Malcolm X: Evidence of US Intelligence Assassination

[Paul Rigby]

Note how the CIA ensures it gets to the victim promptly to check the success (or otherwise) of the hit:

Malcolm X: Evidence of US Intelligence Assassination

BY JOHN POTASH/Rock Creek Free Press

http://redactednews.blogspot.com/2011/01...olm-x.html

With February celebrated as Black History Month, the life and death of black leader Malcolm X, aka El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, deserves a new examination. Malcolm X died from assassins' bullets on February 21, 1965, at the age of 39. By that time, Malcolm X had started a nonreligious activist group that worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and collaborated with African presidents. His legacy inspired many activist organizations. US Intelligence used tactics and personnel to target Malcolm similar to those they used against MLK and the Black Panthers. Closer scrutiny of Malcolm X's life leading up to his murder supports the conclusion that US Intelligence orchestrated his assassination.

An FBI memorandum of March 4, 1968, among other documents, confirm that US Intelligence considered Malcolm X the top threat to the wealthiest white power structure. It discussed the "long range goals" including: "Prevent the rise of a messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.

Malcolm X might have been such a messiah'; … Martin Luther King, Stokely Charmichael and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this… [particularly] King… should he abandon his supposed obedience' to white liberal doctrines' (nonviolence)."

Malcolm X's radical activist evolution started with his father, Earle Little. Working as a preacher, Little led a Lansing, Michigan chapter of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA gained widespread appeal in the 1920s and '30s, reaching a million members amongst northern US blacks.

Garvey originally started his UNIA with its black pride activism in his birth country of Kingston, Jamaica before re-starting it in Harlem. Garvey's life appeared to reflect the effect of government oppression of many black leaders and groups to come after him. He first supported socialists and anti colonialists worldwide. He had a successful international shipping company that helped distribute his Negro World newspaper to the Caribbean and Africa, where other UNIA chapters started. When both British and US Intelligence officials (including emerging FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover) took action against him, he tried on a more conservative, capitalist but nationalist stance that he hoped would allow him to get back into the US. In spite of this moderation of his position, Garvey was shot, imprisoned, deported and exiled for his activist work.

Malcolm X was born in 1925 and grew up in Lansing, MI. The town's segregationist and racist rules included banning blacks from East Lansing after dark. When leaders, such as Earl Little, tried to organize for change, racist whites threatened them. For example, Lansing's Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, threatened Little and then burned his house down in 1929.

In 1931, when Malcolm was 6, his father was found dead with a crushed skull and his body almost cut in half, reportedly due to being laid on street car tracks and run over by a street car. Malcolm's mother, Louise Little, paid for the funeral through a small insurance policy. A larger company wouldn't pay on Little's life insurance because they called it a suicide.

Malcolm rose to a position of influence within the Nation of Islam (NOI), becoming the group's national spokesman. From the late '50s on, Malcolm X's leadership of the New York NOI mosque helped him meet with third world revolutionaries and African leaders in the New York-based United Nations. The FBI began their surveillance file on him early in the 1950s, agents were writing as many as several reports a week on Malcolm X and his influence over blacks.

The CIA grew concerned about Malcolm's influence with these leaders. African leaders soon embraced Malcolm X and had him take part in their political decisions. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, European nations had invaded and forcibly taken Africa's riches of oil, diamonds and other minerals until independence movements drove the European colonizers out.

After WWII devastated most European countries, the chances for African independence movements to gain control of their countries were expedited and US corporations needed to gain control of African wealth through more subtle means. Malcolm's input about racism in the US threatened to sabotage multinational corporations' hundred million-dollar deals. Malcolm X criticized America's capitalist system for exploiting people in general, but he believed that its historical racism kept people of color particularly disadvantaged. With a huge media presence, he expressed his ideas to large forums. However, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad disagreed with Malcolm's leftist political activism. Muhammad restricted Malcolm's political leading Malcolm to split with the NOI in 1964.

African leaders helped fund Malcolm's travels; and he started a new activist group in '64, which he named the Organization of Afro- American Unity (OAAU) in connection with the Organization of African Unity (OAU). African presidents had invited Malcolm as the only American in their OAU meetings because they recognized him as the leader of black American interests.

While Malcolm X maintained his position of militant self-defense, he also began directly collaborating with Martin Luther King's group and other civil rights movement leaders. For example, Malcolm mentored Revolutionary Action Movement leader Maxwell Stamford. Malcolm also supported equality for women, saying that the non-equality of African women in African organizations hindered the liberation movement. Deviating from the stereotype of Muslims, Malcolm said he wanted to practice equality and give women more of a leadership roll in his OAAU.

Undercover police agent infiltrator Gene Roberts joined the OAAU at its inception and rose to the leadership ranks of its Harlem-based security force. Roberts worked for the New York Police department's Bureau of Special Services (BOSS). The FBI directed BOSS actions as part of its Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) National Security Act of 1947, CIA superiors supervised this entire domestic US Intelligence apparatus.

US Intelligence had made several attempts on Malcolm's life early in his development. In1958, New York detectives shot up Malcolm X's office, for the city settled with Malcolm in a $24 million lawsuit. FBI undercover agent, John X Ali, who infiltrated the Nation Of Islam plan since he was living with Malcolm at the time. Agent John X Ali also reportedly played a part in orchestrating the firebombing of national secretary assignment, one of the highest leadership positions in the NOI. NOI leader Elijah Muhammad's son, Wallace Muhammad, said several FBI undercover agents in the NOI national staff helped Ali make that rise, as also attested to by FBI documents.

Malcolm X believed that US Intelligence also set up his near-fatal poisoning in Cairo, Egypt in late July of 1964. He said CIA agents made their presence obvious to intimidate him as he traveled through Africa. They didn't want him to present his planned United Nations proposal, with African leaders, to declare that the US was violating American blacks' human rights.

At a Cairo restaurant, Malcolm said that just as he felt the poison in his food, he recognized the waiter as someone he had seen in New York. Rushed to the hospital, he was barely saved by a stomach pumping. The attending doctor said there was poison in his food. Malcolm had been concerned about NOI death threats, but he knew they didn't have a global spy capacity.

Several other disclosures support Malcolm's belief that this was a CIA attempt on his life. A high level African diplomat later said that the French Counter-Espionage Department reported that the CIA planned Malcolm's murder, and France barred Malcolm for the first time in fear of getting scapegoated for the assassination. The FBI Director wrote a confidential memo on Malcolm's travel plans through Britain and France. He sent it to the CIA Director, the Army Intelligence (Intel) chief, the Naval Intel Director, and the Air Force Counterintel chief, as well as Intel chiefs in London and Paris. One such memorandum on Malcolm and African leaders went directly to the CIA director of covert action, Richard Helms, who had a key role in assassination plots.

FBI and police action on the day of Malcolm X's assassination, February 21, 1965, confirms their role in it. An FBI document mentions that [undercover agent] John Ali met with Talmadge Hayer (a.k.a. Thomas Hagan), one of the gunmen that shot Malcolm X, the night before the assassination. Hotel information on Ali's stay in New York those days supports this. At the Audubon Ballroom hall where MalcolmX gave his last speech, uniformed police left the area. At every other speech by Malcolm, uniformed officers were present inside and outside the halls.

Gene Roberts' revealed his undercover police agent status at a trial against the Black Panthers in 1971. Roberts had followed members of Malcolm X's OAAU as they started the New York Panther chapter. Under cross examination at the trial, Roberts said he was the first to arrive at Malcolm's body and he "proceeded to give Malcolm X mouth-to-mouth resuscitation." But Roberts revealed more, in interviews decades later, which suggests that his real role was to check Malcolm X's vital signs to confirm the assassination's success. Roberts described the actions of his wife, Joan Roberts, who was with him at the event. When Malcolm X was shot, Malcolm's wife Betty Shabazz first tried to cover her daughters and screamed, "They're killing my husband!" When the shooting stopped, Shabazz, a nurse, went to run to her husband, but Joan Roberts grabbed her. Shabazz struggled to get free, threw Roberts into a wall and ran to Malcolm. Gene Roberts said he was there checking Malcolm's pulse. He turned to Shabazz and said Malcolm was dead.

Roberts admission bore even more importance due to its historical parallels. Martin Luther King's family attorney, William Pepper, extensively documented revelations on the role of undercover infiltrator, Military Intelligence agent Marrell McCullough in Martin Luther King's assassination. McCullough disclosed how he raced to and knelt over Martin Luther King as he lay bleeding from the fatal shooting. Pepper noted that McCollough was "apparently checking him for life signs," making sure the assassination was successful and signaling to Military Intelligence that "the army snipers there as backup shooters [weren't needed as]…the contract shooter [hadn't]… failed to kill King." They then communicated to the Special Force Group snipers, who were waiting for their shooting orders, that they could disengage.

Police officials' admissions and later events supported the malevolent roles of the Roberts. Without Gene Roberts' disclosure at a trial six years later, no one would have known he worked undercover for the BOSS police intelligence unit. New York's Herald Tribune also said a "high police official" confirmed that several undercover BOSS agents were in the Ballroom audience at the assassination of Malcolm X.

Police and media's cover-up actions were extensive. For example, New York's Herald Tribune and The New York Times reported that, just after the shooting of Malcolm, police the crowd only grabbed one person, without acknowledging their earlier account. The New York Times later edition dropped the second suspect from its subheading, but still quoted patrolman Thomas Hoy who said that, while one subject was grabbed by Malcolm's supporters, he grabbed a second suspect being chased by some people. Hoy further said, "the crowd began beating me and the suspect" in the Ballroom. In the following days, no mention was made of the second suspect in the mass of media's accounts.

The media also largely ignored the circumstances around the death of Malcolm's close ally, Leon 4X Ameer. Mainstream media alleged that he died of an overdose of sleeping pills fewer than twenty days after Malcolm's assassination. This happened just after Leon 4X announced plans to produce tapes and documents proving that the government was responsible for Malcolm X's assassination. Soon after Malcolm's murder, a partially deleted FBI memo noted the CIA's desire to get rid of Malcolm. The memo also offered a key motive. It said a Life Magazine reporter agreed with a source that the reporter should "check out Washington and the CIA because they wanted Malcolm out of the way because he snafued' African relations for the US", risking deals worth vast amounts of money for top American corporations.

This article was adapted from a chapter of John Potash's book: The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders: US Intelligence's Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcolm, Panthers, Hendrix Marley Rappers and Linked Ethnic Leftists. http://www.fbiwarontupac.com

[Paul Rigby]

Malcolm X assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case

Despite Freedom of Information requests throughout the years, New York still will not release records to the public and claim files would endanger the safety of police officers and constitute unwarranted invasions of privacy

Garrett Felber
Saturday 21 February 2015 18.43 GMT

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/...estigation

Fifty years on, questions surrounding Malcolm X's assassination still contribute to the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust between law enforcement and the black community. And while the murders of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Emmett Till have all been re-examined through federal intervention, Malcolm X's assassination remains a blindspot in US jurisprudence and historical memory.

Malcolm X was a dangerous man. Not dangerous as the widely circulated image of him holding a rifle and peeking through the curtains in his home would suggest. Nor because he disagreed with the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement and its assertion that racial integration was the primary objective of the black freedom struggle. By challenging integration as a primary goal, Malcolm X threatened to undermine the tenuous support that mainstream civil rights leaders were receiving from the government and white liberals. For many white people, Malcolm and the Nation of Islam embodied their greatest fears.

As the public face of the National of Islam, he confronted racism well beyond the confines of southern segregation. He worked tirelessly to denounce America as a damaging imperialist and neo-colonialist system. "Just as a chicken cannot produce a duck egg", he charged, "the system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American." And with his characteristic wit, he added that if it did, "you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken."

By 1963, Malcolm had been suspended from the NOI for calling President Kennedy's assassination a case of "chickens coming home to roost." The rift deepened after Malcolm revealed that the group's leader, Elijah Muhammad, had fathered children out-of-wedlock with NOI secretaries. This public feud combined with competing political visions to cause deep divisions within the Muslim community. Malcolm formed two independent groups in 1964: the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI). A year later, he prepared to release a new political program which would have likely included voter registration drives, local organizing against police brutality, and a call for the United Nations to denounce American racial practices as human rights violations. He was gunned down on the very day he was set to unveil it.

A cast of co-conspirators

When Malcolm X was killed at the Audubon Ballroom on 21 February 1965, a man named Talmadge Hayer (now named Mujahid Abdul Halim) was pulled from the scene of the crime. Yet some witnesses claimed a second figure was also taken into custody by the police.

The late Herman Ferguson, a founding member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (the OAAU, founded by Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam), recalled a police car which pulled up alongside the ballroom and brought out a man with an "olive complexion ... obviously in great pain." Ferguson, thinking that the injured man was one of "our guys," watched as the squad car sped away and over the Hudson River. The Associated Press also reported the day after the assassination that "two men were taken into custody."

In the following days, the NYPD also arrested two other members of the Nation of Islam's Mosque 7 in Harlem: Norman 3X Butler (Muhammad Abd Al-Aziz) and Thomas 15X Johnson (Khalil Islam). Both men, as well as key witnesses who knew them, denied they were at the ballroom that day. Hayer also testified at the end of the 1966 trial that the two men had not been involved. But he refused to name any other accomplices, and all three received life sentences.

A decade into his incarceration, Hayer came forward with new information, identifying four co-conspirators. He signed an affidavit offering the names and addresses of these men, along with a detailed timeline of their plot. With the help of the self-described "radical attorney" William Kunstler, Butler and Johnson appealed their convictions.

Hayer named William Bradley, a NOI member called Willie X, as the man who fired the fatal shotgun blast, adding that Bradley was "known as a stick-up man." The petition noted that Bradley was "upon information and belief presently incarcerated in the Essex County Jail, Caldwell, New Jersey." Kunstler added that he did not know of "any comparable case in American jurisprudential history" in which an accomplice had described a crime in such detail without a thorough reinvestigation. Yet, judge Harold Rothwax rejected a motion to reopen the case.

Bradley (who now goes by Al-Mustafa Shabazz) is living in Newark. Earlier this week, The New York Daily News published an interview with him in which he rejected the claims. "It's an accusation," he said. "They never spoke to me. They just accused me of something I didn't do."

The investigation was botched'

In the weeks following Malcolm's assassination, the organizations he created after his falling out with the Nation of Islam struggled without his leadership, and his friends and comrades attempted to make sense of their loss. Most of his followers had witnessed the murder, and the dangerous climate and mistrust of the aftermath drove some underground for decades.

On 6 March 1965, members gathered for the weekly Saturday class at the OAAU's Liberation School. That meeting had been lost to history until recently, when a detailed account reveal its contents. In 2011, the personal papers of James Campbell, housed at the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, were made available to the general public.

Campbell is an educator and civil rights activist who founded the Liberation School along with OAAU member Herman Ferguson in 1964. His papers include handwritten notes taken by the late Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama. The meeting, the notes explain, was held "to establish stability from this crisis." And the notes contain an unexpected piece of information. Kochiyama's scrawl at the bottom of the 6 March meeting reads:

Ray Woods is said to have been seen also running out of Audubon; was one of two picked up by police. Was the second person running out.'

The notes appear to substantiate the accounts of Herman Ferguson and the AP of a "second man" taken into police custody. That a name should resurface 50 years later is remarkable. But more significant is that the "Ray Woods" named in the note was likely Raymond A Wood, an undercover New York City police officer with the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSSI).

Wood began his career by infiltrating the Bronx Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter under the name Ray Woodall in 1964. There, he posed as a 27 year-old graduate of Manhattan College studying law at Fordham. He was soon named CORE's housing chairman and oversaw a voter registration project.

Wood earned his activist bonafides by getting arrested with two others at city hall while attempting a citizen's arrest of mayor Wagner for allowing racial discrimination on a public construction project. Feminist Susan Brownmiller, a fellow CORE activist at the time, recalled that if "CORE had placed an advertisement in the Amsterdam News describing what it was looking for, Woodall would have fit the bill."

