Kennedys and King Test host626

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  • Dexter King Continues His Long March

    From the July-August, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 5) of Probe

    As we went to press, the test results ordered by Memphis Judge Joe Brown on the alleged rifle used to kill Martin Luther King have not yet been finalized. In mid-June CNN filed a story saying that the first tests run as a result of the judge’s order came back inconclusive. The lead firearms investigator for the defense, Robert Hathaway, asked to conduct another round of testing. The story stated that an inadequate cleaning of the rifle may have necessitated the repeat process.

    In May, the state of Tennessee decided to rule out a trip to Pittsburgh for a possible liver transplant for King’s alleged assassin James Earl Ray. Ray’s doctors say he has a liver disease and may not be able to survive much longer without such an operation. Ray wants to be evaluated at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which has one of the leading organ transplant programs in the world. Reportedly, this issue will be discussed in court at a later time. If the rifle tests come back as Ray’s lawyer, Bill Pepper expects – i. e. showing that the fatal bullet did not come from Ray’s weapon – Judge Brown could order a new trial. Although trials in absentia have been held, in this case Ray wants to testify at his trial. So public pressure could be applied for the transplant. In an interview with Reuters on June 27th, Ray stated, “There are a lot of people who think I should get the transplant.” He added the fact that the King family supported his request and that should be a “strong point” in his favor.

    The involvement of King’s survivors has really been Pepper’s greatest achievement and has given the most ballast to the move for a new trial. Dexter King’s well-publicized spring meeting with Ray, featured on the cover of our last issue, has propelled the MLK case into the mainstream media eye. As Lisa Pease has noted, Dexter’s new prominence has forced the establishment to trot out some grizzled veterans to lead the attacks on Pepper and Ray: Dick Billings, Priscilla Johnson, and Robert Blakey. In the interim from spring to summer, the coverage has improved, but only incrementally.

    On June 8th, the Washington Post featured a column by Jim Lesar of the Assassination Archives and Research Center. Lesar had been Ray’s attorney in the early seventies. In the article, Lesar wrote:

    My own view is that Ray did not shoot King. And though he was in Memphis at the time and likely involved with the people who did, there is substantial evidence that suggests he was not aware that King was going to be killed.

    Lesar went on to single out two aspects of Pepper’s book, Orders to Kill, he considers especially compelling. The first aspect is the accumulation of five affidavits, including Ray’s, identifying the mysterious “Raul,” the apparent CIA operative who Ray states maneuvered him around Montreal and then the U.S. prior to King’s murder. Second, Lesar mentions the role of Lloyd Jowers who ABC’s Sam Donaldson interviewed twice, once in 1993 and again earlier this year. Jowers has stated that he paid a man to shoot King in Memphis. Jowers also has said that he was visited by a “Raul” who, Lesar writes, “delivered a rifle to him and asked him to hold it until final arrangements were made.” The attorney went on to detail certain holes in the official case against Ray. Lesar’s piece was a creditable and objective essay that did not ignore the national overtones of the crime:

    Ray has a right to the trial he never had. But the country also deserves such a trial. With Ray’s death, we shall lose our last best chance to clear up just what happened during a painful moment of our history.

    There were two other national media organs who felt compelled to comment on the King-Pepper-Ray ongoing drama.

    Emerge bills itself as “Black America’s Newsmagazine.” It is published ten times a year and has a circulation of 150,000. It is a subsidiary of Black Entertainment Television, a popular cable TV offering. In their current July/August issue, the cover story asks “Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King?” Writer Les Crane and the magazine had a not-so-subtle angle in the presentation of the story. Referring to Dexter King’s belief in Ray’s innocence, they term this a “strange assertion.” Introducing Ray, they call him a “cagey convict” who “was steadfastly shopping for a new trial – and an organ transplant.” Referring to Pepper, the pejorative used is that he “has wrangled for a movie deal.” Payne then proceeds to actually put some stock in the House Select Committee hearings on the King case. Payne also quotes Jessie Jackson on Ray’s testimony during the Robert Blakey helmed HSCA hearings: “That Raoul shit is getting thinner and thinner.”

    Blakey himself figured in a program seen by millions in regard to the attempt to get a trial in the King case. On June 19th, ABC presented a one hour telecast devoted entirely to the King case. Turning Point is a newsmagazine with three rotating hosts: Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Forrest Sawyer. This installment was hosted by the last, which is interesting. Back in 1991, when Oliver Stone’s JFK was opening, the director made an appearance on ABC’s Nightline. Ted Koppel was not the host that night. Forrest Sawyer was. To say the least, the show’s format – it opened with a long, carefully edited montage which was negative to Stone, the film, and Jim Garrison – and Sawyer himself, were not fair to Stone.

    Turning Point featured a wide variety of interviews: King’s friend and colleague Andrew Young, Coretta King and all four of her children, Memphis pastor Billy Kyles, former New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell, Blakey, King biographer Dave Garrow, journalist Steve Tompkins, and Pepper himself. Predictably, of the guests, the two resisting a new trial for Ray were Garrow and Blakey. Early on Garrow stated:

    I think the King family has been the victim of very bad advice and counsel. What we have here is a situation that is sad and disappointing. James Earl Ray’s guilt is proven.

    Most people would think that a family standing together and demanding, at great personal expense, the truth about a loved one’s death is anything but sad and disappointing. Most would call it courageous and inspiring. Some would even hope that John F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister would do likewise. And, as far as facts and evidence go, in the closest thing to a real trial that Ray had – HBO’s mock trial in 1993 with Pepper as his lawyer – the verdict was for acquittal.

    Blakey, who has become a sound bite propagandist since the release of JFK, said something just as inexplicable:

    We still prosecute people who murder civil rights leaders. We did. His name’s James Earl Ray. If there are other suspects out there that evidence can be developed in, I’d rather see them prosecuted, rather than given an opportunity to write a book.

    Blakey seems to have forgotten the history of the case he studied for two years. In the truest sense of the word, Ray was never prosecuted. As Pepper and others have shown, he was coerced into pleading guilty by Percy Foreman in order to avoid the electric chair. Further, Foreman presented the prosecution’s case to him and told him that if he did not plead guilty that he would not give his case his best effort. Blakey, a law professor, never addresses the legal ethics involved in this or the fact that Foreman and Ray’s first lawyer, Arthur Hanes, agreed to take money from someone who was writing a book, William Bradford Huie, in exchange for channeling information to him from their client. They then talked Ray into agreeing to this as a way of paying their fees. Also, in the nearly thirty years since the murder, no legal authorities, including Blakey, have ever seriously considered formal accomplices in the crime. So how could anyone suggest, as Blakey does, prosecuting “other suspects.”

    Further, on the point of Ray’s guilty plea, what Blakey and Garrow never note is that at the plea hearing, Ray went on the record as saying that he did not agree with Ramsey Clark and Hoover’s ideas on the subject of conspiracy, or lack of it, in the case. He specifically named those two men, as well as the DA in court, as expressing theories he did not agree with.

    Some of Turning Point was good and valuable. ABC showed some archival footage of the murder scene and the events which followed, plus some photographs, which I don’t recall seeing before. Andrew Young was allowed to voice his plea for a “Truth Commission” on the King case. This would be modeled on the present hearings going on in South Africa presided over by Desmond Tutu. Witnesses with worthwhile information are granted immunity in return for full disclosure so the nation can proceed with a cleansing process through the eventual unraveling of the truth. The program also went into Hoover’s attacks on King, both open and clandestine.

    Perhaps the most impressive guest was former New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell. Caldwell has been consistent in his testimony that he saw a man in the bushes below King’s room after the shooting. He also revealed that no one from any investigation “ever came to me and asked me even one question, ever.” Further, he was the only person on the program to ask for full file disclosure:

    I do think that we ought to open up every file that the government is holding, that tells us anything about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We can look in the files and determine the integrity of the investigation. We can do that.

    Predictably, Sawyer constructed a trap for Pepper in the second half of the program. Towards the end of Pepper’s book he details the tale of an Army special forces group sent to Memphis in April of 1968 to surveil King. Working from interviews conducted by reporter Steve Tompkins, Pepper writes that they received a special briefing and were told to actually terminate King. They would have if he would not have been fired upon already. According to Tompkins’ sources, one of the leaders of this group, Bill Eidson, later died. Sawyer took Pepper through this part of his book, questioning his methodology, and then produced Eidson and a cohort. Although Pepper held up fairly well through this elaborate set-up, he had been sandbagged. Strangely, and although the sequence was probably edited to favor Sawyer, he doesn’t seem to have seen it coming. Tompkins was also on the show and he implies that Pepper went too far with the material he had given him. But also, neither Tompkins nor Pepper appear to have checked out their military intelligence sources with the utmost scrutiny.

    This reflects on another aspect of the Bill Pepper-Dexter King alliance. Both Dexter and Pepper of late have been quoted as saying that President Johnson either knew of the King plot or was in on it. For instance, Sawyer asked both about Johnson’s knowledge of the plot and Pepper and King both replied in the affirmative. Dexter defended his position, rather naively, by saying:

    Well, based on the evidence that I’ve been shown, I would think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude to occur on his watch and he not be privy to it.

    By this logic, one could have asked Kennedy how he could not have known about the plots to kill Lumumba, Castro and himself. Intelligence agencies do this all the time. As Victor Marchetti told me in an interview in 1993, Richard Helms specifically told him not to tell Johnson about an operation that had been discussed at a meeting just concluded. Also, the accusations against Johnson are the least supported in Pepper’s (generally) good book. This is not meant to rule out the possibility, but rather to comment on the wisdom of going public with the accusation, especially with the klieg lights bearing down on you.

    There may be something at work behind the scenes here. On January 19, 1997, Pepper did an interview with Ian Masters on his show Background Briefing carried on Pacifica radio. On that program, Pepper commented on the recent rush of new information he had been getting from various sources. This, in itself, would make an experienced field investigator leery. But he then described one of these sources as a former naval intelligence officer who was now working as a featured reporter at a newspaper. This could be Tompkins or Bob Woodward. We hope it’s not the latter. As readers will recall from our special Watergate issue (Vol. 3 No. 2), no reporter did more to bury the real truth of that case with the major media than Woodward.

    There was one – perhaps inadvertently – truthful and poignant moment on the show that almost redeemed the antics pulled on Pepper. Going through a montage of all those who opposed King – black militants, white racists, even Sen. Robert Byrd – the camera came back to his wife, who related the story of how they were together when they learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. They were sitting together when King turned to his wife and said prophetically: “That’s exactly what’s going to happen to me.”

  • The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: Sirhan Now Says: “I Am Innocent”

    From the July-August, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 5) of Probe

    On Wednesday, June 18, 1997, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan stunned a parole board by declaring publicly that he now believes he is innocent of the crime for which he is incarcerated: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

    On June 5th, 1968, RFK, the likely Democratic candidate for President, having just won the California primary, was shot in the pantry in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just finished his victory speech and was headed out when Sirhan stepped from the crowd, and said “Kennedy, you son of a bitch.” Sirhan extended his hand and fired shots at the oncoming Senator. Kennedy fell to the floor and was taken to a hospital, where he died a short time later.

    Deputy District Attorney Thomas Trapp expressed outrage that Sirhan would now dare to claim innocence, calling such a claim “preposterous.” To someone who does not know the case, such a claim seems preposterous indeed, in light of the following facts:

    • Sirhan was witnessed by many people shooting at RFK.
    • An LAPD criminalist testified that the bullets found in the victims matched test bullets fired from Sirhan’s gun.
    • Sirhan conceded having shot RFK and even provided his motive.

    Taken out of context, these facts present a grossly misleading picture of the case. Examined against the full record of the case, the following facts emerge:

    • RFK was shot at point-blank range from behind. Two shots entered his back and a third shot entered directly behind RFK’s right ear. By all eyewitness accounts, Sirhan was never closer than one and a half feet to RFK. The bulk of the witnesses put Sirhan at a distance of three feet or more. Sirhan was firing a gun. But clearly, so was someone else.
    • The criminalist who testified to the match between the bullets and the gun had stored the bullets in an envelope labeled as belonging to the gun with a serial number of H 18602. Sirhan’s gun had a serial number of H 53725. The tests showed conclusively that the victim bullets matched a gun that was not Sirhan’s.
    • Sirhan has consistently, and credibly—even to the prosecution’s experts—asserted that he has no memory of the shooting. With no one to tell him of the exculpatory ballistic and medical evidence, and no memory of where he was and what he did, he believed those who told him he had killed Kennedy, and took his lawyer’s advice to own up to it at the trial. His motive, however, never made sense.

    The day after the murder, a leading Arab activist, Dr. Mohammad T. Mehdi, issued a statement that Sirhan might have been motivated to attack RFK because RFK had promised to sell bomber planes to Israel. On May 18th, in a diary attributed to Sirhan are the words “RFK Must Die!” written over and over. However, RFK’s statement to sell the bombers was not shown on TV until May 20th. So that could hardly have been Sirhan’s motive. In court, during his trial, Sirhan burst out that he had killed RFK “willfully, premeditatively, with twenty years of malice aforethought.” This was not very compelling, however, since Sirhan was only 24 years old at that time of the assassination. He would have had to be contemplating the murder of the as yet little known Kennedy at the age of four! As he saw it, he had only a couple of choices. Either he had killed Kennedy on purpose, or he had lost his mind. Not wanting to believe the latter he embraced the former. And once he believed that, together with his defense team he sought out a motive. Confronted with the possibility that he was out of control or insane, Sirhan replied, “I’d rather die and say I killed that son of a bitch for my country, period [emphasis added].” But believing doesn’t make it so, and the evidence shows that Sirhan could not have fired the three shots that hit Kennedy.

    So we are left with the following. The gun was not matched to the victims’ bullets. Sirhan was never close enough to have shot Kennedy where he was hit. And then there is the memory problem. After extensive hypnosis attempts by both the prosecution and his defense, no one was able to find any evidence of a suppressed memory there. He had an utter blank for the period surrounding the shooting.

    Either we have a case of many witnesses having a collective illusion that Sirhan was not close enough, or a second shooter was in the pantry. Indeed, there is evidence of well above the eight bullets Sirhan’s gun was capable of firing. This has been well documented in The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (by Bill Turner and Jon Christian, published by Random House in 1978 and later by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 1993); The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (by Philip Melanson, published by S.P.I. Books, 1994); and the new book by William Klaber and Philip Melanson, based on newly released files from the LAPD, called Shadow Play: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, The Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice (St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

    If there were two (or even more) shooters and Sirhan was one of them, doesn’t that prove his guilt, regardless of whether he fired the fatal shot or not? Yes, to some degree. But was he a witting conspirator?

    Not necessarily.

    Another possibility, voiced on the air even before Sirhan’s name was made public, was that the shooter was acting under the influence of hypnosis.

    In Richard Condon’s famous 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, the plot centers around a man who was programmed under hypnosis to assassinate the president of the United States. The man was not aware that he had been programmed. While the novel was advertised as fiction, it bore a close resemblance to the most secret of the CIA projects, the mind control experiments held from the early ‘50’s until the mid ‘70’s.

    Under names like Bluebird, then Artichoke (after a favorite vegetable of Allen Dulles’), and finally MKULTRA, the CIA was avidly and amorally experimenting on both witting and unwitting subjects with drugs, electric shock, hypnotism, electrode implantation and other technologies in the search for ways to completely control the actions of humans. Another area of search was devoted to finding ways of creating perfect, if temporary, amnesia so that an agent could perform a task and truly be able to have no memory of it when questioned later. The Senate report on these experiments showed the CIA felt this could be done through the administration of drugs.

     

      A R T I C H O K E

    1.      The ARTICHOKE Team visited [redacted] during period 8 January to 15 January 1954. The purpose of the visit was to give an evaluation of a hypothetical problem, namely: Can an individual of ****** descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?

    2.      PROBLEM:

            a.      The essential elements of the problem are as follows:

                    (1)        As a “trigger mechanism” for a bigger project, it was proposed that an individual of ****** descent approximately 35 years old, well educated, proficient in English and well established socially and politically in the ****** Government be induced under ARTICHOKE to perform an act, involuntarily, of attempted assassination against a prominent ****** politician or if necesssary, against an American official. The SUBJECT was formerly in [redacted] employ but has since terminated and is now employed with the *** Government. According to all available information, the SUBJECT would offer no further cooperation with [redacted.] Access to the SUBJECT would be extremely limited, probably limited to a single social meeting. Because the SUBJECT is a heavy drinker, it was proposed that the individual could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcholoic cocktail at a social party, ARTICHOKE applied and the SUBJECT induced to perform the act of attempted assassination at some later date. All the above was to be accomplished at one involuntary uncontrolled social meeting. After the act of attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the SUBJECT would be taken into custody by the *** Government and thereby “disposed of.” [....]

    Source: Page from a CIA memorandum from 1954. Published in Phil Melanson’s The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, Inc, 1994). in the exhibits (page not numbered).

     

    How far did these experiments progress?

    ….

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

    Related Articles:

    Scott Enyart vs. The LAPD over RFK Assassination Photos

    Sirhan now says: “I Didn’t Kill RFK”

    CBS and the RFK Assassination

    Sirhan and the RFK Assassination / Part I: The Grand Illusion

    Sirhan and the RFK Assassination / Part II: Rubrick’s Cube

    Dan Moldea and the RFK Assassination

    Thane Eugene Cesar’s .22 Gun Found

  • J. Lee Rankin: Conspiracist?

    From the May-June, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 4) of Probe

    J. Lee Rankin was born in Nebraska in 1907, the son of Herman P. Rankin and Lois Gable, both lifelong Republicans. He was associated with Thomas Dewey’s campaign in 1948 and later chaired a state committee for Eisenhower. Prior to becoming chief counsel for the Warren Commission he had been U. S. Solicitor General, a very high position in the Justice Department. He was appointed to the Commission only after a long and rather heated debate, and over the wishes of Earl Warren who had wanted his old friend and colleague Warren Olney as chief counsel. Both John McCloy and Allen Dulles seem to have maneuvered Warren into this choice. According to declassified FBI documents, Rankin also seems to have been involved, again with McCloy and Dulles, in the creation of the 1967 CBS multipart documentary endorsing the Warren Report, hosted by Walter Cronkite.

    What follows is a recently declassified HSCA document sent to us by researcher Peter Vea. It is a report by staffer Michael Ewing of a phone conversation with Rankin in preparation for his public appearance and executive session interview. Rankin was living in New York at the time. It seems that in the intervening years he came to harbor some deep suspicions about the efficacy of the Commission. In fact, as far as we know, these are the strongest criticisms of the Commission that we know of by anyone actually on the legal staff, as opposed to the members of the Commission themselves.

    I called to discuss our plans for an interview and deposition, and he initially commented that he’d been waiting a long time to hear from us. He said he’d be glad to come down as soon as possible, but noted that he had been sick for a month and is having a hernia operation in the next few days and thus will not be available until early July. I will check with him to set up the earliest possible date when he gets out of the hospital.

    He stated at the outset that he “would of course like the opportunity to review the testimony” of the other former Warren Commission staff members who have testified before him. I said that I was unfamiliar with the Committee rules on such a request but thought that it may very well be impossible for us to comply with this request, noting that I did not believe anyone else had ever made such a request. He seemed to be very defensive about what his former colleagues may have testified about him and the Commission.

    After we talked a few minutes he seemed more at ease. I said that we were sympathetic to the problems encountered by the Commission and were probably experiencing some of the same difficulties. He seemed pleased to hear this. He said that “our problem at the outset was having no investigative staff to call our own,” and indicated that he had favored one and had been overruled by higher authority. He stated that “there were some awfully strong personalities among the members” and that “he had continuing difficulties due to those personalities.”

    Though I stated that I didn’t want to go into his past work over the phone at this time, he went on to make several points. First, he stated that he believed that “hindsight makes it clear that both Hoover and the CIA were covering up a variety of items” from the Commission and he personally. He said that the had been continually saddened over the years by “all the disclosures about Hoover’s performance in our area and a number of others.” I commented that he (Rankin) was apparently not one of Hoover’s favorite people and he laughed and said “That is now abundantly clear, though I’ve never read my dossier.” He said that he finds the FBI performance “quite disturbing in hindsight. We would have found their conduct nearly unbelievable if we had known about it at the time.” He commented that the destruction of the Hosty note was “a crime – a crime committed by the FBI, and one which directly related to the assassin’s most important actions and motivations during the final days” before the murder. He again said that he finds the Hosty note destruction “almost beyond belief, just unconscionable.” I commented that we have heard testimony to the effect that if the staff had known about it at the time, that the decision to use the FBI for investigative work might have changed. He agreed, saying, “We couldn’t have used the people involved in any further way, that’s clear. The FBI would have to have been regarded as a suspect in that instance and that in turn would have affected everything.” He indicated that he would have gotten his own investigators at that point.

    He further stated that “Hoover did everything he could” to get the Commission to adopt the earliest FBI report on the shooting, which Rankin said “we of course finally rejected.”

    He then made a point of inquiring about our work relating to the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. He said: “One thing which I think is very important, and I don’t know if you are getting into this – and I don’t know if it is proven or not – is whether the CIA used the Mafia against Castro.” He said that there were reports in recent years that this was true and that it involved an assassination conspiracy against Castro. He said, “Do you know if this has been proven?” I said yes it had, and briefly explained the history of the plots and their concealment from anyone higher than Helms at the time. Rankin then responded, “Ah yes. I’ve been very afraid that it was all true. But I haven’t followed all the books and reports in recent years.” He went on to say, “I would find the plots with the Mafia – the Mafia being mixed up with the CIA and these Cubans – frightening. You’ve got to go after that.” He went on to say “That again is something that would have been beyond belief at the time.” He said Helms’ role in the plots and his concealment of them from the Commission “would have been just unconscionable.” He expressed great anguish over hearing that the plots were in fact confirmed. It seemed strange that he has not followed public developments on the plots more carefully, but he indicated that he simply does not follow these areas and has not read “any of the Church Committee reports.”

    When I said that we were devoting considerable time to investigating the CIA/Mafia plots he said, “Good, good. That is crucial.” He went on to say “that would have changed so much back then” if he had known of the plots. He said that he found the plots all the more disturbing in light of the fact that Robert Kennedy was pushing his investigations of the Mafia so heavily during that same period.

    He repeatedly expressed the view that both the FBI and CIA had concealed important material from the Commission, and that the CIA/Mafia plots would have had a “very direct bearing on the areas of conspiracy which we tried to pursue.” He also asked, “Are you looking into the plots on the basis of whether they were covered up by the CIA because some of the very people involved in them could have been involved in the President’s assassination?” I said that yes that was an area of our investigation, and he replied strongly, “Good. Good. You have to look at it that way.” I also said that we were looking into charges that Castro might have retaliated for the plots by killing Kennedy, and he replied, “Where is any evidence of that? I think the other approach would be much more logical.” This was apparently in reference to probing those involved in the plots themselves.

    I told him that we would of course make extensive material available to him in reference to our questioning of him, noting that we want him to refresh his memory as to his old memos, etc. as well as other documents that we will give him in advance. He was very appreciative of this and said he would like to know more about the CIA/Mafia plots and our work on them.

    He remarked a couple times that he has nothing to regret about his work on the Commission, and that he tried his hardest to make it the best investigation possible. He said he still believes very strongly that he had a good staff of the finest legal minds. He did of course say that the agency cooperation and input (FBI and CIA) was and is the key issue to him.

    He also again said that he would like an opportunity to review the testimony of other WC staffers before he comes down. I again stated, more strongly this time, that I thought that this would probably not be in accordance with Committee rules. He said he “would appreciate the courtesy.”

    Again, he seemed quite friendly throughout the conversation and seemed to look forward to meeting with us.

  • Martin Luther King’s Son Says: James Earl Ray Didn’t Kill MLK!

    From the May-June, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 4) of Probe

    On Thursday, March 27, nearly 29 years after his father’s death, Dexter King met with James Earl Ray in a small room at the Lois DeBerry Special Needs Facility, Ray’s current home. Dexter faced Ray, and after several awkward minutes of small talk came to the question to which so many want the answer: “I just want to ask you for the record, did you kill my father?”

    “No I didn’t,” came Ray’s reply. And in a display of the grace and compassion for which his family has long been known, Dexter King replied, “I just want you to know that I believe you, and my family believes you, and we are going to do everything in our power to try and make sure that justice will prevail.”

    True to his word, Dexter, recently supported by his older brother Martin Luther King III, has continued to talk to the media at every turn, calling for a trial to answer the questions long buried in this case.

    The week after this historic meeting, Dexter King appeared opposite David Garrow on NBC’s Today show. Garrow is the author of the book The FBI and Martin Luther King. He was also one of the ARRB’s guests at the “Experts Conference” held in 1995. At that appearance, Garrow was pushing the ARRB to investigate the FBI’s possible role in the assassination of President Kennedy.

    On NBC, Garrow and King were clearly at cross purposes. King was calling for a new trial, and Garrow was there to convince all that Ray’s guilt was beyond question. Garrow made an astonishing, insulting attack on the King family by saying:

    I think it’s very sad that the King family and the King children are so uninformed of the history that they could be open to believing that Mr. Ray was not involved in Dr. King’s assassination …

    Unfortunately, the King family has not looked at the record that the House Assassination committee [HSCA] compiled 19 years ago. There’s really no dispute among people that know this history well about Mr. Ray’s guilt.”

    King, besides wondering aloud how anyone could object to the family’s wanting to know who killed their loved one, pointed out:

    The House Committee did not have all the information. If it was such an open-and-shut case, why today are we asking this question?

    Just a few days after this exchange, King and Garrow met again on CNN’s Crossfire. On that show, King openly accused Garrow of being a spook:

    Mr. Garrow, I’ve been told – and I am now more than ever convinced – is an agent for the national security and intelligence forces to distort the truth in this case.

    Garrow responded by saying it was “very sad and very embarrassing for the King family to be in a position where it’s saying things like that.” But indeed, it is Garrow who should be embarrassed. Anyone who knows the history of the King assassination knows full well that the evidence shows conspiracy, and that Ray was most likely not the assassin.

    Likewise, this would not be the first time someone accused media people of covering up for the government in this case. During the HSCA, Walter Fauntroy, one of the members studying the King assassination, charged that reporters covering the HSCA were linked to the CIA and suggested the HSCA might investigate them. A few days later, for reasons about which we can readily speculate, Fauntroy backed down, saying the HSCA had “no plans now or in the future” to seek testimony of journalists regarding their possible ties to the intelligence community.1

    Fauntroy was most likely correct in his charge, if the history of this case means anything. One of the earliest books written on the James Earl Ray case was one by Gerold Frank. William Pepper, Ray’s current attorney, in his book Orders to Kill, quotes from an FBI memo from Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach to Hoover’s close confidant, Clyde Tolson:

    Now that Ray has been convicted and is serving a 99-year sentence, I would like to suggest that the Director allow us to choose a friendly, capable author or the Reader’s Digest, and proceed with a book based on the case.

    The next day, DeLoach followed up his own suggestion with this:

    If the Director approves, we have in mind considering cooperating in the preparation of a book with either the Reader’s Digest or author Gerold Frank ….Frank is a well known author whose most recent book is The Boston Strangler. Frank is already working on a book on the Ray case and has asked the Bureau’s cooperation in the preparation of the book on a number of occasions. We have nothing derogatory on him in our files, and our relationship with him has been excellent.2 [Emphasis added.]

    Another author favored by the intelligence community was George McMillan, whose book The Making of an Assassin was favorably reviewed by no less than Jeremiah O’Leary. Mark Lane tells us, “On November 30, 1973, it was revealed that the CIA had forty full-time news reporters on the CIA payroll as undercover informants, some of them as full-time agents.” Lane adds, “It seems clear than an agent-journalist is really an agent, not a journalist.” He then tells us:

    In 1973, the American press was able to secure just two of the forty names in the CIA file of journalists. The Washington Star and the Washington Post reported that one of the two was Jeremiah O’Leary.3

    On March 2 of this year, the Washington Post ran not one but two articles condemning Ray and the calls for a new trial, written by longtime CIA assets Richard Billings and Priscilla Johnson McMillan, wife of George McMillan. In another paper the same Sunday, G. Robert Blakey, the architect of the cover-up at the HSCA, also made his voice heard for the case against a new trial. And a week later, Ramsey Clark – the man who within days of the assassination was telling us there was no conspiracy in the King killing – has also recommended the formation of yet another government panel in lieu of a trial for Ray. The only voice missing was Gerald Posner. But his too will come. Posner’s next book will be about the Martin Luther King assassination, according to Time magazine.

    Is the presence of such people commenting on the James Earl Ray case just coincidence? Or indicative of a continuing cover-up? Examine their backgrounds and decide for yourself.

    Priscilla & George

    It’s predictable, really, that Priscilla would be writing in defense of the official myths relating to the MLK case. “Scilla”, as her husband called her, has been doing the same in the John Kennedy assassination case for years. She just happened to be in the Soviet Union in time to snag an interview with the mysterious Lee Harvey Oswald. Later, she snuggled up to Marina long enough to write a book which Marina later said was full of lies, called Marina and Lee. Priscilla’s parents once housed one of the most famous and high-profile defectors the CIA ever had – Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin. Evan Thomas – father of the current Newsweek mogul of the same name and the man who edited William Manchester’s defense of the Warren Report – assigned Priscilla to write the defector’s biography. Alliluyeva later returned to the Soviet Union in dismay, saying she was under the watch of the CIA at all times.

    I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want.

    – 1962 CIA Memo

    Is Priscilla CIA? She applied for a job there in the fifties, and her 201 file lists her as a “witting collaborator,” meaning, not only was she working with the agency, she knew she was working with the agency. And how independent was she? In a memo from Donald Jameson, who was an experienced Soviet Russia Branch Chief and who in the same year handled Angleton’s prize (and the CIA’s bane) Anatoliy Golitsyn, wrote of Priscilla:

    Priscilla Johnson was selected as a likely candidate to write an article on Yevtushenko in a major U. S. magazine for our campaign…I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want.4 [Emphasis added.]

    Priscilla’s latest writing shows that either she never learned the truth about her husband’s book, or she is unabashedly willing to support the lies therein. For example: George McMillan has long since been taken to task by researchers for writing that Ray’s hatred of King came about as Ray watched King give speeches from Ray’s prison cell. But that prison had no TVs available to inmates, either in cells or cell blocks, until 1970 – two years after King had been killed! This has long since been exposed in print in numerous places. Yet Priscilla repeats this canard in the Washington Post, in 1997. Is this another assignment?

    In addition, George McMillan relied heavily on James Earl Ray’s brother Jerry as a source. Yet Jerry and George both admit that Jerry lied to George. Jerry also alleged, and George did not deny when given the chance, that George made up quotes and attributed them to Jerry. Now, Priscilla writes uncritically of George’s version of events, without acknowledging to Post readers any of these serious challenges to the credibility of George’s description of events.5

    George McMillan himself is also a very interesting character, who shows up in both the King and Kennedy assassination investigations. What is not well known is that George McMillan was one of the earliest post assassination interviewers of George de Mohrenschildt. As reported by Mark Lane on Ted Gandolfo’s Assassinations USA cable program, George McMillan had been in Dallas a few weeks after the assassination. He left his notebook in a hotel with Oswald’s name in it. When the notebook was found, it was reported to the FBI. In it were notes McMillan had taken from de Mohrenschildt. Later, George tried to get in on the Garrison investigation, according to a memo from Garrison’s files, but was rejected because he came on like “three bulls in a very small china shop.” And after de Mohrenschildt’s alleged suicide, McMillan wrote the following in the Washington Post:

    I stayed with de Mohrenschildt and his wife in their lovely house which clutched the side of a steep hill overlooking Port-Au-Prince – and which was, not insignificantly, I suppose, within the compound where Papa Doc Duvalier then lived. We had to pass through heavily guarded gates as we came and went.

