Original subtitles

Before I started making this film, I knew nothing about Bobby Kennedy.

A privileged guy with 10 kids who became a hero to black and Hispanic

communities and promised to heal a divided America.

Then a year before I was born, he was assassinated.

This is the story of Kennedy and his assassin.

The official story, the evidence against, and the others who may have

involved.

This was America in April 1968, in the days after Martin Luther King was

assassinated. Washington burned and days of riots left the city in ruins.

This film was shot by the National Guard as they kept order in the streets.

On the soundtrack, a priest urges people to prayer.

Lord have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

Almighty God.

Look with mercy upon your family.

Guide and guard us in body and soul by your bounteous grace and protection.

I'm telling you, we can have fascism tomorrow if the whole community does not

act now and recognize the threat to white folks of what is happening in the

black community.

As American cities burned, Robert Kennedy stepped forward to heal a

nation. When King was killed, Kennedy was...

to speak to a large outdoor group of blacks in the inner city in

And they didn't know that King had been shot.

God knows that if they could have had guns, they would have been violent.

He steps up to this young white privileged guy, and he said, I have bad

tell you.

Martin Luther King has been killed in Memphis. And this, oh, goes over the

crowd. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with

hatred and...

of the injustice of such an act against all white people.

I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.

I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus, and he once wrote, even in our sleep,

Pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in

our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful

grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness but is love

and wisdom and compassion toward one another.

Feeling of justice toward those who still suffer.

within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Incredibly eloquent.

Absolutely off the top of his head. This was no spin.

This was no counselor.

No people crafting his words. This was him.

That was his great moment.

And I think that's the kind of thing we lost with both King and Kennedy, the two

of them together.

The ability to ring the bell, to prick the conscience of the country, to ask us

to be better than ourselves.

The next day, Kennedy spoke in Cleveland about assassination.

No one, no matter where he lives or what he does, can be certain who next will

suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed.

And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Two months later, he too would be assassinated.

When John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Bobby became his right -hand

man, serving as Attorney General and overseeing the secret war on Castro.

But after his brother died, he was slowly transformed into a gentler, more

compassionate figure.

A 17 -minute ovation at the 1964 Democratic Convention brought his raw

to the American public.

Distrustful and marginalized by President Johnson, he quit the cabinet

to run for senator in New York.

We're here tonight. There's very little more I can say except to introduce the

former Attorney General of the United States and candidate for the United

Senate from New York, Robert F. Kennedy.

Aren't you really using New York State as a kind of jumping -off place for your

own presidential ambitions?

We have a Democratic president.

He's going to be elected in 1964.

In my judgment, he's going to be re -elected.

He's going to be re -elected in 1968, so that the earliest that I'm going to be

jumping off someplace is 1972, which is eight years from now.

I'm going to have to be a wonderful United States senator.

I hear somebody else outside say, are you going to serve your whole six years?

I don't know where I'd go.

With Johnson's help, he won the election and joined the war on poverty, visiting

black slums in the inner city, Kentucky and Appalachia.

He also reached out to Cesar Chavez and the Mexican farm workers during their

grape boycott in California.

He was the only national political figure that would go to Delano and

the farm workers' struggle.

He was very compulsive about seeing a social problem, economic problem, and

want to find the answer to it and do something about it. So he was our kind

activist. By 1968, huge protests swept the country over the war in Vietnam.

And in cities torn by racial tension, the Black Panthers were preaching

revolution. I say violence is necessary.

Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie.

America is in trouble today, not because her people have failed, but because her

leaders have failed.

We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.

We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other

home.

As we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in

Did we come all this way for this?

There was a craziness in the country and a wildness and a violence. We were in

the midst of our second civil war here in the United States. It was that

and much more intense than you're seeing about Iraq or anything like that.

Kennedy's supporters wanted him to spearhead the anti -war movement and run

against Johnson for the presidency.

But Kennedy didn't want to be seen as an opportunist. Robert Kennedy temporized

about whether he should run for president or not. He was ambitious. He

against the war.

Was it the right time to run or not?

I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

It was against the advice of a lot of people, including his brother Ted, but

was something he felt he had to do.

for whatever reason, and then he ran and he got killed.

Tomorrow's citizen needs people.

People who know how to plan for his future.

He needs them in the right places.

Now.

People like Robert Kennedy.

One thing is clear in this year of 1968.

I believe in this country as I traveled across, and that is that the American

people want no more Vietnams.

In August in Chicago, the Democratic Party will nominate its candidate for

President of the United States.

There are two roads to that nomination.

One is to seek commitments through discussions with political leaders.

The other is to go to the people.

I think this is a great country, and I think we've accomplished...

I'm just at the pitch of my campaign speech, and I look around and it says,

a haircut.

I got a haircut.

No matter what happens, I get a very tough road ad.

America was a great force in the world with immense prestige long before we

became a great military power.

The real constructive force in this world comes not from bombs, but from the

imaginative ideas.

the warm sympathies and the generous spirit of a people.

I shall not seek and I will not accept the

nomination of my party for another term as your president.

With the president out of the race, Kennedy took to the campaign trail.

He started out away from the cities in the heartland of Indiana and Nebraska.

Robert Kennedy on a family farm.

How can we make the people in the city understand our problem?

Well, let me present the United States.

Robert F. Kennedy in Indiana.

Even here at home, I've seen children here in the United States starving

adequate or satisfactory meals, whether it be in eastern Kentucky, whether it be

on some of our Indian reservations, or whether it be in the Delta area of

Mississippi. Young children starving to death.

Well, obviously, we can work out a system where you can produce these

those goods be made available to our own population.

This is the most dangerous time that you can possibly live in, but that also

makes it the most interesting time.

Camus said that he wouldn't exchange his time with any other time, just for that

reason. We had great prestige.

a number of years ago around the rest of the globe, but it wasn't because of our

military power and it wasn't because of our economic power. It was just because

people believed in us and believed that we would do what was right, believed

that the principles that we attempted to follow within our own country, we stood

for around the rest of the globe, and they don't have that same confidence

By the end of May, it was clear California would make or break Kennedy's

political career.

It's the 30th of May, I'm going to ride all the way.

on the train to my home, California.

And I hear people say all the way with RFK on the train to my home,

California. And the train has a dream for the great San Joaquin. Can

you hear what this song tries to tell you?

As the train passes by, sing a dream never dies, like the grass of my home

California.

Well, he had just won Indiana and South Dakota and lost Oregon.

Oregon was the first time a candidate ever lost an election, so coming into

California, they were going for broke.

Cesar Chavez, seeing that Robert Kennedy was doing so much on behalf of the farm

workers' struggle, organized over 200 ,000 new voters in California. That's

never been done before.

We saw for the first time in Latino communities, people lined up at the

before the polls opened. This happened in black communities in California as

well. And we've never seen it since.

So there's something there that he had, something very special.

And so if a man follows the difficult and rewarding path of the primaries, if

is willing to come in to the fresh, stern air of popular judgment, he could

worse than submit his hopes to California.

For me, this primary is a vital turning point.

To you, it is a choice about the kind of future you wish.

California is the largest of our states.

In Tuesday's election, however, it will be all of America.

On June 4th, vote for Robert Kennedy.

Kennedy won California and looked set to challenge Nixon for the White House.

Just after midnight, he gave his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los

Angeles. As we were walking through the kitchen towards the embassy ballroom, it

was one of those wonderful scenes, you know, kitchen workers coming over to

shake hands with him and viva Kennedy and Kennedy for Presidente. And it was

just that kind of celebration of people who really needed the presidency more

than anybody else in the country.

And so we walked out and went on the platform and he made this wonderful

speech.

What I think is the...

What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis

and that what has been going on within the United States over the period of the

last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our

society, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the

and the more affluent, or between age groups or in the war in Vietnam, that we

can start to work together. We are a great country and a selfish country and

compassionate country.

And I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of that few

months.

Mayor Yorty has just sent me a message that we've been here too long already.

So my thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.

Thank you very much.

Moments later, he was assassinated.

Oh, my God.

