RFK assassination program on BBC2, Nov. 20

[Jefferson Morley]

You can watch the film here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6166806.stm

You can post a comment here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/...ember_2006.html

Shane O'Sullivan's piece on Bobby Kennedy's assassination, at least as it relates to the late George Joannides, is unfounded and unfair.

O'Sullivan has accurately recounted my reporting in Salon and the New York Review of Books about George Joannides' still unexplained role in the JFK assassination story.

But I do not share O'Sullivan's thinly sourced, very subjective conclusion that Joannides was in Los Angles in June 1968, much less that he was involved in anyway in the RFK assassination. Ed Lopez's perspective is welcome but I see no corroboration of such a claim.

[Myra Bronstein]

We need to post this on various US sites. Right now 20 and 30 somethings are offered a fictional RFK movie and have been trained to lump these political assassinaitons with kooky martian stories a la X-files.

...

Exactly! And the murder of Bobby Kennedy is particularly difficult because the facts support (IMO) the conclusion that Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate MKULTRA victim. That is so incredible that I think many people would immediately smirk and recoil and reject it.

I don't know how to convincingly present my conclusion, the widespread conclusion, that RFK's supposed assassin was a programmed patsy and mainly provided a distraction.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have a list of HSCA witnesses who died shortly before their scheduled testimony?

You will find details on this thread: Deaths of Key Witnesses

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=603

Also, take a look at my page on the subject:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKdeaths.htm

Oh fantastic. Thank you John. You save us so much time with the work you've already done.

[John Simkin]

I thought it might be worth posting Gaeton Fonzi's account of the Morales confession that appeared in The Last Investigation (1993) (pages 388-396). Note that Bob Walton does not mention the Robert Kennedy assassination in this account.

It was while sitting in the El Molino one night, that Ruben Carbajal told Bob Dorff and me about the times he and Bob Walton had gone to Washington to meet Morales and about the trip on which they met other high-ranking CIA officials. To obtain more details about those meetings, I suggested we talk to Walton. The next morning, a Saturday, Carbajal called him and Walton agreed to drive down from his home in Scottsdale to meet the three of us at the Holiday Inn.

Walton is in his mid-fifties, a pleasant, ruddy-faced fellow with Irish good looks and an easy, straightforward manner. He remembers their first trip to Washington as being in the spring of 1973. "I had had a coronary in November of 1972 and Rocky and I started talking about getting into business shortly after that. When you're from a dry climate like Arizona and you go back there in the summer you're just sweating like a pig. But I don't remember being uncomfortable, so I think it was early in the spring of 1973."

Walton corroborates the reason for the trip and the meeting with Morales: "We felt, or at least Rocky felt, that he could give us an inside track on who were the people who were for real and who were not. That was a big concern of mine because I had already been on one wild goose chase, spent an expensive week in Nassau waiting for a transaction to close and it never did."

Their evening with Morales, Walton remembers, was both very pleasant and, in more than one way, especially memorable. "We all went out for dinner, which was very nice. It was Rocky and his wife, me and my wife and Rocky's mother and father."

Morales, not someone who trusted strangers or even associates easily, obviously was impressed by Walton's character and, although their commodities business never took hold, he later called on Walton to represent him on a few matters back in Phoenix. It was something Morales said at one of those subsequent encounters in Phoenix that makes Walton put what had happened in Washington in a very special perspective.

"Morales was building a big, new house out near Willcox," Walton says. "Actually, it was in a little town called El Frita, which is about half-way between Willcox and the Mexican border. It's a remote area, I've only driven that road once in my life. It's an agricultural area, they grow the famous jalapenos peppers there. I never got to see the house, but he had just finished it and was describing it to me when he mentioned that he put in it the best security system in the United States. And I remember asking him, thinking he was worried about burglars or being robbed, 'What do you need so much security for? You're still thirty miles from the Mexican border.' And he said, 'I'm not worried about those people, I'm worried about my own.' "

That struck Walton as curious. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I know too much," Morales said, then quickly dropped it.

