by Lisa Pease
“That is right,” Walker said, but given what Walker had just said, one has to believe he agreed with this as a posture, not a policy.
Houghton said, “We think to put secrecy around this phase of it is just going to open up speculation that is going on with the John Kennedy assassination since we did do, in my opinion, as professional a job of investigation as could have been done anywhere, and I feel that this information should be made available.” But he immediately contradicted himself by saying, “Now, we have not yet decided whether we will make the files available yet. We will decide this.”
Houghton said there were about 50,000 files and a “final report.”
“You need a final, final report,” Walker said.
Houghton noted that Attorney General Ramsey Clark wanted a copy of all the LAPD’s files placed in the National Archives in Washington. The LAPD had agreed to this so long as there was a mutual policy re how the files could be accessed.
Walker and Loring thought that made sense, and since they weren’t the Court’s own files, they had no say over them anyway. But Fitts appeared concerned. “I would like to have a little talk with you about this matter,” Fitts said to Houghton. Fitts said the District Attorney would be interested in how these files would be made available.
Houghton said he was waiting “to get some kind of final decision from Washington on the files” because he didn’t know the National Archives’ procedures.
When Fitts suggested that transcripts of the tapes could be made available, Loring said people should be able to hear the tapes, hear the voices, not just read a transcript.
While Houghton seemed more concerned about the logistics of copying and handing off all their files than the actual exposure of them, that may have been a smokescreen for the record. Near the end of their conversation, Houghton asked if they could go off the record, which was deeply ironic considering he had opened by saying everything should be made public and nothing should be held back.
After the off-the-record discussion, Judge Walker said everything was now clear.
Houghton alerted the group to the fact that he knew of at least four books that were soon to be published on the case, three of which alleged a “major conspiracy in this matter and not what the truth is” but immediately followed it up with the need to keep the files under lock and key. “We are going to isolate the files because they are not available to the average person.”
Hatcher added, “We advise them that they can procure a copy of a page and that our fee is 50 cents a page. That will stop a lot of them.” Adjusting for inflation, 50 cents from 1969 would be roughly $3.53 a page in 2018 dollars.261 That would indeed be a deterrent, as most researchers do not have a lot of money, having spent their time chasing the truth about our collective past.
To see public officials, on the record, discussing how to hide evidence from the public is disturbing. Democracy can only survive with the consent of an informed public. A people deprived of a full and accurate history cannot make the necessary course corrections to improve their future condition. As President Abraham Lincoln once said, “Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.”262
Before 1969 was over, Judge Walker retired; prosecutor Dave Fitts was appointed a judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court by then-Governor and future president Ronald Reagan; Cooper got the lightest possible sentence—a $1,000 fine—for the stolen transcript incident; Jerry Owen got his own TV show; and Los Angeles Times reporter Dave Smith won an award for his coverage of the Sirhan trial.
As with Cooper, Judge Walker had a case hanging over his head at the time of Sirhan’s trial. Walker’s nephew Erwin M. Walker, a former Army officer who had returned from the horrors of war to become a burglar, had murdered a police officer and had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He had been sentenced to death, but his death sentence had been commuted to life without the possibility of parole in 1961 by Governor Pat Brown. In 1970, the year following Sirhan’s trial, Walker’s nephew received a new hearing which eventually was heard by the Supreme Court of California, which ordered the lower court to remove the parole restriction in 1974. One of the counsels for the defense was Evelle Younger. One can’t help but wonder if there was a quid pro quo there: sink Sirhan’s case and Younger will help you rescue your nephew.
In 1970, Governor Reagan appointed Lynn Compton to the California appellate court, Evelle Younger became California’s Attorney General, and Younger then appointed Robert Houghton to head the state’s Criminal Intelligence and Investigation (CII) bureau.