Senator Kennedy has been shot in the head. I am right here. Raper Johnson has

hold of a man who apparently has fired the shot. He still has the gun. The gun

is pointed at me right at this moment. I hope they can get the gun out of his

hand. Get the gun. Get the gun. His hand is frozen.

Get his thumb. Get his thumb.

Take a hold of his thumb and break it if you have to. Get his thumb.

Okay, now hold on to the guy. Hold on to him.

Hold on to him, ladies and gentlemen.

They have the gun away from them, man.

24 -year -old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan is seen firing at Kennedy in a kitchen

pantry and is arrested as the lone assassin.

And notebooks at his house seem to incriminate him. He carries the motive

shirt pocket, a newspaper clipping about Kennedy's promise to sell 50 bombers to

Israel. But only a last -minute change of plan led the senator into the killing

zone.

After Robert said, you know, it's on to Chicago and let's win there, he was

supposed to go down to the ambassador booth downstairs.

And I heard Eddie Menezian say, we're going to the colonial room for a press

conference. So he, instead of coming down the way we had gone up, he turned

around and went through the back of the stage.

Kennedy's campaign manager, Fred Dutton, made the route switch five minutes

before the end of Kennedy's speech with Bill Barry, the ex -FBI agent who served

as Kennedy's unarmed bodyguard throughout the campaign.

They thought it was too late and overcrowded to go downstairs, but nobody

to know about the change.

The arrangement had been he was to go off the podium on the other side to go

down to the lower ballroom to speak to the crowd.

And suddenly Bob came by me.

Heading out the back door, I couldn't figure it out, and so I decided that I

going to run after him and stop him and tell him he was going the wrong way.

When a voice shouts, Senator, this way, Kennedy turns and follows Major D. Carl

Uecker off the back of the stage, wrong -footing his security team.

Uecker led Kennedy behind the curtain and through a backstage ante room.

Instead of going downstairs, they turned right towards the double -swinging

doors of the pantry, on their way to a press conference in the colonial room.

Kennedy shook hands with supporters as he walked through a narrow passageway

jammed with 77 people.

He stopped to shake hands with two waiters at the edge of a metal steam

when the shots rang out.

The X on the floor marks where Kennedy fell after he was shot.

The place is so crowded and packed, the place is hot.

And I decided to get off the platform, and I walked in through the doors and

wound up in the pantry area and stood there waiting. And then I saw him coming

through the swinging doors.

Then he stopped and shook hands with two guys in the kitchen who were standing

up against the wall.

And I remembered saying, you know, this is the guy who's really going to be the

president. As we turned to go, I followed.

And all of a sudden, you know, there were flashes and crackling I heard.

I started shaking violently. I remember that. So I just fell and went out.

As soon as he finished shaking hands, I knew he'd turn around and I would be

able to tell, you know, you're going the wrong way.

And at that time, all of a sudden, it was a string of shots, which I thought.

Initially, we're firecrackers. I really did. I thought some idiot had done that.

And I looked over toward the noise.

And out of the crowd of people at the end of the steam table, there was this

with a gun in it.

I asked Frank to reenact the shooting with our lighting case as Robert

The moment of the shooting, I am standing off of Bob

Kennedy's right shoulder.

at about this position.

And I hear the noise, and I look there, and I see an arm with a gun sticking

between a crowd of people. Then look back in the direction that the gun was

pointed, and I saw that Robert Kennedy had thrown his hands up to his head and

was starting to turn this way.

Then I looked back, and the gun was coming forward, and I met it like this.

Underneath his arms, sort of in a bear hug type of thing, and several other

people grabbed him, mostly from behind.

I got very concerned that somebody was going to kill him.

They were bending his back such that I was afraid they were going to break his

back.

and I wanted him to go to trial.

Nobody had gotten the gun away from him by then. Rosie Greer had it pinned

against the table.

As I looked down, the gun was pointing right up at me, and I thought, I sure

hope that thing is empty.

Kennedy, after he got shot with the first shot, his hands went up to his

like that, and he started to spin to his right.

The second shot, it appeared the bullet hit him.

because his right arm went limp, and it went down to the side, and he started

falling back towards me.

The third bullet, I believe, is that bullet that hit Paul Schrade, because at

that point, Paul went down.

Carl now has got the gun.

He's banging the gun. I'm watching the bullets come out of the gun.

Every time he hits it, he fires.

Goldstein gets hit. What number bullet, I don't remember.

He hits me on my right shoulder. I am now falling.

I'm now on the ground. I have Kennedy on my leg.

I've got Paul under my left arm.

And crying.

I was hysterical.

Carl literally had his hand banging it on the cabinet trying to get him to

release it.

Finally... After the gun was empty, he was still banging his hand, and you

still hear the gun click.

He was still trying to shoot at him on the ground.

When we were on the floor and the shooting was finished, I was on my

I crawled over to the senator.

The first thing he said was, is everybody else all right?

He said, don't say anything, just don't speak.

All he was concerned with was everybody else.

Something I can never forget that.

To see a man who knew he was probably going to die, worrying about everybody

else.

It was just, you know, a horrible time from then on to

know that we had lost him that way.

We won and we lost all in matter of moments.

200 million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night.

any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Dr.

Martin Luther King in April of this year.

But those awful events give us ample warning that in a climate of

extremism, of disrespect for law, of contempt for the rights of others,

violence may bring down the very best among us.

Early the next morning, June 6th, Robert Kennedy died.

His death cast another dark shadow of grief across America.

Thousands came out to mourn Robert Kennedy as he made his final journey by

funeral train to Arlington Cemetery in Washington.

My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in

life.

To be remembered simply as a good and decent man,

who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it,

saw war and tried to stop it.

As he said many times in many parts of this nation, to those he touched

and who sought to touch him, some men see things as they are and say, why?

I dream things that never were and say, why not?

The LAPD concluded all eight shots were fired from Sirhan's gun.

Three hit Kennedy's body and five others were injured.

According to police criminalist Dwayne Wolfer, shot one was the fatal bullet

hitting Kennedy behind the right ear and penetrating his brain.

Shot two passed through the shoulder pad of Kennedy's coat and struck Paul

Schrade in the head.

Shots three and four hit Kennedy under the right armpit.

One bullet lodged in his neck, the other passed through and got lost in the

ceiling. Shot 5 hit Ira Goldstein.

Shot 6 struck the floor and hit Erwin Stroh.

Shot 7 hit William Wiesel in the abdomen. And shot 8 hit the ceiling and

down to hit Elizabeth Evans in the head.

But the police description of the bullet that hit Paul Schrade made him doubt

the official version of events.

Their description of the bullet that hit me was one that went through the

shoulder pad of his coat.

Didn't hit him, but went through...

about here, and came out in the back and hit me in the head. And looking at the

photographs of Dwayne Wolfer wearing Robert Kennedy's jacket, passing a rod

through those two holes, and I'd have to have been much taller than I am at 6

'4", for that to have gone into my head.

There's no real explanation of that.

According to the autopsy report, all three shots that hit Kennedy were fired

a sharp upward angle at a muzzle distance of one inch behind Kennedy and

right. The actual shooter of Robert Kennedy was standing behind Robert

according to the autopsy report. Sirhan was standing in front of him, face to

face. The distance between the muzzle of the assailant's weapon and Robert

Kennedy's body was somewhere between actual contact and no more than three

inches. and the weapon was held at a sharp upward angle, again from the rear.

All the witnesses state that Sirhan's weapon was held between one and a half

six feet away from Robert Kennedy horizontally in relation to the floor.

autopsy report exonerates Sirhan.

Carl Uecker is seen leading Kennedy through the pantry in this 1971

reconstruction.

Uecker insisted Kennedy had just turned to face Sirhan when the shots began,

that Sirhan's gun never got closer than a foot and a half to two feet from

Kennedy, and that he grabbed Sirhan after the first two shots.

Another witness, Lisa Urso, said Kennedy was still shaking hands when the shot

started, but placed the gun five feet from Kennedy in another reconstruction.

What was the distance between the muzzle of the gun and Kennedy?

Well, that's something that I can't be sure of, but I know it wasn't six inches

or anything like that. It was a matter of a foot or two at the most, and

it could have been even a greater distance. The angles of the gun

that I saw was either...

horizontal or slightly or pointed downward, not upward.

