America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (34 page)

The FBI missed other problems too. Eure took care to paint her relationship with McManaman as a professional one. But the FBI knew that McManaman identified Eure as the woman he intended to marry when he was released from Leavenworth Penitentiary. Moreover, no one communicated more with McManaman, by way of letters and visits, than Eure. This situation presented the FBI with
a logical follow-up question for Eure: Why would McManaman refer Nissen to Eure for something as bold as a bounty offer on Martin Luther King Jr.'s life if it were all a joke? Even if he were simply gullible, McManaman would want to confirm details with Eure, who then would have let him in on the joke. But he instead told another criminal to visit her as part of a plot against King. The FBI never even bothered to find out the details of how and why a career criminal like McManaman was introduced to Eure in the first place. But the FBI did not subject Eure to a thorough interrogation.

Nissen eventually turned himself into the FBI at the end of July 1968. He specifically asked to turn himself into Special Agent Wayne Mack from the FBI field office in Phoenix, Arizona, the state where Nissen spent much of his early adulthood. Mack and Nissen developed a collegial relationship despite being on opposite sides of the law. In St. Louis, where Mack had detoured from a flight for in-service training in Washington, D.C., Nissen reiterated his account of McManaman's bounty offer to Mack. But he also added details of the threat outside the parole office, and in interviews with me, Nissen insisted that he told Mack about the Floyd Ayers money-package to Jackson. No record of that story exists in FBI files detailing Nissen's follow-up interview by Mack. Perhaps Nissen's memory of telling the FBI about Ayers, forty years after the fact, is confused. Perhaps Mack deliberately left those details out of Nissen's story to protect Nissen from potential charges of complicity in the King murder. Or perhaps the files have been sanitized.

Had the FBI looked deep within its files, it would have learned that Floyd Ayers had also been trying to get its attention too. For reasons that are not clear, in the week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Floyd Ayers infiltrated King's funeral under false pretenses, attempted an apparent kidnapping of Martin Luther King Sr., and showed up at the White House gates insisting on seeing the president. The Secret Service and the FBI dismissed Ayers as mentally disturbed, and records provide no details of what Ayers told them in interviews.
³²

Without question, Ayers was at best flamboyant and was possibly mentally impaired. But the FBI knew something else about Ayers. Before he infiltrated King's funeral, before the FBI even found James
Earl Ray's Mustang in Atlanta, Georgia, police had suggested Ayers as one of their earliest suspects in the King murder. Not only did Ayers work for KKK leader James Venable, but Georgia law enforcement could not account for his whereabouts on April 4. The FBI dismissed Ayers as a suspect because it could not match his fingerprints to prints recovered at the crime scene. But within two weeks of clearing Ayers in April, the FBI received additional reports casting suspicion on the eccentric salesman.
³³
Two witnesses said that Ayers had been referring to King's eventual murder in the months leading up to April 4.

If the FBI eliminated mention of the Ayers story from Nissen's account, this would be consistent with its general apathy toward Nissen's story as of August 1968. Agents did not even interview Leroy McManaman until September of 1968. At that point, McManaman predictably denied any connection to the King murder and denied having any interaction whatsoever with Donald Nissen. The FBI never followed up by confronting McManaman with records showing that the two men had in fact worked together in Leavenworth's shoe factory. More difficult to understand, the FBI did not bother to ask McManaman how, if Nissen had never known him and never spoken with him, Nissen could provide the FBI with the name of the woman McManaman intended to marry and where she lived and worked in Mississippi. The FBI instead closed the book on Nissen's case.

In fact, as of August 1968, the FBI had three separate threads of evidence pointing to a White Knights bounty offer as motivating Dr. King's murder: the Nissen story, which predated the King assassination; the accounts from Capomacchia and Barnes implicating Tarrants; and the reports from Jerry Ray, James's brother, to informants speaking about a bounty offer. Together these pieces of evidence cried out for a renewed interest in the White Knights and white supremacists as conspirators in the King assassination.

