This Boston Globe article is a rare exception for the MSM. It is an honest and complete review of the evidence showing Bobby Kennedy never bought into the lone assassin, “Oswald did it” scenario. Not on 11/22/63, and not in 1968, when he was running for president in California, just before he himself was killed under suspicious circumstances.
~Jim DiEugenio
This Boston Globe article is a rare exception for the MSM. It is an honest and complete review of the evidence showing Bobby Kennedy never bought into the lone assassin, “Oswald did it” scenario. Not on 11/22/63, and not in 1968, when he was running for president in California, just before he himself was killed under suspicious circumstances.
~Jim DiEugenio
I think all of us who are interested in the assassinations of the sixties carry around certain archetypal, indelible images in our heads that symbolize those moments of horror and tragedy. Some of those images actually exist and are embedded in film or photos, e.g., Zapruder frame 313. Some of them were not actually captured on any kind of film. But they are so well described and documented that they have become real for us.
The image I carry around from the 1968 Los Angeles murder of Robert Kennedy is one that many readers of this site are familiar with. But many, many more who are not readers, and who have not done even a modicum of research on that case, have never contemplated. My image is of a young, excited, attractive girl fleeing the murder scene—the pantry—to escape out the back door of the Ambassador Hotel. She is wearing a white dress with dark polka dots. As she and a companion run down the stairs, they met an even younger RFK worker named Sandy Serrano. When Sandy asked what happened, the girl shouted, “We shot him! We shot him!” Serrano asked, “Who did you shoot?” The girl in the polka dot dress said, “We shot Senator Kennedy”. Sandy then went up the stairs to see if this was so. It was. (Faura, p. 99)
That strange, almost surreal meeting is so vivid, so compelling, that once one reads about it, it becomes almost unforgettable. It is an image that truly is, to apply that overused word, cinematic: what with its kinetic planes of motion, its vivid colors, its almost palpably dark overtones. But beyond that, and for our purposes, Serrano’s testimony is prima facie evidence of conspiracy. For the girl used the first person plural pronoun, “We.” And as many authors have noted, what made Serrano’s experience even more incriminating is that she told NBC newsman Sander Vanocur about it on national television. Albeit back east it was the wee hours of the morning when she was on, lo and behold, there it was, smack dab in the middle of the MSM. (Faura, pp. 10, 99)
At the time of the RFK assassination, Fernando Faura was employed by a newspaper called the Hollywood Citizen News. It is safe to say that no other reporter did as much work in tracking down the girl in the polka dot dress than he did. In fact, it is also safe to say that no one even came close. His work became a standard for other authors on the RFK case when they wrote about her. For example, when I interviewed the late William Turner, he had much respect for the work that Faura did on this crucial issue. And his files contained some of the stories that the local reporter penned about the RFK case.
Faura has now, somewhat belatedly, written a book about his experience on the RFK case. His work elucidates just how important his pursuit of the girl was. No other author has ever written at this length and depth about her.
The irony about Faura latching onto the RFK case was that Bobby Kennedy was not even his beat at the time. He was actually covering a California assembly race in June of 1968. He heard about the RFK shooting on his car radio. By the next morning he learned two important things about the case. First, that prior to being at the Kennedy celebration the night of the shooting, Sirhan had reportedly been at the headquarters of Senate candidate Max Rafferty, located upstairs at the Ambassador Hotel. (p. 13) But more importantly, the first reports about the accused assailant being accompanied by a girl shouting “We shot him!” began to circulate. (ibid, p. 16) As Faura writes, when he heard this, he immediately began to contemplate there had been a conspiracy. Even though his contacts in the LAPD—plus Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief Tom Reddin— were already battening down the hatches and proclaiming Sirhan as the lone assassin. The other evidentiary point that made him suspicious was that, through his reporting contacts, he learned that the police had a file on Sirhan before the RFK murder. Even though, as far as he could discern, Sirhan had no criminal record before this time. (p. 20)
Because of his interest in the case, Faura met with Sirhan’s family lawyer Dave Marcus. Marcus handled immigration problems for Sirhan’s brothers, Munir and Saidallah. Through Marcus, he also met Jordan Bonfante and Robert Kaiser from Life magazine. Bonfante was an editor, Kaiser a contributor. Marcus offered Faura the opportunity to write a book about Sirhan. Faura declined. Kaiser then accepted. (p. 28) In retrospect, one really has to wonder about the wisdom of that decision. Kaiser’s book was the first one out of the chute after Sirhan’s trial. For all of his musing about Sirhan perhaps being a Manchurian Candidate, it is still an official story book. If Faura had been first, his book would have been much more in line with what, say, Harold Weisberg did on the JFK case. It would have been a book doubting the official story. Instead we had to wait several years for the first volume questioning what LAPD had done, i.e., The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, by William Turner and Jonn Christian, released in 1978.
After Faura published a story based on a witness at the Rafferty gathering who saw Sirhan there, two things happened that changed the trajectory of his inquiry. Bonfante got in contact and offered to work with him on the case under the sponsorship of Life. Secondly, a man named John Fahey read the story and came to visit him at work.
Relatively little has been written about Fahey in the RFK literature. For instance, he is not mentioned in the aforementioned Turner/Christian book. Over a decade later, Philip Melanson did not mention him in his estimable The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination. What makes this odd is that both books do reference Faura. And both books do discuss the girl in the polka dot dress. In reading Faura’s book it is hard not to conclude that Fahey was his most important discovery, because it is equally hard not to conclude that Fahey spent a good part of June 4, 1968 with the girl. He then dropped her off at the Ambassador. A few hours later, she escorted Sirhan into the pantry. She then ran out and told Sandy Serrano what they had done.
Before we get into a full discussion of Fahey and his dealings with the FBI, LAPD and Faura, we should set the stage a bit more fully. For many different reasons, the RFK murder does not get the exposure it should, so even readers of this site may not be fully familiar with that case, or the importance of two related points: 1.) The issue of post-hypnotic suggestion, and 2.) The interactions between Sirhan and the girl that evening. We should concisely deal with both of these points in order to understand how important the testimony of Fahey actually is.
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| Author Fernando Faura |
The first psychiatrist who analyzed Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was Bernard Diamond, a professor of forensic psychiatry at UC Berkeley. He is often quoted as saying that it became obvious to him rather early that Sirhan had been previously programmed. Further, that his reaction to hypnosis was exceptionally keen, in the sense that he could easily be put under, fulfill a command given to him while hypnotized, and afterwards deny he had done it or acted under post hypnotic suggestion. For instance, as authors like Melanson have detailed, once he went under, Diamond would suggest that Sirhan later climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. Diamond would then snap him out of the trance. Sirhan would then climb on cue, e.g., Diamond would say a certain word, or make a certain facial expression. After he did it, Diamond would ask him why. Invariably, Sirhan would deny he did so.
After reviewing this record, the late Dr. Herbert Spiegel—perhaps the nation’s leading expert on hypnosis—came to the conclusion that, on a rating scale of susceptibility, Sirhan was a 5, meaning he was in a class of persons that amounted to less than 10% of the population—those who could be hypnotized very simply and easily. He also said that Sirhan’s background as a Palestinian refugee, with a childhood plagued with political violence, could be used as a hook for the programming. Spiegel added the following: these painful memories could be conjured up and then utilized as direction for the intended goal of the programmer.
Perhaps the most interesting observations on this crucial subject were those stated in a legal declaration by Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas. Simson was the chief psychologist in Sirhan’s prison testing program. He ended up spending over 35 hours with Sirhan. Agreeing with Spiegel, he stated that Sirhan was easily hypnotized. Agreeing further, he said that the Arab-Israeli conflict could have been used as a motivation.
In one aspect, Simson went even further than Diamond and Spiegel. After spending so much time with the subject, he did not think Sirhan was sufficiently devious or unbalanced to act on his own in the murder of RFK. He stated that Sirhan had to have been prepared in advance. As he said so simply: “He was hypnotized by someone.” (These and further clinical observations were stated in Simson’s’ 33-point declaration this reviewer read out of Turner’s files.)
Simson developed a degree of trust and rapport with his subject. Sirhan seemed to want to know what happened that night at the Ambassador. So Simson was in the process of attempting to deprogram him when his superiors told him to stop the procedure. Simson was so disappointed in this that he resigned and went into private practice.
Simson had harsh words for Sirhan’s defense team. Sirhan’s lawyers tried to plead diminished capacity at his trial. Diamond then stated that Sirhan had hypnotized himself. Simson could not disagree more. He wrote that it is just not possible to render oneself into such a deep state of hypnosis and then to set up blocks of amnesia so one cannot recall it. He then stated that it was a mistake by the defense—he called it the psychiatric blunder of the century—to admit guilt and then proclaim Sirhan as temporarily deranged. Since Sirhan resisted the derangement syndrome, he was not cooperative with the defense and they could not unlock his mind to find out who had planted the post hypnotic suggestions.
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| Phil Melanson |
How does this all intersect with the girl in the polka dot dress? When Diamond put Sirhan under, he would often ask him to perform something called automatic writing. This is a technique that, through a slow and repetitive process of writing with a pen to paper, attempts to release the subject’s deeper thoughts and feelings. Once, Diamond asked Sirhan if anyone was with him when he shot at Kennedy in the pantry of the hotel. Sirhan began to write out very slowly: “The girl…the girl…the girl.” Secondly, during his discussions with Simson—while in a normal state—the doctor asked him the last thing he recalled about that night. Sirhan replied that he recalled sitting at a small table with the girl. They were drinking coffee. She wanted lots of cream and sugar. They were then asked to leave that area. She then led him into the pantry. (Faura, pp. 210-211)
At this point, Faura begins to use excerpts from Professor Dan Brown’s interviews with Sirhan. Brown is a professor of psychology at Harvard. At the time, he was employed by attorney William Pepper, who was making an attempt to reopen the Bobby Kennedy case. Brown ended up spending even more time with Sirhan than Simson-Kallas did. Brown writes that, after Sirhan followed the girl into the pantry, he recalled getting something like a tap on the shoulder. He then went into his “weapons stance”, like he was at a target range, the visual cue being the polka dots. After firing once or twice, Sirhan snapped out of it and realized he was not at a range; then people started grabbing him and he asked himself “What is going on?”
This makes four forensic psychiatrists who have all come to the conclusion that Sirhan had been programmed. Brown states that “Sirhan has a rare combination of personality characteristics that make him highly vulnerable to … mind control methods.” He further wrote that “Mr. Sirhan’s memory report is consistent with hypnotic programming hypothesis.”
The forensic psychiatrist concluded that Sirhan’s act of firing at Kennedy that night was not the result of his conscious behavior. He wrote that it is “likely the product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control. … further, that the system of mind control which was imposed upon him has also made it impossible for him to recall under hypnosis, or consciously, many critical details of actions and events leading to and at the time of the shooting … .” (ibid, p. 213) In other words, agreeing with Simson-Kallas, someone planted mental blocks in Sirhan’s mind to conceal certain keys to his programming.
To close out this aspect of the case, with all this in the record, it is now necessary to mention two other crucial evidentiary points. Serrano did not just witness the girl and one companion fleeing down the stairs after the assassination. She saw the girl also enter the hotel from that same entrance prior to the shooting. (ibid, p. 101) Except at that time, there was a second male companion with the girl, a man who she later said resembled Sirhan. Secondly, in the pantry, after the shooting, almost everyone was absolutely hysterical—shouting, screaming, weeping, attacking Sirhan. People were panic-stricken, trying to figure out what happened. People were trying to get in the room to see what had happened.
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| RFK signs poster for bystander Michael Wayne minutes before he is assassinated. |
Yet, as Faura details, there were three people who were not acting like this at all. They were not panic-stricken or overcome with grief. They were intent on escaping from the room. These were the girl, her original companion, and a man named Michael Wayne—who we shall discuss later.
As the reader can see from this brief précis, ample evidence exists that Sirhan was being manipulated. More than ample evidence exists that the girl was a key part of that manipulation. John Fahey spent the day of the assassination with the girl. He then dropped her off at the Ambassador Hotel.
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| Robert Parry |
As noted, Fahey came to see Faura after he read his first story on the RFK case, which had made the front page of the Citizen-News. Faura would find Fahey’s story so fascinating, so compelling, so potentially important to solving the case, that he recorded it on tape. He then had it transcribed. (Faura, p. 33)
Fahey worked at a chemical company. He arrived at the Ambassador that morning on a business matter. While waiting in the coffee shop he met up with an attractive young girl. She would eventually give Fahey a few names, but the first one she gave him was Alice. This is one way, Fahey felt, that she was communicating to him she was doing something secretive. In fact, when he asked her directly what she was doing there, she put him off with words to the effect: I would not want you involved. (ibid, p. 36) She then walked him over to the RFK headquarters part of the hotel. She said that Kennedy would be taken care of that night, after his reception. She then said that they were being watched. Since Fahey mentioned that he needed to travel out to Oxnard later, she asked if she could join him. Fahey accepted and they drove off. But shortly after they hit the road, it became evident that they were being tailed. This seemed to genuinely upset her. When Fahey asked why they were being followed, she said it had to do with what was going to happen to RFK after his reception.
Once the pair got to Oxnard, Fahey decided to go on further to Ventura. But he noticed that there was now a different tail behind them. (p. 41) Fahey told Faura that she said some strange things that, at the time, he did not really comprehend. She mentioned getting a false passport to leave the country as soon as she could. She mentioned departing LA on a plane from Flying Tigers Airlines. She also said she had come to Los Angeles from New York City, where she had met a woman named Anna Chennault. Fahey thought she might be delusional, or inebriated.
When they arrived back at the Ambassador it was around 7 PM. She said she was staying at Olympic and Kenmore, which was nearby. Fahey commented that it was pretty clear that she knew her way about every nook and cranny of the hotel. When they got back, she went to the back of the hotel. Spooked, he did not want to be associated with her anymore. (p. 52)
After the assassination, Fahey understood what had happened. He went to the FBI, who interviewed him and said they would recall him. Fahey and Faura went over the route Fahey said he had driven with the girl. Fahey was very specific about where they stopped for lunch and where he got a flat tire. Faura then took him to the police. The reporter gave them a copy of the transcript. They also asked for the original tape to duplicate. Which, of course, Faura did not get back until 20 years later, when it was declassified at the California Archives in Sacramento. After the LAPD interviewed Fahey they told him not to discuss his story, and for Faura not to write about it. They based the latter on a gag order placed over the upcoming Sirhan trial. Faura thought it was nonsense to apply this to the press. But clearly LAPD was fearful that Fahey would give credibility to Serrano’s story.
By this time, Faura was getting suspicious about what the LAPD and FBI were actually doing. Reportedly, the Bureau had four hundred agents working the RFK case. LAPD had set up a select unit inside the force called Special Unit Senator to investigate the case. Yet both seemed to want to ignore the most credible leads. In fact, as Faura would later learn, LAPD wanted to discredit them—as they would attempt to do with both Serrano and Fahey. They actually wanted to make the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress disappear, since she epitomized a sophisticated plot to kill Kennedy.