Evan Freed was six to eight feet from Kennedy when the shooting started.

Sirhan Sirhan would have been directly across from me and the senator would

been to my left. The senator took a couple of steps forward so we would

walking toward each other when the shots began.

It took me at least two shots before I realized what was happening because it

went pow, pow, pow.

At that moment I looked over and I saw Sirhan shooting.

Sirhan Sirhan, for at least a second and a half, was all by himself, standing in

front of where the senator was, with people converging on him. But at that

moment, he was free to fire his gun. And he wasn't moving when he was shooting

when I saw him. He was just standing still with the gun held horizontal,

shooting.

And I would estimate that the distance between him and the senator at that

was about five feet.

This police diagram shows the witnesses clustered around Kennedy at the time of

the shooting.

Those who were asked all placed the gun one and a half to six feet from Kennedy,

except LA Times photographer Boris Yarrow, who was looking through a camera

and could only see Kennedy and Sirhan in silhouette.

Even if Kennedy was still shaking hands, turned to one side, as Wolfer suggests,

the muzzle distance seemed too great.

The first burst of gunfire could not have been that close.

But the police and FBI never asked Burns about the muzzle distance.

The issue of distance never came up. It was never discussed.

Distance seemed to be something that came in later on when people read the

autopsy report and said, how could that be?

Somehow there's two guns.

But I did find one new witness who could place the gun much closer.

Vincent DiPiero had first spotted Sirhan in the kitchen before the speech.

I thought he was a regular dishwasher. I thought he was somebody who worked

downstairs, and I didn't think anybody that was back there didn't belong.

He was walking through the kitchen.

I thought he was looking for a place to stand, so when the senator came down, he

wanted to shake his hand.

I mean, he wasn't, like, casing the place. He wasn't, like, looking

And that's how I recognized him again as we came through the doors because he

was standing on the tray stacker. I saw him starting to get down, figuring he

was going to go shake his hand.

Disregarded Kennedy.

I was watching the senator.

The next time I saw him was when I saw his arm come up with the gun because he

was crouched down.

He was literally crouching like he had a stomach cramp.

And all of a sudden, he came around with his right arm, came up. He pushed Carl

with his left hand, and he came straight up, and he reached. He was lunging.

And the gun was in an upward angle. His hand was going up towards his head.

And when he pulled the trigger, Sir Hand himself was standing probably three

feet away.

But the gun, the muzzle of the gun, couldn't have been more than three to

inches away from his head.

Carl was, I think, taken off guard the way he went around him. He literally

on the inside part of the cabinet, slid along the keg, and pushed Carl, who was

pulling Kennedy to go to the colonial room.

The first shot definitely was Sirhan pulling the trigger.

I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that Carl was in the way.

Carl did grab his arm, whether it was the third shot.

Or the fourth shot? I wasn't counting.

I was praying I didn't get shot.

I read Vincent the statement he gave the FBI two days after the shooting.

I saw this individual reach his right hand around Mr. Uker, and in his hand he

had a revolver which was pointed directly at Senator Kennedy's head.

The revolver was about three to five feet from Senator Kennedy's head.

This individual then shot Senator Kennedy in the head.

Senator Kennedy at this time threw his hands and arms up.

Vincent insisted he didn't write the statement.

But the same day, Vincent gave the following testimony before the grand

How close did the suspect get to the senator?

It couldn't have been more than six feet.

How close to the senator was the suspect when the gun started firing?

Four feet, four to six feet.

When we recall something, very often we may recall the gist, but many of the

details are part of our way of reconstructing the memory. It's very

iceberg.

that melts and then refreezes again. When it refreezes, it's still an

but it's not exactly the same shape as it was in the first place.

Now, that's what our memory is like.

We may remember the gist, but the details can be generated

by what we think happened.

There was also evidence that more than eight shots were fired in the pantry.

The police knew that they could not discover any bullets on the crime scene

because seven bullets were taken from victims and an eighth was supposedly

in the ceiling.

Any evidence of additional shots would confirm that multiple shooters were

involved because the capacity of the so -called Sirhan revolver was eight shots.

Previously undisclosed FBI photographs confirmed there were bullet holes in the

pantry door frames.

These were circled by the L .A. Sheriff's Department deputy. The FBI

these as bullet holes.

There were witnesses that the police criminalists were digging out bullets

the doorframe. Those bullets never materialized. They were never disclosed.

LAPD removed the doorframes and ceiling panels and destroyed them before

Sirhan's appeal even got off the ground.

I discovered new film of an unknown finger pointing out these bullet holes.

Look at the size of the lower hole on this strip of moulding. It's much larger

in the FBI photo, suggesting an attempt was made to dig something out of it. And

FBI agent William Bailey remembers seeing two bullets in these holes.

I saw two bullet holes in a centre divider. I saw two bullets

in the holes.

I have serious reservations whether or not any of Bobby's wounds were

inflicted by... There are a number of candidates for the second gun, but the

most obvious one is a security guard named Thayne Eugene Caesar, who was,

Sirhan, standing in exactly the position and location he had to be to fire the

shots that hit Robert Kennedy.

Thayne Eugene Caesar was standing behind Robert Kennedy and in contact with him

by his own admission when the shooting began. He dropped to the floor and

reached for his weapon. One witness saw him fire.

Caesar's clip -on tie lay on the floor beside Robert Kennedy after the

Here we see Caesar without his tie nearly an hour later.

Caesar's gun was never checked on the night of the shooting.

He told police he had sold his .22 three months before the assassination.

The receipt proves that it was sold after the assassination.

The person who made out this receipt confirmed Caesar told him at the time of

the sale, be careful of this weapon, it was involved in a police shooting.

He was the obvious first suspect. The police brushed him off and never

investigated him further.

There was also evidence of another conspirator, the girl in the polka dot

Twenty -year -old Kennedy volunteer Sandra Serrano was sitting outside in a

escape when she saw two people fleeing the scene.

I was standing there just thinking, you know, thinking about how many people

there were and how wonderful it was.

Then this girl came running down the stairs in the back, came running down

stairs and said, we've shot him, we've shot him.

And I said, who did you shoot?

And she said, we shot Senator Kennedy. A boy came down with her.

He was about 23 years old and he was Mexican -American.

Because I can remember that because I'm Mexican -American.

She had on a white dress with polka dots. She was light -skinned, dark hair.

And she has a funny nose.

I thought it was really funny. All my friends tell me I'm so observant.

After nearly 40 years, Sandra kindly agreed to her first interview since the

night of the shooting.

It was very claustrophobic in the ballroom. You could barely move.

I just stepped out onto the fire escape and a little balcony attached.

While I was sitting there, three people passed by, a woman and two men.

And the woman, I remember, was definitely an Anglo.

And at the time, I thought both men were Latinos.

They went in and said, excuse me, very polite.

Then a little later, two of them came out.

and like tripping over each other and tripping over me.

And I said, what happened? They said, we shot him, we shot him. I said, you shot

who? And they said, the senator.

And I said, what? And then I remember going into the ballroom, and everything

was chaotic, absolutely chaotic.

I remember very distinctively that she was wearing a white dress with black

polka dots, like a little ruffle around the collar, like a bib top, sort of.

Dark hair, definitely.

Like a little pixie kind of cut. And a nose that's sort of like Bob Hope,

Richard Nixon kind of nose, a little bit ski.

There's certain things about what happened that day that I will never

And the statement, we shot him, we shot him, I'll never forget that.

So I'm very clear in my mind that that's what was said.

Both guys actually were short.

A guy in a gold sweater went up and down with the girl, but the second man

didn't come down.

Sandra described him as a white male, 23 years old, 5 '3", with curly bushy hair

and light -coloured clothes.

After seeing the picture of Sirhan in the newspaper, she felt certain this was

the same person.

That's what it was, seeing the photograph in the LA Times, that I said,

really does look like that guy.

As Serrano stuck to her story, Sergeant Enrique Hank Hernandez was brought in to

give her a polygraph test.

He was a very frightening person. And he was like some Dr.

