During the war, Gen. Sudoplatov headed the illegals directorate that became Directorate S of the First (foreign intelligence) Chief Directorate (PGU) upon Stalin’s death. (In fact it was named Directorate S in honor of Sudoplatov.) In his memoirs, published in 1994, he describes all agents recruited by his service in the West, but he makes no mention of any contact between Hopkins and Akhmerov.
Hopkins’s public and friendly contacts with many Soviet officials, including Stalin himself, may sound sinister today, but it must be remembered that the Soviets were our wartime allies, President Roosevelt encouraged those contacts, and it was Hopkins’s job to be nice to the Soviets so they would help us win the war. If Hopkins really were a clandestine Soviet agent, its foreign intelligence service would have insisted he not call attention to himself by socializing with Soviet officials or expressing the pro-Soviet sentiments that he did. That was the rule.
DEVELOPING THE SECRET INK
For fifty-seven years we have had irrefutable intelligence evidence showing that Nikita Khrushchev and his political police were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This overwhelming evidence was posted in the twenty-six volumes of The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, but few, if any, have been able to understand its significance. The reason? This evidence, which is codified, has never before been jointly analyzed by a top U.S. intelligence leader and a former Soviet bloc spy chief familiar with KGB patterns and codes. It took us years to do this, but the results are illuminating.
Decoded, these pieces of evidence prove that John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had a clandestine meeting in Mexico City with his Soviet case officer, “comrade Kostin,” who has been identified by the CIA as belonging to the KGB’s Thirteenth Department for assassinations abroad. It also proves that Oswald’s wife, Marina, came to the United States using a false Soviet birth certificate and that both Oswalds fully intended to return to the Soviet Union after Lee had accomplished his KGB mission. A letter from Marina and Lee to the Soviet embassy in Washington is irrefutable proof of that.
Decoded, this evidence also proves that Oswald’s KGB support officer in the United States, the so-called American named Baron George de Mohrenschildt (who had changed his biography three times), was in fact a Soviet illegal officer. It also documents that de Mohrenschildt committed suicide the day before he was scheduled to testify about Oswald to Congress and that he left behind a manuscript dedicated to Nikita Khrushchev, the last Soviet leader to whom he would have sworn allegiance as a KGB illegal officer.
Here is a graphic sample of such evidence we put together. Each piece of this evidence was published in the Warren Commission Report, and each piece has been declassified to restore “public confidence in government” and allow the American public to “draw its own conclusion as to what happened and why on that fateful day in Dallas in November 1963.”†
There are hundreds more such similar pieces of irrefutable hard evidence buried in the investigative documents concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and waiting to be exposed. They can be found and read, free of charge, in most public libraries. Let’s hope this book will bring them to life again.
† Final Report of the Assassination Records Review, https://fas.org/sgp/advisory/arrb98/part12htm.
MORE SECRET WRITING
CHAPTER 6
THE KILLING OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
As a youth, paradoxically, Stalin attended a theological seminary—from which, however, he was expelled. Mass murder would only come later. Khrushchev rose to ultimate power because he too was willing to kill. Strongly supportive of Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s, Soviet documents show that during the years in which he was leader of the Ukraine, Khrushchev was responsible for killing over 30,000 people.1 From his memoirs we know that a few days after Stalin died, Khrushchev conducted a palace coup during the June 26, 1953, meeting of the Soviet Presidium aimed at killing off the powerful head of the Soviet Union’s political police, Lavrentiy Beria, who was now his rival for the vacant Soviet throne. As related in his own account, Khrushchev came to the meeting with a gun in his pocket and played the main role from beginning to end.
“I prodded [Premier Georgy] Malenkov with my foot and whispered: ‘Open the session and give me the floor.’ Malenkov went white; I saw he was incapable of opening his mouth. So I jumped up and said: ‘There is one item on the agenda: the anti-Party, divisive activity of imperialist agent Beria.’”2
According to Khrushchev, after proposing that Beria be relieved of all his party and government positions, “Malenkov was still in a state of panic. As I recall, he didn’t even put my motion to a vote. He pressed a secret button, which gave the signal to the generals who were waiting in the next room.”3 With Beria under arrest, Khrushchev easily wrested the top job away from his closest ally, Malenkov.
On December 24, 1953, the Soviet media announced that Minister of Interior Lavrentiy Beria, together with former chief of the secret political police Vsevolod Merkulov, chief of foreign intelligence Vladimir Dekanozov, and five other top members of the Soviet political police had all been found guilty of working for Western intelligence and had been executed.4 Khrushchev then appointed General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, formerly the brutal chief Soviet advisor for Romania’s political police, the Securitate, as head of this new PGU.
After crushing the Hungarian revolution and hanging Imre Nagy and its other leaders in 1956, Khrushchev promoted political murder as his primary foreign policy tool. Gen. Pacepa and the other leaders of the Soviet bloc intelligence community were told that Stalin had made one inexcusable mistake—he had aimed the cutting edge of his security apparatus against the Soviet Union’s own people. In his famous “secret” speech criticizing Stalin, Khrushchev said he intended to correct that error. Therefore he ordered his espionage service to form components in all “sister” services in the Soviet bloc to carry out secret assassinations in the West. Soviet satellites were useful at giving cover to Soviet-ordered operations. The Romanian assassination component was called “X,” the last letter of the alphabet. It was managed by DIE General Tanasescu, former chief of the DIE station in Austria.
