learned of King’s assassination the next day, that the team must have been part of a contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.

    Terrell said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting Hill (in response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the details of Hill’s death, Terrell thought the story about Hill’s wife shooting him was a cover, and that his friend had been assassinated. In an interview, Terrell said the CIA’s heavy censorship of his book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill’s death, so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill’s wife was responsible.

    Cover-up

    Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King’s colleague and a 20-year member of Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated King’s assassination. Fauntroy testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation “it was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces.” He discovered electronic bugs on his phone and TV set. When Richard Sprague, HSCA’s first chief investigator, said he would make available all CIA, FBI, and military intelligence records, he became a focus of controversy. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands on U.S. intelligence agencies. Such pressures contributed to the subcommittee’s ending its investigation, as Fauntroy said, “without having thoroughly investigated all of the evidence that was apparent.” Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably had help, and that the government was not involved.

    When I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport, I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution article. The article said Fauntroy now believed “Ray did not fire the shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly involved federal law enforcement agencies, ” and added: “Fauntroy said he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his family.”

    Fauntroy told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to read through his files on the King assassination, including raw materials that he’d never seen before. Among them was information from J. Edgar Hoover’s logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before King’s murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with “persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation in Southeast Asia.” Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed. “What were they doing there?” he asked.

    When Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he’d “uncovered since the assassination committee closed down,” he was promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told him that he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he interpreted the Justice Department’s action to mean: “Look, we’ll get you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I’ll tell them I won’t go and finish the book, because it’s surely not worth it.”

    At the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also spoke about his fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray when he escaped from Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman Fauntroy had heard reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into the area around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to alert Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the HSCA’s star witness and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. When Stokes did, Blanton called off the FBI SWAT team, Ray was caught safely by local authorities, and in Fauntroy’s words, “we all breathed a sigh of relief.”

    The Memphis jury also learned how a 1993-98 Tennessee State investigation into the King assassination was, if not a cover-up, then an inquiry noteworthy for its lack of witnesses. Lewis Garrison had subpoenaed the head of the investigation, Mark Glankler, in an effort to discover evidence helpful to Jowers’s defense. William Pepper then cross-examined Glankler on the witnesses he had interviewed in his investigation:

    Q.(BY MR. PEPPER) Mr. Glankler, did you interview Mr. Maynard Stiles, whose testifying–

    A. I know the name, Counselor, but I don’t think I took a statement from Maynard Stiles or interviewed him. I don’t think I did.

    Q. Did you ever interview Mr. Floyd Newsum?

    A. Can you help me with what he does?

    Q. Yes. He was a black fireman who was assigned to Station Number 2.–

    A. I don’t recall the name, Counsel.

    Q. All right. Ever interview Mr. Norvell Wallace?

    A. I don’t recall that name offhand either.

    Q. Ever interview Captain Jerry Williams?

    A. Fireman also?

    Q. Jerry Williams was a policeman. He was a homicide detective.

    A. No, sir, I don’t — I really don’t recall that name.

    Q. Fair enough. Did you ever interview Mr. Charles Hurley, a private citizen?

    A. Does he have a wife named Peggy?

    Q. Yes.

    A. I think we did talk with a Peggy Hurley or attempted to.

    Q. Did you interview a Mr. Leon Cohen?

    A. I just don’t recall without —

    Q. Did you ever interview Mr. James McCraw?

    A. I believe we did. He talks with a device?

    Q. Yes, the voice box..

    A. Yes, okay. I believe we did talk to him, yes, sir.

    Q. How about Mrs. Olivia Catling, who has testified —

    A. I’m sorry, the last name again.

    Q. Catling, C A T L I N G.

    A. No, sir, that name doesn’t —

    Q. Did you ever interview Ambassador Andrew Young?

    A. No, sir.

    Q. You didn’t?

    A. No, sir, not that I recall.

    Q. Did you ever interview Judge Arthur Hanes?

    A. No, sir.

    So it goes — downhill. The above is Glankler’s high-water mark: He got two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles and Peggy Hurley as a yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25 key witnesses. The jury was familiar with all of them from prior testimony in the trial. Glankler could recall his office interviewing a total of three. At the twenty-fifth-named witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler go:

    Q. Did you ever interview a former New York Times journalist, a New York Daily News correspondent named Earl Caldwell? A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall. Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation? A. I just don’t recall that name.

    MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this investigation — no further questions for this investigator.

    Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King].

    To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

    The vision behind the trial

    In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial, Orders to Kill (1995), William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition, tape, and other witnesses. To keep this article from reading like either an encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have highlighted only a few. (Thanks to the King Center, the full trial trascript is available online at http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.) What Pepper’s work has accomplished in print and in court can be measured by the intensity of the media attacks on him, shades of Jim Garrison. But even Garrison did not gain the support of the Kennedy family (in his case) or achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has opened wide a door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire or oneself.

    The King family has chosen the former. The vision behind the trial is at least as much theirs as it is William Pepper’s, for ultimately it is the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta King explained to the jury her family’s purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: “This is not about money. We’re concerned about the truth, having the truth come out in a court of law so that it can be documented for all. I’ve always felt that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people — my family, other people, the nation.”

    Dexter King, the plaintiffs’ final witness, said the trial was about why his father had been killed: “From a holistic side, in terms of the people, in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same things are still happening. Until we address that, we’re all in trouble. Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anybody.

    “It is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media just went totally negative against the family. I couldn’t understand that. I kept asking my mother, `What is going on?’

    “She reminded me. She said, `Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.’

    “Now the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out, if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic ramifications . . . “

    In his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the root reason for King’s assassination: “When Martin King opposed the war, when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware, the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of the war.

    “The second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. . . . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the wealthiest country in the world.”

    Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King].”

    To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

    Dexter King testified to the truth of his father’s death with transforming clarity: “If what you are saying goes against what certain people believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with — maybe not the way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt with covertly. The result is the same.

    “We are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was watching a special on the CIA. They say, `Yes, we’ve participated in assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that domestically.’ Well, I don’t know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.

    “The issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this country, in this life, that says if we don’t agree with someone, the only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without violence.

    “We’re not in this to make heads roll. We’re in this to use the teachings that my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. We know that it works. So we’re not looking to put people in prison. What we’re looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn and know officially. If the family of the victim, if we’re saying we’re willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for reconciliation, why can’t others?”

    When pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the death of his father, Dexter King said, “One hundred dollars.”

