A Lie Too Big to Fail
Page 54
Around 11:30 A.M. on June 6, 1968, according to the ECC log, “an unidentified man was arrested by LAPD 100 yards from [the plane that was taking the] Kennedy Family [back home]. He was threatening to kill members of Kennedy family. Susp held at Airport Sub Station.” This appears to be untrue, as the Final Report cites an Army Intelligence officer’s report that indicated “Crosson had made a remark earlier to a complaining witness that the Senator’s airplane had been sabotaged and that he, Crosson, had to get to the Kennedy family to protect them.”586 That sounds more like the man who tried to warn that Kennedy would be killed at the Ambassador Hotel. In the ECC log, there was no such clarification. Indeed, he was described as appearing “psycho” and was “being held for FBI info from det. Tom Nieto—Venice Div.” The log did clarify he was arrested at a bar near the airport, not on the tarmac.
And what a story the FBI had to tell. Although Crosson’s name does not appear in the document I’m about to cite, as the subject is redacted, it’s clear from the information provided that this person was Crosson.
According to a partially redacted FBI report dated July 16, 1968, Crosson had gone to the FBI the night of May 23, 1968. The FBI writer of the memo, whose name is also redacted, wrote that Crosson had visited the FBI office in Los Angeles on several occasions. “On each visit to the office subject always left some type of material of no value.” But the next sentence immediately belies that assertion: “On 5/29/68, the subject [Crosson] was located through investigation by the writer and contacted concerning the items he had left at the FBI office.” If he left nothing of value, why did the FBI go to the trouble of locating him? “During the telephone conversation,” the FBI Special Agent wrote, Crosson offered to work for the FBI, stating he “had been doing work for the CIA for five years and that no one would listen to him.” Why wouldn’t the CIA listen to him? Perhaps because Crosson told the FBI agent “that Senator Kennedy would be in Los Angeles campaigning and he ‘did not want to have another Dallas incident.’”
The FBI Special Agent then asked Crosson if he was making a threat. Crosson denied that he was.
So at least twice before the assassination, to the FBI and on site at the hotel, Crosson had tried to sound the alarm on a plot that eventually came to fruition. If he was just a nut, it was an uncanny coincidence. What the FBI agent put in next made me think it was the writer, not Crosson, who was the nut. The agent wrote, “Subject was arrested by the Venice Division, LAPD, on 6/7/68,” an incorrect statement as Crosson had been arrested on June 6, “when he made statements to the effect that he had intended to blow up the plane carrying the body of Senator Kennedy back to New York.” But as we saw, both the LAPD and Army Intelligence reported that Crosson was trying to warn that a bomb might blow up the Kennedy plane. In other words, Crosson was trying to protect, not assault, the family.
So clearly, the FBI author of the memo was not factual, whether accidentally or deliberately, in his report. I believe it was for the latter purpose, based on what the agent wrote next:
[Redacted] VA Hospital, Sepulveda, California, advised her records reflect subject arrested while in Ojai, California, and taken to Camarillo State hospital where he made that statement that he was assigned the task of killing the person who killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy. [Redacted] he was presently at the VA Hospital, Sepulveda, however, she was calling to determine if subject wanted by the FBI.587
What a bizarre story. He was assigned the task of killing the person who killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy, but then taken to a hospital. Note that the report does not say “mental hospital,” but that was my first thought when I saw he had been taken to the VA hospital. Maybe the guy was just crazy.
But maybe he wasn’t crazy at all, because there are two historical precedents for such a task. One person claimed to have been tasked with killing the “shooter” (or patsy) before the assassination. Another was tasked with killing shooters after an assassination. And in both cases, the person assassinated was President John F. Kennedy.
On September 20, 1963, a former military officer who had suffered brain damage during the war, Richard Case Nagell, went into a bank, fired two shots into the wall. He didn’t want to rob the bank. He wanted to get arrested.
He claimed he was afraid he might be killed for his knowledge of an upcoming plot to kill President Kennedy and knew the safest place he could be was federal custody. Crazy? Or crazy like a fox?
