America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (12 page)

More relevantly, evidence suggests that Bill Holt was among many members of the KKK who likely had foreknowledge of the church bombing. Historian Gary May notes that many of those with ties to Eastview Klavern 13 managed to have verifiable alibis on the evening of September 14, when, per the official narrative, a handful of Cahaba Boys finalized their plans for the following morning. Neglecting to mention Gafford, May notes how Bob Chambliss, “not a popular fellow with Eastview men . . . nonetheless received an unusual amount of phone calls” from key figures in the Klan, including Ross Keith, Hubert Page, Gene Reeves, Tommy Blanton, and Frank Cherry.
Subsequently, these callers “went out on the town, creating alibis for each other.” A few “drank at a Birmingham bar,” while others found their way to the bowling alley with the Gaffords and the Holts. Exalted Cyclops Robert Thomas and Eastview's Grand Titan Hubert Page (and his wife) joined the Gaffords and the Holts that night.
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According to McWhorter, Page (who eventually married Mary Lou Holt after she divorced Bill Holt) expected the bombing to occur between 10
PM
and 2
AM
that evening and became incensed when the bomb detonated in the morning, killing the four girls. Page later joined Gafford and the head of the UACG, Bill Morgan, at what McWhorter calls “the kiss of death meeting” at the Cahaba River bridge on the Thursday after the church bombing. There, according to an informant, the elder statesmen berated Chambliss and the others for the negative publicity surrounding the accidental murders of the four girls. “If any one of you ever talks, it will be the kiss of death for you,” one of the attendees insisted.
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One person who talked a lot to authorities about the bombing was Gary Rowe, another member of the Eastview group. The FBI recruited Rowe, a “barroom brawler with a police record” to infiltrate the Alabama KKK in 1960. Rowe, May argues, considered himself to be a “redneck James Bond” and engaged in acts of violence to solidify his bona fides among his fellow KKK members. Rowe joined the attack on the Freedom Riders in 1961. Most famously, in March 1965, the FBI learned that Rowe had ridden in a car with three fellow Klansmen, some of whom had sprayed gunfire into the vehicle of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights activist working on the Selma voting campaign, killing her. Although the FBI warned Rowe against participating in criminal activities, it nonetheless looked the other way at his transgressions, placing more value in the information he could provide than in holding him accountable for his wrongdoings.

But the information Rowe provided to the FBI about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing puzzles historians like May and McWhorter. Notably, Rowe implicated those with indirect associations to the crime—those like Holt, Page, and Thomas—early on in the investigation. But Rowe failed to finger those directly involved in the attack (Cherry, Blanton, and Chambliss) until December 1964, long after the FBI had established their culpability.

To May, this indicates that Rowe may have participated in the actual bombing. He clearly knew and associated with Chambliss and the other bombers, but he appeared to be protecting them for some reason. Rowe offered a confusing explanation about his own whereabouts on September 14 and 15 and could not provide a verifiable alibi. May believes that Rowe had already participated in a major bombing in May 1963, in part because he needed to pacify doubters like Bill Holt, who suspected Rowe of being a government informant. Perhaps, May speculates, Rowe needed to prove himself one more time. This would explain why the FBI remained reluctant to cooperate with Alabama investigators decades after the crime. The FBI lost a measure of public trust when Rowe exposed his history as an informant (and his history of crimes committed while on the FBI payroll) to Congress in 1975.
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Congress learned that the conflicts of interest obvious in the FBI's dealings with Rowe was not uncommon. It became clear that in the BAPBOMB case alone, the FBI had leveraged two of the conspirators, Ross Keith and John Hall, after the bombing, and it is not a coincidence that the FBI began cooperating with Attorney General Baxley only after these two men died. In fact, the decision to protect sources and methods, even at the expense of solving crimes, continues to be a problem for the FBI in the present day. Probably the most famous example, besides Rowe, is Whitey Bulger, the Massachusetts-based Irish mobster who helped the FBI's Boston field office in its operations against the Sicilian Mafia in New England. In using Bulger as a source to bring down the Sicilian Mafia, the FBI let Bulger and his criminal cohorts escape justice for everything from strong-arm robberies to murder. Each time the federal authorities allowed Bulger to escape scrutiny, they made it more likely they would do so in the future, so as not to expose the embarrassing lawlessness “overlooked” in the past. Bulger grew to have a form of pseudo-immunity; his prosecution eventually highlighted a retinue of scandalous FBI activity nearly as long as Bulger's criminal record. The FBI likely helped Bulger escape arrest by the Massachusetts State Police in 1994. Law enforcement finally arrested Bulger in 2011, but not before paying millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements to Bulger's victims.

