A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL

  To

  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  and

  Munir Sirhan

  who have courageously sought the truth

  about what happened to their loved ones

  on June 5, 1968

  © 2018 LISA PEASE

  A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL

  The Real History of the Assassination of

  ROBERT F. KENNEDY

  Lisa Pease

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  EVENTS

  HOPE

  NIGHTMARE

  TRAGEDY

  PREPARATION

  TRIAL

  ANALYSIS

  REINVESTIGATIONS

  TOO MANY HOLES

  SUSPICIOUS OTHERS

  MIND GAMES

  MISSION: POSSIBLE

  INDEX

  I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves.

  Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies, but above all, from our own misguided policies—and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best, hope of man.

  There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.

  —Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Kansas State

  University, March 18, 1968

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Sensible people keep asking if it is really worth the time and effort to dig into the difficult past in this difficult way. Some time ago, near the beginning of this long journey, I tried to explain my own reason for pressing ahead. ‘Assassinations of national figures are not ordinary murders,’ I wrote. ‘When bullets distort or nullify the national will, democracy itself has been attacked. When a series of such events changes the direction of the nation and occurs under suspicious circumstances, institutions seem compromised or corrupted and democratic process itself undermined.’ It was Robert Kennedy’s special gift that he understood the new realities of power in this country and could make people believe that if they roused themselves to the effort they could, as he liked to put it, ‘reclaim America.’ Perhaps that helps explain why the pain of his loss remains so great after so long a time.”

  —Congressman Allard Lowenstein,

  Saturday Review, February 19, 1977

  I STOOD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS WHEN I STARTED LOOKING into this case. Former FBI agent Bill Turner and former journalist Jonn Christian first opened my eyes to the numerous discrepancies in the government’s case against Sirhan Sirhan. Robert Blair Kaiser’s book made me curious about Sirhan’s mental state at the time of the shooting. Dr. Phil Melanson’s work brought provocative witnesses into view.

  I am indebted to the archivists at the California State Archives who put up with my numerous requests and made key records available to me. I am grateful to the news organizations that donated footage of the event to the libraries at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) and UCLA. I watched dozens of hours of video from the event and listened to dozens of hours of taped witness interviews, many of which had never been transcribed, to find some of the new information you’ll see in these pages.

  I’m grateful to the folks who maintain the Mary Ferrell Archives, a collection of files from various government agencies relating to our secret history. The FBI, CIA, LAPD and Los Angeles County files there were invaluable, as were the Sirhan trial transcript and related court filings.

  Thank you, Los Angeles Public Library. I had only a passing interest in this case, having focused my attention on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But one day, while looking for something else, I stumbled upon a drawer full of reels of microfilm from the Robert Kennedy investigation. The tapes were unlabeled, so I put a reel into the machine at random. I was immediately impressed by the number of reports of suspects beyond Sirhan, including one who had been handcuffed at the scene. I knew these files had only been released four years earlier and suspected there was a wealth of information that had not surfaced in the few books on the case that had been published to date. My suspicion proved to be well founded, as you will see in this book.

  Special thanks go to all members of my family as well as the friends and coworkers who urged me to continue even when completion of this journey seemed a distant fantasy.

  Munir Sirhan gave me insight into the shoddy way the defense team treated the family of Sirhan Sirhan and has shown a deep passion for justice as well as a broad knowledge of the intricacies of this case. He also gave me three bags of the best lemons I have ever tasted, fresh off his backyard tree.

  The most surprising and welcome development of all was being able to discuss the case with Robert Kennedy, Jr. Of all the members of the Kennedy family, Bobby has long been the truest heir to the legacy of his father and his uncle John. Bobby is an attorney, an environmental activist, and the co-founder and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. I was impressed with Bobby before I met him. But I was even more impressed after discussing the case with him and seeing how quickly his mind worked, how easily he grasped concepts that others had shown trouble understanding. In turn, he taught me about some legal aspects of this case, as well as how to make perfect corn on the cob! I will be forever grateful to our mutual friend, author David Talbot, for connecting us.

  David also made possible my second meeting with John Meier, whose interesting story about what he learned while working for Howard Hughes greatly informed my work. Or maybe I should thank John, who told David he wouldn’t meet with him unless David brought me along. I was devastated to learn that David had suffered a stroke as I was nearing the finish line on this book. I hope by the time you are reading this that he has fully recovered.

  Paul Schrade became a treasured ally over the course of our many encounters. Not only did I get to know him through this case, I got to know him from political events all over Los Angeles. Whenever there was a group that needed support, he was there. He is a gem of an activist on all sorts of progressive issues, and his tenacity in calling for reinvestigations of this case has been unparalleled.

