by Jay Feldman
That same month, without informing Robert Kennedy, the FBI undertook a concerted campaign aimed at “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader and developing evidence concerning King’s continued dependence on communists for guidance and direction.” The planned strategies included investigating SCLC employees, closely monitoring the SCLC’s finances, identifying and investigating the organization’s contributors, and continuing “to keep close watch on King’s personal activities,” particularly his use of alcohol and his involvement with women other than his wife. This information was intended to be used “at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, [to] expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.”38
The FBI also, without approval, began bugging King’s hotel rooms, and as early as January 5, 1964, in Washington, D.C., the microphones recorded him engaged in a raucous party with two women and several other SCLC leaders. Three days later, Sullivan submitted a memo stating that King not only represented “a very real security problem to this country” but also was “a disgrace to the Negro people of this country … while at the same time purporting to be a minister of the gospel … King must, at some propitious point in the future, be revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro followers as being what he actually is—a fraud, demagogue and moral scoundrel.”39†
Across the bottom of the memo, Hoover wrote, “I am glad to see that ‘light’ has finally, though dismally delayed, come to the Domestic Int. Div. I struggled for months to get over the fact the Communists were taking over the racial movement but our experts here couldn’t or wouldn’t see it.”
The continued hotel room surveillance yielded the desired results. In addition to documenting King’s extramarital sexual activity, the microphones recorded him on one occasion telling a string of off-color jokes.
With the tapes of King’s after-hours indiscretions as evidence, the bureau now opened a two-pronged attack, aiming at both King’s politics and his morals. In early March, a packet of incriminating material was sent to Robert Kennedy. On March 9, Hoover and DeLoach met with President Lyndon Johnson; the three spent the entire afternoon talking about Martin Luther King, and Hoover presented LBJ with a copy of taped highlights recorded in King’s hotel rooms.
Also in March, when Hoover learned that Marquette University, the school that had awarded him an honorary degree in 1950, was considering doing the same for King, he brought FBI pressure to bear on Marquette, and no degree was offered.
The following month the feud between Hoover and King became public when the FBI director’s comments before an executive session of a House appropriations subcommittee in January were released. “We do know that Communist influence does exist in the Negro movement,” Hoover had told the panel, “and it is this influence which is vitally important.”40
King issued an immediate and stern rebuttal. In a press release the next day, he said:
It is very unfortunate, that Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, in his claims of alleged communist influence in the civil rights movement, has allowed himself to aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements. We challenge all who raise the “red” issue, whether they be newspaper columnists or the head of the FBI himself—to come forward and provide real evidence … We are confident that this cannot be done … It is difficult to accept the word of the FBI on communist infiltration in the civil rights movement, when they have been so completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep south. It would be encouraging to us if Mr. Hoover and the FBI would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for bombing churches and killing little children as they are in seeking out alleged communist infiltration in the civil rights movement.41
In early May, Hoover countered, stating publicly, “The existence and importance of the communist influence in the Negro movement should not be ignored or minimized, nor should it be exaggerated … It is up to the civil rights organizations themselves to recognize this and face up to it.”42 Again, King fired right back. On May 10, appearing on Face the Nation, he said he found it “unfortunate” that “such a great man” as J. Edgar Hoover would make such allegations.43
On November 18, Hoover held a rare press conference for women reporters in which he called King “the most notorious liar in the country” and “one of the lowest characters in the country,” remarks that catapulted his hatred for King onto the front pages of newspapers.44 King, who was vacationing in the Bahamas and working on his Nobel acceptance speech, sent a telegram to Hoover offering to meet and discuss their differences, and also issued a press release: “I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office. Therefore, I cannot engage in a public debate with him. I have nothing but sympathy for this man who has served his country so well.”45
Hoover’s response was to have DeLoach offer copies of the hotel room surveillance transcript to select reporters, including Benjamin Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek. Bradlee turned down the proposal and then told a number of colleagues about what had been proffered. Unable to get media coverage or a government leak of the material, the bureau resorted to a variation of one of its tried-and-true COINTELPRO gambits.
FBI technicians compiled a tape from the Washington, D.C., hotel room recording, and on November 21 an agent flew to Florida to mail a package containing the tape to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. The bureau was aware that King was traveling and that his wife, Coretta, opened his mail when he was on the road.
In his biography of Hoover, Curt Gentry underscores the significance of this ploy. “The head of the nation’s police force was protecting the national interest by using intimate tapes to wreak havoc in a man’s marriage … But this was not only a highly bizarre and obscene initiative; it was plainly illegal.”46 Equally significant, the recordings were made illegally—Hoover had never informed the attorney general about the surveillance of King’s hotel rooms or obtained permission to conduct such an operation.
