A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  Bob Maheu called and told me to come over to his house at 8:30 P.M. that evening and I did. He was furious and wanted to know why I was checking up on Thane. I was stunned at his anger and he said to me that if I kept discussing this matter, he would see that I was no longer around the Hughes operation.

  On June 15, Jack Hooper told Meier “that he was speaking with Bob Maheu and I was never to mention his name or Bel Air Patrol!” What was so sensitive about the Bel Air Patrol?

  The answer came not from Meier’s diary but from something Carl McNabb, a former CIA operative, had told me long ago. McNabb had told me that he had learned there was some association prior to the assassination between Maheu and Thane Cesar from the time when Cesar had worked for Maheu at Bel Air Patrol. I could never confirm this, as Bel Air Patrol refused to share its records. But a CIA document (discussing the granting of QKENCHANT clearance to Maheu’s son Peter) confirms that Maheu was, in fact, one of the owners of Bel Air Patrol. Given that he and Hooper owned a number of security firms together, it seemed likely that Hooper too shared the ownership. If there had been a prior connection between Thane Cesar, Hooper and Maheu through Bel Air Patrol, that would have connected the dots for serious researchers very quickly. It makes sense, then, that Meier would be scared into silence with threats from both Maheu and Hooper. It also might explain why on my first trip to see Meier, Maheu called Meier out of the blue and asked if he needed anything. Meier thought it was so odd that Maheu would have called that day, after not having talked to him for ten years.

  On that trip, Meier told me that J. Edgar Hoover had said he knew that Robert Maheu was behind the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the years after that first trip, I had come to believe Maheu, due to his connections listed earlier, was a credible candidate for the assassination plot’s mastermind.

  Meier was not the only person to assert that Maheu was behind the assassination. Researcher Steve Gaal gave me another source. His father, a WWII veteran, had been an electrician for the City of Los Angeles, working often at the “Glass House,” the nickname for the LAPD’s Parker Center. “Sometime between 1977 and 1979,” Gaal wrote me:

  Dad and I were talking about the Vietnam War at our house in Highland Park. I said that if RFK had been elected history would have been different. Dad said maybe that was so. Dad then said that he had talked to the detectives at the Glass House and that they had told him Maheu had done it. Dad was a big gossip with hard right wing views. That the detectives talked to Dad is for myself very believable.842

  Thane Cesar

  IN THE COURSE OF WRITING THIS BOOK, I SUBSCRIBED TO TWO prominent online “public records” database aggregation services. Both listed Thane Eugene Cesar’s profession as “Contract Agent” for the Central Intelligence Agency. I wrote one of the two sources to ask where the records came from. The response was “marketing surveys, land deeds, catalog purchases, voter registrations, lawsuit filings, court records, magazine subscriptions, and address changes.” I wrote the other database company and asked why they would expose a CIA agent’s information. I received no response to that question.

  Interestingly, although Cesar himself told the LAPD he worked for Hughes Aircraft in the 1970s, that employer is not on the list from any aggregator, giving the appearance that Cesar’s primary employer was the CIA at the time, not the Hughes organization, which would fit what we learned about the Hughes organization in the wake of the Watergate hearings. Hughes had been taken over by a combination of the CIA and a Mormon faction (and the Mormons were, at the time, prized recruits for the CIA as they had to spend a year abroad, were clean-cut, and didn’t drink). Cesar’s involvement with the CIA has long been suspected, but at the time of this writing, proof that he worked for the CIA has never appeared in any other source.

  It’s hard to overstate the significance of finding a current or future CIA contract agent holding Kennedy’s right arm at the moment of the shooting. Recall how one witness felt someone was “holding” Kennedy in place while someone else shot him in the head. But if that was Cesar’s only role, why did he, by his own admission, draw his gun? He claimed he didn’t fire it, but he did admit to drawing it. The more reasonable supposition is that Cesar held Kennedy long enough for someone to get off a shot or two to his head, while Cesar fired three shots into Kennedy from behind and to the right—the very position where Cesar was standing. It makes much less sense that Cesar fired all four or five shots into Kennedy. He would have been much more exposed for a head shot. Cesar’s body, however, could have hidden his gun from anyone not looking in that exact spot at the moment while Sirhan was quite obviously pulling focus.

