History: FBI was "out-of-control" LONG before russia-gate attempt to frame Trump, exonerate hitlery

[Apollonian]

History: FBI was "out-of-control" LONG before russia-gate attempt to frame Trump, exonerate hitlery

8 Historic Cases That Show the FBI and CIA Were Out of Control Long Before Russiagate ​

Link: https://www.activistpost.com/2019/0...re-out-of-control-long-before-russiagate.html

March 25, 2019
By Jon Miltimore and Carey Wedler

Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they’re prone to viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.

These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many abuses—constitutional, legal, and moral—of US intelligence agencies.

Unlike some more seasoned media, conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants, classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption, campaign moles, and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means.

These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election.

1. That Time the CIA Considered Bombing Miami and Blaming It on Castro

It’s no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans.

The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine “pretexts” the CIA and US government could employ to justify military intervention in Cuba. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a terror campaign (“real or simulated”) and blaming it on Cuban refugees.

“We could develop a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” the Operation Mongoose document says.

The terror campaign could be pointed at Cubans refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated.) We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States… Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots.

Ultimately, the broader Mongoose effort failed to remove Castro from power or effectively establish an infiltration within Cuba, though the CIA did engage in several sabotage operations. Mongoose was suspended and ultimately discontinued amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

2. In 2014 the CIA Was Caught Red-Handed Spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee

In the summer of 2014, the CIA’s inspector general concluded that the CIA had “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers who were researching the agency’s black history of torture. As the New York Times reported:

An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

And that’s not the worst part.

The Times goes on to note that CIA officers didn’t just read the emails of the Senate investigators. They also sent “a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information.”

John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-2017, insisted during Senate hearings these were “very limited inappropriate actions” and that “the actions of the CIA were reasonable.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) disagreed.

“That’s not what the Inspector General [concluded],” Wyden said. “When you’re talking about spying on a committee responsible for overseeing your agency, in my view that undermines the very checks and balances that protect our democracy, and it’s unacceptable in a free society. And your compatriots in all your sister agencies agree with that.”

Brennan, who publicly lied about the episode, was not punished and even retained his security clearance until Aug. 15, 2018.

3. The FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to MLK and His Wife

Before he had a day named in his honor and a monument on the National Mall, the government viewed Martin Luther King Jr. very much as a threat. In fact, his message of peace, love, equality, and civil disobedience had the FBI so scared that agents actually sent King and his wife a package containing a strange letter and tape recording. It contained details of the civil rights activist’s sexual indiscretions and encouraged him to kill himself.

In 1961, the FBI learned that Stanley Levison, a known “Red,” had become a close advisor to King. The following year, Bobby Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison’s home and office, surveillance that would eventually expand. It turns out that J. Edgar Hoover stumbled on to MLK’s busy sex life while investigating King.

“Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge,” wrote Yale historian Beverly Gage in the New York Times in 2014, “but he did begin to learn about King’s extramarital sex life….”

The FBI apparently had no scruples about using the information to try to bring King down. James Comey, Gage writes, used to keep a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk “as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong.”

4. The CIA Forced Prisoners to Participate in Mind Control Experiments in the 1950s

If you’ve never heard of Project MKUltra, you might find it hard to believe. Also known as “the CIA Mind Control Program,” the effort was launched by the agency in 1953. The program used drug experiments on humans, oftentimes on prisoners who were tested against their will or in exchange for early release. The experiments were undertaken so CIA agents could better understand how to extract information from enemies during interrogations. Here is a description from the History Channel:

MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society.

The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.

Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”

How was any of this legal? Well, it wasn’t, which is why the CIA understood it had to be concealed from the American public at all costs.

“Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,” wrote a CIA auditor. “The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.”

5. The FBI’s Systemic Forensic Fraud in Crime Labs

In the early 1990s, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, an attorney and chemist who worked at the FBI as a Supervisory Special Agent, noticed troubling practices in the in the bureau’s Investigation Laboratory.

There were “alterations of reports, alterations of evidence, folks testifying outside their areas of expertise in courts of law,” said Whitehurst. “[Really] what was going on was human rights violations. We have a right to fair trials in this country… And that’s not what was going on at the FBI lab.”