Accompanying the tape was a fraudulent letter, apparently written by Sullivan, suggesting that the tape would be made public unless King committed suicide:
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God … Clearly you don’t believe in any personal principles.
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age, have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile … But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done …
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days … You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.47
The package sat at SCLC headquarters until the beginning of January 1965, when it would be delivered to King’s home and opened by Coretta King.
In the meantime, intermediaries arranged a face-to-face meeting between Hoover and King, and on December 1 the two met for an hour in Hoover’s office, along with Cartha DeLoach and three of King’s close aides, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Walter Fauntroy, and Andrew Young. Hoover utterly dominated the encounter. After Abernathy and King began
with short complimentary statements about Hoover and the bureau, the director spoke for most of the allotted time, giving a self-aggrandizing account of the FBI’s record on civil rights in the South.‡
At the end of the meeting, King diplomatically told reporters that it had been “a quite amicable discussion” and said, “I sincerely hope we can forget the confusions of the past and get on with the job that Congress, the Supreme Court and the President have outlined, the job of providing freedom and justice for all citizens of this nation.”48
If there were any chance that Hoover might have eased up on King, that possibility was killed when an FBI wiretap caught King in a phone conversation, recounting his impressions of the meeting and saying, “The old man talks too much.” As William Sullivan later wrote, when Hoover “found out what King had said about him, King was lost.”49
The bureau now sent a monograph from Sullivan’s unit titled “Communism and the Negro Movement: A Current Analysis” to LBJ, and obtained White House permission to circulate the paper widely. CIA director John McCone, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, USIA director Carl Rowan, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as well as the military intelligence offices and the National Science Foundation, all received copies.
King was aware that the FBI was disseminating derogatory material about him, and it weighed heavily on his mind, adding to the already immense burden of his position. On December 5, after having shown up a half hour late for a news conference before leaving for Stockholm, where he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize, he told reporters his tardiness was a result of “complete exhaustion” and that he had been advised he needed “a long period of rest.”50 By the end of the year, he was all but debilitated.
Hoover, on the other hand, was going strong. On January 1, 1965, he turned seventy, the mandatory retirement age for federal employees. The previous May, however, LBJ had praised Hoover as a “quiet, humble and magnificent public servant” and signed an executive order exempting him from compulsory retirement for “an indefinite period of time.”51 Johnson’s order effectively meant that Hoover would remain in his position for life.
Four days after Hoover’s birthday, Coretta King discovered the tape and letter that the FBI had sent in November. She listened to a small part of the recording, then called her husband. King, Abernathy, Young, and the Reverend Joseph Lowery went to the King house and listened to the tape with Mrs. King. There was no doubt about the source of the package, which had no return address; only the FBI would have the resources to carry out hotel room microphone surveillance in Washington, D.C., and have it mailed from Florida.
“They are out to break me,” said King in a phone conversation the next day. He told another friend, “They are out to get me, harass me, break my spirit.”52
Young called DeLoach and asked to meet with him and/or Hoover. DeLoach agreed, and Young and Abernathy hastened to Washington. In their meeting, DeLoach denied that the FBI had any interest in King’s personal life and referred them to HUAC for information about Communist influence in SCLC. Young was frustrated by the meeting, finding DeLoach to have “almost a kind of fascist mentality. It really kind of scared me … There really wasn’t any honest conversation.”53
The tapes were never made public, no doubt because Hoover knew that doing so would reveal the bureau’s illegal actions in the matter. King survived the crisis, but the FBI’s harassment of him continued right up to and even after his death. Early in 1965, the agency tried to bring about the cancellation of a dinner to honor King in Atlanta, and Hoover also sought to block an invitation to King from the Baptist World Alliance to speak at its 1965 congress in Miami. The following year, the bureau was instrumental in preventing the Teamsters’ union from making a contribution to SCLC, and further attempted to stop a Ford Foundation grant to the organization. When King spoke against the Vietnam War in April 1967, the bureau stepped up its efforts to discredit him. In October, Hoover approved a plan to circulate an editorial to “publicize King as a traitor to his country and his race and thus reduce his income” from fund-raising efforts.54 The planned Poor People’s March on Washington at the end of the year brought forth another virulent attack. In March 1969, almost a year after King was assassinated, Hoover approved DeLoach’s suggestion to try to derail the congressional momentum to declare his birthday a national holiday. As late as the end of 1970, Hoover was still fulminating about King, telling Newsweek that the civil rights leader “was the last person in the world who should ever have received” the Nobel Prize, and adding, “I held him in complete contempt.”55
In March 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the FBI’s hounding of King was based on nothing more than Hoover’s “personal vendetta against the civil rights leader.”56 FBI agents themselves admitted that despite the “massive surveillance” of King, “there was never a recommendation for prosecution for violation of any Federal or State law. Nor … were grounds for any national security concerns ever established.”57
In addition to the cited counterintelligence programs, there were three other official COINTELPRO operations: “White Hate Groups,” “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” and “New Left.” The first was a narrow, concentrated operation, while the other two were wide-ranging programs directed against entire movements.
