A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  Yet, as an FBI tape recorder whirred, Withers indicated he could pull it off.

  “I just happen to know some people that are in that area that can do these things,” he explained in his soft, gentle voice.

  “…I have made the necessary contact.”

  The job must be done in phases, Withers said. First, Cook would be moved to a minimum-security Correctional Rehabilitation Center. That could “set a stage” for him to qualify for executive clemency.

  When an impatient McGrory complained that wasn’t quick enough, the usually mild-mannered Withers grew testy.

  “We can’t—Fuck!—we can’t accomplish it without it coming into the proper phases,” he says in the eighteen-minute conversation, advising that he’ll need at least a thousand dollars as a down payment to take to his contact in Nashville. Then, he told McGrory, he can quote an “exact figure” for Cook’s release.

  “…The kind of prison record that he has, just doesn’t allow the door to open on him right away.”4

  In all, the FBI taped three phone calls between McGrory and Withers that September and October, six months before topless-bar-owner-turned-informant Art Baldwin began recording the photographer while wearing a body wire. But Withers got spooked and aborted his discussions with McGrory after a friend happened to see her in a downtown Memphis meeting with Corbett Hart, the tall, mustachioed FBI agent who convinced her to cooperate.

  The friend then tipped off Withers.*4

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS’S ROLE IN the Clemency for Cash schemes ran astonishingly deep. As the FBI released more records,*5 his involvement came into focus: A Memphis contractor told agents he gave the photographer a series of cash payments in hundred-dollar bills—$5,000 in all—hoping to secure the release of his son from a thirteen-year sentence for robbery.5 A Los Angeles drug dealer said he paid $65,000 to Withers and others in a failed bid to free his wife from a Tennessee prison.6

  It was fascinating reading, but what I really wanted was a clue—any clue—that might shed light on Jim’s assertion twelve years earlier that Withers had been an informant during the civil rights era. I searched line by line through each repetitious page, through blocky, black type and photocopy blur.

  Then I saw something.

  At first it seemed to be just another report. Dated September 23, 1977, the three-page Teletype from the Memphis field office to headquarters in Washington rehashed the taped phone calls and Withers’s offer to help release Sammye McGrory’s boyfriend for cash.

  Near the bottom of the second page the narrative took a turn. It walked through some background information on Withers. Then—Bam! There it was: “Ernest Columbus Withers was formerly designated as ME 338-R,” the report said.

  ME 338-R. It danced off the page. This had to be Withers’s code number, proof that he’d been an informant. Good Lord. All these years—and now, there it was.

  Jim was right.

  * * *

  —

  THE FBI USES such informant numbers or code numbers—technically known in the business as source symbol numbers—to protect the identity of informants or confidential sources who supply sensitive information to agents. Many of these sources are criminal informants—snitches who help law enforcement catch drug dealers, counterfeiters, bank robbers, and the like. Others may assist national security investigations or help target terrorists. Their work can be perilous. That’s why their identities are closely guarded.

  What little I knew at that point came from obscure histories I’d read about the civil rights movement. Every now and then an FBI document from that period would contain such a number, referencing an individual who had supplied information on a group of activists or a mass march. Normally, these source symbol numbers are redacted. But sometimes the censors make mistakes.

  ME 338-R fit the pattern. ME clearly stood for Memphis. The rest, 338-R, was the actual code number, the unique cipher assigned to Withers. The “R” indicated that Withers was specifically employed to inform on racial matters.

  It all fit—but the report offered more. This time it wasn’t what was written, but what wasn’t.

  A gaping redaction followed the reference to ME 338-R. FBI censors removed nearly a line of type. Immediately following the omitted type came this phrase: “…captioned ‘Ernest Columbus Withers; CI.’ ”

  CI?

  That had to be FBI shorthand for confidential informant. This must be a reference to an FBI file, I thought. And not just any file: a file titled “Ernest Columbus Withers; CI”—his informant file.

  It seemed convincing, but my euphoria soon gave way to doubts. Journalistically speaking, it wasn’t much. What could I write about it? At best I had maybe a weekend story. Perhaps it would be a page-one story on Sunday, the paper with the biggest readership of the week for a daily newspaper.

  But it would be short—and incomplete.

  A story at this point would raise more questions than answers. What exactly did Withers do as an informant? When did he start? How long did he serve? Was he paid? Did he take pictures for the FBI? Why would he do it?

  The level of detail I had didn’t answer any of those questions. And where could I turn for answers? I couldn’t count on Jim. He’d just deny everything.

  No, all I had was a mound of paperwork, none of it helping to unravel the mystery of Withers’s secret life as an informant.

  None of it except that one page—that one, single reference—mentioning ME 338-R.

  *1 On April 14, 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned Ford’s six-count Nashville conviction. The case was doomed a year earlier when the Supreme Court curtailed use of the honest services fraud statute, which makes it a crime for a public official to conceal a conflict of interest. The effort to gut the law was led by Justice Antonin Scalia, who decried its overuse. Convictions under the honest services law now must include an underlying crime of bribery. Though Ford’s case included elements resembling bribery, prosecutors chose to not charge him with that offense. The failure to file bribery charges remains a divisive point of contention among law enforcement officials connected to the case. Meanwhile, Ford’s Memphis bribery conviction was upheld on appeal.

