http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/index.html
(CNN) -- FBI wiretaps have "given us the most powerful and persuasive
source
of all for seeing
how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was," as a civil rights leader,
according to a leading
civil rights scholar.
The FBI's interest in King intensified after the March on Wa****ngton in
1963, witnessed by more
than 200,000.
1 of 2 "You see him being intensely self-critical. King really and truly
believed that he was
there to be of service to others. This was not a man with any egomaniacal
joy of being a famous
person, or being a leader," said Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar David
Garrow
in a recent
interview with CNN.
Hoping to prove that Martin Luther King, Jr., was under the influence of
Communists, the FBI kept
the civil rights leader under constant surveillance.
The agency's hidden tape recorders turned up almost nothing about
communism.
But they did reveal embarrassing details about King's *** life -- details
the FBI was able to use
against him. Watch how the FBI tracked King's every move »
The almost fanatical zeal with which the FBI pursued King is disclosed in
tens of thousands of
FBI memos from the 1960s.
The FBI paper trail spells out in detail the government agency's concerted
efforts to derail
King's efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement.
The FBI's interest in King intensified after the March on Wa****ngton in
August 1963 when King
delivered what many historians consider the most im****tant speech of the
20th century. After the
speech, an FBI memo called King the "most dangerous and effective Negro
leader in the country."
The bureau convened a meeting of department heads to "explore how best to
carry on our
investigation [of King] to produce the desired results without
embarrassment
to the Bureau,"
which included "a complete analysis of the avenues of approach aimed at
neutralizing King as an
effective Negro leader."
The FBI began secretly tracking Dr. King's flights and watching his
associates. In July 1963, a
month before the March on Wa****ngton, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover filed a
request with Attorney
General Robert Kennedy to tap King's and his associates' phones and to bug
their homes and
offices.
CNN special correspondent Soledad O'Brien gains exclusive access to
eyewitnesses, FBI do***ents
and the killer's room in this first installment of CNN's groundbreaking
do***entary series Black
in America.
Thursday, 9 p.m. ET
see full schedule »
In September, Kennedy consented to the technical surveillance. Kennedy
gave
the FBI permission to
break into King's office and home to install the bugs, as long as agents
recognized the "delicacy
of this particular matter" and didn't get caught installing them. Kennedy
added a proviso -- he
wanted to be personally informed of any pertinent information.
While King did have associates who had been members of the Communist
Party,
by all accounts they
severed those ties when they started working in the civil rights movement.
What's more, the FBI
bugs never picked up any evidence that King himself was a Communist, or
was
interested in toeing
the party line.
But the long list of bugs in his hotel rooms picked up just enough about
King's love life.
A decision in a 1977 court case brought by Bernard Lee, one of King's
associates, sealed the
transcripts from those wiretaps until 2027. But King's associates confirm
there were at least two
cases in which FBI surveillance caught King in compromising cir***stances.
The first incident involved King at a party at the Willard Hotel in
Wa****ngton. The FBI recorded
the party and captured the sounds of a ***ual encounter in the room
afterwards. The second
incident occurred during King's stay in a hotel in Los Angeles,
California.
There, agents heard
another drunken gathering in which King told an off-color joke about the
recently assassinated
President John F. Kennedy. Hoover sent transcripts and excerpts of those
recordings to the White
House and to the attorney general.
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Hoover's contempt for King's private behavior is clear in the memos he
kept
in his personal
files. His scrawl across the bottom of positive news stories about King's
success dripped with
loathing.
On a story about King receiving the St. Francis peace medal from the
Catholic Church, he wrote
"this is disgusting." On the story "King, Pope to Talk on Race," he
scribbled "astounding." On a
story about King's meeting with the pope, "I am amazed that the Pope gave
an
audience to such a
degenerate." On a story about King winning the Nobel Prize, he wrote "King
could well qualify for
the 'top alley cat prize!' "
When King learned he would be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in
1964, the FBI decided to
take its harassment of King one step further, sending him an insulting and
threatening note
anonymously. A draft was found in the FBI files years later. In it the FBI
wrote, "You are a
colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that." The letter went on to
say,
"The American public
.... will know you for what you are -- an evil, abnormal beast," and
"Satan
could not do more."
The letter's threat was ominous, if not specific: "King you are done."
Some
have theorized the
intent of the letter was to drive King to commit suicide in order to avoid
personal
embarrassment. "King, there is only one thing left for you to do," the
letter concluded. "You
know what it is ... You better take it before your filthy, abnormal
fraudulent self is bared to
the nation."
With the exception of the wiretap transcripts which remain sealed under
court order, many of the
other memos were made public as part of high-profile congressional
investigations into the FBI's
harassment of King. A summary was put together during the course of these
investigations. Other
memos were released through a Freedom of Information Act request from the
Center for National
Security Studies in 1978. Another large batch was released through a 1979
FOIA request from David
Garrow.
[Ad: advertisement]While the memos depict a cold and calculating attempt
by
the government to
personally embarrass King, the memos also create an ironic by-product,
according to Garrow.
"When you have a wiretap on someone you pick up, all sorts of dreck. But
in
terms of the
political history that ironically the FBI has created for us, it's a
wonderful resource," Garrow
said.
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