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The assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?

by Tom Jackman June 4 at 12:20 PM

Sirhan Sirhan is led away from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. Some believe Sirhan was hypnotized to be present as a distraction from a second gunman. (Bettman/Getty)

Even as Sirhan Sirhan was being captured, seconds after the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, he behaved oddly. A group of men had tackled him, held him down and tried to wrest the gun out of his hands. But “in the middle of a hurricane of sound and feeling,” wrote one of those men, author George Plimpton, Sirhan “seemed peaceful.” Plimpton was struck by Sirhan’s “dark brown and enormously peaceful eyes.” A Los Angeles police officer who had rushed in recalled, “He had a blank, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind.”

At the same time, the short, slim Sirhan — 5 feet 5 inches, about 120 pounds — exerted superhuman strength as one man held his wrist to a steam table in the Ambassador Hotel pantry, firing off five or six more shots even as he was held around the neck, body and legs by other men, witnesses said. It took a half-dozen men to wrench the .22-caliber pistol out of Sirhan’s grip.

At the police station, Sirhan was preternaturally calm, officers later said. “I was impressed by Sirhan’s composure and relaxation,” Sgt. William Jordan wrote in a report later that morning. “He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”

Sirhan’s behavior, combined with his consistent claim that he remembers everything about June 5, 1968, except the moment of the shooting, led some people to suspect that Sirhan was under hypnosis when he fired at Kennedy. His defense team explored that angle before his trial, finding that he was easily hypnotized and could be induced to do things without knowing why, such as climb the bars of his cell. The lawyers chose to use a diminished mental capacity defense instead.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy speaks to campaign workers at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. After making a short speech, Kennedy was fatally shot in an adjacent pantry. (AP)

But the hypnosis angle gained momentum in recent years after Sirhan was examined for more than 60 hours by a Harvard Medical School professor with vast expertise in forensic psychiatry and hypnosis. In a lengthy affidavit filed with Sirhan’s last appeal in 2011, Daniel P. Brown concluded that “Mr. Sirhan did not act under his own volition and knowledge at the time of the assassination and is not responsible for actions coerced and/or carried out by others.” He was, Brown said, a true “Manchurian Candidate,” hypno-programmed into carrying out a violent political act without knowing it.

[Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan.]

“I have written four textbooks on hypnosis,” Brown wrote, “and have hypnotized over 6,000 individuals over a 40-year professional career. Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met, and the magnitude of his amnesia for actions under hypnosis is extreme.” Brown said he has spent another 60 hours with Sirhan in the years since his 2011 affidavit, further confirming his conclusions.

Brown researched not only Sirhan’s background but also the details of the case, and wove together the CIA’s notorious “MKUltra” mind-control experiments of the 1950s and 1960s; the Mafia; the famed “girl in the polka-dot dress” seen with Sirhan before the shooting; and an unknown “Radio Man” who secretly directed Sirhan to write the incriminating “RFK must die!” statements in a notebook found in his bedroom.

[From 1977: CIA papers detail secret experiments on behavior control]

To some, including Sirhan’s current lawyers, Brown’s theory explains why a mild-mannered Palestinian immigrant with no criminal history suddenly showed up at a hotel and shot one of the United States’ leading political lights. To others, it’s reflective of the United States’ thirst for conspiracies, for a belief in a larger, more complex narrative to explain a cataclysmic tragedy, when a simple plotline will suffice.

Lawyers for Sirhan are currently using the theory that he was a hypnotized distraction for the actual killer of Kennedy in a pending appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Although it would have no binding power over the case, a positive finding could be used to push California authorities to reopen the case. Sirhan attorney William Pepper said he’s convinced that someone used “both drugs and hypnosis to make him a totally compliant distraction at the time Bobby Kennedy was within range of the second shooter, who was able to get down behind him.” Kennedy’s fatal wound was fired at point-blank range from behind, while witnesses said Sirhan was in front of him.

But to the U.S. court system, that claim simply didn’t fly. In rejecting Sirhan’s final federal appeal in 2013, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote that Sirhan’s “theory that he was subject to mind control may be intriguing” but that the experts’ views “fall far short of demonstrating that [Sirhan] actually was subjected to mind control.” Wistrich added that “Brown’s retrospective opinion based upon tests assessing [Sirhan’s] mental condition forty years after the fact are of negligible weight.”

Prosecutors noted that many psychological experts believe that a person cannot be hypnotized to do something against their will. But others disagree, and some believe that Sirhan may have been programmed to think he was shooting at a target range, rather than at a human target.

Daniel P. Brown, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, interviewed Sirhan Sirhan for more than 60 hours and said he believes he was hypnotized and manipulated into being present at the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. (Alex Prideaux)

Alan Scheflin, an expert on mind and behavior control and a former law and philosophy professor at Georgetown University, said that “the word hypnosis, like mind control and brainwashing, has a public stigma.” People are skeptical of what can appear like a magician’s trick, he said.

But Scheflin examined the CIA’s mind experiments in detail in his book “The Mind Manipulators” and found that the agency did have a project designed to create hypnotized subjects “for purposes of assassination.” And, Scheflin said, “the CIA experiments showed that was possible. Hypnotized people were ordered to do things they otherwise would not do, such as rip up a Bible or fire a gun at somebody they otherwise wouldn’t. In every instance, they got the results.”

Sirhan had a fascination with hypnosis before the assassination but said he could not remember anyone hypnotizing him to perform devious acts. In recordings of his conversations with defense lawyers and psychiatrists in 1968, released by authors Robert Blair Kaiser and William Klaber, he expresses bafflement that he shot Kennedy but realizes he was captured at the scene with a gun. He also doesn’t recall writing in notebooks, repeatedly, that “RFK Must Die!,” though he acknowledges it appears to be his handwriting.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Sirhan told one psychiatrist. “If I had wanted to kill a man, why would I have shot him right there where they could have choked the … out of me.” He also noted that he was a Christian and that “my own conscience doesn’t agree with what I did. It’s against my upbringing. … ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Life is the thing, you know. Where would you be if you didn’t have life? And here I go and splatter this guy’s brains. It’s just not me.”

Mel Ayton, author of “The Forgotten Terrorist,” about Sirhan, said, “The evidence presented during the 1969 trial revealed how Sirhan was fully aware of everything around him on the night he killed Robert Kennedy and that no credible evidence has ever been discovered that would indicate Sirhan’s actions were the product of a hypnotized mind.” He said Sirhan’s previous knowledge of hypnosis enabled him to construct a story that featured convenient memory loss about the shooting and his notebooks.

“Ignoring Sirhan’s numerous lies that he told his lawyers and writer Robert Blair Kaiser,” Ayton said, “conspiracists prefer instead to take Sirhan at his word.”

Sirhan Sirhan at a parole hearing in 2016 in San Diego, where he was denied parole for the 15th time in the slaying of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (Gregory Bull/Pool/AP)

Brown remains adamant that Sirhan was a victim of a larger scheme, put in place as a distraction while a second gunman fired the fatal shots to Kennedy. And in his four-hour interviews with Sirhan between 2008 and 2010, Brown said Sirhan would suddenly switch into “a military-like alter personality state,” which he called “range mode,” for recalling times when he was shooting at a firing range.

But who would have programmed Sirhan Sirhan in such a way that he would be present at the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy was giving his victory speech after the California primary, and who would have supplied a second gunman to perform the killing? Brown developed a theory inspired by the real-life shenanigans of the CIA.

Beginning in 1949, as the Cold War was heating up, the CIA under Allen Dulles launched a project called “Bluebird,” later called “Artichoke” and then “Project MKUltra,” a series of experiments on unwitting people to see if their minds could be manipulated by drugs, torture or hypnosis. Colleges, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies participated in the project, records revealed in the 1970s showed, with the CIA hoping to be able to manipulate foreign leaders and other important figures, or program others to commit acts of espionage. In Canada, some subjects were kidnapped off the street, and in the United States, some people died of drug overdoses, the CIA later admitted. LSD was administered to some subjects, and professors at Stanford and UCLA participated in MKUltra, records show.

[Lengthy mind control research by CIA is detailed]

In 1966, Sirhan Sirhan was 22 years old and living in Pasadena, Calif., with his mother and brothers. He was not particularly political or ambitious, his family has said. He was traumatized by the death of his sister from leukemia, Brown said in an interview, and turned to hypnosis as a way to explore life after death. He worked at the Santa Anita horse track as a stable boy, walking but not riding horses, hoping to become a jockey. Sirhan also dabbled in shortwave radio and had a set in his room at home.

Brown found that Sirhan was recruited by the operator of a private ranch for thoroughbreds to ride horses there, even though Sirhan had little experience riding. Before long, Sirhan had suffered a couple of falls that required hospitalization. His family reported that after those incidents, Sirhan seemed to have changed.

But after interviewing Sirhan, Brown believes that Sirhan was drugged and taken to a secret location for mind-control experiments such as those performed under the CIA’s auspices. Sirhan and his family both reported that he was gone for two weeks after one of the falls, though Brown said hospital records showed he was released after one day. Sirhan told Brown he was held in a room with bars on the windows and recalled being disoriented and floating in and out of consciousness, sleeping frequently.

“Mr. Sirhan doesn’t describe typical post-concussive symptoms,” Brown wrote in 2011, “but rather symptoms consistent with drug intoxication. … Sirhan’s spotty memory gives the impression of someone who was drugged, treated for superficial wounds at the emergency room, and then possibly taken to a special, experimental unit where his and other patients’ responses to drug and hypnotic programming were observed.”

Brown said that the ranch operator had ties to the mafia and that the mafia in turn had links to the CIA from their work together attempting to kill Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Then, in Pasadena, Sirhan met “Radio Man,” a man who shared Sirhan’s interest in shortwave radios. Brown believes Radio Man used “waking coercive persuasion” and “possibly hypnosis” to control Sirhan. Brown wrote that the “statements about killing RFK written in Mr. Sirhan’s spiral notebooks,” which Sirhan did not remember writing, “were written by Mr. Sirhan in a hypnotic state and while communicating with a third party over his shortwave radio, and thus were coercively and involuntarily induced.”

Over the next two years, Sirhan began visiting a firing range not far from the ranch, sometimes with guidance from Radio Man on how to shoot targets, Brown said. He spent hours at the range on the day of the killing. Brown said much of what Sirhan recalled in their conversations was independently confirmed.

