Orders to Kill

by William F Pepper Esq

  The following Sunday evening I called for the phone number but Bob said he could not find the bill.

  On Monday at 7:45 a.m. we met Bob Cruz, who had organized the surveillance detail. He reported that the mother and daughter had already gone out, apparently leaving Raul at home alone. Before approving the final arrangements for service I needed to be absolutely certain that this was the same man being looked at by Saltman and Herman. I decided to call Raul myself and talk to him on the telephone. I did so and adopted a sympathetic tone, saying that I believed that he may have been harassed unjustly and I wanted him to know that though these people had once been associated with me as a lawyer in the case they were no longer working with me and were off on their own. He ponderously took down Chastain’s and my details. He spoke with a fairly heavy accent and did not appear to be flustered. It was difficult to tell how much, if any, of Raul Pereira’s language problem was feigned. (The surveillance team had told me that he demonstrated a high degree of street smarts when they tried to tail him. They said he knew exactly which moves to make to shake them off.) He seemed puzzled that I knew about his “problem” and confirmed that he had been bothered by some people and that this was upsetting him and his family. He expressed surprise that things thirty years old were being raised now and denied ever being in Houston. I asked him to meet with Chastain and me privately in order to try to clear up any question of his involvement and he asked me to call him back that evening after 7 p.m. when he would have had a chance to talk to his “kids” and his wife. I agreed and we held off any attempt at service that day. At 7:15 p.m. his daughter answered and said, in effect, that her father did not have to prove anything and his word denying any knowledge of the events would be good enough. She confirmed that a man named Saltman had appeared at their front door wanting to question her father and she said that she told him that if he published or released any information about her father they would sue him.

  My impression was that she was well trained and intelligent. Mr. Pereira knew what he was doing by putting her forward. Toward the end of the conversation she said that they might ask their lawyer about talking to me, though she would not give me his name. At that point I concluded that we would have to serve Raul Pereira.

  I left the papers with P.I. Cruz to formally serve.

  The man I have called Raul Pereira was served on July 5 and made a party defendant in the Ray v. Jowers et al. lawsuit.

  30

  Orders to Kill

  OVER A PERIOD OF TWENTY-FOUR months from June, 1993, while all of the other investigative activity was proceeding, information was obtained from a number of sources inside the army. These sources included the two former Special Forces members living in Latin America, whom I have called Warren and Murphy, who answered questions I put to them through Steve Tompkins. Their responses and some corresponding documentation (supplied by Warren) revealed not only the extent of their covert activity in various parts of the U.S. in 1967–68 but also detailed their involvement in the events surrounding Dr. King’s assassination.

  First hinted at by the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1993, the role of the army and the other cooperating government agencies in the assassination of Dr. King has been one of our nation’s deepest, darkest secrets. I have only been able to uncover it by piecing together the accounts of Warren and Murphy with those of other participants and persons who were in strategic positions with access to information, and analyzing relevant army intelligence documents, files and other official records which have never been made public. Wherever possible I have used independent corroboration. I have adopted the policy of not disclosing the names of the most sensitive team members who are still living, but I have named those who are dead in the belief that historical truth requires no less.

  BEFORE SETTING OUT THE DETAILS, however, I believe that it will be useful to lay out the organizational structure which drove the events.

  During the 1960s a highly secret federal organizational structure, with army intelligence in the forefront, carried out officially approved tasks which ranged from conventional intelligence activity—“eye-to-eye” surveillance and information gathering and analysis—to blatantly illegal covert operations. I have been surprised to discover the degree of official cooperation that existed during the time between what have often been publicly portrayed as exclusively competing agencies and officials.

  Military Organization

  In October 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, with a view to eventually consolidating all intelligence functions of the individual armed services under one joint service organization, established the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By 1965, however, the DIA had only taken over the U.S. Army’s Strategic Intelligence School and the administration of the military attache system. The individual armed services, particularly the army, strove to retain their own intelligence apparatus. The army established its own intelligence and security branch on July 1, 1962. Following the Oxford, Mississippi, racial riots of 1963 when the 101st Airborne was deployed, Major General Creighton V. Abrams, the on-scene commander, wrote a highly critical assessment of the state and performance of army intelligence at Oxford. In part he stated:

  “We in the Army should launch a major intelligence project, without delay, to identify personalities, both black and white, and develop analyses of the various civil rights situations in which they become involved.”

  His report received serious attention that resulted in the army intelligence machine that was in place in 1967–68. The intelligence and security branch was a group of professional intelligence officers who were fulfilling the role of the Military Intelligence Division created by its World War I chief lieutenant Colonel Ralph Van Deman. Van Deman, the father of army intelligence, began sixty years earlier to work closely with city police departments. In 1967 it was renamed the Military Intelligence Branch, and it formed part of the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC) based at Fort Holabird, Maryland. Fort Holabird is a ninety-six-acre military compound where by 1968 in a huge steel two-story room, one city block in length, was housed the Investigative Records Repository (IRR). The IRR then contained more than seven million brown-jacketed dossiers on American citizens and organizations, including subversive files on individuals who—according to army intelligence—were “persons considered to constitute a threat to the security and defense of the United States.” There were files on the entire King family in the IRR.

