18-01-2013, 08:04 PM
WHO KILLED BOBBY?: THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY
http://www.naderlibrary.com/RFKREBORN.wh...bby.16.htmSIXTEEN: Intelligence Connections
It's tempting to write off the LAPD's bullying, incompetence, omission, and destruction and manipulation of evidence as simply the cover-up of a botched investigation -- the avoidance of another Dallas, by any means necessary -- until you see the connections fanning out from the department to other government agencies, specifically the CIA.
By late 1967, LBJ was besieged by the antiwar movement. From his bunker at the White House, he looked out at the student dissent and disgust with government and could not believe it was the work of true Americans. Foreign influence must be at play, corrupting American youth, and he encouraged the CIA to root it out with the launch of Operation Chaos, a domestic surveillance operation on the protest movement and the Black Panthers. Through a network of informants and agent provocateurs, Chaos would determine if foreign powers were funding and fomenting this domestic unrest.
The program was tightly held, known only to director Richard Helms and his top lieutenants, Richard Ober and Cord Meyer, who helped establish and run it. One of the main cities targeted was Los Angeles, and links were established with the intelligence division of the LAPD, which was also responsible for the security of VIPs visiting Los Angeles. In sync with this effort, the CIA provided training to police departments in guerrilla techniques and tools of urban warfare. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told researcher Betsy Langman that while he was with the agency in 1967, the Chicago and Los Angeles police departments received several days of "training" from the Clandestine Services Division. When Marchetti asked why a dozen or so LAPD officers were at CIA headquarters, he was told it was a "special," "sensitive" activity that had been directly approved by the CIA director.
In 1982, author Philip Melanson obtained a three-hundred-page "Domestic Police Training" file from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act. These documents confirmed that during the sixties and seventies, the CIA had secret ties to police departments across the country, providing training and equipment in exchange for surveillance, break-ins, and the provision of police credentials to CIA operatives. Los Angeles was one of the cities that received this special training.
The two men who had effective day-to-day control of the RFK investigation also had CIA connections. As day watch supervisor, Lieutenant Manuel Pena had to sign off and approve every report and decide who to reinterview and who to dismiss as the case was prepared for trial. This was the same Manny Pena who scrawled across several blank interview summaries relating to Sandra Serrano, "Polka-dot story of Serrano phony," "Polka dot story Serrano N.G."
Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez was Pena's chief interrogator, called on to administer polygraph tests to troublesome witnesses to determine if they were telling the truth. Without fail, whenever claims of conspiracy were sent to Hernandez, he bullied witnesses into retractions. Luckily, many of these tapes survive, so we can still hear the mockery Hernandez's bullying tactics make of this supposedly objective discipline. Hernandez also led the investigation probing possible conspiracy and oversaw the background checks on Sirhan and his family.
Manuel Pena joined the LAPD in 1941 and served in the Pacific with the Naval Air Corps during World War II. He spent two years in Verdun, France, as a criminal investigator for the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and spoke fluent French and Spanish. He went on to spend sixteen years of his police career working in Robbery-Homicide, reaching the rank of lieutenant. Robert Kaiser recalls his nickname at LAPD was "Shoot 'em up Manny Pena" -- "he killed several people in the line of duty, which wasn't very normal."
In November 1967, Pena retired from the department with a surprise testimonial dinner at the Sportsman's Club attended by Chief Reddin and top department brass. He was to accept a position with the Agency for International Development (AID), a State Department aid agency that among other roles served as a regular cover identity for CIA operatives abroad. He would serve as a "public safety adviser" and train the police forces of friendly dictatorships in sophisticated interrogation techniques to use on leftist insurgents and political dissidents.
FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse had known Pena for years and was the FBI liaison to the LAPD during the RFK case. LaJeunesse said Pena left the LAPD for a "special training unit" at CIA's Camp Peary base in Virginia. After nine weeks' training, he would be posted to Latin America, where he could use his Spanish. Pena had been doing special assignments for the CIA for a decade, mostly under AID cover. On some of these, he worked with CIA operative Dan Mitrione, a "US police adviser" who taught interrogation and torture techniques to the ruling junta in Uruguay and was killed by the Tupamaro guerrillas in 1970 as a result.
Please have a seat. Sorry I'm late.
I know how long you've had to wait.
I did not forget your documents
No time to waste, why not begin?
Here's how it works, I've got these faces
You give them names, I won't deport you
Make sure you face my tape recorder
Make no mistake, this fountain pen
Could put you on a plane by ten
And by the way, your next of kin
I know which house she's hiding in
So now that you know whose skin you're saving
In this photograph, who's this one waving?
I think you know, so speak up, amigo
It says here by trade you were a fisherman
Well I'll bet you Indians can really reel them in
If you get the chance
You should try to get up to Lake Michigan
Well maybe, but then again, anyway...
Where were we then? Is he your friend?
Well I recommend that you look again
Where does he stay? What is his name?
There is no shame. He'd do the same
So what do you say? I don't have all day
It's up to you. Which will it be
Good citizen, or poor campesino?
My dad used to rent us this place in Ontario
He showed us how to cast the line and tie the flies
He used to say God rewards us for letting the small ones go
Maybe, but I don't know
Anyway, it's easy to bite. You can't snap a line.
You just take the bait, you can't fight the hook
Hurts less if you don't try to dive
Senor, as you know I was a fisherman
How full the nets came in
We hauled them up by hand
But when we fled, I left them just out past the coral reefs
They're waiting there for me
Running deep
-- Fishing, by Joan Baez
Pena's new career didn't last long. Robert Kennedy announced that he would run for president on March 16, 1968 and Pena was back in Los Angeles by April. Investigative reporter Fernando Faura was walking along a corridor in Parker Center one day when he noticed a familiar figure behind heavy horn-rim glasses and a black handlebar mustache.
"Hey, Manny, I damn near didn't recognize you with that disguise!"
Pena stopped and explained the AID job wasn't what he expected, so he quit and came back to Los Angeles.
When the LAPD subsequently unveiled Special Unit Senator (SUS), a special task force to investigate the assassination, the man put in charge of preparing the case for trial and supervising the day watch investigators was Manny Pena.
In his 1970 book on the case, SUS Chief Robert Houghton wrote that Pena had "connections with intelligence agencies in several countries." In 1975, Pena's brother, a school principal, was interviewed for a local television show by host Stan Bohrman. During the commercial break, he mentioned how proud he was of his brother's service with the CIA. "Nobody's supposed to know about that. It's supposed to be secret."
In 1977, researcher Betsy Langman interviewed Pena -- then retired from the LAPD, presumably for good -- and asked about his intelligence ties.
"I worked with the AID program out of the Office of Public Safety," said Pena. (The AID program had been unmasked in the mid-1970s as one of the CIA's main covers for clandestine activity abroad.)
"Is AID not CIA?" asked Langman.
"Ah, not to my knowledge," said Pena.
"Was your work away from LAPD in 1967 going to be for AID?"
"Yeah."
"What type of work was it?"
"Ah, that I can't ah ... I don't think that's anybody's business."
***
In 1992, while attorney Marilyn Barrett was working with Paul Schrade on a new petition to reopen the Sirhan case, she discovered that the uncle of a good friend of hers was none other than Manny Pena. Barrett kindly sent me CD copies of a four-hour interview she subsequently conducted with Pena, in which he attempted to correct misconceptions in what he calls "these novels" about the assassination.
Pena was, by that time, seventy-three years old and comes across as a disarming figure, a charming uncle seemingly open about all aspects of his career, and a world away from his sinister-looking LAPD ID photo taken in the late sixties.
Pena was happy to discuss his "intelligence background" outside the LAPD. During his two years in France, he worked closely with the army's Counter-Intelligence Corps and made lots of friends in the intelligence community. He also built up strong connections with Interpol: a senior official in the Mexican government was his "number one connection into Latin America," and he'd make frequent trips down there.
"Our own Internal Revenue used to use me to trace assets in Latin America when they wanted to keep away from diplomatic problems with the State Department. I could get information out of Latin America better than the government through personal friends ... and [LAPD] Chief Parker allowed them to use me providing I never [talked about it] .... If you want to call that an intelligence background, there's nothing mysterious about it.
"In 1967, I decided to retire and go in the Aid for International Development part of the State Department; we call it AID. I was sent to Washington, DC, for orientation at the Foreign Service Institute. I went through their orientation and I was told I was going to be sent to Latin America. Some of the instructors that talk to you there are from CIA, and I was made privy to how to read secret materials and stuff like that, which I can't discuss with you for obvious reasons."
At the time, Pena was recently divorced and had left his car and furniture in Los Angeles. ''After I finished the orientation school, the chief of the AID Program, Byron Engle, told me they couldn't send me to Latin America; they wanted to keep me in Washington, DC, at their International Police Academy," where they trained a lot of Latin American officials.
Engle told him it was a permanent assignment, so he got his car sent to Washington by government transportation. "When the car arrived, they told me I owed them $965. I said, well, that couldn't be -- the State Department said they were paying." But he was told his posting didn't qualify as a permanent change of station, so the government couldn't pay for it. Engle refused to pay, so Pena called Chief Reddin, who was a close friend, and Reddin said, "Tell them to go to hell and come home."
When he'd left the LAPD, Pena still had four months time-in-lieu on the books, so there were still a couple of weeks left before his official retirement date. So he got his car back and drove back to Los Angeles, "and this is what has caused this confusion that these writers write about ... that I was retired with a great deal of fanfare, ... and then all of a sudden, in two months, I'm back on the job over here and mysteriously returned."
The night of the shooting, Pena was home alone in an apartment in Van Nuys, and a friend called and said, "Switch on the TV; they just shot Kennedy." Two or three days later, Chief Houghton handpicked Pena as lead supervisor for the investigation. They picked "just about the forty sharpest guys in the department in every category" and set up SUS:
I was assigned to supervise the case preparation for trial, the conspiracy allegation investigation, [and] I arranged to have the backgrounds of the entire Sirhan family investigated in Jordan because the main defense attorney Grant Cooper was pushing diminished capacity -- that Sirhan had suffered so much as a child and had gone through all kinds of horrible bombings in his home town in Jordan.... Well, I contacted the very same guy I fought with in the State Department, Byron Engle in Washington, DC, and I told him I need his help and I wanted the agents to conduct this portion of the investigation for me, and he says, "Good to hear from you," and he had agents -- some of them from the CIA and some of them from the State Department -- look into it, and they did a beautiful job.
