Some allege that John Warncock Hinckley,Jr., who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in front of the Washington Hilton—now called the “Hinkley Hilton”-- on March 30, 1981, was a victim of mind control. The evidence of mind control is thin. One of the policemen who nabbed Hinckley thought he was hypnotized or in some sort of induced state.
Several weeks before the incident, the papers were printing rumors that someone took a shot at Vice President George W. Bush in the wee hours of the morning. The rumor was traced to a policeman and an official with access to good information. The shooting took place near the town house of the vice president’s long-term mistress, Jennifer Fitzgerald. The Vice President was furious and the Washington Post killed the story. This sort of scare usually heightene concerns about security, but Reagan’s guards at the Hilton advised that he did need to wear his security vest.
When George H.W. Bush made it back to Washington, he immediately ruled out any investigation that the shooting was a result of a conspiracy. Al Haig, in his memoirs, wondered if a conspiracy was involved, but he did not questions Bush’s decision at the time. This is an historical matter that will never be resolved. Orthodox historians have no choice but to accept the official story.
Hinckley was a member of World Vision, a fundamentalist group that sometimes fronts for the C.I.A.. He was also a former member of the National Part of America—Nazis. The weapon he was supposed to have used was a short barrel 22 revolver, an RG-14, using Devastator long bullets. Four people were wounded by the six bullets he fired. There is film of Hinckley firing the first two shots; they hit no one. The sixth shot is said to have hit the side of the limo, ricocheting down the side of the car and hitting the president. Reagan was hit just under the left arm pit, and the bullet supposedly flattened to the size of a dime.
There is confusion about the kind of gun used. Agent Tim McCarthy was hit in the groin and was sure it was stronger than a 22. Hinckley bought a 38 in Dallas, near where JFK was killed. There are photographs of a 38 on the ground and a policeman in a yellow coat picking it up was a handkerchief. There was also a 22 at his feet later. Another hit a DC police officer, and the sixth missed Reagan but is said to have ricoched to strike the Chief Executive.
Before it was fired, Agent Jerry Parr grabbed Reagan and held onto him and pushed him into the limo before the fifth shot was fired. Then he was on top of Reagan. It is hard to imagine Reagan being hit in the chest with Parr on top of him. The last shot was fired when an agent was pushing Hinckley’s gun hand down. If it was fired then, it would have had to climb some way or other. Perhaps another ricochet.
Some think the agent somehow fired that shot, but this writer cannot construct such a scenario and must simply suggest that there are often inexplicable coincidences in such matters. There is the problem that Reagan had to have been hit after there was an armored car door between him and the shooter. They also point to Reagan’s comment that he felt a paralyzing pain just as the agents got him into the car. That sharp pain came after he was out of the line of fire.
Critics of the official story believe that Reagan was only in a position to be hit when Hinckley’s first shot was fired. Indeed, he would have had to been able to shoot through the car door. We know that the bullet had ricocheted, so it must have hit a stone wall and then headed toward Reagan. But a short 22 cannot give a bullet that kind of velocity. A rifle could do that.
Maybe James Brady was hit by something other than a Devastator. The physicians removed a shell with explosive intact from his brain. The Devastator aluminum shell begins to explode on impact. It would be like finding a piece of exploded dynamite with its wrapping intact. The physicians should only have found fragments. There should have been a big area of impact; Brady’s was the size of a pencil eraser
Amateur ballistics experimenters say that the Devastator bullets could not have come out of Hinckley’s 22. Until real experts address this, we can render no judgment
An ambulance bearing a wounded Press Secretary James Brady got to George Washington University Hospital fifteen minutes before the presidential limo, which left five minutes before the Brady ambulance. The Reagan limo got there 15 to 20 minutes after the vehicle carrying press secretary arrived.
The agents claimed they got lost. No motorcycle retinue accompanied them. The story was that they started out for the White House—that was a standing procedure and order. When Parr detected a bit of blood and, he decided to go to George Washington University Hospital. In changing directions, they lost time and for some unknown reason once went three blocks out of their way rather than following a diagonal street. At the hospital, Reagan was mistakenly given a cold blood transfusion. Some think that accounts for the early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease.
While the agents were losing time, there was a sharp battle going on in the situation room of the White House between Reagan loyalists and Bush people. Just six days before, Secretary of State Alexander Haig had been replaced by Bush as head of emergency preparedness planning. Haig made a public comment about his being in control until Bush returned. It was made in the context of controlling emergency planning and not in reference to the presidential sucession. The press never got it right and even showed the clip when Haig passed away. Someone told Haig about the connections between the Bushes and Hinkleys, and he immediately ordered a lock down of the White House.
Reagan began to walk into the George Washington Emergency Room even though his lung was collapsing. At first they could not find where he was hit, and then someone found blood coming out of a small cut below his left armpit. It was a single would with a razon rhin line. What they removed was “thin as s dime” and “razor edged.” Whatever it was, it bounced off a rib and slightly cut his aorta before bouncing off a rib again and then missing the aorta by a quarter of an inch and then went into the lung.
Lt. Colonel Bo Gritz, a veteran of many intelligence operations, suggests that Reagan was struck by a thin planchet rather than a bullet. But he would have no way of knowing for sure. Aerodynamic disks were used in intelligence work and were fired by tubes or guns. Sometimes they bear poison, but this did not.
