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Conclusions
The joint ADL/FBI operation that led to the death of Kathy Ainsworth and was meant to have led to the death of her accomplice, Tom Tarrants, is among the most perplexing events of the 1960s. As the Executive Intelligence Review pointed out in its study of the ADL, what happened, in a nutshell, is that the ADL hired Klansmen to bomb their own official's home and the FBI caught them in the act, triggering a shootout whose purpose was to murder them. (NOTE 1) If Tarrants and Ainsworth were guilty of terrorist activities and nothing more, they should have been taken into custody and placed on trial for whatever criminal acts they had perpetrated, just as White Knights leader Sam Bowers and eleven others were for the murder of Negro leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966. Yet we know that the operation was a murder trap: Tarrants, at least, was targeted for execution. That he survived over 70 bullets is nothing less than a miracle. When in 1998 he met Tom Tucker, one of the police officers involved in the operation, the officer was blunt: Tarrants had not been meant to survive. 'You were supposed to die right there,' he told Tarrants. (NOTE 2) Jack Nelson cites several police officers who admitted as much. (NOTE 3)
The question therefore arises as to why the ADL and the FBI were determined to murder Ainsworth and Tarrants rather than apprehend them and subject them to the force of the legal system. Leading antisemite William Pierce interprets the problem purely from his concern with the ADL. He writes that 'Clearly the plan was to kill both Ainsworth and Tarrants, execution style, as a warning to the Klan not to mess with the Jews.' (NOTE 4) Yet it is important - perhaps more important - to account for the FBI's willingess to orchestrate the murders. Why would the FBI have had an interest in ensuring the deaths of two antisemitic terrorists, when it was (apparently) satisfied with the court system for antinegro terrorists? The answer that stares us in the face is that the pair knew something or had been involved in something that the FBI could not allow to become public.
Given the timing of the ambush so closely on the heels of the assassination of Robert Kennedy - and, in particular, growing public concern over the polka dot girl - an explanation that surely makes sense is that Ainsworth WAS the polka dot girl. That possibility has to be taken seriously when we take into account the physical resemblance of Ainsworth's boyfriend, Tom Tarrants, to the young man in the gold shirt who was seen with the polka dot girl at the Ambassador Hotel. When one learns, furthermore, that Tarrants was: 1) an extreme rightwinger; 2) a crack rifleman; and 3) a participant of some kind in the assassination of Martin Luther King, then his resemblance to the young man at the Ambassador Hotel becomes extremely significant. As I anticipated, therefore, the clarification of the identity of the polka dot girl has therefore opened up further leads in this long dormant case. The likelihood that Ainsworth was the polka dot girl surely seems quite high, once we learn that her boyfriend was an extremely violent young man who either was, or planned to be, involved in the business of political assassination.
If Ainsworth and Tarrants were involved in the events of June 4-5, then we can well understand why the FBI sought to eliminate them rather than arrest them and put them on trial. In my judgment, the FBI and the ADL would have only needed to get rid of the pair by means of such a devious strategy if they had made use of them to carry out a top secret COINTELPRO operation such as the assassination of Robert Kennedy. If we review the essential features of the Meridian affair, it becomes extremely obvious that Tarrants and Ainsworth had to have been very much more than lambs the FBI chose to slaughter to placate the wrath of the ADL.
The Meridian affair reviewed critically
In early June 1968, Meridian FBI agent Frank Watts conceived the idea of a bribing two Klansmen suspected by Meridian police of having bombed the Meridian synagogue on May 29, 1968, to incite two other Klansmen, Danny Joe Hawkins and Tom Tarrants, to bomb the house of Meridian ADL leader Meyer Davidson. The FBI instigated this effort as a means of summarily executing Tom Tarrants. It is not clear whether the operation was also intended to lead to the death of Tarrants' partner, 26yo Jackson schoolteacher Kathy Ainsworth, but it seems likely that it was. Until only a day or so before the operation, Tarrants' partner was to have been Danny Joe Hawkins. Hawkins' mysterious decision to drop out of the operation at the last minute left Tarrants no alternative but to involve Ainsworth, who had been his regular partner on a number of terrorist operations over the preceding eight months. Since Hawkins appears to have had no compelling reason to absent himself, the probability is that he was manouevred out of the operation in order to manoeuvre Ainsworth in. The operation was designed to end with the deaths of both individuals, and the switch was necessary because the plot might have been aborted if the Meridian police officers involved had been aware than it was a female, rather than Hawkins, who was targeted for execution with Tarrants.
