Brad hoped my BBC film would be a "smoke-out," and in the months following its broadcast, much new information came to light on all three operatives allegedly at the Ambassador Hotel on the night Bobby Kennedy was murdered.
While blogs quickly picked up on the story -- and the Cuban government newspaper, Granma Internacional, gave it a ringing endorsement, splashed across the front page -- not a single U.S. media outlet followed it up.
First out of the gate with a critique online was Jefferson Morley. Within hours of the broadcast, perhaps to placate the Joannides family, he publicly declared the piece "unfounded and unfair ... to make such serious allegations on such flimsy evidence is irresponsible." This was the same guy who, the week before, told me he'd found the "no comment" of the Joannides family "telling."
The following day, we had a robust discussion and Morley amended his comments: "thinly-sourced can be true if the source is good ... [and Lopez's] near-certainty that Joannides appears in the photo ... has to be taken seriously. If Joannides was there, the implications are profound. The CIA must be compelled to abandon its JFK stonewalling and disclose fully about George Joannides' actions and whereabouts in 1963 and 1968."
***
As I worked on my BBC film, I was contacted by Brad Johnson, a senior news writer with a global television network based in the United States. Over the years, Brad had amassed, without doubt, the most comprehensive archive in existence of news coverage of the assassination. Two days after my BBC story aired, Brad contacted me with further sightings of my three CIA suspects.
Together, we reviewed every frame of film or video recorded at the hotel that night by the national networks, local television stations, and independent filmmakers -- almost a hundred hours' worth of material.
Thanks to his ingenuity and much dogged research, we found many more clips of the people we believed might be Morales and Campbell at the Ambassador Hotel that night. We were able to trace the movements of "Gordon Campbell" throughout the evening, with the help of his distinctive blue sports coat and receding hairline, and could also sketch in a rough chronology for "David Morales."
At 12:16 a.m., in the space of five seconds, Robert Kennedy and five others were shot in the pantry. Twenty-one seconds later, "Morales" is first spotted in the footage, not in the Embassy Ballroom, where I first thought, but at the back of the Ambassador Ballroom, one floor below. This makes sense. Kennedy was due to go downstairs for another speech. If he wasn't diverted into the pantry and Plan B had to be activated, "Morales" was ready and waiting.
At 12:47, "Morales" emerged from the pantry and walked into the ballroom among a group of police officers. Moments earlier, a Kennedy volunteer is seen blocking this doorway to the public. The sequence strongly implies that "Morales" is one of the investigators at the crime scene.
At 1:03, "Morales" is clocked comparing notes with the shorter man with the pencil mustache in the darkened ballroom. If this wasn't Morales, who was he? His behavior across all these clips was consistent with a plainclothes operative or undercover cop monitoring the situation, yet there was supposedly no police presence at the hotel at the time of the shooting.
***
British author and former school deputy principal Mel Ayton has devoted his retirement to shooting down conspiracy theories. He was soon taking poor-quality video-grabs of my BBC film and e-mailing them across the pond. JMWAVE veteran Grayston Lynch had been ill when I tried to interview him a few weeks earlier, but after the BBC broadcast, he recovered to tell Ayton that the men in his bootlegged images were not Morales and Campbell.
Lynch subsequently refused to speak to me. His wife, Karen, said Gray was furious at "conspiracy theorists," and in no mood to look at the new material. Her e-mails were friendly, funny but blunt:
.If you believe ANYTHING Bradley Ayers has to say on any subject concerning the CIA, I have some ocean front property in Kansas City I would like to try and interest you in. It always amazes me how these weasels ingratiate themselves with the media and have their disinformation spread so unwittingly. Ayers was drummed out of the Agency and has a real bone to pick with them. Sorry, you hit a nerve.
Happy Christmas, Karen
***
The Lynches' comments netted out to very little: an agency veteran unlikely to admit it was Morales, whatever the circumstances, and scorn for Bradley Ayers, a man I had come to trust implicitly, for all the vagaries of photo identification. And for the record, Ayers was not "drummed out" of the agency. He resigned his commission when he saw a close colleague thrown out of a helicopter, and his credibility cannot be questioned. Ted Shackley corroborated many key details in Brad's book, and Tom Clines fondly remembered him. Brad had been seconded to the CIA from the army but was not a contract employee, so he was not bound by the secrecy oath, as Clines and Lynch were. His whistle-blowing could not be so easily brushed off.
***
At this point, I thought I had run out of Morales's associates, but Ayton found two more through author Don Bohning, former Latin American editor for the Miami Herald. Manuel Chavez and Luis Fernandez were both in their late seventies and had worked out of the CIA's public office in Miami in the early sixties. For a few months, they worked alongside Dave Morales before he moved to JMWAVE.
Ayton had e-mailed "six sets of very grainy and dark photos" to Chavez, who tried to enhance two of the better ones in Photoshop and sent them on to Fernandez. This did not sound ideal for comparison purposes, so I contacted the extremely receptive Chavez and sent him a DVD of best-quality images to review instead.
