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Did L.A. police and prosecutors bungle the Bobby Kennedy assassination probe?

by Tom Jackman June 5 at 5:00 AM

Paul Schrade, who was hit by one of the bullets fired during the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, holds a news conference in his Los Angeles hospital room five days after the June 1968 shooting. Beginning in 1974, Schrade launched a campaign to reinvestigate the case, which he continues to do at age 93.  (AP)

LOS ANGELES — For six years after he was shot and wounded while walking behind Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968, Paul Schrade mourned the loss of his friend and stayed out of the public eye. But beginning with a news conference in 1974, Schrade has demanded answers to the question of whether a second gunman — and not Sirhan Sirhan — killed Kennedy.

Soon after Sirhan’s trial ended with his first-degree-murder conviction in April 1969, journalists noted that Kennedy had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, but witnesses all said Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy. Bullet holes found in the doors of the crime scene indicated more shots were fired than could have come from Sirhan’s eight-shot .22-caliber pistol, some witnesses said. Sirhan’s defense team had not challenged any of the physical evidence at trial.

[‘A train to the end of an era’: Reflecting on RFK’s 200-mile funeral procession]

Fifty years after the assassination, Schrade is still pushing for a new investigation.” I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said. “The truth is not known yet about who killed Robert Kennedy.” Schrade, now 93, believes Sirhan wounded him and four other people but did not fire the fatal shot into Kennedy.

Schrade has been supported in his calls for a new investigation into the case by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who met with Sirhan in prison last December and told The Washington Post that “the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.” Now Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has joined Schrade and her brother.

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

“Bobby makes a compelling case,” the former Maryland lieutenant governor told The Post. “I think it should be reopened.”


Kathleen Kennedy Townsend speaks to members of the media in 2016 at an event in Boston announcing the naming of a Navy ship in honor of her father, Robert F. Kennedy. Townsend says she thinks the investigation into her father’s assassination should be reopened.  (Paul Marotta)

Three other Kennedy children — former Congressman Joe Kennedy, activist Kerry Kennedy and filmmaker Rory Kennedy — have said they do not think the case should be reopened. Ethel Kennedy, the senator’s widow and now 90, has not commented.

Schrade and a host of authors and researchers point to a number of apparent missteps by the Los Angeles police and prosecutors in focusing solely on Sirhan, while suppressing evidence of a second shooter, such as:

• Prosecutors withheld the autopsy report from Sirhan’s defense lawyers until six weeks into the trial, showing that Kennedy had been shot at point-blank range from behind. Five other people in the hotel pantry standing behind Kennedy, including Schrade, were hit by bullets fired from in front of them.

• Police failed to investigate an armed private-security guard who was walking behind Kennedy at precisely the angle where the fatal shots to Kennedy’s head and back were fired. He has consistently denied firing his weapon but has told conflicting stories over the years.

• Police officers and FBI agents identified apparent bullet holes in two door frames of the pantry, indicating more than eight shots were fired. But no evidence of those holes was presented at trial, and the Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames shortly after the trial.

• The lead crime-scene investigator testified at trial that bullets from the wounded victims matched a bullet from Kennedy, but presented no photos or evidence to support that. When two ballistics experts examined the bullets after the trial, they found the bullets didn’t match. Subsequent investigations couldn’t match any of the bullets to Sirhan’s gun. The crime-scene investigator was subsequently criticized even by prosecutors for sloppy work in the case, by a judge for seeming perjury in another high-profile murder, and later suspended by his own police chief.

• Los Angeles police bullied or ignored witnesses whose stories did not match the lone gunman scenario, records show, particularly people who claimed they saw Sirhan with a dark-haired woman in a white polka-dot dress. Then at trial, prosecutors brought in a blonde-haired woman with a green polka-dot dress and claimed she was the mysterious woman in question. Sirhan’s lawyers, focusing on a mental health defense, did not challenge that, either.


Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger, seated in the light jacket, introduces his prosecution team for the murder trial of Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. In the back row from left, deputy district attorneys Lynn D. Compton, John E. Howard and David N. Fitts tried the case. (George Brich/AP)

The Los Angeles police have heard all this criticism before, did some reinvestigation in the 1970s that confirmed their own work, and now consider the case closed. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office referred inquiries to the California attorney general’s office, which repeatedly defeated Sirhan’s appeals, and which declined to respond beyond court filings. The California and federal courts have consistently held that Sirhan was guilty of murder, even with new discoveries made in the decades after the early morning of June 5, 1968.