It is by no means clear why Tarrants and Ainsworth were set up to be killed in a police shootout. The ADL, which put up the money that was needed to bribe Alton Wayne and Raymond Roberts to play their part, is depicted by Nelson as having acted out of a spirit of vengeance toward those who had bombed the Meridian synagogue. Leaving aside the matter of whether the best way to get even with the perpetrators was by eliminating them in a police shootout (rather than by securing a conviction against them in court), the fact remains that it is NOT clear that Hawkins and Tarrants had actually carried out the bombing, whatever admissions Tarrants has made that helped him get out of jail after serving only a small fraction of his term. Meridian police told the ADL that the bombing had been carried out by the Roberts brothers, but Frank Watts, apparently without any evidence at all, decided that Hawkins and Tarrants had been the actual culprits. When on June 10 confirmation came that the bombing had been carried out by Hawkins and Tarrants, the source was one of the Roberts brothers - scarcely a disinterested party. The true reasons why Watts suspected Hawkins and Tarrants has never emerged, and no forensic evidence of any kind seems to have been used to determine the matter. In any case, Jack Nelson's book Terror In The Night furnishes Watts with a personal motive. According to Nelson, he found his own name on a KKK death list. Whether this list was authentic, and whether it had anything to do with Hawkins and Tarrants, are two of a great many matters relating to the Meridian affair that Jack Nelson does not bother to scrutinize. In fact, Nelson's book, while ostensibly functioning as an expose of what he and many others believe was an illegal entrapment operation, adds up to an apologia for the behaviour of all the leading protagonists. This is because Nelson never probes his sources for a coherent explanation of their actions in 1968.
Most seriously, Nelson neglects to ask question the draconian nature of the set up. Even if Tarrants had been responsible for the May 29 bombing, the question has to be asked: Since when has a violent act been summarily punished by death? Aren't even bombers entitled to a public trial? Strikingly, Nelson fails to convey to his readers the disproportionate nature of the crude frontier justice the Meridian operation was designed to dispense. First of all, Tarrants - whether working with Hawkins or Ainsworth - was far from being the'mad dog killer' Watts says he was: in his entire career as a White Knights terrorist, Tarrants did not kill a single person, at least so far as the public record of his activities indicates. Second, if the shootout was retaliation for the May 29 synagogue bombing, the question has to be asked why Danny Joe Hawkins - like the man suspected of making the bomb, L. E. Matthews - got off scot free. Third, if Tarrants was to be executed on account of a KKK death list, where is the evidence that Tarrants had anything to do with this particular list? That he was either its author or the man charged with killing the people on it? And even if this list was Tarrants' agenda, since when has it been lawful to execute someone for crimes he has yet to commit? Finally, the question of disproportionality, clear enough in the case of Tarrants' alleged partner, Danny Joe Hawkins, is even more apparent in the case of Sam Bowers. Although everyone agrees that Bowers, who headed the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was the Mr Big of antinegro and antisemitic terrorism in Mississippi in this era - he masterminded, according to the FBI, no less than 9 murders and over 300 other violent acts - he was never subject to an elimination operation of the sort that was supposed to leave Tarrants and Ainsworth both dead. Compared to Bowers, Tarrants and Ainsworth were very small fish indeed, so far as the public record of their activities shows.