    The Verdict

    The jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The courtroom was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.

    “In answer to the question, `Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?’ your answer is `Yes.’” The man on my left leaned forward and whispered softly, “Thank you, Jesus.”

    The judge continued: “Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’ Your answer to that one is also `Yes.’” An even more heartfelt whisper: “Thank you, Jesus!”

    Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

    Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its “limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

    David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: “We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that’s not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences.

    “Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd.”

    I drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I rapped loudly on Olivia Catling’s security door, she was several minutes in coming. She said she’d had the flu. I told her the jury’s verdict, and she smiled. “So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that’s the best part about it.”

    Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

    Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its “limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

    The faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S.A. — as Dr. King’s vision, if made real, would have done in 1968 — should be willing to receive the same kind of reward that King did in Memphis. As each of our religious traditions has affirmed from the beginning, that recurring story of martyrdom (“witness”) is one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good news.

    Update:  Dave Ratcliffe has converted the entire transcript of the 1999 trial in Memphis into html, added annotations, and posted on his website, ratical.org.   He has also published an html version of this essay in which links to the relevant portions of the transcript have been added.  

    The complete transcript is here.

    The linked version of this essay is here.

    Original Probe article

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • The Testimony of Marina Oswald Before the Orleans Parish Grand Jury

    From the March-April 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 3) of Probe

     

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • The King Trial: What the Media Didn’t Tell You

    The King Trial: What the Media Didn’t Tell You

    From Probe, Volume 7, Number 3 (March-April 2000)

     

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • Interview with Richard Sprague

    From the January-February 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 2) of Probe

    WILLIAMS: Before you ever got appointed to the Committee at all, before it was ever in anybody’s mind, is there something you can say about your own reaction to the assassination, and whether, and to what extent it got any interest on your part, or whether it hit you in any way?

    SPRAGUE: Well, let me put it this way, probably the best way to respond to your question. I had been, at the time of the assassination, a District Attorney in Philadelphia, had been a prosecutor of murder cases. In fact the day that the assassination of President Kennedy was announced, I was going into a courtroom for the sentencing of somebody I had prosecuted for first-degree murder, who was to get the death penalty, and that’s the occasion for hearing about the assassination.

    And obviously, I was as horror-struck, as I’m sure everyone else was. And I went through a period of time where I watched on TV the funeral, and I was watching TV and saw the assassination by Ruby of Oswald. I must say that when the assassination occurred, my immediate reaction was that the President of the United States is not assassinated by one person. There has to be a group of some sort involved in the assassination.

    My initial reaction of thinking had been, “I wonder what foreign government was behind this?” I also recall reacting and felt that since Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General of the United States, that because of his own relationship as brother of the President, that Robert Kennedy would leave no stone unturned in trying to get to the bottom of who was behind the assassination. And at the time that Oswald was killed by Ruby, I remember the thought flickering through my mind, whether Oswald was killed in order to keep his mouth shut. That generally was my thinking back then.

    The Warren Commission was appointed and came out with the conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman, and that there was no conspiracy. A person who worked with me in the DA’s office, Arlen Specter, had been a junior lawyer working with the Warren Commission. And I remember thinking when the report came out, you know, I’d be interested in reading it, and finding out what the factual determinations were, how solid they were. But I never got around to reading the report.

    And I guess in the course of time, I kind of accepted that report. I think principally, on the grounds that as a prosecutor, I found it very hard to believe that if there was a cover-up, that there could be so many disparate individuals in high positions of our government that would be involved in a cover-up. And it would seem to me that it would come asunder in some manner, so I kind of just accepted it.

    Arlen Specter, as you know, helped develop, if not was the author, of the single-bullet theory. And I was aware of the controversy that existed about that theory, and the people who suggested that it could not really be; or the people who said that if you really looked at the Zapruder film, a number of people who thought there was shooting from the front, and there were some people on the knoll off to the front. I was aware of all that. I was aware that President Johnson was convinced that there was a conspiracy.

    So I had all that general knowledge. However, having said that, while I worked with Arlen Specter – I was the first assistant with Arlen the DA in Philadelphia for a full eight years, my having been in the DA’s office before and after, and being really Arlen’s right-hand man, I never spoke to him about the Warren Commission work, or what he did there, or his theory. I was involved in my own work, and I guess it is a long way around to respond. I was aware of everything. But I just accepted the Warren Commission report.

    And when I would hear from time to time that there were books, Mark Lane’s book, other books saying it was not true, I noted it with passing interest, but nothing beyond. You know, as today, I have a general interest in why Clinton felt the need to bomb Iraq on the night before an impeachment vote, that these were acts of war, since there was not a need to bomb. And there are questions that pop up in my mind. But am I spending my time really studying it, analyzing it? The answer is no.

    That is really the framework of where I was before I got involved with the House Assassinations Committee, not having really read – actually, I shouldn’t use the word “not having really read” – not having read anything pro or con on the matter, not having engaged really in discussions about it. At my family table, I believe very much in discussions of current events, but never seemed to get into a discussion about the facts of the Kennedy assassination, although I had friends sometimes pooh-pooh that it was done by a single person.

    WILLIAMS: Now, where did that change in terms of your – I don’t suppose the reasoning so much, but then someone approached you or something happened to change that in terms of…

    SPRAGUE: Well, here is what I recall. I did become aware that there seemed to be more questions being stated publicly concerning the findings of whether there were errors in the Warren Commission, and something being taken for granted. I think Mark Lane’s book was being given greater circulation, Rush to Judgment was given greater prominence at that time, and attacks on the Warren Commission. But I think a matter that came up, at least, I believe, in the public eye, and it’s certainly something that I became aware of, Schweiker’s Intelligence Committee came up with intelligence concerning Castro, which then started to raise more questions.

    That seemed to start, at least as I recall, to give greater prominence to questions being raised about the validity of the Warren Commission Report. And then the next thing that sort of stands out in my mind, prior to the election of Carter as President of the United States, the House of Representatives authorized in a resolution, the creation of a Select Committee to investigate the assassination of Martin Luther King and President Kennedy. And that pretty much was the stage. And all of these things I noted with interest, not again, enough of an interest to do any digging, do any reading, but just aware of this because I do believe in staying up to date.

    WILLIAMS: Kind of like in with the daily news.

    SPRAGUE: That’s right. Where are they going with it? And then at some point in time, I recall getting a call from, I think it was Mark Lane, who I didn’t know, had never spoken to. And Mark Lane told me that my name was being considered, or was going to be submitted to the House Select Committee, if I was interested. And I am not sure if he said that Chairman Downing had asked him to call me or if he was to submit names to Chairman Downing, but I was asked if it would be something that I might consider.

    And I have to back up one second here, just so maybe you understand me a little better. Even though I was in public service as a DA, a prosecutor for many, many years, when requests had come to me to take other public matters, if it was something that interested me, I would take it. For example, the assassination of Jock Yablonski and his wife and daughter, and then I was contacted and asked would I take an additional assignment, to handle that investigation for the people, I took it.

    When I was asked by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to undertake an investigation against one of the justices in the Supreme Court, I took it. I was asked by a District Attorney of another county to undertake an investigation, I did it. So that I have – if it involved matters of interest to me, I was always willing to take additional matters. So when I was asked about this, I said “Yes, I would be interested if a number of conditions were met.”

    When I say that was my response, I may have first said I want to think about it, I’ll get back to you. But I then spoke to Mark Lane, who I knew had spoke directly to Downing. (Rep. Tom Downing was the first chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Eds.) But I ended up speaking to Downing. And I thought it over, said that I would be willing to take it on certain conditions. The conditions were that I did not want this to be a political-oriented investigation. That as far as I could see in legislative investigations, the problems with them were that they were very politically oriented.

    And I really wondered, is the legislature a proper vehicle for investigation of a murder? Or is that something that you leave for a grand jury, or the executive branch? And I had that concern, which I expressed. And I said that one of my conditions would be, I do not want any of this nonsense of a majority counsel representing the majority party, and a minority counsel representing the minority party. I wanted it clear that I was the General Counsel, there was no majority or minority. I was Counsel for the entire Committee. I did not want there to be a diffusion of responsibility between a Director administratively, and Counsel. I wanted to be, in effect, the whole show. I would take it if I was the Director, Executive Director over everyone in the title, and General Counsel.

    WILLIAMS: Had there been any talk of the other arrangement?

    SPRAGUE: There had been no discussion. I just laid it down what my requirements would be.

    WILLIAMS: What your conditions were.

    SPRAGUE: And my view was, if they didn’t want to accept it, fine. I had other things to do with my life. The second condition was that – and again, it was really an off-shoot from the first – I was aware of the problems in this majority/minority that arise from the selection of hiring of personnel. And I wanted it clear that all hiring, from the file clerks to the lawyers to everybody, would be by me. There was to be no Congressman, nobody else, that had one iota of a voice in the hiring.

    I didn’t mind if people wanted to suggest to me look at X, Y or Z. But the determination was to be mine. And secondly, that I had the absolute right to fire. That it was not dependent on a vote by anybody – and this included the chairman – had no authority of hiring or firing. It was mine.

    WILLIAMS: You wanted the power to put together a staff that you could work together and not be torn apart by political complications.

    SPRAGUE: Right, and that would have no loyalty to any members of Congress, but that would just be focused, really, in terms of what I wanted done, and recognizing that the power lay with me, that they didn’t have to play up to any Congressman, anybody. That was a second condition.

    A third condition was that there had to be a provision for an ample budget to do the kind of investigation that I wanted done. And that I needed start-up money to at least be able to start recruiting, with the idea of then examining what I thought needed to be done to then be able to submit a budget. It seems to me there was a fourth condition, which right now – oh, yes, that was it. And I wanted it agreed that there would not be any time limitation.

    I did not want to be told “You gotta wrap this up in 60 to 90 days.” It think time limitations are a terrible, terrible restriction in any ability to do a proper investigative job, as Senator Thompson and his recent effort in investigating campaign money, limitations that he had agreed to, which he shouldn’t have.

    I also – those were basically my conditions. There may have been another one, and if so it’ll come back to me as we go along. I also, though, made it clear that in my recruiting of staff, I was not going to hire members of FBI or the CIA or federal agencies either, because to do a thorough investigation, those agencies’ actions would be part of the investigation. And I did not want anyone that would have any conflict of interest, any view of being protective of anyone.

    WILLIAMS: Had you stated that – I’m curious to know – had you stated that right up front to Downing?

    SPRAGUE: Yes. Yes. And I also made clear the way in which I saw, I wanted it understood from the beginning that I intended to proceed with the investigation, that I was going to treat this as though it was a murder case, and that I intended to work anew. I wasn’t bound by whatever there had been determined by anybody. I was going to treat this from the word “go” as a murder case, examine all the circumstances of the murder, the findings, retain our own experts on both murders. Remember, I was dealing with King as well as Kennedy.

    WILLIAMS: That sounds like a fifth condition.

    SPRAGUE: Well, it could be, maybe that was it. And that I was going to – at the same time that I was treating this as – each of these as a murder case and track them through, I was also, because I felt that it was very important to the American public that we examine with an open mind all that had been published of Mark Lane’s theory, Weisberg’s theory, whoever theories, the Warren Commission’s conclusions. And that we ultimately not only publish the results of our own investigation, but that we lay out to the American public the examination of what each and every supporter or critic has said and what was in support of it and what were the defects of it.

    As best as I can recall, that was what I put forth. I was welcomed with both arms around me, told that my conditions had been agreed to – oh, one last condition. I was going to do this as a public service, I was not to get paid for it. I had my own private income, I was going to be able to continue with that, that I would give this full-time.

    WILLIAMS: Wow.

    SPRAGUE: For example, I was teaching as well at Temple Law School, and I enjoyed mixing with the youngsters in classes. Kicking back ideas keeps you fresh, keeps you on your toes, and I did that each Friday evening, and I wanted to be able to continue with that. That was it, and those conditions were agreed to.

    WILLIAMS: Now when you say that, can you recall Downing’s response at all?

    SPRAGUE: Downing’s response was he was enthusiastic about it. I had never met Downing. I came down to Washington, I met with Downing. I thought very highly of him. He seemed to be absolutely – and I do believe Downing was absolutely supportive of that approach. Downing took me around to meet other members of the Committee. And I would say that the initial response and reaction by the Committee members was enthusiastic. And as a matter of fact, while they ended up only criticizing me, the fact the New York Times wrote an editorial about what a great appointment this was, treated me as a white knight who would do this as a thorough, seasoned investigator, prosecutor, without politics being involved. So that’s I guess the answer to your question.

