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White to move and mate in two #660 - Behind the Magic Curtain [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-01
Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days
No physical evidence existed. Many potential witnesses and one of the main suspects, Herman Cash, had died. The investigators had no leads. Finding evidence three decades after the bombing seemed impossible. Conviction of the Klan suspects hinged on Special Agent Bill Fleming’s discovery of missing tape recordings. One critical tape had been dubbed the “Kitchen Tapes.”
in 1965, the FBI had noticed there was a vacancy in the duplex apartment adjacent to that occupied by one of the Cahaba River Boys, Thomas Blanton. An FBI agent posed as a traveling truck driver and rented the apartment. With authorization under national security provisions by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the FBI bugged the apartment. To get that authorization, the FBI presented evidence about the social unrest and violence of the time, the grave concern over communist influence, the church bombing and subsequent riots, and the assassination of President Kennedy.
Bureau employees drilled a small hole in the wall, which turned out to be right under Blanton’s kitchen sink. Because the recordings were not authorized for criminal case purposes, only national security intelligence, the FBI filed away the tape of a conversation between Blanton, his wife, and an unknown third party and other tapes recorded during that time. The tapes were lost, along with the 1965 reel-to-reel recordings from the trunk of Mitch Burns’s car when Burns had ridden around town with Thomas Blanton. By dogged determination and some luck, Agent Fleming found all the tapes in a dusty box in the corner of the FBI’s Birmingham evidence room.
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