Legacy of Secrecy (131 page)

cerned about the Palestinians, he didn’t join any Arab groups or attend

demonstrations, or do any of the other things many other young Arab-

Americans did at the time; Sirhan preferred to bet on horses. However,

Bobby Kennedy’s support for Israel and well-publicized courtship of

Jewish voters in New York might have made Sirhan amenable to taking

action against him in return for a large sum of money—especially if it

meant paying off a debt to the Mafia that put his life, and the lives of

his family, at risk.27

As for Sirhan’s deadline of June 5, 1968, that was the day after Califor-

nia’s June 4, 1968, primary, meaning Bobby would have been expected

to leave California on that date. Assuming he won the primary and got

the nomination, Bobby wouldn’t have spent any significant time cam-

paigning in California again until much later in the summer and into

the fall—apparently too late for Sirhan.

Chapter Fifty-eight

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan might have started stalking Bobby Kennedy on

May 20, 1968, when Bobby attended a luncheon for four hundred sup-

porters at Robbie’s Restaurant in Pomona, California, near Los Angeles.

A Pomona police officer helping with security noticed “a young woman

standing by the kitchen door of the restaurant, apparently trying to

get inside.” As Larry Hancock detailed from police and FBI reports,

the officer told the young woman “the door was locked, and she then

asked him which way Senator Kennedy would enter.” The officer told

her he “would probably go up the stairs to the second floor,” where the

luncheon was to be held.1

The officer later saw “the same young woman, along with a young

man . . . climb over the stair railing behind people checking tickets at the

foot of the stairs.” However, they were intercepted by the restaurant’s

night manager, who had been called in to help with tickets. The woman

claimed, “We are with the Senator’s party,” and was so insistent that

eventually the night manager allowed them to pass. Later, he noticed

that “the [young] man had a coat over his arm even though it was a

very warm day,” and that the couple remained at the back of the room,

away from the main gathering of Kennedy supporters. When the night

manager asked her why, the woman replied, “What the hell is it to you?”

and he left them alone. The restaurant’s owner also noticed the incident,

though from a distance.2

The night manager later said “he was fairly certain the young man

was Sirhan,” and he would later “successfully [pick] out Sirhan’s photo

from a sample set of 25 young dark-skinned males.” He described the

woman as “medium blonde” with “a nice shape” and, at five-foot-six,

somewhat taller than the man. He would later back away from his

identification of Sirhan under questioning from the LAPD, though the

Pomona officer had also seen the oddly behaving couple.3

Witnesses also spotted Sirhan at a rally for Bobby Kennedy in down-

town Los Angeles on May 24, 1968. A clinical psychologist pointed out

Sirhan to his wife, because he thought Sirhan was “out of character with

the crowd, very intense, and sinister.” At the next sighting of Sirhan at

a public gathering, Bobby Kennedy wasn’t present.4 On May 30, 1968,

two Kennedy campaign workers in Azuza, California, each indepen-

dently recalled seeing Sirhan come into their office, along with a young

woman and another young man. The woman was described as having

an “excellent figure” and “dishwater blond” hair. Azuza is about fif-

teen miles west of Pasadena, where Sirhan lived at the time. One of the

Kennedy volunteers said the man, whom she later identified as Sirhan,

claimed to be from the Kennedy campaign office in Pasadena and asked

if Bobby would be going there. After being told he would not, the two

men and the woman left. Given both sightings of Sirhan with an attrac-

tive woman, it should be noted that while Sirhan was interested in girls

and had had a couple of unrequited crushes in the past, he had no docu-

mented dates or girlfriends in 1968.5

In the middle of the afternoon of June 1, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan returned

