The FBI, for its part, created the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The Bureau divided the program into two major components. COINTELPRO White focused on right-wing and white supremacist groups, and COINTELPRO Black focused on civil rights and black nationalist groups. Like Garden Plot, COINTELRPO also included extensive surveillance operations. But it differed from other programs in its willingness to rely on provocation and dirty tricks. The FBI would play upon the natural tendency of many of these groups toward paranoia by pitting members against each other and instigating schisms and rivalries within the groups.
This work included spreading false rumors, sending inflammatory mailings, and sabotaging operations. In each case, the Bureau blamed members of the groups for actions taken by FBI agents or operatives. One humorous example, described to me by a former FBI official, referred to the not uncommon phenomenon of KKK members sleeping around with each other’s spouses. At times, in places like Mississippi, the FBI actually observed these relationships as they developed. Late FBI special agent Jim Ingram, a senior member of the Jackson, Mississippi, field office, said that the FBI successfully took advantage of this phenomenon by placing notes in the mailboxes of KKK members, hinting that someone “knew where your wife was last evening,” eliciting predictable resentments and infighting after the pranks.34
At other times the dirty tricks were more serious. The FBI, to its historical shame, lumped nonviolent civil rights organizations such as the SCLC together with groups like the Black Panthers under COINTELPRO Black. A major target of the program was Martin Luther King Jr., whom J. Edgar Hoover suspected, incorrectly, of being a tool of the Communist Party, and whom Hoover resented for publicly criticizing the Bureau’s handling of racial crimes. In what has to be one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the FBI, the Bureau sent a purported tape recording of Dr. King engaged in extramarital relations to the minister’s family while sending a note to the civil rights leader himself, urging him to commit suicide. The FBI never relented in its effort to gather illicit information on King, through surveillance that included wiretaps and feeding scurrilous material in anonymous leaks to Hoover’s many assets in the media.
With respect to the less sympathetic white supremacist groups, the “fun and games” involving pitting one white supremacist cad against another gave way to much more serious countermeasures—even what would amount to an FBI conspiracy to murder white supremacists. Controversy also continues to persist over whether or not federal law enforcement looked the other way regarding, or perhaps even instigated, murders of Black Panther leaders.
As much as anything else, FBI operations against both white supremacist and black nationalist groups focused on developing informants and infiltrators within radical organizations and undermining the groups from within. In particular, by leveraging potential prison sentences against radicals arrested for various crimes, the FBI turned dedicated KKK members, including senior leaders, into ongoing sources of information and potential players in FBI dirty tricks campaigns. Supporting this thesis, internal reports on groups like the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi start with huge lists of redacted names—sometimes dozens for each report—of informants inside the group. At times the FBI would also use code names for human informants to disguise information obtained from wiretaps and mail intercepts. To this day, the FBI jealously protects the identities of these informants.
Some of that reticence may go beyond simply protecting these individuals against danger. As noted in the chapter on the Birmingham bombing, some suspects in that case were or became FBI informants. The problem for the FBI is that many of those informants were still dedicated racists; they did not change their stripes overnight simply because they began working for the FBI. And informants often found themselves at the scene of, or even participants in, major acts of domestic terrorism. The FBI must frequently decide whether or not to prosecute crimes committed by informants in the furtherance of, or in conjunction with, ongoing FBI investigations. For instance, thousands of secret waivers against prosecution were granted in 2013. But this process can come at a great price to the FBI if the nature of the forgiven crimes is publicized.
The effort to protect the Bureau against embarrassment becomes an important point to consider when one tries to assess what the FBI knew about the religious dimensions of white supremacist violence in the 1960s. Why has it taken so long for the theological foundations of white supremacist violence to be revealed to the American people? J.B. Stoner was clearly motivated by the theology of Christian Identity. But the connection of J.B. Stoner to the Birmingham bombing may well be concealed by the FBI’s ongoing decision to withhold surveillance data obtained from wiretaps in his law office. The same protectionist mind-set may also be in play in additional crimes described in this book that Stoner might have been involved in.
In any event, public statements and testimony from the 1960s show that the FBI greatly underestimated the potential danger of white supremacist groups in comparison to black nationalists. Perhaps owing to his obsession with fighting communism, or perhaps because of implicit racism (or both), J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers the number-one threat to American domestic order. In contrast, as William Turner noted, Hoover minimized the danger posed by the Minutemen, placing their total membership at only five hundred. He insisted that the FBI had thoroughly penetrated the group with informants (something that was at least partly true) and that he had them under control. The growing number of federal prosecutions against white supremacists by early 1967 provided some evidence that the FBI did have this problem under control. The FBI prosecuted Sam Bowers and his senior WKKKKOM members in connection with the Neshoba murders. Charges against Robert DePugh and Wally Peyson for bank robbery had forced both men underground by 1968. (They were caught in 1969.)
