U.S. Secret Police

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

PUBLICATION:

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

DATE:

Sunday, March 21, 1993

TITLE:

Army Feared King, Secretly Watched Him;
Spying on Blacks Started 75 Years Ago

AUTHOR:

Stephen G. Tompkins

FULL ARTICLE:

http://www.gomemphis.com/mlk/tompkin3.html

RELATED ARTICLES:

http://www.gomemphis.com/mlk/tompkin1.html
http://www.gomemphis.com/mlk/tompkin2.html

INTRODUCTION:

The intelligence branch of the United States Army
spied on the family of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for three
generations. Top secret, often illegal, intrusions into the
lives of black Americans began more than 75 years ago and
often focused on black churches in the South and their
ministers.

The spying was born of a conviction by top Army intelligence
officers that black Americans were ripe for subversion -
first by agents of the German Kaiser, then by Communists,
later by the Japanese and eventually by those opposed to
the Vietnam War.

At first, the Army used a reporting network of private
citizens that included church members, black businessmen
such as Memphis's Robert R. Church Jr., and black educators
like the Hampton Institute's Roscoe C. Simmons. It later
employed cadres of infiltrators, wiretaps and aerial
photography by U2 spy planes.

As the civil rights movement merged with anti-war protests
in the late 1960s, some Army units began supplying sniper
rifles and other weapons of war to civilian police
departments. Army Intelligence began planning for what
some officers believed would soon be armed rebellion.

By March 1968, King was preparing to lead a march in Memphis
in support of striking sanitation workers and another march
a few weeks later that would swamp Washington with people
demanding less attention to Vietnam and more resources
for America's poor.

By then the Army's intelligence system was keenly focused
on King and desperately searching for a way to stop him.

On April 4, 1968, King was killed by a sniper's bullet at
the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

In the 25 years since, investigators have focused on the
role the FBI and other police agencies played in King's
life. Few have paid attention to the Army's activities.

Some of the Army's spying against anti-war and civil rights
groups became public knowledge in 1971 congressional hearings.
But key intelligence officers avoided testifying, leaving the
full story untold.

The Commercial Appeal's 16-month investigation of the Army's
secret spy war with black citizens provides a first-time
look inside the Army's largest-ever espionage operation
within the United States.

Much of the story was pieced together from a trail of memos,
memoirs, diaries and meeting notes scattered around the
country in military archives, the Library of Congress,
presidential libraries and private collections. Some of
the documents are still classified. Other pieces came
from interviews with nearly 200 participants, including
the recollections of several dozen Army agents still
living in this country and in Mexico.

This newspaper's investigation uncovered no hard
evidence that Army Intelligence played any role in King's
assassination, although Army agents were in Memphis the
day he was killed.

But the review of thousands of government documents and
interviews with people involved in the spying revealed that
by early 1968 Army Intelligence regarded King as a major
threat to national security.