by Lisa Pease
Tactics the CIA used to avoid scrutiny included not just infiltration and refusal, but evidence manipulation as well. Files were stolen. Tapes of a likely Oswald imposter in Mexico City were destroyed. But the CIA also used the much more subtle technique of simply stalling, as the Pike Committee described in their report:
There were numerous public expressions by intelligence agencies and the Executive that full cooperation would be accorded. … Despite these public representations, in practice most document access was preceded by lengthy negotiations. Almost without exception, these negotiations yielded something less than complete or timely access.
In short, the words were always words of cooperation; the reality was delay, refusal, missing information, asserted privileges, and on and on.335
The LAPD and District Attorney’s office used the same type of stalling tactics, always hidden under the language of cooperation, much to Lowenstein’s dismay. And even when they did investigate, they dismissed any evidence of conspiracy and attempted to explain it away, sometimes with the most ludicrous of explanations.
Consider this particular episode, in which the County offered to search the pantry again—many years after the crime—for evidence of additional bullets and bullet holes! In his unpublished manuscript on the Robert Kennedy assassination, Lowenstein wrote:
Thus did high comedy enter the saga of the continuing effort to confuse the public about the facts in the assassination of Senator Kennedy. A pantry which had been studied minutely by the authorities in the wake of the assassination and had been stripped of relevant physical evidence, a pantry which subsequently had been largely refurbished by the hotel, inexplicably failed to yield new bullets or bullet holes seven and a half years later. …
Nor was it generally reported that on November 18, 1975, thirty days before the great pantry raid, representatives of the District Attorney and of the Attorney General of the State of California opposed in court an effort to question under oath the witnesses who believed they had seen the extra bullets. …
[T]he raid of the pantry was a hoax whose only purpose and accomplishment was to confuse the public into believing that questions raised by the evidence are being investigated satisfactorily, which they are not. To conduct a search for something which cannot possible be, and then to announce that it wasn’t there as evidence that it never existed, is to assume idiots are in the audience.
Remember that the FBI labeled pictures of four holes in the doorframes as “bullet holes.” The LAPD had booked the doorframes into evidence. Why would they do that, Lowenstein asked, if they did not have any evidence to examine? And worse, why did the LAPD later destroy them just two months after the trial had ended, along with the ceiling tiles that Wolfer had stated had an “unbelievable” number of holes in them? The LAPD’s excuse was that these were not considered evidence because they had not been used at the trial, and they had nowhere to put them.
While none of this passed muster with Lowenstein, he was surprised how few people seemed to be able to conceive that the government could be actively covering up a conspiracy in this case:
What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America.336
Researchers were the exception. They had dug into the evidence and faced it fearlessly, and saw clearly the dark hand of conspiracy at work. Several openly speculated the CIA was somehow involved in the death of Senator Robert Kennedy as well as his brother.
The year 1975 was a pivotal one for the RFK case. The cover-up had become so threadbare it needed new tailoring. Information about CIA assassination plots uncovered by the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee, as well as provocative new evidence surfaced by researchers in the John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy assassinations, increased the calls for both Kennedy assassinations to be reinvestigated. Paul Schrade and CBS sued for access to the records on the case, Los Angeles City Councilmember Zev Yaroslavsky called for a new investigation, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, at the prodding of the outspoken Baxter Ward, were also considering further action.
This was the year, too, in which Senator Edward Kennedy indicated support for a new investigation. And there was considerable belief at the time that if Ted ran for president in 1976, he would win. Imagine what a “Kennedy Commission” might have uncovered. “Almost everyone who knows him says he is running,” Carl Rowan wrote in an Arkansas paper. In San Antonio, Ralph Blumenfeld wrote:
The surviving Kennedy brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, said on May 9, 1975, that he would favor a new investigation if there is new evidence in the assassination of his brother Robert or in the assassination five years earlier of his brother John.
“Obviously it is painful for the family,” Ted Kennedy said, “but the first consideration ought to be on the basis of what new evidence is available.”337
I met a woman in Seattle who had testified in Executive Session to the Watergate Committee after learning of a plot to kill Ted Kennedy at the Democratic Convention in 1972 if he had become the nominee. The plot involved shooting Kennedy from the air vents. Curiously, in the course of the Watergate investigation, a report surfaced showing CIA asset Bernard Barker asked Miami architect Leonard Glasser to obtain the blueprints to the Convention Hall, and specifically the air conditioning plans. “This was unreal, because what the hell would anybody want them for?”338 The Watergate committee concluded there was a plan to put a gas into the vents, but a convention hall is huge and the amount of gas required for such a large space would have been prohibitive. Was my informant correct?