In 1994, he blew the whistle on the “systemic forensic fraud” he witnessed. Nothing happened. So he took his case to the Department of Justice. The FBI didn’t like that. Whitehurst was eventually chased out of the Bureau, but not before winning a $1.16 million settlement.

Unfortunately, however, the wheels of justice turn slowly at the Bureau.

“It wasn’t until ten years later that Whitehurst was finally vindicated,” notes the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund note, “when a scathing 500+ page study of the lab by the Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Bromwich, concluded major reforms were required in the lab.”

But by then, an untold number of people had been convicted with the help of tainted evidence—evidence the DOJ knew was tainted.

In 2012 the Washington Post published an extensive review of the FBI and DOJ failures to properly review the cases impacted by the FBI lab scandal, based on Whitehurst’s research.

As a result, the DOJ agreed to conduct yet another review of hair cases in collaboration with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

3,000 cases were identified by the government that had used microscopic hair analysis from FBI examiners.

500 have been reviewed as of March 2015.

268 included pro-prosecution testimony from FBI examiners.

257 (96 percent) contained erroneous statements from “FBI experts”.

At least 35 of these cases involved convicted criminals who received the death penalty, according to the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund.

6. Operation Midnight Climax: Drugging Unsuspecting Johns and Filming their Interactions with Prostitutes

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA admitted to operating a “bawdy house” in a San Francisco apartment where “unsuspecting citizens were lured… for the CIA’s drug experiments,” according to a local news story report documented by the agency.

“Private citizens were taken to the bordello by $100 prostitutes and drugged without their knowledge, usually with LSD,” the San Francisco Examiner reported in 1977 after the CIA admitted to the operation. Agents sat behind a two-way mirror and filmed the interactions between the drugged men and prostitutes.

Then-CIA director Stansfield Turner suggested the operation was intended to understand how drugs could potentially be used against the American people, though he called the experiments “abhorrent” and acknowledged it was “inexplicable” that the CIA would do this without the subjects’ consent. He insisted the agency had ceased the experiments 12 years prior. In a 1977 Senate testimony, CIA agents said the purpose of the experiments was to “learn about thought control and sexual behavior,” the Examiner noted.

7. The FBI Has Routinely Staged Acts of Terrorism

In the wake of 9/11, the FBI has, on numerous occasions, targeted unstable and mentally ill individuals, sending informants to bait them into committing terror attacks. Before these individuals can actually carry out the attack, however, the Bureau intervenes, presenting the foiled plot to the public as a successfully thwarted attack.

In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized several examples of this deceitful tactic:

[T]he FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to months of encouragement, support and money and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a Press Release boasting of its success. In late 2009, the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, to bomb the Washington Metro.

8. The CIA’s Media Manipulation Campaigns

From the agency’s earliest days, it has attempted to control the flow of information to the public. In his book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner documented how much influence the agency’s first civilian director, Allen Dulles, had among major media companies:

Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.

Weiner noted, “It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information.” During his time at the agency, Dulles “built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.”

In 1977, Carl Bernstein further exposed the CIA’s efforts to influence news organization in an article for Rolling Stone in which he revealed that “more than 400 American journalists…in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.”

The Lesson

Amid the media and political establishment’s ongoing, frenzied coverage of Russiagate, Americans are eager to pin guilt on the president have shown a willingness to trust the CIA and FBI without question despite numerous past and present reasons to be skeptical of their conclusions. Considering the CIA’s long history of intervening in other countries’ elections and governments, it is particularly ironic that their claims of Russia’s meddling in the US’ democracy are taken at face value.

Nor is the corruption and deceit limited to the FBI and CIA. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to lawmakers and the public in 2013 when he claimed NSA did not collect any type of data on “millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” He was caught red-handed months later when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency’s mass surveillance operations.