Remembering that now, Walton views his first meeting with Morales in Washington as being far more significant than he realized. After dinner, the whole party went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel. It was late and Carbajal's parents and his wife returned to their rooms and Ruben and Morales returned to the Waltons' room with them. "Didi ended up staying all night," Walton recalls. "My wife went to sleep somewhere around two in the morning and Rocky and I and Didi drank and talked from when we got back from dinner - maybe that was about eleven o'clock at night - until about six in the morning. "

The drinking got heavy. "We had consumed quite a bit of alcohol," remembers Walton. "At one point, between the three of us we had gone through a fifth of Scotch and we had to re-order. It was a real contest." He pauses and smiles. "Ah, my younger days, my misspent youth!" And as the night and the drinking go on, defenses come down and candid truths emerge. "You know," says Walton, "you get in a kind of position where you say, 'All right, I told you everything about me, what are you all about?' "

Morales began with his war stories. Walton remembers him talking about the killing in Vietnam and Laos, about being involved in the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, of hits in Paraguay and Uruguay and Venezuela. ("He said his wife was [in the country] with him and they had real trouble getting him out of town. They almost bought the farm on that one.")

The drinking and the talking continued. At one point, Morales began probing Walton for a bit of his own background. Walton had gone to Amherst College in Massachusetts and, as part of his developing interest in political science and politics, he had done some volunteer work for Jack Kennedy's Senatorial campaign. Later, at Harvard Law, Walton was head of a student group which invited then Senator Kennedy to speak at Cambridge.

Walton never got to explain the details of that association. At the first mention of Kennedy's name, he recalls, Morales literally almost hit the ceiling.

"He flew off the bed on that one," says Walton. "I remember he was lying down and he jumped up screaming, 'That no good son of a bitch motherf*****!' He started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy."

Walton says Morales's tirade about Kennedy, fueled by righteous anger and high-proof booze, went on for minutes while he stomped around the room. Suddenly he stopped, sat back down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added:

"Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"

I looked at Ruben Carbajal, who had remained silent while Walton was telling me this. Carbajal looked at me and nodded his head. Yes, he was there, it was true. But, in all the long hours we had spent together and all the candid revelations he had provided, it was a remembrance he couldn't bring himself to tell me about his friend Didi.

[John Simkin]

I've been travelling, and was unable to catch the programme. I've seen the Guardian, though. This seems on its face to be an extremely thin story. Photographs and photograph recognition are infamously unreliable, especially coming from witnesses so long after an event. That does not mean these fellows were not in the Ambassador on the night - though I would have thought that's the last place such officers would have allowed themselves to be seen and photographed - but I'm surprised (at least on the basis of what I read in the Guardian) that the BBC would have judged the story worth running.

I accept your points about the problems of photographic evidence. However, I believe the BBC was right to run the piece as it draws attention to the activities of David Sanchez Morales and George Joannides. I have problems with the testimony of Bradley Ayers and David Rabern who suggest that the photographs show Gordon Campbell in the hotel. Rabern is a new name to me and I found his testimony unconvincing (he was introduced to Shabe O’Sullivan by Ayers who is trying hard to sell his new book. Ayers was definitely at JM-WAVE in 1963. His books, The War That Never Was (1976) and The Zenith Secret: A CIA Insider Exposes the Secret War Against Cuba and the Plot that Killed the Kennedy Brothers (2006) recount the rumours that were circulating about David Sanchez Morales in 1963. However, he is unable to provide any evidence that Morales was behind the assassination of either JFK or RFK.

What is important is the testimony of two very reliable witnesses: Wayne Smith and Edwin Lopez. They are convinced that the pictures indicate that David Sanchez Morales and George Joannides were both in the hotel on the day RFK was assassinated. Although he has provided the testimony before in Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, it was good to see Bob Walton speaking on camera.

[Myra Bronstein]

I thought it might be worth posting Gaeton Fonzi's account of the Morales confession that appeared in The Last Investigation (1993) (pages 388-396). Note that Bob Walton does not mention the Robert Kennedy assassination in this account.

It was while sitting in the El Molino one night, that Ruben Carbajal told Bob Dorff and me about the times he and Bob Walton had gone to Washington to meet Morales and about the trip on which they met other high-ranking CIA officials. To obtain more details about those meetings, I suggested we talk to Walton. The next morning, a Saturday, Carbajal called him and Walton agreed to drive down from his home in Scottsdale to meet the three of us at the Holiday Inn.