And then there was the Jerry Owen case. Owen, the con-man-cum-preacher who told the LAPD he’d picked up Sirhan and offered to sell him a horse the night that resulted in Kennedy’s assassination, sued KCOP in 1975 for slander over a comment KCOP’s John Hopkins made about the cancellation of the TV show Owen had received post-assassination. Hopkins was alleged to have said Owen’s show was cancelled “because he was a thief; he has burned down several churches in Arizona; he was involved in the killing of Robert Kennedy, and he is a criminal.”339
Vince Bugliosi believed there had been a conspiracy in the Robert Kennedy assassination, and he used the Owen case as a means to bring it into a courtroom. Rather than trying to disprove the defamation charge on technical grounds, he chose instead to try to prove Owen really had been involved in a conspiracy that resulted in the killing of Robert Kennedy. Bugliosi joined the defense very late, however, and had little time to prepare. You can imagine how upset the judge was that Bugliosi wanted to suddenly introduce this angle into the case. The judge did all he could to keep the Robert Kennedy questions out of the case.
In the course of preparing for that trial, Bugliosi had been especially struck by the AP photo that stated a bullet was still in the hole of a doorframe at the back of the stage where Kennedy had exited. He worked his contacts to identify the policemen in the photo as Sergeants Robert Rozzi and Charles Wright. Both assured him there had definitely been a bullet in the hole.
Rozzi gave Bugliosi a signed statement stating the object he saw “appeared to be a small-caliber bullet.” Turner and Christian described what happened next:
Bugliosi was approached by Sergeant Phil Sartuche, an SUS veteran who was monitoring the proceedings for [LAPD] Chief Ed Davis, and who had worked with Bugliosi as an investigating officer in the Manson case. “Vince, do you have Rozzi’s statement?” Sartuche asked. When Bugliosi said yes, Sartuche wanted to see it, but the lawyer said he didn’t have it with him. Sartuche dashed out the nearest exit in such a rush that his service revolver was jostled loose and fell clattering on the floor.
The race was on. Bugliosi hurried to the West Los Angeles Division to try to get a statement from Sergeant Wright before the LAPD could get to him. “I was not quick enough,” Bugliosi recounted. “When I ar
rived I was told Wright was on the phone. Ten minutes later he appeared holding a yellow paper in his hand. The name ‘Sartuche’ was written on it.”340
Of course Wright backtracked from his earlier positive identification of the bullet and said he couldn’t be sure, now, if it had been a bullet. But he had been quite sure before Sartuche got to him. Unfortunately, not a lot of people are brave enough to tell the truth when their future income depends upon them not telling that truth. His reversal must be understood in this light.
In the fall of 1975, pressed for new tests by a joint lawsuit by Paul Schrade and CBS as well as inquiries from the Board of Supervisors and City Council, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke ordered a panel of experts to reexamine the ballistics evidence in the case. While some saw that as a positive move designed to address the questions of conspiracy, this could also be viewed as a defensive move designed to forestall a larger Congressional investigation, a serious possibility at that point, that might have been unable to ignore the growing evidence of conspiracy.
Judge Wenke appointed seven people to the panel so there could be no tie on any vote. Each person was nominated to Judge Wenke by a different party. The panel members were, in alphabetical order, Stanton O. Berg (chosen by Los Angeles County), Alfred A. Biasotti (chosen by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office), Lowell W. Bradford (chosen by CBS News), Cortlandt Cunningham (chosen by then State Attorney General Evelle Younger), Patrick Garland (chosen as an “Expert at large” representing no one’s interests in particular), Charles V. Morton (chosen by Sirhan) and Ralph Turner (chosen by Schrade).341
Five of the seven members—all of those not chosen by Schrade or Sirhan—were members of the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners founded at the February 1969 meeting in Chicago that Wolfer attended immediately following his trial appearance, and some of them had been present at that meeting.342
The panel was given a number of bullets to examine, including bullets purportedly retrieved from Kennedy, Goldstein and Weisel; test bullets fired from Sirhan’s gun; and eight bullets the panel fired from Sirhan’s gun to test against.
The panel’s report stated that two cannelures had been found on the Kennedy neck bullet, and that it was not possible to accurately determine rifling angles on the bullets due to the damage on each bullet. The cannelure discrepancy Harper had found and MacDonnell had confirmed was explained away as having to do with the fact that Harper’s Balliscan photographs were in black and white, while the panel’s photographs were in color. But that didn’t make sense, since Harper had physically examined the bullets by hand many times, as we have already seen. It made more sense that the bullets the panel was examining were not the same ones Harper had examined.
“Can’t anyone on that panel count?” Harper exploded to Christian after finding out the panel found wood embedded in the two bullets found in Sirhan’s car. “They just finished examining the ninth and tenth bullets and don’t even know it!”343
Harper knew that bullet holes had been found in the pantry after the shooting, which begged the question, where did the bullets go? Bullets don’t bore into wood and then throw themselves into reverse and back out! Knowing police as he did, Harper had no trouble assuming the police had dug the bullets out of the wall and planted them in Sirhan’s car in an attempt to further link Sirhan to the pantry shooting while simultaneously disposing of evidence that would have proved to be two bullets too many for Sirhan to have fired.
The panelists, however, as had Grant Cooper at Sirhan’s trial, accepted the validity of the ballistics evidence without question. They stayed narrowly focused on their task. They could not match the bullets found in Sirhan’s car to Sirhan’s gun, due to the damage on the bullets. In fact, the panel couldn’t match any of the bullets from the shooting to Sirhan’s gun.
