Legacy of Secrecy (135 page)

be tried for plotting against [the] life of [Fidel Castro].”21

In 1968, David Morales was in a good position to adapt the pantry/

kitchen plan to use against Bobby Kennedy. Unlike Rosselli and Mar-

cello, Morales was unfettered by suspicion or prosecution, and thus

free from law enforcement scrutiny. In fact, especially in Los Angeles,

Morales could wield important influence over some of those very same

authorities.

Just as it had been in 1963, in 1968 the CIA was involved in a variety of

activities that David Morales could have used to generate a cover-up

after Bobby was murdered. For years, the CIA had maintained a special

relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department, from helping with

covert activities to training certain LAPD officers. Some of those officers

later left the LAPD to work in Latin America, where David Morales

had recently been very active. The CIA’s especially close relationship

with the LAPD had developed because of problems, dating to the 1950s,

between the FBI and the city’s police chief at the time.

According to William Turner, the LAPD was instrumental in the

creation of “the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit [LEIU], a network

of big-city police departments across the country aimed at taking on the

national crime syndicate.” This network linked police intelligence units

from Los Angeles to New Orleans to Tampa, but by 1968, these units

“switched targets from organized crime to political dissidence.” The

CIA helped by having its “Clandestine Services Division” train officers

from Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities “in intelligence techniques.”

In return, the police aided the CIA with domestic operations like “sur-

veillance and break-ins.” Richard Helms’s executive assistant described

seeing a dozen LAPD officers at CIA headquarters in 1967, as “part of a

‘sensitive project’ . . . given the green light by the Director himself.”22

Hank Hernandez, who intimidated witness Sandy Serrano during his

grueling interrogation before polygraphing her, was one of the LAPD

officers who not only received CIA special training but also performed

assignments for the CIA. William Turner pointed out that “as a poly-

graph operator, Hernandez questioned the witnesses whose accounts

indicated a [conspiracy]”—witnesses who were much more likely to

be polygraphed than those who supported the official lone-assassin

scenario. Hernandez was one of the key members of the LAPD’s Special

Unit Senator (SUS) which conducted crucial interrogations about Sirhan,

his family, his money, and his more unusual associates.23

Turner wrote that “Sergeant Hank Hernandez [who was] promoted

to lieutenant in recognition of his status in [SUS] had CIA connections

[and boasted] in a resume . . . that in 1963 he played a key role in [doing]

training for the CIA in Latin America . . . and even received a medal

from the Venezuelan government” for helping to fight “Fidel Castro’s

‘exportation’ of the Cuban revolution.” For that CIA assignment, Her-

nandez utilized “the usual cover of . . . the Office of Public Safety of the

Agency for International Development (AID),” which “has long served

as a cover for the CIA’s clandestine program of supplying advisers and

instructors for national police and intelligence services in Southeast Asia

and Latin America.” In 1968, the Chief Deputy Attorney General of Cali-

fornia confirmed that information to Turner. 24

Turner notes that Hernandez was just one of a small number of SUS

officers who had such ties; another of whom apparently worked with an

associate of David Morales. “In retrospect it seems odd,” Turner writes,

“that . . . policemen who doubled as CIA agents occupied key positions

in SUS, where they were able to seal off avenues that led in the direction

of conspiracy.” Turner wrote those words in 1978, before he or other jour-

nalists knew about David Morales’s work for the CIA or about Morales’s

friendship with Johnny Rosselli.25

Hank Hernandez’s work for the CIA extended beyond Latin America

and apparently outlasted the investigation of Bobby Kennedy’s assas-

sination. Lisa Pease pointed out that “during his session with Sandy

Serrano, [Hernandez] told her that he had once been called to Vietnam,

South America, and Europe to perform polygraph tests.” Pease was told

by “one of Hernandez’s neighbors . . . how Hernandez used to live in a

modest home in the Monterey Park area, a solidly middle-class neigh-

borhood. But within a short time after the assassination, Hernandez had

moved to a place that has a higher income per capita than Beverly Hills:

San Marino. He came into possession of a security firm and handled

large accounts for the government.”26

Hank Hernandez, and others in SUS, didn’t have to play a knowing

part in the conspiracy. They or those higher in the LAPD hierarchy could

simply have been told by someone like Morales that certain leads or

associates of Sirhan involved national security and shouldn’t be pursued

or exposed, since they had no bearing on the case. Even though the SUS

investigation was far bigger and more thorough in many areas than most

people realized, the right words to a few key people—evoking national

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security concerns—would ensure that topics that could lead to Morales

or his associates were avoided. Such arrangements could also ensure

that certain proconspiracy witnesses could be grilled and polygraphed

either until they changed their stories or until an SUS report was written

saying that they had.

The key areas of evidence destruction and missing files center on the

questions of whether more than one shooter was involved, and whether

the Mafia or drug trafficking played some role. David Morales’s involve-

ment in Bobby’s murder could account for many of those problems, such

as the fact that the LAPD’s Johnny Rosselli file was missing when the

House Select Committee on Assassinations asked for it in 1978. Rosselli

had been a major Mafia figure in Los Angeles since the late 1930s and

was being actively prosecuted in 1968, so it’s inconceivable that the

LAPD didn’t have a large file on him. Yet also in 1968, Rosselli was still

pressuring the Agency, through William Harvey, over the CIA-Mafia

plots to avoid deportation, which would have allowed a CIA officer

like Morales to have the LAPD suppress its Rosselli file for reasons of

national security.27

In 2008, anyone can search the LAPD’s and FBI’s raw reports online,

to see how they were summarized in the final, internal SUS Report.