Given the sheer number of informants the FBI uses to investigate criminal activity, and given the large number of waivers the FBI grants each year to allow these informants to violate the law in the name of ongoing investigations, there may be many more Gary Rowes and Whitey Bulgers. In fact, the need to protect “sources and methods” will emerge as a subtheme in our investigation of domestic terrorist groups, and it may partially explain why law enforcement agencies and students of American history have failed to notice the influence of religious extremists in the early history of racial violence.

“Sources and methods” include not only human beings but also wiretaps and electronic bugs—what the FBI refers to as TESUR, or technical surveillance. To J. Edgar Hoover, a well-placed listening device could be as if not more valuable than a human informant; such bugs helped Hoover maintain power through blackmail of American politicians. It now appears likely that the need to protect one electronic surveillance source may have prevented Baxley and his investigators, and later federal prosecutors, from identifying and convicting the likely mastermind of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church: J.B. Stoner. Stoner thus provides a key link between the southern nationalists who executed the actual crime and the religious extremists who visited Birmingham on September 14.

When he reopened an investigation into the Birmingham bombing in 1971, Baxley zeroed in on Stoner as his first suspect. Many people, including Bob Eddy, suspect or have implied that Stoner masterminded the Birmingham bombing but admit that there is no strong evidence to prove it. This is why a set of recent discoveries, which show the FBI continuing to withhold potentially vital intelligence on Stoner, is perhaps the most shocking story left to be uncovered in the case.

Behind the scenes, law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, strongly suspected that Stoner had orchestrated more than one wave of interstate, coordinated bombing campaigns against Jewish and black institutions. These notably included the bombings of several targets in Birmingham, which in 1963 became national headquarters for the NSRP, after moving from Stoner's home city of Atlanta. There is little doubt that Stoner attempted to bomb the church of indefatigable civil rights activist minister Fred Shuttlesworth, the
Bethel Street Baptist Church, in 1958. He telegraphed news of the attack to an undercover informant before it happened and avoided arrest only because the sting operation was too close to legal entrapment. Authorities also believed that Stoner planned the successful bombing of that same church in 1962. (A jury convicted him for that attack in 1983.) A car that closely resembled Stoner's was seen at some Birmingham bombings earlier in 1963, including on May 11, when two bombs almost simultaneously destroyed the motel room of Martin Luther King Jr. and the home of King's brother, A.D. King. Neither man was present, but the bombings set off the first major race riot in the history of Birmingham. On September 25, as the race riots following the September 15 bombing began to settle down, two shrapnel bombs blew up in the Titusville neighborhood in Birmingham and broke the temporary calm. A secretary for the Birmingham NSRP, Phillip Maybry, quoted Stoner as saying that the shrapnel bombing was our “baby,” referring to the NSRP.
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From the start, some of those who best knew Stoner accused him of participating in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. An anonymous source provided a detailed account to national reporter George McMillan, accusing Stoner of masterminding the attack using members of an elite southeastern bombing group called NACIREMA (American spelled backward). In the 1990s, Herbert Jenkins, a former police chief of Atlanta, admitted that he was that anonymous source, but no one knows how he obtained his information or if members of NACIREMA may have helped in the crime.
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Reports indicated that Stoner may have offered bomb-making training to the Cahaba Boys. Other, unconfirmed reports said that Stoner, and two NSRP members he brought to Alabama from Atlanta, met with “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss immediately before and not long after the church bombing. There is little doubt that Chambliss, Blanton, and other Cahaba Boys associated with the NSRP and the likes of Fields and Stoner. In records the FBI provided to Attorney General Baxley in the 1970s, entire sections are devoted to investigating the Birmingham NSRP. Based on those files, Baxley went public to the media about the strange circumstances of NSRP member Bob Gafford's calls to Chambliss and Cherry on September 14. He also noted that Gafford met with Chambliss shortly after
the bombing. Even more suspiciously, when Baxley, in his 1970s investigation, went to reinterview Cherry about the church bombing, Cherry asked to make a phone call in anticipation of the questioning. When Baxley traced the phone call, it again led to Gafford.
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The FBI's investigation of the NSRP did not shed any additional light on these matters, and as time went on, agents focused their suspicions on the Cahaba Boys and their associates in the UACG more than on the NSRP. But just as several members of the Eastview Klavern 13 were rank-and-file members of the UACG, some leaders of the UACG, such as Bob Gafford, were also affiliated with the NSRP. Gafford and others had even attended a meeting with Stoner earlier in September. The failure to fully examine the cross-affiliations between members of the Cahaba River Group, the UACG, and the NSRP appears to be one of the major oversights in the investigation.

