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Even as world leaders milk the idea of "2020 vision" for a brighter future into a cliche, there is profound irony to the fact of Martin Luther King Jr. Day falling this year on January 20, 2020. It is as though the "arc of the moral universe" which King talked about looks to weigh in on the dialogue for those with ears to hear. But with what message, exactly?
It is a question worth planting in mind even if the reader is not so mystically inclined, and even before its context takes richer shape through this article’s topic. You see, of the many over-stressed hard working Americans who will rightfully enjoy a break from labor or school on this holiday, most would be surprised to learn about what the reformer's 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 after twelve jurors heard four weeks of testimony from over 70 witnesses in what is known as the Conspiracy Assassination Trial—a civil trial conducted in Memphis, Tennessee. The verdict affirmed that the convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, was not the shooter, but had been framed as such by the true culprits of King’s assassination: a cohort of mafia, state, local, and federal agencies. And yet, in response to Mrs. King's weighty 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 largely pivoted on the testimony of James Earl Ray and Lloyd Jowers, both of whom had a history of making contradictory statements on their own involvement in the assassination (or lack thereof) and on that of other individuals. Thus, what little media coverage all this did receive conveyed the sense that the truth was obfuscated beyond remedy, and that even if there was a conspiracy, the specifics were to remain indiscernible.
If indeed this was once true based on available information and leads, it is no longer.
At 70 years old, with a medical condition that does not 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 pioneer and first chief counsel of the HSCA, or House Select Committee on Assassinations. The wealth of what he uncovered was blocked from ever making it to the committee.
But before digging into this man’s extraordinary story, there are a couple layers to America's buried history of covert warfare that must be fresh in mind if not introduced to the reader for the first time. Apart from which, there is no framework to fluidly navigate past certain aspects of Gary’s journey, or to appreciating why—over 50 years after King’s assassination—he is just now breaking silence, having granted permission for this exclusive report to an obscure small-town journalist.
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 as he wined and dined 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. They included but were not limited to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, and The Copley Press. (And it is here worth noting that the owner of that last one, James Copley, offered his inter-American organization to be the CIA’s “eyes and ears” against the “Communist threat” in Latin and Central America.)
"From the outset," Bernstein points out, "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 executive or publisher 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; one can choose to believe 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 propaganda or self-serving motives. But the facts of the 20th century as we now have them reveal a much darker story around Mockingbird, and around the covert operations with which this program worked in close concert. A specific example which will also prove significant to the backdrop of King's assassination concerns the CIA's 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's duly elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. (FOOTNOTE: Most of the summary that follows this subject derives from David Talbot’s 2015 biography on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard).
Recognized by historians as the "Kennedys of Guatemala," Jacobo and Maria Arbenz were a wealthy couple who were as popular with the nation’s indigenous and impoverished class as they were detested by the aristocracy. Maria majored in art at a southern California college, and although born into a privileged family from El Salvador, had always felt strongly about the colonial wealth that had been 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 prioritize the redemptive purpose of uplifting the indigenous working class out from their feudalistic and oppressive conditions.
However, the land reforms which Arbenz signed into law to that 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 actors had deep ties. At first the threat was nothing serious, or so Allen Dulles believed—nothing that couldn’t be solved with a two million dollar bribe to the Guatemalan president. But to the CIA director's great surprise and disappointment—a combination that never failed to invoke his full wrath—the bribe was declined. Arbenz had long decided that under his presidency Guatemala was no longer going to be for sale to imperial interests. So the Dulles brothers combined their foreign policy weight to concoct PBSUCCESS, the coded-named 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 posed a clear and present danger to Latin America as a communist threat, enabling President Eisenhower to sign off. Executing it then entailed the recruitment of Castillo Armas, an embittered Guatemalan colonel living 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 backs of money than their president. Although the coup was a largely "wet works" affair at the hands of CIA 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 that is 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 getting started. “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 commanding the official story, the CIA director pulled on whatever strings he needed to prevent objective reporters from traveling to Guatemala. “New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was extremely accomodating 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 screen ‘with a great deal more care than usual.’ ”
Such were the necessary measures for what would come next. 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 rounded up in jail with the added treatment of torture. And at the helm of all this, leading much of SUCCESS from the start, was the CIA’s proven star among their Latin America station chiefs, E. Howard Hunt.
