A Lie Too Big to Fail
Page 73
If John Kennedy was King Arthur in Camelot, Robert Kennedy was Don Quixote in La Mancha, dreaming an impossible dream of a better life not just for Americans, but for the whole world.
When his dreams collided with the dark forces of greed and lust for power, Robert Kennedy was cut down at the crest of a promise that was never to reach our shores. What washed up instead was a bloody tide of lies from which this country has never recovered.
By refusing to honestly and accurately cover the assassinations of the 1960s, the mainstream media lost so much credibility that during the writing of this book, a reality show star who promoted fictitious conspiracy theories named Donald Trump was elected president. And the Senator most responsible for the latest cover-up of these crimes, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, may run as his Democratic opponent in 2020.
Kamala Harris turned to Mel Ayton to rebut Sirhan’s most recent legal filing. Ayton wrote a book on the case in which he argues Sirhan was the first Palestinian terrorist. He cherry-picked character witnesses to try to show Sirhan was a violent person. But none of the people who spent significant amounts of time with Sirhan before the assassination ever described him that way. Most couldn’t believe he had done it since his demeanor was so gentle. Ayton misunderstood the placement of a witness he claimed rebutted Serrano, not realizing that his witness was on the Wilshire side of the hotel, not the 8th Street side where Serrano sat. Ayton had a sound expert listen to the Pruszynski tape. The expert found seven shot sounds and “three possible locations” for the “eighth” shot. To any reasonable, honest person, that means Ayton’s expert found ten possible shot sounds—two more than Sirhan’s gun could have fired.
When she was the Attorney General, Kamala Harris had the power to call for the reopening of this case based on the evidence. She chose instead the politically safe path of cover-up that vaulted so many others up the ladder in their careers. But our country needs someone with integrity and courage. The last thing we need is yet another president unwilling to rein in the CIA.
In 1966, the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who doubled as a spy and therefore understood quite well what he was talking about, said:
In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it. The vast clandestine apparatus we built up to prove our enemies’ resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that vast army of clandestine personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences for them and us.848
The assassinations of the top four leaders of the political left in the five-year period—President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968—represented nothing less than a slow-motion coup on the political scene. Of the five presidents that ruled over the following 20 years, only one would be a Democrat, and a single-term one at that. Another would be the first unelected president, Gerald Ford, a reward, perhaps, for his participation on the Warren Commission. After Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President, two assassination attempts on Ford nearly put a Rockefeller in the White House.
It should be clear to anyone that we cannot fix what is broken without major structural changes. Are secret intelligence agencies compatible with Democracy? Can we ever find the right balance between oversight and secrecy?
Can the police be reformed so that the process of examining evidence of guilt is more transparent? Should all evidence in such cases be made available to the public sooner, so that a resolution may be possible while the guilty parties are still alive and available for prosecution?
Perhaps we need an outside body composed of people over whom the government has no leverage to investigate crimes that change the course of our democracy. The government has proven itself incapable of successfully prosecuting itself, not just in this case, but in many cases. And we need different kinds of investigators. It took housewives, students, retired people and former government employees to further our understanding of this case and others like it. It took, in short, conspiracy theorists. Because you can’t investigate a conspiracy properly if you can’t first imagine that one took place.
People who deride others as conspiracy theorists before first hearing their evidence are part of the problem, not the solution. Yes, there are a lot of junk theories out there. But each assertion should be evaluated on the merits of the evidence presented, not just automatically dismissed by some knee-jerk mindset. Not everything is a conspiracy. But conspiracies happen every day. Don’t believe me? Ask your local prosecutor.
Every time we turn a blind eye to any cover-up, we enable the next one. Every time we give our trust to a government agency that doesn’t deserve it, we enable the worst abuses of that trust. As the poet Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” The CIA has shown us time and again that they will lie to the American people and violate both national and international laws and create their own policy, even when it is at variance with the democratically elected leader of the United States. Why do we let them get away with this? Who really runs the country when our elected officials are afraid to challenge the CIA?
We have so much power when we act collectively. Every time the people cry out with one voice, as they did when Oliver Stone’s film JFK revealed not only the holes in the government’s case but the fact that the government was planning to conceal those records, the people win. The outcry from the public, in the wake of that film, changed the course of history. Congress, through the “JFK Act,” created the Assassinations Records Review Board, which declassified many of the files the CIA, FBI, INS and other agencies had withheld from us. You can’t plan a trip if you don’t know where you are on the map. You can’t cure your illness if it’s misdiagnosed. The truth about our history is critically important so we can plan a better future.