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| Herbert Spiegel |
Therefore, Faura decided to go ahead and commission a drawing of the girl from Fahey’s memory. He then got the sketch illustrated into a portrait. This would serve as an identification instrument for other witnesses. (p. 80)
On June 19th, Fahey called Faura and told him he was going to the Ambassador Hotel. The FBI told him they had found the girl. Faura found out they were actually going to pick her up and have Fahey identify her at the Kenmore Hotel, which was behind the Ambassador. Faura called Bonfante. He brought down a photographer to memorialize the moment. The Bureau had been tipped off by Ty Hammond, manager of the Kenmore. But it turned out that the Bureau had arrived too late and the girl was gone. Disappointed and frustrated, Faura decided to give Hammond the portrait of the girl. Hammond said that yes, it looked like her. (p. 96) He also said the girl had Arab friends and she always entered the Ambassador from his hotel. She was not actually staying there, but lived in the nearby neighborhood. But he was not sure she was still there.
Just as the chase for the girl was beginning to bear some fruit, the police now called it off. On June 21st, according to the authorities—most notably DA Evelle Younger—Serrano had taken back her story. As the public later learned, this was not actually true, and it was done under duress. It was part of the attempt by local authorities to make the girl disappear. By hook or by crook. (ibid, pp. 107-08) But it actually went further than that. Because now, his sources of information began to dry up. When he went to see Hammond, he would not cooperate any further. When he called Fahey, he told the reporter the FBI had seen them together and wanted him to cut off this association.
But Faura continued to investigate. He found two other witnesses who said they saw Sirhan with the girl. Jose Carvajal who worked at the Ambassador saw the two talking with Sirhan on a terrace in front of the rear door of the hotel. Vincent DiPierro saw the two seconds before the shooting. He said that the girl smiled at Sirhan right before he began firing. When DiPierro looked at the portrait, he had only slight modifications to the illustration. (Pp. 117-20)
But as the author notes, what was so odd about this was that Faura learned that the FBI was also still looking for the girl. And so was the LAPD. But if Serrano had been discredited, and the girl did not exist, then why were they still crossing paths? And why had Fahey been fired from his job? (p. 136)
An example of the continuing search for the girl was that both Faura and the FBI interviewed a woman named Pam Russo. She said she had seen the girl with Sirhan at Rafferty’s gathering prior to the shooting. But further, she also said that someone at Rafferty’s actually tackled a man trying to escape the pantry after Kennedy had been shot. (p. 140)
Which leads us to Gregory Clayton and Michael Wayne. Clayton was the bystander who Russo was referring to who tackled a man running out of the pantry—Michael Wayne.
When Faura found out about Clayton, he tracked down his house and visited him in person. The witness told the reporter that he had seen Sirhan at Rafferty’s that night with the girl. (p. 151) He said that, at the Ambassador later, after he heard the first shot, he ran to the entrance of the kitchen pantry. He tackled a man running away from the murder scene. He said there were actually two men who seemed to be fleeing together. One had an object in his hand, which appeared to “flash”. The other man was in such haste that he was knocking a news photographer onto a table and into some chairs. When Clayton yelled for a nearby security guard, the man with the flashing object in his hand ran the other way, into the hallway. Clayton tripped the other man, who was then subdued by the guard. According to the witness, the man they subdued had a “look of madness in his eyes, as if he had rabies.” (p. 153) He then kept saying, “Let me go. Gotta get out of here. Let me go.” As Faura later notes, these were not the words of an innocent bystander. Clayton picked up a paper that Wayne had been carrying. It was a rather bizarre bumper sticker that read, “Kennedy Assassination a Death Hoax.”
As anyone reading the above would understand, the Clayton story suggests there was more than one gun involved in the RFK murder. As does the Brown/Sirhan transcript. Because in one of these sessions Sirhan said that, during the shooting, he saw the flash of another gun firing. (p. 212) Finally, as almost everyone who has seen a photo of Wayne knows, the running man, who said he had to get out of here, all with a look of madness in his eyes, resembled Sirhan.
Faura managed to temporarily make amends with Fahey. Like a good reporter, he did two things to try and certify his story. First, he gave him a polygraph test, which he passed. (p. 181) He then found the waitress who served Fahey and the girl at a restaurant in Oxnard. Her name was Janis Page. (p. 173) The LAPD did their best to negate both of these achievements. They got Page to keep her mouth shut after she talked to Faura, and they gave Fahey their own version of the polygraph. This was through their old reliable Hank Hernandez. (p. 185) As many authors have shown, when LAPD wanted to discredit a witness, they turned him over to Hernandez.
After this, Faura’s efforts became comparable to Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus: rolling a rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down. Fahey cut off relations with him for good. Bonfante let him know that his supervisors at Life had told him that they would not finance any further inquiry into the RFK case. The author tells us that this change came after a call from Washington. (p. 191)
Faura equates the last with the subtitle of the book, the “Paris Peace Talks Connection.” Some background will be required for this aspect of the book. As previously noted, the girl told Fahey that prior to her coming to Los Angeles she had met a woman named Anna Chennault. She also mentioned that she might be able to fly out of town on CAT or Flying Tiger Airlines. (p. 61)
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| William Turner |
Anna Chennault was the Chinese wife of former military pilot Claire Chennault. Claire became famous as an aviation pilot aiding the Chinese struggle against Japan during World War II. His initial volunteer squad was called the Flying Tigers. This was replaced when the USAF formally entered the war and operated in the China-Burma-India air theater.
After the war, Chennault, a big backer of the nationalist Taiwan government, created something called Civil Air Transport (CAT). This supplied freight into Taiwan, aided the French struggle to keep their Indochina empire, and aided the Kuomintang’s occupation of Burma in the mid and late fifties. It also helped in the early years of the American occupation of South Vietnam.
Faura used the later dropping of these names by the girl—Fahey recalled them later, after his recorded interview—to perform two rather large functions. He connects the girl and Chennault to the deliberate sandbagging of President Johnson’s peace talks, and he then suggests that people like candidate Richard Nixon, future Vice-President Spiro Agnew, future Attorney General John Mitchell and Senator John Tower were in on the RFK assassination. (p. 207)
As regards the former, Faura is referring to the rather recently discovered files by journalist par excellence Robert Parry. Parry discovered a file put together by National Security Advisor Walt Rostow at the Johnson Library. That file contained information garnered by the FBI and the National Security Agency about Nixon’s efforts to subvert Johnson’s attempt to get a peace conference with the North Vietnamese prior to the fall election of 1968. Perceiving this to be a boon for the Democrats, Nixon set out to deep-six that diplomatic effort. Nixon did use Republican lobbyist and fundraiser Anna Chennault to communicate with the South Vietnamese government, advising them to stall Johnson, promising Nixon would give them a better deal once he was elected.
The problem with Faura’s theory here is that, as author Ken Hughes has shown, those efforts did not begin until over a month after Robert Kennedy was killed. It was not until July 12 that Nixon alerted Chennault that she would be his go-between for these efforts to obstruct Johnson. So if she was not aware of that function until then, how and why could she have been used prior to June 5th in the RFK plot?
Also, although Faura mentions John Tower as a possible co-conspirator, in rereading some of the literature on Parry’s fine site, Consortium News, I could not detect his name in any of the declassified files on the illicit episode. So, as far as I can see, the top-level players involved were Nixon, Agnew and Mitchell. Mitchell had been at the meeting in July of 1968 where Nixon appointed Chennault as his emissary. (In an interview with journalist Jules Witcover in 1994, Chennault did say that Tower did have knowledge of her mission. See Baltimore Sun, 8/18/2014) And FBI wiretaps seem to indicate that Chennault was getting instructions from Agnew in late October of the campaign. But all of these efforts and communications are to thwart Johnson. Just because The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress had met Chennault in New York, what is the evidence that the men mentioned above were part of the plot to kill RFK? And if they had been, the girl would not be musing about getting a passport and flight on CAT. She would have had her passport and been on a plane the next day.
From what I have learned about the RFK case from writers like Turner, Melanson, and Lisa Pease, most of the evidence inherent in the crime—the MK/Ultra aspect, the associations of the leaders of SUS Hernandez and Manny Pena, the presence of former Iranian intelligence officer Khaiber Khan at RFK headquarters—seems to indicate a CIA modus operandi.
I also have some formal criticisms of the book. Faura was, for all intents and purposes, a participant in the RFK investigation as it unfolded. He was not an academic or a historian looking back at a past event he did not have a hand in. Therefore, his book could have and should have been written from a first person point of view—but it is not. At times, the author refers to himself as ‘Faura’. Before Jim Garrison started his memoir on his inquiry into the JFK assassination, his editor Zach Sklar insisted he write it in the first person. He did this since he thought it would create personal drama and invite reader empathy, since they would be watching a real life protagonist progress through unchanneled and dangerous waters. Sklar was correct and Garrison was grateful for that advice. Well, someone at Trine Day publishing should have insisted on the same thing in Faura’s case.
Also, I would have advised Faura not to use the very short chapter approach he does, some of them being literally less than two pages. This is not the way to build and cap sustained interest. Finally, in this vein, Faura excerpts into the book long sections of taped interrogations he did. Again, not all that scintillating to read. I wish he had summarized the less important parts of the interviews and only given us the key parts in the Q an A format.
In his discussion of the Scott Enyart trial over the photos Enyart took in the pantry of the actual assassination, the (wrong) photos did not show up during the trial, but just prior to it. (p. 219) Finally, the author seems unkind about RFK researcher Ted Charach. Faura does score him for some personal shortcomings. And I agree with them. But to say that the last he heard of Charach he was still trying to sell a vinyl record—that seems really unkind and uncareful. Charach’s 1973 film, The Second Gun, was nothing less than a breakthrough in the Bobby Kennedy case. In fact, that film is still worth seeing today. Also, as reporter David Manning noted in an article on the Enyart trial for Probe Magazine, Charach was one of the key witnesses that turned the case in Enyart’s favor.
All in all, we finally have a record of one of the very, very few mainstream reporters who actually delved into one of the assassinations of the sixties. Who tried to do an honest job and who actually tried to follow the evidence wherever it was headed. He found out the hard way that the local authorities—the police, the DA’s office, Mayor Sam Yorty—did not want to do that in the least. In fact, they were determined to not only avoid that path, but to discredit those who tried. Including the author. This book is his testament to that process.
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Warren Hinckle passed away on August 25th, at age 77. Hundreds at the Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach, San Francisco, attended his funeral service. He was buried on Tuesday the 30th. Some of the luminaries who attended his funeral were historian Kevin Starr, the founder of Salon David Talbot, and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
CTKA carried a notice upon his passing, one from the online version of the Chronicle, the paper he used to write for. Among several others, there were notices in the New York Times, The Nation, and the online magazine Politico. This author read most of them. Not one even came close to recalling or measuring the journalistic brilliance of the man, or the eternal glory of his most significant creation, the last great American magazine, Ramparts. Considering the standard set by that glossy monthly periodical, I understand the reluctance to remind us of Hinckle’s achievement.
For those too young to recall it, Ramparts is hard to describe. For the simple reason that there is nothing today that even resembles it. Which says a lot. Because today we live in the era of online publication; which means journals are much cheaper to produce and maintain, and therefore there is much more freedom to create. The fact that, to this day, no one has equaled Hinckle’s 1964-69 editorial achievement at Ramparts is what makes what he did the stuff of legend. After all, it was nearly half a century ago.
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Edward Keating |
Before trying to detail the pure excitement that Ramparts represented, it is necessary to tell the reader a bit about Hinckle’s background. He was born in San Francisco in 1938. His father was a shipyard worker. He attended parochial schools before studying philosophy at the University of San Francisco. There he edited the student newspaper, The Foghorn. Under his editorship it became quite an unusual student newspaper. For instance, it was one of only 14 college newspapers classified as a daily. As editor of a daily, Hinckle went to Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe for two weeks to cover the 1960 Winter Olympics. From Tahoe, he ran The Foghorn via telephone and telegraph. As he later noted, its readers read little about their college in the college newspaper. For Hinckle featured Herblock cartoons, and headlines like “Dorothy Day Asks: Who Baptized Capitalism?” (USF was a Jesuit college) He once stole the entire press run of the rival San Francisco State newspaper. Needless to say, because of disputes with the college administration, he left USF without graduating.
From there he took a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. His first outpost was in Oakland, which Hinckle called the Siberia of the Chronicle stations. Working the police beat, he discovered an unwritten rule about the paper’s Oakland coverage. The coverage of a homicide largely depended upon where the victim lived. To quote from his memoir: “Ghetto murders, being regarded as natural black events, were rarely considered newsworthy. White trash murders stood a poor to even chance of getting in the paper…..” There was also a rule of thumb similar to this in the area of fatal car accidents: “No niggers after 11 PM on weekdays, 9 PM on Saturdays (as the Sunday paper went to press early).” To this rule there was one exception, in the area of quantity: “If two black persons died in a late evening auto crash, that event had a fair chance of making the news columns.” (Hinckle,, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, pgs. 31-. 32)
Eventually, he made it back to San Francisco, where he was given a bit of leeway. One of his favorite stories was about a former slave from Alabama who emigrated to California. He got rich in the pinball machine business and legally adopted the children of his former master. Then, in the fall of 1961, Hinckle took a temporary leave of absence to help invigorate an ambitious and intellectual Catholic quarterly.
Hinckle had been moonlighting in the public relations business. A friend of his, Harry Stiehl, decided to introduce him to a man named Ed Keating. Keating was a converted Catholic who wanted to start a quarterly periodical that was meant to begin a dialogue between laity and the clergy of the Catholic Church. He also wanted to begin to spawn a new generation of Catholic intellectuals who had a gift for writing and communicating. With his PR connections, Stiehl thought Hinckle could help promote Keating’s new journal. It was called Ramparts.
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Howard Gossage |
Keating had a wealthy wife and some famous contributors, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and John Griffin, who wrote the bestseller Black Like Me. In 1964, Keating tried to raise his journal’s profile by defending the highly controversial play The Deputy which had just opened on Broadway. Hinckle arranged a huge press conference in Keating’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Keating and his magazine got exposure; the play opened successfully and ran for a year. As Hinckle wrote in his book, this episode became the model for what he later termed activist journalism.
It also increased the circulation of the magazine. Keating liked that and he appreciated what Hinckle had done. So Hinckle did it again. But this time he channeled all the PR into an issue that very much interested him—the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi in June of 1964. Hinckle promoted a man named Louis Lomax as the Ramparts author of this sensational article. Lomax did not come through. But like the British at Dunkirk, Hinckle turned an expected disaster into a triumph by promising the details of the Lomax piece in a future issue. (Although Hinckle does not deal with this episode in his book, Peter Richardson does in his chronicle of the magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue.)
