Jay Richard Kennedy and The Dictatorship of Celebrity

politicswestchesterreview |  In her book, A Taste of Power (page 167 on) Brown admits she was TRAINED and PAID and sent into the Party by Jay Richard Kennedy, the informant in Dr. King’s inner circle for the CIA Security Research Section (birth name: Richard Solomonick).

Jay Richard Kennedy was a former Bureau of Narcotics, OSS man who was also the manager for Harry Belafonte, until Belafonte FIRED him in the 1950s. 

JRK was a partner in the Mafia-owned Sands Hotel in Vegas, which is where Elaine Brown met him while working as a hooker in ’63 (her own admission, see her book).

JRK was the owner of a factory in Quebec that produced proximity fuses for the US military during the VietNam war, and (like the UK’s Ian Fleming) the author of numerous spy books from ‘the inside’ of the agency, such as “Man Called X” and his bestselling his book / movie ‘The Chairman’.

JRK was the one who postulated to SRS that Dr. King was a tool of Mao and laid the groundwork for the premise that allowed his assassination.

His ‘confession’ can be found in the British documentary ‘The Men who killed Martin Luther King’.

More information can be found in David Garrow’s book ‘The FBI and Martin Luther King’.

WaPo |  While the FBI leadership’s animus toward MLK fixated on his reported sexual appetites, the CIA entertained and memorialized accounts that described the crucial secret conflict within the civil rights movement as one between Soviet-controlled agents and Communist China’s sympathizers. Top CIA officials relied upon an informant who explained in meeting after meeting how a battle for subversive control over King was being waged between New York lawyer Stanley Levison and activist/entertainer Harry Belafonte. In the CIA’s version of civil rights history, Levison, a onetime Communist Party financial functionary, was actively representing Moscow as he advised King, whereas Belafonte supposedly favored Beijing.

The CIA’s source on King turned out to be novelist and television host Jay Richard Kennedy, who had long-standing friendships with civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer, and who moderated a nationwide August 1963 telecast featuring the leaders of the March on Washington. But Kennedy (born Samuel Richard Solomonick) and Levison, his longtime business partner, had fallen out years earlier. Indeed, by the 1950s, Levison’s first wife, psychotherapist Janet Alterman, was married to Kennedy, who by then was Belafonte’s business manager. Kennedy and Belafonte then had a falling out of their own, and Kennedy subsequently published a roman à clef about Belafonte, “Favor the Runner.”

The Kennedy-Levison-Belafonte story may sound better than fiction but, more importantly, it is a case study in the ways anonymous intelligence sources may have multiple agendas when they tattle on, and smear, people for whom they have preexisting antipathy. Kennedy was not an opposition research contractor like Steele, but when — as in the Steele case, and in the case of the FBI’s most important informant close to King, accountant James A. Harrison — a source is compensated for the information they provide, their incentive to spin a narrative that the payer wants to hear is that much greater.