Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:18 pm

PART 2 OF 2

Central to the psychiatric testimony that followed were two sets of psychological tests given to Sirhan -- the first, in July, by Dr. Orville Richardson at the request of Dr. Eric Marcus, the court-appointed psychiatrist; the second, in November, by Dr. Schorr. The results were then reviewed by five clinical psychologists and four psychiatrists, including Marcus, Pollack, and Diamond.

Sirhan was described as a paranoid schizophrenic by all except Dr. Pollack and Dr. Olinger, on the prosecution side. Pollack said Sirhan was a paranoid personality but not as severely ill as a schizophrenic. Dr. Olinger said Sirhan was suffering from pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia.

The prosecution psychiatrists also questioned the validity of the Rorschach inkblot test. According to Kaiser, "one of them said, remarkably, 'Everyone in the Middle East can take the Rorschach and they all come out as paranoid schizophrenics, so what does that prove?'"

***

The psychiatrists' testimony was punctuated by recordings of Sirhan's time in custody being played into the court record. Bizarrely, Cooper entered these recordings into evidence but did not play the tape of Sirhan reenacting the shooting for Diamond under hypnosis -- to my mind, the strongest indication that he had been programmed.

"During the trial, I wanted Grant Cooper to at least tell the jury this was a possibility," recalls Kaiser, "and show various clues that Sirhan was, in fact, not himself that night, that he might have been acting under some other influences, even programmed under hypnosis. Dr. Diamond had put Sirhan under hypnosis at least a dozen times and we had tape-recorded all of those hypnotic sessions, so those could well have been shown to the jury and let the jury make up its own mind. Cooper decided, 'Hey, they're never going to believe that and I'll look like a laughingstock, it's an incredible theory, let's drop it.' So that was a huge disappointment for me during the trial."

Even Dr. Diamond was loath to attribute Sirhan's programming to another. "Dr. Diamond shied away from that theory, that Sirhan was a 'Manchurian Candidate,''' said Kaiser. "And I'm not sure why -- I think because he didn't want to look silly."

Instead, Dr. Diamond took the testimony of the psychologists to conclude that Sirhan was, in fact, a paranoid schizophrenic. After describing in great detail his six sessions with Sirhan, he summarized his conclusions in court:

The combination of events which led to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy ... I think started with Sirhan's exposure to violence and death in Jerusalem in 1948, and it continues with his immigration to the United States, the development of his mental illness in which his whole personality altered and he became preoccupied with revolution, violence, destruction, paranoid fantasies of glory, power and becoming the savior of his people.

As his delusional fantasies grew bolder, and his fanatical hatred and fear of the Jews increased with each radio and television broadcast concerning the tension in the Middle East ... Sirhan was withdrawing into a ruminative, brooding, isolated sense of failure and insignificance. To improve his mind and to gain control, he hoped, over his personal destiny, he read mystical books and subscribed to ... Rosicrucian correspondence courses in self-hypnosis and mind power.

He practiced his lessons diligently to the point where he became frightened by his own magical, supernatural powers of concentration. He actually believed that he could stop the bombers from reaching Israel and thereby save the Arabs, simply by willing the death of all who would help the Jews. His experiments in inducing the magical trances worked better than he realized -- they worked so well that they frightened Sirhan and convinced him that he was losing his mind ....

He sought the remedy in his books on mysticism and the occult, and he daydreamed of the power of his gun, taking every opportunity on many different days to shoot it, firing hundreds and hundreds of shots as if each shot would somehow make up for his ever growing sense of helplessness, impotence and fear of loss of self-control.

With absolutely no knowledge or awareness of what was actually happening in his Rosicrucian and occult experiments, he was gradually programming himself ... for the coming assassination. In his unconscious mind, there existed a plan for the total fulfillment of his sick, paranoid hatred of Kennedy and all who might want to help the Jews. In his conscious mind, there was no awareness of such a plan or that he, Sirhan, was to be the instrument of assassination.

It is my opinion that through chance, circumstances, and a succession of unrelated events, Sirhan found himself in the physical situation in which the assassination occurred. I am satisfied that he had not consciously planned to be in that situation, that if he had been fully conscious and in his usual mental state, he would have been quite harmless, despite his paranoid hatreds and despite his loaded gun.

But he was confused, bewildered and partially intoxicated. The mirrors in the hotel lobby, the flashing lights, the general confusion -- this was like pressing the button which starts the computer. He was back in his trances, his violent convulsive rages, the automatic writing, the pouring out of incoherent hatred, violence and assassination. Only this time, it was for real and this time, there was no pencil in his hand, this time there was only the loaded gun.

I agree that this is an absurd and preposterous story, unlikely and incredible. I doubt that Sirhan himself agrees with me as to how everything happened ....

Sirhan prefers to deny his mental illness, his psychological disintegration, his trances, his automatic writing and his automatic shooting .... Sirhan would rather believe that he is the fanatical martyr who by his noble act of self-sacrifice has saved his people and become a great hero ... ready to die in the gas chamber for the glory of the Arab people.

However, I see Sirhan as small and helpless, pitifully ill, with a demented, psychotic rage, out of control of his own consciousness and his own actions, subject to bizarre disassociated trances in some of which he programmed himself to be the instrument of assassination .... Then, in an almost accidentally induced twilight state, he actually executed the crime, knowing next to nothing [of] what was happening .... I am satisfied that this is how Sirhan Bishara Sirhan came to kill Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968.


***

Fitts's cross-examination of Diamond was spiky and filled with mutual disdain. "You go along with me so far?" asked Fitts, at one point. "Well, I hear your words," replied Dr. Diamond.

To Fitts, Sirhan was lying when he said he didn't remember the shooting or the notebooks. He suggested that Mary Sirhan had magnified the "horrors of war and the effect on her son in hopes that they will have some impact on this jury and your psychiatric opinion."

"I don't think it is possible to magnify the horrors of war on children," said Diamond; "my daughter, son and granddaughter live in Israel ... and I am fully aware of what the conditions are. I don't feel they were exaggerated."

***

Fitts suggested that Sirhan had simply made up his story from newspaper reports and talking to the defense team, deciding in advance what he would remember and what he would forget.

"Well, no, that was the difficulty," responded Diamond. "He was talking in ways which to me seemed very strange. He was admitting information which certainly would not help him, and was concealing information which might help him; so there seemed to be no logical rhyme or reason to his stories.

"He was quite prepared to admit to me or anybody who would ask him that he had killed Senator Kennedy; that he hated Senator Kennedy; and that he had done this to prevent Senator Kennedy from getting elected to the Presidency and sending fifty bombers to Israel. ... This did not impress me as a sociopath who is inclined to help himself by concealing his crime .... What he wouldn't talk about were all of these things which were related to his psychological state and that I regarded as mental illness."

"Did Sirhan have a true amnesia at the time he shot Kennedy?" asked Fitts.

"I think this was a true amnesia for the time he shot Kennedy .... He does not remember in his conscious state the shooting of Kennedy. He does remember in hypnotic state." But hypnosis merely accessed unconscious thoughts in his mind, explained Diamond, so it was possible the memories under hypnosis were influenced by the newspaper reports he'd read or Diamond's own hypnotic suggestions.

If it was a true amnesia, "should he not have inquired of the police why he was in custody and what he had done?" asked Fitts.

"That's not how dissociative states respond to police apprehension," explained Diamond. "From my study of Sirhan's behavior following his being taken to jail, I think it is very characteristic of this type of slow emergence from a state of dissociation, psychosis and partial intoxication, which I think accounts for some of the behavior here."

***

Fitts asked Diamond if the mirrors at the hotel "have significance for you in terms of his going into the dissociative state?"

"Of course they do," said Diamond, as if Fitts had not been listening to a word he'd said. "When Sirhan came back to the hotel and talked to this girl ... he was exhausted, he felt intoxicated, he felt too drunk to drive [and] he wanted the coffee to sober up. He was thinking sexy thoughts of this girl. And in his wanderings in search of more coffee, he came into this little alcove.

"He was the one who mentioned the mirrors under hypnosis and this of course made me . . . immediately recall these hypnotic experiments [at home]." Diamond had no way of knowing for sure if the mirrors at the hotel triggered a dissociated state in Sirhan, but he thought it quite plausible. "I would have no difficulty in triggering off such a state right now with Sirhan in front of everybody," he said. Judge Walker didn't take him up on it.

***

Three and a half days of testimony from Dr. Diamond was closely followed by four days of testimony from Dr. Seymour Pollack. "Pollack did everything to get Sirhan nailed," recalled Kaiser, "and that's the long and the short of it. He pretended to be very sympathetic to Sirhan, but it was an act."

***

On April 8, the defense rested its case after calling twenty-eight witnesses over nineteen days of testimony. Of the thirty-six days of trial testimony, more than half were spent examining Sirhan's mental condition.

Closing arguments began the next day. David Fitts led off for the prosecution; then Russell Parsons made a short but impassioned plea for the defense:

"I would like your verdict to spell, in every hamlet, on every desert in the Arab republic and in Europe, that a man can get justice in America. And justice is not the death penalty or life imprisonment in this case because that isn't warranted for this poor, sick wretch who did not know what he did."

Sirhan sat smiling through Parson's emotional forty-five-minute speech, by one account "savoring the emotional high-points like a disinterested observer at a speech contest." Emile Zola Berman then reprised the deep psychological "traumata" suffered by Sirhan since his arrival in Pasadena.

***

It was then left to Grant Cooper to make a final stand for Sirhan's life.

"We are not here to free a guilty man," he began. "We tell you, as we always have, that he is guilty of having killed Robert Kennedy. Under the facts of this case, Mr. Sirhan deserves to spend the rest of his life in the penitentiary," he said, immediately contradicting Parsons.

"I wouldn't want Sirhan Sirhan turned loose on society, as he is dangerous. There are two sides to Sirhan Sirhan, as has been pointed out by the psychiatrists, which I think demonstrates the type of mental illness he has.

"There is a good Sirhan and a bad Sirhan, and the bad Sirhan is a very nasty Sirhan but I have learned to love the good Sirhan."

***

Cooper summarized the choices available to the jury. He defined "murder in the first degree" as "willful, deliberate and premeditated murder with malice aforethought -- the specific intent to kill." Second-degree murder was diminished premeditation or deliberation plus malice aforethought. Without malice aforethought, it was manslaughter.

"As I view the evidence," Cooper said, "it would be illogical to suggest this wasn't a willful, deliberate and premeditated murder. There's no suggestion in this case that it was upon a sudden heat of passion, which reduces it to manslaughter."

So everything rested on diminished capacity -- "the extent and quality of the mature, meaningful reflection .... You must consider what effect, if any, this diminished capacity had on the defendant's ability to form any of the specific mental states that are essential elements of murder: the intent to kill, willful, deliberate and premeditated, and the reflection upon the gravity of the complicated act. If you have a reasonable doubt about this, you cannot find him guilty of murder of the first degree.

"If because of mental illness, intoxication, or any other cause, the defendant is unable to comprehend his duty [to act lawfully], he does not act with malice aforethought" and would be entitled to manslaughter. The psychiatrists, even Dr. Pollack, had testified that Sirhan had diminished capacity, so the psychiatric evidence did indeed point to manslaughter, a view shared by Russell Parsons.

"But we are not going to ask for it," said Cooper, discarding his colleagues. "In my opinion as a lawyer, the verdict should be second degree."

***

Cooper then proceeded to trample roughshod over the other issues in the case in a desperate plea for second-degree murder, throwing out any good work the defense had done:

"For the purpose of this argument, we can admit that he bought the gun with the intention of killing either Senator Kennedy or President Johnson or [UN] Ambassador Goldberg or any one of those people that he mentioned in his notebook. We can admit that he did it because he was angry at this country for ... supplying arms to Israel.

"We can admit that on June 2nd, he went to the Ambassador Hotel, having in mind that he wanted to kill Senator Kennedy ... for the purpose -- as Mr. Fitts said -- of casing the joint.

"We can admit that he made inquiries of the different persons, sometimes on the 2nd and sometimes on the 4th, as to the route that Senator Kennedy would take; where he was going to be; whether there were going to be bodyguards or not -- all of these things go to show premeditation and deliberation. It shows some planning, some thinking.

"But we come back to the law, and whether or not that is mature and meaningful thinking. The issue in this case is diminished capacity with respect to premeditation and deliberation. It isn't what happened at the time of the firing of the shot. The deliberation took place a long time before that. I don't care if he was in a hypnotic state at the time he fired the shot, or whether he was in a trance, as Dr. Diamond said; this is beside the point."

***

He then bizarrely dissociated himself from Dr. Diamond: "Were you to accept the fact that he shot Senator Kennedy in a dissociated state, he would be not guilty by reason of insanity, because he didn't know what he was doing at the time."

Instead, Cooper depicted an increasingly sick Sirhan. "Twelve witnesses would testify to his change of personality after he fell from the horse .... Dr. Pollack said he had been going downhill for more than a couple of years. Pollack told you the thing that distinguished between a psychotic and a person who was ... less mentally ill was the amount of glue that held them together .... Sirhan became unglued when he shot Senator Kennedy. His brakes wouldn't hold."

Cooper was becoming unglued himself as he accepted the discredited testimony of Alvin Clark at face value, although Sirhan denied it. "We know from the notebooks that he was thinking about doing it and he did do it." He told the trash collector, who knew where he lived, "I am going to kill Senator Kennedy." "Was this mature, meaningful thinking?"

"You remember Dr. Pollack told you that Sirhan told him he believed he had the right, the duty to kill Senator Kennedy and he didn't feel he should be punished for his act ... if he was going to be punished at all it should be a couple of years. Weigh that. Is that mature thinking? Is that meaningful thinking?" How about the rants in Sirhan's notebook? "Why in God's name did Sirhan deny these writings?" Perhaps it was amnesia, but Cooper stressed that Sirhan didn't try to hide anything.

While Cooper couldn't prove that Sirhan was drunk, and Sirhan couldn't remember how many drinks he'd had, "under hypnosis he did say he had four drinks." Cooper couldn't explain Sirhan's behavior in custody, but "he didn't say I am an Arab and I wanted the world to know. He wouldn't even tell them he was an Arab."

What about the outbursts in court? When the notebooks were received into evidence, "he pointed his finger at the Judge and told him 'You are not going to send me to the gas chamber and then tell the world you gave me a fair trial. I will plead guilty.' Is that mature thinking?"

***

Cooper stressed the transparency of the defense effort: "We permitted the prosecution's psychiatrists not only to examine Sirhan but also to place him under hypnosis and ask him anything he wanted .... Dr. Pollack told you it wasn't heard of, never had it happened before .... Could anybody be more open, more aboveboard than that?"

Cooper's argument was long-winded, garbled, rambling, confused, and incomprehensible. He sounded tired, complained of the heat, misquoted prior testimony, and disavowed his colleagues. He tried to sound smooth and urbane to the jury, but he came off as a patronizing fool, merely annoying them. As Kaiser noted, it was not his finest hour.

***

Cooper finished by distilling the majority of the psychiatric testimony, which he said would "reduce" Sirhan's penalty "to manslaughter." He wrote the names of the seven doctors who agreed Sirhan was paranoid-schizophrenic on the board in the courtroom -- Diamond, Richardson, Marcus, Schorr, Seward, De Vos, and Crane.

Cooper asked the jury not to be swayed by the fact that the victim was Robert Kennedy. "Suppose the deceased in this case had been a fellow by the name of John Smith or Jose Gonzales ... and suppose you had the same kind of testimony by the Court-appointed psychiatrists, do you think you would hesitate two minutes in returning a verdict of second degree murder as a result of diminished capacity? You wouldn't hesitate one minute."

Cooper reminded the jury that even if they rejected the idea that Sirhan was in a trance and cited the notebooks as premeditation, they would still have to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether Sirhan's plans were mature and meaningful.

"I am not suggesting Sirhan Sirhan should be given a medal for what he has done ... but I feel that the evidence and the law justifies ... a verdict of guilty of murder of the second degree, and it would certainly take care of the situation."

The Herald Examiner summed up Cooper's argument as "Sirhan was a killer, but a killer who doesn't think straight."

***

In his closing argument for the prosecution, Buck Compton called the case "highly overcomplicated" by psychiatric testimony. Cooper had conceded malice and premeditation, so Compton asserted that it all came down to the quality of the premeditation.

"Did Robert F. Kennedy," he asked, "breathe his last breath on the dirty floor of the Ambassador Hotel because he favored U.S. support for the state of Israel or because he somehow became a substitute father image in some Oedipus complex in Sirhan's mind?"

Compton said the psychiatric testimony was so confusing, "as I stand here, I can't answer the question as to what Sirhan's real motive was."

"If you believe Dr. Diamond with his mirror act, and believe Sirhan was in some kind of trance, so completely out of it that he didn't know if he was on foot or on horseback, it would be inhumane to punish him for any crime. How can you take a poor guy who doesn't know anything about what he's doing and say, 'You're guilty'? It can't be done. So if you believe those so-called experts, you have to turn him loose. But if you don't buy it, there's nothing left but a plain old cold-blooded, first-degree murder."

Compton's diatribe on psychiatry was plainly ignorant, skating over the facts to score cheap points. Referring to Sirhan seeing Kennedy's face in the mirror, he said "I got a picture of Munir standing there trying to get into the bathroom for hours on end while Sirhan was there practicing his mirror act." [In fact, Sirhan practiced in his room.]

Compton later said the whole reason for the psychiatric discipline "is to find something wrong with somebody and what better way to foist their theories on the whole world than in the case of People vs. Sirhan Sirhan."

***

He dismissed the "intoxication gimmick" used by the defense, and asked the jury to look at the facts. "This guy went out to the Ambassador on the night of June 4. He parked his car three blocks away ... he stuck a gun in his belt and he goes into the Ambassador and he gets into the kitchen area, which is unusual for [a] guest at the Ambassador .... Then he asks people if Kennedy is coming this way, and Kennedy does come that way.

"He pulls a gun out of his belt and goes up and at point-blank range puts a bullet right through his head ... [says] 'Kennedy, you S.O.B' ... then he says 'I can explain, I did it for my country.' Then he refuses to identify himself to the police. He is alert and oriented, no odor of alcohol and he refuses, when questioned, to discuss his conduct."

''Anybody, using good common sense and ordinary reason, would conclude from this that the man premeditated the murder." Compton saw the world in black and white -- good guys and bad guys -- with no room for psychiatry or excuses in the courtroom.

At three p.m. on April 14, the trial ended and the case was sent to the jury for deliberation. The options were manslaughter, carrying a penalty of one to fifteen years; second-degree murder (five years to life); or first-degree murder (life in prison or death in the gas chamber).

The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for sixteen hours and forty-four minutes. McCowan had been telling everyone that they'd come back with second-degree, and during the second full day of deliberation, the jury requested clarification of the instructions for second-degree murder.

As he awaited the verdict, Russell Parsons told the press that Sirhan expected to be traded by the government for concessions in the Middle East if convicted, and that Ambassador Nakhleh had discussed the matter with King Hussein of Jordan at the UN.

***

At 10:47 a.m. on April 17, the jury returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree against Sirhan. They also found him guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to commit murder on the five other counts in the indictment.

At 11:04 a.m. on April 23, a separate penalty trial was concluded when the jury returned the death sentence. Sirhan calmly chewed gum as the verdict was read to him. Kaiser looked on as "Parsons shook his head in disgust, and McCowan put his face in his hands. Sirhan shrugged at his brother Adel, swept the jury with a contemptuous look, threw back his shoulders, and swaggered into the holding tank."

"It's all right," he said, comforting Cooper, Parsons, and McCowan. "Even Jesus Christ couldn't have saved me."

Cooper pledged to take the case to the Supreme Court and cried out to newsmen, "Do any of you think this will act as a deterrent to the kind of crazy mind that assassinates public figures? Assassination has happened before. It will happen again ... but only from those who have warped and diseased minds. I had hoped this circle of violence would end here. It hasn't."

***

Two of the jurors had argued for second-degree murder and life, but the jury finally found unanimity. They considered Sirhan mentally ill but to an insufficient degree for second-degree murder. Juror George Stitzel thought Sirhan deserved death as a "cold-blooded murderer." He said the jury felt Sirhan lied about not remembering the shooting or writing in the notebooks.

***

The verdict came as no surprise to Kaiser. "I think the defense of diminished capacity was over the heads of the jury. They spent far too much time trying to prove it, and the proofs for it were in conflict and so the jury got very confused and they kind of threw up their hands.

"They knew that Sirhan did it. Cooper, in fact, admitted it to the jury and Sirhan on the stand admitted it in a way. He said 'I don't remember doing it but if you say I did it, I guess I did it.' And so the jury went simple.

"You know, juries in America are usually twelve ordinary dummies. Anybody that's got a college degree or a graduate degree is automatically excluded ... because they would be considered prejudiced, but this jury needed some people with graduate degrees to understand this defense, it was too complicated.

"So Sirhan was given the death sentence and it was only later when California changed its death penalty law that Sirhan's death penalty was commuted to life."

"I was upset," recalled Mike McCowan. "I feel he did have diminished capacity but ... it was a long shot that we would be able to keep him from getting the death penalty and you maybe feel that you didn't do your job ... but later on, I said, 'Well, I worked for nothing and I did the best I could do and I can't change the world but I think he got a good defense."

***

On May 5, Kaiser visited Sirhan in his cell. He gave his defense team pretty good marks for their performance but thought the prosecutors were "crooked." Sirhan still couldn't understand the shooting. To satisfy himself with Kennedy, "all I would have needed to do was just to give him a good punch in the nose at that Ambassador. It was a symbolic way of defeating him. It would have been enough for me -- had I been conscious and awake at the time I saw him."

He thought there might be something to Diamond's theories. He compared himself to the ancient sect of the hashshashin, "where the assassin was drugged -- dulled, mentally -- at the time that he commits the crime .... I wasn't under the influence of marijuana, hashish or heroin or whatever. Just a few mirrors and a couple of shots of Tom Collins was enough to put me in that same mental state as the ancient assassins were."

He couldn't understand why anyone in their right mind would kill somebody. "Where's the satisfaction?" Kaiser said, suggesting that the way he shot Kennedy was less cowardly than the snipers who shot Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There you go!" said Sirhan. "At least, Kennedy saw me. I think. I don't know ... you see, this is what I don't understand. How did the man himself feel, you know, when he saw me pulling the trigger? I can't imagine that." Kaiser reminded Sirhan that coroner Noguchi said the first shot came from behind the right ear, so Kennedy couldn't have seen him.

"I don't know about that," said Sirhan. "I must have faced him. How the hell else would I see him from profile? Uh, uh, I don't know if I could see him or distinguish him."

***

On May 21, Cooper's motion for a new trial, based on thirteen alleged court errors, was denied, and a letter from Senator Edward Kennedy to DA Evelle Younger was read into the record: "My brother was a man of love and sentiment and compassion. He would not have wanted his death to be a cause for the taking of another life. You may recall his pleas when he learned of the death of Martin Luther King: 'What we need in the United States is not division ... hatred ... violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion towards one another.'"

But the judge had his mind made up, and Sirhan was formally sentenced to death and remanded to San Quentin, where he would await the apple-green gas chamber. Sirhan listened, with hands on hips, then turned and smiled at McCowan.

"Well, now the real battle begins."

***

A new defense team with a background in Palestinian affairs was already in place for Sirhan's appeal -- Lebanese Americans George Shibley and Abdeen Jabara would be joined by Luke McKissack, a Hollywood attorney for the Black Panthers. McCowan had worked with McKissack before and stayed on to help with the appeal. The new team was formally announced on July 2, and it would be years before all legal avenues were exhausted.

***

The day after confirmation of his death sentence, Sirhan was interviewed by Jack Perkins of NBC on the eve of his move to San Quentin. Sirhan walked into a large room in Los Angeles County Jail, past McCowan, Parsons, and Cooper, and took a seat opposite Perkins under the television lights.

''I'm so nervous!" he kept telling Perkins as Cooper looked on, rather disconcertingly, like a proud father. NBC paid a reported $11,500 to the defense fund for the interview, and the eighteen-minute cut subsequently broadcast on June 3, 1969, is a fascinating distillation of the mysteries and conundrums of the trial. Perkins led Sirhan through the case and often seemed slightly bewildered by his responses.

Early on, he asked Sirhan what he thought about Senator Kennedy.

"I thought that he was the prince, sir. I thought he was the heir apparent to President Kennedy and I wished the hell that he could have made it."

"You admired him?"

"I loved him, sir.... He was the hope of all the poor people of this country, sir. And I'm with the poor people -- the minorities."

"You consider yourself a poor person."

"Yes, sir, I do .... I'm not rich." He broke into a wide, ironic smile. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, sir, on this program."

***

Sirhan spoke of his disillusionment, while unemployed, in the aftermath of the Israeli victory the year before: "I sincerely tried to find a job, sir. After I was dismissed from school and after this Arab-Israeli War ... I had no identity, no hope, no goal, nothing to strive for and I simply just gave up. There was no more American Dream for me."

"Well, why not?"

"Because I was a foreigner in this country, sir. An alien. A stranger. A refugee." He spat out the phrases with an anguished look on his face. "I wasn't an American. I was an Arab, sir. And that's my greatest setback I've got in this country, especially after the Arab-Israeli War. Because everybody in America loved a winner! And the Israelis won, sir, but I was a loser and I did not like it one bit."

***

Perkins moved on to late May, when Sirhan had first heard the reports of Kennedy's promise to send jet bombers to Israel. Sirhan became "terribly mad" -- "every time I heard the reports ... he would seem like a villain to me. Like a man who wants to kill. Like a man who wants to throw those bombs on the people and destroy ... all of a sudden, he wants to send the very same things that we're going to withdraw from Vietnam to Israel. It seemed paradoxical to me, sir. I couldn't believe it."

"You said in court that at the time you heard that ... you got so mad, I believe your words were, 'I could have blasted him right then.'''

"I could have .... I was that terribly mad, sir. I could have done anything right then and I wouldn't have known what I'd done, sir."

***

"All right, Sirhan, now on the night of the assassination, you said you went to the Ambassador Hotel, had a few drinks and then you said you were too drunk to drive home, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir. I did."

''And what happened?"

"I started searching for coffee. That was all that I wanted to do. And I found some."

"Out in the kitchen area?"

"But where, I don't remember, sir. I don't remember where I saw it but I remember getting the cup. It was a shining ... urn. And there was a girl there."

"She was a pretty girl?"

"I thought she was."

"Did you think you might try to pick her up?"

"Why not?"

"Did you know Senator Kennedy was in that hotel that night at that time?"

"Sir, I did not know that." For a moment, Sirhan seemed unsure of himself. Perkins didn't catch it and moved on.

"After you poured coffee for the girl, then what happened?"

"Then, I don't remember much what happened after that."

"You don't remember much? Do you remember anything that happened after that?"

"Other than the choking and the commotion, I don't remember that."

"The last thing you have distinct recollection of, you say, is pouring coffee for a girl in the hotel.... You remember nothing in between?"

"If I do, sir, I don't know it. ... It's totally out of my mind, so obviously I don't remember it."

Perkins turned to the May 18 reference in Sirhan's notebook.

"You were planning to kill Senator Kennedy."

"Only in my mind, sir."

"Well, that's the only place you can plan it."

"Not to do it physically -- I never thought of doing it .... I don't have the guts to do anything like that."

Sirhan didn't remember writing in the notebook.

"I know, sir, that they are my writings. It's my handwriting; they are my ... thoughts. But I don't remember them, sir."

"Well, did you only write them when you were in great fits of anger?"

"I must have been, sir. I must have been. They are the writings of a maniac, sir."

"They're the writings of Sirhan Sirhan."

"Yes, sir, but ... they're not the writings of me now, sir."

"Well, if you were writing in your notebook now, what would you write about Robert F. Kennedy?"

There's a long pause.

"To me, sir, he is still alive."

Perkins looked dumbfounded. "How?"

"To me, my whole life stopped on June fifth .... Reality to me stopped right then, I guess .... All the time over the past year, from June fifth of sixty-eight on, is unreal to me, sir. I still don't believe what has happened .... I have no realization still that I have killed him, that he's in the grave and all that."

***

"Do you wish he were alive again?"

"Very much so, sir. Every morning when I get up, sir, I say 'I wish that son of a gun were alive, I wouldn't have to be here now.'''

"Oh! Well, that's why you wish he were alive? You wish he were alive, so that you wouldn't be in jail."

"No, I wish he were alive, sir, just ... to be president."

***

Perkins asked Sirhan about the derivation of the word "assassin."

"It comes from the Arabic, doesn't it?"

"Yes, sir. Hashashin, I think. Which means drug takers -- consumers of drugs."

"Because originally, this was a sect that took drugs to commit political murders."

"Yes, sir. Sort of to dull the senses of the killer .... Because I don't think a person, sir, in his right mind would have the ... guts to do what I did."

"You have heard the psychiatrists ... say you are a mentally ill man -- emotionally disturbed. Do you believe that?

"Emotionally disturbed, yes," says Sirhan.

''Are you mentally ill?"

"I'm not mentally ill, sir, but I'm not perfect either."

***

"Arab people, in many Arab countries, seem to consider you something of a hero," suggested Perkins.

Sirhan looked down, embarrassed. "Yes, sir."

"A martyr. They look up to you, it seems."

"I don't feel it, sir. I don't feel myself as a hero. I said that before. Although I think that the world, sir, should know ... that twenty years of suffering, depravation, of injustice for the Palestinian Arab people, sir, is enough."

"Do you think your case has brought this to their attention?"

"I think whatever little attention it has brought, sir, is worth it. My life and ... regrettably, Mr. Kennedy's."

***

"How is your family taking this, Sirhan?"

"Well, it was hard, sir.... I think that they're more sorry for President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, than they are for me, to tell you the truth .... I'm the only one that is responsible for what happened to Robert Kennedy, not my family. And ... I beg society out there not to deprive them of their livelihood as they have been deprived for the past year. Just because they are my family."

"Sirhan, this is a question I think the doctors asked you several times. And I'll ask you now, just to see what your response is. If you had three wishes now, what would they be?"

Sirhan winced.

"The first wish, sir ... I wish that Senator Kennedy were still alive.... I've wished that every day that I've been here. Second one ... "

Tears came to Sirhan's eyes and he started to cover his face with his palm. There was a nineteen-second pause as he struggled to compose himself.

"That there should be peace in the Middle East. That's all."

Sirhan covered his face with his hand, overcome with emotion. That night, he was moved to death row in San Quentin.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:20 pm

PART 1 OF 2

THIRTEEN: The Second Gun

Thane Eugene Cesar studied police science at junior college and wanted to be a police officer but was rejected because of an ulcer he had suffered since his teens. By 1968, he was a twenty-six-year-old maintenance plumber at Lockheed in Burbank, home of the U-2 spy plane. He had a security clearance from the Department of Defense, so he could make repairs anywhere in the plant, and worked from seven a.m. to three thirty p.m.

He was six feet tall but out of shape at 210 pounds, with a pudgy, boyish face, two young kids to feed, and a marriage in trouble. He was also "in deep shit for money," so he took a part-time job as a security guard with Ace Guard Service, earning a buck fifty an hour. There was minimal training required -- all you needed was a uniform and a gun. In the last week of May, he worked his first assignment.

The following Tuesday, Cesar got home from work around four thirty and received a call from Tom Spangler, his contact at Ace. Spangler wanted him to work the Ambassador that night on the regular shift from six to two in the morning. Cesar was tired after his day shift, but Spangler twisted his arm -- he'd pay Cesar the full eight hours, but he could leave at midnight. Cesar agreed.

Cesar arrived at the hotel at 6:05 p.m. and reported to head of security William Gardner. Gardner initially posted him at the main doors to the Embassy Ballroom. "At eight-thirty, a quarter to nine, he took me downstairs to the Ambassador Room ... [to] mingle amongst the crowds and kind of keep an eye on things .... At nine o'clock ... he took me back downstairs to the main entrance ... to direct people to the Ambassador Room and keep them from going upstairs to the Embassy Room, which was filled up, [so] nobody could get in. I was only there about twenty minutes. At that point, he came back down and took me up to the kitchen area."

By now, because of massive overcrowding, Los Angeles fire marshals had closed the main doors to the Embassy Ballroom and were admitting people on a "one-in, one-out basis."

At nine thirty, Cesar was reassigned to the east doors of the pantry, leading to the Colonial Room, and at around eleven fifteen, he was moved to the west swinging double doors of the pantry, next to the backstage area. When Cesar left the east doors to the Colonial Room, nobody replaced him, so anybody could have walked in during the hour leading up to the shooting. As Cesar stood by the west swinging doors, ABC television conducted interviews in an alcove just inside the pantry. He listened to Milton Berle crack jokes and chatted to Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier. While he was busy enjoying himself, Sirhan came into the pantry.

When Kennedy finally came down to make his speech, Cesar held the crowd back and was waiting by the swinging doors as the senator left the stage.

***

Cesar was interviewed by the LAPD at Rampart station within hours of the shooting and again on June 24, at his home. The FBI questioned him on June 10. His account of what happened up to the shooting is pretty consistent across these interviews, but his account of his actions afterward seems to change every time he was asked.

In his first LAPD interview, Cesar described picking up Kennedy in the backstage hallway, a couple of feet from the swinging doors. Karl Uecker was leading the senator into the pantry by the right hand, and Cesar fell in behind Uecker and took ahold of the senator's right arm, just below the elbow, with his left hand, and they started pushing their way through the crowd. Kennedy never looked at him, keeping his eyes on the cameras out in front of him.

"I was right behind him all the way down to where the steam table was ... on his right side ... when we got to the edge of the steam table, he had reached out and sort of turned [to his left] to shake hands with some busboys ... my hand sort of broke loose, away from his arm, and, of course, I grabbed it again because people were all over the place.

"Now, at that time, I just happened to look up and that's when I seen ... an arm and a gun. And I reached for mine, but it was too late. He had done fired five shots and when he did, I ducked because I was as close as Kennedy was ... I grabbed for the Senator ... threw myself off balance and fell back [against the] iceboxes ... and then the Senator fell right down in front of me and then I turned around [and] seen blood coming down this side of his face [the right side] ... Murphy -- I think it was Murphy, one of the security guards ... helped me up and he says 'Let's get out in front here and stop the pandemonium.'''

Cesar did not see Sirhan's face "because he was a short man ... standing behind the camera crews and all I could see was his hand and the gun. As soon as I looked up and spotted it, the shots went right off ... to me it looked like he was arching his arm a little bit like he was getting over the group of men in front of him."

"Reaching around somebody or something?"

"Yeah. That's why I suspected he was short also. I didn't see his face."

"Did you get a good look at the gun?"

"I really didn't get a real good look at it. I knew it wasn't a .38 when it went off, because I've shot a .38 and a .22, and I can tell the difference."

***

In his second LAPD interview, Cesar put it slightly differently: "We walked down through the kitchen area with the camera lights in front of us and the camera-crews. I would say five, six, seven people was in front of us .... As we got to the ice-box area and a row of steam-cabinets, Senator Kennedy stopped and sorta turned and broke away from me to shake hands with a couple of gentlemen at the edge of the steam table, I think they were bus-boys. At this time, I was up against the icebox, approximately 12-14 inches, two feet ahead of Senator Kennedy .... I had my eyes on the Senator when he moved up forward a little more to shake hands with them. I happened to turn around and look up and just as I looked up, I seen a gun and when I seen it, it went off.

''At this time, the maitre d' [Karl Uecker] ... in front of me, to my right, either ducked or jumped or something, but he knocked me down against the icebox. Then, I scrambled to my feet, pulled my gun and, meantime, several of the camera crews and whoever was standing around there had grabbed the man that had done the shooting and I wasn't able to get to him."

Cesar's FBI interview summary states that "as Kennedy was shaking hands with a busboy, Cesar looked up and suddenly saw a hand sticking out of the crowd between two camera men and the hand was holding a gun. Cesar continued to be blinded by the brilliant lights and could not see the face of the individual holding the gun. Just as Cesar started to move to jump on the gun, he saw the red flash come from the muzzle [and] was shoved by an unknown individual and the next thing he remembered, he was on the floor against the ice machine.

"Cesar stated he was approximately four feet from the gun when it went off and that Senator Kennedy was approximately two feet from the gun. Cesar scrambled to his feet, drew his gun and moved to the Senator."

***

It's interesting to compare these accounts with what Cesar told John Marshall of KFWB radio at twelve thirty a.m., fourteen minutes after the shooting:

"Officer, can you confirm the fact that the senator has been shot?"

"Yes. I was there holding his arm when they shot him."

"What happened?"

"I don't know .... As he walked up, the guy pulled a gun and shot at him."

"Was it just one man?"

"No. Yeah, one man."

''And what sort of wound did the senator receive?"

"Well, from where I could see, it looked like he was shot in the head and the chest and the shoulder ... ."

"How many shots did you hear?"

"Four."

***

Cesar's hesitant "No. Yeah, one man" response is interesting, as is the fact that he would be the only witness to accurately describe the location of Kennedy's three wounds. Standing behind and to the right of the senator, he had a clear view of Kennedy's right ear and right shoulder and was blocking the view of many of the other witnesses.

Right after the shooting, Paul Hope of the Washington Evening Star also quoted Cesar as saying "I fell back and pulled the Senator with me. He slumped to the floor on his back. I was off balance and fell down and when I looked up, about ten people already had grabbed the assailant." Cesar would never again state that he pulled the senator back with him as he fell.

***

Putting all of Cesar's statements together, we can infer that he either fell back and pulled the Senator with him or was knocked to the ground by Uecker. He then either scrambled to his feet or was helped up by Fred Murphy and drew his gun. Murphy then told him to go out the service doors in the southeast corner of the pantry to the outer doors of the Embassy Ballroom "to get the other security guard to keep the crowd out."

One famous photograph by Boris Yaro shows Kennedy spread-eagled on the floor, as waiter Juan Romero tries to cradle his head. Kennedy's right arm is outstretched, and a few feet beneath it lies Cesar's clip-on tie, evidently knocked off when Cesar fell back against the ice machines. Kennedy had just fallen and Romero was first to reach him, but Cesar is nowhere to be seen.

The Ace guard that Cesar supposedly went in search of, Jack Merritt, did not mention and was never asked about Cesar in his police statement. Cesar claimed he and Merritt stood outside the southeast doors to the pantry, keeping the crowd out "for the next forty, forty-five minutes," but Merritt and Stowers told police they stood guard there, never mentioning Cesar.