There were two factors that allowed Hinckle to gain control of the magazine from Keating. First, because of the success Hinckle had in promoting Ramparts, Keating made him executive editor. Second, Keating was becoming financially overextended. Or as he told Hinckle, “I do have one shopping center left.” (Hinckle, p. 95) Therefore Hinckle now had to find alternative sources of funding himself. Which he did. Thus began Hinckle’s five year reign. He was greatly aided by the PR skills and connections of one Howard Gossage. Gossage was an advertising executive in the Bay Area who was generally described as an innovator and iconoclast in the field. At age 36, he founded his own agency called Wiener and Gossage. He would often have salons at his office headquarters, inviting many of the cutting edge thinkers in the San Francisco area, including Hinckle. (Click here for more on Gossage http://www.howardluckgossage.com/)
To describe in detail the contents of what Hinckle produced in those five years would take a medium sized book. And I don’t mean the machinations that went on at the magazine headquarters, or just naming some of the big stories Ramparts produced. But to detail the contents of what the magazine exposed about America, who Hinckle decided to take on, the methods he employed and the price he was willing to pay, all these—and more—were, to my knowledge, unprecedented before him, and unmatched afterwards. Ramparts was so effective and influential that it became a regular target of the MSM, especially Time magazine and the New York Times, which obviously did not like being exposed as the poseurs they were. Beyond that, the CIA launched operations against Ramparts. These were commissioned by Desmond Fitzgerald, supervised by Richard Ober, and executed by Edgar Applewhite. As detailed in his book Secrets, the late Angus McKenzie showed how this program grew into MHCHAOS, the massive CIA spying on and infiltration of leftist protest groups in that decade.
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Madame Nhu as depicted on cover of Ramparts |
What got the CIA so angry? For starters, Ramparts exposed a program the Agency was running out of Michigan State University. (Click here http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357L/357LMSUinVietnam.pdf) It taught CIA interns how to train interrogators in South Vietnam to torture dissidents in Saigon. This created an uproar. Not just for the story, but also because of the hilariously outrageous Ramparts cover, which featured the immortal image of Madame Nhu in an MSU cheerleaders’ outfit waving an MSU flag. The image suggesting the Vietnam War was now controlling the agenda of American colleges. (Click here for a time capsule reaction http://msupaper.org/issues/The_Paper_1966-04-21.pdf)
Then there was Donald Duncan. Duncan was a Special Forces Sergeant who served in Vietnam and taught at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He resigned his commission and returned to Berkeley, California. There, in February of 1966, Duncan graced another memorable Ramparts cover. He was pictured in a long sleeved uniform, topped with a Green Beret cap. Above him were the words, “I quit”. Above that was the quote: “The whole thing was a lie.” In this emblematic story, Duncan described his ten years in the military, capped by a nearly two year tour in Vietnam. He said he went to Vietnam to fight communism. But what he learned there about the American effort forced him to retire from the service forever. Duncan first focused on the fact that there really was no government of South Vietnam—it was simply constructed and propped up by the USA. And it was in no way a democracy. Secondly, he wrote that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was wildly overrated as a source of supplies for the Viet Cong. Most of the material came over the border or from the sea. Thirdly, he said that the US military was involved in atrocities that violated the rules of warfare, and this extended to the civilian population. Duncan was really the first former GI to open up the path for Mark Lane’s book Conversations with Americans, the Winter Soldier Hearings, and the exposure of the My Lai Massacre. (http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1966-02-Donald-W.-Duncan-The-Whole-Thing-Was-A-Lie-Ramparts.pdf)
In the March 1967 issue Hinckle exposed another instance of the CIA operating domestically. Ramparts now revealed that the Agency was secretly funding the National Students Association. (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967mar-00029) In other words the largest college student association in America–featuring a large annual convention picturing a celebration of youthful democracy–was secretly funded, infiltrated and channeled by the Agency. Many of the top officers knew about it and were briefed on that association. Further, several of them had case officers, code names, and reporting requirements. Incredibly, some of their overseas representatives were actually career CIA agents from Langley. The aim of the program was multi-leveled. First, the Agency would moderate any radical or leftist tendencies in the largest student organization in the world. Second, they would use the overseas voyages of the students to collect information and try and moderate any radical leaders abroad. And third, the propaganda goal was to portray our young representatives as independent citizens, while many of the people they met abroad were communist stooges programmed from Moscow. (Hinckle, p. 185)
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Eldridge Cleaver |
NSA officer Michael Wood had a pang of conscience about it and was talking to Hinckle. Unlike other top officers, Wood had not signed a non-disclosure agreement. Further, Wood had records, not just about the NSA, but other related fronts that the CIA had established. For example, Stephen Spender’s Anglo-American journal Encounter. Wood also showed how the CIA very often used large legal firms in big cities to channel their clandestine funding. Usually these firms had a former OSS officer as a founding member. (One is reminded here of the firm Monroe and Leeman in New Orleans, which helped fund Walter Sheridan’s hit piece on Jim Garrison. See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition by James DiEugenio, p. 238)
MHCHAOS operations officer Richard Ober heard about Wood’s talks with Hinckle. He tried to find a way to stop publication. But he couldn’t find a legal pretext. So he then arranged a press conference in New York. At this conference the officers would pretend that this was all a thing of the past, and they were now reformed. Therefore, the Ramparts story was old hat. Hinkle got wind of this plan. He memorably said, “ I was damned if I was going to let the CIA scoop me.” (Hinckle, p. 190) Ramparts then bought two full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post to expose the illegal association (the CIA is forbidden by its charter to operate domestically) and what the Agency had done to cover it up. When word of the ads leaked, Ober’s press conference collapsed.
The New York Times now started a couple of weeks of reporting on other CIA fronts here and abroad that was influencing cultural affairs. This was one of the many triumphs of Ramparts. In many ways, at many times, it actually led the news cycle. By repeatedly scooping the MSM, it became a model of what they were not doing. At the same time that—out of pure humiliation—the magazine became an object of attack. Ramparts did what the MSM was supposed to be doing but did not—actual investigative reporting. It was showing what the real world around the reader was composed of and what it was all about. But the fact that it was camouflaged made it hard for the average person to detect. So Ramparts did it for them. Which is why as Jeff Cohen, a student at Michigan, told Peter Richardson, Ramparts was passed around the dorm there to the point it was wrinkled and dog eared by the time he got it. “It really was a radicalizing tool of its own. It ripped your head off. “ He added that it had turned his cousin’s fraternity into an SDS chapter.
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Ramparts cover November 1966 |
At its pinnacle, Ramparts had a circulation of about 250,000. One can imagine how the CIA felt when Hinckle started featuring stories about the conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy, and then putting such things on the cover. For this topic, there was another cover for the ages. The November 1966 issue featured the face of JFK made up like a jigsaw puzzle, with several pieces missing. That was followed two months later by “The Case for Three Assassins” written by David Welsh and David Lifton. (Click here to view).
The Welsh/Lifton article began with the following words: “No less than three gunmen fired on the Presidential motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963…” It was a long, illustrated, annotated examination of the ballistics, medical, and eyewitness testimony. It all indicated a triangulation of gunfire in Dealey Plaza. To my knowledge, it was the first time such an intricate discussion reached a mass audience. That issue was then followed by two long pieces on the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans. (Click here for the first one).
These were both penned by former FBI agent William Turner, who was actually working with Garrison. Therefore, Turner had access to the DA and some of his files. Ramparts was one of the very few media outlets that actually treated Garrison and his evidence with respect. Until Jim Garrison published On the Trail of the Assassins, Turner’s articles were–along with Paris Flammonde’s book, The Kennedy Conspiracy—prime reference works for anyone interested in the non-MSM view of Garrison.
Hinckle met resistance inside his office on this issue. Reporters like Bob Scheer did not want to cover the assassinations of the sixties at all. As he once told Turner, such writing amounted to “mental masturbation”. Hinckle disagreed. For the simple reason that he had read the official report and most of the accompanying volumes of evidence. He concluded the Warren Report was impossible to believe: “Anyone who has read those 26 volumes…knows that the function of the Warren Commission was not to ferret out the truth, but to put the citizens at ease that there was no conspiracy.” (Hinckle, p. 217) About Jim Garrison, Hinckle wrote, “… no man I have known had more legitimate reasons to become paranoid than Garrison; there actually were people constantly plotting against him.” (Hinckle, p, 209) With the declassified files of the Assassination Records Review Board, we know that to be, not just true, but an understatement. (See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, Chapters 11 and 12)
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The Ramparts “I Quit” cover |
To chronicle the endless triumphs of Hinckle’s editorship could go on and on, taking scores of pages. But to mention just two other exceptional aspects of Hinckle’s stewardship: Ramparts was the first and only widely read publication to champion the Black Panthers. And again, there was an iconic cover design by art director Durgald Stermer to signify it: Huey Newton in a wicker chair with a spear in one hand and a loaded carbine in the other. Eldridge Cleaver actually became a contributing editor, and Ramparts released his book Soul on Ice through its publishing imprint.
There was also a photo essay “The Children of Vietnam” put together by William Pepper. (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967jan-00045) That 1967 visual article showed just how extensive, indiscriminate and destructive the massive American firepower unleashed in Indochina was. It was laying waste to the civilian population, including tens of thousands of women and children. Martin Luther King picked that issue up off a newsstand before taking a working vacation in Jamaica. When he returned he began making his first speeches against President Johnson and his conduct of the war. Again, Ramparts was leading the news cycle.
The power and the glory all came to an end in early 1969. For three reasons. First, if Ramparts had one failing it was Hinckle’s lack of interest in the arts and the so called counter culture in San Francisco. For instance, there was no Dwight MacDonald or Robert Christgau at Ramparts to review movies or music. And many people wanted to read both. Therefore, young Jann Wenner left Ramparts to start up something called Rolling Stone. Which then became a competitor. There was also an internal coup against Hinckle by new staff members who were tired of his profligate spending. For instance, he had sent a team of 15 correspondents to cover the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. And he had put up ten of them at the four star Ambassador Hotel. Finally, when Hinckle found someone who was interested in bailing him out, Scheer got into a stupid and senseless argument with the man and his entourage. (Hinckle, pgs. 371-78) Hinckle was now out. The magazine declared bankruptcy and reorganized around new leadership.
The new principals were Robert Scheer and David Horowitz. This, of course, meant that Hinckle’s daring, “nothing sacred” approach would be abandoned. Because those two men represented a much more doctrinaire, New Left approach. Therefore instead of writers like William Turner and Bill Pepper, we now got people who really were not all that unusual or new e.g. Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Kozol. The subjects now also became those of the doctrinaire left: Earth Day and the environment, food safety, oil spills in Santa Barbara, and the plight of Native Americans. Without Hinckle, Ramparts had lost its singular, contemporary jazz riff.
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Huey Newton as he appeared in Ramparts |
Later, Scheer was moved out by Horowitz and replaced by a new second in command: Peter Collier. The irony being that it was Scheer who brought both men to Ramparts in the first place. But, predictably, the magazine now began to lose its large circulation. Seeing the writing on the wall, Horowitz and Collier decided to transition their way out. In 1973 they met with Abby and Marion Rockefeller, part of the Rockefeller clan who were outsiders because of their contrary political beliefs—which is why they backed Ramparts. The two men now contracted to do a history of the clan. They got a sizeable advance, and then signed on a new management team for Ramparts. Their book, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, sold quite well. It was published in 1976, the year after Ramparts went under for good.
Ramparts was so unusual, so blindingly meteoric, so politically potent, that, when it fell, it actually dropped the seeds of its own reaction. By 1975, the Sixties were pretty much killed off. And Ramparts, in its new form, did not do a lot to preserve it. Richard Nixon was now president, with the likes of Spiro Agnew as his VP.
Men like Pat Buchanan and William Safire were writing his speeches. And from 1969-75, Henry Kissinger was doing the final reversals of whatever was left of John Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy, specifically in Africa, the Middle East and the continuation and expansion of the Indochina war.
It was within this new political milieu that men like Horowitz, Collier, Sol Stern and Martin Peretz began their migration to what would become the New Right, neoconservative movement. Financial backer Peretz did not like the evenhanded approach Scheer wanted to take in the Middle East. So he pulled out of Ramparts. He now purchased the liberal New Republic from Gilbert Harrison. In a remarkably short time period, Peretz pretty much reversed the trajectory of that journal’s foreign policy pages. By about the mid-eighties, many were calling the New Republic a neoconservative bastion. Which, for all intents and purposes, it was; most notably on the Middle East and Central America.
Sol Stern, who actually wrote the Ramparts article on the NSA scandal, eventually found a home at the Manhattan Institute. This is a New Right think tank that was actually co-founded by the deceased CIA chief Bill Casey. Manhattan Institute has sponsored books by Charles Murray, who was actually a fellow there when he wrote his anti-welfare polemic Losing Ground. Stern’s specialty today is to promote voucher system education, which would almost surely undermine the public school system.
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Peter Collier |
After their tome on the Rockefellers, Horowitz and Collier then wrote books on other wealthy families: the Kennedys, the Fords, and the Roosevelts. Their book on the Kennedys is so bad that this author included it in his review of the anti-Kennedy literature in the essay “The Posthumous Assassination of JFK.” Predictably, that book provided the occasion for the pair to proclaim their conversion to Reagan Republicanism. This was announced in the Washington Post under the banner “Lefties for Reagan”. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 357). They then went on and became beneficiaries of the largesse of the wealthy conservative class. They founded organizations like Encounter Books, FrontPageMagazine.com, the David Horowitz Freedom center, and Discover the Networks. All of these are meant to undermine the things that Ramparts represented: the liberal ideals of an open and more egalitarian society. And with the collapse of the Sixties, and the killing off of its leaders—JFK, Malcolm X, RFK and King, plus the FBI sponsored extermination of the Panthers—that was not really difficult to do.
Hinckle never did anything of the kind. He tried to start up another monthly magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly. But I have it on two sources that the Nixon administration used the IRS and the USPS to obstruct its distribution and circulation. Consequently it closed down in less than a year. He next edited Francis Coppola’s City magazine, which lasted until 1976. He then did something that no one thought possible: he revived The Argonaut, which had closed down in 1956. He did this in 1991, and that publication is still around in both print and online versions.
Besides that, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Francisco in 1987. He also wrote about ten non-fiction books. There are two that are mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Sixties and the assassinations. In 1974, on the eve of the final dissolution of Ramparts, Hinckle wrote a memoir about his editorship of that magazine. It was called If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade. To me, there is nothing at all like it in the literature. It is, at once, funny, pungent, candid, and nostalgic without being sentimental. A definite must read. Then, in 1981, he co-wrote, with Bill Turner, The Fish is Red. That book was later reissued as Deadly Secrets in 1992. Up until that time, and until this day, it is one of the best JFK assassination books written from the point of view of the Cuban exiles’ association with the CIA.