When arrested, Nagell had a document on him that named six CIA officers. Nagell claimed he had been serving as a double-agent for the CIA, pretending to work with a KGB officer in Mexico City. After President Kennedy’s assassination, Nagell claimed that he had learned of a plot to kill Kennedy and that the KGB asked him to kill Oswald in the hopes of preventing the plot from taking place. This alone would not be much evidence of anything, but when Nagell was arrested, he had on him the name Richard Fecteau and the notation that Fecteau was CIA at a time when that information was not publicly known.
Fecteau and John Downey had been captured in the 1950s by Chinese Communists while on a mission for the CIA near Manchuria. The CIA denied the two were employees for decades until after the men were returned to the U.S. in the 1970s.
Nagell also had, to the CIA’s consternation, the names of six other CIA employees in the paper on him at the time of the arrest. The Director of Security at CIA at the time, Robert L. Bannerman, wrote FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on behalf of CIA Director Richard Helms a request for the FBI to not reveal those names and to let the agency know how those names came to be in Nagell’s possession.588 Nagell was not an agency employee, but he appeared to be a “vest pocket operation,” meaning run by a single CIA employee without the knowledge of the rest of the agency, in his dealings. Interested readers should pick up The Man Who Knew Too Much for Dick Russell’s decades-long pursuit of the truth about Nagell and his story.
Naturally, because such an account implicated the CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy, CIA defenders claim Nagell was mentally ill or mentally unstable and therefore nothing he said could be believed. But that would not explain how he came to know secret information about several CIA employees.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created by Congress in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which opened the eyes of many to the evidence of conspiracy in the case. At the end of the film was a note about how many more years the files on the case would remain secret. A public outcry caused Congress to appoint a board to release as many files as possible. The ARRB found Nagell credible and wanted to subpoena tapes and other records he claimed to have kept regarding the actual participants in the plot to kill President Kennedy. But Nagell died in his Los Angeles area home just before the letter reached him.
There is another man who was sent to kill assassins after the plot had taken place. In the files of the Church Committee are a number of documents about a man named Roland “Bud” Culligan. He had apparently been set up on a false criminal charge by the CIA to keep him from talking about some of the many covert operations he had been involved with, some of which involved assassinations. He claimed that, among other “Executive Action” plots he had been involved in, he had shot down UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane. Hammarskjöld and Kennedy had sided with Patrice Lumumba against the Allen Dulles-Richard Helms faction in the CIA that wanted Lumumba removed so business interests could exploit the rare earth mineral wealth in the Katanga province of Congo.
Feeling burned by the CIA, Culligan reached out to people at various levels of the U.S. government and was eventually given the opportunity to testify, in writing, as to what he knew about assassinations. One task Culligan described was being sent to kill the shooters involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. One way to keep participants in a plot silent forever is simply to kill them after the fact. Culligan claimed he lured the assassins with the promise of a new job, and then killed them at the meeting place. As I explained in my testimony to the recent UN Commissi
on on the Hammarskjöld case, I believe Culligan knew about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination but deliberately lied about part of this. He wanted the CIA to know that if he weren’t freed from jail, he could tell much more. Soon after this testimony, Culligan was, in fact, freed from jail.
Was Crosson a CIA employee? Was he a contract agent like Culligan? Was he a vest pocket operation, like Nagell appeared to be? Or was Crosson simply crazy and happened to be correct that someone was going to kill Kennedy that night? After all, no one blew up the plane that flew the Kennedy family back to the East Coast. But maybe he wasn’t crazy at all. And while he was clearly drinking heavily in the wake of the killing of Kennedy, which he had sought to prevent, neither Reinke nor Farrar said anything about Crosson being drunk when he spoke to them. Maybe he was just an American trying to prevent a tragedy about to happen, who then drank himself into an arrest in his grief.
So now we reach the final and most important question. The sheer number of bullets and bullet holes prove there was a conspiracy. There were numerous people who seemed to play a role in the events of the night. So why has Sirhan maintained to this day that cannot remember any co-conspirators?
There are only two possibilities since brain damage was ruled out early in this case. Either Sirhan is lying, or he is telling the truth. And if he is telling the truth, what caused the hole in his memory?