“Considering all of the evidence,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote in 2013, “old and new, incriminatory and exculpatory, admissible and inadmissible, the Court cannot say that it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found [Sirhan] guilty of the assassination of Senator Kennedy beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Lisa Pease, author of a forthcoming book on the investigation’s failures, said: “In ignoring the myriad evidence of conspiracy in this case, the LAPD and DA’s office created the seventh pantry victim: the truth. We have a guy in prison, provably by the evidence, for a crime he didn’t commit.”

There are facts that are not in dispute, namely that Sirhan had a .22-caliber pistol in the hotel pantry on June 5, 1968, and that he emptied all eight shots as Kennedy stood in front of him. Two Ambassador Hotel employees, Karl Uecker and Edward Minasian, said repeatedly that Uecker grabbed Sirhan’s wrist after two shots, slammed it to a table, and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down but never got close to Kennedy.


Sirhan Sirhan, right, being escorted to court by attorney Russell E. Parsons in June 1968 to face charges in the shooting of  Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The defense team did not challenge the police investigation, in part leading to Sirhan’s first-degree-murder conviction. (AP)

“I have told police and testified [to the grand jury],” Uecker said in a 1975 affidavit, “that there was a distance of at least one and one-half feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. … There is no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. … Sirhan never got close enough to a point-blank shot, never.”

But at trial, neither prosecutors nor Sirhan’s defense team focused on the distance between Kennedy and Sirhan. Though Sirhan and prosecutors reached a plea deal in January 1969 for Sirhan to admit guilt and receive a life sentence — a deal the judge rejected — and trial began on Jan. 7, records show prosecutors did not provide coroner Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report until about Feb. 22. By that time, the defense had already decided to concede that Sirhan had shot Kennedy and was trying simply to avoid the death penalty by claiming he was mentally ill.

Noguchi found that four shots had been fired at Kennedy from at most three inches away. Three shots appeared to be in contact with Kennedy’s back and shoulder, based on powder burns to his jacket, Noguchi said, with one shot passing through the jacket’s shoulder pad and not touching Kennedy. All three were fired sharply upward. The fourth shot was fired into the back of Kennedy’s head from three inches away, Noguchi concluded, by test-firing a similar gun to determine how much gunpowder sprayed at various distances.

“Thus I have never said,” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, “that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.” At a conference last month of RFK assassination authors, Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht pressed Noguchi as to whether there was a second gunman, but the 91-year-old pathologist said, “That’s not my duty.” He also told Wecht that defense attorneys never spoke with him before the trial and did not ask him about the muzzle distance at trial.


Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi in 1970. His autopsy of Robert F. Kennedy revealed that the senator was shot from the back, but the report was not provided to Sirhan’s lawyers until six weeks into the trial. (George Brich/AP)

Prosecutors and some authors have theorized that Kennedy turned and raised his arm as the shots began, thus enabling Sirhan to hit him in the back. The government notes that the jury heard the evidence, convicted Sirhan and sentenced him to death, which was later commuted to a life term. But there was plenty of evidence the jury never heard. An appeal Sirhan’s current lawyers have pending to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says Sirhan suffered from ineffective assistance from his legal team.

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

The defense attorneys also went lightly on Los Angeles police criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, who oversaw the crime-scene investigation. He and Noguchi were both photographed pointing to bullet holes in the pantry, and police removed those door frames. Numerous witnesses, including police officers and FBI agents, said the holes were made by bullets. But between the bullets which hit Kennedy and those which hit Schrade and four others, all the bullets from Sirhan’s gun had been accounted for by Wolfer.

“I’ve inspected quite a few crime scenes in my day,” FBI Special Agent William Bailey told authors William Klaber and Philip Melanson for their book, “Shadow Play: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy.” “These were clearly bullet holes; the wood around them was freshly broken away and I could see the base of a bullet in each one.” Many other people saw these holes, reports show.

In 1992, former LAPD organized crime Detective Mike Rothmiller filed an affidavit saying he had reviewed an internal intelligence report about the assassination which “listed a total of ten different bullets that had been recovered from the scene of the assassination and victims.” Rothmiller knew Sirhan’s gun held eight bullets. The report was never disclosed to Sirhan’s lawyers.


