by Lisa Pease
In addition, there was another couple that appeared to have sparked Sharaga’s broadcast of the tall, sandy-haired suspect. Gilman Kraft and his wife Ruth had been near the Ambassador Hotel lobby at the time of the shooting when Kraft’s attention was drawn to a 6’2” Caucasian man in his twenties with “long blond hair” who “hurdled a couch” as he ran through the lobby. In a 1992 interview of Kraft,314 Kraft said that he was a friend of the Kennedys and choked up as he remembered this moment. Asked if the guy pushed him out of the way as he ran by, Kraft said “He didn’t, but if we had been in his path he certainly would have.” He described the young man as lean, between 20 and 30 years old, with “longish blond hair” and said he “vaulted” over sofas “on his way out toward the back of the Ambassador Hotel—the South Side.” This was clearly not Michael Wayne, who had dark curly hair, not long blond hair, and was not that tall.
It appears Kraft’s observations formed the basis for Sergeant Paul Sharaga’s initial broadcast of a tall, sandy-haired suspect, as Kraft’s interview was in a folder with other information about Sharaga.315 Predictably, the police had written “Do Not Type” on the top of his wife Ruth’s LAPD interview report. Both were interviewed at the same time. All interviews were taped initially. Her tape appears to no longer be in existence, but now we likely know what was on it and why the police did not want that information in the record.
I believe Sharaga merged the report from the Kraft couple with the couple he encountered earlier in his mind and reported on separately to other officers. Sharaga’s APB on the tall blond man was then cancelled by Inspector Powers in exactly the manner Sharaga described. I believe in all aspects Sharaga told the truth as he remembered it. I just think in his mind he merged two separate stories into one storyline.
During the course of the original investigation and later reinvestigations, several witnesses were threatened in some way. For example, Darnell Johnson, who saw Sirhan shortly before the shooting in a group of four men and a girl in a polka dot dress who appeared to be together, told the police his brakes had been tampered with.316
Another witness, a 17-year-old boy by the name of John Chris Weatherly, had been shot at after telling KHJ-TV newscaster Baxter Ward about knowing a man named Bill Powers who had seen someone who looked like Sirhan in the back of Oliver Brindley “Jerry” Owen’s truck on June 3, 1968, the day before the primary election that ended in Kennedy’s death. June 3 was a day in Sirhan’s life that no one at the trial—neither the prosecution nor the defense—wanted to talk about. Ward was impressed by the young man’s sincerity and aired the report after changing some names and details to protect him. A few days after the broadcast, someone shot at Weatherly with a high-powered rifle as he arrived home at 3 A.M. in the morning. Jerry Owen, known popularly as “the Walking Bible,” had also reported a phone call telling him to “keep your mother____ mouth shut.”317
And in August 1971, the day before Harper was to testify at Busch’s grand jury hearing regarding the ballistics evidence, Harper noticed a car following him home. He tried to lose the car by speeding up but the other car gave chase, following his random turns. Harper heard what sounded like a shot just as his car hit a dip in the road. Had it not been for the dip, the bullet that might have cost him his life dented his bumper instead.318
If Sirhan were the only shooter, who cared what these other people found? The threats only make sense if there was, in fact, something to hide, that these people were exposing.
After talking to Weatherly and others, Baxter Ward became so invested in this case that, after being elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, as Chairman of the Coroner’s committee, he convened a day-long hearing on May 13, 1974, on the ballistics evidence. The purpose of the hearing was not, purportedly, to reopen the case but rather to make recommendations on the handling of ballistics evidence in California going forward. Predictably, Buck Compton, by then an associate justice on the California Court of Appeals, issued a counter-statement with the stated goal of preventing the public “from being deluded into believing persons other than Sirhan were involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.”319
By 1973, the rumors and innuendo surrounding the case had finally compelled New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein to step into the case. He met privately with actor Robert Vaughn, the star of the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., who had taken a personal interest in the case. As Lowenstein described it years later:
The truth is that I finally went to that first meeting chiefly because in my closed-mindedness I believed that spending half an hour with people who had gone gaga about the Robert Kennedy case would both prove my open-mindedness and help me persuade a good man to avoid further involvement in such foolishness.
That afternoon at Robert Vaughn’s house I saw the autopsy report and discovered that Robert Kennedy had been hit from behind by bullets fired at point-blank range.… I thought I had remembered that Sirhan had been facing Senator Kennedy and had shot him from a distance of several feet, so I assumed that either the autopsy report or my memory was in error. I soon learned that neither was.320
Lowenstein also found that, when he discussed this with others, this was a key factor in changing their minds as well.