On the night of the assassination, Sirhan has described going to the Ambassador to attend a different political victory party, drinking too much and returning to his car. Not feeling well enough to drive, he reportedly returned to the hotel looking for coffee, and an attractive woman in a polka-dot dress led him to a coffee urn near the pantry of the hotel, and then into the pantry. Sirhan has said he remembers gazing at the attractive woman, who was noticed by many other witnesses in the pantry, and the next thing he remembers is being pummeled by the men who captured him.

In an adaptation from their new book, “The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy,” authors Tim Tate and Brad Johnson say they believe they identified the woman in the polka-dot dress as Elayn Neal and that her husband claimed to have worked for the CIA in mind-control experiments. Neal died in 2012, the husband years earlier. Author Shane O’Sullivan reported the same details in the reissue of his book, “Who Killed Bobby?,” and noted Neal did not marry the alleged CIA man until 1973.

Johnson said he learned additional details about Neal after the deadline for his book. He said a reliable source reported that Neal and her husband actually met in 1967 and, by June 1968, appeared to be having an affair. Neal’s own first marriage ended in October 1968.

If someone was controlling Sirhan, how did they get him to the Ambassador at the right place and time? Brown said he believes Radio Man could have signaled Sirhan to return to the hotel with the gun, as the CIA mind-control project was experimenting with such commands.

In the pantry, Sirhan told Brown, he was trying to think of a way of seducing the attractive woman in the polka-dot dress. “I think she had her hand on me,” Sirhan said. “Then I was at the target range. A flashback to the shooting range. … It was like I was at the range again. I think I shot one or two shots. Then I snapped out of it and thought, ‘I’m not at the range, then what is going on?’ Then they started grabbing me … later when I saw the female judge I knew that Bobby Kennedy was shot and I was the shooter, but it doesn’t come into my memory.”

Sirhan admitted at trial in 1969 that he killed Kennedy, though he said then he didn’t remember it. His defense team didn’t learn until midway through the trial that Kennedy’s fatal shots had been from behind. He was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence. For years, Sirhan was skeptical of the hypnosis claim, and he did not respond to The Washington Post’s questions about it. In 1994, he told journalist Dan Moldea, “It’s probably too diabolical to suggest that I was controlled by someone else — but I don’t know. I only know that I don’t remember anything about the shooting.”

Brown wrote that Sirhan entering “range mode” in the pantry “suggests that his action of firing the gun was neither under his voluntary control nor done with conscious knowledge, and is likely a product of automatic post-hypnotic behavior and coercive control.”

California attorneys general argued that “Brown’s conclusions are clearly speculative and necessarily depend on the veracity of [Sirhan’s] story,” and that “Brown completely ignored the vast amount of evidence presented at trial, which contradicted [Sirhan’s] self-serving ‘recall’ of the events and proved that he intentionally killed Senator Kennedy.”

Wistrich, the judge, agreed. “Whether or not the theory that a person can be hypnotized to commit murder,” Wistrich wrote, “and then to lose his memory of committing that murder is scientifically credible … [Sirhan] has not provided any reliable evidence that this actually occurred.”

Note: This story has been updated with additional information about the “polka-dot dress girl.”

Bobby Kennedy and the Promise of Rebirth

Robert F. Kennedy delivers his victory speech for the 1968 California democratic primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Moments later he was shot. (photo: Dick Strobel/AP)

By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News, 05 June 18

“The key question is to pass beyond the facts of CIA’s operations to the reasons they were established – which inexorably will lead to economic questions:

Preservation of property relations and other institutions on which rest the interests of our own wealthy and privileged minority.

These, not the CIA, are the critical issue.“

— Phillip Agee, CIA Officer

t was 1968.

Bobby Kennedy was running for President.

He offered the opportunity to redeem the terrible slaying of his brother.

Bobby blamed himself for Jack’s death. If it hadn’t have been for the machinations around Cuba, Jack might have still been President.

Bobby was in the middle of those machinations. He had been giving advice to the CIA on how to do its job in Latin America and elsewhere. Many Agency officers did not appreciate his efforts, and said so.

He had his own ideas on how to overthrow Castro – while ordering the Agency to stop working with the Mafia to assassinate the Cuban leader.

He had his own ruthless side. Historian Evan Thomas has described how Bobby considered manufacturing an incident to justify an American invasion in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis.

He also supported his brother when Jack changed tactics and tried to reach rapproachement with Fidel in the summer and autumn of 1963.

In the days after Jack’s death, both Bobby and Jackie Kennedy reached out to the Russians and told them that they believed that JFK had been killed due to a domestic operation.

LBJ didn’t want any part of Cuba after what happened to JFK. He turned to Vietnam.

The escalation of civil rights struggles in the midst of a war economy resulted in a social explosion. LBJ was forced to step down. Bobby found himself being forced to step up.

The question of “who had what” and “who had how much” was on the table.

The Black Panthers were seen doing security at his big city rallies.

He traveled to the Mississippi Delta to learn more about poverty.

Cesar Chavez and Bobby stood together in the Central Valley fields.

Working-class white people embraced RFK as one of their own. He was Irish. His father was a bootlegger.

Religious leaders welcomed him. He was a devout Catholic, fiercely ecumenical.

He was determined to bring an end to the Vietnam War.