In the late nineties, this author considered reviving Ramparts. I won’t go extensively into why I decided against it. But one of the reasons I didn’t was because I thought that, with the surge of online journalism, surely someone, maybe more than one, would now use the opportunity to emulate Ramparts, or Art Kunkin’s LA Free Press. The latter was an extraordinary newsweekly that complemented Ramparts. Together, they formed the last pinnacle of American journalism. To say the least, those online expectations were not fulfilled by the likes of Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, and Josh Marshall. In fact, this so called internet revolution was so stillborn that it made Ramparts and the LA Free Press look like even greater achievements. (See here for my particular disputes) In fact, that online result recalls Hinckle’s answer as to why Ramparts was so exceptional, he replied, “Because the rest of the media was so shitty.” I would add: But it took Ramparts to show us how shitty they were.
Today, to do anything like what Ramparts did, a single publishing journal would have to been the first to:
And they would have to have achieved the above in just five years, from about 2001-2005 I think the reader will agree that any such comparison suggests science fiction today. But Hinckle did it.
Therefore, Ramparts stands alone in the history of contemporary American journalism; much as Citizen Kane towers in the history of the American sound film. It is often written that, in that picture, Orson Welles took the art of film direction to a point that no other American has since matched or surpassed. With the death of Warren Hinckle we can say that no other American has produced or edited a magazine, or online journal, that has matched or surpassed what he did at Ramparts. And, from my point of view, it looks like no one else will do so for a long time. For that, among other things, he deserves to be properly saluted upon his passing. He set a standard for us all by reminding us what real journalism can and should be.
~ Jim DiEugenio
CTKA is proud to excerpt a chapter from Greg Poulgrain’s new book about the Indonesia coup of 1965. The full title of the volume is The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles. Poulgrain is a professor of History at University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. In 1998, Poulgrain wrote The Genesis of Konfrontasi. That book was about the conflict between President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia and the proposed union of Malaysia in 1963. There, Poulgrain unfolded a new thesis about that conflict: namely, that it was not motivated by Sukarno’s desire to dominate the Southeast Asian archipelago area. Rather, it was a conscious provocation, created largely by the British to both strengthen their brainchild of Malaysia, and weaken Sukarno. By doing so, they expected to benefit financially. They succeeded spectacularly in both aims.
Poulgrain has now published an even more important book. It deals directly with the epochal, yet underreported, Indonesia coup of 1965. That overthrow is commonly referred to as the bloodiest CIA coup in history. To this day, no one knows how many people perished as a result of it. Various estimates range from 350,000 to 500,000. It was not until 1996 when Lisa Pease wrote her milestone articles about Freeport Sulphur (today called Freeport McMoRan) that anyone focused attention on how the murder of President Kennedy paved the way for this horrendous operation. (Click here for that memorable essay: http://www.thesecrettruth.com/freeport-indonesia.htm)
What Lisa did was to examine American foreign policy towards Indonesia and its leader Sukarno through three presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. Through that examination, it was obvious that a familiar pattern manifested itself: the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower were hostile to Sukarno (actually attempting to overthrow him in 1958); Kennedy tried to establish better relations and had planned a state visit in 1964; Johnson then halted Kennedy’s policy and decided to revert back to 1958 and the coup attempt. Except, this time, it was successful.
Since that excellent essay was published in Probe magazine, others have built on it. This includes Denise Leith’s book The Politics of Power: Freeport in Suharto’s Indonesia. Jim Douglass treated the subject in his fine JFK and the Unspeakable, and I discussed the issue in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed.
But Poulgrain’s new book goes further than anyone has before. In fact, it appears to be a milestone on the subject. Through extensive research into books and documents, plus new in-depth interviews, this book seems to have rearranged the calculus on what happened in Jakarta in 1965. And, rather appropriately, Poulgrain sees that massive slaughter through the prism of two personal profiles: CIA director Allen Dulles and the fallen president John F. Kennedy.
To show just how rich this book is, and how new and unique its perspective is, I beg the reader to take note of just three highlights in this one chapter.
First, Poulgrain reveals that Kennedy was working with United Nations Secretary–General, Dag Hammarskjold. Not just on the Congo crisis, but on a solution to the Indonesia problem. This was new and I consider myself pretty well informed on Kennedy’s foreign policy. This is arresting in two ways. First, Hammarskjold must have appeared to be an even greater threat to the power elite in this light. Second, we all know how reluctant contemporary American presidents are to work with the UN, especially GOP ones. But here you have JFK working with Hammarskjold on two key fronts in the third world.
Second, he reveals that, as with the Kennedy assassination, Harry Truman clearly suggested that he did not buy the airplane accident story about Hammarskjold’s death. In fact, he even went further in the Hammarskjold case than he did with Kennedy. He actually said he had been murdered. In other words, Truman knew what happened to Dag, and he likely knew what happened to Kennedy. In the case of Kennedy, he wrote a timely and suggestive editorial about the CIA which Allen Dulles tried to get him to retract—but he did not. In the Hammarskjold case, when asked to elaborate, he said in effect, I will let you guys figure that all out. In other words, he was not going to go further, hoping they would.
Third, through information in Susan Williams’ book, Who Killed Hammarskjold? it appears that Dulles’s name was on some documents secured by Desmond Tutu through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. These indicate that he would be willing to cooperate in a plot against the UN leader. He was even offering information about the type of plane the UN chief would be flying and the date Hammarskjold would arrive. If Dulles was willing to cooperate in a plot against Hammarskjold in 1961 over Congo, why would he not do the same in 1963 over both Congo and Indonesia? Since as we know, Kennedy continued the struggle for a free Congo after both Patrice Lumumba and Hammarskjold were murdered.
Poulgrain’s work is part of a new path in Kennedy studies. This began with Richard Mahoney’s landmark volume JFK: Ordeal in Africa. It continued with Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans, and Robert Rakove’s Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. Now, Poulgrain extends that horizon line even further, one which finally shines light on who Kennedy really was and why he was killed.
Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II, by Susan Williams
Reviewed by Dan Alcorn, At: AARC
As many CTKA readers and observers of JFK symposiums will know, since the 2013 Cyril Wecht conference in Pittsburgh, one of the topics I have been researching and talking about is John F. Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy. To some people this seemed kind of pointless. After all, in virtually every JFK assassination book Kennedy’s foreign policy boiled down to Vietnam and Cuba. What else was there?
Quite a lot. What was new in my speech mostly came from Philip Muehlenbeck’s volume, Betting on the Africans, which had been published the year before. (Click here for a review) Later, I discovered Robert Rakove’s book, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. That book serves as a fine compliment to Muehlenbeck. (Click here for the CTKA review) I used much of the Rakove material to present my altered versions of the 2013 presentation at both the JFK Lancer in 2013 and 2014 and the AARC Conference in 2014.
These two books form a thematic line that extends back to Richard Mahoney’s landmark volume JFK: Ordeal in Africa. That book was a trailblazing effort in the field of excavating what Kennedy’s foreign policy really was, and where its intellectual provenance came from. It was published in 1983. Even though it bore the Oxford University Press imprimatur, it had little influence. It virtually had little or no impact in the categories of Kennedy biography, studies of the Kennedy presidency, or the JFK assassination field. Which, in retrospect, is stunning. Because what Mahoney did in that book was revolutionary. In a systematic way, he traced the beginnings of President Kennedy’s foreign policy ideas. He did this with a wealth of data he garnered from weeks spent at the JFK Library. He used this ignored information to show how Kennedy’s ideas on the east/west struggles in the Third World originated, why they were different than President Eisenhower’s, and how they manifested themselves once he became president. No other book I had read elucidated this progress in such a detailed and rigorous way. In fact, when I was done with the book I actually felt like I had been snookered by relying on historians like Herbert Parmet, William Manchester, and Richard Reeves for my information on Kennedy’s presidency and foreign policy. Mahoney made them look like hacks.
It became clear to me that there was, quite literally, a war going on. And as unsatisfactory as the Parmet, Reeves, and Manchester books were (with Manchester I am referring to his presidential profile book Portrait of a President) these would be superseded by even worse JFK books later: biographies by John H. Davis, Robert Dallek, Thomas Reeves, and worst of all—perhaps the worst imaginable—Sy Hersh’s pile of rubbish The Dark Side of Camelot.
In 2008 Jim Douglass made a clean break with all the calculated trash. His fine volume, JFK and the Unspeakable, has become something of a classic. It has actually crossed over and is sourced in books outside strictly the JFK assassination or JFK presidency fields. I wrote a very approving essay about Jim’s book. (Click here)
Douglass did an exceedingly good job in elucidating Kennedy’s Vietnam and Cuba policies between the covers of one book. But with the new scholarship by Rakove and Muehlenbeck, the Douglass book seems rather narrowly focused today. And with the even newer book by Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention (see my recent review), we can now add Indonesia to Africa and the Middle East as objects of Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy. In fact, Douglass is on to this. He actually pointed out that I should read and review the Poulgrain book.
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| Four trailblazing books on Kennedy’s foreign policy |
But the Kennedy Enlightment really began with Mahoney. And although his book dealt with three African trouble spots, the majority of the book was focused on the colossal Congo crisis. Which, like other problems, Kennedy inherited from President Eisenhower. As we learn more about the Congo conflagration, we begin to see how large and complex that struggle was. Large in the sense that, in addition to the UN, several nations were directly involved. Complex in the sense that there were subterranean agendas at work. For instance, although England and France ostensibly and officially supported the United Nations effort there, they were actually subverting it on the ground through third party agents. In fact, when one studies the seething cauldron that was the Congo crisis, there are quite a few villains involved. There are only three heroes I can name: Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjold and John F. Kennedy. All three were murdered while the struggle was in process. Their deaths allowed the democratic experiment in Congo to fail spectacularly. Ultimately, it allowed one form of blatant exploitation, colonialism, to be replaced by another, imperialism.
To sketch in the background: In 1960, Belgium was going to leave Congo after brutally colonizing the country for generations. But their plan was to leave so abruptly that the nation would collapse inwardly for lack of leadership. Belgium would then return in order to protect the Belgian assets still there. As we shall see, the CIA was in agreement on this. Especially when Patrice Lumumba was democratically elected as Prime Minister. As Jonathan Kwitny noted, Lumumba was the first democratically elected leader of an African nation emerging from the long era of European colonialism. Ideally, Lumumba could have set a precedent. That did not happen. And the reason it did not happen was largely because of outside interference.
Within days of June 30th, Congo independence, the Belgian plan began to work. Rioting took place and Belgian soldiers began to fire into crowds. On July 11th, the regional governor of the immensely wealthy Katanga province, Moise Tshombe, declared his state was seceding from Congo. Tshombe was egged on by the Belgians and British who wanted mineral rights. In exchange, they promised him military aid and mercenaries if Lumumba attacked Katanga. (Kwitny, p. 55)
As Kwitny notes in Endless Enemies, the CIA and the National Security Council did not like Lumumba. After all, he had the gumption to ask for aid in kicking out the Belgians, who were now parachuting troops back in. Lumumba asked for aid from the USA, the USSR and the United Nations. The first declined, the second seemed amenable to sending arms, and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold decided to send in a UN expeditionary force. The fact that Lumumba went to the USSR was enough for CIA station chief Larry Devlin to portray him as a communist. On August 18th he wired DCI Allen Dulles that Congo was experiencing a classic communist takeover. He then added that anti-West forces were rapidly gaining power and Congo was on the verge of becoming another Cuba. (ibid, p. 59)
This was preposterous. There was no “anti-West force” build-up in Congo. In fact, England and Belgium were sending in troops and mercenaries. These were later joined by the French, who also wanted a stake in Katanga. But Devlin concluded by saying that Lumumba should be “replaced” by a pro-Western group. (ibid) This is just days after Lumumba visited the USA asking for help to expel the Belgians. Ambassador Clare Timberlake contributed the same kind of utter distortion. He told Washington that Lumumba wanted troops in order to expel the Belgians and then nationalize all industry and property. Lumumba would then invite communist bloc experts in to run the economy. (ibid, pp. 59-60)
The Devlin/Timberlake cables had their intended impact. Within 48 hours DCI Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower agreed that Lumumba had to be neutralized. (ibid, p. 62) The CIA took two tracks to achieve this aim. First, Timberlake and his deputy Frank Carlucci tried to get President Kasavubu to stage a coup. He said no. So Devlin went to military colonel Josef Mobutu and asked him to eliminate Lumumba. In September, Kasavubu finally relented and dismissed Lumumba. Lumumba then said he was dismissing Kasavubu. With a Mexican standoff holding, Devlin then went to Mobutu and asked him to arrest Lumumba. But the UN emissary there, Rajeshwar Dayal, prevented the action. And Lumumba now became somewhat of a prisoner in his own home. Kasavubu then dissolved parliament, which had backed Lumumba. (p. 66) The second track of the CIA’s program now kicked in: assassination plots to kill Lumumba. (ibid, p. 67)
As the reader can see, in the space of two months, the Americans and Europeans had pretty much destroyed whatever hope there was for the first democratic nation to emerge and survive in post-colonial Africa. In fact, one could fairly say that they strangled African democracy in the cradle. From here, it got worse. Devlin now wanted Mobutu to eliminate not just Lumumba, but his deputy Antoine Gizenga. (ibid) But Dayal and Hammarskjold kept him protected also.
When Mobutu’s troops began to battle with the UN mission, Lumumba made an impulsive, perhaps reckless, decision. He escaped from Dayal’s protection and tried to flee to Stanleyville, his political base. With Devlin’s help, Mobutu captured him. And after severely beating him, returned him to the capital of Leopoldville.
Three things then happened that sealed Lumumba’s fate. First, Russian planes carrying supplies and arms started arriving in Stanleyville. Second, two CIA assassins also arrived on the scene. And third, John F. Kennedy was about to be inaugurated. Because of these factors, , instead of having Lumumba killed by the CIA agents, or risk a more sympathetic policy under Kennedy, on January 13, 1961, Mobutu had Lumumba shipped to Moise Tshombe in Katanga. As Devlin must have known, this meant he would be killed soon. Four days later, he was. (ibid, p. 69)
The information about his death was kept from President Kennedy for almost a month. He did not learn about Lumumba’s murder until February 13th. He learned of it on a phone call with UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. White House photographer Jacques Lowe captured the moment in a crystalline photograph:
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| Kennedy hears of Lumumba’s murder from Adlai Stevenson (photo by Jacques Lowe) |
Perhaps no photo from the Kennedy presidency summarizes who Kennedy was, and how he differed from what preceded him and what came after him, than this picture.
