New revelations from the recently released RFK files – Part 3:
The CIA deliberately hid what it knew about the RFK assassination
By Lisa Pease, author of
A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
The question experienced researchers must ask when researching any document from the CIA is this: Is this document telling the truth? Is this file the complete record? What parts of it might be lies? What else might have been withheld?
The CIA openly admits to compartmentalizing information so that only people with a “need to know” get portions of information to complete their part of a “project,” be it a coup, a deception operation, a media operation, or something else. But what I didn’t understand until I read Nick Cullather’s book Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952–1954 was that CIA operatives confused even themselves with their own disinformation. Cullather talks about a training program for CIA executives and staff that was not accurate due to this:
“Having done so little historical research of its own, the agency had to rely on accounts by historians with no access to classified documents, and its training program suffered from its own efforts to conceal and distort the public record. For Operation PBSUCCESS [the CIA’s coup in Guatemala], for example, we assigned an article that I later learned was based on disinformation the agency itself spread in 1954. The CIA was reabsorbing its own hype.”
So even if CIA employees wanted to help expose the truth about past assassinations, they might not know where to begin. But how many CIA employees would be willing to expose its secrets to anyone? Most employees share the belief, expressed most clearly by the longtime CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, that a covert agency should not have to follow every request from the overt government. It flies in the face of what Victor Marchetti called the “Cult of Secrecy,” where CIA employees like Richard Helms took greater pride in lying to Congress to protect Agency secrets than in exposing important truths to our elected representatives.
We’re very lucky, therefore, that this one particular memo slipped past the censors. This document, from the Deputy Director of Plans (then Thomas Karamessines, reporting to CIA Director Richard Helms) to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, has essentially given away the whole cover-up game. The truth isn’t any more blatant than this. And I’m sure the CIA will come up with some barely plausible explanation of why this document says what it says, that CIA assets in the research community will quickly echo. But I think this document is a stunner because it proves that the CIA was actively covering up what they knew about Sirhan Sirhan and the RFK assassination. The CIA likely kept double books on the JFK assassination as well, but without a document like this, we can’t prove that.
Compare the first memo below (the FBI’s version) with the second memo below (the CIA’s version). Note that the entire CIA distribution list is hidden in the FBI’s version of the memo. But in the CIA’s copy, we note that the CIA is literally maintaining “dummy” files related to Sirhan Sirhan and the RFK assassination! The line that says “RI 201-835028” is the Records Integration (RI) number for Sirhan’s 201 file. This is the number of the only 201 file the CIA has released on Sirhan Sirhan. In other words, the CIA gave us their “dummy” file on Sirhan. Why would they do that? So they could keep other, more secret records, somewhere else. The “dummy” file was prepared with the expectation it might someday have to be disclosed. In other words, its contents have been essentially pre-sanitized. Had the CIA not been pressed to urgently comply with Trump’s 2025 Executive Order 14176, no doubt the label “dummy” would have been noticed and removed from this document as well.
Source: https://storage.googleapis.com/rfkweb-prod/56-la-156_sec_006_ser_1201-1450-part_6_of_9.pdf, p. 32
Source: https://storage.googleapis.com/rfkweb-prod/07165005_sirhan_sirhan_201.pdf p. 591.
So where is the actual file on Sirhan Bishara Sirhan? Why won’t the CIA hand it over? The obvious answer is that the Agency has something to hide because the official narrative around that case, that Sirhan killed RFK, is provably false. (Sirhan’s gun muzzle, per the witnesses who saw Sirhan and RFK both at the time of the shooting, was three feet in front of RFK. But RFK, per the autopsy report, was shot from behind the ear and under the arm at a distance of not more than 1.5 inches.) Indeed, according to Bill Harvey’s initial notes on Executive action, taken from NARA file 157-10014-10109, assassination plans were to include a “phony” (“dummy”) 201 file in RI that should look like a “CE” or Counterespionage file. CE was a subset of what James Angleton’s Counterintelligence (CI) group did, and “Jim A.” appears on the “Magic Button” notes page.
In the first article in this series, I noted how Angleton’s group moved quickly to take control of the Los Angeles Police Department’s conspiracy investigation in the RFK assassination. Angleton had done the same thing with the JFK assassination. When Helms assigned John (“Scelso”) Whitten to look into the record to see what conclusions he would come up with, he was inadvertently destroying what I believe was Angleton’s carefully constructed narrative designed to blame the Soviet Union, so Angleton convinced Richard Helms to give him control of all Warren Commission liaison activities.
In the second article, I wrote about what may have been an earlier plot to kill RFK and asked why Thane Eugene Cesar only joined the Ambassador Hotel’s outsourced security just 10 days before the assassination of RFK was set in motion. Bill Harvey’s notes could answer that: “What are the limits on teams or individuals selected? No ‘team’ until ready to go.” Less time, less chatter, less chance for some aspect of the plot to leak.
