Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency FOIA release, dated 2025-06-12, collects 1976 CIA paperwork on Harold Weisberg's request (76-F-382) for records on Martin Luther King, Jr. It includes routing slips, an Operations Staff memorandum listing releasable press items and exempt cables, dispatches and memoranda, and a CI Staff reply citing a 1968 Office of Security memo on Coretta Scott King. It also contains a 16 May 1968 memo to the FBI reporting that Gerald Lee Richards, investigated in Japan, did not resemble suspect James Earl Ray.
“Headquarters”11 pages
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inform me of this as soon as possible. I would also request that you indicate what standards, if any, you have established for determining whether or not a request for waiver should be granted. You state that you can proceed no further with Mr. Weisberg's request "unless and until we are in receipt of notarized statements of release from Mrs. Coretta King and James Earl Ray, respectively." Because Mr. Weisberg's request undoubtedly comprises records which do not involve any proper claim of privacy, this cannot be true. I do enclose, however, a copy of a notarized waiver by James Earl Ray. I will immediately contact Mrs. King about a waiver by her. In the meantime, I request that you proceed to make available those records responsive to Mr. Weisberg's request which do not involve any proper claim of invasion of privacy. Sincerely yours, James H. Lesar James H. Lesar
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 295 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.