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By Mel Ayton
It has often been said that lurid theories about the Lincoln and JFK
assassinations have thrived because neither John Wilkes Booth nor Lee Harvey
Oswald received their day in court. The concept of due process is
so embedded in the American psyche, in other words, that its denial
inexorably gives rise to conspiratorial explanations.
The aftermath of Robert F. Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination, however, challenges this somewhat comforting observation.
In this instance, the assassin was literally caught
red-handed—tackled by Kennedy’s bodyguards moments after the shots were
fired, a .22 caliber revolver still in hand. When the trial of Sirhan
Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old native of Palestine, opened seven months
later, his defense counsel explained, “There will be no denial of the
fact that our client . . . fired the shot that killed Senator Kennedy.”[1]
Instead, Sirhan’s lawyers mounted a defense of not guilty because of
“diminished capacity,” the only way to spare their client from what
seemed to be his likely fate, the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Sirhan’s counsel had no other choice because the presiding
judge, Herbert Van Walker, exercising his discretion, had summarily
rejected a plea bargain that would have exchanged life imprisonment for
a guilty plea. “We don’t want another Dallas,” Walker reportedly observed,
repeating the mantra uttered moments after Sirhan’s
apprehension.[2] Walker believed, presumably, that prosecuting Sirhan to the full extent of the law would
avert the uncertainty that was already rampant with respect to the first Kennedy
assassination. The Sirhan case was being tried at virtually the same time the awful
miscarriage of justice in New Orleans—the circus-like persecution of Clay Shaw by district
attorney Jim Garrison—was coming to a head. And that debacle was the direct outgrowth of the
doubt and disbelief which existed because of Jack Ruby’s vigilantism, and the denial of due
process for Oswald.
Sirhan Sirhan had his day in court, indeed, several months. Because of the extraordinary
security precautions employed, Sirhan’s prosecution was judged the most expensive US
trial ever held, costing the county of Los Angeles $900,000 ($5.3 million in 2007 dollars).[3] And despite the best efforts of his lawyers, Sirhan received the ultimate sanction. The only
factor which saved him from being executed decades ago was that three years after his sentence was handed down in May 1969, the state Supreme Court declared California’s death
penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Corcoran
State Prison near Fresno, an infamous maximum-security facility, is where he remains to this
day—along with other notorious inmates such as Charles Manson.
Judge Walker was not a naïve man, but even a cynic might have been hard pressed in 1969 to
foresee how conspiracy theorists would succeed in twisting the facts in a ceaseless effort
to raise doubts about what amounted to an open and shut case. Today it comes as little
surprise, given the absence of any editorial vetting on the internet, to find many websites
and blogs saturated with bogus revelations and mindless repetition of supposed “facts” that
were, in actuality, refuted or rationally explained years ago.[4] The tide of nonsense is sufficiently high that on occasion, and as if by osmosis, palpable falsehoods are accepted and propagated
by even the most venerable news organizations, as will be seen below.
There were, to be sure, apparent anomalies in the evidence, including problems with the
ballistic and forensic evidence. In addition, some eyewitness statements, if taken completely at face
value, at least raised the possibility that Sirhan had not acted alone in the pantry of the
Ambassador Hotel. But such incongruities are entirely normal in most murder investigations,
which are far from being as neat and tidy as an episode of CSI. It is particularly true of
major investigations, where the possibility of human error is compounded because of the vast
amounts of paperwork and physical evidence that must be
processed. Then, too, police forces 40 years ago were simply not as careful about securing
a murder scene as they are trained to be now.
What is immediately apparent when the historiographies of the JFK and RFK assassinations are
placed side by side is their similarity, independent from the reality that Sirhan confessed,
was tried, and convicted. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the assassination mimicry serving as inspiration for Sirhan’s crime in the first place has extended to the post-assassination
arc of the RFK case. Though not in the same order, many of the same tactics used to put the official
story of the JFK assassination in disrepute by 1968 have been employed in the RFK
case—sometimes by the very same people.
Purported Involvement of the CIA
It took four years before allegations of CIA involvement in the JFK assassination
achieved critical mass in the public mind, courtesy of Jim Garrison. In the RFK case, the
allegation was leveled far more quickly, owing to the noxious political atmosphere generated
by Garrison and comrades such as Mark Lane in the late 1960s.