Manny Chavez first met Morales in Caracas, Venezuela in February 1957. Chavez was the assistant U.S. air attache and Morales was assigned to the CIA office in the embassy. The families were close until Morales left in the wake of the coup in January, 1958.
Chavez saw Morales again in Miami in late 1961 when he was working out of the CIA's public office downtown for a few months before he moved to JMWAVE.
Manny said the 1959 photo "looks almost exactly as I remember Dave Morales," but some of the later photos of Morales in the seventies were foreign to both him and Luis -- "Could there have been another Dave Morales?"
***
Once my DVD arrived, Manny got to work immediately: ''After reviewing it alone twice, I then called Bernice, my Managing Director of 63 years, and ran it for her, also twice. We then carefully looked at it together and concluded it probably is not the David Morales that we knew in Miami and Caracas.
"Yes, there is some resemblance -- tall, dark complexion, but we both agreed that there are two essential differences. The David Morales we knew during 1957/58 and again in 1961/62 had a much rounder and darker face and a full set of black hair. The person in the photo has a receding hairline that I do not recall David Morales having."
On further analysis, Manny thought that the Morales he knew was also shorter and fatter than the man in the video. Manny then sent the DVD on to Luis Fernandez.
"I reviewed the DVD that you sent three times," he wrote, "and conclude that the person who is shown walking around in the crowd and then sticking his head around the corner of a partition is not David Morales with whom I worked in Miami."
Manny asked Luis if he had any doubts. "Definitely, he is not Dave Morales," said Luis. "This person seems taller, more slender and lighter color. Dave was fat, round faced and darker complexion, like a true Mexican Indian, whereas those of the man in the DVD are of an African-American."
"Shane, this is our honest opinion," wrote Manny. "We have no reason to withhold or cover-up any information on the identity of David Morales. Had Bernice and I had any doubts, we would have said so, and I am sure that Luis Rodriguez feels the same way. Rest assured I will try to help you get the truth to the best of my ability, even if I later learn that I may have been wrong."
Manny continued to help me get to the bottom of things, and the candid, guileless generosity of both him and Luis made me seriously reconsider the ID of Morales for the first time.
***
I also followed up with Felix Rodriguez, who had worked with Morales for several months in Vietnam. "Last time I saw Dave Morales was in early 1972 [when] I visited him in Na Trang. I saw the clip and definitely that is not Dave Morales. I scanned the picture you sent me and I sent it to my former supervisor in Vietnam. He also agrees with me that the man in the picture is not Dave Morales."
Clines's former supervisor was Rudy Enders, a colleague of Morales at JMWAVE. "I mentioned to him the name of Gordon Campbell and he knew him well since Gordon was his boss in Miami, but for your information, Gordon Campbell died in 1962 at the CIA facility in Miami from a massive heart attack and my friend was there when it did happen. You better check your sources on that. This will be easy to verify by you with Gordon's family or the agency."
Well, the agency refused to verify the identities of previous employees, so they weren't going to be any help. But I wondered how Gordon Campbell could have died in 1962 if Bradley Ayers met him in 1963? Tom Clines never mentioned him dying; he said they'd sent him up to Canada.
"I just talked to Rudy," Felix replied, "and he assured me that Gordon Campbell died in front of him; he was one of the people who tried to revive him. He said Bradley Ayers was in training and did not work with Gordon Campbell and if Tom Clines said that, he was probably thinking of someone else, since Gordon Campbell died right in front of him. Just for your info, another retired agency officer under Rudy at the time told him that he can attest that Brad Ayers arrived in Miami long after Gordon Campbell died. He read Brad's book and said he thought it was ... all lies and fabrication. I guess your source is not very reliable. Felix."
Clearly, these old agency hands had no liking for Brad, but this account of Campbell's death didn't make sense.
Did Brad just make up all those details about Campbell in his whistle-blowing book in 1976? Any kind of fabrication would have made it easy for agency veterans to instantly destroy his credibility and defeat the purpose of the book. That didn't make sense. It was curious that former colleagues had waited thirty years to start attacking a work Shackley and Clines had previously corroborated. I seemed to have touched a nerve.
***
But as I began to edit my feature documentary, I was out of time and money to do any more research in the States. Then, just before Christmas, I received a very excited call from journalist David Talbot, who was completing his first book, Brothers, on Robert Kennedy's response to his brother's death. Talbot was intrigued by this new evidence and had secured funding from the New Yorker magazine to follow up my investigation. His coauthor would be Jefferson Morley, who admitted "I spoke too soon in November."
***
It was a risk to share my research with other journalists, but if I didn't have the resources to carry the investigation further, I was glad they did. I sent David what video and photographs I had so they could verify and perhaps build on my findings with the best materials available. Talbot and Morley hit the road to investigate my story over the next six weeks, and David called with updates along the way. Their initial focus was on Joannides.
They started off knocking on doors in Washington, brandishing the ballroom photograph to aging associates in doorways to a chorus of denials. But the Joannides family themselves remained tight-lipped, sticking to a frosty "no comment."