The survival of liberty depends on skepticism of government power—and make no mistake, that includes President Trump. But in light of these federal agencies’ chronic tendency to engage in behavior wholly inconsistent with American values, the same distrust must be applied to the institutions that claim to shed light on abuses by unpopular leaders.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: History: FBI was "out-of-control" LONG before russia-gate attempt to frame Trump, exonerate hitl

Victims of FBI Subversion Now Embrace America’s Secret Police ​

Link: https://www.activistpost.com/2019/0...rsion-now-embrace-americas-secret-police.html
.
March 26, 2019
By Kurt Nimmo

It shouldn’t come as a surprise the FBI and the DOJ obstructed justice last year when then acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee to pound sand after Republicans demanded he hand over work-related texts.

The obstruction of justice, however, is a trivial matter for the FBI. It has engaged in criminal activity for decades.

It seemed like I’d entered a new dimension deep within Bizarro world labyrinth when Democrats suddenly became defenders of the agency. Liberals and leftists, especially those in the civil rights movement and actively opposed to the Vietnam War, were targeted by the FBI and its Operation COINTELPRO in the 1960s and ’70s. Many of those targeted activists ended up in government and the ivory towers of academia.
.
Likewise the Grand Inquisitor, Robert Muller. He was FBI boss during the Bush and Obama administrations. He is a consummate insider. His mission as special prosecutor is to protect the establishment, the so-called Deep State.

I can only conclude Democrats are either 1) suffering from a special kind of amnesia, or 2) they’re so ethically and morally bankrupt they will buddy up with an agency that seriously violated their rights in order accomplish the current objective: the impeachment and total destruction of Donald Trump.

After J. Edgar Hoover died, the FBI remained the state’s secret police and kept busy sabotaging political opposition to the financial elite and its octopi tentacles, what we now call the Deep State, consisting of multitudinous “intelligence” (subversion and assassination) agencies, the national security state (NSC, Pentagon, and CIA), the ever-growing surveillance apparatus (NSA and appendages), and a hungry herd of “public-private” (in other words, fascist) business interests and contractors bidding to get a permanent spot at the federal feeding trough.

From the Palmer raids prior to the establishment of the FBI (at the time the Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department) to the Occupy Wall Street movement and beyond, the FBI has worked diligently to undermine antiwar, civil rights (the assassination of Martin Luther King), ethnic nationalist movements (Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican separatists, and others), and individuals associated with those political groups.

In the case of the Black Panthers, the preferred method of disruption was assassination (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark), while the antiwar movement and other leftist movements were discredited, members of those groups arrested (usually for drug possession), audited by the IRS, fired and denied employment, and harassed in multiple ways. Many of the victims are organizers of the current leftist agenda, while others have taken over the curriculum of major universities.

Many of these individuals are not opposed to such tactics, so long as the victims are their ideological enemies. Most don’t realize they are being played.

“Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller—a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes!—to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics,” writes author and blogger Jonathan Cook.

Just as Mueller put the left on standby, into waiting-for-the-Messiah mode, so simple-minded, pussy-hat-wearing identity politics has been cultivated in the supposedly liberal bastions of the corporate media and Ivy League universities—the same universities that have turned out generations of Muellers and Clintons—to deplete the left’s political energies. While we argue over who is most entitled and most victimised, the establishment has carried on raping and pillaging Third World countries, destroying the planet and siphoning off the wealth produced by the rest of us.

These liberal elites long ago worked out that if we could be made to squabble among ourselves about who was most entitled to scraps from the table, they could keep gorging on the main course.

From the very start of this fiasco, I realized it was a turf war within the establishment. The political elite are not about sharing and certainly have nothing to do with democracy (except as a deceptive advertising slogan). Trump is an outlier. He didn’t come up through the ranks. He is not acceptable to the establishment, including the Republicans who reluctantly accept him as the leader of their faction of the corporatist political party. For establishment Democrats, he is a spoiler, a man who stole the election from Hillary Clinton, the chosen successor to Barrack Obama.