  Posthumous thanks go to Adel Sirhan, who called me after one of my first articles on the case to find out for himself if I were sincere and honest. He told me I passed his muster, but I never got to meet him in person as he died shortly after.

  I learned so much about the ballistic evidence from Lynn Mangan that I must posthumously thank her too. She spent decades examining the evidence in the case, and hosted me at her place in Reno for a few days to explain to me what she had learned. She generously shared not only her research but also her world-class collection of miscellaneous historical artifacts.

  Posthumous thanks go to Carl McNabb as well, a former CIA operative who quit the agency in disgust and in later years attempted suicide. We took an instant liking to each other, and he shared some information with me he had not shared with others. He was a sensitive and charming man whose genuine concern for the world touched me. In Bill Turner’s and Jonn Christian’s book, he appears under the name “Jim Rose.”

  Posthumous thanks are also due Gordon Novel, another CIA operative who led quite a darker life than Carl. Almost in spite of himself, he provided me some valuable information about this case and others, along with some terrifically entertaining lies. He was the most colorful speaker I have ever encountered, with a vocabulary more befitting a Damon Runyan novel than an assassination investigation.

  Thanks to Cyril Wecht and his son Ben for providing me the opportunity on several occasions to share my knowledge with others at conferences sponsored by the Wecht Institute at Duquesne University. Thanks to Jim Lesar
and all the people at the Assassination Archives Research Center who have hosted me at conferences in Bethesda, Maryland, as well (and who posted my testimony to a United Nations inquiry regarding the 1961 death of U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld). Posthumous thanks to John Judge, who gave me my start as a speaker at Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) conferences in Dallas and Washington, D.C. I’m grateful to have met and learned much about the research process from incredible historians at these conferences, including Bill Turner, John Newman, Gary Aguilar, Bill Davy, Jim Douglass and others. I met the maker of the documentary The Second Gun, Ted Charach, at a couple of these conferences as well. I also shared the stage with Oliver Stone, whose film JFK made possible the release of so many important files, at a couple of related events.

  I must offer special thanks to Jim DiEugenio, my former partner in Probe Magazine, a journal we co-edited for several years that illuminated information from files released through the JFK Act. Our goal was to tie the past to the present, to show the through-line of history. Jim approached Adam Parfrey about publishing a “best of” volume of past articles, which you can find under the title The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Jim has encouraged me to write this book for years. I repaid that favor by giving Jim the awful task of reading the longest version of this manuscript, and over the winter holiday season, no less. I relied on Jim’s good judgment to help me excise less-than-critical information from the present volume. Whatever remains must be blamed solely on me.

  Thank you, Adam Parfrey, for being absolutely fearless and passionate about bringing the darker parts of our past to light in both of these books. Sadly, Adam passed away just as we were making final edits to the book. I will forever miss his voice in the world on this and other subjects.

  My sincere thanks go to everyone who has ever said a kind word to me about this project—whether in person, online (thanks, Twitter family!), on radio shows, in documentaries, at conferences, and in other venues. Your support has carried me when the difficulty of telling this story grew nearly unbearable.

  Final thanks go to you, dear reader. You showed the curiosity it takes to become informed in a world that wants to keep you ignorant. I hope you come away from this feeling empowered. Because once you learn how a magic trick works, you can never be fooled again.

  PREFACE

  I AM NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THE DAY PRESIDENT JOHN F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. But I remember seeing thousands of people waving at Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as it passed through their towns. I remember thinking, even as a young child, that the best politician of my lifetime was already gone. As a child, that was a terribly depressing moment. As an adult, I’ve yet to shake that feeling.

  I learned to distrust the media while serving as Governor Jerry Brown’s assistant during his presidential run in 1992. I would attend events, and then see the way the media reported on them. Huge crowds were dismissed as “a handful of supporters.” The large protests at the Democratic Convention, where I walked the floor as a delegate, went unreported entirely. Liars were given time on Nightline while truth tellers were relegated to the alternative media. At the end of the campaign I volunteered for a time with Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) because I was so incensed at how dishonestly the media reported on major events. I started paying attention to bylines, not just headlines. Who in the media could be trusted? Who could not?

  I started to wonder about other major events. If someone other than Oswald had killed President John F. Kennedy, would the media have told us? If someone other than Sirhan had shot Senator Robert Kennedy, would the media have covered that up?

  My first Internet search ever, in the pre-World Wide Web days, was “JFK assassination.” I found an online group where the assassination of JFK was discussed in minute detail. I plunged head first into an argument there that lasted five years. I realized right away I was outgunned in terms of being able to cite data in defense of my positions. So I went to a local library and found a full set of the Warren Commission volumes of testimony and documents that accompanied the report. I started reviewing newspapers on microfilm, and even found some FBI files at the local library that related to the JFK case. I went from being a curious reader to an active researcher in short order.

