Documents / FOIA release

FOIA on Martin Luther King

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

51. 51.51.51

14 MAY 1968

TO : Director Federal Bureau of Investigation Attention: S. J. Papich

الن

FROM : Deputy Director for Plans

SUBJECT: Assassination of Martin Luther King

Mr. Obstruction

1. On 3 May 1968, an official Italian Intelligence Service provided this Agency's representative in Rome with the following information on one James RAY:

A James RAY, born in Los Angeles on 8 March 1928 (father's name Oliver), arrived at San Gimignano, Siena, in March 1955 and registered as a student at Perugia. In 1956, RAY was confined at San Gimignano Hospital and in 1957, he was in Sant'Antonio de Fiesole Hospital. These confinements were for "osteomyelitical condition causing bone depression in the cranium, on right parietal temple region." RAY returned permanently to the United States in December 1967.

2. The Italian National Police and the Italian Intelligence Service have turned up no other information thus far. -All Italian entry posts have RAY and his aliases on their watchlist.

3. The Federal Bureau of Investigation representative in Rome was advised of the information in paragraphs 1 and 2 above.

CSCI 316/01763-68

Jane 10.75

REC-23 44 38861 3515

This c5c1 was treated as doc 4250 in initial review.

EX 109 MAY 16 1968

59 MAY 2012 T26C

GROUP 1

Excluded from minimum

downtime

declare

71. 16

Not linked to a story yet.

About this file

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.