Our real enemies were in the West, not in the Soviet bloc, Moscow informed the management of the Romanian espionage service of those days. One of the first killing operations conducted under the new rules was the secret kidnapping and execution of anti-Communist émigré leader Oliviu Beldeanu out of West Germany. This was carried out in September 1958 jointly among the KGB, the East German Stasi, and the Romanian espionage service. Official East German and Romanian newspapers blamed the CIA, repeating official communiqués stating that Beldeanu had been arrested in East Germany following a secret CIA infiltration to carry out sabotage and diversion operations. In reality, Beldeanu was kidnapped from West Berlin.
Then came the public trial of Bogdan Stashinsky in October 1962 by the West German Supreme Court. A KGB officer stationed in East Berlin, Stashinsky had defected to West Germany. He confessed to having assassinated two leading Ukrainian émigrés in 1957 and 1959 in West Germany on Khrushchev’s orders. Khrushchev had decorated him for these crimes with the highest Soviet medal, he said. It was, at least in Europe, a PR debacle for Khrushchev as the brutal criminality of his policy of international assassination was officially exposed to the world.
The Stashinsky trial received substantial publicity in the West, including a discussion in a previous book by Pacepa dealing with the KGB’s worldwide disinformation operation, codenamed Dragon, about how it sought to conceal its hand in President Kennedy’s assassination.5 The Stashinsky trial turned into a trial of Khrushchev, refuting Khrushchev’s carefully constructed effort to depict the Soviet Union and its KGB as having sharply departed from Stalin’s practices. The Stashinsky trial showed that this image was definitively untrue. Khrushchev had merely turned assassinations abroad. He had personally ordered the killings committed by Stashinsky and had personally decorated him with the Ord
er of Lenin, the highest Soviet medal.6
In January 1961 Gen. Sakharovsky informed the management of the DIE that President Kennedy had become a puppet in the hands of the CIA. A few months later, Kennedy humiliated Khrushchev into abandoning his efforts to gain control of all of Berlin, which meant that instead of walling off the Soviet sector, Pacepa’s DIE was now tasked to “throw mud on the Pig”—the PGU’s new code name for Kennedy.
On October 26, 1959, a few weeks after visiting the United States, Khrushchev landed in Bucharest for what would become known as his six-day vacation in Romania, his longest vacation abroad. However, his stay in Romania was not really a vacation. Khrushchev’s secret goal during his trip to Washington was to snatch West Berlin from Eisenhower’s hands. At that time Pacepa was chief of Romania’s intelligence station in West Germany and was minutely informed about the conversations with the Soviet leader. After the death of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower had assumed a more personal role in the conduct of American foreign policy.
“We’ll get [West] Berlin,” Khrushchev assured Romanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Khrushchev had inherited his obsession with Germany from Stalin. Germany was the cradle of Marxism, Karl Marx’s birthplace, and it was a matter of personal pride for Khrushchev to see that it be communist. Khrushchev did not get West Berlin. On August 13, 1961, he was forced to erect the infamous Berlin Wall and to proclaim it a great victory.
In October 1962, the United States learned from Oleg Penkovsky, a heroic Soviet military intelligence officer who had volunteered his information to the United States, that in payback for his failure to get West Berlin, Khrushchev was trying to turn Cuba into a Soviet nuclear base from which to attack the U.S. Gheorghiu-Dej happened to be in Moscow during the critical days of the Cuban crisis following a state visit to Indonesia and Burma. Dej stopped off in Moscow for a couple of hours to inform Khrushchev about the results of his visits. And there he stayed.
Just before Dej’s trip, President Kennedy had publicly warned Moscow to refrain from any dangerous adventure in Cuba. Khrushchev, who at critical moments always reached out for an audience, needed to vent his anger on somebody. Without even asking Dej what his program for the day was, Khrushchev commanded that a state luncheon and festive evening at the opera be held in Dej’s honor, both to be attended by the whole Soviet Presidium and widely publicized by the Soviet media as a display of communist unity. During that state luncheon, Khrushchev swore at Washington, threatened to “nuke” the White House, and cursed loudly every time anyone spoke the words “America” or “American.”
The next morning, Dej was having breakfast with Khrushchev when KGB chairman General Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny handed Khrushchev a KGB cable from Washington. It stated that Kennedy had ordered a naval “quarantine” to prevent the eighteen Soviet cargo ships heading toward Cuba from reaching their destination. According to Dej’s account, when Khrushchev finished reading the cable, he “cursed like a bargeman,” threw it on the floor, and ground his heel into it. “That’s how I’m going to crush that viper,” he spat, meaning Kennedy. Back in Bucharest, Dej, in describing Khrushchev’s rage, said, “If Kennedy had been there, the lunatic would have strangled him dead on the spot.”