Two police officers inspect an apparent bullet hole discovered in a door frame in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded on June 5, 1968. The photographer’s caption noted, “Bullet is still in the wood.” Police concluded it wasn’t a bullet. (Dick Strobel/AP)

Wolfer concluded that the holes in the pantry had been made previously through hotel wear and tear, not bullets, though Uecker and other employees said the holes were not there before. The issue was not explored at trial, and when an article appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press shortly after the trial ended questioning the four holes, Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames, records show. The police said there was no room to hold the frames and they were not needed after the conviction, though Sirhan’s appeal was pending. Ceiling tiles with apparent bullet holes in them, removed from directly above the shooting area and also not introduced at trial, were destroyed by the police, too.

Crucially, Wolfer testified that a bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck and a bullet removed from a wounded victim had come from Sirhan’s gun. But he did not submit any photos comparing the two bullets or keep any notes documenting his comparison, and the defense accepted his testimony without challenge. In 1970, when ballistics expert William Harper examined the bullets with a newly invented comparison camera, he found the bullets had not been fired from the same gun.

Soon two other ballistics experts also said the two bullets came from different guns. In 1975, a commission of seven experts was empaneled to review the ballistics, including refiring Sirhan’s gun. But Sirhan’s gun had deteriorated, and it couldn’t be determined whether it had fired either the Kennedy bullet or the wounded victim’s bullet. Later, it was determined that the bullet police submitted for the 1975 test as the Kennedy bullet was from another victim, not Kennedy.

If police had followed a trail of bullets from behind Kennedy’s right side, the person who was standing closest to him was an armed private-security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar said he fell down as the shooting began, then pulled his .38-caliber gun but didn’t fire because Sirhan had already been captured. A news assistant for a local TV station, Don Schulman, gave a radio interview moments after the shooting and described Cesar firing back at Sirhan.


Sirhan Sirhan, third from left in blue, is prevented from shaking the hand of Paul Schrade, near the camera, at the end of a parole hearing in 2016. Schrade apologized to Sirhan for not coming forward sooner. Sirhan was denied parole for the 15th time. Schrade believes Sirhan shot him and four others but not Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (AP/Gregory Bull)

But Los Angeles police did not check Cesar’s gun, records show. When he showed them a .22-caliber revolver similar to Sirhan’s, the police didn’t check that gun either. Cesar was never a suspect for the police and always maintained his innocence. Prosecutors never called him as a witness, even though he was one of those standing closest to Kennedy. Journalist Dan Moldea hired a top polygraph examiner to question Cesar in 1994, and Moldea said Cesar was found truthful. He lives today in the Philippines. His .22-caliber revolver has been found but never tested for comparison to the Kennedy bullet.

Another angle the police were disinclined to follow was the “girl in the polka-dot dress.” Numerous people in the pantry spotted her standing with Sirhan, consistently describing her as “shapely” or “proportionate,” in a white dress with black dots. Most notable of these witnesses was Sandra Serrano, who gave an interview to NBC’s Sander Vanocur an hour after the shooting describing the woman, and a man, running out of the hotel saying, “We shot Kennedy.” But records show an aggressive and demeaning polygraph interview given by an LAPD examiner caused Serrano to change her story. [“Nobody told you ‘We have shot Kennedy,'” Lt. Enrique Hernandez told Serrano, recordings show. “Sandy, you know that this is wrong . . . This didn’t happen.”] Serrano later returned to her original story. John Fahey,  a man who spoke to police during their investigation, had said he spent the day of the election with a woman in a polka-dot dress who told him, “They’re gonna take care of Kennedy tonight.” But police interrogators told him, “These answers will have to be changed,” and eventually Fahey equivocated and his account was dismissed, according to Shane O’Sullivan’s book “Who Killed Bobby?”.

An older couple told Sgt. Paul Sharaga about the man and the woman in the polka-dot dress and also heard the “We shot Kennedy” remark. Sharaga broadcast a lookout for the pair, only to have it canceled 90 minutes later. Recordings show that an LAPD inspector told Sharaga over the radio that one man was in custody, and police “don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy.”

Twenty years later, when the case records were released, Sharaga said the LAPD report on his action was “phony,” because it said the couple reported the girl saying, “They shot Kennedy” instead of “We shot Kennedy.” Sharaga told author William Klaber: “This is just how things were done. If they couldn’t get you to change your story, they’d ignore you. If they couldn’t ignore you, they’d discredit you, and if they couldn’t do that, they’d just make something up.”


