Authors: Lamar Waldron
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