In a divisive time, a terrible time, he offered the possibility of healing.

He delivered an incredible oration in Indianapolis that prevented riots in that city during the night that Martin Luther King was killed.

To that largely African American audience, he spoke about Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright. Aeschylus is known as the father of tragedy.

Bobby had studied Aeschylus in his attempts to cope with his profound suffering.

Aeschylus worked in a vineyard. He told how the god Dionysus visited him in his sleep. Dionysus commanded him to make tragedy his life’s work.

Aeschylus and his brother Cynegeirus fought to defend Athens during the Persian invasion at the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians triumphed over impossible odds. Cynegeirus, however, died in the battle.

From memory, Bobby quoted Aeschylus to the men and women turned towards him that night.

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

Even now, it is hard to grasp the loss of Martin Luther King. Or Medgar Evers. Or the four little girls in Birmingham. Or Malcolm. Or many other civil rights leaders.

When there was a second Kennedy assassination, it seemed like the end of hope.

Many of Bobby’s followers turned to the right and voted for George Wallace in the general election, a Southern governor who stood for segregation.

What made it even worse – if humanly possible – is that there was no attempt for justice for Bobby.

Everyone knew Sirhan Sirhan had fired a revolver – but the coroner made a critical finding.

“The powder residue pattern on the right ear of Senator Kennedy was caused at a muzzle distance of approximately one inch.”

No one saw Sirhan get closer than two feet from RFK. No one ever saw him get behind Bobby’s head. The acoustics evidence showed 13 shots. There were more than eight bullet holes. Sirhan’s revolver held eight bullets.

The evidence was manipulated by a special police unit led by Manuel Pena, who intimidated witnesses and misconstrued the facts at every turn. Pena had been working on special assignments for the CIA for more than ten years.

The autopsy report showing the “one inch muzzle distance” was not given to Sirhan’s lawyer Grant Cooper until he had already stipulated to his client’s guilt.

Furthermore, Cooper was fatally compromised. The attorney was facing disbarment due to a controversy involving grand jury papers found on his desk while he was on a defense team representing Johnny Rosselli, a key player in the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Cooper wasn’t about to rock the boat by putting the government on trial. He used a diminished capacity defense and ignored the second gunman evidence. It was no surprise that this anemic approach failed. Sirhan was convicted for first degree murder and was given life in prison. Why did Sirhan do it? Who were his compatriots? We, the people, learned nothing.

From the seventies onward, the progressive challenge was to fight against succumbing to apathy. Poverty in America went from bad to worse. The forces of military and intelligence took a momentary hit after Vietnam, only to proceed to double and redouble their formidable budgets.

Many progressive organizers were no longer willing to work in national politics – or politics at all.

George McGovern managed to obtain the Democratic nomination in 1972 – only to learn later on that his victory was the plan of the Nixon inner circle. Nixon’s people sabotaged the campaign of the more centrist Ed Muskie.

Remember Lucianne Goldberg – the woman who convinced Linda Tripp to convince Monica Lewinsky to hold on to the blue dress with Clinton’s DNA all over it? During 1972, she succeeded in the outing of McGovern’s vice presidential candidate Tom Eagleton for electroshock treatments, effectively destroying any chance the campaign had to overtake Nixon’s reelection machine.

There was a resurgence of progressive work in the 70s – steadily beaten down and marginalized by the strange terrors of the SLA, the Zebra Killings, and Jonestown. The strange deaths of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. The mysterious assassination of RFK champion Al Lowenstein, one of the only politicians questioning the cause of Bobby’s assassination.

All of these tragedies – from JFK’s death to the shooting of Reagan – had one thing in common: the determined incuriosity of the elected classes and the media. Any organized attempt to investigate these events was waved off as unpatriotic or scoffed at as paranoid.

The result was predictable: A country that no longer knows its history. A nation with little belief in progress, or even the notion of progress. A culture that can be readily manipulated by yet another shock or media event.

The shooting of leaders seemed to end with the shooting of Reagan. The strange events then shifted to “honey traps” – Gary Hart and Bill Clinton were just two men whose careers and reputations took a U-turn. Plenty of Republican and Democratic leaders were taken down in the process. A particularly virulent form of opposition research.

The underground economy of drugs became as large as the visible economy. Arms trading, secret wars, Iraq, Afghanistan – fueled by the powerful tools emerging from Silicon Valley – became the driver of employment. The economy of the middle of the country was hollowed out. Manufacturers fled to the Third World for fewer regulations and cheaper labor. Meanwhile, the cost of real estate on the coastlines of the US and Western Europe spiraled to undreamed-of heights.

Now, in 2018, economic dislocation is the order of the day. Like in FDR’s time.

People in the West now realize what they have in common. In a culture based on possessions, most Americans own relatively little. The last thirty years have seen the biggest transfer of wealth from one social class to another in human history. One percent of the population controls about 40 percent of the resources.

The antipoverty organizer Cheri Honkala likes to say: “The poor have zero. They don’t own anything, so they can’t owe anything. A big portion of the middle class is $80,000 or more in debt.”

It’s no accident that candidates like Bernie Sanders have risen to the forefront. For decades, people on the left did contortions to avoid being called “liberals.” Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist.” The polls show that enormous sectors of the voting population identify with his description.

In an era where Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, #NeverAgain, Fight for 15, and the Poor People’s Campaign are gaining traction, Bernie Sanders is just about the only socialist member of Congress. It’s hard to describe a more profound disconnect between the state and the people.

It’s also hard to describe a more profound disconnect for my generation, the Boomers. Ever since the Kennedys and the McGovern effort, progressives have been in the political wilderness.

With the aid of a corporate-driven security council, the Carter administration thought it would be clever to create a quagmire for the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then they invited the Shah of Iran to take refuge in the United States. It’s been downhill ever since.

The Boomers began their lives with youthful dreams of utopia. We have now spent our adult lives surrounded by Republicans and Republican-like Democrats. For most of my life, the legacy of FDR being prodded by vibrant social movements seemed as distant as Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years’ War.

The centrist Obama offered a brief moment of hope. Occupy and the social movements that erupted during Obama’s time were far more significant. Bernie Sanders opened the door to something real.

Look at the elections this week. Progressives are rising up around the country. Young working-class veterans are joining the fight, coming from a social milieu that doesn’t usually run for office.

These candidates would be getting nowhere without the emerging social movements. These movements are led by people of color and the millennials – the essential ingredients for lasting social change.

Last week, RFK Jr. called for a new investigation of his father’s death, stating that he was now convinced there was a second gunman. His call was joined by his sister, former Maryland, Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

The Kennedy family, for understandable reasons, has historically been reluctant to endanger any more family members by taking a position on this explosive question. Many Americans ask a related question: What’s the point?

On one level, it’s important to know everything we can know. Only then can we move on. On another level, it always comes back to the same thing.

Until a culture is willing to look into its heart of darkness, and grapple with its own weaknesses, nothing much is going to change. The only way to move forward is to face the greatest fears and come to terms with the hardest parts of reality. It’s nothing less than what Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and others call the hero’s journey.

It’s no different than looking at the history of racism or the roots of war. When you look at the life of Bobby Kennedy, there is one distinguishing characteristic – and it’s not his heroic death.

Bobby took the hardest blow that anyone can imagine – the assassination of his brother – and rose up to fight again. His power – his passion – is the heart of his hidden legacy. What Bobby Kennedy offers to all of us is the promise of rebirth.

VISIT READER SUPPORTED NEWS

Bill Simpich is an Oakland attorney who knows that it doesn’t have to be like this. He was part of the legal team chosen by Public Justice as Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2003 for winning a jury verdict of 4.4 million in Judi Bari’s lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police.

Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan

By Tom Jackman May 26 at 7:00 AM

Print edition of the Washington Post, Sunday, May 27

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy lies wounded on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. His wife, Ethel, is at lower left. (Bettman Archive/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES — Just before Christmas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled up to the massive Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center, a California state prison complex in the desert outside San Diego that holds nearly 4,000 inmates. Kennedy was there to visit Sirhan B. Sirhan, the man convicted of killing his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years ago.

While his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, waited in the car, Robert Kennedy Jr. met with Sirhan for three hours, he revealed to The Washington Post last week. It was the culmination of months of research by Kennedy into the assassination, including speaking with witnesses and reading the autopsy and police reports.

“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy said. He would not discuss the specifics of their conversation. But when it was over, Kennedy had joined those who believe there was a second gunman, and that it was not Sirhan who killed his father.

“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Kennedy, 64, said he doesn’t know if his involvement in the case will change anything. But he now supports the call for a re-investigation of the assassination led by Paul Schrade, who also was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles but survived.

Kennedy was just 14 when he lost his father. Even now, people tell him how much Bobby Kennedy meant to them.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in New York in 2017. (Evan Vucci/AP)

RFK’s death — five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas and two months after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis — devastated a country already beset by chaos.

[‘That stain of bloodshed’: After King’s assassination, RFK calmed an angry crowd with an unforgettable speech]

In 1968, the Vietnam War raged, American cities had erupted in riots after MLK’s assassination and tensions between war protesters and supporters were growing uglier. Robert Kennedy’s newly launched presidential bid had raised hopes that the New York Democrat and former attorney general could somehow unite a divided nation. The gunshots fired that June night changed all that.

Though Sirhan admitted at his trial in 1969 that he shot Kennedy, he claimed from the start that he had no memory of doing so. And midway through Sirhan’s trial, prosecutors provided his lawyers with an autopsy report that launched five decades of controversy: Kennedy was shot four times at point-blank range from behind, including the fatal shot behind his ear. But Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was standing in front of him.

Was there a second gunman? The debate rages to this day.

The moments surrounding RFK’s assassination

Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy (D-N.Y.) was shot and killed in 1968, while running for President, but 50 years later, doubts linger on who pulled the trigger.(Joyce Koh /The Washington Post)

But the legal system has not entertained doubts. A jury convicted Sirhan of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death in 1969, which was commuted to a life term in 1972. Sirhan’s appeals have been rejected at every level, as recently as 2016, even with the courts considering new evidence that has emerged over the years that as many as 13 shots were fired — Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets — and that Sirhan may have been subjected to coercive hypnosis, a real life “Manchurian candidate.”

His case is closed. His lawyers are now launching a longshot bid to have the Inter-American Court of Human Rights hold an evidentiary hearing, while Schrade is hoping for a group such as the Innocence Project to take on the case. A spokesman for the Innocence Project said they do not discuss cases at the consideration stage.