Even as a special unit of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detectives were
investigating Sirhan’s every movement and association prior to June 5, some of the
conspiracists who had attached themselves to Garrison’s probe were contacting the LAPD to
report a “CIA conspiracy” in the senator’s assassination. These freelance researchers, or
“Dealey Plaza irregulars” as they were dubbed, claimed that RFK was
killed because the CIA feared he would launch an investigation into “[agency]
involvement in his brother’s death” if elected president in 1968.[5] Garrison himself
was uncharacteristically silent on the subject, perhaps because he had accused the former
attorney general, prior to June 1968, of obstructing the DA’s probe into the JFK assassination. The truth, Garrison alleged, threatened to “interfere with [RFK’s] political career.”[6] In fact, within
the DA’s bizarre world, according to Tom Bethell, who worked on the investigation,
Robert Kennedy was considered a suspect in the JFK case until his own death.[7]
The theme of CIA involvement in the RFK case waned in subsequent decades, but was
resuscitated with the success of Oliver Stone’s 1992 film, JFK. The most persistent purveyor
of this meme was Lawrence Teeter, a criminal defense attorney who took up Sirhan’s case in 1994 and
immediately began petitioning state and federal courts for a new trial. Taking a leaf from two earlier, conspiratorially-minded books about the case, Teeter never denied that Sirhan fired a
handgun shortly after midnight, but claimed the assassin was a victim of hypnotic
programming, à la Richard Condon’s 1959 book, The Manchurian Candidate (later a film by John Frankenheimer).[8] In Sirhan’s case, however, he
was not a tool of a foreign power and Stalinist mother, Teeter contended, but was controlled by the CIA, the
“military-industrial complex,” or both.[9]
As inexorably happens, the latest incarnation of this fantasy is even more Baroque and
involved than its precursors. That did not, however, prevent it from being propagated by the
BBC.
On 6 November 2006, “Newsnight,” the BBC’s flagship news program, broadcast a 12-minute
segment about a forthcoming “documentary” on the assassination, written by Shane O’Sullivan,
an Irish screenwriter. Though not previously known for his investigative prowess or
non-fiction writing, O’Sullivan claimed to have uncovered new video and photographic
evidence that proved “three senior CIA operatives were behind the [RFK] killing.” In the BBC
segment, and a companion article published in The Guardian on the same day, O’Sullivan even
named names: David Sanchez Morales, Gordon Campbell, and George Joannides, all three of whom
were involved in anti-Castro activities out of the CIA’s station in Miami in the early ’60s.[10]
There was only one problem (well, actually there was more than one, but one will suffice)
with O’Sullivan’s allegation. These CIA officers he claimed were the real sponsors of
the assassination were not at the Ambassador Hotel on the night in question.[11]
Primarily because my own book on the RFK assassination, The Forgotten Terrorist, was coming
out in a matter of months, I immediately undertook to investigate O’Sullivan claims. Through
Don Bohning, the former Latin America editor for The Miami Herald (and author of The Castro
Obsession), whose contacts in this subject are unrivaled, former colleagues who knew David Morales and/or Gordon Campbell very well were promptly located.[12] All three positively
and without hesitation stated that the dubious witnesses O’Sullivan had relied upon—Wayne
Smith, Bradley Ayers, and David Rabern—were wrong in their identifications of Morales and
Campbell.[13]
Simultaneously, two other journalists, David Talbot and Jefferson Morley, began
investigating O’Sullivan’s story, because they, too, were working on projects with equity in the allegation. Talbot was putting the finishing touches on Brothers, his
biography of Robert Kennedy post-1963. Talbot was going to argue that JFK had been killed as a result of
a conspiracy involving CIA operatives, and he obviously needed to understand if a similar “plot”
extended to RFK. Morley had a keen interest because he had single-handedly transformed
George Joannides from an all-but-forgotten officer into the crucial link that would supposedly
unravel the CIA’s alleged cover-up of its embarrassing involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald
prior to the JFK assassination. If Joannides had been at the Ambassador Hotel, Morley also needed
to know it immediately.
