The Conspiracy to Kill King, Pt. 4

How Did it Happen?

James Earl Ray met a man he knew as Raoul--sometimes spelled as Raul--in August of 1967 at the Neptune Bar in Montreal. This was the first of 8-10 meetings Ray had with the person who would control his life from that time until the assassination of King. (William Pepper, Orders to Kill, p. 71) The deal was that if Ray would smuggle items into the USA for him, he would supply travel papers and money for his services. At the completion of his first assignment, Raoul paid Ray about $1500 and gave him a phone number to contact him in New Orleans. He also told him that he would have to move south in order to continue his employment. The two met in Birmingham and Raoul bought Ray a car: a white Mustang. This business relationship, Raoul paying Ray for smuggling purposes—sometimes guns—continued into March of 1968. In Birmingham, Raoul told Ray be needed him to go to Aeromarine Supply to buy a rifle. Raoul did not like the rifle Ray first purchased. He asked him to return it. So the next day, March 30^th, Ray returned to pick up the Remington 760 Game Master. This rifle exchange suggests that Ray was being manipulated. (John Avery Emison, The Deep State Assassination of Martin Luther King, p. 507)

Raoul now told Ray to proceed to Memphis and the New Rebel Motel on Lamar Avenue. Ray got there on April 3^rd. Raoul later arrived and told him they would get a room near the river to work the first stage of a planned gunrunning scheme. (Pepper, p. 77) Raoul then wrote out the address of a tavern named Jim’s Grill and told Ray to meet him there the next day at 3:00 PM. Ray turned over the rifle to Raoul and insists he never saw it again.

The next day, a bit late, Raoul met Ray at Jim’s Grill, owned by Loyd Jowers, who we previously mentioned. Raoul instructed Ray to buy a set of binoculars, which he did. When he returned Raoul told him to take his belongings upstairs and wait in the room at Bessie’s Boarding house, which Ray had already booked under a false name. Raoul said he was now going to meet with a gunrunner outside of town. At around 5:20 PM Ray went outside to fix a deflating tire at a gas station. When he returned, he noticed a policeman standing in the street who told him to turn around. Realizing he was involved in illegal operations, he drove out of town toward Mississippi. He heard on the radio that King had been killed. He also heard the authorities were looking for a white Mustang. This clued him into what probably had happened. (Pepper, p. 79)

Let me add one last point in addition to the three indices listed previously about Raoul in the last section. As Philip Melanson noted in his book, according to a retired CIA agent with direct knowledge of the Agency’s Montreal operations in the late sixties, that office had an identities specialist. He went by the name of Raoul Miora. Was this just another coincidence? (The Martin Luther King Assassination, p. 179)

So, according to Ray, it was Raoul who told him to be at Bessie’s Boarding house. As John Avery Emison shows, and as we have noted, Ray could not have known that King was staying at the Lorraine Motel across the street. So let us ask: How did King get to that location? He had not stayed there on his previous visit. On his last visit to Memphis, in the latter days of March 1968, King had stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont. Prior to his return visit the FBI began a counter-intelligence program to manipulate King. They wanted it known that he had previously stayed at a first class white hotel, the Rivermont, instead of an African-American hotel in Memphis, the Lorraine. The Bureau sent this notice out to be publicized. It worked, and this is how King ended up at the Lorraine.(Emison, p. 242)

There was an FBI informant in King’s camp, Ernest Withers, a famous photographer. (Memphis Commercial Appeal, 9/12/10, story by Marc Perrusquia) With Withers in his camp, the FBI knew many, many details about King’s meetings and itinerary. The day before he was killed, the FBI knew from Withers the correct room King was staying in at the Lorraine. (Emison, p. 226)

As the reader can see, there was manipulation going on at both ends of the equation.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations inquiry did not really investigate the evidence of military spying on the civil rights movement, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was King’s group. The 111th Military Intelligence Group (MIG) from Fort McPherson, Georgia, shadowed James Meredith’s famous ‘Walk Against Fear’. That same 111^th MIG “was in Memphis on April 3-4 1968, monitoring the movements of Rev. King the day he was assassinated.”. (Emison, p. 201) A senate sub-committee reported on the intelligence activities as such:

..no demonstration was too small or too peaceful to merit direct or indirect monitoring. No church meeting was too sacred and no political gathering too sensitive to be declared off limits. The picture is that of a runaway intelligence bureaucracy unwatched by its civilian superiors, eagerly grasping for information about political dissenters of all kinds, and totally oblivious to the impact its spying could have on the constitutional liberties it had sworn to defend.(Emison, p. 204)

Military intelligence assumed that ghetto riots were likely caused by conspiracies. And those conspiracies and conspirators also included many who were “behind or involved in mass demonstrations.” (Emison, p. 205). For instance General William Yarborough believed that riots, for example the one in Detroit in 1967, constituted an insurgency. They therefore had to be thwarted by counter-insurgency tactics. It was later revealed that Yarborough thought that the USSR and China were financing King and other black demonstrators. As a result of this, the US Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC) was created with hundreds of men in plainclothes spying on King and thousands of other Americans who were considered radical. There was also a large unit that was secret working under General Creighton Abrams. In other words, there was one group that was acknowledged and one that was covert.