Everyone was certain that Sirhan was the assassin until they heard what was in the autopsy report. Then there would come a kind of mental double-take: the pain of rethinking the worst of nights, the shock of implications dimly glimpsed; and then the sorting out of what if anything to do next. For most, a quick decision to do nothing, to try to put the matter away again; often a warning that going public about my doubts would be awkward, maybe damaging.321
Trying to act through official channels, Lowenstein went to District Attorney Busch “with a list of questions about specific problems that seemed troublesome.”322 But the answers Lowenstein received were “as peculiar as the contradictions in the evidence …. Every official at the D.A.’s office was polite and talked about cooperation, but nobody did anything much with my list except periodically to request another copy.” And worse, the answers he received “often turned out to be untrue—not marginally untrue, but enthusiastically, aggressively, and sometimes quite imaginatively untrue.”323 As Lowenstein wrote in 1977,
As events moved on, I found that propaganda campaigns were being concocted that peddled the precise reverse of the facts. Two of these were especially daring and effective: it was repeated constantly that “every eyewitness” had seen Sirhan kill Kennedy (so how could any rational person doubt that he had done it?); and it was said almost as frequently that there was “only one gun” in the hotel pantry where Kennedy was shot (so how could anyone have fired a second?)—this despite the fact that everyone connected with the case, if very few other people, knew that there was at least one other gun in the precise area from which the bullets that hit Kennedy were fired.324
Lowenstein found the most compelling evidence of a second gun was the bullet found in the stage doorframe immediately after the assassination. The finding of the bullet had been captured in a photograph of two policemen pointing at the hole with a caption that stated a “bullet was still in the wood.”
Then, too, there were the FBI photos of the doorframes in the pantry’s west end captioned “Bullet holes.” When Lowenstein asked for a study of the doorframes, he ran into stonewalling that he initially took for bureaucratic delays rather than an attempt at deception. But the delay stretched on for two years, when he was finally told the doorframes had been destroyed years earlier.
In 1973, Herbert Leon MacDonnell, a famous New York criminalistics professor, added fuel to the growing evidence of conspiracy by confirming Harper’s interpretation of his evidence. He signed an affidavit that indicated the Kennedy neck bullet (Exhibit 47) and the William Weisel bullet (Exhibit 54) could not have been fired from the same gun and that the Kennedy bullet specifically could not have been fired from Sirhan’s gun.
Meanwhile, pantry victim Paul Schrade had been equally puzzled by the
evidence, as had one of the more flamboyant members of the D.A.’s office, one who had never been invited into the Robert Kennedy case at the time, former Assistant District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi. Schrade, represented by Bugliosi and Lowenstein, filed a suit against Sirhan and anyone else who might have been shooting in the pantry as a means to force the case back into a courtroom so the evidence of multiple shooters could be properly examined.
As the calls for a new investigation continued, on December 16, 1974, Ron Kessler, a journalist who had written the AP articles with information leaked from the prosecution during Sirhan’s trial, and who now worked for the Washington Post, interviewed Bill Harper in his home.
Three days later, the Post published Kessler’s piece, which was clearly designed to dispel any notion of conspiracy in the case in an obvious attempt to forestall any attempt at a reinvestigation. For example, Kessler’s article quoted Vince DiPierro as saying “It would be impossible for there to be a second gun. I saw the first shot. Kennedy fell at my feet. I had a clear view of Kennedy and Sirhan.” But Kessler didn’t mention that DiPierro had also put Sirhan’s gun muzzle about three feet from Kennedy, making it impossible for him to have fired any of the shots that hit Kennedy.
Regarding his discussion with Harper, Kessler wrote:
Under persistent questioning in his home here, Harper admitted that what he had previously described as discrepancies between the bullets fail to show they were fired from different guns. The evidence that would permit matching of the bullets is lacking because of the poor condition, Harper said. …
He said “there’s no evidence to show they’re different.” The inability to make a positive identification, said Harper, who is highly regarded in law enforcement circles, is not uncommon in the field of ballistics.325
Kessler’s article so outraged Harper that he wrote to Harry Rosenfeld, the Assistant Managing Editor of the Post:
I have been put in the awkward position of having to call [Ron Kessler] a liar, but this is the case. However, in analyzing Kessler’s article as a whole, there is now no question in my mind—or of many newsmen familiar with me and my work—that his was a calculated attempt to do what you gentlemen in the press call a “hatchet job” on my professional integrity and my findings in this case. Frankly, Kessler’s efforts strangely parallel those of the authorities in this matter, who would have the world believe that all of us daring to challenge their untenable position in this matter are either fools or charlatans or worse.
Frankly, I should have been suspicious of Kessler’s intentions when he refused a copy of my entire affidavit before he left after our one and only two-hour meeting at my home on December 16th. However, I rightfully assumed The Post had given Kessler plenty of time to conduct “an intensive investigation” on this case, as your December 9th letter represented. I would hardly call three days time enough to conduct an intensive investigation on anything as complicated as the case at hand.326
In response, Ben Bradlee, the editor at the Post, sent an Ombudsman to hear Harper’s side of the story. Bradlee offered to let Harper tell his side of the story, but he refused to retract Kessler’s reporting, despite Harper having outlined four specific factual errors in Kessler’s work. Harper refused because just posting his rebuttal would make it look like the issue were a difference of opinion instead of a difference in fact.