Like chickens sans heads, average Democrats by and large are running around wild-eyed, frantically warning Trump is the new Hitler, a racist, a white nationalist, and he must be deposed at all cost. As usual, these Democrats are clueless to the real state of affairs—diversionary politics designed to keep folks immersed in largely meaningless political issues while behind the scenes the bankers and corporatists continue to call the shots and fleece the people, whom they have nothing but contempt for, and in the process save a corrupt system already sagging and teetering.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: History: FBI was "out-of-control" LONG before russia-gate attempt to frame Trump, exonerate hitl

Jim Comey Ignored State Department Whistleblower On Hillary's Crimes With Classified Material ​

Link: https://www.zerohedge.com/political...tleblower-hillarys-crimes-classified-material

[see documents at site link, above]

by Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/10/2020 - 16:00
Authored by Larry Johnson via Sic Semper Tyrannis blog,

One year before Jim Comey was immersed in his plot to overthrow Donald Trump, the duly elected President of the United States, a brave Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State came forward with firsthand information of Hillary Clinton’s rampant abuse of Classified material. The man, a senior State Department diplomat who had served as the acting Ambassador (Chargé d’Affaires) in the Asia Pacific region under President Clinton, also was a veteran of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

The letter from this whistleblower is stunning and I am going to present it in total. It is dated 10 January 2016. You can read it for yourself here starting at page 121. I became aware of this letter thanks to the assiduous research and writings of Charles Ortel (he wrote about this recently at the American Thinker).

The letter explains in great detail how Hillary and her cabal of sychophants used an unclassified system to disseminate Top Secret and Secret intelligence. But the Senior Diplomat did not stop there. He explained carefully and specifically who the FBI needed to interview and the questions they needed to ask. You do not need to take my word for it. You can read the letter for yourself...

And what did the sanctimonious, smug buffoon heading up the FBI do? Nothing. But this senior Foreign Service Officer was dogged in making sure the FBI had the information. He called FBI Headquarters and could not get any confirmation that his letter was accepted. Not satisfied, he walked into the FBI’s Washington Field Office. The results of this meeting were reported to three FBI Agents working on the Hillary Clinton investigation. Named in the report are Peter Strzok and Jonathan Moffa (the third name is blacked out).

Here is the report in its entirety. Please note that the State Department official delivered the information on the 27th of January 2016, but the report was not written up until four weeks later–22 February 2016. (You can see the original on the FBI website here starting at page 11.)

I do not know if John Durham has seen these documents. I am posting to make sure that he does. There is no evidence that Inspector General Horowitz examined these documents or interviewed the Foreign Service Officer.

With Secretary of State Pompeo’s promise that Hillary emails will be forthcoming, I think it is worthwhile to revisit what this brave whistleblower tried to bring to the attention of the FBI, who clearly was hellbent on protecting Hillary rather than pursing justice and upholding the law.

Shameful.

 

[Apollonian]

Here, Hannity/FOX News comments on recent hist. of FBI

 

[Apollonian]

The Plot to Kill Martin Luther King: Survived Shooting, Was Murdered in Hospital​

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-p...ital-an-interview-with-william-pepper/5544005

Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Review of William Pepper's Book​

By Craig McKee
Global Research, December 30, 2023
Truth and Shadows 3 September 2016

Among Global Research’s most popular articles
This article was first published by GR on September 5, 2016.
The realities of the United States of America and the campaign against racism. Let us reflect on “who is the enemy”.
***
For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. – William Pepper (page 15, The Plot to Kill King)
The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable.
Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee. These and many more incredible details of the King assassination are contained in a trilogy of volumes by Pepper culminating with his latest and final book on the subject, The Plot to Kill King. He previously wrote Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003).
With virtually no help from the mainstream media and very little from the justice system, Pepper was able to piece together what really happened on April 4, 1968 in Memphis right down to who gave the order and supplied the money, how the patsy was chosen, and who actually pulled the trigger.
Without this information, the truth about King’s assassination would have been buried and lost to history. Witnesses would have died off, taking their secrets with them, and the official lie that King was the victim of a racist lone gunman named James Earl Ray would have remained “fact.”
Instead, we know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902ndMilitary Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to meet Colonel John Downie, the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer. We also learn that as part of the operation, photographs were actually taken of the shooting and that Pepper came very close to getting his hands on those photographs.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media has ignored all of these revelations and continues to label Ray as King’s lone assassin. In fact, Pepper chronicles in detail how a disinformation campaign has featured the collaboration of many mainstream journalists over almost half a century. He says he suspects that those orchestrating the cover-up, which continues to this day, are no longer concerned with what he writes about the subject.
“I’m really basically harmless, I think, to the power structure,” Pepper said in an interview.