In the final court rejection of Sirhan’s appeals, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich ruled, “Even if the second shooter’s bullet was the one that killed Senator Kennedy, [Sirhan] would be liable [for murder] as an aider and abettor.” And if Sirhan was unaware of the second shooter, Wistrich wrote that the scenario of a second gunman who shot Kennedy “at close range with the same type of gun and ammunition as [Sirhan] was using, but managed to escape the crowded room without notice of almost any of the roomful of witnesses, lacks any evidentiary support.”

‘Is everybody okay?’

On June 5, 1968, Kennedy had just won the California Democratic presidential primary and delivered a victory speech to a delirious crowd.

After winning the California Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy speaks to campaign workers in Los Angeles minutes before being shot on June 5, 1968. At his side is his wife, Ethel, who was pregnant with their 11th child. (Dick Strobel/AP)

At 12:15 a.m., the 42-year-old candidate and Schrade left the celebration, walking through the hotel pantry en route to a news conference. Schrade was a regional director of the United Auto Workers who had helped Kennedy round up labor support, and Kennedy had singled him out for thanks in his victory speech moments earlier.

Schrade, now 93, still recalls the scene in the pantry vividly.

“He immediately started shaking hands” with kitchen workers, Schrade said of Kennedy. “The TV lights went on. I got hit. I didn’t know I was hit. I was shaking violently, and I fell. Then Bob fell. I saw flashes and heard crackling. The crackling actually was all the other bullets being fired.”

Witnesses reported that Kennedy said, “Is everybody okay? Is Paul all right?”

Kennedy was still conscious as his wife, Ethel, pregnant with their 11th child, rushed to his side. He lived for another day and died at 1:44 a.m. June 6, 1968.

[JFK assassination conspiracy theories: The grassy knoll, Umbrella Man, LBJ and Ted Cruz’s dad]

Schrade was shot above the forehead but the bullet bounced off his skull. Four other people, including ABC news producer William Weisel, were also wounded. All survived.

Sirhan was captured immediately; he had a .22-caliber revolver in his hand. Karl Uecker, an Ambassador Hotel maitre d’ who was escorting Kennedy through the pantry, testified that he grabbed Sirhan’s wrist and pinned it down after two shots and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down, never getting close to Kennedy. An Ambassador waiter and a Kennedy aide also said they tackled Sirhan after two or three shots.

Sirhan B. Sirhan, right, who was later convicted of assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, is seen with his attorney, Russell E. Parsons, in June 1968. (AP)

Several other witnesses also said he was not close enough to place the gun against Kennedy’s back, where famed Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on the senator’s jacket and on his hair, indicating shots fired at close contact. These witnesses provided more proof for those who insist a second gunman was involved.

Both the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and the Los Angeles Police Department declined interviews on what they consider a closed case.

[Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.]

Schrade believes that Sirhan shot him and the others who were wounded but that he did not kill Kennedy. Since 1974, Schrade has led the crusade to try to persuade authorities — the police, prosecutors, the feds, anyone — to reinvestigate the case and identify the second gunman.

“Yes, he did shoot me. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Schrade, said in an interview at his Laurel Canyon home. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman? They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”

‘He never got near my father’

At trial, defense lawyer Grant Cooper made the decision not to contest the charge that Sirhan fired the fatal shot and instead tried to persuade the jury not to impose the death penalty by arguing Sirhan had “diminished capacity” and didn’t know what he was doing. It is a standard tactic by attorneys in death penalty cases, but Cooper, who died in 1990, was widely criticized for not investigating the case before conceding guilt.

Sirhan is now 74 and approaching 50 years behind bars. After California’s courts abolished the death penalty in 1972, he was first made eligible for parole in 1986 but has been rejected repeatedly.

In 2016, Schrade spoke on Sirhan’s behalf at his parole hearing and apologized for not coming forward sooner to advocate for Sirhan’s release and exoneration.

California inmates are not permitted to give media interviews, and Sirhan did not respond to a letter from The Post. But his brother, Munir Sirhan, said Sirhan still holds out hope of being released and that his defense team probably hurt his case more than helped it.

There’s plenty of damning evidence against Sirhan. He confessed to the killing at trial, though he claims this was done on his attorney’s instruction. He took hours of target practice with his pistol earlier in the day, and he took the gun into the Ambassador that night. He had been seen at a Kennedy speech at the Ambassador two days earlier. He had a newspaper clipping critical of Kennedy in his pocket and had written “RFK must die” in notebooks at home, though he said he didn’t remember doing that. And he waited in the pantry for about 30 minutes, according to witnesses who said he asked if Kennedy would be coming through there.

[Lee Harvey Oswald’s chilling final hours before killing JFK]

But questions about the case arose almost immediately in Los Angeles, resulting in hearings and reinvestigations as early as 1971 by the district attorney, the police chief, the county board of supervisors and the county superior court. Many of them focused on the ballistics of the case, starting with Noguchi’s finding that Kennedy had been shot from behind, which Sirhan’s lawyer didn’t raise in his defense.

In addition, lead crime scene investigator DeWayne Wolfer testified at trial that a bullet taken from Kennedy’s body and bullets from two of the wounded victims all matched Sirhan’s gun.

