On the Trail of the FBI's KKK Source: What I Discovered

Perhaps I’ve read too many murder mysteries and police procedurals, seen too many movies and watched too much television—-especially the CSI shows that multiply like crab grass. It may explain why lately I’ve been drawn to historical characters whose lives ended violently and whose deaths have an air of mystery about them. I’ve become a self-styled "closer," the name police give to their colleagues who work the cold cases whose solution have eluded them.

In my second book, Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington, I tried to understand how a brilliant young man from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who seemed destined for a distinguished career in American government in the 1940s, associated with American Communists, and Soviet agents and was eventually convicted of perjury and sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary where he was murdered by inmates in 1954. My research led me to conclude that Remington was not simply a victim of McCarthyism but was guilty of having lied under oath about his Communist connections and, while not a master spy, did pass government records to Elizabeth Bentley, a Soviet courier, during World War II to. I also discovered that the Justice Department deliberately misrepresented the way Remington died. He was not defending himself during a fist fight with fellow prisoners, as the government claimed, but was asleep when viciously attacked by men who wanted to prove their patriotism by killing a Communist. Case closed, or so I believed.

While working on the Remington story, I became fascinated by an extraordinary phenomenon occurring in the American South beginning in the 1990s-–the reopening of Civil Rights cold cases in an effort to finally bring to justice the killers of a host of innocent African Americans. David Halberstam called it “little Nurembergs,” as one by one the killers of Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Ben Chester White and the four young victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing were found guilty of murder by Southern juries.

These investigations led me to examine the murder of Viola Liuzzo, the only white woman to lose her life in the struggle for equal rights. The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, published this month by Yale University Press, presents my findings.

My research in FBI, Justice Department and the Liuzzo family attorney’s records convinced me that the Liuzzo Case was unique and offered important lessons for our current war against terrorism. Unlike the other well known Civil Rights murders, the crime was quickly solved because one of the four Klansmen who shot Liuzzo on an Alabama highway following the conclusion of the 1965 Voting Rights March, was an FBI informant. As soon as Gary Thomas Rowe could get away from his associates, he quickly reported the murder to his FBI handler and, within hours, the Klansmen were apprehended. President Lyndon Johnson announced their arrest over nation-wide television. In none of the other civil rights murders was an FBI informant so deeply involved and an examination of Rowe’s career led to disturbing conclusions about the role of informants then and now-- their activities can actually produce the very tragedies they are supposed to prevent.

Rowe, a nightclub bouncer, brawler and self-proclaimed “hell-raiser,” was recruited by the FBI in March 1960 to join the Eastview Klavern of the Alabama Knights of the KKK. Although his FBI handler warned him that he was not an FBI agent and must avoid violent activities, Rowe learned quickly that to protect his “cover” he had to take a leading role in the Klan’s attacks on civil rights workers. In May, 1961, Rowe learned that the Klan was planning to assault a group of Freedom Riders when they arrived in Birmingham and he became the liaison between the Klan and Public Safety Director Bull Connor, who gave the Klan fifteen minutes to “beat” the Freedom Riders “until they looked like a bulldog got a hold of them.” Rowe warned his FBI handler of the immanent attack, but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept it secret from Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Bureau did nothing to stop the attack.

The FBI’s response to Rowe’s actions that day revealed how an informant can dominate his handler and escape punishment for his crimes. Although a Justice Department investigation later concluded that “of the hundreds [involved]…Rowe was one of the handful most responsible for the violence,” the FBI covered up his actions that day. Rowe told his contact that he had beaten an innocent bystander but the Agent lied to the FBI’s Special Agent-in-Charge, assuring him that “Rowe was not personally involved in the fighting…” Instead of being arrested and his relationship with the FBI terminated, the Bureau rewarded Rowe with a cash bonus of $175 and praised him as “without doubt the most alert, intelligent, productive and reliable informant…currently being operated…”

During the years that followed, Rowe rose within the ranks of the Eastview Klavern and continued to attack African-Americans and civil rights workers with impunity, knowing that the FBI would protect him. The same cloak of immunity which covered Rowe also extended to his closest colleagues inside the Klan whose prosecution would have implicated Rowe, allowing them to get away with crimes which included assault and perhaps murder. Following the Liuzzo shooting in March 1965, he quickly made a deal with the Justice Department: In exchange for immunity from prosecution, he agreed to testify against his fellow Klansmen. On the strength of his eye-witness testimony, the Klansmen were convicted of violating Mrs. Liuzzo’s civil rights, but served less than ten years in prison. Rowe was reward by his grateful government with a gift of ten thousand dollars, a new identity and a job as an Assistant U.S. Marshall in California.

Although the Klansmen would later charge that Rowe himself murdered Liuzzo, which led her family to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the FBI in the 1980s, a judge ruled against them and evidence I uncovered indicated that another Klansmen fired the fatal shots. The Klansmen responsible for Liuzzo’s murder are dead as is Rowe and the case is officially closed, but—in fact, it deserves to be examined and discussed for what it tells us about the dangers of recruiting informants and putting them into terrorist groups. To reassure their associates that they are truly committed to their cause, they too must commit brutal acts. And to hide their association with despicable characters, intelligence agencies become silent partners in the crimes their informants commit. I hope that as the U.S. seeks better “human intelligence” in the war on terrorism, The Informant will provide a cautionary tale about the role played by informants in that struggle. Along with the newly reopened case of Emmett Till and the start on June 13 of the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, accused of killing James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964, I recommend opening, intellectually if not legally, the case of Viola Liuzzo. It has too much to teach us to be closed forever.