Prologue

On April 4, 1967—exactly a year to the day before his Memphis assassination—Martin Luther King Jr. took to the podium in Riverside, New York in delivery of the historic sermon, Beyond Vietnam. This event inaugurated his ministry’s new-found determination to lead a grassroots movement exposing the Vietnam War as a fraudulent “demonic, destructive suction tube” of human skills and resources which could better apply to programs of social uplift. In it, he made the provocative claim that there was something artificial to America’s democracy.

Elaborating on this, King suggested that the rise of Communism worldwide essentially owed itself to this departure of America’s leadership in modeling democratic integrity. He pointed to those places beyond Vietnam, where historical pattern was beginning to suggest that wherever there was U.S. military intervention, an ulterior financial motive was at play from America’s ruling class. The war on Communism, he implied, was being used a cover in justification of a “malady deep within America’s spirit” not unrelated to that “root cause” of racial segregation he had described at Selma:

“The threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishing of a segregated society. They segregated Southern money from the poor whites; they segregated Southern churches from Christianity; they segregated Southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. We have come a long way since that travesty of justice was perpetrated upon the American mind.”

If it isn’t already obvious, King was expressing belief here that such divisions in the United States were socially engineered. Although nuanced as always in his choice of words, he was nonetheless drawing attention to a high cabal who had the level of banking power to gradually subvert America’s democracy where it matters the most: at the base of the collective mind and popular opinion. And as we will see throughout this book, King was well aware that this elitist “They” of whom he spoke at Selma was the same “corrupt regime stacked against the poor” that he would be focused upon exposing the final year of his life. Of course, if any such claims were made by a grassroots activist today, he or she would be unanimously condemned by media pundits for espousing far-fetched “conspiracy theory.” 

Only, this commonly weaponized buzz term had not yet become a thing that early in 1967. Strangely however, the 1967 CIA memo titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” which proposed the circulation and weaponization of “conspiracy theory” as a suppressant to pro-conspiratorial views of the Kennedy assassination, was being prepared around the same time King was drafting Beyond Vietnam. Yet the fact that this buzz term was unavailable as a propaganda tool did not stop the media from making a unified strike on King. 

In the days following the sermon, as if marching to the same set of talking points, 168 newspapers nationwide fell into place along the echo chamber and blasted his dissent of the war as “unpatriotic.” Scolded for having veered from his lane of civil rights into foreign policy matters of which he was not qualified to speak, the relatively warm treatment from the press the Nobel Peace Prize winner had long enjoyed would never be recovered. But King, being a molder of consensus rather than a seeker of it, had braced himself for this crucifixion of his popularity.

The sermon’s rough draft indicates that he had just emerged from a two month prayer retreat in which he was resolved to seek divine guidance on whether being outspoken against the war was the right battle for him to pick. Not only did he emerge with the firm conclusion that Heaven had spoken, but refreshed in a determination to “speak the truth only as God revealed it to me…no matter how many people disagreed with me.” In his actual sermon, he conveyed this sense of divine leading in more subtle language, suggesting that the insights gleaned from his civil rights journey were in sovereign preparation for this hour of confrontation with the “world’s greatest purveyor of violence: my own government.” And although King’s legacy is radiant with history’s praise, a moment of self-honesty is in order: How would today’s listener have responded to his claim of prophetic commissioning?

Next to the taboo that has since become of conspiratorial belief, what is more regarded with suspicion if not hostility by the modern ethos if not one’s presumption to speak for God? Even within mainstream Christianity this sort of thing tends to automate harsh skepticism instead of a remotely open-minded response. Yet hear from God Martin Luther King Jr. apparently did. Although arguably the establishment’s most articulate and dangerous critic, fond of quoting that “truth crushed to earth will rise again,” even King could not have humanly known the extent to which our nation’s buried history would one day rise to the surface of public light over 50 years after his death to vindicate the precision of his claims regarding all the above, and this, on levels we can only appreciate now that the truth of his assassination is coming to light.

You see, it was just in recent years that Gary Revel (now 70 years of age) decided that it was time, as well as safe for everyone concerned, to share his story with the world. At the initiative of Jack Kershaw, attorney to convicted assassin James Earl Ray, Gary was hired in 1976 to conduct a special investigation into leads of Operation Zorro, the codenamed high-level plot to murder King and frame Ray as the scapegoat. The trove of first-hand information Gary came away with after concluding the investigation two years later was ultimately blocked from entering the House Select Committee on Assassinations. It would remain suppressed from the public domain altogether for decades to come, and for reasons that will become self-explanatory, his findings were also kept from the 1999 Assassination Conspiracy Trial held in Memphis after Ray’s 1998 death.

In 2018, however, Gary authorized me to document and share this exclusive report in a journalistic capacity for the first time. What began as the writing of an article turned into a book as more layers of suppressed history continued to be unraveled by critical questions and trails of evidence. And to be clear, I engaged this story because upon being introduced to it, I first of all realized that Gary’s claims, if true, were not anything that could appropriately be labeled “conspiracy theory.” His findings constitute a tightly-laced tapestry of first-hand testimony and sources which are either true or fabricated in the nature of their details, but nothing in between whereby a body of speculative ideas or loose-fitting correlations paint a theoretical kind of picture. As I set out to corroborate the story, consulting other sources who were originally involved in some intimate way, I came to appreciate not only the truthfulness of his story, but its unique value as something of a long-missing puzzle piece which converges a high-definition picture of America’s buried history. 

As a result, I can now make sense of the senseless world we otherwise find ourselves in today. I even have an idea of where to begin in solving our ongoing problems of social and political divisions at a root level. And grandiose though such a claim must sound, I am confident that by the end of this book, the reader will have been equipped with a historical framework to soberly decide whether these words amount to embellishment, or to understatement. But the choice to proceed with an open mind must be entirely yours.

Patrick Wood