  At that time USAINTC took over control of seven of the eight existing counterintelligence or U.S. army military intelligence groups (MIGs) in the Continental United States (CONUS) and Germany (the 66th MIG). The eighth MIG—the 902nd—was under the command of the army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) who from December 1966 until July 1968 was Major General William P. Yarborough. He had run the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, between 1961 and 1965 and was the founder of those units known as the Green Berets. By 1967 the MIGs employed 798 army officers, 1,573 enlisted men, and 1,532 civilians, including sixty-seven black undercover agents. Of this total force, 1,576 were directly involved in domestic intelligence gathering activities, and of these “spies” some 260 were civilians. I was provided with a copy of the ACSI command structure and table of organization as it existed in 1967.

  The MIG officers were responsible for “eye-to-eye” surveillance operations, which included audio and visual recording of people and events designated as targets. Dr. King was a target, and throughout the last year of his life he was under the surveillance of one or another MIG team. Thus, in New York he was surveilled by the 108th MIG; in Los Angeles the 115th; Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and the South, the 111th; in Chicago the 113th; in Washington, D.C., the 116th; in Newark, New Jersey, the 109th; and in Germany the 66th which was based in Stuttgart, Germany. I set out in Chart 7 (see Appendix) a map showing the territorial areas and headquarter bases of the MIGs inside the CONUS and in Charts 8, 9, and 10 in the Appendix the USAINTC Table of Organization in 19
67, the USAINTC Field Offices and the USAINTC communications network.

  Closely related to the USAINTC structure at the time was the separate intelligence office of the army chief of staff commanded by ACSI Yarborough. In addition to his control of the 902nd MIG, he supervised the Counterintelligence Analysis Board (CIAB), both of which were based in Falls Church, Virginia, though the CIAB was also secretly housed in a red brick warehouse at 1430 S. Eads Street in Arlington, Virginia. The CIAB analyzed a wide range of MIG-produced intelligence and forwarded reports usually directly to the ACSI. The 902nd MIG was a highly secretive operation, which I have learned carried out some of the most sensitive assignments.

  Intelligence gathering was also done in 1967 (at least from June 12, when formally assigned the task) by the 20th Special Forces Group (20th SFG) headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. As we will see, this function was in addition to the provision by the 20th SFG of small specialized teams for other “behind the fence” (covert) operations. This group was made up of reservists from Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana. The Alabama reservists were part of the third largest state National Guard unit in the country (20,016 members—surpassed only by New York and California). (From the early 1960s in Southeast Asia the Special Forces (Green Berets) began to be used for specialized intelligence-gathering functions in addition to their covert mission activity.)

  The Klan had a special arrangement with the 20th SFG. The 20th SFG actually trained klansmen in the use of firearms and other military skills at a secret camp near Cullman, Alabama, in return for intelligence on local black leaders. The earliest of such training exercises began on November 12, 1966. Some members of the 20th SFG also used these sessions for illegal weapons sales.

  The U.S. Strike Command (CINCSTRIKE) was the overall coordinating command (which could call upon all military forces on U.S. soil) for the purpose of responding to urban riots in 1967–1968. At that time it included liaison officers from the CIA, FBI, and other nonmilitary state and federal agencies. It was headquartered at MacDill air force base in Tampa, Florida, and the ACSI and USAINTC commanders were primary leaders in developing CINCSTRIKE strategy for the mobilization of forces as required for defensive action inside CONUS.

  The United States Army Security Agency (ASA) headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, which in 1964 became a major command field operating agency under the control of the army chief of Staff, carried out all “non eye-to-eye” or ELINT (electronic intelligence surveillance). The ASA employed expert wiretappers, eavesdroppers, and safecrackers. The surveillance included wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping such as that carried out against Dr. King on March 18 and March 28, 1967, when he stayed at the Rivermont Hotel in Memphis (and, as we shall see, on April 3 and 4 at the Lorraine Motel). Thus, the “federal” agents with whom MPD special services/intelligence officer Jim Smith was working on March 18, whom we had initially believed to be FBI agents, were almost certainly ASA agents though probably assigned to work with the 111th MIG. In the field, the members of the ASA were also housed, though always in a distinctly separate working area, with the MIG operations. At Fort McPherson in Atlanta, for example, they were in the same building as the headquarters of the 111th MIG but worked clandestinely and were entirely separated by a floor-to-ceiling chain-link fence.

  Finally, in terms of this story, there was the Psychological Operations (Psy Ops) section. This group was primarily used for highly sensitive and technical photographic surveillance and reports. Psy Ops teams were used by MIGs or for other special missions, including those run out of the ACSI’s office.