  Another source for a connection between Thane Cesar and the security arm of the Hughes organization can be found in the book The Assassination Chain. Sybil Leek, one of the authors, saw Cesar in Las Vegas in the company of a “hit man for a Florida group”:

  [The hit man] always seemed to be near a sturdy, well-built and quite interesting-looking man, but they never spoke. So I asked my Las Vegas friend who this other man was. “He’s a professional bodyguard,” he replied; and I remarked that I was looking for a bodyguard myself, he would fit the bill perfectly. “You are too late,” said my friend. “He is owned by Howard Hughes and his name is Thane Cesar and he is as tough as they come.”843

  Cesar was apparently not the bodyguard for the hit man, however, as Cesar left the room first and the hit man followed. Perhaps he was simply hanging out with a coworker.

  Maheu and Owen

  IN MAHEU’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MAHEU RECOUNTED AN EPISODE with a religious figure who attempted to blackmail Howard Hughes. When I read it, I was instantly struck by how well this fit, with one exception, “The Walking Bible” Jerry Owen.

  Maheu described how Bill Gay, the leading member of the “Mormon Mafia” that controlled access to Howard Hughes, asked Maheu to take care of a blackmailer that may well have been Owen:

  Hughes, according to Gay, was being blackmailed, and the blackmailer, believe it or not, was a minister. He was a man of some standing in the L.A. Community, and had found out that one of his young female parishioners had had an affair with Howard.

  Apparently either the girl, or a friend of the girl’s, had confessed about the affair, looking for advice. Well, instead of saving the poor girl’s soul, this so-called “man of God” decided to turn a tidy profit, and threatened to release what he knew to the press unless he was sufficiently compensated.844

  The man was asking for “just a few thousand dollars,” which Maheu didn’t think was that much money, but in the FBI, he had learned that “the worst thing you can do with a blackmailer is pay him. It simply never stops there.” So Maheu looked for anything he could use as leverage over this preacher. Maheu went to “Peter Pitchess, an ex-FBI agent and a friend.” Pitchess was at that time the undersheriff of L.A. County.

  I asked Pete if the minister had any kind of record, and I hit the jackpot. Not only did our blackmailer have a record, he had a record as a pederast! He’d been charged, though never convicted, with molesting young boys. I couldn’t wait for my tête-à-tête with the blackmailer now. This was a meeting I thought I might even enjoy.845

  Although Maheu described the preacher as “unimpressively soft, even a bit effeminate,” I wondered if Maheu were deliberately misrepresenting the man to hide the fact that this was Owen. Owen was a big tall menace of a man, a former boxer. In all other aspects, the story matches. He had a long rap sheet and had been accused of having sex with both boys and girls. Whoever, this particular preacher was, Maheu threatened to expose him to the media, which was enough to cause the preacher to back down.

  A covert operation

  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO RUN A COVERT OPERATION? NO ONE WOULD entrust an assassination plot of importance to a single individual, even one as experienced as Maheu. It takes careful planning and a well-rehearsed team. As Watergate participants and CIA assets, Eugenio Martinez’s and Bernard Barker’s information on this point matters. In 1974 they wro
te, “…you have a briefing and then you train for the operation. You try to find a place that looks similar and you train in disguise and with the codes you are going to use. You try out the plan many times so that later you have the elasticity to abort the operation if the conditions are not ideal.”846

  Clearly, there was a team at the hotel the night of June 4, 1968. Michael Wayne and a girl in a polka dot dress made it a priority to collect press badges, which could then have been used as “all access” passes so team members could go anywhere in the hotel.

