CIA document talks of need to "remove" Martin Luther King from leadership of "Negro movement"

Wayne Madsen Report
Wednesday January 23, 2008

On the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and amid attempts by the Hillary Clinton campaign to "revise" the history of the civil rights leader in a blatant attempt to tarnish the candidacy of her rival, Senator Barack Obama, it is noteworthy to point out that Dr. King was assassinated as part of a U.S. government plan, documented in a CIA memo, to replace the Nobel Peace Prize winner as the leader of the "Negro movement."

The May 11, 1965, memo for the record, given to this editor by a member of the King family, recounts a conversation between an individual whose name was redacted and the CIA's Morse Allen, the CIA's research director who was responsible for Project Artichoke and MK-ULTRA, two of the CIA's behavior modification programs that, in part, sought to create willing assassins.

The memo bemoaned the anti-Vietnam war activities of civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and King. It also warns of the attempt by the "Communist left" to infiltrate the "Negro movement." The mindset of the CIA is interesting. They saw the civil rights movement not as a broad based attempt by a number of Americans to secure equal rights for African Americans, but as a "Negro movement" that was seen as a potential Fifth Column for the Communists.

Allen was concerned that Communists would take advantage of a break by the civil rights movement with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and a resulting "violent disruption of the Negro [emphasis added] Civil Rights Movement. Allen was also concerned that King might be assassinated "before his exposure" and that would make him a martyr. During the time the memo was written, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was trying to "expose" King. Hoover ordered the FBI to bug King's hotel rooms and tape record his alleged trysts. Hoover mailed one of the recordings to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, with a note urging Dr. King to commit suicide.

The most revealing part of the CIA memo is the following: "It is [redacted]'s belief that somehow or other Martin Luther KING must be removed from the leadership of the Negro movement, and is removal must come from within and not from without. [Redacted] feels that somewhere in the Negro movement, at the top, there must be a Negro leader who is 'clean' who could step into the vacuum and chaos if Martin Luther KING were either exposed or assassinated."

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis. The King family never accepted the full guilt of the accused assassin, James Earl Ray.

King was succeeded as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1980, Abernathy endorsed the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush over President Jimmy Carter. Abernathy founded the American Freedom Coalition along with Christian Right leader, Dr. Robert Grant. The organization received funding from Sun Myung Moon's quasi-fascist Unification Church.

The CIA memo stating that King should be replaced by someone "clean." Abernathy fit the bill.

Hillary Clinton, who is close to the right-wing Christian Fellowship Foundation cult leader David Coe and was a "Goldwater Girl" during the time the right-wing plot was being hatched against King in the mid-1960s, has played the "race card" in her campaign against Obama.

Hillary Clinton's father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and a Republican until his death in 1993. Hillary later worked for the Nelson Rockefeller campaign in 1968 and attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. Bill Clinton reportedly cringed at Hugh E. Rodham's use of the "N word," which lasted up until the time Clinton was sworn in as president. Clinton's father-in-law died at the age of 82 in April 1993, a few months after Clinton was inaugurated.

This anniversary of the birth of Dr. King should, above all, remind us of the racist and covert operations by the United States government to assassinate King and destroy the civil rights movement. It is no time for a one-time Republican and Barry Goldwater supporter -- Goldwater only won his own state of Arizona and the segregationist states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in 1964 --to raise the race issue. And it is no time for someone who grew up in suburban Chicago and who must have heard her father constantly ranting about the "niggers" to be using the race card against an opponent who is fulfilling Dr. King's dream of a color blind nation.

Hillary Rodham in 1964 was joined in her support for Goldwater by someone else who was irritated by the civil rights movement -- a young Houston businessman and CIA agent who was running for the US Senate against progressive Democrat Ralph Yarborough. George H. W. Bush lost that Senate race and was unable to join his father and Goldwater supporter, Prescott Bush, in the U.S. Senate as a father and son team. However, George H. W. Bush would later become the head of the CIA and receive the endorsement in 1980 of Dr. King's government-sanctioned "replacement."

Considering the racist nature of the Republican Party from 1964 to the present day, a transformation that was engineered by Hillary Clinton's one-time hero Barry Goldwater, Dr. King's name should not be used by either the leading Democratic candidate -- Clinton -- or her possible Republican opponent, John McCain, the Arizona senator who describes himself as the political heir of Goldwater.