But Bowers and fellow travelers like J.B. Stoner would not be deterred. Those with the best access to white supremacists groups, such as investigative reporters Norden and Turner, described an interesting development from 1966 to 1968. Seemingly disparate white supremacist groups—organizations like the National States Rights Party, the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (the second largest KKK group in the country, headquartered in Georgia but with a national reach), the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Minutemen—increasingly tightened their relationships with each other. FBI documents confirm such developments. This went beyond simple cross-affiliations by various members to actual cooperation. Turner and Norden also began to note the religious impulse inspiring several of these groups. Progressively, Swift’s taped sermons and Bible studies gained a wider audience among the cadre of radicals who remained dedicated to the white supremacist cause despite their failures in 1964 and 1965.
Those listening to the Reverend Wesley Swift’s words in February 1967 would hear some familiar themes. “Now, we have had the sign of the ‘son of man’ in the heavens February 4, 1962,” he began. Swift was echoing a landmark sermon he had given several years before, in February 1962. In the earlier sermon, Swift referred to a recent solar eclipse in 1962, a sign of the beginning of the end-time, when God will “awaken” his followers and they will fulfill their destiny by “challeng[ing] the power and forces of darkness. And from this time forward, expanding and moving and working to this destiny, Christian civilizations and the white nations of the western world shall move forward, against the enemy.” Swift called this 1962 sermon “Zero Hour,” a reference to the beginning of the countdown to the End of Days.35
But in February of 1967, with riots and civil unrest seemingly having confirmed his prophecy, Swift combined the reference to zero hour with a reference to Chapter 14 of the book of Revelations: “We have passed the time of the beginning of tare time. And we have come to the time of the abomination of the desolator who stands in the Holy place. This shows us that we are in the end time or in the last days.”36 For many evangelical fundamentalists, Chapter 14 of the book of Revelations describes the Great Tribulation, when God imposes a se
ries of plagues on mankind.
One of the signs of these end-times is the “reaping of tares.” Tares are weeds that are difficult to distinguish from wheat and that absorb needed nutrients from wheat. In the Great Tribulation, God directs his flock to harvest both the wheat and tares but to burn the tares. For Swift, the identity of the tares was obvious: “The Jews are the tares and the tares are the enemies of God’s Kingdom.” “Tare time,” as Swift called it, had already begun by early 1967. In February he predicted that the rest of the year would be marked by
increasing catastrophes, Negro riots. And anything Communism has its hands on will increase as they try to destroy Christian America and Western Civilization … the White man will stand—shoulder to shoulder against the Negro and the anti-Christ.37
What remained to be begun was yet another prophecy in the book of Revelations, one also deeply rooted in symbolism: the winepress of fermented grapes. Chapter 14 of the book of Revelations prophecies that
Another angel, the one who has power over fire, came out from the altar; and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, saying, “Put in your sharp sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, because her grapes are ripe.” So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses’ bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles.
As one commentator describes the metaphor: “Satan and his angels will gather all the enemies of the God of heaven” and “Jesus alone will crush them and their blood will mingle with water that makes up their bodies and run like streams.”38 In February 1967, Swift did not mention what biblical scholars refer to as the grapes of wrath. But as will become clear, Swift’s followers were determined to see his prophecy come to pass. And to do it, they likely perpetrated one of the most consequential acts of terrorism in American history.
7
THE ALPHA
the FAILED ATTEMPTS to ASSASSINATE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., 1958–1967
On March 31, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend Wesley Albert Swift each delivered a sermon about the future of America, but rooted in very different ideas about God’s design for humanity.
Dr. King spoke to an audience at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in an oration entitled “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution.” King had delivered the speech before, at a commencement at Oberlin College, in Ohio, in 1965. But the civil rights movement and King’s mission had undergone many changes in the intervening three years. At Oberlin, King spoke mainly to the socioeconomic challenges still facing the black underclass. “Remaining awake” in 1965 meant recognizing the need to expand one’s conception of social justice in a world that demanded more compassion with greater urgency. “To rise to our full moral maturity as a nation, we must get rid of segregation whether it is in housing, whether it is a de facto segregation in the public schools, whether it is segregation in public accommodations, or whether it is segregation in the church,” King urged the Oberlin graduates.1
But by 1968, King’s speech had evolved to fit the changing dynamics of a nation in upheaval over economic and racial inequality, a country bitterly divided over the Vietnam War (that King hinted at in 1965 but did not mention by name). In the nation’s capital, King assumed the role of an Old Testament prophet, warning America about God’s judgment if it maintained its current course. “One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done,” King told the crowd at the National Cathedral. “It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough … you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.’” King remained convinced that the world would change, quoting, at the beginning of his sermon, from the book of Revelations, Chapter 16: “Behold I make all things new; former things are passed away.” But now he saw “the Great Revolution” as three interlocking revolutions—economic, moral, and military—happening at once. The dangers posed by automation to the working poor, the moral decay stemming from racism, the threat of nuclear conflict as a result of the cold war: They could destroy a nation that, in a metaphor King used to great effect, chose to sleep through these times like Rip Van Winkle. But, King argued, if a courageous people managed the situation correctly, these seemingly intractable developments would finally convince a slumbering society of the promise of a “new day of justice and brotherhood and peace.” King, as was his custom, struck an optimistic note: “We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands.”2
But for all his faith in God’s benevolence, King nonetheless ended his sermon with an explication for divine guidance and with a conditional assertion about the future, in lines not found in the 1965 commencement address: “God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace.”3
If the Reverend King lacked a degree of certainty in the future in 1968, it was not simply because he recognized, like a good student of the book of Genesis, the problems that human free will and temptation presented even to God’s grand designs. As far back as 1965, the growing schism inside the United States and within the civil rights movement had worried King. The nation’s continued unraveling from 1967 through 1968 chastened his expectations for the country even further.