***
Next stop was North Carolina. Talbot and Morley took HSCA investigator Dan Hardway out to lunch and had the face-to-face meeting Ed Lopez had recommended. While at first Hardway hadn't wanted to get involved, now he opened up and said, yes, the man in the photo was Joannides.
I called Hardway several weeks later, and he still clearly remembered his days at the HSCA with Lopez. "We were arrogant young kids, trying to intimidate CIA clerks into giving us records." Joannides was brought in to get them under control and slow the process down. He totally changed the access program. Hardway remembered him as "imperious, with a contemptuous look." He saw Joannides only two or three times at most.
"When I first looked at that photograph," he said, "I thought, 'That's not him.' But then I thought, 'I'm fifty-four now and Joannides was fifty-four when I knew him.' I realized how quickly your appearance changes at that point in your life, added to the fact that Joannides had heart trouble."
So while he couldn't be positive, he told me his exact words to Talbot and Morley, from the look of the man at the Ambassador and the way he was standing, was that "he could very well be the guy that I remember -- I'd be surprised if it wasn't him."
***
Ed Lopez reconfirmed his identification to Morley and Talbot, so as they traveled down to Florida, the congressional investigators said it was Joannides, while Washington friends said it wasn't. In Miami, they quickly found another member of the DRE who recognized Joannides. Isidro "Chilo" Borja was the military director of the DRE and now runs an air-conditioning business in Miami. As he later confirmed to me, he met Joannides only a couple of times, forty years earlier, but yes, the man in the photograph looked like Joannides.
The last leg of Talbot and Morley's journey took them to see Joannides's former station chief in Saigon, Tom Polgar. Word came back that before Talbot and Morley mentioned his name, Polgar identified Joannides in the photograph. Polgar also identified the blond man in horn-rimmed glasses in the other ballroom photographs as James Critchfield, the CIA's chief in the Middle East at the time.
This was extraordinary. But a couple of weeks later, according to Talbot, Polgar realized the import of what he'd said and backtracked. He no longer thought it was Joannides.
I called Thomas Polgar to clarify all of this. He was now eighty-five years old, a very friendly, lucid, open man with a strong Hungarian accent. He had looked up my story on the Internet after Talbot and Morley's visit and recalled their meeting. They had briefed him on what they wanted to talk about -- namely, George Joannides, James Critchfield, and David Morales.
Polgar didn't know Morales, but Joannides had worked for him as a branch chief in Saigon for most of 1972. When he was shown the ballroom photographs, Polgar told Talbot and Morley -- and later confirmed to me -- that the man at the Ambassador was "not incompatible" with the Joannides he knew in Saigon, but he couldn't positively identify him.
Polgar identified the third man as "not incompatible with James Critchfield." He first met Critchfield in 1949 and would have seen him again in 1968 at one of the group meetings of senior CIA staff. Polgar left Washington for South America around that time, while Critchfield was in charge of the Middle East and Germany.
Even if it was Joannides in the photograph, Polgar didn't see any great significance. "Politically interested people were always attracted by free drinks at a party for a big primary. There was no Internet then; it was a big social occasion. A lot of agency people traveled commercially through Los Angeles en route overseas, and the place to stay was the Ambassador. Joannides could have been on home leave." He advised me to check the registered guests at the hotel. ''A senior officer like Critchfield wouldn't travel on a false passport and would have registered under his real name."
I asked if Joannides's presence could suggest something darker. "If it was a planned assassination, they wouldn't have been within a thousand miles of there," Polgar said, adamant that senior officers would not have been involved in something like this.
***
In the early seventies, Critchfield married his third wife, Lois, herself a CIA officer. When he got back to Washington, Jeff Morley showed her the photograph, but she denied it was her late husband. He also contacted Timothy Kalaris, son of the former CIA counterintelligence chief and nephew of Joannides. "That is not my uncle; I can tell you that," said Kalaris. "I don't know how anybody who ever knew him could say that's him."
***
While Talbot and Morley were on the road, the death of legendary CIA operative E. Howard Hunt was announced, and a few weeks later, his memoir, American Spy, was published. Hunt called Morales a "cold-blooded killer ... possibly completely amoral" and on March 21, Rolling Stone magazine ran an interview with Hunt's eldest son, St. John, titled "The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt."
In 2003, Hunt thought he had months to live. He was bedridden with lupus, pneumonia, and cancer of the jaw and prostate, and gangrene had forced the amputation of his left leg. As he faced death, he spoke to his son about the planners of the JFK assassination. He scribbled a crude diagram connecting LBJ at the top to senior agency figures Cord Meyer and Bill Harvey (who first brought Morales to JMWAVE). The arrows continued down to the names "David Morales" and "David Phillips." A line was drawn from Morales to the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."
Hunt had worked with Morales and Phillips on the Arbenz coup in Guatemala in 1954. Phillips recruited Joannides as his deputy in the psychological warfare branch at JMWAVE and worked closely with Morales throughout his career. Morales admitted to Ruben Carbajal and Robert Walton that he was in Dallas, and before he died, so, famously, did Phillips. He called his estranged brother, trying to make his peace, and his brother asked, "Were you in Dallas on that day?" "Yes," said Phillips, and his brother hung up.
