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Conspiracy Theories · Spotify Studios

The Assassination of Malcolm X Pt. 2

·37 min·3 clips
The FBI wrote anonymous letters and leaked information to widen the rift between Malcolm X and Nation of Islam leadership.
The story begins after the gunfire. Gene Roberts has just watched Malcolm X get murdered, and he walks his superiors through the assassination moment by moment. Their attention lands in a strange place. Instead of focusing only on what Roberts saw, the brass wants to know why he gave CPR before paramedics arrived. Roberts does not treat that as complicated. He is a police officer, and to him the job includes trying to keep someone alive, even if that person is under surveillance. His answer does not satisfy them. What bothers them is that an undercover officer tried to save Malcolm X, a man authorities had been watching closely. The episode then backs up. Roberts was inside the Organization of African American Unity, Malcolm's political group, when the killing happened. Yet he was never called to testify. The lead NYPD investigator did not even know Roberts was undercover. That omission is hard to get around. If a police witness with a front row seat was kept out of the investigation, the official record starts to look thin. The surveillance story goes wider from there. The NYPD and FBI had watched Malcolm from his rise in the Nation of Islam, alarmed by his power as a radical Black leader. They watched Elijah Muhammad and the Nation too, using phone taps, tails, office microphones, and informants. This was not a light touch. Three of ten people in Nation leadership roles were working with the FBI. Malcolm was approached too. About a month before formally breaking with the Nation, he refused to become an informant, even when betrayal might have been useful to him. After that, the FBI saw room to work. Agents noticed distrust and jealousy around Malcolm, especially among Elijah Muhammad's children, and pushed those cracks wider. Anonymous letters fed suspicion. Press leaks made strained relationships worse. Surveillance did more than observe the conflict. It helped bend it.

As heard by us

A murder case that keeps widening into surveillance, informants, and official confusion.

The episode begins on February 21, 1965, with Malcolm X being shot, then stays tightly with Officer Gene Roberts, the undercover officer inside the Organization of African American Unity, as he is pressed on what he saw and why he tried to give Malcolm CPR before paramedics…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want an assassination story with surveillance, informants, and a police memo's worth of tension.

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