And they established that Sirhan was never within 130 miles of any bombing in his youth ... this was a fairy tale that Grant Cooper made up, and we busted him real wide with that in the trial. He was flabbergasted and a little angry that we had gotten the government to do that. But they did it for me, at my request. So we still had a friendship going there, even though I quit them.
It's ludicrous to state that Jerusalem, where Sirhan grew up, was never within 130 miles of bombing during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This illustrates how deluded Pena was during the original investigation, and how far the prosecution went to distort Sirhan's upbringing. The interview was yielding intriguing information on Pena's CIA links, and Barrett kept him talking.
"And these are the same people that I went to Latin America for later on."
"What was that trip about?" asked Barrett.
In late 1969 or early 1970, the State Department sent a three-man team to Colombia -- the assistant attorney general of California, Howard Jewel, one of the counsels for a Supreme Court justice, and Pena as their investigative consultant.
"We were asked to make a survey of their criminal justice system," recalled Pena, "because there were complaints that people were disappearing in the justice system. They'd go in, be arrested, be arraigned, and go to court, and nobody'd ever hear of them again." The State Department asked him to stay on in Latin America for three-year stints in three different countries, to help reorganize their investigative systems, but, with the drug lords and corruption, Pena thought, "I don't want to stay down here, this is too damn dangerous."
When Pena got the check for the job, "it was paid from the International Legal Center, based in New York. I said, 'This isn't from the State Department,' and I had a detective friend in New York PD check out who it was. International Legal Center was a mail drop; it never existed and yet I got paid and the IRS accepted my tax report, so I had a suspicion it was probably a CIA operation down there. But I've never been told. That's just the policy in government work. If you don't need to know, they don't tell you .... I have never told ... or admitted to anybody that I have been or am a CIA agent because no one has ever told me, 'Manny, you're actually a CIA agent."
"Do you think AID is a front for the CIA?" asked Barrett.
"It's been rumored very highly." Pena laughed.
Barrett also asked Pena about Hernandez's intelligence background.
''I'd rather let Hank explain for himself. He's never been with the CI ... AID, that I know of ... he was on the Sirhan case with us; he was a darned good polygraph man -- the best -- we used him a lot; he did a lot of the background investigation, too, on the conspiracy things. But I've never worked an intelligence assignment with him, so I don't know." Pena said he had never worked with Hernandez outside of the LAPD.
"The main thing I wanted to get straight," concluded Pena, "and I'm surprised that this latest novel didn't cover it correctly, was how I happened to retire twice, you know. The way they've written it, it sounds like I was brought back and put into the case as a plant by the CIA, so that I could steer something around and ... guide the investigation to a point where no-one would ever discover a conspiracy or something ... that's not so. Sirhan himself will tell you that nobody operated with him; he operated by himself. And, quite frankly -- I say this kind of jokingly -- but I wouldn't recognize somebody that was programmed hypnotically to commit an assassination if I was talking to one, you know? I don't know enough about it."
After her four-hour interview, Marilyn Barrett believed that Pena was not directly involved in any nefarious activity but had been given orders from the top to "shut this case down" to give the public closure, and to convey a sense that the police got their man, that the case had been solved quickly and definitively.
She thinks the LAPD did a very bad job, but doesn't think they were actively involved in any wrongdoing. When she brought her petition in 1992, somebody in the DA's office told her the case would never be reopened; they'd had orders from the top to shut it down. She also found memos by DA staff, saying they needed to shut this petition down.
Barrett tried to arrange a short telephone interview for me with Pena, but he was reported to be too old and ill to take my call.
Like Pena, Enrique Hernandez had served with the army in Korea and spoke fluent Spanish. He was thirty-seven years old and had been with the LAPD for fifteen years at the time of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. He was the sole polygraph examiner for SUS, and he talked up his credentials to Sandra Serrano before her test began: "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. Perez Jimenez was the last name. And this is when there was a transition in the government of Venezuela and President Betancourt came in ... there was a great thing involved over there and I tested the gentleman."
So what had an LAPD polygraph officer been doing in South America? Hernandez himself provided the answer for Now It Can Be Told in 1992, when reporter Alexander Johnson confronted him and Hernandez granted his only television interview:
"I conducted an interrogation of Sandra Serrano and my objective was to determine the truth and I think I accomplished that."
"And what was the truth at that point?" asked a determined Johnson.
Hernandez smiled awkwardly and paused, searching for the right words.
"That the statements she made to the police investigators soon after the shooting were made up, and not true."
Hernandez did admit training Venezuelan police officers in the early sixties.
"I was loaned from the Los Angeles Police Department to the Department of State for a mission in Caracas, Venezuela."
"Did you work in any capacity for the CIA?"
"No, sir."
"As a contract agent?"
"In any capacity whatsoever, no ... I know people who have been and are with the CIA, but I've never worked with them."
Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown in a military coup in January 1958 and fled via the Dominican Republic to Miami Beach, where he lived comfortably from February 1958 to 1963, when he was extradited by the Venezuelan government to stand trial, accused of having embezzled two hundred million dollars. He was tried and convicted by the Venezuelan Supreme Court and placed under house arrest until 1968, when he was released and fled to Spain. From this timeline, it seems most likely that Hernandez was training Venezuela police in 1963 when he was called in to help with the trial. Johnson did not ask when and why Hernandez went to Europe or Vietnam.
During the interview with Serrano, Hernandez also stated: "I know the layout of the hotel, and after I arrived in Los Angeles it's the first place they took me" [emphasis added]. This suggests that Hernandez was out of Los Angeles at the time of the assassination, perhaps on another foreign assignment.
Shortly after the assassination, Hernandez was rumored to have swapped his solid middle-class neighborhood for a new home in upscale San Marino. But it wasn't until Hernandez died of cancer on December 18, 2005, at the age of seventy-four, that obituaries sourced by his son Enrique Junior would throw light on his extraordinary career.
Hernandez was born in Jerome, Arizona, in 1931 and moved to Los Angeles with his parents and eight siblings in 1941. After dropping out of high school, he joined the army at seventeen, initially stationed in Japan. He returned to Los Angeles after the Korean War and joined the LAPD in 1953, rising to lieutenant in the detective bureau and ending up in the department's "exclusive Scientific Investigation Department."
"In the early sixties," read the notice, "the Justice Department developed an initiative to send bilingual U.S. law enforcement experts to Latin American nations to offer training on policing techniques. Hernandez was part of the program."
After twenty years with the LAPD, Hernandez retired in 1973.
"From the kitchen table at his Monterey Park home, Hernandez and his wife developed a plan to go into the private security business .... His son said the firm's first major contract was with NASA at Edwards Air Force Base. Other NASA installations quickly followed. The firm now has wholly owned subsidiaries in nineteen countries and employs more than 30,000 people. Although its earnings are not public, some estimates put them at more than $1 billion annually."
There may be some truth in the romantic tale of a billion-dollar company hatched at the Hernandez family kitchen table, but it's a little hard to swallow. It would be a lucky start-up, indeed, that lands its first major contract with NASA. Hernandez's son Enrique Junior is now CEO of Inter-Con and sits on the board of McDonald's, Wells Fargo, and the Tribune Company (owners of the Los Angeles Times).
In interviews, Pena and Hernandez both referred to the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a police assistance program set up during the Kennedy administration in November 1962. Until its demise in 1975, the program trained seventy-five hundred senior officers in U.S. facilities, and more than half a million foreign police overseas.
The program was an aggressive Cold War effort to enhance domestic security among third world allies, and CIA Deputy Director Robert Amory sat on a White House Special Group with Robert Kennedy overseeing its creation. He described OPS as a joint project of the CIA and AID; it was decided AID would be its home, "but the brains are in CIA, so we'll move those brains over to AID.... So we just took the CIA men ... and gave them the mission of training [foreign] police forces using American police forces occasionally as sort of sponsors ... which is dangerous ground because you can get into Gestapo-type tactics and so on ... but essentially bringing to bear good police methods, good filing systems, good fingerprinting systems, good systems of riot control."
The public safety program was expanded within U.S. AID and placed under the control of CIA veteran Byron Engle, who reported directly to the director and deputy director of the CIA. (Engle later personally recruited Pena from the LAPD.)
During his decade as OPS chief, Engle took advantage of early police retirements and started hiring ex-chiefs and technical specialists from police forces across America, attracted by good salaries and exotic climes. He also recruited CIA personnel and supplied cover for agency officers operating abroad.
According to McClintock, OPS "became best known as a conduit for CIA training, assistance, and operational advice to foreign political police, and for linking the United States to the jailers, torturers, and murderers of the most repressive of 'free world' regimes [through] instruction in torture ... the fabrication and use of terrorist devices and assassination weapons ... as well as its key role in the best-known assassination program of them all, Vietnam's Operation PHOENIX," in which at least twenty thousand Vietnamese were killed.
In 1962, President Romulo Betancourt's police force in Venezuela was struggling to control a militant group of Castro-inspired leftists, who had bombed a luxury hotel and attacked the U.S. embassy. According to A. J. Langguth, "under pressure from the Kennedys, Engle borrowed four Spanish-speaking officers from the LAPD and quietly sent them to Caracas to give intensive classes in police work." I think it highly likely Hernandez was one of these four LAPD officers; he later boasted to Sandy Serrano that he had received a personal commendation from Robert Kennedy, presumably after this secret mission.
In 1963, Kennedy helped set up the principal training establishment for the OPS, the International Police Academy (IPA). The basic course ran fifteen weeks and included modules on VIP protection and "Criminal Violence Control," dealing with airline security, bomb threats, kidnapping, extortion, and assassination.
By 1968, its peak year, OPS fielded 458 advisers in thirty-four countries, with a budget of $55.1 million. By 1971, the program had trained more than a million policemen in forty-seven nations, including eighty-five thousand in South Vietnam and a hundred thousand in Brazil.
But the program was by then highly controversial, and had become synonymous with human rights abuse and torture. CIA field operatives had used OPS as an ideal cover to train police forces in the agency's interrogation techniques.
The agency coached military and police interrogators throughout Latin America, promoting methods of torture that became the hallmark of the continent's military dictatorships. AID police advisers tortured political dissidents, and through its field offices in Panama and Buenos Aires, the agency's Technical Services Division shipped polygraph and electroshock machines in diplomatic pouches to public safety offices across Latin America. When embassy staff complained about these abuses, they were reminded that U.S. policy precluded interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Ironically, it took the murder of an American -- Dan Mitrione, a police adviser in Uruguay -- to expose this involvement in torture and hasten the program's demise.