But there are no signs of a renewed investigation after the interview with McManaman in September of 1968. James Earl Ray had been captured and by the spring of 1969 had confessed to a judge and been sent to prison on a ninety-nine-year sentence. But the alarming fact is that when Ray's later protests of innocence led to a renewed
congressional investigation in 1976 (after Christensen's article raised hackles at the FBI and intrigued investigators for the HSCA), the response by the FBI appears to be a cover-up, including the destruction of files and the use of FBI-legitimated sources to shift blame away from white supremacists. At least one of the sources claimed to Congress that men like Barnes were not dangerous—something contradicted by FBI records—and that the White Knights would never work across state lines—something contradicted by Beckwith's attempt to blow up Al Binder's office in New Orleans. Congress relied so heavily on these sources that it did not even bother to interview Sam Bowers, then in prison. The HSCA forced even hardened Mafia dons to testify on the JFK assassination, but it did not demand that Sidney Barnes testify before investigators when the white supremacist refused to cooperate. The FBI did not emphasize Nissen's story to Congress, and Congress never even approached him.

All of this highlights the alarming possibility that the FBI not only failed to stop King's murder but also failed to fully resolve it after the fact—even though it had the resources to potentially do both. If the FBI was protecting L.E. Matthews, this would not be the first time that sources and methods, and the desire to protect the Bureau's reputation, trumped the imperative for justice.

But an additional and just as disquieting possibility emerges from the events surrounding the King assassination and what they mean to the study of America's domestic, religious terrorism. The uncomfortable reality may be that the very sources (deep-cover informants and constitutionally dubious wiretaps) and methods (including violence) that the FBI used with white supremacists groups, and hid at all costs, prevented a much wider racial conflagration in the months and years following King's murder. Yet even if the ends somehow justified the means in the short term, the failure by law enforcement to more thoroughly investigate the motives of the groups it had infiltrated allowed said groups, during the lull in religiously motivated terrorism in the 1970s, to evolve in ways that would have enormous implications for homegrown terror by the 1980s.

10

THE END OF AN AGE

the
FRAGMENTATION
of the
RADICAL RIGHT
in the
1970S

“N
ow this is a long fight. It is a hard fight,” said J.B. Stoner in June of 1969 as he addressed the national convention of the National States Rights Party as its newly elected chairman. Ostensibly, he was referring to the campaign for elected offices in the coming years. But Stoner spoke to a much longer struggle as well. “The Jews have been conspiring and carrying on their campaign on top of the world for centuries . . . and they still don't have it. . . . The Lord Jesus Christ himself called the children of the Jews the children of the devil and that is what they are, the children of the devil. . . . They are Satan's kids. Now they have been fighting for a long time so we have to fight for quite a while. We can't expect to win the fight in a few weeks or few months when the Jews have been after it for centuries.”
¹

In many ways, Stoner's speech sounded like a rationale as much as a rallying cry. Despite the riots from the previous year, despite the chaos at the Democratic National Convention the previous summer, the race war so many saw as imminent had yet to materialize.

Yet tensions persisted through 1968 and into 1969. The number of urban riots diminished dramatically, but violence spread into other political arenas. A radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground became the latest New Left group to embrace violence as a form of political protest. With the ongoing activity of groups like the Minutemen, police estimated that America experienced an average of twenty bombings per week in 1969. So the religious radicals in the NSRP had not yet given up hope.

One speaker at the convention, identified only as Stephens, insisted to the NSRP delegates:

The battle is yet to be won. You and I will wind up being the soldiers that carry the forefront through the line to win the fight. So if
we leave this fight out against the Jewish, nigger revolution that we are in, and it is a revolution, they sort of proclaim it to be a revolution, you and I are going to end this revolution. When the battle starts, you and I will be the first ones there. We will be on the front lines, and when this smoke does clear away from this battle, then we should see nothing but white faces left in our nation.
²

Stephens's words echoed the horrific sermon delivered by the Reverend Connie Lynch in Saint Augustine in 1964. “There's gonna be a bloody race riot all over this country,” Lynch insisted. “The stage is being set for a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, there ain't gonna be nothing left but white faces.”