Jekyll, Mr. Hyde type, you know. One minute he was just like really, really

and soft -spoken, like a wonderful big brother.

And the next minute he was like...

You know, you're an awful person and you're hurting the Kennedys.

I've seen those people.

No, no, no, no, Sandy.

I don't know what I told you about that. You can't say you saw something when

you didn't see it.

Sandy, look, I can explain this to the investigators where you don't even have

to talk to them and they won't talk to you.

I can do this.

But please, in the name of Kennedy.

I've never seen a girl. No, no. I'm talking about what you have told here

saying a person told you he had shot Kennedy. And that's wrong.

No, it is unsanitary. Look it, look it. I love this man.

And you're shaming your... Right now, he can't even... Well, I'm trying not to

shout, but this is a very emotional thing with me too, you see.

If you love the man, the least you owe him, the least you owe him is a courtesy

of letting him rest in peace.

I felt like I was a criminal.

That's my best description.

I felt like I was a criminal, and I had done something wrong.

You didn't do that. You didn't see that. You weren't there.

You're making all of this up. Why are you doing this?

Just a lot of browbeating.

During later years, it crosses your mind. Why did they invest so much in

you up?

If there was nothing there, why did they beat you up so much?

I remember.

thinking that he was lying.

And then thinking, no, he can't lie. He's the police. The police don't lie.

Finally, Hernandez wore Serrano down.

I remember saying to him, whatever you want me to say, I'll say, okay?

I'm not here to hurt anybody. I don't want to do anything bad.

So whatever you want me to say, I'll say.

And they were the cops. They were the good guys.

Hernandez pressured Serrano into a retraction and concluded she had never

Serhan in person and had fabricated for some unknown reason the girl in the

polka dot dress.

Someone in the LAPD said that it was not going to be another Dallas. They were

going to wrap it up real quick.

And so I remember when I read that and talking to my uncle and aunt, who I

with at the time, we all sort of said, yeah, right, you know, maybe that's why

they were so hard on you.

But Serrano wasn't the only witness to see a girl in a polka dot dress.

De Piero's description of the girl was almost identical to Sander Serrano's.

An attractive brunette in a white dress with black polka dots and a ruffled bib

-like collar.

There was a girl that I saw. He glanced at her as though a guy was checking out

a girl. Whether they were together, I doubt it, but I mean, I don't think that

she would have wanted to go out with somebody like him. But he was standing

the stacker and she was behind that to his left.

And what was she wearing?

The famous polka dot dress.

Do you remember what colours it was? I remember them as white and black, but

they could have been purple, they could have been a dark colour. I don't

remember exactly.

During the trial, Vincent identified Valerie Schulte as the girl.

Schulte was standing in the pantry but had blonde hair, wore a green dress with

yellow polka dots, was on crutches and had no contact with Sirhan. Whether he

had blonde hair at that time or not, I don't remember.

But I remember seeing what I thought was brown hair.

All I remember was she was very pretty.

And she looked just like Valerie, unless she has a twin that had dark brown

hair. The LAPD agreed that Schulte did not match DiPiero's description.

The final report concluded Sandra Serrano had no knowledge of a girl in a

dot dress until she spoke to DiPiero.

There must have been a mutual agreement between them as to the description of

the girl and the polka dot dress.

Valerie Schulte was named as the only girl in a polka -dot dress in the

Miss Schulte is blonde and slender and does not fit the description which

Serrano supplied investigators in any way.

Serrano grew up in the family home in Pasadena.

His sole surviving family member is his younger brother, Maneer, seen here in

his first ever interview.

We came to the U .S. by a Christian sponsorship.

I believe it was the Nazarene Church brought us here as refugees.

from Palestine.

We were a normal Christian, God -fearing family, believe it or not, at one time.

Mom worked at the Presbyterian church, teaching children.

One brother was an entertainer. They'd always have feuds, entertaining, belly

dancing, and mother's an avid Christian and what have you. But other than that,

just a normal, happy -go -lucky Christian, God -fearing people, believe

not.

Sirhan was born in Jordan in 1944, and both brothers experienced heavy bumming

during childhood.

It's like sticking your tongue into a 220 -volt current.

I mean, the whole ground would shake, the buildings would shake. You were

terrified not only of the sounds outside, but the screaming in the

of the makeshift bomb shelters.

But because of those facts, they've sheltered me from the Middle East. So

more of an American than I am.

And even things that I do remember, they tried to make me forget them so that,

you know, to go on with life. It was a new beginning.

Sirhan grew up a shy teenager.

He dropped out of college after the death of his sister and worked as a gas

station attendant.

He liked to play pool.

He liked music.

He liked to read a lot. He was interested in languages. He would go

house narrating phrases in various languages, Spanish, Russian, French.

He wanted to be a UN interpreter at one time.

So, you know, his vocabulary was up to par, so to speak.

I don't know what sidetracked him from that to go to horse racing.

In 1966, Sirhan left home to work as a stable boy and trained to be a jockey.

But a few months later, a nasty fall ended his career before it started.

He was working a horse and due to the fog, it bucked him into the railing and

had a severe injury to the head. And he wasn't the same afterwards. He was a

little... A little shaky.

I don't know how to describe it. But he just wasn't himself.

He was a little aloof and a little more tense and what have you. And just wanted

to be more or less by himself after that for some odd reason.

After the fall, Sirhan's interest in mysticism grew.

He joined the mystical order of the Rosicrucians and took to hypnotizing

in his room.

He had a fish weight hanging from the light in his room.

And I asked him what that was all about, and he said it had something to do with

his mystical powers, so to speak.

Once in a while, he'd get mail from the Rosicrucians, and Mom would ask him what

that was all about.

And he wouldn't elaborate much.

In March 1968, Sirhan asked Munir to help him buy a gun.

Sirhan said to me that he used to belong to the ROTC program in high school, and

he wanted to...

acquire a gun so he could practice.

So I made him promise that he'll throw it away after he practiced, and I'll see

what I could do.

While at work, I asked one of the fellows there, did he know of a gun that

could buy? He said, yeah, he has one. So I told him to come to the house, and

that was it. That was history. It was never discussed.

It was never... I just forgot about it.

I woke up like a normal day. My mother was gone. Adele was asleep.

I went to work as normal, and I saw my colleagues sitting in the coffee shop.

I looked over at the TV and said something to the effect that Bobby

been shot.

All of a sudden, I saw Sirhan's picture on there. I said, something to the

effect that if anyone recognizes this fellow to get in touch with the police.

I looked at it once, and when I took a closer look, I ran down to my superiors.

Since I didn't have a car at the time, I asked him if I could borrow his car to

run home.

Complete shock.

Complete shock.

Devastation. Shock.

And when we first saw him in jail, I think Mother and I went up first. When

Mother first asked him, he said, Mother, I don't remember.

I don't know what happened.

And he says that to this day, when you ask him about the particulars of that

night, he doesn't recall.

Munir rejects the idea that Sirhan was the first Arab terrorist.

You know, sitting here, you're in Sirhan's home.

If we were sitting here and a fly happened to venture in, you know, your

reaction in mind would be grab the fly swatter, you know, grab something, kill

that fly, get it out of here.

Sirhan would open the door, you know, and he'd try to pull the fly out and

it go out the door again. I mean, life meant something to him.

You know, and especially the things that he went through, we all went through,

you know, the upheaval in the Middle East and what have you. You know, how

people do you know that will open a door and let it fly out?

You know, it's not conceivable to me that the guy would actually take a gun

whether he was five feet away, like most people say, or eight feet away or an

inch away, it's just not conceivable to me that he would take a gun and actually

use it against a person.

He was such an unlikely assassin.

He was kind of a chicken shit, to use an American expression.

Example, he worked as a grocery boy in a store in Pasadena, and he got very

angry with the owner one day, and then he said, then I called him a goddamn son

of a bitch. And I said, oh, did you call him a goddamn son of a bitch right to

his face? He said, no, I said it under my breath so he couldn't hear me.

Well, that kind of a guy, it's very unlikely that he's going to be a macho

assassin.

How did he make that transformation?

Sirhan was a highly suggestible young man. He was not an idiot. He was quite

intelligent. He was well -read. He stuck to the story that he didn't remember,

killing Robert Kennedy.

Kaiser helped bring Grant Cooper into the case as Sirhan's attorney.

He was kind of a warm, friendly human being.

who didn't think along the lines of conspiracies, and he didn't have a

suspicious mind at all.

He pretty much took people at their face value.

Mr. Cooper said, well, he was there, and he was there with a gun.

There's nothing to do but plead guilty and try to save his life.

We were always at odds with the defense team.

In fact, Mother used to even write to the judge at nighttime. She felt that

attorneys weren't doing enough.

We had so much eyewitness evidence that Sirhan was indeed the shooter.

We kind of took the LAPD's word for it, and in the trial, that's what Cooper

did. His idea was not to make the LAPD look bad.

It was to convince the jury that Sirhan did not have the emotional capacity and

the mental capacity to meaningfully and maturely reflect on the gravity of his

contemplated act. That's language from the law, the law of diminished capacity

in California.

The diminished capacity defense was based around Sirhan's fall from the

1966. From the people that I talked to that knew him before and that knew him

after, they said he was never quite the same after that.

Never quite the same.

The psychiatrists were, I guess, under Cooper's direction, were trying to show

that Sirhan's brain was the ticking rate.

And Parsons' favorite expression in regards to Sirhan is, the boy is sick,

boy is sick.

which we thought was a hideous statement.

We didn't know that there's a defense that if you weren't in your proper frame

of mind at the time that you did something legally, it could help you.

A normally conditioned American who's been trained to kill and then to have no

memory of having killed.

Sirhan Sirhan was unconscious due to hypnotic programming at the time of the

assassination and had no knowledge or memory of what happened or the

process.

Defence psychiatrist Dr Bernard Diamond used hypnosis to recover Sirhan's memory

of the shooting and explore his mental state at the time.

Sirhan bought two boxes of .22 calibre bullets at Lock, Stock and Barrel and

practised at a firing range for six hours on the day of the shooting.

He bumped into a friend at Bob's Big Boy and challenged him to a game of pool,

but his friend cried off and Sirhan drove down to check out the campaign

at the Ambassador.

He wasn't a drinker, but that night he had four Tom Collins cocktails and soon

started feeling sleepy.

One of the problems Dr.

Diamond had was that Sirhan couldn't remember the actual shooting of Robert

Kennedy. So he put him under hypnosis and had him recreate the night of the

assassination.

He went back to the hotel in search of coffee and met a girl by a coffee urn.

Once brought out of hypnosis, Sirhan again couldn't remember.

To me, it was obvious that he had been programmed to kill Robert Kennedy and

programmed to forget that he'd been programmed.

And there were all kinds of clues that night that the police tried to suppress,

as a matter of fact. One key scene, he's looking over the shoulder of a teletype

operator in a press room near the ambassador pantry, and she reported to

police that he seemed in a kind of a trance.

And the police told her, you don't tell anybody that.

After they finally subdued him, George Plimpton, the writer, reported that

Sirhan's eyes were enormously peaceful.

Strange. In the struggle for the gun, Sirhan showed enormous strength

Kennedy's bodyguards. When arresting officers shone a flashlight in his eyes,

his pupils were dilated and didn't react, suggesting he may have been

The stunning thing about Sirhan, stunning fact about him, is that he went

hypnosis so quickly and so willingly and was so highly programmable to do things

like climbing the bars of his cell like a monkey under post -hypnotic

suggestion. If there had been some handlers, whether from the CIA or

they had a pretty fit subject on their hands there in Sirhan Sirhan.

Dr. Diamond shied away from that theory that Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate.

He didn't want to look silly, and it was a pretty outlandish theory.

But the fact that so many years have passed and he stuck to that story lead

to think that he really didn't remember shooting Robert Kennedy, that he

probably killed Kennedy in a trance and was programmed to forget that he'd done

it and programmed to forget the names and identities of others who might have

helped him do it.

Dr. Herbert Spiegel is the world authority on hypnosis and has taught at

Columbia University for over 40 years.

He seemed to be a very hypnotizable person. The people who were programming

worked on the assumption that the Israeli -Arab war was an insult to him

built up his first skepticism and his anger to justify getting rid of somebody

who is such an enemy of the Arab culture.

Up to the time of the coffee, He was not in a trance state. This was a part of

their controlling his environment.

But probably after that, that's when they induced the hypnosis with him. And

from that time until it was all over, he was in a trance state. So he had a

spontaneous amnesia for the whole event.

For hours after his arrest, Sirhan happily chatted away to the police and

custody without once mentioning the shooting.

He didn't realise why he was held until he was arraigned the next morning.

He does not have an emotional knowledge that he committed a crime because he's

totally dissociated from it. He could easily feel at ease and sharp and alert

because he doesn't feel guilty about anything.

The prosecution discovered a notebook in Sirhan's room that contained

repetitious incantations of the phrase, RFK must die or RFK must be

assassinated, up and down the page.

The prosecution was jubilant because it regarded this as a Rosetta Stone, which

confirmed that Sirhan had tried to program himself into committing the

assassination. They are the writings of a maniac.

It's my handwriting.

They are my thoughts, but I don't remember them.

I don't have the guts to do anything like that.

Sirhan later blamed the killing on Kennedy's promise to send 50 bombers to

Israel, and that June 5th in his notebook marked the anniversary of

victory in the Six -Day War the year before.

Sirhan first learned of Kennedy's support for Israel in a television

May 20th, yet he wrote the statement in his notebook two days earlier.

Before trial in a hypnotic session inside Sirhan's cell, Dr. Diamond asked

Sirhan in trance, tell us more about Robert Kennedy.

And Sirhan wrote out the phrase, RFK must die, die, RFK must die. The same

of repetitious phraseology, indicating that the notebook was written in a

hypnotic trance as well.

Writing it down was his way of reinforcing the direction of the

was going on.

How much preparation time would we need for something like this?

A few months is all that's necessary because he was so highly hypnotized.

he could be very quickly programmed.

change his perspective in a rather short time and give him instructions.

But the big thing would be to control his environment, to see to it he was at

the right place at the right time. There was this woman in the polka dot dress

and a man, whoever they are. And I just assumed that they were the people who

were part of a team who programmed him, and they were the agents to see to it he

was at the right place.

How much time every day would they need to see him?

for a couple of months to be able to program it?

If I were doing it, I think just one or two hours a day would be enough.

And how would you mask that so he wouldn't be able to remember going to a

certain place? Yeah, tell him that you won't tell anybody about it. This would

be our secret.

The people who do it, if they do, don't go around advertising it.

And if they do it, they can be very secretive the way they were secretive

with...

It's her hand.

So I don't think we can say it's out of style now or it's not being used now. We

don't know.

The CIA had an extensive mind control operation underway, two of them, MK

and Operation Artichoke. Operation Artichoke began in 1953.

One of its first experiments asked, can an individual be made to perform an act

of assassination involuntarily under the influence of Artichoke against a

prominent politician or, if necessary, an American official?

They discovered throughout the 50s and the 60s that they could use

hypnoprogramming to manipulate people into committing crimes with no knowledge

or memory of what they were doing.

That's what happened to Sirhan.

By 1968, Operation Chaos saw the CIA spying on anti -war protesters and the

Black Panthers with the help of the LAPD's Intelligence Division.

The LAPD does have a history of ties with the CIA, and we know that in the

persons of two people who played a critical role in the investigation,

Peña and Sergeant Enrique or Hank Hernandez.

Hernandez told Sandra Serrano a little about his background during her

test.

I have been called to South America, to Vietnam, and Europe, and I have

administered tests.

The last test that I administered was to the dictator in Caracas, Venezuela.

He was a big man, a dictator.

And this is when there was a transition in the government of Venezuela, and

that's when President Betancourt came in, but this is on me now. But there was

great thing going on over there, and I tested it, gentlemen.

So what is an LAPD polygraph officer doing in South America working for the U

.S. government? That's an indication of a CIA connection.

In the case of Manuel Peña, Peña left the LAPD shortly before the

and went to work in South America for the Agency for International

a division of the State Department, which is a known CIA front.