COINTELPRO–White Hate Groups was noteworthy in two ways. To begin with, it was the first COINTELPRO that was not instituted by the FBI itself, but rather was launched as a result of external pressure. Moreover, while the focus of COINTELPRO-WHG was the Ku Klux Klan and several other far-right groups, including the American Nazi Party and the National States Rights Party, the degree of repression on the right never approached the all-encompassing surveillance of and overbearing crackdown on the left. Whereas the tentacles of COINTELPRO-CPUSA and COINTELPRO-SWP (and later COINTELPRO–New Left) reached well beyond those organizations to encompass many other groups and individuals, the White Hate Groups operation confined itself to the targeted groups themselves. The White Citizens’ Councils, for example, many of which were Klan fronts, were never investigated or placed under surveillance; nor was the John Birch Society, which stood at the very vanguard of the radical right.
COINTELPRO-WHG began in the summer of 1964, foisted on the FBI by President Johnson and the Justice Department after years of the bureau’s stonewalling on civil rights prosecutions and attempts at discrediting civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King. During the spring of 1964, there had been fifty race-related murders, beatings, and bombings in the South, culminating in the killings of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the early morning hours of June 22.
Even before the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, Robert Kennedy had written to LBJ to propose an FBI operation in the Deep South, suggesting that the FBI could employ the techniques used in infiltrating the Communist Party and other groups. After the murders, Johnson sent the former CIA director Allen Dulles to Mississippi to assess the situation, and Dulles recommended that there be a significant increase in FBI agents in the state, in order to control and prosecute terrorist activities. LBJ instructed Hoover to “put people after the Klan and study it from one county to the next. I want the FBI to have the best intelligence system possible to check on the activities of these people.”58 Hoover had no choice but to comply.
On September 2, a directive to seventeen field offices launched a new COINTELPRO against the Klan and other affiliated white hate groups. The field offices increased their infiltration of various Klan organizations, with more than 750 new informers, and by 1965 the bureau had over 2,000 plants—about 20 percent of the organizations’ total membership—working throughout the KKK network.
The new operation was at once similar to and different from existing COINTELPROs. The most obvious similarity was that the techniques employed in COINTELPRO-WHG were adapted from those used in other operations—anonymous letters a
nd telephone calls, planted news stories, the snitch jacket, fomenting and exploiting rivalries, and IRS harassment.§
The most striking difference was that COINTELPRO-WHG targeted groups and individuals engaged in illegal activities, while the other operations were for the greatest part aimed at law-abiding organizations and citizens.
As with existing COINTELPROs, the FBI did not hesitate to violate the law in order to achieve its goals. KKK informers and infiltrators often took part in violent acts, and the bureau, while not condoning such behavior, did not expressly forbid participation. “You can do anything to get your information,” the FBI told the informer Gary Thomas Rowe, who was ultimately indicted for the March 1965 slaying of the civil rights demonstrator Viola Liuzzo. “We don’t want you to get involved in unnecessary violence, but the point is to get the information.”59 In reality, given the nature of the Klan and other similar groups, any infiltrator who tried to discourage violence was endangering both his credibility and his life.
COINTELPRO-WHG is a clear example of how the FBI’s focus had shifted from law enforcement to intelligence gathering—in a number of instances, the bureau went so far as to obstruct justice in order to protect its informants. In the case of Rowe, who was in a car with two Klansmen when they shot Mrs. Liuzzo and who subsequently testified at their 1965 trial and conviction, it was not until thirteen years later that he himself was indicted in the killing. It can be surmised that only his value to the FBI kept him from being charged sooner.
The bureau also impeded justice in the September 1963 Birmingham church bombing in which four black girls were killed. The FBI had enough evidence to proceed with a prosecution, but it made no move in that direction and for years even refused to cooperate with a state investigation of the crime. Finally, in 1977, with the aid of bureau information, a former Klansman was convicted in the case.