America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (33 page)

One need only consider the individuals whose pictures were
not
shown at the gun store on April 5 to fully understand the oddness of this investigative effort. It took days before the FBI showed a picture of Byron de la Beckwith, the man it firmly believed had assassinated Medgar Evers in 1963, at the gun store. Agents did not show pictures of Jimmy George Robinson, a Birmingham-based NSRP member who had assaulted King in 1965, for another week.
²⁴
Indeed, virtually all of the Cahaba Boys, directly responsible for the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, remained at large in Birmingham—and none of their pictures were shown at the gun store. Yet the FBI showed Tarrants's picture right away, when at that point Tarrants was only a fugitive from Mobile on an illegal firearms charge.

As it turns out, the gun store incident was not even the earliest sign of the FBI's suspicions of Tarrants. The Mobile Field Office removed one of its agents, Gerard Robinson, from his normal assignment routine to visit Tarrants's Alabama home on the evening of April 4. In an interview with the author, the agent remembered the odd nature of the request: He was asked, in violation of strict FBI protocol, to visit Tarrants's residence without his partner. Robinson can't recall another solo visit in his career, and he still does not know why his superiors sent him to Tarrants's residence alone.
²⁵
Furthermore, additional records—in the files of Wesley Swift but not in the FBI's MURKIN files—show that the FBI's Los Angeles field office continued to show pictures of Tarrants in California, again on the possibility that Tarrants was the man who used the alias Eric Galt.
²⁶
The reasons for Robinson's visit, and the reasons for showing Tarrants's picture in the days that followed, are not evident in any available records.

A full search of all MLK records by the National Archives and Research Administration failed to reveal anything justifying the early interest in Tarrants. The author's FOIA request for the Mobile Field Office file from which the Tarrants pictures came revealed that this specific file had been destroyed by the FBI in November 1977,
²⁷
at the height of Congress's renewed inquiry into the case, a year after senior FBI officials had forbidden field offices to destroy any record related to the King crime.
²⁸
Tarrants admits that he became a witness for the new investigation, and the record makes it obvious that he was one of two anonymous sources cited by Congress in its final report on the King murder. To destroy a record of a living individual, much less one who was important to a congressional investigation, defies federal regulations.

The file destruction occurred one year after Christensen published his article linking Tarrants to the King murder, a piece that raised questions about other Floridians—notably former Miami native
Joseph Milteer—and their connections to the crime. As it turns out, the FBI told researcher Ernie Lazar that it had also destroyed its field office file on Joseph Milteer, also in 1977. In fact, the FBI told the author that it had also destroyed the Miami MURKIN file—or at least elements of it—at the same time, in 1977, although this is presently unresolved, as the National Archives claims to have some, and possibly all of the Miami file. In short, it appears that the FBI was removing records that would cast doubt on Tarrants at the very moment that it was vouching for the recently released Tarrants as a source to Congress. What explains the FBI's early interest in Tarrants and its decision to hide that interest from congressional investigators? The answer may have less to do with Tarrants than with a much more valuable secret the FBI was protecting, and continues to protect to this day.

Of course, there was a very good reason for the FBI to hunt for Tommy Tarrants in connection with the King assassination, but it is a reason the FBI should not have been privy to if the available records are complete. Tarrants's own account has him visiting Wesley Swift two weeks before the King murder. There he obtained a rifle with the express purpose of killing Martin Luther King Jr. Tarrants then went underground as part of a guerrilla campaign against the government. Nothing in the records suggests that the FBI knew this information before June of 1968. Yet, if the FBI did
somehow
know about Tarrants's visit with Swift, it would go a long way toward explaining the Bureau's early fascination with Tarrants as a suspect in the King murder. Perhaps the absence of these records is deliberate. For it now appears that the FBI had developed a source who could have informed agents about the Tarrants–Swift episode and warned them about Tarrants's plan to launch a guerrilla campaign. But, as this book alludes to in earlier chapters, the FBI remains reluctant to disclose sources and methods, even decades after an informant was utilized and even after the informant's death. The likely source for the information may well have been one of the FBI's all-time most valuable informants: Sam Bowers's successor, L.E. Matthews.

This book is the first to suggest that Matthews worked as a deep-cover source for the FBI. But the author is not the only person to believe this to be the case. Award-winning investigative reporter
Jerry Mitchell, one of the leading experts on the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, also believes that Matthews was an informant. Several different pieces of information support this contention. First, despite his being the head of the WKKKKOM, and despite the fact that he was the chief bomb maker for the group in the years before 1968, Matthews was never once charged or indicted for any crime by federal law enforcement after 1968. One could pass this fact off as simply good luck or skillful evasion on the part of Matthews, but that explanation does not hold water. When the FBI finally convicted Byron de la Beckwith, in the early 1970s, for conspiracy to bomb the New Orleans office of Jewish lawyer Al Binder, the main evidence against Beckwith was the testimony of law enforcement agents who saw L.E. Matthews provide Beckwith with a bomb (uncovered in Beckwith's trunk, according to the state). But even though the FBI arrested and convicted Beckwith for the crime,
nothing happened to Matthews, the head of one of the FBI's most despised racist organizations
.
²⁹
Indeed, Matthews's tenure as head of the WKKKKOM from the late 1960s through the 1970s was remarkable for the sheer lack of violence perpetrated by his group. Once considered the most violent white supremacist organization in the country, the group did almost nothing while Sam Bowers remained behind bars.