So what can you do? It’s not possible to bring Robert Kennedy back. But there is a way to right one historical wrong, to draw the world’s attention to what really happened, to open people’s eyes to how the world really works. You can help free Sirhan Sirhan, who is still alive and continues to be up for parole regularly. Now that you know Sirhan didn’t kill Robert Kennedy, you need to become an ambassador for the truth in this case. Use the hashtag #FreeSirhan in social media as a statement of awareness. Write your elected officials and send them copies of this book. Write small summaries of key points and forward to media people. Friends don’t let friends wallow in ignorance. Arm them with useful information. Make a documentary with your phone’s camera. Write a novel to explain this in fictional form. Write a stage play, a screenplay. A simple cartoon of Sirhan with an impossibly long arm circling around Robert Kennedy’s body to hit him from behind first drew my serious attention to this case. If we free Sirhan, that could have a profound impact on how people view the government in a way that could promote a number of positive changes. “That’s how we’re gonna win,” as the character Rose said in The Last Jedi, “Not fighting what we hate—saving what we love.” We may not be able fight all that is wrong. But we can save a man who has spent nearly his entire adult life in jail for a crime he provably didn’t commit. That’s one wrong we can right—and must. When we stand together and speak the truth, all missions become possible.
Robert Kennedy urged us to seek out the “harsh facts” about our country so we could make the country better. This book was my attempt—and yours, by reading it—to heed that call. Kennedy dedicated his last days to serving an impossible dream of an America that was a more generous and compassionate place. He spent the last years of his life tilting at the windmills of greed and self-interest that ultimately cut him down. But his song lives on in all of us who strive, in whatever ways we can, to reach those unreachable stars.
771 Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Wa
rrior (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), p. 400.
772 Ibid.
773 Miles Copeland, The Real Spy World (First Sphere Books edition, 1978), pp. 40–41.
774 Copeland, p. 41.
775 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Pocket Star Books, 1994), pp. 280–281.
776 Summers, p. 281 and my conversation with Gordon Novel in 2004.
777 David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books, 1992), pp. 31–32.
778 Audio and text from www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001436.html, accessed December 31, 2017.
779 Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978), p. 455.
780 Schlesinger, p. 458.
781 Schlesinger, p. 456.
782 Andrew Tully, CIA: The Inside Story (New York: Crest Books, 1963), p. 184.
783 John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 105.
784 Lisa Pease, “Midnight in the Congo: The Assassination of Lumumba and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjöld,” Probe, Vol. 6. No. 3, March-April 1999.
785 James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010 edition).
786 Douglass, p. 15, citing Daniel Schorr, All Things Considered, March 26, 2001, Hour 1, National Public Radio (NPR).
787 Drew Pearson, “Was JFK Killed in CIA Backfire?”, New Orleans States-Item, March 3, 1967.
788 Speech given by President John F. Kennedy at American University.
789 Richard Starnes, Scripps News Service, “Arrogant, Power Mad—That’s our CIA in Viet Nam,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 2, 1963, p. 27.
790 Richard Starnes, “Spy Bureau,” The Pittsburgh Press, October 19, 1963.
791 Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 226–227.
792 Helms, p. 227.
793 Smith, p. 383.
794 Ibid.
795 Harry S. Truman, “CIA Off-Base as Policy Arm, Founder Truman Says,” The Sunday Press (Binghamton, NY), December 22, 1963. While some authors have suggested Truman not only did not pen this but did not agree with it, multiple drafts of the article in Truman’s own handwriting, and correspondence asserting these same points, prove those assertions to be incorrect. This is a lie that Allen Dulles inserted into a CIA memo in the hopes of discrediting Truman’s indictment. But researcher Ray Marcus contacted the Truman Library and tracked down Truman’s handwritten drafts of this article as well as letters that reiterate these same concerns re the CIA.
796 HSCA executive session testimony of James Wilcott, March 22, 1978.
797 Ibid.
798 Lisa Pease, “The Lost History of ‘J. Edgar,’” Consortium News, consortiumnews.com/2011/11/14/the-lost-history-of-j-edgar/, November 14, 2011. Read Cunningham’s testimony to the Warren Commission to see this sleight-of-hand maneuver.
799 Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 212.
800 John R. Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017), p. 205.
801 Richard Goodwin, Remembering America.
802 Bohrer, p. 233.
803 Bohrer, p. 241.
804 Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War (New York: Roaring Book Press, 2015), p. 137.
805 Email from Jim DiEugenio to the author, December 8, 2017.
806 Ibid.
807 Timothy S. Robinson, “At CIA, Domestic and Foreign Spying Had Equal Priority,” September 9, 1979.
808 Arnold H. Lubasch, “GROVE SUES CIA.; SEEKS $10 MILLION,” New York Times, July 17, 1975.
809 CIA’s IG report on the Castro assassination plots. You can read the full report here: www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=9983#relPageId=3&tab=page.