  Interagency Structure

  Alongside this multifaceted army structure were the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, the FBI, and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). The NSA monitored and analyzed all targeted international cable, telephone, telex, teletype, and telefax communications as well as, on occasion, specified, sensitive domestic telecommunications traffic. As discussed earlier (see chapter 11) the CIA, through its clandestine Office of Security and the Domestic Operations Division, carried on extensive domestic operations interfacing on domestic activity (as did each of the army operating commands) with the FBI and ONI. These operations were carried out on a project-by-project basis, usually through specially created SOGs (Special Operations Groups). The interagency umbrella or coordinating intelligence body was the United States Intelligence Board (USIB). Represented on the USIB were the CIA (whose Director Richard Helms was its chairman), the NSA Director, the National Security Adviser to the president, the ACSI, the FBI, the ASA, USAINTC, the DIA and ONI.

  This overall military/law enforcement and intelligence agency structure determined and controlled the planning and implementation of the range of military operations in Memphis, including the use of the Tennessee National Guard. Riot control in Memphis was accomplished through the use of the Tennessee National Guard.

  The Principal Senior Officials

  Mayor General Yarborough took over in December 1966, as ACSI, coming from command of the 66th MIG in Stuttgart, where his primary duty was to catch communist spies and run agents in East Germany. A limited number of key officers served under him. The commanding officer of USAINTC, the overall army intelligence organization, was Brigadier General William Blakefield, who was not a trained or experienced intelligence officer and who seemed to have been chosen for that position by army chief of staff Harold Johnson precisely because he was an outsider. The impression I have formed is that General Blakefield was uncomfortable with this command area and that he followed the ACSI General Yarborough on most issues.

  The director of the CIA at the time was Richard Helms, and J. Edgar Hoover, of course, led the FBI. Though a closely guarded secret, FBI director Hoover seconded a trusted agent, Patrick D. Putnam, to Yarborough’s ACSI staff in the Pentagon in order to ensure the closest working relationship. Putnam began this assignment in December 1966 with Yarborough’s arrival and continued until his departure in July 1968.

  The commanding officer of the 111th MIG (the group which covered all of the Deep South and so was most often engaged in surveilling Martin King) was Colonel Robert McBride.

  From 1959 to 1971, the commander of the 20th SFG was Colonel Henry H. Cobb, Jr. (service number 0000514383) of Montgomery, Alabama, who retired as a Major General. His second in command was Major Bert E. Wride (service number 0002267592). The Alabama Army National Guard, which contained the 20th SFG, was per capita the nation’s largest in 1968. Alabama also had the largest number of armories (140) of any state in America. In 1968 the Alabama Guard operated on a $150 million budget.

  In 1979, after his retirement, Cobb became Alabama Adjutant General—the highest ranking member of the Alabama Army National Guard, appointed by Governor Fob James.

  The 20th SFG Professionals

  Warren and Murphy, the two members of the Special Forces team deployed to Memphis on April 4 who had agreed to discuss the mission, had been active in covert Special Operation Group (SOG) missions in Vietnam. They were hardened, highly skilled veterans; Warren was a sniper. Both were from the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam, and part of a Mobile Strike Force Team involved in cross-border covert operations in 1965–66. They were reassigned in 1967 as reservists to the 20th SFG, with Camp Shelby, Mississippi, as their training base, although they also secretly trained, according to Warren, at Mississippi Senator James Eastland’s plantation near Rosedale in Sunflower County. I obtained a copy of the 20th SFG roster of Alabama soldiers around the time and their names appeared.

  Other Domestic Missions

  Warren and Murphy stated that throughout 1967 they were deployed in 902nd covert operations as members of small specialized “alpha team” units in a number of cities where violence was breaking out. They were issued photographs of black militants in each city they entered, and in some instances particular individuals were designated as targets to be taken out (killed) if an opportunity arose in the course of a disruption or riot. During this time, army intelligence published g
reen and white books (“mug bugs”) on black radicals, which contained photographs, family history, political philosophy, personal finances, and updated surveillance information in order to facilitate their identification by army commanders and intelligence personnel.

  An example given by Warren was his mission in Los Angeles in February 1968, when there was a major black conference at the L.A. Sports Arena. SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were there. The 20th SFG had the arena staked out in case of trouble. Surveillance pictures of a militant black group called the Brown Berets were passed out to the members of the team. The group’s borrowing of the Green Beret symbol “pissed all of us off,” Warren said. One target was a man named Karenga (Ron Karenga) whose organization’s headquarters were down on South Broadway near some strip joints. The 20th SFG had a team across the street waiting for him, but he never showed up. Warren said that on that occasion they also had a secondary mission, which was to do recon. (reconnaissance) of a home up in the western hills near the UCLA campus. The recon was to determine the feasibility for a future “wet insert ops determined” operation (“wet insert ops determined” means that the unit carries out a surreptitious entry at night into the targeted residence, kills everyone there, and leaves without a trace). He said their recon confirmed the feasibility of such an operation. Warren subsequently learned that the house was used by Senator Robert Kennedy when he was in Los Angeles in 1967–68. (Shortly after the recon Kennedy would declare for the Presidency.)

  Warren said that in 1967 he was also similarly deployed on other sensitive operations in: