American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  In 1970, when Congressman Mendel Rivers tried to get Ray’s entire army file, he received a response from Major General Kenneth Wickham that this would not be possible: “This is particularly true since there are medical aspects that cannot be disassociated from any discussion of Mr. Ray’s military background.”29

  Ray’s brother also describes an encounter in Montreal with a CIA asset who had ties to the Klan, Jules Ron “Ricco” Kimble, an identities specialist who got Ray his alias as “Eric S. Galt.” Kimble said that “an older man came out from McGill University’s Allen Memorial Institute to hypnotize” both Ray and him. Verification for this, as far as Kimble, came from Royal Canadian Mounted Police files. At that time, there wasn’t any public knowledge about Dr. Ewen Cameron’s mind-control experiments being conducted at McGill under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA Sub-project 68.30

  Early in 1968, Ray “began writing certain phrases over and over on paper. These are included in the FBI file on the assassination. [Robert Kennedy’s assassin] Sirhan did the same thing. One of the phrases James wrote was, ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.’”31

  Was that somebody’s idea of a bad joke? I never believed The Manchurian Candidate was more than fiction until I got into doing this book. But there are records that prove MK-ULTRA did exist, it’s undeniable. Then when you start looking at these different assassinations and how the assassins acted and reacted, you start to wonder. During the course of filming the TV show on conspiracies, we brought in an innocent person who had volunteered and put him under hypnosis with an expert. We went through a whole scenario where the guy comes out the door, starts walking and talking with me about baseball, then gets a call on his cell phone. All he needed to hear was a particular word, and that would cause a subconscious reaction to where he’d start limping, although he’d deny he was doing it. In his mind, he’s not limping because he’s been told that he’s not.

  Then we put him back in the room, and the hypnotist asked us, “Do you want him to remember this or not?” We chose that he not remember, because we wanted to see what would happen. When he came out of the hypnotic state, he swore to us that he’d only been in the room for a couple of minutes, when it was really nearly an hour and a half. When we told him the various things he’d done, you could clearly see that he did not believe us. Then we told him to look at his watch. That’s when he freaked out, realizing how much time had passed.

  So I’ve witnessed hypnosis firsthand. I was told that pretty much anyone who’s willing can be hypnotized, because it comes from within, and the hypnotist is just someone who leads you down the path. Some people accept it more than others. To get someone to the level of an assassin, it would require you to work with them for more than a year. The hypnotist also said, “Remember this, a military man is much more predisposed to be a Manchurian Candidate than a civilian, because when you get indoctrinated into the military, you are told there are times when killing may be necessary. And that’s already settled in your mind, so you might not have such an adverse reaction under hypnosis.”

  It’s impossible to say whether the self-hypnosis that James Earl Ray was practicing, and what his brother is now claiming, actually fell under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program or something similar. But we shouldn’t rule it out. Since the congressional committee’s report already concluded that Ray probably had help, and the King family’s court case saw a jury return a verdict of conspiracy that included agencies of our government, wouldn’t you say that justice for Dr. King remains a long way from being served?

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  I fault the media again here, for giving us the sensational gavel-to-gavel coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, while ignoring matters of true national importance like the civil case brought by members of the King family. I also wonder when we’ll call for accountability of law enforcement agencies that seem in such a hurry to remove evidence from a crime scene, as they did in Memphis and would do again in Los Angeles and after 9/11.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT KENNEDY

  THE INCIDENT: Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary and seeming to clinch the Democratic nomination for president.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a young Palestinian opposed to Kennedy’s policy toward Israel, fired a pistol eight times from a few feet in front of him, was taken into custody immediately, and pled guilty to the murder.

  MY TAKE: Sirhan didn’t have enough rounds in his gun to make all the bullet holes found by police, so there was a second gunman firing from behind. Sirhan was hypnotically “programmed,” using methods developed by the CIA, to take part in the murder.

  “A revolution is coming—a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough—but a revolution is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.”

  —from a speech by Robert Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, May 9, 1966

  At the time Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. on June 5, 1968, I viewed it more as a copycat political murder—this young Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who didn’t like Kennedy’s policies toward Israel, much like five years earlier Oswald had been a disgruntled Communist. It was now a trend, a cycle, where if a Kennedy decided to run for president, some idiot would put an end to it. At that point, I still didn’t believe the government would lie to me. This was before my doubting the of the Warren Commission, which didn’t start until I got out of the military and heard Mark Lane speak. Later, the death of Robert Kennedy became the turning point where I felt either their father Joe had done something that was never going to be forgiven, or there certainly were forces out there ensuring another Kennedy would never occupy the White House. To say that my trust of the Establishment had deteriorated would be an understatement.

  Robert Kennedy was only 42 when he was assassinated and, having just won the California primary, was on his way to the Democratic nomination and likely the presidency. He would have begun withdrawing our troops from Vietnam and saved thousands of American lives. He’d already been talking with his aides about reopening the investigation into who killed his brother. I think it’s safe to say that, if he’d lived, we’d have a different kind of country than what we’ve become. Robert would have led a “compassionate” revolution—because he was a man not only of courage, but of compassion.

