Racist Gore's Secret History
As a Tennessee FBI Hit-Man
by Anton Chaitkin
Al Gore got into national politics as a police agent, rewarded with a seat in Congress for running a racist FBI frame-up against an African American political leader, who was trying to stop Nashville police from destroying the community by allowing unhindered narcotics trafficking and prostitution.
Years later, during Sen. Al Gore's abortive 1988 Presidential race, a biography promoting his campaign suddenly appeared, written, strangely enough, by a former Federal Bureau of Investigation official, Hank Hillin (Al Gore, Jr.: Born To Lead, reissued in 1992, as Al Gore, Jr., His Life and Career. Until 1999, the FBI man's book was the only published account of Gore's life. Hank Hillin told this reporter that he has known Gore and his family since Gore was four years old, and he described how Gore was brought in to work in the Tennessee arm of the FBI's terror campaign against black elected officials.
The pattern of hundreds of FBI/Department of Justice operations, beginning in the late 1950s, in which minority officials were illegally targeted, fell under the FBI internal designation, "Operation Frühmenschen" (German for "early" or "primitive men"). This racist doctrine, guiding FBI prosecutions of minorities, was first publicly identified by Rep. Mervyn Dymally (D-Calif.). On Jan. 27, 1988, Dymally, then the chairman of the Black Congressional Caucus, put into the Congressional Record a sworn affidavit from former FBI special agent Hirsch Friedman, originally filed in Federal court in Atlanta; it stated:
"The purpose of this policy was the routine investigation without probable cause of prominent elected and appointed black officials in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States. I learned from my conversations with special agents of the FBI that the basis for this policy was the assumption by the FBI that black officials were intellectually and socially incapable of governing major governmental organizations and institutions."
John Seigenthaler, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, hired the 23-year-old Gore in 1971, as a reporter, on the police beat. Seigenthaler, like FBI official Hillin, had earlier worked in the U.S. Justice Department with the anti-labor dirty operations around Justice Department official Walter Sheridan, a leader of the faction covering up the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Gore, the Police Agent
Al Gore first became famous in 1974, when he and his boss Seigenthaler cooked up a sting against Morris Haddox, a black City Council member and a thorn in the side of the Nashville establishment. Less than two months before the Gore covert attack, Haddox had declared that it was the practice of the police to allow dope dealing and prostitution to run completely unchecked in the black community, and he vowed to block consideration of other legislative matters until the City Council took up a reform of this criminal malfeasance.[1]
Though nominally only a reporter with a private newspaper, Gore personally arranged with Hillin's partners in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) to set up a radio transmitter on the person of a stooge, who was furnished with money to ensnare Councilman Haddox. The bribery indictment of Morris Haddox was announced in a Tennessean article on Feb. 7, 1974, under the byline of Albert Gore, Jr. The article included a photo of that sideburned reporter and undercover police spy, exultant, and accompanied by three photographers.
Rallies supporting Councilman Haddox were held in black churches. A statewide black political convention unanimously condemned Gore and Seigenthaler for the frame-up. The Tennessean of Feb. 11 quoted African American college teacher James Mock, denouncing those "playwrights who set up their scenario in the black community and had Mr. Haddox play it out .... attacking the whole political structure of our black community."
A Feb. 12 Tennessean article by Al Gore, headlined "FBI, IRS, Alerted in Council Probe," explained that the FBI—the Hillin task force—was taking an official role in the legal attack on the Nashville Metro Council.
Although Haddox was later acquitted by a jury, Gore's printed smears drove Haddox out of political life. Two decades later, Haddox came back into the Nashville council, Gore's attack having faded from public memory.
In 1987, during his campaign for the 1988 Presidential nomination, Gore boasted to the Des Moines Register that his reporting "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail." Newspapers around the country picked up and exposed this falsehood, and the embarrassment contributed to Gore's 1988 defeat.[2]
Publisher-spook John Seigenthaler arranged for his employee Al Gore to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that opened up in 1976; Gore would be sponsored by the banker-faction behind Walter Sheridan. Gore left the newspaper after winning the election, to take his seat in Congress—which had earlier been occupied by his father, Albert Gore, Sr.
Gore's FBI-stooge job, and his resultant elevation to Congress, was in line with his imperial racist family background. He had grown up mostly in Washington, D.C., attending private school as the insufferably arrogant son of a rich, white, Southern politician. His father was in the orbit of Cordell Hull, the aristocratic Tennessean who became Secretary of State under President Franklin Roosevelt and bitterly opposed FDR's endeavors on behalf of the colonial peoples challenging British imperial racism.
In 1964, Gore Sr., then a Senator, sold out President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Civil Rights movement by voting against the landmark Civil Rights Act (July 2, 1964), which dealt a death-blow to Jim Crow by outlawing racial segregation throughout the nation. Gore, Sr., also tried unsuccessfully to cripple the bill with an amendment stopping the cutoff of Federal funds to states that would defy the law, and perpetuate racial discrimination.
At the time of his son's frame-up of Morris Haddox, Gore Sr., by then out of politics, was vice president of Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum Company, and chairman of Hammer's Island Creek Coal Co. The Gore family was then making its fortune in the oil industry, from Hammer's intrigues on behalf of British strategic operations. The senior Gore was also at the time on the faculty of Nashville's Vanderbilt University, the national center for the "respectable" revival of the 19th-Century Ku Klux Klan.
While working for Seigenthaler and the FBI anti-black strike force, Al Gore, Jr. was attending Vanderbilt University's Divinity School! This was the home base of the "Fugitives" and the "Nashville Agrarians," the gnostic cultists who revived the Southern Confederacy's "Lost Cause" as a neo-feudal attack on minorities, labor, and modern industrial civilization.
With this point of view, Gore, Jr. made his way to power, having joined his father's British employers in their war against the Democratic Party tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, and against populations of color all over the world.
[1] Two local newspaper articles, both printed Nov. 12, 1973, make clear the fascist motivation for the sting: The Nashville Banner, under the headline, "Councilman Haddox Calls for Showdown With Police," says Haddox declared he would block legislative bills affecting his district of Nashville, until the police department was reformed. He spoke of the case of a black female drug addict, who was reportedly sodomized by 25 police officers, at the same time that the police were not enforcing the drug or prostitution laws in the black community. The Tennessean, headlined "Haddox Puts Policing Ahead of Legislation, by Wayne Whitt, has a photograph of Morris Haddox, with caption quote: "People deserve better." The article describes Haddox's threat to stop legislation unless the police department was made to enforce the law, and stop allowing unhindered prostitution and the sale of dangerous drugs in the black community.
[2] Following the Haddox frame-up, the Hillin-Seigenthaler gestapo went into action against Democrat Ray Blanton, who was elected Tennessee's governor in 1974. Blanton opposed their racism and police-state schemes, and attempted to launch an inquiry into the frame-up of James Earl Ray in the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.—which is still unsolved. Hillin told this reporter, "I was assigned to bring Blanton down." The resultant four-year witch-hunt and imprisonment of the innocent Blanton (conviction later overturned) are recorded in the pages of Hillin's first book FBI Codename TENNPAR, which made Hillin famous, and paved the way for his Gore biography two years later. A star player on the Hillin-Seigenthaler team, as celebrated in TENNPAR, was the KKK-style Memphis Federal prosecutor Hickman Ewing. Soon after wrapping up the Blanton case, Ewing began a smear and prosecution campaign against Memphis's black Congressman Harold Ford, that lasted ten years; Rep. Ford was acquitted. Ewing went on to serve as an operative in Kenneth Starr's assault against President Bill Clinton.