The only television footage of Cesar shows him shortly after this, at 1:07 a.m., following Merritt through the lobby, walking calmly past the fountain and away from the Embassy Ballroom. His clip-on tie is missing, but we only see his left profile -- his holster is on his right side, so his gun is not visible.

***

Also troubling are Cesar's repeated references to a camera crew supposedly out in front of the senator, which blinded Cesar with their camera lights. The police were never able to find this camera crew, and no film or photographs ever emerged of the senator before he fell to the floor. During early interviews with witnesses, the final questions investigators would ask as a matter of routine were: Did you see a girl in a white dress with black polka dots? and Did you see a camera crew? Neither was ever found.

***

Cesar later said he was "all but ignored during the chaos following the shooting" and was getting ready to go home when he volunteered himself to police officers for questioning. On the audiotape of Cesar's subsequent interview at Rampart station, he sounded calm throughout, joking that he would be "retired after tonight. I like those quiet jobs." Cesar was asked to identify Sirhan's gun but was never asked about his own. During the second LAPD interview, in Cesar's kitchen, Sergeant Paul O'Steen asked him to describe his uniform and the equipment he was wearing. "I had a Sam Browne on with a, uh ... [coughs] ... with a .38 revolver with a four-inch barrel." The police asked nothing further about the gun until shamed into doing so in 1971.

Cesar got one sentence in the LAPD final report: "Two other guards, Stanley Kawalec and Thane Cesar, waited for and accompanied Senator Kennedy through the pantry." There's no mention that Cesar had a gun, pulled a gun, or was in a position behind and to the right of Kennedy, which matched the bullet trajectories described in the autopsy.

When one witness said he saw a security guard pull his gun in the pantry, the police told him there were no other guns pulled in the pantry; he was wrong. The name of that witness was Don Schulman, and over the next several years, Cesar and Schulman would be intertwined in the maverick reporting of the Father of the Second Gun Theory, Theodore Charach.

***

On June 4, Don Schulman was a nineteen-year-old film runner with KNXT, the local CBS affiliate, and a Kennedy fan. He'd been assigned to Alan Cranston's party at the Ambassador but that finished early, so he and his camera crew went over to check out the Kennedy celebrations. He hadn't eaten all day, so he went into the pantry in search of some sandwiches, as huge crowds awaited the senator's arrival. The crew were tired of humping their cameras around, so they took a break in the ballroom and asked Schulman to cue them when the senator came down to speak.

***

When Kennedy finally appeared, Schulman said he was standing on a ledge by the door at the east side of the stage through which the senator entered the Embassy Ballroom. In television footage of Kennedy's entrance, Schulman can clearly be seen in a blue sport coat, standing on the ledge as the senator passes by, smiling and signaling with his hand to the back of the room.

After the speech, Schulman expected Kennedy to leave by the same door he came in. Instead, Kennedy went around the back way, so Schulman jumped down from the ledge to follow, to "get a good spot for the camera crew." He was pushed through the narrow doorway by a surge of people into the wake of the senator's party, and through the swinging doors into the pantry -- "he was in front of me and ... I was just being shoved along with the crowd. I couldn't have gone back if I'd wanted to .... " On the way in, he spotted a college friend, Ira Goldstein, in the crush and said hello.

There were blinding lights, and the crowd was jammed in like sardines. Schulman's eyes were on the senator as somebody led Kennedy by the hand through the pantry. Then the shots rang out.

***

Schulman's first instinct as he saw Kennedy fall was to find his news crew and call his assignment editor at KNXT. He "high-tailed it out of there before the Senator hit the floor." As he turned to leave, he saw a woman screaming hysterically, with blood gushing from her forehead. In the chaos, unknown to Schulman, his friend Ira had been shot in the leg. He hurried out through the ballroom into the lobby, looking for a telephone.

Jeff Brent, another friend of Schulman's, was just outside the pantry when the shooting happened, reporting for Continental News Service. Brent switched on his tape recorder and narrated the scene: "Ladies and gentlemen, Kennedy has been shot! Robert Kennedy has been shot! ... I was near the senator. I heard gunshots coming from inside this room in here. Ladies and gentlemen, there was mass chaos, you heard it as it happened!"

Brent, Goldstein, and Schulman had all worked at a campus radio station together at Pierce Junior College. Within ten minutes of the shooting, Schulman recalled bumping into Brent on his way to the phone. Brent pushed RECORD and taped Schulman's immediate reaction:

"I'm talking to Don Schulman. Don, can you give us a halfway-detailed report on what happened within all this chaos?"

"Okay. I was, ah ... standing behind Kennedy as he was taking his assigned route into the kitchen. A Caucasian gentleman stepped out and fired three times ... the security guard ... hit Kennedy all three times. Kennedy slumped to the floor. As they carried him away, the security guards fired back ... As I saw ... they shot the, ah ... man who shot Kennedy, in the leg. He, ah before they could get him he shot a -- it looked like to me -- he shot a woman and he shot two other men. They then proceeded to carry, ah, Kennedy into the kitchen and ... I don't know how his condition is now."

"From what you saw, Don ... was he grazed or did it appear to be a direct hit? Was it very serious from what you saw?"

"Well, from what I saw, it looked ... fairly serious ... he was definitely hit three times. Things happened so quickly that ... there was another eyewitness standing next to me and she is in shock now and very fuzzy, as I am, because it happened so quickly."

"Right. I was about six people behind the senator, I heard about six or seven shots in succession. Now ... is this security guard firing back?"

"Yes, ah the man who stepped out fired three times at Kennedy, hit him all three times and the security guards then fired back ... "

"Right."

"Hitting him, and he is in apprehension."

At first, Schulman seemed to say that the security guard hit Kennedy all three times, but later he stated that the Caucasian man who stepped out fired three times at Kennedy, hitting Kennedy all three times, and then the security guards fired back. From this ninety-second recording was born the "second gun" theory and its self-appointed father, Ted Charach.

***

Schulman's description was extraordinarily accurate on several key points. He correctly stated that Kennedy was shot three times even though reports by Kennedy's press secretary and the police would mistakenly say for days that the senator was shot only twice. Schulman also saw security guards drawing their guns in the pantry. Very few witnesses saw this, but it turned out to be true. He saw an injured woman (Elizabeth Evans) and two injured men (the wounds of Weisel and Schrade were bloody and clearly visible, while Stroll and Goldstein had minor injuries.).

After speaking to Brent, Schulman called in his story to assignment editor Jack Fox at the station. Within minutes, news anchor Jerry Dunphy was relaying it on air -- "Don Schulman, one of our KNXT employees, witnessed the shooting that we have been telling you about .... A man stepped out of a crowd and shot Kennedy. Kennedy's bodyguards fired back. A suspect now in custody ... Don Schulman, of KNXT, tells us that Kennedy was shot three times." It seems a UPI reporter was listening in to the Brent interview, because the story immediately hit the wires and was reported by Phil Cogan of KLA radio at 12:52 a.m.

Schulman was told to go speak to CBS reporter Ruth Ashton-Taylor, who was interviewing witnesses in the Venetian Room. At six minutes before one, Schulman appeared live on air and retold his story:

"Well, I was standing behind him [Kennedy], directly behind him. I saw a man pull out a gun; it looked like he pulled it out from his pocket and shot three times. I saw all three shots hit the senator, then I saw the senator fall, and he was picked up and carried away.

"I also saw the security men pull out their weapons; after then it was very, very fuzzy; next thing that I knew there were several shots fired. And I saw a woman with blood coming from her temple. Also a man was shot in the leg and I saw the security police grab someone .... "

"Thank you, Don."

***

Schulman's story stayed broadly the same during this interview. He didn't explicitly state that the guards fired back, but their guns were drawn, and he heard several more shots. As he later told the DA's office, "when I got to Ruth Ashton ... apparently, she didn't ask the same questions that [Jeff Brent] asked and even though it was a couple of minutes' difference, the response was different. Not a different story, just some left out, some more detail ... it's a matter of semantics."

Schulman was then told to go to Good Samaritan, where he reported on the senator's condition from a communications car. When he got back to the station at three in the morning, Schulman was exhausted, but KNXT news anchors Jerry Dunphy and Clete Roberts wanted to interview him live on air about what he'd seen. He breezed through it quickly, with no mention of guards with guns or conspiracy -- "Clete said to me, 'Did you see a security guard pull a gun?' I think that was one of his lead questions, and at that time, I said 'No, I didn't see anything.' 'Was there a conspiracy?' 'No, I didn't see anything.'''

''I'd been up almost two days. I had my contact lenses in the whole time and I didn't take them out and my eyes were inflamed. I was tired as can be. I didn't give a goddamn." He'd had it; he just wanted to go to bed.

The next day, the Boston Herald American carried a UPI story that quoted Schulman as saying "the gunman was shot by Kennedy's bodyguards." France Soir, the largest French newspaper, reported a man firing "and then the Kennedy bodyguard pulls his gun out of his holster and fires from the hip like in a Western movie."

The LAPD logged Jerry Dunphy's aircheck regarding Schulman and the guard firing in its media files, and a few days later, investigators visited CBS to talk to witnesses who had been at the hotel. Schulman later recalled the interview for Deputy DA Thomas Kranz:

"I said, ... 'The Senator was shot three times.' They said, 'No, he was shot twice.' I said, 'Well, I saw three times.' They said, 'No, he was shot twice.' I said, 'Fine, whatever, I thought I saw three times.' Then they said, 'Anything else?' I said, 'Yeah, I saw other guns pulled and possibly fired.' They said, 'Why do you say that?' I said, 'Well, because there was just like firecrackers, a whole bunch of shots.' They said, 'There was no other guns.' I said, 'I thought I saw them.' They said 'No, you didn't.' I said, 'Okay.'''

In other interviews, Schulman said, "As soon as I told them [my story], they weren't interested in me ... They filled out their reports, thanked me very much and ... the officer who interviewed me [said] they had enough witnesses and none of them saw that, so there's no use him even writing it down."

This official disinterest is reflected in the summary of Schulman's police interview in LAPD files, dated August 9, 1968: "Just prior to Kennedy coming down, [Schulman] stationed himself just inside door at east end of the stage so he could signal camera crew when Kennedy arrived. Stayed at this location until after Kennedy's speech, then went into area just inside doorway to [opposite] direction Kennedy was leaving. Witness forced by crowd following Kennedy to go through double doors [emphasis added] and was just outside serving kitchen when he heard noise like firecrackers. Saw woman bleeding and Kennedy on floor. Did not see actual shooting or suspect due to crowd. Saw no woman in polka dot dress. Did not take photos. Thinks he saw three gunshot wounds when he looked at Senator."

This is an amazing report. If Schulman was just inside the doorway from the Embassy Ballroom and was pushed through the double doors, as the report states, he was inside the pantry at the time of the shooting. And Schulman was positive he saw Kennedy hit three times. If he didn't enter the pantry until Kennedy was lying on the floor, how could he have possibly known this? While a pool of blood formed under the senator's right ear, the two wounds under Kennedy's right armpit were not visible as he lay on the floor.

***

Curiously, the officer who interviewed Schulman was Sergeant Paul O'Steen, the same officer who had interviewed Thane Cesar in his kitchen on June 24. Cesar's interview was cursory, lasting fifteen minutes, and no attempt was made to check his gun. If Schulman is correct and he was interviewed prior to this, the Cesar interview is shockingly negligent. If Schulman was actually interviewed on August 9, after Cesar, why is O'Steen so keen to dismiss a second gun and why did it take over a month to contact Schulman to check out reports of a guard firing back?

O'Steen's report had the desired effect. Schulman was ignored and KNXT colleagues fell in with the police -- he must have been mistaken, they said; nobody else saw what he saw. "I got to the point where everybody was telling me I'm out of my mind ... so I just related the story .... If they all thought I was mistaken, that was all right with me."

***

Grant Cooper was never told about either Cesar or Schulman. Cooper told researcher Betsy Langman he had no idea there was an armed guard on Kennedy's right side just before the shooting. "I never dreamed that anybody else fired a shot ... that thought never entered my head."

While Cooper was tied up with the Friars Club case, he was depending on defense investigator Michael McCowan for his information. McCowan had access to all the police files and told me he did interview Cesar, but his eight-line summary on him seems to be drawn entirely from Cesar's FBI report. McCowan doesn't mention that Cesar had a gun, much less that it may have been fired.

McCowan had concluded early on that Sirhan did it alone. So, despite being the only witness to accurately describe Kennedy's wounds, Cesar was never called to testify at trial. And the eyewitness account of Don Schulman, the only witness to report seeing another gun fired, was suppressed and ignored.

***

When Sandra Serrano completed her interview with NBC's Sander Vanocur an hour or so after the shooting, Teddy Charach took her seat. It quickly became clear Charach wasn't in the pantry, but as he rattled on with his unsolicited report, Vanocur's face betrayed the thoughts of many after him -- "Who let this guy in here?"

Charach grabbed the spotlight and never really let it go, a true eccentric who has made this case his life's work. He puzzled the LAPD to the point of suspicion. When they checked gun-range rosters for Sirhan's name, Charach's name was also checked, along with more than a dozen others.

Charach was a constant thorn in the side of the LAPD and district attorney's office in the early seventies, and their intelligence files portray a Canadian newsman "of questionable prominence," with a string of traffic citations for excess smoke coming from his vehicle, prone to releasing press statements from an address at the Washington Hilton. Charach had a theatrical style of presentation that looks pretty funny now, but he did truly pioneering work at the time, conducting "audio-video interviews" with key witnesses the authorities either ignored or willfully misinterpreted.

Two or three months after the assassination, Charach picked up the phone and called Don Schulman. He was doing an investigation on the Kennedy killing, Charach said, and it was most important he come talk to him. Schulman said, "Fine, come over."

"I was a little skeptical at first because he had this funny look about him," Schulman recalled. "I didn't know what his story was." Schulman made Charach a copy of the Jeff Brent recording, and about a week later, Charach returned. "He tells me that on the tape -- he had listened to the tape over and over again -- I said I saw a security guard pull a gun and shoot Senator Kennedy. I said, 'No, I didn't. If you listen to the tape, you can see that point where I get confused or where I was just shook-up.' 'Oh, no,' he says. 'You saw it. You saw it.' I said, 'No, I didn't.' We got into about an hour-and-a-half debate on his interpretation of what I saw."

Schulman had played the tape five or six times for friends and had never noticed anything odd about it, but now, as he played the tape back with Charach, "it shook me up ... and it could very easily and it has been misconstrued to say that I saw the guard pull out the gun and shoot Kennedy three times."

Charach told him to stick to his story, but it wasn't his story -- "I've never not stuck to my story .... My story is that I saw a guard pull out a gun and fire. That's what I've said, and that's what I've always said .... I never knew where the shots came from .... I didn't even see Sirhan shoot Kennedy, I have no idea who shot or not, to tell you the truth I just said I heard the shots and I saw him shot, in my mind, three times I did say I saw a guard with a gun and I really feel that it was fired. But as to whether he shot [Kennedy] ... Jesus! You know, it's crazy; it's insane."

But Charach took Schulman's "slip of the tongue" and ran with it, using the Brent tape to promote his theory that it was the guard who shot Kennedy. At one point, Charach said to Schulman, "If you could only remember, think what you'll do .... What you saw is history."

"Well, it's not a question of thinking what I'll do," replied Schulman. "I just didn't see anything like that. I saw a guard pull his gun and I'm pretty sure he fired. I'm pretty cotton-pickin' sure he did."

Charach then came back and told Schulman he was making a documentary record album. Schulman said, "'Okay, fine. But I'm only gonna say what I said before. I've nothing new and startling.' He then claimed that he'd like to put me under hypnosis because he feels that I saw a lot that I didn't know I saw. I tell him that I would have no objections. He said, 'Well, what if we put you under a lie-detector test?' I said, 'That'd be all right too.''' Schulman didn't follow the trial very much and let Charach get on with it.

***

Thane Eugene Cesar was having marital problems. By the fall of 1969, his wife, Joyce, had left him for a clarinet player. Cesar was playing cards one night when he bragged that there was "a helluva lot more to the Bobby Kennedy assassination than anyone knew about." Life was about to get a lot worse. A man named Ken Marshall was at the card table and tipped off Ted Charach, who happened to share an attorney with Cesar. Two exclusive interviews were arranged with the Ace guard that October.

Charach taped these sessions and would later use excerpts in his documentary film, The Second Gun. Cesar gives an extraordinarily candid account of his actions at the Ambassador Hotel, revealing a right-wing, seemingly racist worldview that would haunt him for years to come. Cesar later claimed he was candid with Charach because he had nothing to hide and that his remarks were distorted. But the audio excerpts in "The Second Gun" seem to be straight representations of what he said.

Cesar told Charach he wasn't a Democrat "and I definitely wouldn't have voted for Bobby Kennedy because he had the same ideas as John [Kennedy] did, and I think John sold the country down the road .... He literally gave it to the Commies, the minorities, the blacks." Cesar told Charach he voted for segregationist George Wallace in 1968 and passed out handbills and made donations to the Wallace campaign.

The man who'd guarded Kennedy had very strong opinions: "The black man, for the past four to eight years, has been cramming this integrated idea down our throat ... so you've learned to hate him. And one of these days, at the rate they're going, there is going to be a civil war in this country. It's going to be white against the black ... and the blacks ain't never gonna win!

"I'm fed up and I know a lot of people that I work with have the same feeling .... We had it shoved down our throat enough. But one of these days, it's going to be shoved too far, and then ... we're going to fight back! First of all, I think the white man is going to try and do it with his voting power. And if they can't do it by getting the right person to straighten the thing out, then he's going to take it in his own hands. I can't see any other way to go!"

[Ruben "Rocky" Carbajal, Morales' best friend] I don't have respect for that Robert,
when he put down in the newspaper --
I'm just quoting what he put down in the newspaper --
he says, "The blacks, take anything you want,
it belongs to you."

Image

What kind of a goddamn asshole is that?
All the ethnic groups around the United States,
what about the rest of 'em?
I say, that man is crazy.
He wants to start a civil war
right here in the United States
with that stupid talk like that.
Then he got knocked off in a hurry, didn't he?

-- RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, by Shane O'Sullivan -- Illustrated Screenplay


SUS chief Robert Houghton would later claim there was nobody "with right-wing connections inside the kitchen pantry," but Cesar's views make a mockery of this.

Cesar then took Charach through what happened that night, interspersing his comments with his trademark chuckle. "At eight thirty, quarter to nine," he said, "I can remember it as long as I live -- I was standing at the main door of the ballroom. [Ace guard] Jack [Merritt] looks at me and he says, 'You know, I got a funny feeling there's gonna be big trouble here tonight,' and I looked at him and I says, 'Why?' He says, 'I just got that feeling,' and I just laughed it off as a joke. But maybe he knew something I didn't." Cesar gave a dirty laugh.

Charach, acting on Don Schulman's story, then tried to zero in on when Cesar drew his gun:

"When the shots were fired, that's when I reached for my gun, and this is when I got knocked down."

"Did you get your gun out of your holster?"

"Yeah, but it didn't do me no good, because I'm on the floor. But anyways, I got back up and I had my gun out."

"Did you see the other guys pull their guns after you pulled your gun?"

"No. After we went through the swinging doors, yeah, there were three of us who had their guns out [Cesar, Merritt and Murphy]."

"What about in the kitchen?"

"Naw, I didn't see anybody else pull their guns in the kitchen area ... except for myself."

"And you pulled it out the instant you saw ... "

"When I seen the flashes in the gun go off, I pulled it, but I got knocked down!"

"How far did you have it out?"

"I had it in my hand."

Asked again about when he drew his gun, Cesar answered, "When I saw the gun [Sirhan's] go off, I pulled it ... just as soon as the shots were fired."

***

So now, off the official record, Cesar described pulling his gun not as he scrambled to his feet after the shooting but as soon as the shots were fired, as he was thrown off balance and fell and, by one account, pulled Kennedy with him.

Cesar also mentioned for the first time to anyone that he got powder burns in his eyes: "I got powder in my eyes from the flash. I was a little behind Bobby, so I would say I was about three feet from the flash, 'cause I looked up and seen a red gun flash and, like I say, I got a little bit of powder in my eyes." Cesar later confirmed this story to author Dan Moldea.

When Charach later checked this with ballistics expert William Harper, Harper said Cesar would not get powder in his eyes from Sirhan's gun at that range but if Cesar himself had fired, the powder could have been blowback from his own barrel.

Cesar described seeing an open wound in the back of the Senator's head "because the back of his head was blown off!" He then raced out of the pantry to hail fellow Ace guard Jack Merritt at the Embassy Ballroom outer doors, who then charged into the pantry, also brandishing his gun.

When Charach brought up the obvious discrepancies with Cesar's statements to investigators, Cesar admitted those reports were "wrong, inaccurate and misleading ... he had fabricated his testimony." Charach then addressed the issue of Cesar's gun.

"What caliber gun did you have on you?"

"Thirty-eight."

"Is there any chance that gun could have gone off?"

"My gun?"

"Yeah."

"Ahhh ... the only way it would have [gone] off is if I had pulled the trigger, because the hammer wasn't cocked. It would have taken more pressure .... I would have had to want to fire the gun .... It wouldn't have been something where I would have slipped on the trigger."

Cesar admitted to Charach that it was possible to build a .22-caliber gun within the frame of a .38 and said there was "something in the back of his mind" he wanted to share with him -- something he would never share with investigators.

''A month after [the assassination], I had a little H&R .22, just like the one that was used on Bobby ... and I took it out in the woods and I had three or four guys with me, and I fired it as fast as I could .... I asked each one of them. I said, 'How many times did I fire that gun?' And not one of 'em said over five times. So it's impossible to count how many times you fire a revolver if you pull the trigger fast enough, because you can make two shots sound like one."

"What is a H&R .22?" asked Charach.

"It's exactly the same kind of .22 like he had ... same length barrel, same size; the only difference is his was, I think, an eight shot and mine's a nine. That's the only difference between ... the one Sirhan used and the one I had."

Cesar said he'd sold the .22 about a year before (October 1968) to a colleague who was retiring from Lockheed and going back to Arkansas. H&R stood for Harrington & Richardson, and Charach discovered that H&R manufactured look-alike .22s and .38s.

Cesar again confirmed this story during a polygraph examination arranged by Dan Moldea in 1994. He recalled firing the .22 "one time after the assassination, [and] it was unbelievable how quick you could rap off [eight] shots."

***

Ted Charach decided to put the evidence he'd collected "on the record." He approached Dr. Noguchi's attorney, Godfrey Isaac, with his findings, but Isaac initially dismissed him as just another conspiracy nut. Charach persisted, though. He waited in reception to grab a free moment with Isaac, played him the tape of his conversation with Cesar, and finally convinced him to take the case.

On June 4, 1970, Isaac filed a complaint against the LAPD and LADA on behalf of Charach, charging them with "deliberately, intentionally and knowingly" suppressing evidence regarding the assassination. At a press conference the same day, Karl Uecker appeared with Charach as he publicly outlined his second-gun theory for the first time, relating new evidence not presented at the trial.

Schulman saw a guard fire his gun and saw Kennedy hit three times; Karl Uecker grabbed Sirhan after the second shot; anti-Kennedy right-winger Gene Cesar drew his gun from a firing position matching the rear, upward trajectory of the shots described in the autopsy; and the discrepancies between the witness statements and the muzzle distance were made public for the first time. The 4,818 interviews conducted during the RFK murder investigation and $1 million spent had somehow glossed over all these issues. The "heart-breaking conclusions" of Charach's "two-year probe" were impressive but thoroughly ignored by the mainstream press. Only the Los Angeles Free Press reported the story.

***

Witnesses generally described two shots, then a pause, then a barrage of shots. Charach suggested that Sirhan's first two shots missed or went through the shoulder pad of Kennedy's suit coat; the next three came from Cesar's gun, behind Kennedy, as Uecker jumped on Sirhan and he sprayed bullets at the other victims. Charach called Schulman "one of history's most important witnesses." The official story was a fraud. "Karl Uecker's heroic actions saved the life of Senator Kennedy before the intervention of a second weapon."

Charach insisted that Uecker grabbed Sirhan in the pause after the second shot, not the fourth, as prosecutor Fitts suggested at trial. He appealed for a reexamination of "the cancer of ... the American political assassination syndrome .... We are the witnesses and we will not remain silent, less history judge us with the guilty."

Charach subsequently introduced Isaac to Mary Sirhan and, after meeting Sirhan in prison, Isaac agreed to represent him.

***

By now, CBS had grown increasingly irritated with Charach's touting of its former employee Schulman as a prime witness. Charach had apparently threatened to sue CBS for negligence, so its Los Angeles affiliate, KNXT, aired an editorial by newsman Carl George, attempting to debunk Schulman's story: "We checked videotapes recorded the night of the assassination [the Ruth Ashton-Taylor interview]. Schulman made no reference to having seen a security guard draw and shoot his gun from a position on the floor .... He does not say it until two years later."

This was not true. Schulman told Jeff Brent, and the KNXT aircheck by Jerry Dunphy reported Schulman seeing the guard fire -- presumably prompted by what Schulman called in to the station.

CBS cameraman John Viazenko then claimed that Schulman was in the ballroom, not in the pantry, and CBS colleagues Frank Raciti and Dick Gaither later told Robert Kaiser the same thing. Again, these claims are not credible. While there is no footage of Schulman at the time of the shooting, he was where he said he was before the speech, and seemingly alone. I don't believe that any of Schulman's colleagues were close enough to know where he was during the shooting. It sounds to me like CBS staff were ganging up on a lowly film runner to support their news agenda.

Schulman was angered by the story and made his feelings known to CBS News. They eventually apologized on air.

***

By 1971, Schulman had quit the news business and loved his new job, fighting narcotics in the city schools. Charach had completed his investigative audio probe Why? and was now making his documentary film on the assassination. He told Schulman he was being supported by the Kennedy family, and Don finally consented to a short interview, filmed in his backyard: "I was in the pantry way following the senator. He stopped and shook hands with several people and started to progress again. We were packed in there like sardines. There were lights and cameras and people and a lot of excitement. The senator had just finished shaking hands with someone, and another man, I think it was the maitre d', walked up and took his hand. As we were slowly pushed forward, another man stepped out and he shot. Just then, the guard who was standing behind Kennedy took out his gun and he fired also. The next thing I knew is that Kennedy was shot three times."

"Now, how far was Sirhan from Senator Kennedy at the time?"

"I would say approximately from three to six feet."

"Where was this guard who was firing his gun?"

"He was standing directly to the side and back of Kennedy."

"On what side?"

"He was standing on the right-hand side .... I didn't see everything that happened that night because of the blinding lights and the people screaming, but the things that I did see, I'm sure about. And that is, Kennedy being shot three times; the guard definitely pulled out his gun and fired."

At this point, Schulman didn't know what to think. "Charach may turn out to be some great investigative genius and he may turn out to be some nut you lock up."

***

Charach screened the first fifty-minute cut of his film on May 21, 1971, to an invited audience including Jesse Unruh and Rafer Johnson. The DA's office was worried, so an informant smuggled in an undercover ballistics specialist from the DA's office as his guest. They reported back that the screening was very impressive. Jesse Unruh cried after the presentation and had to go outside. Rafer said it opened his eyes to what had really happened.

Watching the longer cut of the film today, it's easy to make fun of the action-figurine reconstructions Charach uses to illustrate the bullet paths but, the testimony of these primary witnesses still retains its power, and Charach presents a sober and compelling case for a second gunman firing the fatal shots.

***

At this point, Charach was proving to be a real thorn in the side of LA justice. The district attorney's office, worried about Sirhan's impending appeal, sent out feelers to the FBI, seeking information about Cesar. As press coverage of Charach and his second-gun theory began to proliferate, the DA's office called Cesar in for questioning on July 14, 1971.

Three years on from the assassination, a deputy district attorney, two DA investigators, and two sergeants from LAPD would question Cesar about his gun for the first time. According to LAPD files, Cesar was scheduled for a polygraph examination at the end of the interview "as a result of a misquoted statement which appeared in the June 12, 1970 issue of the Los Angeles Free Press."

Cesar admitted to the investigators that he had owned a .22 but sold it to workmate Jim Yoder just before he retired from Lockheed, "somewhere around" February 1968 -- four months before the assassination. The .22 had been purchased in 1961 for home protection.

Once more, Cesar had changed his story. A few minutes later, his loose tongue began to get him tangled up again. He recalled Sergeant O'Steen coming to his home and taping their interview. Cesar said after the interview was over, in a conversation not recorded, "I did mention to him -- in fact, I don't remember if I showed it to him, but I mentioned I had a gun similar to the one that was used that night." Sergeant Charles Collins quickly seized on the apparent contradiction.

"Did you own that .22 on the night of the Kennedy assassination?"

"No," replied Cesar.

"Well, how did you show it to the sergeant the night he came out to interview you?"

"No, I didn't," said Cesar. "That's what I said. I just told him about it, and I wanted, you know, I was telling him what it was. I wanted to show it to him, you know, what kind of gun it was."

"But you didn't have it available that night to show it to him?"

"No, no. In fact, I don't remember whether Jim Yoder had left the state or not for Arkansas, but I had already sold it to him for $10."

***
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

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Cesar's shifting statements were highly suspicious. Years later, he told Dan Moldea he did, in fact, show his .22 to O'Steen that night. They talked about how easy it was to conceal such a weapon -- you could hide it in the palm of your hand. Cesar brought the gun out and said, "His was just like mine, except it was a different brand."

But once again, Cesar's deception was swept under the carpet. At the end of his 1971 interview, investigators decided that "a polygraph examination would not add to the investigation ... because Mr. Cesar answered all questions put to him in a thorough, straightforward and honest manner ... all questions were satisfactorily answered and the evidence given by Mr. Cesar coincided with other evidence received by investigators.... The investigators never doubted Cesar's word regarding his activities in the pantry .... Subsequent investigation, including comparison of his own statements, indicates that Schulman was inaccurate in his allegation that Cesar fired his weapon."

District Attorney Busch subsequently told the press that Mr. Yoder, the new owner of the gun, had been contacted and Cesar's statement had been verified, but this was another lie. Nobody had bothered to call Yoder to check this out.

When Ted Charach finally located Yoder, he said he had retired from Lockheed in the fall of 1968 and returned to his native Arkansas. Before he left, Cesar sold Yoder a .22 he had decided to "get rid of." Yoder produced a receipt from Cesar dated September 6, 1968, and sent a copy to Charach -- he paid fifteen dollars for a nine-shot H&R .22 pistol, serial number Y13332.

"Something came up and he said he went to the assistance of an officer," recalled Yoder. "He seemed a little worried, and he said there might be repercussions from that and that was, I would say, to the best of my knowledge, sometime in June." Yoder was sure Cesar had told him he had fired the gun while giving "emergency assistance with that unidentified officer."

Unfortunately, Yoder no longer had the gun. In October 1969, it was stolen during a burglary. Five years later, when the LAPD belatedly tried to verify the burglary, they found the local sheriff's department's files had been purged. The gun wasn't recovered until the mid-nineties, when Charach launched Operation Tinker Toy with producer Beaux Carson and had it fished out of a lake in Blue Mountain, Arkansas.

***

Nine days after the Cesar reinterview, Don Schulman was called in by Deputy District Attorneys Richard Hecht and Sid Trapp and two others. Much of the interview is taken up with the men from the DA's office trying to get as much information as they can on Charach, and feverishly speculating whether the Brent tape has been edited to make it sound like Schulman said the security guard shot Kennedy.

The rest of the interview explores the key points with Schulman, and his story holds up well, even three years after the shooting. Schulman placed himself in the pantry, about level with the partition, twelve feet behind and to the right of Kennedy when the shooting started. His attention was focused on the senator, and he had a fairly clear view of him.

"As I recall, the man stepped out and shot Kennedy three times. The whole place broke out into a panic. There was a lot of guards around. I saw their guns and one fired back, as I recall, and that's it."

"Did you see the person who fired the three shots?"

"No, I did not."

He's referred to the Jeff Brent interview.

"This statement here -- 'It looked like he pulled it out of his pocket and shot three times.'''

"I think I was referring to Sirhan but ... it all happened so quickly."

"Alright. Well, did you see Sirhan shoot the Senator?"

"I don't know. As I said, I focused my attention mostly on Senator Kennedy."

"Well, did you see somebody pull out a gun?"

"Um ... I saw a guard pull out a gun. I saw several guns."

"Alright, now did you see someone fire a gun three times?"

"No, I did not see anyone fire three times; I saw the Senator hit three times ... three blood splotches ... One minute he was standing up; the next minute he was on his way down."

"Can you say with certainty in your own mind that that particular security guard fired a weapon at that time?"

"Um ... well, as I said in the past, I could be pretty sure he pulled out the weapon and fired. I could be pretty sure somebody fired back."

"What was it that you saw to indicate to you that he fired?"

"I had thought someone had hit Sirhan, it all happened so fast, he was yelling, 'My leg! My leg!' ... and I saw the Senator was hit and then, I saw their guns and the security guard pulled out his gun and fired."

He had a picture in his mind of a guard with a gun in his hand. He didn't see him draw or point it -- "all of a sudden, he was there with the gun." The guard was wearing a dark uniform and standing -- not kneeling or lying down -- behind and to the right of Kennedy. He saw the guard fire once. He also saw other guns drawn just after the shots were fired but couldn't say who was holding them or whether they were guards in uniform.

He didn't remember Kennedy's hand going up to his head or his head jerking back -- "I just in my mind saw the three splotches of blood .... At first, I heard three shots. Then I heard a whole series of shots and it happened, just, in an instant .... He was standing one minute and then he started to slump down ... after that, I just wanted to get the heck out of there."

"What do you mean by hit three times?"

"Well, as I recall right now, I saw three blood splotches and heard ... three shots. And this in my mind told me three times."

***

Schulman couldn't recall much beyond his key statements.

"I wish you'd come to me when it had happened," he said.

"Well, a lot of times people's memory improves as time goes on," strained his inquisitors as they aired their doubts about his statements:

"You are correct about a lady being struck in the head and bleeding and you are correct about a security guard with a gun in his hand. However, in the position that you're standing, you would have to have been almost directly behind or right next to a man, six foot three [Paul Schrade] who was struck in the forehead and fell to the ground immediately. How you missed him, I don't know."

Toward the end of the interview, Hecht set out his position: "I don't think anybody would dispute that you were there ... we know you were there ... [and] it's not our intention to, in any way, ask you to change your story ...

"I don't question what you saw," he continued, "but I wonder about the sequence .... I think there's a very good possibility that you're right outside the room when this happens, outside these doors and there you would have seen Mrs. Evans and as you come in here, right after it, you would have seen the guard with the gun in his hand."

"Well, that's how I recall it," replied Schulman. "I don't mean to argue with you but ... that's not the way it happened."

Schulman was positive of the sequence of events. He had to be in the pantry before the shooting because he said hello to Ira Goldstein while he was in there. "I didn't see everything," he concludes, "and I really didn't see that much ... but I know what I saw."

***

Hecht asked Schulman what he could swear to in court "if we've got somebody's life on the line."

"Okay, the thing I could swear to -- that I, in my mind, saw the Senator hit three times, that I saw and heard three gunshots simultaneously and three that I assumed to be wounds because of the blood. Also, that I did see other weapons. One in particular was a guard behind the Senator and that I did see the woman shot in the forehead and that I saw Ira Goldstein ... those are the things that I'm absolutely concretely positive about .... I did see a guard pull a gun and I'm pretty sure that the guard fired."

"Don, I don't want to tell you what to do but temper what you say. You say you saw a guard pull a gun but a minute ago, you said you only saw him with the gun out."

"Well, it's like here we go with the [Brent] tape .... I assume he pulled it because where else is he gonna get it?"

"Did you assume he fired it?"

"Uh ... I'm pretty darn sure he fired it."

"Are you positive?"

"I'm pretty positive he fired it ... [but] I could not in clear conscience get up and swear before God ... when a man's life is at stake."

***

By the end of the interview, Schulman was sick of the whole thing: "If I could walk away from this whole thing right now and say the hell with you and Ted Charach, I really would ... to hell with it, just there it is, forget it."

The investigators played it cool when Schulman offered to let them copy the Jeff Brent tape, but as soon as he left, the room broke out in consternation.

"Do we want his tape now?"

"You bet your life I want that tape now. What the hell are you doing? It's the only goddamn tape in the world of that original conversation."

"It's not .... He copied it from Brent."

"Brent's got the original... [Brent] has altered that fuckin' thing with Charach. That's how it comes out.... Hey, Charach's right on his ass. Charach and Isaacs ... As soon as he gets back, they're gonna be right on his ass to find out what happened and they'll ... wanna hear the tape."

"We can delete this swearing later," said the secretary.

Moments later, the tape recorder was turned off. All these guys seemed to care about was confiscating a tape that made them look bad.

***

In October 1971, six months after losing his job at Lockheed, Cesar filed for bankruptcy. In 1973, he was hired by Hughes Aircraft, where he would stay for the next seven years. Again, he received a special security clearance from the Department of Defense, joining a company closely tied to the CIA.

***

It seems very strange that despite this renewed interest from the DA's office, investigators never questioned Cesar's contact at Ace Guard Service, Tom Spangler, or the company owners, Frank and Loretta Hendrix.

Once again, it was left to a "citizen researcher" to step into the breach. By 1973, Betsy Langman, a flirtatious and fast-talking New Yorker who would later marry novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, was writing an article on the case for Harper's magazine. She visited the Ace office in Sepulveda and interviewed owner Frank Hendrix, a salty, straight-talking character who called himself a two hundred percent American. Hendrix fought the Japanese in World War II and was fiercely protective of the police -- "dirty filthy rotten people call a cop a pig. Nobody dared call me a pig; I'd kill him."

[Ruben "Rocky" Carbajal, Morales' best friend] They called him "The Man of a Thousand Faces."
That's what he was called.
He hated all communists, you know.
He's what you call 100% American. all the way through.
You don't mess with him, or he'd blow your ass apart.

-- RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, by Shane O'Sullivan -- Illustrated Screenplay


On the night of the shooting, Hendrix was at the Century Plaza with six guards, and his men were also with Senator McCarthy over at the Hilton. Guards were assigned randomly, and he had a turnover of a thousand guards a year. All his guards carried .38s and worked a six-to-two shift. He didn't know if Cesar fired back, but Cesar told him the crowd was pushing in on him too much to pull his gun -- he couldn't get his arms up.

Hendrix was very cooperative and pulled Cesar's work records, which showed his first assignment was the week before the shooting. Hendrix explained that Ace had the Ambassador account for a year prior to the assassination and a year afterward. He had to have a guard on the pantry door for a month after the shooting to keep tourists out.

