Legacy of Secrecy (110 page)

made to his attorney shortly before he was killed. The result was that no

Congressional investigator checked the few marks on James Earl Ray’s

Los Angeles map to see if they were connected to Rosselli.10

James Earl Ray’s detailed street map of Los Angeles had only ten

marks on it, most in and around Beverly Hills—and one marked the

block taken up by Johnny Rosselli’s apartment building. Rosselli’s lav-

ish apartment was in the Glen Towers Building at 1333 South Beverly

Glen, with Warnall Avenue behind it. During James Earl Ray’s time in

Los Angeles, he lived in and frequented considerably less affluent sur-

roundings than the neighborhoods surrounding Beverly Hills. Ray lived

in a seedy part of Hollywood when he first moved to Los Angeles, and

on January 21, 1968, he moved three blocks, to the St. Francis Hotel on

Hollywood Boulevard. The FBI described the St. Francis, where Ray had

delivered his first heroin shipment in Los Angeles, “as a ‘den of iniquity’

teeming with prostitution and drug trafficking.” Ray frequented a dive

bar in the St. Francis called the Sultan Room and another bar nearby

called the Rabbit’s Foot—quite a contrast with the places Rosselli pre-

ferred, like Rodeo Drive and (until recently) the posh Friars Club.11

Ray’s mark on Rosselli’s building is unconnected to any of Ray’s

known activities and was so far away from Ray’s usual haunts that

the Rosselli connection seems beyond coincidence. Ray took maps seri-

ously in the weeks and months prior to Dr. King’s murder. An Atlanta

map (with one of Ray’s fingerprints), found at the same time as the

Los Angeles map, had only four marks: one near Dr. King’s office and

church, one near Dr. King’s former home, and one at Atlanta’s Capitol

Homes housing project, where Ray would abandon his Mustang when

connecting with Joseph Milteer.12

In late 1967 and early 1968, Rosselli was in a difficult legal and finan-

cial situation and could not have refused a request from Carlos Marcello

to help monitor James Earl Ray in Los Angeles. However, we do not

posit a major role for Johnny Rosselli in Dr. King’s murder—most likely,

it was simply a matter of Rosselli’s having some trusted mob associ-

ate keep a discreet eye on Ray and his activities to ensure that he was

doing what he was told, and nothing more. An experienced criminal like

548

LEGACY OF SECRECY

Ray might have become suspicious of some of the people he was deal-

ing with, or even noticed the covert surveillance, and the mark noting

Rosselli’s apartment could have been the result of Ray’s seeing one of

those people enter Rosselli’s building. The same might have been true

of the other marks on the map in the Beverly Hills area, where Rosselli

often spent time and may have met someone keeping an eye on Ray.

According to Ray’s controversial statement, discussed earlier, in early

1968 he was still “working with agents of the Federal Government” as

part of the effort “to overthrow Castro.” Ray had apparently indicated

to his brother, “At a later time, if necessary, I will give more extensive

proof about the federal agents with whom I was involved.”13 No such

proof ever surfaced, either from Ray or from CIA files, but since Rosselli

had been active for three years in anti-Castro operations for the CIA,

Rosselli or his mob associates may have used that as a cover story to

Ray, as a way to keep tabs on him.

Just before James Earl Ray went to Los Angeles, and right after Ray

left the city for good, Johnny Rosselli had several meetings with his

good friend William Harvey, the former CIA officer who still had many

contacts in the Agency. Later in the spring of 1968, Rosselli would be

linked to a Los Angeles hit involving another old CIA friend, David

Morales. Harvey had formerly been involved in Cuban operations,

and Morales had been active in covert Cuban activities as recently as

the fall of 1967. Morales would soon be working again with several

AMWORLD veterans in the Far East, but would make at least one trip

to the Los Angeles area. The possibility exists that Rosselli used his CIA

associates to arrange surveillance of Ray as part of what Ray thought

were operations directed against Castro. If that were the case, we can

only imagine the consternation and cover-ups that would result after

Dr. King’s murder—the same result Rosselli and Marcello had manipu-

lated to occur after JFK’s assassination. Ray would claim that all of his

activities, from the fall of 1967 through his time in Los Angeles and up

until his trip to Memphis, were part of these anti-Castro gunrunning

activities.

Declassified CIA files from late 1967 and 1968 about operations against

Cuba are very sparse, after they came under the control of Morales’s

close associate, David Atlee Phillips. The files that have surfaced show

that although operations were not as extensive as they had been in their

heyday in the mid-1960s, some covert actions were still being under-

taken. One of the few CIA agents with even partially declassified files

for that year is Luis Posada; however, his CIA records sometimes don’t

match, indicating either sloppy record-keeping not typical of the CIA,

or later tampering, perhaps after Posada became the prime suspect in

the terrorist bombing of a Cubana airliner in 1976.14

The CIA admits that after Posada was fired in 1967 (or 1968), the

Agency rehired him as a CIA contractor in 1968, and he remained one

until at least 1975 (or 1976). The CIA retained Posada despite a Febru-

ary 1968 CIA report saying that he had a “tendency [toward] clandes-

tine sabotage activities.” Four months later, the CIA expressed concern

about Posada’s “unreported association with gangster elements.”15 Cuba

expert Ann Louise Bardach writes that while Posada was employed by

the CIA in 1968, he “worked closely with” a violent associate of Felipe

Rivero, still facing charges for the Expo 67 bombing. CIA files say that by

April 1968, “Posada [would be] working on [a] case involving possible

smuggling from Miami to Venezuela, involved” with a “Negro who

infiltrated . . . black power groups in Miami.”16

We are not suggesting that Posada, or the CIA as an organization,

had anything to do with Dr. King’s death. However, the violent, lightly

documented (and thus deniable) milieu of CIA Cuban operations under

David Atlee Phillips in 1968 created a situation that “gangster elements”

like Rosselli and Marcello could use to their advantage. To add to the

murky picture, in early 1968, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was being

transformed into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, creat-

ing disruptions that didn’t make it any easier for agents to spot Ray’s

drug trafficking.17

Some CIA officials and officers viewed Martin Luther King as the

enemy, a perception that could have made them susceptible to manipu-

lation. The following CIA Security Office memo from March 1968 shows

how some in the Agency viewed Dr. King:

The FBI noted that Dr. King has shown not only a willingness, but

even an eagerness, to accept Communist aid, to support Communist

causes, to confer with high-ranking Communist functionaries, and

to rely heavily upon the advice and direction of dedicated Com-

munists with concealed affiliation . . . one of these Communist advi-

sors wrote King’s vicious denunciation of US policy in Vietnam. . . .

According to the FBI, Dr. King is regarded in Communist circles

as “a genuine Marxist-Leninist who is following the Marxist Com-

munist line.”18

Whether the CIA memo is racist or simply Cold War paranoia is not clear,

but it’s erroneous on most counts. For example, King’s only advisor

with a hidden tie to American communists severed those ties in 1963,

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

a fact that J. Edgar Hoover was well aware of and that an intelligence

agency like the CIA should have known as well.

Before Dr. King openly joined the antiwar movement in the winter

of 1967, most CIA surveillance of him was apparently obtained from

agencies helping the FBI with its monitoring of King, such as the Miami

Police Intelligence Unit. Only one of those files appears to have been

declassified; it says the Miami police weren’t even telling the FBI they

were giving information to the CIA.19 By early 1968, the CIA had its own

domestic surveillance targeting the antiwar movement, including Dr.

King. However, the CIA’s actions against King were mild compared

with those of the FBI.

The Senate Church Committee of the mid-1970s described the FBI’s

vendetta against Dr. King as a “war.” Using the same techniques it

applied against Soviet agents, “the FBI collected information about Dr.

King’s plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program,

employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau’s

disposal. . . . FBI informants in the civil rights movement and reports

from field offices kept the Bureau’s headquarters informed of develop-

ments in the civil rights field.”20

The FBI’s attempt “to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights

movement entailed attempts to discredit him with churches, universi-

ties, and the press”—and that extended to smearing Dr. King to Con-

gress and government officials. A major part of the FBI’s operations

against King, and the rest of the civil rights and peace movements, was

through COINTELPRO, short for Counter-Intelligence Program. Started

in 1956, LBJ’s pressure on Hoover in 1964 caused the FBI’s “COINTEL-

PRO–White Hate” program to begin targeting with increasing effec-

tiveness groups like the Klan. Ironically, because of the FBI’s growing

domestic surveillance of the peace movement, its efforts against King

had started to diminish somewhat by early 1967—until King came out

strongly against the war. With Hoover’s Cold War mindset, the FBI

Director felt renewed justification in going after King, and the summer

1967 race riots allowed Hoover to expand his operations against the

entire civil rights movement.

The FBI created a new program called “Black Nationalist-Hate

Groups,” which targeted the SCLC, the Congress for Racial Equality, the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, and

the Black Panthers. Dr. King was personally added to the list in February

1968, after Attorney General Ramsey Clark turned down Hoover’s Janu-

ary 2, 1968, request for more wiretaps on King and the SCLC.

Hoover had no legal justification for going after Dr. King, who con-

stantly preached against violence while condemning both riots and

revolution. Taylor Branch quoted Dr. King as saying that “riots just

don’t pay off,” and he urged “his staff to combat the ‘romantic illusion’

of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara.” But that didn’t stop

Hoover from targeting Dr. King through the sometimes all-too-willing

press. At one extreme,
Parade
magazine helpfully asked the Bureau if

it could say the FBI “has a great deal of titillating information about

[King’s] sexual activities.” The request was denied only because Hoover

wanted to maintain the fictitious notion that the FBI wasn’t “furnishing

information to the public” about King. At the other extreme, and in a

far rarer effort, Richard Harwood at the
Washington Post
was apparently

disgusted by yet another FBI attempt to give “reporters tape-recorded

evidence of [King’s] ‘moral turpitude.’” So, in late February 1968, Har-

wood mentioned the FBI’s tactic in a column which also suggested that

“Hoover had become a pampered tyrant with homosexual leanings.”21

Around the same time, Martin Luther King became quite depressed

during a short trip to Acapulco. Branch found that Dr. King “stared alone

from a high balcony until nearly dawn” and wouldn’t tell a worried aide

what was wrong. It’s not known whether King was despondent over

the FBI’s latest sexual blackmail, the constant stream of death threats,

or other pressures in the SCLC and his home life.22

The FBI propaganda and dirty-tricks war on Dr. King were relentless.

As Nick Kotz noted, the FBI created serious programs with silly names,

like GIP (Ghetto Informant Program), the “‘Rabble Rouser Index’ [for]

the level of threat posed by specific individuals,” and POCAM, launched

on January 4, 1968. The latter was a twenty-one-city COINTELPRO

effort to sabotage Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign.23

On March 6, 1968, Hoover began a new COINTELPRO initiative to

“prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the mili-

tary black nationalist movement.” Along with Dr. King, other leaders

targeted were Elijah Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, and Stokely

Carmichael. A typical FBI trick involved telling Carmichael’s mother the

Black Panthers were going to shoot her son, causing Stokely to leave the

country. FBI offices were given deadlines to submit ways “to pinpoint