  *2 Through subsequent FOIA requests, the author obtained digital copies of the actual audio recording made by the FBI on September 13, 1977. On the scratchy audiotape, Withers is heard in his peculiar, sing-song voice offering to arrange the release of a convicted killer for as much as $16,000.

  *3 Although the FBI redacted her name and her comments from the transcript, the accounts in the FBI files match those in news clippings that identify her as Sammye Lynn Cook aka McGrory. The clippings from public trials in 1979 show McGrory testified about her encounter with Withers.

  *4 In the two subsequent phone conversations, Withers seemed to want nothing to do with McGrory. “Maybe you should just deal with a lawyer and not with me. Because I don’t want to get in no hassle about trying to do a favor,” Withers says at one point. Withers’s altered tone poses a question: Did he have a pang of conscience? The answer seems to be an emphatic no. Retired FBI agent Hank Hillin writes in his book, FBI Codename TennPar, that Withers was tipped off by a private investigator. FBI records provide a name for the investigator: Renfro Hays, Withers’s friend. (Coincidentally, Hays worked in 1968 for the defense of assassin James Earl Ray, and Withers once reported him to the FBI, suspecting he might have had a hand in King’s murder.) In a May 1, 2014, interview with the author, retired agent Corbett Hart offered more: he said he was meeting with McGrory when Hays, whom McGrory had hired, happened upon them. Hays then alerted Withers.

  *5 The FBI eventually released hundreds of pages connected to Withers’s involvement in the Clemency for Cash probe. Nearly all of it came after the author and The Commercial Appeal filed a FOIA suit in federal court.

  8.

  UP ON THE RIDGE

  NOVEMBER 2010

  A BROODING GRAY SKY HUNG OVER Asheville as I walked up Hi
llside Street, into a damp, November wind. Already, winter was here. It snarled across western North Carolina, stripping leaves from the maple and tulip trees, strangling the last of autumn. But it couldn’t squelch this Appalachian city’s mesmerizing beauty: its bustling artist colony, its vibrant architecture, the Blue Ridge Mountains rising majestically on one side to the east, the Great Smoky Mountains on the other, stretching in a haze over the western horizon into Tennessee.

  There were plenty of distractions, but I was here for one thing—to learn more about what Withers did for the FBI.

  I flew here to meet Betty Lawrence, the daughter of long-deceased FBI agent, William H. “Bill” Lawrence. Over two and a half decades, from 1945 to 1970, he was the Bureau’s chief spook in Memphis. He ran its domestic intelligence operations there. In a long and colorful career that could have inspired a spy novel, Lawrence tracked suspected Communists, helped bust up the Ku Klux Klan, and hounded militant civil rights and peace activists whom the government viewed as dangerous subversives. He worked for a time with Clarence M. Kelley, later appointed FBI director by President Nixon, and he received training in the detection of Soviet Bloc espionage under Mark Felt, later revealed as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal.1

  Lawrence created an intelligence unit at the Memphis Police Department, a sort of FBI Lite, criticized for its widespread spying. When it was finally exposed in 1976, the unit burned thousands of files it had kept on Memphians before a federal judge shut it down for illegal political surveillance.

  He was a legend in Memphis.

  Bookending his tenure there were two pivotal moments in the long-running American conflict between national security and individual civil liberties:

  In 1954, he arrested Junius Scales, said to be the only American ever to go to prison simply for being a member of the Communist Party. For this, Lawrence received a personal commendation from Director J. Edgar Hoover. The arrest made national news and demonstrated the Justice Department’s commitment to stemming the tide of communism, which many Americans believed was inundating their government and vital institutions.

  And in 1968, he kept tabs on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his final days before he was shot in Memphis.

  Many thought that the FBI had killed King. In fact, though the murder allegation was baseless, Lawrence would be called years later to testify before Congress to account for his spying on the civil rights leader.

  As a reprieve from his work, the tall, lanky agent took summer vacations driving up the Blue Ridge Parkway past Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not far from Asheville. When he and his wife, Margaret, retired to the area in 1971, their two grown daughters followed. Now, only the daughters survived. And what they’d been telling me over the phone hooked me.

  “My father was always very careful not to talk about business. But, yes, I knew Mr. Withers. I knew that my father knew Mr. Withers,” the elder of the two sisters, Nancy Mosley, a retired librarian, said in the helpful tone of one who’d dedicated her life to assisting others.

  What she offered next knocked me to the edge of my seat.

  “One time,” she said, “Mr. Withers came to our house. And he took a portrait of our family.”

  Good Lord. If I was hearing this right, the family might actually have records linking Withers to special agent Lawrence.

  “You wouldn’t still happen to have that picture, would you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Nancy said from her home in Charlotte. “Betty has it.”

  When I called Betty Lawrence, an attorney in Asheville, she was every bit as sweet and helpful as her sister. Yes, she said. She has the picture.

  “I got it out and put it on the piano this morning,” she told me.

  As we chatted, I worked up the nerve to ask—could she send me a copy?