By 1965, "Woodall" had been reassigned under his real name to infiltrate a group calling itself the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). He was credited with foiling a bomb plot by the BLM that allegedly targeted the Statue of Liberty and other national monuments, just a week before Malcolm X's assassination. One of the four arrested in the plot was Walter Bowe, who also co-chaired the cultural committee in Malcolm's OAAU. Wood's close association with an OAAU member makes it likely that others within the organization would also have known and recognized him.

Wood was promoted to detective second grade for making the arrests in the BLM case. And although his name and a photo of the back of his head circulated throughout the press in the week leading up to Malcolm X's assassination, the NYPD reported that he was put back to work because his "face is still a secret."

There is no question that the police were keeping close tabs on Malcolm X in the period prior to his assassination. Tony Bouza, a former BOSSI detective and lieutenant from 1957 to 1965, explains that the NYPD, and not the FBI, was the primary agency conducting this surveillance. Gene Roberts a man known affectionately within the OAAU as "Brother Gene" and photographed trying in vain to resuscitate Malcolm X at the assassination was later confirmed as an undercover agent.

Bouza argues that the NYPD failed to take basic and minimal steps to protect a prominent public figure from a threat that was widely believed to be imminent. And he is harshly critical of its subsequent failure to disclose all that it knew about the assassination of Malcolm X. "The investigation was botched," he said, and a "parallel tragedy lies in the NYPD's obvious stonewalling of any release of records."

But Bouza also insists that Wood had nothing to do with the case, and there are other reasons to doubt this latest eyewitness account placing Ray Wood at the Audubon. Such reports are unreliable, even those recorded shortly after the assassination. Accounts of what happened at the Audubon Ballroom that day are also conflicting. One OAAU member named Willie Harris was interviewed by the NYPD while being treated at a medical center after a stray bullet hit him at the ballroom. Harris claims he sought help from a police officer who then took him to the hospital. Is it possible that the unnamed witness mistook Harris for Ray Wood? Finally, there is the question of why BOSSI would send an undercover agent back into a place where he might be recognized after his name had been in the press.

The simplest way to resolve these questions would be for the NYPD to release its surveillance files and disclose what Ray Wood, Gene Roberts, and its other undercover officers reported in the years surrounding the assassination. But the department has repeatedly refused to release them.

My attempts with professor Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University in 2008-2009 to access BOSSI files through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ended in a full denial. In denying the requests, the department's legal bureau cited a number of Public Officers Laws, claiming that the files would endanger the safety of officers and constitute unwarranted invasions of privacy. A more recent FOIA request this year produced some materials relating to the assassination case, but only documents that were already publicly available at the New York Municipal Archives. The release did not include any files related to BOSSI's surveillance.

The most obvious avenue for reopening the investigation into Malcolm X's assassination is the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. In 2011, the Justice Department responded to calls to reopen the case with the statement that "the matter does not implicate federal interests sufficient to necessitate the use of scarce federal investigative resources into a matter for which there can be no federal criminal prosecution." The Till Act, however, was specifically crafted to render these objections moot. It allocates $10m annually for such investigations, and requires the Justice Department to work in concert with local law enforcement to implement state law.

Janis McDonald, who co-directs the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University College of Law, told me that rulings such as this ignore "the intent of Congress when the Emmett Till Act was enacted." Its implementation, she said, "has been a failed promise to the families of those who were killed and a disregard of the congressional intent to preserve the integrity of the law for everyone. This Act has never been a priority for the Department of Justice." It is set to expire in 2017 if not renewed by Congress.

According to Paula Johnson, co-director of the Syracuse Cold Case Justice Initiative, the "purpose of the Emmett Till Act is to fully investigate and resolve just such killings." The account placing Ray Wood at the scene, she said, "warrants further investigation into the knowledge or role of law enforcement in Malcolm X's death."

Until Malcolm X's assassination case is reopened and surveillance files are made fully available, the injustice to one of America's boldest civil rights figure continues, while one or more of his killers may roam free.

As the case turns 50 this week, the NYPD and other surveillance agencies must make their records public. It is time to for a new investigation into the assassination of this civil rights leader that will lay to rest the lingering questions about the case, and ensure that all those involved have been brought to justice.

Garrett Felber is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. He was Senior Research Advisor at the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University and is co-author of The Portable Malcolm X Reader with Manning Marable.