On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev backed down in the face of fierce American resistance and ordered his ships loaded with nuclear rockets to turn away from the confrontation. It happened to be Pacepa’s birthday, and Dej celebrated both events with champagne. “That’s the end of the lunatic,” Dej predicted. He hated Khrushchev.
The following year, John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 20, 1963, sent the United States into shock. An age of peace and innocence had abruptly come to an end. Then Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s accused assassin, was himself killed by Jack Ruby two days later, live in front of national television cameras. The Dallas police and the FBI quickly identified Oswald as the lone assassin of the president. But the whole truth about this odious crime of the century is still in the dark.
The JFK assassination was one of the few episodes in the Cold War where both sides had an interest in hiding the truth. After the humiliations of his erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the withdrawal of his nuclear missiles from Cuba in 1962, Khrushchev lost the confidence of the Soviet Union’s governing elite. The October 1962 trial of Stashinsky at the West German Supreme Court depicted Khrushchev to the West as just another odious butcher. It was not true that after the XXth Party Congress, Khrushchev had stopped the KGB’s killings—he had merely turned its focus abroad.
Lyndon Johnson’s and Khrushchev’s interests happened to coincide on the JFK assassination. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip in 1914 had set off the First World War; President Johnson reasonably feared JFK’s assassination might ignite the first nuclear war. Therefore, on November 29, he created a blue-ribbon commission, the Warren Commission, named after its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, invoking the integrity of its distinguished members to hush even the slightest rumor of “foreign complications” stemming from Oswald’s known defection to the Soviet Union and his connections with Cuba. Gen. Pacepa has described the KGB’s operation to hide its hand in the JFK assassination, codenamed on the Romanian end “Dragon,” in an earlier book.7 Thus, the interest of both the U.S. and the USSR in hiding the truth allowed a KGB disinformation operation, also aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s connection with Oswald, to achieve currency.8
The Warren Commission did not actually begin its field investigation on the JFK assassination until March 18, 1964, after the trial of Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin, had ended.
On June 15, 1964, when everyone had already learned from KGB disinformation that the Soviet Union had not been involved in JFK’s assassination, the Warren Commission finally announced that it had completed the investigation. Its final report was not written by intelligence experts but by three lawyers (Norman Redlich, Alfred Goldberg, and Lee Rankin) who had no experience in foreign counterintelligence and had never heard of KGB patterns and codes. It was like charging carpenters to perform heart surgery. The lawyers also worked under constant pressure from the commission to close doors rather than open them because of the time pressure to complete the report before the upcoming presidential election.
The Warren Commission report, published by the Government Printing Office on September 24, 1964, did not address the multitude of KGB-sponsored books already published in the West that accused the U.S. of killing President Kennedy, although these books had already become popular items. The Commission report consists of twenty-six volumes of testimonies to the commission, documents obtained primarily from federal and state authorities and from the Soviet government, plus one volume containing the summary report. The summary report, which can be found in most public libraries, is a disorganized hodgepodge of material assembled by various staff members, to which is attached an unsatisfactory index. Nevertheless, the complete publication contains a wealth of raw information that, to an informed analyst with Soviet intelligence experience, shows the Soviet hand.
SOVIET FINGERPRINTS
The FBI once told the U.S. Congress that only a native Arabic speaker could catch the fine points of an al-Qaeda telephone intercept, especially one containing doublespeak and codes. Both coauthors of this book are familiar with both doublespeak and codes. In the intelligence community, everything of even relative importance is expressed in doublespeak or in code. In the Soviet bloc intelligence community, even the names of the officers were in code. In 1955, when Pacepa became a foreign intelligence officer, he was told that his name there would be Mihai Podeanu, and Podeanu he remained until 1978 when he broke with communism. All his subordinates used codes in their written reports and even in conversations with their own colleagues. When Pacepa left Romania for good, his espionage service was the “university,” the country’s leader was the “architect,” Vienna was “Videle,” and so on.
Espionage ope
rations can be easily isolated out by their particular codes if you are familiar with them. Counterintelligence experts call them “operational evidence” and accord them the same credibility as police investigators give to DNA and fingerprint evidence.
The twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission Report contain dozens of KGB codes and operational patterns. But to the best of our knowledge, none were identified by the Warren Commission because of its members’ lack of familiarity with KGB codes and patterns. Here is one example of codes published by the Warren Commission but ignored by its analysts and the writers of its final report, who were lawyers, not intelligence officers.
On April 10, 1963, a shot was fired at American General Edwin Walker at his home in Dallas, Texas. The incident was reported in the local American news, and the bullet was recovered, but no evidence turned up at the time that could help identify the perpetrator.
After Oswald’s arrest for the assassination of President Kennedy, the bullet taken from Walker’s house was examined by ballistics experts, who concluded that it could have been fired by Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.9
On December 2, 1963, ten days after Kennedy’s assassination, the Dallas police found, at the house where Oswald’s wife, Marina, was staying, an undated note in Oswald’s handwriting, which must have been written just before he took the shot at Walker on April 10, 1963. The note consists of instructions in Russian to his wife on what to do if he should be arrested or worse. Here is its English translation (emphasis as in the original):
Operation Dragon Page 7