logo
Trump's CIA releases 1,500 pages of never-seen-before RFK files including chilling handwritten notes from killer

Trump's CIA releases 1,500 pages of never-seen-before RFK files including chilling handwritten notes from killer

Daily Mail​12-06-2025
The CIA released over 1,500 pages Thursday of new previously unseen documents surrounding the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, which included handwritten notes from the convicted killer.
The new documents include a heavily redacted psychological profile of Sirhan Sirhan, noting that the man convicted of killing Kennedy had 'high intellectual potential' which was 'not properly utilized,' but conceded he had 'no specialized training in any area.'
Kennedy was shot and killed after the Democratic presidential primary in California in June 1968, just four-and-a-half years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Sirhan, a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship, claimed he murdered RFK because of his support for Israel.
A personality assessment of Sirhan was also included in the release.
'Obviously, we cannot see him as part of a conspiracy,' the assessment read, but said it was possible 'he could be a tool of a conspiracy' even though 'the odds against him being successful were tremendous.'
'It is very unlikely however that he could have effectively acted under precise instructions,' the memo read.
'Today's release delivers on President Trump's commitment to maximum transparency, enabling the CIA to shine light on information that serves the public interest,' CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement. 'I am proud to share our work on this incredibly important topic with the American people.'
The assessment describes Sirhan as an 'impulsive assassin' rather than a 'calculating assassin.'
It included a copy of Sirhan's handwritten notes in which he raged against Kennedy.
'Kennedy must fall. Kennedy must fall. Please pay to the order of Sirhan Sirhan,' reads the note, decrying the 'second group of American Traitors who must be disposed of.'
'We believe that Robert F. Kennedy must be sacrificed for the cause of the poor exploited people,' the notes continued.
The documents also revealed that Kennedy met with the CIA after he toured the Soviet Union as a young Senate staffer in 1955 as a voluntary informant.
Kennedy delivered significant detail of his trips to the the USSR, visiting locations highlighting the court system, manufacturing facilities, a mosque, collective farms, a music festival, and a union school.
'The records reveal for the first time that Senator Kennedy shared his experiences traveling to the former Soviet Union with CIA, reflecting his patriotic commitment to serving his country,' the CIA said in a statement.
DNI Secretary Tulsi Gabbard and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe testify at a congressional hearing
Other files show the FBI and CIA's concerns that they would be accused of assassinating Sen. Kennedy as part of an ongoing 'political murder conspiracy' circulating in the public.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, thanked the Trump administration for revealing more documents about his father's death.
'Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government,' he said. 'I commend President Trump for his courage and his commitment to transparency. I'm grateful also to Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe for their dogged efforts to root out and declassify these documents.'
Gabbard has focused intently on releasing documents related to Senator Kennedy's death, revealing in April that the documents, 'really support the questions that Secretary Kennedy has been asking for decades about who really killed his father.'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Why are the Macrons suing Candace Owens?
Why are the Macrons suing Candace Owens?

Spectator

time2 hours ago

  • Spectator

Why are the Macrons suing Candace Owens?

As bizarre conspiracy theories go, the rumours about France's First Lady Brigitte Macron take some beating. The stories that have been circulating about her in the murkier corners of the internet generally suggest that she was born a man under the name of Jean-Michel Trogneux, that she and the French President Emmanuel Macron are related in some way, that Brigitte's first marriage (to André-Louis Auzière) was non-existent and, for good measure, that Macron is a CIA plant who was installed into the Élysée Palace through nefarious means. Up until now, the rumours have largely remained both shadowy and obscure, with few other than the most credulous basement-dwellers attaching either veracity or importance to them. However, the Macrons have now decided to sue the popular and influential podcaster and influencer Candace Owens for defamation in an American court, calling her repetition of the claims 'outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched', and saying that 'Ms Owens' campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety.' For good measure, it says that Owens 'disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favour of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers'. Unsurprisingly, Owens is – no pun intended – cock-a-hoop at the idea of an embarrassing public trial involving her new nemeses. Owens is yet to file a formal defence to the claim but she commented on her Candace podcast last night that 'I find this to be irresistible and delicious' and then began to hint at some of the names of people who might be involved, including none other than the Prince and Princess of Wales and Donald Trump. Owens made yet another potentially defamatory remark about France's first lady – 'You are officially a very goofy man, Brigitte…You definitely have balls' – and then defiantly said: 'On behalf of the entire world, I will see you in court.' As Owens knows – and as the Macrons should have been made aware – suing for defamation in the United States is fraught with difficulty. The verdict of proof is on the plaintiff, not the defendant, meaning that Brigitte Macron will be faced with the embarrassing and unprecedented situation of having to prove her femininity. Even then, the case could still collapse unless it can be proved beyond a measure of doubt that Owens knew her claims to be false and therefore hurtful. A similar libel case has been overturned in France, with the Paris appeals court dismissing convictions against two women for making similar statements, which has emboldened those who believe (or claim to believe) that they are speaking truth, rather than a conspiracy theory. It is likely, given the consistency of her arguments, that the podcaster will suggest that she believed Brigitte's allegedly masculine birth to be true, and it will be phenomenally hard for any lawyer to disprove this. No wonder that Owens described this as a 'catastrophic PR strategy', and suggested: 'fire everyone around you who said this was a very good idea for you to be the first sitting first lady of a country to file a lawsuit against a journalist in another country'. She is not wrong. As Macron, knowing that his reputation in France lies somewhere in le caniveau, attempts to spend the final years of his presidency styling himself as an international statesman – hence his high-profile address to [arliament during his recent state visit to Britain, and his bromance with the king – and therefore would like to be seen as an impressive, noteworthy figure. This story, in all its tawdry and embarrassing details, represents the very opposite of what Macron is trying to achieve. He and his wife are right to be offended by it, and a degree of understandable anger at the outrageous claims is a very human response. However, when the president had his audience with the king, he might have been advised to take on the royal adage of 'never complain, never explain'. Unfortunately, what is now going to take place in a Delaware courtroom is an awful lot of complaining and explaining. Even if the Macrons do emerge triumphant, the reputational damage and resulting humiliation is likely to be so horrendous that it will be hard to see what led them to bother. Whatever happens, Owens has already won.