In 1969, Mitrione, the former police chief of Richmond, Indiana, was appointed head of the OPS mission in Montevideo. His deputy, William Cantrell, was a CIA operations officer. The country was beset by strikes, student demonstrations, and a band of urban revolutionaries calling themselves Tupamaros, who captured the public's imagination with outrageous actions and a Robin Hood philosophy. They kidnapped and tried prominent figures before "people's courts" and ransacked an exclusive nightclub, scrawling their slogan on the walls: "Either everyone dances or no one dances."
Mitrione intensified the use of torture as the government fought back. He built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house and demonstrated torture techniques to selected Uruguayan police officers, using beggars taken off the streets, some of whom died during the sessions.
On July 31, 1970, Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros, who demanded the release of 150 prisoners in exchange for his return. Nixon dug his heels in, and the Uruguayan government refused. Ten days later, Mitrione's dead body was found on the backseat of a stolen car. "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere," said the White House, as Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis visited Richmond, Indiana, to stage a benefit show for the family.
Days later, the real story began to emerge. Alejandro Otero, the former Uruguayan chief of police intelligence, confirmed that Mitrione had used "violent techniques of torture ... and a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that it was his family being tortured."
Otero was a CIA agent and had been trained at the IPA in Washington. What finally drove him to speak out was the torture of a female friend of his who was a Tupamaro sympathizer. When Otero complained, he was demoted.
In Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America, OPS continued to train and serve as cover for death squads composed primarily of police officers, who bombed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers with material supplied by the Technical Services Division and engaged in assassination and kidnapping.
In July 1975, finally aroused by persistent allegations of torture and police brutality, Congress cut all funds for "training or advice to police, prisons, or other law enforcement" -- in effect, abolishing OPS.
While the foreign service of Pena and Hernandez may have been innocuous, the Office of Public Safety to which they were attached was implicated in human rights abuses and assassination from the late sixties through the early seventies. As we will see, a legendary CIA operative named David Morales took his own murderous revenge on the Tupamaros while working under OPS cover.
***
Bill Jordan, the Rampart sergeant who interviewed Sirhan in custody, also had an intriguing CV. He joined the U.S. Marines at the age of fifteen in 1941 and served three years in combat in the Pacific. He graduated from the police academy in 1954 and, while with the Intelligence Division, provided security for Senator John Kennedy during the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles and was later assigned to protect Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., when they were in town.
According to his resume, Jordan also attended "special schools" in antiterrorist techniques, special weapons, and riot control "conducted by the Federal Government and the military."
After he retired from the LAPD, Jordan put some of this knowledge to work in 1978 when Costa Gratsos, a close associate of the recently deceased Aristotle Onassis, resurrected a plan to stage a coup d'etat against "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, with the help of exiled Haitian banker Clemard Charles. Jordan told author Peter Evans that his security company had been hired to handle the policing of the island after the takeover.
But the closer Jordan looked at the plan, the less he liked it. "Clemard Charles was the problem. First, he gave me this short list. These are very bad people, they must be eliminated," he said. "Every time I saw him, he'd hand me another list. It was beginning to look like the Haitian phone book. Once a guy like Clemard Charles got in you might be looking back and thinking what a wonderful guy Baby Doc was compared with this butcher."
The invasion never happened, but Jordan's involvement in this world of coups and assassinations must be noted. Jordan died in September 2005, at age eighty-two.
***
There are also a number of intelligence connections to Sirhan's defense investigators, Michael McCowan and Robert Kaiser. During the trial, Kaiser discovered he was under surveillance:
In the middle of the trial, more or less, I was living in a rented house in Hollywood and I had practically nightly conversations with Dr. Diamond about the progress of the trial. Anybody who was eavesdropping on those conversations would have been able to tip off the prosecutors on the strategy of the defense.
So my suspicions were aroused when one day, I realized there was a lot of interference on the line, and I called the phone company and they said they'd send someone out to check the line. And a man came out wearing the denim clothes of a telephone repairman. He spent a bunch of time, maybe a half an hour there, and he said, "Well, things should be okay now," and then he left. Several weeks later, I was in the offices of the prosecuting attorneys, and I saw the same man coming out of one of the offices, and all of a sudden, a light went on over my head. I thought, "Wow, this guy is probably working for the DA's office and if he's tapping my phone, then the DA's office is privy to everything the defense is trying to do." I did not tell Cooper about it. I didn't tell anybody about it, I didn't know what to do.
In retrospect, I probably have to blame myself for at least not telling Cooper about it. It could have led to a mistrial if we'd been able to prove that, but then what? A mistrial, so then we retry him, you know? Cooper, at that point, didn't want to hear it; that's probably why I didn't tell Cooper.... He was tired of this trial.... I could just see him throwing up his hands."
***
In 1999, while preparing an updated edition of his book, Kaiser tried to find out who the telephone repairman may have been. He remembered the fifteen-man investigative unit in the DA's office under the direction of George Stoner and interviewed Clay Anderson, who was part of that team. Anderson said the likeliest candidate for the repairman was their sound technician, Fred East, now deceased. "If East was doing anything illegal, I couldn't admit it [but] I never heard a whisper about [East] doing a wire tap [of anyone working on the Sirhan defense team]. I literally cannot imagine anyone having done that."
"Fred East, Los Angeles County district attorney's investigator," was quoted in a 1964 Time magazine article on bugging devices, and it seems East was, indeed, the wire-tapping specialist at the DA's Bureau of Investigation and quite possibly the man who came to "fix" Kaiser's phone. East was also present when investigators from the DA's office asked Sandra Serrano to reconstruct her story at the Ambassador. He presumably recorded the interview and advised on the impossibility of Serrano having heard gunshots.
Kaiser later gave Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter a written declaration, professing his belief that the prosecution had had him wiretapped.
***
Michael McCowan was still working on the Sirhan case in September 1970, when Sirhan's release was allegedly one of the conditions -- later denied -- for freeing the "Black September" hostages held by Palestinian guerrillas on two hijacked airliners in the Jordanian desert.
Sirhan's mother, Mary, accompanied by her son's new attorney Luke McKissack and "his investigator Michael McCowan," tried to travel to Jordan to discuss the guerrilla demands, but at Kennedy airport in New York, the State Department revoked the passports of the two men and denied Mary Sirhan permission to travel, as the trip "would be prejudicial to the foreign policy of the United States government."
McKissack was preparing Sirhan's appeal at the time, but why was McCowan still working as a pro bono investigator more than a year after the trial? McCowan's partner, Ronald Allen, put it simply: "Mike had been involved all along. You get into something and you don't want to let it down." But others accused McCowan of babysitting Sirhan for the CIA.
By September 1974, McCowan was president of the guard and patrol division of American Protection Industries, supplying the Century Plaza and LA Hilton (and good friends with Frank Hendrix of Ace Guard Services). But he was in trouble again, convicted of giving a federal receiver eleven thousand dollars in return for the security guard service contract for a federally financed housing project. He was placed on five years' probation.
In 1977, McCowan was characterized as "a private eye who specializes in tough insurance claims" in Desmond Wilcox's book, Americans. McCowan recounted a recent mission to Switzerland to retrieve stolen diamonds for an insurance company. "The wrong kind of people" knew about the cache, so he traveled back and forth disguised as a man with a broken neck, hiding the diamonds in his surgical collar and neck brace. He collected twenty-five thousand dollars for less than a week's work.
McCowan's name didn't surface again publicly until 1995, when author Dan Moldea published his book on the case, The Killing of Robert Kennedy.
The book climaxes with three interviews with Sirhan in California's Corcoran prison. In the penultimate chapter, after building a compelling case for conspiracy, Moldea made an abrupt U-turn and declared Sirhan the lone assassin. On the last page of the book, Moldea described a prison visit by McCowan, in which he tried to reconstruct the murder with Sirhan: "Suddenly, in the midst of their conversation, Sirhan started to explain the moment when his eyes met Kennedy's just before he shot him. Shocked by what Sirhan had just admitted, McCowan asked, 'Then why, Sirhan, didn't you shoot him between the eyes?' With no hesitation and no apparent remorse, Sirhan replied, 'Because that son of a bitch turned his head at the last second.'''
Robert Kaiser told Moldea of McCowan's allegations in late May 1994, and Moldea later claimed he asked Sirhan about them during their final meeting the following week. But Moldea was never allowed to see Sirhan alone, and Sirhan and his brother Adel -- who was at all three meetings -- insisted the subject was never raised. Moldea's own notes of the meeting, given to Sirhan to confirm their accuracy, also omit any mention of such a conversation.
Eight months later, Moldea finally located and interviewed McCowan by telephone. McCowan confirmed Kaiser's quote, and signed a statement verifying the story and approving its accuracy. Moldea put it in the book. In a letter to his long-time legal researcher Lynn Mangan dated June 24, 1995, Sirhan wrote the following about the matter: "I flatly deny making the statement Moldea ascribes to me in his book via Kaiser via McCowan. This quote was never mentioned by Moldea during any of his visits with me."
On McCowan, Sirhan wrote: "Whenever he came with the others (he seldom came alone) I told him all I could remember of the shooting night -- the same stuff that I told whoever asked me including the psychiatrists. McCowan was much more interested in my background than in the shooting scene. He always had that smooth chatty 'I am your best friend' attitude -- an insincere chumminess, and he made statements that included the answer or inference that he wanted to establish .... McCowan has very, very seldom come to mind over the years because I realized when I was on Death Row that he did not give a damn about me from the outset, and that he was out for all the glory he could get at my expense, like Parsons and Cooper."
McCowan told Kaiser about Sirhan's alleged comments, but only after the trial.
"McCowan did report Sirhan saying that," Kaiser told me. "And I didn't know whether to believe McCowan or not. McCowan was a puzzle to me. He had his own agenda. There's been some suggestion that Mike McCowan was, in fact, a plant in the defense investigation team for another agency."
Kaiser remembered talking to the FBI's Roger LaJeunesse in 1999, a year before the former agent died, about the curious visit from the man who came to fix his phone. When Kaiser asked him about possible FBI liaisons with the CIA, "I have a vague recollection that he said he thought Michael McCowan was working with the CIA."
It wouldn't have surprised Kaiser. "McCowan was kicked off the LAPD when he got a federal conviction for mail tampering, and he had every reason to cooperate with the CIA/FBI during the case."