***

Hendrix's own view was that "Robert Kennedy killed himself" because of his unwillingness to have uniformed security around. While Hendrix does not seem suspect, not all of his statements check out. Ace was actually incorporated on January 2, 1968, and didn't receive its license until the following March, so it couldn't have held the Ambassador account for a year before the shooting. By 1988, the company had rebranded as Ace Security Services, and former LAPD criminalist DeWayne Wolfer was listed as company president.

Mike McCowan, it turns out, was a very good friend of Hendrix's. When Langman interviewed McCowan in 1973, he was president of a rival guard service, American Protection Industries. The two companies held the accounts for a lot of the big hotels in Los Angeles. Hendrix first knew McCowan as a cop who came to his home after a burglary in the mid-sixties.

***

Ted Charach kept refining his film, and the completed 110-minute cut was screened to critical acclaim in New York in October 1973 and nominated for a Golden Globe the following year. By this time, Congressman Allard Lowenstein, a close friend of Robert Kennedy's, was investigating the case. He got Paul Schrade involved, and in 1975 a civil suit brought by Schrade and CBS led the DA to appoint Special Counsel Thomas Kranz to reexamine the case.

It was also clear that Don Schulman was not the only one who saw a guard with a gun in his hand in the pantry. Bill Barry saw a guard with a gun out and told him to put it back in his holster, and Karl Uecker told Ted Charach that "just after releasing Sirhan from the headlock," he also saw a guard with a gun in his hand: "I just couldn't believe my eyes.... " He confronted the guard, shouting "Are you crazy! Pulling your gun ... you could've killed me."

Television producer Richard Lubic was three feet to the right of Kennedy at the time of the shooting: "I was at Senator Kennedy's right side when Sirhan appeared. The muzzle of the gun was 2 to 3 feet away from Senator Kennedy's head. It is nonsense to say that he fired bullets into Senator Kennedy from a distance of 1 to 2 inches, since his gun was never anywhere that near to Senator Kennedy.

"I was kneeling at Senator Kennedy's right side after he fell to the floor. I saw a man in a guard's uniform standing a couple of feet to my left behind Senator Kennedy. He had a gun in his hand and was pointing it downward." Lubic told the police about this second gun, but it was omitted from his police interview summary, and Cooper never asked him about it during the trial: "They told me what to say before I went on the stand. What questions they would ask me and what I was supposed to answer and don't change."

On October 24, Don Schulman was once again summoned to the DA's office, to meet with Kranz and his fellow investigators. The tapes of these sessions suggest that Kranz hadn't done his homework or even listened to the 1971 interview. As Schulman described Kennedy walking ahead of him into the pantry, Kranz exclaimed, "Oh, he was ahead of you! I didn't know that." He mistook Kennedy bodyguard Bill Barry for TV detective Gene Barry; called reporter Andrew West, Adam West, star of Batman; and renamed the Colonial Room the Empire Room.

Rather than let Schulman tell his story, Kranz continually interrupted and made elementary blunders that reveal the depth of his ignorance. When Schulman claimed he was right when he said Kennedy was shot three times, Kranz corrected him:

"Well, actually, he hadn't been hit three, there was [sic] only two wounds."

"Oh, well, at the time I said he was shot three times."

"Well, there were three bullet holes," said Kranz, "but one didn't hit his wounds. One just went through a coat."

In fact, there were four bullet holes and three wounds -- one went though Kennedy's coat. Schulman was correct and Kranz would make the same mistake in his report -- astonishing ignorance, given that Schulman's accuracy in describing three hits was key to his story.

Schulman told essentially the same story he'd described in 1971. He remembered saying hello to Ira Goldstein and being pushed along with his eyes on the senator -- "the next thing I knew, I saw three blood splotches."

"But you didn't actually see him shot?"

"No, I didn't see Sirhan step out and shoot .... I saw the blood splotches. When I said, 'The man stepped out and shot the Senator three times' [on the Brent tape] ... that was an afterthought of people telling me, 'Hey, somebody shot him' and it was a man."

On guns, Schulman said, "I saw other guns pulled and possibly fired .... I thought I saw three guns. They were in front of me."

"Do you know what position they were pointed at?"

"No idea ... Some people can remember every detail. I'm just not that kind of person ... I'm very, very positive I saw other guns but were they aimed at the Senator? I don't recall."

After the shooting, he saw blinding camera lights, he noticed a big, black man pounce and wrestle with someone, and he heard someone yelling, '''My foot, my foot, my leg,' or something." Although Sirhan was not shot, other witnesses also heard him complain that someone was twisting his leg, and he was later diagnosed with a sprained ankle.

For the most part, Kranz and his fellow investigators seemed more interested in Charach's politics -- who was backing him, was he tied to the Black Panthers, was there a connection to Watergate? Classic seventies paranoia. But Schulman's reply disarmed them:

"Ted? Pure money ... He's admitted that to me several times ... he didn't say I would lie but he said if I could jolt my memory to tell the truth, as he saw it, we could make a lot of money."

The room erupted in laughter.

***

At the end of the interview, Kranz praised Schulman for his consistent accounts over the years and gave him his card, in case he had any more problems from Charach. When Schulman left the room, the tape was left running. Suddenly, we hear the voice of Bill Jordan, who had been sitting in on the interview with Frank Patchett from Special Unit Senator. Jordan wasted no time in criticizing Kranz's performance -- "From that ... conversation we held here, you can't place him anywhere."

Kranz said he was more interested in how Schulman was led astray by Charach than by Schulman's story: "I had the feeling he was wearing contact lenses, he had blurred vision and that affected what he saw.... I never felt, particularly in light of the ballistics examinations, that his statements regarding the security guard had that much weight, but to me, it was intriguing about the way he's been used and misinterpreted over the years."

"He really doesn't change his story," admitted Jordan.

"No!" agreed Kranz.

"He's still sticking with ... he sees guns and this kinda shit. I think if this thing is gonna go anyplace and he's gonna be a problem," said Jordan, "I'd like to call him in and we'll interrogate him .... But I don't think it'll go that far."

"No, I don't," agreed Kranz. "To me, he's consistent with Cesar's statement, that Cesar pulled his gun, ran out, I forget where Cesar ran out, did he run out through the revolving doors?"

"Well, he didn't really run out," said Jordan. "See, Cesar, when the shooting started, discretion is the better part of valor and he hit the deck. ... And right after it's over, he jumps up and pulls out his gun, and I think it's Jess Unruh or somebody says, you know, 'Put it away.' ... So he puts the gun away."

"Then, did he leave the room?" asked Kranz.

"He said he went out and got his two Ace security guards."

"His supervisors ... restationed him to another location," added Patchett, "and he was so excited he lost his tie and didn't remember how he lost it."

As Cesar's tie lay next to the dying figure of Bobby Kennedy, Cesar disappeared from the pantry. He didn't alert Ace guards Jack Merritt and Albert Stowers, as Jordan could have seen from their police statements. But where exactly Cesar went is still a mystery.

***

There's a surreal moment in the Kranz interview when Schulman and Kranz one-up each other with jaw-dropping statements.

"Let me tell you the weirdest thing in the whole world that you're not gonna believe," said Schulman. "Ace Guard Service ... while I was going through college and needed extra money, I worked for them." He'd spent three weeks at Zodi's discount store in San Pedro.

Kranz then trumped Schulman. "Well, I used to go out with Valerie Schulte, the girl in the polka-dot dress!" he said. "On the Muskie campaign [in 1972]."

So, there they were: the key witness and the key suspect to a second gun in the pantry working for the same guard service; and the man whose report would finally close the lid on the reinvestigation of the case dating the "official" girl in the polka-dot dress.

***

A month later, in the office of Cesar's attorney, Thomas Kranz interviewed Gene Cesar and subsequently whitewashed his story in the Kranz Report, belatedly published in 1977, after delays in "proof-reading." Kranz devoted eight pages of his sixty-page opinion to Schulman, Cesar, and Charach.

His discussion of Schulman doesn't start promisingly: "There is some confusion as to Schulman's exact physical location, in or out of the pantry, at the time Sirhan started firing." Kranz proceeds to quote Sergeant O'Steen's LAPD report at face value, despite Schulman's statement that it was wrong.

Recapping Schulman's 1971 interview with Hecht and Trapp, Kranz stated that Schulman's "recollection of that evening was poor but he recalled seeing certain things." All mention of a gun firing is omitted.

The report goes on to state, "Schulman told Kranz he saw a security guard with a weapon drawn, but never saw the guard fire.... He states that he saw the guard, presumably Thane Cesar, with his gun out and pointed toward the ground, only after Kennedy was lying on the ground injured."

The tape of the Kranz-Schulman interview clearly shows that this statement is completely false. Besides being pretty sure the guard fired, Schulman never saw Kennedy lying on the ground -- he was already on his way out of the pantry. He saw the gun drawn but couldn't recall where it was pointed. But in 1977, researchers could not hear the Kranz-Schulman tape. It was discovered loose in a box in the DA's office years later.

***

Kranz stated that "Cesar was in full uniform of the Ace Guard Service which required .38 calibers in holsters, and Cesar had been checked out earlier in the evening by his superiors and determined to be carrying the regulation .38 caliber weapon." Even if this is true -- and there is no paperwork to support it -- Cesar could have swapped weapons at any time.

Cesar told Kranz he was a registered Democrat and acknowledged making a three-dollar donation to the Wallace campaign but said he never campaigned for him. At the beginning of his interview, Kranz asked, "Why didn't you fire your gun? You were there to protect Senator Kennedy."

Cesar's reply was simple and direct: "I was a coward." The moment he saw the gun fire, he hit the deck.

Kranz concluded, "In hindsight, it seems obvious that the LAPD should have seized the .38 weapon that Cesar was carrying on the night in question. Additionally, it was proved by the very determined and thorough investigative research conducted by Ted Charach that Cesar owned a .22 caliber revolver at the time of the shooting. Cesar was somewhat vague as to when he had sold the weapon, at first telling investigating officers that he remembered selling the weapon in the spring of 1968 ... such inconsistencies in [his] statements ... suggested that good judgment required the LAPD to at least inspect and test the weapon beyond a cursory search at Rampart Division" (which, as indicated, never took place).

Cesar told Kranz he had never fired his .38 on the evening in question and that his gun was examined at Rampart station. According to the Kranz Report, "The LAPD orally verifies, but have no documents to substantiate," that the .38 was examined by "an unnamed LAPD officer, but was not seized or subsequently test-fired."

The audiotapes of Cesar's LAPD interviews, available to Kranz but released to the public only in 1988, clearly show that Cesar's gun was not examined after the shooting. This unattributed oral verification seven years after the fact is clearly fabricated, and Cesar's statement that the gun was checked is false.

***

The Kranz Report effectively closed the lid on the official investigation of the RFK investigation. Although Kranz recommended that the LAPD open its files to the public, this didn't happen for another eleven years. When the files were finally released in 1988, twenty years after the shooting, they clearly showed up the Kranz Report for the sham it was.

***

Kranz went on to serve as principal deputy general counsel of the army in the Reagan administration and as a special assistant to President George H.W. Bush. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him as principal deputy general counsel of the navy. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the case remains closed.

***

After Cesar's interview with the DA's office in 1975, he disappeared from view. One Los Angeles official said he had died in Arkansas, the last home to his missing gun. Then, in 1987, author Dan Moldea found him working as a plumber in Simi Valley. He had filled out over the years and weighed well over 250 pounds and sported a neatly trimmed beard.

Cesar had learned to live with the "second gun," and blamed Charach for all the controversy. He could have sued him, but his lawyers said, "Why bother; Charach doesn't have any money."

Cesar shared his financial records with Moldea. He had never been a wealthy man. After his bankruptcy in 1971, he worked the night shift at Hughes Aircraft, remarried, and divorced. He'd visited the East Coast only once, to visit relatives, and had made only two trips abroad, to the Philippines to visit his third wife, Eleanor, before she became a U.S. citizen after their marriage in 1986.

Cesar admitted he had been burned up after the Watts riots and was now a staunch Reagan supporter. He still thought the Kennedys were "the biggest bunch of crooks that ever walked the earth" but joked that "just because I don't like Democrats doesn't mean I go around shooting them."

Cesar had no criminal record or association with extremist groups, but did have some odd connections. After his initial FBI interview, Cesar remembered calling up "a very good friend [and former neighbor] who works for the FBI ... he went and pulled the files to see exactly what they reported on me. They gave the same conclusions the LAPD did; that I wasn't a suspect."

Cesar acted out the shooting with Moldea. He positioned himself behind and to the right of Kennedy, almost touching his back. He recalled "bright television floodlights" in front of him, an arm, and a gun. Kennedy was not face-to-face with Sirhan. He was still facing north toward the busboy, shaking hands, and the barrel of Sirhan's gun was "perpendicular" to his head, at a muzzle distance of about two feet.

Cesar didn't see any other guns, and nobody came between him and the senator before the gunfire began. At first, Cesar told Moldea he didn't see Kennedy fall or get hit because as soon as he heard the shots, he stumbled and fell to the floor "instantaneously." In later interviews, he told Moldea he did see Kennedy fall -- in one account, the senator fell backward two feet to his left. In another, Kennedy fell backward right in front of him.

Cesar got up "after a five count" and pulled his gun, with his arm cocked at a forty-five-degree angle. Thirty seconds later, when he was sure Sirhan had been restrained, he put the gun back in his holster. His adrenaline was pumped up, and "I was scared ... you know, physically shaking."

But Cesar's memory was still defective on key points. Cesar told Moldea he had worked at Ace for six months before the assassination (his first assignment was actually the week before). He also said he had worked at the Ambassador "several times before the incident," which was clearly not true. June 4 was his first time.

Cesar told Moldea his two guns were shaped about the same. His .38 was about eight inches long with a four-inch barrel, the H&R six inches long with a two-inch barrel -- "you can hide a H&R in the palm of your hand." He denied carrying a .22 instead of his .38 that night -- it wouldn't have fit in his holster. He also denied ever using his .22 as a backup gun.

At the end of their first interview, Moldea asked Cesar point-blank if he shot Bobby Kennedy, either intentionally or accidentally. Cesar glared back and simply replied, "No." Cesar admitted that "some of the evidence makes me look bad" but insisted "no matter what anybody says or any report they come up with, you know, I know I didn't do it."

Moldea concluded, "Gene Cesar may be the classic example of a man caught at the wrong time in the wrong place with a gun in his hand and powder burns on his face -- an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of history. However, considering the current state of the evidence, a more sinister scenario cannot be dismissed."

***

The release of the police investigation files in 1988 yielded a possible encounter between Cesar and Sirhan. "Kennedy girl" Eara Marchman was walking out toward the kitchen area and observed "a man in a blue coat, dark complexion, possibly about 5'3/6', wearing lt. colored pants, standing talking to, and possibly arguing with, a uniformed guard who was standing by swinging kitchen doors." She saw the man in profile only, but identified his mug shot as Sirhan.

***

Author Philip Melanson also found two further witnesses to a second gun.

Lisa Urso didn't see a second gun fired but "she clearly recalled someone she assumed to be a 'security guard' drawing a gun" right after the shooting, then putting it back in his holster. But Urso's "guard" was not wearing a uniform -- she described him as blond, wearing a gray suit, and standing "by Kennedy." When she told investigators about this guard, "they reacted with disinterest on one occasion; hostility, on another."

Urso was also puzzled by the senator's reaction after the first shots. She told Melanson that "Kennedy grabbed his head behind the right ear and jerked forward about six inches before moving in the opposite direction and falling backward. Why this [double] motion, she wonders, if Sirhan fired from the direction the Senator first moved toward."

Melanson also located Kennedy fund-raiser Nina Rhodes, and asked her to write a statement in support of a petition to the LA County grand jury to look into LAPD misconduct during the original investigation:

"As the speech came to a close," recalled Rhodes, "I left the Press Room to wait for the Senator at the bottom of the ramp .... The entourage moved rather quickly. I chased after the Senator and as I did, I heard a series of popping noises which I first thought were flash bulbs but then realized were gunshots. There were 12-14 shots in all. I was 6-7 feet from the Senator when I saw him and a number of others fall. Rosie Grier and Rafer Johnson charged after someone ahead and to the left of me. This surprised me because it was my impression that some of the shots had come from ahead of me and to my right [the Senator's position] and my attention was focused there ... in conclusion, I would like to stress ... I heard 12-14 shots, some originating in the vicinity of the Senator, not from where I saw Sirhan."

When Melanson gave Rhodes a copy of her FBI interview summary, she identified fifteen errors. Most important, she stated, "I never said I heard eight distinct shots. From the moment the tragedy began I knew that there was at least 10-14 shots and that there had to be more than one assailant. The shots were to the left and right from where I was."

Investigators ignored Nina Rhodes. The FBI altered her troubling statements, and the LAPD omitted her from their list of witnesses in the pantry at the time of the shooting.

Her statements seemed to echo what another witness, Joe LaHive, told a radio interviewer on the night of the shooting. LaHive said the shots "went off with a staccato burst and it was almost like rapid-fire. The guy must have just squeezed them off as fast as he possibly could, and if there were two people, that would account for the seeming sequence of shots."

***

In 1992, an investigative reporter for the television series Now It Can Be Told, confronted Gene Cesar as he walked out of his garage to speak to his paperboy. A portly Cesar, with a beard and glasses, briefly rebuffed the reporter's questions in his doorway:

"Did you have a .22 caliber gun on you? Did you fire a shot that night?" she asked.

"Still the same answer -- you'll have to go through my agent .... I don't want to talk to nobody," said Cesar.

***

Dan Moldea kept in touch with Cesar after his initial interview and spent time with him and his wife during frequent trips to Los Angeles. Once, over lunch, Cesar casually mentioned some diamond purchases he had made from a local businessman who was an associate of the Mafia in Chicago. When Moldea asked him about this again in later meetings, there were discrepancies in the date of the initial purchase, ranging from 1968 to 1974. This was very odd, as Cesar was "in deep shit for money" at this time, worked a second job as a security guard, and was going bankrupt in late 1971.

Moldea would not tell me the name of the Mafia associate. It was an Italian name but not Rosselli. Moldea said he could never figure out who the guy was, just a tangential associate of the Chicago Mob or something more sinister. He thinks Cesar was involved with a lot of shady people.

***

Moldea subsequently asked Cesar to submit to a polygraph test and Cesar agreed. Dr. Edward Gelb, the former president of the American Polygraph Association, was asked to administer the test, and Cesar passed "with flying colors," convincing Moldea he was innocent.

Cesar said he agreed to the test because he had nothing to hide -- "If I was guilty ... you never would've found me .... You don't kill somebody, and then be open about it."

But given the misuse of the polygraph in this case, it was an odd way to reach a conclusion. Polygraph tests are not accepted in court because they can be fooled. If Cesar was part of any conspiracy, he had twenty-five years to think up a way to beat the polygraph. His belated test results had little value.

But Moldea had his ending -- "To sum up, Gene Cesar proved to be an innocent man who since 1969 has been wrongly accused of being involved in the murder of Senator Kennedy."

An article Moldea published on his Web site gives some insight into the writing of his book and illustrates the contrivance at work regarding his eventual U-turn. The final switcheroo seems to be inspired by the advice of his writing coach and the dramatic story structure of Hollywood:

"Then, in Chapters Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine, there is The Twist -- the essential element of nearly every great story. In Chapter Twenty-Eight, Cesar takes and conclusively passes a polygraph test. Then, in the final conflict in Chapter Twenty-Nine, Sirhan and I face off in a very dramatic confrontation in a prison-visitation room at Corcoran State Penitentiary in central California over what Sirhan does and does not remember about the night of the murder."

While such a scenario is all very well as a sales pitch, in print, it simply doesn't work. It's perverse to catalog the abuse of the polygraph by the LAPD to cover up conspiracy, and then declare a prime suspect innocent when he passes a polygraph twenty-six years after the fact.

As to the "chilling prison interview" with Sirhan, while Moldea strains to be cinematic, Sirhan comes across in the chapter as very thoughtful and polite, and the reader is left bemused when, in the last few pages, Moldea goads Sirhan into an angry exchange with the classic windup line -- "Sirhan, when your mother dies, God forbid, are you going to remember everything and come clean?"

***

When I interviewed Moldea regarding Cesar in August 2005, he had spoken to him the previous Sunday. Cesar was now living in the Philippines, but they were still in regular contact, and there was a film project in the works. Moldea was now the primary contact for Cesar, effectively his agent.

Cesar was so grateful to Moldea for "getting him off," he later asked Moldea to be the godfather to his child. When I asked how I might interview Cesar for my film, Moldea told me it would cost fifty thousand dollars. Would Cesar tell me anything he hadn't already told Moldea? Probably not, said Moldea, but that was his price. A year or so later, during filming for a BBC story on my investigation, I invited Moldea to do an on-camera interview to discuss new evidence of CIA operatives at the hotel. Moldea said his fee would be twenty-five hundred dollars. My BBC colleagues rolled their eyes, but Moldea said if we didn't want to pay for his opinion, somebody else would.

***

While I acknowledge Moldea's excellent research in this case, these experiences do make me wonder about the objectivity of his relationship with Cesar. It seems odd that the perpetually broke and publicity-shy Cesar would insist on a fifty-thousand-dollar fee for an interview, while previously volunteering to undergo a polygraph test, unpaid, with an author who, at the time, believed in conspiracy.

Moldea completed his book, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, in October 1994, but he quoted no date for the polygraph test. A public records search shows that Cesar and his wife filed for bankruptcy in June 1994. Cesar was still living in Simi Valley and owed a long list of creditors -- primarily credit card companies, the IRS, and credit unions at his previous employers, Anheuser Busch and Hughes Aircraft.

Cesar unsuccessfully filed an Employment Discrimination suit against Anheuser Busch two years later and subsequently moved to the Philippines. It doesn't sound like the profile of an assassin on a CIA pension, but unanswered questions remain.

***

The best illustration of the second-gun theory I have seen came in a Discovery Channel program first broadcast in December 2005. The producers built a reconstruction of the pantry and replayed two scenarios. In the first one, Dan Moldea illustrated his theory that the crowd pushed Kennedy toward Sirhan, helping him achieve the muzzle distance required by the autopsy. In the second reconstruction, ballistics expert Michael Yardley donned a security guard uniform and played Gene Cesar. As the crowd was distracted by Sirhan, Yardley pulled Kennedy to one side and shot him from behind, with his body masking the gun. None of the witnesses noticed.

Yardley's second-gun scenario was by far the more convincing of the two, but, strangely, it was cut from the U.S. version of the show. When I discussed the program subsequently with Yardley, he was in no doubt, having examined and acted out the evidence, that there was a second gun in the pantry. There were too many bullets for there to have been only one gun, and his reenactment showed it was very possible for a second gunman to slip in unnoticed and kill the senator.

If we put all this together, it's clear that Cesar's position behind and to the right of Kennedy matched the shooting position described in the autopsy, and if there was a second gun fired, either he fired it or he was best placed to see who did.

Could Cesar have shot Kennedy by accident? Well, if he instantaneously reached for his gun, lost his balance, and pulled Kennedy back with him, one accidental shot is very possible, but four seem highly unlikely. If Cesar did fire his gun that night, his firing position suggests he inflicted all of Kennedy's wounds and that it could not have been an accident.

Cesar's inconsistency regarding when he hit the floor is also troubling. How could Cesar so clearly describe Kennedy's wounds if he hit the deck instantaneously? Only Cesar and Schulman were accurate about the number of shots that hit Kennedy, and only Cesar was accurate about the location of the wounds. Because Kennedy landed on his back, nobody had a clear picture of these wounds until Kennedy reached the hospital. Cesar obviously saw the bullets hit Kennedy before he fell back against the ice machines.

As to what gun Cesar was carrying, as Ted Charach discovered, H&R made look-alike .22s and .38s. Who would be any the wiser if Cesar had been carrying his .22? We'll probably never know, because his gun was never checked.

***

At first, the police insisted there were no other guns drawn in the pantry, and told Don Schulman he was mistaken. But we now know there were others guns drawn in the pantry. Barry, Lubic, Uecker, and Urso saw other guns, and Jack Merritt admitted he drew his. Just because Schulman was the only one to see a second gun fired doesn't mean he's wrong.

Cesar has repeatedly changed his story on when he drew his gun, and his movements after the shooting. He repeatedly lied to investigators about when he sold a .22 revolver very similar to Sirhan's. He was the guard William Gardner assigned to the "killing zone," with advance notice Kennedy was coming through, in position to guide Kennedy through the pantry. He was on duty when Sirhan slipped into the pantry, and was possibly seen talking to Sirhan. His hatred for Kennedy and minorities gave him ample motive for the shooting, and Cesar himself has conceded that the evidence makes him look bad. His gun was never seized, and questions remain as to who pulled his tie off. Did Kennedy grab for it as he felt the shot behind his right ear?

Balancing this evidence is the fact that Cesar had no criminal record, was only given the assignment at the last minute, volunteered himself to police officers afterward, and agreed to take a polygraph test. Also puzzling is why an assassin would sell the murder weapon and sign and date the receipt.

***

The jury is still out on Cesar -- but there's no doubt investigators over the years have done their best to give him an easy ride.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:24 pm

PART 1 OF 2

FOURTEEN: The Reinvestigation

In February 1969, Los Angeles County Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi met attorney Robert Joling at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. He handed him a black-and-white negative of a photomicrograph -- a photographic enlargement of a bullet comparison made by DeWayne Wolfer on June 6, 1968, between the Kennedy neck bullet and, ostensibly, a test bullet.

If this was proof that the Kennedy bullet matched a test slug from Sirhan's gun, Noguchi wasn't convinced. "Hold on to this for safekeeping; we may need it someday," he told Joling.

As Sirhan's trial began in earnest, Noguchi was beset by power struggles within the County Coroner's Office and a bitter feud with Lin Hollinger, the county chief administrative officer. Hollinger tried to transfer Noguchi to Rancho Los Amigos Hospital as chief pathologist. When Noguchi refused, Hollinger demanded his resignation, citing sixty-one charges he was ready to file against him. Noguchi later described this extraordinary smear campaign in his autobiography as "perhaps the most lurid ever brought against a public servant .... I described to associates a splendid vision I had in which a fully loaded jet liner collided with a hotel and amidst the flames, I, Thomas T. Noguchi, stood [and held a press conference]."

During subsequent hearings, Deputy LA County Counsel Martin Weekes alleged that a smiling Noguchi danced in his office while waiting for Kennedy to die and told associates: "I am going to be famous. I hope he dies, because ... then my international reputation will be established." A secretary described Noguchi slashing a piece of paper in two with a penknife and telling her he'd like to perform a live autopsy on Lin Hollinger.

***

"In sum," Noguchi later wrote, "the implication was that I was mentally disturbed -- crazy. I was furious but at the same time, thought it would be hopeless to fight back -- suicidal. The Board would produce witnesses to 'support' the charges, and my reputation would be destroyed."

Noguchi resigned on February 25, the day before he testified at the Sirhan trial, but then withdrew his resignation before supervisors could act on it. When Hollinger finally fired him and filed charges on March 18, Noguchi enlisted attorney Godfrey Isaac to fight the case and clear his name.

Hollinger cited a delay in handling the Kennedy autopsy in his complaint, so Dr. William Eckert, former chairman of the pathology section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, was called to testify in Noguchi's defense. "Forensic science had taken a black eye in the United States because of the Texas assassination," Eckert explained, so he flew out after the autopsy to assist Noguchi as a consultant in completing the case. Eckert called the autopsy "probably the best, most thorough and most minutely handled forensic case I've ever seen."

Finally, on July 31, Noguchi was cleared of all charges and reinstated as Los Angeles County Coroner. Isaac blamed the charges on in-house grudges and a misunderstanding of Noguchi's "graveyard humor."

***

How much of this harassment was engineered to deflect attention from the troublesome Kennedy autopsy is unclear, but the timing was problematic. There was also evidence of a provocateur within the County Coroner's Office.

Dr. Donald A. Stuart, a graying, bespectacled Englishman in his late forties, applied for the position of deputy medical examiner on June 27, 1968, just three weeks after the assassination. Stuart claimed he had both legal and medical degrees from the University of London, and Dr. Noguchi felt his dual qualifications marked him as "ideally suited" to the job. He started on July 1.

Stuart later played an important role in the hearings on Noguchi's conduct, testifying to Noguchi's alleged use of amphetamines and supposedly unstable behavior. Noguchi's attorney, Godfrey Isaac, claimed that Stuart "absolutely, unequivocally lied" about a capsule test he conducted to determine what drugs Noguchi was allegedly taking.

On February 2, 1972, after three and a half years as deputy medical examiner, Stuart was arrested as an imposter who had faked his medical degree and physician's license, and practiced in Chicago, Toronto, Buffalo, the Bahamas, and the Florida Keys on false credentials. While Stuart may have been a garden-variety English con man, the timing of his appointment within weeks of the assassination is highly suspect. As deputy coroner, he was ideally placed to monitor Noguchi and the drafting of the autopsy report in the run-up to Sirhan's trial.

***

Defense attorney Grant Cooper was also in hot water. The day after the end of the Sirhan trial, the federal investigation into his use of the stolen transcripts resumed. On August 6, after a year-long investigation by U.S. Attorney Matt Byrne, Cooper and Rosselli's attorney, James Cantillon, were charged with contempt of court and faced a fine or imprisonment, with no maximum prescribed by law. This was an ignominious end for Cooper, one of the country's most prominent criminal defense lawyers.

On September 23, Cooper was fined one thousand dollars for contempt of court by Judge Stephens, who said he was treating the offense as a misdemeanor, not involving moral turpitude. But the state bar association subsequently disagreed, concluding that Cooper's crime had involved moral turpitude, and the state supreme court publicly reprimanded him on July 1, 1971. The LA Times noted, "It was the mildest form of discipline the court could impose. Other choices available were disbarment or suspension."

It was a curious episode. Was the Los Angeles legal establishment taking care of one of its own, or was Cooper given an easy ride in return for his weak defense of Sirhan at the trial?

***

Away from the legal disputes of Cooper and Noguchi, DA Evelle Younger tried to wash his hands of the Sirhan case with a press conference a week after sentencing. Younger said that, after more than four thousand interviews with witnesses, there was no credible theory to support a conspiracy. Now that the court order on publicity was lifted, he promised "full disclosure of the results of the investigation ... so any doubting members of the public can satisfy themselves ... that Sirhan acted alone."

Duplicate copies of documentation and photographic evidence would be available for review in the county clerk's office, and the "literally tons of information" in LAPD files would be made available "to the fullest extent that security precautions and administrative resources will permit." The police investigation files would not be released for another nineteen years.

***

On May 20, Judge Herbert Walker had restricted further access to the Sirhan exhibits to counsel of record, to ensure the preservation of evidence pending Sirhan's appeal. But County Clerk William Sharp later claimed he was never properly informed of the order, so, incredibly, over the next two years, researchers visiting the Exhibits Room in the county clerk's office gained full access not to duplicate copies of exhibits, but to much of the original evidence itself.

John Kennedy Assassination Truth Action Committee researchers Lillian Castellano and Floyd Nelson were frequent visitors, and on May 23, two days after Sirhan's formal conviction, they published the first article to suggest that a second gun had been fired in the pantry.

Their Los Angeles Free Press story was inspired by two photographs of apparent bullet holes at the crime scene unaccounted for during the trial. Even one extra bullet would have meant a second gun.

Amateur photographer John Clemente's picture appeared to show two bullet holes in the center divider between the swinging double doors at the west end of the pantry. John Shirley was in the kitchen with Clemente and provided an affidavit confirming what he'd seen:

"In the wooden jamb of the center divider were two bullet holes surrounded by inked circles which contained some numbers and letters .... It appeared that an attempt had been made to dig the bullets out from the surface. However, the center divider jamb was loose, and it appeared to have been removed from the frame work so that the bullets might be extracted from behind. It was then replaced but not firmly affixed."

The second photograph, by AP photographer Wally Fong, depicted LAPD officers Robert Rozzi and Charles Wright kneeling down with flashlights to inspect a hole in a doorjamb leading from the backstage area into the narrow corridor that led into the pantry. Under the headline "Bullet Found Near Kennedy Shooting Scene," the officers point to a hole in the doorjamb, and the AP caption reads, "A police technician inspects a bullet hole discovered in a door frame .... Bullet is still in the wood."

***

According to an LAPD Property Report postdated June 28, Wolfer removed two pieces of wood from the kitchen door frame and booked them as evidence on June 5 -- "both contained numerous holes." Wolfer also booked "two pieces of ceiling insulation" from the pantry.

According to Wolfer's log, he conducted chemical and microscopic tests on a ceiling tile that first afternoon to check for bullet holes, and X-rayed it early the next morning. On June 14, he X-rayed a "door-jam."

The Analyzed Evidence Report states analysis was completed on June 28, but no analysis is given -- just a reference to two "boards from door frame" and two "ceiling panels."

According to Wolfer's trajectory analysis, bullets struck two ceiling tiles, but on June 27, 1969, more than a month after the Free Press article appeared, both tiles were destroyed by the LAPD, along with the door-frame wood, before Sirhan could even start his appeal. This destruction was not made public until 1975.

***

Soon, word was filtering through to Sirhan on death row about Charach's second-gun theory and all the ballistics evidence that was never presented at trial. Sirhan tried unsuccessfully to block Robert Kaiser's new book on the case, and Kaiser's subsequent radio appearances to promote R.F.K. Must Die! merely fuelled Sirhan's paranoia about all the horrible things the defense investigator had written about him. He started writing furious letters to Grant Cooper that really began to worry his former attorney.

Cooper met the Sirhan family in his office in downtown LA and agreed to give the letters back to the family if a meeting could be arranged with Sirhan to defuse the situation. Cooper went up to see Sirhan in San Quentin and explained that had he known about any of the ballistics issues, he would have presented them at trial. Sirhan accepted Cooper's explanation, and peace was restored.

But while the Sirhan family waited in Cooper's office for the letters, there was a slight delay -- Cooper's secretary was making copies of the letters in another room. One of them later turned up as an exhibit at Sirhan's parole hearing in the early 1980s as evidence that he shouldn't be released.

The undated, handwritten letter was addressed to Cooper but mainly referred to Kaiser's book, with a swipe at his earlier studies for the priesthood:

Hey Punk,

Tell your friend Robert Kaiser to keep mouthing off about me like he has been doing on radio and television. If he gets his brains splattered he will have asked for it like Bobby Kennedy did. Kennedy didn't scare me, don't think that you or Kaiser will -- neither of you is beyond my reach -- and if you don't believe me just tell your ex-monk to show up on the news media again -- I dare him.

RBK must shut his trap, or die.


In the margin, Sirhan wrote a p.s. for Cooper: "Don't ever forget, you dirty son of a bith [sic] that you cost me my life."

While author Dan Moldea cited this as proof that Sirhan can remember the killing, the target of the piece, Robert Kaiser, took it with a grain of salt. "I took it as a piece of literary criticism -- he didn't like my book!" Kaiser laughed heartily. "And said so in the only way he knew how, 'RBK must die.'''

As we have seen during the trial, Sirhan was prone to the occasional outburst, and Kaiser had heard other potential incriminating statements: "After the trial, he said to me in a very braggadocio moment, 'Look, they can gas me if they want, but I achieved in one day what it took Kennedy his whole life to achieve. I'm now as famous as he is.' So that could, out of context, be taken as an admission. But I'm not so sure that it was anything other than braggadocio, because it doesn't fit with so many other things that I knew about Sirhan."

Kaiser, the butt of the "Hey Punk" note, dismissed it as a temper tantrum, and still feels it's 95 percent probable that Sirhan was hypnotically programmed to commit the assassination.

***

Just before Kaiser's book came out, SUS chief Robert Houghton published his account of the investigation, Special Unit Senator. Houghton's description of the bullet fragment taken from Kennedy's brain aroused the professional curiosity of "crusty septuagenarian" William W. Harper, a consulting criminalist in more than three hundred cases over thirty-five years. The dimensions of the fatal fragment sounded larger than a .22 to Harper, so he visited the county clerk's office and began to examine the physical evidence.

Harper had been in charge of technical investigations for the Office of Naval Intelligence for three years during World War II and had spent seven years as a consulting criminalist to the Pasadena Police Department, in charge of their crime laboratory. He had a long-held distrust of DeWayne Wolfer, having tangled with him in a previous case. He had warned both Grant Cooper and District Attorney Evelle Younger about Wolfer before the Sirhan trial, but they had ignored him.

With the consent of Sirhan's appeal attorneys, Harper spent seven months carefully reviewing the ballistics evidence -- the gun, the bullets, the shell casings, the autopsy report, and relevant portions of the trial testimony.

According to county clerk's office records, Harper visited nine times between August 12, 1970, and January 12, 1971, and was given free access to all of the physical evidence and the autopsy photographs.

In November and December, Harper brought along a portable Hycon Balliscan camera he had helped develop. As a bullet is rotated in phases in front of the lens, the Balliscan takes a longitudinal photograph of the entire circumference of the bullet, which can be subsequently enlarged for examination. Harper found the Weisel bullet (People's 54) to be "in near perfect condition" and selected it as his "test" bullet for photographic comparison with People's 47, the Kennedy neck bullet, to establish if both were fired from the same gun.

***

Harper's examination of the rifling impressions on People's 47 and People's 54 disclosed no matching individual characteristics to establish they that had been fired from the same gun, so he proceeded to measure the "rifling angle" -- the slant angle of the impression made on each bullet, by the spiral rifling grooves and ridges ("lands") cut into the barrel during the boring process.

Harper measured a difference in rifling angles of twenty-three minutes between the bullets -- about a third of a degree. "Since the rifling angle is a basic class characteristic of a fired bullet," he wrote, "it is my contention that such a difference would rule out the possibility of those bullets having been fired in the same weapon." To Harper, this was "independent proof that two guns were being fired concurrently in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel at the time of the shooting."

On December 28, Harper published his conclusions in a seven-page sworn affidavit. His key finding was that

Senator Kennedy was fired upon from two distinct firing positions while he was walking through the kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel. Firing Position A, the position of Sirhan, was located directly in front of the Senator, with Sirhan face-to-face with the Senator. This position is well established by more than a dozen eyewitnesses. A second firing position, Firing Position B, is clearly established by the autopsy report. It was located in close proximity to the Senator, immediately to his right and rear. It was from this position that four shots were fired, three of which entered the Senator's body. One of these three shots made a fatal penetration of the Senator's brain. A fourth shot passed through the right shoulder pad of the Senator's coat. These four shots from Firing Position B all produced powder residue patterns, indicating they were fired from a distance of only a few inches. They were closely grouped within a 12-inch circle.