How America let Iran slip into the clutches of fundamentalism
How America let Iran slip into the clutches of fundamentalism

Telegraph

time6 hours ago

  • Telegraph

How America let Iran slip into the clutches of fundamentalism

In 1980 I was invited along with a cohort of historians to attend a conference at Harvard on 'Knowing Your Enemies'. We soon discovered that it was funded by the CIA, who wanted to see if they could learn from history why they had failed entirely to anticipate the fall the previous year, in the Iranian revolution, of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the succession of a fundamentalist Islamic state. At the end of three days of discussion, a senior CIA official addressed us. They had learnt very little, he claimed, from listening to historians. They were working instead with interesting research on the brains of guerrillas, which seemed much more promising. It is exactly this question of American failure that Scott Anderson pursues in King of Kings, his excellent narrative account of the two tumultuous years that resulted in the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini and the creation of an Islamic republic. Though inevitably he does not have access to the records of the Ayatollah and his militant followers, he has done scrupulous research on the final months of the Shah's fading rule. But it is American policy towards Iran that interests him most, because he sees the American response as a catalogue of missed opportunities, failed communication, and incompetent organisation. The CIA comes in for especial criticism, operating in Iran without a single person who could speak the language, much more concerned about monitoring the Soviet Union to the north of Iran, since the Cold War seemed to be the central pivot of American foreign policy. Anticipating a powerful Islamic revival in the Middle East was not on the books. One reason for the poor understanding of the country lay in America's confidence in Iran. The Shah was commander of the fifth largest army in the world, armed with American equipment; he deployed an extensive secret security service, and he had access to substantial oil revenues. From the late 1960s, the Shah had embarked on a grandiose programme of modernisation, turning his back on the Islamic traditions of the state, and the simple faith of millions of his subjects. The turn to the West encouraged widespread corruption among a wealthy and spoilt elite, widening to a dangerous chasm the gap between rich and poor. The principal voice denouncing the westernisation drive was Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled from Iran in 1964, but installed in neighbouring Iraq; tape recordings of his violent and angry sermons were smuggled into Iran. For Khomeini and other Muslim zealots, the West was Satan in a very literal sense, and the Shah Satan's servant. Anderson is very good on the many American personalities who were on the scene. Very few had any inkling that the Shah was not, as President Jimmy Carter put it in late 1977, 'an island of stability in a troubled region'. And the few who sensed that the great bulk of poor, religiously committed Iranians were not content to follow the Shah's bandwagon to the West were largely ignored. Chief among them was the junior diplomat, Michael Metrinko, the only American on the government payroll in Iran who could speak Farsi. From his isolated consular post in Tabriz, Metrinko observed the first outbreaks of popular violence were driven by the rural poor – those who migrated to the towns in the 1970s to dead-end jobs, and who were sustained by small local mosques where the clergy encouraged them to reject the Shah. Metrinko sent regular warnings to the embassy in Tehran; these were disregarded. He was told not to rock the boat, so that Washington, as a result, got little intimation of what was in the air in Iran outside the gilded palace. Anderson reflects on whether the King of Kings, or his wife, Farah Pahlavi, really understood that there was deep resentment at the royal system. Perhaps they both did, she more than he from her regular forays outside the palace walls. But it was easy for them to deny the brittle state of their country's social system when their perspective was restricted chiefly to the vast palace enclosure. Anderson interviews the elderly queen at her home in the United States, who now admits that there were missed opportunities for addressing the people's grievances. There was little she could do at the time – her husband disliked her interference – but it was clear anyway that the royal couple's room for manoeuvre was shrinking rapidly by 1978. To understand why it was a fundamental Islamic leader who became the chief challenge to the Shah, Anderson has used the westernised pharmacist, Ebrahim Yazdi, as his entry point. Though living and working in America, Yazdi was a devout Muslim hoping to see the end of the Shah's rule, and a spokesman for the large exile Iranian community with links to Ayatollah Khomeini. It was partly thanks to his efforts at promoting Khomeini that he gained ever-higher profile in Iran, and later in 1978 it was Yazdi who brought him to Paris when he was expelled from Iraq. Here Khomeini was able to establish a court visited by waves of journalists and followers from the Iranian exile communities. His public image of a stern and uncompromising cleric placed him in direct opposition to the Shah and by 1978 he had won millions of new followers among Iran's poor and unprivileged. More moderate clerical leaders in Iran hoped to find some compromise, but Khomeini was the Iranian revolution's Lenin: no half-way house, but a complete revolutionary overthrow. Throughout 1978 and into the early weeks of 1979, sporadic outbursts of violence and mass protests ought to have warned America to be less sanguine. The change in American perception came very late – too late according to Anderson. Fixated on the Cold War, Washington officials saw the agitation as possibly communist-inspired, which completely blindsided American diplomats and soldiers as they prepared for a possible communist coup. The idea that religious zealotry might usher in a very different kind of regime got little traction until, on February 1 1979, the Ayatollah himself landed in Iran (declaring an Islamic republic two months later). Anxiety among his supporters that he might still be assassinated meant that he arrived wearing a heavy bullet-proof vest, and the elderly cleric struggled to walk down the stairway from the aeroplane. But there was nothing frail about his politics. Anderson is unsparing in his description of just how rapidly the revolution unfolded, and with what vengeful violence against anyone accused of pro-American or anti-Islamic sentiment. All revolutions produce a hanging judge, and none was more enthusiastic than the Ayatollah's chosen hangman, Sadegh Khalkhali. Since the Ayatollah believed that those contaminated by Satan had no right to live, thousands were killed in the first weeks. American diplomats seized as hostages might have joined the list of the dead, but were released a year or so later. Not surprisingly perhaps, the plebiscite to confirm the new Islamic Republic won 98.2 per cent of the vote. Iran today is still an authoritarian, theocratic state, surviving more than forty years of the West's hostility. Anderson finds fault in many ways with the American response, but it is worth asking what alternative there was for the Shah and the survival of American interests. Anderson does not really suggest one, though he is intelligently critical of the mistakes. Military intervention so soon after the end in Vietnam would have been unpopular and costly; better understanding about the power of religious belief would only have accelerated the American retreat, since there was little America could offer to a stridently anti-Western movement. The Ayatollah's success transformed the Muslim world in the Middle East with a wave of religious militancy. Now once again Iran is at loggerheads with the West, but this time American super-bombs are dropping on Iranian targets and regime change is seen in Washington as a possibility. The guerrillas, it seems, are finally in control. ★★★★☆ Richard Overy is the author of books including Rain of Ruin. King of Kings is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £25. To order your copy at £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books

Massive spike in threats against Obama after Trump team claims he committed ‘treason'
Massive spike in threats against Obama after Trump team claims he committed ‘treason'

The Independent

time19 hours ago

  • The Independent

Massive spike in threats against Obama after Trump team claims he committed ‘treason'

Threats made online against former president Barack Obama spiked over the weekend after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused him of a years-long coup attempt against President Donald Trump. Gabbard has claimed Obama and his top officials ran a 'treasonous conspiracy' by insinuating they manufactured an investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election to undermine Trump's first election. Hours after she made the claim, on July 18, violent rhetoric about Obama surged on platforms such as Truth Social, Telegram, and Gab, with some calling for his arrest, imprisonment, and execution. That rhetoric was intensified after the president posted an artificial intelligence-generated video of Obama being arrested and continued to re-post Gabbard's claims throughout the weekend. By July 19, threatening comments targeting Obama rose from three to 56 – a more than 1,700 percent increase, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Truth Social users posted rhetoric calling for a 'firing squad,' a 'public hanging,' and 'streaming' his execution live – all while decrying Obama for the alleged treason. One user called for Obama's execution by using memes of a guillotine, electric shock chair, and public hanging platform. For years, Trump has blamed Obama and other Democrats for abusing power to facilitate investigations or indictments into himself. Since taking back the White House, Trump has promised to conduct a campaign of retribution against those he believes have targeted him. The documents Gabbard referred to as evidence of Obama's meddling show that the Obama administration wanted a review of the allegations against Russia before leaving office and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly. spokesperson for Obama denied Gabbard's allegations, calling them 'bizarre,' 'ridiculous,' and 'a weak attempt at distraction. The Independent has asked the White House for comment. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said similar violent rhetoric increased on Gab, a platform known for platforming right-wing extremists. Between July 17 and July 20, comments targeted Obama as treasonous and deserving punishment rose from nine to 48, a more than 400 percent increase. A review of targeted comments made on Telegram in the same timeline revealed that threats against Obama rose from zero to 12. A White House spokesperson told Newsweek that, "President Trump and the entire administration strongly condemn all forms of violence. The Trump administration also believes in accountability and that individuals who participate in criminal activity should be held to the fullest extent of the law.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store