Because of the recent BBC Newsnight segment featuring Shane O’Sullivan’s allegations that George Joannides, David Morales, and Gordon Campbell, three CIA agents, were at the Ambassador Hotel the night Bobby Kennedy was killed, and the barrage of disinformation certain to be unleashed in the next couple of years as we approach the 40th anniversary (2008) of the Robert Kennedy assassination, I wanted to republish my full RFK articles online.
In 1998, after several years of research, I wrote and published a large two-part article on the key facts and allegations surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy in Probe Magazine. For a few years, the full versions were available online. When they were published in the book The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (Feral House, 2003), I truncated the online versions in the hope that people would buy the book. Many did. Thanks!
There is a great amount, sadly, of bad, inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete data on the Web regarding just about any subject, but especially where alleged CIA operations are involved. Bear in mind that if the CIA was behind the assassination, they would make certain they had mouthpieces all over the blogosphere and the Web decrying any who would suggest a conspiracy. Trust no one. Read as much as you can and make up your own mind.
I firmly believe that the RFK assassination is the most transparent of all the assassinations of the sixties. The police records on the case were extensive, with a great deal of detailed information captured in over 20 reels of microfilm at the California State Archives. If people are serious about the case, you have to go to the primary sources, read the original witness reports, listen to the untranscribed tapes. Find out what was deliberately suppressed. And we will never know how much more information about this case lurks (or used to lurk) in the files of the CIA because no government body has ever pushed for them to be made public.
Since the initial writing of these articles, I have collected dramatic new evidence I have yet to publish. Some of it is really damning. But it will take me a while to compile it all into a digestible tract. So meanwhile, I have reposted my original articles as they appeared in Probe Magazine back in 1998 on my Web site, the Real History Archives. If you want the updated versions of these articles, which include information on another key suspect in the case, not mentioned in these two pieces, you’ll have to get the book.
As I wrote in Part I:
Indeed.
Are you up to the task?
Can you handle the truth?
If so, Happy Holidays. This is my gift to you.
Wow, I read most of the first link Part1 and I look forward to your “dramatic new evidence”. I was living in Ca. at the time and was very aware of the conflicts in the whole Sirhan thing, but a lot of it had faded from my memory…
Thanks, Diane101! I’d love to hear your thoughts on Part II – lots of interesting stuff re dirty dealings in Iran, as a sideshow to the main event..!
I think the whole thing is just bizarre. All of it. Even the guy’s name. Sirhan Sirhan? I mean, cmon!
A goofy double name didn’t seem to hurt Duran Duran any…
😉
Yes, within days after the assassination they gave the assassin’s name as “Sirhan Sirhan.” Not strictly impossible, but it should have made everyone think twice.
After John F Kennedy I think they decided the cover-up did not have to be more than pro forma. That is, they did not have to create a likely explanation, but only a vaguely possible one.
The burdern of proof had been shifted to the doubters of the official story, so the story itself no longer had to make sense.
Well, the obvious problem was that Sirhan did shoot at Kennedy. I don’t know if the gun had blanks in it or not. I do know a bunch of people got shot. It’s not so much that it is hard to imagine such a huge cover-up. It’s hard to imagine a plot so complex and so uncertain to go off as planned.
Sirhan BISHARA Sirhan. Not quite as bizarre…! 😉
A tad off subject here but I went to see “Bobby” over the holidays. Completely different than I had anticipated but a really fabulous movie. It is more about the lives of orninary people and what was happening to them that day. The real footage though and Bobby’s words made me so sad. We lost so much that day. I was only 16 at the time but it had a huge impact on me.
I will read your diaries when I get home. I want quiet time away from ringing phones to read it.
Thanks. I’d love to hear your thoughts after you tackle these!
I can’t resist sharing this – this shows how ready the LAPD were to cover an emerging conspiracy up well before they had the bulk of the facts in hand. Quoting from Part 1:
That others were being considered seriously by the LAPD as suspects in the original shooting is not surprising. What is surprising is how quickly they were willing to dismiss these suspects; a curious bias displayed overtly, on the record, and just over an hour after the shooting. Had this been the first political assassination of a Presidential figure by the name of Kennedy in this country, such an attitude, while surprising, may have been normal. But after all the questions raised in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, such a cavalier dismissal of the evidence of additional suspects becomes more serious. As Los Angeles Chief of Detectives Robert Houghton reported in his book about the case, it wasn’t as if no one was making the connection:
Houghton fails to explain how Brown was able to “satisfy himself” that the APB should be cancelled when he harbored such dark thoughts and when an hour was hardly long enough to get to the bottom of a conspiracy. But this would become the modus operandi of many at Special Unit Senator, the LAPD task force created to investigate the circumstances of the assassination. While one public official after another proclaimed that they “didn’t want another Dallas”, they avoided, denied, and as we will see lied and even destroyed evidence, creating in effect a second “Dallas”.
Thanks for sharing, Lisa! I appreciate the way you have made things as clear as possible to the uninitiated like me. The RFK assassination details are the least well known, it seems, at least in my circles. I have heard vaguely of some of the inconsistencies and I have always said to myself “Yeah, they did it to him, too” without knowing the details. I’m looking forward to further enlightenment.
I am also hoping that someday soon any of the perpetrators who are still alive will have to face some real justice. I know that’s probably too much to ask, but who would’ve ever thought that Edgar Ray Killen would be convicted and then die in prison for his involvement in the Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman civil rights killings in Mississippi? Better late than never…
And who would have thought Byron De La Beckwith would finally get convicted of the Medgar Evers assassination?
There is always room for hope. Blueneck, I’d be very interested in your thoughts on these pieces should you find time to wade in. Thanks!
I think you did a great job on the two pieces you have shared.
If I might presume to give advice, I would ask for a narrative paragraph or two in which you place yourself and the reader in the doorway or some other strategic point in the space and vigorously describe the space itself, i.e., ‘standing in the doorway through which R passed, if you look to the left you will see, two feet away…and if you look to the right you will see…bullet x was lodged up and to your left…,etc. I would guess that you have provided photos and other visual aids in your book, which I plan to acquire soon (it’s on my wish list for the impending holiday, and if I don’t get it as a gift, I’ll buy it with a gift certificate that I will undoubtedly receive to Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, or Borders), but it never hurts to have a spatial narrative for basic orientation when dealing with such complex details. I particularly liked the paragraph that started: “Solve this one for yourself. Place a friend in front of you and slightly to your left…”
Also, the chain of custody (or lack thereof) of evidence could use a diagram, as it is hard to keep track of the twists and turns in one’s mind.
As for the rest of the material, I found it much easier to comprehend fully and I think you do a great job of laying it out for those of us who are not previously well informed on the details of the obvious and not-so-obvious pre facto co-conspirators and post facto cover up enablers.
As an aside, I recently saw “The Manchurian Candidate” all the way through for the first time. It strikes me that Frank Sinatra’s belief that the movie led in some way to the assassination of JFK is misplaced. It seems to me that the JFK assassination was more of a straight-ahead mis-direction scheme and that the RFK assassination has more possible elements of that movie in its background. That is ironic because “The Manchurian Candidate” had been removed from circulation after JFK’s death. Perhaps suppression of the film was exactly the wrong thing to do…
Thanks SO much for your comments and suggestions. I will definitely implement in my new book if/when I get back to it (more when than if). I also have a much clearer picture now, having read much more, of who was where in the pantry, where the girl exited the pantry and the hotel, etc. I’ve had a chance to be inside the pantry since writing those pieces, and it’s so much more clear to me now, seeing the space/distances for myself. I can see where that would be helpful.
Re the original film “The Manchurian Candidate” – I agree – much more similar to Sirhan’s case. I don’t know if you read Part II – but one of the consultants to that film bragged to prostitutes that he was the one who programmed Sirhan. True? Not true? There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that was true – more even than is in that article. But again – that’s for another time!
The scene where the hypnotized guys on stage think they’re at a garden party is to me the most brilliant scene I’ve ever seen of any kind on film. Just amazing, melding the real and fake worlds so fluently. Brilliant filmmaking!