414 LAPD interview transcript of Fred Dutton, September 6, 1968.
415 Robert J. Joling, J.D. and Philip Van Praag, An Open & Shut Case, (United States: JV & CO, LLC, 2008), p. 288.
416 When Faura interviewed a fry cook named Jesse at Tony’s Drive In at the corner of Wilshire and Westwood, the 5’8” light-complected Mexican appeared to Faura to be wholly innocent. But when Faura returned to his car, three men were stopped in a “no parking zone” right in front of his car. Faura thought the three of them exchanged looks as he walked up. “The man in the front passenger seat held a walkie-talkie on his lap, the antenna fully extended. His left hand moved to cover it” as Faura approached, “but it was too long. It appeared to be slightly smaller than those used by the police but larger and more solid than those sold to the public.” Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing (TrineDay, 2016), p. 19.
When Faura got into his car, he feigned getting out a cigarette but instead took down the license number. When he returned to his office, he called a friend in the police department to have the plate traced, but no record of that plate existed. Faura, pp. 24–25.
417 In what could be just a strange coincidence, or not, Khaiber Khan gave Michael Wayne a ride to the same corner where Tony’s Drive In was located, Wilshire and Westwood, on the night of the assassination. See the SUS Final Report, in the “Khaiber Khan” section, p. 432.
418 Toby Rogers, The Ganja Godfather: The Untold Story of NYC’s Weed Kingpin (Trine Day, 2015). Just before the passage regarding his conversation with Breslin, Rogers provided pictures of the two different editions with the changing headlines.
419 Robert J. Joling, J.D. and Philip Van Praag, An Open & Shut Case, (United States: JV & Co., LLC, 2008), p. 288.
420 SUS Final Report, p. 199.
421 LAPD Radio log, June 5, 1968.
422 LAPD Radio log, June 5, 1968.
423 LAPD Unusual Occurrences Log, June 5, 1968.
424 LAPD interview summary of Michael Wayne, July 2, 1968. The rest of this section blends several LAPD interviews with Wayne and an FBI report on Wayne as well. Both agencies interviewed Wayne multiple times.
425 LAPD interview of Michael Wayne, August 14, 1968.
426 FBI interview of Khaiber Khan taken June 10, 1968 and dated June 12, 1968.
427 LAPD interview of Donald MacEwen, the Bell Captain, June 6, 1968. MacEwen received the bag from “Mary Vaughn, the night clean-up lady” who said he had found it in the flowers of the Dolphin Court. MacEwen said he gave the bag to an officer who in turn gave it to “Lt. McArthur.”
428 LAPD interview of Officer E.W. Crosthwaite, September 30, 1968. Crosthwaite said a bellboy had given him the bag, which had originally been found by a maid in a flower pot in “one of the large flower pots in the lobby floor of the hotel” and that he had given it to “Sgt. McArthur,” who was “in the kitchen,” at 3 A.M.
429 FBI interview of Daniel Hall, June 12, 1968, dated June 14, 1968.
430 LAPD interview of Michael Wayne, July 2, 1968.
431 LAPD interview of Fred Droz, June 27, 1968.
432 FBI interview of Robert Healy, conducted June 19, 1968.
433 LAPD interview summary of Virginia Guy’s 7 A.M. interview on June 5, 1968.
434 Ibid.
435 LAPD interview of Michael Wayne, June 5, 1968.
436 FBI interview of Michael Wayne, July 8, 1968.
437 FBI interview of Augustus Mallard, June 9, 1968.
438 I called Steve Fontanini in 2005 in the hopes of obtaining permission to reprint his picture, but at that time, unfortunately, his memory was largely gone. Fontanini didn’t even remember taking a picture of Wayne, so I was unable to discuss that with him further.
439 FBI interview of Betty Barry, taken June 21, 1968 and dated June 27, 1968.
440 LAPD interview of Ira Marc Goldstein, June 5, 1968.
441 LAPD interview of Ira Marc Goldstein, June 5, 1968.
442 Phone call with Paul Schrade, January 8, 2017.
443 Author interview of Vince DiPierro, November 21, 2016.
444 FBI interview of Marvene Jones, dated June 12, 1968.
445 LAPD interview of “Gregory” [George] Ross Clayton, October 11, 1968.
446 Faura, prepublication version, p. 152.
447 The California State Archives can provide a copy of this photo. I have a copy, but when I contacted Steve Fontanini in 2005 to attempt to obtain permission to reprint the photo, his memory seemed to be faltering. He didn’t recall taking the picture, even though there are numerous records indicating he did, so I did not pursue that further.