“I don’t think I threaten them, really. The control of the media is so consolidated now they can keep someone like me under wraps, under cover, forever. This book will probably never be reviewed seriously by mainstream, the story will not be aired in mainstream – they control the media. It was bad in the ’60s but nowhere near as bad as now.”

And the most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King – which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.
“That is probably the most shocking aspect of the book, that final revelation of how this great man was taken from us,” Pepper says. (By the way, when I quote Pepper as having “said” something I mean in our interview. If I’m quoting from the book, I’ll indicate that.)
The hospital story was told to Pepper by a man named Johnton Shelby, whose mother, Lula Mae Shelby, had been a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s that night. Shelby told Pepper the story of how his mother came home the morning after the shooting (she hadn’t been allowed to go home the night before) and gathered the family together. He remembers her saying to them, “I can’t believe they took his life.”
She described chief of surgery Dr. Breen Bland entering the emergency room with two men in suits. Seeing doctors working on King, Bland commanded, “Stop working on the nigger and let him die! Now, all of you get out of here, right now. Everybody get out.”
Johnton Shelby says his mother described hearing the sound of the three men sucking up saliva into their mouths and then spitting. Lula Mae described to her family that she looked over her shoulder as she was leaving the room and saw that the breathing tube had been removed from King and that Bland was holding a pillow over his head. (The book contains the entire deposition given by Johnton Shelby to Pepper, so readers can judge for themselves whether they think Shelby is credible – as Pepper believes he is.)
In fact, a second invaluable source was Ron Adkins, whose father, Russell Adkins Sr., was a local Dixie Mafia gangster and conspirator in the planning of the assassination even though he died a year before it took place. Ron told Pepper he had overheard Bland, who was his family’s doctor, tell his father that if King did survive the shooting he had to be taken to St. Joseph’s and nowhere else. As Pepper describes it:

He remembers Breen Bland saying to his father, ‘If he’s not killed by the shot, just make sure he gets to St. Joseph Hospital, and we’ll make sure that he doesn’t leave.’

Ron, who was just 16 when the shooting took place, was apparently taken everywhere by his father in those days, and he was able to recount many details of what happened as the assassination was planned and carried out.
“I definitely found him credible,” Pepper says. “I found him troubled, I found him disturbed in a lot of ways by things that went on earlier in his life.”
His deposition is also contained in the book, which Pepper explains was important so that readers could judge the statements for themselves.
“What I wanted to do was to make sure that the entire deposition of these critical moments and this critical information was there, so that one could go and read the depositions and see that I was being accurate,” Pepper says.
Besides describing what he heard Bland tell his father, Ron Adkins described the many visits made to Russell Sr. by Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man. Known to Ron as “Uncle Clyde,” the high-level FBI official often delivered cash to the elder Adkins for jobs he and his associates would carry out on behalf of Hoover. Among those the younger Adkins said were paid to supply information about the activities of Martin Luther King were the reverends Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Jesse Jackson.

The basics of the official story
If you seek out any information from a mainstream source about James Earl Ray, you’ll find him described as the killer of Martin Luther King, just as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are labelled “assassins” in the murders of John and Robert Kennedy.
But once you read any or all of Pepper’s three books on the King slaying, you see very clearly that Ray is not a killer at all. Instead, he was a petty criminal who was a perfect “follower.” Like Oswald and Sirhan, Ray was set up to take the fall for an assassination that originated within the American deep state. In fact, Pepper says he’s convinced that knowledge of the plot went all the way to the top.
“The whole thing would have been part of Lyndon Johnson’s playbook,” Pepper says. “I think Johnson knew about this.”
As the official story of the shooting goes, at 5:50 p.m. on April 4, Kyles knocked on the door of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel to let King and the rest of his party know that they were running late for a planned dinner at Kyles’s home. Kyles then walked about 60 feet down the balcony where he remained even after King came out of the room at about 6 p.m. (Although Kyles has maintained ever since that he spent the last half hour in the room, Pepper has proven otherwise.)