The burial of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery on June 8, 1968. (AP)
READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, Paul Schrade, RFK, Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan

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.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, RFK, Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan

UPDATE: AARC FOIA suit on CIA’s 1963 study of plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler

Doc. 26. Reply in Support of AARC’s CMSJ & Opp. to CIA’s MSJ (180220)

Doc. 26-2. AARC FOIA suit on CIA’s 1963 study of plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler

RELATED:

CIA Responds to AARC FOIA suit on CIA’s 1963 study of plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler

Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: Assassination files, CIA, Hitler plots, JFK, Kennedy assassination

CONSOLIDATED CIA FILES BY CARMINE SAVASTANO

Courtesy of Carmine Savastano, author of Two Princes and a King: A Concise Review of Three Political Assassinations

A collection of Central Intelligence Agency internal documents that present information regarding selected historical agents, employees, and officers. Among the details reviewed are biographic information, service dates, personnel and security files, employee job performance, considerations for advancement, and the operational utilization of intelligence employees. These gathered files can offer some insights hidden from most original investigators and review specific information often left out of general Agency correspondence.


FEATURED REFERENCES
Biographic Profiles: Internal documents that offer detailed summaries of physical characteristics, service dates, and personal contacts.
Contact Division Files: These files that note contacts made with official agencies, staff, biographical information, and files created by the Office of Operations.
Fitness Reports: These documents monitor employee job performance, considerations for advancement or demotion, and the proper utilization of intelligence employees and leaders.
Personnel Files: An extensive series of files that include cables, messages, written notes, some operational details, awards, personnel action requests, and biographic information compiled by the Office of Personnel.
Personal History Statements: This document presents primary and supplemental reports that offer extensive biographic information, educational qualifications, and travel records for reference purposes.
Security Files: The Office of Security compiled these documents to assess potential security risks, protect sensitive information, and for determining the reliability of contacts, sources, assets, employees, officers, and members of the public who sought security approvals.
Miscellaneous Files: Supporting files with useful information regarding the subject not present in other related documents.

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Tennant H. Bagley
Bagley was direct relation of multiple US Navy admirals and served in WWII, he later earned his doctorate in political science from international study. He joined the CIA in July of 1950 and was a noted intellectual trained in four languages. During 1951, he extensively studied operational and clandestine methods and later served in the Foreign Intelligence Operations Section at CIA headquarters. Bagley’s later marriage to an Austrian woman despite the warnings of supervising officials caused him to be moved from his later post in Austria to the United States. His personnel file verifies that in 1961 he used Department of State cover while employed in various Agency capacities. During 1965, Bagley served as the Chief of the Soviet Russia Division’s Counterintelligence Group and later that year was promoted to Deputy Chief of the entire Soviet Russia Division. Among his most notable endeavors was developing KGB defector Yuriy Nosenko, yet Bagley later joined the CIA faction labeling Nosenko as a false defector. In 1967, Agency officials sent Bagley to Belgium and he served as the Chief of Brussels Station until 1972 when he faced involuntary retirement. He sought during later years via reports, books, and interviews to substantiate his prior critical ideas and circumstantial evidence regarding Nosenko’s allegiances.
Personnel File

                   T. h. Bagley

                 T. h. Bagley

William Vincent Broe
Broe started his official career in government as a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later joined the CIA to serve in Far East Division operations. He became Station Chief of Tokyo and subsequently the Chief of Western Hemisphere (WH) Division in 1965. Broe led his division to undertake repeated illegal clandestine operations in South America to influence foreign governments and finished his intelligence career as Inspector General before retiring in 1973.
Biographic Profile   Personnel File

                  W. V. Broe

                W. V. Broe

Charlotte Louise Bustos-Videla (Zehrung)
She was a CIA Western Hemisphere Division staff employee that married former Argentine Brigadier General Cesar Bustos-Videla. Charlotte was prior trained as an Economist, Statistician, and Stenographer and she later was a foreign intelligence officer and granted a cryptographic clearance in 1974. She was an integral part of multiple Latin American operations and was the “internal troubleshooter” for years while assigned to Mexico City station.
Personal History Statement   Personnel File

                  C.L. Bustos-Videla

                C.L. Bustos-Videla

David Lamar Christ
He was captured during an operation while targeting a Communist news agency in Cuba and received the Distinguished Intelligence Cross for his actions during incarceration. He also was the Records Officer for his component in the Domestic Contact Services Division and noted by one reviewer to have been ardent but not a dominant personality. Christ had extensive knowledge of some Agency research projects that included foreign intelligence operations and eventually was promoted to Chief of CIA Technical Services. His role in the Technical Services Division focused on agent management, developing additional useful micro technology, coordination of surveillance installation operations, and gathering intelligence. Christ became the Chief of Applied Physics Division within the Office Research and Development and later retired in 1970.
Biographic Profile   Personnel File   Security File
 