Walton is in his mid-fifties, a pleasant, ruddy-faced fellow with Irish good looks and an easy, straightforward manner. He remembers their first trip to Washington as being in the spring of 1973. "I had had a coronary in November of 1972 and Rocky and I started talking about getting into business shortly after that. When you're from a dry climate like Arizona and you go back there in the summer you're just sweating like a pig. But I don't remember being uncomfortable, so I think it was early in the spring of 1973."

Walton corroborates the reason for the trip and the meeting with Morales: "We felt, or at least Rocky felt, that he could give us an inside track on who were the people who were for real and who were not. That was a big concern of mine because I had already been on one wild goose chase, spent an expensive week in Nassau waiting for a transaction to close and it never did."

Their evening with Morales, Walton remembers, was both very pleasant and, in more than one way, especially memorable. "We all went out for dinner, which was very nice. It was Rocky and his wife, me and my wife and Rocky's mother and father."

Morales, not someone who trusted strangers or even associates easily, obviously was impressed by Walton's character and, although their commodities business never took hold, he later called on Walton to represent him on a few matters back in Phoenix. It was something Morales said at one of those subsequent encounters in Phoenix that makes Walton put what had happened in Washington in a very special perspective.

"Morales was building a big, new house out near Willcox," Walton says. "Actually, it was in a little town called El Frita, which is about half-way between Willcox and the Mexican border. It's a remote area, I've only driven that road once in my life. It's an agricultural area, they grow the famous jalapenos peppers there. I never got to see the house, but he had just finished it and was describing it to me when he mentioned that he put in it the best security system in the United States. And I remember asking him, thinking he was worried about burglars or being robbed, 'What do you need so much security for? You're still thirty miles from the Mexican border.' And he said, 'I'm not worried about those people, I'm worried about my own.' "

That struck Walton as curious. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I know too much," Morales said, then quickly dropped it.

Remembering that now, Walton views his first meeting with Morales in Washington as being far more significant than he realized. After dinner, the whole party went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel. It was late and Carbajal's parents and his wife returned to their rooms and Ruben and Morales returned to the Waltons' room with them. "Didi ended up staying all night," Walton recalls. "My wife went to sleep somewhere around two in the morning and Rocky and I and Didi drank and talked from when we got back from dinner - maybe that was about eleven o'clock at night - until about six in the morning. "

The drinking got heavy. "We had consumed quite a bit of alcohol," remembers Walton. "At one point, between the three of us we had gone through a fifth of Scotch and we had to re-order. It was a real contest." He pauses and smiles. "Ah, my younger days, my misspent youth!" And as the night and the drinking go on, defenses come down and candid truths emerge. "You know," says Walton, "you get in a kind of position where you say, 'All right, I told you everything about me, what are you all about?' "

Morales began with his war stories. Walton remembers him talking about the killing in Vietnam and Laos, about being involved in the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, of hits in Paraguay and Uruguay and Venezuela. ("He said his wife was [in the country] with him and they had real trouble getting him out of town. They almost bought the farm on that one.")

The drinking and the talking continued. At one point, Morales began probing Walton for a bit of his own background. Walton had gone to Amherst College in Massachusetts and, as part of his developing interest in political science and politics, he had done some volunteer work for Jack Kennedy's Senatorial campaign. Later, at Harvard Law, Walton was head of a student group which invited then Senator Kennedy to speak at Cambridge.

Walton never got to explain the details of that association. At the first mention of Kennedy's name, he recalls, Morales literally almost hit the ceiling.

"He flew off the bed on that one," says Walton. "I remember he was lying down and he jumped up screaming, 'That no good son of a bitch motherf*****!' He started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy."

Walton says Morales's tirade about Kennedy, fueled by righteous anger and high-proof booze, went on for minutes while he stomped around the room. Suddenly he stopped, sat back down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added:

"Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"

I looked at Ruben Carbajal, who had remained silent while Walton was telling me this. Carbajal looked at me and nodded his head. Yes, he was there, it was true. But, in all the long hours we had spent together and all the candid revelations he had provided, it was a remembrance he couldn't bring himself to tell me about his friend Didi.

Well they sure took care of that son of a bitch Morales, to keep him from testifying at the HSCA, eh?