  Two women in polka dot dresses seemed to escort two men, one of which was Sirhan Sirhan, and another which looked remarkably like him, but who was wearing a white shirt and black pants and who had a pronounced acne condition. One of these teams was upstairs when Kennedy was killed. It’s likely the other team was waiting downstairs near the makeshift bar tended by the man Sirhan felt communicated with him without words, in case Kennedy had gone that direction instead. That’s why it didn’t matter which way Kennedy exited the stage or where he went next. He was not going to be allowed to leave the hotel alive.

  Someone had to man the southwest fire escape exit door so that the girl in the polka dot dress and the man in the gold sweater could sneak Sirhan into the hotel that way. Someone had to be sure the door would not be blocked when it came time for the gold-sweatered guy and the girl in the polka dot dress to exit after the deed was done. There was a man in a maroon coat standing near that door all night. Recall how he turned to the wives of two TV executives to say, “You’ve seen me here all night,” as if he were trying to establish an alibi. One of the women saw him holding what looked like a radio to his cheek. Remember that the strange girl who rode with John Fahey up to Oxnard and back said the people following them communicated by radios. If the man in the maroon coat were part of the plot, it suddenly makes sense that the polka dot girl would be yelling “We shot him” as she ran past him and out the back fire escape. She may have simply been alerting her cohort at the back door, not realizing Sandra Serrano and Katie Keir would hear her, and not caring when their escape seemed assured.

  Rather than imagining Thane Cesar fired five shots without anyone seeing him, including one or two into Kennedy’s head, which would have left him very exposed, it makes more sense that he got off a quick three shots under Kennedy’s arm while he held Kennedy firmly in place for the man in a white busboy outfit to make two quick shots to Kennedy’s head, possibly with a gun that was disguised or small enough to remain hidden.

  With Sirhan firing blanks, someone else had to fire from near Sirhan’s position to make it look like Sirhan was firing actual bullets. Harold Burba and Nina Rhodes-Hughes saw someone firing from atop a steam table. The man on the table resembled Sirhan and was dressed in a blue suit. As the shooting began, a short, bearded man ran out, possibly breaking Virginia Guy’s tooth in the process. He carried a gun partially hidden under a poster or a newspaper. Michael Wayne pulled focus in the lobby as at least two other people with guns—the short man in the blue suit and a tall sandy-haired man—made their escape.

  APBs were issued for several other suspects besides Sirhan before Inspector Powers got on the police radio to make clear he didn’t want anyone “to get started on a big conspiracy.” At some point, someone reported a kitchen worker named “Jesse Greer” had shot Robert Kennedy. This was possibly the same “Jesse” Fernando Faura tried to track down at the corner of Westwood and Wilshire, the same location from which Wayne had hitchhiked to the Ambassador Hotel.

  The police recognized early on there were too many bullets, so they kept those bullets on log sheets marked “confidential.” Some discrepancy between bullets was so immediately apparent that Wolfer created a secret photo comparison of two bullets not recovered from actual pantry victims. The LAPD deliberately kept this photo secret for fear a “discerning buff” might detect the fraud, until there was a reinvestigation seven years later. And while the panel did realize there was something off about the bullets, no one on the panel thought to check the current markings on the bullets with the original log entries, which would have shown the bullets were not the original ones recovered in the pantry.

  Lt. Manny Pena, the man who had retired from the LAPD the year before to work for the Agency for International Development (AID), which has served as cover for the CIA in many countries, had a serious hold over not just the LAPD’s investigation but the FBI’s as well. An FBI memo dated June 13 lays out Pena’s role and strange request:

  Lt. Manuel S. Pena, who is in charge of the new Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) group investigating the Kennedy assassination [meaning Special Unit Senator – LP], advised on 6/13/68 that he desires everything the FBI has which might be pertinent to the trial of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. In particular, Lt. Pena wants statements of people interviewed at the Ambassador Hotel of people placed at the crime scene. He also desires statements of interviews of people of the Kennedy party.