                   D.L. Christ

                 D.L. Christ

Viola June Cobb
Cobb served in the Oklahoma Civil Air Patrol and was the managing editor of a medical news magazine. She later was employed by Castro regime to manage its English publications and became among those officials with some access to important members of the Cuban leadership. She also worked as a CIA double agent in her senior staff role under Fidel Castro and reported to the CIA from Cuba. Cobb also had connections to other people who have made various assertions related to Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions in Mexico City. Additionally, she testified before Congress regarding national security in 1962 and further claimed she could prove connections between Oswald and Soviet officials.
Security File

                  V. J. Cobb

                V. J. Cobb

Lucien Emile Conein
He was a notorious former member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and subsequently the Central Intelligence Agency that had an extensive military and covert intelligence background. Conein attended the British Special Intelligence School and received training in psychological warfare from US officials; he served as an operations officer at CIA Headquarters and collaborated with revolutionary forces in Saigon during the overthrow of Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem. Conein later attempted to use his CIA contacts to sell arms to criminal and rebel groups abroad.
Biographic Profile   Personal History Statement   Personnel File

                        L.E. Conein

                      L.E. Conein

William John Crawford
Crawford began serving the Agency in the Clerical Branch his training included counterinsurgency orientation, photographic intelligence and counterintelligence training dealing with clerical materials. He advanced to recruitment officer, became a CIA personnel officer, and the Acting Executive Officer in Project AQUATONE’s Detachment C military group that included pilot testing for U-2 missions. He later is promoted to administration officer and in 1964; he was involved in CIA operations related to Iran, Jordan, and Lebanon.
Biographic Profile  

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Ross Lester Crozier
Crozier served in the US Air Force while using multiple pseudonyms (false names) during his operational career while located in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Cuba. He was among the Agency’s case officers later handling the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a Cuban exile group supported and funded by the Agency. The primary objective of the DRE was undertaking anti-Castro operations that include propaganda, sabotage, and nearly any illegal operation to reduce the power of the Cuban regime.
Personal History Statement   Personnel File

                       R.L. Crozier

                     R.L. Crozier

George A. Fill
He served in United States Army Military Intelligence as a Russian Liaison Officer, worked in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Washington D.C. Station and later was an operations officer located at CIA Headquarters. Subsequently Fill undertook Turkish, Baltic, and Soviet Branch Division operations and served as Chief of a CIA base in Chicago, Illinois gathering intelligence about immigrants from Soviet areas.
Biographic Profile

                        G. A. Fill

                      G. A. Fill

Daniel Flores
Flores served in the United States Marines and later became a file clerk for the Central Intelligence Agency. He subsequently was noted to have produced one of the most productive sources the CIA had from a challenging sensitive asset and was an operations officer using the designated alias Danilo Freitas. Flores was assigned to the Agency’s Directorate of Plans on its Special Affairs Staff and later was promoted to Operations Instructor for the Operational Training Branch.
Personal History Statement   Personnel File  

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Jerome Fox
Fox was educated at Bard College in New York and majored in economics; he was also later trained in black (Illegal) propaganda methods, skilled in photographic interpretation, and served as a member of the Strategic Intelligence Staff. He was involved with CIA operations gathering and interpreting economic and military intelligence acquired in Soviet Bloc, North Vietnamese, Philippines, Indonesian, and Chinese areas.
Biographic Profile   Personnel File

                            J. Fox

                          J. Fox

Anne Lorene Goodpasture
She assisted the Agency’s Station Chief Winston Scott in various important operations concerning Mexico City station. Goodpasture was among those who handled the original Cuban and Soviet Embassy tapes allegedly containing calls from Lee Harvey Oswald and she was among those responsible for the mishandling of the Mexico City Man photographs responsible for feeding public claims that Oswald was impersonated. She was questioned regarding the matter multiple times and was of little help in deciphering the issue and no tape of Oswald has ever been produced for public review. According to some internal Agency files, these tapes were prior mistakenly destroyed but some officials and the public highly doubted the official explanation. Additionally contending accounts and evidence handling failures never explained the diverging stories and claims by multiple connected officials.
Fitness Report   Personnel File