Urban and racial rioting continued to plague the nation in the summer of 1967, a level of domestic disorder not seen since post–Civil War Reconstruction. In Newark, New Jersey, false rumors that a black cab driver had died in police custody sparked four days of rioting from July 12 to July 17, requiring massive intervention by local and state police as well as by the National Guard. The urban combat that commenced resulted in twenty-three dead and 750 injured. Follow-up studies indicated that law enforcement, including the National Guard, had expended 13,319 rounds of ammunition in pursuit of snipers who may not have actually existed.4 A week later, Detroit, Michigan, experienced the single worst urban riot in the history of the nation: After five days of rioting, 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, and over 7,000 were arrested. Sandra West, a UPI reporter who had lived her whole life in Detroit, described the chaos:
Sunday I saw sights I never dreamed possible… . Raging fires burned out of control for blocks and blocks. Thick black smoke and cinders rained down at times so heavily they blocked out homes as close as 20 feet away.
Looters drove pickup trucks loaded with everything from floor mops to new furniture. Price tags still dangled from the merchandise.5
Riots also struck Birmingham, Chicago, and Milwaukee, among other major cities. In sum, during the “long hot summer” of 1967, the United States experienced 158 different riots, resulting in eighty-three deaths, 2,801 injuries, and 4,627 incidents of arson.6
With national press reports that “guns—hand guns, rifles, shotguns—are selling as though they were about to close down the gun factories,”7 King continued to insist on nonviolence. But in August of 1967, he told a crowd of frustrated young civil rights activists that blacks “still live in the basement of the Great Society.” He observed some months later that a “riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”8
In December 1967, with a renewed sense of purpose, King launched what would be his final mission, the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC): a proposed march of several thousand members of America’s underclass from America’s poorest state (Mississippi) to the nation’s capital.
The protestors would camp out on the National Mall. King hoped that if they were arrested, waves of new people would take their place, as they had in Birmingham in the spring of 1963. The goal of this campaign was to scandalize President Lyndon Johnson and the American government into a massive investment in social services, way beyond anything implemented in LBJ’s War on Poverty. King had already burned his bridges with his onetime White House ally, and with the liberal political establishment in general, by openly opposing the Vietnam War, calling America the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence” in 1967.
King’s public opposition to the Vietnam War and his focus on economic justice also alienated him from a large swath of the general public that had openly supported his fight for legal equality in the South prior to 1966. In 1965, when he spoke at Oberlin, King found himself in fourth place on Gallup’s poll of America’s most admired people. But as soon as he began to focus on socioeconomic conditions in northern cities, starting in 1966, public opinion began to shift against him. By the time he gave the sermon at the National Cathedral in March 1968, a majority of white Americans—more than 70 percent—held an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King. More alarming, perhaps to King, was the fact that 57 percent of black Americans considered him to be irrelevant.9 Groups like the Black Panthers and the more radicalized version of SNCC increasingly captured the imagination of a frustrated African American community.
Even King’s longtime nemesis J. Edgar Hoover began to question the civil rights leader’s prominence given the growing influence of black nationalism. Hoover continued to leak negative rumors and innuendo about Dr. King in 1968, but internal documents show that Hoover’s concerns increasingly began to focus on militant black nationalist groups and leaders. A memo dated March 4, 1968, from the director to every FBI field office, raised alarm at the growing civil disorder in America and spoke to the need to “neutralize” a potential black “Messiah” who could trigger “a true black revolution” inside the nation. The document offered three potential candidates: Martin Luther King, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and Stokely Carmichael. But King was not seen as a threat as long as he retained his “‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence).” The FBI instead focused its attention on Carmichael as the real danger.10
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