There were three odd situations that day. Army Colonel Rodreguez, carrying the “football” or case with nuclear arming codes took off running, and he was gone for several hours and ended up with the Secret Service. At George Washington University Hospital, the F.B.I. got the coded card our of Reagan’s wallet which could be used to open the suitcase. The F.B.I. would not give Rodriguez the card. On that odd day, SAC bombers flew with no code books. Hinckley ws not turned over to civilian authorities; he was whisked off to Quantico Military Base. Then he went to Fort Butler in South Carolina for psychiatric evaluation.
At the time, Judy Woodruff, now a CNN anchor, insisted the shot came from an overhang above Reagan’s automobile. Later, she said a Secret Service agent up there fired the shot.
Young Hinckey was obsessed with women, particularly actress Jodie Foster and allegedly shot Reagan to impress her. John Chancellor reported "the bizarre coincidence" that Scott Hinckley, an older brother, was scheduled to dine with Neil Bush and his wife on March 31, 1981. RCA then owned NBC and it made sure Chancellor was prevented from investigating the coincidental connection.
At the time of the shooting, Scott, vice-president of C.I.A.-connected Vanderbilt Energy was meeting with Energy Departmentofficials trying to answer claims of overcharges from 1977 through 1980. Incensed because the media did not trace any of the odd aspects of the shooting, Journalism Professor and former Rhodes Scholar Nathaniel Blumberg wrote a novel The Afternoon of March 30 on what might have been going on.
The Hinkley family started in Texas where his father was an oil man and friend of George H.W. Bush and they moved to Evergreen, Colorado. In the 1960 s, the Hinckley’s Vanderbilt Oil was in trouble, getting little out of its six wells. The Bush family bailed them out, and the company changed its name to Vanderbilt Energy. Somehow, several millions trinkled in every year. . Oilman John Hinckley, Sr. was a reputed C.I.A. man and a leader of World Vision, a right-wing Christian evangelical organization. It became important in the 1950s. It was fiercely anti-Communist and worked with refugees from Communist nations. It often used missionaries to recruit people for intelligence work, following the long-established Rockefeller pattern of working through missionaries in Latin America.
World Vision people did espionage work for the C.I.A. in Southeast Asia and ran recruiting camps for the Contras in Hondouras During the Vietnam War, World Vision had military equipment and USAID money, some of which was a poss through or pass over for its C.I.A. sponsor. Later, its money came from the National Endowment for Democracy. In Lebanon, it permitted its camps to be used by the fascist Phalange to kill Palestinians. In the United States it had refugee camps for Cubans and Thai, where a steady diet of anti-communism was offered. In the camps for Cubans, Alpha 66 and Omega 7, anti-Castro militants, worked openly and recruited. John Hinckley Jr. worked in the Arkansas camps for the Thai as did Mark David Champan, who eventually killed John Lennon.
World Vision became involved in Jonestown after the massacre, developing a plan to repopulate it with C.I.A. mercenaries from Laos. In 1977, the American Council of Churches and other religious bodies forced the C.I.A. to outlaw the use of mssionaries on intelleigence work, except under exceptional circumstances. The Southern Baptists and Worle Vision, both of which had been coopative said they forbad missionaries from doing intelligence work. Critics in 2009 claim that World Vision in Nicosea, Cyprus is a C.I.A. front and is involved in sponsoring terrorist activities. Indian critics note that World Vision is funded by the US government but that it continues to proselatize. The organizationsofficials seem to use a revolving door that takes them in and out of US government positions.
Like the organizations that Sarah Palin’s religious organizations are tied to, these people think they are engaged in’spiritual warfare” with the forces of evil. Hinckley stalked Jimmy Carter in 1980, hoping to shoot him. He was detained in Nashville for 5 hours in October, 1980 because he had guns in his possession. Carter was expected in that city then.
The story gets stranger. Some make the case that Hinckley was shadowed by an evil twin or Doppelganger. His name was Edward Richardson, a follower of Carl McIntyre’s International Council of Christian Churches, looked just like Hinckley and also wrote sick love letters to Jodi Foster. He wrote threatening letters to Reagan and Foster, and was arrested a week after Hinckley by the New York Port Authority Police. Why had he followed Hinckley from Connecticut to Colorado?
Another person who looked somewhat like Hinckley and was the same age was Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon about a month before the attack on Reagan. A policeman who apprehended ihim thought he was under mind control; he was clutching a copy of The Catcher and The Rye. He said a voice in his hea commanded him to kill Lennon. Chapman was in therapy at the time and had been with World Vision. Some insist he had been involved in a remote viewing program, but this writer cannot nail that down. Money was no problem for him. He was a world traveler, staying in the best hotels, and he and his wife collected art ane even owned a $7500 Norman Rockwell lithograph. Their monthly ren was $400. When he was nabbed, he had over $2000 in cash and credit cards. New York columnist Jimmy Breslin concluded Chapman was under mind control. He was eventually able to prove that Lennon was under constant F.B.I. surveillance, but that is quite different from killing someone. John Lennon, who had become a powerful spiritual force, had made the mistake of asking fans to join revolutionary movements for human rights.