            A.L. Goodpasture

          A.L. Goodpasture

William King Harvey
He was a former reporter and Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who became a notable CIA officer and was involved in various sensitive illegal compartmentalized operations including multiple plots to assassinate foreign enemy leaders. Harvey was directly involved overseeing Phase II of the Castro assassination plots, he led the CIA’s Staff D group that concentrated on the penetration of enemy signals intelligence and the penetration of enemy cryptographic material, and he led the Task Force W group that focused on the overthrow of the Castro regime. His notorious activities such as Project ZRRIFLE link him directly to assassination plots before and after the death of President Kennedy.
Biographic Profile   Personal History Statement  Personnel File

                     W.K. Harvey

                   W.K. Harvey

Calvin Wilson Hicks
He was an Operations Officer that served at CIA Headquarters and in field primarily in the Far East, Middle East, and Western Hemisphere Division. Hicks was a Staff Employee of Western Hemisphere Division under military cover and during periods of his operational activity he administrated a school, provided training and firearms lessons to students, and was a consultant to military and corporate Agency components. He was imprisoned in China during a portion of his Far East service.
Personnel File   Security File

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Balmes Nieves Hidalgo Jr.
Hidalgo was a CIA staff member who testified in a formerly classified Executive Session of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He possessed longstanding connections to multiple people associated with the JFK assassination case and Hidalgo’s Agency operations included the collection of information, anti-Communist counterintelligence, and he performed some work from the CIA’s JMWAVE station.
Personal History Statement   Security File   Security File 2

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Sylvia Ludlow Hoke
Hoke was a Personnel Research Technician Placement and Employee Relations staffer for the United States Air Force and a CIA employee. She additionally was the sister of Ruth Paine who housed Lee Harvey Oswald’s family in Texas and she reported occasional discussions her sister had with Marina Oswald and general information to the CIA.
Security File

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Everette Howard Hunt
The Agency employed Hunt to serve as an intelligence officer in 1949 and he transferred to Mexico City station in 1950. Officials assigned him to Washington D.C. and he served as an operations officer for the Directorate of Plans in 1953. By 1957, Hunt was at Uruguay station and returned to serve at Agency headquarters in 1960, except for just over a year he spent as a CIA officer in Spain. Hunt is the subject of speculations and some have claimed he is associated with the assassination of President Kennedy. However, substantial primary evidence discounts such prior claims and assertions seek to link him to matters that no verifiable facts do. Hunt serves for most of his remaining CIA career in Washington D.C. and retired in 1970 and his subsequent clandestine work for the Nixon administration ended with disastrous results due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal.
Biographic Profile   Fitness Report   Personnel File   Security File 1   Security File 2   Security File 3   Security File 4

                       E.H. Hunt

                     E.H. Hunt

Miguel Angel Diaz Isalgue
He possessed several valuable relatives in multiple Communist nations, including a sister married to a former Cuban Ambassador to Poland and one cousin who was a personal aide of Fidel Castro. Related documents state he was a team leader and principal agent on behalf of the CIA’s JMWAVE Station in Miami. He served as principal agent for over a dozen black infiltration operations targeting Cuba between 1961 and 1968 and was the target of an unsuccessful recruitment pitch by Cuban intelligence. Isalgue was the owner of the Hogarama Discount store and was noted to have contacts in multiple business arrangements in Costa Rica and Venezuela.  The Agency assigned him multiple cryptonyms for operational use, among his later assignments was a recruitment pitch targeting a Cuban official during the 1970s.
Personnel File   Clandestine Service File

George Efythron Joannides
Joannides is a figure noted first as merely a CIA Office of Legal Counsel Liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was involved in the procurement of and denial of information sought by investigators in this role but evidence subsequently revealed Joannides to have been a prior Case Officer for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE, Student Revolutionary Directorate). This organization was an international CIA funded anti-Castro exile group with offices in Miami and New Orleans. In 1962 Joannides served as “Deputy Chief of Branch handling (in absence of Chief) all aspects political action and psychological warfare and supervising…case officers and clerical personnel…Case Officer for student project involving political action, propaganda, intelligence collection, and hemisphere-wide apparatus.” Joannides further “maintains contacts with key elements of veteran’s type organization as a developmental project” and he managed a teacher’s organization engaged in radio and media propaganda according to official files.
Fitness Report

