Kennedys and King Test Site

Category: Robert Francis Kennedy

Original essays treating the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, its historical and political context and aftermath, and the investigations conducted.

  • A Lie Too Big to Fail: Second Edition

    Lisa Pease’s excellent book on the murder of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 has now been reissued. She has attached a 20-page afterword to the original text. If you have not read it, do so now. It is a classic in that field.

    A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Second Edition

    In this author’s view, Lisa Pease is the foremost researcher/writer on the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. That event occurred in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, almost immediately after the senator had been announced as the winner of the 1968 California primary. This was a crucial win for RFK. It essentially knocked out of the running his chief primary rival, Senator Eugene McCarthy. The only man left standing between RFK and the Democratic nomination was Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

    The problem with Humphrey was that he was tied to an unpopular president in Lyndon Johnson. Which is why Johnson had abdicated. LBJ had almost lost to McCarthy in New Hampshire. And according to Jules Witcover’s book 85 Days, his internal polls said he was going to lose in the state of Wisconsin. Therefore, Johnson made his epochal announcement on March 31, 1968: he would not run. That declaration rocked the MSM and the country. But it was one thing to almost lose to Eugene McCarthy. Johnson simply could not stomach losing to his hated rival, Bobby Kennedy.

    As Witcover’s book shows, Bobby Kennedy had planned on entering the primaries before the New Hampshire result. But he did not want that announcement to impact the voting there. So he delayed it until afterwards. Then, 2 weeks later, LBJ withdrew.

    The problem for Humphrey was not just Johnson’s poor ratings. The elephant in the room was the Tet Offensive. At a famous meeting in the Oval Office, Bobby Kennedy had tried to tell Johnson what he thought was the best way out of Vietnam. Johnson should declare a cease-fire, set up a provisional government, and then hold elections. Johnson said that would never happen. Because he knew from his commanding general, William Westmoreland, who had told him victory would arrive in a few months. At that time, all of LBJ’s dovish enemies would be vanquished. Robert Kennedy left the meeting in shock and disbelief. He knew there was no such victory in sight. (James Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable, p. 410).

    Tet showed he was right. But Humphrey was stuck with both Johnson and Vietnam. RFK was not. The Democratic Party did not want more of either Vietnam or Johnson. So Bobby most likely would have won the nomination. And Richard Nixon would not have been able to use those issues against him. Plus, RFK would have had the ghost image of his martyred brother behind him. In other words, America would have been saved from six years of Nixon, the increased bombing in Indochina, the invasions of Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the ultimate resignations of Nixon and Agnew, the lasting image of the last helicopter on the American Embassy leaving Saigon, etc.

    After Johnson stepped out of the race, Martin Luther King would now be able to do what he wanted to do. His advisers had requested that he endorse McCarthy. He said he wanted to wait for Bobby to declare his intention since he thought he would make an outstanding president. (The Promise and the Dream by David Margolick, p. 295) King never got to make that endorsement. He was murdered in Memphis on April 4, 1968. RFK was campaigning in Indiana when he got the news. His advisors told him that he probably should not speak that night because of the risk of violence. RFK said, “I’m going to 17th and Broadway. I’m going to go there and that’s it.” (ibid, p. 340) The first thing he asked was for the crowd to lower his campaign signs. He then went on and gave the crowd the news that King had been assassinated. A great stillness ensued. He urged them not to take up arms, not to burn down buildings. That would lead to greater polarization. That was not what America needed at this time. He said King had dedicated his life to justice and love between human beings. And he had died in that effort. And that is what we should all try to emulate at this moment. It was probably one of the greatest speeches of his life to that unsuspecting crowd in Indianapolis. As a result, Indianapolis was one of the very few big cities that did not go up in flames.

    As a result of King’s death, Bobby Kennedy was the last hope left from the sixties. JFK, Malcolm X and King were now all gone–all under the most suspicious circumstances. Yet justice was not achieved in any of those cases. One could argue that justice really did not move at all. Jackie Kennedy did not want Bobby to run in 1968. As author Randy Taraborrelli revealed in his 2003 biography of the First Lady, she said America was too full of hate; the same thing that happened to her husband would now happen to Bobby.

    She was right. The Sixties died on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel. It was the end of an era.

    But the perpetrators knew they had to come up with something bold and original this time. The scenario of the gunman from a distance, dropping his rifle and going on the lam, had been used in the JFK and King cases. So they decided on a fresh idea. This time, the fall guy would be right in front of the victim, thus making himself obvious. As Lisa Pease calls it in her book A Lie Too Big to Fail, it was really a magic act, a grand illusion, one made up by artists of assassination. It was so daring, so startling, so convincing that the Bobby Kennedy case was labeled The Open and Shut case.

    As Pease shows in her book, it was anything but. There were so many problems with the case against Sirhan that a cover-up had to be snapped on quite quickly and completely. Two former CIA assets were installed at the LAPD under the title Special Unit Senator. They did all they could to discredit and confuse one of the key witnesses, Sandy Serrano, and to allow one of the main suspects, Michael Wayne, to escape indictment. (Pease’s work on Wayne is simply stellar.)

    This book also goes into detail as to how and why Grant Cooper, Sirhan’s main lawyer, blew the case for his defendant. No one has gone into the Friar’s Club scandal as she has. She also points out the early hero in the RFK case, the now-ignored Pasadena criminalist William Harper. On his own, using his own technology, Harper pretty much exposed what had really happened during the ‘magic act”. But in an important way, Pease goes even beyond Harper to show just how corrupt the LAPD was with the ballistics evidence in the RFK case. It only began with the infamous DeWayne Wolfer.

    As her book shows, one does not have to execute the perfect crime to escape justice. One only has to control the cover-up afterwards That is what happened here—so completely and exhaustively, that the general public still has no inkling as to what really happened at the Ambassador. I cannot summarize what did happen any better than the brilliant crusader for truth, Yale lawyer Allard Lowenstein:

    Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President’s, was mourned as an extension of the evils of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths …brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random….What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 633)

    That is the riddle that Lisa Pease spent well over two decades trying to solve: why is a case that is actually more clearly a conspiracy than John Kennedy’s, deemed the opposite? As an Open and Shut case for the prosecution. She did an utterly heroic job in explicating how it ended up that way. And in every aspect. A Lie Too Big to Fail is encyclopedic in its scope, and microscopic in its analysis. And since the author is an able writer, it never loses the quality of being a murder mystery. But, unfortunately, this is not fiction. This is the final step of the American political system being demolished in front of one’s eyes. And the demolition was permanent. Because the Democratic Party has never been the same after 1968. As the great French playwright Jean Genet said after RFK’s murder, “America is gone.”

    A Lie Too Big To Fail has now been reissued in a second edition. This features a 20-page addendum by the author consisting of new developments in the case; and also her encounter with the late James Phelan, the FBI asset who threatened to sue her for telling the truth about him and Robert Mahue. For reasons made clear in the volume, it was understandable that Phelan would not want that relationship delved into. Because Maheu is a very central character in the architecture of this superb book.

    I am not going to reveal the why. I will just recommend you read it and find out for yourself.

    ________
    The updated edition (which is currently available only in the paperback version) may be found here: here.

  • Review of RFK Legacy film

    Director Sean Stone and producer Rob Wilson bring us an interesting, compelling and well made film on the career of Senator Robert Kennedy, his assassination, and his enduring legacy.

    Sean Stone and Rob Wilson: RFK Legacy

    Rob Wilson produced JFK Revisited for director Oliver Stone. He has now produced RFK Legacy for director Sean Stone, Oliver’s son. This new documentary seems to me to be unique in its field. Because it deals with three Kennedys: John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Jr. And the concentration is on Senator Robert Kennedy: his life, and also his assassination.

    It begins with Robert Kennedy announcing that he is running for president in 1968. It then briefly deals with three primaries in that race: Indiana, Oregon–the first election a Kennedy lost– and the triumph in California on June 4th over Senatorial rival Eugene McCarthy. We see RFK at the podium reciting his now iconic (and final) public phrase, “On to Chicago and let’s win there.” The film then cuts to the aftermath of that victory: the utter shock, disbelief and hysteria of the crowd as some of them see, and the rest of them learn, that RFK has been assassinated. Recall, this is just two months after the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. And it is the second Kennedy to be assassinated in five years. The grief at what had just happened at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was almost palpable. The Jungian consciousness behind it all was this: it was the premature burial of the sixties.

    The film follows as RFK’s body was transported from California to a requiem at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, as that was the state from which he was senator. To make the passing of the era even more symbolic, on that plane were not just Ethel Kennedy, but both Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King. Bobby Kennedy had paid a large part of the cost for King’s funeral in April. And the night of King’s murder, he gave what was probably his finest speech—one which prevented Indianapolis from going up in flames, as almost every other major city in America had. Jackie Kennedy strongly objected to RFK running for president. She feared that what had happened to her husband would happen to him. He had become the substitute father to her children.

    What then followed the service was the train ride from New York City to the burial at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, DC. Arthur Schlesinger was on that train. He had originally thought Bobby was a lesser candidate than Jack. He had since changed his mind. At the end, he thought RFK would make an even greater president than his brother. One reason was that he had become more radical than Jack. He wrote in his diary, “We have now murdered the three men who, more than any other, incarnated the idealism of America in our time.” He pledged never to get this close to any other such candidate. It was too tragic. (David Margolick, The Promise and the Dream, pp. 385-86)

    The film flashes back to RFK’s career with commentators like Lisa Pease in the present and Ed Murrow from the past. We see a young Robert Kennedy as lead counsel for the McClellan Committee going up against the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and, later, Sam Giancana. Members of the press now pronounced Kennedy “ruthless’ for exposing the Cosa Nostra so relentlessly. Which is something that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were reluctant to do.

    When his brother won the presidency, RFK continued his crusade against organized crime as Attorney General. He also, like no other previous AG, pursued the breaking down of segregation in the South and civil rights for African Americans. Further, as the film shows, it was RFK who exposed to JFK that the CIA had deceived him about the Bay of Pigs operation. They knew it could not succeed without Pentagon support. In fact, they knew it would fail. But they thought JFK would commit American power to salvage it. He did not. Therefore, JFK fired Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell.

    This split with the Agency was made worse by the fact that the CIA had secretly contracted out with three members of the Cosa Nostra—John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante—to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is after RFK had ordered a full court press on organized crime, and ordered an almost total surveillance over Giancana. When the FBI (accidentally) discovered these plots and informed Bobby about them, he asked for a briefing by the CIA. The Agency told him the plots had stopped. They had not. And the Agency knew they had not when they lied to him about it.

    By midway through 1961, Bobby became an advisor to JFK on foreign policy. During the Missile Crisis, there was no one more trusted by the president than Bobby. When there was true fear of having to resort to the Greenbrier Underground Shelter –which the film depicts—President Kennedy opted for the blockade alternative. For which he was harshly criticized, especially by the Joint Chiefs. When the Russians communicated a truce agreement, it was RFK who advised his brother on the terms to accept.

    As the film notes, after the double assassinations of JFK and then Oswald, Bobby Kennedy began a metamorphosis. He now became a gentler, kinder, more sensitive politician and person. This was typified by his visits to Mississippi at the request of Marian Edelman, and to California for Cesar Chavez. (I was personally told by the late Paul Schrade that it was Cesar’s idea to approach RFK on this.)

    In keeping with the title of the film, we now shift to RFK Jr. He consciously followed his father’s footsteps by first attending Harvard and then the University of Virginia School of Law. He developed a chronic drug problem after his father’s death, which included running away from home. He was eventually arrested for heroin possession in South Dakota. As part of his probation, he worked for the conservation group the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was that experience which transformed him into an environmental lawyer of the first rank.

    Some of his successful crusades were his legal actions over pollution of the Hudson River, during which he joined the Riverkeepers group, which had started with fisherman John Cronin. It was this longstanding Hudson River campaign which many feel was the real beginning of the environmental movement in the USA. Kennedy also took on Monsanto and General Electric. He became well known in New York and was featured on the cover of several popular magazines for saving the Hudson River from becoming a cesspool. New York magazine captioned him as “The Kennedy Who Matters”. He wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature, railing against George W. Bush’s environmental policies. This and his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 got him interviews with Jon Stewart and then Stephen Colbert. He was so in demand that he was doing almost 200 speeches per year.

    The film deals with what eventually caused the MSM to turn on Kennedy. It began with his campaign against mercury in pollution and the fact that it was in some vaccines wrapped in a preservative called thimerosal. He was not the only person to warn about this. Congressman Frank Pallone had done so in 1997. The film also features people like psychologist Sarah Bridges, actress Grace Hightower and essayist Lyn Redwood on the issue. I am not qualified to render any kind of definitive judgment on the subject, so I will not.

    The film then deals with the other issue that turned the MSM against Robert Kennedy Jr. That would be his view of the assassinations of his uncle and then his father. As the film shows, RFK Jr. was first suspicious about his uncle’s death. This was based on the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. He could not understand why Ruby did what he did in public and in front of TV cameras. He later found out that Ruby was much more than just a patriotic strip club owner. At this point in the film, Sean Stone brings in David Talbot, who does a very nice job describing what happened when RFK heard the news from J. Edgar Hoover that his brother was dead. He immediately suspected a conspiracy, as Talbot described in the early part of his book, Brothers.

    RFK could not stay for the rest of the LBJ term. So after he, Thomas Kuchel and Hubert Humphrey got his brother’s civil rights bill through the Senate, he departed. (As Clay Risen shows in his book The Bill of the Century, what LBJ did on this bill has been greatly exaggerated.) As senator from New York, Kennedy became what author Edward Schmitt called the President of the Other America. He was there for the poor, the young, and the downtrodden.

    He was obviously the candidate to run against Johnson in 1968. After all, as he himself told Daniel Ellsberg, his brother’s policy would not have allowed Vietnam to escalate as under Johnson. (Ellsberg at Harvard JFK seminar in 1993). As Talbot states, by 1968, RFK was going to run on civil rights, poverty and withdrawing from Vietnam. Contrary to popular belief, and as revealed by author Jules Witcover in his book 85 Days, Kennedy had decided before the New Hampshire primary that he would run. McCarthy’s strong showing in that primary, plus the devastating Tet Offensive, forced Johnson out. As Witcover notes, Johnson would have lost in Wisconsin. And he knew that.

    The film closes with two powerful strophes. First is President Kennedy’s advocacy for Rachel Carson. Specifically in her battle against DDT and other pesticides in her 1962 classic Silent Spring. Carson had attended the May 1962 White House conference on conservation. And she testified before JFK’s Science Advisory Committee. She was battling breast cancer at the time, and she passed on in April of 1964. She was viciously attacked by the chemical companies, but she stood her ground.

    The second strophe is the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy Jr admits that he had accepted the orthodoxy on this case until he talked to Paul Schrade. Schrade was one of the victims of the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel that night. When the trajectory of the bullet that hit him was explained, he knew that the LAPD was passing horse manure. He eventually convinced Bobby to read Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report. That did it for RFK Jr. Thankfully, Sean Stone features Lisa Pease in this last segment. There is no better authority on the RFK murder than Lisa. And her book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, is mandatory reading for anyone interested in that case. Stone’s closing twenty minutes or so is quite pointed intellectually and well done artistically. Kudos should also go to Oliver Stone, who did the face-to-face interview with RFK Jr., editor Kurt Mattila, composer Jeff Beal and cinematographer Egor Povolotsky.

    I would recommend viewing the film to our readers. It is being streamed at Angel.com (https://www.angel.com/blog/rfk-legacy/posts/where-to-watch-rfk-legacy).

  • New Revelations from the Recently Released RFK files – Part 1

    Did the LAPD invite the CIA into their RFK assassination investigation, or did the CIA push their way in? New documents definitively answer that question.

    New Revelations from the Recently Released RFK files – Part 1

    By Lisa Pease, author of A Lie Too Big to Fail

    Having extensively researched CIA and FBI files on both the JFK and RFK assassinations for more than 30 years, I’m uniquely positioned to identify what’s new and important in the recently released RFK files. So far, I have found three big stories in the recently released records. I’ll start with the first story and continue in subsequent articles to illuminate the other two important stories I’ve found. There are also several smaller stories, which I will get to eventually.

    Just before the RFK files were released, a reporter from CBS News contacted several people who have written books about the RFK assassination to ask what they expected to find in the files. I told the reporter I was especially eager to see the CIA files, as I knew they had been involved in the LAPD’s investigation but had only seen portions of the LAPD’s communications, never the responses.[1]

    It’s a fact that the CIA was involved in the LAPD’s assassination investigation. But there could be innocent or sinister theories for why that would be. If the LAPD had invited the CIA into the case, that could indicate the CIA was not involved and was only summoned due to their ability to track down information about the numerous foreigners who became, however temporarily, part of the LAPD’s investigation. However, it could also have been possible that the LAPD invited the CIA into the investigation because they had planned it together. If, on the other hand, the CIA had invited themselves into the investigation, that would reveal a vested interest in the outcome of the investigation and would also appear to exonerate the LAPD in the planning of the assassination.

    So the first thing I wanted to know from the files was simply that: did the LAPD invite the CIA in? Or did the CIA invite themselves in?

    The first semi-answer came from an important CIA file released back in 2021, that I did not see until this year, after my book came out and after the updated paperback version had gone to print, that contained two documents.

    The first page of the 2021-released document was the CIA’s response to Dan Rather’s questions about whether Manny Pena and Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, the two LAPD officers in charge of the conspiracy side of the investigations of “Special Unit Senator,” the Los Angeles Police Department unit formed to investigate RFK’s assassination, had worked for the CIA. The CIA denied any connection, despite the fact that both of them had been credibly linked to the CIA.[2]

    I had seen the first document in the files years earlier and had to laugh upon seeing it again because the CIA has been known, frequently, to lie on the record when people got too close to their ties to the assassinations of the 1960s. In fact, several years back, I saw a comment in a forum where a poster said to his knowledge, the CIA had never lied to the Warren Commission. I was able to find a lie the CIA made to the Warren Commission in five minutes. Helms denied to the Warren Commission that the CIA had ever had any interest in Oswald, a lie that is now completely exposed with previous and current file releases.

    In the recently released RFK files, there is another “big lie” file about Oswald, also in response to the Dan Rather inquiries, in which the CIA goes to great lengths to say they knew nothing about Oswald before the assassination, something proven to be ridiculously false over the years, and something even Dan Rather raised questions about in his special.

    The second document in the 2021 file, however, dropped a bombshell, albeit with lawyerly language:

    Sirhan Sirhan’s security file reflects that he had never been of interest to the Agency prior to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. On 5 June 1968 when Sirhan was identified as the probable assassin, the Director of Central Intelligence met with the Deputy Chief of the CI Staff, the Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, and the Director of Security and directed that the CI staff would be the focal point for action in the Sirhan case. The CI staff was to collect all available information on Sirhan and provide appropriate portions of this material to the Office of Security for release to the Los Angeles Police Department. This material was to be released to the LAPD through the Office of Security’s Los Angeles Field Office.[3]

    (I found the use of “reflects that” telling, as if the file might have had more in it at one time but has been altered to “reflect” a certain version of events.)

    So James Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence group was designated as the records collection point for the RFK assassination investigation, just as his team had run point for the JFK assassination, and could control what was released to the LAPD from the CIA’s end, by the CIA’s OS LAFO contact:

    Mr. William Curtin, the Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office, contacted Inspector Yarnell of the LAPD on 5 June 1968 and advised him that the Agency was prepared to cooperate with the LAPD in its investigation of Sirhan.

    From that one sentence, it appeared CIA initiated contact with the CIA first, but I wasn’t ready to declare a conclusion until I read Sirhan’s 815-page 201 file, released in 2025 by the Luna Committee. In there, we find this important bit of information from William Curtin himself:

    When the announcement of the Subject’s [Sirhan’s] identity and foreign background was made public on 5 June 1968, upon instructions from Headquarters, I contacted Inspector Harold YARNELL, in the absence of [LAPD] Chief Tom REDDIN.[4]

    Inspector Yarnell was a member of the LEIU – the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit – a private network of intelligence officers at various police departments across the country. Yarnell had been the Secretary-Treasurer of the LEIU and became the Commander of the LAPD Intelligence Division, where he interfaced with, among others, Lt. Jack Revill of the Dallas Police Department (named chief of the Dallas Intelligence Unit).[5]

    But it’s what Curtin wrote next that proved the CIA had forced its way into the investigation and not been invited:

    Inspector Yarnell was informed of our desire to aid the Los Angeles Police Department in any way that we could in the conduct of their investigation of the Subject. He expressed his appreciation and stated that they would gladly accept any information we wished to pass along to them. However, he advised that their case against the Subject appeared to be airtight and that he did not at that time foresee that they would be calling on us for any assistance.[6]

    In other words, the LAPD’s response to the CIA’s offer of help had been essentially, thank you, but no thank you. That is quite notable. The LAPD didn’t yet know what they didn’t know. But the CIA knew there would be things the LAPD didn’t know, names that would need to be investigated.

    Twelve days later, Inspector Yarnell called William back and set up a meeting with Yarnell, Captain Brown (the Chief of Homicide at LAPD) and Curtin. At this point, Yarnell’s tune changed slightly. Although they felt they had a rock-solid case against Sirhan (which they didn’t—see my book for why the case for Sirhan’s guilt falls flat), Yarnell said they were pursuing a possible conspiracy angle and needed information about Sirhan and possible associates. The CIA’s one request in response is that all mention of their cooperation be kept from the press. And for the most part, it was.

    But I find even this confession of the alliance and circumstances possibly incomplete, because Sirhan had not yet been identified when Chief Reddin gave his 7:00 a.m. press conference on June 5. As I wrote in my book, after viewing the tape from that conference:

    Throughout the press conference, Reddin’s delivery was calm, articulate, and professional, until he came to one particular question. He had just explained that the LAPD was checking with other agencies for any information they might have on the suspect— “the immigration service, the CIA, the Bureau of Customs, Social Security, the Post Office department—”

    “Why the CIA, Chief?” a reporter asked.

    Suddenly, Reddin became visibly rattled and nearly choked as he tried to get the agency’s name out. “The C-A … the C-A … the C-I-A has types of information that might help us identify who the person might be. We’ll give them his picture.” Reddin regained his composure shortly after, but it was a bizarre break—and the only such break—in an otherwise seamless presentation.[7]

    Perhaps Reddin had learned of the CIA’s call to Captain Brown and was planning to share their unknown suspect’s picture with the CIA, but right about this time, Munir Sirhan, the brother of Sirhan who was at his early morning job and watching the TV in the breakroom saw a picture of his brother on TV and went with his brother Adel to the local Pasadena police to identify him. So maybe Curtin’s timeline is an official lie.

    There’s also the weird question the LAPD asked Sirhan about him being married. After the shooting, Sirhan was extensively questioned for a few hours before Reddin heard Sirhan had asked for a lawyer and shut down the questioning. The LAPD and the DA’s assistant who questioned him recognized Sirhan was in some sort of dissociative state. He couldn’t remember what kind of car he drove and couldn’t or wouldn’t give his name. Even his interrogators didn’t believe he was lying. Before his identity had been revealed, one LAPD officer asked Sirhan if he were married (to which Sirhan replied, quite oddly, that he didn’t know).

    It turns out the CIA knew of another man called “Sirhan Sirhan” in the United States who was married, and had been married in 1957 (Sirhan Sirhan had never married and would have only been 13 at the time!), and a reporter with ties to the CIA and Israel named John Kimche had written about him a week after the assassination took place. Kimche thought the Sirhan he was writing about was the Sirhan Sirhan in custody because his source had been right so many times before. The CIA tracked down the man, identified by a friend as “Sirhan Sirhan,” and reported back that he was really Sirhan Salim Sirhan Abu Khadir, a resident of Detroit.”[8] But who told the LAPD within hours after the shooting that the guy in custody might have been married? Might the CIA have planted this story with Kimche after the fact to explain earlier initial misinformation? Had someone from Israel called it in to try to paint Sirhan as someone with ties to Al Fatah (which Sirhan Bishara Sirhan did not have)? Maybe the LAPD just asked if he was married for no reason. But they also asked if his name was “Jesse,” and there was, in fact, a suspect named “Jesse” that apparently had been taken into custody separately from Sirhan and released. So the question may not have been random at all.

    There are still many mysteries in this case. But the CIA pushing their way into the LAPD’s investigation, while not surprising to those who have long assumed a CIA hand in the assassination of RFK, is genuinely new information, with genuinely sinister implications.

    (Part 2 coming soon)

     

    1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gabbard-rfk-assassination-files-release/

    2. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House: 2025 paperback edition), pp. 98-99.

    3. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/SIRHAN%20SIRHAN%20INVESTIGATI%5B16011338%5D.pdf, p. 4

    4. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/rfk/releases/2025/0612/07165005_sirhan_sirhan_201.pdf, p. 24

    5. https://afsc.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/1979_NARMIC_Police%20Threat%20to%20Political%20Liberty.pdf, page 52.

    6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/SIRHAN%20SIRHAN%20201%5B16506077%5D.pdf, p. 74

    7. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House: 2025 paperback edition), p. 58.

    8. Sirhan 201 file, p. 779.

  • New RFK Film – Rob Wilson, Sean Stone, and Oliver Stone – “Legacy”

    A new film on the RFK case is now available. It was made by Rob Wilson, Sean Stone and Oliver Stone, and is titled Legacy. Three of the main interview subjects are Lisa Pease, Dick Russell and Robert Kennedy, Jr.

    Please see a review of the film here.