Despite their predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories when it came to one or both
Kennedy assassinations, not even Talbot and Morley could countenance
O’Sullivan’s flimsy proof.[14] After six weeks of crisscrossing the country, their
investigation not only confirmed the mistaken identifications of Morales and Campbell, but
took the debunking of O’Sullivan’s allegation two steps further. In an essay posted in the spring of
2007, they proved that Campbell could not possibly have been in Los Angeles in 1968 because
he had died in September 1962. In addition, utilizing Morley’s familiarity with Joannides,
Talbot and Morley quoted five close friends/relatives who said the man who “looked Greek” to
Shane O’Sullivan was definitely not Joannides.[15]
In a brief rebuttal, O’Sullivan claimed to “welcome this new evidence,” although he found
the tone of Morley and Talbot’s article “absurdly pompous,” given that they, too,
had initially been titillated and intrigued by the allegation (according to
O’Sullivan). In any case, the Irish screenwriter promised to address the issue again in more
detail when his feature-length documentary was released in a matter of months.
The Actual Documentary
When RFK Must Die was finally released in 2007, a
reasonable person might have predicted that a chastened O’Sullivan would back off from his
claim of CIA involvement. Quite the contrary.
O’Sullivan devoted 45 minutes of his 138-minute “investigative
documentary” to the supposed controversy over CIA operatives allegedly
at the Ambassador. To his credit, O’Sullivan showed Ruben Carbajal,
one of David Morales’s best friends, denouncing those who allege the CIA officer was present at the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968. But
then O’Sullivan devoted even more footage to the supposed
identifications of Morales and Joannides made by the likes of Wayne
Smith, Bradley Ayers, David Rabern, and Edwin Lopez.
Even more astounding was O’Sullivan’s subsequent disclosure that upon further investigation, he had
actually discovered the real identifies of the men he previously claimed were as “Gordon
Campbell” and “George Joannides.” From LAPD files, O’Sullivan had learned these men were two now-deceased executives from the Bulova Watch Company, who had been attending a company convention at the Ambassador at the time of the California primary.
“Campbell” was actually Michael Roman, Bulova’s national sales manager in 1968, and “Joannides” was,
in reality, Frank Owens, a regional sales manager. But O’Sullivan then went on to insinuate, incredibly, and without citing a shred of
evidence, that Bulova—a fabled New York company founded in 1875 by a Czech immigrant—was a
well-known CIA “asset,” “cover,” or “front.”[16]
In all the investigations ever conducted into the CIA, no information has ever surfaced to
suggest that Bulova was utilized for cover purposes or as a CIA front—though, in all
likelihood, some officers undoubtedly wore the company’s popular “Accutron” wristwatch in
the mid-1960s. Perhaps O’Sullivan made the connection because Bulova used to advertise the
“Accutron” in 1966 on the popular TV spy show, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” If so, that should
have raised, by the reasoning and logic O’Sullivan consistently employs, some questions
about the actor Robert Vaughn, who played Napoleon Solo in the TV series, and just
coincidentally happened to be one of RFK’s most prominent backers in Hollywood.
Was Vaughn actually playing a dual and sinister role? Perhaps using his access to Kennedy to
telegraph the senator’s schedule and whereabouts? Where was Robert Vaughn shortly after
midnight on 5 June 1968? And was he wearing a Bulova?
Perhaps O’Sullivan will address these new questions in his forthcoming book, the next fruit of his investigation. Who Killed Bobby? is to be published in the United States in a matter of weeks. In all likelihood, though, Who Killed Bobby? will probably have the same impact and shelf-life as Peter Evans’s 2005 book, Nemesis. In that work, Evans, a British author, claimed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with the acquiescence of Aristotle Onassis (!), retained Sirhan to assassinate RFK.[17]
Fabricated Gunshots
Insinuating CIA complicity, of course, is only one of the tactics shared by those who stoke conspiratorial explanations for the Kennedy assassinations. Another is to
call into question the ballistic evidence. Championed by former Representative Allard K. Lowenstein (D-New York) and former RFK aide Paul Schrade, this mode of criticism reached its
first peak in December 1974 and took three years to wane. Since next month marks the 40th
anniversary of RFK’s slaying, it would not be complete without another supposedly new
challenge to the forensic evidence.
