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Sept. 17, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
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Edition 575 - Tim Tate
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is definitely Howard Hughes, and this is still the unexplained.
Well, we're three-quarters of the way through September now, and I guess we're contemplating Christmas and the new year, but God, what happened to this last year?
It just kind of went in the snap of a finger, didn't it, by the looks of it?
I know three months still to go, so let's not write it all off yet.
But, you know, fascinating times in which we live, and we're surviving through.
Here in London, it's starting to get dark now at about half past seven in the evening.
That's a bit of a shock.
You just kind of ask yourself, what happened to summer?
Anyway, look, I hope everything's okay with you, and that you're keeping happy, and that you're keeping engaged with the world, and life is delivering the things that you want.
That's all we can hope for, any of us, isn't it, really?
And, you know, we hope for better times, too.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work on these shows.
And thank you to Haley for being good enough to book the guests for the online edition.
Now, on this one, you're going to hear somebody who was on my radio show recently for a very good reason.
It's a slightly extended version of my conversation with the author and investigative journalist Tim Tate, who's written extensively and spent 25 years researching the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.
Bobby Kennedy, JFK's brother, was a hot ticket to become president in that year.
He was going to be facing, potentially facing, Richard Nixon, and the outcome of the election that followed may have been quite different.
That's not to say that it would have been an easy campaign for him.
He would have had to fight for it.
But had it not been for the assassination, history may have turned out differently.
We will never know.
Questions about the assassination have been asked for all of the 53 years since.
A man called Sirhan Sirhan has served 50 years in jail for this.
And recently, a parole board recommended that he should get parole and be allowed out, as we would say in the UK on license.
That, I think, may be disputed, but there are people who always questioned why this man was behind bars for that length of time anyway, because there have been people who say that the fatal shot was not fired by him, although he was undoubtedly there at the venue in Los Angeles, and he was undoubtedly in possession of a gun that was fired.
But whether he fired the shot that killed the man who might have become president has been debated by some for many years, including Tim Tate, investigative journalist, broadcaster, a man who spent 25 years researching this case.
And you're going to hear some compelling evidence in the light of that recent parole hearing.
I wanted to bring Tim Tate back here.
So a chilling and a fascinating edition of The Unexplained, I think this is going to be.
As I say, this was originally broadcast very recently on my radio show, and I wanted you to hear this.
Just a couple of shout-outs to do.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, by the way.
Please keep them coming with your guest suggestions and comments.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
Follow the link, and you can send me an email from there.
Glenn in Melbourne, nice to hear from you.
Kate in the Peak District of Derbyshire, nice to hear from you, Kate.
Tana, thank you for your email, Tana.
Tony, thank you for getting in touch.
Alex, thank you for your suggestion about metamaterials and ultramaterials.
I'm going to try and get onto that.
Steve, thank you very much for your mail.
Samantha in Connecticut, thank you.
Paul liked Barry de Gregorio, who was on the show recently.
We were talking about Mars and samples and various other things.
Paul says that edition was an eye-opener.
He seemed to be a deeply sincere man who has an important message.
I agree.
Whether you agree with what he has to say or not, he puts a very cogent case, I think, and we'll have him on the show again.
Monzi sent me this email, and I'd like to get your thoughts about this if you'd like to give me them.
Monzi says, this has been happening to me for years, but I have no explanation or understanding of what's occurring.
On a large number of occasions in conversation with people, they stop and look at me, seemingly puzzled and unnerved at what they've witnessed while they look at me.
I feel no change or awareness that anything unusual has happened.
On at least 17 occasions now, different people of varied age groups and sexes with no connection with one another say that they see my face take the form of what has been described as a lizard or reptile appearance.
It's always momentary, five or ten seconds, but enough to scare whoever I've been with half to death.
I'm totally baffled by it all.
I'm 58 years of age now, totally sane man.
This started happening to me when I first reached my teens, and over the years, I've never really bothered to question it, although I know I should have.
Recently, a friend of my partner, whom I've been talking with, didn't mention to me at the time, but later told my partner that she saw my eyelids come in from the side and my skin rapidly change colour and texture before returning back again.
She had no idea that others had seen this in the past.
I have no explanation and no idea that others had seen this anything, and having never witnessed it myself, have often wondered if my leg was being pulled, if I was being teased.
But how can this be with people years apart and with no connection with one another?
Monzi, I don't know.
Monzi says, just thought you might be interested.
Has anybody else experienced this?
Someone suggest I contact your show, suggest Ed that I contacted your show.