But more than anything, it is what we do not have on Matthews that cinches the case that he was an informant. When Congress reinvestigated the King murder, and included among its host of suspects J.B. Stoner, Sam Bowers, and Sidney Barnes, the obvious person to call as a witness was Matthews, who was associated with all of these individuals. But the available record—the final report from Congress—makes no mention of Matthews. It does, however, refer to two unnamed informants with intimate connections to all parties whose identities the FBI wanted to protect. We now know that Tarrants was one of these individuals. It seems likely that Matthews was the other.

Failed attempts to verify the identity of this second informant ironically corroborate this hypothesis. The sheer lack of material on Matthews is too suspicious. When the author requested Matthews's file by way of FOIA, the FBI provided him with five total pages of
material, two of them duplicates and
all of them from 1983
.
³⁰
It is worth noting that files on individuals of similar significance run into thousands of pages. Deavours Nix, who ranked below Matthews in the WKKKKOM, has an eleven-thousand-page FBI headquarter file. Tarrants's file is of similar length. When he asked if the FBI had destroyed Matthews's records or transferred them to the National Archives, the author was told no. According to leading FOIA attorneys, the FBI often simply pretends that highly confidential and sensitive material does not exist rather than provide it to citizens in a FOIA request. The FBI is under no obligation for full disclosure in response to FOIA requests when national security—or sources and methods—are at stake. Process of elimination shows that either the FBI had an unbelievable lack of interest in a key KKK figure or that it continues to withhold information on Matthews, a practice almost always reserved for its most valued informants.

If Matthews was an FBI informant, it raises an alarming possibility for the King assassination investigation. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Matthews himself could have participated, in some way, in plotting the assassination. Recall that in March of 1968, Matthews offered his home to Eugene Mansfield, the former Grand Dragon who, suddenly and without warning, quit his job in Louisiana and moved in with Matthews. The records show Matthews discussing a hit with Mansfield that month, and law enforcement could not find Mansfield on April 4.

At the same time, FBI records show that Matthews was in and out of his hometown in Mississippi, working on some vague out-of-state project in the month before King's killing. Records also show that Matthews frequented John's Restaurant; he might fit the description of one of the suspicious men that Myrtis Hendricks saw interacting with Nix and Bowers.

The possibility also exists that Matthews engaged in such plotting to curry favor with Bowers, with the knowledge of someone inside the FBI. (Informants, especially at that high level, are often kept secret, even from FBI agents in the same field office.) If so, the FBI and Matthews may have found themselves in a complicated but not unfamiliar position as the plot against King unfolded. Their paradoxical challenge was to figure out how to protect an informant
while preventing a major act of domestic terrorism. The temptation is to wait until other witnesses and evidence can be used to stop the crime without compromising new sources and methods. Often, even a low-level criminal can become the basis for implicating higher officials in a plot, until ultimately law enforcement rolls up an entire organization. But then timing becomes key. Act too early and the criminal case may not be solid enough to convict senior members of an organization. Act too late and the crime may well come to pass. The latter leaves the government with the unenviable choice between explaining why it did not prevent a major act of terrorism, and covering up its unintentional complicity and never admitting it to the public.

I already suggested something along those lines when discussing the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In
Chapter 13
I offer a similar scenario for the 1995 terrorist attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. If the FBI learned of a potential King plot from L.E. Matthews and failed to act in time to prevent the assassination, this would go a long way in explaining the Bureau's behavior after April 4.

This explanation starts with its handling of Donald Nissen, the fugitive who left his family and a steady job in Atlanta after having been threatened, in December of 1967, for revealing what he knew about a White Knights bounty offer. The FBI's initial investigation into Nissen's claims may well reflect genuine limitations in terms of data-mining capabilities. Larry Hancock and I were able to connect the 1967 bounty offer (from McManaman) on King to the 1964 bounty on King (offered to McManaman's colleague Donald Sparks) only with the help of database technology and the Internet. Similarly, the superficial investigation of Sybil Eure, the woman who appears to have been a cutout for the bounty plot, could easily be attributed to antiquated perceptions about women and violence. But the follow-up investigation into Nissen's claims, after the FBI realized that he had jumped his parole, is harder to understand and more open to less forgiving explanations.

Upon discovering that Nissen had gone AWOL, the FBI reinvestigated his claims about a White Knights bounty. In May 1968, it returned to Jackson, Mississippi, to interview Sybil Eure, the
go-between who received the package containing bounty money from Nissen in the summer of 1967. Eure's memory improved upon the second visit. Unlike her August 1967 interview with the FBI, Eure now remembered a story about a $100,000 bounty on Martin Luther King's life. It was all a joke, she claimed. Eure explained that in the spring of 1964, while short on cash and developing a professional relationship with McManaman (whom she identified as a real estate guru), she had seen TV reports linking the Mississippi Burning murders to Neshoba sheriff Lawrence Rainey. She had joked with McManaman that she could get $100,000 from Rainey if they promised to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps, as it had in 1967, the FBI did not think a woman was capable of participating in a Klan-connected murder conspiracy; the agents once again seemed to take Eure at her word.
³¹
But in May of 1968, that decision was harder to justify.

For one thing, Leroy McManaman was already back in Leavenworth Penitentiary in the spring of 1964, when the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi. Plus, the FBI did not connect Rainey to the Neshoba murders and to the KKK until August of 1964. In other words, Eure could never have been watching TV news reports about the Neshoba murders in April of 1964; she couldn't have made her supposed joke about a King bounty because she wouldn't have been in McManaman's company when the Neshoba murders occurred later that summer. One might be apt to forgive this oversight by the FBI save for one thing: Just a few months before interviewing Eure for a second time, federal prosecutors finally convicted several individuals, including Rainey and Sam Bowers, for plotting the Neshoba murders. The Jackson field office helped lead the effort to ensure the prosecution. It is hard to imagine that the FBI could have failed to see the major problem in the timing of events narrated by Eure.