Robert A. Maheu was such a colorful character that it's widely believed the television show Mission: Impossible" was based on him and his private investigative agency. As an ex-FBI agent, the CIA asked him to handle jobs it wanted to steer clear of, such as lining up prostitutes for a foreign president or hiring the mafia to kill Fidel Castro. For more than 15 years, Maheu [was] on monthly retainer to "The Agency," CIA records show. Maheu was the right-hand man to Howard Hughes as Hughes ... helped finance CIA operations. A new book alleges that Maheu may have performed another mission for the CIA: the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Maheu would have had access to the CIA's experiments in hypnosis and mind control. That would have enabled him to frame Sirhan Sirhan as a patsy for the slaying of Kennedy, while other gunmen actually fired the fatal shots, argues author Lisa Pease, who spent 25 years researching her book, "A Lie Too Big to Fail." Sirhan's lawyers in 2010 accused the CIA of hypnotizing Sirhan and making him "an involuntary participant." With Maheu's contacts throughout the CIA and organized crime, he is "the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy's assassination," Pease wrote. Chief among that evidence is the autopsy finding that Kennedy was shot point blank in the back of the head, while Sirhan was in front of Kennedy. Witnesses at the scene of the shooting were adamant that Sirhan never got close enough to fire at close range. Not long after the trial, a ballistics expert examined the three bullets recovered from the scene and found that they did not match Sirhan's gun.