    WILLIAMS: Yes. Okay, so then after seeing Downing – I am going to turn – look back for a moment. Was there any kind of process that went through your mind in terms of your own qualifications? Did you do any kind of thinking about that in terms of how you would fit for this position? Because that’s a big undertaking. Or had you figured by that time, this is something I am ready for without much real …?

    SPRAGUE: Maybe it was a fault of mine. I never had much qualms about my ability to undertake, really, whatever I decide to undertake. And I never had any question about my ability to do this, provided the commitments to me were stuck to. Now I must tell, and maybe we’ll get into it in subsequent questions. Of course, one of my assumptions was that there was really a commitment by the Congress of the United States, when the resolution created this Committee, to really have an investigation of the two assassinations, and that the Congress of the United States would be whole-heartedly behind it and that they would give you the proper funding.

    Now if you say to me today, “Well, Dick did you go and speak to anyone higher than Downing, to see where was the Congress of the United States, where was Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House?” Where was majority leader, who became speaker, Jim Wright in all of this? The answer is “No,” I didn’t have any contacts with them until after I was down there, which I can get into.

    WILLIAMS: Yes.

    SPRAGUE: But the assumption was what I just said, and as I went along I learned otherwise.

    WILLIAMS: Yes. As far as you were concerned at that time, Downing knew what he was talking about. And as far as you felt here, the reception you got from the Committee members represented the commitment Congress was making to you. And that seemed solid at the time.

    SPRAGUE: Absolutely.

    WILLIAMS: Really no reason to question it.

    SPRAGUE: That’s right. The only thing that first happened that took me back a little bit after I accepted it, I learned that Downing was not going to run for re-election. And that therefore, his term as Chairman was going to end upon his term of office being over. And then the question arose, who is going to be the next Chairman? I had had enough – by the time I really learned of that, I had had enough contacts with the Committee, and forgive me if I mistake names of the members of the Committee, you can probably help me. I think there was somebody named Preyer [Richardson Preyer was a representative from North Carolina. Ed. Note] Preyer, that was it, who impressed me very much. Preyer was a very impressive person, and I really hoped that he would become Chairman in place of Downing. I did learn, I think from Downing, that one of the people who had been somewhat of a problem for him was Gonzales. And lo and behold, Gonzales was going to then become the Chairman in place of Downing, which I can get to as we go along. [Henry Gonzalez was a representative from Texas. Ed. Note]

    I guess the bottom line of all of this is, there were the high hopes, the understandings, agreement that I just told you. When I got to Washington, I learned that the leadership of the Democratic Party was not as much in support of this investigation as I had kind of assumed. For example, I learned that prior to the [1976] Carter election, the Black Caucus had been formed, in the House of Representatives, and that the Black Caucus had very much wanted an investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King.

    Until this time, the Congress had refused all the push to get a reopening of the Kennedy investigation. And I had always been curious, how come they all of a sudden agreed to King and Kennedy? What I learned when I got to Washington was that when the Black Caucus had been formed and with the Carter election coming up, the Democratic leadership wanted the Black Caucus to feel they had real input, real power with the Democratic organization. And since the Black Caucus wanted an investigation into King, they wanted to give the Black Caucus what they wanted.

    But they felt from a country standpoint, they could not quite have an investigation of King without coupling it with Kennedy. And that was really the political motivation for at least forming the Committee prior to the Carter election, so that as a result there wasn’t quite the enamorment with the idea of an investigation. It was created for political purposes. Secondly, I was at a really early stage – I can’t remember quite when – was advised that Richard Helms, former Director of the CIA and later ambassador to Iran, had sent word back indirectly that the investigation as to the Kennedy assassination really ought not to proceed, and that the Kennedy family really could find it embarrassing.

    WILLIAMS: Do you remember how you became aware of that, and through what channels?

    SPRAGUE: No, I’ve tried to rack my brain since, but somehow I was made aware of that. For example, you asked me how I became aware of the motivation of the situation. There were so many people who were giving me information, I just can’t tell you.

    WILLIAMS: Things were happening fast.

    SPRAGUE: Although as I go along, I do know that Tip O’Neill ended up asking me to do something which I do think was counterproductive to the success, at least toward the investigation while I was there. And I do know, there is no secret about this, I remember – and I am sort of jumping ahead of myself here.

    JOHN : Sure.

    SPRAGUE: But it maybe fits in. But at a certain point in time, I mean we were in the press. I mean, if I sneezed, it became a headline in the press, which we can get get. Everything I did was a big story. And Tip and Jim Wright called one day saying, “We’d like to get an update of where we are in this investigation.” And I remember coming over with the two deputies there, headed to Wright’s offices, and I think we had a luncheon. My deputies were Bob Tanenbaum of the Kennedy part – and I can get into how I organized this – and Bob Lehner for the King investigation.

    We went over and sat down with Wright. And he struck me as somebody with an attention span of all of ten seconds. And Wright said, you know, “Tell me where you are in the investigation,” and all of a sudden he interrupts me and says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What are you telling that and that for?” He said, “You haven’t gotten to Sirhan, Sirhan.” And I looked at him, “Sirhan, Sirhan?” “Yes, he did the shooting.” And we said, “Sirhan, Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy.”

    And he said, “Of course, that’s what you’re investigating.” We said, “No, we’re investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.” And Wright said, “Oh, yes, yes. That’s right.” I mean, I’m relating – now this is a majority leader of the House of Representatives. That’s the kind of situation we ran into.

    When I got to Washington, and again, I cannot say enough complimentary words about Downing. Downing was absolutely superb in terms of backing and sticking to what he said, but because he was leaving, he really didn’t stay in his office. He turned over his office to me. Now, we were given – and this is my best recollection – but this is the first time I really saw what I thought was not sticking to commitments.

    Before I went down there, [I asked] what kind of a budget do you have right now preliminarily? And I was told, I think I was told $150,000 for hiring staff. And I said, “Wait a minute, you are telling me I have a $150,000 budget to hire a whole staff, forget it.” And I was told, “Oh, no, no, no. You don’t understand the way that Congress works. There is $150,000 which is allocated which will run out.” I think this was September or something – “That’s what you can spend right now. So if you hire somebody – I’m just making up a salary – for $50,000, and their salary then for the remaining three months is, let’s say, $15,000, you still hire at the $50,000 salary, but you’ve the $15,000 to pay them here. And in the new budget, the full year’s salary will be there.”