Andrew Young (left) and others on balcony of the Lorraine pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)
Members of a militant black organizing group the Invaders, who were also staying in the motel because of King’s visit, were told shortly before the shooting by a member of the motel staff that their rooms would no longer being paid for by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and that they had to leave immediately. When they asked who had given this order, they were told it was Jesse Jackson. At the time of the shooting, Jackson was waiting down by the swimming pool. Ron Adkins also identified Jackson as the person who called the owners of the Lorraine Motel and demanded that King be moved from a more secure inner courtyard room to an exposed room on the second floor facing the street.
The Memphis Police Department usually formed a detail of black officers to protect King when he was in town, but did not this time. Emergency TACT support units were pulled back from the Lorraine to the fire station, which overlooked the motel. Pepper also learned that the only two black members of the Memphis Fire Department had been told the day before the shooting not to report for work the next day at the fire station. And black detective Ed Redditt was told an hour before the shooting to stay home because a threat had been made on his life.
Just about a minute after King exited his room, a single shot was fired and the bullet ripped through King’s jaw and spinal cord, dropping him immediately. The shot appeared to come from across Mulberry Street. King was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead just after 7 p.m.
According to the official story, the shot was fired by Ray from the bathroom of a rooming house above a bar called Jim’s Grill, which backed on to Mulberry and faced onto South Main Street. But, as Pepper’s investigation proves, the shot actually came from the bushes located in between the rooming house and the street. In fact, the only “witness” who placed Ray at the scene was a falling-down-drunk named Charles Stephens, who later did not recognize Ray in a photograph and who cab driver James McCraw had refused to transport a short time before because he was too intoxicated.
The bushes that concealed the shooter were conveniently trimmed the day after the shooting, giving a false impression that a shooter could not have been concealed there. Several witnesses, including journalist Earl Caldwell and King’s Memphis driver, Solomon Jones, described seeing the shot come from the bushes and not from the bathroom of the rooming house as the official story states.
Another casualty of the King murder was cab driver Buddy Butler who reported that he saw a man running from the scene right after the shot, going south on Mulberry St., and jumping into a police car (this would turn out to be MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark). Butler reported this to his dispatcher and later to fellow cab driver Louie Ward. Butler was interviewed at the Yellow Cab Company later that evening by police. Ward was told the next day that Butler had either fallen, or was pushed, to his death from a speeding car on the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.
The owner of Jim’ Grill, Loyd Jowers, would later admit to being part of the conspiracy to kill King, and he would be found responsible – along with various government agencies – for the killing in a 1999 civil lawsuit by the King family, which was represented by Pepper.
“The King family got enormous comfort out of the results of that trial and the evidence that came forward from that,” Pepper says.
Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill and girlfriend of Jowers, says she saw him rush into the back of the Grill through the back door seconds after the shot, white as a ghost and holding a rifle, which he then wrapped in a tablecloth and hid on a shelf under the counter. He turned to her and said, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She responded, “Of course not, Loyd.” Spates, who didn’t come forward until the 1990s, also recounted that Jowers had been delivered a large sum of money right before the assassination.
James McCraw stated that Jowers had shown him a rifle the day after the shooting and told him it was the one used to kill King.
“We confronted Loyd,” Peppers explains. “We told him he was likely to be indicted if he didn’t help us, if he didn’t give more information. Jowers didn’t know there was no way the grand jury was going to indict him. All he knew was what he did, what he participated in, how much money he got for it – he got quite a large sum of money, built a taxi cab company with it, had his gambling debt with [local Mafia figure Frank] Liberto forgiven.”
Liberto, an associate of Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello, turned out to be involved in the assassination also. He owned a produce warehouse and one of his regular customers, John McFerren, was making his weekly shopping trip there when he overheard Liberto shout into the phone an hour before the shooting: “Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony.” Nathan Whitlock and his mother, LaVada Addison Whitlock, who owned a restaurant frequented by Liberto, stated that Liberto had told them he was responsible for the King murder.

