As a composite of what was made explicit in the files, of what could be clearly inferred because of the files, and of what Sullivan relayed to Gary personally, the conspirators to President Kennedy’s assassination can be roughly categorized into three layers. On the first and least defined tier, were those who had only to nod in firm agreement with the plot, having it within their combined means to contribute to a well-rounded cover up. While there may never be a full accounting of who all participated in this elusive sense, a good idea of its leading figures will grow clearer as the big picture emerges.
Matters become tangible on the second tier, where FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, in his sly ability to feel things out, led in unifying stakeholders and steering them toward the specifics. In a rare occasion of solidarity between the competing agencies, Hoover would eventually lay the blueprints for Dallas with CIA head of covert operations, Cord Meyer, who mapped out Dealey Plaza as ideal for three triangulated sniper teams. By no means the mastermind, Vice President Johnson was brought into the conversation early by Hoover, his next door neighbor. The giddy Vice President well understood who he would be indebted to once sworn in as puppet-in-chief. In fact, Kennedy had not yet been buried when Johnson signed Memorandum 273, reversing Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam.
As for the mafia on the third tier, they were glad to continue their tradition of doing the CIA’s dirty work. Whereas James Angleton is credited for having brokered the CIA’s relationship with the “Mob’s Accountant” Meyer Lansky, the key liaison for this operation was Heineken owner, Louise Bloomfield, a Canadian CIA agent whose close relationship with the Rockefeller name gave him a global diversity of connections. Bloomfield had already been entertaining hopes for the “big event” for some time with Meyer Lansky. Together Bloomfield and Lansky arranged a Florida meeting of the Italian mafia’s regional godfathers: Sam Giancana (Chicago), Santo Trafficante (Miami), Johnny Roselli (Las Vegas), and Carlos Marcello (New Orleans).
Their formal purpose in meeting was to vote on supporting the “big event,” which they always did on large-scale matters of effect on all. Although the mafiosos remained bitter about the Bay of Pigs, in that Kennedy’s refusal to invade Cuba cost their hopes of reopening casinos on the island, revenge was not the motivating issue here. As mentioned previously, it was about protecting the heroin pipeline being operated in Vietnam with the CIA—an enterprise grossing 30 billion dollars a year.
As such, the mafia’s vote to join the plot was unanimous. It was then their responsibility to contract the very best underworld assassins to comprise one of the triangulated sniper teams. Any prospects had to be untraceable to the Italian Mafia and skilled with a rifle but versatile enough for contingencies if things didn’t go as planned. E. Howard Hunt would coordinate the details of their Dallas activity and assigned positions. Santo Trafficante ended up hiring Lucien Sarti, a Corsican assassin who, dressed in a police uniform, delivered the fatal shot from behind the grassy knoll’s picket fence.
After the assassination, mafia hitmen also came in handy for the clean-up of liabilities and witnesses. The most important being the scapegoat himself, Lee Harvey Oswald. The lot of silencing him fell to Jack Ruby, a CIA-mafia affiliate known publicly as the owner the Dallas strip club, Carousal. In fact, Ruby was a front man for the strip club’s real owner, Carlos Marcello, who ordered Ruby to shoot Oswald in plain view of the news cameras lest Ruby receive a slow and painful death of his own.
The silencing of Oswald in this rapid way made things much easier on Bill Sullivan. As chief of domestic intelligence, his job in this was to lead the Bureau’s official investigation of the patsy and doctor it to the “lone nut” narrative. As on other occasions this involved collaboration with his CIA counterpart, James Angleton, who helped airbrush away the CIA ties from Oswald’s background. Once the two had their narrative on Oswald in order, they rehearsed it for answers they would be called upon to give the Warren Commission.
Not that the Warren Commission—formed to conduct the official investigation of the president’s murder—was anything to fret about. Appointed by President Johnson one week after the assassination, its majority of members had strong ties to the FBI or CIA, not to mention its two most influential ones: Allen Welsh Dulles himself, and John J. McCloy, the former U.S. High Commissioner to Germany. Not coincidentally, both of these men were known for their adversarial relationship with the slain 35th president, and while this wasn’t great for the conspirators in terms of public optics, the pros of having these guys on board far outweighed the cons.
Both Dulles and McCloy, you see, had been pioneering figureheads of the Psychological Strategy Board, a Cold War think tank formed in 1951 which gave rise to the CIA’s umbrella of psychological warfare programs including Mockingbird and MK Ultra.
Likewise, both Dulles and McCloy were among those instrumental in the recruitment of Nazi war criminals for shaping these programs. The best of the dirty tricks cultivated therein for mass thought-control would be recycled for consumption by the American public through the Warren Commission. This included the PSB re-invention of “buzzwords”— concepts that when repeated by charismatic personalities become mainstreamed as true or proper without regard for logical thinking. And so it came to pass that the CIA, in wishing to protect the Warren Report’s long-term credibility, gave birth to “conspiracy theory,” weaponizing the term to insinuate nutty thinking dangerous to one’s career and social acceptance.
“The artistry when you think about it is unbelievable,” Sullivan commented in a reflective moment at the pub. “If anybody questions it, they’re made to feel like idiots or nut cases, or if they seem too logical or get too close, they accidentally die, like William Sartor.”
At this point in their dialogue, Gary and Sullivan were not far along relative to the full ground they would cover that evening. There was no need to discuss JFK’s assassination at length because, as Sullivan was able to see for himself, Gary had done his homework of learning the files. What of it they did talk about, though, brought something into richer perspective for Gary like only a face to face dialogue could: Namely, that the gas lighting and deception fed to the public was but a taste of the disinformation culture which permeated the intel community within from top down. Make no mistake, Dulles and Hoover were conmen of the highest order, not unlike cult leaders who seemed to swallow their own lies.
Just after the Bay of Pigs, Dulles sent an all-station cable to CIA personnel offering his account of why the operation failed, getting his own house in line with the narrative before feeding it through the Mockingbird pipeline. Its main idea, although dressed as always in subtle language, was that a victory in Cuba would have been secured had the White House adhered to the course originally planned by the CIA. It was one in a series of messages pushed through the Washington echo chamber inculcating this idea that the free world hung delicately in the balance from total collapse to communism, and this, because of President Kennedy’s “lack of determination to succeed” in Cuba or Vietnam.
At the end of the day, therefore, one did not have to altogether lack a moral compass to support the conspiracy to kill him. In Bill Sullivan’s position at the FBI in 1963, it was enough to tell one’s self that a “greater good” for national security was being served. The immense pressure to jump aboard this fast-moving train of narrative control—rather than stand fatally in its way—made Sullivan’s choice simpler yet. And once aboard, the will power to get off wasn’t going to come naturally any time soon.
The Alert and Knowledgeable Citizen
Given the FBI-CIA-Mafia entanglement referred to as “the system,” going after major crime rings was not a real option for the Bureau’s Director. The Mob’s Accountant Meyer Lansky kept explicit photos of Hoover on the receiving end of a sexual act with his FBI partner Clyde Tolson as blackmail ammunition. The photos were believed to have been originally taken by the CIA during one of the couple’s crossdressing extravaganzas and then given as copies to Lansky ensuring that Hoover would never betray either of them. But who had time for a petty feud with the mafia anyway?
The real enemy to be concerned about, everyone agreed, was communism, and the real domestic threat in this regard—Hoover and the CIA led themselves to believe—was the man they gave the derogatory nickname, “Zorro.” Its meaning for King with reference to the fictional hero was double, alluding to his being a voice for the working class and something of a lady’s man. In both respects the Hoover FBI created misleading dossiers, mischaracterizing his social reform ideologies as communistic, and embellishing his extramarital affairs in language nuanced to imply more deviant perversions. The dossiers were then held over King’s head as black mail ammunition to keep him under control as a potential insurgent threat. Here again the man across the table from Gary at the Nashville pub would be the one to know.
Throughout the 1960s, Sullivan led COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious spying and propaganda arm known as the “department of dirty tricks.” It was his job “to discredit and harass targeted groups and individuals by any means available, including wiretaps and forged documents and worse. King was a prime target.” In fact Sullivan was the one who sent the tape recordings of King’s extramarital activity to Mrs. King in 1964. The mail included an anonymous letter written in the voice of a disappointed admirer who threatened to expose King publicly as a “fraud,” suggesting in no unclear terms that it would be better of King to commit suicide than to witness his legacy’s plunge into darkness.
However, in spite of the anxiety it caused him, being threatened with a smear campaign had an effect on King in the long run that his oppressors did not intend.
As best explained by King himself to a confidante, even the fear of exposure for his moral failings had to be mined for redemptive value rather than be allowed to control him: It reinforced the need to lead in a manner which reproduced and empowered independent thinkers such that the movement generated its own life apart from whether his individual popularity suffered a deadly blow. Time would tell whether the Nobel Prize Winner would hold to this philosophy of servant leadership over accolades. Nevertheless, his having to reconcile such matters added to an already diverse portfolio of objects lessons in psychological and information warfare.
Having a heightened filter for propaganda, King understood better than anyone come 1967 that even the truly reported facts from the media had to be considered in light of one’s political agenda for airing them. The war on communism, for example, was no doubt real, but by February of that year, King was growing more troubled that the war in Vietnam wasn’t concerned with the “fight for freedom” as propagated. Why was it, truly, that America’s young black and white men were being sent abroad to kill and die at each other’s side when they hadn’t the freedom to live by each other’s side in peace at home?
From his perspective it was the sort of question a civil rights leader with a non-politicked worldview ought to appreciate. Yet for a time he had refrained from engaging the Vietnam War publicly, heeding advice from external voices—including those from the news media—that it wasn’t his place. At the same time, a growing internal voice had been suggesting otherwise, bringing to mind images of troubled German citizens at the dawn of Nazi Germany who didn’t break their silence in time to avoid holocaust and world war. Like a fire being bottled up in his bones, so consuming was this inner conflict that King set aside two months of retreat just to settle it.
It was during that period he read The Children of Vietnam, the Ramparts Magazine article that would move him to tears and prove the tipping point to his life’s next chapter. Capturing his thoughts on paper, he concluded, “Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam.” As for those who would question the wisdom of this decision, “they seem to forget that before I was a civil rights leader, I answered a call, and when God speaks, who can but prophesy?… I decided then that I was going to tell the truth [about the war] as God revealed it to me… no matter how many people disagreed.”
Although those precise words never made it to the final draft, they were the foundation to Beyond Vietnam, his Riverside sermon delivered April 4, 1967—one year to the day before being assassinated. In it, King used unvarnished language to describe the war as a fraudulent “demonic suction tube of human lives and skills,” and “my own government” as the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. He then took matters a dangerous step further, claiming that the rise of communism was a consequence of America’s failure to authenticate its own democracy. Not only so, but the military interference of America’s ruling class in other nations was motivated by their “immense profits of overseas investments,” making it impossible for the people of other lands to authenticate their own democracy through “peaceful revolution.” As a prime example he even cited Guatemala.
On top of all this, he began his sermon with the observation “that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.” And he ended the sermon with a self-admonishment, saying that “the cross is something that you may bear and ultimately that you die on. The cross may mean the death of your popularity… the death of your bridge to the White House… the death of a foundation grant… that is the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now” (italics mine).
In other words, the proven social reformer had just made a major announcement to the world: That from then on, his activism would be solely focused on leading a grassroots movement to demand that the world’s most powerful government withdraw from a fraudulent war. Although there was no question of who the underdog would be in this upstream battle, King made no apologies of his conviction that the Creator “of all God’s children” had called and equipped him for this hour of publicly confronting the forces behind the military industrial complex (later naming them a “corrupt regime stacked against the poor,” and elsewhere, the “Goliath” of the day). Nothing—not even the fear of a smear campaign—was about to stop him. And Sullivan, who knew his subject quite well after years of spying on him, could see where this was going.
Operation Zorro
Theoretically, the option of conducting a smear campaign to silence the dissenter was still on the table. At this stage in the game, however, the risk of going this route would pronounce itself clearly in the days following Beyond Vietnam—when 168 newspapers blasted King for his sermon, and still, he was found standing, determined to stay the course with his controversial anti-war message. Against such bravery, combined with a proven ability to help people see past their dogmatically conditioned beliefs, there was no countermove in any psychological warfare handbook.
At this point the only solution for being rid of King would have to come from the CIA’s assassination manual, and the FBI director himself wasted no time contacting his constituents to coordinate plans. Within a week or two Hoover had Clyde Tolson wire $25,000 to Missouri State Penitentiary’s warden to buy his cooperation for the “escape” of their designated scapegoat, James Earl Ray. This first step of their plan succeeded on April 23, 1967. The mystery men who would introduce themselves as “Raoul” then tracked Ray down at the Montreal bar in July.
Both the files and dialogue with Sullivan confirmed for Gary Ray’s admission of the Raouls being E. Howard Hunt and Lucien Sarti. As a matter of primary importance to this scapegoating process, also known in black operations as “sheep dipping,” Hunt gave Ray a travel itinerary for delivering drugs and guns that adequately shadowed King’s itinerary to various cities. This made Ray appear as a stalker relishing his opportunity to strike. Even so, the plans to frame him of course experienced a last minute complication. Picking up on the fact that something had gone south with the alleged “gun deal” in Memphis that day, Ray wound up fleeing to Europe on one of the fake passports Hunt had issued him, which in turn presented another big problem for the conspirators.
By June of 1968, “Memphis was a powder keg,” as Sullivan described it to Gary. “We had to catch Ray before the city erupted, but he couldn’t be caught before Bobby Kennedy was out of the way. He was the only person knowledgeable enough to crack the conspiracy.”
In fact, the New York Senator was well on course to do just that. As the Democratic Party’s hopeful nominee, RFK’s hopes for the White House included plans to reopen an investigation of his brother’s death and to finish what his brother started—of withdrawing the United States from Vietnam. Furthermore, he already suspected that King’s assassination was correlated to his brother’s. The minute they had Ray in custody, RFK would have had eyes all over the situation. By all accounts, plans would have to be made for his assassination, too. With this accomplished on June 6 at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel, the conspirators had a clear runway for Ray’s arrest, which they did two days later.
As with JFK’s assassination, Sullivan and Gary did not spend much time on the details of RFK’s assassination. Due to particular sensitivities on this subject, the author has agreed not to go further into it except to point out what is already been well established by published sources: that all evidence suggests a second gunmen was present in the hotel kitchen and shot the senator in the head from behind, while the alleged assassin, Sihran Sihran, was so discombobulated in his hypnotic state that several of his shots fired at point blank range missed entirely.
Instead, what remained of Gary and Sullivan’s time together was focused on two subjects. One, was the break-down of details on King’s assassination, i.e. which of Hunt’s team members fired the fatal shot, from where, how each made his get-away, and eye witness testimony in this regard. (The author has agreed to exclude these details as arrangements are underway for their disclosure through other means.) Second, was the plan moving forward about what was to be done with this information, and in hand with this, the question Gary had been waiting to ask: About why, if Sullivan was part of the conspiracy, was he now supporting an investigation from the shadows?
The MetaDream Journal 