We know that the C.I.A. had its own remote viewing program for 25 years and that it was conducted in cooperation with the Church of Scientology. The military also had a RV program.The first publif information on remote viewing appeared in a Jack Anderson column on 23 April 1984. Years later Ted Koppel did a rather dismissive report on RV.
In the 1980s, the Army’s RV program was called “Grill Frame.” The DIA’s program was “Sun Streak,” which was renamed “Star Gate” in 1991. After 1995, it was transferred to the C.I.A.. We do not know for certain, which /RV program, if any, was involved with Chapman. The Carter Administration tried and failed to kill off the C.I.A.’s RV program, but it continued, using many people supplied by the Church of Scientology. In 1995, John Mc Cahon, who ran it for a time, said more than $20 million had been spent on it.
Showing posts with label MKUltra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MKUltra. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Sirhan Sirhan and the Death of Robert F. Kennedy
Recently, two forensic experts, Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag, reported at the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science on their study of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. They analyzed the Pruszynski tape, which recorded sounds in the pantry where Kennedy was shot in 1968. Independent journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski, who covered the campaign for the Montreal Gazette, had inadvertently left his recorder running that day. They found that 14 rather than 8 shots were fired from two guns. The fatal shot came from a gun that was behind the senator. Van Praag also offered his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science, of which he is past president.
Robert Francis Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel after winning the California Democratic primary on June 15, 1968. It was about a quarter past midnight. He was hit three times from the rear, all of the shots coming from a sharply upward angle. The first shot was in the back of the right ear and probably fired at the distance of three inches. A fourth shot went into his suite but did not penetrate his body. He expired the next day.
Few have questioned that there was a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian gunman. A careful examination of all of the facts involved raises questions about what actually happened, but there is not enough information to construct a coherent alternative to the official story. This means that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK.
People who observed Sirhan-Sirhan noted that he held his 22 pistol almost absolutely parallel to the floor. All witnesses said Sirhan’s gun was anywhere from 18 inches to 3 feet away from Kennedy. The four bullets that hit Kennedy and his clothes came from six inches away or less. They were point blank shots. The fatal shot to the head came from two inches away. No witness placed Sirhan’s gun any closer than 18 inches away.
Some critics of the official story insist that Kennedy was facing Sirhan and there is abundant witness testimony to support their view. If that is true, the bullets the Palestinian fired had to miss hitting Kennedy in the front, so they might have ricochet and somehow entered Kennedy from below and behind.
Kennedy did not turn his head enough for Sirhan to somehow hit the back of his ear. Five other people were wounded. One of those people was Paul Schrade, who was standing behind Kennedy and was somehow hit in the head by a bullet that had hit the senator, which was coming back to front and upward at about a 80 degree angle. Witnesses said Schrade was standing behind Kennedy. Another person was hit twice. Elizabeth Evans was bending over to find her shoe and was hit in the forehead by a bullet that somehow went through the ceiling tile, hit something hard, and bounced back into the room to hit her.
Oddly, Kennedy aide Rafer Johnson grabbed Sirhan’s gun and put in his pocket and did not realize he had it until the next morning, according to an interview he gave Tom Brokaw. Johnson was the Olympic gymnast who wrestled Sirhan to the ground. This small story sheds some light on the thoroughness of the on-site investigation.
People saw Sirhan firing and Kennedy fall. They cannot be blamed for putting the two events together. But if the coroner is right about the bullets coming from behind Kennedy, there is a problem understanding what happened.
People heard two shots and then a lot of pops, like balloon pops. A LA photographer described the scene.
There was either one or two shots fired. O.K. And then, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There was a pregnant pause between those two because my initial impression was some jackass has set off firecrackers in here; because I got hit in the face with debris...And then it hit me. Oh, my God, it’s happened again.
The LAPD said eight shots were fired, all by Sirhan Sirhan. He must have gotten off all eight shots in his weapon, an Iver Johnson pistol. He did not have the opportunity to reload. The door jam in the room had two bullets and there were bullet holes in the ceiling tiles. Witnesses saw two policemen each removing at least one bullet from the door. That means at lest nine bullets were fired, before the ceiling is considered.
The LAPD said it removed 5 or 6 tiles but photographs show more tiles than that missing. The LAPD subsequently destroyed the tiles and door jam because they could not be conveniently saved in filing cabinets. The investigation was operated by Special Squad Senator, led by Lt. Manual Pena and Enrique Hernandez. Both had served on detached duty with the C.I.A. in Central America. Pena was brought out of retirement for the investigation and had been working for the C.I.A. in the interim. The unit had a way of losing documents.
Standing behind and to the side of Kennedy was Thane Eugene Cesar, brought in from the Ace Security Service at the last minute. He was a security guard at Lockeed and seemed to spend most of his time in an area operated by the C.I.A. Retired engineer Jim Yoder told an FBI agent that Cesar often had a floating assignment working in an off lkimits area known to be under the control of the CIA.
Thane said that when he heard a shot, he got on one knee and drew his gun. He had been holding the senator’s elbow. It was not standard practice for Ace employees to carry guns, but the LAPD did not pursue this. Because it was known that he was an outspoken Kennedy hater, the police subjected him to a polygraph test, which he passed. He was a George Wallace supporter. The LA Police did not examine his weapon to see if it had been fired.
