George Joannides, David Morales, and Gordon Campbell were long-time CIA operatives and close associates. Joannides was himself Chief of Psychological Operations (PsyOps) for the CIA in Miami in the sixties. Morales was a CIA assassin. The three played significant roles in Agency black operations in Southeast Asia and in South America. Black Ops includes political murder.

As now established by photographs taken on the evening of June 4, 1968, these three men were present in the Embassy Ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, talking with one another in the crowd awaiting the appearance of a victorious Robert Kennedy.

The CIA’s PsyOps program included intensive use of psychoactive drugs and other mind-control modalities beginning in the 1950s and continuing to the present day. See “Acid Dreams” by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain.

A key player in the mind-control experiments undertaken in secret and using unaware citizens during the 1960s was William J. Bryan, a hypnotist who worked closely with Joannides.

During the relatively brief period of congressional curiosity about the CIA’s unlawful domestic activities, there was an inquiry into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The liaison between the House Committee and the CIA was George Joaniddes, who acted as “gatekeeper” for CIA documents. Committee staffers have since stated that the Committee was unaware of Joannides role in PsyOps.

Friends of Morales have said that Morales boasted to them of his “presence” in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and Los Angeles on June 4, 1968. Morales died one week before his scheduled testimony before the House Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

Numerous witnesses have confirmed that Bryan bragged to them that he had been the “programmer” of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who was arrested, tried, and convicted for killing Senator Kennedy.

There is no conceivably innocent reason for the presence of Joannides, Morales, and Campell at the RFK victory rally at the Ambassador Hotel.

It’s been forty years since Robert Kennedy was murdered. Joannides, Morales, and Bryan are dead. Campbell’s whereabouts are unknown.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it is widely believed –– and promoted as the official story by the media –– that Sirhan Sirhan was a lone assassin and that there was no conspiracy involved in the murder.

Those who believe this cannot, however, answer or dispute the following facts:

* Sirhan’s .22 caliber Iver-Johnson held eight bullets. Kennedy was hit three times. Five others were wounded. The best available evidence, accounting for the known wounds, bullet holes, and the bullets actually recovered from ceiling panels and the center post between the kitchen doors, is that eleven bullets were fired in the kitchen that night. The photographic evidence, including FBI documents showing circled bullet holes in the door post, and the statement of FBI agents who witnessed the removal of slugs from these holes, has been ignored. The post, as well as pertinent ceiling panels, removed by the L.A.P.D., were destroyed two weeks before Sirhan’s trial in 1969. This wasn’t known until 1988, when the archives were opened on the case. The L.A.P.D. said that it didn’t have enough room to store the materials and so had destroyed them. Missing were more than 1,400 exhibits.

* The only person who took still photographs in the kitchen that night and who was taking photographs of Kennedy at the time he was shot, was then-15-year-old Scott Enyart, who had gained access using fake press credentials. Enyart got twenty-six exposures, including 10 in the kitchen area. Immediately after the shooting, Enyart was stopped by police outside the Ambassador Hotel and taken into custody. He was held for the entire night. In the morning, he was told that his film was evidence and would be used in the subsequent trial. It was therefore confiscated. The film was not used at the trial. Enyart received from the L.A.P.D. 16 negatives, none of them of his exposures in the kitchen area. Enyart has said that he was at all times behind Kennedy in the crowd and never saw Sirhan (who was in front). The exposures he got were of the back of Kennedy’s head and of anyone else nearby.

* After a lengthy autopsy, L.A. Coroner Thomas Noguchi reported that Kennedy had been shot from behind, with the fatal bullet fired within an inch of his skull, behind his right ear and at an upward angle. He determined this by the powder burns on the Senator’s ear. Noguchi was approached by a deputy district attorney who asked him to change his testimony to say that Kennedy had been shot from a distance of three feet. Naguchi refused.

* Surhan’s attorneys did not question the discrepancy between Noguchi’s report and the fact that Sirhan had himself been firing from in front of Kennedy, and that the muzzle of his gun at no time came closer than three feet from Kennedy (most witnesses put the distance at six feet). After Noguchi refused to cooperate with the D.A., he was suddenly subjected to accusations of incompetence and charges that he was joyful at Kennedy’s death since the autopsy would crown his career; he was fired. Subsequently, he filied suit for reinstatement and won.