Peña returned to Los Angeles and the LAPD shortly before the assassination

was given command of the Division of the Special Investigation.

squad, especially with the senator, which was concerned with conspiracy

Really working for poor people in this country is a dangerous thing to do.

We found out that with King, Dr.

King. We found out with threats against Chavez. We found out with Robert

Kennedy. Our main approach here would be that the CIA planned the assassination.

It's possible.

I mean, they've done worse things, haven't they?

In fact, that's where Robert Kennedy went first, so you probably know that.

When he first heard that his brother was killed, he called John McCone, head of

the CIA, and said, did your guys do it?

By 1968, Bobby Kennedy posed a huge threat to the CIA.

He was a loose cannon, soft on communism, and a champion of the

And if elected, he would stop the war, take control of the CIA, and

reinvestigate his brother's death.

throwing the spotlight on the agency.

I discovered new footage, which appeared to show three senior CIA agents at the

Ambassador Hotel that night.

But to understand who these men were and the bitterness between the CIA and

Bobby Kennedy, we have to go back to the Bay of Pigs.

Kennedy was handed the CIA's plan for the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs

1961, and of course, as the world knows, it was a colossal failure.

The CIA blamed the Kennedys for withdrawing air support at the last

leaving the men they had trained to be massacred on the beaches.

The failure of the Bay of Pigs placed the Kennedy administration in huge

embarrassment. Something had to be done about Castro.

Robert Kennedy took over, in effect, the operative direction of the CIA.

I was an active duty army officer, a regular army captain, in 1963.

with a specialty in covert and paramilitary intelligence operations.

Suddenly was beckoned to Washington, D .C., and offered an opportunity to serve

with the CIA in a secret war against Cuba. I transferred to South Florida, to

JM Wave, which is the only CIA station that was ever established on U .S. soil.

I met the assistant chief of station, a fellow by the name of Gordon Campbell.

who later became my case officer on a particular mission shortly before the

Kennedy assassination.

I also worked with a fellow by the name of David Morales, who was the chief of

operations. The concept was to conduct covert paramilitary operations

involving infiltration and commando raids in an effort to destabilize Cuba.

We also embarked on efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Bobby Kennedy, chairing the special group, had to pass on each and every

mission. It created a huge amount of resentment on the part of the

people at JM Wave, particularly, I know for a fact, Morales, because I had sat

in on briefings or heard him go into a rage in his office where he would throw

chairs and go absolutely berserk.

When the word came down that that operation had to be changed or possibly

canceled because the risk of attribution and unintended consequences was too

great.

I will never forget being on the steps of the cathedral after the assassination

and seeing Bob Kennedy come down the steps. I never have seen a more ravaged

in my life. He didn't know who was responsible for the murder of his

Was it the CIA?

Was it Cuban nationals? Was it part of the Cuban brigade?

There was such guilt about the role that he played. And did I inadvertently set

in motion the forces that led to my brother's death?

The word around the station was that Castro had killed Kennedy and that

was an operative, a Castro operative. Deep in my guts, I had some

feeling that what we... had been doing down there was in

some way connected.

But there was also a kind of gnawing suspicion about some of the things I had

heard at the station, the anti -Kennedy comments, the sentiments that were

expressed about the Bay of Pigs, just discussed with the Kennedy

From that point forward, I had growing suspicions about the agency's role in

Kennedy, in John Kennedy's assassination.

The secrets of both Kennedy assassinations may lie buried in a

in Arizona.

Morales was a legendary backstreet operator for the CIA.

If you saw him on the streets of a South American capital, you knew a coup was

about to happen.

That's when the terrorists took over for three and a half years.

They went from door to door.

You know,

as soon as they opened the door, you had to kill children, old men, children,

old men. Anybody that was there got killed right down the line.

All these holy people are thinking, by talking to people, you're going to get

done. You've got to kill them.

He was striding around the room, and he was out of control.

And I don't...

I don't ever recall seeing him lose it like that before.

And what was his actual comment then that finished that?

It was something like, I was in Dallas when we got that

motherfucker and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.

What it said to me was that he was in some way

implicated with...

the death of John Kennedy.

And let's go one step further, and also Bobby.

They were sort of getting some information about what happened down

know, to Dallas.

And as we were drinking, he let them know around about way,

well, we got the son of a bitch. That's what he said.

And so in the same conversation, Robert said that, and Denny said, I was in Los

Angeles too when we got the little bastard, meaning Bobby.

No, he was in Los Angeles, but he didn't say that we got him, you know, that

they got him.

Because that's just a difference, you know, the wording, you know.

Because the only reason he'd be in that area at that moment, because his

daughters were married, you know, one of them was living over there, you know.

I said, what's the matter with you, Diddy?

He said, I don't feel too good. I said, why not?

He said, I had a few drinks with my cronies up there before I left West D

said, really?

He said, on the plane, I've been feeling good. I said,

I was just waiting for you because I'm going to take off and go to Wilcox. He

used to leave his truck right then and drive over there.

Okay, well then, let me know as soon as you get there. Let me know how you feel.

You got me worried.

You don't look the same no more, you know. I mean, he's always happy -go

That night, Morales had a massive heart attack.

The ambulance took hours to arrive and didn't bring any oxygen.

Within a week, he was dead.

They waited five hours to get him to the hospital to

make damn sure that he didn't... I guess he wanted him dead, I guess, real good,

by orders, I don't know.

And when you say they, who killed David?

They would have to draw you a picture, the same people he worked for.

The CIA?

Yeah, because he was going to go before the Senate.

They summoned him to go before the Senate. Before he could get there, they

knocked him off.

But he knew too much.

He was the number one winner in the CIA.

He only had two bosses, the president and the head of the CIA.

And didn't he have plans to teach?

Yeah, he wanted to go teach at Flagstaff Political Science.

Yeah, that's the figure that I had previously identified as Morales.

His nose was a little more flattened, but the stance, the shoulders, the face,

the pie astute, the general facial impression is an individual that I would

identify as Morales to practically 100 % degree.

Police,

could we ask for your cooperation?

Those of you inside of this circle around here, could you move back,

a way you can't do anything, and you can't see anything, and there's nothing

here.

This definitely, from the profile, is hugely similar.

The body language is very, very much characteristic of Morales.

See how he moves back and forth very casually, not to attract attention to

himself? That is no question.

I also showed these clips to Wayne Smith, who worked with Morales at the U

Embassy in Havana in 1959.

That's Dave Morales.

Really?

Yeah, I'm virtually certain.

Is there anything?

No, we see him again. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, and you'll see him repeated.

Yeah.

Yeah,

when he turns that way, that's Morales.

That's Morales.

Yeah, I knew Morales quite well. He worked in the CIA station in Havana when

was third secretary of the political section.

59 until we broke relations in 61.

And saw him again a number of times. When I saw him in Argentina, we got into

argument about Kennedy, Bay of Pigs and all that.

And what he said was that Kennedy got...

what was coming to him.

And did he give any indication that he might have been involved in something?

didn't. He said Kennedy got what was coming to him. He said it in a very

determined way, so he took great satisfaction in it,

but no, he didn't.

Is there a benign explanation for why he would be there?

Well, I don't see any. I mean, if...

If the CIA or the security division or the Department of State ordered him to

there to protect Bobby Kennedy, that would be one thing. But I don't think

that's the case. And if they didn't, then there is no benign explanation that

can think of.

And is David Morales a suitable figure to protect Bobby Kennedy?

No.

No, I mean, in my wildest imagination, I couldn't imagine signing David Morales

to protect any of the Kennedys.

Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. David Morales is there.

Well, the two things have to be related.

After these interviews, I found more clips of the same man emerging from the

pantry among a group of police officers.

And was taken away by the police.

As we understand it, there was only one person involved in the shooting.

Minutes later, he's seen lurking in shadow outside the pantry doorway and

popping his head around the doorway two minutes later to listen to Valerie

Schulte, the official girl in the polka dot dress.

Again, Ayres and Smith identified this man as David Morales.

The LAPD showed a 20 -minute film of the shooting to witnesses and

investigators.

It included the following clip of two men walking through the ballroom from

direction of the pantry as panic spreads that Kennedy has been shot.

