Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 13
ОглавлениеWAS THIS REALLY A LONE ASSASSIN?
Senator Robert F Kennedy, younger brother of America’s greatest martyr since Abraham Lincoln, was shot on 5 June 1968. It was five years after the assassination of President Jack Kennedy and a year to the day after the start of the Israeli/Arab Six Day War. It was also just two months after the murder of Dr Martin Luther King.
Younger, taller, more handsome and with fewer compromises on his political record than JFK, Bobby Kennedy was popular and in tune with the times. He had once been an active supporter of McCarthyism’s anti-Communist witch-hunts, but by 1968 he was strongly for black civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. He had already shown, as Attorney General in JFK’s ‘Camelot’ administration, that he was determined to take on organised crime and the mafia.
At the age of just 42, he looked to many people like America’s next president.
RFK was gunned down in a kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he and his team went from the party celebrating his victory in the California Democratic primary to a press conference in another part of the hotel. The route through the building had been changed at the very last moment on the orders of Kennedy’s security chief, Bill Barry.
His attacker, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Palestinian refugee who saw Bobby Kennedy as pro-Jewish and objected to his promise to sell 50 Phantom fighters to Israel.
‘RFK must die,’ Sirhan had written in his diary. ‘Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June ’68.’ The date planned for the shooting was no accident, as this was the anniversary of the Six Day War.
Sirhan was tried, convicted of murder and sent to prison for life. A politically motivated fanatic, people assumed, or a lone nut. But there was enough that didn’t ring true to launch dozens of alternative explanations and conspiracy theories over the years. Could it have been the mafia, the CIA, white racists or red spies? Sirhan claims to recall nothing about the shooting and pleaded insanity in court, which led to the idea that he might have been a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ assassin, hypnotised by others to attack and kill without fear or remorse.
REASONS TO DOUBT
Bobby Kennedy was shot at by Sirhan Sirhan in front of a crowd of witnesses, including a young British journalist from the Daily Mirror, John Pilger.
Pilger was just feet away, so close that the woman who was standing right next to him suffered a bullet wound in the head. There were 77 people in the pantry area at the time. Bullets taken from Kennedy’s body were later identified by their rifling marks as almost certainly being from Sirhan’s gun, an Iver Johnson .22 Cadet 55-A.
It seemed an open and shut case. Sirhan was caught red-handed, pinned down by bodyguards and arrested on the spot. In his pocket was a newspaper clipping about Kennedy’s support for Israel. He was a strange, distracted, obsessive man, violently anti-Jewish and quite capable, it seemed, of carrying out this crime. There seemed to be no reason to go looking for other suspects or to think that Sirhan was anything other than a lone gunman. Why should anyone suppose there was a conspiracy?
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Bobby Kennedy had a lot of enemies, with a lot of economic, political and military firepower. He had bitter personal foes within the powerful Teamsters Union, including union leader Jimmy Hoffa, and in the CIA.
Many Southerners hated him for his stand on civil rights. He was feared and detested by the mafia, which had suffered when he was Attorney General and looked like having an even rougher ride if the charismatic and ruthless RFK won the Democratic nomination and became president. If there really had been a conspiracy behind the assassination of Jack Kennedy five years earlier, those plotters could be sure Bobby would try to strip away the cover-up and avenge his brother. So there was no shortage of potential conspirators. But the existence of people who would be pleased, rather than shocked, at RFK’s death does not make a conspiracy. Even the strongest motives prove nothing.
The reasons to believe this was not a lone assassin are far more solid. And the most powerful evidence is the most concrete. Sirhan’s gun – the cheap Iver Johnson revolver – could hold eight bullets. The number of bullets fired and found at the scene, embedded in bodies, ceiling panels or the pantry’s doorframe was nine, at least. Some counts make that thirteen or even fourteen bullets, and the Los Angeles Free Press, which reported this, backed up its claim with a photograph of the doorframe, showing several holes. There were simply too many bullets for the official story to be true.
The coroner, Thomas Noguchi, who performed the post mortem and saw the crucial evidence of the doorframe before it was inexplicably destroyed, later wrote in his autobiography, ‘Until more is precisely known, the existence of the second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.’
Noguchi’s autopsy report specified the actual cause of death as a fatal shot with a .22 calibre gun held close to the back of RFK’s head, behind the right ear. It was so close there were powder burns. Nobody has ever claimed Sirhan got that near.
Forty years on from Sirhan’s attack and Robert Kennedy’s death, John Pilger repeated his eyewitness account in a radio interview.
‘He was wrestled to the ground and then there were other shots. There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit – just grazed – was standing next to me and that happened after Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins.’
The newest forensic evidence concerns the one and only sound recording of the shooting, captured accidentally by a Polish journalist, Stanislaw Pruszynski, who forgot to switch off his tape recorder after Kennedy’s victory speech.
This recording was subjected to modern audio lab analysis in 2008, and the results were presented to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Washington that year. At least ten, and maybe as many as thirteen, shots can be heard, in a five-second period of mayhem (see bit.ly/audioanalysis). That’s more than the eight bullets in Sirhan’s revolver. And the time between some of the shots is far too short for them to have come from a single weapon.
Five of these shots feature the slightly different sound signature of a Harrington & Richardson 922, the only other pistol that is known to produce a similar pattern of rifling marks to the Iver Johnson 55-A. And an H&R 922 was the gun carried that night by Thane Cesar, a hired-in security guard who was close behind and to the right of Bobby Kennedy when Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward to confront RFK and the shooting started.
