BOOK REVIEW
Dissecting an assassination
An Act of State. The Execution of Martin Luther King by William Pepper

Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again" - Martin Luther King

Americans celebrate Martin Luther King Day to commemorate the message of the greatest prophet of non-violence the world has seen since Mahatma Gandhi. School textbooks in the US contain chapters on the civil rights movement spearheaded by King, and universities offer undergraduate and graduate level courses on his philosophy, actions and significance.

Yet the most under-researched and clouded subject is that of his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Neither the speechmakers on MLK Day, nor the Americans who are taught about the man in school and college know who shot King on that fateful evening and why. Like three other contemporaries who were assassinated inexplicably in the turmoil-ridden 1960s, John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X, King's murder has remained an unsolved mystery.

William Pepper, an American lawyer and associate of King, has been fearlessly probing the truth for a quarter of a century, fighting threats to his life and other insuperable roadblocks and hurdles. This book summarizes his findings and finalizes the list of conspirators who wanted the apostle of peace out of their way.

In spring 1967, King was emerging as the focal point of a coalition of the growing peace and economic justice movements in the US. Against the advice of his peers who limited themselves to civil liberties in the domestic arena, King catapulted to the epicenter of the anti-Vietnam war cause due to his formidable conscience and belief in the oneness of human suffering in every corner of the world.
Pointing out that civil rights legislation was not enough to meet the basic needs of poor Americans, King was also mobilizing half a million impoverished citizens in the Poor People's Campaign that would culminate in a unique demonstration-cum-encampment outside the US Congress to demand economic justice. King declared intentions of moving into mainstream politics as a potential presidential candidate to highlight the anti-war and anti-poverty agenda. These bold and captivating planks outraged and struck fear in the hearts of wealthy and powerful interest groups in the country. "It was for this reason alone that King had to be stopped." (p 6)

During a whirlwind tour to galvanize public opinion, King went to Memphis to participate in a sanitation worker's strike on April 3, 1968. He was shot dead the following day on the balcony of his hotel room. State investigations nailed a petty criminal fugitive, James Earl Ray, for the killing and sentenced him to 99 years in prison without a judicial trial. It was another lone-assassin explanation for the removal of another progressive leader. In 1978, following persistent rumors of a gross miscarriage of justice, the author interviewed Ray in jail and found that "he was set up" and was not even present at the crime scene when King was murdered.

Pepper began poring through the official version of events that was published for limited circulation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Some startling facts surfaced. As early as December 1963, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials met in Washington "to explore ways of neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader". (p 11) Wiretaps and phone bugging of King and his entourage went on uninterrupted for the last five years of his life. The bureau also engaged in surreptitious activities and burglaries against King to soil his reputation. There was an attempt to assassinate King in 1965 through the collaboration of FBI and Louisville police officers, involving a US$50,000 contract to kill.

Pepper found out that the state's chief witness, who claimed that James Earl Ray shot King from a bathroom window and then fled, was heavily drunk that evening. Other witnesses testified that the bathroom was empty at the time of the shooting. Members of organized crime rings in Memphis and New Orleans had a connection to the murder, as was admitted by Lloyd Jowers, the owner of the grill opposite King's hotel and a key player in the assassination. Jowers was approached before the assassination with $100,000 and a weapon, and he was present to take the gun from the actual sniper seconds after firing at King, not from the bathroom but a bushy area adjoining his bar. When Pepper petitioned the attorney-general to reconsider Ray's case based on new evidence, he was met with stony refusals.

Undeterred, the author continued arranging meetings with witnesses that were never considered by the state prosecutors. Oil and media baron H L Hunt's aide confessed that at various meetings between his boss and FBI director J Edgar Hoover, King was discussed. In June 1967, Hunt told Hoover "he could finish King by constantly attacking him on his daily radio broadcasts", at which Hoover replied, "The only way to stop King would be to completely silence him." (p 43)

Hunt, who had top-level mafia ties, was interestingly a close friend of then president Lyndon Johnson and his assistant, Booth Mooney, the author of many anti-King radio broadcast scripts. On the evening of the assassination, to ward off suspicions, Hoover called Hunt and advised him to cancel his anti-King radio programs. The same cabal of Johnson, Hunt and Hoover met the evening before JFK's assassination in 1963 in a closeted session, at the end of which LBJ came out and told his wife, "After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again - that's a promise." (p 127) Corroborating the link between the JFK and King assassinations, Pepper uncovered facts about the shadowy "Raul" who set up James Earl Ray and also had close ties with Jack Ruby, the killer of Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Widening the focus of the inquiry, the author next lands on incontrovertible proof of the hand of US army intelligence in the King assassination. Army intelligence had been desperately searching for a way to finish King, according to several sources. A Special Forces Alpha 184 sniper team was in Memphis on the day of the killing. It was notorious for "behind the fence" covert operations and special training links with the Ku Klux Klan. A two-man "reconnaissance unit" was sent to Memphis on April 4 with explicit orders to "shoot to kill 'body mass' [center, chest cavity] Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the Reverend Andrew Young". The team's pep talk before the mission stressed how the targets were "enemies of the United States who were determined to bring down the government". (p 68)