So Monzi, I'm glad that you did.
And to my listener, listening to this now, have you experienced anything like that?
You look at somebody and their face changes for five seconds, maybe a little more.
Monzi had that experience.
What is that all about?
Your suggestions, please, welcome.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Don't forget, when you do get in touch with me, the usual stuff tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Okay, from my radio show recently now, a reappearance of Tim Tate, British author, investigative journalist, a man who really knows how to do the legwork on these investigations.
And we talk about the latest evidence and the latest information about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
I want to go back over something that we've talked about before for a very good reason.
It's been in the news again recently.
Plus, I think there is an eternal and deep fascination in the machinations of what happens in America when it comes to politicians and assassinations.
Why do those things happen going back through history?
Of course, the most famous was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas, Texas, which removed a president and changed the course of history.
That is still being debated.
Who did it?
How many were there?
And was Lee Harvey Oswald really alone, or was he just a patsy, as he said himself?
Less examined is the assassination of John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy, who in 1968 was not a shoe-in by any manner or means.
He was going to have to fight for it, but he was a potential presidential running candidate.
He was unfortunately assassinated in 1968 at the very beginning of this process.
Well, a third of the way through this process, he addressed a rally at a hotel in Los Angeles and on his way out of this quite triumphant sounding rally, you'll be hearing some of it in just a moment, was gunned down as he made his exit from the hotel, passing, I believe, through a kitchen.
A man who's given 25 years or so to researching this and the truths behind it that perhaps we haven't heard is Tim Tate, a co-author of a book about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
He's been on the show before, but there is much new to talk about.
That's what we're going to do tonight.
The book is called The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Crime, Conspiracy, and Cover-Up a New Investigation.
And in the light of some recent events, we're going to take another look at this.
Tim Tate is online to us now.
Tim, sorry to keep you waiting while I talked at such length.
How are you?
I'm very well.
How are you?
Very good, Tim.
I always think of the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a mile marker for the world because we had been through the 60s.
It was the era of flower, power, love and understanding, supposedly, even though the Vietnam War was still going on.
And the innocence that surrounded that generation and that era, I think, ended when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
What do you think?
I think you're absolutely right.
For me, and I was 12 when Bobby Kennedy was murdered, it marked the death not just of the 60s, but more crucially, of what I think had characterized at least some of that decade, and that was hope and idealism.
Bobby Kennedy's assassination was the fourth political assassination of the decade and the last of that decade.
And I think, as you say, it really marked the death of hope, the death of the 60s idealism and hope.
See, I always think about the way of things and the public perception of things.
And I think, as you rightly imply there, that people suddenly think that any possibility that we are going to enter more enlightened times has been extinguished by that act.
And sometimes people say things about themselves that can be incredibly prophetic.
I might have mentioned this the last time we spoke, but John Lennon was interviewed some years before his death at the hands of a gunman.
And he said, you know, John Kennedy, Gandhi, they all ended up getting shot.
And that quotation rang like a bell.
But I think for the world also, that was another ending of innocence, but, you know, in a later era.
And I mean, as it happens, literally less than, well, only a few hours before he was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy said in jest to someone who was driving him to the hotel, be careful or I'm going to die tonight.
War words to that effect.
You know, it was in jest, but horribly prophetic, as it turned out.
I think looking back at all the footage, and I was a tiny little boy, but I can remember when this happened.
You know, I was a little boy in short trousers.
My grandmother had taken me out for the day to Southport, to the fun fair, and she was taking me home to my mum and dad.
You know, my parents had been given a break from me for the day.
And my grandmother did what people used to do in those days.
She said, I'm just going to get off the train, son.
It's okay.
And these were more innocent times.
It was safe to do that.
So she got out of this compartment train to go and buy a paper in the days when buying the latest Liverpool Echo, which had a huge circulation, including Southport, where we were, was absolutely essential in the evening to see what was going on in the world.
I didn't understand any of this, but I said, it's all right, I'll sit here now.
And she went and got the paper, and the front page of the paper was the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.
I didn't understand any of it until later.
But she was astonished.
I can remember her astonishment that what she believed was history repeating itself had happened.
And I think a lot of people felt that way.
It was an event that you would not have thought possible.
Yeah, I mean, you would have hoped would not have been possible, though there was throughout Bobby Kennedy's campaign to win the nomination, the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidential election of that year, there were fears for his safety all the way through, and there were threats to his safety.
And, you know, this was not something which the idea that he would be killed.
