Source – covertactionmagazine.com

• “….Two different insider sources told author Lisa Pease that Robert Maheu was the mastermind of the assassination. A lifelong Republican, Maheu was a top adviser to Howard Hughes. He had mob contacts through Johnny Roselli and ran assassination plots for the CIA. When the CIA leadership decided to recruit the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro, they turned to Maheu”

New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House

Continued From Part 1…

The LAPD task force set to investigate the killing—the “Special Unit Senator” (SUS)—was headed by 22-year LAPD veteran Lt. Manuel Pena, who reportedly killed eleven people in the line of duty—more than any other officer in the history of the department.^[32]

In November 1967, Pena temporarily retired from the LAPD to work with USAID’s Office of Public Safety in South America, a CIA front headed by known CIA agent Byron Engle.^[33]

One of his colleagues was Daniel Mitrione, an Indiana police officer who was kidnapped and killed by left-wing guerrillas in Uruguay in retaliation for his promotion of torture techniques among the U.S.-trained police.^[34]

Charles A. O’Brien, California’s Chief Deputy Attorney General, told William Turner that USAID was being used as an “ultra-secret CIA unit” that was known to insiders as the “Department of Dirty Tricks” and that it was involved in teaching foreign intelligence agents the techniques of assassination.^[35]

To help oversee the RFK investigation, Pena selected another CIA compatriot, Sgt. Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, a polygraph specialist who was subsequently promoted to lieutenant in recognition of his performance on the SUS.

Hernandez had played a key role in the CIA’s “Unified Police Command,” a training operation for Latin American countries and received a medal from the Venezuelan government for his efforts in helping prevent Fidel Castro’s exportation of the Cuban revolution onto its soil.^[36]

Under Hernandez and Pena’s direction, SUS became what authors William Turner and Jonn Christian termed a “kind of Bermuda triangle” into which reports and major leads on the case—including any that pointed to CIA or FBI involvement—disappeared.”^[37]

The SUS at one point requested that the FBI report “any attempts to write stories regarding the assassination which might tend to suggest a conspiratorial aspect.”^[38]

The SUS did question the woman with the polka-dot dress, though the tape was made blank and witnesses who had seen her—most notably Sandra Serrano—were intimidated, coerced and smeared.^[39]

When Paul Sharaga, the LAPD officer who put in the all-points bulletin, prepared a report, the SUS disposed of it, and it never again surfaced.^[40]

The SUS further tried to have Coroner Noguchi commit perjury.

When he refused to comply, it questioned his competency and character and had him suspended—with his findings never seeing the light of day.^[41]

Documents assembled by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison that pointed to a connection with the JFK assassination were among those—perhaps not surprisingly—ignored.^[42]

The LAPD took no action additionally when Roy Donald Murray, a prosperous cotton rancher in the northern California town of Earlimart who hated Kennedy and Cesar Chavez, was overheard by a local police officer in May 1968 boasting about pledging $2,000 to his mafia friends in Las Vegas for an assassination fund.^[43]

The FBI also did not follow up on a report by Edward Hugh Pole, who served time with Jimmy Hoffa in the Lewisburg penitentiary and said that Hoffa had boasted to fellow prisoners that he had put a hit out on Bobby Kennedy—who had been the one during his stint as Attorney General to put him in jail.^[44]

Show Trial

Lisa Pease referred to Sirhan’s trial as a “show trial.” Key witnesses were never asked to testify, ballistics tests were never ordered, and discrepancies in the LAPD’s story and shoddy investigation went unchallenged by Sirhan’s defense team.

Remarkably, Coroner Noguchi’s report, which detailed the existence of two shooters and specified that Sirhan could not have been the one to deliver the lethal shots, was not entered into evidence at the trial and Sirhan’s lawyer, Grant Cooper, cut short Noguchi’s testimony.

Cooper also cut short the testimony of LAPD criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, who was cited in later probes to have been negligent in his conduct, and who had been photographed pointing to bullet holes in the walls which he now said were not genuine.^[45]

Cooper had had a felony indictment hanging over him during Sirhan’s trial, which was withdrawn once the death sentence was passed.^[46]

William Pepper, who took over Sirhan’s case in 2010 after serving as the Martin Luther King family lawyer, said that “there can be no reasonable doubt that this conflict influenced, more precisely directed Cooper’s lamentable trial performance.”^[47]

Secret Team

In her 2018 book A Lie Too Big to Fail, Lisa Pease suggests that the hit team included a 21-year-old bookstore clerk named Michael Wayne and the girl in the polka-dot dress, who collected press badges which enabled members of the team to go anywhere in the hotel.

Wayne later helped provide a diversion while the assassin(s) got away. Suspiciously, he was found with the business card of Duane Gilbert, a right-wing extremist and militant involved in a previous theft of dynamite.

Throughout the night, the hit teams communicated through radio—with different teams likely prepared for Kennedy in different rooms of the hotel.

One of the team members manned the southwest fire escape so the girl in the polka-dot dress could sneak Sirhan into the hotel that way. A man in a maroon coat stood next to the door all night holding a radio.^[48]

When the woman in the polka-dot dress shouted “we shot him” as she and the assassin were making their escape, she may have been trying to alert her cohort at the back door.

Markings of a CIA Special-Op

The secret team appears to have been part of a highly sophisticated intelligence operation that required a large support team and compliance with the with LAPD, L.A. County’s Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office, state government, the media and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The operation additionally required control of Sirhan’s defense team, access to trained assassins, and access to a patsy that could be hypnotized—which only the CIA could provide.^[49]

An Irish filmmaker, Shane O’Sullivan, identified two men photographed at the Ambassador Hotel on the night Kennedy was killed as Bulova Watch Company sales managers attending the company’s convention. O’Sullivan stated that Bulova was a “well-known CIA cover.” One of the men bore some resemblance to CIA agent George Joannides, chief of the CIA’s psychological warfare branch in Miami during the early 1960s who served later as a CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassination.

CIA agent Bradley Ayers and diplomat Wayne Smith, who worked with him at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, identified CIA assassin David Sanchez Morales as the man in a photo taken at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Kennedy’s killing—though others who knew Morales said it was not.^[50]

O’Sullivan featured an interview with Morales’s former attorney Robert Walton, who quoted Morales as having said, “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”^[51]

Another important potential CIA connection emerges with the mysterious girl in the polka-dotted dress. Witnesses believe she may have been Patricia Elayn Neal, a high-school drop-out from Red Bluff, California.

In 1973, she married Jerry Capehart, a Korean War veteran who managed Hollywood musical star Rosemary Clooney as well as country singer Glenn Campbell and 1950s rock star Eddie Cochran, with whom he co-wrote some famous songs.

Capehart’s son, Ray, told researchers that his father told him he had at one time worked for the CIA—and that he had been involved in mind-control experimentation.^[52]

Not coincidentally, Sirhan appears to have been subjected to mind-control experiments and programmed to be part of the assassination plot.

Real Life Manchurian Candidate?

In 2010, attorneys acting for Sirhan filed a motion in the United States District Court for the Central District of California which argued that he was “an involuntary participant” in the shooting in the Ambassador Hotel pantry because he had been “subjected to extensive and sophisticated hypno-programming and mind control”—which had turned him into a robot assassin—a real-life “Manchurian Candidate.”

The latter is a reference to a 1962 film made by John Frankenheimer in which an American soldier is programmed in captivity during the Korean War to assassinate a U.S. presidential candidate.^[53]

The Manchurian Candidate film dovetailed with a CIA disinformation campaign that helped convince the public that the North Koreans and Chinese had brainwashed U.S. POWs during the Korean War.

This belief justified the CIA’s efforts to develop truth drugs and advance brainwashing techniques under Operations Artichoke, Bluebird and MK-ULTRA—and to hire hypnotists with the goal of programming people.^[54]

One Bluebird memo asked: “Can we create by post-H control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles? Could we seize a subject and in a space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? Can we alter a person’s personality?”^[55]

The answers appear to be yes.

In May 2008, Sirhan was examined by Dr. Daniel Brown, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and expert on hypnosis, who revealed evidence of hypnotically induced altered personality states.

Brown observed Sirhan switch into a personality state that responds in robot-like fashion to certain cues and adopting the behavior of firing a gun at a firing range. While in this state, Sirhan showed a loss of executive control and complete amnesia.^[56]

After the assassination, LAPD officers had noticed in Sirhan an eerie calm—as if he did not genuinely know what he had done. Two of the men who had overpowered him during the shooting observed in Sirhan a tranquil look, with his eyes appearing peaceful. When asked by an NBC reporter whether he had planned to kill Senator Kennedy, Sirhan replied “only in my mind. I did it, but I was not aware of it.”^[57]

The girl in the polka-dotted dress may have played the role of the queen of diamonds in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate—she was there to trigger Sirhan’s trance.^[58]

Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, a San Quentin psychologist who worked extensively with Sirhan in 1969, described Sirhan’s comments about Arab-Israeli politics relating to the assassination as “very repetitious” and “spoken like an actor playing a role, reading a script.”^[59]

Simson-Kallas believed that Sirhan was indeed a Manchurian Candidate who was “prepared by someone, hypnotized by someone.”^[60]

Sirhan revealingly had no memory of writing his diary in which he expressed outrage about Kennedy’s sending jet bombers to Israel two days before he learned about it by reading an article in the newspaper.^[61]

There were also statements in the diary denouncing capitalism and pointing to Kennedy as a reactionary, when Sirhan was not known to espouse left-wing views or to even have an interest in politics.

Walter Crowe, Sirhan’s closest friend at Pasadena City College (PCC), had once tried to form a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) group at the college, but Sirhan was “apathetic” and would not participate.^[62]

His diary—written under hypnosis—appears to be a key part of the conspiratorial plot whose aim was not only to have Kennedy killed but also to discredit left-wing views.

Before the assassination, Sirhan had disappeared for a three-month period after falling off a horse (he had wanted to be a jockey).^[63]

He made frequent trips at the time to Corona—where there was a huge Naval Surface Warfare Center, implying work for the U.S. government.^[64] Sirhan’s name appeared at the Corona Police Department firing range, where he was training for his special mission.^[65]

Herb Elfman reported to police that Sirhan belonged to a secret hypnosis group and referred them to a local radio station employee, Steve Allison, who managed a radio show that interviewed Dr. William Joseph Bryant (1924-1977) of the American Institute of Hypnosis.

Bryant was a pioneer hypnotist who served as chief of all medical survival training for the U.S. Air Force, or brainwashing section in South Korea during the Korean War.

A consultant on The Manchurian Candidate film, he had a long history of hypno-programming with the CIA.

Within hours of Kennedy’s shooting, he told listeners to a Los Angeles radio station that the suspect had “probably acted under post-hypnotic suggestion.”^[66]

Bryant’s possible connection to Sirhan is reflected in a reference that Sirhan made in his diaries to the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, with whom Bryant had worked. Afterwards, Sirhan had no memory of ever writing about DeSalvo and did not appear to have any knowledge about him.^[67]

Researcher Jonn Christian interviewed two prostitutes who claimed Bryant had confessed to them to programming Sirhan.^[68]

In March 1977, Bryant was found dead at the age of 51 in the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas right after he was summoned to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was said to have died of natural causes—as he was obese—though no autopsy was performed.^[69]

Was CIA-Mob Liaison Robert Maheu the Mastermind?

Two different insider sources told author Lisa Pease that Robert Maheu was the mastermind of the assassination.

A lifelong Republican, Maheu was a top adviser to Howard Hughes. He had mob contacts through Johnny Roselli and ran assassination plots for the CIA. When the CIA leadership decided to recruit the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro, they turned to Maheu.^[70]

His company, Robert Maheu Associates—the inspiration behind the Mission Impossible television series—fronted for CIA activities and provided a cover to CIA employees.

Maheu furthermore had friends in the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department, and had run CIA operations in conjunction with the LAPD.^[71]

He knew Thane Cesar, who worked for Bel Air Patrol, which Maheu owned. Cesar was listed as a CIA contract agent in a CIA database.

John Meier, a top aide to Howard Hughes from 1966 to 1970, recounted a meeting between Maheu and Don Nixon, Richard’s brother, at the Desert Inn Country Club in Las Vegas on June 6, 1968.

Maheu was all smiles and Don Nixon walked in all smiles. They embraced each other and Don Nixon said “well that prick is dead,” and Maheu said, “well it looks like your brother is in now.”^[72] Maheu then joked that they should now be calling Don Nixon “Mr. Vice President.”

This conversation does not prove Maheu was behind Kennedy’s killing, but provides a clear motive—one he shared with his former boss, Howard Hughes.

Hughes wrote to Maheu after the assassination that “the Kennedy family and their money influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities … I hate to be quick on the draw, but I see here an opportunity that may not happen again in a lifetime. I don’t [sic] aspire to be President, but I do want political strength … And it seems to me that the very people we need have just fallen smack into our hands.”^[73]

LBJ’s Suspicious Behavior

After Kennedy was shot, Lyndon B. Johnson—then a lame duck president who had announced he would not seek reelection because of the debacle in Vietnam—repeatedly phoned the Secret Service to ask if Kennedy had died, pacing the floor for hours, phone in hand, muttering “I’ve got to know. Is he dead? Is he dead.”

Johnson also instructed his aide Joseph Califano to call Larry Levinson, another aide, to get an update from the Secret Service. Levinson in turn asked Califano if this was something Johnson wished to have happen—which appears to have been the case.

According to Ted Van Dyk, an aide to Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, when Humphrey got the Commanding General of the U.S. Air Force to dispatch a plane for a top Boston brain surgeon who was to be flown immediately to Los Angeles to operate on Kennedy (who was then still alive), Johnson canceled the plane, claiming that Humphrey had no authority to send it.

Johnson had long hated Kennedy and would have been humiliated by his nomination for president. After Kennedy’s death, Johnson instructed his aide to develop a “draft Johnson movement.” He hoped to arrive as a surprise guest at the Democratic national convention to great acclaim as the man capable of saving the Democratic Party—but alas it was not to be.

A SAVAK Hit Job?

Author Robert Morrow, in his 1988 book The Senator Must Die, suggests that Kennedy’s assassin went under the pseudonym Ali Ahmand and worked for Iranian intelligence under the Shah of Iran who had also recruited Sirhan as part of the plot.^[74]

According to Morrow, the Kennedys had become enemies of the Shah—who had been installed in power in a CIA-backed coup—when as a Senator, John F. Kennedy uncovered the Shah’s misuse of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funds and launched an attack on him from the Senate floor.

Bobby Kennedy subsequently snubbed the Shah by bypassing Iran on a goodwill trip around the world, and Kennedy threatened to cut off all aid after his election as president before his father, Joseph, interceded.^[75]

When JFK was assassinated, the Shah privately was delighted. In the 1968 election, he poured in millions of dollars in support of Nixon.^[76]

Alex Goodaryi, the Shah’s liaison to the U.S. mafia, said that “the mob claimed with Nixon as president, the Shah would be in a position to eventually raise oil prices. Then, with U.S. backing, control the whole Middle East. However, if [Robert] Kennedy won, the Shah would be totally isolated from any further U.S. aid and military support and be subject to worldwide censure.”^[77]

According to Morrow’s hypothesis, the Shah ordered Colonel Mansur Rafizadeh, the head of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police that had been created by the CIA, to eliminate Kennedy, and Rafizadeh recruited Sirhan and the other main culprit, Ali Ahmand, aka Khalid Iqbal.^[78]

Iqbal was pictured in a photo at the Ambassador Hotel next to Jesse Unruh, the Speaker of the California State Assembly who was then managing Kennedy’s presidential campaign, wearing a yellow sweater with a camera hanging from a strap around his neck.

Morrow believes that the camera was a disguised gun, and that Sirhan was there to provide a distraction that would enable Iqbal to carry out the killing and afterwards get away with the girl in the polka-dot dress who was his accomplice.^[79]

Sirhan fired two shots at Kennedy, was tackled and drew attention, giving space to Iqbal to rapidly pull the lethal camera up behind Kennedy’s ear and shoot him four times behind the ear.

With the crowd turning on Sirhan and pandemonium breaking out, Iqbal then motioned to his accomplice and found his way through the crowd and down a corridor to an exit, after which they jumped into a shiny black car and sped down Wilshire Boulevard away from the hotel.^[80]

Although Iqbal’s description matched some eyewitness accounts of the man accompanying the girl in the polka-dotted dress, proof for Morrow’s theory has not been established. Iqbal, whose real name was Khalid Iqbal Khewar, sued The Boston Globe for libel for publishing Morrow’s account and was awarded damages of $1.2 million after winning his case.^[81]

Allard Lowenstein

Allard K. Lowenstein was the former Director of the National Student Association (NSA) and Democratic Congressman from Nassau County, New York, from 1969 to 1971, who had led the “Dump Johnson” movement because of Johnson’s support for the Vietnam War.^[82]

Anguished by Kennedy’s death, he was able to review Noguchi’s autopsy report specifying that Kennedy had been hit from behind by bullets fired at point-blank range. Lowenstein also scrutinized the trial records, searching for testimony that placed Sirhan’s gun to the rear and within inches of Bobby, and finding that there was none.

Lowenstein followed up by interviewing eyewitnesses who pointed to Sirhan being several feet—rather than inches—removed from Bobby, and to him having been subdued after firing two shots. He found that their stories were consistent with their earlier testimony.

The official response to Lowenstein’s queries by the LAPD was one of stonewalling, and he realized that a propaganda campaign was being fabricated to deliver information that was the exact opposite of the facts.

In March 1980, Lowenstein was shot and killed in his office by a former protégé Dennis Sweeney, who claimed among other crazy things that he had received messages in his head broadcast by a CIA transmitter. After Sweeney shot Lowenstein, Sweeney calmly waited in Lowenstein’s office to be arrested. He was deemed insane and sentenced to a mental hospital.

At the time of the shooting, Lowenstein was on the verge of getting a commitment from President Jimmy Carter to reopen the investigation into the Sirhan case if Carter were re-elected to a second term that November. But as writer Robert Vaughn put it: “Al died, Carter lost to Reagan, and the official veil of silence over the RFK murder has remained intact.”^[83]

Kamala Harris and the Continuing Government Cover-Up

In 2012, while serving as California’s Attorney General, Vice President Kamala Harris had Sirhan’s request for a retrial dismissed.

She argued that “overwhelming evidence” existed against Sirhan’s claims that he was hypno-programmed to fire a gun as a diversion.

Harris stated in federal court that “(Sirhan) cannot possibly show that no reasonable juror would have convicted him if a jury had considered his ‘new’ evidence and allegations, in light of the overwhelming evidence supporting the convictions and the available evidence thoroughly debunking Sirhan’s second-shooter and automaton theories.”

In fact, as this essay has displayed, there is overwhelming evidence supporting—not debunking—Sirhan’s second-shooter theory.

This evidence ranges from eyewitness accounts to the autopsy report to the fact that more bullets were fired than was the capacity for Sirhan’s gun.

There is also circumstantial evidence about the automaton theory which begs for further investigation.

Had Kennedy Lived…..

Harris’s stance is part of a 50+ year effort by government authorities to cover up the truth about Kennedy’s assassination and to protect the powerful persons who coordinated it.

Had Kennedy lived, American history would have turned out differently.

For one thing, the major riots outside the Party convention following the nomination of Hubert Humphrey –which divided and destroyed the Democratic Party—would never have taken place.^[84]

Kennedy might then have replicated his brother’s defeat of Nixon in 1960, and as president ended the Vietnam War, expanded the War on Poverty and scuttled the War on Drugs.

Instead of imploding under the weight of Nixonian repression, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) might have evolved into an influential left-wing caucus in the Democratic Party or a new social democratic party equivalent to the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP).

This was the nightmare scenario for American conservatives and the corrupt elements of “the deep state,” who in carrying out Kennedy’s assassination, destroyed the hope for a better America that he and his supporters represented.

---

1. See Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon (New York: Random House, 2017); Lester David and Irene David, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Folk Hero (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986); Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Kennedy to be sure had some neoliberal views, suggesting not long before his death that welfare had “destroyed self-respect and encouraged family disintegration.” ↑
2. David and David, Bobby Kennedy, 4. ↑
3. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2018). ↑
4. Tim Tate and Brad Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up—A New Investigation (London: Thistle Books, 2018) ,101; Mel Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), 49-73. ↑
5. Compton served as an LAPD detective in the 1950s and was connected to the LAPD’s red squad. See Tom O’Neill, with Dan Piepenberg, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2019), 233. ↑
6. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 230. ↑
7. William Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 167, 168. ↑
8. Cesar stated that he “never would have voted for Bobby Kennedy because he had the same ideas as John did, and I think John sold the country down the road. He gave it away to the commies … he literally gave it to the minority.” Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 231. In the 1980s, Cesar supported Ronald Reagan. ↑
9. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail. According to researcher Alex Botus, Cesar was connected to the California mobster John Alessio. Robert Melanson, Who Killed Robert Kennedy? (Berkeley, CA: Odonian Press, 1993), 42. Cesar told journalist Dan Moldea about diamond purchases he had made for the Chicago mob between 1968 and 1974. ↑
10. Robert Maheu and Richard Hack, Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by His Closest Advisor (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). ↑
11. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 483. ↑
12. Chris Spargo, “Robert F Kennedy was assassinated by Thane Eugene Cesar, declares RFK Jr, who says it was the security guard who fatally shot his father from behind after planning the murder with Sirhan Sirhan,” Daily Mail, September 12, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7456521/Robert-F-Kennedy-assassinated-Thane-Eugene-Cesar-Sirhan-Sirhan-says-RFK-Jr.html ↑
13. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 256; Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 138; Mikko Alanne, “Why the RFK Assassination Case Must Be Reopened,” The Huffington Post, April 4, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rfk-sirhan_b_1251410. Pease suggested that the number of bullets could be as high as 17. ↑
14. Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 41. Two ceiling tiles were allegedly removed, including several outside of Sirhan’s range of fire. ↑
15. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 191, 195, 196. Nina Rhodes-Hughes, a Kennedy fundraiser, stated that she heard 12-14 shots fired, though the FBI quoted her falsely as having heard eight shots, which she explicitly denied is what she told them. Some claim the sound of shots in Pruszynski’s audio tape may have been sounds of people fumbling or microphones bumping into things. Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist, 133, ↑
16. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 86, 87; Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991 (New York: Shapolsky, 1991), 34, 35. ↑
17. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 183. Wolfer interestingly later became president of Ace Security Services, the same company which Thane Cesar had worked for on the night of RFK’s assassination. ↑
18. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail; Lisa Pease, “Sirhan Says ‘I Am Innocent,’” in The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X, James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, eds. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), 532; Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 158. ↑
19. William Klaber and Philip H. Melanson, Shadow Play: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2018) 106, 107. Freed related that he was contacted by the FBI afterwards but that they “seemed to be avoiding asking me questions about the 2^nd gunman.” According to most witnesses, the second shooter was taller than Sirhan, ↑
20. Klaber and Melanson, Shadow Play, 108, 109; Robert Blair Kaiser, “R.F.K. Must Die!”: Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination, rev ed. (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2008), 73. ↑
21. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail; Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, xxiv, 161, 165; Klaber and Melanson, Shadow Play, 98. Schulman specified that the security guard behind Kennedy had fired his gun. He said Kennedy had been shot three times, but the FBI insisted to him that he had been shot twice which was wrong. Curiously, there is no record of him having been interviewed by the LAPD. ↑
22. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 213. ↑
23. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 213. [NOTE: Should 23, 24 and 25 be “Idem.”? They are identical to note 22.] ↑
24. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 213. ↑
25. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 213. ↑
26. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 280. ↑
27. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail. ↑
28. Robert D. Morrow, The Senator Must Die (Santa Monica, CA: Roundtable Publishing, 1988), 203, 204, 211; Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 248, 249, 250; Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 183, 244. Strangely, the LAPD’s log omits reference to the girl in the polka-dot dress. One witness, Earnest Ruiz, thought he saw the man later come back into the pantry as Sirhan was being removed and was the first to yell “let’s kill the bastard.” An alternative scenario with the woman in the polka-dotted dress is presented in Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist, 154. ↑
29. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 211. For a reporter’s quest for the truth about the woman in the polka-dot dress, see Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing: The Paris Peace Talks Connection (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2016).
30. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 360. ↑
31. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 360; Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist, 142; The Assassinations, Pease and Di Eugenio, eds., 533. The LAPD also “lost” the records from Sirhan’s blood test and destroyed the doorframes from the crime scene that possessed the bullets. ↑
32. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 64. LAPD chief of detectives Robert Houghton, in his book Special Unit Senator: The Investigation of the Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Random House, 1970), boasted that Pena had commanded detective divisions, supervised a bank robbery squad, spoke French and Spanish and had connections with various intelligence agencies in several countries. ↑
33. On the OPS, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). ↑
34. See A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth about U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (New York: Pantheon, 1979). Mitrione’s motto was “the right pain, in the right place, at the right time.” ↑
35. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 65. FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse claimed that Pena had been carrying out CIA special assignments for at least ten years. This was confirmed by Pena’s brother, a high school teacher, who told television journalist Stan Bohrman a similar story about his CIA activities. ↑
36. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 210. Hernandez had claimed to have administered a polygraph test to Venezuelan dictator Marco Jimenez who was replaced by CIA favorite Romulo Betancourt. Hernandez died in 1972 at age 40. At the time of his death, he had begun to express doubt about the Sirhan lone gunman theory. ↑
37. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, xxiii. ↑
38. Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 134, 135. ↑
39. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 276; Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 213; Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, xxiv. ↑
40. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 212. Scharaga subsequently was forced to leave the LAPD. ↑
41. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 223. Thomas Noguchi, Coroner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). ↑
42. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 211, 212, 213. The Garrison documents included one obtained from a raid on the right-wing National States Rights Party which had the initials of three people to be eliminated: JFK, MLK, RFK. ↑
43. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 214, 216, 216, 217. ↑
44. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 221, 222. ↑
45. Klaber and Melanson, Shadow Play, 91, 92, 93. ↑
46. Klaber and Melanson, Shadow Play, 38, 235. Cooper’s strategy in the trial had been to try to avoid the death penalty by pursuing an insanity defense. Cooper stunningly admitted to onetime New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein that, “had he known during the trial” what he had since learned, “he would have conducted a different defense.” The felony was for possessing stolen transcripts of the grand jury proceedings in the Beverly Hills Friar’s Club card cheating case in which Johnny Roselli was one of the defendants. ↑
47. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 346. Famed forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht stated that “any first-year law student would have done a better job than Sirhan’s counsel [Cooper].” ↑
48. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail; The Assassinations, Pease and Di Eugenio, eds., 599. ↑
49. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 487. Researcher Philip Melanson identified the LAPD as one of the police forces that indeed maintained a clandestine relationship with the CIA. Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination. Prosecutor Lynn “Buck” Compton and District Attorney Evelle Younger both had verifiable intelligence ties.
50. Manny Chavez, a former U.S. Air Force Intelligence officer who served in Venezuela as a military attaché in 1957-59 while David Morales was assigned to the CIA Station there for a year, said that, after careful study, he was convinced that the person in the photo was not Morales as he knew him up until 1963. Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist, 169. ↑
51. Smith said that, if Morales was there the night Kennedy was killed, he had to have something to do with it. Morales died of a “heart attack” before he was slated to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. After Morales fell ill, it took the medics five hours to get him to a hospital and did not provide him any oxygen. His friend Ruben Carbajal told filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan that “the people who killed Morales were the same people he had worked for—the CIA—he knew too much.” Carbajal, however, does not believe that the man identified by Ayers and Smith as Morales was in fact Morales. ↑
52. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292. Neal died in February 2012 at age 63 from cirrhosis due to her alcoholism. She had dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant and marrying the father, her first husband, who was then shipped off to Vietnam, and may have worked at one time as a prostitute. She moved to Missouri with Capehart after their marriage in 1973 and divorced him after 11 years. Neal’s kids remembered that their mother had been haunted by something in her past and expressed fears about being followed. She maintained an obsession with a polka-dotted dress she kept stored away in her home. Capehart once told the kids that she was the famous girl in the polka-dotted dress, though expressed anger when she put the dress on and was going to wear it in public at a church service. See also Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File: On the Robert F. Kennedy Killing (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2016). Faura, then a reporter for The Hollywood Reporter, interviewed John Fahey, who worked at a chemical company and had breakfast with the woman in the polka dot dress at the Ambassador hotel and spent the day with her. She told him of connections to Anna Chennault, the wife of Flying Tiger Clare Chennault and a confidante of Richard M. Nixon. Faura had been spied on and harassed by the LAPD, whihc falsified records regarding his involvement in the investigation.
53. Frankenheimer ironically drove Robert Kennedy to the Ambassador Hotel on the night of his death in his Rolls-Royce after Kennedy stayed at his Malibu mansion. ↑
54. See Jonathan Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, rev ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). ↑
55. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 303. ↑
56. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 235, 324. ↑
57. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 194; The Assassinations, Pease and Di Eugenio, eds., 533. Two waiters observed Sirhan smiling. Earlier in the evening, a witness observed Sirhan staring at a teletype machine, as though transfixed. ↑
58. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, xxix. ↑
59. Melanson, Who Killed Robert Kennedy? 65. ↑
60. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 199. ↑
61. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 334. All the other candidates in the 1968 election supported military aid to Israel, marking Sirhan’s motive as generally suspect. ↑
62. Melanson, Who Killed Robert Kennedy? 65. ↑
63. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 330, 331. ↑
64. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 409. ↑
65. Ibid. Some researchers suspect that Sirhan was hypnotized at the Santa Anita racetrack where he worked as a jockey. Sirhan worked there with Thomas Bremer, whose brother Arthur shot presidential candidate George C. Wallace in 1972 in an attempted assassination that also benefited Richard M. Nixon’s election chances. ↑
66. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 331; Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 202. ↑
67. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 332. ↑
68. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 334. ↑
69. Tate and Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 334; Philip Melanson, The Robert Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991 (New York: Shapolsky, 1991). ↑
70. Maheu, Next to Hughes, 108-34. ↑
71. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail. One of these operations was the manufacture of a pornographic film allegedly showing Indonesia’s socialist leader Sukarno in a compromising position with a female Russian agent. On Maheu’s CIA ties, see also Bayard Stockton. Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey, (Virginia: Potomac Books, 2006), 171
72. Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, 493. ↑
73. Maheu, Next to Hughes, 206-207. After Kennedy’s death, Maheu assisted Hughes in giving Hubert Humphrey a donation of $50,000. ↑
74. Morrow, The Senator Must Die. [NOTE: Should there be page numbers here?] ↑
75. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 176, 177. ↑
76. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 178. ↑
77. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 178. ↑
78. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 178. ↑
79. Morrow, The Senator Must Die, 186. ↑
80. Sirhan expected to be arrested but accepted the reward of a sizeable check deposited into his bank account. He believed that he would be regarded as a hero in Jordan and the Arab World. ↑
81. Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist, 159, 160. ↑
82. David and David, Bobby Kennedy, 280. ↑
83. Robert Vaughn, A Fortunate Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 258. ↑
84. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who spearheaded the repression of the protests, supported Kennedy.

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