Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
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.
DEATH AND SUSPICION IN SMOLENSK
The tragic air crash that killed Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 other Polish VIPs in April 2010 was one of the worst peacetime disasters ever to hit a European Union country.
The heads of Poland’s Army, Navy and Air Force, the security services, the national bank, the Olympic committee and the Polish Church were all killed when their official plane, a Russian-built Tupolev 154, crashed in dense fog while trying to land at the Smolensk air base in Western Russia.
The country’s leaders were flying to Russia for a ceremony to commemorate an earlier national tragedy – the cold-blooded, pre-planned slaughter of 22,000 Poles in 1941. The victims of the original massacre were soldiers, doctors, teachers, lawyers and engineers, all executed 70 years before at Katyn and other places in the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin’s secret police. Smolensk North, 12 miles east of Katyn, had been chosen as the nearest suitable airfield.
Apart from so many of the leaders of Polish society, the crashed plane carried a dozen relatives of the Katyn massacre victims, MPs, a much-loved Polish actor and a national heroine, Anna Walentynowicz, the 90-year-old ex-crane driver who had originally founded the Solidarity trade union.
Also on the plane was the controversial Deputy Defence Minister, Stanislaw Komorowski. He was the man who, according to WikiLeaks, had poured scorn on the US plan to site a Patriot missile battery with no live missiles in Poland, shouting at the Americans that his country wanted ‘missiles, not potted plants’.
The president’s identical twin brother and political comrade in arms, former Prime Minister Jaroslav Kaczynski, would also have been on board the Tu-154 but had stayed in Poland to look after their mother, who was seriously ill.
The crash happened after the Polish pilots had been advised to divert to Minsk or Moscow on safety grounds. Instead, they ploughed on and tried to make a visual landing in thick fog on an airfield with no form of instrument landing system.
Smolensk Airport has a tricky approach, across an undulating landscape. So much so that, at the point of first impact, 1,200 yards short of the threshold, the plane was actually 50 feet below the level of the runway.
In the end, as the plane came in far too low, it hit the top of the trees, plunged into the forest and burst into flames. There were no survivors.
On the face of it, the accident looked like a clear case of pilot error. But the political dimensions involved meant that few people could accept what had happened at face value, without at least wondering whether there was some conspiracy or cover-up behind it.
The fact that the flight was a pilgrimage to Katyn seemed to encourage grim suspicions. The obscenity of the Katyn massacre had been perpetrated by Soviet Russia, at a time when it was allied to Nazi Germany. Fifteen months later, under attack by Hitler, the Soviet Union had changed sides and made a determined effort to put in place a cover-up and pretend Katyn’s mass graves were the result of a Nazi atrocity. Britain and the US knew it was the Soviets but conspired to keep the secret to avoid embarrassing their new ally, Stalin. And it wasn’t until 1990, under Mikhail Gorbachev, that the Russians finally admitted responsibility.
REASONS TO DOUBT
A catastrophe on the scale of the Smolensk air disaster is hard to take in, under any circumstances.
But one that more or less decapitates a country, taking away its president, many of its top politicians, its military and security service leaders, the president of the national bank and even its leading clergymen, all in the blink of an eye, is bound to be truly traumatic.
And the last thing anyone wants to have to deal with is any suspicion that the crash was anything but a horrific accident, caused by bad weather, bad luck and perhaps the inevitable element of human error.
Initial impressions seemed to confirm this was the case. The fog was definitely getting worse as the doomed flight neared Smolensk and the last flight in, a big military AWACS jet, had taken a quick look and diverted to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport,