9

Conclusion

THE FACTS UNCOVERED in the John and Robert Kennedy assassination investigations clearly support the contention that an operation involving hypno-programmed fall guys and hidden sharpshooters was indeed activated, and that rogue CIA personnel at the highest levels, headed by Richard Helms and James Angleton, masterminded the program. The conspirators’ motives were to stop both Kennedy brothers’ plans to end the Cold War by negotiating peace with Cuba, North Vietnam, and the Soviet Union.

Two victims of the Agency’s MKULTRA program, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan B. Sirhan, both unwitting patsies, suffered similar experiences at the hands of rogue agents.

Both Lee and Sirhan had been befriended by mysterious characters, significantly older than they, who assumed controlling presences in their lives. Lee’s older friend was CIA contract agent George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian émigré in Dallas who was introduced to Lee upon his return from the Soviet Union.¹⁶²³ George de Mohrenschildt was expected to appear before the House Committee on Assassinations when he was found dead from a gunshot wound, an apparent suicide.¹⁶²⁴ Sirhan’s close friend was Tom Rathke, the college-educated horse groom who introduced Sirhan to the occult. Sirhan later came to believe such practices brought on his extraordinary predicament.¹⁶²⁵

Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan spent months away from home with little or no financial resources. Lee had no trouble affording travel expenses and accommodations neither when he “defected” to the Soviet Union nor when he returned to the United States with wife and child in mid-1962.¹⁶²⁶ And Sirhan disappeared for three months,¹⁶²⁷ from approximately December 1967 through February 1968. His whereabouts and his means of support during this time period are unknown.

The CIA’s presence in the lives of Lee and Sirhan was substantial. Lee had been immersed in the intelligence community early on, attending the military’s Defense Language Institute, where he studied Russian,¹⁶²⁸ after which he was assigned to Atsugi, Japan, a key US “CIA listening post.”¹⁶²⁹ Upon leaving the Marines, there is evidence Lee became a fake defector to the Soviet Union. It is known that James Angleton oversaw every detail of the defector program and therefore would have been handling Lee’s assignments in the USSR. Lee’s associations with CIA assets included, besides George de Mohrenschildt, an American Air Force doctor stationed at the US Embassy in Moscow, Captain Alexi Davison of Atlanta, Georgia.¹⁶³⁰ Dr. Davison, who returned home in 1963, was named by the Soviets as a key CIA operative in one of the most important US spy networks in the Soviet Bloc.¹⁶³¹ David Ferrie, Lee’s friend in New Orleans whose agency work was confirmed by director Richard Helms in early 1969,¹⁶³² was a CIA pilot. In addition, Lee was witnessed meeting with one of Richard Helms’s top lieutenants, David Phillips, in Dallas in 1963.¹⁶³³ Sirhan’s ties to the intelligence community initially came from a US Army Intelligence liaison in Los Angeles who reported shortly after the Robert Kennedy assassination that his office had a file on Sirhan that was created before the assassination.¹⁶³⁴ Additionally, a key CIA asset, a nationally recognized hypnosis expert, Dr. William J. Bryan Jr. of Los Angeles, later boasted to friends that he had hypnotized Sirhan,¹⁶³⁵ both prior to the assassination and after in his jail cell before the trial.

In both Lee and Sirhan’s cases, we see a profusion of so-called incriminating evidence carefully fabricated to frame them. For example, we have Lee’s alleged “diary,” covering two years of his life, all of which, according to experts, was written in a day or two,¹⁶³⁶ and a faked photo of him posing with a rifle in his backyard.¹⁶³⁷ In Sirhan’s case, a forty-eight-page notebook—produced by the prosecution to show alleged premeditation—was apparently penned by Sirhan, but the writings are obviously a product of those who had a special expertise in the methods of hypnotic trances and producing so-called automatic writing. When defense psychiatrist Dr. Bernard Diamond tried to elicit from Sirhan while under hypnosis when exactly the notebooks were written, Sirhan continually answered that he had no memory of them.¹⁶³⁸

Both Lee and Sirhan’s handlers meticulously crafted for both of them their own paths of circumstantial incrimination. Lee believed his assignment was to gain intelligence on anti-Castro forces and pro-Castro Cubans in the New Orleans area. But by acting as a pro-Castro leftist radical,¹⁶³⁹ Oswald was unwittingly being set up by his handlers to appear to be a potential assassin in the making. In Sirhan’s case, he was witnessed with a young woman and a man just prior to the assassination, during which he exhibited a total personality change and signs of being in a frenzied state,¹⁶⁴⁰ behavior that was highly uncharacteristic of him. They appeared to be “stalking” RFK. Sirhan was also seen practicing shooting with the couple at a gun club and said later that he does not even recall why he was there.¹⁶⁴¹

