A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  A few moments later, Le Beau went upstairs, entered through the main door of the banquet hall, and as he did so, he observed the same couple standing by themselves at the left of the main door leaning against the south wall. At this time, Le Beau said he realized that the couple were not part of the Senator’s party because they were standing approximately 75 feet from the speaker’s stand and there was [sic] a large number of camera and TV men standing between the couple and Kennedy, who was speaking at the time. The couple was practically obscured from the speaker’s stand.570

  Le Beau described the female as 25–30 years old, 5’4” to 5’6” with a “trim nice figure” and shoulder-length light brown hair, wearing a satin blouse. As for the man, he had thought it was Sirhan when he saw his picture in the paper, but when the FBI showed him a picture of Sirhan from three years earlier, Le Beau said the “skin of his face is too smooth.” In Sirhan’s mug shot, his face was beaten up and scratched, so he looked like he had an acne condition. But that was not what Sirhan looked like before he was captured. When Le Beau was asked if he could swear under oath the man was Sirhan, Le Beau “hung his head, stared at the floor for several long moments and then replied, ‘No.’”571 That said, the owner of the restaurant, Mrs. Felecia Maas, had hired a photographer that day, and according to an FBI report, “In one 8x10 photograph of a scene shot outside the restaurant there appears to be a male Latin-type answering the description of Sirhan standing in the crowd.”572 Maybe this was Sirhan. But I doubt it, for this reason. Whatever his faults, Sirhan was, according to the vast majority of reports, unfailingly polite to strangers. When Le Beau walked past the couple, he bumped the man he thought was Sirhan and said “excuse me.” According to Le Beau, the person responded, in a surly manner, “why should I?” This just doesn’t sound like Sirhan. But it sounds very much like the man who was upset that he couldn’t be hired at the hotel as a waiter.573

  Officer William Schneid saw this same couple when he worked security at Robbie’s Restaurant that day. Just before Senator Kennedy and his party went upstairs, Schneid noticed a girl in her mid-twenties trying to get into the kitchen, but someone was not letting her in. Just before Kennedy walked up the stairs, Kennedy said to Schneid, “Officer, let them through,” referring to the people waiting in line to have their tickets checked. The crowd surged around him at this and Schneid had to step aside.

  At that moment, as Schneid told the FBI, he saw the same girl who had tried to get into the kitchen ducked into a booth on the north side of the staircase. “It was his impression that she was trying to get to someone,” possibly the male companion seen with her on the stairs soon after. Schneid remembered this girl and the man with her being detained briefly on the stairs before they were allowed through.

  Schneid felt the man bore a resemblance to Sirhan but was not Sirhan. For one, the man was taller. While the man was curly-haired and slim, Schneid pegged the man’s height as about 5’6” or 5’7”, taller than Sirhan. He put the girl in the 5’4” to 5’7” range and said she was “proportionate,” with an “officious” manner. He said her hair was “medium to light brown.” This sounds very much like the girl Sandra Serrano and Vince DiPierro saw, who bugged Conrad Seim incessantly for his press pass. But the man she was with did not seem to match the description of Sirhan. This sounds instead like the taller doppelganger.

  John Fahey’s girl

  DID JOHN FAHEY SPEND THE DAY WITH A GIRL WHO LATER donned a polka dot dress? In Chapter 1, we saw how John Henry Fahey met a woman who ended up spending the day with him. She claimed “they” were going to “get Kennedy tonight at the women reception” without explaining what she meant by “they” or “get.”

  The woman told Fahey she had just come from Beirut. “Is there a Beirut?” Fahey had asked Fernando Faura, not even knowing if that was a city or country.574 She also mentioned Aqaba and other places in the Middle East. “She had travelled all over through the Arabic countries there,” Fahey told Faura.

  Faura believed the woman Fahey was with had been the girl in the polka dot dress. Faura had written one of the only news accounts of this girl, so he was familiar with some of the characteristics the police had announced publicly, including that she had a “funny” nose. So when Faura interviewed Fahey, he asked specifically about the girl’s nose. Fahey mentioned that the woman had a “hooked” nose “of the fashion where you can realize she was from the Arab world.” A “hook nose” is synonymous with a Roman nose, where the nose turns inward and downward, and Fahey also described it as a “Nasser nose,” which also describes a nose that curves downward, not upward as Serrano, DiPierro575 and other witnesses described. That description strongly indicates this was not the woman later seen in a polka dot dress, but some other woman likely involved in the plot.

  Faura had taken Fahey to a police artist (who was not then working for the police) and had some pictures drawn which were then fleshed out by another artist and photographed. Faura then sent a representative of his to show the pictures to Vince DiPierro. But years later, when I showed DiPierro the same drawing, he had no reaction to that drawing at all, yet when I showed him a photograph of a voluptuously shaped woman in a polka dot dress (that Faura had staged for his newspaper), DiPierro had a visible and large reaction, as if suddenly remembering something intensely unpleasant. Although Faura quotes his associate’s account of DiPierro’s identification as having said, “That’s the girl,” Faura also presents enough evidence to disqualify this, because DiPierro noted several things that didn’t fit what he remembered, saying if those facial characteristics were different, “That’s the girl.” That’s not a solid identification. In addition, Fahey described the woman as having dirty blonde hair, but nearly all witnesses to “the” girl in the polka dot dress said she had brunette or dark hair.