The big finding that the media reported heavily was that the panel could find no evidence that a second gun had been used. The media instantly misreported that as definitive proof that no second gun had been used. Lowell Bradford, the CBS-chosen expert, was particularly upset by this misreporting. Absence of evidence is the not the same thing as evidence of absence. As Bugliosi put it during his appearance in the Owen case, “It would be like walking down my street and saying I saw no avocados on the street. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any avocados, only that I didn’t see the avocados.”344
Oddly enough, a close reading of the panel’s report suggests a second gun had very likely been used, because while three of the victim bullets could be matched to each other (according to five of the seven experts, with the other two saying only they could not make a positive identification of the victim bullets with each other345), none of the victim bullets could be positively matched to Sirhan’s gun. And none of the test bullets fired from Sirhan’s gun in 1975 could be matched to Wolfer’s test bullets fired in 1968 or any of the other evidence bullets.
Let me restate that. Not one of the bullets from the pantry could be successfully matched to Sirhan’s gun. A match should have been possible if the official story had been correct. At the very least, test bullets fired from the gun should have matched the original test bullets fired from Sirhan’s gun. But even those did not match. So what happened?
The official explanation for this was that Sirhan’s gun had become heavily coated with lead since the time Sirhan fired it in the pantry. But given the gun had been in the sole possession of the court since the time of Wolfer’s test firings that implied that someone in an official capacity with the justice system had to have repeatedly fired lead bullets through the barrel, fouling the barrel, an extraordinary development that represented illegal evidence tampering. Since that would lead to the obvious question of why the prosecution felt the need to obscure evidence in their own case, a different explanation had to be concocted: that unnamed cops accessed the evidence and fired Sirhan’s gun over the years to make souvenir bullets, a ghoulish and illegal act and one that permanently damaged the evidence in a case under appeal that was guaranteed to receive immense scrutiny.
But does that explanation make sense? The gun was not stored in an LAPD evidence locker where anyone with a friend in the property lab could get to it. It was stored nearly immediately after Wolfer fired the test shots with the County Clerk in a secured area that a cop would have no access to. And remember that Joe Busch’s grand jury found no evidence to suggest any of the evidence had been tampered with while in custody.
According to Turner and Christian, “One of the firearms experts later postulated that the leading might have ‘grown’ within the gun barrel (like algae)—a theory completely beyond the comprehension of scientists in the field of metallurgy, we discovered.”346
There are, of course, two other possible explanations. The first is that someone in an official capacity, like Wolfer, knew the bullets would not match the gun and deliberately fouled the barrel while he had it to prevent that secret from being proven. But this seems unlikely, as Wolfer had not yet made any bullet comparisons at the point at which he gave the gun to the Grand Jury so he could hardly have known there would be issues to cover up.
The last explanation is the simplest, and here perhaps Occam’s Razor serves us the best. Maybe the reason the barrel was leaded is that none of the copper-jacketed bullets expended in the pantry had been fired from it. Credible witnesses saw Sirhan fire his gun in the pantry. But no witness “saw” him fire copper-jacketed bullets, or any bullets, for that matter. Bullets move too quickly to be seen with the naked eye. People saw a flame coming out of Sirhan’s gun and assumed that meant a bullet had exited. But Sirhan could have been firing blanks, i.e., slugless cartridges. The numerous witness reports of seeing a tongue of flame come from Sirhan’s gun muzzle support this notion, as bullets do not create much of a flash when fired, but blanks or slugless cartridges contain paper that flash-burns when the gun is fired, producing a long, highly visible flame.
If Sirhan had fired blanks, then at least two other shooters had to have been fi
ring in the pantry to account for the sheer number of bullets (seven removed from victims, one lost in the ceiling space, and another four that apparently entered the southern and center pantry doorframes, to be removed and hidden later). If Sirhan had fired blanks, the conspirators would have wanted someone firing from Sirhan’s direction to hide this fact. And that appears to be exactly what happened.
It also appears that Wolfer or someone working closely with him in the lab somehow substituted fake bullets for the three victim bullets the panel had matched to each: the Kennedy bullet, the Goldstein bullet, and the Weisel bullet.
This begins to sound like a crazy conspiracy theory. But in fact, there’s strong evidence suggesting this is exactly what happened, and the panel’s experts all missed it due to a form of misdirection. The panel was so focused on proving matches or mismatches between the bullets that not one of them stopped to verify that the bullets they were comparing were actually the bullets they were purported to be.
In the LAPD’s files, there is a mysterious document titled “Confidential Addenda to the Lowenstein Inquiry.” The undated, anonymous document from the SUS files states:
This separate addenda contains confidential information relative to the questions submitted by Allard Lowenstein. The information has not been revealed prior to this report and may conflict with previous statements made by the Chief of Police and other officials.
Serious consideration should be given to the release of this information.
There exists a photograph of the Kennedy bullet and a test bullet taken through a comparison microscope showing one Land comparison.
It is not intended to be a bullet striation identification comparison because the lighting and details of the bullet are not displayed in the proper position.