John Kiriakou described the physical evidence in the RFK assassination as internally contradictory. Sirhan Sirhan’s gun held eight rounds. The crime scene contained more bullets than eight — a count Kiriakou cited as decisive proof that a second shooter was present.[1] In a separate telling, he put it as investigators recovering one more bullet than Sirhan’s gun could hold.[2] A third telling gives the arithmetic explicitly and differently: the revolver held seven rounds and eight bullets were recovered. He adds a further count from an auditory forensic investigation conducted in 1993, which he says found that between ten and thirteen shots were fired — a figure irreconcilable with any single revolver.[3][4]
Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, who conducted the autopsy, found that the shot that killed Kennedy entered from behind and below his right ear at a range of one to two inches. Witnesses and photographs, however, placed Sirhan in front of Kennedy, and contemporaneous accounts established that Sirhan never got within several feet of him.[5] Kiriakou has also described the finding as powder deposition at the back of Kennedy’s head, despite Sirhan firing from across the room.[2]
Kiriakou renders the coroner’s distance finding elsewhere as one to three inches, and frames the resulting contradiction in the same terms he applies to the JFK assassination: “but Sirhan was in front of Kennedy, so how did the kill shot come from behind?” — a magic bullet.[4][6]
The security guard
Kiriakou noted that a hotel security guard named “Caesar” appears on video standing directly behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting. National Geographic tracked the man down years later.[7]
In a fuller telling, Kiriakou gives the guard both a motive and an on-camera act. Cesar was a white supremacist who told a reporter afterwards that he hated Kennedy because, if elected, Kennedy was going to bring Black people into government as his brother had. The video, which Kiriakou says the National Geographic Channel found in the 1990s, shows Cesar at the very back of the kitchen reaching into his waistband, drawing a gun, and returning it to his belt — with the shots audible in between. Asked directly by a reporter whether he had shot Kennedy, Cesar’s answer was “no, I was going to.” He was subsequently polygraphed by the FBI and passed: on Kiriakou’s reading, Cesar did not fire, but intended to, “which isn’t a crime.”[6][8][9][10]
Sirhan’s shifting account
Sirhan Sirhan remains imprisoned. Kiriakou described his continued incarceration as indefensible given the physical evidence. Kiriakou also noted a possible connection to MK-Ultra: Sirhan has said he has no memory of the shooting, and Kiriakou cited this in the context of CIA behavioral-control research.[11]
Kiriakou lays out that memory claim as the end point of a sequence rather than a fixed position, calling Sirhan “utterly inconsistent” about the night. On first arrest he said he had done it, was proud of it, and had done it — his words, as Kiriakou reports them — with twenty years of malice aforethought, because of Kennedy’s support for Israel. Sirhan is Palestinian; Kiriakou notes he is also Greek Orthodox, many Palestinians being Christians and most of those Greek Orthodox. He later said he had not done it; later still that he might have and did not remember; and later yet that he supposed he could have done it but had no memory of it.[10][12]
The MK-Ultra thread, as Kiriakou states it here, is specific: it emerged some twenty years after the fact that Sirhan may have taken part, while in college, in a medical experiment that turned out to be a component of MK-Ultra. His conclusion is agnostic — “we don’t really know the answers to these questions.”[13]
The 2025 records release
Of the three killings covered by the 1992 declassification statute, Kiriakou is most hopeful about this one, on the grounds that its unanswered questions are the most clear-cut. In February 2025 he noted that the FBI had announced two weeks earlier the discovery of a further 1,800 pages of RFK assassination material it had not known existed — papers that had sat in an official’s desk since 1968. He contrasts the Bureau’s record-keeping with the Agency’s disposal habits: the CIA, he says, will at least admit to having destroyed the documents “the old school way” — as when Gina Haspel, told not to destroy the torture tapes, put them through a grinder.[14][15][16]
A formative memory
John Kiriakou recalls his mother crying all day when Robert Kennedy was shot and killed, part of the 1968–69 upheaval — with the King assassination and the Kent State shooting — that he says formed his political conscience as a boy.[17][18] In a separate telling, he traces the same memory to a couple of months after the King assassination: his mother crying as she told him Robert Kennedy had been killed, part of what he calls a “nightmarish” 1968.[19]
Kiriakou has also said, separately, that he believes the FBI — not James Earl Ray alone — killed Martin Luther King Jr.[2]
The community-college coincidence
Asked whether the MK-Ultra programs could have produced a subject who killed without knowing why, Kiriakou raised a documentary coincidence rather than a claim. “There were references to Los Angeles County Community College in the MK-Ultra documents. There was some kind of experimentation going on at the LA community college, and it just so happened to be exactly the same time that Sirhan Sirhan was taking classes there.”[20]
He sets out the speculation without adopting it — that Sirhan “may have either volunteered to be a part of these experiments for money, or was tricked or somehow duped into taking part” — and grounds it in what the man himself has maintained: “he too later said, and he”s been relatively consistent about this, that he doesn”t know why he killed Bobby Kennedy. He doesn”t have any memory of killing Bobby Kennedy.” Told that loss of memory was among the programs” stated objectives, Kiriakou answered “exactly”, and noted that the same fear “gave rise to the whole Manchurian Candidate fear in the 1950s.”[21][22]