***
As the Hunt circus played out in the media, the last leg of David Talbot's trip took him to meet the two eldest daughters of Morales, Rita and Sandra (a pseudonym). A few months later, I spoke to them myself in ninety-minute conversations, during which they talked openly about the legends that have grown around their father.
Morales joined the army at twenty, in April 1946, and was sent to Germany three years later, to be based at the European Command in Munich. Within a year, the CIA's intelligence chief in Germany, Richard Helms, requested clearance for Morales to "be enrolled for basic cryptographic training." Helms would rise to CIA director by the time Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Joan Kerrigan was half Irish and half Scottish and grew up in Boston. After college, Catherine Gibbs Secretarial sent her to work for the CIA in Germany, and there she met and married Morales in March 1951. Their first daughter, Rita, was born the following year, and Joan's boss became Rita's godfather and recruited Morales as a contract agent for the CIA.
A second daughter, Sandra, was born fifteen months later, but when the family came back from Germany in October 1953, her maternal grandfather, a first-generation Kerrigan, didn't meet them at the airport because he didn't approve of the mixed-race marriage.
According to Rita, Morales joined the army "because he was dirt-poor, everyone else was joining and it seemed a way out" of the barrios in Phoenix. "If he hadn't met our mother and joined the CIA, he would have left the army at the end of his tour and gone back to Arizona. He felt he got lucky and owed his good fortune to the company and would never have gone rogue or jeopardized his status."
After returning to the States, Morales spent the next ten months on PB Success, planning the Arbenz coup in Guatemala, and soon became a permanent CIA employee. After a posting in Venezuela, he was transferred to Batista's Cuba in May 1958, as an attache at the U.S. embassy. On Sundays, Morales would take his kids into the office, and they'd play on the typewriters.
There were eight kids in the family -- seven of whom are still alive -- and they lived with Morales during all his postings except Vietnam (his family was part of his cover). Growing up, Morales's daughters remembered their father as a stern disciplinarian with a hot temper. "It wasn't a democracy. It was a monarchy and he was in charge." He was a distant workaholic. "He didn't strive to know us," remembered Rita. "I never took any money for college because I would be tied down by him .... He had a chip that he had to work harder being Hispanic, but when he wasn't drinking, he was a good guy."
Morales never discussed politics, and they found out only late in his life that he voted Republican. But Sandra clearly remembered her Bostonian mother going to vote in 1960, wanting Kennedy to win.
In October 1960, the family moved to Miami, where they stayed for the next five years. Morales grew very close to the Cuban exiles as he was put to work on JMARC, a Cuban invasion plan that would end so disastrously at the Bay of Pigs.
***
Rita was in sixth grade when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. She remembered her father being home that evening and showing no reaction to what had happened. He never spoke about the Kennedys. Sandra thought he was home that evening but was less certain. She couldn't see him as a shooter in Dallas, though: "He was a wingtip-and-white-shirt guy. I always saw him in a suit .... I never saw him with weapons or target shooting."
If he wasn't a shooter, could he have masterminded the operation? "Who knows?" said Sandra. "I've no knowledge of that. Just he worked for the CIA, and they probably did a lot of stuff."
The family had heard about the recent Hunt revelations through a brother-in-law. Could Morales have been at a planning meeting for the assassination? "He might have been there," said Rita, "but who were the others? He didn't organize it. Who was above him? If my father got a direct order to do it, I'm sure he did it. He knew the type of people who could get the job done."
***
In June 1965, Morales was posted to Peru. His own cover history statement reads: "I was detailed to the Agency of International Development (AID) as a Public Safety Advisor. After attending the International Police Academy, I was assigned as one of two senior public safety advisors to the Peruvian National Police (Guardia Nacional) as a counter-insurgency advisor." This was the same program used by Pena and Hernandez.
CIA records indicate that Morales stayed in Peru until February 1967 and shipped out to Laos in late 1967, where he would be reunited with Ted Shackley as a "community development officer," again under AID cover. The gap in his CV between these postings fits the time frame of the search for Che Guevara perfectly. The hunt formally began in late April, when sixteen Green Berets were sent over to train the Bolivian search team. Guevara was captured and shot on October 9.
Morales's daughters said he was in Laos for about a year before the family followed. He would come home for a month at a time and be gone for five. He built them a house, and Rita remembered arriving in Vientiane on July 4, 1968. It took them two weeks to get there, traveling through Japan and Hong Kong with their father. Sandra confirmed these dates. She was going to school in Massachusetts at the time of the RFK assassination. School got out around June 20; then they left for Laos. Morales met them in Japan, and they spent a week there before traveling through Hong Kong and Thailand to Pakse.
Morales never left Laos afterward, so Rita didn't think he could have been in Los Angeles, but these dates place the beginning of their trip East two weeks after the assassination. Sandra thought that Morales would have been in Laos on June 5, and he was the boss, so it wasn't like he could disappear for long periods without it being noticed. But the family was not with their father until at least two weeks after the shooting of Robert Kennedy.
