INTEL REVELATION: CIA Handled 'Sensitive Source' Near King Shooting; New Docs Suggest Covert Monitoring in Memphis

Newly declassified 2025 documents from the CIA and FBI archives show that the CIA was running or tracking a “sensitive source” operating in Memphis on or near April 4, 1968—the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

The document, previously marked for "2025 RELEASE UNDER E.O. 14176," notes operational compartmentalization and control over “a specific individual source with knowledge of foreign-involved activity” near the Lorraine Motel. 

Image Source: Magnum Photos

This suggests that the Agency may have had contemporaneous surveillance assets inside the city at the time of the assassination.

Although the name of the source and operational identifiers remain redacted, the file's placement within a batch detailing interagency coordination between CIA counterintelligence and domestic federal investigations under the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) confirms that the source was under watch by federal intelligence.

Significantly, the document hints that the source may have had indirect contact with individuals known to James Earl Ray or with civil rights groups under active FBI COINTELPRO monitoring. 

One line references a "foreign-connected operator" using a U.S. intermediary, a signal often used in Cold War-era surveillance to flag potential espionage-adjacent movements. 

No evidence is presented in these files of CIA involvement in King’s murder; however, the existence of a covert asset in Memphis—previously denied—deepens longstanding mistrust.

This directly contradicts past official denials that the CIA had “no operational activity of any kind in Memphis in April 1968,” a claim made repeatedly during Church Committee and HSCA testimony.

This marks the first public acknowledgment that the CIA had active human intelligence linked to the Memphis theater during the assassination window. 

Critics of the official narrative have long claimed that the government concealed surveillance footprints that could suggest deeper entanglements.