The Alpha 184 mission was a backup plan to an officially deniable "civilian scenario" that involved Jowers and the mobsters. Army photographers were perched on top of a nearby building to capture the entire killing on camera to suppress observations and tamper with the evidence on the crime site immediately after the killing. Members of this sensitive mission either died in mysterious circumstances a few years later or escaped the country. One of them admitted "a clean-up process had begun within a year of the assassination ... if he returned to the United States he would be immediately killed". (p 73) The 1972 Ervin Committee condemned the US military for domestic surveillance of civilian political activity in no mean terms, confirming that King was one of the millions of US citizens and entities targeted for bugging and infiltration.

By a tortuous and circuitous route, Pepper got the case proving innocence of Ray running in a County Criminal court. Judge Brown concluded that the rifle produced by the state was not the murder weapon because the death slug did not match test-fired bullets from the same gun. Just as legal momentum was gaining, the government got a higher court to overturn Brown's ruling and removed him from the case on grounds that he had "ceased to be impartial."

Pepper went on unveiling new parts of the conspiracy puzzle. Members of the Memphis Police Department (MPD) used Lloyd Jowers' grill for "planning sessions" before the assassination. The MPD's best shooter, Earl Clark, may have been the actual trigger puller behind the bushes. When a former FBI agent spotted a person in Atlanta who matched the murder suspect and asked for permission to apprehend him, he received strange instructions and was disallowed from detaining the suspect without explanation. The massive damage limitation and cover-up operations, understandable given how far up the official line the conspiracy went, ensured that government investigators sidelined crucial facts like these.

In 1999, Pepper and the King family managed to arrange for a trial of Lloyd Jowers. The jury pool contained a disproportionate number of employees of law enforcement agencies and security firms. Aspects of the local and wider conspiracy came out cogently at the trial. Mafia organizations had informed the co-conspirators that "there would be no security, the police were cooperating, and that a patsy (decoy) was in place". (p111) Removal of police from the area of the crime, failures to place the usual security unit around King and deletion of other individuals whose presence in the area could jeopardize the assassination - all inevitably pointed to an orchestrated plan. An anonymous caller changed King's lodging from the protected ground floor to an open balcony terrace room. The small police presence at King's hotel completely disappeared within half an hour of the murder. A fireman yelled at the police standing at some distance that the shot came from a clump of bushes but was ignored. Moments after the shooting, a figure rushed into a car and drove right past the police barricading the street, as the MPD let him go. There never was a house-to-house investigation after the incident despite it being a standard police practice.

Other exposes at the trial included an FBI agent who was in the assassination in-group telling one witness, "the CIA ordered it done". A journalist who knew Raul, the weapon and cash facilitator, startled the court by informing that the accused's family was "being protected and advised by US government agents who had visited their home on three occasions - the government was helping them through these difficult days". (p125) When Ray tried a prison break in 1976, he narrowly escaped death, not capture, by an FBI SWAT team consisting of more than 30 sharpshooters. The implication of this astonishing operation was to prevent Ray from spilling any beans on the cover-up once he was out of custody.

Last but not least, the King versus Jowers trial threw light on government use of the media for disinformation, psychological warfare and propaganda. In 1967-68, there was extraordinary press and radio hostility for King's anti-Vietnam war position. The "powerfully comprehensive control of the media by the forces who control American public policy" enabled biased and unquestioning coverage of the assassination and repeated brainwashing of the public with the official version of events. No less a publication than the New York Times was implicated in furthering the official spin.

The final judgement of the case apportioned 30 percent liability to defendant Jowers and 70 percent to "all other co-conspirators", ie agents of the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee and the Government of the United States. Despite this overwhelming verdict and President Clinton's orders to conduct another official investigation into fresh allegations, the US Attorney General dished out one more sham exonerating report in June 2000. The Department of Justice taskforce that collected proof for this report had an "orientation to defend the status quo in the case at all costs". (p226) It selectively decided who and what to believe and protected agencies whose culpability was an open secret. Pepper's disappointment with this latest charade is vivid: "Our democracy is a perpetrated illusion, a myth, even a disappearing fantasy when it comes up against the special interests of wealth and power." (p261)
Martin Luther King's vision of root-and-branch transformation of society to overcome militarism, infringement of liberties and unresolved racism is still a valid pursuit for decent Americans. The truth about his assassination plot is a wake-up call for them and a shocking rebuttal of what George W Bush loudly trumpets as "the meaning of American justice."

An Act of State. The Execution of Martin Luther King by William Pepper, Verso Books, London, 2003. ISBN: 1-85984-695-5. Price: US$25, 334 pages.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)