  That night in the Ambassador Hotel, it seemed a pretty open-and-shut case that Sirhan was another “lone nut.” After all, he was wrestled to the ground after firing his .22-caliber revolver from a few feet in front of Kennedy. The police soon found a diary, in which Sirhan wrote over and over that “RFK must die.” We soon learned he’d been stalking the senator, which again raises the question in my mind as to how come nobody in authority picked up on Sirhan as a potential threat. The curious thing, even at his trial, was that Sirhan had no memory of committing the killing. He still doesn’t.

  Let’s start by looking at the physical evidence. First of all, Sirhan’s revolver held only eight rounds and he never had time to reload. But a reporter’s recording has what audio expert Philip Van Praag has determined are thirteen shots in a little more than five seconds.1 Two of those are what forensic experts call “double shots,” meaning they happened so close together that there’s no way they came from the same gun. In pictures taken in the pantry later that night, you can see some policemen looking up at what they later said was a bullet hole in a ceiling panel. The trouble is, that’s behind where Sirhan was shooting from.2 The L.A. County coroner, Thomas Noguchi, said almost right away that the fatal shot had come from less than an inch away from Kennedy’s head, behind the right ear. That, of course, also rules out Sirhan.3

  You’d think some of this might have come up at Sirhan’s trial. But his defense attorneys decided not to challenge any
evidence, because their claim was that Sirhan had “diminished capacity” (a nice way of saying he was crazy) and they were looking to get him a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Again, once he pled guilty, there was no real trial with witnesses who might contradict the official story. After a judge approved a citizen’s petition to reinvestigate the firearms evidence, in 1977 the L.A. district attorney’s office wrote that “the apparent lack of reports, both written and photographic, either made ... and destroyed, or never in existence, raised serious doubts as to the substance and reliability of the ballistics evidence presented in the original Sirhan trial.”4

  So, if not Sirhan, then who killed RFK? Well, several witnesses saw a security guard who was standing behind Kennedy draw his gun, and one witness even said that he fired it. This was a fellow named Thane Eugene Cesar. He was a plumber by trade, who’d been hired part-time by Ace Security less than a week before the assassination, his assignment being to guard the pantry that night. One of Cesar’s first statements to the police was that he’d been holding Kennedy’s arm when “they” shot him. Not “he,” but “they.” He said when he saw Sirhan’s gun, he reached for his own. But the LAPD never asked to see his gun, or even to ask him what kind it was.5

  Years later, he passed a polygraph overseen by author Dan Moldea, who called Cesar “an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of history.”6 Well, maybe he was. Or maybe not. Acoustics expert Van Praag did tests on an H&R 922 pistol of the type that Cesar had on him, and concluded that an H&R 922 had been fired at the same time as Sirhan’s .7 Then, too, besides Sirhan and Cesar, another man with a gun was mentioned by several more witnesses. Conceivably, that person could have gotten in between Kennedy and the security guard to fire the fatal shot, as RFK was falling back from Sirhan.8

  The strongest evidence that Sirhan had accomplices are no less than fourteen witnesses who all talked about a girl in a polka-dot dress. A 20-year-old Youth for Kennedy volunteer immediately reported seeing such a girl, both to the press and the police. Earlier in the night, Sandra Serrano said, she’d observed a young woman dressed in a white dress with black or dark-blue polka dots, walking up a back stairway of the hotel. She was with two men, one well-dressed in a white shirt and gold sweater, and the other rather disheveled and short with black bushy hair, who was likely Sirhan.

  Then, after the assassination, Serrano saw the same girl, running down a fire escape out of the hotel and shouting, “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!” Later, an LAPD interrogator put heavy pressure on Serrano to recant her story, which she did at the time. But when Serrano was interviewed again 40 years later, she stuck to what she’d originally said. And she wasn’t the only one who reported seeing something like this. Police Sergeant Paul Sharaga, who was in the hotel’s back parking lot six minutes after the shooting, also heard a young couple run past yelling about having killed Kennedy.9 He put out an APB. But Sharaga said, when he went to look for the three copies he made of his report two weeks later, they had vanished.10

  Sirhan himself said: “I met the girl and had coffee with her. She wanted heavy on the cream and sugar. After that I don’t remember a thing until they pounced on me in that pantry.”11 Could it be that the girl said some keyword or phrase that triggered his amnesia?

  According to the LAPD logs, the cops were looking for two suspects besides Sirhan within minutes of the assassination. Then they stopped searching within the hour, because “they only have one man and don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy. This could be somebody that was getting out of the way so they wouldn’t get shot.”12 Huh? That makes no sense at all for an honest investigator to reason.