But other experts who examined the three bullets said they had markings from different guns and different bullet manufacturers. An internal police document concluded that “Kennedy and Weisel bullets not fired from same gun,” (Weisel was the wounded ABC news producer) and “Kennedy bullet not fired from Sirhan’s revolver.”

Evidence photographs of the gun used in the assassination plot to kill Robert F. Kennedy are displayed at Paul Schrade’s Los Angeles home. (Patrick T. Fallon for The Washington Post)

This prompted a Los Angeles judge in 1975 to convene a panel of seven forensic experts, who examined the three bullets and refired Sirhan’s gun. The panel said no match could be made between the three bullets, which appeared to be fired from the same gun, and Sirhan’s revolver. They found Wolfer had done a sloppy job with the ballistics evidence and urged further investigation.

In addition, witnesses said bullet holes were found in the door frames of the Ambassador pantry, and photos showed investigators examining the holes in the hours after the shooting. Between the three bullets that hit Kennedy and the bullets that hit the five wounded victims, Wolfer had accounted for all eight of Sirhan’s shots. Bullets in the doors would indicate a second gun. Wolfer later said the holes and the metal inside were not bullets, and the door frames were destroyed after trial.

Though Los Angeles authorities had promised transparency in the case, the police and prosecutors refused to release their files until 1988, producing a flood of new evidence for researchers.

Among the material was an audiotape, first unearthed by CNN journalist Brad Johnson, which had been inadvertently made by Polish journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski in the Ambassador ballroom, and turned over to police in 1969.

Pruszynski’s microphone had been on the podium where Kennedy spoke, and TV footage shows him detaching it and moving toward the pantry as the shooting happens.

In 2005, audio engineer Philip Van Praag said the tape revealed that about 13 shots had been fired. He said he used technology similar to the ShotSpotter technology used by police to alert them to gunshots, and which differentiates gunshots from firecrackers or other loud bangs.

Charles Wright, a police technician, and Officer Robert Rozzi inspect a possible bullet hole in a door frame in a kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. (Dick Strobel/AP)

Van Praag said recently that different guns create different resonances and that he was able to establish that two guns were fired, that they fired in different directions, and that some of the shot “impulses” were so close together they couldn’t have been fired by the same gun. He said he could not say “precisely” 13 shots but certainly more than the eight contained by Sirhan’s gun.

“There were too many bullets,” Robert Kennedy Jr. said. “You can’t fire 13 shots out of an eight-shot gun.”

British author Mel Ayton wrote “The Forgotten Terrorist,” which posits that Sirhan killed Kennedy because he supported sending military firepower to Israel — the Sirhans were Christian Palestinians forced from their Jerusalem home by Israel in 1948. He said Van Praag had misinterpreted the Pruszynski tape and that other experts who examined it show only eight “spikes,” one for each gunshot. Ayton also cited numerous eyewitnesses who said they heard at most eight shots.

Ayton and investigative reporter Dan Moldea, who also wrote a book about the assassination, argue that Sirhan’s gun could have reached Kennedy’s back. No witnesses saw the actual shots fired in the chaos of the pantry, and Moldea noted that Kennedy almost certainly turned and tried to protect himself after the first shot, which some said was preceded by Sirhan yelling, “Kennedy, you son of a bitch!”

“What were Kennedy’s last words?” Moldea asked during an interview. “‘How’s Paul?’ How would Kennedy know Paul had been injured if he had not been turned around. He turned around when Sirhan rushes towards him, yelling ‘you son of a bitch Kennedy.’ Kennedy’s not going to just stand there. He turns his back defensively.”

Moldea theorized that Schrade fell forward into Kennedy, pinning him against a table and pushing him into the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun, enabling him to fire four contact shots into Kennedy. One shot went through his jacket without hitting Kennedy, one went into his back and stopped below his neck, one went through his armpit and one went into his brain.

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t find those theories persuasive. “It’s not only that nobody saw that,” Kennedy said. “The people that were closest to [Sirhan], the people that disarmed him all said he never got near my father.”

Paul Schrade stands in the library named in his honor at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles. Schrade survived being shot by Sirhan but believes a second gunman shot Kennedy. (Patrick T. Fallon for The Washington Post)

Schrade used an expletive to describe Moldea’s explanation and said he fell backward when he was shot above his forehead.

Both Ayton and Moldea assisted the California attorney general’s office in contesting Sirhan’s final appeal, and the government’s legal briefs cited the investigative work of both men.

Moldea had initially been a believer in the second-gunman theory, but after interviewing numerous police officers, witnesses and Sirhan, he concluded in his 1995 book, “The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy,” that Sirhan acted alone. He cited as additional proof a comment Sirhan reportedly made to a defense investigator about Kennedy turning his head before Sirhan shot him, a comment Sirhan strongly denied making.

More recently, Sirhan’s lawyers have explored whether he was hypnotized to begin shooting his gun when given a certain cue, even hiring a renowned expert in hypnosis from Harvard to meet with Sirhan.

Judge Wistrich was completely dismissive of any suggestion of hypnosis. Schrade said the various theories of conspiracy and hypnotic programming are of little interest to him.

“I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said.

It was Schrade who persuaded Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to examine the evidence. “Once Schrade showed me the autopsy report,” Kennedy said, “then I didn’t feel like it was something I could just dismiss. Which is what I wanted to do.”