In the wake of Lumumba’s murder, Dag Hammarskjold was not about to give up. Secretary General Hammarskjold was from Sweden and his family had a long history in public service. His father had been a regional governor and then Sweden’s prime minister. Two of his older brothers had also spent time in government service, one as a governor and the other working with the League of Nations. As an economist, Dag worked for the Finance Ministry and coined the term “planned economy”. He and his brother Bo helped launch the Swedish welfare state.
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| Dag Hammarskjold August 27, 1960 |
Hammarskjold first worked with the Swedish delegation at the United Nations. He then, rather unexpectedly, was voted its second Secretary General in 1953. As writer Susan Williams notes, his ascendancy coincided with the beginning of the de-colonization process in Africa and Asia. By 1960, 47 of the 100 UN members came from this Afro/Asia bloc. (Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold? p. 23) In 1960 alone, 16 African nations had joined the UN. Hammarskjold decided to tour the continent in late 1959. He had harsh words for the apartheid regime of the Union of South Africa. Therefore, he became an enemy of white supremacists on that continent. And with those nations who still held colonies there, or were trying to unduly influence their former colonies e.g. France, England, Portugal and Belgium. (ibid, p. 24)
Because of his Swedish background and his work in civil service and planned economies, Hammarskjold had a special sensitivity to these new and awakening nations. He understood that, individually, these states felt weak and isolated. But as members of the UN, they felt part of a world community that could elevate their stature. Or, as he put it, the function of the UN was to protect the weak against the strong. (ibid)
Hammarskjold suspected what the Belgian secret agenda was before they pulled out of Congo. Therefore he sent Ralph Bunche, part of the American delegation, there as independence was enacted. King Baudouin of Belgium was there for the official proceeding. He actually praised what Belgium had done for Congo and specifically singled out Leopold II for praise. Which would be like giving credit to John Calhoun in the struggle for civil rights for Black Americans. Lumumba felt he had to respond. He said, words to the effect, “we are your monkeys no more”. (Williams, p. 31)
There can be little doubt that tensions began to build because of this exchange. Also because, in the ranks of the army, Belgians still remained in command centers. When violence broke out, Lumumba blamed it on the Belgians in the military and accused the former mother country of trying to recolonize Congo—which was accurate. As civilian Belgians tried to leave the country, Baudouin sent in troops to protect them. A week later, Tshombe announced the Katanga secession. Katanga contained about 60% of Congo’s mineral wealth. Tshombe was clearly in alliance with the giant mining conglomerate Union Miniere, a Belgian/British transnational. For immediately after this announcement, the company said it would not pay its corporate taxes to the Congo capital of Leopoldville anymore. It would now pay them to Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga. (ibid, p. 33) The company also extended Tshombe a large loan. Further, Belgian advisors began to flock to Katanga as well as British mercenaries from nearby Rhodesia. Congo was going to be stillborn.
Lumumba now turned to Hammarskjold for help. The Secretary General immediately passed UN Resolution 143. This demanded that the Belgians leave Congo and promised assistance to Lumumba until the nation was able to defend itself. Within 48 hours, there were 3,500 UN troops on the ground in Congo. Although he was now being accused of acting too late by the USSR, Hammarskjold proclaimed he would not recognize either Mobutu or Kasavubu as the leader of Congo. (Williams, p. 39) But when Lumumba was murdered, the Russians again criticized the Secretary General for doing too little, too late.
Hammarskjold replied by passing resolution 161. There were now 15,000 UN troops in Congo, they were now allowed to use military force. The mission was to expel all foreign troops, and Parliament would be reconvened under UN protection. The Secretary General clearly saw Congo as a defining moment for both the UN and his leadership. (ibid, p. 41)
The UN commander on the ground, Conor Cruise O’Brien, demanded Tshombe step down and Katanga rejoin Congo. To strengthen himself, Tshombe now recruited French veterans of the OAS, the terrorist group of army veterans who had split off from French president Charles DeGaulle over Algerian independence.
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| Moise Tshombe December 22, 1961 |
In the face of this, O’Brien launched two offensives into Katanga. The first was called Operation Rumpunch, and the second was named Operation Morthor. The first operation was quite successful, the second was not. About half of Elisabethville was still under Tshombe’s control. (ibid, p. 49) By this time, the British premier of the African Federation—Roy Welensky— was clearly favoring Katanga, as was the Union of South Africa. Welensky, working with his colleague on African Affairs, Baron Cuthbert Alport, was also secretly supplying mercenaries from Rhodesia to Tshombe. (ibid, p. 51)
As a result of this secret policy, Welensky now shifted troops into Ndola, the main airport for Rhodesia, which was just a few miles from the border with Congo. Welensky shipped in food, supplies and arms from as far away as Australia. (ibid, p. 53) Rhetorically, Welensky went as far as to compare the UN troops in Congo to the Nazis.
This information is important. Since we are about to discuss the second high profile murder over the Congo Crisis: that of Dag Hammarskjold. Today I, and many others, call it a murder, not a suspicious death. The state of the evidence seems to me to clearly denote that this was a planned assassination. After considering some of the work of Susan Williams and others, the reader will likely agree.
Hammarskjold flew into Congo on September 13, 1961. He was surprised to hear about Operation Morthor, since he maintained he had not authorized it. While there, the Battle of Jadotville began. This was fought between a company of Irish UN troops and mercenaries employed by Tshombe. During the battle, Tshombe requested a meeting with Hammarskjold.
This was to occur on September 17th, in Ndola, a city in British controlled Rhodesia. Tshombe requested no reporters be alerted. But, Baron Alport was there. He stationed himself in the airport manager’s office, right below the control tower. As previously stated, also on hand was a temporary arm of the Rhodesian Ministry of Defense set up by Welensky. Hammarskjold was to arrive aboard a DC6 piloted by a Swede. Below him, on the runway, were 18 Rhodesian planes and two American DC3’s. (ibid, p. 68) In referring to the last, a Rhodesian air squadron leader told the UN Commission that there were “underhand things going on” at the airport, “with strange aircraft coming in, planes without flight plans and so on. There were American planes sitting on the airfield with engines running, likely transmitting messages.” (Lisa Pease, “Midnight in the Congo”, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 3 p. 20) Further, another witness said the American planes were full of sophisticated communications equipment. (Williams, p. 188)
Hammarskjold’s flight never landed at Ndola. And there is no tape recording of the approach of the plane. But there were notes kept. According to the written record, the last message from the plane was that the pilot was descending from 16,000 to 6,000 feet. (Williams, p. 70) At this point, Ndola lost contact with the plane. Because it was around midnight, no search party was sent out. Alport made a comment that the plane must have landed elsewhere. He then suggested the control room staff retire at around 3:00 AM. Yet, there were reports being filed around this time that several witnesses had independently seen a large ball of fire go off in the sky in the nearby vicinity. (ibid, p. 72) At 7 AM, a UN plane flew into Ndola to begin a search for Hammarskjold and the 15 other lost passengers of the Albertina. The pilot was arrested upon touching down. (ibid, p. 73)
The airport manager did not return until 9 AM, three hours after dawn. The search did not start until an hour later. The wreckage of the plane was found at about 3 PM, eight miles from the airport. There was one survivor, Harold Julien. He would pass away six days later. But not before he said the plane was in flames before it hit the ground. Further, the plane was determined to be under power, and the landing gear was lowered. Although all the passengers were severely burned, Hammarskjold was not—at all. Further, in something that simply cannot be explained, there was a playing card stuffed into his ruffled tie. Although it is not possible to determine what the card is from the photos, a witness at the scene said it was the ace of spades. (Williams, p. 7) Another oddity, Alport ended up with Hammarskjold’s briefcase. (ibid, p. 85) These anomalies suggest someone was at the crash scene before the official first responders arrived. As we shall see, the evidence for this is more than circumstantial.
Two of the security guards on the plane had bullets in their bodies. This was officially explained by saying that the heat of the crash had caused ammunition to explode. But a Swedish expert who had done experiments on this topic said that, even if this were so, the projectiles would not have enough force to penetrate the bodies. (See Pease, and Williams, p. 6) What makes this even more fascinating is the testimony of Major General Bjorn Egge. Egge had been the head of the UN military information mission in Congo. He had flown to the Ndola hospital, where the victims had been transported. When he saw Hammarskjold’s body he noticed what appeared to be a bullet hole in his forehead. (Williams, p. 5) That hole is not apparent in the autopsy photos Williams saw. But when the photos were shown to forensic experts, two of them said it appeared the photo had been retouched at the forehead. (ibid, p. 9)
Let us now consider sole survivor Julien’s crucial testimony: that the plane was in flames before it hit the ground. (Williams, p. 94) There is much evidence to corroborate this key point. Charles Southall was a Navy intelligence analyst in 1961. At the time, he was attached to the NSA base on the island of Cyprus. On the night of the crash, he was at home. His commanding officer called him and said he should come out and listen to a recorded communication intercept he had captured. This was the only time such a thing happened while he was in Cyprus, so Southall did so. He said that, on the recording, he heard a pilot say he was descending on the DC6. He then heard what he thought was the sound of a cannon firing. Then, the pilot said, “I’ve hit it…It’s going down.” (Williams, p. 143) Someone in the office recognized the pilot’s voice, and the NSA had a dossier on him. When the Swedish government reopened the case in 1992, Southall tried to communicate with them through the American State Department. But the Swedes found out about him through an independent source and he was interviewed more than once. (ibid, p. 147)
Southall’s testimony is echoed by the words of Swedish flying instructor Tore Meijer. He was stationed as a flight teacher to the Ethiopian Air Force in 1961. On the night of the crash, he was listening to a short wave radio he had just bought. Therefore, he was testing various frequencies. (ibid, p. 152) He picked up a conversation that included mention of the Ndola airport. In his own words, he then described the following: “The voice says, he’s approaching the airport, he’s turning—he’s leveling—where the pilot is approaching the actual landing strip. Then I hear the same voice saying, “another plane is approaching from behind, what is that?” The voice then said, “He breaks off the plan…he continues.” Meijer said he lost the contact at this point.
The idea that another plane intercepted Hammarskjold’s is corroborated by at least seven witnesses on the ground. (Pease, p. 20) For example, Dickson Buleni said he saw a smaller plane above the larger plane dropping something that looked like fire on it. (Williams, p. 117) This testimony is similar to that of Timothy Kankasa and his wife. (ibid, pp. 93, 122) But the Kankasas revealed something that may be even more interesting. They said that the crash was not initially discovered at around 3 PM on the 18th. Timothy and a few other residents of Twapia Township discovered it about six hours earlier. Further, the couple stated that this information was reported to local officials. Timothy also said he had reported it to the first investigating body from Rhodesia, but it had been edited out of his testimony. (ibid)
Again, there is independent corroboration for this earlier successful search, which punctures the 15-hour official lag time between the crash and the discovery of the plane wreckage. Colonel Charles Gaylor had been instructed by the USAF to fly to Ndola to help escort Hammarskjold to any other destination he wished to fly to as a result of his work there. Therefore, he was awaiting the landing of the Albertina that night. When Hammarskjold’s plane did not land, Gaylor retired so he could wake up and begin searching for the lost plane. He found it the next morning and relayed the information to the Ndola airport. Gaylor said that the Rhodesian planes did not show up until four hours later. (ibid, p. 188)
Another witness, who also saw a second plane in the sky, built on this disturbing indication of a deliberate and immediately enacted cover up as to the discovery of the wreckage. He saw two Land Rover type vehicles rushing at high speed toward the scene within an hour of the crash. (See Pease, “Midnight in the Congo”, p. 20) He and another witness then saw the vehicles return after they saw and heard a large fireball explosion. (Williams, p. 105)
One should note in regards to this testimony: when studying the photos of the wreckage of the Albertina, it certainly does not look like the plane simply crashed. Because the damage is just too extensive. It does appear that there was at least one explosion. But further, there do not seem to be any photos taken of Hammarskjold in situ. (Williams, pp. 13, 111) Because of this lack, because of the delay in the “discovery”, because of the testimony of Bjorn Egge about a bullet hole in Dag’s forehead, because of the experts who detected signs of tampering with the photos, because of the lack of any burns, because of all this, some have suggested that Hammarskjold may have survived the crash. And I should add one more point on this issue. Williams could not find any official autopsy reports. There are only summaries and conclusions. (p. 8)
From just this brief précis of the evidence, the reader can see that the original story, which said the crash was due to pilot error, is simply not credible today. The evidence indicates that Hammarskjold’s plane was sabotaged. A cover up, which seems preplanned, then ensued. The motive—as with Lumumba’s murder— was to make sure that Congo would not be an independent country. One in which the citizenry would be able to enjoy the fruits of its own prodigal resources. Which is what Lumumba had promised his followers during his campaign. With both Lumumba and Hammarskjold done away with, that aim now seemed unattainable.
As Susan Williams writes in her book, John Kennedy was an unflinching admirer of Hammarskjold. After his death, Kennedy summoned one of his assistants into the oval office. The president told Sture Linner that, compared to Hammarskjold, he was a small man. Because, in his view, Dag Hammarskjold was the greatest statesman of the 20th century. (p. 239)
When Kennedy came into office, one of the reversals he made of President Eisenhower’s foreign policy was in Congo. He had tried to make the issue of the rising tide of African nationalism part of the 1960 campaign. For he attempted to differentiate himself from his opponent Richard Nixon on the point. (See Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, pp. 37-41) This was a legitimate point of difference. At a National Security Council meeting, the vice-president once claimed that “some of the people of Africa have been out of the trees for only about fifty years.” Budget Director Maurice Stans replied that he “had the impression that many Africans still belonged in trees.” (ibid, p. 6) Kennedy did not at all share in this view. From at least 1957, with his powerful Senate speech on the French/Algerian crisis, Kennedy had become a staunch advocate of favoring African nationalism and liberation over the concerns of our European colonialist allies. (ibid, p. 36) For in that speech he actually stated that a true ally of France would not have done what Eisenhower and Nixon had with Algeria. Which was to either remain silent on the conflict, or even supply France with weapons. A true friend would have pointed out the folly of the colonial struggle. And then escorted France to the bargaining table to foster her exit from a hopeless and expensive civil war. (The full text of this visionary speech is in the book The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 66-80)
When Kennedy was inaugurated, he immediately enacted policies to carry out these differing views on Africa. As Muehlenbeck demonstrates, he did so on a number of different fronts. But the policy reversal that was done fastest was in Congo. Which he requested his first week in office. And which he approved on February 2nd. (See “Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa,” by James DiEugenio, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 2, p. 21) Upon hearing of this, Ambassador Timberlake sent word to Allen Dulles that Kennedy was breaking with Eisenhower, and his new program was more or less a sell-out to the Russians. When Hammarskjold got wind of the reversal, he told Dayal that they could soon expect an organized backlash to Kennedy’s reformist policy. Which, in large part, backed Lumumba—not realizing he was dead—and was open to negotiations with Russia over a militarily neutralized Congo. Kennedy also opposed the secession of Katanga and was willing to cooperate with the UN in an attempt to keep Congo free and independent.
In other words, for all intents and purposes, Kennedy agreed with the outlines of what Hammarskjold was doing. To make the distinction clear, he recalled Timberlake. (ibid, p. 22) Then, in September, Hammarskjold was killed.
At this point two remarkable things occurred in the immense Congo struggle. First, former President Harry Truman made a stunning comment. He said, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him.’ ” (Williams, p. 232) Author Greg Poulgrain later shed some light on the origins of this surprising comment. He interviewed Hammarskjold’s close friend and colleague at the UN, George Ivan Smith. It turns out that Hammarskjold and Kennedy were cooperating, not just on Congo, but on the problem of the Dutch occupation of West Irian, which Indonesian leader Achmed Sukarno felt should be part of Indonesia. (Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention, pp. 77-78) Smith also added that Kennedy had let Harry Truman know about these discussions. Which seems logical, since Truman was the only previous Democratic president still alive.
The second remarkable development was that Kennedy decided to shoulder on with what Hammarskjold had begun in the Congo. In other words, by himself, he was going to oppose the imperialist forces of England, France, and Belgium. Which all desired to split Katanga away from Congo. And then make both states pawns for European multinational corporations. There can be very little doubt that this was Kennedy’s aim. Why? Because, after Hammarskjold’s demise, he went to the UN to pay tribute to his legacy. He then appointed Edmund Gullion as his ambassador to Congo.
Anyone who knows anything about Kennedy will realize, it was Gullion who first altered JFK’s consciousness on the subject of the appeal of communism in the Third World. This occurred on Senator Kennedy’s visit to Saigon in 1951. JFK never forgot the prediction that Gullion made at that time. Namely that France would not win the war in Indochina. When Kennedy gained the White House, he brought Gullion in as an advisor on colonial matters. And now he sent him to Leopoldville to attempt to compensate for the loss of Hammarskjold. As Richard Mahoney wrote, this indicated just how important Kennedy thought the Congo was. Because no ambassador in the entire administration had more secure access to the oval office than Gullion. (Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 108) Kennedy then went further. He made George Ball his special advisor on Congo inside the White House. Ball later became famous as the one man willing to argue against President Johnson during his disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War. But even in 1961 Ball had a reputation as something of a maverick on foreign policy.
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| Kennedy addresses U.N. General Assembly September 25, 1961 |
Addressing the General Assembly at the memorial for Hammarskjold, Kennedy said, “Let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain.” He backed this up by having his UN delegation vote for a use of force resolution to deport the mercenaries and advisory personnel out of Katanga. (DiEugenio, p. 23) In doing so, Kennedy was militarily moving against his formal allies, the British, French and Belgians. For those nations were all paying lip service to the UN forces. But not so clandestinely, they were undermining the mission. Therefore, Kennedy was not just honoring Hammarskjold rhetorically. He was continuing his policies—and pushing the UN into following him. In fact, when hostilities broke out in Katanga with Tshombe trying to block highways used by UN troops, Kennedy told the new UN leader U Thant, who was wavering on the commitment, not to worry at all about European reaction. He would take care of that. He then said in public, these leaders should spend less time criticizing the UN and more time convincing Tshombe to negotiate a truce with the new leader of Congo, Cyrille Adoula. (Mahoney, p. 117)
Kennedy also had to deal with the big guns of the MSM who seemed to favor Tshombe. That is: Time magazine, who put him on their cover; William F. Buckley, who (incredibly) compared Katanga’s secession to the Hungarian uprising of 1956; and Sen. Thomas Dodd, who actually visited Tshombe in Katanga to show his support. In the face of this, Kennedy decided to use economic warfare. He told the representatives of the giant Union Miniere mining corporation that unless they significantly cut their monthly stipend to Tshombe, he would unleash a terrific attack on Katanga, and then turn over the company’s assets to Adoula. This achieved its aim. The stipend was significantly reduced. (DiEugenio, p. 24)
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| Kennedy and Cyrille Adoula at the White House |
Kennedy then brought Adoula to New York. In his address to the United Nations, the African leader criticized Belgium and praised Congo’s national hero, Patrice Lumumba. (Mahoney, p. 134) In reaction, Tshombe’s supporters then wanted to bring him to the USA to counter this appearance. Gullion argued against it. He suggested denying Tshombe a visa on the basis that he was not a real representative of Congo. Kennedy listened to arguments for and against the denial. He then sided with Gullion and denied the visa. (DiEugenio, p. 24)
On the day before Christmas of 1962, Katangese troops fired on a UN helicopter and outpost. Kennedy had previously forced the issue on his White House staff by demanding a unanimous vote to back the military invasion of Katanga. George Ball, who was holding out for more negotiations, came over to the Kennedy/Gullion side. So now the USA fully backed Operation Grand Slam, the UN attempt to finally take Elisabethville, capital of Katanga. By January 22, 1963 Grand Slam had succeeded on all fronts. Tshombe, predictably, fled to Rhodesia. As Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s representative to the United Nations wrote, it was that body’s finest hour.
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| Kennedy addresses U.N. General Assembly September 20, 1963 |
The UN had never before done what Hammarskjold had committed it to in Congo. That is, send a large military force into an independent nation to put down an internal civil war. But Hammarskjold had done so at Lumumba’s request. Both men had been murdered over that struggle. With Hammarskjold gone, the United Nations did not want to stay after Grand Slam was completed. In fact, it’s an open question if Grand Slam would have been launched without Kennedy’s visit to the UN the year before. But because of the expense, controversy, and length of the expedition, the UN leadership wanted to leave Congo in 1963. Even with Adoula’s position precarious and the Congolese army a rather unreliable force. Again, Kennedy took it upon himself to go to New York. On September 20, 1963 Kennedy addressed the UN General Assembly on this very subject. He said he understood how a project like this would lose its attraction after its initial goals were met. Because then the bills would come due. But he urged the UN to do what it could to preserve the gains they had made. He also asked that they do all in their power to maintain Congo as an independent nation in its fragile state. He concluded the UN should complete what Hammarskjold had begun.
Kennedy’s speech turned around the consensus opinion to depart. The UN voted to keep the peacekeeping mission there. But later in 1963, things began to unravel. Kasavubu decided to disband Parliament. This ignited a leftist rebellion from Stanleyville. There was an assassination attempt on Mobutu. With this, Mobutu, already a darling of the CIA, now became the Pentagon’s poster boy at Fort Benning.
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| Mobutu Sese Seko with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (1973) |
After Kennedy’s murder, President Johnson sided with the CIA and the Fort Benning crowd. As the Stanleyville rebellion picked up steam, the CIA now descended on the American embassy and took it over. It became the base for an air operation run by Cuban exile pilots. Incredibly, Belgium now became an ally of the USA. Tshombe was asked back to Congo by Mobutu. Tshombe immediately found a treasure trove of Chinese documents and a defector who now said China was behind the leftist rebellion. (Kwitny, p. 79) Needless to say, within 18 months, Johnson and the CIA had reversed the Kennedy/Hammarskjold program. Adoula and Kasavubu were dismissed or forced out; Gullion left. In 1966 Mobutu installed himself as military dictator. The riches of the Congo were now mined by the European forces Lumumba asked Hammarskjold to remove. Like Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu became one of the richest men in the world. His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped 100 million dollars. (Kwitny, p. 87) Like Suharto, he reigned for three decades. And like the Indonesia dictator, when he fell, he left his country in a destabilized, anarchic state with poverty predominating. In other words, where they were at the beginning.
One of the most fascinating revelations in Greg Poulgrain’s The Incubus of Intervention was this: In addition to JFK working with the Secretary General Hammarskjold on Congo, the two were also working on a design for Indonesia. (Poulgrain, p.77) They were planning on a solution to the West Irian problem. Which was part of the former Dutch Empire that Netherlands did not want to let go. Probably because of the great mineral wealth there, which likely even surpassed that of Katanga. Further, the two men were also working on a plan to aid countries coming out of colonialism. This was called OPEX. This was a UN group that would send professionals of all kinds into these areas to aid their development. Not as advisors, but as servants of the new country. This is the plan Hammarskjold had in mind for West Irian. In their original concept, Hammarskjold would play the lead role in both Congo and Indonesia, with Kennedy supporting him. With the Secretary General’s 1961 murder, Kennedy had to soldier through both situations himself. He was doing a fairly good job, until he too was assassinated. In fact, he had planned on a state visit to Jakarta in 1964, a first for an American president.
As one can see from this discussion, and also Poulgrain’s book, Kennedy’s policies were reversed in both countries shortly after his murder. (See again the above-cited review; also, this interview with the author) The results were horrendous for the citizens of both countries. For when Mobutu and Suharto took over, any idea of having the prodigal natural resources of both states aid in fostering its citizenry was lost. Because of the two overthrows, Lumumba and Sukarno did not funnel the money into improvements for the daily lives of their citizens, through building infrastructure, energy sources, hospitals, primary and secondary schools etc. Instead it went to the shareholders of the exploiting companies and into the pockets of Mobutu and Suharto.
As Jonathan Kwitny has noted, Congo could have been a sterling example of a nation crippled by colonialism, now being set free. And aided by the USA, allowed to grow and nurture, and thereby be a model—for not just Africa—but the rest of the world. That is what Hammarskjold and Kennedy had hoped for. Just as they had imagined for Sukarno and Indonesia. Instead, something contrary to that occurred. Or as Kwitny wrote:
The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in post-colonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. (Kwitny, p. 75)
Kennedy and Hammarskjold understood this moral and practical quandary. It was not until recently that the importance of the Hammarskjold/Kennedy relationship has been highlighted. I and others have also tried to show that Kennedy’s foreign policy should be seen not just as a series of individual instances, but in the gestalt. That is, as part of an overall pattern. Largely because of his sensitivity to these Third World issues—which was not at all the case with Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon. But this gestalt concept has been very late in arriving. Because the cover up about the facts of Kennedy’s real foreign policy has been more stringent and assiduous than the cover up about the facts of his assassination.
Too often we think of that foreign policy in terms of just Cuba and Vietnam. As seen above, that view foreshortens history. It’s the way the other side wants us to see Kennedy—a view without Hammarskjold. Constricted by this deliberate obstruction, we fail to see who Kennedy really was. Not only does that foreshortened view cheat history, it cheats Kennedy—and helps conceal the secrets of his assassination.
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| from “JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder” JFK Lancer conference, November 2014 |
See now U.N. to Probe Whether Iconic Secretary-General Was Assassinated for the discovery of the original SAIMR documents.
by Tricia Jenkins, At: Newsweek
The dust jacket for The Plot to Kill King quotes former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark as stating that “No one has done more than Dr. William F. Pepper to keep alive the quest for truth concerning the violent death of Martin Luther King.” This is unassailably true. Dr. King’s murder has never received anything approaching the level of attention and scrutiny that has been afforded the assassination of President Kennedy but, for nearly three decades, Pepper has worked tirelessly to uncover the truth and bring it to the attention of the American public. As he chronicles in his latest book, Pepper was the last attorney for accused assassin James Earl Ray before his death, and tried every avenue available to him to gain his client the trial he had been denied in 1969 when the state of Tennessee and his own lawyer, Percy Foreman, broke Ray down and coerced him into entering a guilty plea.1 Pepper and his investigators spent many, many hours locating overlooked witnesses, uncovering leads, and assembling a case. Then in 1993 he took part in a televised mock trial that resulted in a “not guilty” verdict for Ray.2 After Ray died in 1998, and any and all possibility of a real criminal trial went with him, Pepper worked with the King family in filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Loyd Jowers and “other unknown co-conspirators” so that the information he had uncovered could still be put before a jury. After 14 days of testimony from over 70 witnesses, the jury found that Jowers and others, “including governmental agencies”, were responsible for the death of Martin Luther King.3
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| William Pepper |
Yet Pepper is and always has been a controversial figure, even among those who share his disbelief in the official story. For example, Harold Weisberg – who worked as an investigator for Ray’s defense team in the early 1970s and wrote the classic MLK assassination book, Frame Up – referred derisively to Pepper as “a would-be Perry Mason” and described his work as “worse than worthless.”4 On the other hand, the late, great Philip Melanson once described Pepper’s research and investigation as “groundbreaking” when it came to “establishing the presence of Army Intelligence and Army Intelligence snipers” in Memphis on the day of the murder.5 Over the years, this reviewer has adopted something of an agnostic position when it comes to areas of Pepper’s work. Whilst there is undoubtedly great value in what he has uncovered and accomplished, it nonetheless remains true that there a number of legitimate reasons for doubting important elements of Pepper’s research.
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| Loyd Jowers |
Take for example the man at the very centre of Pepper’s conspiracy narrative, Loyd Jowers. In 1968, Jowers was the proprietor of Jim’s Grill, a restaurant located underneath the rooming house from which the state alleges Ray fired the fatal shot. For many years the only thing Jowers had to say that was of any interest to investigators was that a white Ford Mustang had been parked directly in front of the grill on the afternoon of the assassination; corroborating Ray’s claim of where he had parked his car and helping establish the presence of two white Mustangs on Main Street. But in 1993, Jowers appeared on ABC’s Prime Time Live claiming that Memphis-based produce dealer and alleged Mafia figure, Frank Liberto, had contacted him shortly before the assassination and paid him $100,000 to hire someone to assassinate Dr. King. He was then visited by a man named Raul who handed him a “rifle in a box” and asked him to hold onto it until “we made arrangements, one or the other of us, for the killing.”6
On the face of it, Jowers’ story seems plausible enough. There is no doubt that he was at the scene of the crime and in a position to assist in carrying out the assassination. Additionally, parts of his account were corroborated by two other witnesses: former Jim’s Grill waitress, Betty Spates, and local Memphis cab driver, Jim McCraw. Also, Jowers’ claim that Frank Liberto brought him into the plot recalls the statement of civil rights leader John McFerren that, sometime in the afternoon shortly before Dr. King was shot, he overheard Liberto telling someone on the telephone to “Shoot the son of a bitch when he comes on the balcony.”7 And yet Jowers was, by any definition, a most unreliable witness. By Pepper’s own admission there were numerous different versions of his story. In fact, he contradicted himself on virtually every important detail.
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| Jim’s Grill |
He initially named black produce-truck unloader Frank Holt as the gunman he had hired but changed his mind after Holt was found alive and well and passed a polygraph test, denying any involvement.8 Jowers then hinted that deceased Memphis Police Lieutenant Earl Clark was the real gunman only to tell Dr. King’s son, Dexter, that he “couldn’t swear” that he was because “All I got was a glance of him.”9 To Dexter, Jowers said that the gunman handed him the still smoking rifle, yet at an earlier time he had claimed to have picked it up after it had been placed on the ground.10 Around this time he also changed his mind about ever having been asked to hire the gunman, saying instead that he had simply been told to be out in the bushes behind Jim’s Grill at 6:00 PM and that he didn’t even know Dr. King was going to be killed.11 In this scenario, Jowers merely held onto the $100,000 until it was collected by a co-conspirator.
