The newly declassified
documents released by the National Security Agency offer more proof of what's
long been known and that's that the federal government routinely spied on Dr.
Martin Luther King. However, the NSA taps are only the tip of the government
spy iceberg against King. What's still only sketchily known or remembered is
that the government waged a long, brutal and systematic covert campaign against
King that didn't stop at illegal surveillance and wiretaps. The aim was two-fold,
to discredit King not as a critic of the Vietnam War but as the nation's
paramount civil rights leader and to discredit the entire civil rights movement
in the process. The ringmaster for the dirty war on King , then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and other top FBI officials
routinely spit out these choice expletives about King "Dangerous," "evil," and a "colossal fraud." They didn't stop
at name calling. They talked ominously of "neutralizing" him as an
effective leader. And even more ominously they sent him a poison pen letter flatly
saying "King you are done" and suggesting he kill himself.
Hoover
assigned Assistant FBI director William Sullivan the dirty job of getting the
goods on King. Sullivan branded King as the "most dangerous Negro of the
future in this nation." In his book My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI,
Sullivan described the inner circle of men assigned to get King. The group was
made up of special agents mainly drawn from the Washington and Atlanta FBI
offices. Their job was to monitor all of King's activities. Much of their dirty
tactics are well known. They deluged him with wiretaps, physical surveillance,
poison-pen letters, threats, harassment, intimidation, and smear sexual leaks
to the media, and even at the time of his murder, Hoover had more plans to
intensify the spy campaign against King. Decades later, Sullivan still publicly
defended the FBI's war against him, and made no apology for it. The FBI patterned its spy and
harassment campaign against King on the methods used by its counterintelligence
division and internal security sections during the 1940s and '50s. The arsenal
of dirty tactics they used included unauthorized wiretaps, agent provocateurs,
poison-pen letters, "black-bag jobs" (breaking and entering to obtain
intelligence) and the compiling of secret dossiers.
In the 1960s, the FBI recruited thousands of "ghetto informants," for
their relentless campaign of harassment and intimidation against African
American groups. The bureau even organized its targets into Orwellian
categories agents gave such labels as "Rabble Rouser Index," "Agitator Index"
and "Security Index."
We
know only the bare outline of what the FBI actually did to King in his final
days. There are still a lot of dots that need to be connected in the FBI's
murky onslaught against King. But we do
know this. The FBI officials who directed the illegal spy campaign against King
and the FBI agent who played a major role in running the program in Atlanta against
him were also involved in every phase of the investigation into King's
assassination. The likelihood is, of course, that James Earl Ray acted alone
and killed King. Yet the taint of the severely compromised cast of government
officials that controlled the investigation nearly three decades after his
murder still raises questions about the scope, or lack thereof, of the
investigation.
Unfortunately,
the other truth is that the House Select Committee on Assassination that
investigated King's murder ordered the files sealed for fifty years. They are
still sealed. So we don't really know what the FBI did or didn't do in the
run-up to King's murder. The files just might answer many questions about the
secret war the FBI waged against King from the late 1950's to his murder.
Then
there was Army Intelligence's war on King. It is not as well- known as the
FBI's but it was still just as prolonged and lethal. It started in 1947 with
surveillance of King who was then a student at Morehouse College at a meeting
of the Intercollegiate Council he attended, the group was suspected of being
Communist influenced. The reports on King's activities continued through the
1950s. As King's stature as America's best known civil rights leaders rose in
the 1960's, Army Intelligence kicked its spy campaign against him into high
gear. It went beyond mere taps and surveillance. According to classified
documents uncovered a few years ago for seven years it flew at least 26 super
secret U2 spy flights over civil rights actions in Birmingham, Alabama and
other cities.
The
assault on King was more than the FBI and Army Intelligence's acting out of
their paranoid obsessions against King. It was a war against the civil rights
movement. The federal government shamefully and disgracefully with the full
knowledge and assent of presidents and attorney generals decided that the cheap
and dirty way to win that war was by discrediting the most respected and
admired symbol of that movement. The NSA taps were only a tiny part of that
war.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He
is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America
Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio
Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio
Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network. His latest ebook '47 Percent Negro': A Chronicle of the
Wackiest Racial Assaults on President Obama is now available (Amazon).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
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