“What we wanted to do,” Hunt later admitted 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.” (As we will continue to find in unraveling layers, this psychological warfare tactic was unfortunatel not the only gem gleaned from Nazi Germany).
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 they even hoaxed a failed attack from Arbenz’s troops heard by listeners as shots being fired in the background. In truth, the team was bunkered at the CIA’s station south of Miami, and their objective was to convince the people of Guatemala that Arbenz had lost control of his military, which, in effect, became increasingly true.
From the start, Hunt had established strict orders that Arbenz and his family must be allowed to leave 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 get to voice his side of the story.
In Paris, the exiled leader’s attempt to hold a press conference was countered by French authorities who threatened to deport his family unless it was 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 to fall out of favor with 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 shared the block with E. Howard Hunt, who had just been made Uruguay’s new CIA chief. 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 waking up each day or going to bed at night to the scene of black cars in front of his residence. Evidently, his stalkers found this kind of long-term narrative maintenance worthwhile, if not addicting.
For as we will find in the coming pages, SUCCESS was not merely a shameful incident recovered from among the bones of America’s closeted history. For the likes of the Dulles brothers, Hunt, and the initiates who would refine their Oz-like wizardy, the Guatemala coup was a rough template of operations past and future. The speciality of this template lay in toppling servant leaders and replacing them with those who could be puppeteered by America’s ruling class. Yet especially where this involved the craft of subverting democracy where it counts—in shaping the “popular” narrative or a convincing projection thereof—it was indeed un-American at best. It was a beast of untamable genetics, fated to turn on the land and way of life it purportedly kept safe.
Meeting James Earl Ray
It was winter of 1976, and when Gary Revel was offered a job to investigate leads of a conspiracy in the death of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, his first inclination was to turn it down.
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 was offered by Jack Kershaw, legal counsel to King’s convicted assassin, James Earl Ray. This idea of a ‘conspiracy’ in Gary’s mind smacked of a desperate push on Kershaw’s part to get his client off the hook, and Gary, a great admirer of King’s, would have no part in that.
But then he learned from Kershaw that Percy Foreman—a close friend to President Lyndon Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Texas Oil Tycoon, H.L Hunt—was 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 long before the event.
On April 23, 1967, he escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary with help from an outside source. That source then tracked him down at a Montreal bar in July taking the form of two men—Raoul One and Raoul Two. They helped themselves to a seat at Ray’s table as he was alone having a beer. By each introducing himself as “Raoul,” the emphasis was on maintaining invisibility. Leaving no trace to one’s identity or presence was paramount in the new life Ray was about to begin. Equipped with cash, a set of fake IDs, and a pale yellow Mustang, Ray began this new life on the road, driving from one city to another delivering packages and guns under Raoul One’s direction.
(It is important to note that shortly into describing all this, Ray arrived at the feeling that he could trust Gary, and took the unprecedented step of fingering the Raouls by their actual names; Raoul One as the CIA covert specialist himself, E. Howard Hunt, and Raoul Two as Lucien Sarti, the Corsican assassin from 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 [over the last nine years]," Ray warned. "If what I tell you now gets out, I'm dead meat.")
Be that as it may, all was business as usual for Ray come that afternoon of April 4, 1968.
He had just come 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 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 with the Remington when Hunt walked in shortly after, announcing that the buyers would be arriving in a few minutes. Bargaining with this crew of Central Americans, Hunt claimed, would go smoother if Ray was not present for the deal. In urging Ray to go elsewhere for a while and relax, Hunt was adamant to remind that he return to the room by 5 o clock, presumably to come back for the gun and receive his cut of the money. Yet there was an adamance to this reminder that to Ray seemed uncharacteristic, and that's when a bad feeling about this whole 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 at the bar, Ray noticed that a pair of suited men, FBI-looking, were present there 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 this gave of the restaurant proved to be significant. It allowed Ray to see Hunt walk inside minutes later through the front entrance, where he said something to the suited men who in turn exited 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. Oddly though, nobody was present there. 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 there 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 nervousness and made 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 had been sagging quite low. The attendant agreed to patch it 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 very godfather of New Orleans, Carlos Marcello. Ray shared his concern over what he had just seen at Jim’s Grill, 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 instead to get back to the boarding room for 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 cops. Furthermore, a caravan of emergency vehicles was on the way. There was no longer a shred of doubt now 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, he now had an inkling of what the “gun deal” was really about. That awful feeling of being a fugitive was back.
Operation Zorro
While Gary had yet to confirm his gut feeling that Ray was being truthful, he decided to take the job. Over that next year he would return often to Brushy Mountain for a routine series of tape-recorded interviews with Ray. Between visits he would track down a host of other first-hand sources for interview and ended up with a collection of leaked FBI documents. The result of all this was a comprehensive picture of “Zorro,” which was Hoover’s codename for the operation to silence King—and his growing case against the Vietnam War—by any means necessary.
While the bulk of this story’s details are in reserve for a developing book, their day of public disclosure may come first to the big screen. A completed screenplay based on the true events of MLK: The Gary Revel Story has recently come into the hands of a production team that secured the story rights. Before then, Gary Revel now 70 years old did not feel it was time to share his story with the world.
However, permission has been granted here to follow up on the aspect of Gary’s journey with regard to this unique fact of his survival. The Kennedy and King assassinations were notorious for the suspicious deaths of witnesses or investigators who evidently learned too much. In fact, the gas station attendant who patched Ray’s tire that night, Willie Green, was among them.
Once Ray was arrested in England and charged for King’s murder—two months after the assassination—Green recognized Ray on television and remembered being with him at the time of the assassination. He knew there was no way Ray could have done it and said so to the Scimitar Press, a local Memphis paper which printed his story at a seemingly great cost. Green was found stabbed to death behind the gas station’s counter soon thereafter. Of interest at the crime scene was the open cash register still loaded with money, which the assailant neglected to loot.
So indeed, how does one come out of this investigation alive?
Help from the Shadows
At an early point in the investigation, Gary was on his way to meet with a source for interview when he spotted a black Sedan in the rear view mirror. Spotting it again on a separate trip, he had to start wondering if he was being followed or being paranoid. But on the day he visited the isolated country home of Ed Reddit—who was forcibly pulled from his duty of providing King’s security the day of the assassination—the guessing ended. A pair of agents sat parked in a Sedan front of Reddit’s home long enough to make sure they were seen.
Efforts to deter Gary's quest for the truth would only intensify from that day forward. Things got especially ugly after an interview with John McFerren, which invited a pair of Carlos Marcello’s hitmen onto Gary’s trail. By all means he would have wound up dead were it not for the timely intervention of an extraordinary source.
At first, that source introduced himself as “Cousin Billy,” a bearded hobo whose distinguishing features were further hidden by a large round-top hat and pair of aviator sunglasses. Still, something about this stranger’s manner of speech and discretion in reaching out about the investigation was compelling enough. Gary followed his instruction to meet up in the recesses of an abandoned hospital. Any doubt of this being the right move lifted after the stranger plopped a manila envelope onto a desk in the dim lighting of a kerosene lamp. It yielded a cache of FBI files each rubber stamped with the Bureau’s top secret seal. Not a word redacted.
Now as a man rooted in the biblical worldview, Gary could have well left that hour-long meeting wondering if he had just been met by an angel. In addition to some much needed advice on how these files could be used as “life insurance” against Marcello, they provided material evidence of an already strong picture that was developing around Zorro. What’s more, Cousin Billy didn’t miss a beat in answering key unresolved questions that had been troubling Gary. For example, regarding the mafia involvement—what did they gain from the death of a civil rights leader?
According to Billy, the Vietnam War was huge business for more than just arms manufacturers and other components of the MIC (military industrial complex). Billions of dollars in heroin were being trafficked from Saigon by the Italian Mafia in league with rogue CIA elements. The U.S. warships in the South China Sea were even part of the pipeline. Thus, when King began to publicly question the narrative on America's military presence in Southeast Asia, appealing to logic and the pursuit of clarity over regurgitated hippie slogans, multiple stakeholders were made nervous.
Indeed, the stranger seemed to know juts how this systemic corruption worked in uncanny detail, yet as time would certainly tell, he was no angel.