Setting up the patsy
One thing that many don’t know is that Ray was in prison in 1967, the year before the assassination, serving a 20-year sentence for a grocery store robbery in 1959. After a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts, Ray succeeded in breaking out of prison on April 23, 1967. Unknown to Ray was the fact that the escape had been orchestrated, because he had already been chosen as the patsy in the planned assassination of King, which was still a year away.
The warden of Missouri State Penitentiary was paid $25,000 by Russell Adkins Sr. to allow the escape (as confirmed by Ron Adkins). The money was delivered to Adkins by Tolson, and it was this same connection that would later be used to finance the assassination of King.
After his escape from prison, Ray went to Chicago for a few weeks where he got a job. But, worried about getting caught, he went to Canada, specifically Montreal, and took the name Eric S. Galt. His intention was to get a passport under a false name and to travel to a country from which he could not be extradited.
At the Neptune Bar in the Montreal dock area in August 1967, Ray met a mysterious figure who identified himself as “Raul.” Raul asked Ray to help him with a smuggling scheme, and Ray agreed. In the months ahead, Ray would do a number of jobs, including gun running, for Raul for which he was paid and given a car. Always, Ray had to wait to be contacted by Raul, who Ray said co-ordinated his activities right up until the day of the assassination.
At one point Ray was instructed to purchase a deer rifle with a scope (although Raul was not satisfied with the one he bought and made him exchange it for another). Ray was instructed to go to Memphis (he arrived April 3, 1968) and upon meeting with Raul in his motel was given the name of Jim’s Grill, where the two were to meet at 3 p.m. the next day. He also handed the rifle over to Raul and always maintained that he never saw it again.
Ray rented a room at the rooming house above Jim’s Grill (the two met the day of the assassination as planned). About an hour before the shooting, he was given money to go to the movies, but first he tried to have a tire repaired because Raul had said he wanted to use the car. But when Ray heard the sirens that followed the shooting, he got scared and left the area.
Fearing he had been set up, Ray left the country and ended up in England where he was captured on June 8, 1968 at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was trying to leave the UK. Once charged with the crime, Ray was pressured by his second lawyer, Percy Foreman, to plead guilty on the grounds that the evidence was too strong against him and Foreman was not in good health and couldn’t offer a strong defence.
“Foreman was sent in with the purpose of replacing the original lawyers,” Pepper says.
Foreman offered Ray $500 to get another lawyer if he pleaded guilty and even put this in writing. Ray would regret accepting this offer for the rest of his life. He tried unsuccessfully to rescind the guilty plea and get a trial for the next 30 years, finally dying in prison of cancer in 1998.

Pepper becomes convinced of Ray’s innocence
It was 10 years after the assassination before Pepper would even consider meeting with Ray. He had taken for granted at first that Ray was the assassin, but he was encouraged to meet him by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as President of the SCLC. Abernathy had remained unsatisfied with the official account of the shooting.
In the book, Pepper describes his first meeting with Ray in 1978 and how he quickly came to believe that Ray had not been the shooter and that the case was essentially still unsolved. It wasn’t until 1988 before Pepper became certain that Ray had not played any knowing part in the conspiracy, and at that point he agreed to represent him, which he did until his death.
Purveyors of the official story of the assassination have always claimed that Raul was an invention of Ray’s, and mainstream media accounts refer to this question as still unanswered even though Pepper not only found witnesses who described their connections to Raul, he actually found Raul himself with the help of witness Glenda Grabow (Pepper learned that his last name was Coelho). She identified Raul as someone she had known in Houston in 1963 and who around 1974, in a fit of rage, had implicated himself in the King assassination right before raping her. Grabow also identified Jack Ruby as someone who she had seen with Raul in 1963. This fascinating story is recounted both in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King.
One of the most intriguing things to come out of both of these books is the account of a young FBI agent named Don Wilson who after the assassination was sent to check out a white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray drove a white Mustang) that had been abandoned and that was thought to be connected to the assassination. Wilson opened the car door and some papers fell out. He examined them later and found a torn-out piece of a 1963 Dallas, Texas telephone directory. Written on the page was the name “Raul” and the initial “J” and a phone number, which turned out to be that of a Las Vegas night club run by Jack Ruby, the man who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. A second piece of paper had a list of names with amounts of money beside each. Wilson decided to hold on to this evidence, fearing it would disappear forever if he turned it in. He held on to it for 29 years before making it available to Pepper and the King family.