Witnesses saw a blond haired man in a gray suit who was putting a weapon in his holster. A tall dark haired man in a black suit was seen fleeing. One witness saw a security guard fire a weapon. Police later told people who thought they saw a gunman in a suit that he was with the Secret Service.
A Youth for Kennedy volunteer, Sandy Serrano , told Sergeant Paul Schraga that he heard a young man and women say “We shot him.@ When asked who, they said “Senator Kennedy.@ She was a reasonably good looking woman in a polka-dot dress. . The same Youth for Kennedy volunteer told an NBC correspondent:
She practically stepped on me, and she said, "We’ve shot him. We’ve shot him." Then I said, "Who did you shoot?" And she said, "We shot Senator Kennedy." And I says, "Oh, sure." She came running down the stairs, very fast, and then the boy in the gold sweater came running down after her, and I walked down the stairs."
An older Jewish couple confirmed the young volunteer’s story. The tape of her questioning and lie detector test reveals that the police were trying to pressure her into abandoning her story. Years later, Serrano said she was no longer so sure of what she saw, and the authorities produced a fire inspector who said he did not see her where she was supposed to have been.
Lisa Pease , who has studied all the photographs of people in that pantry, believes the girl was the daughter of Khaiber Khan, an Iranian exile and espionage expert with ties to the C.I.A. who was working for RFK. He said he was not at the hotel, and he was not found on the pictures.
There was a Hungarian refugee there named Gabor Kadar. To get in, he stole a waiters uniform. He helped wrestle Sirhan. There is no way of knowing if he was a Kennedy fan or if he was there to help create a scuffle around Sirhan while conspirators escaped and or cover their tracks.
Schraga put out an All Points Bulletin, but his superiors asked him to cancel it. He declined, and they withdrew it for him, saying the comments of the young couple must have been misunderstood .
Within minutes of the shooting, the LAPD said there was a lone assassin. A department criminologist, De Wayne Wolfer , said it was “unbelievable how many holes there are in the ceiling.” Yet the single shooter theory was to depend upon the claim that there were only eight shots fired. Ex- F.B.I. agent William Bailey also said there were a large number of bullet shells, far more than eight. LAPD criminologist Larry Baggett analyzed the bullet that entered the senator’s neck and found that it was not fired from Shirhan’s gun. He concluded that the other bullets that hit Kennedy and William Weisel did not cvome from that weapon. Moreover, they did not all come from the same gun.
BBC investigator/film-maker Shane O’Sullivan has studied the film of the crime and found three former C.I.A. employees there. They were David Sanchez Morales, a veteran agent who worked for David Atlee Phillips. Before the shooting, David Rabern, a sometime C.I.A. contract worker saw saw Morales and Campbell and thought they were part of the security detail. Two are seen exiting the pantry after the shooting. They were David Sanchez Morales, a veteran agent who worked for David Atlee Phillips. Gordon Campbell, number two man in the huge Miami station (JM-Wave); and George Joannides. Morales was a deadly assassin and explosives man active in Central America.
At a late night party in 1973 he reportedly 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." Joannides , who would become chief of psychological operations, was connected with Cuban exiles in the early sixties, and there was an unsuccessful effort to access his records through the JFK Records Act. He was the C.I.A. liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1978 but never told them he was involved with the Cuban exiles. The latter two are now deceased. Morales was known to hate the Kennedys. After the murder of Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover told his friend John Meier that he knew that the C.I.A. took out Bobby and that Robert Mahue was involved. Hoover said he was powerless to do anything about it. Meier was a Howard Hughes employee. Who knows how reliable Meier’s comment is by itself. No living man has more reason to detest the C.I.A.
Dr. Thomas Noguchi said in the autopsy report that Kennedy had been hit by three bullets. A fourth damaged his suit coat and came upward at about an 80 degree angle. Norguchi and LAPD criminologist DeWayne Wolfer both conducted powder tests and concluded that the three body shots came from about an inch away. Later,Noguchi pointed out that he had refrained from saying whether there could have been a second shooter. What survived from the police file was not released until 1988. The LAPD destroyed a large number of photographs it considered redundant.
Pierre Finck, JFK autopsyist, was consulted in the autopsy. Also involved was Russell Fisher, a Maryland coroner who had ruled that a bound, gagged, and weighted C.I.A. officer had committed suicide.
Evidence clearly shows that there were serious problems labeling bullet fragments and that two of the Kennedy bullets were “cleaned.” The most important fragments were booked under one set of numbers, placed in evidence with a different set of related numbers. They had also been taken into F.B.I. custody for eight days. The official blow-ups of the fragments can be questioned. A year before, in the Jack Kirschke case, criminalist Wolfer presented photographic evidence that a subsequent DA said in 1971 “ combined with his very esoteric photographic manipulations label his work in this instance nothing but perjury.” Pasadena criminologist William H. Harper found problem with Wolfer’s presentation of the evidence at the Sirhan Sirhan trial.
"My examinations disclosed no individual characteristics establishing that Exhibit 47 [the Kennedy neck bullet] and Exhibit 54 [the Weisel bullet] had been fired by the same gun. In fact, my examinations disclosed that bullet Exhibit 47 has a rifling angle of approximately 23 minutes (14%) greater than the rifling angle of bullet Exhibit 54. It is, therefore, my opinion that bullets 47 and 54 could not have been fired from the same gun."
There was also a problem with gun registration numbers. The test bullets were fired from a gun with the serial number H18602. The number on Sirhan’s gun was H53725. Maybe all this just points to sloppy record keeping. The confusion over the numbers was not resolved, and Wolfer said that at one point during the tests he did not have custody of gun # Hi8602 during the tests, but the records showed otherwise. Even when the case was finished, the bullet fragments were labeled in such a confusing way that they are probably of no value to anyone who would reopen the case. Several years later, tests showed that the prosecution contention that all the shells came from the same manufacturer was incorrect.
Sirhan’s first lawyer stipulated his guilt, hoping to cut a deal. This attorney had just finished defending an of Johnny Roselli. Witness Juan Romero said at the trial he saw the shooter and it was not Sirhan. The defense did not have access to the autopsy report until after the trial began. In other words, the prosecution sat on the autopsy report for almost six months. Sirhan was condemned to death, a sentence later commuted to live in prison.
When what was left of the Kennedy file was released in 1988, it turned out that over 2400 photographs had been burned. Without the door jam and tiles, the nearly obvious conclusion could not be proven—there were more bullets than Sirhan’s weapon would hold. Originally it was said there were no bullets in the door jam. After the trial, photographs turned up that showed bullet holes circled. If only one of those was really a bullet, it means there were at least 9 shots, even accepting the somewhat plausible LAPD theory advanced to explain how 8 could do so much damage.
Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan's second attorney, and Professor Philip Melanson think Sirhan was under some form of hypnosis, but that he also used his revolver. They also believe there was at least one more shooter. The first attorney had hired a psychiatrist whose questions seemed aimed more at implanting memories than learning anything useful. His diary contained strange “automatic writing” about it being necessary for Bobby Kennedy to die. He kept repeating statements that RFK must die, suggesting he had been programmed. Before the shooting, he spent some time at the ranch of fundamentalist preacher Jerry “The Walking bible” Owen, who said that Sirhan kept saying Kennedy must die because he would stop the Vietnam war, and God would not like that.
Charles McQuiston, a former Army intelligence officer , though Sirhan Sirhan had been programmed. “I believe Sirhan was brainwashed under hypnosis by the constant repetition of words like, 'You are nobody, you're nothing, the American dream is gone'.… Somebody implanted an idea, kill RFK, and under hypnosis the brainwashed Sirhan accepted it”
If Sirhan he was programmed, the trigger words came from a young woman who said to him "Could you pour me a cup of coffee with a lot of cream and a lot of sugar?" He claimed to remember those words and then someone wrestling him to the ground. Police Sergeant Bill Jordan said that Sirhan could remember everything that happened to him in the last year, but that he was a complete blank when it came to a twelve week period. It has been suggested that he was programmed then.
Oddly, a witness remembers a pretty girl standing next to and conversing with Sirhan. Some hypothesize that she was his controller. She was wearing a polka dot dress. Standing near here was a young man in a gold sweater. Vincent DiPierro, a waiter, said he and others noticed Sirhan because the pretty girl in the polka dot dress seemed to be sticking by him, talking to him, and at one point holding him up. The LA Police later convinced Vincent and the young volunteer, Sandy, to stop talking about the girl in the polka dot dress.
Another pantry witness, Darrell Johnson, saw the girl in the dress with dots.
"While I was waiting [for Kennedy], I saw four guys and a girl about halfway between Kennedy and where I was standing. The girl had a white dress with black polka dots. During the time that a lady yelled, "Oh, my God," they walked out. All except the one...this is the guy they grabbed [Sirhan]. The others that walked out seemed unconcerned at the events which were taking place."
For hours before the shooting, Sirhan was observed standing next to the newwire teletype machine with a vacant stare on his faith. After the shooting he could remember nothing but leaving the hotel at one point to go to his car. Many witnesses remarked on the wierd look, or stupid, sickly smile, on his face ehwne he fired his shots. The arresting officer wrote that Sirhan was "definitely under the influence of something."
Hours after the shooting, the late Dr. William Joseph Bryan, Jr, president of the American Institute of Hypnosis, was interviewed on a Los Angeles radio show and said obviously the shooter acted under post-hypnotic syggestion. Later, psychiatrists said that Bryan bragged about hypnotizing Sirhan. As a young man, he was briefly drummer for Tommy Dorsey’s band. This may have just meant he hypnotized Sirhan in jail, trying to get more information out of him. On the other had, he may have been trying to learn if Sirhan was under mind control. Bryan had a long history of work for the government and had visited Sirhan several timers. Oddly , Bryan was the grandson of William Jennings Bryan and a bishop in the Old Catholic Church, the same sect that claimed the membership of hypnotist David Ferrie. He was also technical consultant for the film, The Manchurian Candidate. Initially, Palestinian Sirhan said he did it for his country, but after his trial he denied that he shot Kennedy. He was a Palestinian zealot who grew up in the household of a zealot, yet he said at the trial that he knew nothing about the state of the Israeli-Palestinian controversy.
John Meier, a Hughes Tool employee, claims that J. Edgar Hoover told him that Robert Maheu of the C.I.A. and Hughes engineered the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Hoover added that he was powerless against the C.I.A., which might hav meant he did not regret Kennedy’s death.
Jimmy Breslin asked a group of friends if Bobby had the stuff to go all the way. John J. Lindsay answered, “Yes, of course, he has the stuff to go all the way, but he’s not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it, just as sure as we’re sitting here. He’s out there waiting for him.” Harold Weisberg discussed the possibility that RFK could be assassinated on Washington ,D.C. He said that he asked an RFK aide why the Senator accepted the Warren Commission Report, and the reply was “It’s simple, Bobby wants to live.” The aide added that there were, “too many guns between Bobby and the White House”. Harold got the impr4ession the guns belonged to the C.I.A
Robert Francis Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel after winning the California Democratic primary on June 15, 1968. It was about a quarter past midnight. He was hit three times from the rear, all of the shots coming from a sharply upward angle. The first shot was in the back of the right ear and probably fired at the distance of three inches. A fourth shot went into his suite but did not penetrate his body. He expired the next day.
Few have questioned that there was a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian gunman. A careful examination of all of the facts involved raises questions about what actually happened, but there is not enough information to construct a coherent alternative to the official story. This means that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK.
People who observed Sirhan-Sirhan noted that he held his 22 pistol almost absolutely parallel to the floor. All witnesses said Sirhan’s gun was anywhere from 18 inches to 3 feet away from Kennedy. The four bullets that hit Kennedy and his clothes came from six inches away or less. They were point blank shots. The fatal shot to the head came from two inches away. No witness placed Sirhan’s gun any closer than 18 inches away.
Some critics of the official story insist that Kennedy was facing Sirhan and there is abundant witness testimony to support their view. If that is true, the bullets the Palestinian fired had to miss hitting Kennedy in the front, so they might have ricochet and somehow entered Kennedy from below and behind.
Kennedy did not turn his head enough for Sirhan to somehow hit the back of his ear. Five other people were wounded. One of those people was Paul Schrade, who was standing behind Kennedy and was somehow hit in the head by a bullet that had hit the senator, which was coming back to front and upward at about a 80 degree angle. Witnesses said Schrade was standing behind Kennedy. Another person was hit twice. Elizabeth Evans was bending over to find her shoe and was hit in the forehead by a bullet that somehow went through the ceiling tile, hit something hard, and bounced back into the room to hit her.
Oddly, Kennedy aide Rafer Johnson grabbed Sirhan’s gun and put in his pocket and did not realize he had it until the next morning, according to an interview he gave Tom Brokaw. Johnson was the Olympic gymnast who wrestled Sirhan to the ground. This small story sheds some light on the thoroughness of the on-site investigation.
People saw Sirhan firing and Kennedy fall. They cannot be blamed for putting the two events together. But if the coroner is right about the bullets coming from behind Kennedy, there is a problem understanding what happened.
People heard two shots and then a lot of pops, like balloon pops. A LA photographer described the scene.
There was either one or two shots fired. O.K. And then, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There was a pregnant pause between those two because my initial impression was some jackass has set off firecrackers in here; because I got hit in the face with debris...And then it hit me. Oh, my God, it’s happened again.
The LAPD said eight shots were fired, all by Sirhan Sirhan. He must have gotten off all eight shots in his weapon, an Iver Johnson pistol. He did not have the opportunity to reload. The door jam in the room had two bullets and there were bullet holes in the ceiling tiles. Witnesses saw two policemen each removing at least one bullet from the door. That means at lest nine bullets were fired, before the ceiling is considered.
The LAPD said it removed 5 or 6 tiles but photographs show more tiles than that missing. The LAPD subsequently destroyed the tiles and door jam because they could not be conveniently saved in filing cabinets. The investigation was operated by Special Squad Senator, led by Lt. Manual Pena and Enrique Hernandez. Both had served on detached duty with the C.I.A. in Central America. Pena was brought out of retirement for the investigation and had been working for the C.I.A. in the interim. The unit had a way of losing documents.
Standing behind and to the side of Kennedy was Thane Eugene Cesar, brought in from the Ace Security Service at the last minute. He was a security guard at Lockeed and seemed to spend most of his time in an area operated by the C.I.A. Retired engineer Jim Yoder told an FBI agent that Cesar often had a floating assignment working in an off lkimits area known to be under the control of the CIA.
Thane said that when he heard a shot, he got on one knee and drew his gun. He had been holding the senator’s elbow. It was not standard practice for Ace employees to carry guns, but the LAPD did not pursue this. Because it was known that he was an outspoken Kennedy hater, the police subjected him to a polygraph test, which he passed. He was a George Wallace supporter. The LA Police did not examine his weapon to see if it had been fired.
Witnesses saw a blond haired man in a gray suit who was putting a weapon in his holster. A tall dark haired man in a black suit was seen fleeing. One witness saw a security guard fire a weapon. Police later told people who thought they saw a gunman in a suit that he was with the Secret Service.
A Youth for Kennedy volunteer, Sandy Serrano , told Sergeant Paul Schraga that he heard a young man and women say “We shot him.@ When asked who, they said “Senator Kennedy.@ She was a reasonably good looking woman in a polka-dot dress. . The same Youth for Kennedy volunteer told an NBC correspondent:
She practically stepped on me, and she said, "We’ve shot him. We’ve shot him." Then I said, "Who did you shoot?" And she said, "We shot Senator Kennedy." And I says, "Oh, sure." She came running down the stairs, very fast, and then the boy in the gold sweater came running down after her, and I walked down the stairs."
An older Jewish couple confirmed the young volunteer’s story. The tape of her questioning and lie detector test reveals that the police were trying to pressure her into abandoning her story. Years later, Serrano said she was no longer so sure of what she saw, and the authorities produced a fire inspector who said he did not see her where she was supposed to have been.
Lisa Pease , who has studied all the photographs of people in that pantry, believes the girl was the daughter of Khaiber Khan, an Iranian exile and espionage expert with ties to the C.I.A. who was working for RFK. He said he was not at the hotel, and he was not found on the pictures.
There was a Hungarian refugee there named Gabor Kadar. To get in, he stole a waiters uniform. He helped wrestle Sirhan. There is no way of knowing if he was a Kennedy fan or if he was there to help create a scuffle around Sirhan while conspirators escaped and or cover their tracks.
Schraga put out an All Points Bulletin, but his superiors asked him to cancel it. He declined, and they withdrew it for him, saying the comments of the young couple must have been misunderstood .
Within minutes of the shooting, the LAPD said there was a lone assassin. A department criminologist, De Wayne Wolfer , said it was “unbelievable how many holes there are in the ceiling.” Yet the single shooter theory was to depend upon the claim that there were only eight shots fired. Ex- F.B.I. agent William Bailey also said there were a large number of bullet shells, far more than eight. LAPD criminologist Larry Baggett analyzed the bullet that entered the senator’s neck and found that it was not fired from Shirhan’s gun. He concluded that the other bullets that hit Kennedy and William Weisel did not cvome from that weapon. Moreover, they did not all come from the same gun.
BBC investigator/film-maker Shane O’Sullivan has studied the film of the crime and found three former C.I.A. employees there. They were David Sanchez Morales, a veteran agent who worked for David Atlee Phillips. Before the shooting, David Rabern, a sometime C.I.A. contract worker saw saw Morales and Campbell and thought they were part of the security detail. Two are seen exiting the pantry after the shooting. They were David Sanchez Morales, a veteran agent who worked for David Atlee Phillips. Gordon Campbell, number two man in the huge Miami station (JM-Wave); and George Joannides. Morales was a deadly assassin and explosives man active in Central America.
At a late night party in 1973 he reportedly 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." Joannides , who would become chief of psychological operations, was connected with Cuban exiles in the early sixties, and there was an unsuccessful effort to access his records through the JFK Records Act. He was the C.I.A. liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1978 but never told them he was involved with the Cuban exiles. The latter two are now deceased. Morales was known to hate the Kennedys. After the murder of Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover told his friend John Meier that he knew that the C.I.A. took out Bobby and that Robert Mahue was involved. Hoover said he was powerless to do anything about it. Meier was a Howard Hughes employee. Who knows how reliable Meier’s comment is by itself. No living man has more reason to detest the C.I.A.
Dr. Thomas Noguchi said in the autopsy report that Kennedy had been hit by three bullets. A fourth damaged his suit coat and came upward at about an 80 degree angle. Norguchi and LAPD criminologist DeWayne Wolfer both conducted powder tests and concluded that the three body shots came from about an inch away. Later,Noguchi pointed out that he had refrained from saying whether there could have been a second shooter. What survived from the police file was not released until 1988. The LAPD destroyed a large number of photographs it considered redundant.
Pierre Finck, JFK autopsyist, was consulted in the autopsy. Also involved was Russell Fisher, a Maryland coroner who had ruled that a bound, gagged, and weighted C.I.A. officer had committed suicide.
Evidence clearly shows that there were serious problems labeling bullet fragments and that two of the Kennedy bullets were “cleaned.” The most important fragments were booked under one set of numbers, placed in evidence with a different set of related numbers. They had also been taken into F.B.I. custody for eight days. The official blow-ups of the fragments can be questioned. A year before, in the Jack Kirschke case, criminalist Wolfer presented photographic evidence that a subsequent DA said in 1971 “ combined with his very esoteric photographic manipulations label his work in this instance nothing but perjury.” Pasadena criminologist William H. Harper found problem with Wolfer’s presentation of the evidence at the Sirhan Sirhan trial.
"My examinations disclosed no individual characteristics establishing that Exhibit 47 [the Kennedy neck bullet] and Exhibit 54 [the Weisel bullet] had been fired by the same gun. In fact, my examinations disclosed that bullet Exhibit 47 has a rifling angle of approximately 23 minutes (14%) greater than the rifling angle of bullet Exhibit 54. It is, therefore, my opinion that bullets 47 and 54 could not have been fired from the same gun."
There was also a problem with gun registration numbers. The test bullets were fired from a gun with the serial number H18602. The number on Sirhan’s gun was H53725. Maybe all this just points to sloppy record keeping. The confusion over the numbers was not resolved, and Wolfer said that at one point during the tests he did not have custody of gun # Hi8602 during the tests, but the records showed otherwise. Even when the case was finished, the bullet fragments were labeled in such a confusing way that they are probably of no value to anyone who would reopen the case. Several years later, tests showed that the prosecution contention that all the shells came from the same manufacturer was incorrect.
Sirhan’s first lawyer stipulated his guilt, hoping to cut a deal. This attorney had just finished defending an of Johnny Roselli. Witness Juan Romero said at the trial he saw the shooter and it was not Sirhan. The defense did not have access to the autopsy report until after the trial began. In other words, the prosecution sat on the autopsy report for almost six months. Sirhan was condemned to death, a sentence later commuted to live in prison.
When what was left of the Kennedy file was released in 1988, it turned out that over 2400 photographs had been burned. Without the door jam and tiles, the nearly obvious conclusion could not be proven—there were more bullets than Sirhan’s weapon would hold. Originally it was said there were no bullets in the door jam. After the trial, photographs turned up that showed bullet holes circled. If only one of those was really a bullet, it means there were at least 9 shots, even accepting the somewhat plausible LAPD theory advanced to explain how 8 could do so much damage.
Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan's second attorney, and Professor Philip Melanson think Sirhan was under some form of hypnosis, but that he also used his revolver. They also believe there was at least one more shooter. The first attorney had hired a psychiatrist whose questions seemed aimed more at implanting memories than learning anything useful. His diary contained strange “automatic writing” about it being necessary for Bobby Kennedy to die. He kept repeating statements that RFK must die, suggesting he had been programmed. Before the shooting, he spent some time at the ranch of fundamentalist preacher Jerry “The Walking bible” Owen, who said that Sirhan kept saying Kennedy must die because he would stop the Vietnam war, and God would not like that.
Charles McQuiston, a former Army intelligence officer , though Sirhan Sirhan had been programmed. “I believe Sirhan was brainwashed under hypnosis by the constant repetition of words like, 'You are nobody, you're nothing, the American dream is gone'.… Somebody implanted an idea, kill RFK, and under hypnosis the brainwashed Sirhan accepted it”
If Sirhan he was programmed, the trigger words came from a young woman who said to him "Could you pour me a cup of coffee with a lot of cream and a lot of sugar?" He claimed to remember those words and then someone wrestling him to the ground. Police Sergeant Bill Jordan said that Sirhan could remember everything that happened to him in the last year, but that he was a complete blank when it came to a twelve week period. It has been suggested that he was programmed then.
Oddly, a witness remembers a pretty girl standing next to and conversing with Sirhan. Some hypothesize that she was his controller. She was wearing a polka dot dress. Standing near here was a young man in a gold sweater. Vincent DiPierro, a waiter, said he and others noticed Sirhan because the pretty girl in the polka dot dress seemed to be sticking by him, talking to him, and at one point holding him up. The LA Police later convinced Vincent and the young volunteer, Sandy, to stop talking about the girl in the polka dot dress.
Another pantry witness, Darrell Johnson, saw the girl in the dress with dots.
"While I was waiting [for Kennedy], I saw four guys and a girl about halfway between Kennedy and where I was standing. The girl had a white dress with black polka dots. During the time that a lady yelled, "Oh, my God," they walked out. All except the one...this is the guy they grabbed [Sirhan]. The others that walked out seemed unconcerned at the events which were taking place."
For hours before the shooting, Sirhan was observed standing next to the newwire teletype machine with a vacant stare on his faith. After the shooting he could remember nothing but leaving the hotel at one point to go to his car. Many witnesses remarked on the wierd look, or stupid, sickly smile, on his face ehwne he fired his shots. The arresting officer wrote that Sirhan was "definitely under the influence of something."
Hours after the shooting, the late Dr. William Joseph Bryan, Jr, president of the American Institute of Hypnosis, was interviewed on a Los Angeles radio show and said obviously the shooter acted under post-hypnotic syggestion. Later, psychiatrists said that Bryan bragged about hypnotizing Sirhan. As a young man, he was briefly drummer for Tommy Dorsey’s band. This may have just meant he hypnotized Sirhan in jail, trying to get more information out of him. On the other had, he may have been trying to learn if Sirhan was under mind control. Bryan had a long history of work for the government and had visited Sirhan several timers. Oddly , Bryan was the grandson of William Jennings Bryan and a bishop in the Old Catholic Church, the same sect that claimed the membership of hypnotist David Ferrie. He was also technical consultant for the film, The Manchurian Candidate. Initially, Palestinian Sirhan said he did it for his country, but after his trial he denied that he shot Kennedy. He was a Palestinian zealot who grew up in the household of a zealot, yet he said at the trial that he knew nothing about the state of the Israeli-Palestinian controversy.
John Meier, a Hughes Tool employee, claims that J. Edgar Hoover told him that Robert Maheu of the C.I.A. and Hughes engineered the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Hoover added that he was powerless against the C.I.A., which might hav meant he did not regret Kennedy’s death.
Jimmy Breslin asked a group of friends if Bobby had the stuff to go all the way. John J. Lindsay answered, “Yes, of course, he has the stuff to go all the way, but he’s not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it, just as sure as we’re sitting here. He’s out there waiting for him.” Harold Weisberg discussed the possibility that RFK could be assassinated on Washington ,D.C. He said that he asked an RFK aide why the Senator accepted the Warren Commission Report, and the reply was “It’s simple, Bobby wants to live.” The aide added that there were, “too many guns between Bobby and the White House”. Harold got the impr4ession the guns belonged to the C.I.A
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