Missing Its Man

The FBI ignores a tip

In nearly two years of sometimes chaotic operations, the House Select Committee on Assassinations has shed little new light on the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. But when the committee begins public hearings scheduled for next week, it will produce some evidence that, if nothing else, is bound to embarrass the FBI.

Committee investigators have received documents from FBI files showing that the bureau unaccountably, never followed up an intriguing story about King's death told to an agent by an informant in 1973. The informant reported that Russell G. Byers, 46, then an auto parts dealer in St. Louis, had told him that two Missourians--Stockbroker John R. Kauffmann and Patent Attorney John H. Sutherland--had offered him $50,000 in 1967 to arrange for King's assassination. Byers said that he turned down the offer. Subsequently, the New York Times obtained another FBI document, quoting Byers as saying that Kauffmann later made the payoff to the actual assassin, James Earl Ray, who is now serving a 99-year term for the murder.

The agent in St. Louis who talked with the informant wrote up a report--but then filed it in his office rather than forwarding it to other agents working on the King case. Not until Byers came under investigation for an art theft last spring in St. Louis did the FBI discover the report. The Justice Department promptly passed it along to the House committee.

The truth of the matter may never emerge. Under questioning by committee members, Byers has stuck by the informant's account of the $50,000 bounty on King. It is not clear whether he also confirmed that the money was paid to Ray. The committee plans to administer a lie-detector test to Ray about the tale; he will be removed from jail to testify at the hearings. But Kauffmann and Sutherland have both died, and their widows insist that their husbands had nothing to do with the murder of the civil rights leader.

The whole episode of the misplaced documents might have been dismissed by the FBI'S critics as a regrettable oversight, but for the hostility that the bureau demonstrated toward King over the years. Thus filing away the reports was a mistake that the FBI could not afford to make. -

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