Perhaps even more troubling than these inconsistencies – of which there are more – is the fact that Jowers and his friend Willie Akins are known to have contacted Betty Spates in January 1994 saying that they were interested in doing a book or a movie and they needed her to change her story. If she would say that she saw a black man handing the rifle to Jowers immediately after the shooting, they could all make $300,000.12 And if that wasn’t bad enough, in an April 1997 tape-recorded conversation with Shelby County district attorney general’s office investigator, Mark Glankler, Jowers basically disavowed his confession by stating that Ray’s rifle was the real murder weapon and that “there was no second rifle.”13
It may also be seen as significant that Jowers never did repeat his conspiracy allegations under oath. He was not actually present for the King v. Jowers civil trial, apparently owing to ill health. The only time he gave a legal deposition after his appearance on Prime Time Live was during the 1994 Ray v. Jowers lawsuit, at which time he reverted to his 1968 story and insisted that he was in the bar serving drinks when the shot was fired. Jowers had agreed that the transcript of his Prime Time Live appearance could be entered into evidence but, through his attorney Lewis Garrison, stipulated “that the questions were asked and Mr. Jowers gave these answers”.14 Thus he did not swear to the accuracy of his alleged confession, he merely agreed that he had given it.
In The Plot to Kill King, Pepper attributes Jowers’ many contradictory assertions to his fear of being prosecuted and an understandable desire to minimize his own role when talking to members of the King family. Pepper also argues, in spite of Jowers’ attempt to encourage Spates to lie for her share of $300,000, that it is “arrant nonsense” to suggest that he fabricated his story “in anticipation of a book or movie deal.” In fact, he says, “Jowers lost everything. Even his wife left him. There was no book or movie deal, and he was, for the most part, telling the truth.”15 Yet none of these arguments preclude the possibility that Jowers’ confession was invented as part of a money-making scheme that backfired.
That being said, it should be borne in mind that Jowers’ initial Prime Time story did not come completely out of the blue. Suspicion had already been cast on him by statements that Spates and McCraw had given to Pepper, after which Jowers’, through Garrison, had contacted the Shelby County district attorney general offering to tell everything he knew in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Needless to say his proffer went completely ignored without anyone even attempting to speak with him. Assistant district attorney general, John Campbell, would later attempt to justify this total lack of interest by stating that the story looked “bogus” and that if they had given Jowers immunity “it would imply we thought there was some validity to his story, and that would increase the value of what he could sell it for.”16 Precisely how they were able to deduce immediately and without even talking to Jowers that his story was “bogus” is anyone’s guess.
In the end, it will be up to each individual researcher to decide which, if any, of Jowers’ varying accounts to believe. Whilst it is true that the jury in King v. Jowers did find him partly responsible for the assassination, it is also true that his assertions were not thoroughly tested at the trial because neither Pepper nor Garrison were looking to undermine Jowers’ credibility. Legendary attorney, author, and activist, Mark Lane, was critical of the trial for that very reason, telling this reviewer that in his opinion, “It was not a real trial … both sides offered the same position and I have reason to doubt that the position they offered was sound. The jury, having seen no evidence to the contrary, had no choice. In my view, the court system should not be utilized in that fashion.”17
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| Mark Lane with James Earl Ray |
Lane’s assessment is, in my view, somewhat off the mark in that it suggests a type of collusion between Pepper and Garrison that was likely not the case. In truth, Garrison was in an extremely awkward position. He could not simply deny the existence of a conspiracy without calling his own client a liar, so his strategy was to attempt to minimize Jowers’ role and convince the jury that, as he stated in his closing argument, “Mr. Jowers played a very, very insignificant and minor role in this if he played anything at all. It was much bigger than Mr. Jowers, who owned a little greasy-spoon restaurant there and happened to be at the location he was.”18 In that regard, it worked to Garrison’s advantage to allow Pepper to put on a case for a wide-ranging conspiracy without offering a rigorous challenge. Nevertheless, the result of this strategy, as Lane suggested, was that the jury essentially heard one story from both sides and for that reason the verdict was far from surprising.
By noting these circumstances, it is not meant in any way to suggest that the civil trial or the jury’s verdict were entirely without merit. On the contrary, as Pepper details in The Plot to Kill King, numerous witnesses gave significant and often startling testimony under oath – many for the first time – and put important evidence on the record. For example, a succession of witnesses provided evidence establishing the manner in which Dr. King was, seemingly intentionally, stripped of all reasonable security, and left entirely vulnerable to a sniper’s bullet. Of particular note is the testimony of Memphis Police Department homicide detective Captain Jerry Williams who had been in charge of organizing a unit of black officers that had previously provided protection for Dr. King on his visits to Memphis. Williams said that he was not asked to form his unit on Dr. King’s final, fatal visit, and was later falsely informed that Dr. King’s organization, the SCLC, had said Dr. King did not want protection.19 Additionally, as University of Massachusetts Professor Philip Melanson testified, MPD Inspector Sam Evans had ordered the emergency services’ TACT 10 unit removed from the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel, claiming this too was done at the request of someone in the SCLC. As Pepper writes, “When pressed as to who actually made the request, he said that it was Reverend [Samuel] Kyles. The fact that Kyles had nothing to do with the SCLC, and no authority to request any such thing, seemed to have eluded Evans.”20
Not only had Dr. King been stripped of protection but a last-minute switching of his motel room had made the assassin’s job all the easier. Former New York City police detective Leon Cohen testified that Lorraine Motel manager Walter Bailey told him on the morning after the assassination that Dr. King had originally been allocated a more secure courtyard room. But on the evening before his arrival, Bailey had received a call from someone claiming to be from the SCLC’s Atlanta office requesting Dr. King be given a balcony room instead. Bailey said he was “adamantly” opposed to the change “because he had provided security by the inner court” but his caller had insisted the rooms be switched anyway.21 Needless to say, no genuine member of the SCLC is known to have made any such request.
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| King on the Lorraine balcony |
As well as being shown how Dr. King was maneuvered into a vulnerable position, the Memphis jury also heard much evidence helping to establish James Earl Ray’s probable innocence. The state has always maintained that Ray holed himself up in a shared bathroom in the rooming house opposite the Lorraine and waited until Dr. King appeared on the balcony at approximately 6:00 pm. After supposedly firing the fatal shot, he is said to have rushed back to his rented room, put the rifle in its box, placed it amongst a bundle of his belongings, then ran down the stairs to the ground floor. Once outside, he allegedly dumped his bundle in the doorway of Canipe’s Amusement Company, climbed into a white Mustang parked just south of Canipe’s, and quickly sped away.
Pepper provided evidence that successfully countered every step of this most likely false narrative. The notion that Ray had been lying in wait in the bathroom was contradicted by the sworn deposition of James McCraw, who had been in the rooming house only a few minutes before Dr. King was shot. McCraw said that he saw the bathroom door wide open and there was no one inside.22 Raising the possibility that the shot was actually fired from the thick shrubbery below the bathroom window, Pepper read into the record the sworn statement of SCLC member Reverend James Orange who said that he saw what he thought was gun smoke rising from the bushes immediately after he heard the shot.23
Ray’s alleged flight down the rooming house stairs had, according to the state, been witnessed by Charles Stephens, who occupied the room between the bathroom and the room Ray had rented. But his ability to witness anything was called into question by taxi driver McCraw, who had been called to the rooming house specifically to pick Stephens up. McCraw said that he found Stephens lying on his bed, too drunk to even get up.24 McCraw’s account was corroborated by the testimony of MPD homicide detective Tommy Smith who entered the building shortly after the assassination and found Stephens still so intoxicated that he could hardly stand.25 Not mentioned at the trial was the fact that two weeks after the murder, Stephens had been shown a picture of Ray by CBS news correspondent Bill Stout and failed to recognize him. In fact, he said Ray was “definitely not” the man he claimed to have seen fleeing the rooming house.26
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| Judge Joe Brown with the supposed murder weapon |
Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over Ray’s final appeal, took the stand to testify about a series of ballstics tests that he had ordered be performed on the Remington Gamemaster rifle found in the doorway of Canipe’s. The FBI had never been able to establish that particular rifle as the murder weapon – supposedly because the bullet removed from Dr. King’s body was too mutilated. Judge Brown, himself a ballistics expert, explained that 12 of the 18 bullets fired during his tests had contained a similar flaw – a bump on the surface – that was not present on the death slug. He also said that the rifle had never been sighted in and, as a result, had failed the FBI’s accuracy test. “ … based on the entirety of the record”, Brown said, “and the further ballistics tests I had run, it is my opinion this is not the murder weapon.”27 Brown’s opinion was re-enforced by the testimony of Judge Arthur Hanes, Jr., who, alongside his father, had been Ray’s defense attorney before Ray made the fatal mistake of hiring Percy Foreman. Judge Hanes told the court that Guy Warren Canipe had said to him in 1968 that the bundle containing the rifle had been dumped in the doorway of his store approximately 10 minutes before the assassination and he was prepared to testify to that effect.28
Finally, Pepper showed, through the FBI statements of Ray Hendrix and William Reed, that James Earl Ray had most likely left the scene in his white Mustang shortly before the assassination, not immediately after. Ray always maintained that he parked his car directly in front of Jim’s Grill, not south of Canipe’s, and that he left the area sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 pm to try to get his spare tire fixed. The April 25, 1968, statements of Hendrix and Reed corroborated Ray’s account. The pair told the Bureau that they had left Jim’s Grill at approximately 5:30 pm and noticed a white Mustang parked directly outside. When Hendrix realised he had forgotten his jacket, he went back into the grill to retrieve it whilst Reed stood staring at the car. When Hendrix reappeared the two walked a couple of blocks north on South Main Street until they reached the corner of Main and Vance, at which point what appeared to be the very same Mustang, driven by a lone, dark-haired man, rounded the corner in front of them. This independent confirmation of Ray’s movements, essentially constituting an alibi, was hidden from the defence and the FBI kept the crucial documents from the public for decades.29 Finding these statements and having them entered into evidence, as they should have been in 1969, is one of the many things for which Pepper is to be applauded.
Another is his effort to locate and identify the mysterious figure previously known only as “Raoul” or “Raul”. For those unfamiliar with the King case, Raul was the name of the man whom Ray always claimed had set him up for the assassination. Shortly after his escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967, Ray made his way to Montreal, Canada, hoping to obtain the travel documents he needed to flee the country. It was there in a place called the Neptune Bar that he said he met Raul, a dark-skinned man with a Spanish accent, who promised to provide the documents Ray needed if he agreed to smuggle some items across the border. For the next several months, Ray said, he received large sums of money – including $1,900 to buy the Ford Mustang – and followed Raul’s instructions. According to Ray, these instructions ultimately included purchasing the Remington Gamemaster rifle and renting a room at the flophouse opposite the Lorraine Motel.
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| Jerry Ray before the HSCA |
Needless to say, the state and its defenders have always maintained that Raul did not exist. Yet as Pepper points out, this leaves them with the problem of accounting for the large sums of money Ray was known to have spent whilst having no other known source of income. Desperate to explain this away, the HSCA theorized that Ray and his brothers had robbed a bank in Alton, Illinois. “The problem with this ‘theory’”, Pepper writes, “is that I called the local sheriff and the bank president in Alton. I was advised that they knew James had nothing to do with the robbery. The real culprits were known but there was not enough evidence to charge them.”30 On Pepper’s advice, Ray’s brother Jerry surrendered himself to the Alton police in 1978, offering to waive the statute of limitations so that he could be charged. He was promptly informed that neither he nor his brothers had ever been suspects.31
Because Ray was a largely incompetent crook, and because he was never the violent racist that the media falsely made him out to be, those who spent any length of time with him rarely doubted his claim that he had been set-up by someone. Quite simply, the idea of Ray as a lone nut assassin has never made any sense. As Arthur Hanes Sr. is said to have remarked, “Unless Ray is a complete damn fool I don’t see how he could have made the decision to kill King. Before King was killed, Ray was doing all right. He was free, able to support himself with smuggling and stealing. He was driving a good car all over Canada, the United States and Mexico. He was comfortable, eating well, finding girls, and nobody was looking for him. Why then would he jeopardize his freedom by killing a famous man and setting all the police in the world after him?”32 Indeed, one might ask why Ray, being on the run from prison and desiring little more than to leave the United States for a country with whom the US had no extradition treaty, would have even re-entered the country in the first place after having made it as far as the Montreal docks? It might well be said that Ray’s actions following his prison break only make sense if we accept that someone was manipulating him.
Pepper believed Ray’s story and, soon after agreeing to represent him, set out to find Raul. Eventually Pepper’s investigators came into contact with a rather eccentric witness named Glenda Grabow who told them that in the 1970s she had been involved in gunrunning, among other illegal activities, with a man whose nickname was “Dago” and that he had confessed to her his involvement in the murder of Dr. King. Meanwhile Pepper, who heard a rumour that Raul was living in the northeast, had zeroed in on an individual named Raul Coelho, living in Upstate New York. Investigators John Billings and Ken Herman obtained a picture of this Raul taken in 1961 when he emigrated to the US from Portugal, placed it amongst a spread of six photographs, and showed them to Grabow. According to Herman, “she pointed out Raul with no hesitation. She was sitting at the kitchen table in my house and zeroed right in on the guy.” The spread was then shown to Glenda’s younger brother, Royce Wilburn, who also knew “Dago” and he too identified the picture of the New York Raul.33
Billings then took the obvious next step and showed the spread of photographs to Ray in his cell at Riverbend Prison in Nashville, Tennessee. As Billings later testified, “I told him we had a picture of Raul. And he seemed somewhat surprised. And I asked him if he would choose to attempt to pick out Raul in a photo spread … So we put this before him, and James put on his glasses and very – for a minute or two studied these pictures very carefully.” He then dropped his finger down on the picture of the New York Raul and said “that’s Raul.” Asked if he was positive Ray said, “Yes, I am.”34
The pictures were also shown to British merchant seaman Sid Carthew who had come forward after watching a video tape of the televised mock trial saying that he too had met a man named Raul in the Neptune Bar, Montreal, in 1967. Over the course of two evenings, Raul had offered to sell him some Browning 9mm handguns. “He said to me, how many would you want, and I said four … and he said, four, what do you – four, what do you mean by four. I said four guns. He wanted to sell me four boxes of guns … once he knew that I would have only take – took four, he was very annoyed … it wouldn’t be worth his while to deal in such a small number, and that was the end of the conversation, and he went back to the bar.”35 Carthew selected the same photograph from the spread as Grabow, Royce, and Ray had before him. And according to Pepper, so too did Loyd Jowers.36
In its response to the King v. Jowers trial and verdict, the Department of Justice insisted that the New York Raul had had nothing to do with the assassination and dismissed these photographic identifications as “suspect”. It said that the photo array was “deficient and unfairly suggestive” because the Raul photograph is the only one of the six to have “extremely high black and white contrast and no intermediate gray tones” and thus “stands out markedly from the others.”37 Essentially the DOJ suggested that the contrast of that particular photo causes it to draw the eye and that was why Pepper’s witnesses picked it out. This reviewer recently decided to put that notion to the test by sharing the photo array on a social media site, asking if anyone could pick out a man named “Raoul” (Ray’s original spelling) who “has allegedly been involved in drug smuggling, gun dealing, and murder.” I also hinted at a connection to the assassination of Dr. King. Of the 14 respondents, not a single one picked out the picture of the New York Raul. While this was hardly a perfect experiment, the result nonetheless stood in stark contrast to the DOJ’s suggestion that the picture of Raul Coelho was more likely to be picked over the others because of its high contrast.