* Sirhan was tackled immediately after opening fire. He continued to squeeze the trigger but after the first –– and conceivably the second –– shot he could not aim.

* The L.A.P.D. had jurisdiction over the investigation, collecting original evidence, interviewing witnesses, and conducting the ballistics tests on what was purported to be Sirhan’s gun. The department structured its investigation to funnel all materials through two men who were designated to act as gatekeepers, controlling what would become part of the record and what would be discarded.

* The two L.A. cops who thus controlled the investigation were Lieutenant Manuel Peña and Sergeant Enrique Hernandez. The investigation was named ‘Special Unit Senator’ or SUS. The unit was created by Chief of Detectives Robert Houghton, who picked Hugh Brown, Chief of Homicide Detectives as the overall head of it, but specified that Peña was to control the daily flow and direction of the investigation.

* Peña had ‘retired’ from the L.A.P.D. in November of 1967, in order to “accept a position with the Agency for International Development Office in the State Department. The newspaper article covering his retirement party, presided over by Houghton, noted that as a “public safety advisor, he will train and advise foreign police forces in investigative and administrative matters.” It also noted that he spoke fluent Spanish and French.

* According to FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse, Peña was assigned to a “special training unit” at a CIA base in Virginia, one described by then California’s Chief Deputy Attorney General, Charles A. O’Brien as a “Department of Dirty Tricks,” which specialized in teaching foreign “intelligence apparats” the techniques of assassination.

* While still with the L.A.P.D., Peña had worked simultaneously with AID for more than ten years before the 1967 assignment. He subsequently ‘returned’ to the L.A.P.D. shortly before the June, 1968, assassination of Senator Kennedy.

* Hernandez, meanwhile, was by his own subsequent admission a CIA operative within the L.A.P.D. and had been among a group of “about 50” from a dozen U.S. urban police forces to receive “special training” from the Agency in the early and mid-sixties. He played a key role in “Unified Police Command” training for the CIA in Latin America in 1963.

* The ballistics evidence introduced at Sirhan’s ‘trial’ was cooked. The .22 Iver-Johnson admitted into evidence bore a different serial number from Sirhan’s gun, and the claim that all spent slugs recovered from victims, including Kennedy, had been fired from a single weapon, Sirhan’s, has since been flatly refuted in forensic examination by experts.

* Photomacrographs of the slugs taken using a revolving camera show that the striations –– barrel markings –– are identical in those taken from the other victims, yet do not match the one recovered from Kennedy. William Harper, a veteran criminalist, who was able to examine, but not remove, the slugs in L.A.P.D. custody, took the photos using a portable Balliscan camera he had helped to develop. Harper, who had worked in the field for three decades, including seven years with the Pasadena Police Department as a forensic consultant, said of his comparison of the Kennedy bullet with one taken from ABC newsman William Weisel, “I can find no individual characteristics in common between these two bullets.” This finding was later verified by the President of the American Academy of Forensic Science.

* Countless reports from eyewitnesses to the assassination and events surrounding it were deep-sixed by Peña and Hernandez, including numerous accounts concerning a “girl in a polka dot dress” sighted in Sirhan’s company earlier in the evening and at the moment he stepped out in front of Kennedy in the kitchen. Several, including kitchen employees, reported that they had the impression that she was actually “in control of him.” Yet a police request for an APB based on witness stories, phoned in by Sergeant Paul Shraga from the Ambassador, was abruptly cancelled, and his written report simply gone from the files (he kept a copy). Peña and Hernandez systematically abused all such witnesses and berated them until many ‘recanted.’ There is an audio tape available on the internet in which Peña, ‘questioning’ a key witness named Sandy Serrano, subjects her to the ugliest, most malicious half hour of her life. It is quite clear, listening to it, that Peña’s only goal was to force Serrano away from the account she gave immediately after the shooting, tearfully describing what she’d seen and heard to a television audience of millions. She had to be discredited or destroyed.

* Interestingly, the last thing Sirhan recalls before the shooting –– which he cannot remember –– is that “a girl asked me to pour her some coffee.” This may have taken place in an adjacent press room, where coffee was available, because he was seen there as well, along with the girl in the polka dot dress.