           G.E. Johannides

         G.E. Johannides

Samuel Goodhue Kail
Kail graduated from West Point, served in the Korean War, and was the US Army Attaché stationed at the US Havana Embassy from June 1958 until 1961; among his duties was gathering military intelligence. He was transferred in 1962 to Opa Locka Processing center in Miami for interviewing newly arrived Cuban exiles. In 1962, Kail was assigned to the CIA Office of Operations for training Agency personnel and assets. He later retired from US military intelligence during 1969 and Kail subsequently testified to the House Select Committee that he believed the CIA funded his prior military unit.
Contact Division File   Security File

Thomas John Keenan
He served as the case officer for a notable surveillance effort associated with the Agency’s Mexico City station. Keenan received aid from Agency employee Anne Goodpasture to undertake covert intelligence collections targeting Communist embassies in Mexico City. Kennan was noted in one document to be “case officer two of the station’s technical support projects, one sensitive double agent case, and has other operational responsibilities.”
Fitness Report   Personnel File

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Robert Malcolm Keith
Keith served in the United States Navy; he was educated in military science, chemistry, and engineering at West Point military academy. He attended the Citadel military college and the Agency further trained him in a variety of skills that include study of the Russian and German languages, secret writing, and technical operations. Keith supported Agency Soviet, Indonesian, and Chinese operations and was both an intelligence and operations officer during his career.
Biographic Profile

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Herman Edward Kimsey
Kimsey was a staff employee in the Technical Services Division who used a media cover to gather intelligence from a variety of public sources for the Agency. He participated in Agency Project BEVISION and later was promoted to Chief of Research and Analysis and was claimed by author Hugh McDonald to have known the unidentified man in Commission Exhibit 237, however by this time Kimsey was deceased and could not offer a response.
Personnel File  Security File

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Henry Preston Lopez
Lopez was a Harvard educated lawyer who ran an unsuccessful campaign to become the Secretary of State for California. He possessed several connections to Communist groups and leftist organizations that fought against US Congressional actions during the 1950s amid the Red Scare. The Agency gave Lopez an intelligence gathering assignment in 1960 within Cuba as a tourist seeking to invest in local businesses. Lopez was hired by the CIA project to organize the most viable Cuban exile groups to for Agency operational use. During his organizational efforts, he used the pseudonym Edward G. Tichborn for Operation AMPATROL and following a thorough assessment of the gathered candidate groups Lopez informed the Agency there was little chance of unity among the disparate factions. Lopez resided in Mexico City during 1961 and during this period worked as a CIA undercover contract agent who was compensated by the local CIA Station. In 1966, his wife’s serious illness forced him to leave Mexico and they relocated to New York City.
Personnel File   Security File

James Walter McCord Jr.
He is a former employee of the Department of Justice and was a former special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The CIA trained him in counterintelligence operations and McCord served as a security investigator for the Agency earning high praise for his various undertakings. Yet he subsequently faces arrest and prison for participation in the Watergate burglary with his former CIA coworker E. Howard Hunt.
Biographic Profile   Personnel File

                J.W. McCoRD Jr

              J.W. McCoRD Jr

James Walton Moore
Moore served in the US Navy, was a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Group, and then joined the CIA and was assigned to its Washington DC Headquarters. He transferred to Special Operations Division for whom he conducted overseas assignments in India, China, and other parts of Asia. Eventually Moore was promoted to the role of intelligence officer and he later managed a small local CIA office within Dallas in 1963. Moore had multiple contacts with George de Mohrenschildt a known associate of Lee Harvey Oswald and de Mohrenschildt claimed they discussed Oswald significantly before the assassination of President Kennedy. This claim drew unwanted attention to Moore after reporters and members of the public attempted to link him to the Kennedy assassination with the name Maurice Bishop.
Personal History Statement   Personnel File   Security File

                J.W. Moore

              J.W. Moore

David Sanchez Morales
He was born March 30, 1926 and his career prior to the Agency included physical education instruction during the 1940s and subsequently he joined the United States Army in 1946. Morales during his time in the military simultaneously was studying law, political science, and multiple foreign languages. Morales left the military according to his Agency biographic profile in 1953 and he was an operations officer assigned to Havana Station in Cuba by 1958. During January of 1963 Morales was classified as an operations officer and served as the Deputy Chief of JMWAVE Miami Station. He was noted to have orchestrated and undertaken multiple covert and paramilitary operations across the Americas. Subsequently Morales used a position in the Agency for International Development (AID) for operational cover. Some have claimed Morales was involved multiple assassinations and some in the public later have alleged he privately claimed responsibility for these crimes.
Personal History Statement