In other words, the RFK assassination and aftermath seemed to follow the path outlined by Harvey. But I don’t believe Harvey orchestrated the RFK assassination. He had left the agency to become briefly, a lawyer, and served as an unofficial legal adviser to Johnny Rosselli when he was embroiled in the Friars Club card-cheating scandal. In early 1968, Harvey wrote the CIA asking essentially hey, are you planning to do something about RFK since he’s about to run for president, and noting that if the CIA didn’t help Rosselli in his legal troubles from the card cheating scandal at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, Rosselli might have to go public with something sensitive. (Helms was furious at this and said he would not let Harvey blackmail the agency but eventually capitulated and provided assistance to Rosselli.) Harvey also asked if Robert Maheu was (still) working for the agency. The two implications from Harvey’s comments were that 1) Maheu may have said something that hinted at killing RFK, and 2) Harvey was trying to find out if Maheu’s plot was a CIA-sanctioned one. (I’d like to think if it weren’t, the CIA would have ended Maheu’s contract with the agency. Instead, Maheu’s firm’s contract amount was increased shortly after RFK’s assassination.)
When I served as a juror on a conspiracy trial, the judge told us a “fact” of the case was whatever we believed, based on reasonable inference. If someone came in from the outside and was partially wet, carrying an umbrella, we could reasonably assume it had been raining outside, even if we had no direct knowledge of that or could “prove” that. That said, every now and then, actual proof surfaces. As it did in this document. Why do I say proof?
Michael Goldsmith of the HSCA asked Richard Helms about the CIA’s use of phony files. He showed him Harvey’s assassination notes and said, “[W]ould you agree that here is a case where at the very least agency personnel were contemplating the use of a fake 201 file and possibly a fake operational file?”
Helms responded, “Yes, it looks like that. But then his boss would have known about this.” [Emphasis added.] In other words, in the document above, the “dummy” (phony) file for Sirhan’s 201 file would have had to be at least known by Helms, because he was Karamessines’ boss as CIA Director at that point in time. In other words, the choice to create a dummy file was approved at the highest level of the CIA. That’s proof, actual proof, that the CIA as an institution, not rogue operators, wanted to hide what it knew about Sirhan Sirhan and therefore the RFK assassination.
Similarly, I think when the CIA invests as much as it clearly has in hiding documents related to JFK and RFK assassinations, we must reasonably infer that they have something terrible to hide. If JFK and RFK were killed by “rogue operators,” and the CIA’s first goal was serving the American people, the CIA would have prosecuted its own for killing JFK. That they have not indicates that the CIA as an institution was involved, and that serving up the truth to the American people is not the priority.
As I have said many times over the past 30 years, accountability matters. If no one at the CIA is ever held accountable for lying to officers of the government for withholding or stealing back information, then these crimes against the people of the United States will continue. Keeping our real history from us is essentially treasonous.
I remember when the CIA deleted a specific report on the CIA’s torture program from the Senate servers. Even longtime CIA supporter Dianne Feinstein was incensed. But no one was prosecuted. No one went to jail for that, even after the CIA’s own Inspector General (IG) report on the incident confirmed CIA employees not only breached the Senate firewall and conducted unauthorized searches but were also monitoring Congressional emails!
And back in the 1970s, when the HSCA was doing its investigation, Regis Blahut from the CIA’s Office of Security broke into the photographic evidence location and fingered the photo packets. This was proven since the packets had been dusted with a secret fingerprint dust. Blahut denied anyone at CIA had ordered him to break in and insisted he had an innocent motive, but when asked for that motive, all he could say was "There's other things that are involved that are detrimental to other things." When asked what that meant, Blahut said only, "I signed an oath of secrecy” with the CIA and could not discuss the matter any further. The CIA let Blahut go, but the HSCA should have found out who ordered Blahut to break in, as he clearly didn’t do that on his own.
It's too late to prosecute Helms and Karamessines for lying to the world about what they knew about the RFK assassination. It’s too late to prosecute Regis Blahut. But it might not be too late to prosecute whoever stole the torture files off the Senate’s network. And it’s definitely not too late for Rep. Luna and her committee to finally hold someone accountable, for once, for obstructing the declassification of our real history. Or at least, the CIA’s sanitized version thereof.
It’s also interesting that this document shows the CIA was tracking and informing the FBI on upcoming witnesses to the Sirhan trial. Did they also profile the jurors, as the CIA did in the trial of Clay Shaw? We don’t know, because at least some of the files already pulled on the RFK assassination from the CIA have yet to be released. I was told, for example, that two Office of Security files on Sirhan had been located. But where are they? They are not in the already released files.
Will the government ever have the will or the courage to follow all the evidence to the obvious conclusion – that the CIA killed its own president and then was forced to kill the President’s brother to keep the cover-up from being exposed? More than 60 years later, I’m not holding my breath.