The shooter revealed
Another incredible revelation in The Plot to Kill King is the identity of the man who appears to have fired the fatal shot. Pepper learned his identity from Lenny B. Curtis, who was a custodian at the Memphis Police Department rifle range. Curtis told Pepper this in 2003, and Pepper recorded a deposition with him but kept it confidential out of fear for Curtis’s life. Only after his death in 2013 did Pepper reveal what Curtis had said – that the shooter was Memphis police officer Frank Strausser.
“We had to be very careful about [Curtis’s safety],” Pepper says.
Curtis said to Pepper in his deposition that he heard Strausser say about King four or five months before the assassination that somebody was going to “. . . blow his motherfucking brains out.” He also described that Strausser had practised in the rifle range with a particular rifle that had been brought in four or five days earlier by a member of the fire department. That fireman had shown the rifle to Curtis and asked, “How would you like that scoundrel, that baby there?” When Curtis said it look like any other rifle, he replied, “No, this is a special one; that baby is special.” Lenny remembered that on the day of the assassination, Strausser spent the whole day practicing with it. (Strausser has given several conflicting accounts of where he was and what he was doing that day.)
After the assassination, Curtis says he was followed and intimidated by Strausser. Pepper writes:

Lenny said that he subsequently became aware that strange things were happening around him. His gas was strangely turned on once when he was about to enter his house. He had lit a cigarette, but as he opened the door he smelled gas and quickly put out the cigarette. A strange Lincoln was occasionally parked across the street from his apartment house. He was frightened. One morning when the car was there, he got into his own car and quickly drove off, and the strange car pulled out and followed him. He managed to see the driver. It was Strausser.

In the book, Pepper describes how he came to meet with Strausser, who he describes as a committed and devoted racist.
“He had no respect for black people at all,” Pepper says. “He wasn’t explicit about his racism. But he was not at all sympathetic to what Martin King was all about.”
In the hope of prompting an admission, Pepper lied and told him that he had been implicated in the killing by Loyd Jowers – but Strausser didn’t take the bait. Pepper also told Strausser that the footprints found in the bushes after the shooting were from size 13 shoes (which they were). Then he asked him about the size of his feet:
“He had a bit of a grin on his face, and he said ‘13 large,’” Pepper says.
Pepper also arranged to have cab driver Nathan Whitlock, who Strausser knew, tell him that there was a good possibility that he (Strausser) would be indicted for the shooting. He responded: “What are they going to indict me for, something I did 30 years ago?” Then he caught himself and added, “Or something I knew about 30 years ago?”

A threat to the powers that be
As Pepper explains, King was not only hated by the establishment as he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he was feared. Not only did he have the ability to move large numbers of people with his message of peace and tolerance, but he had designs on a political career. According to Pepper, King was planning to run for president on a third-party ticket with fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was also causing panic in powerful circles because he intended to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to an encampment in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 to bring attention to the plight of the poor.
“They were terrified that the anger level when [the demonstrators] were not going to get what they wanted was going to rise to such a point where Martin was going to lose control of that group and the more radical among them would take it over and they’d have a revolution,” Pepper explains. “And they didn’t have the troops to put it down. That was a real fear that the Army had. And I think it was a justifiable fear.”
King would also have posed an increasing threat to the political establishment because he intended to become much more vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War. He had been influenced by an article and photos by Pepper called, “The Children of Vietnam,” which was published in Ramparts Magazine in January 1967 and later reprinted in Look magazine. (The man who published the piece in Look, Bill Atwood, actually told Pepper he received a visit from former New York governor and ambassador to the Soviet Union Averill Harriman who passed on a message from President Johnson that he would appreciate it if Atwood never published anything by Pepper.)
Beyond King’s importance as a powerful force for justice, peace, and equality, he was also Pepper’s friend. And the lawyer/journalist had to deal with that loss as he sought the truth about who really killed King and fought for justice for the man falsely accused of his murder. He writes:

For me, this is a story rife with sadness, replete with massive accounts of personal and public deception and betrayal. Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen. In addition, there is an element of personal despair that has resulted from this long effort, which has made me even question the wisdom of undertaking this task. (page xiv, The Plot to Kill King)

But he did undertake it, and we should all be grateful that he did.