As Nelson recounts the story, the operation simply does not make sense. Nelson does not seem to see the fault lines in the narrative he constructed (based on interviews with many of the participants); indeed, he seems resolved to gloss over them, which is a conspicuous failure in a 'passionate muckraker' as Nelson sees himself. A more critical reading of Nelson's narrative suggests other possibilities. The first possibility is that the operation was actually instigated by FBI director Hoover. Nelson tells us that Watts informed Hoover about developments daily, but he does not tell us a single thing about Hoover's reactions, such as whether he sent directives to Mississippi for the conduct of the operation. The sheer vehemence of Hoover's campaign against Nelson after he began investigating the entrapment operation is proof that a great deal was at stake in the case that Hoover did not wish to see exposed.
A second possibility - the only one that makes entire sense of the affair - is that Tarrants and Ainsworth were both targeted for execution because they had been involved in something which the FBI could not allow to become public knowledge. That matter could well have been anything, except for one thing: the disturbing resemblance Tarrants and Ainsworth had to the two (as yet) unidentified participants of the RFK assassination team. If Tarrants and Ainsworth were involved, it is not hard to see why the pair were targeted for elimination. After the assassination of President Kennedy, a conspiracy that left the FBI (and other implicated agencies) involved in extensive operations to eliminate dozens of persons who knew too much, the FBI no doubt decided to make a clean sweep this time. By setting Tarrants and Ainsworth up as terrorists, perhaps by implicating them in terrorist acts actually perpetrated by others, the FBI and the ADL found a pretext to rid themselves of two persons who might have been sources of trouble in the future. The FBI was highly likely to be preoccupied by such matters in mid-June, 1968, when there was a chance that the mysterious polka dot girl might actually be identified by somebody.
As I speculated when I commenced my investigation of the RFK assassination that the identification of the polka dot girl would open fresh leads into this unsolved 36-year old crime. However, I did not expect to ever identify her, and I certainly did not expect to identify the man in the gold coloured shirt. Least of all, did I expect to identify a suspect in the Martin Luther King case. Whether we have uncovered the truth about Tarrants, Ainsworth and the Meridian affair, or whether I have been misled by a truly amazing coincidence, is for the reader to decide. What is clear, though, is that the only real obstacles to my theory as it is presently constituted are Tarrants' hair colour and whether Kathy Ainsworth's nose can reasonably be described as 'funny.'
BELOW: This photo shows Frank Mankiewicz a few feet away from a dying Kennedy just minutes after the assassination. He looks demonic or distressed, depending on one's opinion of his role in the affair. More likely to have been involved, perhaps, is the individual standing in front of him, who seems to be relaying a message of some kind. Mankiewicz seems to be watching him intently. Am I the first person to have noticed that this man is wearing a white tie with black polka dots?
This website argues that Sirhan's handler was Kathy Ainsworth, a 26yo KKK terrorist from Jackson, Mississippi. If she was, her involvement points to her boyfriend, 21yo Thomas A. Tarrants III, as the Caucasian man seen firing three shots into Robert Kennedy by Don Schulman. The other persons involved in the assassination were a hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan, Sirhan double Michael Wayne, Gabor Kadar, Thane Eugene Cesare, as well as a possible traitor within the Kennedy camp, Frank Mankiewicz. The assassination was a joint FBI/ADL operation. The two organizations co-operated again a few weeks later when they arranged for the execution of two of the principals involved in the successful operation to purge America of its last great progressive politician. The country has been on a downward slide to militarism and irrationality ever since.
NOTES
(1) http://www.beyond-the-illusion.com/files/New-Files/990731/ugly-truth-about-adl.txt
(2) http://www.clarionledger.com/news/miss/reports/preacher/pkep.html
(3) Nelson, Terror In The Night, pp. 264.
(4) http://www.natall.com/pub/1998/102498.txt
For information about the RFK assassination:
An interview with some of the leading figures involved in investigating the assassination, including Kennedy aide Paul Schrade. (Real Audio)
www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn970618.html
A good short introduction to the RFK assassination
www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/rfk.html |
