New Furor over an Old Informant

Did he commit murder and provoke violence?

Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was one of the most mysterious figures in the civil rights protests of the 1960s. A ne'er-do-well and braggart, he drifted from job to job, working as an ambulance driver, bartender and nightclub bouncer. But he also was the FBI'S most important informant on the Ku Klux Klan's violent activities in Alabama. Rowe provided the bureau with information on the Klansmen's beating of black Freedom Riders at a Birmingham bus depot in 1961. He tipped off agents about a bomb shortly before it went off at a Birmingham church, killing four young black girls in 1963. His testimony sent two Klansmen to prison in connection with the murder near Selma, Ala., of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist from Detroit, in 1965. Then, to protect Rowe from Klansmen's revenge, the Justice Department gave him a different identity and helped him make a new life at an undisclosed location in the Southeast.

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.

State investigators questioned Rowe again about the bombing and had him take two lie-detector tests last fall. He flunked both of them. Just why he failed is in dispute. Some Birmingham detectives now suspect that he was with the Klansmen who planted the bomb. State investigators think Rowe may only have been withholding key information about the crime from interrogators.

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.

In the third puzzling revelation of the week, Birmingham detectives disclosed that they had also questioned about the bombing two former Klan members: Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., 33, and Eugene Thomas, 54, who served ten years in prison for their part in the Liuzzo killing. They too wanted to switch the subject, to the Liuzzo shooting. For the first time, they claimed that Rowe killed the woman. Rowe has admitted being present at the murder, but insists that he only pretended to shoot a pistol at her, while Wil kins fired the fatal shot. But Wilkins and Thomas waited for twelve years before giving their account to police, and some officers believe they are only trying to get even with Rowe for testifying against them at their trial.

In 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 his participation in the Klans men's beating of Freedom Riders in Birmingham and had even ordered him to seduce Klansmen's wives in an effort to cause dissension in the KKK's ranks.

Last week Justice Department officials immediately attacked Rowe's credibility and theorized that he was only out to promote a TV version of his 1976 autobiography, My Undercover Years with the Ku Klux Klan. The film, The Freedom Riders, stars former Dallas Cowboys Quarterback Don Meredith as Rowe, and will be completed within three weeks. But NBC has not yet decided when it will be aired. Said one Justice Department official of the controversy over Rowe: "It's unadulterated crap, all of it. He didn't shoot Liuzzo. He didn't kill a black. He didn't bomb the church."

At 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."

Finally, the 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.

Civiletti ordered two separate investigations: one by the internal watchdog unit that oversees FBI activities and a second by the Justice Department's criminal division. It immediately dispatched investigators to Birmingham to begin learning the truth about the mysterious Gary Thomas Rowe.

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