Yarborough’s group had 300 offices throughout the nation. One of their groups was the 113^th MIG, in Evanston, Illinois. One of their targets was Adlai Stevenson III, hardly a radical. But he had supported Jesse Jackson, who was with the SCLC party at the Lorraine on the day King was killed. (Emison, p. 208). The army started a file on King in 1947, while he was still a college student. By 1957 they were describing King as a ‘communist tool’. (ibid, p. 216). By 1967, the army had King’s office in Ebenezer Baptist Church wired.

In that same year, King made his famous speech in New York where he condemned the Vietnam War thus forging an irreparable break with the White House. King had been warned about this by no less than Stokely Carmichael who told him he was now asking for trouble. He appears to have been correct because now the word “treason” was being thrown around in the MIG units and officers were telling commanders that the speech caused African-American troops to be unsettled and the Army commanders were increasingly worried that the black unrest at home was communist inspired. (Emison, pp. 219-20)

To seal the deal with the Pentagon, there was now the Poor People’s March. In December of 1967 Army intelligence labeled this as “a devastating civil disturbance whose sole purpose is to shut down the United States government.” Army officers now targeted certain city priorities in advance of “King’s plans to ignite violence and mayhem” throughout the United States in April. Green Berets were instructed to construct street maps in order to identify landing zones for troops and to also scout out sniper sites in 39 cities, including Memphis. (Emison, p. 221)

King had struck at the heart of what many thought had gone wrong with America since 1963. Johnson had forsaken President Kennedy’s War on Poverty, and his own Great Society, in exchange for a misguided, utterly wasteful, and seemingly hopeless war in Indochina. In his New York City speech, King bitterly complained that young black soldiers were fighting in Southeast Asia to win rights for Vietnamese that some of them did not have in the USA. He then observed that both black and white soldiers who cannot sit together in certain cities in America were joining hands in Vietnam to burn down the huts of poor Third World people. King specifically wanted to stop the war and bring the money spent in Vietnam back to the domestic front for items like full employment, guaranteed incomes and the construction of affordable residences. (The Nation, article by Mark Engler, January 15, 2010)

As the reader can see, King was now clearly going beyond civil rights and was essentially demanding a reevaluation and reconstruction of American values and priorities away from the Pentagon and toward its poverty stricken citizenry. This was really what the Poor People’s March was really about. King had discussed this project with Bobby Kennedy through a mutual acquaintance, and Kennedy was for another March on Washington for this cause. (Philadelphia Tribune, 2/21/12, story by Marian Wright). As the reader can also see, the Pentagon saw this as igniting domestic violence and mayhem.

If we consider Raoul to be a CIA operator, and we understand that a MIG was monitoring King in Memphis, is there a connection between the two? According to Emison there was. Some of the CIA’s Special Operations Group from Vietnam was dumped into the Alabama National Guard, specifically the 20^th Special Forces Group stationed just outside Birmingham. And here is the capper: some of the 20^th SFG shared a training site with Klansmen in Cullman, Alabama. The Special Forces unit used a network of Klansmen in order to garner information about “nigger troublemakers”. They then passed this on to the Pentagon. (Emison, pp. 221-24)

As Emison notes, this explosive mixture—CIA, Pentagon, Klan-- was in training 260 miles from Memphis. At a time when King was doing something they all feared: arranging a demonstration in the capitol that could surpass the legendary August, 1963 March on Washington. Can one imagine the impact if both King and Bobby Kennedy had lived to take the podium at that event?

Let me make some final evidentiary presentations on the King case.

First, there was an army jacket found in the trunk of Ray’s car. It was inventoried into evidence. Arthur Hanes Jr. told Emison that he and his father were excited by this discovery. The main reason being that it was too small to fit Ray. Did it belong to Raoul? (Emison,p. 483)

Second, as the late Reverend James Lawson told me after a speech I did in Santa Monica on the King murder, King had a special security force in Memphis. It was made up of African/American homicide detectives. He added that this unit was not activated on King’s last visit. Combined with this, as Philip Melanson noted more than once, the Memphis Police tactical units—specially equipped riot control patrols of about 3-4 automobiles-- were ordered back from a security ring around the Lorraine. On the morning of April 4^th, they were withdrawn to a five block distance from that area. Which undeniably helped the escape of those involved in the murder. (Melanson, pp. 171-72)

Fourth, there is the mystery of Marrell McCollough. He was an undercover police operative posing as a member of the Invaders, a Black Panther copycat youth group. (Melanson, p. 171)

According to information unearthed by renowned author Douglas Valentine, McCullough was recruited by the FBI to serve in the MPD Intelligence Squad. Before the HSCA he identified himself as a police officer. But he had joined the CIA years before, in 1974. When asked if he had any relationship with another intelligence agency back in 1968, he denied it. What makes McCollough interesting is that the HSCA had evidence indicating that he was involved in the provocation of the March 28^th mini riot involving King, and which caused him to return to Memphis. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 518) McCullough was also at the Lorraine at the time of the shooting, even though the Invaders had been asked to leave by Jesse Jackson. He ended up being one of the first persons to reach King after he was killed. Needless to say, there is something to ponder there, but I will leave it at that.

John Avery Emison has now written two valuable books on the MLK case. The first one was titled The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover Up. He has followed that up with The Deep State Assassination of Martin Luther King. They are both worth having. There are very few people who are working the fields in the King case. In that regard, he might be the most valuable asset we have.

(Bill Christian is the Chief of Staff for Representative Anna Paulina Luna. Please contact him and request him to hold open hearings on the King case. He can be contacted at 202-225-5961, or at 226 Cannon House Office Building, Washington DC 20515. His email is William.Christian@mail.house. gov.)