Even as world leaders and media personalities are heralding the cliche of “2020 vision” for a brighter future, there’s a certain irony to the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. Day falls this year on January 20, 2020. It’s as though the “arc of the moral universe” which King talked about has preordained the year and date to align as a message to those with ears to hear. But what is that message, exactly?
It is a question worth planting in mind even if the reader is not mystically inclined, and even well before its context takes richer shape through the lens of this article’s topic. You see, of the many working class Americans who will enjoy a break from labor or school on this holiday honoring the social reformer, most would be surprised to learn about what his late widow, Coretta Scott King, once tried bringing to public attention. “There is an abundance of evidence,” she proclaimed in a press statement on December 9, 1999, “of a major high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s verdict has validated our [family’s] belief.”
The verdict she was referring to had been reached the previous day in what is known as the Assassination Conspiracy Trial—a civil trial held in Memphis, Tennessee over four weeks of testimony from over 70 witnesses. Its twelve jurors affirmed in their verdict that the originally convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, was not the shooter but had been framed as such by the true assassins: a syndicate of federal, state, local, and mafia agencies. And yet, in response to Mrs. King’s weighty press statement, and to the trial as a whole, the mainstream media coverage amounted to a virtual blackout.
Why?
Giving the media the benefit of the doubt (for now), it has been said in their defense that the trial created more questions than answers. After all, it was significantly based on the testimony of James Earl Ray and Lloyd Jowers, both of whom had a history of contradictory statements about their participation in the crime. Thus, what little media coverage all of this did receive conveyed the impression that the truth of the matter was obfuscated beyond remedy, and that even if there was a conspiracy, the specifics were likely to remain indiscernible.
If indeed this was once true, it is no longer.
At 70 years old, with a medical condition that doesn’t allow him to take each new day for granted, Gary Revel has decided to break silence on what he has known for more than 40 years. In 1977 he conducted a special investigation into King’s assassination as an associate to Richard Sprague, the organizer and first chief counsel of the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations). The trove of what Gary unearthed was in the end blocked from due process by the committee, remaining withheld from the public domain until now.
But before going into this man’s extraordinary story, there are a couple layers to America’s buried history of covert warfare that must be brought to mind in fresh terms, if not to the reader’s awareness for the first time. Otherwise, there is no framework to fluidly grasp key aspects of Gary’s journey, or to why—over 50 years after King’s assassination—he is just now breaking silence on what he discovered, having granted permission to share it in this exclusive report.
The Dark Arts of Narrative Control
Interestingly, it was late in that very year of Gary’s investigation in October of 1977 that Rolling Stone published Carl Bernstein’s groundbreaking report, The CIA and the Media.
In brief, it exposed the origin story to a most secretive CIA program (which has since become known by its codename, Mockingbird) whereby the legendary Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Welsh Dulles, pioneered a subversive relationship with the press by wining and dining news media executives. Over time, this enabled the CIA to install 400 plus of their journalist-operatives, or “mockingbirds,” into strategic media positions worldwide. For a while, the CIA even had its own journalism school, launching their best and brightest into lasting careers as news executives, editors, and star reporters among the leading platforms. These included but were not limited to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, and The Copley Press. (And it is here worth noting that the owner of that last one, James Copley, offered his inter-American newspaper network to be the CIA’s eyes and ears against the “Communist threat in Latin and Central America.”)
“From the outset,” Bernstein notes, “the use of journalists was among the CIA’s most sensitive undertakings, with full knowledge restricted to the Director of Central Intelligence and a few of his chosen select deputies.” In those early Cold War years of the agency’s formative existence, this meant DCI Allen Dulles and his division chiefs of covert operations: Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer, Richard Bissell, Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Karamessines, and Richard Helms. Each of whom might initiate contact with a news producer on given collaborations.
In other words, an obscenely small clique of mortal men at the heart of the intelligence community had built for themselves a pipeline to the mainstream media of unprecedented narrative-shaping power. Just how was this power utilized?
If judging from Bernstein’s article, there is room for interpretation, allowing the conclusion that the journalist-operatives were generally tasked with intelligence-gathering on foreign subjects within reason of legitimate national security concerns, and that no such pipeline was abused in an alarming way for black propaganda or self-serving motives.
But the facts of the 20th century as we now have them in 2020 reveal a much darker story around Mockingbird, and around the covert operations with which this program worked hand-in-glove. To use a specific example which will also prove informative to the backdrop of King’s assassination and Gary’s story, consider the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Guatemala’s duly elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. (FOOTNOTE: Most of the following summary on this derives from David Talbot’s 2015 biography on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard).
Known as the Kennedys of Guatemala, Jacobo and Maria Arbenz were a fashionable couple who were as popular with the nation’s indigenous and impoverished class as they were detested by the aristocracy. Maria attended a Catholic women’s college in California, and although born into a privileged family from El Salvador, had fostered her own convictions about the colonial wealth that was built on the backs of the poor. From before they met, Jacobo Arbenz shared his wife’s love of the indigenous culture and sensitivity for their plight. They believed their ascent to the presidency was to include the redemptive purpose of uplifting the indigenous from their feudalistic and oppressive conditions.
However, the land reforms which Arbenz signed into law toward this end posited a threat to the United Fruit Company, in which Allen Dulles, his brother the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and other foreign policy stakeholders were deeply invested. To solve the problem, Allen Dulles had the U.S. ambassador offer Arbenz a two million dollar bribe, but to the CIA director’s great surprise and disappointment—a rare combination that never failed to invoke his full wrath—the bribe was declined. Arbenz had long decided that under his leadership Guatemala would no longer be sold out to imperial interests. So the Dulles brothers combined the full weight of their foreign policy influence and concocted PBSUCCESS, the codenamed operation for staging a coup that would reclaim Guatemala for United Fruit.
Living up to its name, the operation first of all succeeded at convincing the White House that Arbenz represented a threat to Latin America as a communist agent, enabling President Eisenhower to sign off. Materializing it then entailed the recruitment of Castillo Armas, an embittered Guatemalan colonel exiled in Honduras who had attempted and failed to take power years earlier. With the CIA’s full blessing and supply of untraceable money, he was to march back into his homeland and rally his men as the face of the National Liberation Movement.
Payments then followed to Guatemala’s military leaders, who were less squeamish about accepting large bags of money than their president. Although the coup was a largely “wet works” affair at the hands of CIA-trained mercenaries, involving a range of secret assassination techniques used on 58 Arbenz loyalists, the operation’s success owed itself to the fantastic, multi-layered craft of narrative control.
“On June 27th, 1954, as [Arbenz] prepared to flee the presidential palace,” reports David Talbot, “he made a final radio broadcast, denouncing the ‘fire and death’ that had been rained upon Guatemala by United Fruit and its allies in ‘U.S. ruling circles.’ Few of his fellow citizens heard Arbenz’s farewell address: in a last act of sabotage aimed at his government, the CIA jammed his radio speech.”
And with that, the censorship was just beginning. “The CIA’s disinformation campaign began immediately after Arbenz’s downfall, with a stream of stories planted in the press—particularly in Latin America—alleging that he was a pawn of Moscow, that he was guilty of the wholesale butchery of political foes, that he had raided his impoverished country’s treasury, that he was sexually captivated by the man who was the leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party. None of it was true.”
Of equal importance to highjacking the official story, Dulles did what was necessary to prevent objective reporters from traveling to Guatemala. “New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was extremely accommodating to Dulles throughout the covert operation, agreeing to keep foreign correspondent Sydney Gruson, whom Dulles considered sufficiently incompliant, out of Guatemala and even assuring the CIA director that Gruson’s future articles would be screened ‘with a great deal more care than usual.’ ”
Then, under pressure from the CIA, the new regime proceeded to incarcerate 4,000 suspected communists, including professors, clergymen, and school teachers—most of whom had never heard of Karl Marx. Local Guatemalan journalists reporting on the abuse were likewise thrown in jail with the added treatment of torture. And at the helm of all this, leading much of PBSUCCESS from the start, was the CIA’s proven star among Latin America station chiefs, E. Howard Hunt.
“What we wanted to do,” Hunt admitted many years later in a filmed interview, “was to have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz particularly, and to terrify his troops, much as the German state terrified the population of Holland, Belgium, and Poland at the outset of World War II, and just rendered everybody paralyzed.”
To prepare the ground for this terror campaign, Hunt launched Voz de Liberacion Radio on May Day of 1954. Its team of CIA-trained propagandists numbering less than a handful claimed to broadcast live from a hidden outpost within Guatemala’s jungle, at one point even hoaxing a failed attack from Arbenz’s troops on the radio station. In truth, the team had been bunkered at the CIA’s station south of Miami and merely fired shots off in the background to create this scenario. The overall objective of the radio program was to convince the people of Guatemala that Arbenz had lost control of his military, which, as a result, became increasingly true.
From the start of the operation, Hunt had established strict orders that Arbenz and his family must be allowed to escape the country unharmed, stressing that the CIA would get blamed for an assassination. But there were other ways of making sure the ousted populist would never gain opportunity to voice his side of the story.
In Paris, the exiled leader’s plan to hold a press conference was countered by French authorities threatening to deport his family unless the conference got canceled. In search of a more hospitable place to call home, Arbenz worked his way down a list of Latin American leaders with request for asylum, being met with the same icy rejection at each attempt. Word had already spread from the Dulles State Department that anyone too accommodating to the alleged communist could expect animosity from Washington.