In late March, ABC News reported that two “forensic scientists,” Robert Joling and Philip
Van Praag, had developed startling new evidence that undermined the notion Sirhan was
the only one who fired a gun in the Ambassador’s pantry. In their new, self-published book, An Open
and Shut Case, Joling and Van Praag asserted that an
audio recording of the assassination proved at least 13 shots were fired, which
exceeded by five the number of bullets that Sirhan’s revolver could fire. According to ABC,
the authors also claimed the bullet that killed Kennedy had entered the back of his head, and Sirhan was believed to be facing RFK at all times. “It can be
established conclusively that Sirhan did not shoot Senator Kennedy,” Joling told ABC. “And
in fact not only did he not do it, he could not have done it.”[18]
While ABC News’s lack of judgment here was not as bad as the BBC’s, it was only so by a
very small margin. The ABC story included this sentence: “But other forensic scientists
dismiss these theories, saying the analysis is flat-out wrong.”[19] That was plain lazy,
“on-the-one hand, on-the-other-hand” journalism. Given the seriousness of the allegation, it
was incumbent upon the network to do its own rudimentary vetting of the story. If ABC had,
it would have discovered the Joling/Van Praag allegation is neither novel nor accurate, and
thus not news.
The notion that Sirhan was never in position to shoot Senator Kennedy in the back of the
head is very old, but oft-repeated, buncombe—not dissimilar from the canard that there was
something “magic” about the bullet that passed through President Kennedy before striking
Governor Connally.[20] Vincent DiPerro, an Ambassador waiter in 1968, was standing five feet
behind the senator in the pantry and had an unobstructed view of the shooting. As he told
The Washington Post’s Ronald Kessler in 1974, it was true that Sirhan was standing about
three feet in front, and slightly to the right, of Kennedy. But a moment before Sirhan
whipped out his handgun, Kennedy turned to his left to greet some busboys. As Sirhan began
firing, he lunged forward, bringing the muzzle of his Ivor-Johnson revolver to within inches of
Kennedy’s head.
“It would be impossible for there to be a second gun,” DiPerro told Kessler. “I saw the
first shot. Kennedy fell at my feet. His blood splattered on me. I had a clear view of
Kennedy and Sirhan.”[21] After Kennedy was shot, according to DiPerro, Sirhan continued to
fire wildly and rapidly, while bystanders slammed his gun hand down on a nearby table in an
effort to wrest it from him. There are at least three more eyewitness statements
corroborating DiPerro’s account that Sirhan, and no one else, shot Kennedy at point-blank range.
The allegation that more than eight shots were fired is also a concoction, although
of a more recent vintage. It has the same odor as the House Select Committee on
Assassinations’ 1979 discovery of a fourth shot in the JFK case, because it, too, cannot
withstand scientific scrutiny.
The story here begins in early 2006, while I was conducting archival research for my account of
the RFK assassination, The Forgotten Terrorist. I learned from a source that the RFK-related holdings of the California
State Archives contained a previously unreported tape recording of the gunshots in the pantry. The
35-minute recording had been made by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance journalist at the
time, and is the only extant recording of all the shots fired.
At my request, Philip Harrison of J.P. French Associates, the oldest independent forensic
speech and acoustics laboratory in the United Kingdom, analyzed a digital copy of the
Pruszynski tape. During this process, Harrison would consult both his laboratory colleague, Professor Peter French, who is also a lecturer in forensic speech and audio analysis at the University of York, and Steve Barber, who is well-known for having exposed HSCA’s bogus claim of a fourth shot in the JFK case. Harrison was able to identify seven impulse sounds (which are characterized
by a sharp onset and rapid decay) that corresponded to Sirhan’s gun being fired to the exclusion
of another weapon (the seven impulses all exhibited very similar characteristics). An eighth shot could not be clearly identified on the spectrogram made from the tape recording; this sound appeared to be masked by other noise, including screams. Harrison’s report was
printed as an appendix in The Forgotten Terrorist, published in May 2007. A trio of Americans, led by Steve Barber, who had begun to analyze the Pruszynski recording even before Harrison became involved, also concurred
with Harrison’s finding. Their analysis was published online in March 2007 on History News Network.[22]
The following month, the Discovery Times Channel broadcast an episode of its
“Conspiracy Test” series in which it was claimed that “forensic audio experts” had detected
not seven or even eight, but as many as 13 shots on the Pruszynski tape. One of the experts,
Philip Van Praag, insisted there were 13 identifiable sound signatures, while the
other, Wes Dooley, found ten.[23]
It could be argued that Harrison’s analysis simply ought to be given more weight than Van
Praag’s or Dooley’s on the basis of Harrison’s superior expertise and experience. A trained
acoustic engineer, Harrison has worked on more than 1,000 cases for one of the leading
forensic firms of its kind in the world. Van Praag is actually an audio engineer by
profession, which is quite a different thing, and his experience is simply not comparable to
Harrison’s; nor is Dooley’s. It could also be argued that the vast majority of ear-witness
testimony comports with Harrison’s analysis and contradicts Van Praag’s and Dooley’s
assertions.
But the most revealing aspect of all is that neither Van Praag nor Dooley has been willing to discuss
their respective findings in detail, despite several appeals. Indeed, Dooley disclosed to Harrison that he had had to destroy his files after the documentary was filmed, and that he did not consider his findings to be as conclusive as the documentary made them seem.[24]
This is not the method of science. It is pseudo-science.
Facts Irrelevant
Whether they are relative neophytes, like Shane O’Sullivan, or grizzled veterans,
like Robert Joling, who has cried conspiracy and cover-up in the RFK case for nearly 40
years, the tactics and gambits employed by conspiracists are easily identifiable. If caught
in a lie, they shamelessly manufacture a new one. Facts don’t matter, because their conspiracy-mongering
is seldom, if ever, about the facts. As far back as 1971, Lynn D. Compton, the chief
prosecutor in the Sirhan case, noted that conspiracy theories about the second
Kennedy assassination were unlikely to cease because the allegations were not rooted in the
facts of the case, but stemmed from the critics’ political agenda.[25]
To be sure, conspiracism about RFK’s political murder has never gripped Americans’ collective psyche to quite the same degree as has the assassination of his brother. The pantry has no grassy knoll, and “Ambassador Hotel” never connoted the same instant chill as the words “Dealey Plaza.” The Los Angeles County DA and LAPD chief never became household names overnight. The city of Los Angeles never bore the kind of burden visited upon Dallas.
Perhaps that is because Robert Kennedy was not president when he was assassinated, and the shock of the sequel was more like a numbing after-shock than a political earthquake. There is also the fatigue factor: just how many conspiracies must a citizen keep track of? Finally, one would like to think that the due process accorded Sirhan has something to do with the relative deficit of interest in conspiracy theories about RFK’s assassination.
But this much is true: the public’s lack of interest has not stemmed from conspiracy theorists’ lack of effort.
Mel Ayton is the author of books and articles on the JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations. His latest book, The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was published by Potomac Books in 2007 and will be issued in paperback this month.
© 2008 by Mel Ayton
[1] Janet M. Knight, ed., 3 Assassinations: The Deaths of John & Robert Kennedy and Martin
Luther King (New York: Facts on File, 1971), 205.
[2] Ibid. While waiting for the police to arrive,
Sirhan’s captors had to fend off many hysterical on-lookers who attempted to assault Sirhan (in some cases successfully, as his left index finger was broken). “We don’t want another
Dallas!” went the cry. “Let’s keep this one alive! We don’t want another Oswald!” Robert A.
Houghton, Special Unit Senator: The Investigation of the Assassination of Senator Robert F.
Kennedy (New York: Random House, 1970), 292.
[3] Knight, 3 Assassinations, 205.
[4] Books that have thoroughly debunked the supposed mysteries of the RFK
assassination include Dan E. Moldea,
The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1995); and Mel Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007).
[5] Houghton, Special Unit Senator, 292.
[6] Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver
Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans, 1998) 124.
[7] Tom Bethell, “Was Sirhan Sirhan on the Grassy Knoll?” Washington Monthly, March 1975.
[8] Robert Blair Kaiser, “R.F.K. Must Die!” A History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination and Its
Aftermath (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970); William W. Turner and Jonn G. Christian, The
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: A Searching Look at the Conspiracy and Cover-up,
1968-1978 (New York: Random House, 1978). In the late 1960s, Turner, a disgruntled former FBI
agent, was the author of several articles in Ramparts magazine that extolled
the virtues of Garrison’s probe.