Ironically, one of the most frequently cited reasons for doubting the DOJ’s assurances and believing that the man Pepper found may well have been the real Raul is the manner in which he was assisted and protected by the US Government. As Pepper discovered after he made Raul a party defendant in the Ray v. Jowers lawsuit, despite supposedly being nothing more than a retired auto plant worker of modest means, Raul was being represented by two large, prestigious law firms. And when Portuguese journalist Barbara Reis tried to interview him, a member of Raul’s family told her that agents of the US government “are looking over us”, had visited them on at least three occasions and were monitoring their telephone calls.38 As Pepper observed, “Imagine that degree of care and consideration by the government for just a little old retired autoworker.”39
Most of the above, actually most of what is in The Plot to Kill King, will be familiar ground for those who have read Pepper’s first two books, Orders to Kill and Act of State. In fact, the first two thirds of the new book are little more than a retread of the previous two with entire passages actually being lifted word-for-word from Act of State. The final third of the book, which details Pepper’s “continuing investigation”, unfortunately does not do much to elevate matters or add to our understanding. The new information presented therein is, in this reviewer’s estimation, of very dubious reliability.
Pepper makes the absolutely startling claim that, although Dr. King’s gunshot wound would have been fatal anyway, he was intentionally finished off by the emergency room doctors who were supposed to be saving his life. He writes of a story that was related to him by a blind Memphis resident named Johnton Shelby, who claims that his mother, Lula Mae, was a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital and took part in Dr. King’s emergency treatment. According to Shelby, the morning after the assassination his mother gathered the family together to tell them that the emergency room doctors had been ordered by the head of surgery and a couple of “men in suits” to “Stop working on that nigger and let him die.” They were all then ordered to leave the room immediately. Shelby said that as his mother was leaving, she heard the men sucking saliva into their mouths and spitting so she glanced over her shoulder. She then saw that Dr. King’s breathing tube had been removed and a pillow was being placed over his face so as to suffocate him.40
An extraordinary story like Shelby’s requires extraordinary proof. Yet Pepper seems to swallow the whole thing hook, line, and sinker despite the fact that, by his own admission, he spoke with numerous medical personnel who were known to have been in the emergency room and found absolutely no corroboration for it whatsoever. Shelby named a few people with whom his mother supposedly shared her experience but, needless to say, they were all conveniently dead in 2013 when he first came forward. More importantly, in accepting Shelby’s story, Pepper has to ignore the fact that it is directly contradicted by testimony that he himself put before the jury in King v. Jowers.
At the civil trial Pepper put John Billings on the stand to testify not only about his time investigating Glenda Grabow and Raul Coelho but also about his activities on the day of the assassination. In April 1968, Billings was a junior at Memphis State University and was working as a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s. He walked into Emergency Room 1 just as Dr. King’s treatment was beginning and stood and watched as several doctors were “feverishly working … for 30, 45 minutes or so.” One of the doctors eventually walked up to Billings and told him to “go get someone in charge.” He walked out of the room and found “one or two gentleman wearing suits” who “seemed to be more or less telling everyone what to do.” He led them back into the emergency room “and the doctors informed them of something to the effect of Dr. King is – Dr. King is terminated. We have done everything that we can. We feel there’s nothing left that we can do.”41 Nowhere in Billings’ first hand account was there any reference to emergency room staff being ordered to stop working on Dr. King and leave the room. He specifically recalled that the doctors themselves made the decision to stop when they felt they had done everything they could.
At one point Pepper hints at the idea that the “connections, associations, and personal success” linked to a career practising medicine in Memphis might explain why the numerous doctors who treated Dr. King did not recall the supposed intervention. But he cannot apply any such argument to Billings who did not follow a career in medicine and worked hard as one of Pepper’s investigators to uncover details of the conspiracy to kill Dr. King. It is readily apparent that Billings had absolutely no reason to withhold any details surrounding Dr. King’s emergency treatment. Which is probably why Pepper avoids mentioning his testimony on the issue altogether.
Pepper also buys into a very elaborate yarn spun by one Ronnie Lee Adkins a.k.a. Ron Tyler. Ronnie’s father, Russell, worked for the city of Memphis for 20 years in the “Engineering Division”. Despite his modest means he was, according to Ronnie, both a 32nd Degree Mason and a Klansman who attended “meetings” that involved everyone from Mayor Henry Loeb and Memphis police and fire department director Frank Holloman to Frank Liberto, Carlos Marcello, and J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy in the FBI, Clyde Tolson. Russell was known as a “fixer” and, through Tolson, Hoover would give him money to perform various deeds including “local-area killings.” On one particular occasion in 1967, Tolson gave him money that was to be paid to the warden of Missouri State Prison to arrange for the escape of James Earl Ray. Of course, as any reasonable person would expect, Russell saw no need to shield his young son from his nefarious deeds, so little Ronnie not only got to see the money being handed to his father, he even got to go along to Missouri to see it passed on to the warden. Or so he says.
According to Ronnie, in 1964 his father went on a trip to Southampton, England, with Tolson. When he returned he called a meeting with his eldest son Russell Junior and others to tell them that “The coon has got to go.” From then on “prayer meetings” were held at the Berclair Baptist Church, among other places, which eventually came to focus on how to get the garbage workers “pissed off” as a means of drawing Dr. King to Memphis. Allegedly “the word come down from Hoover” that the assassination was to occur in Memphis so that “daddy and them could handle it.” If the reader is dubious that planning for the assassination would have begun four years before it occurred, they will be even less impressed by the claim that way back in 1956 Tolson had handed Russell a “Personal Prayer List” of his and Hoover’s featuring the names JFK, RFK and MLK. That’s right, Ronnie claims that nearly five years before the Kennedys made it to the White House, and at a time when Dr. King’s activism was just beginning, Hoover had already put their names together on a list and handed it to his Memphis “fixer” for no apparent reason.
When Russell died in 1967, Junior allegedly took over in planning the assassination alongside Holloman. Someone in their camp then supposedly engineered the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. For those who are unfamiliar with those names, Cole and Walker were two black sanitation workers who, on February 1, 1968, were tragically crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck where they were trying to hide from the rain. It was this tragic accident, and the paltry assistance the city gave to the families of the victims, that prompted Dr. King to travel to Memphis and join a city-wide march in support of the striking sanitation workers. But in Ronnie’s world, this was no accident, “Somebody pulled the hammer, pulled the lever on the truck and mashed them up in there.”
After Dr. King booked into the Lorraine Motel, Ronnie says, Jesse Jackson – who had supposedly been paid by Russell to keep tabs on Dr King – was instructed to have his room changed to the balcony room 306. Jackson then “went down there and talked to the man and, or his wife Lurlee … and had him move Martin and Ralph up to 306.” The Reverend Billy Kyles, another alleged informant, was given the job of getting Dr. King to come out of his room and onto the balcony at precisely 6:00 pm.
On the day of the assassination, Ronnie claims, he carried the murder weapon into town on the back of his motorbike wrapped in a bedspread and handed it to Junior and Loyd Jowers in the parking lot next to Jim’s Grill. When 6:00 pm came and Dr. King appeared on the balcony, Junior fired the shot then handed the rifle to Earl Clark who, in turn, handed it to Jowers. Junior then ran through the vacant lot between the rooming house and the fire station, climbed into the white Mustang parked outside the grill and drove away.42
The above is but a brief synopsis of Ronnie Lee Adkins’ story. There are many more details for which there is not enough space in this short essay. Nonetheless, from what I have included I believe it is clear that calling Adkins’ story hard to believe would be a vast understatement. In fact it is, in this reviewer’s opinion, so utterly lacking in credibility that it hardly seems worth wasting time on a detailed deconstruction. Not only is there no corroboration for any of it, numerous details are in direct conflict with information Pepper has previously presented. For example, Adkins has Jesse Jackson visiting the Lorraine personally to have Dr. King’s room changed. Yet, as noted earlier, Walter Bailey told Leon Cohen that he received the instruction not in person but over the phone from someone who identified himself as a member of the SCLC’s Atlanta office. Adkins has Ray leaving the scene in the white Mustang parked south of Canipe’s and his brother fleeing in the one parked outside the grill when numerous statements establish that it would have had to have been the other way around. And he has Jowers attending some of the so-called “prayer meetings” and receiving the rifle in a parking lot despite nothing like this appearing in any of Jowers’ own accounts.
In Adkins’ narrative there is no mention of or accounting for Raul and he names some extremely unlikely individuals as part of the plot. He even has MPD officer Tommy Smith – who, you might recall, testified on behalf of the King family that Charlie Stephens was too drunk to identify Ray – waiting in his car on Main Street and then dropping the bundle of evidence in the doorway of Canipe’s. Pepper himself is forced to admit how impossible this is given that “the bundle contained various bits and pieces, including the throw-down gun, which James had left on the bed in his rented room in the rooming house.”43
There are also logical problems aplenty with Adkins’ story. Like why on Earth would Hoover have had the names JFK, RFK and MLK put on a list and handed to Russell Adkins in 1956? Was anyone even referring to them by their initials back then? Once Dr. King’s assassination was decided, why did it take four years for so many presumably intelligent people to formulate a plan? How did they come to decide that “pissing off” the sanitation workers was the best way of getting Dr. King into Memphis? Why was it necessary for 16-year-old Ronnie to carry the rifle to the scene on the back of his motorbike? Who thought that was a good idea? What if he had been stopped by police officers not in on the plot? Why did Junior not just take the rifle with him in the first place? And what exactly was Earl Clark doing in the bushes if he wasn’t the shooter? Would it have been so difficult for Junior to have handed the rifle to Jowers himself? It should be noted that there is no support anywhere in the record for the notion that there were three people hiding in the shrubbery.
At the end of the day, even without these logical and factual inconsistencies, Adkins’ fantastical story is based on nothing more than the uncorroborated word of a man who, by his own account, had to quit school without graduating after he took a pistol into the lunchroom and fired off several shots.44 Accepting this man’s word without verification is, as far as this reviewer is concerned, completely unthinkable.
It is not to Pepper’s credit that he endorses the likes of Shelby and Adkins and I believe that his critics will rightly have a field day with their stories. State apologists like Gerald Posner have delighted in quoting Pepper’s former investigator Ken Herman as stating that “Pepper is the most gullible person I have ever met in my life” and the new information he presents in The Plot to Kill King is doing very little to prove this remark wrong. Unfortunately, he compounds the problem by picking and choosing what he wishes to believe of these troublesome new tales. He rejects one of the central facets of Adkins’ account – that his brother Junior fired the shot – and asserts instead that the real gunman was a former MPD officer named Frank Strausser. Yet his strongest evidence in support of this belief is that Strausser is alleged to have accidentally admitted his involvement to Nathan Whitlock.45 This is the very same Nathan Whitlock who has long claimed that Frank Liberto admitted his own involvement in the assassination to him. Which just leaves this reviewer wondering what exactly it is about Mr. Whitlock that compels people to confess their part in this crime in his presence.
Ultimately, I cannot say that The Plot to Kill King is a book I would recommend. As noted above, most of the book is a recapitulation of Pepper’s first two. Unfortunately, it is not as well written as either of his earlier works and is poorly edited to boot. There are numerous typographical errors – with Loyd Jowers and Marina Oswald being among those whose names are misspelled – as well as unnecessary repetition of information and witness statements being referred to before they’ve even been introduced. If the new information Pepper presented had been more reliable then it may have redeemed matters but unfortunately that was not to be. Pepper’s second book, Act of State, was a much more worthy addition to the literature. It was better written, better organized, and featured worthwhile rebuttals to both Posner and the Department of Justice. Readers are advised to track down a copy of that book instead.
1. See here for details: http://mlkmurder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/why-did-james-earl-ray-plead-guilty.html
2. See Pepper, Orders to Kill, Chapters 24-25.
3. The 13th Juror: The Official Transcript of the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial, p. 752.
4. http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/P%20Disk/Pepper%20William%20F%20Dr/Item%2002.pdf
5. Who Killed Martin Luther King?, History Channel documentary, 2004.
6. The 13th Juror, p. 458.
7. Pepper, The Plot to Kill King, p. 82
8. Ibid, pgs. 90-93.
9. The 13th Juror, pgs. 177-178.
10. Pepper, Act of State, p. 41.
11. The 13th Juror, p. 178.
12. Orders to Kill, p. 336.
13. United States Department of Justice Investigation of Recent Allegations Regarding the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., June 2000, Part IV, Section C.1.b. https://www.justice.gov/crt/iv-jowers-allegations#analysis
14. Orders to Kill, p. 383.
15. The Plot to Kill King, p. 154.
16. Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream, p. 291.
17. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15699&p=250020
18. The 13th Juror, p. 739.
19. The Plot to Kill King, p. 171.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid. p. 298.
23. Ibid. p. 175.
24. Ibid. p. 298.
25. Ibid. p. 174.
26. Orders to Kill, p. 97.
27. The Plot to Kill King, p. 177.
28. Ibid. p. 178.
29. Ibid. p. 184.
30. Ibid. p. 198.
31. The 13th Juror, p. 343.
32. William Bradford Huie, He Slew the Dreamer, p. 177. I say “said to have remarked” because Huie, who attributed those remarks to Hanes, is a self-admitted fabricator. Therefore nothing he wrote should be taken as absolute fact without independent corroboration.
33. Posner, p. 296.
34. The 13th Juror, p. 257.
35. Ibid. pp. 270-277.
36. Act of State, p. 222.
37. Justice Dept. Report, Part VI, Section C.3.b.
38. The 13th Juror, p. 295.
39. Act of State, p. 204.
40. The Plot to Kill King, p. 261.
41. The 13th Juror, p. 249-250.
42. The Plot to Kill King, p. 238-258.
43. Ibid. p. 256.
44. Ibid. p. 239.
45. Ibid. p. 235.