Always close to the intelligence community, Kessler went on to write books about the CIA, the FBI, and the Secret Service, begging the question of whether Kessler was one of the CIA’s assets in the media. In recent years, the Senate’s report on torture, the one the CIA tried hard to suppress, included a discussion of Ron Kessler’s role in supporting the CIA’s side of the story. In a 2014 Bloomberg article titled “Was Ron Kessler a CIA journalism asset?”, Emily Greenhouse wrote that the Senate’s report on the CIA’s use of torture, which the CIA tried to suppress, included comments indicating:
CIA officials had “provided assistance” with Kessler’s book, in order to “shape press reporting on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.” The Senate report quotes then-Senior Deputy General Counsel John Rizzo saying that the Director of the CIA “blessed” Kessler with agency cooperation. It seems to paint Kessler as something of a chosen mouthpiece, the person in whom the CIA put its faith.327
That the CIA used journalists to cover up its actions and to attack the CIA’s detractors was first uncovered and documented by both the Church and Pike Committees, investigations by Senate and House committees formed in the wake of the Watergate Committee’s and Rockefeller Commission’s exposures of the CIA’s numerous illegal domestic activities. Carl Bernstein, of the famous Woodward and Bernstein team whose reporting led to the Watergate investigation, wrote what is still the most thorough documentation of the CIA’s role of journalists to sway public opinion on matters of importance to the agency. Bernstein also wrote of journalists being used for operational work as well.328
Short of a CIA admission, which would never be forthcoming because the CIA never confirms or denies whether people are their employees or assets for obvious reasons, it’s impossible to prove that Kessler’s work on the Robert Kennedy case was similarly supported by the CIA. But it’s certainly reasonable to suspect it was, given his history with the agency, which you’ve seen, and given the CIA’s covert involvement in this case, which will be discussed in later chapters.
Bradlee had chosen to run Kessler’s hit piece on Harper, wrote Lowenstein, “just as Paul Schrade and I were holding our Los Angeles press conference” to get the case reopened. “The Kessler recanting of the Harper ‘contentions’ drowned our efforts at a critical juncture.”329
Lowenstein was scathing in his critique of the Post in this episode, noting that “It was not until May 20, 1975, that a careful reader of the Post could discover that Mr. Harper had denied the Kessler version of their interview.” On May 20, 1975, Lester Hyman, a former chairman of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts, as Lowenstein recounted, “managed to get a letter printed in the Post protesting the failure to report Mr. Harper’s protests.” Hyman noted that the Post devoted plenty of space to “the fantasies of the so-called lunatic fringe” but did not devote “equal space” to professionals like “Harper.” Hyman lamented that even though some “charlatans” were “involved in the assassination story,” that should not have been an excuse “to deter a responsible search for the truth.”330
The Post had been lauded for its reporting on the Watergate break-in. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Post were credited with forcing President Nixon to step down. But their reporting only scratched the surface of government misdeeds, as events were about to reveal.
On Christmas Eve, 1974, the New York Times published an explosive article by Seymour Hersh implicating the CIA in illegal domestic activities. Dealing with this fell to America’s first unelected president, former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, who had received covert CIA donations as a Congressman.331 Ford had created a commission nicknamed the “Rockefeller Commission” after Ford’s similarly unelected Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whom Ford appointed to oversee it.
The entire commission was so overtly CIA-friendly the press quickly deemed its investigation a “whitewash.” Asked at a press event why he had appointed such people, Ford said he needed people who could keep some things secret. The reporters wanted to know what Ford meant. “Like assassinations!” Ford blurted out, adding immediately—but belatedly—“That’s off the record.”332 The comment led to a firestorm of publicity. Whom in the U.S. had the CIA assassinated, given that the topic of inquiry was illegal domestic CIA activities? Was Ford worried that the CIA’s role in the JFK assassination might be exposed due to his tenure on the Warren Commission?
It’s incredibly difficult to investigate the activities of an intelligence agency when secrets aren’t put to paper and lies are deliberately spread. But when the target of an investigation has the ability to infiltrate and control the investigation as well as
the media narrative, they have power unaccountable to anyone. That’s what the Church and Pike Committees and later the House Select Committee on Assassinations faced. The complete disregard the CIA held toward its ostensible overseers in this period was evident to the participants. When questioned by the Church Committee, James Angleton famously said, “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”
Dan Hardway, one of the HSCA’s investigators into the CIA’s possible role in the JFK assassination, experienced this incredible attitude firsthand, as he recounted in a talk at Duquesne University in 2013:
I was sent to Jacksonville, FL, with investigator Gaeton Fonzi, to interview Joseph Burkholder Smith, a retired CIA officer. Upon our arrival, we handed him our HSCA credentials, telling him we were there to ask him some questions on behalf of Congress. He flipped the credentials back at us and told us, “So you represent Congress, what the f*** is that to the CIA. You’ll be gone in a few years and the CIA will still be here.” That really sums up a lot of the problem that we had.333
The CIA was not above infiltrating the investigations of others to disrupt them, as Gaeton Fonzi reported in his book The Last Investigation. The HSCA found that when Jim Garrison, as District Attorney of New Orleans, was investigating various local figures for potential roles in the plot to kill JFK, the CIA planted several operatives on his staff.334
