COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : When the State Is Terrified, Citizens Beware : A Memphis reporter writing about Dr. King uncovers decades of Army spying on Americans.

Six days past the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968, the South African black leader Chris Hani was shot dead outside his home in Boksburg, a suburb of Johannesburg.

Hani was Public Enemy No. 1 of the white power structure. He represented the militant wing of the coalition forming the African National Congress.

His was the most powerful voice insisting that majority rule must also mean control of capital and resources. He insisted that the ANC make good on its 40-year-long promise of a socialist South Africa. So Hani died with a bullet in his brain, as people advancing such views so often do. The state knows its enemies, which brings me to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On March 21, the Commercial Appeal, hometown newspaper of Memphis, published an impressive story, several thousand words in length, by one of its reporters, Stephen G. Tompkins. For 16 months, Tompkins investigated domestic intelligence operations by the U.S. military, what he calls the “largest domestic spy network ever assembled in a free country.” Tompkins begins his story in 1917, when Lt. Col. Ralph Van Deman created an Army intelligence network targeting four prime foes: the Wobblies, as the International Workers of the World were called; opponents of the draft; socialists, and “Negro unrest.”

By the end of 1917, the War Department’s military intelligence division had opened a file on Martin Luther King Jr.’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A. D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and first president of the Atlanta NAACP. King’s father, Martin Sr., Williams’ successor at Ebenezer Baptist, also entered Army files. Martin Jr. first shows up in these files in 1947. He was attending Dorothy Lilley’s Intercollegiate School, and the Army suspected Miss Lilley of communist ties.

The fact that three generations of the King family were spied on by Army intelligence is not surprising when one reads Tompkins’ description of how wide the net was cast.

By the early 1920s, the Army had a spy network across the South. It included Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor at the Tuskegee Institute, and no less a notable than Joel Spingarn, white board chairman of the NAACP. Van Deman made Spingarn a major in military intelligence, and the latter--a man still much honored by the NAACP--helped operate a small unit of undercover agents. Van Deman considered the NAACP to be communist-inspired.

With the upsurges of the 1960s, the Army intelligence domestic network cranked into high gear. By 1963, Tompkins reports, U-2 planes were photographing disturbances in Birmingham, Ala., capping a multilayered spy system that by 1968 included 304 intelligence offices around the country, “subversive / national security dossiers” on 80,731 Americans, plus 19 million personal dossiers lodged at the Defense Department’s central index of investigations.

A more sinister thread in Tompkins’ narrative commences with the anger and fear with which the Army high command greeted King’s denunciation of the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967. Army spies secretly recorded Stokely Carmichael telling King, “The Man don’t care (if) you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.”

Army intelligence increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying landing zones and potential sniper sites in major American cities. The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group headquartered in Alabama as a subsidiary intelligence network. The Army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis.

All through early 1967, Army spying on King intensified. Tompkins describes the increasing hysteria of Army intelligence chiefs at the threat they considered King to be posing to national stability. Their units dogged King through early 1967; a Green Beret special unit was operating in Memphis on the day King was shot. He died from a bullet from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store, in a murder for which a lone gunman, James Earle Ray, is serving a 99-year sentence.

Tompkins says carefully that his newspaper “uncovered no hard evidence that Army intelligence played any role in King’s assassination.” A quarter of a century later, Chris Hani’s murder suggests to us once again that a terrified state is capable of anything.