[9] “Lawrence Teeter,” Washington Post, 5 August 2005; Isabel Vincent, “Kennedy’s Killer
Demands Retrial: Sirhan Sirhan Claims He Was a Victim of Hypnotic Programming,” National
Post, 11 June 1003.
[10] Shane O’Sullivan, “Did the CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy?” The Guardian, 20 November 2006.
Morales, a senior officer, was the paramilitary chief of operations; Joannides served as
chief of psychological warfare operations; and Campbell was a former Army colonel serving as
a contract agent.
[11] In his article, O’Sullivan had noted that Tom Clines, a retired senior CIA officer, had
disputed the identifications when presented with the same evidence. But O’Sullivan dismissed
Clines’s denials as an effort to “blow smoke.” O’Sullivan, “Did the CIA Kill Bobby
Kennedy?” 20 November 2006.
[12] Via Bohning I contacted Lt. Col. Manuel Chavez, an Air Force intelligence officer, who had
known Morales in Venezuela in the late 1950s and later, in Miami; Grayston Lynch, the CIA
officer present during the Bay of Pigs invasion, who knew Morales and Gordon Campbell from
the CIA Miami station; and Luis Rodriguez, an Army officer seconded to the Miami station
when Morales worked there.
[13] Ayton, “Did the CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy? The BBC’s Blunder,” HNN, 27 November 2006, updated
4 December 2006. Wayne Smith, a former foreign service officer, is known to believe, as he
once put it, that “the [JFK] assassination “was carried out by the ‘cowboys’ of the CIA—men
like David Morales.” He would hardly qualify as an objective eyewitness regarding Morales’s
alleged involvement with RFK’s murder. Eric Hamburg, JFK, Nixon, Oliver Stone & Me: An
Idealist’s Journey from Capitol Hill to Hollywood Hell (New York: Public Affairs, 2002),
273. The credibility of Bradley Ayers, who served in the CIA’s JMWAVE station in Miami with
Morales, is also suspect. Ayers has long sought to profit
from his association with JMWAVE station; his first book on the subject was a sober account,
but his second, self-published book was sensational, and even contradicted the first one—a
sure sign of unreliability. Compare Bradley E. Ayers, The War That Never Was: An Insider’s
Account of CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), with
Ayers, The Zenith Secret: A CIA Insider Exposes the Secret War Against Cuba and the Plot
That Killed the Kennedy Brothers (Brooklyn, NY: Vox Pop, 2006). As for Rabern, whom
O’Sullivan described as a “freelance operative who was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion
force,” no one who knows anything about the 1961 operation recalls Rabern as having anything to do
with the invasion. Rabern also apparently claims to have been at the
Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was shot, although there is no reason to believe that is true
either. Ayton, “Did the CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy?” 27 November 2006. It was Ayers who discovered, while working on his second book, that
Rabern had supposedly seen Morales at the Ambassador. Ayers went on to accuse Morales in the
book of complicity in everything from the JFK assassination to the murder of Arizona reporter Don
Bolles in 1976, often in cahoots with then Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). Ayers,
Zenith Secret, 199, 255.
[14] Although their joint article flatly called the BBC report “erroneous,” Talbot’s book claimed, “Morley and I unearthed new evidence that tied Morales and other JMWAVE veterans to
the assassination of President Kennedy, and possibly to the killing of Bobby Kennedy as
well.” Talbot’s “new evidence” included old and discredited allegations about former CIA
officers H. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips. Talbot, Brothers, 398-406.
[15] Jefferson Morley and David Talbot, “The BBC’s Flawed RFK Story,” Mary Ferrell Foundation;
Talbot, Brothers,
397-398. Edwin Lopez, a New York lawyer who served as a researcher for the House Select
Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), was O’Sullivan’s sole source for the identification of
Joannides, who served as a liaison to HSCA from the agency. But Lopez is also a conspiracy theorist regarding CIA involvement, and his HSCA
colleague, Don Hardway, who spent just as much time with Joannides, did not think the grainy photograph depicted Joannides.
[16] RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Soda Pictures, 2007. Written, directed, and produced by Shane O’Sullivan.
