ASSASSINATIONS PROBE SHOULD BE JUNKED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81M00980R000600210003-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 8, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: September 9, 1978
• Content Type: NSPR

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I`~r L 7:t r~: ncD
HUMAN EVENTS
9 September 1978
Lane Peddles Conspiracy Nonsense
U
As-sassit-nations Probe Should B.e J'nke(
When James Earl Ray, who is serving 99 years
in prison for killing Martin Luther King, appeared
before the House Assassinations Committee in
mid-August, television viewers may have noticed he
was accompanied by a bearded attorney called
Mark Lane.
The teaming up of Ray and Lane is hardly a ma-
_ jor surprise, since Ray has been singing Lane's tune
that U.S. intelligence agencies may have been in-
volved in the King slaying. Lane has always been
attracted to the bizarre, including the idee.fixe of
many U.S. radical., that the F111 and the CIA are
repeatedly bumping off prominent Americans such
as President Kennedy and King. Indeed, Lane's
vigorous propagation of this view was instrumental
in bringing into existence the assassinations panel,
which this week resumes its investigation of the
deaths of these two .men.
Lane has been riding high as an assassinations
buff and revisionist "historian. Until recently, he
has been operating from what the Washington Post
has described as "the toniest area of Capitol
Hill...."
His Rush to Judgment-Lane's version of the
Kennedy slaying-made the best-seller list, and
Code Name "Zorro"-a fanciful tract on King's
murder-has reportedly done well. Lane and writer
Donald Freed also wrote a fictionalized novel on
JFK's murder titled Executive Action, which was
turned into a film grossing $15 million. Lane gets
$1,000 to $1,750 for his anti-Establishment lecture
performances, and his Citizens - Commission of
Inquiry takes in money by selling his book on the
Kennedy murder and bumper stickers asking "Who
Killed Kennedy?" Lane insists he hasn't seen much
of the money, and that his lecture fees are poured
back into his Citizens Commission, which, in fact,
triggered the congressional assassinations probe.
Lane's cast of mind has delighted the left. Within
one month of the Kennedy assassination, for in-
stance. Lane had turned out a 10,000-word brief in
which he argued that Lee Harvey Oswald was the
victim of a massive frameup. The piece was pub-
lished in the National Guardian, a New York week-
ly described by the House Committee on Un-
American Activities as a "virtual official propa-
ganda arm of the Soviet Union." In 1964, the
National Guardian sponsored a Lane speaking
tour, in which he called for a re-opening of the
Kennedy slaying.
Lane's leftism is long standing. From 1948 to
1952, he was a member of the American Labor
party, cited by the Senate Internal Security sub-
committee as a Communist party front. In the early
1950s, Lane served on the board of directors of the
New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild,
cited in 1950 by the HCUA as the "foremost legal
bulwark of the Communist party." In the 1960s
Lane spoke in defense of the Castro government
before the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee
(also labeled a CP front by the HCUA), addressed
several meetings of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs (a
youth organization conceived by the Communist
party), and made anti-war speeches before rallies
sponsored by the Trotskyite Socialist Workers
party.
A Reuter's press dispatch of April 6,. 1964, re-
ported that Lane appeared before the Congress.of
the International 'Association of Democratic Law-
yers in Budapest-also a Communist front-urging
the creation of an international commission to
-probe-Kennedy's-denth:-if.aite;has confiitucd_hii
links with the left up until the present time.
The reason for Lane's popularity on the left
is simple: he has been a major propagandist
against the U.S. intelligence community.
While reputable writers and journalists believe
that Oswald, for instance, may not have been work-
ing alone as the Warren Commission concluded,
few would deny that Oswald was the murderer or
that he was a committed Marxist. Lane, however,
said in a February 1967 Playboy interview that
"... there is no convincing evidence that Oswald
fired a gun ... on the day of the assassination."
Moreover, he has tried to pin the blame for JFK's
death directly on the CIA. In an interview with the
East Village Other in New York on July 9, 1969,
Lane was quoted as saying: "I do know that the
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CIA killed John Kennedy." In an article he wrote
for the Los Angeles Free Press on Aug. 7, 1970, he
bluntly asserted the "CIA killed JFK" to keep the
war going. He reiterates the theme in the October
1978 issue of Hustler in an article titled: "The As-
sassination of President John F. Kennedy. How. the
CIA Set Up Oswald."
A master of innuendo, he has suggested that the
FBI, the Dallas police department and even Presi-
dent Johnson were involved in the Kennedy assas-
sination. He accused LBJ of being "responsible for
the fact that the crucial material evidence... have
[sic] either disappeared or been left to the tender
mercies of the FBI," as if the FBI had no business
investigating what the law required them.to. While
saying he personally believed Johnson had nothing
to do with the killing, Lane, nevertheless, certainly
suggests thatt'hose who think LBJ was involved
have made a ver v.,,persuasive case.