  In addition, Khaiber Khan, an interesting character I wrote about in The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, saw a man and a woman sitting in a blue Volkswagen in the rear of the Kennedy headquarters on Wilshire on June 3. He saw the same couple the next day, June 4, inside Kennedy’s headquarters, but this time, the girl was wearing a “white dress with dark polka dots about the diameter of a penny.” It appears then the girl in the polka dot dress was already wearing it while Fahey was still driving with his woman along the coast.576

  Fahey also said the girl had blue eyes, which looked brown or green at times. Gray eyes can look blue, green or even brown depending on the light and surrounding colors. No one who saw the girl in the polka dot dress noted her eye color, and remember how Eve Hansen said in her taped interview that she had a thing for blue eyes, so if the girl in the polka dot dress had them, she probably would have noticed that. In other words, it appears the girl in the polka dot dress had brown eyes. Blue eyes, dirty blonde hair, and a nose that turned down, not up, means Fahey was not with the same girl Serrano and DiPierro saw in the company of Sirhan. But the fact that she wasn’t the same girl doesn’t make her any less interesting. It just broadens the number of participants a bit.

  In one of Fahey’s interviews, he remembered that the woman had shown him a picture of her child,577 presumably the daughter who was at school on the East Coast.578 One of the easiest ways to blackmail someone is to threaten their offspring. Many people are brave enough to withstand torture to themselves, but most people would rarely consent to the torture or death of a loved one, especially a child. If the woman had a baby that was not with her, that could explain why she felt compelled to participate in something that was clearly causing her distress. Fahey described how her hands were sweaty and she seemed very nervous.

  Fahey also said a few things which led me to believe the woman may have been involved in the world of intelligence. She had a husband stationed or traveling between Guam and Taiwan,579 which makes it sound like her husband was involved in the military or perhaps military intelligence. She spoke Arabic and English and had traveled extensively in the Middle East. She appeared to lie without compunction, tell
ing Fahey her name was Alice, Virginia, Betty, and several other names, none of which appeared to be her real name. The last name she gave him was “Oppenheimer,” a German name. But when Fahey spoke a few words in German to her, she did not appear to understand what he was saying. Fahey told Faura the girl claimed her own name as Oppenheimer, but she also showed him a picture of another woman and said that woman’s name was Oppenheimer. She also referred to a man named Oppenheimer who was an official of the Federal Aviation Agency in Guam.

  The woman claimed to have lived in many places, changing her current home each time she picked a place Fahey knew anything about. She said she had to ship a bunch of clothes ahead to Australia, presumably where she was headed next.580 “She wanted to get out of the country—she was leaving the country,”581 Fahey had told Hernandez during his polygraph session.

  In one of his conversations with Faura, Fahey remembered the woman talking about catching a ride with CAT (Civil Air Transport), a known CIA front, or the Flying Tigers, a CIA-connected airline run by Colonel Claire Chennault. She mentioned having met Claire’s wife Anna in New York. In 1968, Anna Chennault was helping Nixon and his backers sabotage President Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace efforts in Vietnam so that Johnson could not run on having ended the war there (and so military contractors could continue to make their fortunes there).

  Fahey’s woman clearly had intelligence connections and appeared to be conflicted about whatever role she was supposed to play. Equally clearly, she was not the same person who had been seen by Serrano and DiPierro later that night.

  A large group?

  IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW THIS WAS NOT A QUICK HIT WITH one or two assassins, but a large operation with helpers and others that may have included members of the security force at the hotel.

  After the assassination, Second Lieutenant Russell Davis of the U.S. Marine Corps told the FBI he thought he saw the police leading “three short, dark, possibly Puerto Rican, individuals” away when he got off an elevator on the Embassy Room level and saw the post-shooting tumult.582 Were these just witnesses the police were escorting to its bus? Davis wouldn’t have reported it to the FBI if he didn’t think it was something more sinister.

  Paul Burke, a public defender,583 called the LAPD at 6:45 A.M. to say he saw “three carloads of Latins or Cubans being directed by a male in a gray uniform in the rear-back-area of the Ambassador Hotel prior to the shooting. States the individual looked hard and surly looking.”584 The men in gray uniforms were from Ace Guard Service. The security men from the hotel had brown uniforms. If a hotel guest had reported this I would have dismissed this. But Burke, as a public defender, had seen a lot of hardened criminals in his time, and felt it worth reporting this group. That’s significant.

  Foreknowledge

  PEOPLE LIKE TO POOH-POOH THE NOTION OF A LARGE OPERATION, saying if so many people were involved, why hasn’t anyone talked? The Manhattan Project was kept secret for several years, despite employing many thousands of people. How many secrets have been kept that have never been exposed? We can’t answer that. But there’s one that we know about, because it is still redacted.

  In the wake of the exposure that some of the people participating in the Watergate break-in had CIA backgrounds, in 1973, CIA Director James Schlesinger asked CIA employees to come forward and spill the beans on any illegal operations they knew about. The report put together from these revelations came to be known as the “Family Jewels.” Members of the Church and Pike Committee members saw the Family Jewels. A number of people did. But to date, no one has told what’s behind the redactions in Family Jewel #1. Although the CIA “released” the Jewels to the public in 2007, Jewel #1 remains, at the time of this writing, redacted. Whatever the CIA’s top transgression was, we, the people, still don’t know about it. See Figure 12.

  Figure 12: CIA Family Jewel #1 is still redacted as of November 2017

  When the CIA is involved, big secrets involving large groups of people can be kept forever. If you can’t keep a secret forever, you can’t get a job with the CIA. How is this guaranteed? You sign a vow of secrecy when you join the CIA. You can get fired or lose your pension or be jailed if you lose your pension. That’s the official threat. Unofficially, Agency employees feel they could get killed for talking or, worse, that a family member could be made to suffer. Those are successful deterrents.

  In addition, people are often chosen to work in such plots because their background makes them “plausibly deniable.” The CIA doesn’t usually send its employees out to kill someone. It asks its employees to recruit “cut-outs” who in turn hire their own assassins and take the fall if the plot does not succeed. Each person only knows their own small piece of the puzzle, but many don’t know what puzzle they are a piece of. They have specific instructions and don’t always know the end result of completing those instructions. This is called compartmentalization. That’s how CIA and other secret agencies protect their operations from exposure.

  Whoever planned this operation, however, didn’t do it very well, because the plot was leaking like a sieve before it happened. At least four different people appeared to have some sort of foreknowledge of the events that were about to take place and at least two of them appeared to be trying to stop it.

  The first person with foreknowledge was Michael Wayne or whoever was in the electrician’s booth. The strange man Daniel Hall talked to who hinted of something big to happen at the hotel may have been this same person in the electrician’s booth, so we’ll leave the count at one here, even though these may well have been two different people.

  The second person who provably displayed foreknowledge was the woman who spent the day with John Fahey who told him that Kennedy would be killed that night.

  The third person with possible foreknowledge of a plot was a woman who could not have been Fahey’s woman because she was seen in Los Angeles at the same time that Fahey was still on the road with his woman. Christine De Sautels told both the LAPD and FBI that on the afternoon of the primary, as she was about to leave Kennedy’s headquarters on Wilshire, a young woman knocked on the window of her car at the curb.

  “I know you work in there,” the woman said, referring to the Kennedy campaign office. “You’ve got to take me to the racetrack. Have to inform some people out there to save this country.”

  De Sautels was on her way to pick someone up and said she couldn’t help.

  “Don’t take me wrong, I don’t want to go out there and bet. You have to help me save the country. He is going to be killed,” the mystery woman said.

  De Sautels suggested the woman go inside to the Kennedy headquarters with her story, but the woman was persistent.

  “There are people at Hollywood Park who have to know about this. We’ve got to keep him from being killed.” Given Sirhan’s connections to the horse racing world, this comment especially seemed to indicate actual knowledge of the plot rather than some paranoid fantasy, but De Sautels had no way of knowing that at the time.

  At this point another woman came up and asked De Sautels to move her car, and while the first woman responded to the second woman, De Sautels drove off. When she came back later that afternoon, she asked around at Kennedy headquarters to see if anyone had seen the woman who had warned of a plot.

  De Sautels described the woman as “possibly of Latin descent as she had a dark complexion,” mid-twenties, with long brown hair with “blond highlights.” She was slender, wearing capris and carrying a notebook “and a large bag-type purse.” De Sautels wouldn’t have given the woman another thought had Kennedy not been killed that night.585

  There was one more person who appeared to know Kennedy would be killed that night: William Crosson.

  As we saw in the first chapter, a former Army Sergeant had repeatedly approached the hotel desk where Donald Reinke and Gail Farrar worked to try to warn that Kennedy would be killed. The police and FBI either accidentally or deliberately misrepresented parts of this story.

  William Frederick “Billy
” Crosson was born May 9, 1922 in Iowa. He married at age 24 in California and had three children, one of which was named Steven William Crosson. (I tried to find Steven, but it appears he died of lung cancer in Ojai in 2002.) Later, Crosson divorced. He died a year and a month after the assassination at the young age of 47, per the Social Security Death Index.

  Crosson was arrested by the Venice Division of the LAPD the day after Kennedy was killed, i.e., June 6, 1968. And here is where the story seems to have been deliberately misrepresented.

  According to the LAPD’s cardfile entry, Crosson was arrested on June 6 for being “plain drunk.” The same card indicates a letter by Crosson to Senator Kennedy—written before he was killed—was booked as evidence item 52. I contacted the California State Archives to get a copy of this letter, but was told there were only scraps of paper and nothing that resembled a letter in the evidence envelope. Given how the LAPD had changed evidence that pointed to conspiracy, I wonder if the letter contained something that necessitated its disappearance.

  In its summary of Reinke’s interview, the LAPD noted that Crosson had been arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport. That was not true. The following is the story reconstructed from the Emergency Control Center (ECC) Log and the LAPD’s own final report on the assassination.