448 LAPD interview of Steve Fontanini, June 28, 1968.
449 The audio of Wayne’s polygraph session was provided to me by CNN producer Brad Johnson.
450 FBI interview report of Patricia Nelson, dated June 10, 1968.
451 LAPD interview of Joseph Thomas Klein, June 7, 1968. There is a nearly illegible copy of this interview in one spot in the files. The legible copy can be found here: www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=116655&search=Strain#relPageId=122&tab=page
452 LAPD interview summary of Dennis Weaver, July 1, 1968.
453 LAPD interview of William Singer, June 6, 1968.
454 Harold Burba’s Grand Jury testimony.
455 FBI internal memo dated June 10, 1968, via www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99631&relPageId=178&tab=page, accessed November 28, 2016.
456 Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing (Waterville, OR: TrineDay, 2016), p. 153.
457 FBI interview of Mrs. Judith Abo, taken and dated July 8, 1968.
458 LAPD phone call report from Samuel Strain, June 5, 1968.
459 FBI interview of Samuel Strain, June 28, 1968 dated July 1, 1968.
460 FBI memo from a redacted special agent to SAC, Los Angeles.
461 FBI interview of Fred Parrott, taken June 20 and dated June 21, 1968.
462 LAPD log of telephone calls received, June 5, 1968, 8:30 P.M., from Samuel T. Strain; LAPD interview of Samuel Strain on June 7, 1968.
463 FBI interview of Dr. Marcus McBroom, taken July 8 and dated July 11, 1968.
464 Transcript of taped interview with Marcus McBroom by Greg Stone and Paul Schrade, March 9, 1968.
465 LAPD interview of Ernesto Alfredo Ruiz, June 7, 1968. Ruiz thought she was wearing glasses. If so, this was not the woman in the polka dot dress others had seen with Sirhan that night, as no one else had mentioned glasses. See www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99737#relPageId=4&tab=page, accessed December 13, 2016.
466 Faura, p. 153.
468 LAPD interview of Joseph Thomas Klein, June 7, 1968.
469 FBI report on Michael Wayne, July 6, 1968.
470 LAPD report titled “Michael Wayne/Keith D. Gilbert Business Card Investigation,” July 22, 1969.
471 Maureen O’Hagan and Michael Ko, “Feared Seattle property manager is arrested; dozens of guns seized,” Seattle Times, February 16, 2005, citing a federal court opinion.
472 LAPD interview of Michael Wayne, July 12, 1968.
473 LAPD interview of William Gardner, June 27, 1969.
474 LAPD report summary of the Wayne-Gilbert investigation, July 22, 1969.
475 Daily Summary of Activities, April 10, 1969.
476 LAPD interview of Michael Wayne, June 25, 1969.
477 Turner and Christian, p. 135.
478 Audio tape of LAPD interview of Judy Groves, June 28, 1968, provided by the California State Archives.
479 LAPD Interview summary of Judy Groves, June 28, 1968.
480 SUS Final Report, p. 441; LAPD interview of Sanford Groves, July 9, 1968. The interview notes do not say that Groves saw Khoury but do say Groves knew Fisher knew Khoury. It appears some of what Sanford Groves said is now missing. The SUS report writers did not invent material out of whole cloth. The statement about Sanford Groves calling Fisher had to come from somewhere.
481 LAPD interview of Fred Droz, June 27, 1968.
482 LAPD interview of Fred Droz, June 27, 1968.
483 LAPD interview of Joel Fisher, July 2, 1968.
484 SUS Progress report on Khoury by Lt. Higbie, July 18, 1968. Francois is misspelled “Flancois” here, but Khoury’s Ambassador Hotel employment application shows the name clearly as “François.”
485 SUS Progress report on Khoury by Lt. Higbie, July 18, 1968.
486 SUS Final Report, p. 441.
487 LAPD interview of Fred Droz, June 27, 1968.
488 LAPD interview of Joel Fisher, July 2, 1968.
489 LAPD interview of Fred Droz, June 27, 1968.