[Pat Speer]

I share some of the concerns of Summers and Morley. It seems to me the program should have contacted men other than Lopez, men like Blakey and Cornwell, to see if they would also ID Joannides. I would also liked to have seen a close-up comparison of the Morales look-alike. I live in Los Angeles, an area that is roughly 50% latino, and I see Morales look-alikes every day. This gets into the uncomfortable issue of race, but experts on eyewitness testimony, like Elizabeth Loftus, have found that people's ability to recognize faces is somewhat limited when looking at faces outside their own race. I couldn't help but notice that all the men IDing Morales were white.

John, in your post on the blog you stated outright that Morales was murdered. I don't remember seeing any evidence for this. If I remember correctly he died of a heart attack. Since Sullivan, Artime, Prio, DeMohrenschildt, Giancana, Rosselli, and Hoffa all died in this same 2-3 year window, I at first found Morales' death suspicious. I think Fonzi looked into this, however, and found that Morales had had a history of heart disease. If I'm remembering incorrectly, or if there's evidence for foul play in Morales' death, I'd appreciate a reminder.

[Richard J. Smith]

Hey all, anybody want a copy made?

And there's this picture of, probably, him in Dealey Plaza on Nov 22, '63.

http://www.jfkresearch.com/eaglesham/page5.jpg

So there are pictures placing (probably) him at both Kennedy murder scenes...

That is definitely NOT Morales on the lampost at the corner of Main and Houston.

RJS

[John Geraghty]

You can watch the film here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6166806.stm

You can post a comment here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/...ember_2006.html

Shane O'Sullivan's piece on Bobby Kennedy's assassination, at least as it relates to the late George Joannides, is unfounded and unfair.

O'Sullivan has accurately recounted my reporting in Salon and the New York Review of Books about George Joannides' still unexplained role in the JFK assassination story.

But I do not share O'Sullivan's thinly sourced, very subjective conclusion that Joannides was in Los Angles in June 1968, much less that he was involved in anyway in the RFK assassination. Ed Lopez's perspective is welcome but I see no corroboration of such a claim.

Shane O'Sullivans reply to Mr.Morley

We spoke to Jefferson Morley while researching our film but he did not want to be interviewed on camera, citing a lack of knowledge of the RFK case.

Morley agreed that Ed Lopez was an extremely credible witness on Joannides and that his positive ID raises the serious possibility that Joannides is the man in the photograph - I see nothing "unfounded" about that. With his ten years of research into Joannides, Morley knows the implications if Joannides was at the hotel.

In 1963, Joannides was the case officer for the DRE, an anti-Castro group of Cuban exiles supported by the CIA. Joannides' primary contact was Dr Luis Fernandez-Rocha. When I showed Fernandez-Rocha the photograph, he said "I will neither confirm or deny that this is Joannides."

In the interest of balance, we asked Morley to suggest an equally credible witness to identify Joannides but so far, he has not done so.

I too encourage everyone to post something, even something small or something already posted on the forum. Please do so to create more exposure for both cases.

John

[James Richards]

Hi James,

good job! Thanks for that, sure looks like him to me from the photo. The hairline and ear especially.

My next question is....who is he?

Anyone who you'd expect to be associated with the CIA or operations like this? (Francesca Akhtar)

Francesca,

Gran was one of the militant Cubans from Miami who mixed with all the usual suspects.

As an extension to this all, it should be remembered that Gerry Hemming puts himself at Sirhan's mother's house on the morning after the shooting. He recalls that Dick Hathcock was also there, the same Hatchcock who told about Loran Hall taking Hemming's rifle out of hock back in 1963.

In the Roy Hargraves interview published in Larry Hancock's book, he puts himself, Hemming and Lawrence Howard in Los Angeles at the time.

I guess another question is, did David Morales have an 'in' with the LAPD? A school friend of Morales', a man he remained close with over the years was Ruben Ortega who was the Phoenix Police Chief. I wonder if Ortega knew Thomas Reddin, LA Chief? Many years ago I asked Reddin about this but he never replied. He died in late 2004 so I guess we will never know.

James

[Don Roberdeau]

I thought it might be worth posting Gaeton Fonzi's account of the Morales confession that appeared in The Last Investigation (1993) (pages 388-396). Note that Bob Walton does not mention the Robert Kennedy assassination in this account.

...

Walton never got to explain the details of that association. At the first mention of Kennedy's name, he recalls, Morales literally almost hit the ceiling.

"He flew off the bed on that one," says Walton. "I remember he was lying down and he jumped up screaming, 'That no good son of a bitch motherf*****!' He started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy."

Walton says Morales's tirade about Kennedy, fueled by righteous anger and high-proof booze, went on for minutes while he stomped around the room. Suddenly he stopped, sat back down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added:

"Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"

...

Well they sure took care of that son of a bitch Morales, to keep him from testifying at the HSCA, eh?

Good Day Myra.... Priceless! LOL and probably spot on!!

Best Regards in Research,

Don

Don Roberdeau

U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, CV-67, "Big John," Plank Walker

Sooner, or later, the Truth emerges Clearly

http://members.aol.com/DRoberdeau/JFK/DP.jpg

http://members.aol.com/DRoberdeau/JFK/ROSE...NOUNCEMENT.html

http://members.aol.com/DRoberdeau/JFK/BOND...PINGarnold.htmlhttp://hometown.aol.com/DRoberdeau

T ogether

E veryone

A chieves

M ore

Edited November 21, 2006 by Don Roberdeau

[Pat Speer]

Other possible players...

Jim Braden...reported to have been staying across town at the Century Plaza when Kennedy was at the Ambassador.

Robert Maheu... had a number of associates within the LAPD. At one point he aproached Darryl Gates on behalf of Howard Hughes.

Johnny Rosselli... implicated Sirhan's attorney in some legal entanglements just as he took Sirhan's case. Sirhan's recent attorney Larry Teeter believed this was designed to compromise Cooper and get him to convince Sirhan to plead guilty.

Sidney Korshak... had close ties all over Los Angeles, including the L.A. FBI, who took his word, the word of a mob lawyer, over the words of an eyewitness when investigating Marcello's threats on JFK's life.

[Michael Hogan]

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/

Read this from Lisa Pease.

Lisa Pease's work with Jim DeEugenio and PROBE always adhered to a very high standard. However, her comments on Shane O'Sullivan's work seem somehow lacking to me.

First of all, she has not yet seen the video. I suppose that, in and of itself, does not invalidate her opinions. But the fact that she does not even acknowledge Ed Lopez' positive identification of Joannides, speaks to the incompleteness of her evaluations, in my opinion.

This is what she writes about Joannides:

The other big red flag in this story is the suggestion that George Joannides would be there, or involved.

Consider:

1. I believe the CIA directed and controlled the assassination of John Kennedy. I think Joannides was involved in helping set up Oswald as a Communist through his role with the DRE (Carlos Bringuier of the DRE "fought" Oswald in the street, leading to Oswald's arrest and subsequent appearance on a televised debate, enhancing the "legend" (intelligence parlance for a false identity story) of Oswald as Communist rebel. But Joannides was a headquarters man, from what I gather. He was not a field operative. He has never been placed in Dealey Plaza, even though there's strong reason to believe he abetted the coverup and possibly helped orchestrate events from a distance. Joannides is a handler, a puppetmaster. And his region was Florida and the East Coast. If he was going to handle someone killing Bobby, the last place he'd be would be the site of the crime.

2. I believe Morales was likely involved in the Kennedy assassination. But with Jim Garrison concurrently conducting his investigation into the CIA's role in the assassination of John Kennedy that same year, that very month - why on Earth would anyone in the CIA been so stupid as to send someone involved in one assassination to commit another? It makes much more sense that a new team would be used - all new players. Different reporting structure. Different agents, assets, and cutouts. It makes NO sense that the team that had so botched the Kennedy assassination as to have given rise to a real life prosecution effort in New Orleans would be used again.

I'm sorry, Shane O'Sullivan. I really think you've been had.

In light of Lopez' positive ID, the above just seems weak and primarily just her speculation. Perhaps Lopez is mistaken, but Lisa Pease can do better than that if she wants to demonstrate him wrong.

Thanks to Mark for posting that link.

[Ron Ecker]

Is there any chance of some stills from the program being posted of the Morales lookalike? It's impossible to tell from viewing the program at the Web link (on my computer anyway) how much the man looks like Morales.

Edited November 22, 2006 by Ron Ecker

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

I share some of the concerns of Summers and Morley. It seems to me the program should have contacted men other than Lopez, men like Blakey and Cornwell, to see if they would also ID Joannides.

Lopez and Hardway dealt with Joannides on a nearly daily basis, whereas Blakey and Cornwell seemed to traipse through Langley as rarely as they could justify. If anyone is well positioned to ID the CIA man, it is Lopez, though any corroboration for Lopez's ID would be welcome.

I would also liked to have seen a close-up comparison of the Morales look-alike. I live in Los Angeles, an area that is roughly 50% latino, and I see Morales look-alikes every day. This gets into the uncomfortable issue of race, but experts on eyewitness testimony, like Elizabeth Loftus, have found that people's ability to recognize faces is somewhat limited when looking at faces outside their own race. I couldn't help but notice that all the men IDing Morales were white.

Ms. Loftus was recently vivisected while on the stand in the Scooter Libby case; so much so that it appeared she was unfamiliar with her own prior work, and the judge ruled against the Libby defense team being allowed to call her as an expert witness. Whatever her academic credentials may be, her value has subsequently plummeted, and I wouldn't put too much stock in her theories unless and until her reputation can be rehabilitated.

Moreover, it is one thing to be confused about a person of different ethnicity in an instance where one gets only a brief glimpse. It is another thing entirely for men like Ayers and Smith - who knew Morales over a period of years [albeit much prior to the 1968 photo evidence] - to misidentify Morales because he wasn't white.

John, in your post on the blog you stated outright that Morales was murdered. I don't remember seeing any evidence for this. If I remember correctly he died of a heart attack. Since Sullivan, Artime, Prio, DeMohrenschildt, Giancana, Rosselli, and Hoffa all died in this same 2-3 year window, I at first found Morales' death suspicious. I think Fonzi looked into this, however, and found that Morales had had a history of heart disease. If I'm remembering incorrectly, or if there's evidence for foul play in Morales' death, I'd appreciate a reminder.

Morales' friend Ruben Carbajal certainly thought there was something odd about El Indio's death, as recounted by Fonzi:

"That night Morales had what Carbajal calls "a supposed heart attack." Even today he thinks there is something suspicious about his friend's death. "His brother Robert, who grabbed a plane from Phoenix and flew right there, he told me they were supposed to send an ambulance from that other chickenxxxx town up there, Benson I think it is, and they had called about nine or nine-thiry but something was wrong with it. Then when it got there the oxygen wasn't working right, none of the equipment was working right. It took about six hours by the time they got him to the hospital over there in Tucson. It all seemed pretty strange to me."

Morales died when the hospital withdrew life support. There was no autopsy, at his wife's request.

On to other matters re: this thread...

Rather than expend too much time and energy debating whether all three CIA men [Morales, Joannides, Campbell] were present at the Ambassador, can I suggest that the presence of any one of them is sufficient to raise a foul smell? Let us recall a few other salient details that seem not to have registered with some members here:

The Special Unit Senator investigation was controlled by Manuel Pena, of whom it was said that any and every single piece of evidence, and every witness, passed through his hands. The LAPD's own flow charts indicate that Pena decided which witnesses would be interviewed, or re-interviewed. In the period immediately prior to the Senator's murder, Pena had been on loan from the LAPD to the CIA, and various persons who knew Pena, including his brother, vouched for the fact that Pena had rendered assistance to the Agency for a decade or so.

Also singularly instrumental in the obstruction of an objective investigation was polygrapher Enrique "Hank" Hernandez, whose own resume reveals that he had worked for CIA stretching back at least five years prior to Kennedy's murder in LA. Now that the audio tapes of his session with witness Sandy Serrano are available to the public, one can hear for oneself just how radically his interviewing style departed from established polygraph protocols.

Is it really just happenstance that the two men who seem to have most negatively influenced the outcome of the SUS investigation were themselves Agency appartchiks? In the event that CIA had nothing to do with the crime, the Langley-related resume entries for Pena and Hernandez mean nothing. However, conversely, if it emerges that CIA personnel orchestrated the murder of Robert Kennedy, the control exercised over the subsequent murder investigaton by two of CIA's own takes on another hue entirely, and fits snugly with the appointment of Joannides as liaison with the HSCA as another example of deliberately gaming the outcome of legal investigations by illegal means, for a self-servingly fraudulent end.

[John Simkin]

John, in your post on the blog you stated outright that Morales was murdered. I don't remember seeing any evidence for this. If I remember correctly he died of a heart attack. Since Sullivan, Artime, Prio, DeMohrenschildt, Giancana, Rosselli, and Hoffa all died in this same 2-3 year window, I at first found Morales' death suspicious. I think Fonzi looked into this, however, and found that Morales had had a history of heart disease. If I'm remembering incorrectly, or if there's evidence for foul play in Morales' death, I'd appreciate a reminder.

The problem with David Sanchez Morales was that he was indiscrete when drunk. In 1960 Wayne Smith was a State Department officer in the American Embassy in Havana whereas was stationed there as an undercover CIA agent. Wayne tells the story of being in a bar in Havana with Morales. After a heavy drinking session Morales began talking about the CIA’s secret operations that involved frog men operating out of Guantanamo Bay.

Another example of Morales indiscretion was allowing his photograph to be taken by Kevin Schofield at the El Molino restaurant on 4th August, 1973. The picture appeared in the Arizona Republic with the following text: “Feted by friends at a fiesta Saturday was former American counsul to Cuba, David Sanchez, left, who was in that country when Castro took over… In government service for 28 years, Sanchez is now consultant in the office of deputy director for Operations Counter-insurgency and Special Activities in Washington.”

This was the greatest crime any CIA agent can commit and as a result he was forced to resign from the agency. However, he continued to make regular trips to Washington. When asked about this by his friend Ruben Carbajal, Morales replied: “Oh, they run into some problems, I have to go up there and take care of them. These people never let go of you.”

Morales built a new house at El Frita, which is about half-way between Willcox and the Mexican border. Morales told another friend, Bob Walton, that he had put in the best security system in the United States. Walton said, “What do you need so much security for? You're still thirty miles from the Mexican border.” Morales replied, “I'm not worried about those people, I'm worried about my own."

Gaeton Fonzi, staff investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HUCA) found out about Morales from CIA asset, Paul Bethel, who was one of David Phillips contract workers. It was suggested that Morales might have been the “Latin-looking” man seen with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.

Fonzi had also read David Phillips’s autobiography, ‘The Night Watch’. It includes a reference to a CIA agent who used the code-name Hector (Rip Robertson) and his “sidekick ‘El Indio’, a massive American of Mexican and Indian extraction I had seen only briefly during the revolt (the CIA-stage 1954 Guatemala coup) but was to work with in other operations over the years.” El Indio was of course Morales.

When Fonzi interviewed Phillips on behalf of the HSCA he asked him about Morales. Phillips said that Morales was an unimportant figure in the CIA and suggested that he might have died as a result of his heavy drinking. At this stage Morales was still alive. What is more, Morales was far from being an important figure, he had in fact been Chief of Operations at JM/WAVE in 1963 and at the centre of the operation to kill Fidel Castro. The operation that was later turned to kill John F. Kennedy. Fonzi also discovered that Morales had worked very closely with John Rosselli, who also played a key role in the plots against Castro. Rosselli was to be one of the first people to be interviewed by the HSCA but went missing in July 1976. His body was later discovered in the Intracoastal Waterway in North Miami. He had been cut up and stuffed into a 55-gallon steel drum.

No wonder that Morales was worried about his own health during the HSCA investigations. Rip Robertson had died in 1970 and could not be interviewed. William Pawley had committed suicide in 1977. The other key figure, Carl E. Jenkins, had remained deeply undercover and was not being investigated by the HSCA.

Morales made his last trip to Washington in early May, 1978. Ruben Carbajal had a drink with Morales a few days later. Carbajal told him he looked unwell. He replied: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Ever since I left Washington I haven’t been feeling very comfortable”. That night he was taken to hospital. Carbajal went to visit him the next morning. As Carbajal later recalled: “They wouldn’t let no one in, they had his room surrounded by sheriff’s deputies.” Later that day (8th May) the decision was taken to withdraw life support. Morales’s wife, Joanne, requested that there should not be an autopsy. The CIA took good care of her and she moved to a fine house in Boston and according to Fonzi spent her time “pursuing her studies in Chinese antiquities”.

Fonzi never got the chance to interview Morales. Unlike, the recent case of Alexander Litvinenko, the poisoning of Morales received no publicity. After all, it is only the Russians who kill people who pose a threat to the stability of the state.