There is no mention of them in the police investigation file.

Certainly verified 90 % ID of Gordon Campbell.

Less a little hair, as I remembered him. The facial features are certainly his.

Absolutely. And, you know, I'm looking beyond the face. I'm looking at the body

that carries.

Take a look at that again.

Obviously, the two of them are together.

They're looking for a way out because this fellow is guiding him, showing him

exit. Campbell also appears in a photograph taken in the ballroom a

hours before the shooting.

Can you identify the man with him?

No, I told you that face is familiar, but I looked at that photograph.

I can't.

It does not surprise me at all that these folks would be so audacious as to

believe that they could pull this off. In fact, they did.

I had been told by a group of people that I was working with that had worked

Central Intelligence.

We did a short project in alarm systems just days before

that. And they had mentioned that at the Ambassador Hotel, I said, hey, Rayburn,

don't you go there all the time? And I said, yeah.

I live just down the road. He says, wow, they're going to have a big to -do

there. Are you going to be there?

I said, yeah, I could be there.

So just one of those things. That's not an unusual thing for any of the

agencies. Even police departments will give free tickets to functions and such

as that just to have their people in the audience.

I was walking across, going towards the front doors when I heard the gunshots.

And, you know, it's just like a little pop, pop, pop, popping sound. You can

barely hear.

Could he have done it alone?

I don't think so.

I don't think the man's makeup would have allowed him to do that in the first

place. I think there was probably a lot of people involved.

Why that never came out is a mystery still.

He showed me the picture, and I told him that I'd seen the guy there on the

premises. I didn't see him in the ballroom. I saw him out in the lobby

He was in and out.

I see him there.

Yes.

How are you doing?

I was playing on the tiny bus.

Oh, that's him, yeah.

So do you think that's the same man that you saw in the photograph?

Oh, yeah.

That's him.

Yeah. They definitely were observing and collecting information.

Okay, I just want you to have a look at this photograph.

The two men in the center, this photograph was taken in the ballroom. I

wonder if you saw either of those men that night?

This man here, the bald one? Yeah. I think he was talking to Morales

at one time.

So you'd be sure then that the man on the left in the photograph was talking

Morales at one time?

I'm almost certain, yeah.

They've got the military stance, arms behind their back.

That's a dead giveaway.

So this is a swing door to the pantry, and we have a small mustachioed man

and we have our bald man here.

Yep, there he is.

Is this the same man that you saw there on the map?

Oh, yeah.

That's him.

Because their central intelligence doesn't make them bad guys

They are out there protecting our country like everyone.

But in the same token, it doesn't mean they can't have turned bad.

Sirhan Sirhan was probably one of several that were armed and ready to

Sirhan Sirhan was, in my opinion, also a throwaway. He's what we call the

shooter in the public side.

But who the real shooter was?

On this level here, you get a professional.

And a professional you'll never see, you'll never know, you'll never know

anything except that they were there. That's about it.

We've camouflaged firearms in all different kinds of configurations.

Sometimes it looked like a day timer, first light situation.

It'd show a zipper on the outside, but it had velcro and you could pop it open.

Would they have used the silencer?

Strongly possible, yeah.

Silence can be made out of all kinds of things, too.

Maybe a book or something like that could be inside that, and it could be

muffled. You walk up into a busy area like an airport or whatever and stand

to somebody and pop them, boom, boom, and just walk away.

As they fall, you're going the other direction.

That would have been the proper way to do it, and just disappear.

Not get out there like Sirhan Sirhan did and start shooting his gun.

I mean, that could have been to draw that away from the real shooter.

Suspicion?

High, high suspicion.

Yes, I can't deny that. Why they were doing the things that they were doing,

I'm surprised that that was never investigated.

After all of these years, you'd think that someone would have noticed these

things.

and done something about them.

And can you say anything about how you knew Gordon Campbell or what you know of

him, who he was?

No.

Okay.

But you have met Gordon Campbell?

I've seen pictures of him.

Do you know if Campbell is still alive?

To my knowledge, yes.

Do you know where?

Um, no.

David later told me he had seen Campbell several times in the year before the

assassination in a police station environment.

With Campbell now linked to Morales, I turn my attention to the third man

standing next to Campbell in the photograph.

I first met George Ioannidis in 1977 when I was working at the House of the

Committee on Assassinations.

Let me just take you back a minute. Here we were, a congressional committee.

investigating who might have killed a president back in 1963.

As you know, the majority of the American public at the time thought

been a conspiracy.

I had been a law student at Cornell Law School.

I was a bit of a rebel, and so was Dan Hardaway, my partner, looking at these

files. We would dress up in cut -off shorts just below our crotch area, and

would show up at the CIA in these outfits.

The man the CIA called out of retirement to act as their liaison to the

committee was George Ioannidis. He never disclosed he worked as chief of

psychological warfare operations at the CIA's Miami base in 1963.

George Ioannidis was the guy who was supposed to be our point person.

He was probably in his mid -50s, a dapper guy, funny and affable. He might

with you about a football game or a baseball game or a movie.

that you'd seen. But when we got down to work, he was all business.

What we could see, what we couldn't see, why we could see something, why we

couldn't see something, why it was redacted, why it wasn't redacted.

I mean, George was the gatekeeper. He was the guy who stonewalled us.

The Lopez report has become known over the years, basically concluded there was

some type of a relationship between the CIA, and Lee Harvey

Oswald. Exactly what that relationship was, we could never tell. I have no

in my mind that he was being run by someone at the CIA.

Was there a connection to the point where they were running the

That we could not confirm.

Oswald spent the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, coming as the age -supporting

customer. Here he had a well -publicized confrontation with the CIA -sponsored

disaster group called the DRO.

How could we trust anything that the CIA was giving us if the guy that was our

point of contact who controlled what we saw or didn't see happened to have been

a person whom we would have investigated back then had we...

We'd known who he was.

Let me now show you a photograph that was taken in the Ambassador Hotel the

night Robert Kennedy died.

And I'd like you to look at the figure on the right centre of frame.

Well, when I look at this picture, to me it's a younger George Ioannidis.

I couldn't say 100 % that it's him, but if I was a betting man, I'm 99 % sure

that it's George Ioannidis.

The guy is young and in shape.

Always standing, you know, stands erect.

It's the way I remember him being. The glasses, his hair slightly receding.

I mean, you just look at him and you say, this is the guy that I spent many

hours with at Langley. This is George Jonas.

George Jonas is an enigma to me.

After he died, when I heard that...

he'd been involved with JM Wave, that he'd been involved with the DRE.

And now looking at this photo, it doesn't surprise me for a minute to find

at the Ambassador Hotel on the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot.

If he was level operative, that he appears to have been through DRE and JM

if another operation was going on, that was key.

he would have been there.

These are people who will do anything for the good of their country. And if it

meant assassinating a second candidate to make sure that he didn't rise to

because he would be dangerous for the country,

they'd do it.

Journalists David Talbot and Jefferson Morley found two others who could

identify Joe Inidis.

Ed Lopez, investigative partner Dan Hardway, and Chilo Borja, a key figure

the DRE.

The Joannidis family have refused to comment on the photograph.

I also found more photographs of Campbell and Joannidis in the ballroom,

from behind, with a third man I have not been able to identify.

I had now identified three senior operatives at the hotel with three

unidentified associates.

The man who connects all three is the late Ted Shackley, station chief at JM

Wave and later Saigon, where Morales and Joannidis would again work for him in

the late 60s.

Above him, the chain of command led right to the top.

Someone else, high up, would know about it.

Would four other people know about it? No. But one other person high up would

know about it. But that nothing would be written about it so that it couldn't be

traced because the issue of plausible deniability was paramount with the

Our witnesses leading off today are Mr. Richard

Helms. who was the director of the CIA during the period in question.

Is it policy not to transmit some things in writing? Sir, when the day comes

that an intelligence organization, particularly a secret intelligence

organization, everything has to be put in writing, it's going to come to a

resounding halt, I'm afraid.

And if I had to pick one person who would know this operation, it would be

Richard Holmes.

He was this angry, very cruel guy.