  “Sure,” she said without hesitation. I couldn’t believe my luck. She agreed to scan it and e-mail it to me. Shortly thereafter, I had it:

  A color photo of Bill Lawrence, square jawed, bespectacled, smiling; dressed in a dark suit and resting in an armchair. On either side were his daughters, sitting on opposite armrests, each with a hand on one of their dad’s shoulders. Behind them stood their mother, Margaret, Bill’s wife.

  When I showed it to Jeff McAdory, The Commercial Appeal’s no-nonsense picture desk editor and an experienced photo archivist who had worked with Withers, he scoffed. Withers always shot in black and white, Jeff said. True—for the most part. But at times Withers took film to color photo labs to be processed. And when I ran Jeff’s concerns by the Lawrence sisters, they wouldn’t budge. They had no doubt Withers shot this picture: he came to their home in the Memphis suburbs at Christmastime in 1967, they said, and took the family’s portrait in their living room.*

  “This was a fellow Daddy worked with,” Betty said. “And he was introduced to us as Mr. Withers. He was Daddy’s black photographer friend.”

  * * *

  —

  THE LAWRENCE SISTERS were talking now because of the news. On September 12, 2010, The Commercial Appeal published a seven-page special report in which I broke the story that beloved civil rights photographer Ernest Withers had secretly doubled as an FBI informant. The New York Times picked it up, running its own front-page article. Major television networks, including CNN and NBC, also broadcast the news.

  My story reported that from at least 1968 until 1970 Withers operated under a code number, ME 338-R, helping the FBI monitor Memphis’s volatile sanitation workers strike as well as a range of civil rights activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was in town.

  The story was a huge breakthrough—solid and factual—yet it raised as many questions as it answered. The FBI refused to release key records—most critically, Withers’s informant file. Because of that, parts of my story amounted to more of a circumstantial case than one of direct evidence.

  In fact, the whole thing involved some rather creative detective work.

  After finding the passage in the 1977 Clemency for Cash report that said, “Ernest Columbus Withers was formerly designated as ME 338-R,” I scoured thousands of pages from other FBI reports. The principal body of reports I found was written between 1968 and 1970. Just as I’d hoped, FBI censors repeatedly had failed to redact the ME 338-R code number from them, too. Using those reports, I was able to pinpoint dozens of specific acts Withers performed for the FBI.

  Among them, he passed on details from inside civil rights strategy meetings; he handed over financial reports; he snapped pictures of militant activists and their supporters, including a group of Catholic priests. He monitored political candidates, jotted down license tag numbers, and may have passed on political gossip from Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta.

  In several cases, I located photos Withers shot, helping to corroborate his presence at certain scenes and to confirm his identity as informant ME 338-R. As backup, I consulted two leading authorities on FBI surveillance during the civil rights era who vouched for my findings. Yes, they said, ME 338-R is Withers. Yes, he did all these things for the FBI and likely got paid, too.

  Nonetheless, several of Withers’s surviving relatives and associates were understandably skeptical.

  “While the FBI was using him, he was using the FBI,” King’s close associate Rev. Joseph Lowery told NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. “I still would like to think that he understood that there was nothing he could do to give the FBI, that could be used, to hurt us, to hurt the movement. I believe that about Ernest.”

  Ernest’s daughter, Rosalind Withers, didn’t buy any of it. She doubted her father had been an informant and argued that the FBI code number, ME 338-R, could not be credibly tied to him.

  “We as a family, none of us have ever heard anything like that. I don’t believe it,” she said. “I think this whole thing is based on just one thing, which is a number. And do we know that number was assigned to him? Where’s the proof of that?”2

  * * *

  —


  BUT BETTY LAWRENCE didn’t share their skepticism.

  “I have no doubt. I think you’ve got the proof,” she told me.

  In a series of phone conversations, Betty kept hinting she had records from her father—records that identified Withers as an informant. She even suggested she had independent corroboration about Withers’s code number, ME 338-R.

  Yet, when I pressed her on these points, she backed away. She allowed only that she’d recently found boxes of her father’s records. She found them, she said, after her mother passed away. Margaret Lawrence had died the previous year, in late 2009, at age eighty-seven, having survived her husband by nineteen years. Ironically, I’d called Mrs. Lawrence several times in the months before her death. The phone rang and rang. No one answered.

  After she passed away and my story ran, I contacted her daughters, Nancy and Betty. I’d like to think my skill as a reporter got them talking. But more likely it was the national news buzz and the fact that their father’s secrets couldn’t hurt anyone anymore; the principal players had passed on. The balance of their sympathies, it seemed, had swung to history, to helping make sense of this troubled period, the 1960s.

  I was grateful for their help. But it was incredibly frustrating, almost like a tease. Betty knew more, but she wouldn’t say what. She would only hint at it.

  “You’ve already proved it,” she said, dismissing my inquiries.3

  I decided to take a chance. I booked a flight to North Carolina. Technically, I went there for other research. The library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the nearest to Memphis holding a collection of the FBI’s COINTELPRO files. I wanted to review the records to broaden my understanding of the Bureau’s inner workings in the ’60s.