    One can only imagine the kind of clearance needed to be able to live inside the dictator’s compound, and to gain access to it as a journalist.

    ….

    The rest of this article in its original form is embedded below, and can also be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease

    Notes

    1. Three Assassinations, Volume 2 (New York: Facts on File, 1978), p. 245. Fauntroy’s original charge was made 4/27/77.

    2. William Pepper, Orders to Kill (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), pp. 53-54.

    3. Mark Lane and Dick Gregory, Murder in Memphis (formerly Code Name: Zorro) (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), pp. 232-233.

    4. CIA Memo from Donald Jameson, Chief SR/CA, dated December 11, 1962.

    5. Lane and Gregory, pp. 230-251.

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  • Michael Baden’s Deceptions

    From Probe, Volume 4, Number 4 (May-June 1997)

     

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  • The FBI and the Framing of Oswald

    From Probe, Vol. 4, no. 3, March-April 1997

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  • The FBI and the Framing of Oswald

    From Probe, Vol. 4, no. 3, March-April 1997

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  • What Did Otto Otepka Know About Oswald and the CIA?

    From the March-April, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 3) of Probe

    Otto Otepka once told journalist Sarah McClendon that he knew who had killed JFK, but would say no more on the subject.1 What might he have been in a position to know?

    As head of the State Department’s Office of Security (SY), Otto Otepka was responsible for issuing or denying security clearances for State Department personnel. He took his job very seriously. In 1958, Otepka was awarded for Meritorious Service by no less than John Foster Dulles. The award lauded Otepka’s “loyalty and devotion to duty” as well as his “sound judgment, creative work and unusual responsibilities”, adding that Otepka “reflected great credit upon himself and the Department and has served as an incentive to his colleagues.”2

    Not a McCarthyite

    Otepka has often been unfairly portrayed as a right-wing clone of Senator Joe McCarthy. But the record does not support this caricature. In fact, Otepka crossed swords with Joe McCarthy in 1953 over Wolf Ladejinksy, a State Department agricultural expert who had once been employed by a Soviet trade agency. Despite such an obvious affiliation, Otepka’s evaluation cleared Ladejinsky of McCarthy’s unfair charges. Otepka himself has stated,

    I thought my whole record would prove I was not a McCarthyite. I had never approved of Senator McCarthy’s tactics. Everyone in the security field knew that.3

    November 5, 1963, Otto Otepka was unceremoniously fired from State based on charges that were unfounded.

    How did Otepka fall so far from grace? And could it have had anything to do with his investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald?

    Otto Otepka’s troubles started in December of 1960. Otepka’s biographer William Gill clearly believes that Otepka’s problems stemmed originally from Otepka’s continued denial of a security clearance for the former OSS veteran Walt Rostow. Otepka had denied him clearance twice before, and in December of 1960, Dean Rusk, newly appointed Secretary of State, visited Otepka in person to ask what Rostow’s chances would be of getting cleared at that time. Otepka was unable to give Rusk any reason to believe Rostow would ever receive clearance, and Rusk subsequently placed Rostow in the White House as a member of Kennedy’s personal staff, specifically as McGeorge Bundy’s second in command on national security matters.

    Walt Whitman Rostow was the brother of Eugene Rostow. In Professor Don Gibson’s article about the creation of the Warren Commission, (Probe, May-June 1996) Gibson revealed Eugene Rostow’s primary role in the formation of that body. Eugene’s call was made less than two and a half hours after Oswald was killed. Walt Rostow also shared something in common with the CIA’s legendary Counterintelligence Chief, James Angleton. He did not believe in the Sino-Soviet split.4 Rostow was no communist, but in fact a hawkish Cold Warrior.

    Walt Rostow was one of Kennedy’s “counterinsurgency” experts. “He made counterinsurgency seem profound, reasonable, and eminently just,” said author Gerald Colby in his book Thy Will Be Done. Walt Rostow – like Dean Rusk, Roswell Gilpatrick, Edward Lansdale, Paul Nitze, Harland Cleveland, Roger Hilsman, Lincoln Gordon, Adolf Berle, McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger – came to work in the Kennedy administration directly from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project. This group had been hand-chosen by Nelson Rockefeller to assist him when he himself was seeking the Presidency. Author Colby called this “Nelson’s Secret Victory”, pointing out that while Kennedy knew many powerful people, they were mostly politicians, not men with experience in foreign affairs. The Rockefeller family network, and Nelson’s group in particular, provided a large assortment of bright, qualified men. However, with such a homogenous group surrounding him, Colby noted, “there was no one to advise the young president on the wisdom and efficacy of such covert operations as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA’s secret war in Indochina, Project Eagle, or Lumumba’s murder.”5

    Otepka’s biographer doesn’t seem to understand the distinction between Kennedy and this group. He insinuates that Bobby was behind Walt Rostow’s rise and Otepka’s fall. Bobby was originally the true believer in counterinsurgency as a means for conducting limited warfare and thus saving a greater number of lives than in outright war, which at that point in time seemed to mean nuclear war. But Bobby became disenchanted himself with both Rusk and Rostow and their type of counterinsurgency. Colby includes the text of one of Bobby’s speeches as released to the press, in which was written, “Victory in a revolutionary war is not won by escalation, but by de-escalation.” Kennedy did not actually speak these words when the speech was delivered, but the words were widely quoted by the press.6

    Investigating Oswald

    Was the denial of clearance for Rostow the trigger for Otepka’s eventual downfall? Or could it have been a letter that went out a few weeks earlier? In a letter dated October 25, 1960, Hugh Cummings of State’s Intelligence and Research Bureau wrote a letter to Richard Bissell at CIA, requesting information on defectors to the Soviet Union. Number eight on the list of eighteen names was Lee Harvey Oswald. In the book Spooks, Jim Hougan writes that,

    According to Otepka, the study on defectors was initiated by him because neither the CIA nor military intelligence agencies would inform the State Department which defectors to the Soviet Union were double agents working for the United States.7

    Although Otepka remained in the dark, within the CIA there seemed to be fewer questions as to for whom Oswald worked.

    When State’s request came to CIA, Bissell turned the request over to two places: James Angleton’s Counterintelligence (CI) staff, and Sheffield Edwards’ Office of Security (OS) staff. In OS, Robert Bannerman, himself a former SY official and a colleague of Otepka’s, told his people to coordinate their response with CI. Evidently, Bannerman knew that Angleton’s CI staff, as opposed to the Soviet Russia Division (SR), would have the answers State needed. Paul Gaynor, of OS’s Security Research Staff (SRS), also seemed to have special knowledge that Angleton would be the appropriate person to handle this request. He passed Bannerman’s request for a coordinated response for State to Marguerite Stevens of SRS.

    John Newman, in Oswald and the CIA, describes the unusual nature of Gaynor’s framing of this request:

    This request, as Gaynor relayed it to Stevens, however, was worded in a peculiar way, as if to dissuade her from doing research on seven people. Bannerman specified that he wanted information on American defectors other than Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin, and five other defectors regarding whom Mr. Otepka of the State Department Security Office already has information. One of the “five other defectors” that Stevens was not supposed to look into was Lee Harvey Oswald.8 [Newman’s emphasis]

    Readers of Probe will remember from the last issue how CIA told the Headquarters offices of the FBI, State and INS that the CIA had already given information (re Oswald’s Mexico City trip) to the field offices of the same entities, which proved to be a lie. Is this a similar lie? Did Otepka have the information already? No, according to Otepka. In addition, we know now that Angleton’s CI/SIG chief, Birch D. O’Neal, prepared his own response regarding these “defectors”. And 10th on the list was Oswald. And more importantly, Oswald’s particular entry was marked SECRET.9 And again, as described in the last Probe, SIG – the Special Investigations Group – contained Angleton’s private handful of his most closed-mouth associates.

    It’s significant that both Bannerman and Gaynor knew that the appropriate area for responding to inquiries about Oswald was Angleton’s CI staff. It’s interesting too how Gaynor relayed a response to a subordinate, Marguerite Stevens, in a manner that did not indicate to her that someone else in CIA had information on Oswald.