So the agent gives the Cuban agent the device to kill somebody.

I'm sorry he didn't give him a pistol because it would have made the whole

a lot simpler and less exotic.

Well, whether it's a pistol or a needle, if Amlash is a political plot to

destabilize the government, what in the blazes are we giving an agent a device

that will kill Castro with for if it's not an assassination plot?

Well, if you want to have it that way, why don't you just have it that way?

He had no respect for what we were doing. He was angry about being where he

And he had no compunction about letting us know what his feelings were. It sort

of blew us away.

Helms initiated the CIA's mind control program in 1953 and was a close

of the man who ran it for the next 20 years, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.

But as I built my case against the CIA, I also had to factor in some negative

identifications. OK, see the figure in the white shirt here?

No, no. This one right here?

Yeah. No way.

No? Nuh -uh.

No way. That's not him at all.

That's not him.

Is there any resemblance at all? No.

Well, that's the same person it was before.

There was a security guard there for Kennedy.

I guarantee you there was no security guard for him.

That's not him. I guarantee you it's not him.

I really don't know why Rubin would respond that way. I guess

probably when confronted with a photograph, which would be pretty hard

putting him on the spot, may be reluctant to condemn his lifelong

friend. He can live with the thought that Morales may have been involved in

way, almost be proud of it, but to ID him may be just too far reach for

him.

And it doesn't surprise me.

I also interviewed Tom Clines and Ed Wilson, close colleagues of Morales who

weren't willing to go on camera.

Wilson didn't recognize Morales.

Clines said it looked like him, but Morales walked with his tie down and

a slouch, which I found a little strange.

On balance, I still felt I was on the right track with my three suspects and

aired the story in a segment on the BBC.

Now, formally, I believe the CIA have said what about these guys? You know, I

mean, the comments you'd expect, that they can't go into previous operatives'

identities and that also they have no domestic jurisdiction.

So the question that we're asking is, we have interviewed various people who

knew these men well.

They say that they're the men in the photograph, so we're asking the CIA and

Los Angeles Police Department to address that question. Assuming there is much

more to it than the straight Sir Hans, Sir Hans story, do you think we'll ever

get to the bottom of it?

I think it's important that we do. I mean, there's a guy called Paul Schrade

was walking behind Kennedy on the night he was shot in the head, and he's been

one of the leading campaigners to reopen the case for years because of the

second gun theory and various doubts that there have been around.

So I think this evidence is quite important because it's the first time

we've actually showed a CIA presence.

on the night at the domestic assassination.

And it's important that we get some answers to this from the relevant

authorities. You know, every day there's new revelations, Mr. Sullivan. And this

is the most revealing so far, or one of the most revealing.

My understanding is that the senator didn't want any protection.

And if they went there to protect him, what were they doing there?

How could Sirhan determine the last minute?

change of plans on the direction of Kennedy's travel throughout that whole

Because there's no way Sirhan could have found out the change of plan and

direction and be there lying in wait without some sort of direction.

And this explains it. It may explain why Sirhan doesn't remember.

It's horrendous to think that the government would be involved in

this. But if it is, let's get down to the bottom of it and find out the truth.

After the BBC story, I sent the video of Morales to others who knew him at CIA.

None of them could recognize him.

Manuel Chavez said he was too tall and light -skinned. He remembered Morales as

5 '10 with very dark Indian features.

Then with the help of journalist David Talbot, I discovered new photographs of

Morales taken in Peru and Vietnam in the years before and after the

assassination.

While Bradley Ayers feels these confirm his identification, now I'm not so sure.

Morales said he was there, but I'm not sure this is the same person.

But the strangest twist came with Gordon Campbell.

I was told he died of a massive heart attack at JM Wave in 1962, a year before

Bradley Ayres even met him.

But this Campbell was 57 years old, much older than the man Ayres knew.

Were there two Gordon Campbells, or was it simply a cover identity?

Then, with the help of an American journalist, I found more clips of

and could chart his movements throughout the evening with the help of his blue

sports coat and distinctive hairline.

We see him with the group in the ballroom early on, then watching the

next to Roger Mudd.

Then a man calls out Mike and Campbell joins the group in the middle of the

ballroom in a light -hearted mood and gesturing at the bank of TV cameras

him.

Just before the speech, Campbell walked through the room with a colleague and

then walked forward towards the stage as the crowd get word of the shooting.

It was now clear he didn't emerge from the pantry but was watching the speech

from the back of the ballroom with this group.

Two new clips also showed his immediate reaction to the shooting.

Later on, we see him listening to interviews with witnesses.

The Latin man with Campbell also turned up cheering for Kennedy earlier in the

night, listening to interviews later on, and chatting with eyewitness George

Green.

But who were the group with Campbell in the ballroom 30 minutes before the

shooting? I found two photographs in the police investigation files suggesting

they had checked out these people.

Campbell is circled along with some other men.

On the back of the photograph is the name Michael Roman.

The group were salesmen for the Bulova Watch Company at the hotel for a sales

meeting. Michael D. Roman was the national sales manager and vice

Bulova. Before his appointment, he served as police commissioner of

Illinois, where he also raised ponies and collies.

Was this a case of mistaken identity, or was Michael D. Roman Gordon Campbell's

real identity?

Mechutron time is kept by a tuning fork instead of a balance wheel. It splits a

second into 360 parts and is used as a timer in satellites.

The most precise time you can keep on your wrist.

Bulova was no ordinary company.

Chairman of the board was Omar N. Bradley, a five -star general and hero

World War II, now living in Beverly Hills.

Forty percent of Bulova's revenue came from the defense industry, and sources

told me it was the well -known CIA cover.

Roman had been appointed vice president by Bradley in 1964.

In the spring of 1968, Bradley was one of the wise men advising Johnson on his

strategy in Vietnam.

The FBI finally interviewed Michael D. Roman five months after the

assassination, and he reported nothing out of the ordinary.

In 1976, he became the head of the Retail Jewelers of America and was a

-respected figure in the industry for the next 20 years.

He died in 2002.

Roman's family deny he led a double life with the CIA and identified the man

next to him as Frank Owens, a regional sales manager for Bulova who died a few

years ago.

Did Roman and Owens double as Campbell and Ioannidis?

It seems unlikely, but at this point I just don't know.

Whether the CIA were involved or not, one thing has stayed constant over the

years. One thing that has not changed is the fact that he does not remember.

Sirhan is still in prison and has been turned down for parole 13 times.

He's been turned down every time and always on the same ground. He lacks

remorse. But it's circular because how can you lack remorse if the basis for

that finding of lack of remorse is that you don't remember and if in fact you're

telling the truth when you say you don't remember. Of course he's telling the

truth. That's why he's requested hypnosis in order for him to be able to

With a proper, well -designed, regression technique, it's possible to

uncover that memory.

He could possibly reveal how he was programmed and where he was going and

he was going to do about it. But the court would not give me permission to do

it.

The Ambassador Hotel closed in 1989 and the pantry gradually deteriorated.

Now the hotel itself has gone to make way for a new high school in memory of

Bobby Kennedy.

But nearly 40 years on, the mystery around this case still remains.

Were senior CIA agents at the hotel that night? Did they program Sirhan to shoot

Robert Kennedy or to act as a decoy for the real assassin?

I still can't say for sure what happened that night, but the evidence that

others were involved is mounting.

See, this is not an Agatha Christie mystery story where everything is neatly

tied up in a bow in Chapter 23 at the end of the book.

It's one of our most enduring murder mysteries, and it will probably continue

be such.

That's the way life is. Nothing is ever quite resolved, is it? And what can be

done with the case now?

Define the truth.

Define the truth. As I've grown up with this case, there are just things that

boggle the mind that should be looked into for the love of humanity.

If all of this leads to where we suspect it's going to lead, we don't want it to

ever happen again.

The first wish then.

I wish that Senator Kennedy was still alive.

I wish that every day that I've been here.

Second one, that there should be peace in the Middle East.

There are some who talk about my youth.

It is true I am younger than many who have run for president.

and older than many of those who founded this country.

Whatever my years, however, I will gladly match my experience with that of

others who have aspired to the presidency.

And after all, we are still a young country.