Word: fbi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week the name of Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., now 47, emerged again at the center of a new controversy over his role as an FBI informant. Birmingham police and state investigators leaked information to reporters that depicted Rowe as an agent provocateur. Rowe may actually have helped the Klansmen plan the acts of violence that he later reported to the FBI. Moreover, Rowe admitted that he participated in the violence, and he may even have committed murder while on the FBI's payroll...
While Rowe was talking to state investigators, he suddenly changed the subject and claimed that he had shot and killed a black man during a night of racial rioting in Birmingham in 1963. Rowe said he reported the killing to FBI Agent Byron McFall and was told to "forget it." McFall has denied the allegation. Police have no record of the killing, but they do not rule out the possibility that it may have occurred...
...Washington, FBI officials were alarmed by the allegations about Rowe. Some FBI critics have argued for years that the bureau's system of paying informants encourages them to provoke more crimes than they prevent. In Rowe's case, he started out in 1959 earning an occasional $20 from the FBI for tidbits of information. But at his peak he was paid a steady $300 a month. Rowe testified before a Senate committee investigating FBI undercover agents in 1975, while wearing a hood to disguise his new identity. He told the Senators then that FBI agents had approved...
...first the FBI's only official response was a written statement maintaining that McFall, who oversaw Rowe's undercover activities, constantly advised him "to avoid violence." The statement conflicted somewhat with McFall's own testimony to the Senate committee in 1975. At that time, he said of Rowe: "If he happened to be with some Klansmen and they decided to do something, he couldn't be an angel and [still] be a good informant...
...Justice Department was prodded into action last week by two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrats Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and James Abourezk of South Dakota. They wrote a letter to Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, reminding him that the committee was drafting new rules of conduct for FBI agents and was "intensely interested" in the controversy about Rowe...