    And that was made, you know, absolutely clear to me. And so when I get down there, remember, I started out it was me alone. No secretary, no office. I’m working out of Downing’s office. And what I did do, having been a prosecutor for years, I put out word that I was interested in top notch prosecutors from around the country. People who had had superb investigative prosecutorial experience, state investigators, local, not federal people, and I was going to recruit from that.

    And let me say, the response that I got really was a breath of fresh air, in terms of the type of people who responded. Really even to this day, you know, it just was such a wonderful feeling that there’s that kind of talent and that kind of capable people with ability around this country. I thought wonderful, wonderful people. And in that process, I started interviewing. And again, in view of my original condition, even though it was terrible in terms of time consumption, I did not delegate that to anybody.

    I reviewed all the applications, and set up the interviews. And in that process, I started setting salaries, recruiting the staff. I met Bob Tanenbaum, who came from [Henry] Morgenthau’s office in New York. I met Bob Lehner, neither of whom I had ever met before in my life. What I wanted to do here, I didn’t want this to be a cozy place of people that I knew either.

    WILLIAMS: Yes.

    SPRAGUE: I really wanted top notch talent that all were imbued with a spirit of doing a job.

    WILLIAMS: And I get the impression from what you’re saying, if I am reading that correctly, that in proportion to the response you had, if something had happened, for instance, where Lehner or Tanenbaum were not interested, you had several different choices you could have made from highly qualified people.

    SPRAGUE: There’s no question about that. And I did an interviewing and culling-out process, and hired from secretaries to clerks to filing people, to the Tanenbaums and Lehners.

    And my idea was looking at organizations, looking at myself at the top, having Tanenbaum with a team carrying out the investigation and the review, in terms of what people had said and done, critics pro and con, on the Kennedy side, having Lehner as the Chief Deputy under me on the King side with a staff. Available to both was what was needed, like a librarian. What we needed is access to all that had been filed, we needed as the investigation would be proceeding, somebody that would see that everything was filed and distributed within that area.

    That was the basic concept here. I also, as I started getting more people hired, wanted to use a couple of people like Tanenbaum and Lehner – because certain names I can recall, some others – sort of as a think tank. I am a big believer in working as a team. I don’t think that all wisdom flows through me, and I wanted there to be a group whose thoughts or ideas and suggestions, analysis, and evaluation, and that was the concept.

    WILLIAMS: Had you in mind, like you mentioned, these people who would be reviewing the information, had you in mind street detectives who would be out investigating?

    SPRAGUE: Absolutely.

    WILLIAMS: And how would you conclude the number of those needed, or were you just feeling your way along on that?

    SPRAGUE: Feeling my way along. And I guess I sort of have to break it down here, as to prior to the end of the of year and after the end of the year. But the idea was to have an investigator, non-federal people in each area for purposes of interviewing, for purposes of giving them leads, as though we were starting the investigation from there. I did recognize that time makes much more difficult doing an investigation that anything really, particularly a homicide. And I did end up with a feeling that with the amount of time since the two assassinations, that if there was to be a thorough investigation and an analysis of the various pro and con views, that this was probably the last chance. I ended up feeling that if it was defeated at that time, it never will come to fruition and people will continue with their beliefs, pro and con thereafter. So I say that in terms part of what we said at the beginning.

    WILLIAMS: You bet. I hear you loud and clear.

    SPRAGUE: We started recruiting, which included detectives. And again, as I recruited, I was perfectly willing to hear recommendations from the attorneys we had hired. For example, Tanenbaum recommended some detective that had worked very closely with him, who I interviewed, who impressed me and we hired. So the whole idea was to use them with these lawyers.

    Now, one of the criteria I was using in the hiring of lawyers, as far as I got, and that becomes an important limitation, “as far as I got,” was I did not want lawyers who sat at the desk. I wanted people who had been active investigators, who when they were assigned homicides back in the prosecutorial days of State offices, had gone to the scenes and worked with the police, and that was the whole idea here. As I was hiring, I was also having a study being made by each respective side as to what they really felt were the needs of that side to do the investigation, the examination, what experts were needed.

    WILLIAMS: This would be Tanenbaum and Lehner.

    SPRAGUE: Right. And to give me recommendations for manpower, to give me recommendations in terms of budgetary needs. I also did arrange, while I was going about this recruiting, because I wanted the staff, even though it was a skeleton staff, to have some things to do. I didn’t want them all sitting while I’m doing all of the recruiting and interviewing, I wanted to put them to some work. I did start to have them starting to review material that been published. I remember that we brought in a number of people who had been critics. I forget the person’s name in the Zapruder film, again, if you want, I’ll get his name, the guy that enhanced it.

    WILLIAMS: Robert Groden.

    SPRAGUE: Groden, that was it. We brought Groden in and we had him show and then analyze it, and explain it. We had some people come in and sort of lay out difficult things, and we were open to everybody. And I really didn’t distinguish, I wasn’t trying to make value judgments. The fact that somebody thought somebody was a crackpot didn’t mean anything to me. I felt that my job was to do analysis. So I was having that done.

    And again, and this may become not important from your standpoint, but who knows, it may explain my tenure on the Commission. Wanting my people to go out – oh, and I hired [Gaeton] Fonzi, who was a person I thought very highly of. And while Fonzi had his own views, that made no difference to me because I wanted people who I knew would not be beholden to the Federal government, and who would carry out investigations that I gave them, and I felt would do a thorough job. That was my criteria. Fonzi, I think, is outstanding and a terrific person to have.

    And I know he has his certain views of what he thinks happened, and that is fine with me. I don’t mind that, as long as it didn’t blind him to looking thoroughly and fairly, which I felt he would do. So we were doing that. Now you got to understand, as I said, initially I didn’t even have a secretary. I was making personal calls until I could get a secretary and do this and that. And working on getting space and getting furniture and all that.

    But we were doing some preliminary interviewing. One of my thoughts had been, just like your having a tape recorder here, that it would be a helpful tool if in interviewing, because we didn’t have a secretary to take along, if we, with the interviewee’s permission, tape record the interview. And we had, I think, I had gotten one tape recorder, so that in terms of ultimately our budget requests, because – and we had done some interviews, as you are doing now, I felt it would be very helpful to our investigators to have along a tape recorder for interviewing.

    I also had the thought that since part of this was a thorough investigation where I had some question on an the interview about somebody telling the truth, maybe we could pull that interview and put it under one of these stress analyzers, and not that I think they are so great, but any little bit is a helpful investigative tool.

    WILLIAMS: Sure.

    SPRAGUE: I say that because jumping ahead, at a certain point I was accused of wanting to wiretap and engage in unconstitutional efforts in this investigation. And let me tell you that in over seventeen years as a prosecutor, even back in the days where wiretapping was lawful, I never have wiretapped in my entire life, and I don’t like it. I think it is dirty and I have never done it and never had any intent to – and I want you to be aware of that, as that becomes germane to this story.

    WILLIAMS: Yes, I can recall reading that, I think.

    SPRAGUE: Well, I’ll get into that as we go along.

    WILLIAMS: Yes.

    SPRAGUE: But I …

    WILLIAMS: This was premised on this – just this decision that you had made to tape record.

    SPRAGUE: Right, right.

    WILLIAMS: Somebody blew that up into wiretapping.

    SPRAGUE: Absolutely. And it may take you in an area of interest in terms of the press, because I came away with this with that as the most fascinating area from my standpoint. But in any event – so I had the people engaging in some work, and I’ll get back to that in a moment. As we were getting to the end of the year, I all of a sudden was told from, I think it was Tip O’Neill’s office, or it may have been from Gonzales, who was becoming the new Chairman, because by now I have hired people with that $150,000 that I had to play with, whose – the budget for them for the following year, with a full year’s salary, would have been – I’m making up a figure, I don’t remember what it is, but let’s say $500,000.

    And all of a sudden at the end of the year I am told, “You have overspent your budget.” To which I responded, “What do you mean I’ve overspent the budget? I was told I would have a budget, I had this for …”, “Oh, no, no. That represents your entire budget, and you’re not going to have more than $150,000 for the next year.”

    WILLIAMS: Oh my gosh!

    SPRAGUE: Yeah, well, and I’ve got people now hired whose salary far exceeds that. And my reaction was stronger than what you just said.

    WILLIAMS: Oh, I can bet it was!

    SPRAGUE: And I said, “Well, that’s preposterous! It’s ridiculous!” And I was dealing with Gonzales.

    WILLIAMS: Now was this new, like had you been told previously of this other arrangement by Downing, and then now you’re getting a different story from someone else?

    SPRAGUE: I had been told all along that the $150,000 was mine to spend and that would represent just the portion of their annual salary, which we would have the funding for the following year, plus more, when I came up with my entire budget. So, for example, if, let’s say two days before the end of the year, I still was saying – and again I am making this up – if for example, I had $20,000, I could hire like yet 10 people because for the remaining two days I had enough for their salary.

    WILLIAMS: For that time.

    SPRAGUE: But all of a sudden I’m finding out what I told you.

    WILLIAMS: This was not true.

    SPRAGUE: And I had discussions about this with the Committee members that they had to fight to get this budget. And in the new Congress they have an appropriation that they call a continuing funding until there’s a new budget. Well, all I had now was that same lousy $150,000, and the new budget doesn’t come up until, I forget what time. And the bottom line is that my staff went for I think they went for two to three weeks, just out of loyalty to me, without getting paid a penny, continuing their work.

    WILLIAMS: This was into the new year.

    SPRAGUE: That’s right, which again, is a credit to them. Somewhere along the line, and as I say, we can back up for more detailed questions.

    WILLIAMS: Yes.

    SPRAGUE: I decided, you know, I said we had this think tank, and one of the things I set in motion was, let’s interview James Earl Ray. We collected a fair amount of information, and I thought, well, let’s start with interviewing him. Also in the Kennedy thing, because the Committee was chomping at the bit for, “Let’s get some things underway.” And I can understand that.

    And by the way, I think I came up with a budget, a proposed budget for the next year, and I think it was like $14 million. [This figure appears to be for two years. Eds. Note] And all of a sudden, it’s like that was the big red flag, how dare! And when you think what they are paying now. And I remember arguing that $14 million was less than the cost of one airplane.

    Well, when the budget came out, all the people who really didn’t want the investigation used that – and that was an outrage. And I’ll get back to that in a moment, because a number of things came to a head, let me tell you. But I did decide, let us pick an area, that even though I am still recruiting, and I’m now fighting a battle to get a budget, and I’m trying to get funding for the people, that we’ll do some investigation.

    As I say in King, let’s go interview James Earl Ray, and some other things. And Kennedy, this was after talks with Tanenbaum, let’s look at some areas, and one that stands out in my mind, there had been a representation, back in the days of the Warren Commission, that on a certain day, Oswald was in Dallas prior to the assassination of Kennedy, and seen talking to him was [Sylvia Odio].

    And the Warren Commission discounted that, gave no credence to that, on the basis that Oswald was in Mexico City that same day and obviously could not have been in two places at one time. So we decided, well, let’s take a look at that.

    And here you can get more details from Bob Tanenbaum, but I’ll give you my recollection of this thing. Because this brought other matters to a head. And by the way, at that time George Bush was the head of the CIA. And in my request for information, I was told there would be full cooperation, and that they would provide what we wanted. Keep that in mind, because that changes.

    So anyway, looking into the Warren Commission Report, we wanted to find out on what basis did the Warren Commission accept that Oswald was in Mexico City. And the report from the Warren Commission was that Oswald had gone into, I believe – I may have my embassys’ wrong here, I think the Cuban Embassy, and he had called over at the Russian Embassy. And there had been a photographic surveillance by the CIA, as well as a wiretap catching some of those photographs catching Oswald going into the Cuban Embassy, and there was a wiretapped conversation of Oswald calling whoever it was at the Russian Embassy.

    So we said, “Fine, let’s see the photographs.” Well, the short of it is, there were no photographs. And why did the Warren Commission accept it? They accepted it because they had been told that by the CIA. So then we wanted to know how come – we want to see the photographs for that day. What do we want to see? Is there still a photograph of Oswald going into the Cuban Embassy? I assume it is the Cuban, I am not sure, but I believe it was the Cuban Embassy.

    And then we were told, there were no photographs from that day because the camera wasn’t working. So then when this was reported back to me, I demanded – I wanted to see what photographs there were the day before and the day after. I was all of a sudden very curious, how come a camera – how long a time was this camera not working? Was it just that day?

    And secondly, I wanted to see the repair bills if these cameras were not working. I wanted to see what was done for the repair. Hold that to the side for now. So, but then we decided, well, let’s ask for the copy of the wiretap, of the actual recording. And the CIA responded, “We don’t have that. It is not in existence. Because once we transcribe something, we reuse the tape. And we had transcribed this conversation before the assassination of Kennedy without knowing at that time any importance to Oswald. There was no need, therefore, to have kept the tape, and we had reused the tape.”