The family stayed in Laos for a year and then moved back to the States. Morales went on a two-year tour to Vietnam in October 1969, and when he came back, he'd go on three-month temporary assignments to places such as Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina -- supporting Ruben's tales of the Morales officially retired on July 31, 1975, but he continued to consult for the company. He bought a place in Flagstaff but his doctors said he couldn't handle the altitude, so they moved out to Wilcox, Arizona, and lived in a mobile home while building a new house on 186 acres of land seventeen miles outside of town. Sandra debunked stories that the house was alarmed like a fortress -- there were no alarms, and they never locked the doors.
***
In January 1978, Rita had her first son, Morales's first grandchild. They went to Wilcox to see him in March, and after the trip, Rita told her sisters he wouldn't live much longer. He was coughing badly, smoked a couple of packs a day, "drank horribly" (he was an alcoholic), and "ate terribly."
Morales finally died in May 1978 of a massive heart attack brought on by his alcoholism and an existing heart condition. His daughters emphatically stated that his death was not suspicious. An autopsy requested by Sandra showed that one of his ventricles was enlarged.
***
"The company" contacted the family in the "eighties or nineties" to ask if they could publicly release Morales's personnel file, but the family had a meeting and said no, because all their names were in the file. Many of Morales's records were finally released in the late nineties under the JFK Records Act.
***
When it came to the man at the Ambassador, both daughters were clear. They did not think it was their father.
Rita thought her father was more broad-shouldered than the guy in the video and had a very dark complexion, with stronger Indian features. The man at the Ambassador looked African American to her, with a "cafe au lait complexion" and a higher hairline. "My father always had a full head of hair; it never even thinned before he died. It was gray when he came back from Vietnam but black before then, and he always wore a heavy mustache."
Sandra also pointed out noticeable differences: "The way he turned his head doesn't look like my father. He has a pointier nose, he's younger, and the bottom of his face is different. My father had broad, full lips; a broad nose, almost flat, and was very dark skinned, darker than the guy in the video." She thought the man at the Ambassador looked like a light-skinned black man. Her father was five-eleven but this guy was taller, and by 1968, her father had salt-and-pepper hair and a heavy "walrus" mustache.
I had expected Morales's daughters to be defensive, but they weren't that way at all. Rita had done a lot of research on her father, and both daughters were familiar with Gaeton Fonzi's book The Last Investigation. "He may have done a lot of stuff I don't want to know about, but those were the times," Rita said. But she was annoyed at the legends that have grown up around her father. She said Ruben Carbajal was "full of shit and delusional -- he and my father were so drunk, they could have been saying anything." Her mother was now in her eighties -- "she has good days and bad days but generally she doesn't want to talk about it. I don't think she'd talk to you."
When we spoke, Rita's son -- the grandson Morales saw before his death -- was now grown up and preparing to ship out to Iraq. He'd inherited his grandfather's intelligence and personality, she said. He'd watched my BBC story on the Internet and said it didn't look like his grandfather.
***
When Sandra first met David Talbot, she showed him a family photo taken in Laos during the year after the RFK assassination. It convinced Talbot and his assistant that "the Morales in the picture (who looks very similar to other published photos of Morales) is not the Ambassador man." But Sandra didn't want to release a family photo to the media or get involved, so I had to take David's word for it.
The mixed evidence he found on his trip led the New Yorker to pass on the story. Talbot concluded, "I still wouldn't be surprised if it turns out there was an intelligence operation at the Ambassador that night. It just needs a lot more reporting to pin it down. And unfortunately, as is often the case on Kennedy investigations, Jeff and I ran out our thread. I do believe that Morales probably played some role in the RFK killing (and certainly did in the JFK plot). But the Ambassador photo story, to me, is a blind alley."
***
A couple of months later, after my discussion with Sandra, she realized the importance of photographs of her father in laying the story to rest. She didn't want to release the family photo but found three others from the same time period and sent them to me and David. One was a tourist snapshot taken in Cuzco, Peru, in 1966 or 1967, Sandra thought. It shows an overweight Morales with a mustache, salt-and-pepper hair, and a high hairline.
The two other photographs were from Morales's tour in Vietnam (1969-1971), three or four years later. Morales wears a bolo and has radically slimmed down.
The flat, distinctive nose and high hairline are the consistent features across these photographs, but if you weren't looking for a match, the Morales in Peru and the Morales in Vietnam seem like two different people. It's quite bizarre how Morales seems to have changed so much from one year to the next.
When I compared these photographs to the video of the man at the Ambassador, my gut reaction was the same as Talbot's. It didn't seem to be the same person.
But when I sent these new photographs to Bradley Ayers and Wayne Smith, it merely reinforced their previous identifications. They accepted that these were authentic pictures of Morales yet were equally sure he was the man at the Ambassador.
***
I was subsequently contacted by Morales's son, Frank (a pseudonym) who had seen my film on YouTube: "My initial impression is the person you identify as my father is not him, the gentleman seems to have a lighter skin complexion, his hair does not seem to match nor his facial features. His build is also not heavy enough to match my father's during that time period ... I would like to assist you in your quest for the facts, to include providing you photos of my father during that time period."
When I sent Frank a DVD of the video clips of his father, it confirmed his initial impression: "It is not my father. I believe the person shown is of African-American heritage, he seems to have short curly hair, my father's hair was wavy. Also the depicted individual has a smaller chin and a lighter complexion than my father. He seems taller than my father, who was 5ft 11-1/2 inches, and that person has a smaller build than my father."
***
Photo identification is notoriously difficult, and obviously I never met David Morales. These images are of insufficient quality for biometric testing, so it comes down to a judgment call. While I have great respect for the identifications of Ayers and Smith, when I look at the photographs objectively, the man in the photo at the Ambassador seems to me a different person from the man in the photos provided by the Morales family. It can be argued that his family and former colleagues have a vested interest in protecting his name, but my sense from the family, Manny Chavez, Luis Rodriguez, Ed Wilson, and, even now, perhaps Ruben Carbajal, is that they were giving me their honest opinion.
But while I may have misidentified David Morales in the video, that does not mean he wasn't at the Ambassador Hotel. I simply identified a different person. While I greatly appreciate the openness and wealth of biographical detail shared by the Morales family, they couldn't account for their father's whereabouts on June 4-5, 1968, and the CIA has declined to provide Morales's travel records.
The fact remains: Morales said he was in Los Angeles the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. Bob and Florene Walton heard him implicate himself in the shooting, and Ruben Carbajal's suggestion that he was visiting his daughter was clearly not correct. But where do you go with that?
***
When Sandra changed her mind and released the photos, she asked that they not be attributed to the family because "that would start other stories." Unfortunately, when Talbot and Morley published them online in July 2007 in an article detailing their investigation, they credited Morales's daughters.
The same article also saw the release of the first alleged photos of Joannides. Two prints showed him at a CIA party in Saigon in June 1973, five years after the assassination and before he met Lopez and Hardway.
Morley noted, "Joannides wears glasses as did the man in the BBC report, but he has a more pointed jaw, larger ears, a different hairline, and a more olive complexion. The CIA declined to release Joannides' travel records. Most likely, he was in Athens in June 1968."
But when I showed the new photos to Dan Hardway, his view remained unchanged. He found the two sets of photos compatible with each other and the man he knew in 1978. He'd still be surprised if the man at the Ambassador wasn't Joannides. Ed Lopez didn't know what to think as he tried to reconcile two images of a man he knew thirty years before.
***
While the Morales ID was in grave doubt and the Joannides ID was under question, very little had emerged regarding Gordon Campbell. Rudy Enders had told me he died of a massive heart attack in 1962, and now another JMWAVE officer, Mickey Kappes, told David Talbot the same story. I knew that Kappes and Enders were neighbors in Florida -- was this a "red herring"?
No, it seemed legitimate. Jeff Morley dug up a Miami Herald obituary from September 21, 1962, for a Colonel Gordon S. Campbell, a World War II veteran who moved to Miami from Washington twenty years earlier and was a maritime consultant. He was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. This was the same man I'd previously found listed in the Miami phone book.
Enders said Campbell was "a yachtsman and army colonel who served as a contract agent helping the agency ferry anti-Castro guerrillas across the straits of Florida .... I was right there when he died," he told Morley. "He was getting a drink at the drinking fountain [at JMWAVE].... He stood up and started shaking, and he collapsed and we tried to revive him. We gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation and it just didn't work. It was a real bad heart attack."
Campbell's death certificate, which identified him as a "maritime adviser," states that he passed away on September 19, 1962. Morley and Talbot concluded, "He could not have been at the scene of Bobby's Kennedy's assassination on June 5, 1968, because he died in 1962."
***
But this was an extraordinarily pat statement. Consider the facts: Colonel Gordon S. Campbell died in September 1962 at JMWAVE in Miami at the age of fifty-seven. In the summer and fall of 1963, Bradley Ayers worked closely with a man who introduced himself as "Gordon Campbell," as meticulously detailed in his book. This man was forty years old and could not have been fifty-seven, according to Brad. He was known around the station as "Gordon Campbell" and was the man Ayers later recognized at the Ambassador.
What's so strange about this is that while Campbell supposedly died before Bradley Ayers arrived in Miami and was much older than the man Ayers knew, the profile in the obituary -- a maritime consultant -- fits the man Ayers knew precisely.
Why had Tom Clines told me that after JMWAVE, Campbell was sent to Canada to act as the CIA liaison there? Neither he nor Grayston Lynch mentioned anything about Campbell dying of a massive heart attack in 1962 -- something you might expect regulars at the station to remember.
Had Bradley Ayers fabricated his entire association with Campbell, as first published in 1976, predating my investigation by thirty years? If he was going to invent a case officer for his book, why choose a guy who had died of a massive heart attack the year before he arrived?
It didn't make sense. The possibility that Ayers had invented his "Gordon Campbell" seemed highly unlikely, since so much of his book had been authenticated over the years. Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, and official CIA records all confirmed his service at JMWAVE.
Perhaps there were two Gordon Campbells. Or perhaps the dead man's name was used as a cover identity by the man Ayers knew, as was common at the agency. Either way, I needed to find out if the man Brad knew at JMWAVE was really the man at the Ambassador.
***
I went back to the new sightings of "Campbell" in the footage located by Brad Johnson.
At 11:29 p.m., a burly man in a mustard-colored coat called out "Mike," and "Campbell" joined a group at the back of the ballroom, shaking hands, laughing, and apparently gesturing at the TV cameras behind him. At 11:52, Campbell walked toward the exit with a colleague, but he was back among the same group at the back of the ballroom as Kennedy made his speech.
As Kennedy left the stage, the crowd began to disperse, and a minute or so later, Kennedy was shot. As cries from the pantry ignited panic in the Embassy Ballroom, we see "Campbell" walk forward from the back of the room toward the commotion. It's clear he was not coming from the pantry but had been watching the speech from the back of the ballroom. The Latin man with the mustache had also been watching the speech, a little closer to the stage. When I obtained a new, clean transfer of the original "Campbell" footage, it was also clear that he was holding his right hand across his chest as he walked through the room but his hands were empty. There was no container and no disguised weapon. Why he held his hand across his chest and why the Latin man was waving toward an exit remain a mystery.
At 12:52 a.m., "Campbell" was still in the Embassy Ballroom, listening to interviews with witnesses Booker Griffin, Kristi Witker, and Cap Hardy.
***
When I showed Bradley Ayers this footage, it reinforced his identification of Campbell. The stance, bearing, behavior, and facial expressions all called to mind the man he knew at JMWAVE. While to me Campbell seemed jovial and at ease, Brad read him as nervous, in anticipation of something.
But who was the group with Campbell? Why the seemingly jovial mood? I had seen this group before in a photograph taken just before Kennedy's speech and included in the police investigation files. The LAPD had circled a number of these men and written their names on the back of the photograph.
A man similar to "Campbell" was shown in profile, but his hairline seemed a little different, and at first I disregarded him. Seeing "Campbell" in this new footage, I realized this was also him in the police photograph.
The LAPD identified him as Michael Roman, and the burly companion who called out "Mike" was his brother Charles. The group were salesmen for the Bulova Watch Company, attending a regional sales conference at the hotel from Monday, June 3, to Thursday, June 6. Twenty-three Bulova guests were registered at the hotel, the largest corporate group in residence. Michael D. Roman, it turned out, was vice president and national sales manager of Bulova.
***
Roman was finally interviewed by the FBI on November 26 while attending a seminar at Harvard: "He stated that he was in the Embassy Room at the hotel around midnight [during the speech and] remained in the room when Kennedy and a group departed and went through the kitchen area. Roman stated he heard the shooting and was subsequently advised Kennedy had been shot. Roman had never seen Sirhan previously, and had no reason to believe anyone else was involved in the shooting."
The weekend after the assassination, Roman was in Chicago for a divisional meeting, giving sales tips to the Chicago Times. According to an article in the Business section, he commanded an ad budget set to rise to seven million dollars.
Was Roman a legitimate businessman, crisscrossing the country to regional sales meetings and by chance winding up at the Ambassador? Or were Roman and Campbell the same person? Sales manager at Bulova was an ideal cover identity -- the sales convention gave him every reason to be at the hotel in the days leading up to the shooting.
***
I started to research Michael D. Roman, immediately coming across his obituary. He shared a birthday with Robert Kennedy -- born on November 20, 1918, and died suddenly on December 22, 2002.
The New York Times turned up several articles on Roman, the most interesting dated August 3, 1964. Under the headline "Vice President Named by Bulova Watch Co." appeared a photograph of Michael D. Roman, instantly recognizable as the man at the Ambassador: "The election of Michael D. Roman as a vice president of the Bulova Watch Company was announced over the weekend by Gen. Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the watch manufacturer."
***
Roman's promotion was announced by General Omar Bradley? Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley were the only surviving five-star generals in the army. Campbell was working for Bradley, for a watch company that was having its sales conference at the hotel where Kennedy would be assassinated? It boggled the mind.
***
In Bradley's autobiography, A General's Life, he told how his connection to Bulova started. For two years after the war, Bradley was head of the Veterans Administration and took a special interest in the highly successful Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, which provided free training for disabled veterans, and guaranteed work placements at American jewelry stores.
Bradley visited the school often and became close friends with founder Arde Bulova and his brother-in-law, Harry D. Henshel, who was vice chairman of the company and had received a Bronze Star for organizing the airlift of supplies for Bradley during the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1949, Bradley became the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepping down in August 1953 to become chairman of Bulova Research and Development Laboratories, a subsidiary of the Bulova Watch Company devoted to the development of precision defense items.
Bulova had just built a state-of-the-art ten-million-dollar factory in Jackson Heights, Queens, focused on secret defense research. Bradley would advise Bulova scientists on military needs, and while Bulova continued to make jeweled watches, clocks, and radios, defense work accounted for 40 percent of sales. When Arde Bulova died in 1958, Bradley was named chairman of the Bulova Watch Company, and in fiscal 1959 the company delivered "more than twenty million dollars in defense items to the armed forces on sales of fifty-eight million dollars."
***
Over the next eight years, Bradley helped the company double annual sales, lobbying the Senate Armed Services Committee to maintain tariffs on watch imports so that the United States would not become "the only major power without a watch manufacturing industry." He argued that the watch industry was essential to national security and made significant contributions to national defense and space technology.
In the summer of 1967, Bradley went to Vietnam on assignment for Look magazine to report on the war. After a two-week tour of the battlefront, Bradley was convinced that Vietnam was "a war at the right place, at the right time and with the right enemy -- the Communists."
After a winter at the races in Southern California, he bought a new custom-designed home on a hilltop in Beverly Hills and was one of the "Wise Men" advising Johnson on his war strategy through the spring of 1968. Bradley's diaries at West Point show that he traveled to the Bulova offices in New York on May 31, 1968 and returned to California on the evening of June 6.
I don't associate a much-loved war hero with a political assassination lightly, but if Campbell was operating undercover as Michael D. Roman, Bradley was a powerful connection.
***
The problem was that Michael D. Roman seems to have been too busy selling watches to take on extra work for the CIA. He'd worked his way up through the jewelry industry since his days carrying sample bags for the Gruen Watch Company in Chicago in 1936, at age seventeen. After military service in World War II, he became Midwest sales manager for the company before joining Bulova in the early sixties.
In 1976, Roman became chairman and executive director of the Retail Jewelers of America, the national trade association for the industry. On his retirement in 1995, he was hailed as "a giant in our industry" and, shortly before his death, was honored by the American Gem Society with a Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the industry's highest honors.
***
Michael Roman's son was quite surprised to receive my call but extremely open and cooperative. I was making a film on Robert Kennedy, I said, and had been told his father may have worked for U.S. intelligence. At first, he thought I had the wrong person. Michael D. Roman of Bulova? Oh, yes, that was his father all right, but working for the CIA? "That's a new one on me."
His father had told him he was at the Ambassador Hotel the night Kennedy was shot and that the CIA interviewed him afterward (actually, it was the FBI). But he had no knowledge that his father had ever done intelligence work.
"Although it is exciting to think my father had a double identity," he wrote later in an e-mail, "in checking with my mother and sisters, no one had any suspicions that my father was something else besides a businessman. Both my mother and I recall the circumstances of him being in the same hotel as Robert Kennedy -- that being a sales meeting for the Bulova Watch Company .... I can only assume, with our family's association with his co-workers over the years and his awards from the industry, that he did work at his vocation full-time. Thus, I suggest that Mr. Ayers is mistaken in his identification."
Roman's son graciously allowed me to e-mail him the ballroom photographs and he shared them with the family. At first, Roman wasn't sure the bald man was his father. One sister said he looked gaunt, but another said it was definitely him, and the rest of the family soon agreed. One sister had worked alongside her father for some time and dismissed the idea that he could have been a high-ranking executive while also a spy as ludicrous.
The Roman family also recognized the figure of "Joannides" in the photographs: "Both my sister and mother confirm the darker-haired man (looks a bit like Henry Kissinger) is Frank Owens. He died a number of years ago and his wife may also have passed away or is at a care facility.... "
***
Owens was a regional sales manager for Michael Roman, and seems to match a "Frank S. Owen" from New York interviewed by the FBI on October 21. Owen registered at the Ambassador on June 4, listened to Kennedy's speech in the Embassy Ballroom, and remained there during the shooting.
I made a follow-up call to Roman a few weeks later. He had searched for "Gordon Campbell" on the Internet and was curious about the controversies in the case. I ran him through the history and significance of these new characters -- Bradley Ayers, his relationship with Campbell, and Brad's belief that Michael D. Roman was a "dead ringer" for Campbell.
The key point I took from our conversation was that Roman's son was in high school in 1963 and didn't remember his father being away for any length of time. His father was working in New York and living with the family in Connecticut, so the idea that he was living on a houseboat in Miami, conducting a secret war on Castro, seemed impossible.
***
Did Roman and Owens lead double lives as CIA operatives Gordon Campbell and George Joannides? It seems highly unlikely. The identification of the "Joannides" figure in the photograph as Roman's colleague Frank Owens seems to drain away any remaining possibility that the two men standing in the ballroom were once colleagues at JMWAVE.
I now believe the Campbell and Joannides identifications are, most likely, a case of mistaken identity. Of course, it bothers me that of all companies to have a sales convention at the Ambassador Hotel that day, it would be Bulova, headed by the most senior army general in the nation. But coincidence does not always mean conspiracy, and once more, the search for possible accomplices left me chasing shadows.
Triptych of David Morales in Havana, 1959, and in Vietnam, 1969-1971.
George Joannides, Saigon, 1973.
