THE ON-GOING COVER-UP

March 24, 1998: CBS News' 48 HOURS broadcasts "Orders To Kill," a scathing attack on Dr. William F. Pepper, for eighteen years the attorney of James Earl Ray. In 1995, Pepper had released his book by that name, and it is his assertion that his client, James Earl Ray, was a patsy, manipulated to cover-up the real events surrounding Dr. King's death. A hit team, Pepper claims, murdered Dr. King at the request of the Intelligence Agencies of the Federal government. On camera, in his Memphis hotel room only days before, Dr. Pepper is notified of the arrest of his new witness.

(The witness, James Cooper Green, was actually a participant on that bloody day thirty years before. As with most domestic Intelligence operations Jim's job, to murder James Earl Ray after 5:00 p.m. on April 4th, was to be performed on a "need to know" basis. Jim Green was not to be privy to the day's full operations, only his part. He would not learn that Dr. King was killed until he watched the news at ten o' clock that night.)

Jim Green never talks to the 48 HOURS team. After arriving in Memphis in March of 1998 for the specific purpose of going on camera, he is arrested under suspicious circumstances by the DEA and held for ten days on flimsy charges that would later be dropped, long after the CBS team has left town. The DEA report of Jim's arrest describes Task Force surveillance of a room near his in the Memphis Holiday Inn Express. A "possible methamphetamine lab" is operating out of room 165. Seemingly without reason, the DEA runs a check on the Florida plates of the truck owned by the guests in room 163, James and Linda Green. The investigation report states "…registration on the Florida plate came back James (redacted) Green…". As with nearly all of the Federal Government's involvement in this case, a seemingly routine document is a lie. The Green's truck was registered to Linda Green, Jim's wife, and was in her name only. The only way the feds could have known Jim was in that car would be if he were under surveillance for another reason.

The same incestuous Memphis power structure that had prevented James Earl Ray from getting a real trial also makes certain Jim Green remains in a cell until the 48 HOURS team leaves town. A routine $5,000 bond set by Judge Joe Brown would be increased tenfold within hours after the arrest.

Within the 48 HOURS presentation, Dan Rather reports that on the fourth of April in 1968 Jim Green was "in Federal prison." However, that too is a lie. His own records show that he was not sentenced until three months later, and his official record was expunged in 1988. Therefore, any existing records of Jim's imprisonment in April '68 are a recent fabrication and of dubious origin.

There was far more reason to believe that the real purpose for the arrest was that the Federal Agents were looking for physical evidence Jim had preserved since April 4, 1968. They suspected he would be bringing some of it to Memphis for the filming of the TV show. The most important and damning evidence Jim has protected is one of two 30:06 rifles left in one of the duplicate Ray Mustangs, a rifle that has a high likelihood of being linked through ballistics to the slug that took Martin Luther King's life. However, the instigators of this surreptitious kidnapping, while succeeding in preventing Jim's story from being aired, came up empty in a search for evidence. He did not bring the rifle with him.

For nearly a quarter of a century Jim Green has remained silent about his participation in government assassination and abuse. His only breaking of this code was his 1977 testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. When that testimony is made public in 2029, it will reveal that Black Congressman Louis Stokes of Ohio badgered Jim into silence at those hearings.

Even Linda Green, Jim's wife, was protected from the truth until the their children were grown. In 1998, to provide documentation of what he was to reveal, Jim handed Linda a copy of James Earl Ray's autobiography. In Tennessee Waltz (pg. 73-74) Ray weaves a vividly detailed description of two strangers trailing him in Memphis hours before the King murder. Jim pointed to the description of a thirty-ish man in a navy peacoat and questioned, "Who's that, Linda?"

"Butch Collier", was Linda's response. There was no doubt from Ray's vivid recollections that she recognized one of the men trailing James Earl Ray. For the past quarter century she had been married to the other.

Later, documents within the FBI's own investigative file would validate what Jim was claiming: that forces within the Federal Government directed the murder of Dr. King through racketeering union-associated- operatives who, in turn, hired locals in Jim's home town of Caruthersville, Missouri.

Jim's amazing memory for details would prove invaluable. Phone call conversations written up in the FBI's own MURKIN (FBI acronym for Murder of King case) investigation files suddenly begin to make sense. Jim's description of two fake James Earl Ray Ford Mustangs finds credibility in the FBI's own documents. In addition, the long-held suspicion that Ray was allowed to escape from prison in 1967 gains validity when FOIA requests by researcher Lyndon Barsten show that the FBI was tracking Ray for eleven months prior to the King assassination in Memphis.