Kaiser put me in touch with Pete Noyes, a veteran investigative journalist in Los Angeles, now seventy-five years old and still working in the investigative unit at the local Fox affiliate, Channel 11. Noyes was working for KNXT in Los Angeles on the night of the assassination, the same channel as Don Schulman.
Noyes confirmed that another investigator from the Treasury Department (now deceased) told him that McCowan was planted on the defense team by the CIA to find out anything he could about Sirhan. In return, after the Sirhan trial, his civil rights would be restored after his earlier mail-fraud conviction. Noyes added, "I can't understand how Kaiser didn't know McCowan was CIA, because everybody else seemed to."
Mention of the Treasury brought to mind the only Arabic page in Sirhan's notebook -- a letter written to his mother. One sentence is translated as: "I am also waiting for a check from the American Treasury Department which you are to send (P P Peggy)."
***
When I first tracked Michael McCowan down, he confirmed the telephone interview with Dan Moldea and stood by the alleged Sirhan confession -- "Sirhan said that to me." He said he'd be happy to meet up for an interview when I came to the States, and I asked a few final questions.
"Who were your main contacts at the LAPD?"
"Nobody. I was on the defense team. People have said I was FBI or CIA, but that's all nonsense."
"Have you ever had any indication the CIA were involved?"
"Let's talk about that when you get here."
***
During our interview a few months later, McCowan constantly circled back to three issues that were key to his understanding of the case -- the "many more will come" reference in Sirhan's school textbook; the disputed sighting of Sirhan following Hubert Humphrey down to San Diego; and Sirhan's disputed confession.
He reenacted Sirhan's statement three or four times but broke eye contact with me after each telling. It was the most important point in the interview and, for me, the least convincing.
Toward the end of our conversation, I brought up the accusations of Noyes, Kaiser, LaJeunesse, and others that McCowan had been a plant on the defense team for another agency.
"Roger LaJeunesse was a really good friend of mine," said McCowan. "I always liked him ... and I think he was liaison for the FBI at the Sirhan case, and he would have never said that about me. I don't believe." He seemed genuinely hurt by the idea and sure his friend would never have betrayed him like that.
"Not blow my cover!" he said, followed by a big, hearty laugh.
"And the Treasury guy saying you were CIA -- where would that come from?" I asked.
"That's interesting. Why the Treasury guy? What would it have to do with the Treasury Department?"
I offered, "Apparently, they were one of the agencies doing their own investigation for whatever reason.
"On me or on Kennedy?"
"No, no, on Sirhan .... The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- would that be part of their jurisdiction?"
"Oh, yeah, with the gun thing and all, probably. I don't know. I don't recall ever talking to the Treasury people. Ever."
Pete Noyes later told me his source was in IRS intelligence.
"Just to clarify it," I asked McCowan, "did you ever work in any way with the FBI or CIA as an informant or agent?"
"Never," said McCowan. "Didn't work with the CIA. Was never a CIA operative. Never was an FBI operative. I dealt with some FBI guys and I knew some CIA guys and I could see why somebody would think, 'Okay, I'm planted in there because I've done some strange things in my life ... My present wife thinks I'm a CIA guy.... but I'm not getting a pension! If I was getting a pension from the FBI or the CIA, my wife would know about it! And I'm not ....
"But I don't find it unreasonable for people to think that ... but I don't think they'll ever find or there is any concrete evidence that I've ever been involved with either of those agencies."
"You weren't getting compensated," I asked, "so why did you work for Sirhan from June 1968 through to possibly going out to Jordan (for free) if you weren't a CIA babysitter?"
"Okay, well here's the real simple explanation to that. When I had the opportunity to do this, being an investigator and a lawyer, it's a great opportunity to see how good you are. It was a wonderful experience for me. I didn't expect the money and I didn't write a book about it or I didn't try to promote it. I never have given an interview, really. It just was something that was exciting for me to do and I did it."
Although he seemed wary recalling the details of the case, McCowan was at his most relaxed and jovial discussing these accusations, and I found his answers pretty convincing. As he conceded, he'd done a lot of strange things in his life and seemed to have a tendency to schmooze various agencies for information, blurring the boundaries of his relationship with the prosecution, LAPD, FBI, and Secret Service; but I found nothing concrete to tie Michael McCowan to the CIA.
***
In the mid-nineties, Jean Scherrer, the LAPD's "man who wasn't there," also reappeared. When author C. David Heymann interviewed former LAPD officer Daniel Stewart for his book on Robert Kennedy, the former head of VIP security tagged along.
Stewart had been assigned to Good Samaritan Hospital on the night of the shooting and was present with Sergeant Bill Jordan at the autopsy. Scherrer claimed to be the LAPD official assigned to work with Kennedy, went along to the hotel because he had "a premonition," and later was Rafer Johnson's chaperone when he delivered the gun to the LAPD. As noted previously, Scherrer told Heymann that for five thousand dollars, he would go into more detail about the assassination.
In 1996, the paths of Scherrer and Michael McCowan crossed in an apparent attempt to compromise Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter and legal researcher Rose Lynn Mangan.
Photographer Scott Enyart was suing the city of Los Angeles over pictures he had taken on the night of the shooting that the LAPD confiscated and never returned. Enyart claimed he was in the pantry, standing on a steam table at the time of the shooting, taking pictures of the senator. When the police finally returned his photographs, the images of those key moments in the pantry were missing.
Two weeks before the case began, Sirhan's researcher Rose Lynn Mangan was approached by a neighbor in Carson City, Nevada, by the name of Jerry Vaccaro. Vaccaro told Mangan he'd been interviewed during the investigation into the JFK assassination and, it turned out, he was a friend of Mike McCowan's dating back to the mail fraud charges in 1966.
Vaccaro set up a lunch meeting in Burbank with Mangan, Adel Sirhan, and Larry Teeter, and he brought along Jean Scherrer. According to Vaccaro, Mike McCowan had applied for a presidential pardon in the mid-seventies to clear the mail-fraud case from his record. The pardon was denied, but McCowan's petition included confidential FBI documents showing that McCowan had been an FBI plant on the Sirhan defense team. In return for these embarrassing documents, Scherrer and Vaccaro wanted the movie rights to Sirhan's life story.
Mangan and Teeter immediately smelled a rat and flatly turned the offer down. Teeter wrote to Police Chief Willie Williams and the DA's office documenting the offer. The timing was worrying -- it seemed an obvious "sting operation" to compromise Mangan before she testified at the Enyart trial. The only response they ever got from the authorities was a postcard of acknowledgment.
When I asked Mike McCowan about the offer, he said he'd never heard of Larry Teeter and knew nothing about it. I spoke briefly to Danny Stewart, but he didn't want to discuss the case -- "most of the LAPD guys prefer not to." He'd lost touch with Jean Scherrer, and I haven't been able to find him.
***
When I discussed a possible assassination plot with seasoned operatives, they invariably pointed to a man on the inside as an essential element of such an operation. He could have been an insider working for Kennedy or the hotel who knew what was going on and could have, perhaps unwittingly, passed information to the plotters or been manipulated into directing the senator into the "killing zone."
While I don't suspect Pierre Salinger of any conscious connection to the shooting, some of his business relationships are worth examining with this in mind.
In Salinger's 1995 autobiography, P.S. A Memoir, he writes of his friendship with Bob Six, the founder of Continental Airlines. In the summer of 1965, Six was setting up a subsidiary in Southeast Asia called Continental Air Services (CAS). It would provide air services to the CIA as an alternative to the agency's own carrier, Air America, which was in danger of being banned from certain countries due to regional tensions over Vietnam. CAS would have no direct links to the agency; all contracts would go through the usual cover organization, AID.
Six had meetings at the CIA with William Colby, then director of covert operations and later head of the CIA. Colby told Six he needed someone with top secret government clearance to work at a high level in the new company. Salinger had such clearance during his career in the Kennedy White House and was perfect for the job.
Salinger accepted the offer "because it sounded like an exciting job" and flew out with Six to start work at the new headquarters of CAS -- a converted motel in Vientiane, Laos. CAS would take over from Air America in supplying the U.S.-funded Meo army to the north, who were repelling North Vietnamese incursions along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Each morning, CAS DC-3s took off with sacks of "hard rice," full of military equipment to be parachuted to the Meo. According to Salinger, half the staff had CIA links. CAS also made daily reconnaissance flights, to report on North Vietnamese troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh trail, information that was used by the U.S. Air Force for their covert and illegal bombing raids in Laos.
Salinger worked for Continental Air Services for the next two years, bringing him into the same orbit as CIA operatives Tom Clines and David Morales, whom we'll discuss in the next chapter.
Another odd Salinger connection was Robert Maheu, right-hand man to Howard Hughes and the liaison connecting the CIA, John Rosselli, and the Chicago Mob during earlier attempts to assassinate Castro. During the California campaign, Kennedy staff decided to approach Hughes for a campaign contribution.
Salinger thought Hughes was approachable and got the assignment -- "I knew Hughes' right-hand man, Robert Maheu, quite well, so I called and made an appointment with him." The morning after their meeting, Maheu called to say that Hughes had agreed to give Kennedy twenty-five thousand dollars.
By 1968, the Hughes organization, through Maheu, was working hand in glove with the CIA. John Meier was Hughes's third in command and an arch-nemesis of Maheu's. In an interview with researcher Lisa Pease, Meier claimed that Maheu had connections to Thane Eugene Cesar and the upper ranks of the LAPD. According to Pease, "Meier saw enough dealings [within the Hughes organization] before and after the assassination to cause him to approach J. Edgar Hoover with what he knew ... Hoover expressed his frustration, saying words to the effect of "Yes, we know this was a Maheu operation. People think I'm so powerful, but when it comes to the CIA, there's nothing I can do."
I subsequently met Meier in person, and while he claims to know who financed, organized, and carried out the assassination of Robert Kennedy, I have yet to see any evidence of this.
***
When they retired, two legendary figures of American intelligence also held photographs of Robert Kennedy's autopsy in their personal safes -- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. As author Anthony Summers noted, of all the famous deaths in Hoover's long career, the gruesome color pictures of the RFK autopsy are the only death pictures preserved in his official and confidential files, segregated from the main FBI filing system.
