User:Fritzpoll/ConspiracyTheory/CIA operatives

CIA operatives

On November 20, 2006, the BBC's Newsnight presented research by Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA officers were present on the night of the assassination. On November 20, 2007, O'Sullivan released a video documentary entitled RFK Must Die, providing an update on his investigation and findings.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction, and some of the officers were based in Southeast Asia at the time, with no apparent reason to be in Los Angeles. Three of those accused were former senior officers who had worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's main anti-Castro station based in Miami.

JMWAVE Chief of Operations David Morales, Chief of Maritime Operations Gordon Campbell and Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations George Joannides were identified by former acquaintances in photographs taken at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968. Among those acquaintances was Congressional investigator Ed Lopez, who worked with Joannides while the latter was serving as CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

According to close associates of Morales, he was known for his deep anger with the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Morales' former attorney Robert Walton quoted Morales as having said, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." O'Sullivan reported that the CIA declined to comment on the officers in question.

O’Sullivan interviewed David Rabern, a freelance undercover operative and private investigator who had been in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the fateful night in 1968. While Rabern did not know Morales and Campbell by name, he had noticed them talking to each other in the hotel lobby prior to the assassination. He also noticed Campbell in and around several police stations in Los Angeles prior to the assassination - a state over which the CIA had no jurisdiction.

At the end of his documentary, however, Mr. O'Sullivan casts some doubt upon his own presentation up to that point, and reveals that the two men who were previously identified in the documentary as "Campbell" and "Joannides" were in fact two now-deceased Bulova Watch Company employees, at the Ambassador for a company convention. They are further revealed in other footage of the ballroom on the night of the assassination, in various social situations, laughing, talking with others, etc., prior to the shooting of Senator Kennedy. After the shooting, they are shown in television news footage, listening to witnesses, unabashedly wandering before presumably openly visible television cameras, generally looking quite casual and not in any hurry to depart the area. Footage of "Campbell" in particular had been shown several times earlier in the documentary in seemingly suspicious movements, appearing hurriedly to depart the ballroom after the shooting, touching his chest furtively as if concealing a gun, etc.; the later footage in the documentary shows he was still in the ballroom at the time of the shooting and not directly involved.

Moreover, the impressively positive identifications by CIA operatives and acquaintances over time of "Morales" as being a man in the ballroom footage, (and equally at home casually appearing several times in front of obviously placed television cameras after the shooting, including once during an interview of a witness in the kitchen pantry where the shooting took place), were called into question also by O'Sullivan's revelation of new, recently-discovered photographs to add to the 1959 photo used through most of the documentary for viewer comparison to the man in the film footage. The latter photograph indeed greatly resembled the man in the Ambassador ballroom footage; but the new photos, taken between 1966 and 1971, show a man with less resemblance to the man in the Ambassador footage of June 5, 1968.

O'Sullivan himself expresses doubt in the end that the "Morales" in the film footage at the Ambassador and the man positively identified as Morales in the 1966-71 photos are the same man.

O'Sullivan also indicates, without any substantiation, that the Bulova Watch Company was a "well-known cover" for the CIA, according to "several people" to whom O'Sullivan talked off-camera, and attempts by implication to confirm that link by the fact that World War II General Omar Bradley was the chairman of Bulova at the time and also advised President Johnson on Vietnam; nowhere, however, is Bradley linked with the CIA. Bulova did make bomb fuses for the government during the Cold War, but there is no documented historical link with the CIA.

O'Sullivan concludes by asking rhetorically whether the two employees, named by their Bulova employee names in the documentary, based on their being labeled on the back of L.A.P.D. evidence photos demonstrating they had been investigated and interviewed briefly by the police at the time of the assassination, could have been using other names, "Campbell" and "Joannides", in their supposed CIA roles, with the Bulova jobs as cover. The documentary also reveals, however, that the man identified as "Campbell", under his real name, advanced to become a "well-respected" and well-known man in Bulova and the watch industry generally by the late 1970's.

In the end, O'Sullivan's documentary is inconclusive about a CIA presence at the hotel. Whether Sirhan, however, was "handled", brainwashed, manipulated or hypnotized as a "Manchurian candidate", is extensively explored by the documentary, but in the end is loaned no more than speculation by the effort. The analysis, however, is at once intriguing and even plausible.

Robert Kennedy, ironically, had spent the previous night before the shooting at the home of supporter and friend, director John Frankenheimer, director of both "Seven Days in May" and "The Manchurian Candidate".