While the major`. culprit in JFK's death is the
CIA, King, in Lane's fevered imagination, was al-
most certainly felled by t:he FBI. There is no evi-
dence of this either, of cowrse. But Lane and
"comedian" Dick Gregory co-;authored a book in
1977 called Code Name "ZoriOP't which tries to
build a case against the FBI. Indeerj, the cover of
the pocketbook features these words't om a New
York Post review: "Makes a Powerful Case for As-
sassination by the FBI." Lane also libeled the
bureau as "prime suspects" in the killing %;Y nn he
was hawking his book in the Nation's Capitali1 last
year.
Unfortunately for Lane, however, the assass'i na-
tions panel, now looking into his charges, held
hearings that boomeranged badly on the parcel's
creator. In the Zorro book, for instance, Vane
(pages 356 and 357 of the pocketbook edition) Ie-
ports on his interview with Dean Cowden, "a lon'g_
time resident of Memphis and a professional invest-
ment counselor dealing in commodities.".
While the prosecution says that Ray shot King
from the bathroom of the rooming house he had
rented in Memphis, Cowden informed Lane that, he
had spotted Ray; in a Texaco service station aflhe
very_ time Ray was supposed to have been in-the:
bathroom. He said he recognized Ray from
_the_pictures_ in-the newspapers...Before the assas-
sinations panel two weeks ago, however, Cowden
admitted he had conned Lane as a favor to Renfro
Hays, a private investigator who, Cowden claimed,
was trying to sell rights to information about the
King murder. When the story was told to Lane,
said Cowden,' he "went.: for it hook, line and
sinker." Cowden, who says he wasn't even in
Memphis the day of King's murder. added that
Lane never even queried him to make sure the story
was correct.
So far as the FBI having anything to do with
King's death, the Carter Administration's Justice
Department-hardly a bastion of right-wing c on-
servatism-issued a report last year clearin.19 that
agency of any wrongdoing in the King casez.
After an eight-month probe that tyik investi-
gators to more than a dozen citiesilq involved in-
terviews with 40 persons and included the review
of more than 200,000 docriinents, the report
concluded that the FBI ty' obe was "thorough
and honest." And wheeas Lane argues that
Ray is innocent an h others were involved, the
department conchtuies that "... the sum of all
the evidence ol* Ray's guilt points to him so ex-
clusively that 'it most effectively makes the point
that no o else was involved."
Perhaps someone else was involved, but there
can be nfu legitimate question that Ray is guilty. He
admitte i buying the murder weapon, his finger-
print--sdwere on the weapon, he rented the rooming
house and, when faced with a possible death sen-
tence, pleaded guilty (only to change his story after
he w-,~c certain he would escape execution).
In n interview with Playboy in September 1977,
Rayi again protested his innocence, even agreeing
to p?;:rmit Playboy-which seemed potentially sym-
patkietic to his "I didn't shoot King" routine-to
strap him to a lie detector. Playboy hired Douglas
Wicklander, a polygraph expert with John E. Reid.
& Associates, a highly respected firm in Chicago
which has instructed federal and state agencies in
the use of lie detectors. John Reid co-authored with
Fred Inbau, the former director of the Chicago
Crime Laboratory, a classic book on the use of
polygraphs, Truth and Deception, the Polygraph
Lie Detector Technique. But the polygraph back-
fired on Ray. Ray, for instance, was asked the fol-
lowing questions:
Q: Did you kill Martin Luther King Jr.?
Ray: No.
Q: Did you fire the shot that killed-Martin Lu-
ther King Jr.?
Ray: No.
Q: Do you know for sure who killed Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.?
Ray: No.
After reading the polygraph, Wicklander, Reid
and Joseph Buckley gave. Playboy the following
conclusion: "It is the opinion of the examiner,
based on this subject's polygraph records, that he is
not telling the truth on the previously listed ques-
tions."
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But when Ray said "No" when asked if he ar-
ranged King's death with someone else, the poly-
graph experts said he was telling the truth.
,In other words, the evidence is overwhelming
that Lane, whose initial charges on the Kennedy
and King assassinations spurred the congressional
probe into being, has based his "case" or "cases"
on nothing but left-wing fantasies. So why doesn't
the committee close up shop rather than waste
more of the taxpayers' money? The panel has al-
ready gone through $4 million and wants $750,000
more from the House Administration Committee.
To our way of thinking, Rep. Bob Bauman (R.-
Md.) was right when he called for the shutting down,
of the assassinations panel close to a year and a half
ago.
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