We have found repeated examples where references to drugs and the

Mafia were eliminated or minimized.28 Other obvious subjects took an

extraordinarily long time to pursue. Regarding Sirhan’s drug-linked

former boss, John H. Davis points out that it took the LAPD and FBI

“ten months to find out who Donneroummas was, that his real name

was Henry Ramistella, and that he had a criminal record.”29 By that time,

Sirhan’s trial was already underway.

The LAPD’s forty-person SUS was in an extremely secure area that

was not accessible to the average patrolman or detective.30 Even within

that unit, certain people, like Hank Hernandez and a few more, were

essentially choke points whose decisions could determine what leads

SUS pursued or which witnesses were viewed as credible. How people

like Hernandez gained their prized positions is also unclear, since

released files show that certain of these individuals were playing key

roles very early in the LAPD’s investigation of Bobby’s murder, even

before SUS was formed.

In 1968, the LAPD was helping the CIA—and military intelligence, and

at times the FBI—in the extensive surveillance of “subversives,” which

by 1968 included a huge array of groups ranging from communists to

“pro-Arab” groups to Iranian dissidents to civil rights activists to peace

protesters. Sirhan had ties—however brief—to people in the first three

groups in the months (and especially weeks) before Bobby’s murder,

connections that could have brought him under such surveillance. The

CIA and other agencies would have been just as anxious to hide any

pre-assassination surveillance of Sirhan and his associates as they had

been for Oswald.31

In 1968, Helms and Phillips were still concerned with the Garrison

investigation, which by then focused on the upcoming trial of former

low-level CIA informant Clay Shaw, whom Garrison tied to David Ferrie

through New Orleans’ gay subculture. (The strong ties between Ferrie

and Marcello no longer concerned Garrison and had so far escaped press

attention.) In April 1968, the CIA generated a file card for internal use,

saying that as far as Lee Harvey Oswald was concerned, until recently

in the CIA:

. . . there had been no secret as far as anyone was concerned in regard

to the fact that [Guy] Banister [and] David William Ferrie and subj

[Oswald] may have known or been acquainted with one another.32

Much evidence shows that Helms and Phillips knew that Oswald

actually worked with Banister and Ferrie in the summer of 1963—and

that Phillips had met with Oswald, while Helms reportedly ordered

Oswald’s New Orleans files to be taken to Washington after JFK’s assas-

sination. Helms and Phillips would have been focused on preventing

that information from coming out in Garrison’s investigation, as well as

on making sure the CIA’s authorized and Helms’s unauthorized anti-

Castro operations weren’t exposed. Rosselli played a key role in keeping

the unauthorized operations from being revealed, giving Morales even

more leverage to use if the SUS investigation came too close to Rosselli or

his associates. Amidst all that, Helms and Phillips were also dealing with

other problem areas, from Cuban operations (for Phillips) to domestic

surveillance, Vietnam, Iran, and the Middle East; and other Cold War

hot spots (for Helms). Helms and his subordinates probably would have

welcomed whatever Morales could do to keep a lid on national security

concerns during the SUS investigation.

Morales’s intelligence background, coupled with Johnny Rosselli’s

Los Angeles ties and Carlos Marcello’s national Mafia clout, meant that

relatively few people would need to have been knowingly involved

in Bobby’s murder. Because of Morales’s confession—which became

known to researchers only through a privately printed book published

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in 1997—claims were made on a BBC program on November 20, 2006,

that Morales and two other CIA associates were visible in videotape and

films taken in the Ambassador’s ballroom the night Bobby was shot.

(These allegations were disproven the following year.) We feel that the

cautious Morales would never have allowed himself to be visible in the

Ambassador’s ballroom, especially in front of cameras. Also, Bobby had

met with Morales in the past and could have recognized him.

Because most of the CIA files on Morales are still classified, it’s impos-

sible to determine what his self-confessed role actually was. The same

is true for Johnny Rosselli and Carlos Marcello, especially while so

many of their CIA and FBI files—and tapes, in Marcello’s case—remain

unreleased. But the bottom line is that because of Sirhan’s actions in

the months prior to Bobby’s murder and what the LAPD did in the

shooting’s immediate aftermath—followed by mob lawyers Cooper and

Parsons taking control of Sirhan’s defense—the final outcome of Sirhan’s

trial was a foregone conclusion months before it actually occurred.

In the summer and fall of 1968, as the Friars Club trial dragged on, Rus-

sell Parsons primarily handled Sirhan’s pretrial defense while Grant

Cooper represented one of Rosselli’s codefendants. Parsons and Cooper

had Sirhan enter a “not guilty” plea on August 2, 1968. On December 2,

1968, Rosselli and his four codefendants—including Cooper’s client—

were all found guilty in the cheating scandal. Cooper officially assumed

command of Sirhan’s defense the very next day, with sentencing in the

Friars Club case still eight weeks away.

Defense investigator and journalist Robert Blair Kaiser noted Sirhan’s

preoccupation with large sums of money, even though “Sirhan never

could explain the references in his notebook to money.” Sirhan once told

Kaiser, “You get me $100,000 [and] I could be pretty well set up.” Yet

when Kaiser encouraged Sirhan to really open up to him in their hun-

dreds of hours of talks—so that Sirhan could make lots of money—Sirhan

refused, and confided only in his mob attorneys. Kaiser was frustrated

that he couldn’t convince Cooper or Parsons to investigate conspiracy

angles and the possibility that someone had paid Sirhan to kill Bobby.

Later, Kaiser said that he realized, “What kind of defense would it be,

to claim that your client was some kind of paid killer?”33

Kaiser wrote that “Grant Cooper once asked Sirhan about the money