    Another significant element in CI/SIG’s response was that it included a known lie. Oswald was listed as having “renounced” his citizenship.10 Although Oswald had attempted renunciation, he had not followed through and was still considered by both governments a citizen of the United States. Newman muses of this assertion, “Was CI/SIG truly incompetent or spinning some counterintelligence yarn?”11 The latter seems more likely, in light of other events.

    The Opening of Oswald’s 201 File

    Late November, 1960, Angleton’s staff sent Bissell their proposed response to State, which Bissell signed and forwarded. Yet we are to believe that, despite this obvious flurry of attention, just a few days later, on December 9, 1960, CI/SIG’s Ann Egerter opened a 201 file in the name of Lee Henry Oswald. Newman has stated that he thinks this name might have been the result of a simple mistake. While this response seems strained for a file that was restricted, as this one was, this explanation is even more weak in light of the recent attention focused on one Lee Harvey Oswald preceding the opening of this file. In fact, Egerter herself directly related the opening of the file to State’s request for information when deposed by the HSCA. Does this make any sense? It seems more like Egerter was trying to hide the CIA’s knowledge of Oswald, than preparing to divulge more of it.

    Newman raises an interesting issue by quoting a memo from the man who later took Angleton’s position, George T. Kalaris. Kalaris gave a different version of why the 201 file was opened at that time, which states flatly:

    Lee Harvey Oswald’s 201 file was first opened as a result of his “defection” to the USSR on 31 Oct 1959 and renewed interest in Oswald brought about by his queries concerning possible reentry into the United States.12

    One of Oswald’s own letters supports Kalaris’ assertion. Oswald wrote to the American Embassy in Moscow in early 1961:

    Since I have not received a reply to my letter of December, 1960, I am writing again asking that you consider my request for the return of my American passport.13

    Newman quotes from an ABC Nightline broadcast from 1991, in which ABC claims that the KGB had intercepted this letter and that the original still exists in Soviet files. Newman further points out that only some extraordinary source or method could have relayed this information to the CIA so quickly for them to open the 201 file by December 9th. Even if Oswald wrote on December 1st, how did the CIA, continents away, learn the contents of a letter in the cold war Soviet Union within eight days? And more importantly, what would that indicate about the level of interest the CIA really had in Oswald, to be monitoring him so closely? In addition, Newman points out that,

    Throughout Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, an Agency element which appears regularly on cover sheets for Oswald documents is CI/OPS, which means “Counterintelligence Operations.” If Oswald was a dangle, this might suggest that it was a counterintelligence operation run by Angleton.

    Whatever the truth of the opening of the 201 file and the true purpose of Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union, Otepka’s request for information sparked a chain of communications to Angleton’s unit, which then lied about Oswald in response. And Otepka’s life irrevocably changed. From December 1960, whether due to his refusal to clear Rostow, his poking into Oswald, or some other reason, Otepka started being taken off any “sensitive” security cases. It seemed Otepka’s reputation for meticulous attention to detail and thoroughness was making him a problem in SY. Why? Who was threatened by a man doing a good job?

    Downward Spiral

    An incredible, three year campaign unfolded against Otepka. Because of his stellar record, no one dared fire him. But all kinds of efforts were spent trying to make him want to quit, starting with his removal from the most sensitive cases in December, 1960. The first public attack began when stories appeared in the press that State – and specifically Otepka’s security area – would be undergoing a “reduction in force.”14

    Shortly thereafter, Otepka was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), of which Senator James Eastland was Chair and Senator Thomas Dodd a vocal member. Otepka had gotten to know Jay Sourwine, the subcommittee’s Chief Counsel. Informally, Otepka had shared some of his concerns for what he saw as a loosening of the clearance procedures with Sourwine. Sourwine and the subcommittee quickly began, with Dodd presiding, to hold what came to be known as the Otepka hearings. In the subcommittee’s subsequent report, the members concluded that the release of the news stories was meant to cause Otepka’s voluntary resignation.

    Since this effort failed, other steps had to be taken. Otepka’s superior in SY tried to entice Otepka into taking a position in a different division. But Otepka refused, and none too soon, since that division was dissolved a mere two months later.15 Next, Otepka was shifted into a position that was essentially a demotion. Still, Otepka hung on, trying to do the job he felt needed to be done.

    Otepka had found that Rusk had appointed a number of officials to State under a blanket waiver that effectively backdated security clearances for the new officials. Otepka tried to raise his concern with his superiors, and urged them to go to SISS. But SY just wanted Otepka to look the other way.

    In 1962, John Francis Reilly took control of SY. From the very beginning, he too seemed to be on a mission to get rid of Otepka. Otepka’s biographer relates this encounter, just weeks into Reilly’s term:

    Smiling broadly, [Reilly] asked, “Where’s your rabbit’s foot?” Mystified, Otepka raised his eyebrows in question. Reilly laughed and, maintaining his air of benevolent affability, he explained that Otepka had just been selected to attend the National War College. This was an honor usually reserved for Foreign Service officers marked for higher things. Being human, Otepka was naturally pleased. Reilly seemed genuinely delighted that such good fortune had befallen a member of his staff and just for a moment, Otepka was taken in. He accepted the appointment with thanks, and perhaps with a sense of relief that he could escape, at least temporarily, from the strained atmosphere that prevailed in SY. Reilly shrewdly asked him to put his acceptance in writing.

    That same day, May 7, Otepka wrote Reilly a memorandum formally expressing his willingness to attend the War College for ten months beginning in August. However, he could not resist adding, tongue in cheek, that the appointment had come as something of a surprise to him because the State Department had repeatedly assured him, the Congress, and the public that he would be kept in a responsible position in the Office of Security. Reilly returned this memo with the request that Otepka delete his comments on the Department’s premises. Otepka complied.16

    Reilly, however, overplayed his hand. His overdone praise made Otepka a bit uneasy, and he decided to do a little checking on his own. What he found was that his appointment had not been entered with the regular nominations, but was entered as a last minute emergency-type nomination. Otepka then asked Reilly if by accepting, he would still be able to return to his post at State. Reilly admitted he would have to fill Otepka’s spot, and there would be no place to which Otepka could return. With that, Otepka rejected this “honor” and chose to remain in place.

    Less than a week after Otepka’s refusal, Reilly placed his first spy, Fred Traband, in Otepka’s office. More would follow. Reilly also brought in a National Security Agency (NSA) alumnus, David Belisle, to work with Otepka. Belisle brought with him a new “short form” procedure to rush through people’s security clearances. Otepka was appalled, but powerless. Belisle took away Otepka’s card-file index, the product of years of work. Otepka was removed from the FBI’s after-hours call list, which was another demotion. For a short time, Otepka was seriously thinking of quitting. Ironically, it was his buddy, Jay Sourwine, who talked him out of it. Ironically because it was this very relationship that most contributed to Otepka’s eventual downfall.

    Sourwine started working on Otepka to get him to divulge what was really going on behind the scenes at State. But as usual, being a by-the-book person, Otepka insisted on following protocol. If Sourwine wanted him to testify before SISS, the subcommittee would have to formally request his testimony. And then, Otepka insisted on getting clearance from his superiors before testifying. Was Sourwine truly interested in helping Otepka, or was he part of a plot to entrap Otepka into saying something that would finally provide the justification for Otepka’s ouster?

    In mid-February, 1963, Otepka was formally notified that his appearance was requested before SISS. Otepka testified to the subcommittee on four different occasions. At the very first hearing, Sourwine asked the question relating to the cause of Otepka’s appearance before the committee in the first place. He asked if Otepka had been subjected to any “reprisals” from State because of his previous testimony. But Otepka was wary of saying anything that could make his already uncomfortable situation at SY worse, and defended both State and their treatment of him. Otepka defended his own actions, but would not point an accusatory finger at anyone else. Sourwine continued to press the matter with more subtle questions, until he got Otepka to talk about a case where Otepka conceded to being pressured to put through two security clearances where he didn’t feel one was justified. Otepka’s refusal to clear the persons delayed the formation of the committee to which these people had been appointed for over a year. And in the end, through Otepka’s persistence, they were both dropped from the committee.17

    One of Otepka’s biggest heresies, however, was disclosing to the Senate subcommittee that, despite the subcommittee’s earlier report and recommendations from the earlier Otepka hearings, State had continued to process under blanket waivers nearly 400 people in the roles of file clerks and secretaries. As author Gill put it, “it is often easier for an obscure clerk or a trusted secretary to waltz off the premises with a top-secret document than it would be for an official at the policy-making level who is afraid he is being watched.”18 This greatly alarmed the senators, but Otepka added one more piece of information. There was an effort underway to reinstate Alger Hiss to the State Department. Knowing what we know today, one might wish that effort had been successful. But at the time, all that was known was that Hiss had been convicted of perjury and had been accused of espionage.

    High-Tech Harassment

    Shortly after the third or fourth appearance, Otepka began noticing trouble on his phone line. Chatter could be heard sometimes, other times calls wouldn’t go through, and sometimes there would be an amplification effect. Otepka was being bugged. And not just through the phone. Listening devices were installed in his office. What could someone possibly fear that Otepka might be discussing to warrant such intense surveillance?

    And then there was the night Otepka had been working late, stepped out for dinner, and then returned to work some more. Imagine his surprise when, around 10pm, David Belisle and another NSA spook entered his office, thinking he was gone for the night. Belisle made the flimsy excuse that he had been concerned by a cleaning woman he claimed to have seen entering Otepka’s office. But Otepka had been sitting there for some time, and called Belisle on this lie.19

    When Otepka’s regular secretary fell sick, one Joyce Schmelzer was placed in his office with orders to spy on Otepka. One of her tasks was to gather the burn bag each night, mark it with a big red “X”, then call to alert another SY member that Otepka’s burn bag was on the way down. The trash was searched regularly for any incriminating information that could be used against Otepka.

    For weeks, his house was under surveillance. His wife, tired of seeing the man in the car parked across the street every night, called the local police. After the police forced the man to identify himself (he worked for a private security firm), the man never reappeared.

    Was Otepka keeping people with carefully constructed communist-like backgrounds from being placed, on behalf of intelligence agencies, in State for official cover? It would seem his offenses must have been extraordinary to warrant such high-level harassment. Was someone out to discredit Otepka in case he later spilled the beans on one particularly sensitive case?

    Someone had even drilled a hole into his safe, and with a mirror determined the correct combination, and then plugged the hole again. What could someone possibly fear that Otepka might be discussing to warrant such intense surveillance? According to Otepka, the only sensitive material in the safe was his half-finished study of American defectors in the Soviet Union, with a yet to be completed determination on one Lee Harvey Oswald. When Hougan asked Otepka specifically if Otepka had been able to figure out if Oswald was an agent of the US or not, Otepka answered, “We had not made up our minds when my safe was drilled and we were thrown out of the office.”20

    Amazingly, the people involved in harassing Otepka did little to cover their tracks. It was an open secret that Otepka was being tapped. And Otepka still had many friends in State, who told him who was responsible for many of these activities. Meanwhile, Reilly was trying to undermine Otepka’s support on SISS. He told all kinds of lies about what Otepka had done on various security cases and directly contradicted Otepka’s testimony before the subcommittee. Otepka was appalled. The Senate subcommittee was in quandry about who to believe – Otepka, or his SY superior. Sourwine told Otepka he would need something other than his word. He would need documents. Again, one should consider what followed in regards to the question of whether Sourwine was engaging in some form of entrapment.

    Preparing the Defense

    For ten days, Otepka gathered his evidence. He prepared a 39 page brief with 36 attachments to support his own testimony and directly refute that of Reilly’s. Of the attachments, 25 were unclassified; six were marked “Official Use Only”, three were marked “Limited Official Use”; and two were marked “Confidential.”21

    Otepka was careful that none of what he divulged to the Senate subcommittee was information that in any way could compromise the national security of the United States. And even the two marked “Confidential” were mere transmittal memorandums for more sensitive attachments, and Otepka did not turn over the attachments.

    The piece d’resistance in this affair was the manipulation of evidence taken from Otepka’s own safe. Sensitive documents were “found” in his burn bag one night, with the classification tags illegally clipped off. Otepka claimed, and the State Department never denied, that the evidence seems to support the contention that the documents were planted in his bags for the sole purpose of discrediting him. The day after these documents turned up, SISS called several SY members to the Hill to discuss the bugging of Otepka. The first man called was the spy Reilly had planted in Otepka’s office from the beginning, Fred Traband. Traband was so unnerved at being called, however, that, while denying knowledge of the tapping, he told the story behind the burn bag operation. The next man, Terry Shea, not only acknowledged the burn bag story, but added that Reilly had personally searched Otepka’s files and safe. The rest continued to deny any participation in or knowledge of the tapping of Otepka.

    House of Cards

    On June 27, 1963, Reilly unceremoniously shunted Otepka out of his office into a new, make-work position reviewing and updating policy manuals. Otepka was ordered to turn over the combination to his safe (which still held the unfinished Oswald study) and was sent to another office on another floor. He was denied access to his former records. Many of Otepka’s staff were purged from their positions at this time as well. On his new office wall, Otepka hung these words from Prime Minister Churchill:

    Never give in. Never, never, never, never! Never yield in any way, great or small, large or petty, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.22

    Adrift without direction, Otepka took some time off, and then made the mistake of stopping by his old office for a look. Belisle heard about this and admonished Otepka to stay away. Otepka’s wife was surprised, when calling her husband at his office, to hear “Mr. Otepka is no longer here.” And Otepka’s phone was rigged so that he could receive no incoming calls himself. His buzzer was disabled. When a call for Otepka came in, a phone would ring in another location, where a secretary would have to answer the call, and then walk to his door, knock, and tell him to pick up the line, before he could receive the call. This also ensured no privacy, since anyone could be listening on the other end of his calls. One of the men involved in tapping Otepka, Elmer Hill, had his wiretap lab across from Otepka’s office.23

    Domestic Espionage?

    At the end of July, the other shoe dropped. Otepka was informed by the FBI that he was being formally charged with espionage. Years later, it was discovered this move was ordered by Rusk himself, and the order hand-delivered by Reilly to the Department of Justice. This, for turning documents over to a Senate subcommittee. He was also charged with having clipped security classifications from documents, something Otepka did not do.

    In our last issue of Probe, we told of another whistleblower, Richard Nuccio, and how he was punished for giving information to the congressional body legitimately designated to receive such. Peter Kornbluh, writing for the Washington Post, quoted a 1912 law which stated that “the right of employees …to furnish information to either House or Congress, or to a committee or member thereof, may not be interfered with or denied.” Otepka himself cited this same law to the FBI in defense of his own actions.

    Meanwhile, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was going to bat for Otepka. They hauled before them what the committee later called the “lying trio” of Reilly, Belisle and Hill.24 All three were found to have committed perjury when they denied knowledge of the tap on Otepka.

    The Long Shadow of Walter Sheridan

    In an interesting and relevant side story, the tapes made from the bugging of Otepka’s office were passed to a man that was unidentified in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s hearings. Jim Hougan, while researching a strange case of bugging on Capitol Hill, found a man, Sidney Goldberg, who claims that the man in the corridor was none other than Walter Sheridan.25 Walter Sheridan was the former NSA and FBI man who did so much to sabotage Jim Garrison during his investigation into Kennedy’s assassination. According to a source of Goldberg’s, Hougan wrote that Sheridan “disposed over the personnel and currency of whole units of the Central Intelligence Agency.”26 In addition, the same source claimed that Sheridan was behind the preservation of Belisle’s job with State when Belisle’s role in the bugging of Otepka was revealed. Belisle was not fired, but was transferred to Bonn, Germany. Sheridan denied having any role in these events. But is Sheridan to be believed, in light of the lies he put forth during the Garrison investigation?

    Despite the support of the committee, Otepka was on the way out. He was met at work on September 22, 1963, with a note saying “You are hereby notified that it is proposed to remove you from your appointment with the Department of State ….”27 Otepka was outraged at the charges:

    “I was not particularly disturbed by the charges regarding my association with Jay Sourwine or the data I’d furnished him for the subcommittee,” Otepka later recalled. “But I was shocked and angered to find that the State Department had resorted to a cheap, gangland frame-up to place me under charges for crimes it knew I had never committed.”28

    One would think that finally, Otepka’s ordeal would be over. One would be wrong. He had been fired from his career position at State. Yet even after this, Otepka was warned that his home phone was probably tapped! And just a few days later, the man who had originally divulged who was behind the tapping of Otepka, Stanley Holden, suffered a mysterious “accident.” Holden was a good friend of Otepka’s, and had himself been under surveillance. His face and tongue had been so badly cut that stitches were required. His own explanation of being hit in the face by a heavy spring did not seem to explain his wounds, and the rumor went around that he had been beaten up by those who didn’t like him talking.

    In a last ditch effort to preserve Otepka at State, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee wrote a brief letter, signed by every subcommittee member, which strongly urged Rusk to reconsider the decision to force Otepka out of State. But Otepka’s fate had already been sealed. On November 5, 1963, Otepka was finally formally ousted from the State Department. Just seventeen days later, Kennedy would be assassinated. And the killing would be pinned on the man Otepka was trying to investigate when he was removed from his office.

    Notes

    1. Sarah McClendon, Mr. President, Mr. President! (Santa Monica: General Publishing Group, 1996) p. 82

    2. William J. Gill, The Ordeal of Otto Otepka (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969), p. 56

    3. Gill, p. 232

    4. Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1995), p. 553

    5. Colby and Dennett, p. 343

    6. Colby and Dennett, pp. 542-543.

    7. Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1978) p. 371

    8. John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), p. 172

    9. Newman, p. 172

    10. Newman, p. 172

    11. Newman, p. 173

    12. Newman, p. 176

    13. Newman, p. 177

    14. Gill, p. 117

    15. Gill, p. 123

    16. Gill, pp. 161-162

    17. Gill, p. 235

    18. Gill, p. 238

    19. Gill, p. 243

    20. Hougan, p. 371

    21. Gill, p. 254

    22. Gill, p. 280

    23. Gill, p. 285

    24. Gill, p. 289

    25. Hougan, p. 128. Hougan wrote of a wiretap that was discovered that ran from Capitol Hill to the Esso building, terminating not in the basement, where most lines terminate, but on the top floor behind a locked door to which the phone company didn’t even have access. The floor was leased to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, and the room was marked as a “restricted area”. Goldberg had a source that claimed Walter Sheridan was the ultimate recipient of this tap. In addition, Bernard Fensterwald appears in this story. When he heard that Goldberg was on the trail of the tap, he walked into Goldberg’s office and offered to help. Fensterwald convinced Goldberg to sign a statement that wasn’t true under the guise that this would help him. The situation became a nightmare for Goldberg. Fensterwald also played a role in protecting the tap. The tap was brought to the attention of Senator Long’s Ad-Prac committee by Bernie Spindel, a famed wiretapper himself. Spindel claimed government agents were constantly working on the tap. Fensterwald then committed a “blunder”: he requested information on the cable from the telephone company. This had the effect of sending a warning to whoever was bugging the hill. Because such requests took several days to process, the buggers had plenty of time to remove the tap that was under investigation. Why would Fensterwald, a sophisticated lawyer who sat on a committee specifically involved with wiretapping issues, make such an obvious mistake?

    26. Hougan, p. 128

    27. Gill, p. 291

    28. Gill, p. 293

  • Is It Ever Too Late To Do The Right Thing?

    From the March-April, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 3) of Probe

    In 1963, a popular political figure was shot in the back. The killer was not convicted. In his closing arguments to the jury, having laid out the evidence of the accused’s guilt, the Assistant District Attorney responsible for the case asked the jury:

    Where justice is never fulfilled, that wound will never be cleansed ….Is it ever too late to do the right thing?

    And the Hinds County jury rose to the call, and made a bridge across history to right an old wrong. On Saturday morning, February 5, 1994, the Hinds County, Mississippi jury, over 30 years after the crime, convicted Byron de la Beckwith with the murder of one of the earliest civil rights activists of the 1960’s: Medgar Evers.

    The circumstances that brought this case from the dustbin of history back into the headlines and courtroom is an extraordinary one, detailed in the book Ghosts of Mississippi, by Maryanne Vollers (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1995) and depicted in a movie made from the book. Were it not for a courageous, tenacious Assistant District Attorney named Bobby DeLaughter, and a set of fortuitous circumstances, aided by the widow Myrlie Evers, this crime might have gone forever unsolved, unpunished. Fortunately for the Evers family and for history, DeLaughter was determined to bring this to trial, saying “We would have been derelict in our duty if we had not proceeded.”

    In 1987, DeLaughter’s boss, District Attorney Ed Peters, had said he didn’t think the case could be reopened. And most likely he would have been right, had it not been for a confluence of evidence that surfaced, such as a 1989 Jackson Clarion-Ledger article revealing the possibility of jury tampering in a previous trial; long-preserved court records from previous trials, held by the widow; and in a truly mystical twist of fate – the finding of the murder weapon in DeLaughter’s ex-father-in-law’s gun collection. And by the time of the trial, DeLaughter and his staff had found six people to whom Beckwith had bragged of his murder of Evers. No, in Mississippi, in 1994, it was not too late to see justice served.

    But is it too late in Memphis? In an eerily preemptive comment made to USA Today in 1994, the NAACP’s Earl Shinhoster had warned that the Evers victory might be a unique case, saying that it “would take something of proportion or magnitude”of what had happened in the Evers case to right other old wrongs, “which we may not ever get”. On February 20, 1997, the family of Martin Luther King, together with William Pepper, lawyer for James Earl Ray, went before Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown to plead for new scientific tests to be performed on the alleged murder weapon. No match has ever been made between the bullet found in King and the weapon associated with Ray. Sophisticated tests could conceivably rule out Ray as the assassin.

    As the last chance for the truth is fading with Ray’s health, the family of Martin Luther King has stepped from the shadows of their own long-held doubts to call for a new hearing of evidence in the killing of the great leader. Spurred by the rapid deterioration of James Earl Ray, the man alleged to have been the assassin, Dexter King, the youngest son of Martin Luther King, spoke for his family in calling for a real trial. The King case was never tested in a court of law, since Ray immediately confessed, then recanted a couple of days later claiming his confession was coerced. “The lack of a satisfactory resolution to questions surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. has been a source of continuing pain and hardship to our family. Every effort must be made to determine the truth…this can only be accomplished in a court of law,”said Dexter to reporters, adding that the family members “…are united today in calling for the trial that never occurred. We make our appeal at this time because of concerns that Mr. Ray’s illness may result in death, which will end the possibility of a trial ever to come.”

    As reported in the last issue of Probe, Ray is deathly ill. In need of a liver transplant and in hospital care, this is his last chance to see the truth come out in his lifetime. His current lawyer, William Pepper, has written a book detailing much of the evidence that shows that Ray could not have committed such a crime without help, and that it is extremely unlikely that Ray committed the crime at all. In December of 1993, Lloyd Jowers, owner of the restaurant Jim’s Grill, (located in the basement of the rooming house from which the shots were allegedly fired,) went on ABC’s PrimeTime Live show to say that he been had asked to hire an assassin to kill King. The person he hired, he said, was not James Earl Ray. Jowers’ confession came on the heels of an HBO-sponsored mock trial in which Pepper and others laid out the facts of the case before a jury. The jury in the HBO trial found Ray not guilty, but the facts uncovered in the process caused Jowers to ask for immunity if he told more of what he knew. When promises of immunity were not forthcoming, Jowers went into hiding.

    Dexter and the family have harbored suspicions of a high level conspiracy involving forces in the government for 29 years, but have kept silent. Now, Dexter is finding his voice. “It’s no secret that my father during that time was considered enemy No. 1 to the establishment. It’s no secret that he was not the most favorite person of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI.”Citing his father’s opposition to the Vietnam war, Dexter expanded upon this theme, suggesting that “There may have been individuals [in the government] who saw him as a major threat. The country was in turmoil at the time, I guess you could say civil unrest, and this frightened many people. So, certainly there would be adequate motive.”

    ….

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

  • Is It Ever Too Late To Do The Right Thing?

    Is It Ever Too Late To Do The Right Thing?

    From the March-April, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 3) of Probe

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