  He requested that the LAPD be given the results of any foreign investigation on the background of subject Sirhan and his family, particularly anything of a local nature supporting or eliminating any intra United States or local conspiracy. Lt. Pena advised that it is necessary for him to know whether this information is forthcoming from the FBI or whether the LAPD will have to make its own arrangements to obtain same.

  Lt. Pena further advised that there would be no distribution of LAPD material until he personally had a chance to review this material.847

  So Lt. Pena was demanding the FBI give him all relevant evidence, while pre-screening anything the FBI got in return. And in the LAPD interview summaries, witnesses with evidence of conspiracy were asked if they had talked to the FBI or not, and the answer was recorded carefully in the LAPD’s files. So Pena would not withhold records from the FBI that they already knew about, but there are notations in other files that indicate if the FBI had not already interviewed the witness, Pena simply buried the information. The annotations “Do not type,” and “No further int[erview]” appear on a number of cover sheets for interview summaries with evidence of conspiracy.

  Pena and Hernandez were nearly inseparable during the investigation. When Jerry Owen surfaced in San Francisco in the office of someone powerful enough to raise a stink, Pena and Hernandez flew to San Francisco to talk to the man personally. Hernandez mentioned during one of his sessions having worked with high-level government officials in Venezuela, hardly the type of thing a local law enforcement guy does. And we saw how Pena’s own brother talked of how proud Manny was of his service to the CIA.

  Sirhan’s trial was nothing more than a show trial designed to debunk evidence of conspiracy while ensuring that Sirhan would be put to death. Only the move away from the death penalty in California has kept Sirhan alive to date.

  The Wenke panel reinvestigation of the ballistics evidence was a waste of taxpayer money because the bullets had clearly been switched, so none of their conclusions mattered.

  Most journalists repeated what government authorities told them about the case without question. Others, including authors as well as journalists, may have been actively part of the cover-up.

  Several of those who participated in the cover-up in the law enforcement and legal arenas were rewarded with better jobs or lucrative government contracts. The only Congressman to passionately lobby for a deeper investigation of the Robert Kennedy assassination was shot in his office by a man who claimed the CIA had put voices in his head.

  By contrast, on December 19, 2017, Robert Kennedy, Jr. visited Sirhan in prison in the company of Sirhan’s attorney Laurie Dusek. Bobby hugged Sirhan, told him he knew he hadn’t killed his father, and that he considered him as much a victim as his father. “He’s a sweet man,” Bobby told me after his visit. Bobby took the time to learn the truth about this case. What he found moved him to action, and rightfully so.

  Anyone who has looked closely and honestly at the evidence has realized that more than one person was involved in Robert Kennedy’s death. So w
hy can’t reporters see this? Why can’t the media explain this? Because the media and the government are two sides of the same coin, and those who challenge the government’s version of history, as numerous reporters have found out, all too often lose status and sometimes even whole careers. Kristina Borjesson published an anthology of such stories in her book Into the Buzzsaw, in which journalists describe how they lost their careers when each of them exposed a truth that the government did not want exposed.

  That’s why I wrote this book. I knew no journalist would give up 25 years of their life to learn the truth about this event. But the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.

  Our democracy is hanging by a thread. The propaganda that has arisen to hide the malfeasance of government actors has made it difficult to tell good information from disinformation. There really is such a thing as “fake news,” but the news that is fake is sometimes the opposite of news so labeled.

  I hope my efforts to expose this crisis are met with the mental courage needed to rescue our country from forces that rely on secrecy and corruption to exist. We cannot have full secrecy and full democracy. You have to sacrifice one to gain something of the other. Our task is to help our elected officials understand this and to support them in tipping the scales toward greater democracy and away from excessive secrecy.

  There is a role for secrecy and intelligence activities. But there is a need for much greater transparency, much bolder oversight, tighter control of budgets and operations, and a quicker declassification process. Those who say we need greater secrecy to “protect” democracy are part of the problem, not the solution. What’s the point of having a secret intelligence service if there is no democracy left to protect?