MLK assassination
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The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 is one of three killings covered by the 1992 statute mandating the release of federal assassination records, alongside the JFK and RFK assassinations. John Kiriakou treats it as the case where the official account is weakest on its own terms.

From assumption to conclusion

Kiriakou says he began from the conventional view, "I always believed that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King", and then decided that "if I'm going to have an opinion it needs to be an educated opinion," reading everything he could get his hands on. His conclusion was that if Ray fired the shot, he was, to borrow Lee Harvey Oswald's word, a patsy.

The case against Ray as lone gunman

The argument Kiriakou makes is one of plausibility rather than forensics. Ray was a man with a well-documented lifelong drinking problem, drunk, in Kiriakou's description, all the time. The vantage point was a run-down flophouse boarding house a full block from the Lorraine Motel, where the rooms had no bathrooms and a single shared bathroom stood at the end of the hall; that bathroom had a long narrow window in the shower with a view of the motel.

His summary of what the official account requires: "we're supposed to believe that this drunk guy with a 40-year-old rifle sat in a public bathroom all day long, nobody ever noticed him, and then he hits the perfect shot from a block away."

The FBI suicide letter

Kiriakou couples the implausibility argument with what he calls a matter of 100 per cent established fact: that two years before the killing the FBI tried to induce King to take his own life, sending him an anonymous letter purporting to come from an African-American man opposed to him, telling him he was a disgrace to Black people and should do the only honourable thing. By all accounts, Kiriakou says, King laughed it off, as he did the accompanying threat to tell his wife he had been unfaithful, common knowledge, in King's own reported reply.

Kiriakou stops short of asserting Bureau responsibility, framing it as an open question that the hatred of King inside the FBI in the 1960s makes reasonable to ask: "perhaps they did it, perhaps they set him up, perhaps they worked with James Earl Ray, we don't know." Elsewhere he has stated the stronger version, that he believes the FBI rather than Ray alone killed King.

Why classified at all

Kiriakou's sharpest question about the withheld files is not what they contain but why they exist as secrets. King held no elected office, no security clearance, and no access to classified information, "he's a preacher and a civil rights leader, so why would that case be classified in the first place?" His general principle: "if this is a criminal act, nothing should be classified."

A childhood memory of the manhunt

Kiriakou recalls being eight or nine and watching the news coverage of James Earl Ray's escape from prison with his parents, and being shocked by the Americans being interviewed who said they hoped Ray would come to their house so they could hide him, "he's a hero." His parents, he says, were appalled.

The agents at the Lorraine Motel

Kiriakou draws attention to how the documentary MLK/FBI closes: "you can't see their faces, but you hear their voices. These are the voices of two of the FBI agents who were involved in the surveillance of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where he was assassinated ... these FBI agents are saying that they were doing the surveillance that night and saw the whole thing unfold."

He notes one editorial choice he could not account for: "they interviewed Jim Comey, which made no sense to me."

What King's own circle believed

Kiriakou cites Andrew Young, "a lieutenant of Martin Luther King," later mayor of Atlanta and US ambassador to the United Nations, "a giant in his own right", and others around King who "said that they never believed that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. They believed that it was the FBI, or somebody working for the FBI."

On Ray he records the sequence without adjudicating it: arrested at Heathrow Airport in London "with a false Canadian passport, actually with two false Canadian passports, trying to get to Brussels. He was on the run. He at first confessed to killing King, but then later said that he was a dupe and that he didn't have anything to do with it." A great many people, including national African-American leaders and members of King's family, believe Ray was innocent.

Asked directly whether the bureau sat silently by while King was killed, Kiriakou did not hedge: "Oh, I think I think they did actually."

See also

- Martin Luther King Jr.
- RFK assassination
- JFK assassination
- John Kiriakou