Angleton's colleagues were astonished by their bizarre find in his personal safe when he retired. They had no idea why Angleton had the pictures or "why it was appropriate for CIA staff files to contain them. They were accordingly destroyed."
http://www.naderlibrary.com/RFKREBORN.wh...bby.16.htmSIXTEEN: Intelligence Connections
It's tempting to write off the LAPD's bullying, incompetence, omission, and destruction and manipulation of evidence as simply the cover-up of a botched investigation -- the avoidance of another Dallas, by any means necessary -- until you see the connections fanning out from the department to other government agencies, specifically the CIA.
By late 1967, LBJ was besieged by the antiwar movement. From his bunker at the White House, he looked out at the student dissent and disgust with government and could not believe it was the work of true Americans. Foreign influence must be at play, corrupting American youth, and he encouraged the CIA to root it out with the launch of Operation Chaos, a domestic surveillance operation on the protest movement and the Black Panthers. Through a network of informants and agent provocateurs, Chaos would determine if foreign powers were funding and fomenting this domestic unrest.
The program was tightly held, known only to director Richard Helms and his top lieutenants, Richard Ober and Cord Meyer, who helped establish and run it. One of the main cities targeted was Los Angeles, and links were established with the intelligence division of the LAPD, which was also responsible for the security of VIPs visiting Los Angeles. In sync with this effort, the CIA provided training to police departments in guerrilla techniques and tools of urban warfare. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told researcher Betsy Langman that while he was with the agency in 1967, the Chicago and Los Angeles police departments received several days of "training" from the Clandestine Services Division. When Marchetti asked why a dozen or so LAPD officers were at CIA headquarters, he was told it was a "special," "sensitive" activity that had been directly approved by the CIA director.
In 1982, author Philip Melanson obtained a three-hundred-page "Domestic Police Training" file from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act. These documents confirmed that during the sixties and seventies, the CIA had secret ties to police departments across the country, providing training and equipment in exchange for surveillance, break-ins, and the provision of police credentials to CIA operatives. Los Angeles was one of the cities that received this special training.
The two men who had effective day-to-day control of the RFK investigation also had CIA connections. As day watch supervisor, Lieutenant Manuel Pena had to sign off and approve every report and decide who to reinterview and who to dismiss as the case was prepared for trial. This was the same Manny Pena who scrawled across several blank interview summaries relating to Sandra Serrano, "Polka-dot story of Serrano phony," "Polka dot story Serrano N.G."
Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez was Pena's chief interrogator, called on to administer polygraph tests to troublesome witnesses to determine if they were telling the truth. Without fail, whenever claims of conspiracy were sent to Hernandez, he bullied witnesses into retractions. Luckily, many of these tapes survive, so we can still hear the mockery Hernandez's bullying tactics make of this supposedly objective discipline. Hernandez also led the investigation probing possible conspiracy and oversaw the background checks on Sirhan and his family.
Manuel Pena joined the LAPD in 1941 and served in the Pacific with the Naval Air Corps during World War II. He spent two years in Verdun, France, as a criminal investigator for the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and spoke fluent French and Spanish. He went on to spend sixteen years of his police career working in Robbery-Homicide, reaching the rank of lieutenant. Robert Kaiser recalls his nickname at LAPD was "Shoot 'em up Manny Pena" -- "he killed several people in the line of duty, which wasn't very normal."
In November 1967, Pena retired from the department with a surprise testimonial dinner at the Sportsman's Club attended by Chief Reddin and top department brass. He was to accept a position with the Agency for International Development (AID), a State Department aid agency that among other roles served as a regular cover identity for CIA operatives abroad. He would serve as a "public safety adviser" and train the police forces of friendly dictatorships in sophisticated interrogation techniques to use on leftist insurgents and political dissidents.
FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse had known Pena for years and was the FBI liaison to the LAPD during the RFK case. LaJeunesse said Pena left the LAPD for a "special training unit" at CIA's Camp Peary base in Virginia. After nine weeks' training, he would be posted to Latin America, where he could use his Spanish. Pena had been doing special assignments for the CIA for a decade, mostly under AID cover. On some of these, he worked with CIA operative Dan Mitrione, a "US police adviser" who taught interrogation and torture techniques to the ruling junta in Uruguay and was killed by the Tupamaro guerrillas in 1970 as a result.
Please have a seat. Sorry I'm late.
I know how long you've had to wait.
I did not forget your documents
No time to waste, why not begin?
Here's how it works, I've got these faces
You give them names, I won't deport you
Make sure you face my tape recorder
Make no mistake, this fountain pen
Could put you on a plane by ten
And by the way, your next of kin
I know which house she's hiding in
So now that you know whose skin you're saving
In this photograph, who's this one waving?
I think you know, so speak up, amigo
It says here by trade you were a fisherman
Well I'll bet you Indians can really reel them in
If you get the chance
You should try to get up to Lake Michigan
Well maybe, but then again, anyway...
Where were we then? Is he your friend?
Well I recommend that you look again
Where does he stay? What is his name?
There is no shame. He'd do the same
So what do you say? I don't have all day
It's up to you. Which will it be
Good citizen, or poor campesino?
My dad used to rent us this place in Ontario
He showed us how to cast the line and tie the flies
He used to say God rewards us for letting the small ones go
Maybe, but I don't know
Anyway, it's easy to bite. You can't snap a line.
You just take the bait, you can't fight the hook
Hurts less if you don't try to dive
Senor, as you know I was a fisherman
How full the nets came in
We hauled them up by hand
But when we fled, I left them just out past the coral reefs
They're waiting there for me
Running deep
-- Fishing, by Joan Baez
Pena's new career didn't last long. Robert Kennedy announced that he would run for president on March 16, 1968 and Pena was back in Los Angeles by April. Investigative reporter Fernando Faura was walking along a corridor in Parker Center one day when he noticed a familiar figure behind heavy horn-rim glasses and a black handlebar mustache.
"Hey, Manny, I damn near didn't recognize you with that disguise!"
Pena stopped and explained the AID job wasn't what he expected, so he quit and came back to Los Angeles.
When the LAPD subsequently unveiled Special Unit Senator (SUS), a special task force to investigate the assassination, the man put in charge of preparing the case for trial and supervising the day watch investigators was Manny Pena.
In his 1970 book on the case, SUS Chief Robert Houghton wrote that Pena had "connections with intelligence agencies in several countries." In 1975, Pena's brother, a school principal, was interviewed for a local television show by host Stan Bohrman. During the commercial break, he mentioned how proud he was of his brother's service with the CIA. "Nobody's supposed to know about that. It's supposed to be secret."
In 1977, researcher Betsy Langman interviewed Pena -- then retired from the LAPD, presumably for good -- and asked about his intelligence ties.
"I worked with the AID program out of the Office of Public Safety," said Pena. (The AID program had been unmasked in the mid-1970s as one of the CIA's main covers for clandestine activity abroad.)
"Is AID not CIA?" asked Langman.
"Ah, not to my knowledge," said Pena.
"Was your work away from LAPD in 1967 going to be for AID?"
"Yeah."
"What type of work was it?"
"Ah, that I can't ah ... I don't think that's anybody's business."
***
In 1992, while attorney Marilyn Barrett was working with Paul Schrade on a new petition to reopen the Sirhan case, she discovered that the uncle of a good friend of hers was none other than Manny Pena. Barrett kindly sent me CD copies of a four-hour interview she subsequently conducted with Pena, in which he attempted to correct misconceptions in what he calls "these novels" about the assassination.
Pena was, by that time, seventy-three years old and comes across as a disarming figure, a charming uncle seemingly open about all aspects of his career, and a world away from his sinister-looking LAPD ID photo taken in the late sixties.
Pena was happy to discuss his "intelligence background" outside the LAPD. During his two years in France, he worked closely with the army's Counter-Intelligence Corps and made lots of friends in the intelligence community. He also built up strong connections with Interpol: a senior official in the Mexican government was his "number one connection into Latin America," and he'd make frequent trips down there.
"Our own Internal Revenue used to use me to trace assets in Latin America when they wanted to keep away from diplomatic problems with the State Department. I could get information out of Latin America better than the government through personal friends ... and [LAPD] Chief Parker allowed them to use me providing I never [talked about it] .... If you want to call that an intelligence background, there's nothing mysterious about it.
"In 1967, I decided to retire and go in the Aid for International Development part of the State Department; we call it AID. I was sent to Washington, DC, for orientation at the Foreign Service Institute. I went through their orientation and I was told I was going to be sent to Latin America. Some of the instructors that talk to you there are from CIA, and I was made privy to how to read secret materials and stuff like that, which I can't discuss with you for obvious reasons."
At the time, Pena was recently divorced and had left his car and furniture in Los Angeles. ''After I finished the orientation school, the chief of the AID Program, Byron Engle, told me they couldn't send me to Latin America; they wanted to keep me in Washington, DC, at their International Police Academy," where they trained a lot of Latin American officials.
Engle told him it was a permanent assignment, so he got his car sent to Washington by government transportation. "When the car arrived, they told me I owed them $965. I said, well, that couldn't be -- the State Department said they were paying." But he was told his posting didn't qualify as a permanent change of station, so the government couldn't pay for it. Engle refused to pay, so Pena called Chief Reddin, who was a close friend, and Reddin said, "Tell them to go to hell and come home."
When he'd left the LAPD, Pena still had four months time-in-lieu on the books, so there were still a couple of weeks left before his official retirement date. So he got his car back and drove back to Los Angeles, "and this is what has caused this confusion that these writers write about ... that I was retired with a great deal of fanfare, ... and then all of a sudden, in two months, I'm back on the job over here and mysteriously returned."
The night of the shooting, Pena was home alone in an apartment in Van Nuys, and a friend called and said, "Switch on the TV; they just shot Kennedy." Two or three days later, Chief Houghton handpicked Pena as lead supervisor for the investigation. They picked "just about the forty sharpest guys in the department in every category" and set up SUS:
I was assigned to supervise the case preparation for trial, the conspiracy allegation investigation, [and] I arranged to have the backgrounds of the entire Sirhan family investigated in Jordan because the main defense attorney Grant Cooper was pushing diminished capacity -- that Sirhan had suffered so much as a child and had gone through all kinds of horrible bombings in his home town in Jordan.... Well, I contacted the very same guy I fought with in the State Department, Byron Engle in Washington, DC, and I told him I need his help and I wanted the agents to conduct this portion of the investigation for me, and he says, "Good to hear from you," and he had agents -- some of them from the CIA and some of them from the State Department -- look into it, and they did a beautiful job.
