America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (13 page)

The records are very clear on this. An October 9, 1963, document shows J. Edgar Hoover asking U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy for wiretaps on Stoner. The document reads:

M
EMORANDUM FOR THE
A
TTORNEY
G
ENERAL

In view of the tense racial situation in Birmingham, further inflamed by the bombings, it is believed that additional activity on the part of those who are responsible for the bombings could easily lead to more rioting, bloodshed and loss of life, materially affecting the security of the United States.

It is requested that you authorize the installation of a technical surveillance at the office of Jesse Benjamin Stoner in Atlanta, or at any address to which he may move.

Respectfully,

J
OHN
E
DGAR
H
OOVER

Director
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Former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen says that when Hoover wanted a wiretap, even if an attorney general turned down his request, Hoover would plant the bug anyway. But Bobby Kennedy even approved Hoover's requests for bugs on Martin Luther King Jr., so it is unlikely that he refused a request on a noted white supremacist like Stoner, especially at a time when his brother, the president, was stationing federal troops outside Birmingham to prevent the kind of “rioting, bloodshed and loss of life” Hoover was describing in his request. Any doubt that RFK approved the Stoner wiretap was resolved two pages later in the same file. Following the aforementioned request by Hoover is a page referencing the same
date, October 9, but which has been deleted. Anyone familiar with FBI records would recognize this kind of form, which indicates that a record has been removed for classification purposes “and placed in the Special File Room of Records Branch.” Just two pages later, we find the following:

Subject UNKNOWN SUBJECTS; BOMBING OF SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH, BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, 9/15/63

BOMBING MATTERS

This serial, the original memorandum from the FBI to the Attorney General dated 10/9/1963, which was returned to the Bureau signed by the Attorney General authorizing FBI to conduct electronic surveillance, has been permanently removed for retention in the National Security Electronic Surveillance File, per memorandum XXXXXXXX to Mr. XXXXXXXXX dated 7-13-73. See 62-115687-1 for details and where maintained.
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Stoner is not referenced by name (nor is anyone else), but the date of the relevant Stoner technical surveillance (TESUR) request is referenced, and the account appears two pages later in the overall file section. The FBI consistently keeps records in a logical order by subject matter. But if there is any further doubt that such surveillance was not only approved but took place, further records make it obvious. Additional files show the FBI doing a “survey” of an office in Atlanta, albeit for someone with a redacted name. Such surveys were simply surreptitious visits (possibly even break-ins) to a designated area for technical surveillance, to see if planting a bug was feasible and, if so, how exactly to accomplish that. The record makes it clear that the FBI determined that the surveillance of the Atlanta office was viable, and for an indefinite period of time rather than a fixed length of days. Furthermore, additional documents, from weeks later, show the FBI asking for more recording devices to continue the technical surveillance of the Atlanta office. In other words, the surveillance, as one would expect, succeeded, and routine adjustments needed to be made to continue it.

Because the names on the other documents are redacted, one could conceivably argue that they refer to another person, not Stoner. A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, however, puts that suspicion to rest. The FBI transferred a number (but not all) of its files on Stoner to the National Archives. The author's FOIA request for that material resulted in the release of twenty-five hundred pages—but four hundred pages were withheld in full because they were wiretap records. This may not even represent the full amount. Other files have not been released to the author, and the FBI refused to release or even acknowledge the existence of anything relating to Stoner from its National Security Electronic Surveillance File.

When told about this development, Bob Eddy was surprised. He never saw any records of any transcripts or recordings on J.B. Stoner. Moreover, he never had any reason to think they existed because the original Hoover memo, requesting the TESUR, was never given to him. Bill Fleming, an FBI agent who reviewed FBI files in connection with the later prosecutions of Blanton and Cherry, was also contacted by the author. Fleming said that he never saw any records on a Stoner wiretap; nor did he have any reason to suspect they existed.
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Attorney General Bill Baxley was also surprised to learn about the Stoner wiretaps. Stoner was the first person Baxley investigated for masterminding the church bombing.
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Although Baxley is still less convinced of Stoner's guilt than Eddy, both men believe the transcripts should be released.

There is reason to be concerned that some material, at least on Stoner, could have been destroyed. Researcher Ernie Lazar claims that the FBI destroyed its Birmingham field office file on Stoner. Obviously, this would be the most likely file to hold any new information on Stoner's connection to the Birmingham bombing. The destroyed file might augment information, reported in Birmingham police files, that Admiral John Crommelin stayed with Stoner in Birmingham the weekend of the church bombing.

All five Christian Identity zealots who met in Birmingham on September 14, 1963, were, in fact, also members of the NSRP. Gafford's friends Mary Lou and Bill Holt were also on the mailing list for Wesley Swift's sermons. If Stoner was not an official minister in the church, he acted like one. Stoner used the official NSRP newsletter,
The Thunderbolt,
to promote ideas that could have served as sermons for Wesley Swift. Regarding Jews, the publication said that “Jew-devils have no place in a White Christian nation.”
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Of blacks it said, “The Negro is actually a higher form of gorilla. God did not wish for the white race to mix with these animals. Tell your friends and children these scientific truths so that communist teachers and preachers will not be able to brain wash them with ‘the Big Lie' that all men are equal.”
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Stoner, of course, also traveled the country with Identity minister Connie Lynch, riling up southerners into fits of violence. On the surface, this work appears to be counterproductive. By inciting violence, the rabble-rousers increased the chances that a riot would elicit federal intervention, a development that few southerners, raised from childhood to resent military occupation under post–Civil War Reconstruction, would welcome. This would be particularly true for a provocative attack like the shrapnel bomb that struck the Birmingham neighborhood of Titusville on September 25, 1963.