This wasn't an extraneous thought.
This was something which worried his team and his family.
Was his killing before or after?
I get foggy with the history, Martin Luther King.
It was after Martin Luther King's.
And one of the things I was doing in the 25 years, as you say, that I've been working, I and my co-author have been working on this book.
One of the things I wanted to do was to go back through all His campaign speeches, his appearances in that period when he was running for the nomination.
And the speech he made impromptu when the news came in of Martin Luther King's assassination was just extraordinary.
It was amazingly powerful.
And it was so powerful that it averted a riot.
Other cities burned in the aftermath of King's assassination.
Bobby went on stage at a campaign event impromptu and his speech calm, he broke the news of the assassination to his audience, but his speech was so good and his delivery and his emotion was so powerful that that city did not burn.
There was no riot there that night.
Was it believed at the time that he had the sort of force and power that his brother had?
Or were people just trying to read that into him?
Both.
But from my point of view, and I think many other far more eminently qualified political historians, Bobby Kennedy would have been a far better and more important president for the U.S. had he got that far than his brother.
Bobby was brighter.
He was no whited sepulchre, but he was, I think, certainly particularly in the years after John Kennedy's assassination, he'd undergone a lengthy period of introspection and thinking and immersion in America's problems and the world's problems.
And had Bobby Kennedy made it to the Oval Office, not just the course of American history would have been different and changed, but I think the world as well, the world history would have been very different.
Do you think that he was hoping?
I know a lot of people hoped, a lot of politicos hoped at the time.
Was he, because his brother had been slain in the way that he was slain, was he trying to put right all of those wrongs?
He was different to Janak.
He was far more driven in many ways and a far more analytical and, I think, reflective thinker.
In terms of his brother's assassination, he'd spent several years after 1963 keeping his own counsel, saying nothing.
But in that seminal year of 1968, his final year, he had begun to move towards a position in which he thought that and was saying, however privately or quietly, that the inquiry into the investigation into John Kennedy's assassination needed to be reopened.
Right.
And this brings me to another point that I think it's important to make in these opening comments about this case.
That he didn't much care who he upset, did he?
No, I mean, one of the several years before his death, he was asked by a reporter about his reputation for being a hard ass, basically.
He was a tough fighter in the Senate and as John Kennedy's Attorney General.
And he said to this reporter, you know, you won't have to look far for my enemies.
They're all over town.
And he met Washington.
And that was absolutely right.
He didn't court popularity, particularly in the Senate or in Congress or certainly in LBJ's White House after Jack Kennedy's death.
Bobby was driven and driven to do what he thought was right and what he knew needed to be done.
Okay.
Well, the thing I would say, by contrast to that, is that for many of the, for want of a better phrase, ordinary people, the people who he met on the campaign, the crowds that came, Bobby was loved.
And it was an extraordinary devotion, much greater, I think, than Jack Kennedy inspired during his presidency.
If you look at the film of Bobby on the campaign trail, they're mobbing him.
It's like a rock star, but it's the absolute passion and love.
And so when I first went to the States to begin investigating the case, which was in the late 80s, what I was struck by very early on was this extraordinary split.
Half of the people I talked to loathed Bobby Kennedy with a passion and half adored him with an equal passion.
Right.
And, you know, if you polarize people, that can have consequences.
But equally, in order to achieve things, then sometimes you do have to polarize people.
He wasn't afraid of doing that.
I think it's a good point at which to hear some of the sounds that are relevant to this.
So what I've done is I've put together a little compilation of an ABC television news report from the States, which was on YouTube.
I found it there, which will show you what happened.
The speech in the hotel, it was the Ambassador's Hotel, wasn't it, or the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles?
Yeah, the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Okay, so this was in the run-up to a presidential primary, wasn't it?
I think he was wanting to go head-to-head ultimately with Richard Nixon for the presidency.
Yeah, just to set the scene, Bobby had come late into the running.
He was going for the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidential election.
He wasn't a shoe-in, but the big hurdle he had had to overcome was winning California.
And if he won California, he stood a very good chance of going on to getting the nomination, the Democratic Party's nomination, and that would mean he would go head-to-head with Richard Nixon in the election.
And on the night of June the 4th, stroke June the 5th, and this is the tape you're about to play, he accepted victory.
He pronounced victory because he had won the California primary, and that set him on the road or would set him on the road to winning the nomination and going head to head.
Which ultimately, sadly, because of the events that happened in the minutes after that speech, never happened, and we can only imagine.