But what seems like oversights may well be an artifact of selectivity, as it is now rather obvious that the FBI did not provide William Baxley and his investigators with the full story on its investigation of the NSRP, especially of Stoner. Baxley deposited his full records, including records provided by the FBI, at the Birmingham Public Library, where they can be viewed today. When one explores the entire file, the dearth of material on Stoner sticks out like a sore thumb. There is far less material on Stoner, for instance, than on his NSRP cofounder, Edward Fields, even though Stoner had a much more substantial résumé when it came to violence in general and bombings in particular. Even more conspicuous is the fact that nowhere in the thousands of pages of material can one find a direct interview with Stoner himself. The material is filled with dozens, if not hundreds of interviews with possible suspects who provide alibis and narratives relative to the crime, including first-person accounts and sworn statements.

Less suspicious and less senior NSRP members provided their alibis directly to the FBI, but not Stoner. Yes, there are instances when suspects refuse to cooperate with the FBI, but at least their records document an attempt to interview the suspect and often-repeated efforts to get the suspect to change his mind. The FBI files provided to Baxley do not even contain a record of Stoner rejecting an interview.

Even when pressure from national news organizations forced the FBI to finally relent and give Baxley the files, in 1976, the FBI was far from forthcoming with information. Bob Eddy says that the original stash of documents was much less extensive than what is now available to the public in the Birmingham library. The Bureau told Eddy that he would have to develop additional leads on his own from the initial, limited material it provided to him. Then, if Eddy requested material based on those leads, the Bureau would provide him with additional records from its BAPBOMB file. It is important to note here that if Eddy was not given enough information to suspect that additional files might exist, he obviously would never have the impetus to request them. Eddy says he still suspects that Stoner may have been a key player in the church bombing. But he also said that the available evidence to support an indictment was lacking. Nor did any additional evidence emerge during the later prosecutions of Blanton and Cherry (although attorneys for Blanton suggested Stoner as an alternative suspect in the crime). Eddy's experiences in the latter two cases, when the FBI provided a new Alabama attorney general with wiretap records that helped cinch the case against both men, did nothing to disabuse him of his frustrations with the FBI. But he had no reason to think that the FBI continued to withhold vital information after that point.
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That good faith now appears to be misplaced. It may well be that Eddy could not build a case against Stoner in 1977 or in the decades that followed because he was never given or told about potentially vital material that the Bureau developed on Stoner.

In contrast to the material disclosed to Eddy that is now available at the Birmingham Public Library, the BAPBOMB file the FBI provides to the public on its online vault is extensive in volume, but it is heavily redacted. Many pages are deleted or removed from the file set, and the material that is exposed to the public is often so covered in black ink that the narrative is barely comprehensible. But the online vault does provide one unique advantage relative to the Birmingham library files: One can search the digital text through the FBI's internal search engine and through Google. In contrast, the hard copy original of the FBI's BAPBOMB file is available in Birmingham without missing pages and without any redactions. This
material, together with records from local investigations, makes it clear that the FBI did not provide its entire file to Attorney General Baxley. This is not particularly surprising given the scandal associated with the FBI's decision to withhold the wiretap tapes on Blanton and Cherry until 2001. What is surprising is that the complete files contain evidence that the FBI never revealed to Alabama prosecutors and investigators: That it also had wiretaps planted in Stoner's Atlanta law office.