                  D.S. MORALES

                D.S. MORALES

CONTINUE READING AT TPAAK.COM

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: Assassination records, CARMINE SAVASTANO, CIA, JFK, JFK files, Kennedy assassination

USA TODAY: JFK files: 15-year lawsuit over mysterious CIA agent drags as final files await release

JFK files: 15-year lawsuit over mysterious CIA agent drags as final files await release

Ed Brackett, USA TODAY Published 4:34 p.m. ET March 19, 2018 | Updated 8:41 p.m. ET March 19, 2018
AP JFK FILES STILL SEALED A FILE USA

(Photo: AP)

WASHINGTON — For 15 years, journalist, author and assassination expert Jefferson Morley has fought to compel the CIA to produce records about longtime spy George Joannides, who worked with a group associated with President John F. Kennedy’s acknowledged assassin and then aided the committee that tried to investigate that killing.

Morley returned to federal court again Monday, this time before a three-judge appeals court panel to get the government to pay legal fees that have climbed to more than $500,000, said Morley’s attorney, James Lesar.

Circumstances around Kennedy’s murder and the various theories over the decades that reject the idea that the lone assassin was Oswald — who himself was murdered during a jail transfer two days after Kennedy was killed — can get pretty complicated.

Morley, however, says his case is simple: The government needs to inform the public of its activities. Morley wants the appeals court in Washington to force the government to pay his legal fees and to get the CIA to reveal some of Joannides’ records.

“We’re talking about very specific things. We are not talking about a Chinese box,” he said in response to a question mentioning the term.

Bill Miller, public information officer of the Washington U.S. Attorney’s office, said the office had no comment on the case beyond its court motions and filings.

As more and more government files have been released under the JFK Records Act since October, various long-held CIA secrets have been revealed, many of them not related to the assassination, at least directly. But even with the court case and the Records Act — with its final production due in April — files on Joannides remain scarce.

In 1963, the year Kennedy was murdered, Joannides was the CIA case officer over students from Cuba eager to oust dictator Fidel Castro, who had seized power in 1959. In 1978, Joannides was named by the CIA as its contact with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

The committee wanted to know more about the student group, which was called the DRE and code-named AMSPELL. It was part of the CIA efforts to undermine Castro. Another CIA operation on a separate track even aimed to assassinate Castro, using the Mafia and assets within Cuba.

Oswald had a bizarre interaction with a DRE member in New Orleans the summer leading up to Kennedy’s Nov. 22 murder, in Dallas — to which Oswald moved from New Orleans. And just after the assassination, the DRE publicized that encounter with Oswald, and Oswald’s avowed support of Castro.

Committee staffers wanted to know more about Oswald and the DRE, but they were stymied by Joannides and the CIA, who did not tell the committee that the agent handled the DRE in 1963 was … Joannides himself.

CIA trying to chill inquiry, lawyer says

Lesar, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, said the CIA is trying to chill further efforts to open more records by making the plaintiffs pay for the litigation even when there’s a public benefit.

So far, however, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has disagreed, ruling there is no public benefit in records relating to Joannides, who died in 1990. Other appeals court proceedings have sent the issue back to Leon to address finer legal points.

Monday’s appeals court appearance is the fifth time Morley’s case has been presented, Lesar said.

A ruling from the panel of three circuit judges — Karen Henderson, Brett Kavanaugh and Gergory Kalsas — could come anywhere from a month to one and a half years, Lesar said.

Most of the fees come from the years-long fight over who should pay, Lesar said.

Morley’s lawsuit began nearly 15 years ago, after the CIA refused to produce any records it had on Joannides that the National Archives didn’t already have. Five years after that 2003 filing, Morley prevailed. The CIA produced records showing among other things that Joannides had a residence available to him in New Orleans possibly around the time Oswald had a very public altercation there with a member of the student group.

The records also revealed that a then-retired Joannides got a “Career Intelligence Medal” in 1981. Morley said Monday that its reference to his work at headquarters is a pat on the back for stonewalling the House committee.

CONTINUE READING AT USA TODAY

LISTEN to the 19 March, 2018 Oral Argument HERE

RELATED:

CIA is accused of pouring cold water on legal efforts to force it to reveal the contact one of its spies had with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before JFK’s murder

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, George Joannides, HSCA, Jeff Morley, JFK, JFK ASSASSINATION FILES, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy assassination

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