Okay, this is the ABC News report, and on the back of this is a little bit of CNN from a couple of weeks ago describing the parole hearing of the man who went to jail for killing Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan.
50 years on, 50 years in jail.
It's looking closer that he will actually get parole and walk free.
We'll talk more about that.
Let's have a listen to this compilation.
First, Senator Kennedy in victory, and then the voice of Reporter West as our cameras show the panic that gripped the scene.
So I thank all of you who made this possible this evening, all of the effort that you made, and all of the people whose names I haven't mentioned, but who did all of the work at the precinct level, who got out the vote, who did all of the effort, brought forth all of the effort that's required.
I was a campaign manager eight years ago.
I know what a difference that kind of an effort and that kind of commitment made.
So I thank all of you.
Those of you are here.
Senator Kennedy has been shot.
Is that possible?
Is that possible?
Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen?
It is possible.
He has not only Senator Kennedy.
Oh, my God.
Senator Kennedy has been shot.
And another man, a Kennedy campaign manager, and possibly shot in the head.
I am right here.
Rafer Johnson has a hold of a man who apparently has fired the shot.
That's it, Rafer.
Get it.
Get the gun, Rafer.
Hold on to the gun.
California Parole Board has granted parole to Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of assassinating then Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
This was Sirhan's 16th parole hearing.
He's been in prison for more than 50 years.
Prosecutors did not oppose his release.
The board's decision could still be reversed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, who will review the case.
Sirhan is now 77 years old.
He was just 24 when he shot Kennedy to death in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
The Palestinian American was said to be outraged by Kennedy's support for weapon sales to Israel.
And that is the CNN report of what happened a couple of weeks ago before that.
The awful and tragic sound and the chaos, rather reminiscent, I thought, of the Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald situation.
You know, a total scrum, total chaos there when RFK was shot.
And then before that, the speech that was triumphal.
And certainly looking at the video of it, people appeared to love him in that hall, at that hotel on that night.
So that is a snapshot of 53 years there, Tim, that tells the entire story, I think.
And I have to say that I was absolutely shocked when I read on the wires that Sirhan Sahan, after 50 years, would be eligible and possibly might get parole.
What did you make of it?
I think there's no doubt that Sirhan should be paroled.
He has spent 50-some years in prison.
He, by any rational analysis, is not a threat to anyone, nor has he been for many years.
But beyond that, and, you know, I have to phrase this very carefully, beyond that, he should be paroled because he did not shoot Robert Kennedy.
Yes, he was in the pantry.
Yes, he fired the gun, a gun rather, but no, he did not fire the shots which killed Bobby Kennedy.
And I say that not from speculation or as some lunatic conspiracy theory.
I say that because I've spent years and years and years going through LAPD's own investigative reports.
And, you know, we're talking tens upon tens of thousands of individual pages, hours upon hours of video and audio recordings.
And they all show one simple fact that Sihan could not have and did not shoot Robert Kennedy.
So he ended up spending 50 years, as it is up to now, in prison.
And he was not the one, you say, and you are not alone in saying that, who fired the fatal shot.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
And the Kennedys tend to attract conspiracy theories.
I don't like conspiracy theories.
I like facts.
I like original documents.
I like original testimony.
I like to go back to the source.
So if you'll bear with me, the reason why Sahan could not have and did not kill Robert Kennedy is a simple question of physics.
Okay, let's get into that then in the next segment, because I want to unpick the events and what followed those events at the Ambassador Hotel.
Tim Tate is here, 25 years of his life he's given to investigating this.
There is now a lot of compelling discussion about how this happened, if Sihan Sihan is ultimately paroled and does walk free.
There will be more talk about that.
That's why we're addressing this tonight.
Tim Tate is here, 25 years of his life investigating this.
So, Tim, we have the prospect of a parole on the horizon.
This has split the Kennedy family, though, hasn't it?
Yes, I think in fairness, you have to say it doesn't take much to split the Kennedy family.
The family, and Bobby had a very large family, 10 children.
The family has never spoken with one voice, even where it's spoken at all, about Sahan.
For a long time, the torch for reopening the case was carried by Bobby's surviving eldest son, Robert Kennedy Jr.
But now he's been joined by his brother Douglas.
But six other Kennedys, six of their siblings, have opposed the parole board's recommendation for release.
Now, I can't speak for the Kennedy family.
I've spoken relatively briefly with Robert Kennedy Jr.
I've never spoken to any of the others.
But it is an unfortunate fact, it would appear, that the Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's family is split on this issue.