And they established that Sirhan was never within 130 miles of any bombing in his youth ... this was a fairy tale that Grant Cooper made up, and we busted him real wide with that in the trial. He was flabbergasted and a little angry that we had gotten the government to do that. But they did it for me, at my request. So we still had a friendship going there, even though I quit them.
It's ludicrous to state that Jerusalem, where Sirhan grew up, was never within 130 miles of bombing during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This illustrates how deluded Pena was during the original investigation, and how far the prosecution went to distort Sirhan's upbringing. The interview was yielding intriguing information on Pena's CIA links, and Barrett kept him talking.
"And these are the same people that I went to Latin America for later on."
"What was that trip about?" asked Barrett.
In late 1969 or early 1970, the State Department sent a three-man team to Colombia -- the assistant attorney general of California, Howard Jewel, one of the counsels for a Supreme Court justice, and Pena as their investigative consultant.
"We were asked to make a survey of their criminal justice system," recalled Pena, "because there were complaints that people were disappearing in the justice system. They'd go in, be arrested, be arraigned, and go to court, and nobody'd ever hear of them again." The State Department asked him to stay on in Latin America for three-year stints in three different countries, to help reorganize their investigative systems, but, with the drug lords and corruption, Pena thought, "I don't want to stay down here, this is too damn dangerous."
When Pena got the check for the job, "it was paid from the International Legal Center, based in New York. I said, 'This isn't from the State Department,' and I had a detective friend in New York PD check out who it was. International Legal Center was a mail drop; it never existed and yet I got paid and the IRS accepted my tax report, so I had a suspicion it was probably a CIA operation down there. But I've never been told. That's just the policy in government work. If you don't need to know, they don't tell you .... I have never told ... or admitted to anybody that I have been or am a CIA agent because no one has ever told me, 'Manny, you're actually a CIA agent."
"Do you think AID is a front for the CIA?" asked Barrett.
"It's been rumored very highly." Pena laughed.
Barrett also asked Pena about Hernandez's intelligence background.
''I'd rather let Hank explain for himself. He's never been with the CI ... AID, that I know of ... he was on the Sirhan case with us; he was a darned good polygraph man -- the best -- we used him a lot; he did a lot of the background investigation, too, on the conspiracy things. But I've never worked an intelligence assignment with him, so I don't know." Pena said he had never worked with Hernandez outside of the LAPD.
"The main thing I wanted to get straight," concluded Pena, "and I'm surprised that this latest novel didn't cover it correctly, was how I happened to retire twice, you know. The way they've written it, it sounds like I was brought back and put into the case as a plant by the CIA, so that I could steer something around and ... guide the investigation to a point where no-one would ever discover a conspiracy or something ... that's not so. Sirhan himself will tell you that nobody operated with him; he operated by himself. And, quite frankly -- I say this kind of jokingly -- but I wouldn't recognize somebody that was programmed hypnotically to commit an assassination if I was talking to one, you know? I don't know enough about it."
After her four-hour interview, Marilyn Barrett believed that Pena was not directly involved in any nefarious activity but had been given orders from the top to "shut this case down" to give the public closure, and to convey a sense that the police got their man, that the case had been solved quickly and definitively.
She thinks the LAPD did a very bad job, but doesn't think they were actively involved in any wrongdoing. When she brought her petition in 1992, somebody in the DA's office told her the case would never be reopened; they'd had orders from the top to shut it down. She also found memos by DA staff, saying they needed to shut this petition down.
Barrett tried to arrange a short telephone interview for me with Pena, but he was reported to be too old and ill to take my call.
Like Pena, Enrique Hernandez had served with the army in Korea and spoke fluent Spanish. He was thirty-seven years old and had been with the LAPD for fifteen years at the time of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. He was the sole polygraph examiner for SUS, and he talked up his credentials to Sandra Serrano before her test began: "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. Perez Jimenez was the last name. And this is when there was a transition in the government of Venezuela and President Betancourt came in ... there was a great thing involved over there and I tested the gentleman."
So what had an LAPD polygraph officer been doing in South America? Hernandez himself provided the answer for Now It Can Be Told in 1992, when reporter Alexander Johnson confronted him and Hernandez granted his only television interview:
"I conducted an interrogation of Sandra Serrano and my objective was to determine the truth and I think I accomplished that."
"And what was the truth at that point?" asked a determined Johnson.
Hernandez smiled awkwardly and paused, searching for the right words.
"That the statements she made to the police investigators soon after the shooting were made up, and not true."
Hernandez did admit training Venezuelan police officers in the early sixties.
"I was loaned from the Los Angeles Police Department to the Department of State for a mission in Caracas, Venezuela."
"Did you work in any capacity for the CIA?"
"No, sir."
"As a contract agent?"
"In any capacity whatsoever, no ... I know people who have been and are with the CIA, but I've never worked with them."
Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown in a military coup in January 1958 and fled via the Dominican Republic to Miami Beach, where he lived comfortably from February 1958 to 1963, when he was extradited by the Venezuelan government to stand trial, accused of having embezzled two hundred million dollars. He was tried and convicted by the Venezuelan Supreme Court and placed under house arrest until 1968, when he was released and fled to Spain. From this timeline, it seems most likely that Hernandez was training Venezuela police in 1963 when he was called in to help with the trial. Johnson did not ask when and why Hernandez went to Europe or Vietnam.
During the interview with Serrano, Hernandez also stated: "I know the layout of the hotel, and after I arrived in Los Angeles it's the first place they took me" [emphasis added]. This suggests that Hernandez was out of Los Angeles at the time of the assassination, perhaps on another foreign assignment.
Shortly after the assassination, Hernandez was rumored to have swapped his solid middle-class neighborhood for a new home in upscale San Marino. But it wasn't until Hernandez died of cancer on December 18, 2005, at the age of seventy-four, that obituaries sourced by his son Enrique Junior would throw light on his extraordinary career.
Hernandez was born in Jerome, Arizona, in 1931 and moved to Los Angeles with his parents and eight siblings in 1941. After dropping out of high school, he joined the army at seventeen, initially stationed in Japan. He returned to Los Angeles after the Korean War and joined the LAPD in 1953, rising to lieutenant in the detective bureau and ending up in the department's "exclusive Scientific Investigation Department."
"In the early sixties," read the notice, "the Justice Department developed an initiative to send bilingual U.S. law enforcement experts to Latin American nations to offer training on policing techniques. Hernandez was part of the program."
After twenty years with the LAPD, Hernandez retired in 1973.
"From the kitchen table at his Monterey Park home, Hernandez and his wife developed a plan to go into the private security business .... His son said the firm's first major contract was with NASA at Edwards Air Force Base. Other NASA installations quickly followed. The firm now has wholly owned subsidiaries in nineteen countries and employs more than 30,000 people. Although its earnings are not public, some estimates put them at more than $1 billion annually."
There may be some truth in the romantic tale of a billion-dollar company hatched at the Hernandez family kitchen table, but it's a little hard to swallow. It would be a lucky start-up, indeed, that lands its first major contract with NASA. Hernandez's son Enrique Junior is now CEO of Inter-Con and sits on the board of McDonald's, Wells Fargo, and the Tribune Company (owners of the Los Angeles Times).
In interviews, Pena and Hernandez both referred to the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a police assistance program set up during the Kennedy administration in November 1962. Until its demise in 1975, the program trained seventy-five hundred senior officers in U.S. facilities, and more than half a million foreign police overseas.
The program was an aggressive Cold War effort to enhance domestic security among third world allies, and CIA Deputy Director Robert Amory sat on a White House Special Group with Robert Kennedy overseeing its creation. He described OPS as a joint project of the CIA and AID; it was decided AID would be its home, "but the brains are in CIA, so we'll move those brains over to AID.... So we just took the CIA men ... and gave them the mission of training [foreign] police forces using American police forces occasionally as sort of sponsors ... which is dangerous ground because you can get into Gestapo-type tactics and so on ... but essentially bringing to bear good police methods, good filing systems, good fingerprinting systems, good systems of riot control."
The public safety program was expanded within U.S. AID and placed under the control of CIA veteran Byron Engle, who reported directly to the director and deputy director of the CIA. (Engle later personally recruited Pena from the LAPD.)
During his decade as OPS chief, Engle took advantage of early police retirements and started hiring ex-chiefs and technical specialists from police forces across America, attracted by good salaries and exotic climes. He also recruited CIA personnel and supplied cover for agency officers operating abroad.
According to McClintock, OPS "became best known as a conduit for CIA training, assistance, and operational advice to foreign political police, and for linking the United States to the jailers, torturers, and murderers of the most repressive of 'free world' regimes [through] instruction in torture ... the fabrication and use of terrorist devices and assassination weapons ... as well as its key role in the best-known assassination program of them all, Vietnam's Operation PHOENIX," in which at least twenty thousand Vietnamese were killed.
In 1962, President Romulo Betancourt's police force in Venezuela was struggling to control a militant group of Castro-inspired leftists, who had bombed a luxury hotel and attacked the U.S. embassy. According to A. J. Langguth, "under pressure from the Kennedys, Engle borrowed four Spanish-speaking officers from the LAPD and quietly sent them to Caracas to give intensive classes in police work." I think it highly likely Hernandez was one of these four LAPD officers; he later boasted to Sandy Serrano that he had received a personal commendation from Robert Kennedy, presumably after this secret mission.
In 1963, Kennedy helped set up the principal training establishment for the OPS, the International Police Academy (IPA). The basic course ran fifteen weeks and included modules on VIP protection and "Criminal Violence Control," dealing with airline security, bomb threats, kidnapping, extortion, and assassination.
By 1968, its peak year, OPS fielded 458 advisers in thirty-four countries, with a budget of $55.1 million. By 1971, the program had trained more than a million policemen in forty-seven nations, including eighty-five thousand in South Vietnam and a hundred thousand in Brazil.
But the program was by then highly controversial, and had become synonymous with human rights abuse and torture. CIA field operatives had used OPS as an ideal cover to train police forces in the agency's interrogation techniques.
The agency coached military and police interrogators throughout Latin America, promoting methods of torture that became the hallmark of the continent's military dictatorships. AID police advisers tortured political dissidents, and through its field offices in Panama and Buenos Aires, the agency's Technical Services Division shipped polygraph and electroshock machines in diplomatic pouches to public safety offices across Latin America. When embassy staff complained about these abuses, they were reminded that U.S. policy precluded interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Ironically, it took the murder of an American -- Dan Mitrione, a police adviser in Uruguay -- to expose this involvement in torture and hasten the program's demise.
