Tuesday, November 21, 2006

RFK: New evidence

Shane O'Sullivan, a screenwriter and BBC investigator, has found photographic evidence of the presence of three CIA personnel in the Ambassador Hotel on the night RFK was shot. You will find the BBC Newsnight report (online here) absolutely compelling.

The testimony confirming the identity of these spooks is, in my view, persuasive, if not conclusive. One of the three men is Dave Morales, a name some of you will recognise.

Morales, nicknamed "El Indio," once bragged to his lawyer of his involvement with both the JFK and RFK assassinations, and had bragged about the 1963 killing to his oldest friend. Morales had helped to engineer the overthrow of the democratically elected leader Arbenz in Guatemala. A heavy drinker, he had the rep of being a daring CIA assassin, and reportedly aided in the capture of Che Guevara.

Former CIA operative Bradley Ayers appears on the BBC program to identify Morales. Earlier, Ayers had encountered an eyewitness who placed Morales in the Ambassador that evening.

For an alternative take on Ayers, Morales and the Newsnight program, see this write-up by Lisa Pease. Pease -- who, as I already knew, had interacted with Ayers some years ago -- believes that Ayers has long had a Morales fixation. Perhaps, but in the Newsnight segment (which Pease had not watched before writing), he seemed reasonably cautious in his assessment, which is seconded by others.

In the past, researchers have relied too heavily on blurry and grainy photographic evidence. (JFK researchers may recall the Billy Lovelady fiasco.) But the photographs used here are, in my opinion, of a somewhat better nature.

4 comments:

sunny said...

Ms. Pease wrote:

And in an even more direct parallel, in the seventies, two researchers linked two photos of hobos arrested in Dealey Plaza to Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt. They presented photos that looked the most like the hoboes for comparison. But in the end, that was proven phoney as well.

umm, no it wasn't. As Mark Lanes "Plausible Denial" makes clear, a jury of our peers determined that E. Howard Hunt was one of the hobos. I cannot believe Ms. Pease has not read that book, or, if she has, why she felt it necessary to make this statement.

gary said...

Sunny, if I'm not mistaken, that jury never saw the tramp photos.

Joseph Cannon said...

Yeah, I read "PD" quite a while ago, and I don't think that the trial touched on the photos. That book by Weberman was the one that focused on that.

I always preferred the theory that the "Hunt" tramp was Crisman. But I have a weakness for the outre, and Crisman was a very outre kind of a guy.

Real History Lisa said...

"sunny" is very wrong - the book Plausible Denial details the libel suit E. Howard Hunt filed against the Spotlight not for claiming he was the tramp in the photos, but for claiming that a CIA document from CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton to Richard Helms talked about what they would do about Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Read the book and get the facts straight - it's a very interesting book, but it is not about the tramp photo identification, which was discredited by the Rockefeller commission, long before this trial ever came to be, and was not the topic of the trial.

Joseph - after seeing the special I still have serious doubts as to how valid this will prove. William Pepper was set up in a similar manner.

No one would like this to be true more than I, as it should indeed bring about the first federal-level investigation into the assassination of RFK, one that has the potential to bring prosecutions and closure to both the JFK and RFK cases. But we're a VERY long ways from that. Photo identification is often wrong, at least in the JFK case it has been! And I found my own double in a photo taken several years before I was born. A photo is not hard evidence without other corroboration. If the CIA records show Morales in Los Angeles that day, that gets a helluva lot more provacative. But if Joannides, Morales, et al have rock solid alibis for that day? Then no matter how much people believe the photo identifications, it just can't be so.

I feel Shane has only scratched the surface here. Perhaps his film and book will provide more detail. Or not. I'm still leaning towards a misidentification at this point.

By the way - Dan Hardway, who worked side by side with Ed Lopez and interacted with Joannides just as much, could not confirm or deny that the man in the photo was Joannides - he just didn't remember well enough since that was some 30 years ago. That definitely casts doubt on Eddie's level of certainty, in my book. And it casts doubt on the honest of Shane O'Sullivan because he didn't tell us this in the special. How many others failed to identify or said the men WEREN'T who he claimed that Shane hasn't told us about? Time will tell.