And I think that makes an unemotional examination of the facts rather more difficult.
But there will have to be one, won't there?
Subsequently, if Sihan Sahan is let out on whatever license conditions, that inevitably fires the starting pistol, if you will excuse that bad analogy here, on all of the conspiracy theorists, all of the people with alternative evidence, and all of those who say this man should never have been in prison in the first place.
Oddly, I wish you were right in that regard.
The fact is that I suspect it will not have any effect like that.
For, well, at least 20, yes, 20 years at least, the evidence showing that Sahan did not kill Robert Kennedy has been there.
It's there because it's in the Los Angeles Police Department's files.
I was one of the first journalists and researchers to get access to those.
LAPD suppressed all that evidence, all its case files, for 20 years from 1968 to 1988.
When it finally was forced to release all the evidence, all these tens of thousands of pages, those files, those documents, their own investigative reports, their own interviews show that Sahan did not kill Robert Kennedy.
And from the mid-1990s onwards, there have been attempts to get the case officially reopened.
None of those attempts have been successful.
There is, for reasons I find hard to understand, an absolute refusal to reopen the case and to have an honest, transparent, official reinvestigation.
And that's what's needed, because whatever else LAPD did in 1968, its investigation was neither honest nor transparent.
And yet, maybe you can understand why what happened happened.
You know, with the looking back through the prism of history into an era that was a simpler era where people accepted, tended to accept what they were told.
You know, here they had a man with a gun, you know, who had no real purpose for being there and was part of this.
So the temptation for the officers of law and everybody else to say, we've got our man, let's put him on trial, throw him in jail and chuck away the key.
You know, but the temptation to do that over all of these years, I think you can probably understand if you look at it with the spectacles, you know, supplied in the 1960s, not the way that we look at things now.
Well, I mean, I would understand it completely, and I'd understand it completely now, never mind in the 1960s.
Let's be clear about this.
Sahan was in the pantry.
He was firing a revolver, and he was firing a revolver towards Bobby Kennedy.
I mean, to put it bluntly, he was arrested.
LAPD arrested a man with a smoking gun.
Now, it's not unreasonable to start from the position, this is the most likely killer.
The problem is that within weeks, LAPD knew that all the evidence, all the eyewitness evidence, the ballistic evidence, the post-mortem evidence proved that Sahan didn't do it.
And that's where I think you have to fault LAPD, because instead of saying our theory isn't right, it's not holding water, it buried that, it suppressed that, and it did worse.
It harassed witnesses.
How so?
Those who...
And there were a number of eyewitnesses.
All of those eyewitnesses told the same story.
And that story was that Sehan moved out, jumped out, if you like, in front of Bobby Kennedy and pointed his gun at him in front of Bobby Kennedy, and he never got closer than three feet.
His gun never got closer than three feet from the front of Bobby Kennedy's head.
The post-mortem, the official autopsy carried out by a truly great coroner called Thomas Noguchi, showed that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in the back of the head at a distance of one and a half to three inches.
Now, you cannot square the two.
An LAPD could not square the two.
A man who is always in front of the victim cannot shoot that victim through the back of his head.
So we have a very similar situation in very different circumstances to the situation that all these years later we faced with JFK.
In other words, from which direction did the bullet come and how was the fatal shot administered?
No, I think it's, I mean, this is one of the things that struck me when I first began this back in 1988 was that unlike the JFK case, Bobby Kennedy's assassination is remarkably clear-cut in terms of the ballistics, who was where and who shot from where.
It's far, far clearer than JFK's assassination at that point.
And I keep returning to this trite phrase.
It's a simple question of physics.
A man in front of his victim cannot shoot that victim from behind.
Why would the police want to suppress this?
I mean, you can go into all sorts of deep, state, dark explanations that there might have been a cabal or a bunch of people behind the scenes who wanted this man out of the picture because he was such a firebrand, and that's not what a lot of people would have wanted.
I mean, he did, as we said, he upset a lot of people, did Robert Kennedy, as did his brother.
Is it to suppress something like that, or is there another reason, do you think?
I'm an old-fashioned, old-school journalist, and one of the things that was hammered into journalists of my generation is don't speculate as to motive.
Go to the evidence and see where that takes you.
And one of the problems, I think, which has plagued the Robert Kennedy assassination and probably plagued the Jack Kennedy assassination, though I'm not as familiar with that, is researchers and journalists who have started from a theory and then sought out and cherry-picked evidence to support their theory.