In 1969, Mitrione, the former police chief of Richmond, Indiana, was appointed head of the OPS mission in Montevideo. His deputy, William Cantrell, was a CIA operations officer. The country was beset by strikes, student demonstrations, and a band of urban revolutionaries calling themselves Tupamaros, who captured the public's imagination with outrageous actions and a Robin Hood philosophy. They kidnapped and tried prominent figures before "people's courts" and ransacked an exclusive nightclub, scrawling their slogan on the walls: "Either everyone dances or no one dances."
Mitrione intensified the use of torture as the government fought back. He built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house and demonstrated torture techniques to selected Uruguayan police officers, using beggars taken off the streets, some of whom died during the sessions.
On July 31, 1970, Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros, who demanded the release of 150 prisoners in exchange for his return. Nixon dug his heels in, and the Uruguayan government refused. Ten days later, Mitrione's dead body was found on the backseat of a stolen car. "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere," said the White House, as Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis visited Richmond, Indiana, to stage a benefit show for the family.
Days later, the real story began to emerge. Alejandro Otero, the former Uruguayan chief of police intelligence, confirmed that Mitrione had used "violent techniques of torture ... and a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that it was his family being tortured."
Otero was a CIA agent and had been trained at the IPA in Washington. What finally drove him to speak out was the torture of a female friend of his who was a Tupamaro sympathizer. When Otero complained, he was demoted.
In Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America, OPS continued to train and serve as cover for death squads composed primarily of police officers, who bombed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers with material supplied by the Technical Services Division and engaged in assassination and kidnapping.
In July 1975, finally aroused by persistent allegations of torture and police brutality, Congress cut all funds for "training or advice to police, prisons, or other law enforcement" -- in effect, abolishing OPS.
While the foreign service of Pena and Hernandez may have been innocuous, the Office of Public Safety to which they were attached was implicated in human rights abuses and assassination from the late sixties through the early seventies. As we will see, a legendary CIA operative named David Morales took his own murderous revenge on the Tupamaros while working under OPS cover.
***
Bill Jordan, the Rampart sergeant who interviewed Sirhan in custody, also had an intriguing CV. He joined the U.S. Marines at the age of fifteen in 1941 and served three years in combat in the Pacific. He graduated from the police academy in 1954 and, while with the Intelligence Division, provided security for Senator John Kennedy during the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles and was later assigned to protect Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., when they were in town.
According to his resume, Jordan also attended "special schools" in antiterrorist techniques, special weapons, and riot control "conducted by the Federal Government and the military."
After he retired from the LAPD, Jordan put some of this knowledge to work in 1978 when Costa Gratsos, a close associate of the recently deceased Aristotle Onassis, resurrected a plan to stage a coup d'etat against "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, with the help of exiled Haitian banker Clemard Charles. Jordan told author Peter Evans that his security company had been hired to handle the policing of the island after the takeover.
But the closer Jordan looked at the plan, the less he liked it. "Clemard Charles was the problem. First, he gave me this short list. These are very bad people, they must be eliminated," he said. "Every time I saw him, he'd hand me another list. It was beginning to look like the Haitian phone book. Once a guy like Clemard Charles got in you might be looking back and thinking what a wonderful guy Baby Doc was compared with this butcher."
The invasion never happened, but Jordan's involvement in this world of coups and assassinations must be noted. Jordan died in September 2005, at age eighty-two.
***
There are also a number of intelligence connections to Sirhan's defense investigators, Michael McCowan and Robert Kaiser. During the trial, Kaiser discovered he was under surveillance:
In the middle of the trial, more or less, I was living in a rented house in Hollywood and I had practically nightly conversations with Dr. Diamond about the progress of the trial. Anybody who was eavesdropping on those conversations would have been able to tip off the prosecutors on the strategy of the defense.
So my suspicions were aroused when one day, I realized there was a lot of interference on the line, and I called the phone company and they said they'd send someone out to check the line. And a man came out wearing the denim clothes of a telephone repairman. He spent a bunch of time, maybe a half an hour there, and he said, "Well, things should be okay now," and then he left. Several weeks later, I was in the offices of the prosecuting attorneys, and I saw the same man coming out of one of the offices, and all of a sudden, a light went on over my head. I thought, "Wow, this guy is probably working for the DA's office and if he's tapping my phone, then the DA's office is privy to everything the defense is trying to do." I did not tell Cooper about it. I didn't tell anybody about it, I didn't know what to do.
In retrospect, I probably have to blame myself for at least not telling Cooper about it. It could have led to a mistrial if we'd been able to prove that, but then what? A mistrial, so then we retry him, you know? Cooper, at that point, didn't want to hear it; that's probably why I didn't tell Cooper.... He was tired of this trial.... I could just see him throwing up his hands."
***
In 1999, while preparing an updated edition of his book, Kaiser tried to find out who the telephone repairman may have been. He remembered the fifteen-man investigative unit in the DA's office under the direction of George Stoner and interviewed Clay Anderson, who was part of that team. Anderson said the likeliest candidate for the repairman was their sound technician, Fred East, now deceased. "If East was doing anything illegal, I couldn't admit it [but] I never heard a whisper about [East] doing a wire tap [of anyone working on the Sirhan defense team]. I literally cannot imagine anyone having done that."
"Fred East, Los Angeles County district attorney's investigator," was quoted in a 1964 Time magazine article on bugging devices, and it seems East was, indeed, the wire-tapping specialist at the DA's Bureau of Investigation and quite possibly the man who came to "fix" Kaiser's phone. East was also present when investigators from the DA's office asked Sandra Serrano to reconstruct her story at the Ambassador. He presumably recorded the interview and advised on the impossibility of Serrano having heard gunshots.
Kaiser later gave Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter a written declaration, professing his belief that the prosecution had had him wiretapped.
***
Michael McCowan was still working on the Sirhan case in September 1970, when Sirhan's release was allegedly one of the conditions -- later denied -- for freeing the "Black September" hostages held by Palestinian guerrillas on two hijacked airliners in the Jordanian desert.
Sirhan's mother, Mary, accompanied by her son's new attorney Luke McKissack and "his investigator Michael McCowan," tried to travel to Jordan to discuss the guerrilla demands, but at Kennedy airport in New York, the State Department revoked the passports of the two men and denied Mary Sirhan permission to travel, as the trip "would be prejudicial to the foreign policy of the United States government."
McKissack was preparing Sirhan's appeal at the time, but why was McCowan still working as a pro bono investigator more than a year after the trial? McCowan's partner, Ronald Allen, put it simply: "Mike had been involved all along. You get into something and you don't want to let it down." But others accused McCowan of babysitting Sirhan for the CIA.
By September 1974, McCowan was president of the guard and patrol division of American Protection Industries, supplying the Century Plaza and LA Hilton (and good friends with Frank Hendrix of Ace Guard Services). But he was in trouble again, convicted of giving a federal receiver eleven thousand dollars in return for the security guard service contract for a federally financed housing project. He was placed on five years' probation.
In 1977, McCowan was characterized as "a private eye who specializes in tough insurance claims" in Desmond Wilcox's book, Americans. McCowan recounted a recent mission to Switzerland to retrieve stolen diamonds for an insurance company. "The wrong kind of people" knew about the cache, so he traveled back and forth disguised as a man with a broken neck, hiding the diamonds in his surgical collar and neck brace. He collected twenty-five thousand dollars for less than a week's work.
McCowan's name didn't surface again publicly until 1995, when author Dan Moldea published his book on the case, The Killing of Robert Kennedy.
The book climaxes with three interviews with Sirhan in California's Corcoran prison. In the penultimate chapter, after building a compelling case for conspiracy, Moldea made an abrupt U-turn and declared Sirhan the lone assassin. On the last page of the book, Moldea described a prison visit by McCowan, in which he tried to reconstruct the murder with Sirhan: "Suddenly, in the midst of their conversation, Sirhan started to explain the moment when his eyes met Kennedy's just before he shot him. Shocked by what Sirhan had just admitted, McCowan asked, 'Then why, Sirhan, didn't you shoot him between the eyes?' With no hesitation and no apparent remorse, Sirhan replied, 'Because that son of a bitch turned his head at the last second.'''
Robert Kaiser told Moldea of McCowan's allegations in late May 1994, and Moldea later claimed he asked Sirhan about them during their final meeting the following week. But Moldea was never allowed to see Sirhan alone, and Sirhan and his brother Adel -- who was at all three meetings -- insisted the subject was never raised. Moldea's own notes of the meeting, given to Sirhan to confirm their accuracy, also omit any mention of such a conversation.
Eight months later, Moldea finally located and interviewed McCowan by telephone. McCowan confirmed Kaiser's quote, and signed a statement verifying the story and approving its accuracy. Moldea put it in the book. In a letter to his long-time legal researcher Lynn Mangan dated June 24, 1995, Sirhan wrote the following about the matter: "I flatly deny making the statement Moldea ascribes to me in his book via Kaiser via McCowan. This quote was never mentioned by Moldea during any of his visits with me."
On McCowan, Sirhan wrote: "Whenever he came with the others (he seldom came alone) I told him all I could remember of the shooting night -- the same stuff that I told whoever asked me including the psychiatrists. McCowan was much more interested in my background than in the shooting scene. He always had that smooth chatty 'I am your best friend' attitude -- an insincere chumminess, and he made statements that included the answer or inference that he wanted to establish .... McCowan has very, very seldom come to mind over the years because I realized when I was on Death Row that he did not give a damn about me from the outset, and that he was out for all the glory he could get at my expense, like Parsons and Cooper."
McCowan told Kaiser about Sirhan's alleged comments, but only after the trial.
"McCowan did report Sirhan saying that," Kaiser told me. "And I didn't know whether to believe McCowan or not. McCowan was a puzzle to me. He had his own agenda. There's been some suggestion that Mike McCowan was, in fact, a plant in the defense investigation team for another agency."
Kaiser remembered talking to the FBI's Roger LaJeunesse in 1999, a year before the former agent died, about the curious visit from the man who came to fix his phone. When Kaiser asked him about possible FBI liaisons with the CIA, "I have a vague recollection that he said he thought Michael McCowan was working with the CIA."
It wouldn't have surprised Kaiser. "McCowan was kicked off the LAPD when he got a federal conviction for mail tampering, and he had every reason to cooperate with the CIA/FBI during the case."
