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.
“Hill”18 pages
# SECRET 5. Beards and long hair prevailed, and others stood out like a sore thumb. There was not a single Negro in the audience, nor, that morning, on the platform. Even the speaker who spoke on the case of Martin Luther King was white. 6. Not all the speakers preannounced were present. The chairman announced the absence of Richard Sprague. Another speaker, a lawyer from Los Angeles whose name was drowned out in the noise, was also absent. They were replaced by Dr. Robert Forman and someone whose name sounded like "Ed Kirkley". 7. The chairman announced that all the speeches would be tape recorded for subsequent publication. He further invited the audience to attend movies to be shown that night. One of these, "Burn", was to be shown at the University. Others by prearrangement would be shown at local movie theaters. The latter were connected with the Kennedy assassination. The case of the President's murder was in the center of the conference and, as noted by one of the organizers (Smith), one half of the speakers were to center their attention upon the Oswald case. 8. The chairman adhered strictly to the program and every speaker mentioned in the program for the morning session of November 23 spoke as specified. Of those who spoke, Norman Mailer, Robert P. Smith and Ronald Van Doren deserve particular attention. Their speeches in summary are reviewed below. 9. A table at the back of the audience presented recommended literature. The books included H. Weissberg's Whitewash and Peter Noyes' Legacy of Doubt. For some reason there was a copy of one paper only, that of George O'Toole's "Assassination Tapes". There was also a bibliography of political assassination; the foreword to which lists the persons most actively collaborating with the Committee.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 295 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.