At last, Uruguay came through for Arbenz, but under the strict condition that he would not be speaking out, publishing, teaching, or seeking employment. And not coincidentally, the family’s new home in Montevideo would share a block with the CIA’s newly appointed Uruguay chief: E. Howard Hunt. Until Arbenz’s odd death in 1971—of drowning in a Mexico City hotel bathtub—his remaining years would be spent under the constant sense of being trailed, often seeing the same black cars parked in front of his residence morning or night. Evidently, his stalkers found this kind of long-term maintenance worthwhile, if not addicting.
For as we will find in the coming pages, PBSUCCESS was not merely a shameful incident from among the bones of America’s closeted history. For the likes of the Dulles brothers, Hunt, and other initiates who would refine their Oz-like wizardry, the Guatemala coup was a template of operations past and future. Its specialty was in replacing leaders of the people’s choice with those who could be puppeteered by America’s ruling class, and its method in subverting the democratic process where it counts: in shaping the “popular” narrative or a convincing projection thereof. Indeed, not unlike Hunt’s Nazi-inspired terror campaign through Voz de Liberacion, it was an un-American template at best, a monster of untamable genetics, fated to turn on the very land and citizens it purportedly kept safe.
Meeting James Earl Ray
It was the winter of 1976 when Gary Revel was first offered the job to investigate leads of a conspiracy in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The 27 year old Nashville resident had the background in covert ops to qualify him for the job, but with three young growing children, a young wife, and numerous other career endeavors, there simply was not time for such a commitment. Plus, the job had been pitched to him by Jack Kershaw, legal counsel to King’s convicted assassin, James Earl Ray. In Gary’s mind this idea of a ‘conspiracy’ smacked of a desperation on Kershaw’s part to get his client off the hook, and Gary, a great admirer of the civil rights leader, would have no part in that.
But then he learned from Kershaw about Percy Foreman—a close friend to President Lyndon Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Texas Oil tycoon H.L Hunt—who had been Ray’s first legal counsel almost a decade earlier. This, among other oddities surrounding Ray’s initial legal treatment, sufficed to pique Gary’s interest. He agreed to join Kershaw for a visit to Brushy Mountain Prison where he could hear Ray’s testimony for himself and then decide on taking the job. According to what Ray shared with him on that visit, the process of his being framed for King’s assassination began roughly a year before the event.
On April 23, 1967, he escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary with help from an outside agency. That agency then tracked him down in Montreal, Canada in July through two of its operatives. They found Ray at a bar while he was alone having a beer and helped themselves to a seat at his table, each introducing himself to the fugitive under the cryptonym “Raoul.” This manner of leaving no trace to one’s identity or presence would be paramount to the new life Ray was about to begin. Equipped with the cash, set of fake IDs, and pale yellow Mustang provided by the Raouls, Ray began this new life on the road driving from one city to another delivering packages and guns under routine instructions from Raoul One.
The real names of these Raouls, however, would not remain a mystery to Ray forever. Having decided that he had lived in fear and silence long enough, and that Gary Revel could be trusted, Ray confided to him on that first day of their meeting the actual identities of these men: Raoul One, the leader of this black market operation, was none other than the CIA covert op specialist, Everette Howard Hunt. Raoul Two, who had very little to say around Ray, was Lucien Sarti, also known as “Frenchy”—the Corsican assassin from the The French Connection heroin network whose name is likewise known in association with the Kennedy assassination.
“You can see why I didn’t say their real names before,” Ray clarified to Gary. “If what I tell you now gets out, I’m dead meat.”
Continuing with his story, all was business as usual for Ray come that afternoon of April 4, 1968 in Memphis. He had just driven there from Aeromarine Supply in Birmingham, Alabama, where he purchased a Remington 700 .243 according to Hunt’s directive. Its purpose was for a “gun deal” of some kind. Hunt never offered more details than needed ahead of time and Ray knew better than to ask probing questions. Oftentimes, the specifications on a given job came moments before its execution, and this one, about to go down in urban Memphis, was no exception.
At three o clock, just three hours before King’s assassination, Ray was reconvened with Hunt in a private room at Jim’s Grill. Plans for the gun deal were confirmed to take place within the next hour or two once some buyers from Central America arrived. Also present with Hunt besides Sarti were two other CIA affiliates: Gerry Patrick Hemming and Frank Angelo Fiorini, AKA Frank Sturgis (whose names if unfamiliar to the reader are worth a gander online). Each was to receive a $10,000 payout once the deal went through including Ray, whose main task was to bring the rifle.
At around four o clock, Hunt met with Ray individually for his set of instructions. Immediately, he was to go to the Room and Boarding House of the adjacent building and check in to a room located in back of the second floor. That’s where the deal would be occurring, Ray was told, and as such, it was important he bring the rifle as a model for the buyers.
Having followed this instruction, Ray was in the boarding room waiting when Hunt walked in shortly after and said that the buyers would be arriving in a few minutes. The deal would go smoother, Hunt claimed, if Ray was not present for it. In urging Ray to go elsewhere and relax for a while, Hunt was adamant to remind that he return around 5 o clock, presumably for his cut of the money. Yet there was an adamance to this reminder that felt odd to Ray. It was that moment a bad feeling about this gun deal vaguely introduced itself.
Additionally, before leaving the room Ray had noticed from the window that a small crowd was gathering across the street at the Lorraine Motel parking lot. He had no idea what that was about, and in any case, opted to return to Jim’s Grill for a beer. While ordering his beer at the bar, Ray noticed that a pair of suited men, FBI-looking, were present in the restaurant with another suited man, Jim Jowers, who owned the place.
Now feeling a bit anxious, Ray grabbed his beer and headed to the back end of the grill, hunkering down at a dark corner table by the kitchen. The vantage point of the restaurant this afforded proved to be significant. It allowed Ray to see Hunt walk inside minutes later through the front entrance, wherein he said something to the suited men who then left the building with him.
Totally puzzled by all this, Ray slipped out of the restaurant and returned to the boarding room as planned at five o clock, where, strangely, nobody was present. It was however apparent through the window that the crowd at the Lorraine was growing larger. After ten minutes of waiting and still no sign of Hunt, Ray began to worry something had gone wrong. He then went outside and hopped into his Mustang, merely sitting there parked for a while as he kept an eye out for Hunt and tried to make sense of the situation.
While sitting for almost a half hour, he met eyes at one point with a pedestrian (Peggy Hurley, who would later testify to Ray’s presence at the soon-to-be crime scene). The nature of the look she gave him added to his discomfort, making him want to get on the move. Knowing that a full tank of gas was going to be needed regardless, he proceeded to the nearest station. While fueling up he also inquired with the attendant about getting his tire patched, which was sagging quite low. The attendant agreed to do so but said it would be at least ten minutes before he could begin. Ray conceded, and during the wait, paranoia got the best of him.
In hopes of gaining clarity he walked to a nearby payphone and dialed the number to one of their gun running associates: the godfather of New Orleans, Carlos Marcello. Ray shared his concern over what he had just seen at Jim’s, fearing that maybe Hunt was working with the FBI to bring them all down, or something. In confident reply, Marcello told him there was nothing to worry about, urging Ray to instead get back to the deal ASAP. Ray never did make it back though.
Upon trying, he found that the main road to the boarding house had just been blocked off by police. Furthermore, a caravan of emergency vehicles was on the way. There was no longer a shred of doubt that something had gone terribly wrong. Deciding it best to flee town, Ray turned the car around. He was fixing to head south on the interstate to Atlanta when the music on his radio abruptly stopped.
An announcement was made that Reverend King had just been shot. It occurred minutes ago on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Although Ray was yet unaware he was the designated scapegoat for King’s murder from day one, he now had an inkling of what the “gun deal” was really about. And that awful feeling of being a fugitive returned. Eventually, Ray would make it down to the Atlanta airport and flee to Europe on the fake Canadian passport Hunt had issued him. But in a nutshell, that is as far as his testimony got on that first day of what would become the Gary Revel investigation.
From Gary’s end of the table, what he had just heard from Ray had the ring of truth to it, outlining the rudiments of a black op that frankly seemed beyond anything a man like Ray could fabricate or sustain for long if it wasn’t true. And while he knew that Ray had a history of self-contradicting testimony, it at least made sense now why that would be the case: The scapegoat’s early attempts at trying to convince authorities that there was more to his story, so as to create room for the possibility of having a trial one day, while not wanting to expose Hunt or the higher powers involved, was an impossible position to navigate without causing obfuscation.
Nonetheless, if Ray was now sincere in his commitment to not be hampered by fear, then, Gary decided, he could find it within himself to match the courage and accept the job as special investigator. Over that following year, he would return to Brushy Mountain Prison for a series of tape-recorded interviews collecting over 100 hours of dialogue with Ray. Between visits Gary was on the road tracking down a host of other first-hand witnesses and sources for interview. The investigation’s final product would do far more than just corroborate Ray’s claims; it would yield a high-definition version of the picture Coretta Scott King relayed in her press statement—not only of there being a joint operation between the government and organized crime to kill her husband—but of the very agencies and individuals involved in this unthinkable plot, down to their meticulous long-term and immediate steps taken to murder King and frame Ray as the crazed lone gunman.
Since a book would be required to detail the whole of Gary’s investigation (and is underway accordingly), our focus here will be on just three of these sources besides Ray with whom interviews were conducted, and on some of the telling events surrounding these interviews. The point of commonality to these three sources being that they contributed the most toward piecing together the overview of this picture.
The MetaDream Journal 