When I started on this, and the first thing I did was a documentary film for Channel 4 in 1992 on our documentary, which explored the case and came to certain conclusions.
And then when, in the years since, I was working and my co-author was working on what became our book, we started from a really simple principle.
We're going to start from ground zero.
We're going to start from every single sheet of paper in the LAPD files.
Every single one of these tens upon tens of thousands of reports, interviews, tape recordings, interview recordings.
We're going to go through everything and then we're going to see where that evidence points.
And what that threw up was something which I don't think has been talked about elsewhere.
And that's that LAPD and indeed the FBI were made aware in the first few weeks after Bobby Kennedy's assassination of three, not one, not two, but three conspiracies to murder him.
And they sent out their officers to interview the named suspects.
Now those interviews were perfunctory and they were abandoned and then deep-sixed for 20 years, but those conspiracies were documented in LAPD's own investigative files.
Who were the conspirators named in these LAPD files?
Well, organized crime was the prime organization and named individuals within that.
Okay, and we know, of course, that Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General, when he was that, was very hard on the mob and they didn't like him for that.
The mob loathed Bobby Kennedy, and they loathed him with good reason for not just in his years as Attorney General in John Kennedy's administration, but in the years before that, he had humiliated organized crime leaders in Senate hearings.
He had gone after organized crime with a vengeance.
And it's not surprising in that sense when the details of clear conspiracies to murder Robert Kennedy if he won the California primary emerge in LAPD's own investigative files.
What's puzzling is that LAPD did nothing with them.
But they must have done a profile of who was there in that chaotic kitchen when this happened.
They must have known who was there and what connections whoever was there might have had.
They certainly did put together a profile of everyone they could talk to and everyone they found in that kitchen, Though there are redactions, I have to say, even in the finally released LAPD files.
And some of those people who were in the kitchen, in the pantry, and in the right place to have killed Bobby Kennedy should have been considered suspects.
LAPD did not do that.
And they did worse than that.
They covered up the existence of these people and they harassed eyewitnesses who reported the presence of these people.
In the words of Lee Harvey Oswald, then, do we think that Sirhan Sahan was a Patsy?
Yeah, this is the point in the story at which people tend to roll their eyes when I mention this.
And, you know, when I first took the idea of the film to Channel 4 in the late 80s, early 90s, I got exactly the same reaction.
The commissioning editor looked at me as if I'd taken leave of my senses.
Because the most likely explanation for Sehan's presence is that he had been hypnotized, or to give it its technical term, hypnoprogrammed.
And as I say, people say, oh, God, it's a conspiracy theory.
Unfortunately, it isn't.
It's a conspiracy fact.
How can we know that?
Well, because some of the papers, the documents I discovered way back, and not just me, but I discovered, were from the CIA.
Yes, the CIA crops up in this too.
And they relate to something the CIA code-named Project Artichoke.
Now, what follows is not my interpretation.
This is verbatim, word for word, from the CIA's own internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
And what was Project Artichoke?
It was a program to create a hypno-programmed robot assassin.
Again, it sounds absurd, but it's not me saying this.
This is the CIA saying, this is what we did.
This is the program we embarked on.
This is the experiment we embarked on.
And you could say, well, it sounds crazy.
And then I came across a report in these Project Artichoke files in which the CIA said, great, we made it work.
We've done it.
We've achieved it.
And here's what we did.
Here's how it worked.
Now, that program existed.
It was funded by the US taxpayer.
It was aimed at and succeeded in creating a hypno-programmed assassin.
And the target of this notion, of this putative program, was to be a political figure, domestic or international.
Again, it's not me saying this.
This is the CIA describing its own actions.
I suppose the question If there was some kind of plot to do this, if Sihan Sehan, and we have to say that I've read reports that say that Sihan Sehan has no real memory of what happened, doesn't remember it.
So that would add fuel to that particular fire.
But why would anybody want to do this?
Before we get to why would anyone want to do this, just on Sihan and not remembering, Sihan has said, Sehan's story has been pretty much the same since June 1968.
The last thing he remembers is about 10 minutes before the assassination, and he's having coffee with an attractive girl wearing a polka dot dress in the Ambassador Hotel.
The next thing he remembers is one of Bobby Kennedy's bodyguards jumping on his head after the assassination.
The period in between, Sihan cannot remember and has never remembered.
Provident psychiatrists examined him at the time in 68.
Nine of them court appointed, two of them were court appointed, several from the defense, several from the prosecution, and psychiatrists have examined him since.
The consensus is unchanged and has been unchanged for many, many years.
Sihan was acting in an hypnotic state on the night of the assassination.
Again, this is not me saying this.
This is not speculation.
This is scientific evidence.
So does the scientific evidence and what you found in police files suggest then that he was there, perhaps under the influence of hypnosis, programmed to do something, loosed off a shot that didn't actually kill the president, and somebody else loosed off a shot that did?
The evidence suggests that Sehan was there, as you say, in an hypnotic state, and that he fired all eight shots from his cheap revolver.
And those shots hit five other people in the pantry, wounding them.
All of them survived, but they were hit by Sahan's bullets.
Now, just for a simple piece of evidence, if you want one, for example, Sahan had eight shots in his revolver.
He fired all eight.
He never reloaded because he couldn't, because Bobby's bodyguards were sitting on him at that point.
If any more than eight bullets or bullet holes were found in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, that would indicate the presence of a second gun, wouldn't it?
Or indeed spent cartridges.
Indeed.
We have absolute cast iron evidence that at least 13 bullets and or bullet holes were recovered or discovered in the pantry on that night.
How do we know?
Because LAPD photographed its own officers pointing at them.
You can't get 13 shots out of an eight-shot revolver.
And one question before we bring this up to date with the parole hearing and what happens next, Tim, is why do you believe that over all of these years, 53 of them, why do you think this case never got the traction that the JFK case got?
You know, we know that he was the president.
We know it happened in public view, in a motorcade in Dallas.
We know those things.
But nevertheless, this case has only ever got a tiny fraction of the traction and coverage the JFK got.
I think the first answer is exactly as you say.
JFK was the president.
Bobby was only possibly, probably going to be a presidential candidate.
But there is a much bigger reason, I think, than that.
And that is what LAPD did immediately after Sahan was arrested.
It collected all this evidence.
And I should say this evidence is vast.
I mean, it really is the most extraordinarily vast collection of documents and videotapes and audiotapes that I've ever had to work with.
What did LAPD do with that?
It suppressed it.
It locked it up away from public scrutiny for 20 years and it resisted all attempts, including attempts in court, to get it unearthed.
It was only when that material was finally prized out of LAPD's grip and the files were delivered to the California State Archive that the evidence, some of which, as I say, we've discussed, emerged.
And because there was such a lot of it, it takes researchers like me and like others a long time to do that.
And by the time all of that's happened, all steam and momentum has gone out of the case.
So why has it not had the attention it deserves?
And I think it should have much more attention.
I think it's primarily because LAPD played a very clever game and suppressed the evidence for 20 years and kept it out of public view.
Do you believe that somebody in LAPD, alive or dead, will certainly have known, maybe personal persons may have known who was behind this if it happened in this way?
Oh, absolutely.
Dead now.
They'll all be dead now.
But their own files, and indeed the FBI's files, which were also released to the California State Archive, name the names.
They say this person, this is just one example.
This man who was a wealthy rancher and Bobby had a beef with ranchers because he'd supported the Farm Workers Union.
This man boasted publicly prior to Bobby's assassination that if Bobby won the California primary, he was going to be killed by the mafia.
And more than that, this man said, there is a half million dollar fund to provide the money for this, and I have contributed several thousand dollars myself.
LAPD knew this because the man in question boasted about this in front of local law enforcement in Northern California.
They had his name.
They knew he had boasted.
They knew he had said, I've contributed to a fund to support the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.
And when police officers, in this case the FBI, went to see him after the event, he said, yep, yep, I did say all of that, but no, no, no, I didn't really mean it.
And that's where it lay.
How astonishing.
And I'm sure there is much more in those files that you have seen that we won't have time to talk about.
Let's bring it up to date if we can.
There's been a parole hearing.
The news went around the world that Sihan Sehan may get out.
The news also went around of the Kennedy family being split on this issue.
As far as you know it, Tim, what is the process from here on in then?
We heard that the governor of California may be able to put a block on this, but where does it stand at the moment?
It stands at the moment that it's going to be on the governor's desk.
He has to sign or not sign, authorize, if you like, the recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Normally, that would be a difficult decision for the governor, who's a Democrat.
It's made even more complex because that governor, Gavin Newsom, is currently in the midst of a recall election.
Republicans in the state are trying to get him bounced out of office, so he's fighting a recall election.
What he will do about the Board of Pardons and Parole's recommendations in those circumstances is certainly, as far as I'm aware, impossible to estimate.
Okay, but this isn't going to go away, is it?
If the man has been suggested for parole once, even if the governor vetoes it, it's going to come up again, isn't it?
Well, maybe.
Sir Hans, in his late 70s, he's not in great health.
I have worked closely with one of the survivors, surviving victims from the pantry shooting, a man called Paul Schrade, who was one of Bobby's close aides and friends.
And Paul, who is a wonderfully brave man in his 90s, has supported Sahan's applications for parole for many years.
But as Paul says, Sahan hasn't got much left in him.
Every attempt takes it out of him.
And every time he goes before the Board of Pardons and paroled and then gets back to his prison cell, he finds he's subjected to less than pleasant treatment, not necessarily from the staff, though sometimes, but from other inmates.
How many more times can Sahan be expected to do this?
And I think the answer is probably not very many.
If he does get out eventually on parole, will we be hearing these arguments that we've just been discussing rehearsed?
Will we be hearing them rehearsed in the public?
Is it likely that the case is going to be reinvestigated by the media?
People will start to talk about it.
They'll say, how could this man have done this?
And there's evidence that shows that he may have been some kind of Manchurian candidate under the influence of hypnosis.
This man was dealt a bad hand.
And we need to do something about this in this era of truth and justice that we supposedly live in.
Or is it just going to go away?
My fear is that unless we get lucky, it's going to go away.
I have been beavering away at this, as you know, for 25 years.
I have never understood why it is so difficult to get mainstream media attention.
The last real big attempt to do anything serious was my film for Channel 4 here and A ⁇ E in the States in 1992.
You know, trying to get traction for this story and this miscarriage of justice, if you like, is bizarrely difficult.
Maybe, maybe that's because the Kennedy family is divided over it.
Maybe it's because the Kennedy family doesn't speak with one voice.
But it is extraordinarily difficult to get much in the way of serious continued attention.
And there's something called, well, there is at the moment, and has been for a couple of years, an attempt at a truth and reconciliation commission concerning the Bobby Kennedy and the other three political assassinations in the U.S. of the 60s.
It's a great idea, but it's not getting anywhere.
And what really needs to happen is a new official investigation with the powers of subpoena, with access to all the documents, and which operates openly, honestly, and transparently.
So there has to be the will for that.
Unfortunately, we're pretty much out of time.
I don't know how these things work.
Just one question.
If Sihan Sahan is let out, I don't know whether it's permitted.
I don't know what the rules are in America.
Would you try to interview him?
Yeah, I would love to have interviewed Sahan.
The rules currently, because he's an inmate, California does not allow journalists to interview prison inmates.
I would love to do so if he gets out.
Whether that will happen is a moot point.
It will depend on willingness, Sahan's willingness to do it.
It will depend on what advice he gets.
I would love to do that.
But, and I say this as gently as I can, there's very little that Sahan can tell us that he hasn't already told us.
Bear in mind, his story hasn't changed.
He does not remember anything.
Tim, I'm sorry we're out of time.
A quick answer to this question very, very finely, if you could.
Will you be in the light of whatever happens?
Do you plan to revisit your book, update it?
Well, we updated it.
The book came out in 2018, and we updated it last year.
Unfortunately, my co-author died last year unexpectedly, but we updated it for a new publisher last year, and we added in new information and new details.
What I would say, if you'll just give me a couple of seconds, is that this is such a complicated and difficult, politically difficult and emotionally difficult case, that one of the things we wanted to do with the book was to make sure that it didn't make assertions which were not supported.
So when we quote a document, when we tell you a fact, we also say, this is where you find the document.
This is where you find the fact.
Go look at it for yourself.
Go check us and argue with anything we've said, but above all, check the original documents because that's what we did.
So ultimately, the verdict will come from the court of public opinion, and perhaps there is no truer court, not only in the land, but in the world.
Tim Tate, thank you very much indeed.
The book is called, Isn't It?
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Crime, Conspiracy, and Cover-Up a New Investigation.
Always a pleasure to speak with you.
Always fascinating to do that.
Thank you, Tim.
Thank you.
Taken from my radio show recently, Tim Tate, an extended version of our conversation there about Robert Kennedy, his assassination in 1968, five years more or less, after the assassination that rocked the world, his brother, JFK, the president at the time.
And Bobby Kennedy, of course, it had been hoped, might have become a contender to be president of the United States.
History turned out differently.
And now there is a question about Sirhan Sirhan.
Your thoughts about this edition?
Always welcome.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here, too.
So until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, Whatever you do, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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