The CIA is nothing, if not shameless.
Fifty three years ago, the agency with the help of the FBI and local police, was spying on Martin Luther King as he passed through Miami. The agency wanted to know more about one of his associates said to be “a member of the Communist party.” They were especially interested in who spent the night in his hotel room.
(You can read all about it in King’s partially declassified CIA file, which has been authenticated and made available by the Mary Ferrell Foundation.)
Today the agency’s social media propagandists tweeted about King, without apology or shame.
The co-optation of Martin Luther King’s “life and legacy” by people who hated him when he was alive and feared his legacy is an old story.
In 1966, King’s radical critique of American racism and militarism was seen by President Johnson, CIA director Richard Helms, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as a national security threat. So the CIA sought dirt by spying on him.
History Censored
What makes the agency’s praise today propagandistic is the fact that CIA is still hiding the details of its surveillance of King and of its investigation of his assassination.
Of the 48 pages in the CIA file obtained by congressional investigators in the 1970s, 13 are completely redacted. They are completely white. The file has literally been whitewashed. More than 50 years later, the CIA still doesn’t want you know why they spied on King or what they learned after his assassination.
Tweet from Langley Translated: “We honor Dr. King but please don’t ask us any questions about our interest in him at the time of his death.”
Whitewash
The agency’s entire King file was supposed to be released on October 26, 2017, but President Trump caved in to pressure from the CIA and postponed the release of the rest of the King file and thousands of other JFK assassination files until at least 2021.
This week, Martin Luther King III, and other family members and 50 other people called for a re-opening of the investigation of King’s death, citing the government’s continuing cover-up.
The CIA’s MLK file is Exhibit A in the continuing cover-up.