Critical evidence linking Oswald and Sirhan to the JFK and RFK assassinations is also lacking. Lee was seen by three witnesses four minutes before the JFK shooting—not on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository awaiting the presidential motorcade—but relaxing in the first-floor break room and then in the second-floor lunchroom. Two minutes after the assassination, Lee’s supervisor, Roy Truly, and patrolman Marrion Baker again witnessed Lee in the lunchroom calmly sipping a Coke.¹⁶⁴² While Sirhan was apprehended with gun in hand, the forensic evidence showed Bobby was shot from behind as evidenced by the powder burns on his head and back. Sirhan, however, had been positioned in front of Kennedy. LA coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi has documented that it was impossible for Sirhan to have fired the fatal shots.¹⁶⁴³

In both political murders, eyewitness testimony has indicated the presence of hidden gunmen, expert shooters concealed on the sidelines, who carried out the assassinations, while unwitting fall guys, Lee and Sirhan, were blamed. President Kennedy was hit in a crossfire involving three gunmen.¹⁶⁴⁴ Eyewitness statements, film evidence, and the autopsy all indicate that shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository, from another building on Houston Street, and from behind a fence on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza.¹⁶⁴⁵ Robert Kennedy was shot in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, according to eyewitnesses, by two gunmen in suits who stood directly behind Kennedy and at his left side, firing from inches away before escaping in the chaos.¹⁶⁴⁶ Judge Robert A. Wenke’s 1975 panel reported that Sirhan’s gun could not be “positively identified” as the murder weapon because the markings on the victim bullets were significantly different from those bullets from the test-fired Sirhan gun.¹⁶⁴⁷ In fact, Sirhan’s Iver-Johnson .22 was later discovered to be coated with lead in the bore, indicating that the gun had been firing blanks,¹⁶⁴⁸ a ruse Sirhan’s handlers used to protect the actual assassins who were in the line of fire.

Lee and Sirhan both appeared confused upon discovering they were being charged with murder. Lee, a young ex-Marine, immediately replied that he was a patsy.¹⁶⁴⁹ He did not live long enough to disclose details of whom he thought had set him up. When Sirhan was taken into custody, he was found to be in a stupor. He found out that Robert Kennedy was shot when attorney A. L. Wirin arrived at the county jail to meet with him in his cell.¹⁶⁵⁰

The true perpetrators intended to make sure that any hint of a conspiracy would be buried with Lee and Sirhan in their graves by silencing both of them. Lee’s death came swiftly. Two days after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lee was shot in Dallas Police headquarters by mobster Jack Ruby and died two hours later. Strong Agency-Mob ties would have meant Ruby’s death if he had not followed orders to silence Lee.¹⁶⁵¹ In the Robert Kennedy assassination, at least ten shots were fired in the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen pantry, according to a report on audio recordings from three open news microphones conducted by the Stanford Research Institute in 1982.¹⁶⁵² Three bullets hit Bobby, a fourth pierced his jacket shoulder, and five people were wounded in the melee. But after RFK staffers piled onto the diminutive Sirhan, none of the gunmen had a clear shot at Sirhan.

The evidence compiled on the rogue agency MKULTRA assassination program indicates that the operation was masterminded by Richard Helms, who served three decades in the CIA, became its Director (1966–1973) and was MKULTRA’s major promoter. James Angleton, long-time CIA counterintelligence chief, was also a key MKULTRA backer. Both are now deceased. Richard Helms passed away at eighty-nine from bone cancer in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2002.¹⁶⁵³ James Angleton succumbed to lung cancer. He died in Washington, DC, at age sixty-nine on May 11, 1987.¹⁶⁵⁴ Their closest associates, David Phillips, CIA western hemisphere chief, died of lung cancer in Bethesda, Maryland, on July 7, 1988, at sixty-five,¹⁶⁵⁵ and the last remaining member of the group, E. Howard Hunt, CIA disinformation writer and sabotage expert, died of pneumonia in Miami on January 23, 2007 at age eighty-eight.¹⁶⁵⁶

In dissecting the assassinations of the sixties, beneath the surface, they involve similar motives, means, and opportunities. The motive of the rogue intelligence operatives was to control America’s destiny in their own twisted way. The means by which they intended to accomplish this end was to use a workable version of the MKULTRA plan involving unwitting fall guys along with professional hitmen. The opportunities were readily available, given the wide range of allies supporting them, from various local law enforcement individuals, to mobsters, to foreign spy agencies.

Everyone knows there is a price to pay for ignoring the lessons of our past. Thomas Jefferson forewarned our nation at its very beginning regarding the consequences of apathy and insufficient vigilance. He left us this poignant, poetic reminder: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Ultimately, it is hoped that the information presented herein will aid the cause of those seeking justice for Sirhan Sirhan and the family of Lee Harvey Oswald. May it also serve as a guidepost as we seek to avoid future tragedies like the Kennedy assassinations.