No right-thinking person who experienced the riots that followed the murders of little Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, and the other children could expect such an attack to do anything other than incite further violence. Klan terrorists often used conventional dynamite bombs to cause property damage and to scare targeted groups rather than to kill victims. This appears to have been the intended purpose of the bomb that exploded on September 15; an apparent problem with the triggering mechanism delayed the detonation, and thus the four girls died.
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But the shrapnel bombs used on September 25 had only one purpose: to maim and kill. The perpetrators had actually designed one of the two bombs for a delayed explosion. It appears that the bomb makers intended the first device to lure out spectators and law enforcement; the second explosion could then have killed dozens of police officers and citizens. It was a sheer stroke of luck that no one got injured in the Titusville bombing. If, as Phillip Maybry quoted Stoner as saying, the shrapnel bomb was our “baby,” what motive could explain such a brazen act of attempted terrorism?

The issue here again involves the differences between rank-and-file segregationists, even violent KKK members, and the men who
believed in radical, Christian Identity theology. To the former, federal intervention was anathema to their customs and traditions going back to the era of Reconstruction. To the radical religious zealots, that same deep-rooted resentment among the general white population was exactly what stoked a violent response from bystanders at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The provocative riots that triggered the federal intervention in the first place—in Alabama and in Mississippi—developed only when the black community boiled over after major, provocative acts of violence. Thus, for the religious zealot, who as Tommy Tarrants revealed wanted to “polarize the races” in hopes of fomenting a race war, the shrapnel bomb, and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church itself, represented the best hope for accelerating the end-times. Wesley Swift pointed to this idea in his sermon “Armageddon: Local and Worldwide” in May 1963, saying:

I tell you that here in America we are on the edge of an unusual chain of events, and it may be that the sudden movement of your enemy may be your salvation. Someone said: “there may not be another election but there is going to be deliverance.” You are in one of the most unusual periods in the history of our nation. You are going to see brush fire wars which can break into the big ones and could start anytime.
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Any Identity believer observing the tinderbox that was Birmingham in 1963 could have guessed what would happen if someone attacked a target as honored in the black community as the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. After several months of bombings and bombing attempts, the city became known as Bombingham and the neighborhood that included the church was known as Dynamite Hill. The bombing of Martin Luther King Jr.'s hotel room, which coincided with the attack on his brother's home, on May 11, ignited the first major race riot in the history of the city. In early September, after several months of bombings and other acts of racial violence, President John F. Kennedy prepared for an armed intervention in the city. In just the period from September 1 to September 14, there were three bombings in Birmingham. All the ingredients were present for racial violence on a scale that would impress even Wesley Swift.

Yet the weight of the evidence suggests that the bomb that went off on September 15 was not intended to kill anyone. The reaction of the suspects after the fact certainly point to that. Hubert Page was furious that the four girls were killed. Robert Shelton wanted nothing to do with those associated with the bombing and may have used a source, Don Luna, to implicate the men to the FBI. But even if the five Swift followers could not have anticipated the killing of the four girls, they still could have known, through someone like Stoner, about the impending attack on the church. Their hope for racial violence and federal intervention on a grand scale would be in the local reaction to the bombing. In the perverted worldview of religious radicals like Swift, the unintended death of four girls presented a unique opportunity.

The riots that followed the bombing of the church on September 15 could actually have been much worse, with far more violence and casualties. The Reverend Ed King, a white minister who became a leading member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, described the tension in an interview with the author.

He went to Birmingham to help mourn the girls' deaths and to lead protest marches against the violence. The activist became concerned when he went outside and noticed “whites with machine gun emplacements a block away from the church. . . . I realized some of them thought there would be a march or a demonstration.” No such event was planned. Then again, no marches had been planned following the funeral for Ed King's close friend Medgar Evers, but chaos followed in Jackson when local police overreacted to peaceful protests by black Mississippians. In Birmingham, a few months later, thousands of mourners joined the family to pounce. In the marches that followed, Ed King saw moments when misunderstandings could have led to another disaster. In Jackson, “the police panicked . . . in Birmingham I realized the same thing could happen.” Only in Birmingham the police had “machine guns ready, and we could have a massacre. . . . All it would have taken was a bottle breaking that sounded like a gun.”
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He approached Diane Nash Bevel, a major civil rights activist, then married to one of Martin Luther King's top lieutenants, James Bevel, with his fears. She patiently convinced the thousands of mourners to go home.

But if the five Swift followers who had visited Birmingham on the eve of the church bombing had had their way, a bloodbath would have been unavoidable. In his secretly taped conversations with Somersett, Sidney Barnes told the informant that the five men stayed in Birmingham to try to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. after he arrived to deliver the eulogy for the four girls. They followed King in Birmingham—with Noah Carden waiting to shoot the minister with a rifle—but they could not get close enough to take a clear shot.

One can imagine the impact that killing King would have had on a black population already stirring with anger over the murders of September 15. The attitude among America's black community, according to Ed King, “was ‘there is nothing the white racist will not do.' There is nothing Washington will do to protect us. They [the white supremacists] have killed these little girls. This wasn't voter registration.” “If white police had killed more blacks at a funeral” following an uprising over the assassination of Martin Luther King, “I think there would have been riots in Jackson, in Atlanta, in New Orleans.”
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