During the SUS investigation, Sergeant Hernandez, the man who polygraphed all witnesses to any aspect of conspiracy (and told them all they were lying), was promoted to Lieutenant. In 1973, Hernandez left the LAPD and formed Inter-Con, an international security firm, with a contract obtained from NASA. Contrary to propaganda that assured the world NASA was not a spy or warfare agency, NASA has worked closely with both the CIA and the Department of Defense on numerous projects. Inter-Con continues to be an “important security provider” to “Departments of State, Homeland Security, Justice and Defense.”263
After the trial, the LAPD destroyed the several ceiling panels which had, as Wolfer had told the interagency working group on the case, an “unbelievable” number of holes in them from the shooting. The LAPD also burned more than two thousand photos relating to Sen. Kennedy’s assassination in a hospital incinerator. Not all the photos ended up in the incinerator, however. The autopsy photos (or presumably copies thereof) found their way into the safe of James Angleton, the man who headed the CIA’s large counterintelligence unit and whose most secretive “black op” group had secret files on Lee Harvey Oswald that long predated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The LAPD destroyed the telltale pantry door jambs that the FBI had photographed and labeled as containing “bullet holes” as well. The excuse for the destruction was that they could not fit inside a file cabinet, as if that was the only way evidence was ever stored.
The LAPD created three drafts of its “Final Report,” each more redacted than the one before. Perhaps realizing that any information helped the conspiracy angle more than the “lone nut” one, the LAPD, in the end, decided not to release its report or files ever.
History, however, had other plans.
229 Keith A. Findley, “‘Making a Murderer’ shows that our justice system needs a healthy dose of humility,” Washington Post, January 15, 2016.
230 Grant B. Cooper, “Confessions, Cops and the Courts,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1966.
231 Amelia Hritz, Michal Blau, and Sara Tomezsko; “False Confessions,” Cornell Law School on Social Science and Law website, courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/FalseConfessions.html, accessed March 15, 2015.
232 After the FBI turned them down, LAPD sought help from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office. SUS Daily Summary of Activities, January 29, 1969.
233 Dave Smith, “Sirhan Change of Plea Seen Likely,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1969.
234 “Sirhan Offered New Defense Team,” Los Angeles Times, 2/13/69.
235 UPI story in The Bryan Times, 1/8/69, raising the question of whether the trial was also recorded on videotape.
236 LAPD interview of Frank Burns, June 19, 1968.
237 Dave Smith, “Sirhan Protests as His Attorney Describes Him as Mentally Ill,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1969.
238 Kaiser, pp. 275–276.
239 A compelling video from 1968 of a Soviet woman named Ninel Kulagina apparently moving objects simply by concentrating on them can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMj_bgzCUw8. Uri Geller claimed he could bend spoons with his mind, while others claimed it was merely sleight of hand. Would it surprise the reader to learn that Uri Geller was befriended by James Angleton, then the CIA’s head of counterintelligence?
240 Sirhan trial transcript, p. 3058.
241 Sirhan trial transcript, p. 3193.
242 I finally reached Romero as
the book was going to press and asked him why he didn’t identify Sirhan as the shooter. He said he really didn’t see the shooter’s face so he didn’t want to identify the wrong man under oath and potentially send an innocent man to prison. It’s also important to note that, as with other witnesses, Romero’s current memories have occasionally contradicted his earlier statements. For example, he now says he handed Kennedy a rosary from Romero’s own pocket, but originally and at the trial, he said someone else handed him the rosary to give to Kennedy. Romero is clearly an honest person. But honest people can still make mistakes. I trust what he said immediately after it happened over what he said dozens of years later. Alison Winters wrote a book called Memory which describes how flawed memory can be, and how it can change over time. For that reason, I have given greater credibility to witnesses’ earlier statements than to later ones, which may have been colored by additional information.
243 Author’s in-person interview with Vincent DiPierro, May 2006.
244 “To perform the following feats will, I imagine, be found above the power of the most accomplished imposter: to keep the pupils dilated, without the use of drugs, in passing from darkness into sunshine…. The dilation and insensibility of the pupil are recorded in my first case, and have since been frequently seen.” James Esdaile, M.D., Mesmerism in India (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1846), quoted in Dr. Milton V. Kline, The Roots of Modern Hypnosis: From Esdaile to the 1961 International Congress on Hypnosis (Xlibris Corporation, 2006), published posthumously.