Kennedy called Sirhan’s trial “really a penalty hearing. It wasn’t a real trial. At a full trial, they would have litigated his guilt or innocence. I think it’s unfortunate that the case never went to a full trial because that would have compelled the press and prosecutors to focus on the glaring discrepancies in the narrative that Sirhan fired the shots that killed my father.”

Kennedy is not afraid to express controversial views. Last year, he and actor Robert DeNiro held a press conference to argue that certain vaccines containing mercury are unsafe for some children. He said he is not opposed to all vaccines, but wants to make them safer.

Three of his sisters — former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, human rights activist Kerry Kennedy and filmmaker Rory Kennedy — declined to discuss the assassination or the case against Sirhan. Kennedy understands why.

“I think that, for most of my family members,” he said, “this is an issue that is still too painful to even talk about.”

Ethel Kennedy with five of her children and their pony, Toby, at Hickory Hill in McLean, Va., in 1957. Joseph, 4, is feeding Toby. Ethel is holding Courtney. In the cart, from left to right, are: Kathleen, 5; Bobby, 3; and David, 1. (Washington Star/AP) Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stand before a mural depicting the late senator at Robert F. Kennedy School in Manhattan in 1973. (Marty Lederhandler/AP)

It’s painful for him, too. Kennedy was asleep in his dorm at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md., on June 5, 1968, when a priest woke him and told there was a car waiting outside to take him to the family home, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Va. The priest didn’t say why.

In his new memoir, “American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,” Kennedy said his mother’s secretary was waiting for him. “Jinx Hack told me my father had been shot, but I was still thinking he’d be okay. He was, after all, indestructible.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his older sister Kathleen and brother Joe flew to Los Angeles on Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s plane, Air Force Two.

At Good Samaritan Hospital, Kennedy wrote, his father’s head was bandaged and his face was bruised. A priest had already delivered last rites. His mother was there.

“I sat down across the bed from her and took hold of his big wrestler’s hand,” he wrote. “I prayed and said goodbye to him, listening to the pumps that kept him breathing. Each of us children took turns sitting with him and praying opposite my mom.

“My dad died at 1:44 a.m., a few minutes after doctors removed his life support. My brother Joe came into the ward where all the children were lying down and told us, ‘He’s gone.’ ”

Members of the Kennedy family, including Ethel, clutching a rosary, kneel at Robert F. Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 20, 1970, to mark what would have been his 45th birthday. (AP)

AT THE CIA, IMMORALITY IS PART OF THE JOB by Fay Vincent

Gina Haspel testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, May 9. Photo: Ting Shen/Zuma Press

The Wall Street Journal

Spying is a dirty yet necessary business, not best examined in open hearings.

By Fay Vincent

May 16, 2018 7:01 p.m. ET

The confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel to head the Central Intelligence Agency became a theater of the absurd, as senators pressed her for an assurance that she would apply “moral” standards to intelligence-gathering, including interrogation of terrorists.

As I watched, I kept thinking of Sen. Frank Church and the disaster his Senate select committee inflicted upon the CIA in 1975. The committee was troubled by the disclosures of various misguided, even bizarre CIA endeavors during the Cold War, including an attempt to kill Fidel Castro. It ultimately adopted a series of proposals to rein in the agency that led the Carter administration to impose broad changes.

The effort to reform intelligence operations to make them moral was a noble one—and the damage it wrought to national security took decades to undo. The new generation of CIA veterans like Ms. Haspel must wonder if anyone in the current Senate has even heard of the Church Committee.

Senators today seem to assume there is agreement on what constitutes moral conduct in spycraft. But recruiting spies is not the work of moralists. The CIA’s mission involves persuading others to disregard their deepest moral and legal obligations. It is a dirty yet necessary business, not best examined in open hearings.

In 1977 my friend Dick Helms was prosecuted by the Carter Justice Department for perjury after he denied in an open Senate hearing that the CIA had been involved in the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Helms was bound by his oath as a CIA officer never to reveal classified secrets. Yet before the Senate he was under the perjury threat if he fulfilled his obligation to preserve intelligence secrets. What was the moral thing to do in that situation?

Helms lied because he was operating under longstanding directions he and others at the agency had received from senior senators, including Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia, who worried candid answers in open hearings might risk “the lives of our boys.” They instructed Helms to protect intelligence operations in such hearings.

Helms’s defense lawyer. Edward Bennett Williams, warned the Justice Department he would have Helms testify in open court to numerous examples of CIA officials lying to Congress to preserve secret agency activities, with the likely exposure of important top-secret operations. The government relented, and Williams arranged for Helms to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with no penalty. In 1983 President Reagan recognized Helms’s long service with a National Security Medal as an implicit apology. No CIA director has since been charged with a crime.

Intelligence work can involve complex judgments about morality and even legality. The law must remain our bulwark, morality a sweet frosting. To serve as head of the CIA is to be in charge of vital operations that must be subject to the rule of law, not the moral sensitivities of any one person.

Dick Helms died in 2002. His portrait hangs in honor at CIA headquarters. There is no portrait of Frank Church.

Mr. Vincent, a retired lawyer, was commissioner of Major League Baseball, 1989-92.

Appeared in the May 17, 2018, print edition.

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