An article in today’s Guardian has the potential to re-open, and perhaps even solve, the investigations into both the JFK and RFK assassinations. I know that sounds incredible, but it is true. To explain why will be painstaking and involve a lot of retelling of history.
The assassination of JFK has been controversial from the moment it occurred, but the assassination of RFK has been much less so. In fact, I never questioned the official story of the RFK assassination until this year, and I didn’t even know there was cause to do so.
Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, in the pantry of a ballroom in the Ambassador Hotel, on June 5th, 1968 and died the next day. The assassin was immediately subdued and later identified as Sirhan Sirhan, a 24 year old Christian Palestinian. Witnesses saw him unload all eight shots from his .22 caliber gun. They also agreed that Sirhan was facing Kennedy and never got within two feet of him. There are two difficulties with the official story. First:
In conducting the autopsy on Kennedy, Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on Kennedy’s ear and gunpowder residue in his hair. Noguchi said this indicated that Kennedy was shot from a distance of, at most, 1.5 inches (37 millimeters.) (When a firearm is discharged, the powder residue travels only a few inches because the material is very light.) Noguchi’s conclusions led to speculation that Sirhan was too far from Kennedy and in the wrong position to have administered the fatal shot (also fired from a .22 caliber handgun, one which had apparently been fired into Kennedy’s head at point-blank range from behind his right ear) and that a second shooter must have been present. Dr. Noguchi himself wrote years later that “Until more is precisely known…the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.”[5]
Independent testing (shown in a program on the Discovery Channel) indicates that gunpowder residue can easily travel over 15 inches (38 cm), but that the stippling effect observed requires that the gun must have been less than 2 inches (5 cm) away.
Kennedy was killed by a bullet that entered the rear of his head behind the right ear. This is curious because Sirhan was facing him as he shot. However, this could be explained if Kennedy wheeled away from Sirhan as he began to fire. The powder burns are much harder to explain.
The second problem with the official story is in the number of bullets recovered (possibly ten) versus the number of bullets in Sirhan’s gun (ostensibly eight). BooTrib member Lisa Pease has written about this issue. It’s complicated, and resolving it is not the focus of this essay.
The focus of this essay is on the implications of new evidence that suggests that three CIA officers , two of whom have long been suspected by ‘conspiracy’ buffs of involvement in the JFK assassination, may have been present in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom the night RFK was killed. The CIA officers are George Joannides, David Sanchez Morales, and Gordon Campbell.