See also Carl Sextus, Hypnotism, Its Facts, Theories and Related Phenomena, with Explanatory Anecdotes, Descriptions and Reminiscences (New York: H.M. Caldwell Co., 1893), p. 148. “During the whole experiment, the pupils of the eyes of the subject were also considerably dilated, even if we allowed him to look straight at the light.”
245 Sirhan trial transcript, pp. 3857–3859.
246 Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, p. 204n.
247 FBI report by Amedee O. Richards, Jr., December 4, 1968.
248 Video of the press conference can be viewed at the UCLA television archives.
249 LAPD interview of Robert Klase, 7/8/68.
250 FBI interview report of Alvin Clark, 6/11/68, p. 3.
251 UPI, “Witness’ Story of Sirhan’s Plans,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2/22/69.
252 The CIA’s spying on Congress will be explained in detail in a later chapter. That the CIA had White House gardeners, secretaries and janitors on their payroll was exposed by the Pike Committee in their censored report, which was leaked to the Village Voice and later published in book form in the UK. The CIA’s role in bugging lawyers the rooms where 9/11 terrorism suspects met with their lawyers has been detailed in a number of sources, including a Reuters report of February 11, 2015 and a Human Rights Watch report of February 21, 2013.
253 “Playboy Interview: Jim Garrison,” Playboy, October 1967.
254 “Ferrie Death Probed, Link to ‘Plot’ Is Denied,” Washington Evening Star, February 23, 1967.
255 CIA Dispatch from Chief, WOVIEW to Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases, April 1, 1967, with handwriting that says “This was put together by Ned Bennett of CA [Covert Action] staff, in close connection with CI/R&A [Angleton’s Counterintelligence/Research and Analysis staff], NARA 104-10404-10376, viewable at www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=3167&relPageId=2.
256 Tim Weiner, “Role of C.I.A. In Guatemala Told in Files Of Publisher,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1997/06/07/us/role-of-cia-in-guatemala-told-in-files-of-publisher.html, June 7, 1997.
257 Sirhan trial transcript, p. 3957.
258 Letter from Grant Cooper to Roger S. Hanson, Esquire, November 3, 1972.
259 Opinion by Thompson, J., with Wood, P.J. and Lillie, J., concurring, 53 Cal. App. 3d 409, Crim. No. 26380. Court of Appeals of California, Second Appellate District, Division One. December 2, 1975, law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/3d/53/405.html, accessed October 4, 2015.
260 Klaber and Melanson, p. 79. Their sources were Lynn Mangan and Lt. Booth, both of whom had conversations with Cooper regarding Harper’s conversation. Mangan was undoubtedly notified of this even by Harper himself, as she was a friend of Harper’s and discussed the case at length with him on a number of occasions, per my own conversations with Lynn Mangan. See letter from Grant Cooper to Roger S. Hanson, Esquire, November 3, 1972 re Cooper’s admission that Harper had warned him “that Wolfer could not be relied on.”
261 Per the U.S. Department of Labor’s CPI Inflation Calculator at www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.
262 The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, April 21, 1865.
263 Inter-Con’s description of its services at its website at www.icsecurity.com/sectors/government-and-diplomatic, accessed November 26, 2015.
REINVESTIGATIONS
“Eventually, reluctantly, against all my instincts and wishes, I arrived at the melancholy thought that people who have nothing to hide do not lie, cheat, and smear to hide it.”
WHEN PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, MALCOLM X, MARTIN LUTHER King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated within a five-year period, the antiwar left in American was essentially beheaded. While some placated themselves with the belief that some or all of these were killed by lone nuts, others began to suspect a coup had transpired in America. All four had spoken out vigorously against the Vietnam War and had promoted the notion that nations were entitled to self-determination. In the years since, presidents have largely supported the neoconservative and neoliberal views that nations should be, essentially, subservient states to America, a view each of these leaders had opposed.
These assassinations threatened America’s status as a democracy. As Representative Allard Lowenstein wrote in later years,
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 is natural that many people will then wonder if they know the full story of these events, and that there will be a national nervousness that more may occur.264
Not surprisingly then, a Pew Research Center report that has tracked the public’s faith in government for decades shows a deep downward spike that began with the release of the Warren Report at the end of 1964. The Warren Commissioners did nothing to inspire confidence in their report when they locked up their records until 2039, preventing independent review.265 And despite more than 50 years of information and disinformation to the contrary,266 a majority of Americans still believe that President John Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. Far fewer, however, know anything of substance about the assassination of President Kennedy’s brother.
After Senator Kennedy’s assassination, protests against the government’s growing involvement in the Vietnam War became more frequent and more virulent. Antiwar activists were arrested at a Democratic Convention that had been robbed of its likely standard-bearer. Instead of the torch being passed to a new generation, the delegates returned the torch to the previous one with the nomination of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey.
In 1969, the last brother who could possibly have reclaimed that torch, Ted Kennedy, became embroiled in an incident on Chappaquiddick Island that resulted in the death of a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne.267 The scandal put a bullet in the hopes of many for another Kennedy presidency.
And with the death of two Kennedys and the neutralization of a third, the Vietnam War kicked into high gear. Protestors, failing to stop the war’s escalation, in some cases turned to drugs, following Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” After reports surfaced of the now infamous My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers brutally massacred the majority of innocent civilians in a Vietnamese hamlet, one very prominent antiwar protestor, John Lennon, the wildly popular songwriter and singer with the rock group The Beatles, refused an award from the British government in protest of its support for the U
.S.’ war in Vietnam.
A decade later, Lennon would be killed by a gunman. The strange background and behavior of the man arrested, Mark David Chapman, sparked theories that he had been hypnotically manipulated in some way by the CIA. In an eerie similarity to the Sirhan case, Chapman had been standing to Lennon’s right, but all the wounds came from Lennon’s left, suggesting someone else had fired the shots that killed Lennon. Policemen used the word “programmed” in reference to Chapman’s apparent mental state. After the killing, instead of running off, he waited patiently to be caught. Chapman claimed he did it for publicity, but he threw away his best chance at publicity when he accepted a plea bargain.268
On May 4, 1970, four students protesting the Vietnam War were killed by the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Kent State University, and nine others were wounded in the fusillade. To some commentators, the country seemed on the verge of a new civil war as the decade started.
In the same year as the Kent State shootings, the first two major books on the Robert Kennedy assassination were published. Each, in very different ways, provided evidence of conspiracy and cover-up. One was R.F.K. Must Die, by Robert Blair Kaiser, the man who had traded part of his book advance for a seat on the defense team before and during Sirhan’s trial. While Kaiser refused to concede that anyone other than Sirhan had been firing (despite having notified Grant Cooper about the fact that Sirhan had been a few feet in front of Kennedy while Kennedy had been shot from a distance of one inch, behind the right ear), Kaiser did believe that someone had hypnotically programmed Sirhan to do the shooting for reasons that will be clear in a later chapter. But ironically it was the book by LAPD Chief of Detectives Robert Houghton and co-author Theodore Taylor, Special Unit Senator, that did more damage to the LAPD’s version of events.
Houghton’s approach in Special Unit Senator was to raise evidence that suggested a conspiracy solely for the purpose of rebutting it. For example, the girl in the polka dot dress was mentioned but quickly explained away as having been Valerie Schulte, even though Schulte could not have been the girl. Schulte had a cast on her leg and therefore couldn’t have been seen running down the back steps by Sandra Serrano. She had worn a green dress with yellow lemons on it and therefore could not have been the girl in a white dress with dark polka dots. And where both DiPierro and Serrano had described the girl in the polka dot dress as a dark brunette, Schulte was a light blonde. None of this mattered to Houghton, though, as most of the public did not know these details and were easily fooled. Evidence of conspiracy that could not be so easily waved away, such as the presence of four bullet holes in the pantry door jambs, was simply omitted from Houghton’s presentation.