  The fact is, the LAPD had a long history of a “special relationship” with the CIA, from helping out with clandestine activities to training certain officers for double duty. When they formed Special Unit Senator (SUS) to look into the assassination, the two main cops through which all information flowed both had ties to the CIA. “In retrospect it seems odd that ... policemen who doubled as CIA agents occupied key positions in SUS, where they were able to seal off avenues that led in the direction of conspiracy.”13 They also badgered any witness who didn’t support the Sirhan-did-it-alone scenario.

  Manuel Pena, a multilingual fellow who’d done special ops for the CIA, saw all the SUS reports and was the man responsible for approving all interviews. His partner, Sergeant Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, handled all the polygraph work, which he’d also done in Vietnam, South America, and Europe. Both Pena and Hernandez had been undercover CIA with the Agency for International Development (AID). Later, Hernandez started his own security firm and got rich handling big government contracts.14

  As soon as Sirhan’s trial ended, the LAPD got busy destroying evidence, including the ceiling panels and door frames from the pantry that they’d taken pictures of showing extra bullet holes. Their rationale, when asked later, was these were “too large to fit into a card file”! Once again, we’ve got the authorities destroying evidence at a crime scene, just like with the King case. They also burned some 2,400 photographs, supposedly all duplicates, but we know some important ones are still missing—like the pictures taken by a 15-year-old kid named Scott Enyart. He was standing on a table so he could get a good view of Kennedy as he came in and took three rolls of Kodak film that the cops confiscated afterwards and said he could get back—if he came around in twenty years! Enyart had to fight in court to eventually be returned only 18 prints (no negatives), which were then promptly stolen out of the back seat of a car.15

  Also gone missing were “X-rays and test results on ceiling tiles and door frames, spectrographic test results [for bullets], the left sleeve of Senator Kennedy’s coat and shirt, the test gun used as a substitute for Sirhan’s gun during ballistics tests, and results from the 1968 test firing of Sirhan’s gun.” Tapes of key interviews that raised the question of conspiracy disappeared, too.16

  When the LAPD declassified more files in 2008—forty years too late!—a fuller picture of Sirhan started to appear. He was raised a Christian, wanted to be a jockey, and spent a good bit of time betting on horses at the Santa Anita racetrack. He wanted to make a bundle of money, and seems to have had some gambling debts. His personality appeared to change after he fell off a horse in September 1966. That’s when he began developing a curiosity about mysticism, such as the Rosicrucians, and got into learning self-hypnosis. Toward the end of 1967, Sirhan pretty much dropped out of sight for three months. His mother was worried because she didn’t know where he’d gone. When he finally did come home, his interest in hypnosis escalated.17 At the same time, somebody put Sirhan under clandestine surveillance for reasons that were never explained. Some 16-millimeter footage taken of Sirhan late in 1967—by whom or for what purpose we don’t know—later showed up in a drawer of a private detective’s office.

  In mid-February 1968, Sirhan bought a .22-caliber Iver-Johnson, the pistol he would use the night of the assassination, for twenty-five bucks on the street. A gunshop owner remembered him coming in with several other people asking for “armor piercing ammunition,” for another weapon he doesn’t seem to have owned.18 So it sure looks like somebody was prompting Sirhan. He was also seen stalking Kennedy on two other occasions, both times with a young female companion (at a luncheon May 20 and a downtown L.A. rally four days after that). And he was seen doing target practice at tin cans with a young brunette and a tall guy who had sandy-colored hair.19

  What does it all add up to? A few weeks before RFK’s assassination, the Providence Evening Bulletin ran a story headlined—“‘To Sleep’: Perchance to Kill?” It told of a visiting professor of psychology at Rhode Island College, who had been a leading adviser to the military since the 1930s on the possible applications of hypnosis. Dr. George H. Estabrooks was quoted that “hypnotism is widely used by intelligence agencies of the United States and other countries.” He went on to say that the key to creating an effective spy—or assassin—revolved around splitting someone’
s personality: “It is like child’s play now to develop a multiple personality through hypnosis.”

  The professor added that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby “could very well have been performing through hypnosis. They would have been perfect cases but I doubt you will find anyone admitting this possibility, especially in the Warren Report.” Estabrooks concluded by referring to the novel and film, The Manchurian Candidate, as putting forth an “entirely possible” scenario.20

  The Manchurian Candidate had been a best-selling book in 1958, later made into a movie by John Frankenheimer (who, ironically, was a good friend of Robert Kennedy’s and had him as a houseguest right before the assassination). It’s about a soldier who gets “brainwashed” by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War, then later is used in a domestic assassination plot against an American presidential contender. This was regarded as pretty wild fiction at the time. Nobody knew until the late 1970s that both the military and CIA had been experimenting for years with drugs, hypnosis, and other means to figure out how to alter human behavior.

  Back in 1954, a CIA study had raised the question: “Can an individual of (deleted nationality) descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily, against a prominent (deleted) politician or if necessary, against an American official.” After being drugged, the subject would perform the deed “at some later date,” after which “it was assumed the subject would be taken into custody by the (deleted) government and thereby ‘disposed of.’”21