In marked contrast, the shots from Firing Position A produced no powder residue patterns on the bodies or clothing of any of the surviving victims, all of whom were walking behind the Senator. These shots were widely dispersed. Senator Kennedy received no frontal wounds. The three wounds suffered by him were fired from behind and he had entrance wounds in the posterior portions of his body.... It is self-evident that within the brief period of the shooting (roughly 15 seconds) Sirhan could not have been in both firing positions at the same time.


The second gunman could not have been firing back at Sirhan, because Gun B was fired at an almost contact distance, with two shots traveling steeply upward and one hitting the ceiling. The shoulder-pad shot was fired back-to-front from an inch away, so this must also have come from Firing Position B and could not have hit Paul Schrade, who was behind the senator and walking in the same direction. This meant a ninth shot was fired and another bullet was missing.

Harper concluded that the Weisel bullet was fired by Sirhan from Firing Position A and the Kennedy bullet was fired by a second gunman from Firing Position B. Had Sirhan escaped, the autopsy report and physical evidence would have led the police to seek two gunmen. The autopsy would have pointed to a fatal shot from an inch behind the senator. But five additional victims were shot behind the senator. "Had the gunman, after shooting the Senator, turned to his left and fired apparently indiscriminately into the crowd of his followers? If so, why?" asked Harper. There must have been two guns.

"When all recovered bullets are the same caliber, the conclusion that a single gun is involved must not be hurriedly reached," wrote Harper. "The capture of Sirhan with his gun at the scene resulted in a total mesmerization of the investigative efforts .... The well-established teachings of criminalistics and forensic pathology were cast aside and by-passed in favor of a more expedient solution and, unfortunately, an erroneous oversimplification."

***

Harper also found two evidence envelopes at the county clerk's office with alarming implications for the case. The first was the envelope prepared by Dr. Noguchi after extracting the Kennedy neck bullet at autopsy. Noguchi wrote "5 grooves" on the envelope, but Wolfer and Harper agreed the bullet had six. "Maybe they didn't count right," Harper later told the DA's office, but "this is a conflict that deserves some explanation ... bullets don't grow grooves."

Harper also discovered that the test-shot envelope containing three test bullets fired on June 6, presented as Exhibit 55 at the trial, bore the serial number of a different gun. Sirhan's gun had serial number H-53725, but the serial number H-18602 was written twice on the envelope. Why would Wolfer fire test bullets with a different gun?

Image

-- Creating an Egregore, by Don Daniels


This second gun, H-18602, was found hidden under the dashboard of a Buick Century owned by petty criminal Jake Williams, after his arrest in a robbery case on March 18, 1967. The Williams gun was test-fired four days later. As it was the same Iver Johnson Cadet model as Sirhan's, Wolfer later used it for the muzzle-distance tests on the hog's ears.

Wolfer had custody of Sirhan's gun from 1:45 p.m. on June 5 until the morning of June 7, when it was booked as evidence before the grand jury. On June 10, Wolfer sent his partner, Officer William Lee, to the LAPD Property Division to book out the Jake Williams gun for the powder pattern tests and later sound tests in the pantry to disprove Serrano's claims that she'd heard gunshots.

Wolfer later dismissed the mislabeled envelope as a "clerical error." Before testifying before the grand jury on June 7, Wolfer asked the DA if he could retain three of the seven test shots for further examination. Four were sealed by the grand jury, and he took the "three better ones" back to his office, and locked them away in his desk drawer. He labeled the evidence envelope at a later date, and a colleague simply read him the wrong serial number. He insisted he didn't have custody of the Williams gun until June 10, so that couldn't have been the test gun he used on June 6.

But Wolfer's log shows that at eight a.m. on June 8, he performed "chronograph tests on Mini-Mag ammunition -- 2" Iver Johnson -- California State College at Long Beach." If Sirhan's gun was with the grand jury, it's highly probable Wolfer used the Jake Williams gun for this test. If the booking date of June 10 is wrong and Wolfer had H-18602 early on the eighth, he may well have had it as early as the sixth. Later in the chapter, I'll consider why he may have needed two guns.

Unfortunately, by the time Harper made this discovery, the Jake Williams gun had been destroyed. Unclaimed guns were routinely destroyed a year after they were no longer needed as evidence. The LAPD property card for the gun shows that it was "reactivated 6-10-68" and "destroyed July 1968."

It was later explained that the gun was awaiting scheduled destruction in July 1968 when booked out by Lee and Wolfer. It was then routinely destroyed a year later, in July 1969, despite its key role in the Sirhan case. (I have been told the gun was never actually destroyed and is now in the possession of a gun collector in Florida.) The test bullets fired from the Williams gun never materialized.

***

The industrious Harper was beginning to ruffle feathers and connecting to other researchers troubled by the two-gun theory. Grant Cooper had referred Ted Charach to Harper the previous summer, and he was also consulted by a Los Angeles attorney named Barbara Blehr.

When Wolfer was recommended for promotion to chief forensic chemist at the LAPD Crime Lab, Blehr, with the support of Harper, filed a complaint with the Civil Service Commission against Wolfer, seeking to block his appointment, citing major errors in the Kennedy case and two others.

Blehr's petition, filed May 28, 1971, charged that Wolfer, in his zeal to help the prosecution, had violated four universally accepted precepts of firearms identification in the Sirhan case, centering around his "glaring error" in mislabeling Exhibit 55 with the wrong serial number. Blehr's petition was supported by declarations from Ray Pinker, who founded the LAPD crime lab in 1929; Jack Cadman, chief criminalist for the Orange County crime lab; and Dr. Lemoyne Snyder, author of the landmark textbook Homicide Investigation. All expressed deep unease about Wolfer.

Image

-- Allen Dulles's identification card from the Office of Strategic Services, the United States' intelligence gathering agency during World War II. © 2007 Princeton University Library


"... 55 individual division and branch chiefs in the Clandestine Services."

-- "The Inspector General's Report on the Cuban Operation," by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick


Image

Image

Image

Hitler became the DAP's 55th member and received the number 555, as the DAP added '500' to every member's number to exaggerate the party's strength.

-- Nazi Party, by Wikipedia


[T]he lower world of Abraxas is characterized by five, the number of natural man (the twice-five rays of his star).

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


New district attorney Joseph P. Busch promised to investigate Blehr's petition, which incorporated Charach's second-gun theory, but a "whitewash" seemed likely when Police Chief Edward Davis set up a Police Board of Inquiry to look into the charges, comprised of two deputy chiefs and a commander. Wolfer came out fighting and filed a two-million-dollar defamation suit against Blehr on July 23, as he awaited the outcome of the inquiry.

***

The same day, Deputy DA Richard Hecht interviewed Don Schulman, nine days after interviewing Cesar and waiving his polygraph test. It was clear where the DA's investigation was going. During this time, Harper paid a visit to Dr. Noguchi with an investigator from the DA's office and asked the investigator to simulate Sirhan's firing position while shooting Kennedy.

"Using Dr. Noguchi as a model, the DA's investigator placed himself in a position almost beyond belief," Harper recalled. "The position reminded me of something between Rudolf Nureyev performing the pas de deux and the shooting stance of a left-handed detective friend of mine when shooting righthanded around the front left corner of a simulated building in the FBI Combat Course."

In early August, Busch claimed his grand jury investigation found no evidence of a conspiracy but that "serious questions" had been raised about the handling of the exhibits in the county clerk's office. He suggested that the bullets Harper examined may have been "tampered with" after the trial and that the staff in the county clerk's office were negligent in allowing unauthorized access to the exhibits, resulting in "altered" or even "switched" evidence.

As Harper was the only researcher who'd accessed the firearms evidence, he was clearly the one being accused of "tampering." This was obviously a diversionary ruse to deflect Harper's testimony about a second gun. The day before Harper was due to testify before the grand jury, he was shot at in his car by two "workmen" in a blue Buick who tailed him from his Pasadena home. The next day, he stood firm before the grand jury and vehemently denied any tampering.

In 1975, a panel of firearms examiners confirmed that the striations on the key evidence bullets were in the same condition then as they were in 1968, proving that the LAPD and DA's claims of tampering were a diversionary tactic to sling mud at Harper, with no factual basis whatsoever.

In September, Wolfer gave a sworn deposition to the LAPD Board of Inquiry about his work on the Kennedy case and angrily refuted Blehr's allegations. "I have never in my life been approached to change opinions or go for the prosecution," he said. "I call them as I see them."

But interesting new information emerged in a deposition given by Wolfer in the case of Blehr v. Wolfer on September 20. In a normal case where the evidence was clear-cut, there would be no need for spectrographic or neutron-activation analysis of the bullets to ensure they all came from the same batch of lead and the same gun.

But in the Kennedy case, Wolfer said he had, in fact, made spectrographic analyses of the various bullets and bullet fragments recovered, indicating further checks were needed to establish that they'd all come from the same gun.

Wolfer never mentioned these spectrographic tests or their results at trial, but later told Blehr that all the spectrograms showed "identical" results. When asked to produce them, Wolfer said they had been either "lost" or "destroyed." Earlier in the case, Wolfer had quashed Dr. Noguchi's request for neutron-activation analysis. Presumably, Dr. Noguchi either wasn't told of, or wasn't convinced by, Wolfer's spectrographic tests.

Blehr also produced the photographs from the Free Press article and asked Wolfer about apparent bullet holes in the kitchen circled by investigators.

"We did open up the holes that were circled and examined all other possibilities," said Wolfer. "We took a knife and cut into the holes ... and saw what was in it."

"You mean you probed the holes?" asked Blehr.

"We didn't probe, because if there were bullets I wouldn't want to scratch or damage the bullet to see what was in the back or what was in the hole."

"Was that photographed?"

"No, because this is a negative type .... If you don't find a bullet we just wouldn't photograph just any hole. I mean there were too many holes to photograph."

In 1988, when the police files were finally released, a dozen police photographs emerged of these holes.

A few weeks later, the police board rejected Harper's findings, calling the one-third-of-a-degree difference in rifling angle "questionable ... when the difficulty of exactly aligning the two bullets is realized."

The expected "whitewash" of Wolfer materialized, and he was cleared for promotion to chief of the LAPD Crime Lab. Chief Davis, a right-winger who often railed at the city's "swimming-pool Communists," dismissed Blehr's allegations as a "vendetta" and lauded Wolfer as "the top expert in the country."

Despite all the controversy around Wolfer and the ballistics, Sirhan's appeal attorneys were strangely indifferent to the possibility of a second gun. Luke McKissack refused to include Harper's findings in Sirhan's appeal, and later said -- rather implausibly -- that if there was a second gun, it was someone unconnected to Sirhan "who seized on the impulse of the moment" to fire at the senator.

In 1972, the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, and Sirhan's death sentence was commuted to life. As Ted Charach completed his film, the controversy continued to build, drawing an affidavit of support from Grant Cooper.

In late 1973, Charach recruited independent criminalist Herbert MacDonell to review Harper's Balliscan photographs of the Kennedy and Weisel bullets.

MacDonell had his own independent crime lab in Corning, New York, and had been a defense consultant in the murder of Black Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton by the Chicago police in December 1969. The police claimed they shot the Panthers in self-defense, but an appeals court later found the Panthers were shot while they slept. The police fired up to ninety-nine shots while the Panthers fired once in response.

MacDonell accepted Charach's assignment, and his main contribution concerned the bullet cannelures -- knurled rings running around a bullet's circumference that lessen resistance to the rifling. He concluded that the Weisel bullet had two cannelures while the Kennedy bullet had only one. The Omark-CCI shell casings found in Sirhan's revolver indicated that he fired CCI long rifle Mini-Mag ammunition, which had two cannelures. Omark confirmed to MacDonell that they had never manufactured such ammunition with fewer than two cannelures.

MacDonell concluded that if the Kennedy bullet had only one cannelure, it was a different type of ammunition. He also measured a half-degree difference in rifling angles between the Kennedy and Weisel bullets and found no matching individual characteristics between the striations on the bullets. "Overall sharpness of the Kennedy bullet suggests that it was fired from a barrel whose rifling was in far better condition than the one from which the Weisel bullet was fired."

Based on the photographs, he agreed with Harper that the bullets removed from Kennedy and Weisel "could not have been fired from the same weapon" and added that, due to the single cannelure, the Kennedy bullet was not fired from the Sirhan revolver.

As a KHJ news reporter, Baxter Ward had aired a series of reports on the case in 1971. He was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 1972 and when he launched a bid for governor in 1974, reopening the Sirhan case played a prominent role in his campaign.

Ward asked Dr. Noguchi to rephotograph the Kennedy and Weisel bullets with a Balliscan camera from the coroner's office, and on May 13, Ward held a special three-hour hearing on the ballistics evidence, calling for a new investigation into the "unanswered questions" in the case. "There's an angle of fire that seems haywire, a distance of firing that seems haywire, and now the bullets," he said.

Wolfer and DA Joseph Busch refused to appear, dismissing the hearing as a campaign stunt, but Herbert MacDonell and fellow criminalist Lowell Bradford testified, as did Dr. Noguchi.

MacDonell and Bradford said they were unable to match the Kennedy and Weisel bullets "based on the photographic evidence," but neither had actually examined the bullets under a comparison microscope. Why Ward brought them to Los Angeles but didn't arrange such analysis is very puzzling to me and an omission Ward would come to regret. William Harper was ill, but his sworn affidavit set out his position, and MacDonell and Bradford called for an independent panel to refire Sirhan's gun.

Dr. Noguchi reiterated his grand jury and trial testimony regarding muzzle distance, and said he regretted not pressuring Wolfer into having neutron-activation analysis done on the bullets. Wolfer had told him such analysis might change the chemical composition of the slugs. Noguchi also admitted his own error in counting five grooves on the Kennedy neck bullet, when it had six.

The LA Times attacked Ward's "strange and ghoulish inquiry ... his attempt to capitalize politically on a national tragedy smacks of cheap sensationalism." DA Busch also blasted Ward's hearing as "ridiculous," saying the "two-gun" theory had been "fully investigated and rejected" in previous inquiries. The board of supervisors rejected Ward's bid to have the Sirhan gun refired by an independent firearms panel and Ward also lost his bid for governor.

***

A month later, former congressman Allard Lowenstein officially entered the case after a year spent reviewing the evidence at the behest of researcher Jonn Christian and the actor Robert Vaughn. Vaughn and Lowenstein had been close friends of Robert Kennedy's. Lowenstein had been at the forefront of the "Dump Johnson" movement in 1968, recruiting Eugene McCarthy to run for president, and later in the year, supporting RFK.

Lowenstein's interest, in turn, brought shooting victim Paul Schrade back into the case, and on Sunday, December 15, they held a joint press conference in New York to demand that the case be reopened, citing too many bullets, bullets from different guns, and the muzzle distance issue.

They called for an independent panel to examine the firearms evidence; retest the gun; oversee neutron-activation tests on the bullets; and conduct a new trajectory study to account for the extra bullet holes. They also demanded the release of the official LAPD ten-volume report.

Busch batted them off the next day, saying he'd already refuted their claims and declaring that the evidence that Sirhan acted alone was "absolutely overwhelming." But he said he would be open to reopening the case if Sirhan requested it. Sirhan's attorney Godfrey Isaac started work on a writ of error in the California Supreme Court, seeking a new trial based on this new evidence.

The following Sunday, December 22, Paul Sharaga was interviewed by Art Kevin on radio, publicly outlining his tale of the girl in the polka-dot dress for the first time.

Isaac's petitions followed in mid-January, charging that police and prosecutors deliberately suppressed evidence of conspiracy -- Cesar and Schulman were never called to testify, and Cesar's gun was never checked by the police. Isaac's petition was denied without comment a month later, but the pressure on Busch continued to build.

On February 19, 1975, Ted Charach's film, The Second Gun, was shown at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention in Chicago. At the invitation of President Robert Joling, William Harper also gave a presentation based on his affidavit. Harper insisted that spectrographic or neutron-activation analysis should still be done on the firearms evidence. "It will be, indeed, a very dark day in the history of criminalistics if the RFK-Sirhan case is laid to rest shrouded in the clouds of technical uncertainties, of which there are many -- far too many."

***

At the end of May, Sirhan was given a parole date of February 23, 1986. If parole was granted, he would be released after sixteen years and nine months -- "at the top range for first-degree murders," said Phillip Guthrie, assistant director of the state department of corrections. The average was eleven years. "He was extremely well behaved all the time he has been in prison -- absolutely no problem," said Guthrie, acknowledging Sirhan's exemplary prison record and positive response to psychiatric evaluations. "The Adult Authority considered that while he killed a very well known figure they had to treat him as if he killed an ordinary person."

State Treasurer Jesse Unruh called such reasoning "asinine" and branded Sirhan a "traitor," guilty of "treason," who deserved to stay in prison for life. Unruh argued that the parole date sent out an "open invitation" to an assassination attempt on Ted Kennedy.

But under the liberal governorship of "Jerry" Brown, the Adult Authority chairman stood firm. "This should prove we don't have any political prisoners," he said. Mary Sirhan felt her son would be safe if paroled because "when they find out my son's shot did not kill the senator, there'll be nothing to be mad about."

On June 27, District Attorney Joseph Busch died suddenly of a heart attack, just as it seemed he was considering a limited reopening of the case. Sirhan prosecutor John Howard was named acting DA and started to think of a judicial framework in which to conduct a limited reinvestigation.

Howard was still unconvinced by the two-gun claims of Harper and MacDonell. "Their findings are based on photographs, and the only accepted method of bullet identification is under a comparison microscope," he told the Los Angeles Times. "God help us if all the bullet comparisons are inconclusive after refiring the gun. Then someone will probably come up with a third gun theory."

***
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

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PART 2 OF 2

On July 13, a special committee of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences recommended that the case be reopened to answer "legitimate questions ... regarding the firearms identification." Committee chair Ralph Turner, a professor at Michigan State University, agreed with Harper's findings on the rifling-angle discrepancies, and did not think bullets showing such a variance could be fired from the same gun.

On July 24, Schrade, Lowenstein, and CBS News formally asked the police commission to release all investigative files on the case. "As a victim of that assault who was nearly killed," said Schrade, "I have the legal and moral right to learn if anyone other than Sirhan Sirhan was firing a gun in there."

On August 14, Thomas Kranz, a former aide to Kennedy in the 1968 campaign, was sworn in as a special counsel to probe the case after the board of supervisors authorized reopening the investigation.

A week later, during police commission hearings into disclosing LAPD files, Assistant Police Chief Daryl Gates revealed that the ceiling panels, the X-rays of the ceiling panels, and the door-frame wood taken from the crime scene had been destroyed on June 27, 1969, after Sirhan's conviction. He said these items were not technically evidence, as they hadn't been introduced at the trial. "They have absolutely no value whatsoever. All of the ... real important testing, as far as the trajectory and the line of fire and the number of bullet holes, that was done prior to their removal.... We made those tests and they showed absolutely nothing."

Dion Morrow, special counsel for the city attorney's office, justified the destruction to the press: "There was no place to keep them. You can't fit ceiling panels into a card file."

***

By now, the board of supervisors, the DA, and the state attorney general had joined a separate Schrade-CBS firearms petition in the hope of ending the long-running controversy. On September 11, 1976, Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke approved their bid to reinvestigate the firearms evidence, and a panel of seven examiners was appointed: Patrick Garland, a firearms examiner with the Virginia Bureau of Forensic Sciences; independent firearms examiner Stanton Berg from Minneapolis, Minnesota; Lowell Bradford, a forensic consultant from San Jose and former head of the Santa Clara County Crime Lab; Alfred Biasotti, assistant chief of the California Department of Justice investigative services branch; Cortland Cunningham, chief of the firearms and tool-marks unit at the FBI lab in Washington, DC; Charles Morton, a criminalist with the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Oakland; and Ralph Turner, a professor at Michigan State University's school of criminal justice.

Wolfer lodged an unsuccessful objection, claiming the panel was biased in favor of conspiracy. He also argued that the condition of the gun and the bullets had changed so much since 1968 that the new tests would be meaningless. But on September 14, Wenke ordered a reexamination of the evidence, and two days later, Wolfer was subpoenaed as Wenke put his work in the Kennedy case under the microscope.

Wolfer was first asked to verify that the bullets introduced as evidence were the same bullets he examined in 1968, but without proper documentation, this verification relied heavily on Wolfer's memory and integrity. He located his initials on the bullets with a magnifying glass, but the "31" marked by Dr. Noguchi on the base of the Kennedy neck bullet and the "X" marked on the base of the Goldstein bullet by his surgeon, Dr. Finkel, were not checked. When the firearms panel later made an inventory of these bullets, the markings made by the doctors on extraction were no longer present. In effect, these could have been any bullets previously marked for ID by Wolfer. It was a precarious start.

The 1975 panel unexpectedly discovered two four-by-five-inch black-and-white photo negatives and four contact prints among records received from the LAPD evidence clerk. Marked Special Exhibit 10, these were copies of the photomicrograph dated June 6, 1968, that Robert Joling had previously given Dr. Noguchi a copy of in Chicago. Wolfer identified the photomicrograph under oath as a comparison between the Kennedy neck bullet and a test bullet fired from Sirhan's gun. But when the firearms panel compared the surface defects on the bullets in evidence with the photomicrograph, they determined it was actually a comparison between the Kennedy neck bullet and the Goldstein bullet. They also noted that the condition of the bullets had not changed appreciably since the original photograph was taken.

Questioned as to why he said he didn't prepare photographs and yet here was a bullet comparison identified in his printing, Wolfer thought for a moment, then remembered that a detective giving a class on evidence was in the lab on another matter and wanted to show his students a comparison photomicrograph. Wolfer took a picture of the comparison "as a favor to him, not as evidence." It was a bizarre story, but it still didn't explain how Wolfer mistook the Goldstein bullet for a test bullet.

While Wolfer supplied an analyzed evidence report for the Kennedy neck bullet, there were no such reports for the other victim bullets, so Wolfer's trial testimony was based on his word alone. One of the firearms examiners later characterized Wolfer's working practices as highly contentious: "He bragged to cohorts that he did not make notes of work; take pictures of bullet comparisons or any other laboratory identifications; did not write reports, instead submitted a declaration, the general format of which was: 'If called as a witness in this case, I will testify that ... ' This meant everything rested on his word and his memory, with few if any backup records. He could not be cross-examined on notes, reports and photographs and without these, there was no record of tests performed or a traceable chain of possession."

With Wolfer's foggy memory and glaring lack of documentation, the panel examiners had to do the best they could with the exhibits in evidence. Judge Wenke issued a court order on September 18, asking them to retest the victim and test bullets to determine if they were in good enough condition to make reliable firearms identification; if such identifications confirmed Wolfer's original findings or supported the conclusion that a second gun was fired; and if all bullets had the same rifling angles and number of cannelures.

At the end of the first day, the group immediately agreed that the condition of the test bullets in People's 55 (the three test bullets presented at trial) and grand jury Exhibit 5-B (the four test bullets presented to the grand jury) was not sufficient for identification.

All things happen in Fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of Five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5. The Law of Fives is never wrong.
-- The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson


During the trial, Wolfer had testified to a match between the three least-damaged victim bullets -- Kennedy, Goldstein, and Weisel -- and a test bullet fired from Sirhan's gun. But when Bradford and Berg examined these test bullets in 1975, they found that the copper alloy coating had been stripped away, leaving no bore impressions for comparison. The examiners couldn't match the test bullets to each other, much less to the Sirhan gun. How could Wolfer have possibly testified to a match with these test bullets in 1968 if they had no identification markings?

Cunningham described the surfaces of the four test bullets that Wolfer submitted to the grand jury as "practically devoid of microscopic marks, which could indicate that they had been fired from a barrel in a leaded condition." This was another mystery. Lead bullets can either be left untreated or coated with a copper alloy. Firing lead bullets through a gun barrel builds up microscopic lead deposits on the barrel over time. These can cause the copper alloy coating of other bullets to be stripped away as they're fired through the barrel, leaving no bore impressions on the bullet for identification.

Conversely, firing copper-coated bullets through a barrel tends to clean out these lead deposits. So why would Sirhan's barrel be in a leaded condition if he had fired eight copper-coated bullets through it in the pantry? If Sirhan's copper-coated Mini-Mags cleared out any lead deposits in the barrel, why was the copper coating stripped from Wolfer's test bullets the next day? Were lead bullets fired through the gun in the meantime? If so, by whom?

As the original test bullets were unusable for identification, a panel request to test-fire the Sirhan gun was granted on September 26. The gun was examined and, as predicted, had severe leading in the bore. A dry cloth patch was pushed through the bore and each of the cylinders. Then Garland fired two copper-coated CCI Mini-Mag .22 long rifle bullets into a water tank in the basement of the Halls of Justice, followed by two lead CCI long rifle bullets, which tend to leave stronger bore impressions for identification.

The first four test bullets didn't create sufficient striations for comparison, and lead was still obvious in the bore, so four more copper-coated bullets were fired, removing most of the remaining lead.

Although the new test bullets could be identified with one another, Cunningham found "significant differences" between the individual striations on these test bullets and the marks present on the three victim bullets. The leaded barrel may have altered the character of these markings, making a conclusive match impossible.

Over the next eleven days, each examiner conducted his own individual bullet comparison using a comparison microscope and consulting the photographs previously made by Harper and Noguchi, where necessary. Each expert finished his individual report before the group assembled to complete a final joint report to present to Judge Wenke.

Contrary to later spin by the LAPD, the panel's conclusions unanimously rejected Wolfer's key findings. They found that not one of Wolfer's seven copper-coated test bullets had sufficient striation marks for identification with the victim bullets, with one another, or with the Sirhan gun. "The examination results contradict the original identification made at the trial of Sirhan," noted Lowell Bradford, "in that there is no basis for an identification of any of the victim bullets ... because of the failure of the test bullets to receive bore impressions."

The panel agreed that the Stroll bullet was a CCI Mini-Mag with the same rifling characteristics as the Sirhan weapon. But they again contradicted Wolfer in determining that the Evans, Schrade, and fatal Kennedy fragments were too badly damaged to determine class characteristics and manufacturer.

Garland later noted that "carelessness, incomplete notes [and] improperly marked evidence are unacceptable in a job in which a man's life or freedom are dependent on an examiner's competence."

Yet, with no supporting documentation or analysis for his opinion and no challenge from the defense, Wolfer's fraudulent testimony had gone undetected at trial.

The examiners were equally dismissive of Harper and MacDonnell's findings. They all agreed the Kennedy neck bullet had two cannelures, not one. The quality and black-and-white nature of the Harper and Ward Balliscan photographs were blamed for obscuring the second cannelure on the Kennedy bullet. (Herbert MacDonell later told me that Harper lit his Balliscan photo from above -- cannelure photographs should be lit from the side.)

The panel concluded that the alleged "sharper rifling" of the Kennedy bullet was due to impact damage on the Weisel bullet. The examiners found no significant differences in rifling or rifling angles among victim bullets, and Harper was later criticized for failing to examine these bullets under a comparison microscope before embarking on his campaign to refire the gun. Harper claimed that such a microscope was too heavy to carry to the county clerk's office, but there were plenty of researchers who could have helped.

The gross characteristics -- weight, number of grooves, land width, number of cannelures, and so forth -- of Kennedy, Goldstein, Weisel, Stroll, and the test bullets all matched and were consistent with the .22-caliber CCI long rifle ammunition used by Sirhan. But the lack of sufficient matching individual striations again prevented a positive identification.

Belying the mishandling furor four years earlier, none of the bullets revealed "any unusual amount of oxidation or deterioration." The problem was that individual striations didn't reproduce very well on the copper-coated bullets Sirhan used; the leaded barrel stripped striations from the test bullets; impact damage left "very limited areas with undamaged rifling impressions" on the key victim bullets; and some fine detail may have been lost due to subsequent handling or oxidation over the intervening years.

Nonetheless, Berg, Cunningham, Bradford, and Garland identified the Kennedy, Goldstein and Weisel bullets as having been fired from the same gun, while Biasotti thought it "very probable." Berg, Cunningham, Garland, and Biasotti also strongly suggested that the Sirhan gun had fired these bullets but couldn't make a positive identification.

The fact that the victim bullets could be matched to each other but the test bullets could not was strange, though. Why would the Sirhan barrel produce clearly defined striations on the victim bullets on June 5 and poorly defined striations on Wolfer's test bullets in the next firing?

***

The examiners' joint report concluded that, while they could not match any of the bullets to the Sirhan gun, the matching class characteristics and "gross imperfections" of the bullets examined suggested "there is no substantive or demonstrable evidence that more than one gun was used" and that no further tests were needed.

"There is no substantive evidence ... that suggests or supports a second gun theory," wrote Lowell Bradford in his report. "The question of a second gun is open, but the weight of findings is against it ... unless it were of identical class characteristics as the Sirhan gun and using ammunition of class characteristics identical with the Sirhan ammunition."

During subsequent hearings, Stanton Berg said the odds were "up around ninety-nine per cent" that the bullets came from Sirhan's gun, but conceded there was a "very slim possibility" a second gun was used.

As Special Counsel Kranz later noted, "For a second gunman to fire at Kennedy, he would have to have a gun exactly like Sirhan's .... What were the chances of two ... Iver Johnson .22 caliber revolvers firing the same copper-jacketed, mini-mag, hollow-tipped ammunition at the same time? Additionally, five of the seven experts found that Kennedy, Goldstein and Weisel were fired from the same gun. All three were in Sirhan's line of fire. Goldstein was eight feet east of Kennedy. Weisel twenty-seven feet east. A second gunman would have to shoot Kennedy close-up from the right rear, then turn around, without being seen and fire at Goldstein and Weisel."

Later it was determined that Cesar's .22 had similar class characteristics to Sirhan's gun, so if he was firing Mini-Mags, the bullets in evidence could fit his gun. But to me, the idea of Cesar shooting Kennedy and then turning around to shoot Goldstein and Weisel just doesn't make any sense.

After their meticulous two-week study, on October 6, the firearms panel publicly announced their findings. "No 2nd Gun, Kennedy Case Panel Reports" was the LA Times headline, while Sirhan's attorney Godfrey Isaac conceded the findings "have effectively laid the second-gun theory to rest."

LAPD Chief Davis completely misinterpreted the findings as a triumph for the head of his crime lab: "After years of unwarranted attack on criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, his integrity and professional excellence have been vindicated. However, this will not stop the conspiracy theory profiteers or the conspiracy theory nuts from drumming up additional allegations which will tend to undermine the police, the prosecution and the courts."

In an October 8 news conference, Lowenstein, Joling, and Schrade insisted that the second-gun issue was still open and that further trajectory studies in the pantry were needed, but Schrade acknowledged that "in great part the second-gun theory has been refuted. These bullets ... most likely came from the Sirhan gun. Doubt has been reduced by these tests, but not eliminated."

William Harper was called back for questioning on November 7 and asked if he had seen anything in the panel's report that caused him to modify or change his opinion. Harper replied, "The answer to that is 'no.' Just plain 'n-o"' -- though he admitted he hadn't really digested the examiners' report yet and, five years after his original examination, he wasn't inclined to get back into it.

Proconspiracy writers have tended to gloss over the panel's conclusions over the years, claiming they were inconclusive and never linked Sirhan's gun to any of the bullets in the case. But the finding that the Kennedy neck bullet and the Goldstein and Weisel bullets were fired from the same gun must be addressed in any responsible analysis of the ballistics in the case.

Assuming the bullets examined in 1975 were the same bullets Wolfer examined in 1968, it's hard to refute the panel's contention that these three key victim bullets were probably fired from Sirhan's gun. Goldstein and Weisel were in Sirhan's line of fire, but if Sirhan also hit Kennedy in the neck, it means, contrary to witness testimony, that his gun did come within an inch of Kennedy's right armpit, and that he was not in front of Kennedy, but to his right side.

If Sirhan's gun arm closed the muzzle distance to within an inch and lined up with the bullet trajectory of one armpit shot, he must also have fired the other, as the two armpit shots were only an inch apart.

From the same firing position, it's quite possible that Sirhan fired the fatal shot and the shoulder-pad shot as well, but these have different bullet trajectories that could also have been fired by a second gun. Dr. Noguchi couldn't identify the caliber of the fatal Kennedy bullet fragments, and we don't really know where the bullet that passed clean through Kennedy's suit coat went. If more than eight shots were fired in the pantry, it must be considered possible that these shots were fired by a second gun.

The Wenke hearings wound down by calling the firearms examiners back for questioning about outstanding issues that still needed clearing up. Allard Lowenstein asked Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to conduct the cross-examination, and on December 16, the last of the seven experts, Patrick Garland, was called to testify.

Garland blamed heavy leading in the barrel of Sirhan's gun for wiping out the individual striations necessary to identify it as the murder weapon. Questioned by Bugliosi, he could not say on what basis Wolfer positively identified the evidence bullets as coming from Sirhan's gun. Sixteen copper-jacketed slugs were fired through the weapon, tending to clean the barrel, Bugliosi said, so how could he account for the heavy leading?

"I said before it was strange," Garland told Bugliosi, "and I can't explain that." Had someone fired the gun after Wolfer? "Yes, sir," replied Garland.

Had there been an unauthorized firing of the alleged murder weapon using lead bullets after Wolfer's initial test? The truth finally came to light in 1994 when Dan Moldea interviewed Dave Butler, who worked alongside Wolfer in the LAPD's Scientific Investigation Division.

"I've still got test bullets from that gun," said Butler. "We fired some extra test shots and I saved them."

"How many?" Moldea asked.

"I don't know. We fired a bootful of test shots."

"More than twenty?"

"Yeah. What we do is submit x amount to the court as evidence ... but extra rounds are saved, and they are maintained in our files. Well, when the [Schrade suit] came up, the gun barrel was grossly changed internally .... The examiners basically found out that the gun barrel had been tampered with ... and they couldn't come back with a positive comparison."

Butler eventually took two bullets and casings home as souvenirs.

"And this is from the test firings?"

"Yeah, this is before the gun's released (to the grand jury). This is after the main test-firing."

So, according to Butler, the extra test-firings occurred on June 6, before the gun was released to the grand jury and within hours of Wolfer's initial firing. Butler doesn't seem to realize that this extra firing and the fact that the barrel was not subsequently cleaned are more likely to be the cause of the changed barrel characteristics than any alleged "tampering."

But this still doesn't explain why the copper-alloy coating was stripped from Wolfer's initial test bullets. Did Butler fire lead bullets through the barrel before Wolfer did his tests with the copper-coated Mini-Mags? We don't know.

***

His interest piqued by the cross-examination of the firearms panel, Vincent Bugliosi began to investigate other areas. Paul Schrade showed him the AP photo, captioned "Bullet Found Near Kennedy Shooting Scene," of Officers Rozzi and Wright kneeling down to inspect a hole in a doorjamb leading from the backstage area into the narrow corridor that led into the pantry.

Attempts to identify or interview the officers over the years had been fruitless, but now Bugliosi obtained an affidavit from Rozzi confirming that "sometime during the evening when we were looking for evidence, someone discovered what appeared to be a bullet a foot and a half or so from the bottom of the floor in a door jamb on the door behind the stage. I also personally observed what I believed to be a bullet in the place just mentioned. What I observed was a hole in the door jamb, and the base of what appeared to be a small caliber bullet was lodged in the hole."

Bugliosi then phoned Officer Wright: "The bullet was definitely removed from the hole, but I don't know who did it," he told the lawyer. Under pressure from the LAPD and the DA's office, Wright subsequently backtracked, refusing to confirm the telephone conversation or to provide a statement. Years later, after Wright retired, Dan Moldea asked him, on a scale of one to ten, how sure he was that the object he saw was a bullet. "You can never be 100 percent sure," said Wright, "but I would say it would be as close to a ten as I'd ever want to go without pulling it out."

Bugliosi also interviewed assistant sound man Robert Alfeld and electrician Paul Dozier, who both worked at the hotel. While walking through the pantry on the morning of June 6, the day after the shooting, they spotted some objects under the base of the last ice machine on their right and picked them up to discover three rimfire, long rifle .22-caliber expended shell casings. At first, they thought someone was playing a "morbid joke" and had thrown them there after the assassination. They couldn't believe the FBI and police had not noticed them in their extensive search of the crime scene.

They took the shells up to their office, still thinking they were a joke, put them in a desk and forgot about them. Alfeld's father died two days later, and while he was away from work for a few weeks, the FBI interviewed Dozier and he told them about the casings. Alfeld placed no value on the casings until 1975, when he read an article about the mishandling of evidence in the RFK case and called William Harper.

On November 18, Bugliosi subpoenaed Rozzi, Wright, and Alfeld to appear before Judge Wenke, but Wenke was interested only in the firearms experts and refused to widen the scope of his inquiry to include the issue of how many shots had been fired in the pantry.

Undeterred, Bugliosi continued to interview witnesses to the "bullet holes" in the doorframes, including Dr. Noguchi himself: "I asked Mr. Wolfer where he had found bullet holes ... he pointed, as I recall, to one hole in a ceiling panel above and an indentation in the cement ceiling. He also pointed to several holes in the door-frames of the swinging doors leading into the pantry. I directed that photographs of me be taken pointing to these holes .... I got the distinct impression from him that the holes may have been caused by bullets."

Hotel maitre d' Angelo Di Pierro told Bugliosi he was inspecting the pantry with police in the hours after the shooting: "I observed a small caliber bullet lodged about a quarter of an inch into the wood on the center divider of the two swinging doors. Several police officers also observed the bullet." The bullet was at head height and Di Pierro remembered thinking if he'd walked through the door, it might have hit him:

I am quite familiar with guns and bullets, having been in the infantry for three and a half years. There is no question in my mind that this was a bullet and not a nail or any other object. The base of the bullet was round and from all indications, it appeared to be a .22 caliber bullet.

A day or so later, the center divider that contained the bullet was removed by the Los Angeles Police Department for examination. I don't know who removed the bullet or what happened to it. The hole that contained the bullet was the only new hole I observed after the shooting. Even prior to the shooting, there were a few holes from nails, et cetera on the two swinging doors.


Waiter Martin Patrusky also gave Bugliosi an affidavit, stating that during a police witness reconstruction four or five days after the shooting, "one of the officers pointed to two circled holes on the center divider of the swinging doors and told us they had dug two bullets out of the center divider. The two circled holes are shown in [the photograph] ... I am absolutely sure that the police told us that two bullets were dug out of these holes."

On June 5, while working as a carpenter at the Ambassador, Dale Poore was asked by two police officers to "remove the wooden facing, which was less than one inch in depth, from the center post of the double door area on the pantry side of the door located at the west end of the pantry. Before removing the material [Poore] noticed two apparent bullet holes on the east portion [pantry side] of that center post. These two holes were approximately four feet from ground level, with one about four inches higher than the other." The wood was taken away for inspection and replaced with a new piece of wood.

In 1975, Poore told the DA's office: "It looked like the bullet had went in at sort of an angle as it was traveling this way. So it made a bit of an oblong hole and the fiber of the board had closed in some after it went in. And that's the only reason I thought it had been a bullet went in there because you put any kind of a metal instrument, punch nail sets, anything in the hole, it won't have a fiber around the edge."

The other carpenter employed by the hotel, Wesley Harrington, assisted Poore and was asked if he would describe the holes he saw as bullet holes: "Yes, I would. During my teenage years ... we had use of air rifles and .22 rifles and we had fired into old buildings and trees, and this looked like a hole similar to a small caliber bullet."

After gathering these affidavits, Bugliosi and Schrade presented a new petition to Wenke, which described the LAPD trajectory analysis as "shamefully superficial" and called for a new panel to conduct "photographic reconstruction of the assassination scene, a re-examination of bullet pathways and a determination of how many shots were fired." They were once again denied.

***

If two bullets were extracted from the door frames in the pantry, where are they now? Suspicion has long fallen on People's 38, two spent bullets allegedly found on the front seat of Sirhan's car. The panel examined these slugs and confirmed that traces of wood were embedded in the base and tip of each.

Were these bullets really found in Sirhan's car or dug out of the pantry door frame? The wood facing was destroyed by the LAPD in 1969, but the wood tracings in the bullets could have been microscopically compared with the original door frame in the Ambassador pantry. They weren't.

This leaves us with two possibilities: either Sirhan fired two rounds into a tree or board, dug them out, and put them in his glove compartment before he drove to the crime scene; or the bullets dug out of the wooden door frame were planted in Sirhan's car or falsely labeled.

In May 1976, a Freedom of Information Act request by researcher Greg Stone uncovered four FBI photographs of four circled holes in the door frames, with captions describing them as "bullet holes." Two were in the center divider and two were in the left doorframe. Both sets of holes were circled, and inside one circle in each was an officer's badge number 723, the initials LASO, and the name W. Tew (Deputy Sheriff Walter Tew of the LA sheriff's office).

By November 1976, former FBI agent William Bailey had heard of Bugliosi's claims of extra bullets in the pantry and approached him after a speech in New Jersey. Bailey had resigned from the FBI in 1971 and was now an assistant professor of police science at Gloucester County College nearby. He'd been in the pantry four to six hours after the shooting, on FBI assignment to interview witnesses and carefully examine the crime scene. He wrote out an affidavit for Bugliosi on the spot, stating, "At one point during these observations, I [and several other agents] noted at least two small caliber bullet holes in the center post of the two doors leading from the preparation room [pantry]. There is no question in our mind that they were bullet holes and were not caused by food carts or other equipment in the preparation room."

A few months later, Bailey received a call from DA investigator William Burnett.

"There were at least two bullets in the center post," confirmed Bailey.

"Can other agents corroborate this?"

"Yes, Agent Robert Pickard can."

Nobody doubts that Bailey was in the pantry. Indeed, he was also present when Sandra Serrano and Vincent Di Pierro reviewed polka-dot dresses a few days later. And in a succession of television interviews over the years, he has consistently stuck to his story:

"There were two very distinct holes in the center divider, and I looked closely at the holes -- I could see that they were bullet holes. You could actually see the base of a bullet in each hole.

"I've serious reservations whether or not any of Bobby's wounds were inflicted by Sirhan's gun. I, at this point, feel that there probably was a second gun there and that it was fired."

***

When the Kranz Report finally appeared in March 1977, it was a predictable whitewash. But while Kranz said the LAPD did an "excellent job" in its conspiracy investigation, he was extremely critical of Wolfer, whose work was "sloppy" and whose lack of records was inexplicable.

Kranz was also at a loss to explain the destruction of the door frames and ceiling tiles before Sirhan's appeal: "Potential evidence should never be destroyed until the entire case has run out. What the hell were these things destroyed for? ... They were opening up the doors to total criticism and doubt."

He also called the destruction of the Jake Williams gun "just idiotic. There's no excuse or explanation that justifies why it was done."

In 1988, after twenty years, the LAPD finally released its investigation files, revealing more destruction of evidence. On August 21, 1968, LAPD Officer Roy Keene had signed an order sending 2,400 photographs to County General Hospital in Los Angeles to be burned in a medical-waste incinerator. Of the 4,818 interviews and interrogations LAPD conducted during its original investigation, tapes of only 301 survived.

The release of these files inspired a new generation of investigators and provided further evidence of bullet holes in the pantry. Fifty-one photographs taken in the hours after the shooting by LAPD photographer Charles Collier showed multiple holes in the door frames and ceiling panels and, again, Wolfer and Noguchi pointing to these holes. One photo shows Wolfer pointing to a spot on the upper door frame. Another shows Dr. Noguchi measuring two holes in the left door frame and pointing to two holes in the center divider.

Karl Uecker told archivist John Burns he also saw what appeared to be two bullet holes in the center divider of the pantry doorway upon returning to the crime scene after a police interview on the morning of June 5. He passed through those swinging doors dozens of times each night and was positive the holes were not there prior to the shooting.

The most comprehensive study of the bullet holes in the pantry was conducted by author Dan Moldea. In the spring of 1990, he interviewed more than one hundred LAPD officers and sheriff's deputies, a dozen of whom recalled seeing bullet holes in the pantry.

Sergeant James MacArthur, senior police detective at the crime scene, said he saw "quite a few" bullet holes. Inspector Robert Rock told Moldea that a couple of bullets were dug out of a door frame. Officer Kenneth Vogel was positive he saw two bullet fragments on the pantry floor, which he brought to the attention of an LAPD official. No such fragments are recorded in police files.

Sergeant Raymond Rolon told Moldea, "One of the investigators pointed to a hole in the doorframe and said, 'We just pulled a bullet out of there.'" Deputy Sheriff Thomas Beringer recalled a man in a tuxedo "trying to take a bullet out of the door-frame with a silver knife, for a souvenir." SID Officer David Butler told Moldea he saw Wolfer take two .22-caliber bullets out of the center divider. They tore out the wood facing and laid it down on the steam table, and Wolfer disassembled it to get the bullets out. These bullets were never booked as evidence.

When the shooting victims were taken to the hospital, police at the crime scene had no way of knowing how many bullets had been fired. Word was that Kennedy had been shot twice, so finding bullets in the door frame was a good opportunity to build an airtight case against Sirhan. Even later, when it was found that Kennedy had been shot three times and a fourth bullet had gone through his shoulder pad, none of the officers at the scene realized the significance of the extra bullets in the door frame, except DeWayne Wolfer.

In 1994, Sirhan's researcher Rose Lynn Mangan reentered the case after a long hiatus and conducted a thorough examination of the ballistics evidence and records at the new home of the police files, the California State Archives in Sacramento. She made two extremely important discoveries.

The first was that the inventory done by the firearms panel in 1975 suggested that the ID markings on the base of the Kennedy neck bullet and the Goldstein bullet had changed since 1968, breaking the chain of custody of two key bullets in the case.

Of the three bullets that hit Kennedy's body, one was lost in the ceiling, and one was so fragmented that Dr. Noguchi could not even confirm what caliber it was, so the bullet removed from Kennedy's neck was the only bullet that could link Sirhan's gun to the murder.

Dr. Noguchi's autopsy report describes the recovery of the Kennedy neck bullet at 8:40 a.m. on June 6: "The initials TN, and the numbers 31 are placed on the base of the bullet for future identification." But no bullet markings were noted when the bullet was booked into evidence and there is no further record of the ID marking "TN 31" in reference to this bullet. When Pat Garland made his inventory in 1975, he recorded the markings on the base of the Kennedy neck bullet as "TN DW." The" 31" marked on the base by Dr. Noguchi had disappeared.

Similarly, the base of the Goldstein bullet was marked with an "X" by Dr. Finkel on extraction on June 5, 1968. By 1975, the "X" had been replaced by a "6," a new panel ID number added by Garland.

Identification markings on the base of a .22-caliber bullet are engraved with an electric needle and are so small, they would be extremely difficult to erase or write over. In 1974, Dr. Noguchi authenticated these bullets for Baxter Ward by visual observation, but we have no record to indicate that he checked the ID markings. While it's possible that the ID marks eroded over time or due to poor maintenance, the integrity of these bullets must be seriously questioned.

Mangan's second important discovery came in the form of a second test-shot envelope. The envelope for Exhibit 55 entered as evidence at the trial contained three test bullets and was dated June 6, with the name "Sirhan B. Sirhan," the crime "187 P.C." (murder), and the serial number of the Jake Williams gun, H-18602.

Wolfer had dismissed this wrong number as a "clerical error," but in 1994, Mangan discovered the test-shot envelope Wolfer submitted to the grand jury on June 7 as Exhibit 5-B. This contained Wolfer's four other test bullets, but the envelope was dated June 5, with the name "John Doe," the crime "217 P.C." (attempted murder -- Kennedy was still alive), and the serial number of the Sirhan gun, H-53725.

This strongly suggests that Wolfer conducted one test-firing on June 5, while Kennedy was still alive and before Sirhan's identity was known; and another on June 6, after Kennedy died. We also know that Dave Butler fired "a bootful" of shots from the Sirhan gun before it was sealed by the grand jury on June 7; that Wolfer had the Jake Williams gun on June 8 and possibly earlier; and that the Sirhan gun was not providing test bullets with sufficient striations for identification.

The permutations of which gun Wolfer used for these test-firings and which of the resulting test bullets he entered as evidence -- none of which he marked for identification -- is mind-boggling.

While the ballistics evidence to date was complex and inconclusive, there was one more hand to be played involving the acoustic evidence.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:27 pm

PART 1 OF 2

FIFTEEN: The Manchurian Candidate

In 1959, Richard Condon published his second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, a heady psychodrama of assassination, conspiracy, and paranoia. It pushed all the hot buttons of the time -- the Communist witch hunts of McCarthyism and the threat of Communist brainwashing evoked by American POWs returning from the Korean War with accounts of mind manipulation.

Protagonist Raymond Shaw is a hypnotically programmed assassin, a U.S. soldier brainwashed by the North Koreans whose father is running for vice president in a campaign orchestrated by his mother, Eleanor Iselin. The Iselins pose as McCarthyites but are actually Communist agents. Raymond's mission is to assassinate the presidential nominee so that his father and the Communists can rise to power. Every time Raymond hears the phrase "Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?" it triggers a hypnotic trance in which he kills, with no memory of having done so.

In 1962, with Frank Sinatra playing Major Bennett Marco, Shaw's former comrade (and Laurence Harvey as Shaw), John Frankenheimer directed the film of the book, which became a cult classic. Frankenheimer reflected on the film before his death in 2002:

I became good friends with Bobby, who loved the movie. I made all the films for Bobby's 1968 campaign, he stayed at my house, and I drove him to the Ambassador Hotel on the night he died. Did I think that the political assassination in The Manchurian Candidate prompted Sirhan Sirhan to kill Bobby? No way. But the incident affected my perspective on life because, with Bobby, I felt I was part of something that could change the world: he turned me into an idealist. Then, suddenly, it was gone and nothing mattered. My career was defused. It took a long time to reinvest my life with some kind of meaning. I finished the sixties with a bad case of burn-out ... his death was the defining moment of my life.


By 1968, the idea of a "Manchurian candidate" was still dismissed as a Hollywood fantasy, and Dr. Diamond referred to the idea that Sirhan could have been programmed by someone else as a "crackpot theory." But unknown to the public or Sirhan's small army of psychiatrists, the CIA had in fact been working on their own "Manchurian candidate" since the early 1950s.

Dr. Diamond did, at least, agree that Sirhan was in a hypnotic trance at the time of the shooting, and there are a number of clues that suggest this. Between nine thirty and eleven that night, Sirhan stood staring, mesmerized by the Teletype machine in the Colonial Room, as described by Western Union operator Mary Grohs: "Well, he came over to my machine and started staring at it. Just staring. I'll never forget his eyes."

Vincent Di Pierro's strongest impression of Sirhan was "that sick smile on his face" while he was shooting. Several other witnesses remarked on this strange smile; one also described how Sirhan's brow was furrowed in "tremendous concentration" as he fired.

In the struggle on the steam table, Earl Williman described Sirhan's "superhuman strength" as half a dozen burly Kennedy aides tried to prize the gun from his grasp. Frank Burns and Karl Uecker were also surprised at the strength of Sirhan's grip as Uecker smashed his hand on the steam table to try and shake the gun free. Despite the furious activity swirling around him, writer George Plimpton described Sirhan's eyes as "dark brown and enormously peaceful." Joe LaHive thought Sirhan looked "very tranquil" as he was being kicked and punched in the pantry. In a hypnotic session with Dr. Diamond, Sirhan remembered "resting" on the steam table, and these witness descriptions seem to fit his hypnotic mood.

An urgent Teletype sent from the FBI office in Charlotte, North Carolina to Los Angeles at 12:55 p.m. on June 5 reported a call from a member of the Psychiatry Department at Duke University Medical Center in Durham. He had seen the suspect on live television and suspected he had "some physical symptoms of being on amphetamines or other type drug. If urine analysis not performed today or tomorrow, would probably not be medically possible to tell if suspect using some kind of drug." No analysis was made. Amphetamines increase concentration and energy, and could have deepened the hypnotic state and strengthened Sirhan's grip on the gun.

How also to explain Sirhan's jovial banter in custody? According to Bill Jordan, "He was happy to talk about anything other than the Kennedy case .... I was impressed by Sirhan's composure and relaxation. He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation." Was Sirhan a callous, cold-blooded murderer, smugly dusting himself off after a job well done, or in a dissociated state, completely unaware of the shooting? At three thirty in the morning, he asked Deputy DA John Howard if he'd been arraigned yet. Sirhan seemed so disoriented, Howard had to remind him he was in Los Angeles.

Later that morning, when examined by Dr. Crahan in his cell, Sirhan shivered, appearing to have a chill. Months later, every time Dr. Diamond brought Sirhan out of a trance, he had a habit of shivering as he readjusted to full consciousness. Was he slowly emerging from a trance as Dr. Crahan examined him nine hours after the shooting?

The combination of these factors, his interviews with Sirhan, and what he saw in the psychiatric sessions with Diamond and Pollack certainly convinced Bob Kaiser: "I hold it now, maybe ninety-five percent certainty ... that he really didn't remember shooting Robert Kennedy, that he probably killed Kennedy in a trance and was programmed to forget that he'd done it, and programmed to forget the names and identities of others who might have helped him do it."

Dr. Diamond told researcher Betsy Langman in 1974: "Let me immediately state that it was immediately apparent that Sirhan had been programmed .... His response to hypnosis was very different ... strange, in many respects. And he showed this phenomenon of automatic writing, which is something that can be done only when one is pretty well trained."

Diamond was also surprised at how easy it was to hypnotize Sirhan: "Most people may take an hour or more to go under hypnosis the first time. A schizophrenic usually takes much longer, if he goes under at all. But it took less than ten minutes for Sirhan to go into a deep authentic sleep." He got the feeling Sirhan had been hypnotized before.

The LAPD confirmed that Sirhan had indeed been hypnotized before. He'd gone to see stage hypnotist Richard St. Charles in late 1966 at a Pasadena night club within walking distance of his home. He volunteered to be hypnotized on stage and joined the performer's mailing list. St. Charles then wrote notes on his potential clients. "The notes that I had were that he was a very good subject." St. Charles felt Sirhan had "very definitely" been hypnotized before.

Diamond believed Sirhan "programmed himself exactly as a computer is programmed by its magnetic tape [through a] correspondence course in self-hypnosis .... This seems the most logical explanation of all the things that happened." But Kaiser was convinced Sirhan had been programmed by somebody else. Was it the Rosicrucians? Was it stable hand Tom Rathke or someone more sinister? He didn't know. The American public were still in their own twilight state, dissociated from what the CIA was doing in their name -- assassinations, experimental testing, and mind control.

In late May 1969, at the end of the trial, Sirhan was transferred to death row in the old tower at San Quentin. Over the summer, he received twenty weekly visits from the prison's senior psychologist, Dr. Eduard Simson. Simson had been a practicing clinical psychologist for thirteen years, with a BA from Stanford, an MA from New York University, and a PhD in psychology from Heidelberg University. He had worked at San Quentin for six years, studying thousands of prisoners, and was in charge of the prison's psychological testing program.

Simson was so disturbed by what he found in these sessions that he later wrote a twenty-three page affidavit outlining his findings. His key discovery was that "nowhere in Sirhan's test response was I able to find evidence that he is a 'paranoid schizophrenic' or 'psychotic,' as testified by the doctors at the trial. My findings were substantiated by the observations of the chief psychiatrist at San Quentin, Dr. Schmidt, who also did not see Sirhan as psychotic or paranoid schizophrenic.

"The fact that Sirhan was easy to hypnotize, as testified by Dr. Diamond, proves he was not a paranoid schizophrenic," wrote Simson. "Paranoid schizophrenics are almost impossible to hypnotize. They are too suspicious and do not trust anybody, including friends and relatives, not to speak of a hypnotist from, for him, the most hated race (Jewish) .... Sirhan, however, was an unusually good hypnotic subject .... He had manufactured a hypno-disk, and was practicing self-hypnosis in his cell, an activity requiring considerable self-control, which no psychotic has."

Sirhan's decidedly average IQ of 89 presented at the trial was also much lower than the superior IQ of 127 that Simson later calculated using the same test procedure. Simson blamed the wide disparity on the stress of the trial and Sirhan not wanting to cooperate "with a Jewish doctor [doctors] he deeply distrusted .... This deep distrust, NORMAL [under the circumstances] was interpreted by his doctors as 'paranoia,' 'schizophrenia,' or 'psychosis.' None of these labels could describe Sirhan's behavior on Death Row where I found his behavior fell well within the normal range."

An Estonian emigre, used to regional political conflicts and neutral on the Middle East, Simson quickly gained Sirhan's trust. Sirhan told Simson the same story he had told the police, his attorneys, and the DA about the night of the shooting: he remembered pouring coffee for the girl, then the choking, but nothing in between. Simson felt that Sirhan spoke about the crime as if "reciting from a book" and was baffled by the lack of details. ''A psychologist always looks for details," he said. "If a person is involved in a real situation, there are details." Simson thought the girl might have triggered the trance. "You can be programmed that if you meet a certain person or see something specific, then you go into a trance."

By now, Sirhan was coming around to the idea that he might have been hypnotized. "Sometimes, I go in a very deep trance so I can't even speak," he told Simson. "I don't remember what I do under hypnosis. I had to be in a trance when I shot Kennedy, as I don't remember having shot him. I had to be hypnotized! Christ!"

Sirhan asked Simson to use hypnosis to help him remember what happened, and they built up a strong rapport. "He was extremely eager to talk to me," Simson recalled. "He himself wanted to find out. If I had been allowed to spend as much time with him as necessary, I would have found out something." But before they could have their first hypnotic session, Simson's visits were abruptly terminated by Associate Warden James Park in September 1969. Park was concerned that Simson "appears to be making a career out of Sirhan." Simson was incensed. "A psychologist spends as much time with a patient as the disease demands," he said. He had never been cut off like that before, and immediately resigned.

After Simson's visits were terminated, Sirhan, through his family, asked Simson to review the psychiatric testimony at the trial. Several years later, after talking to William Harper about the ballistics issues in the case, Simson read the trial transcript and "was appalled at the conduct of the mental health professionals involved." He found "errors, distortions, even probable falsification of facts," largely because everybody assumed Sirhan alone had killed Kennedy.

"There is a dominant impression that the psychiatric-psychological team, largely made up of Jewish doctors, pooled their efforts to prove that Sirhan, the hated Arab, was guilty and insane, a paranoid schizophrenic. The evidence suggests Dr. Diamond was not objective enough and was not an impartial searcher for truth as a psychiatrist in such a grave situation involving a man's life and death should be .... Sirhan told me he did not trust Dr. Diamond, that he was making up stories for him to please and confuse him .... They were not in a position to unlock Sirhan's mind. This could only be done by a doctor Sirhan fully trusted."

Simson also felt that Sirhan's handwriting at San Quentin differed, "often drastically," from the writing he observed in the notebooks. "Whether someone else wrote the notebooks or whether they were written under some special influence, such as hypnosis, is entirely unsolved. If someone hypnotized him when the notebooks were written, who was it?"

Simson concluded that "Sirhan was the center of a drama that unfolded slowly, discrediting and embarrassing psychology and psychiatry as a profession. The drama's true center still lies very much concealed and unknown to the general public. Was Sirhan merely a double, a stand-in, sent there to attract attention? Was he at the scene to replace someone else? Did he actually kill Robert Kennedy? Whatever the full truth of the assassination, it still remains locked in Sirhan's other, still anonymous minds A close study of the trial testimony and my own extensive study of Sirhan leads to one irrevocable and obvious conclusion: Sirhan's trial was, and will be remembered as, the psychiatric blunder of the century."

To Simson, Sirhan was the ideal "Manchurian candidate": "He was easily influenced, had no real roots, and was looking for a cause. The Arab-Israeli conflict could easily have been used to motivate him."

Simson's thoughts are echoed by Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University since the early fifties, a man who devised two of the most widely used tests for measuring a subject's susceptibility to hypnosis.

When I visited Dr. Spiegel, he explained his chance introduction to the field while completing his residency in psychiatry in Washington, DC, during World War II. A visiting German professor agreed to teach him hypnosis in exchange for English lessons, and after Pearl Harbor, Spiegel was called up by the army, not as a psychiatrist but as a battalion surgeon for a thousand men with the First Infantry Division in the invasion of North Africa.

"I was in combat for about six months, and during that time, I treated hundreds of casualties and had a great opportunity to use hypnosis to deal with pain and anxiety and phobias of various kinds."

Dr. Spiegel defines hypnosis as a state of "attentive, receptive concentration" characterized by what he terms the "compulsive triad": (1) "a spontaneous amnesia to the post-hypnotic signal"; (2) "a compulsive need to comply with the signal"; and (3) a rationalization of why he's doing it. "He doesn't say, 'I'm doing it because the hypnotist told me to do it.' He comes up with his own rationalization to explain what he's doing."

Yes, students will study things such as "practical magic," "out-of-body travel," and "reincarnation," performing various spiritual practices in a setting deeply connected to AMORC's version of Rosicrucian practices and authority. In my opinion, many of these practices trigger a hypnotic state, rather than the meditative state suggested by the teachings.

And even if we ignore, for the moment, the hypothesis of the willful design of creating a state of trance, in my opinion, these practices can and often would trigger a hypnotic state if the subject is not truly knowledgeable about using meditation to increase wakefulness instead of deepening a state of trance. Furthermore, the subject's vulnerability to such a state would be greatly enhanced if he bought into the infallibility of the authority of the institution behind his spiritual practices.

Many people would argue that a hypnotic state is different than a meditative state, and it has long been known that a state of hypnosis can produce positive hallucinations and create behavioral- oriented suggestions that can affect behavior outside of the hypnotic trance. We are speaking here of "posthypnotic suggestions."

There are some scientific studies that attempt to discern the difference between the meditative state and the hypnotic state. Some studies conclude that the difference lies more in the intention of the practitioner, rather than in the practice itself. One argument is that when you talk about meditation and embark upon a study comparing it to hypnotism, you are really only talking about one technique of meditation, and there are many.

So a study that addresses, say, an altered state induced by using devotional mantras and compares it to a state of hypnotic trance might have different consequences than a study that examines a meditative practice like Zazen, focused on clearing the mind of thought, and compares it to an hypnotically induced state of consciousness. In my opinion, whatever scientific differences might show up, the state induced by AMORC that I experienced, particularly in my home sanctum, had all the earmarks of hypnosis.

After making claims to supreme authority, AMORC has the member study the monograph's claims and teachings after progressing from a state of deep relaxation induced by watching candles, burning incense, and chanting, to the practice of visualization for the purpose of changing the colors of a candle, experiencing the presence of cosmic masters during teaching and initiation, and seeking the manifestation of heartfelt goals.

AMORC makes many non provable and self-magnifying claims about the role of Rosicrucians and their divine purpose in the universe during this ongoing experience that I have called the deepening. In my experience, this indoctrination does not have the effect of bringing the member into a heightened state of clarity, as meditation is supposed to do, but into a heightened state of suggestibility.

Hypnotism relates to the unethical mind control practices of destructive cults in a variety of ways. In many cults which claim to be religious, what is often called "meditation" is no more than a process by which the cult members enter a trance, during which time they may receive suggestions which make them more receptive to following the cult's doctrine. Nonreligious cults use other forms of group or individual induction. In addition, being in a trance is usually a pleasant, relaxing experience, so that people wish to reenter the trance as often as possible. Most importantly, it has been clinically established by psychological researchers that people's critical faculties are diminished in the trance state. One is less able to evaluate information received in a trance than when in a normal state of consciousness. A lot has to do with the intentions of the subject. In hypnosis, the subject, if aware and consenting to the process, is looking for a kind of sleep state, a trance state. In meditation, he is trying to wake up, to achieve a higher state of consciousness. Some say that both states of mind are connected with some kind of link to the subconscious, but from a different perspective.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


Spiegel estimates that between 80 and 85 percent of the population have the capacity for hypnosis, and how hypnotizable a person is seems to be genetically determined. One of the standard testing procedures he devised to identify and grade this natural hypnotizability is called the Hypnotic Induction Profile: "On a zero-to-five scale, about fifteen to twenty percent of the population are zeros. That includes mentally ill people like schizophrenics, severely depressed people, and some with severe psychopathic personalities or severe obsessive compulsives; [they] are not hypnotizable -- they don't have the biological capacity for it. Then, on the high side, about five to ten percent of the population are extremely hypnotizable, and then most people are in between." The higher on the scale a person is, the more can be achieved through hypnosis in psychotherapy.

If Sirhan was low on the scale, he could not have been programmed to shoot Robert Kennedy. "But, on the basis of what Dr. Diamond described, he seemed to be a very hypnotizable person. He had Sirhan act like a monkey or do all kinds of bizarre things which only a high [on the scale] could do. Now, if he were a one or a two, it'd be impossible for [Diamond] to get him to do that."

Dr. Spiegel felt that Sirhan "was on the high side, but I wanted to test him to establish his hypnotizability, to see he wasn't faking it." But when Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter tried to arrange this, "the judge would not permit me to examine him at all."

Until Spiegel is allowed access to Sirhan by the courts, on the basis of Dr. Diamond's reports, "I just am assuming that he was what we call a grade five. And knowing what grade fives can do, I was able to postulate that if we have him in a trance state, he could possibly reveal a lot of information about how he was programmed and where he was going and what he was going to do about it; but we weren't allowed to do it."

***

One of the perennial questions regarding hypnosis relates to its use in crime -- can an individual be programmed to do something against his or her moral values? While there is some disagreement about this in the field, many of the naysayers seem more intent on protecting the reputation of hypnosis than on reporting the limits of what's possible. These include the late hypnotherapist Dr. William J. Bryan, a technical adviser on the filming of The Manchurian Candidate and often cited as the man who programmed Sirhan. In his book Legal Aspects of Hypnosis, Bryan declared, "It is impossible by means of hypnosis to force a subject to commit an act which violates his basic moral code."

But leaders in the field such as George Estabrooks and F. L. Marcuse refute this claim. They both argue that a person's "moral code" is not rigid and adapts to circumstances. Very few people "so abhor violence that they would not engage in it ... to save their own lives," wrote Estabrooks. While a subject may resist a direct suggestion to do something he or she perceives as antisocial, Estabrooks reported no failures in experiments "of a more subtle type, where the hypnotist takes great care to alter his subject's perception of the situation to create in him the conviction that the required act is ... actually desirable."

Estabrooks tells of an experiment by J.G. Watkins during World War II, in which a private in the U.S. Army was put into a deep trance and told, "'In a minute you will slowly open your eyes. In front of you, you will see a dirty Jap soldier. He has a bayonet, and is going to kill you unless you kill him first. You will have to strangle him with your bare hands.' A lieutenant colonel, the head psychiatrist ... was placed directly in front of the subject and about ten feet away." He was soon attacked by the private.

The moral code can also be sidestepped by appealing to a sense of higher moral purpose. Of several landmark cases in criminal history, the most famous is probably the Hardrup case in Denmark in 1952.

Palle Hardrup and Bjorn Nielsen befriended each other in prison, and after their release, Nielsen continued to develop Hardrup as a hypnotic foil for his criminal schemes. He conditioned Hardrup to go into a trance at the sight or sound of the letter "X" -- his hypnotic cue or "key word." "X" represented a guardian spirit (Nielsen), who would appear to Hardrup in trance and give him orders.

First, Hardrup was forced to arrange for his girlfriend to have sex with Nielsen. Then, Hardrup was directed to rob banks to raise money for a new political party that would unify Scandinavia. The first robbery went well but during the second one, he shot dead two bank staff in Copenhagen and was captured by the police. The moral purpose of unifying Scandinavia had been sufficient justification for Hardrup's willingness to kill.

Once back in prison, Hardrup was examined by psychiatrist Dr. Paul J. Reiter, and his amnesia symptoms led Reiter to suspect hypnotic conditioning and programming. After nineteen months, Reiter finally "unlocked" Hardrup's mind, and the court freed him and sent Nielsen to prison for life for robbery and murder "planned and instigated by influence of various kinds, including suggestions of a hypnotic nature."

In 1967, Dr. Spiegel was asked to make a film with NBC newscaster Frank McGee. Titled Fact or Fiction -- An Experiment in Post-Hypnotic Compliance, it provides an early illustration of how a grade five (highly hypnotizable person) could be hypnotically programmed and their moral values altered.

Dr. Spiegel's unrehearsed experiment was filmed at NBC on May 31, 1967, in the presence of McGee and the forty-year-old subject, Mr. Snyder, a New York businessman whose politics were "somewhat left of center" and whom Spiegel had determined to be a grade five.

After hypnotizing Snyder, Dr. Spiegel told him about "a Communist plot developing that is aimed to control all the major radio and TV networks in this country .... Later on, when you're questioned about this, no matter who doubts you and no matter how stringently others question you about this, you will hold firmly to this conviction, and furthermore, you will urge them to alert themselves to it. At some time you may be shown a sheet of paper with three names on it, and if you're pressed hard enough, you'll even reveal what you know about those three named persons."

Spiegel then brought him out of the formal trance, Snyder opened his eyes, and the posthypnotic phase began. Snyder couldn't remember what happened while he was in trance but did know he was at NBC studios. "As a matter of fact," he said, scratching the side of his face, "I wonder if NBC knows what's going on .... The front pages are covered with all kinds of news, but the Communist infiltration, my God, they don't know about the mass media. The radio and television stations of this country are important means of reaching the people and here we are unaware of it. ... The people in charge of the programming could be the dupes of the Communist party, my God, we could brainwash the whole population."

Snyder said an unnamed friend gave him this information -- he didn't want to betray him, "but I think friendship should stop at a certain point where the whole country could be in peril. ... I hate the Communists."

"Suppose I told you that I knew the friend?" said McGee. "Is it Jack Harris?" he asked, conjuring an invented name.

Snyder averted his eyes, shifted uncomfortably, and shook his head.

"No ... no ... this man was a draft dodger and he was caught because he believed in the Communist party ... I don't really think I should betray him." Under questioning, Snyder described hearing his friend discuss the plan "in a room over a little off-Broadway theater, right off Sheridan Square."

McGee pulled out a blank sheet of paper. "I asked you a while ago ... "

"About Richard Harris?"

"Yeah. Jack Harris .... Did you know him as Richard?"

"Yes."

"Uh-huh. I want to hand you a sheet of paper and ask you if the names on this paper were not present that night."

Responding to the hypnotic stimulus, Snyder hallucinated three names on the blank sheet of paper -- "Richard Harris" and two others -- providing detailed descriptions. On a count of three, Spiegel put him back in trance, and Snyder continued to comply with the program: "Slowly but surely, the networks ... are going to be under the control of the Communist Party; that's already in full swing and ... we better do something about it before people start believing the Communist way of life.... it makes me tremble to think what might happen in this country .... [Harris] is a demon. He should be tarred and feathered and got out of the country."

When Snyder was shown the completed film several days later, he had no recollection of the program. "I'm absolutely dumbfounded," he said. "I just can't conceive of having said the things I said. I don't think that way or believe that way. It worries me that I could be made to have these thoughts which are so foreign to my self-beliefs."

NBC never aired the experiment. "I suppose it was too graphic," Spiegel later told author and investigator William Turner. "It might have frightened a lot of people." After seeing the film, Turner asked, "If you had stuck a gun in the subject's hand and instructed him to shoot McGee, what would he have done?" "Ah," the doctor said, "the ultimate question. I'm afraid he might have shot him."

Dr. Spiegel agreed that it's impossible to get most people to do something against their moral values "because eventually, they would have enough of their conscious awareness that ... they would break off their hypnotic relationship, but with a high, they lose that connection with their everyday perspective ... they're so compliant and uncritical, they adopt the new perspective 100 percent."

"It can be described as brainwashing," Spiegel once said, "because the mind is cleared of its old values and emotions, which are replaced by implanting other suggestions. Highly hypnotizable persons, when under the control of unscrupulous persons, are the most vulnerable."

The Spiegel film also illustrates how vulnerable hypnotized subjects are to deception. "Their desire to comply, both in and out of the formal trance, is such that they may convincingly invent information in an effort to give the hypnotist what he seems to want." So while careful and dispassionate regression can "uncover incredibly accurate and subtle factual and emotional experiences buried in the remote memory of the past," without independent corroboration, such memories may also be "stress-hallucinations" invented to please the hypnotist.

Dr. Spiegel feels all of the above apply to Sirhan Sirhan:

The people who were programming him worked on the assumption that the Israeli-Arab War was an insult to him and I think they played on that and built up his first, skepticism, then his anger at the Israelis.... At first, he had no feelings about Kennedy but when they told him about how Kennedy was pro-Israeli, they built up his antagonism ... to not so much focus on killing him but to focus on ... getting rid of somebody who is such an enemy of the Arab culture. On the basis of that, they were able to program him to tell him that we're going to give you an occasion to sometime get in front of him and we're going to give you a gun and when the time comes, you're going to shoot him.


Spiegel believes the "automatic writing" in Sirhan's notebooks dates from the time he was being programmed -- "writing it down was his way of reinforcing the direction of the programming that was going on."

Having established and reinforced Sirhan's antagonism toward Kennedy, the next step was to "control his environment and see to it he's present at the time, and tell him what he's going to do and even have a signal to tell him when to do it." How would you do that? "Well, there was this woman in the polka-dot dress and a man, whoever they are," said Dr. Spiegel. It was quite possible for the senior programmer to assign control of Sirhan to coconspirators, like the girl in the polka-dot dress. "You don't have to be a genius to program somebody. If somebody is highly hypnotizable and you can tap it, then almost anybody with a malevolent goal can program him to do it."

With the girl acting as a handler for Sirhan, Dr. Spiegel assumed that "up to the part [with] the coffee, he was not in a trance state ... but probably after that, that's when they induced the hypnosis with him and from that time until it was all over, he was in a trance state, so he had a spontaneous amnesia for the whole event."

How much preparation time would be needed for something like this? "I would say within a few months is all that was necessary, because he was so highly hypnotizable, he could be very quickly programmed." How much every day would they need to see him to be able to program him? "If I were doing it, I think just one or two hours a day would be enough." And how would you mask that, so he wouldn't be able to remember going to a certain place? "Tell him, 'You won't tell anybody about it. This will be our secret.'''

Contrary to previous books on this case, there is no evidence of a three-month gap where Sirhan went mysteriously missing in the months leading up to the shooting. Sirhan's family told that the FBI he slept at home every night in the year leading up to the assassination, so the idea that Sirhan was spirited away to a military installation in the desert for programming is simply not credible.

Dr. Spiegel offered a much more plausible scenario. Sirhan was out of work for three months prior to the assassination and spent most of his time alone, with no regular friends to track his movements or report unusual acquaintances. Sirhan spent most days at the library or at the racetrack, "losing heavily," and frittering away the last of his insurance money. He therefore represented the perfect candidate -- alienated, isolated, and highly hypnotizable, with deep feelings about the Arab-Israeli War that could be redirected toward Kennedy.

Sirhan was recruited and went to see the programmer every day for an hour or two at the "library" to further his "studies." At night, he went home and practiced the self-hypnosis in his room and wrote in his notebook, as a kind of homework to strengthen the programming. The programmer created an amnesia for his sessions with Sirhan and an amnesia for the notebook, so Sirhan couldn't remember writing in it.

By the time Kennedy hit California, plans were well advanced. If Sirhan wasn't aware of Kennedy's promise to send bombers to Israel, he could certainly be told by his programmers. On election night, Sirhan could be cued to shoot by a "keyword," or conditioned to respond to the program at the sight of Kennedy. If necessary, hypnotic control could be strengthened by amphetamines slipped into his coffee -- to enhance concentration and conjure up the tremendous strength he would show during the struggle for the gun.

With all this in mind, the idea of a "Manchurian candidate" doesn't seem so outlandish after all.

***
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

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PART 2 OF 2

When it comes to clues that Sirhan was in a trance that night, Dr. Spiegel told me there are no physical symptoms that typify a trance state. The "sick smile" described by Vincent Di Pierro and the stomach cramps Sirhan complained of "could be somatic expressions of anxiety -- he was under such pressure to comply with the hypnotic signal that, even though there was some resistance to it, he had to comply." Sirhan's shivering when he emerged from a trance with Dr. Diamond could also be "a somatic reflection of anxiety" due to the uncertainty of his reorientation to real life.

Contrary to previous writing on the subject, Dr. Spiegel also noted that as drugs and alcohol impair concentration, a hypnotic trance works best when the mind is clear. Back in the sixties, "they used to think hypnosis was a form of sleep and you exaggerate that by using drugs and alcohol. But since we now know that hypnosis is the opposite of sleep, today, if they were doing it, they would not use drugs or alcohol."

Dr. Spiegel also found Sirhan's bizarre behavior in custody entirely consistent with his having been programmed: "He does not have an emotional knowledge that he committed a crime, so in that sense, he's an honest liar. So he could easily feel at ease and sharp and alert because he doesn't feel guilty about anything. The last thing he knows, he was having coffee with this woman and to be in a police station -- he has no knowledge of what happened, so why am I here? He had a total blank because he's totally dissociated from it."

Why didn't he ask, "Why am I being held? I want my rights," and so on. "Well, he's too compliant. He's with authority. As a compliant subject, 'If I'm here, I guess I'm supposed to here. What right do I have to question this?' That would be typical of the trance state, the automatic compliance to a situation and with no challenging at all of the circumstance."

According to Dr. Spiegel, Sirhan could well have stayed in the trance until he was arraigned later that morning. "If he fell asleep, then the odds are he would come out of the trance," but Sirhan didn't fall asleep during that time, and the shower he took would not have affected the trance.

Sirhan's subsequent rationalization that he must have killed Kennedy even though he couldn't remember the shooting, also fits this pattern of compliance: "One of the outstanding features of a grade five or highly hypnotizable subject is that they have this spontaneous amnesia and they don't critically appraise anything they're told ... he confesses to doing it because his thinking was, 'Well, if you say I did it, I guess I did it .... I don't remember it but I have no reason to deny what you're telling me.'''

We finally turned to Dr. Diamond's diagnosis of Sirhan as a paranoid schizophrenic. "I think he was dead wrong!" exclaimed Dr. Spiegel. ''All our research shows clearly that schizophrenia does not occur in hypnotizable people. I have never yet seen a schizophrenic that was hypnotizable."

Ultimately, Dr. Spiegel believes that a group of people programmed Sirhan -- "one senior programmer and many accessories." The senior programmer could assign hypnotic control of Sirhan to colleagues like the girl in the polka-dot dress, and the whole project was "very carefully designed by people who were expert in brainwashing victims ... finding him, training him, then having this man and a woman develop a comradeship with him so they got used to the idea of being together; and placing him there at the right spot, with a gun to use, as instructed."

Dr. Spiegel thinks it probable that these techniques are still used today but "the people who do it ... don't go round advertising it. And if they do it, they can be very secretive, the way they were secretive with Sirhan. So I don't think we can say it's out of style now or it's not being used now; we don't know."

The search for Sirhan's programmer inevitably leads to a discussion of the military uses of hypnosis. For centuries, "hypnotic couriers" have been used to convey messages, to lessen the chance these messages would fall into enemy hands. In 1500 B.C., the Egyptians used a hypnocourier system in which "programmed" virgins served the pharoah as royal "message-bearers from the gods." As Emery notes, these women were sent under military escort to distant dignitaries who knew the cue that would unlock the courier's lips and release the secret message locked in her unconscious." The courier had no conscious knowledge of the message, and no torture would release it without the right prompt.

The use of hypnotic couriers in modern warfare was outlined by an early pioneer in the field, Dr. George E. Estabrooks, a Rhodes scholar with a doctorate from Harvard who formulated guidelines for the use of hypnosis in military intelligence in both world wars. Estabrooks described the "preparation" of Captain Smith, a "hypnotic courier" during World War II:

Captain Smith had undergone months of training. He was an excellent subject but did not realize it. I had removed from him, by post-hypnotic suggestion, all recollection of ever having been hypnotized. First I had the Service Corps call the captain to Washington [to deliver a report to Tokyo].... Then I put him under deep hypnosis, and gave him -- orally -- a vital message to be delivered directly on his arrival in Japan to a [Colonel Brown] of military intelligence. Outside of myself, Colonel Brown was the only person who could hypnotize Captain Smith. This is "locking." I performed it by saying to the hypnotized Captain: "Until further orders from me, only Colonel Brown and I can hypnotize you. We will use a signal phrase 'the moon is clear.' Whenever you hear this phrase from Brown or myself you will pass instantly into deep hypnosis." When Captain Smith reawakened, he had no conscious memory of what happened in trance. All that he was aware of was that he must head for Tokyo to pick up a division report.

On arrival there, Smith reported to Brown, who hypnotized him with the signal phrase. Under hypnosis, Smith delivered my message and received one to bring back. Awakened, he was given the division report and returned home by jet. There I hypnotized him once more with the signal phrase, and he spieled off Brown's answer that had been dutifully tucked away in his unconscious mind. The system is virtually foolproof. As exemplified by this case, the information was "locked" in Smith's unconscious for retrieval by the only two people who knew the combination. The subject had no conscious memory of what happened, so could not spill the beans. No one else could hypnotize him even if they might know the signal phrase."


***

After investigating Soviet interrogation methods, the CIA began experimenting with hypnosis in April 1950, with the establishment of Project Bluebird. The project's initial objectives were defensive -- discovering means of "conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information from them by unknown means" and "preventing hostile control of Agency personnel." Early CIA memos on the subject were preoccupied with "sealing" the programmed mind from attempts by other hypnotists to put their agent into a trance. The usual method of sealing was simply a hypnotic suggestion to prevent the subject from being hypnotized by any unauthorized person.

But the examination of possible offensive uses of hypnosis and drugs were soon added to the project's charter, and by December 1950, the Bluebird team had used drugs to induce a hypnotic-like trance. Between 1950 and 1952, Bluebird was redesignated Artichoke, and further goals were added, including the ability to induce amnesia.

In 1951, CIA behavioral research coordinator Morse Allen became obsessed by hypnosis and took a four-day crash course from a leading stage hypnotist in New York. Allen learned enough to experiment on the secretaries back at CIA headquarters. As Melanson noted, he hypnoprogrammed them "to 'steal' secret files and pass them to strangers" and induced one secretary "to report to the bedroom of a complete stranger, where she fell into a preprogrammed trance."

On April 13, 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles accepted a proposal from a senior official in clandestine operations, Richard Helms, to establish a research program "to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials ... enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are." The detail didn't sound very restrained: "We intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well-predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control."

The program was given an initial budget of three hundred thousand dollars and designated MKULTRA. It was to be run by thirty-six-year-old Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) -- a department tasked with devising bugs, disguised weapons, special cameras, and secret writing techniques.

Over the next ten years, the TSD would initiate 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior in forty-four colleges and universities, fifteen research foundations, twelve hospitals, and three penal institutions.

Subprojects included the implanting of electrodes in the brains of animals to enable experimenters to direct them by remote control, in the hope that they could be wired and used for eavesdropping. MKULTRA continued until 1963, when the CIA inspector general discovered the program during an inspection of TSD operations. His report noted that "present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs."

By 1954, the CIA's pursuit of the possibility of a programmed assassin was proceeding in earnest. An agency memo dated January of that year discussed a "hypothetical problem": "Can an individual of ****** descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?"

As the subject was identified as a heavy drinker, it was proposed that he "be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party, ARTICHOKE applied and the SUBJECT induced [involuntarily] to perform the act of attempted assassination at a later date ... against a "prominent ****** politician or if necessary ... an American official." The killing was described "as 'a trigger mechanism' for a bigger project." After the assassination, "it was assumed that the SUBJECT would be taken into custody by the *** Government and thereby 'disposed of.'"

Morse Allen provided a demonstration at CIA headquarters two months after the memo was written. He put one of his secretaries into a deep trance and hypnotized one of her colleagues -- who was afraid of guns -- telling her that if she could not awaken the first woman she would become so angry she would "kill" her while she slept. Allen's "assassin" obediently picked up a gun left by her boss and "shot" her sleeping colleague. When Allen brought her out of the trance, she had no memory of the "shooting."

As these experiments developed, the doctors became more adventurous and learned how to split personalities into multiple parts. George Estabrooks was again one of the first to write about the military advances behind closed doors:

Suppose, for example, that we were to use hypnosis to create a multiple personality, which could be manipulated at will by the hypnotist who had produced it and was entirely resistant to hypnosis by anyone whom the hypnotist had not specifically designated. The job would take time, but it would be entirely possible to ... split the subject's personality into completely dissociated parts.

Before we begin to work on him, our subject is a completely loyal American ... a man of democratic principles, to whom all the brutality and race-hatred of Nazism are repugnant beyond words.... After a few months of our kindly ministrations he emerges somewhat altered. Now he is anti-Semitic, antidemocratic ... sadistic, warlike -- perfect Storm Trooper material. And believing, as he now does, that the United States is decadent, that the Jews are subhuman, and that it is Hitler's historic mission to rule the world, he runs out and joins the local branch of the Nazi Bund and throws himself enthusiastically into all its activities. With his energy, vigor and conviction, he may even rise to a position of some importance in the organization. Now he is a dedicated Nazi, an enemy to everything his country stands for.

How have we succeeded in producing this complete reversal? How can we make a monster out of a man? Unfortunately, it is quite simple. We tell the truth to the most important part of him -- his unconscious.

And if they got really clever and tried hypnosis? That would be a waste of time. Like all good little Nazis, our hero would be far too strong-minded and firm to be susceptible to it. Except, of course, by the American counterintelligence agent, a pleasant young man whom he met quite by accident in a restaurant one day shortly after his conversion to the Nazi ideal, with whom he struck up a casual friendship primarily on the basis of their mutual interest in checkers, and with whom he now plays that harmless game for a few hours every Thursday evening.

Both checker players, of course, have ulterior motives in their friendship: the Nazi thinks the pleasant young man might ultimately be persuaded to the fascist way. And the pleasant young man knows that the Nazi has information for him. But how can the Nazi know this? How can he know that the meeting between the two men was planned ... that every time the pleasant young man, puzzled over what move to make ... pensively scratches the right side of his nose, he, the good little Nazi, immediately falls into deep trance, becomes a loyal American again, and reveals all the little Nazi plans he and his playmates have made during the week? He cannot know. He has no more reason to suspect the pleasant young man than his Nazi friends have to suspect him. The trick is as close to foolproof as any human plan.


In a May 13, 1968, article in the Providence Evening Bulletin, Estabrooks was more forthcoming. Described as a former consultant for the FBI and CIA, he was quoted as saying that "the key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man's personality, or creating multi personality, with the aid of hypnotism." Estabrooks suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby could have been controlled in this manner. "This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it. It is child's play now to develop a multiple personality through hypnotism."

On December 17, 1963, only weeks after the first Kennedy assassination, Richard Helms updated the CIA's deputy director on the program he'd created: "For over a decade, the Clandestine Service has had the mission of maintaining a capability for influencing human behavior," he wrote, acknowledging that operational targets were "unwitting," and detailing ongoing research into "chemical agents which are effective in modifying the behavior and function of the central nervous system." This included research into three key areas of interest: "Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness; Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use; Substances which alter personality structures in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced."

Partly in recognition of such pioneering work, Helms was made director of the CIA in 1966 and was in charge at the time of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Before leaving office in 1973, Helms and Gottlieb ordered all records of these mind-control programs destroyed as the first in a long series of scandals shook the agency. But certain financial records were misplaced, and when they finally surfaced in 1977, newly appointed CIA director Stansfield Turner and the Senate Subcommittee on Health finally discovered the truth about MKULTRA.

***

Within hours of the shooting at the Ambassador, and before Sirhan was identified, hypnotherapist Dr. William Bryan told Ray Briem on Los Angeles radio station KABC that the suspect probably acted under posthypnotic suggestion.

Bryan was the founder and executive director of the American Institute of Hypnosis, a grand name concealing the fact that he had been refused membership in other, more traditional medical societies. He specialized in sex therapy and criminology, and designed a switchboard of electronic instruments called the Bryan Robot Hypnosis System, which allowed him to hypnotize and simultaneously monitor feedback from three different clients through the use of a control room, televisions, and multiple tape decks. In one room, someone was stopping smoking; in another someone was overcoming impotence; in another, someone was going through an age regression.

Los Angeles Times sportswriter Jim Murray interviewed the 386-pound Bryan in 1963 and described him as looking more like a department store Santa Claus than a Svengali: "He is blond, round-faced (with a belly to match), he always talks as if a crowd had gathered. He has about as many self-doubts as Cassius Clay and can hypnotize himself at will, except he should do it more often when the mashed potatoes are coming."

Bryan defined hypnosis as "increased concentration of the mind ... increased relaxation of the body ... and an increased susceptibility to suggestion." Sex and religion were his twin obsessions. He was an ordained priest in a fire-and-brimstone sect called the Old Roman Catholic Church and was a frequent guest preacher at fundamentalist churches in Southern California. He called prayer a form of hypnotism and the visions of prophets a form of autohypnosis -- "in the Middle Ages, most of the prophets who heard the voice of God actually dissociated their own voices and heard themselves."

The fundamentalist preacher also thought sex essential to his practice. He once told a Playboy interviewer: "I enjoy variety and I like to get to know people on a deep emotional level. One way of getting to know people is through intercourse." In 1969, the California Board of Medical Examiners gave Bryan five years' probation for sexually molesting women patients he had hypnotized to cure their "sexual disorders."

In an interview on KNX radio in 1972, Bryan claimed to be the "chief of all medical survival training for the United States Air Force during the Korean War ... which meant the brainwashing section." He detailed the brainwashing process in a later interview: "You have to have the person locked up physically, to have control over them; you have to use a certain amount of physical torture and there is also the use of long-term hypnotic suggestion ... probably drugs whatever and so on. Under these situations, where you have all this going for you, like in a prison camp and so on, yes, you can brainwash a person to do just about anything. What I'm speaking about are the innumerable instances we ran into when I was running the country's brainwashing and anti-brainwashing programs."

***

Authors Turner and Christian first noticed a link between Bryan and Sirhan's notebook in 1976, after a tip from Dr. Spiegel that anything mentioned to a subject under hypnosis was automatically etched in their subconscious. In one of Bryan's most famous cases, he had hypnotized Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, for attorney F. Lee Bailey. DeSalvo was the sexual psychopath who murdered thirteen women between 1962 and 1964.

Sirhan's notebook contains the reference "AMORC AMORC Salvo Salvo Di Di Salvo Die S Salvo," but it was clear from a conversation Sirhan had with Frank Foster in Central Jail in the hours after the shooting that he had no idea who DeSalvo was. This led Turner and Christian to ask: If Sirhan didn't know who DeSalvo was, why does the name appear in his notebook? As Bryan was prone to brag about his work with DeSalvo, did he imprint the name in Sirhan's mind?

In 1974, researcher Betsy Langman interviewed Bryan at the American Institute of Hypnosis on Sunset Strip for a "general article on hypnosis." Bryan called himself "probably the leading expert in the world" on the use of hypnosis in criminal law -- "I can hypnotize everybody in this office in five minutes."

Toward the end of the interview, Langman asked, "Do you feel Sirhan Sirhan could have been self-hypnotized?"

Bryan's mood changed abruptly. ''I'm not going to comment on that case because I didn't hypnotize him."

"I was just asking your opinion," said Langman.

Bryan exploded. "You are going around trying to find some more ammunition to put out that same old crap -- that people can be hypnotized into doing all these weird things. This interview's over!" he barked, charging out of his office.

A sympathetic secretary took the shaken Langman across the street for coffee, and recalled Arthur Bremer's assassination attempt in Laurel, Maryland, on George Wallace during the 1972 presidential campaign. Bryan had received an emergency call from Laurel minutes after Wallace was shot, and the call seemed to be connected with the shooting.

It's also worth noting that David Ferrie, a key suspect in Jim Garrison's 1967 probe into the JFK assassination, was also an ordained priest in the Old Roman Catholic Church; and James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., consulted a hypnotist named Xavier von Koss in Los Angeles four months before the King assassination.

William Bryan was found dead in 1977 in his room at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, apparently from natural causes. Hollywood reporter Greg Roberts had queried Bryan about the Sirhan case just before his death, but Bryan had strongly denied any involvement.

Two Beverly Hills call girls subsequently told Jonn Christian that they had been "servicing" Bryan twice a week for four years. Bryan regaled them with talk of his famous cases -- how he had deprogrammed Albert DeSalvo and hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan. He said he had worked with the LAPD on a lot of murder cases, so they didn't think his work with Sirhan anything unusual. Bryan also told them he worked on "top secret projects" for the CIA.

A close colleague of Bryan's later told Philip Melanson that Bryan flatly announced to him that he worked for the CIA and said the authorities had summoned him to hypnotize Sirhan. "It was actually, I believe, conducted in a prison cell. That's what I got [from Bryan]."

The executor of Bryan's estate was John Miner, a deputy DA during the Sirhan trial, specializing in the "medical evidence." Miner later accompanied Enrique Hernandez to Wisconsin to interview Henry Peters, the priest who gave Sirhan Bible lessons -- perhaps thinking that Peters might have "influenced" Sirhan -- but Bryan himself was never interviewed.

Bryan is by no means the only suspect in the search for Sirhan's programmer. When the police searched Sirhan's car, they found a copy of Healing: The Divine Art, by Manly Palmer Hall, on the backseat. Hall was the highly theatrical founder of the Philosophical Research Society. He was a master hypnotist with a practice in hypnotherapy.

Lycanthropy is folklore associated with the name of Lycaon, mythical king of Arcadia, who was changed into a wolf by Zeus who was offended because the king made him an offering of human flesh. In many myths persons are changed into animals as punishment for evil deeds, but in most cases these merely signify that the animal nature dominates vicious persons and they become human beasts. Accounts of lycanthropy do not imply that the physical body of the wizard or witch changed into a wolf, but rather that the soul or 'double' of the sorcerer assumed the appearance of the wolf.

-- Healing: The Divine Art, by Manly P. Hall


Sirhan confirmed to Turner and Christian that he paid several visits to the headquarters of the Philosophical Research Society, an alabaster temple near Griffith Park. The police never interviewed Hall, and he was protected by strong links to Mayor Yorty, who had considered Hall his guru for the past twenty years.

Candy Jones was a famous pinup model during World War II who later claimed to be a victim of CIA mind control during the sixties. She developed the alter ego "Arlene Grant," she said, and was used as a hypnocourier by the CIA in the manner described by Estabrooks.

In The Control of Candy Jones, author Donald Bain gave Jones's programmers the pseudonyms "Gilbert Jensen" and "Dr. Marshall Burger." Jensen, a disciple of Burger, was Candy's recruiter and primary programmer. He programmed himself into the role of her lover and was an associate of Dr. Bryan's. During deprogramming by her husband, John Nebel, in the early seventies, Jones recalled that under hypnosis, Burger talked about a racetrack in California and "bragged" about hypnotizing Sirhan. Jones also reenacted a visit to Dr. Burger's institute in Los Angeles on June 3, 1968. "Was he with the CIA?" she was asked. "He is the CIA," she said.

Dr. Spiegel worked closely with Candy Jones and John Nebel and wrote the foreword to Bain's book, believing Jones's claims to be authentic. When "Dr. Burger" died, his true identity was revealed as Dr. William Kroger.

By his own account, Dr. Kroger worked as a consultant to the FBI during the seventies, using hypnosis to assist memory recall through age regression, time compression, and automatic writing. Kroger also worked closely with Dr. Martin Reiser, who had run the behavioral science investigation program for the LAPD since 1968.

In his book Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Kroger devoted a chapter to specialized hypnotic techniques, many of which touch on areas familiar to the Sirhan case. ''After engrafting an amnesia for his own identity," he wrote, "the skillful therapist assumes the role of the sibling, a friend, a teacher, an employer, a lover or a mate" to encourage the patient to "reveal the way he felt toward significant persons in his life at different age levels."

Kroger traced the origin and development of the personality structure through age regression and handwriting samples by the same person at their current age and when regressed. The similarity between the variations in this writing in Kroger's illustrations and the variations in Sirhan's notebooks is striking. Could the different writing styles in Sirhan's notebooks -- the writing he calls too "scribblish" -- be attributed to the age regression or role-playing Kroger described?

Kroger went on to discuss how "dissociated or automatic handwriting" can be used to ascertain the reasons for a conflict. "After the arm and the hand are dissociated, the patient, upon direct questioning, may give one answer while his hand is writing something else. This is because his hand is released from cortical control (the normal motor functions controlled by the brain).

"Automatic writing, too, occurs at nonhypnotic levels.... Specifically, the subject is told that the dissociated hand holding the pencil will write even while he is engaged in conversation. It will do so without any attempt on his part to control its movements. He is also instructed that he will have no knowledge of what is being written, that after being dehypnotized, he will understand that the significance of the material appears nonsensical or cryptic, and that it can be interpreted by the subject in a subsequent session."

Again, the parallels to Sirhan's lack of recognition of the writing in his notebooks is striking.

Kroger later worked at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, run by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, an MKULTRA veteran. There, he wrote Hypnosis and Behavior Modification, with a preface by Martin Orne and H. J. Eysenck, two other MKULTRA veterans. The final chapters describe the chilling possibilities offered by combining hypnosis with electrical stimulation of the brain, brain implants, and conditioning.

While Dr. Spiegel indicated that hypnosis would be sufficient to program Sirhan, some odd notations in Sirhan's notebook suggest the use of drugs and electroshock techniques. One of the most bizarre pages is a mess of looping doodles, through which the repetition of several words is visible -- "Danger Danger 8 8 8 8 8 fuck you fuck you Fuck you drugs drugs Drugs Drugs." On another page, "Electronic equipment this seems to be the right amount of preponderance" is written upside down.

Sirhan described himself as a "square" -- he hardly drank, he didn't take drugs, and he wasn't aware of any electroshock treatment. These references appear suddenly amid Sirhan's normal doodling on horses, girls, politics, and Robert Kennedy, and again suggest unconscious exposure to drugs and electroshock during his conditioning in the lead-up to the assassination. While Dr. Spiegel felt that most drugs impair the hypnotic effect, he admitted that amphetamines would help intensify concentration and provide the energy and strength Sirhan displayed in the struggle for the gun.

Phillip Melanson interviewed Dr. Kroger in 1987 (giving him the pseudonym Jonathan Reisner in his book, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination). Kroger said he knew Bryan "very well" but denied working with him. "He was brilliant but a discredit to his profession -- too flamboyant, a genius but a grandstander."

Two of Melanson's sources who knew both men claimed they jointly conducted workshops on sex and hypnosis and shared an interest in the supposed links between mystical orders and hypnosis, as well as in the use of autohypnosis.

Bryan and Kroger believed that the mesmerization of an audience by a political speaker was a form of hypnosis and that Hitler was the greatest mass-hypnotist in history. They once made a joint television appearance to discuss the Sharon Tate murder case. At one point, Kroger was discussing Hitler and said "Sieg Heil!" seven times.

Both men also claimed to have been technical consultants on the film version of The Manchurian Candidate. Kroger told Melanson that the idea of a programmed robot assassin was "preposterous ... it can't be done ... you can't force people to do things against their will." He also denied any connection to CIA research.

Kroger did boast, however, that he could write himself out of the patient's memory by adopting the role of a lover, relative, or close friend and make the patient forget the hypnotist.

Near the end of their interview, Melanson brought up the subject of Candy Jones. Kroger dismissed the whole story as fictitious, but said he had threatened to sue the publishers: "There was a real problem with that book ... except that [the doctor] was supposed to be in northern California, people could have thought it was me. I told the publishers that; I threatened to sue. You see, the problem was that I dated Candy a couple of times way back ... when she was a model."

While the doctor who programmed Sirhan is most likely dead, his lock remains on Sirhan's mind, and it will take a psychiatrist of great skill to recover Sirhan's memory and trace the guiding hand behind the assassination.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:29 pm

SIXTEEN: Intelligence Connections

It's tempting to write off the LAPD's bullying, incompetence, omission, and destruction and manipulation of evidence as simply the cover-up of a botched investigation -- the avoidance of another Dallas, by any means necessary -- until you see the connections fanning out from the department to other government agencies, specifically the CIA.

By late 1967, LBJ was besieged by the antiwar movement. From his bunker at the White House, he looked out at the student dissent and disgust with government and could not believe it was the work of true Americans. Foreign influence must be at play, corrupting American youth, and he encouraged the CIA to root it out with the launch of Operation Chaos, a domestic surveillance operation on the protest movement and the Black Panthers. Through a network of informants and agent provocateurs, Chaos would determine if foreign powers were funding and fomenting this domestic unrest.

The program was tightly held, known only to director Richard Helms and his top lieutenants, Richard Ober and Cord Meyer, who helped establish and run it. One of the main cities targeted was Los Angeles, and links were established with the intelligence division of the LAPD, which was also responsible for the security of VIPs visiting Los Angeles. In sync with this effort, the CIA provided training to police departments in guerrilla techniques and tools of urban warfare. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told researcher Betsy Langman that while he was with the agency in 1967, the Chicago and Los Angeles police departments received several days of "training" from the Clandestine Services Division. When Marchetti asked why a dozen or so LAPD officers were at CIA headquarters, he was told it was a "special," "sensitive" activity that had been directly approved by the CIA director.

In 1982, author Philip Melanson obtained a three-hundred-page "Domestic Police Training" file from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act. These documents confirmed that during the sixties and seventies, the CIA had secret ties to police departments across the country, providing training and equipment in exchange for surveillance, break-ins, and the provision of police credentials to CIA operatives. Los Angeles was one of the cities that received this special training.

The two men who had effective day-to-day control of the RFK investigation also had CIA connections. As day watch supervisor, Lieutenant Manuel Pena had to sign off and approve every report and decide who to reinterview and who to dismiss as the case was prepared for trial. This was the same Manny Pena who scrawled across several blank interview summaries relating to Sandra Serrano, "Polka-dot story of Serrano phony," "Polka dot story Serrano N.G."

Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez was Pena's chief interrogator, called on to administer polygraph tests to troublesome witnesses to determine if they were telling the truth. Without fail, whenever claims of conspiracy were sent to Hernandez, he bullied witnesses into retractions. Luckily, many of these tapes survive, so we can still hear the mockery Hernandez's bullying tactics make of this supposedly objective discipline. Hernandez also led the investigation probing possible conspiracy and oversaw the background checks on Sirhan and his family.

Manuel Pena joined the LAPD in 1941 and served in the Pacific with the Naval Air Corps during World War II. He spent two years in Verdun, France, as a criminal investigator for the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and spoke fluent French and Spanish. He went on to spend sixteen years of his police career working in Robbery-Homicide, reaching the rank of lieutenant. Robert Kaiser recalls his nickname at LAPD was "Shoot 'em up Manny Pena" -- "he killed several people in the line of duty, which wasn't very normal."

In November 1967, Pena retired from the department with a surprise testimonial dinner at the Sportsman's Club attended by Chief Reddin and top department brass. He was to accept a position with the Agency for International Development (AID), a State Department aid agency that among other roles served as a regular cover identity for CIA operatives abroad. He would serve as a "public safety adviser" and train the police forces of friendly dictatorships in sophisticated interrogation techniques to use on leftist insurgents and political dissidents.

FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse had known Pena for years and was the FBI liaison to the LAPD during the RFK case. LaJeunesse said Pena left the LAPD for a "special training unit" at CIA's Camp Peary base in Virginia. After nine weeks' training, he would be posted to Latin America, where he could use his Spanish. Pena had been doing special assignments for the CIA for a decade, mostly under AID cover. On some of these, he worked with CIA operative Dan Mitrione, a "US police adviser" who taught interrogation and torture techniques to the ruling junta in Uruguay and was killed by the Tupamaro guerrillas in 1970 as a result.

Please have a seat. Sorry I'm late.
I know how long you've had to wait.
I did not forget your documents
No time to waste, why not begin?
Here's how it works, I've got these faces
You give them names, I won't deport you
Make sure you face my tape recorder

Make no mistake, this fountain pen
Could put you on a plane by ten
And by the way, your next of kin
I know which house she's hiding in
So now that you know whose skin you're saving
In this photograph, who's this one waving?
I think you know, so speak up, amigo

It says here by trade you were a fisherman
Well I'll bet you Indians can really reel them in
If you get the chance
You should try to get up to Lake Michigan
Well maybe, but then again, anyway...

Where were we then? Is he your friend?
Well I recommend that you look again
Where does he stay? What is his name?
There is no shame. He'd do the same
So what do you say? I don't have all day
It's up to you. Which will it be
Good citizen, or poor campesino?

My dad used to rent us this place in Ontario
He showed us how to cast the line and tie the flies
He used to say God rewards us for letting the small ones go
Maybe, but I don't know
Anyway, it's easy to bite. You can't snap a line.
You just take the bait, you can't fight the hook
Hurts less if you don't try to dive

Senor, as you know I was a fisherman
How full the nets came in
We hauled them up by hand
But when we fled, I left them just out past the coral reefs
They're waiting there for me
Running deep

-- Fishing, by Joan Baez


Pena's new career didn't last long. Robert Kennedy announced that he would run for president on March 16, 1968 and Pena was back in Los Angeles by April. Investigative reporter Fernando Faura was walking along a corridor in Parker Center one day when he noticed a familiar figure behind heavy horn-rim glasses and a black handlebar mustache.

"Hey, Manny, I damn near didn't recognize you with that disguise!"

Pena stopped and explained the AID job wasn't what he expected, so he quit and came back to Los Angeles.

When the LAPD subsequently unveiled Special Unit Senator (SUS), a special task force to investigate the assassination, the man put in charge of preparing the case for trial and supervising the day watch investigators was Manny Pena.

In his 1970 book on the case, SUS Chief Robert Houghton wrote that Pena had "connections with intelligence agencies in several countries." In 1975, Pena's brother, a school principal, was interviewed for a local television show by host Stan Bohrman. During the commercial break, he mentioned how proud he was of his brother's service with the CIA. "Nobody's supposed to know about that. It's supposed to be secret."

In 1977, researcher Betsy Langman interviewed Pena -- then retired from the LAPD, presumably for good -- and asked about his intelligence ties.

"I worked with the AID program out of the Office of Public Safety," said Pena. (The AID program had been unmasked in the mid-1970s as one of the CIA's main covers for clandestine activity abroad.)

"Is AID not CIA?" asked Langman.

"Ah, not to my knowledge," said Pena.

"Was your work away from LAPD in 1967 going to be for AID?"

"Yeah."

"What type of work was it?"

"Ah, that I can't ah ... I don't think that's anybody's business."

***

In 1992, while attorney Marilyn Barrett was working with Paul Schrade on a new petition to reopen the Sirhan case, she discovered that the uncle of a good friend of hers was none other than Manny Pena. Barrett kindly sent me CD copies of a four-hour interview she subsequently conducted with Pena, in which he attempted to correct misconceptions in what he calls "these novels" about the assassination.

Pena was, by that time, seventy-three years old and comes across as a disarming figure, a charming uncle seemingly open about all aspects of his career, and a world away from his sinister-looking LAPD ID photo taken in the late sixties.

Pena was happy to discuss his "intelligence background" outside the LAPD. During his two years in France, he worked closely with the army's Counter-Intelligence Corps and made lots of friends in the intelligence community. He also built up strong connections with Interpol: a senior official in the Mexican government was his "number one connection into Latin America," and he'd make frequent trips down there.

"Our own Internal Revenue used to use me to trace assets in Latin America when they wanted to keep away from diplomatic problems with the State Department. I could get information out of Latin America better than the government through personal friends ... and [LAPD] Chief Parker allowed them to use me providing I never [talked about it] .... If you want to call that an intelligence background, there's nothing mysterious about it.

"In 1967, I decided to retire and go in the Aid for International Development part of the State Department; we call it AID. I was sent to Washington, DC, for orientation at the Foreign Service Institute. I went through their orientation and I was told I was going to be sent to Latin America. Some of the instructors that talk to you there are from CIA, and I was made privy to how to read secret materials and stuff like that, which I can't discuss with you for obvious reasons."

At the time, Pena was recently divorced and had left his car and furniture in Los Angeles. ''After I finished the orientation school, the chief of the AID Program, Byron Engle, told me they couldn't send me to Latin America; they wanted to keep me in Washington, DC, at their International Police Academy," where they trained a lot of Latin American officials.

Engle told him it was a permanent assignment, so he got his car sent to Washington by government transportation. "When the car arrived, they told me I owed them $965. I said, well, that couldn't be -- the State Department said they were paying." But he was told his posting didn't qualify as a permanent change of station, so the government couldn't pay for it. Engle refused to pay, so Pena called Chief Reddin, who was a close friend, and Reddin said, "Tell them to go to hell and come home."

When he'd left the LAPD, Pena still had four months time-in-lieu on the books, so there were still a couple of weeks left before his official retirement date. So he got his car back and drove back to Los Angeles, "and this is what has caused this confusion that these writers write about ... that I was retired with a great deal of fanfare, ... and then all of a sudden, in two months, I'm back on the job over here and mysteriously returned."

The night of the shooting, Pena was home alone in an apartment in Van Nuys, and a friend called and said, "Switch on the TV; they just shot Kennedy." Two or three days later, Chief Houghton handpicked Pena as lead supervisor for the investigation. They picked "just about the forty sharpest guys in the department in every category" and set up SUS:

I was assigned to supervise the case preparation for trial, the conspiracy allegation investigation, [and] I arranged to have the backgrounds of the entire Sirhan family investigated in Jordan because the main defense attorney Grant Cooper was pushing diminished capacity -- that Sirhan had suffered so much as a child and had gone through all kinds of horrible bombings in his home town in Jordan.... Well, I contacted the very same guy I fought with in the State Department, Byron Engle in Washington, DC, and I told him I need his help and I wanted the agents to conduct this portion of the investigation for me, and he says, "Good to hear from you," and he had agents -- some of them from the CIA and some of them from the State Department -- look into it, and they did a beautiful job.

And they established that Sirhan was never within 130 miles of any bombing in his youth ... this was a fairy tale that Grant Cooper made up, and we busted him real wide with that in the trial. He was flabbergasted and a little angry that we had gotten the government to do that. But they did it for me, at my request. So we still had a friendship going there, even though I quit them.


It's ludicrous to state that Jerusalem, where Sirhan grew up, was never within 130 miles of bombing during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This illustrates how deluded Pena was during the original investigation, and how far the prosecution went to distort Sirhan's upbringing. The interview was yielding intriguing information on Pena's CIA links, and Barrett kept him talking.

"And these are the same people that I went to Latin America for later on."

"What was that trip about?" asked Barrett.

In late 1969 or early 1970, the State Department sent a three-man team to Colombia -- the assistant attorney general of California, Howard Jewel, one of the counsels for a Supreme Court justice, and Pena as their investigative consultant.

"We were asked to make a survey of their criminal justice system," recalled Pena, "because there were complaints that people were disappearing in the justice system. They'd go in, be arrested, be arraigned, and go to court, and nobody'd ever hear of them again." The State Department asked him to stay on in Latin America for three-year stints in three different countries, to help reorganize their investigative systems, but, with the drug lords and corruption, Pena thought, "I don't want to stay down here, this is too damn dangerous."

When Pena got the check for the job, "it was paid from the International Legal Center, based in New York. I said, 'This isn't from the State Department,' and I had a detective friend in New York PD check out who it was. International Legal Center was a mail drop; it never existed and yet I got paid and the IRS accepted my tax report, so I had a suspicion it was probably a CIA operation down there. But I've never been told. That's just the policy in government work. If you don't need to know, they don't tell you .... I have never told ... or admitted to anybody that I have been or am a CIA agent because no one has ever told me, 'Manny, you're actually a CIA agent."

"Do you think AID is a front for the CIA?" asked Barrett.

"It's been rumored very highly." Pena laughed.

Barrett also asked Pena about Hernandez's intelligence background.

''I'd rather let Hank explain for himself. He's never been with the CI ... AID, that I know of ... he was on the Sirhan case with us; he was a darned good polygraph man -- the best -- we used him a lot; he did a lot of the background investigation, too, on the conspiracy things. But I've never worked an intelligence assignment with him, so I don't know." Pena said he had never worked with Hernandez outside of the LAPD.

"The main thing I wanted to get straight," concluded Pena, "and I'm surprised that this latest novel didn't cover it correctly, was how I happened to retire twice, you know. The way they've written it, it sounds like I was brought back and put into the case as a plant by the CIA, so that I could steer something around and ... guide the investigation to a point where no-one would ever discover a conspiracy or something ... that's not so. Sirhan himself will tell you that nobody operated with him; he operated by himself. And, quite frankly -- I say this kind of jokingly -- but I wouldn't recognize somebody that was programmed hypnotically to commit an assassination if I was talking to one, you know? I don't know enough about it."

After her four-hour interview, Marilyn Barrett believed that Pena was not directly involved in any nefarious activity but had been given orders from the top to "shut this case down" to give the public closure, and to convey a sense that the police got their man, that the case had been solved quickly and definitively.

She thinks the LAPD did a very bad job, but doesn't think they were actively involved in any wrongdoing. When she brought her petition in 1992, somebody in the DA's office told her the case would never be reopened; they'd had orders from the top to shut it down. She also found memos by DA staff, saying they needed to shut this petition down.

Barrett tried to arrange a short telephone interview for me with Pena, but he was reported to be too old and ill to take my call.

Like Pena, Enrique Hernandez had served with the army in Korea and spoke fluent Spanish. He was thirty-seven years old and had been with the LAPD for fifteen years at the time of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. He was the sole polygraph examiner for SUS, and he talked up his credentials to Sandra Serrano before her test began: "I have been called to South America, to Vietnam and Europe and I have administered tests. The last test that I administered was to the dictator in Caracas, Venezuela. He was a big man, a dictator. Perez Jimenez was the last name. And this is when there was a transition in the government of Venezuela and President Betancourt came in ... there was a great thing involved over there and I tested the gentleman."

So what had an LAPD polygraph officer been doing in South America? Hernandez himself provided the answer for Now It Can Be Told in 1992, when reporter Alexander Johnson confronted him and Hernandez granted his only television interview:

"I conducted an interrogation of Sandra Serrano and my objective was to determine the truth and I think I accomplished that."

"And what was the truth at that point?" asked a determined Johnson.

Hernandez smiled awkwardly and paused, searching for the right words.

"That the statements she made to the police investigators soon after the shooting were made up, and not true."

Hernandez did admit training Venezuelan police officers in the early sixties.

"I was loaned from the Los Angeles Police Department to the Department of State for a mission in Caracas, Venezuela."

"Did you work in any capacity for the CIA?"

"No, sir."

"As a contract agent?"

"In any capacity whatsoever, no ... I know people who have been and are with the CIA, but I've never worked with them."

Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown in a military coup in January 1958 and fled via the Dominican Republic to Miami Beach, where he lived comfortably from February 1958 to 1963, when he was extradited by the Venezuelan government to stand trial, accused of having embezzled two hundred million dollars. He was tried and convicted by the Venezuelan Supreme Court and placed under house arrest until 1968, when he was released and fled to Spain. From this timeline, it seems most likely that Hernandez was training Venezuela police in 1963 when he was called in to help with the trial. Johnson did not ask when and why Hernandez went to Europe or Vietnam.

During the interview with Serrano, Hernandez also stated: "I know the layout of the hotel, and after I arrived in Los Angeles it's the first place they took me" [emphasis added]. This suggests that Hernandez was out of Los Angeles at the time of the assassination, perhaps on another foreign assignment.

Shortly after the assassination, Hernandez was rumored to have swapped his solid middle-class neighborhood for a new home in upscale San Marino. But it wasn't until Hernandez died of cancer on December 18, 2005, at the age of seventy-four, that obituaries sourced by his son Enrique Junior would throw light on his extraordinary career.

Hernandez was born in Jerome, Arizona, in 1931 and moved to Los Angeles with his parents and eight siblings in 1941. After dropping out of high school, he joined the army at seventeen, initially stationed in Japan. He returned to Los Angeles after the Korean War and joined the LAPD in 1953, rising to lieutenant in the detective bureau and ending up in the department's "exclusive Scientific Investigation Department."

"In the early sixties," read the notice, "the Justice Department developed an initiative to send bilingual U.S. law enforcement experts to Latin American nations to offer training on policing techniques. Hernandez was part of the program."

After twenty years with the LAPD, Hernandez retired in 1973.

"From the kitchen table at his Monterey Park home, Hernandez and his wife developed a plan to go into the private security business .... His son said the firm's first major contract was with NASA at Edwards Air Force Base. Other NASA installations quickly followed. The firm now has wholly owned subsidiaries in nineteen countries and employs more than 30,000 people. Although its earnings are not public, some estimates put them at more than $1 billion annually."

There may be some truth in the romantic tale of a billion-dollar company hatched at the Hernandez family kitchen table, but it's a little hard to swallow. It would be a lucky start-up, indeed, that lands its first major contract with NASA. Hernandez's son Enrique Junior is now CEO of Inter-Con and sits on the board of McDonald's, Wells Fargo, and the Tribune Company (owners of the Los Angeles Times).

In interviews, Pena and Hernandez both referred to the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a police assistance program set up during the Kennedy administration in November 1962. Until its demise in 1975, the program trained seventy-five hundred senior officers in U.S. facilities, and more than half a million foreign police overseas.

The program was an aggressive Cold War effort to enhance domestic security among third world allies, and CIA Deputy Director Robert Amory sat on a White House Special Group with Robert Kennedy overseeing its creation. He described OPS as a joint project of the CIA and AID; it was decided AID would be its home, "but the brains are in CIA, so we'll move those brains over to AID.... So we just took the CIA men ... and gave them the mission of training [foreign] police forces using American police forces occasionally as sort of sponsors ... which is dangerous ground because you can get into Gestapo-type tactics and so on ... but essentially bringing to bear good police methods, good filing systems, good fingerprinting systems, good systems of riot control."

The public safety program was expanded within U.S. AID and placed under the control of CIA veteran Byron Engle, who reported directly to the director and deputy director of the CIA. (Engle later personally recruited Pena from the LAPD.)

During his decade as OPS chief, Engle took advantage of early police retirements and started hiring ex-chiefs and technical specialists from police forces across America, attracted by good salaries and exotic climes. He also recruited CIA personnel and supplied cover for agency officers operating abroad.

According to McClintock, OPS "became best known as a conduit for CIA training, assistance, and operational advice to foreign political police, and for linking the United States to the jailers, torturers, and murderers of the most repressive of 'free world' regimes [through] instruction in torture ... the fabrication and use of terrorist devices and assassination weapons ... as well as its key role in the best-known assassination program of them all, Vietnam's Operation PHOENIX," in which at least twenty thousand Vietnamese were killed.

In 1962, President Romulo Betancourt's police force in Venezuela was struggling to control a militant group of Castro-inspired leftists, who had bombed a luxury hotel and attacked the U.S. embassy. According to A. J. Langguth, "under pressure from the Kennedys, Engle borrowed four Spanish-speaking officers from the LAPD and quietly sent them to Caracas to give intensive classes in police work." I think it highly likely Hernandez was one of these four LAPD officers; he later boasted to Sandy Serrano that he had received a personal commendation from Robert Kennedy, presumably after this secret mission.

In 1963, Kennedy helped set up the principal training establishment for the OPS, the International Police Academy (IPA). The basic course ran fifteen weeks and included modules on VIP protection and "Criminal Violence Control," dealing with airline security, bomb threats, kidnapping, extortion, and assassination.

By 1968, its peak year, OPS fielded 458 advisers in thirty-four countries, with a budget of $55.1 million. By 1971, the program had trained more than a million policemen in forty-seven nations, including eighty-five thousand in South Vietnam and a hundred thousand in Brazil.

But the program was by then highly controversial, and had become synonymous with human rights abuse and torture. CIA field operatives had used OPS as an ideal cover to train police forces in the agency's interrogation techniques.

The agency coached military and police interrogators throughout Latin America, promoting methods of torture that became the hallmark of the continent's military dictatorships. AID police advisers tortured political dissidents, and through its field offices in Panama and Buenos Aires, the agency's Technical Services Division shipped polygraph and electroshock machines in diplomatic pouches to public safety offices across Latin America. When embassy staff complained about these abuses, they were reminded that U.S. policy precluded interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

Ironically, it took the murder of an American -- Dan Mitrione, a police adviser in Uruguay -- to expose this involvement in torture and hasten the program's demise.

In 1969, Mitrione, the former police chief of Richmond, Indiana, was appointed head of the OPS mission in Montevideo. His deputy, William Cantrell, was a CIA operations officer. The country was beset by strikes, student demonstrations, and a band of urban revolutionaries calling themselves Tupamaros, who captured the public's imagination with outrageous actions and a Robin Hood philosophy. They kidnapped and tried prominent figures before "people's courts" and ransacked an exclusive nightclub, scrawling their slogan on the walls: "Either everyone dances or no one dances."

Mitrione intensified the use of torture as the government fought back. He built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house and demonstrated torture techniques to selected Uruguayan police officers, using beggars taken off the streets, some of whom died during the sessions.

On July 31, 1970, Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros, who demanded the release of 150 prisoners in exchange for his return. Nixon dug his heels in, and the Uruguayan government refused. Ten days later, Mitrione's dead body was found on the backseat of a stolen car. "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere," said the White House, as Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis visited Richmond, Indiana, to stage a benefit show for the family.

Days later, the real story began to emerge. Alejandro Otero, the former Uruguayan chief of police intelligence, confirmed that Mitrione had used "violent techniques of torture ... and a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that it was his family being tortured."

Otero was a CIA agent and had been trained at the IPA in Washington. What finally drove him to speak out was the torture of a female friend of his who was a Tupamaro sympathizer. When Otero complained, he was demoted.

In Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America, OPS continued to train and serve as cover for death squads composed primarily of police officers, who bombed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers with material supplied by the Technical Services Division and engaged in assassination and kidnapping.

In July 1975, finally aroused by persistent allegations of torture and police brutality, Congress cut all funds for "training or advice to police, prisons, or other law enforcement" -- in effect, abolishing OPS.

While the foreign service of Pena and Hernandez may have been innocuous, the Office of Public Safety to which they were attached was implicated in human rights abuses and assassination from the late sixties through the early seventies. As we will see, a legendary CIA operative named David Morales took his own murderous revenge on the Tupamaros while working under OPS cover.

***

Bill Jordan, the Rampart sergeant who interviewed Sirhan in custody, also had an intriguing CV. He joined the U.S. Marines at the age of fifteen in 1941 and served three years in combat in the Pacific. He graduated from the police academy in 1954 and, while with the Intelligence Division, provided security for Senator John Kennedy during the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles and was later assigned to protect Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., when they were in town.

According to his resume, Jordan also attended "special schools" in antiterrorist techniques, special weapons, and riot control "conducted by the Federal Government and the military."

After he retired from the LAPD, Jordan put some of this knowledge to work in 1978 when Costa Gratsos, a close associate of the recently deceased Aristotle Onassis, resurrected a plan to stage a coup d'etat against "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, with the help of exiled Haitian banker Clemard Charles. Jordan told author Peter Evans that his security company had been hired to handle the policing of the island after the takeover.

But the closer Jordan looked at the plan, the less he liked it. "Clemard Charles was the problem. First, he gave me this short list. These are very bad people, they must be eliminated," he said. "Every time I saw him, he'd hand me another list. It was beginning to look like the Haitian phone book. Once a guy like Clemard Charles got in you might be looking back and thinking what a wonderful guy Baby Doc was compared with this butcher."

The invasion never happened, but Jordan's involvement in this world of coups and assassinations must be noted. Jordan died in September 2005, at age eighty-two.

***

There are also a number of intelligence connections to Sirhan's defense investigators, Michael McCowan and Robert Kaiser. During the trial, Kaiser discovered he was under surveillance:

In the middle of the trial, more or less, I was living in a rented house in Hollywood and I had practically nightly conversations with Dr. Diamond about the progress of the trial. Anybody who was eavesdropping on those conversations would have been able to tip off the prosecutors on the strategy of the defense.

So my suspicions were aroused when one day, I realized there was a lot of interference on the line, and I called the phone company and they said they'd send someone out to check the line. And a man came out wearing the denim clothes of a telephone repairman. He spent a bunch of time, maybe a half an hour there, and he said, "Well, things should be okay now," and then he left. Several weeks later, I was in the offices of the prosecuting attorneys, and I saw the same man coming out of one of the offices, and all of a sudden, a light went on over my head. I thought, "Wow, this guy is probably working for the DA's office and if he's tapping my phone, then the DA's office is privy to everything the defense is trying to do." I did not tell Cooper about it. I didn't tell anybody about it, I didn't know what to do.

In retrospect, I probably have to blame myself for at least not telling Cooper about it. It could have led to a mistrial if we'd been able to prove that, but then what? A mistrial, so then we retry him, you know? Cooper, at that point, didn't want to hear it; that's probably why I didn't tell Cooper.... He was tired of this trial.... I could just see him throwing up his hands."


***

In 1999, while preparing an updated edition of his book, Kaiser tried to find out who the telephone repairman may have been. He remembered the fifteen-man investigative unit in the DA's office under the direction of George Stoner and interviewed Clay Anderson, who was part of that team. Anderson said the likeliest candidate for the repairman was their sound technician, Fred East, now deceased. "If East was doing anything illegal, I couldn't admit it [but] I never heard a whisper about [East] doing a wire tap [of anyone working on the Sirhan defense team]. I literally cannot imagine anyone having done that."

"Fred East, Los Angeles County district attorney's investigator," was quoted in a 1964 Time magazine article on bugging devices, and it seems East was, indeed, the wire-tapping specialist at the DA's Bureau of Investigation and quite possibly the man who came to "fix" Kaiser's phone. East was also present when investigators from the DA's office asked Sandra Serrano to reconstruct her story at the Ambassador. He presumably recorded the interview and advised on the impossibility of Serrano having heard gunshots.

Kaiser later gave Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter a written declaration, professing his belief that the prosecution had had him wiretapped.

***

Michael McCowan was still working on the Sirhan case in September 1970, when Sirhan's release was allegedly one of the conditions -- later denied -- for freeing the "Black September" hostages held by Palestinian guerrillas on two hijacked airliners in the Jordanian desert.

Sirhan's mother, Mary, accompanied by her son's new attorney Luke McKissack and "his investigator Michael McCowan," tried to travel to Jordan to discuss the guerrilla demands, but at Kennedy airport in New York, the State Department revoked the passports of the two men and denied Mary Sirhan permission to travel, as the trip "would be prejudicial to the foreign policy of the United States government."

McKissack was preparing Sirhan's appeal at the time, but why was McCowan still working as a pro bono investigator more than a year after the trial? McCowan's partner, Ronald Allen, put it simply: "Mike had been involved all along. You get into something and you don't want to let it down." But others accused McCowan of babysitting Sirhan for the CIA.

By September 1974, McCowan was president of the guard and patrol division of American Protection Industries, supplying the Century Plaza and LA Hilton (and good friends with Frank Hendrix of Ace Guard Services). But he was in trouble again, convicted of giving a federal receiver eleven thousand dollars in return for the security guard service contract for a federally financed housing project. He was placed on five years' probation.

In 1977, McCowan was characterized as "a private eye who specializes in tough insurance claims" in Desmond Wilcox's book, Americans. McCowan recounted a recent mission to Switzerland to retrieve stolen diamonds for an insurance company. "The wrong kind of people" knew about the cache, so he traveled back and forth disguised as a man with a broken neck, hiding the diamonds in his surgical collar and neck brace. He collected twenty-five thousand dollars for less than a week's work.

McCowan's name didn't surface again publicly until 1995, when author Dan Moldea published his book on the case, The Killing of Robert Kennedy.

The book climaxes with three interviews with Sirhan in California's Corcoran prison. In the penultimate chapter, after building a compelling case for conspiracy, Moldea made an abrupt U-turn and declared Sirhan the lone assassin. On the last page of the book, Moldea described a prison visit by McCowan, in which he tried to reconstruct the murder with Sirhan: "Suddenly, in the midst of their conversation, Sirhan started to explain the moment when his eyes met Kennedy's just before he shot him. Shocked by what Sirhan had just admitted, McCowan asked, 'Then why, Sirhan, didn't you shoot him between the eyes?' With no hesitation and no apparent remorse, Sirhan replied, 'Because that son of a bitch turned his head at the last second.'''

Robert Kaiser told Moldea of McCowan's allegations in late May 1994, and Moldea later claimed he asked Sirhan about them during their final meeting the following week. But Moldea was never allowed to see Sirhan alone, and Sirhan and his brother Adel -- who was at all three meetings -- insisted the subject was never raised. Moldea's own notes of the meeting, given to Sirhan to confirm their accuracy, also omit any mention of such a conversation.

Eight months later, Moldea finally located and interviewed McCowan by telephone. McCowan confirmed Kaiser's quote, and signed a statement verifying the story and approving its accuracy. Moldea put it in the book. In a letter to his long-time legal researcher Lynn Mangan dated June 24, 1995, Sirhan wrote the following about the matter: "I flatly deny making the statement Moldea ascribes to me in his book via Kaiser via McCowan. This quote was never mentioned by Moldea during any of his visits with me."

On McCowan, Sirhan wrote: "Whenever he came with the others (he seldom came alone) I told him all I could remember of the shooting night -- the same stuff that I told whoever asked me including the psychiatrists. McCowan was much more interested in my background than in the shooting scene. He always had that smooth chatty 'I am your best friend' attitude -- an insincere chumminess, and he made statements that included the answer or inference that he wanted to establish .... McCowan has very, very seldom come to mind over the years because I realized when I was on Death Row that he did not give a damn about me from the outset, and that he was out for all the glory he could get at my expense, like Parsons and Cooper."

McCowan told Kaiser about Sirhan's alleged comments, but only after the trial.

"McCowan did report Sirhan saying that," Kaiser told me. "And I didn't know whether to believe McCowan or not. McCowan was a puzzle to me. He had his own agenda. There's been some suggestion that Mike McCowan was, in fact, a plant in the defense investigation team for another agency."

Kaiser remembered talking to the FBI's Roger LaJeunesse in 1999, a year before the former agent died, about the curious visit from the man who came to fix his phone. When Kaiser asked him about possible FBI liaisons with the CIA, "I have a vague recollection that he said he thought Michael McCowan was working with the CIA."

It wouldn't have surprised Kaiser. "McCowan was kicked off the LAPD when he got a federal conviction for mail tampering, and he had every reason to cooperate with the CIA/FBI during the case."

Kaiser put me in touch with Pete Noyes, a veteran investigative journalist in Los Angeles, now seventy-five years old and still working in the investigative unit at the local Fox affiliate, Channel 11. Noyes was working for KNXT in Los Angeles on the night of the assassination, the same channel as Don Schulman.

Noyes confirmed that another investigator from the Treasury Department (now deceased) told him that McCowan was planted on the defense team by the CIA to find out anything he could about Sirhan. In return, after the Sirhan trial, his civil rights would be restored after his earlier mail-fraud conviction. Noyes added, "I can't understand how Kaiser didn't know McCowan was CIA, because everybody else seemed to."

Mention of the Treasury brought to mind the only Arabic page in Sirhan's notebook -- a letter written to his mother. One sentence is translated as: "I am also waiting for a check from the American Treasury Department which you are to send (P P Peggy)."

***

When I first tracked Michael McCowan down, he confirmed the telephone interview with Dan Moldea and stood by the alleged Sirhan confession -- "Sirhan said that to me." He said he'd be happy to meet up for an interview when I came to the States, and I asked a few final questions.

"Who were your main contacts at the LAPD?"

"Nobody. I was on the defense team. People have said I was FBI or CIA, but that's all nonsense."

"Have you ever had any indication the CIA were involved?"

"Let's talk about that when you get here."

***

During our interview a few months later, McCowan constantly circled back to three issues that were key to his understanding of the case -- the "many more will come" reference in Sirhan's school textbook; the disputed sighting of Sirhan following Hubert Humphrey down to San Diego; and Sirhan's disputed confession.

He reenacted Sirhan's statement three or four times but broke eye contact with me after each telling. It was the most important point in the interview and, for me, the least convincing.

Toward the end of our conversation, I brought up the accusations of Noyes, Kaiser, LaJeunesse, and others that McCowan had been a plant on the defense team for another agency.

"Roger LaJeunesse was a really good friend of mine," said McCowan. "I always liked him ... and I think he was liaison for the FBI at the Sirhan case, and he would have never said that about me. I don't believe." He seemed genuinely hurt by the idea and sure his friend would never have betrayed him like that.

"Not blow my cover!" he said, followed by a big, hearty laugh.

"And the Treasury guy saying you were CIA -- where would that come from?" I asked.

"That's interesting. Why the Treasury guy? What would it have to do with the Treasury Department?"

I offered, "Apparently, they were one of the agencies doing their own investigation for whatever reason.

"On me or on Kennedy?"

"No, no, on Sirhan .... The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- would that be part of their jurisdiction?"

"Oh, yeah, with the gun thing and all, probably. I don't know. I don't recall ever talking to the Treasury people. Ever."

Pete Noyes later told me his source was in IRS intelligence.

"Just to clarify it," I asked McCowan, "did you ever work in any way with the FBI or CIA as an informant or agent?"

"Never," said McCowan. "Didn't work with the CIA. Was never a CIA operative. Never was an FBI operative. I dealt with some FBI guys and I knew some CIA guys and I could see why somebody would think, 'Okay, I'm planted in there because I've done some strange things in my life ... My present wife thinks I'm a CIA guy.... but I'm not getting a pension! If I was getting a pension from the FBI or the CIA, my wife would know about it! And I'm not ....

"But I don't find it unreasonable for people to think that ... but I don't think they'll ever find or there is any concrete evidence that I've ever been involved with either of those agencies."

"You weren't getting compensated," I asked, "so why did you work for Sirhan from June 1968 through to possibly going out to Jordan (for free) if you weren't a CIA babysitter?"

"Okay, well here's the real simple explanation to that. When I had the opportunity to do this, being an investigator and a lawyer, it's a great opportunity to see how good you are. It was a wonderful experience for me. I didn't expect the money and I didn't write a book about it or I didn't try to promote it. I never have given an interview, really. It just was something that was exciting for me to do and I did it."

Although he seemed wary recalling the details of the case, McCowan was at his most relaxed and jovial discussing these accusations, and I found his answers pretty convincing. As he conceded, he'd done a lot of strange things in his life and seemed to have a tendency to schmooze various agencies for information, blurring the boundaries of his relationship with the prosecution, LAPD, FBI, and Secret Service; but I found nothing concrete to tie Michael McCowan to the CIA.

***

In the mid-nineties, Jean Scherrer, the LAPD's "man who wasn't there," also reappeared. When author C. David Heymann interviewed former LAPD officer Daniel Stewart for his book on Robert Kennedy, the former head of VIP security tagged along.

Stewart had been assigned to Good Samaritan Hospital on the night of the shooting and was present with Sergeant Bill Jordan at the autopsy. Scherrer claimed to be the LAPD official assigned to work with Kennedy, went along to the hotel because he had "a premonition," and later was Rafer Johnson's chaperone when he delivered the gun to the LAPD. As noted previously, Scherrer told Heymann that for five thousand dollars, he would go into more detail about the assassination.

In 1996, the paths of Scherrer and Michael McCowan crossed in an apparent attempt to compromise Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter and legal researcher Rose Lynn Mangan.

Photographer Scott Enyart was suing the city of Los Angeles over pictures he had taken on the night of the shooting that the LAPD confiscated and never returned. Enyart claimed he was in the pantry, standing on a steam table at the time of the shooting, taking pictures of the senator. When the police finally returned his photographs, the images of those key moments in the pantry were missing.

Two weeks before the case began, Sirhan's researcher Rose Lynn Mangan was approached by a neighbor in Carson City, Nevada, by the name of Jerry Vaccaro. Vaccaro told Mangan he'd been interviewed during the investigation into the JFK assassination and, it turned out, he was a friend of Mike McCowan's dating back to the mail fraud charges in 1966.

Vaccaro set up a lunch meeting in Burbank with Mangan, Adel Sirhan, and Larry Teeter, and he brought along Jean Scherrer. According to Vaccaro, Mike McCowan had applied for a presidential pardon in the mid-seventies to clear the mail-fraud case from his record. The pardon was denied, but McCowan's petition included confidential FBI documents showing that McCowan had been an FBI plant on the Sirhan defense team. In return for these embarrassing documents, Scherrer and Vaccaro wanted the movie rights to Sirhan's life story.

Mangan and Teeter immediately smelled a rat and flatly turned the offer down. Teeter wrote to Police Chief Willie Williams and the DA's office documenting the offer. The timing was worrying -- it seemed an obvious "sting operation" to compromise Mangan before she testified at the Enyart trial. The only response they ever got from the authorities was a postcard of acknowledgment.

When I asked Mike McCowan about the offer, he said he'd never heard of Larry Teeter and knew nothing about it. I spoke briefly to Danny Stewart, but he didn't want to discuss the case -- "most of the LAPD guys prefer not to." He'd lost touch with Jean Scherrer, and I haven't been able to find him.

***

When I discussed a possible assassination plot with seasoned operatives, they invariably pointed to a man on the inside as an essential element of such an operation. He could have been an insider working for Kennedy or the hotel who knew what was going on and could have, perhaps unwittingly, passed information to the plotters or been manipulated into directing the senator into the "killing zone."

While I don't suspect Pierre Salinger of any conscious connection to the shooting, some of his business relationships are worth examining with this in mind.

In Salinger's 1995 autobiography, P.S. A Memoir, he writes of his friendship with Bob Six, the founder of Continental Airlines. In the summer of 1965, Six was setting up a subsidiary in Southeast Asia called Continental Air Services (CAS). It would provide air services to the CIA as an alternative to the agency's own carrier, Air America, which was in danger of being banned from certain countries due to regional tensions over Vietnam. CAS would have no direct links to the agency; all contracts would go through the usual cover organization, AID.

Six had meetings at the CIA with William Colby, then director of covert operations and later head of the CIA. Colby told Six he needed someone with top secret government clearance to work at a high level in the new company. Salinger had such clearance during his career in the Kennedy White House and was perfect for the job.

Salinger accepted the offer "because it sounded like an exciting job" and flew out with Six to start work at the new headquarters of CAS -- a converted motel in Vientiane, Laos. CAS would take over from Air America in supplying the U.S.-funded Meo army to the north, who were repelling North Vietnamese incursions along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Each morning, CAS DC-3s took off with sacks of "hard rice," full of military equipment to be parachuted to the Meo. According to Salinger, half the staff had CIA links. CAS also made daily reconnaissance flights, to report on North Vietnamese troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh trail, information that was used by the U.S. Air Force for their covert and illegal bombing raids in Laos.

Salinger worked for Continental Air Services for the next two years, bringing him into the same orbit as CIA operatives Tom Clines and David Morales, whom we'll discuss in the next chapter.

Another odd Salinger connection was Robert Maheu, right-hand man to Howard Hughes and the liaison connecting the CIA, John Rosselli, and the Chicago Mob during earlier attempts to assassinate Castro. During the California campaign, Kennedy staff decided to approach Hughes for a campaign contribution.

Salinger thought Hughes was approachable and got the assignment -- "I knew Hughes' right-hand man, Robert Maheu, quite well, so I called and made an appointment with him." The morning after their meeting, Maheu called to say that Hughes had agreed to give Kennedy twenty-five thousand dollars.

By 1968, the Hughes organization, through Maheu, was working hand in glove with the CIA. John Meier was Hughes's third in command and an arch-nemesis of Maheu's. In an interview with researcher Lisa Pease, Meier claimed that Maheu had connections to Thane Eugene Cesar and the upper ranks of the LAPD. According to Pease, "Meier saw enough dealings [within the Hughes organization] before and after the assassination to cause him to approach J. Edgar Hoover with what he knew ... Hoover expressed his frustration, saying words to the effect of "Yes, we know this was a Maheu operation. People think I'm so powerful, but when it comes to the CIA, there's nothing I can do."

I subsequently met Meier in person, and while he claims to know who financed, organized, and carried out the assassination of Robert Kennedy, I have yet to see any evidence of this.

***

When they retired, two legendary figures of American intelligence also held photographs of Robert Kennedy's autopsy in their personal safes -- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. As author Anthony Summers noted, of all the famous deaths in Hoover's long career, the gruesome color pictures of the RFK autopsy are the only death pictures preserved in his official and confidential files, segregated from the main FBI filing system.

Angleton's colleagues were astonished by their bizarre find in his personal safe when he retired. They had no idea why Angleton had the pictures or "why it was appropriate for CIA staff files to contain them. They were accordingly destroyed."
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:32 pm

PART 1 OF 2

SEVENTEEN: The CIA at the Hotel

Four years ago, the story you've just read inspired me to write a screenplay on the case. It would be a challenge to distill the complexities and conundrums into a two-hour film, but the biggest problem was that I still didn't know "who did it." I didn't believe the official version of events. I didn't believe Sirhan acted alone, so I went in search of an ending and became, to use a very seventies term, an "assassinologist."

I read all the books on the case and was particularly affected by Robert Blair Kaiser's sublime portrayal of the struggles to unlock Sirhan's mind. The more I listened to Sirhan speak, in custody, with Kaiser, or under hypnosis, the more credible I found his memory block and the possibility that he was a "Manchurian candidate."

In subsequent books on the case, author Phillip Melanson presented the most convincing scenario to me: Sirhan as a hypnotically controlled "patsy" with a programmed memory block; two guns -- the second wielded by Cesar or someone else; Pena and Hernandez covering up within the LAPD; and unnamed doctors and CIA operatives filling out the conspiracy.

But this last part, about the CIA operatives, seemed undeveloped. Pena and Hernandez, with their CIA connections, could supervise the cover-up, but there was no evidence of a CIA presence at the hotel on the night of the shooting.

If you're researching one Kennedy assassination, you've got to research the other. If there was a conspiracy in Los Angeles and the CIA was involved, I reasoned, the same team was probably involved in Dallas as well. Yet the existing books on the Robert Kennedy case were very light on connections between the two assassinations.

So, this was my starting point -- to look at CIA operatives suspected of involvement in Dallas in 1963 who might also have been in Los Angeles five years later. One of the first people I looked at was David Sanchez Morales.

***

Morales was a legendary CIA operative, about whom little was known until the late eighties, when Bradley Ayers began to investigate the man he had worked with at the CIA's secret Miami base, JMWAVE, in 1963. Morales was chief of operations and went by the nickname "El Indio" -- the "Big Indian." Close friends called him "Didi." He was half Mexican and half Yaqui-Pima Indian, known as big more for his weight (250 pounds) and oversized reputation than his height (a modest five-ten). The first known photograph of Morales, taken in Havana in 1959, was initially released in the Cuban press in 1978, the year he died.

Ayers located two close friends of Morales in his hometown of Phoenix -- Morales's best friend since childhood, Ruben Carbajal, and his former lawyer, Robert Walton -- and they were interviewed in 1992 by author Gaeton Fonzi for his book The Last Investigation.

Fonzi spent several days with both men before a final joint interview. The friends recalled a drinking session with Morales and Walton's wife, Florene, at the Dupont Plaza hotel in Washington in the spring of 1973. At one point, Walton let slip that he had done some volunteer work for Kennedy.

"[Morales] flew off the bed on that one," said Walton. "I remember he was lying down and he jumped up screaming, 'That no good son of a bitch motherfucker!' He started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was, and talking about how he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy.

"Suddenly, Morales stopped, sat down on the bed and added, 'Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?'"

Fonzi looked over at Ruben Carbajal, who had been listening silently. Carbajal looked at Fonzi and nodded. "Yes, he was there, it was true," Fonzi wrote. "But, in all the long hours we had spent together and all the candid revelations he had provided, it was a remembrance he couldn't bring himself to tell me about his friend Didi."

Author Noel Twyman interviewed Walton and Carbajal separately three years later for his rare, self-published book, Bloody Treason. Neither man had any doubt that Morales had been involved in the JFK assassination and again recalled the hotel drinking session.

"He said, 'We got that son of a bitch, and I was in Los Angeles also when we got Bobby,'" recalled Walton.

"When 'we' got Bobby?"

"'When we got Bobby.' And when he said 'also' I linked that back to Dallas. I'm not sure he ever said 'I was in Dallas' but he did say 'I was in Los Angeles when we got Bobby.'''

Ruben was now more open about the Dallas comment. "By 'we took care of that son of a bitch,' does 'we' mean the CIA?" asked Twyman.

"Goddamn right, that's what it means," replied Carbajal.

Twyman asked Ruben about Walton's quote, essentially, "and I was in Los Angeles when we got Bobby."

"I don't remember that part right now," said Ruben carefully. "I don't remember that part.... Because he could have been there. He was there many times. Two sisters, you know, lived there and one of his daughters."

Ruben had gotten used to Morales's involvement in Dallas, but he wasn't ready to finger him for another Kennedy assassination.

***

As Twyman's huge and impressive tome focused on the JFK assassination, he never pursued the Los Angeles angle. Morales's SOB line regarding Dallas became widely known through Fonzi's book, but the Los Angeles addendum was overlooked, remaining buried on page 471 of Twyman's book until 2004.

Twyman told me the main source of his information on Morales was Bradley Ayers, who, last he'd heard, was living in the woods in Minnesota. I did a search and found that Ayers had moved to Frederic, Wisconsin. I couldn't find a phone number, so I e-mailed Gary King, the editor of the local paper. Brad popped in occasionally, so Gary would call and ask if he'd be willing to talk to me. A few days later, word came back that Brad Ayers was willing to cooperate, and my introduction to the world of David Morales began.

***

Brad was understandably cagey in our initial discussions, but very willing to help any investigation into the Kennedy assassinations. He suggested I get a copy of his book, The War That Never Was, a whistle-blowing account of his time at JMWAVE, first published in 1976. His publisher had insisted on pseudonyms to protect operatives' identities, but Brad faxed me a key to the true cast of characters.

He also told me he had a witness in a "Southwest city" who had matched the 1959 photo of Morales to a man seen at the Ambassador Hotel the night of the RFK assassination. He would go into details when we talked a bit more but, approaching seventy years old, he was eager to get things "on the record." He later summarized his background:

I was a regular army captain in 1963, with a specialty in covert and paramilitary intelligence operations. Suddenly, I was beckoned to Washington, DC, asked to report to the Office of Special Warfare at the Pentagon, and subsequently offered an opportunity to serve with the CIA in its secret war against Cuba. I transferred to South Florida, to JMWAVE, the only CIA station that was ever established on U.S. soil.

I arrived in April 1963, and Ted Shackley, as chief of station, welcomed me. I met the assistant chief of station, a fellow by the name of Gordon Campbell, who later became my case officer on a particular mission shortly before the Kennedy assassination. I also worked under a fellow by the name of David Morales, who was the chief of operations. The concept was to conduct covert paramilitary operations involving infiltration and commando raids in an effort to destabilize Castro's Cuba. We also embarked on efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.


Kennedy had been handed the CIA's plan for the invasion of Cuba on assuming office in January 1961. Brigade 2506, a small military contingent of commandos -- approximately fifteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles -- would be landed on the south shore of the island at the Bay of Pigs, and then penetrate inland and take over the country, in the belief that the Cuban population would rise up against Castro. From a military planning standpoint, it was an ill-conceived operation and really stood no chance of succeeding without air support.

But CIA director Allen Dulles assured the young Kennedy it would be another quick, bloodless coup in the manner of the CIA overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Kennedy pressed ahead but made it clear it must be a Cuban operation, with no U.S. hand visible. Aging American warplanes, repainted with Cuban markings, attempted to bomb Castro's air force in advance of the landing but failed miserably. The Kennedys refused to authorize further air support, and Castro's planes picked off the fifteen hundred invaders with ease, killing many and capturing the rest.

It was a spectacular embarrassment for the Kennedy brothers three months into JFK's presidency, and the CIA would never be trusted again. Dulles was fired, and the president threatened to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds."

He chose his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to personally oversee a new secret effort to overthrow Castro and reclaim the Kennedy honor. Bobby chaired the same "Special Group, Counterinsurgency" that would oversee the creation of the Office of Public Safety, the police advisory body headed by Byron Engle that would later provide operational cover for Pena, Hernandez, and David Morales. And so, Robert Kennedy, chairing the special group, proceeded to micromanage the secret war on Castro.

***

The special group soon identified a need for paramilitary training for Cuban exiles willing to go on infiltration raids into Cuba, and Bradley Ayers got the call. He went by the cover name "Daniel B. Williams" and was initially assigned to the operations branch:

"Dave, the big New Mexican Indian who ran it, was the only branch chief who treated us less than respectfully. He ran all the station's activities with a heavy hand and was famous for his temper." Morales resented Ayers's intruding on his turf and repeatedly tried to block his path to station chief Ted Shackley, raising objections to his proposals to train the Cubans properly in response to failed missions.

In The War That Never Was, Ayers refers to Assistant Chief of Station Gordon Campbell by the pseudonym "Keith Randall." He judged Campbell to be around forty years old, "in robust physical condition ... dressed as if he had just come off the golf course, tanned, clean shaven, with a trim build, balding blond hair, and penetrating blue eyes." Campbell also ran the Maritime branch and lived with his wife on a yacht berthed at Dinner Key Marina in Miami.

***

Ayers would sit in on briefings with Shackley, Campbell, Morales, other branch chiefs from JMWAVE, and visiting personnel from Washington, DC, such as Des Fitzgerald and William Harvey. Bobby Kennedy was demanding quick results and was on top of everything.

"Robert Kennedy, chairing the special group, had to pass on each and every mission," Brad recalled, "and you had these suits sitting there in Washington under Robert Kennedy's control -- and all well-meaning of course -- but they weren't in the field. The majority of them had no military background. It created a huge amount of resentment on the part of the operational people at JMWAVE. Particularly, I know for a fact, Morales would go absolutely berserk when the word came down that an operation had to be changed or possibly even canceled because the risk of attribution and unintended consequences was too great."

***

In the summer of 1963, Ayers was taken by airboat to a covert meeting at the Waloos Glades Hunting Camp in the Everglades. At dusk, some men were standing around a campfire in the middle of a clearing, with lights burning in two Quonset huts and two helicopters parked in the shadows.

The door to a Quonset hut swung open and four men emerged. One was Gordon Campbell, and "I caught my breath at the appearance of the second man. It was the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. The four men talked in low voices for a few minutes, and then the attorney general came over and shook hands with each of us, wishing us good luck and God's speed on our mission."

Toward the end of November, as Ayers trained Cuban exile commandos on a tiny island in the Florida Keys, he recognized a plane passing overhead "as the single-engine Cessna based at the CIA headquarters in Miami .... A white object was released directly over the old house. It was a roll of toilet tissue, streaming as it fell. It landed only a few feet away.... The center tube of the tissue roll had been closed with masking tape .... Hastily, I opened up the tube and pulled out the paper inside. It was Campbell's printing:

NOVEMBER 22 1963

PRESIDENT KENNEDY HAS BEEN SHOT BY AN ASSASSIN. SUSPEND ALL ACTIVITY. KEEP MEN ON ISLAND. COME ASHORE WITHOUT DELAY. GORDON


***

Ayers saw very little of Campbell after that, and more than a month after the assassination, Campbell told him to ease off on the training and then pretty much disappeared.

"The word around the station," Brad told me later, "was that Castro had killed Kennedy, and that Oswald was a pro-Castro operative. I don't know why, but deep in my guts, I had some feeling that what we had been doing down there was in some way connected. I had a gnawing suspicion about some of the things I had heard at the station. The anti-Kennedy comments. The sentiments that were expressed about the Bay of Pigs. The resentment that I couldn't help but overhear -- just disgust with the Kennedy administration. From that point forward, I had growing suspicions about the agency's role in John Kennedy's assassination."

***

As I read Brad's book, I sought out film footage of the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination. If Morales said he was there, perhaps his highly distinctive features would appear in the material shot that night. I ordered tapes of network news footage of Kennedy's victory speech and the shooting aftermath.

A week later, at the end of September 2004, the tapes arrived. The first one was a raw video feed recorded by a CBS camera at the Ambassador, minutes before Kennedy took the stage. About fifteen minutes into the tape, less than a minute after Kennedy left the stage and headed toward the pantry, the camera panned across the ballroom. Standing at the back in a white shirt was a "dead ringer" for the Morales in the 1959 photo. I couldn't believe it. It was a wide shot, so "Morales" was quite small in the frame and the lack of detail was frustrating, but as the camera held on him for a few seconds, my gut feeling said this was Morales.

I played the tape on. Twenty-eight minutes later, I saw him again, floating around the darkened ballroom with a shorter colleague with a pencil mustache. They loitered behind CBS reporter Terry Drinkwater as he prepared a piece for the camera. I got a closer look at the bronzed complexion and strikingly distinctive features. His belly protruded from his gray suit, and his colleague scribbled notes as the pair surveyed the room. Not only did it look like Morales; they were acting like spooks.

***

I had also ordered a copy of the LAPD's "composite of motion picture films" from the California State Archives, the repository of the LAPD investigation files since the late eighties. SUS had assembled a twenty-minute film of footage shot at the hotel before, during, and after Kennedy's speech, capturing some of the shooting aftermath. The picture quality is admittedly very poor -- ungraded 16-millimeter prints, crudely spliced together into a rough chronology -- but the film contains a key scene that promised to unlock the secrets of the assassination.

Within moments of the shooting, NBC producer Chris Michon ran from the pantry doorway out into the ballroom, climbed up on a viewing platform, pointed an imaginary gun to his head, and mouthed the words "bang, bang, bang" to alert his camera team on risers at the back of the room to start rolling. Next to NBC on the risers, Walter Dombrow's CBS camera picked up Michon's panicked reaction as ripples of hysteria began to sweep the room.

Image
-- RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, by Shane O'Sullivan -- Illustrated Screenplay


Dombrow zoomed out to pick up the commotion, then reframed on a balding man in a blue jacket walking calmly through the crowd toward the back of the room. He seemed to be coming from the direction of the pantry, and he held his right arm across his chest, with what seemed to be a small container in his hand. A shorter Latin man with a mustache, alongside him to his right, had both arms raised, motioning him toward an exit. The bald man glanced at the Latin man, who waved toward the exit again, and the bald man left in that direction. As panic swirled around these men, they seemed composed and alert and moved through the room with a sense of purpose.

***

I was intrigued. Repeated viewings of this clip suggested that the bald man may have been leaving the pantry with a disguised weapon in his hand, as a Latin accomplice (who fit a Cuban profile) waved him toward an exit.

I sent frame-grabs of my discoveries by e-mail to Brad's local paper. Gary King printed them out, and Brad reviewed the images of "Morales" and the second suspicious character who seemed to be leaving with a package in his hand. Brad's response was immediate. Allowing for the quality of the images, he gave a strong indication that this was, indeed, Morales. But the real surprise was the other suspicious character. "Less a little hair," Brad saw him as a "dead ringer" for Gordon Campbell, suggesting that two JMWAVE veterans were at the hotel, with two unidentified associates, on the night Bobby Kennedy was murdered. I had a potentially incredible story on my hands.

I now came to a fork in the road. Thoughts of a screenplay were being rapidly overtaken by plans for a documentary. Why fictionalize a story whose every twist and turn was this strange and unpredictable? The facts of the case were all-important and could not be muddied by dramatic license. A documentary it would be.

To finance it, I would need to shoot some footage to give potential backers a sense of the story -- key interviews with Brad and others who knew Morales and Campbell and could identify them on camera.

In January 2005, surfing my credit card, I flew to snowbound Minneapolis to finally meet Brad and show him these clips in person.

In response to the first clip, of the bronzed figure at the back of the ballroom, he said, "Yeah, that's the figure that I had previously identified as Morales to a very high degree, I would say 90 percent. I'm a little bit troubled by the configuration of the nose ... but the general facial impression except for the nose, is an individual that I would identify as Morales to a practically hundred percent degree."

The second clip, in which the same man is seen surveying the room with a colleague, seemed to strengthen his ID: "This, definitely from the profile, is hugely similar. The body language is very, very much characteristic of Morales. See how he moves back and forth very casually, so as not to attract attention to himself. That is [him], no question. The second clip reduces any significant question I have about the first clip. And, to me, it reinforces my opinion that that's Morales."

Why was Morales there? The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction, and wouldn't normally be there protecting Bobby Kennedy. Given Morales's frequently expressed hatred of the Kennedys, Brad concluded that his presence at the hotel could mean only one thing -- he was involved in the assassination.

***

With the Morales ID confirmed in Brad's mind, we moved to a possible identification of Gordon Campbell, and I showed the clip of the balding man as he moved through the room: "Yeah, that's excellent. I could certainly verify 90 percent ID of Gordon Campbell. Less a little hair, as I remembered him. The facial features are certainly his. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm looking beyond the face, I'm looking at the body, the carriage."

There were no photos of these men publicly available in 1968, so the likelihood of them being identified by any of Kennedy's staff was minimal: "It does not surprise me at all that these folks would be so audacious as to believe that they could pull this off; in fact they did."

***

I had also found an amateur photograph of the same man standing in the Embassy Ballroom earlier in the night with a swarthy, Mediterranean-looking colleague. Brad confirmed that this was the same Gordon Campbell as in the video clip. The swarthy figure next to him looked familiar, but he couldn't identify him. So, at this point, there were five possible conspirators: An initial ID on Morales and Campbell, and three other men pictured with them at various times in the hotel.

I couldn't find anyone else who knew Gordon Campbell, so on this first trip, the focus was on David Morales. I flew to Phoenix, his hometown, where Ayers had first come in the late eighties as a private investigator, to explore the shadow world of "El Indio."

Much of what we now know about Morales was dug up by Ayers on this initial investigation. He was mugged, had his briefcase stolen, and was continually under surveillance. But he located Walton, Carbajal and a possible witness to Morales at the Ambassador Hotel. True to his word, Brad now put me in touch with David Rabern.

***

David was now CEO of a million-dollar security firm, the most prominent in the Southwest. He was a highly respected figure in his industry, coauthoring a textbook for the certification of security professionals. We grabbed a discreet corner in a local restaurant and David sketched in how he came to be at the Ambassador Hotel that night.

In 1968, Rabern was an undercover operative in Los Angeles, freelancing for a number of different agencies, and specializing in concealed-alarm installation, sweeping buildings for bugging devices, and planting some of his own, often in a variety of disguises. He lived close to the Ambassador and had just worked on a short project in alarm systems with "a group of people ... that had worked for Central Intelligence":

And they had mentioned that, at the Ambassador Hotel -- they says, "They're going to have a big to-do there, you gonna be there?" and I said, "Yeah, I could be there." ... That's not an unusual thing for any of the agencies. Even police departments will give free tickets to functions and such as that, just to have their people in the audience.

I was walking across [the lobby] going towards the front doors when I heard the gun-shots and ... it was just like a little pop-pop-pop-popping sound that you could barely hear. Could [Sirhan] have done it alone? I don't think so. I don't think the man's makeup would have allowed him to do that in the first place. I think there was probably a lot of people involved. Why that never came out is a mystery still.


When Brad Ayers visited Rabern in the late eighties, he took the 1959 photo of Morales from his briefcase and got an instant reaction. "I told him I'd seen the guy on the premises. I didn't see him in the ballroom. I saw him out in the lobby area. In fact, I probably saw him several times. He was in and out."

When I played David the video clips, he instantly recognized "Morales" as the same man.

"Yes. I'll be darned .... Oh, that's him, yeah .... That's him .... They were certainly observing and collecting information," he said as "Morales" surveyed the room with a colleague.

I asked David if he recognized anyone in the photograph of "Campbell" and his swarthy colleague in the ballroom. "This man here, the bald one ... I think he was talking to Morales at one time .... "

"So you'd be sure then, that the man on the left in the photograph was talking to Morales at one point?" I asked.

''I'm almost certain, yeah .... You've got the military stance, arms behind their back; that's a dead giveaway." He laughed.

The video of Campbell confirmed the identification. While Rabern didn't know Morales and Campbell by name, he remembered seeing them at the hotel that night and connected them, seeing them talking together at one point.

But he also sounded a word of caution at this stage: "Because they're Central Intelligence doesn't make them bad guys automatically. They're out there protecting our country like everyone. By the same token, it doesn't mean they can't have turned bad."

We began to analyze how such an operation might have been put together. "Sirhan Sirhan was probably one of several that were armed and ready to take him. Sirhan Sirhan was, in my opinion also, a throwaway. He's what we call the shooter in the public's eye but who the real shooter was? This level here, you get a professional. And a professional, you'll never see. .. you'll never know anything except they were there, that's about it."

A second gun could be disguised: "We camouflaged firearms in all different kinds of configurations. Sometimes, they'd look like a day-timer ... purse-like situation. It'd show a zipper on the outside but it had Velcro and you could pop it open."

Would the assassin have used a silencer, so witnesses wouldn't hear the extra shots? "Strongly possible, yes. Silencers can be made out of all kinds of things, too. Maybe a book or something like that, could be inside that and could be muffled .... That would have been the proper way to do it, and just disappear. Not get out there like Sirhan Sirhan did, and start shooting his gun .... I mean that could have been to draw that away from the real shooter."

Overall, David thought it was an impressive presentation.

"Suspicion? High, high suspicion I can't deny that. Why they were doing the things that they were doing I'm surprised that that was never investigated. After all of these years, you'd think that someone would have noticed these things and done something about them."

***

While in Phoenix, I also interviewed Robert Walton, a good friend of Morales's who had also acted as his lawyer during the seventies. Now sixty-nine, Walton was struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's.

It was true, he told me, that Morales hated the Kennedys after the Bay of Pigs and saw them as rich, spoiled brats. David also hated Communists. When he went on a parachute jump one time, he found out some of his co-fliers were playing for the other side and he proceeded to cut the straps on their parachutes.

We discussed the drinking session at the Dupont Plaza in 1973, when Morales gave his "five-minute self-indictment" in the presence of Walton, his wife, Florene, and Ruben Carbajal. The tirade was sparked by an admission that Walton had worked for Kennedy as a volunteer.

"You did work for Kennedy?" asked Morales.

"Yeah, I did," said Walton.

"Well, that motherfucker ... ," raged Morales as he launched into a tirade. "He didn't hit anybody," recalled Walton, "but he was striding around the room and ... he was just out of control. I don't ever recall seeing him lose it like that before."

"And what was his actual comment then, that finished that?" I asked.

"Well, it was something like ... 'I was in Dallas when we got that motherfucker and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.' ... Just right out of the blue .... I mean, boom, and then, everybody was kind of stunned. I don't remember anything being said after that. Everybody was in my room and everybody else left.

"What it said to me was that he was in some way implicated with the death of John Kennedy and, let's go one step further, and also Bobby ... but there were no details."

"Did you ever talk to him about that subject again?" I asked.

"I never had the opportunity to risk having my nose broken." Robert laughed. He looked at the footage but couldn't say if it was Morales one way or the other. It had been a long time, and the quality of the images and his waning eyesight proved inconclusive.

***

The next day, I drove down to Nogales on the Mexican border to meet Morales's best friend since childhood, Ruben "Rocky" Carbajal. Now in his late seventies, Ruben was a pugnacious character, with a neat mustache and a silver tongue. We talked in the private bar of his home, bought from the police chief, on a hill overlooking the town. Ruben chain-smoked throughout, a bourbon lined up on the counter.

"They called him a man of a thousand faces," he began. "He was one of the most interesting men you ever want to meet." Ruben knew Morales by his nickname, "Didi." They grew up together in the barrios of Phoenix. David's father abandoned the family when he was five years old, "so he grew up with us, you know, in and out of our house all the time. We went through high school together. My parents wanted him to be with me to make sure nobody messed around with me, 'cause everybody's brother wanted to kick the shit out of me."

According to Ruben, David rose to the rank of brigadier general in the CIA and was fiercely patriotic: "He's what you call a hundred percent American all the way through -- you don't mess with him -- and he'll blow your ass apart."

Ruben talked me through Didi's exploits over the years: "Well, he's the one, him and Tony Sforza, that did up Che Guevara up there in Bolivia. Didi cut his head off; get that through your head."

After the death of Dan Mitrione, Morales was brought in to cleanse Uruguay of Tupamaros. "They went from door to door," said Ruben, knocking on the counter, "and as soon as they opened the door, they had to kill children, old men, children, old men, anybody that was there got killed, right down the line ... and that's how they gave the government back to the people .... "

"So they just wiped out all the leaders of the Tupamaros?"

"They wiped out their families and everybody," said Ruben. "All these holy people that think by talking to people, you gonna get it done; you gotta kill 'em.'"

From there, David went on to Chile to "overthrow old Allende" in 1973, allegedly stealing ten million dollars from the Chilean treasury in the process. Earlier that year, Walton and Carbajal had joined Didi for a drinking session at the Dupont Plaza. Ruben had his own take on the incident.

"They were sort of wanting some information about what happened down there, you know, at Dallas. And we were drinking and finally Didi ... let them know in a roundabout way, 'Well, we got the son of a bitch,' that's what he said. You don't have to be a brain to figure out what he meant, you know."

Ruben made it clear that Didi hated the Kennedys for going back on their word and withdrawing air support at the last moment at the Bay of Pigs, and he was sure Morales's comment was more than idle boasting -- "You don't make comments like that, if you don't know what's going on."

"Did he ever tell you anything else about Dallas?"

"No, I didn't ask no more. The more you ask, the less chance you got of living." Then Ruben launched into a tirade about Robert Kennedy, and it was easy to hear Morales echoed in his voice.

"And then I don't have no respect for that Robert, when he put down in the newspaper ... 'The blacks, take anything you want, it belongs to you.' What kind of a goddamn asshole ... all the ethnic groups we have in the United States, what about the rest of them, huh? I tell you, that man is crazy, he wants to start a civil war right here in the United States, with that stupid talk like that. And then he got knocked off in a hurry, didn't he?"

***

I asked Ruben about the Los Angeles part of David's confession. Bob Walton heard Morales say "I was in Los Angeles, when we got the little bastard," meaning Bobby.

"No. He was in Los Angeles but he didn't say 'We got him,' you know. That 'they got him.' Just a difference [in] the wording, you know."

Great, I thought. Back to Sandra Serrano country. "We shot him." "They got him." Did he think David was involved in the Bobby Kennedy shooting?

"No, he probably ... might have known behind the scenes what was going on, but that has never been clear to me, you know, exactly what happened."

"He didn't say 'we got the little bastard'?"

"No, he didn't say that. That wasn't his words at all. Not to me. Robert Walton might have interpreted it that way, but I didn't interpret it that way. 'Cause the only reason he'd be in that area at that moment, 'cause his daughters were married and one of them was living over there, you know."

***

But June of 1968 was too early for Morales' daughters to be married. His eldest, Rita (a pseudonym), was only sixteen, and the family was about to leave Boston to join Morales in Laos, where he'd been stationed for almost a year. If Morales was in Los Angeles, he wasn't visiting family, that's for sure.

***

When I showed the video clips to Ruben, he was instantly dismissive.

"See the figure in the white shirt here?" I said, pointing out the figure at the back of the room.

"No way. No way; that's not him at all."

"Is there any resemblance at all?"

"No."

I showed him the second clip.

"Well, that's the same person there was before. No, those are security guards there for Kennedy. I guarantee you he was no security guard for him. That's not him. I guarantee you it's not him."

Ruben's reaction puzzled Brad Ayers.

"I really don't know why Ruben would respond that way. I guess probably when confronted with a photograph, which would be pretty hard evidence, putting him on the spot, he may be reluctant to condemn his lifelong friend. He can live with the thought that Morales may have been involved in some way, almost be proud of it. But to ID him, that may be just too far a reach for him. And it doesn't surprise me."

***
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:33 pm

PART 2 OF 2

Bob Walton thought the interview "was a very difficult assignment" for Ruben. "He doesn't want to admit to dirty tricks or a murder committed by his friend and is still trying to protect his reputation. It's the legal problem of 'declaration against interest' -- not wanting to be caught up in a murder-accident investigation and keeping quiet about it."

Walton held firm -- David had definitely said "we" in relation to Bobby. He'd talked to his wife, Florene, about it a couple of times, and she had heard David say "we" for Dallas and Los Angeles as well. But photo identification was difficult -- "plus David was a master of disguise, so it's not easy to identify him in the first place!"

I pondered whether to believe Ruben or not. His denial of Morales in the video was immediate and convincing, but I found his shifting of "we got him" to "they got him" problematic. When Noel Twyman first asked Ruben about the Los Angeles part of the statement, he said "I don't remember that part right now." Ten years later, his memory seemed to have improved. The clincher for me was the suggestion that Morales was in Los Angeles to see family. I found this preposterous. Ayers's and Walton's thoughts on Ruben's dilemma were persuasive, and I concluded that he was still trying to protect his friend.

***

I was out of Morales leads for now, so my attention turned to Gordon Campbell. While much had been written about the "Big Indian," the only other book to mention Campbell, Deadly Secrets, used Brad Ayers as its main source. The authors added some new details, describing Campbell as a tall man with close-cropped silvering hair and a military bearing. He oversaw the maritime branch of JMWAVE, taking charge of all CIA naval operations in the Caribbean.

The Miami telephone book for 1962 and 1963 did list a Gordon S. Campbell at 10091 Sterling Drive, south Miami, but a public record search revealed that he died on September 19, 1962, age fifty-seven. Not our man.

It seemed the only way to discover the truth about Campbell at this late stage was to speak to others who knew him at JMWAVE. But that wasn't going to be easy. Very few seemed to know Campbell. Ted Shackley made no mention of him in his posthumously released autobiography, and I had no secondary confirmation that he was, in fact, deputy chief of station.

***

The more David Rabern thought about that night at the Ambassador, the more came back to him and the more he seemed willing to share over the next few months. He remembered seeing "Morales" out in the parking lot before the shooting, with two of the guys he'd worked with on the alarm project. He also saw the bald head of "Campbell" within fifteen minutes of the shooting, walking briskly back through the lobby toward the kitchen area.

He remembered a briefing meeting at a bank building on Wilshire Boulevard. Operatives were given packets of instructions for a particular assignment and he recalled seeing "Campbell" leaving the meeting as he was just coming in. I got the sense these operations were targeted at the antiwar movement and compatible with something like Chaos, but David wouldn't elaborate.

Rabern remembered seeing "Campbell" probably half a dozen times in a two-year period before the assassination, usually in a downtown police station environment, in the company of two men and a woman, all of whom he assumed to be LAPD officers.

The woman was in uniform and had a nice body and a vivacious personality; she wasn't beautiful, but she caught his attention. One of the guys was Mexican, in his early to mid-thirties, six-one, 200 pounds, and he talked to "Campbell." The other guy was Caucasian, six-two or six-three, 220 pounds. The two men associating with "Campbell" weren't wearing uniforms but were law enforcement and had a certain gait that showed they were carrying guns. He remembered "Campbell" wearing a light blue sweater and carrying a sidearm, which means he would have to have been with the police or in some official capacity.

***

Meanwhile, I was still trying to identify the other man standing with "Campbell" in the ballroom. To me, he had an undeniably Mediterranean look. As I researched possible colleagues of Campbell who bore these features, two figures from the Greek mafia within the CIA caught my attention -- deputy director Thomas Karamessines and George Joannides.

Karamessines's obituary photograph in the Washington Post quickly told me it wasn't him, but Joannides's notice from 1990 didn't carry a picture, and it seemed that no photograph of Joannides had ever been made public. Joannides had become something of a cause celebre in assassination circles, as outlined in a series of articles by Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley.

In 1976, after numerous scandals exposed unauthorized and illegal CIA covert operations, Congress appointed a House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate the JFK assassination. In 1978, as the committee's aggressive young investigators probed through layers of CIA records, the man the agency called out of retirement to act as their liaison to the committee was George Joannides. To the young investigators examining possible links between Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA, Joannides was a smart and highly efficient lawyer, but at no time did they suspect he had played a key role in the story of Lee Harvey Oswald fifteen years before.

***

Joannides was born in Athens in 1922 and grew up in New York City, graduating with a law degree from St. John's University in Queens. Joannides joined the CIA in 1951 and spent eleven years in Greece and Libya before a posting to JMWAVE in Miami as deputy to the chief of psychological warfare operations, David Atlee Phillips.

Joannides was a cosmopolitan man, fluent in French and Greek and competent in Spanish. His brother-in-law was George Kalaris, who would later succeed James Angleton as CIA director of counterintelligence.

In November 1962, CIA deputy director of plans Richard Helms handpicked Joannides to be the case officer for the most popular group of militant anti-Castro exiles in Miami, the DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil or Revolutionary Student Directorate).

David Phillips had been funding the DRE's anti-Castro propaganda campaign to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars a month and Joannides's job over the next year or so involved trying to dampen the group's military ambitions while encouraging their propaganda campaigns and intelligence collection. The DRE knew their case officer as "Howard."

On July 31, 1963, Joannides was promoted to chief of psychological warfare operations at JMWAVE, and the following week, Carlos Bringuier, the DRE delegate in New Orleans, began to report a man actively promoting Castro in New Orleans. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald. On August 5, Oswald walked into the DRE's local office and offered to train commandos to fight Castro. Four days later, a DRE supporter spotted Oswald on a street corner handing out pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the most prominent pro-Castro group in the country at the time. Bringuier and his friends went to confront this Castro double agent. As they angrily denounced him, a crowd gathered and police broke up the altercation.

Twelve days later, Bringuier and Oswald debated the Cuban revolution on Bill Stuckey's weekly radio show on WDSU, and Oswald revealed he had lived in Russia and advertised his Marxist credentials. All of this was fed back to "Howard."

As the DRE unveiled an ambitious new invasion plan, Ted Shackley recommended that all funds to the directorate's military section be cut off. Helms agreed, and on November 19, 1963, Joannides told the DRE that the agency was cutting off its support. Three days later, Kennedy was assassinated.

After Oswald's arrest, the DRE went public with details of Oswald's pro- Castro activism in New Orleans, setting the tone for early press coverage of John Kennedy's assassin. Did Joannides and the DRE conspire to create a Communist legend for Oswald? We still don't know.

***

In April 1964, Joannides left Miami and was transferred to Athens with a job evaluation that praised his performance as "exemplary." Joannides stayed in Athens until 1968 and was posted to Vietnam in 1970 to once again work for Ted Shackley, by now Saigon station chief. He returned to Washington in 1972 to work in the general counsel's office at CIA headquarters until he retired in 1976 to set up a practice in immigration law.

After his stint liaising with the HSCA, Joannides retired in January, 1979. He once told one of his children that he was skeptical of JFK conspiracy theories, but he did not explain why. His heart problems worsened in later years, and he died on March 9, 1990, at the age of sixty-seven. His obituary in the Washington Post made no mention of his twenty-eight years of CIA service, stating only that he had been a lawyer at the Defense Department whose assignments included service in Vietnam and Greece.

***

I was intrigued and called Jefferson Morley in search of a photograph of Joannides. There were none in the public domain, he said, and the Joannides family refused to give him one. I told him I thought I might have a photograph of Joannides at the Ambassador Hotel. These guys were master spies, he said. They wouldn't let themselves be photographed. He wasn't interested.

Undeterred, I began to e-mail the photograph to as many of those who knew Joannides as I could. Outside the CIA, the most objective place to start seemed to be the HSCA investigators who worked with Joannides in 1978. Former chief counsel G. Robert Blakey told me he had only limited contact with Joannides, but the two investigators who saw him most were two Cornell law students he had assigned to investigate Oswald and Mexico City -- Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez. "They had almost daily contact with Joannides."

Both men are still practicing lawyers -- Hardway in North Carolina, Lopez in Rochester, New York. I e-mailed them the photo, and the results were encouraging. Hardway's initial response was: "This could be him. Much younger in the picture than in the seventies, and it's been a long time." He suggested I talk to Ed Lopez, and I was stunned by his response -- Lopez was "ninety-nine percent sure" it was Joannides.

***

Next up was the DRE. Cofounder Juan-Manuel Salvat told me Dr. Luis Fernandez-Rocha was the main contact for Joannides. Dr. Fernandez-Rocha confirmed this in a telephone interview. He remembered meeting "Howard" once a month, and he liked him very much -- "he was very cordial and charming, a very well-educated man with excellent manners." His last contact with Joannides was at the end of 1963 or early 1964.

After my call, I e-mailed him the photograph, and when we spoke four days later, he came right to the point: "Regarding the photograph -- this is important. I cannot confirm or deny that this is him. The photograph is a little fuzzy and he looks much thinner than I remember. He has a different haircut and different glasses, but these things can easily change. Number two: I didn't know he had any involvement with Robert Kennedy. I didn't meet Robert Kennedy, and I have no idea of any connection between him and Robert Kennedy." He stressed that it was important I quote him this way, and at the time, the tension in his voice and choice of words gave the impression of a man with something to protect.

I also spoke to Robert Keeley, who had served as a political officer at the Athens embassy from 1966 to 1970 and later returned as ambassador. He recalled Joannides working downtown as a CIA officer. It was common for Greek Americans to come over with their language skills, often under joint U.S. military-AID cover, and Joannides was one of the more senior people there.

Keeley would meet Joannides once in a while at social gatherings, and their wives were good friends. But his response to the photo was inconclusive: "The photo is a bit fuzzy. I can't help you one way or the other. I cannot say that it is his image, and I can't say it isn't."

***

When I was finally commissioned to make the BBC story, I headed straight to Rochester to show the photograph to Ed Lopez in person.

Today, Lopez is a distinguished lawyer at Cornell University. He grew up a Puerto Rican in New York, and back in 1978, he was a twenty-two-year-old hippie law student, described by fellow investigator Gaeton Fonzi as "a brilliant free spirit with an infectious smile, long, curly locks, baggy jeans and flip-flops."

"I was a bit of a rebel," remembered Lopez. "Dan and I would dress up in cut-off shorts just below our crotch area and cut-off shirts and show up at the CIA in these outfits." The CIA was understandably suspicious of "these two little hippies coming in to look at the files to make a decision about whether they might have been involved in the assassination." They put the young law students under surveillance, and there was a white van parked regularly outside their apartment.

Blakey assigned Lopez and Hardway to examine Oswald's activities in Mexico City prior to the John F. Kennedy assassination, when he allegedly visited the Cuban and Russian embassies and made contacts in a city that was a hotbed of espionage at the time. Ultimately, "the Lopez report basically concluded that there was some type of a relationship between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald. Exactly what that relationship was we could never tell." What was his personal view? "I have no doubt in my mind that he was being run by someone at the CIA ... Was there a connection to the point where they were running the assassination? ... That we could not confirm."

***

Lopez first met George Joannides in the early summer of 1978, when Joannides was assigned as the new CIA liaison to the HSCA investigators. "Joannides was our point person, the guy who controlled what we could see and what we couldn't see at the CIA. He was probably in his mid-fifties .... He was a dapper guy, funny and affable ... five-eleven or so, in shape, with graying hair, slightly receding."

The HSCA knew practically nothing about Morales or Campbell at the time, and to Lopez, Joannides was nothing more than an extremely competent clerk providing access to the files. Joannides never disclosed his history with the DRE at JMWAVE, even though this was one of the areas the committee was investigating.

After Joannides died, Lopez finally found out about his past. "At first, I was shocked; then I was angry because I felt like we had been taken. And then, being a lawyer, I said, 'My God, this is obstruction of justice.' But the guy himself, he did his job perfectly."

Joannides never blanched as Lopez and Hardway discussed his past colleagues, and Lopez was very clear on Joannides's mission: "The CIA wanted someone who knew what had been going on back then to control what was made available to us.... How could we trust anything the CIA was giving us if the guy that was our point of contact, who controlled what we saw or didn't see, happened to have been a person who we would have investigated back then had we known who he was?"

***

When I showed Lopez the ballroom photograph in person, he seemed extremely confident of his identification: "When I look at this picture, to me it's a younger George Joannides. I couldn't say one hundred percent that it's him ... but I'm ninety-nine percent sure that it's George Joannides."

I had also found two additional photographs of "Campbell" and "Joannides" standing in the same position in the ballroom. These were taken from behind, and showed a third man beside them, with blond hair and horn-rim glasses. These new images also brought an immediate smile of recognition. "I don't mean to be funny, but I often saw the back of Joannides because he would come down to get us at Langley and we'd be following him. Again, it looks to me just the way George looked. Same posture, hair ... like I said, I'm ninety-nine percent sure that it's him."

Ed reflected on the photographs: "George Joannides is an enigma to me. After he died, when I heard that he'd been involved with JMWAVE, that he'd been involved with the DRE, and now looking at this photo ... it doesn't surprise me for a minute to find him at the Ambassador Hotel on the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot. If he was the level operative that he appears to have been through DRE and JMWAVE, if another operation was going on that was key, he would have been there."

Was there a benign reason why he might be at the hotel? "Can I give an alternative explanation for George Joannides being there other than to, like, run an assassination? God help us. The agency hated the Kennedy brothers. Every CIA operative I met from the early sixties hated John Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs. These are people who'll do anything for the good of their country ... and if it meant assassinating a second Kennedy to make sure that he didn't rise to power because he would be dangerous for the country, they'd do it."

***

Lopez was clear on what was needed now. "I think the key people at the CIA need to go back to anybody who might have been around back then, bring them in, and interview them. Ask: 'Is this Gordon Campbell? Is this George Joannides? Did you know about any operation going on? If you didn't, then why the hell were they there?'

"Do I expect that to happen? No. I expect a very short, pat answer. 'We don't know why he was there. It's a rogue element.' That's the way the CIA worked. Everybody was a rogue element because no one can know what everybody else is doing."

As we wrapped up, Ed said I should go visit his fellow investigator Dan Hardway and talk to him face-to-face; he had a phenomenal memory.

***

After interviewing Ed Lopez, I traveled to Washington, DC, to meet a still skeptical Jefferson Morley. Having invested ten years in the Joannides story, he was literally shaking as we sat at his kitchen table and I showed him the photographs in the ballroom and the alleged video of Morales and Campbell.

My own attempts to contact the Joannides family had met a wall of silence, but Morley planned to visit one of Joannides's daughters that weekend. For years, Morley has been involved in a laudable and protracted struggle to get the CIA to comply with the JFK Records Act and release Joannides's operational records from JMWAVE. He has been supported by a who's who of respected authors on the Kennedy assassination, a bipartisan group mixing Oliver Stone and Gerald Posner, the most famous proponent of Oswald as lone gunman. Although Joannides's wife is dead, Morley has courted the Joannides children during this period, believing that their cooperation would ultimately help lead to the records' release.

When he visited one of the daughters that weekend and showed her the main photograph in the ballroom, the response was a terse "No comment." Weeks later, a second daughter, now a superior court judge in Alaska, would give the same response. You had to wonder: If it wasn't their father in the photograph, why were they being so defensive?

***

While in Washington, I also visited Wayne Smith, who during twenty-five years with the State Department (1957-1982) served as executive secretary of President Kennedy's Latin American Task Force and came to know Morales well.

The moment Smith saw the bronzed figure at the back of the ballroom, he exclaimed, "That's him. That's Dave Morales."

"Really?" I said, surprised at the speed of recognition.

Smith gave a deep, visceral sigh, as if taken aback by the implications. "Yes, I'm virtually certain; is there anything [more]?"

I played the second, longer clip, and he watched intently. "Yeah, that's ... yeah, when he turns sideways, that's Morales. That's Morales."

Smith was intrigued and recounted his connection to Morales. "He worked in the CIA station in Havana when I was third secretary of the Political Section [from] fifty-nine until we broke relations in sixty-one." He saw him again a number of times after that, passing each other in corridors at the State Department and they had dinner together when Morales visited Buenos Aires in 1975.

"When I saw him in Argentina," Smith recalled, "we got into an argument about Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs and all that ... and what he said was that 'Kennedy got what was coming to him.'''

Did he give any indication that he might have been involved in some way? "He didn't," said Smith. "He said 'Kennedy got what was coming to him,' and he said it in a very determined way, as if he took great satisfaction in it, but no, he didn't."

I asked Smith if there was a benign explanation for Morales's presence at the hotel? "Well, I don't see any ... if the CIA or the Security Division of the Department of State ordered him to be there to protect Bobby Kennedy, that'd be one thing, but I don't think that's the case. And if they didn't, then there is no benign explanation I can think of."

Was Morales a suitable figure to protect Bobby Kennedy? "No!" Smith laughed. "No, I mean, in my wildest imagination, I couldn't imagine assigning David Morales to protect any of the Kennedys .... Bobby Kennedy is assassinated [and] David Morales is there? The two things have to be related."

***

Smith's ID of Morales was hugely significant, validating Brad's identification and supporting Brad's credibility in his ID of Gordon Campbell.

David Rabern had placed "Morales" and "Campbell" together. "Campbell" and "Joannides" were photographed together. It seemed three senior figures from JMWAVE who worked under Bobby Kennedy in the war on Castro were at the Ambassador Hotel the night he died, and they certainly weren't there to protect Kennedy.

I continued to seek further corroboration from four former CIA colleagues. Felix Rodriguez canceled, and Grayston Lynch was ill, but I did meet Tom Clines and Ed Wilson, Morales's closest associates in the agency, next to the late Tony Sforza, according to Ruben.

I met Clines at the Marriott in Tysons Corner, Virginia, a stone's throw from CIA headquarters. He didn't want to appear on camera, but we talked for an hour or so about his time at JMWAVE. He had started off training a select band of twenty-nine guys for the Bay of Pigs and went on to be the case officer for Cuban exile leaders such as Manuel Artime and Rafael Quintero. He worked in covert operations in Miami. Morales was his boss, and later in his career, he was Morales's boss. He said Gordon Campbell wasn't deputy chief -- that was a guy by the name of R.B. Moore, "a pretty ineffectual guy not worth talking about."

He described Chief of Station Ted Shackley as "a one-man brigade." He went to Clines, Morales, and Sforza for difficult missions. They'd attempt crazy operations that often ended disastrously, but a good few were successful.

Bobby Kennedy was seen as an irritant by the covert ops people because he had a back channel to the Cubans, who would skirt around the bureaucracy to get boats quickly by calling Bobby from a pay phone. Clines never met Kennedy personally but described him as overanxious to get results, complaining that the agency was slow and sidestepping them with the Cubans. He smiled when I asked if mobster Johnny Rosselli worked at the station but wouldn't answer directly.

When I first spoke to Clines, he brought up the "assassination of Kennedy Senior" at the end of the call. When I asked his opinion, he said he wouldn't discuss it on the phone, but in person, he didn't want to touch it either, dismissing Morales's hotel-room rant as "just bullshit."

As talk turned to the matter at hand, Clines fondly remembered Brad Ayers as a wild character who would bring snakes up from the swamps to show the women in the office. Then I showed him the video of Morales, twice. He said it looked like Dave but it wasn't him. "Dave was fatter and walked with more of a slouch," he said. "He would have had his tie down." It seemed an odd comment. To me, the "Morales" in the video did walk with a slouch and his tie down. Was this a coded way of saying it was him?

I also showed Clines the alleged photograph of Campbell and Joannides. He said he knew both men, and that it wasn't them, either. "Campbell was good to know," he added, "because he came from a rich family, but he wasn't a memorable guy -- if you gave him a gun for an operation like that, he was likely to shoot himself. That's why we sent him up to Canada, as the CIA liaison up there."

Clines discounted Brad's ID because he wasn't at JMWAVE very long, but he was surprised by Wayne Smith's. "Smith knew Dave, and he would know, but I don't think it's him."

By 1968, Morales was again working for Ted Shackley in Laos. Could Shackley have masterminded such an operation? "But he was in Southeast Asia," protested Clines. Supposedly, so was Morales. "Why don't you ask his wife, Hazel?" Clines said. "She knew everything."

It was a strange meeting. Clines's comments on Morales seemed ambivalent to me -- "It looks like him but it's not him." What does that mean? When I spoke to David Rabern later, he was sure Clines would have been briefed by the agency before the interview and suggested I take what Clines said with a pinch of salt.

***

A few days later, I met Ed Wilson in the boardroom of his attorney's office in Seattle. Wilson is currently suing the CIA for falsely imprisoning him for twenty-two years for selling explosives to Libya. Wilson has always insisted that the deal was an agency operation and that the CIA hung him out to dry. An appeals court in Houston freed him in 2004, and he is now suing for compensation.

Wilson appeared tall, as sharp as a tack, and very distinguished in a tweed jacket and neatly trimmed moustache. He was in his late seventies, worked out every morning, and was an engaging raconteur. Every Morales anecdote was accompanied by a disbelieving guffaw. He was clearly very fond of Dave.

They knew each other mainly in Washington from 1971 to 1976. When Dave was in town to go to language school with Clines, he would stay at one of Wilson's apartments. "He and Clines couldn't go a night without drinking. And Morales couldn't go to bed at night without getting laid."

Morales was fiercely loyal to Ted Shackley: "Shackley liked guys like Morales that would just do anything. If the operation was military, it would probably be Clines and Morales. In the Dominican Republic deal, the opposition had a radio station across the river. So Dave got his bag and rowed across and said, 'Hi, I'm Doctor Mendes, I want to visit my patient,' and pretty soon, the radio station just blew up." Wilson guffawed. "I tell you these stories because that's Dave, you know, he's a nutcase. He was a helluva character, a dedicated, loyal American; he really was. I don't know about the Allende thing, but I'm sure if Shackley was involved, he was involved 'cause they were, like, connected at the hip, you know."

But work always came above family. "Dave, one time, was working on an operation in a Miami safe house, and they were all around a table working on it, and Dave got a phone call, and he said, 'Is there anything I can do?' and listened -- ' No, nothing you can do.' He went on with the meeting. Come to find out that his kid had [fallen] in the swimming pool and was close to death and they pulled him back. When I think of Dave, I think of that story. What a coldblooded bastard. I would have got in my car and gone there, but not Dave. If there was nothing he could do, he continued with the meeting."

When it came to Dave's outburst at the Dupont Plaza, Wilson was as dismissive as Clines: "I think that comment was just Dave being a big shot. That's bullshit, you know."

Would he be capable of something like that? "He'd be capable, but what would be his purpose unless somebody [ordered] him which is probably what you're after, but I don't believe it.... He's too smart.... Why would anybody risk their whole career to do something off the record or illegal? ... You know damn well you're gonna get caught."

Finally, I showed Ed the video clips of "Morales" in the ballroom: "That's not Dave. No. He has negroid features; Dave didn't. Indian Dave had dark features, but he had Indian features .... The complexion's not that far off, but that's not Dave. That's not his mouth; that's not his eyes. That's not his nose. I'm pretty good on faces. I'd bet my life on it, that's not him."

***

It was a very definite "no" from a man with no agenda; but the strange thing was that Wilson didn't recognize Morales in the 1959 photo, either. His response to the photo of the two men standing in the ballroom was also interesting.

"I seen that guy with the glasses somewhere, but God, I can't tell you where for the moment .... The other guy with the bald head looks familiar too .... He looks a little like Helms, in a way. The other guy looks like a normal CIA spook. Doesn't have his cloak and dagger with him, but ..."

He guffawed again, the laugh of a man wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA for twenty-two years, freed of bitterness but with a well-honed sense of the absurd.

***

Wilson was free with his opinions and very persuasive, but he didn't know Morales in 1968 and he didn't recognize him in the earlier 1959 photo. Who could I trust? Two independent witnesses outside the agency, or close confidants of Morales, some still consulting for the CIA?

With the Morales ID, the scales were now finely balanced, but with the identifications of Campbell and Joannides at the hotel on the same night, a Morales look-alike talking to Campbell out in the lobby seemed too freakish a coincidence. I had to give Ayers and Smith the benefit of the doubt.

On balance, I still felt I was on the right track with my three suspects, so I aired the story in a segment on the BBC on November 20, 2006 -- Robert Kennedy's eighty-first birthday, had he lived.

Image
Two men, allegedly Gordon Campbell and George Joannides, stand in the Embassy Ballroom.

Image
"Campbell," "Joannides," and an unidentified third man.
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