    The problem with that arose because we had gotten access to an FBI document which stated that after the arrest of Oswald, a FBI agent who had at least taken part in the interrogation of Oswald, had listened to the CIA tape, and in his report said the voice on the CIA tape was not the voice of Oswald. So, if that was true, it showed that that tape was in existence after the assassination of Kennedy. So keep that in mind.

    So then, we thought, let’s look at the transcript. Which transcript had been produced to the Warren Commission? And of course what we noted, which I think strikes anybody who looks at that transcript, it was an innocuous conversation, and some – the interpreter says that the speaker spoke in broken Russian, I believe it was. But that the voice on there introduces himself as “Lee Henry Oswald,” which, if Oswald was trying to disguise who he is, I mean, whoever heard of giving your first and last name, and only changing your middle name?

    But the Warren Commission had accepted that transcript as proof that he was in Mexico City at the time. So then, we decided, well, let’s see if we can find the person who was the interpreter and the stenographer, the typist, for the transcript. And we located them. It was a husband and wife team in Mexico City. Tanenbaum can give you more details.

    And our people spoke to them. They looked at the transcript. She said this is not the transcript that I typed. The interpreter disputed things that were on there, and we asked, “Do you still have the typewriter that you used,” and they still had it, and we brought it back to Washington. And I will make a bet with you right now that that typewriter is still sitting in Washington. Nobody knows what the hell it is doing there. Nobody followed through and had the typewriter compared with the type on the transcript, which is something …

    WILLIAMS: Oh, wow!

    SPRAGUE: This is the kind of thing we were doing. And we also had done, let’s say federal, record checks along the following lines. I was interested in, of those Americans that had defected to Russia, what was the time sequence when they decided they wanted to come back to this country, before they were allowed to come back?

    And there was a startling difference between Oswald and others. His time for coming back was much, much quicker. We also checked into those that, when they came back were debriefed by the FBI with one exception. Oswald was not debriefed by the FBI. Now, I’m not saying that this, therefore that we jumped to the conclusion, “Ah, ha! The CIA is involved in the assassination.” I am just giving you an idea of the areas of inquiry, in what I believe was the thoroughness with which we were trying to undertake.

    WILLIAMS: Right. You were still letting the evidence go walking, and right now…

    SPRAGUE: Absolutely.

    WILLIAMS: You were going to hold your options open until you accumulated enough evidence. . .

    SPRAGUE: We were just going to do that type of thorough thing. I demanded the records from the CIA, and now there was an abrupt refusal, and I subpoenaed them. At that point, Gonzales, who was Chairman of the Committee, ordered the CIA, or told the CIA that they need not respond to my subpoena, and fired me, and ordered the U.S. Marshals come in and remove me from my office.

    WILLIAMS: Oh, so that firing was directly after you had subpoenaed the records from the Central Intelligence Agency.

    SPRAGUE: Right. But there’s more involved in it than the timing…

    WILLIAMS: Right.

    SPRAGUE: … if you checked the record. That came up after that. He ordered my firing. He ordered marshals to remove me from my office in what I’m sure was the first and only time in the history of the United States Congress. The rest of the Committee, backed me to a man and overrode the Chairman, and ordered that I remain, and the marshals were directed to get off.

    Of course, that led to Gonzales taking it up in the House of Representatives, and the House backed the rest of the Committee. And he resigned and Stokes came on. [Louis Stokes was the Representative from Ohio. Eds. Note] I’m sure that’s the only time in the history in the United States Congress that in the fight between the Chairman and the Director, that the Chairman got bounced.

    But there’s a terrible price paid for that. Every Congressman dreams of being Chairman of a Committee and being all powerful. It ultimately did not sit well with the Congress that a Chairman got ousted, and…

    JOHN : The chief counsel.

    SPRAGUE: … the chief counsel stayed in. And that rubbed a lot more. But I’ve got to back up a second. When I proposed the budget, and those that did not want this investigation jumped on this thing, this terrible: “Who does Sprague think he is, that much money.” It was a realistic budget to do the kind of job that had to be done. You know, and I met with Schweiker [Sen. Richard Schweiker was a Republican from Pennsylvania. Eds. Note] and I sat down with Schweiker before he went out of office. I got good ideas, I think, from him as to things that we wanted to do.

    WILLIAMS: So you had done some thinking through of this whole thing in terms of your initial budget…

    SPRAGUE: Oh, yes. And also – and I had a committee here – I mean, Gonzales, really in terms of being a leader and head of the Committee, it was night and day different from Downing. Members of his own Committee despised him. The Committee was concerned about how they were going to get more funding.

    I know I wanted to do the kind of job I said. They wanted to do something dramatic to help get new funding. And I remember they wanted to call some mobsters, like Trafficante, in to have him take the Fifth Amendment, which I protested. They said they wanted him – like ask questions, when did you stop murdering Kennedy, and take the Fifth Amendment, and you get a headline. All that was nonsense to try to help get funding, which was no – again, no way to run it. But in this fight to get funding, and I think because he knew exactly what he was doing, at least in retrospect, Tip O’Neill asked me to address the Congress.

    WILLIAMS: The entire House?

    SPRAGUE: Now you say the entire House, I think it may have been the Democratic Caucus.

    WILLIAMS: The Democratic Caucus.

    SPRAGUE: I think that was it. They don’t let a non-member of Congress really speak to them from the pit of the Congress. Tip O’Neill arranged for me to do it. And so here I am speaking right in the pit, whatever you call it, the pit of the House of Representatives, with the Congress around me, to tell them why I need this budget, which I did. And they listened in a half-way fashion, some did and some did not.

    The effect of that was, well, I think I am a very quiet, honest person. I don’t go around trying to stir things up. I just try to do my job. I’m not somebody who you would think, well, people would notice or pay attention to. For some reason, in my public life, it’s the opposite.

    And the Committee had become known from the early start of it as “The Sprague Committee,” which rubbed a lot of – I mean, whoever heard of a Committee being named, again, for the chief counsel? It’s like the Chairman, you know, but not the chief counsel. That rubbed people wrong.

    But Tip O’Neill’s maneuver in having me talk – he didn’t have the Chairman – he didn’t have a member of the Committee, he didn’t have Gonzales do it, he had me. It had a lot of the members of Congress thinking, “Who the hell is this guy who thinks he is bigger than any of the Congressmen? It’s not the Chairman, it’s not Committee, this guy is talking to us, like he’s riding over everybody.” And if Tip O’Neill was trying to create, in a very subtle way, a political reaction, he was very successful. Because that, coupled with “The Sprague Committee,” the fact that I unseated a Chairman, led to a very bad reaction. Now, at or about this time, all of a sudden, and this came up, and if you check your records, the timing here, because you asked when did Gonzales fire me, it’s after he countermanded the subpoena to the CIA.

    And just at that time – and I am not a big conspiracy buff – when I say “at that time,” I mean what I say, the subpoenas of the CIA, lo and behold, the Los Angeles Times comes out with an article, and it was prefaced upon a letter that a Congressman from out west, a former FBI agent [Rep. Don Edwards of California. Eds.].

    I think he had it put in the Congressional Record, because you see, that protects him from a suit. And, anyway, the substance of it was, I guess maybe the Los Angeles Times came out first, and then he wrote his letter. … But anyway, the whole idea between the Times and Edwards was that I was going to go about this investigation in a reckless manner.

    I was going to be doing it by using unconstitutional means, violating due process. I wanted to wiretap, and I was trying to get wiretap equipment. I mean, a horrendous attack. I immediately – and again, the timing of this is with the subpoena of the CIA, my being upheld by the Committee, but I immediately saw the threat politically of this, and we had a PR man on our staff, because I wasn’t going to take – with all the work I was doing, I was going to deal with the press. And we had hired a fellow who did that.

    This was a friend of mine named Burt Chardak, who’s still alive, you could interview him, because he’s a newspaper man. And this is the first time he sees it from the other side. And he’s in Florida, and I can get his address for you.

    WILLIAMS: That would be great.

    SPRAGUE: But Burt Chardak, a very good, savvy newspaper man, was our PR man. I immediately told him to contact the press around the nation, editorial boards, let them have the facts in the sense as I just gave them to you, take the time, which he did. Not one newspaper in this entire country or one editorial board contacted us to at least get more information. Not one newspaper or editorial board around this country printed our side of it.

    But with the attack by the Los Angeles Times, it was then picked up immediately by the Washington Post, and the New York Times, all of whom carried similar editorials, which then led to editorials all around the country about what a terrible ogre and what a terrible person I was. That’s the scenario at that point.

    WILLIAMS: The failure to check that, in other words, made you wonder what was going on out there.

    SPRAGUE: Oh, absolutely. And to this day, while I’m certainly not a conspiracy buff, and I don’t believe for a moment the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times were all in bed with each other, to this day I find that the most fascinating part of my stint there.

    But, let me just finish this aspect of it. Then the New York Times decided to really get in. And remember, I was the fair-haired boy at the beginning, now I was a horrible monster. They assigned a reporter named Burnham. I can’t think of Burnham’s first name – David Burnham? And he subsequently – I don’t think it was Fonzi – but he admitted it to somebody, that they assigned him to try to do a hatchet job on me.

    WILLIAMS: He came here to dig up stuff.

    SPRAGUE: Yes. And what he did is he then dug up an attack by the Philadelphia Inquirer on me from years back, which ultimately the Inquirer got hit with a $34 million judgment, and which was upheld to the tune of $24 million, the highest award against a newspaper for defamation of a public official in the United States. But Burnham, this was before that trial, Burnham dug up their attack on me and had The Times publish it as though it was true.

    And that was the main attack on me. At this point, and by the way, I must tell you, in my fights with Gonzales, he had tried to unseat me even earlier and appoint somebody that was a friend of his as chief counsel, you know, none of which I would accept, because it violated my conditions. And ultimately, when Stokes got appointed – and by the way, I had to testify before the whole Committee in response to the Burnham article and relate what the true facts were, which as I say, the best way in terms of history to show the true facts is that they had a $34 million judgment, which was ultimately upheld at $24 million against them.

    But Stokes finally said to me that the only way the Committee would get their new

    budget – and it would have to be reduced to a terrible amount, I think like 14 million would be made down to 4 million at some time – was that I had to give them back the power to hire and fire, which I refused. I said “No way.” And they ultimately said that “You’re going to have to agree to a lower budget and not hiring and firing in order for us to get the budget through.” And I had a meeting with my staff, who still wanted me to stay. I had good loyalty, but I mean the staff felt that they had a real non-political professional who was fighting and was doing the right thing. And I told them “No,” let the work of the Committee go on. I had had enough of this, and I was out.

    WILLIAMS: So it was your resignation. You weren’t actually fired, or would you say that you were pressured, in a way, to resign?

    SPRAGUE: No, no, it was my decision. I was told that I had to accept the change in the conditions in order for the budget to be approved. And I wouldn’t accept that, and by midnight or something, I drafted a letter of resignation, and gave it. And there were a number of members of the Committee that did not want me to. And even after the fact, I think one of them said, one or two even voted to not accept it.

    WILLIAMS: So Congressional members were supporting you in saying “Don’t resign.”

    SPRAGUE: That’s right. Stokes was adamant, Preyer. There was a great number of them in my corner. But there was no way that I would – let me say this, it gets back to maybe what I said at the beginning. A legislative committee dealing with political figures, they each have their own political future, their constituencies, their own interests at heart, is not the proper vehicle for an investigation of this nature.

    One of my good friends in Washington, Joe Rauh, who I’m sure you’ve heard of. Joe Rauh was a great crusader, liberal lawyer. He helped found the Americans for Democratic Action. He really was the author of the civil rights legislation that Johnson signed. He had been Jock Yablonski’s personal lawyer, and that’s how we met.

    WILLIAMS: I see.

    SPRAGUE: He was very, very – I mean, he was everywhere in the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. A very good friend of mine. And he came to the view that I might be a great investigator, prosecutor, but that combination does not mix with a political animal like the Congress of the United States.

    WILLIAMS: I was wondering before as you were talking, because you said this has happened at other times in your life, that you suddenly found that you had become larger than life as you get into some kind of conflict like this. I wonder if it’s because, in a way, you are a quiet, fairly gentle, straightforward person, but highly determined. You have a strong will about what will be.

    SPRAGUE: Well, I think that’s part of it. There’s no doubt that, you know, I believe I listen. I believe if you talk to people in this office, it is a hard-working office. But I think everybody will tell you that after I listen, I make up my mind that’s the way.

  • The Media Buries the Conspiracy Verdict in the King Case

    From the January-February 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 2) of Probe

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)