So, what does all of this tiresome jabbering get us? I’d say it provides the first pieces to a very interesting puzzle. Since the physical evidence is essentially unassailable –– mis-matched bullets, powder burns, a second gun being drawn (and three witnesses swearing was fired), and the damage being caused by at least ten bullets and probably eleven –– the fact of Sirhan’s technical innocence of Kennedy’s murder, although he did shoot five others, begs the question.

At least, I think it does. If we’re not willing to look at this as a country, we will never recover the grace and the promise we once expressed. Many of the conspirators who killed Bobby are dead by now; forty years has passed. What difference does it make?

I hear that question from some of you, and I know that others ask it, too. I wish to say in all kindness that you may want to re-examine what your country asks of you.

Because if it is so, this conspiratorial history I write about, this persistent twitch that I am fully aware annoys plenty of people, then the implications for who we are right this minute in America, how things are done, who fixes what, are of the most critical importance.

We can complain all we want to about the warfare state and the borrowing of billions from China, thus indebting the American people to the Chinese for at least a hundred years, and we are losing jobs and the dollar’s in near free-fall against the euro, and the housing bubble’s gone, and the government has simply taken hundreds of billions out of OUR pockets to pay to Bear Stearns, because the powerful are not permitted to go under. We can carp about the compliant media, those toads who never get it right and never take any responsibility. We note with increasing alarm the use of torture as a policy of government, the use of tasers by police with almost NO public argument about it, and the establishment of “Free Speech Zones,” although the last time I checked the country itself is a free speech zone, or used to be.

But unless we come to terms with how we got here, we’ll never unscramble it. As disgraced Attorney General John Mitchell predicted in the mid-’70s, America “is going to go so far to the right you will not even recognize it.”

In 1963, Frank Sinatra starred with Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate.” In the film, an American taken prisoner during the Korean War is subject to brainwashing which makes him a ‘sleeper’ agent of the reds inside the U.S. He is then placed in position to assassinate a presidential nominee.

For many years after the death of JFK, the film was not shown. Now it’s available, and in fact there’s been a remake. The author, Richard Condon, had not invented the concept; he had learned from his intelligence sources that the CIA had been working on such a program for years. Fanciful?

In July of 1975, Naval Lieutenant Commander Thomas Narut spoke at a NATO-sponsored conference of 120 psychological researchers in Europe. During the Q-and-A session which followed, he told of taking part in a Navy program in which “potential assassins” were computer-slected and then trained for placement in U.S. Embassies around the world, ready to kill should the need arise. “It’s happened more than once,” Narut admitted. He then described training in Naples and at a neuropsychiatric lab in San Diego. Gruesome films of bloody incidents were shown to trainees to rid them of qualms about killing, he said. The Navy then summoned him to its European headquarters in London. Narut never said another word about it.

The journals Sirhan filled with repeated lines such as “RFK must die!” suggested a form of automatic writing, according to experts, including the psychiatrists who examined him in prison. Dr. Bernard Diamond said that Sirhan slipped into a hypnotic trance so deeply and immediately that it was obvious he had been hyponized many times before. Diamond thought that Sirhan had hypnotized himself, but was unable to explain how he might have hypnotized himself to forget.

At San Quentin Prison, Sirhan was examined by prison psychiatrist Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, who immediately suspected that something unusal was going on. The convicted assassin spoke as though “reciting from a book,” and Simson-Kallas came to believe that he had been hypnoprogrammed. “He was prepared by someone. He was hypnotized by someone. He was there to draw attention, to be the obvious, simple explanation so that people wouldn’t ask questions.” Simson-Kallas was removed from the case by then Associate Warden James Park and resigned in protest. “He’s (Sirhan) not lying,” Simson-Kallas later said. “There’s no question of that.” Park was then promoted.

Critics of conspiracy theories, at least those who go beyond the plainly corrupt position that such theorists are prima facie whacko, often raise two objections. First, they argue, how come we don’t know who was involved? Second, why hasn’t anybody talked?

The thing is, we do know who was involved, and plenty of people have talked. That this has been so systematically ignored not only by most politicians but by the entirety of mainstream media is probably the greatest scandal in American history and poses its most grave challenge to national survival.

Forty years ago, Bobby Kennedy was murdered to prevent him from becoming President. He was fighting to stop a war and to heal the divisions in the country. He was speaking for those who had no voice. We owe him the truth.