  The more I learned about the JFK assassination, the more I wondered what happened to RFK. I read every book published on the case, including some obscure ones rarely cited. And then one day, I opened “the wrong” drawer in the library and found, to my amazement, microfilm of the LAPD’s and FBI’s investigation into the RFK assassination. At the time, those files had only been released four years earlier. I knew only a handful of people, at best, had looked at those files. I realized I might find things in that data that no one else had found. And I did, as you’ll soon see.

  Similarly, many witness interviews were never transcribed. I listened to hours of audio tapes, some recorded at extremely low volumes. I also went through a number of video archives throughout the Los Angeles area and found interesting nuggets that have never been reported before that dramatically contradict the official version of events.

  The official story is deceptively simple. A young Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan shot Senator Robert Kennedy in front of numerous witnesses in a narrow serving area called “the pantry” at the Ambassador Hotel just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Senator Kennedy had just won the Democratic presidential primary the night before in California and was walking through the pantry on his way to a room where the print media reporters were waiting. He never made it that far. Five other people were wounded during the shooting. Sirhan was tried and convicted in a trial and sentenced to death.

  But even in the early days after the assassination, conspiracy theories were forming. Weren’t there too many holes in the victims and the doorframes in the pantry to have come from a single gun? A bullet pictured in a newspaper was one bullet too many for the official scenario to work, as a housewife pointed out, to deafening media silence. Witnesses to evidence of conspiracy were told they could not speak to reporters per a judge’s order. A film about a second gun that had entered the case raised numerous questions about the validity of the authorities’ conclusions about the case. A criminalist from Pasadena with a lot of credibility wrote a report demonstrating that two different guns had been fired in the pantry, meaning Sirhan could not possibly have acted alone. Others pointed to the fact that witnesses uniformly put Sirhan in front of Kennedy, but Kennedy was shot from behind.

  The discrepancies in the case led to a formal re-examination of the evidence. A panel of experts examined the bullets to determine if more than one gun had been used. But the public was told of only a single key finding—that the panel found no evidence proving that a second gun had been used. They were not told other key data, such as the fact that the panel could not match any of the victim bullets to Sirhan’s gun. And while the panel did discover one deliberate deception, they missed the much larger deception operation that had been pulled on them, as you will learn in this volume.

  It has often been said that one lie begets another. Nowhere is that more evident than in this case. Each time one lie was exposed, another lie had to be concocted to explain the previous lie away. Those who protected the lies ascended to higher positions of power. Those who challenged the official story would be shot at, sued, or marginalized as “conspiracy theorists,” a frame the CIA promoted to its media assets in 1967 when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating suspects in the JFK assassination case with deep connections to the CIA.

  It really is a crime to marginalize the few who have spent years trying to find the truth about this and other cases, who have given generously of their time and resources, who view such research not as a hobby or a gruesome pastime but as an important part of participating in what’s left of our democracy. Each person bears a responsibility to pass an accurate understanding of the past to future generations so that the country and humanity can suc
cessfully advance. When we turn our backs on the truth, either through lies or indifference, we are ruining our own future. Without an accurate understanding of where we’ve been, we can’t understand where we are, or where we’re going.

  “Who controls the past controls the future,” Eric Blair wrote under his pseudonym of George Orwell in his book 1984. No one understood that better than Blair, who was himself an intelligence agent. He originally named his book 1948, because he saw so clearly where the dictatorial impulse led, and how “perpetual war for perpetual peace” was not just an idea but already in motion after World War II ended.

  The Cold War was a blanket term for what was in effect a series of resource wars. Who would control the oil supplies around the globe? Who would control the rare earth minerals that made flight, computers and cell phones possible? We will perhaps always be involved in resource wars unless we recognize that nearly every international conflict is about resources, and that ideology is simply the fig leaf used to hide that fact.

  Both JFK and RFK understood this. Both actively sought to stop the plundering of the poorer nations by the rich. In doing so, the Kennedys put themselves at odds with powerful people who drove the economy, controlled the media, and ran covert operations. Both brothers paid a high price for their efforts to make the world a better, fairer place.

  I didn’t plan to write a book when I started on this journey. I just had an intense, personal curiosity. I wanted to understand what happened for myself. But as the years went by and I read the books of others on the case, the gap between what I was learning and what appeared in print began to weigh on me. Reluctantly, I realized I had a responsibility to share what I had found.

  Thank you for being brave enough to open this volume. It takes a certain amount of courage to challenge the status quo, to dare to have a thought that differs from what the media screams at you daily. The media usually provides facts, but not always the clarifying context. Facts without context can become lies. “He robbed a bank” is a lot different from “He robbed a bank because his kid was being held hostage.” While both statements could be technically accurate, the first statement is closer to a lie if the second statement is true. Context matters.