810 Testimony of Scott Breckinridge to the Church Committee, June 2, 1975.
811 CIA’s IG report on the Castro assassination plots.
812 Memo from J. Edgar Hoover to his top lieutenants, May 10, 1962.
813 Tad Szulc, “The Politics of Assassination,” New York, June 23, 1975.
814 Sy Hersh, “Aides Say Robert Kennedy Told of CIA Castro Plot,” The New York Times, March 10, 1975.
815 Sy Hersh, “Aides Say Robert Kennedy Told of CIA Castro Plot,” The New York Times, March 10, 1975.
816 David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 477.
817 FBI memo from Sam Papich to D.J. Brennan, Jr., October 9, 1967.
818 FBI memo from Sam Papich to D.J. Brennan, Jr., October 9, 1967.
819 FBI memo from Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, October 20, 1967.
820 FBI memo from D.J. Brennan, Jr. to William Sullivan, November 1, 1967.
821 FBI memo from D.J. Brennan, Jr. to William Sullivan, November 1, 1967.
822 FBI memo from D.J. Brennan, Jr. to William Sullivan, November 1, 1967.
823 Undated memo from unnamed source to Sullivan, immediately following the November 1, 1967 in the FBI’s volume 1c of Castro-related memos.
824 FBI memo from D.J. Brennan, Jr. to William Sullivan, March 29, 1968.
825 FBI “URGENT” teletype from Director to the FBI Los Angeles office, April 11, 1968.
826 Bayard Stockton, Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006), p. 12.
827 Maheu, p. 40; Bayard Stockton and Tara Stockton, Flawed Patriot (Washington: Potomac Books, 2006) p. 12.
828 Maheu, p. 40.
829 Maheu, p. 44.
830 FBI memo from J. Edgar Hoover to SAC Los Angeles dated June 18, 1959, archive.org/stream/RobertMaheu/1342370-0_-_1_djvu.txt, p. 120.
831 Unnamed Times correspondent, “Actor Shoots Self in Head Accidentally,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1959. Rand died the next day.
832 FBI memo from J. Edgar Hoover to SAC Los Angeles dated June 18, 1959, archive.org/stream/RobertMaheu/1342370-0_-_1_djvu.txt, p. 120.
833 Maheu, p. 139.
834 Maheu, pp. 73–75.
835 NARA Record Number: 104-10122-10346, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=53708&search=Harpstar#relPageId=3&tab=page.
836 Maheu, p. 73.
837 Maheu, p. 73.
838 Bill Blum, Killing Hope, p. 102.
839 Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness.
840 Michael Drosnin, Citizen Hughes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), p. 458.
841 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (New York: Random House: 1984), p. 6.
842 Email from Steven Gaal to Lisa Pease, 2011, as a follow-up to an in-person conversation.
843 Sybil Leek and Bert R. Sugar, The Assassination Chain (New York: Corwin Books, 1976), p. 243. Punctuation is as it appeared in the original.
844 Maheu, pp. 63–64.
845 Maheu, pp. 64–65.
846 Eugenio Martinez and Bernard Barker, “Mission Impossible: the Watergate Bunglers,” Harpers Magazine, October 1974. On the Internet, the source of this article appears to be misattributed to Vanity Fair in 1974.
847 FBI memo from [Redacted] to SAC, Los Angeles, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99632&search=bugging#relPageId=75&tab=page, June 13, 1968.
848 Victor Marchetti, “Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History,” Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 9 p. 305, www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p305_marchetti.html.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abo, Dr. Stanley
Ace Guard Service
Adair, Randolph
Agency for International Development (AID)
Aiken, Gail
/> Aisyah, Siti
Alarcon, Arthur
Albarelli, Hank
Allen, Morse
Ambrose, John
AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) (see also Rosicrucians)
Angleton, James
Arbenz, Jacobo
Arcega, Victor
Arnot, Larry
ARTICHOKE
Attwood, William
Aubry, Dick
Ayton, Mel
Azcue, Eusebio
Bailey, F. Lee
Bailey, William
Bain, Donald
Bakar, Khalid Abu
Ballantyne, Nina
Bannerman, Robert L.
Barber, John
Barker, Bernard
Barry, Betty
Barry, Bill
Bay of Pigs
Bazilauskas, V. Faustin
Beckley, Johnny
Beilenson, Delores
Belcher, Michael Wayne
Belin
Belli, Melvin
Bellino, Carmine
Berg, Stanton O.
Beringer, Tom
Berman, Emile Zola “Zuke”
Bernstein, Carl
Beveridge, William
Biasotti, Alfred A.
Bidstrup, Hans
Bissell, Richard
Blair, Eric
Blehr, Barbara
Blum, Bill
Bohrman, Stan
Bolf, Jean
Borjesson, Kristina
Boston Strangler
Braden, Tom
Bradford, Lowell W.
Bradlee, Ben
Brandt, William E.
Breckinridge, Scott
Bremer, Arthur
Breshears, Carol Ann
Breslin, Jimmy
Briem, Ray
Brown, Daniel
Brown, Derren
Brown, Hugh
Brown, Pat
Bruce, David
Bryan, William J.
Buckner, Everett
Bugliosi, Vincent (Vince)
Burba, Harold
Burke, Paul
Burns, Frank
Burris, Richard
Busch, Henry
Busch, Jim
Busch, Joseph P.