Lynch escaped incitement charges in 1964 even though a white mob sent nineteen blacks to local hospitals after his speech. But Stoner's rabble-rousing friend finally went to prison for instigating racial violence in Baltimore in 1966; he was not at the 1969 convention. In his stead, at the convention and elsewhere, Neuman Britton assumed the role of instigator. Like Lynch, Britton was a Christian Identity minister, and at the convention he echoed the CI preaching of Wesley Swift: “There is nothing left but blood for America over the dead cause I know for a sure thing that there will never be any peace . . . until we removed from these shores the serpent race and this beastly race that is so prevalent among us.” Speaking of the blood that will flow from the “wine press of wrath,” he asserted, “We have arrived at the apex of this age.”
³

In many ways, 1969 represented the apex for the National States Rights Party and for
organized
violence by adherents of Christian Identity. But despite “favorable” conditions, the “Jewish, nigger revolution” never escalated into a race war.

A reasonable question would be: Why not? Certainly, the idea of a pitched conflict between racial groups, fighting in armies representing their ethnic identities, is hard to fathom, even in an era like the 1960s. But to many Americans, a civil war based in part on race and also on class and political ideology seemed more than possible in 1969. In hindsight, with well-armed elements of the right and the left openly courting such a war, the violence of the late 1960s, as unique as it was in its historical intensity, seems somewhat tame
relative to what it could have been. New Left radicals engaged in street battles with law enforcement, and police recovered millions of rounds of ammunition from right-wingers, yet one did not find members of the Minutemen launching mortar shells at machine-gun-wielding members of the Black Panthers. With such willing participants, the lack of open conflict demands an explanation.

A likely answer is one that will unsettle many civil libertarians, who for decades have justifiably highlighted the abuses and dangers associated with programs like COINTELPRO, which surveilled, infiltrated, and provoked dissident groups inside the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union still speaks ominously about how national law enforcement spied on civil rights organizations and antiwar protest groups. The approach undermined legitimate and peaceful dissident groups and put a chill on political free speech. Liberals bemoan the treatment of groups like the Black Panthers and the KKK, even if they dislike what these groups stood for. Recall that to undermine the Klan in Mississippi, the FBI went so far as to use Mafia members to scare or beat confessions out of Klansmen; by all accounts, the sting operation that wounded Tommy Tarrants was ultimately meant to kill him (and did kill Kathy Ainsworth)—with no arrest or trial needed. When it came to the Black Panthers, the record indicates that the FBI either actively facilitated violence or, at best, passively allowed it to take the lives of several leading members, such as Fred Hampton.

But for those who feel that the ends justify the means, there is little doubt that the no-holds-barred approach by federal law enforcement, however distasteful, undermined violent and radical groups. By the early 1970s, many of the top members of these groups were in prison. Robert DePugh, who for years had deferred the most violent Minutemen activity in favor of a massive attack in the future, was in federal prison when the race riots of the late 1960s presented the best opportunity to put his strike teams into coordinated action. Sam Bowers was finally convicted for his role in the Neshoba murders in 1967, and by 1969 he found himself in prison, in part due to testimony from a deep-cover informant. On the other side, H. Rap Brown—who had an anti-riot act named after him in 1968—faced ongoing arrests and trials from 1967 onward. Black Panther leader
Huey Newton served time for manslaughter charges (which were eventually dropped) from 1968 to 1970.

Those known militants not in prisons were under constant surveillance by local police and often by federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. For this very reason, Bowers resorted to using Tarrants and Ainsworth in his White Knights campaign against Jewish targets in Mississippi. FBI biannual summary reports from the 1960s include weekly synopses detailing the activities of almost every key white supremacist in every major white supremacist group. Much of this inside information was collected by informants. It now appears very likely that the man who took over as Grand Wizard for the WKKKKOM when Bowers went to prison, L.E. Matthews, worked for the FBI. One of the most visible Klansmen in North Carolina, George Dorsett, was on the FBI payroll.
⁴
At the peak of the COINTELPRO White program, “the Bureau had over 2,000 Klan members on its payroll, recruiting them at the average rate of two per day.”
⁵
The number of informants turned against the Black Panthers dwarfed even this total: the FBI had more than seven thousand informants inside the Black Panther Party as of 1971.
⁶
In addition to conventional surveillance and inside informants, wiretaps provided extensive information on white supremacist groups. If the wiretap surveillance on Stoner's law office extended through the 1970s, it would mean that the FBI likely had inside information on a vast array of KKK activities across the nation, as Stoner represented dozens of racists across the country as a legal advisor.