to the same gun shop near Los Angeles—Lock, Stock, ’n Barrel—that he

had visited in April, when he had asked about armor-piercing ammo

for a .357 Magnum. On June 1, two witnesses saw Sirhan in the shop

again: the clerk who waited on Sirhan that day, and the shop’s owner,

who both said that Sirhan was accompanied by two young men who

also appeared to be of Middle Eastern extraction. The gun shop’s owner

thought they were the same three-man group from April. The clerk, who

hadn’t been present for their April visit, told the FBI he sold Sirhan “two

boxes of high-velocity .22 caliber long rifle bullets,” with fifty shells in

each box.6

Also on June 1, 1968, Sirhan signed in for two hours of target prac-

tice at the Police Department gun range in Corona, the town where

Sirhan had previously worked at a couple of horse farms. Though the

log book verifies Sirhan’s presence, no one actually remembered see-

ing him there.7 But Sirhan was observed firing his gun that same day,

in the same general area, by an insurance executive and his son, who

were hiking in the Santa Ana Mountains. They encountered a man later

identified as Sirhan, taking target practice at tin cans. Sirhan was with a

young brunette woman and a tall man with “sandy colored hair and a

ruddy complexion.” The insurance executive remembered the encoun-

ter because all three were quite “unfriendly [and gave him the] sensation

that it would be possible for them to put a bullet in your back.” He and

his son quickly left the area.8

Two witnesses also saw Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel on

June 2, 1968, during Bobby Kennedy’s rally there. According to LAPD

records, one witness actually knew Sirhan because he had worked close

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to Sirhan’s last job. He recognized Sirhan near one of the ballrooms,

while the other witness saw Sirhan in the hotel’s Coconut Grove restau-

rant, where Bobby’s rally was being held.9

That same day, Sirhan had been sighted at another of Bobby’s Los

Angeles campaign offices, on Wilshire Boulevard. Around 2:00 PM,

two volunteers—a man and a woman—saw the man they later identi-

fied as Sirhan walk in. When the male volunteer asked Sirhan what he

could do to help him, Sirhan pointed at a distinguished-looking older

man in the office, saying, “I’m with him.” The man Sirhan pointed to

was a new volunteer named Khaiber Khan, a wealthy and prominent

Iranian dissident who opposed the US-backed Shah of Iran and his bru-

tal secret police, the SAVAK. After Sirhan left, the female witness said she

noticed that her copy of Bobby’s campaign itinerary had “disappeared

from her desk.”10

Khaiber Khan himself would later tell police that two days later, on

June 4, he had seen Sirhan at around 5:00 PM at the same Wilshire cam-

paign office. Khan said Sirhan was with a young woman “in her early

20s . . . with light brown or dark blond shoulder-length hair . . . ‘a good

figure, and nice legs.’” The woman was wearing a “light . . . dress with

black or blue polka dots the size of a dime.”11

Due to the American government’s strong support for the Shah, Khan

and his Iranian dissident associates were probably under some type

of US surveillance. Sirhan’s contacts with Khan meant that the same

domestic surveillance would also pick up on Sirhan—which would later

cause US agencies to cover up or destroy information after Sirhan was

arrested as Bobby’s assassin. The Army Intelligence memo had said that

“Sirhan [was] active in gaining support for Shah of Iran’s visit,” but since

the rest of its Sirhan file has never been released or acknowledged, it’s

not clear whether it referred to the Shah’s imminent visit, slated for June

11, 1968. If it did, that would have provided all the more reason to have

Iranian dissidents like Khan under surveillance—and for someone to

take advantage of that by placing Sirhan in close proximity to Khan.12

Also on June 4, 1968, the day of the California primary, Sirhan was

seen taking target practice with his pistol at the San Gabriel Valley Gun

Club. He stayed until closing time, 5:30 PM. Sometime before leaving

his house that day, Sirhan had thrown away an envelope on which he’d

written, “RFK must be disposed of like his brother.” That evening, Sirhan

took his pistol when he went to the Ambassador Hotel.13

Even before Sirhan began stalking Bobby Kennedy in late May 1968,

he had been linked to several people and groups that could have been

expected to cause the LAPD or other officials to cover up Sirhan’s involve-

ment after he was arrested for shooting Bobby—and that’s exactly what

happened. Two of these connections were to the staunchly conservative

mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty.

Mayor Yorty had a friend named Jerry Owen, a small-time tele-

vision preacher in Los Angeles whose show was called
The Walking

Bible
, because of Owen’s claim to have memorized the Bible. Sam Yorty

appeared on Owen’s show, was photographed with Owen in the mayor’s

office several times, and Yorty authorized the city to loan Owen “horse

trailers and other city property.” William Turner found several credible

witnesses who placed Sirhan with Owen in May 1968, prior to Bobby’s

murder. Several of those witnesses later testified under oath in a civil

trial about Owen’s pre-assassination contact with Sirhan.14

As Larry Hancock summarized, “Jerry Owen ran horses at a ranch

out in Orange County. . . . A number of people [said] they had personally

heard Jerry Owen mention Sirhan and even saw Jerry with Sirhan (or

someone looking very much like him). These people understood that

Sirhan was doing minor jobs for Jerry, handling and feeding his horses.

Their stories . . . don’t show up in the internal police reports dealing

with Jerry Owen.” However, Turner found indications that the LAPD

conducted a more intensive investigation of Owen’s possible contacts

with Sirhan than the released files reflect. After the assassination, Jerry

Owen apparently tried to provide cover for his contact with Sirhan by

telling police that he had first met Sirhan on the day of Bobby’s murder,

when he gave Sirhan a ride.15

Owen wasn’t the only good friend of Mayor Yorty whom Sirhan con-

tacted prior to the assassination. Mayor Yorty was a longtime follower of

the charismatic and eccentric Manly Palmer Hall, whom William Turner

described as a hypnotherapist who had “gained considerable publicity”

by hypnotizing Hollywood actors. For twenty years, Yorty “had been

a student of Hall, whom he regarded as a guru.” As part of Sirhan’s

seemingly increased interest in the occult and self-hypnosis, Sirhan told

Turner that “he remembered paying several visits to [Palmer Hall’s]

headquarters, an alabaster temple near Griffith Park [and] ‘I remember

seeing Manly Hall there himself there.’” Turner also notes that police

found a copy of one of Hall’s books in Sirhan’s car after Bobby’s assas-

sination, but “the book mysteriously disappeared from the grand jury

exhibits.”16

LAPD detectives would, naturally, have tried to protect Mayor Yorty

and his friends from being drawn into the Sirhan case, which raises

the possibility that someone had made sure that Sirhan had those

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connections—and more serious ones—prior to Bobby’s murder. Ironi-

cally, it would be Mayor Yorty himself who would publicly proclaim

Sirhan a communist soon after Bobby’s murder, saying that Sirhan “was

a member of numerous communist organizations . . . [and] that Sirhan

was sort of a loner who favored communists of all types.” As Melanson

pointed out, Sirhan belonged to no communist organizations, and Sirhan

hadn’t seen his only communist acquaintance for three years—until

May 2, 1968. The man, a friend from Sirhan’s college days, was Walter

Crowe, who told the FBI “he had tried to interest Sirhan in Marxism or

communism, but couldn’t.”17

When Crowe met with Sirhan at Bob’s Big Boy on May 2, just over a

month before Bobby’s murder, Crowe had been under surveillance by

the LAPD’s intelligence unit—and likely also the FBI, since the Bureau

later had more details about Crowe’s meeting with Sirhan than records

show that Crowe himself told the FBI or the LAPD. Crowe was not a

significant communist figure, but he and his associates were some of the

hundreds, if not thousands, of leftists targeted for surveillance by the

LAPD, the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence. Turner has written

at length about the ultra-conservative mentality—a McCarthey-esque

belief in the Red Menace—that pervaded the five-thousand-member

LAPD in 1968.18

However, Turner also points out that, based on his own FBI experi-

ence and the files on Crowe, other young people with whom Crowe met