Documents / FOIA release

FOIA on Martin Luther King

Central Intelligence Agency · 2025-06-12 · 295 pages · text by GLM-OCR

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.

  • p. 133 …In all fairly recent reports on cessation for Anderson Layer, in the letter's Chicago with…
  • p. 154 …Kennedy, Anderson, S.C.1 Droke House, 1969. Booker, Simeon. "Now JPK Surpassed Abraham Lincoln." Ebony…
  • p. 218 …needed to protect them from each other (Anderson, "Sam Hall"; Cole, The Funco File; Dick, Vulcan…
  • p. 219 …large numbers of people. ## Bibliography ## Fiction 1. Anderson, Poul. "Sam Hall". Astounding Science Fiction. September 1953…
  • p. 222 …Wiswesser The Differences in Two Strains of Corn / Edgar Anderson The Six Blind Men of Nepal…
  • p. 234 was Intertel that ITT hired in 1972 to snoop on columnist Jack Anderson. The latest and…
  • p. 235 …In 1962 Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson wrote that "Chotiner ... besides representing the top gangster of…
  • p. 236 …Jack Anderson documents, for example, that as early as 1960, then Vice-President Nixon and Attorney…

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ation aid, it has not been validated for historical research. Even though familiar with the machine believe to be used in this way, my project first attempt to do so.

easier to demonstrate with the PSE speaker is telling the truth than to is lying. Stress can be caused by other than deception; but the abf stress is an extremely reliable on of truthfulness. Of course, the e of stress does not prove that a int is true, only that the speaker it to be true.

hoggin I found a great deal of stress summary of the assassination tapes. single instance can I say that the in was lying. I point this out not only act myself from line suits but be am not morally certain any one indi as not taking the truth.

netheless, stress in the testimony witnesses to the same event makesematical probability overwhelming least some of them were lying.

points could not be better illushan they were by the Jim Garlay Shaw Affair.

son, it may be recalled, was the New District Attorney who, in 1967, I to have solved the Kennedy assas-. He presented an elaborate case a local businessman. Clay Shaw, ers. as members of an assassination acy. In one of the hour-long proCBS interviewed Garrison, Shaw, other people involved in Garrison's ons.

interview, Garrison was hostile and make many firm, factual statements test with the PSE. However, he did there's no question about it [that he how the assassination had been car] . . . we know the key individuals I . . . there is no question about the conspirators] were there [in Dealy " The PSE showed good to hard in each of these statements. I also oncontroversial statement of Garis a control: "Oswald was not killed t the movie theater where he was I," and found no stress. Garrison's ents about his case against Clayrongly indicated deception.

ran some statements by Clay Shaw his involvement in such a conspir d denying ever knowing or meeting rvey Oswald. I also ran a control nt. Shaw turned out to be heavily throughout.

was not particularly surprising. The had been accused of conspiring to the President of the United States is being interviewed about it before on cameras. He would have to have pretty cool customer not to show stress. even if he were telling the truth.

ing that both Garrison and Shaw stress was not an encouraging

valid evidence linking Shaw to the assassination and then, in the time-honored tradition of prosecutors, invented the rest of his case. But Shaw's stress could easily be the result of his predicament, and Garrison's might also be the result of some outside issue. The situation was ambiguous.

I ran the testimony of Lee Odom. Odom, a Dallas businessman, was attempting to explain the mysterious coincidence of the post office box numbers. It seems that the Dallas post office box number 11906 appeared in the notebooks of both Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald. In his testimony. Odom stated that he could not account for the number appearing in Oswald's notebook, he knew how it got into Shaw's. It was Odom's box number, and he had given it to Shaw, whom he'd met by chance on a business trip to New Orleans. The PSE showed hard stress during his statement. No unrelated control statement was available for me to run for comparison.

This didn't really clear things up. There were several obvious alternative explanations for Odom's stress. For example, there

Deception is not proved by stress, but given enough witnesses' testimony, the PSE is able to arrive at the truth

had been a number of rather unsavory allegations in the press about Clay Shaw, unrelated to the Garrison charges. Odom may have felt extremely uncomfortable about linking himself to this man in anyway. The coincidence of the box numbers seemed very suspicious, but Bob Smith of the Committee had pointed out to me that both Shaw's and Oswald's notebooks were filled with numbers, so the chance of such a coincidence was not that remote.

At this point I began to wonder if the television camera was the "outside issue" in every case. Perhaps just being on television will so thoroughly rattle the average person that, lying or not, he is going to show stress on the PSE. I checked this out by recording and charting a number of people on television programs—public officials, men in the street, even witnesses to a particularly gruesome accident. There was occasional stress, but it never reached the high level I was finding in the assassination tapes.

and-so" with an accuracy of better than 94 percent. The problem obviously was not the television camera.

I also recalled something else which put my mind to rest on this point: the PSE had been used to analyze the statements of con-

I ran the testimony of William Gurvich on the PSE. Gurvich had been Garrison's chief aide in the investigation of Clay Shaw until he resigned, charging Garrison with wrongdoing. He said. "The truth as I see it is that Mr. Shaw should never have been arrested." He was asked if Garrison had known of certain illegal and unethical methods Gurvich had alleged were being used by Garrison's staff. He answered, "Yeah, of course he did. He ordered it." There was no stress in Mr. Gurvich's statements. The PSE showed that he believed what he was saying.

Obviously I did not have enough testimony from a large enough number of witnesses to create a detailed picture of the Garrison-Shaw affair, but it seems probable that, at the very least. Garrison did not have much of a case against Shaw (a view later held by a New Orleans jury) and likely that Shaw was completely innocent of complicity in the assassination. The lesson of this episode is twofold. First, stress in any one person's testimony does not prove deception. Second, given enough testimony by different witnesses, the PSE can arrive at the truth.

The first person I ran on the PSE who had any direct knowledge of the assassination was Oswald's widow, Marina. Unfortunately, only one of her statements was on the CBS tapes—that Oswald had owned a rifle. The PSE said she was telling the truth.

The rifle had been one of the major points of controversy raised by critics of the Warren Report. The debate centered on two points: whether the Mannlicher-Carcano alleged to have belonged to Oswald was the rifle found by the Dallas police in the Texas School Book Depository, and whether that particular gun could have been the murder weapon.

On the tapes, Darrell C. Tomlinson, an employee of Parkland Hospital, testified that he had found a rifle bullet on a strefcher which he believed had carried Governor Connally. There was no stress in his statement. The PSE said he was telling the truth.

Dr. Joseph D. Nicol, Superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation for the State of Illinois. ran ballistic tests on bullet fragments found in the presidential limousine, and on the intact bullet found by Tomlinson. Nicol testified that both the intact bullet and the bullet fragments had been fired by the Mannlicher-Carcano. He. too. was apparently telling the truth.

Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman of the Dallas police claimed that he found Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. However, on the day of the assassination, he had told the press that the rifle he'd found was a German Mauser. The following day he signed an affidavit to that effect. But on the CBS tapes he testified that he had been mistaken about that point, that it had really

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About this file

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.