Kaiser put me in touch with Pete Noyes, a veteran investigative journalist in Los Angeles, now seventy-five years old and still working in the investigative unit at the local Fox affiliate, Channel 11. Noyes was working for KNXT in Los Angeles on the night of the assassination, the same channel as Don Schulman.
Noyes confirmed that another investigator from the Treasury Department (now deceased) told him that McCowan was planted on the defense team by the CIA to find out anything he could about Sirhan. In return, after the Sirhan trial, his civil rights would be restored after his earlier mail-fraud conviction. Noyes added, "I can't understand how Kaiser didn't know McCowan was CIA, because everybody else seemed to."
Mention of the Treasury brought to mind the only Arabic page in Sirhan's notebook -- a letter written to his mother. One sentence is translated as: "I am also waiting for a check from the American Treasury Department which you are to send (P P Peggy)."
***
When I first tracked Michael McCowan down, he confirmed the telephone interview with Dan Moldea and stood by the alleged Sirhan confession -- "Sirhan said that to me." He said he'd be happy to meet up for an interview when I came to the States, and I asked a few final questions.
"Who were your main contacts at the LAPD?"
"Nobody. I was on the defense team. People have said I was FBI or CIA, but that's all nonsense."
"Have you ever had any indication the CIA were involved?"
"Let's talk about that when you get here."
***
During our interview a few months later, McCowan constantly circled back to three issues that were key to his understanding of the case -- the "many more will come" reference in Sirhan's school textbook; the disputed sighting of Sirhan following Hubert Humphrey down to San Diego; and Sirhan's disputed confession.
He reenacted Sirhan's statement three or four times but broke eye contact with me after each telling. It was the most important point in the interview and, for me, the least convincing.
Toward the end of our conversation, I brought up the accusations of Noyes, Kaiser, LaJeunesse, and others that McCowan had been a plant on the defense team for another agency.
"Roger LaJeunesse was a really good friend of mine," said McCowan. "I always liked him ... and I think he was liaison for the FBI at the Sirhan case, and he would have never said that about me. I don't believe." He seemed genuinely hurt by the idea and sure his friend would never have betrayed him like that.
"Not blow my cover!" he said, followed by a big, hearty laugh.
"And the Treasury guy saying you were CIA -- where would that come from?" I asked.
"That's interesting. Why the Treasury guy? What would it have to do with the Treasury Department?"
I offered, "Apparently, they were one of the agencies doing their own investigation for whatever reason.
"On me or on Kennedy?"
"No, no, on Sirhan .... The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- would that be part of their jurisdiction?"
"Oh, yeah, with the gun thing and all, probably. I don't know. I don't recall ever talking to the Treasury people. Ever."
Pete Noyes later told me his source was in IRS intelligence.
"Just to clarify it," I asked McCowan, "did you ever work in any way with the FBI or CIA as an informant or agent?"
"Never," said McCowan. "Didn't work with the CIA. Was never a CIA operative. Never was an FBI operative. I dealt with some FBI guys and I knew some CIA guys and I could see why somebody would think, 'Okay, I'm planted in there because I've done some strange things in my life ... My present wife thinks I'm a CIA guy.... but I'm not getting a pension! If I was getting a pension from the FBI or the CIA, my wife would know about it! And I'm not ....
"But I don't find it unreasonable for people to think that ... but I don't think they'll ever find or there is any concrete evidence that I've ever been involved with either of those agencies."
"You weren't getting compensated," I asked, "so why did you work for Sirhan from June 1968 through to possibly going out to Jordan (for free) if you weren't a CIA babysitter?"
"Okay, well here's the real simple explanation to that. When I had the opportunity to do this, being an investigator and a lawyer, it's a great opportunity to see how good you are. It was a wonderful experience for me. I didn't expect the money and I didn't write a book about it or I didn't try to promote it. I never have given an interview, really. It just was something that was exciting for me to do and I did it."
Although he seemed wary recalling the details of the case, McCowan was at his most relaxed and jovial discussing these accusations, and I found his answers pretty convincing. As he conceded, he'd done a lot of strange things in his life and seemed to have a tendency to schmooze various agencies for information, blurring the boundaries of his relationship with the prosecution, LAPD, FBI, and Secret Service; but I found nothing concrete to tie Michael McCowan to the CIA.
***
In the mid-nineties, Jean Scherrer, the LAPD's "man who wasn't there," also reappeared. When author C. David Heymann interviewed former LAPD officer Daniel Stewart for his book on Robert Kennedy, the former head of VIP security tagged along.
Stewart had been assigned to Good Samaritan Hospital on the night of the shooting and was present with Sergeant Bill Jordan at the autopsy. Scherrer claimed to be the LAPD official assigned to work with Kennedy, went along to the hotel because he had "a premonition," and later was Rafer Johnson's chaperone when he delivered the gun to the LAPD. As noted previously, Scherrer told Heymann that for five thousand dollars, he would go into more detail about the assassination.
In 1996, the paths of Scherrer and Michael McCowan crossed in an apparent attempt to compromise Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter and legal researcher Rose Lynn Mangan.
Photographer Scott Enyart was suing the city of Los Angeles over pictures he had taken on the night of the shooting that the LAPD confiscated and never returned. Enyart claimed he was in the pantry, standing on a steam table at the time of the shooting, taking pictures of the senator. When the police finally returned his photographs, the images of those key moments in the pantry were missing.
Two weeks before the case began, Sirhan's researcher Rose Lynn Mangan was approached by a neighbor in Carson City, Nevada, by the name of Jerry Vaccaro. Vaccaro told Mangan he'd been interviewed during the investigation into the JFK assassination and, it turned out, he was a friend of Mike McCowan's dating back to the mail fraud charges in 1966.
Vaccaro set up a lunch meeting in Burbank with Mangan, Adel Sirhan, and Larry Teeter, and he brought along Jean Scherrer. According to Vaccaro, Mike McCowan had applied for a presidential pardon in the mid-seventies to clear the mail-fraud case from his record. The pardon was denied, but McCowan's petition included confidential FBI documents showing that McCowan had been an FBI plant on the Sirhan defense team. In return for these embarrassing documents, Scherrer and Vaccaro wanted the movie rights to Sirhan's life story.
Mangan and Teeter immediately smelled a rat and flatly turned the offer down. Teeter wrote to Police Chief Willie Williams and the DA's office documenting the offer. The timing was worrying -- it seemed an obvious "sting operation" to compromise Mangan before she testified at the Enyart trial. The only response they ever got from the authorities was a postcard of acknowledgment.
When I asked Mike McCowan about the offer, he said he'd never heard of Larry Teeter and knew nothing about it. I spoke briefly to Danny Stewart, but he didn't want to discuss the case -- "most of the LAPD guys prefer not to." He'd lost touch with Jean Scherrer, and I haven't been able to find him.
***
When I discussed a possible assassination plot with seasoned operatives, they invariably pointed to a man on the inside as an essential element of such an operation. He could have been an insider working for Kennedy or the hotel who knew what was going on and could have, perhaps unwittingly, passed information to the plotters or been manipulated into directing the senator into the "killing zone."
While I don't suspect Pierre Salinger of any conscious connection to the shooting, some of his business relationships are worth examining with this in mind.
In Salinger's 1995 autobiography, P.S. A Memoir, he writes of his friendship with Bob Six, the founder of Continental Airlines. In the summer of 1965, Six was setting up a subsidiary in Southeast Asia called Continental Air Services (CAS). It would provide air services to the CIA as an alternative to the agency's own carrier, Air America, which was in danger of being banned from certain countries due to regional tensions over Vietnam. CAS would have no direct links to the agency; all contracts would go through the usual cover organization, AID.
Six had meetings at the CIA with William Colby, then director of covert operations and later head of the CIA. Colby told Six he needed someone with top secret government clearance to work at a high level in the new company. Salinger had such clearance during his career in the Kennedy White House and was perfect for the job.
Salinger accepted the offer "because it sounded like an exciting job" and flew out with Six to start work at the new headquarters of CAS -- a converted motel in Vientiane, Laos. CAS would take over from Air America in supplying the U.S.-funded Meo army to the north, who were repelling North Vietnamese incursions along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Each morning, CAS DC-3s took off with sacks of "hard rice," full of military equipment to be parachuted to the Meo. According to Salinger, half the staff had CIA links. CAS also made daily reconnaissance flights, to report on North Vietnamese troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh trail, information that was used by the U.S. Air Force for their covert and illegal bombing raids in Laos.
Salinger worked for Continental Air Services for the next two years, bringing him into the same orbit as CIA operatives Tom Clines and David Morales, whom we'll discuss in the next chapter.
Another odd Salinger connection was Robert Maheu, right-hand man to Howard Hughes and the liaison connecting the CIA, John Rosselli, and the Chicago Mob during earlier attempts to assassinate Castro. During the California campaign, Kennedy staff decided to approach Hughes for a campaign contribution.
Salinger thought Hughes was approachable and got the assignment -- "I knew Hughes' right-hand man, Robert Maheu, quite well, so I called and made an appointment with him." The morning after their meeting, Maheu called to say that Hughes had agreed to give Kennedy twenty-five thousand dollars.
By 1968, the Hughes organization, through Maheu, was working hand in glove with the CIA. John Meier was Hughes's third in command and an arch-nemesis of Maheu's. In an interview with researcher Lisa Pease, Meier claimed that Maheu had connections to Thane Eugene Cesar and the upper ranks of the LAPD. According to Pease, "Meier saw enough dealings [within the Hughes organization] before and after the assassination to cause him to approach J. Edgar Hoover with what he knew ... Hoover expressed his frustration, saying words to the effect of "Yes, we know this was a Maheu operation. People think I'm so powerful, but when it comes to the CIA, there's nothing I can do."
I subsequently met Meier in person, and while he claims to know who financed, organized, and carried out the assassination of Robert Kennedy, I have yet to see any evidence of this.
***
When they retired, two legendary figures of American intelligence also held photographs of Robert Kennedy's autopsy in their personal safes -- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. As author Anthony Summers noted, of all the famous deaths in Hoover's long career, the gruesome color pictures of the RFK autopsy are the only death pictures preserved in his official and confidential files, segregated from the main FBI filing system.
Angleton's colleagues were astonished by their bizarre find in his personal safe when he retired. They had no idea why Angleton had the pictures or "why it was appropriate for CIA staff files to contain them. They were accordingly destroyed."
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass