After the Soviet Union collapsed, substantial new evidence proving KGB involvement in killing President Kennedy came to light. The next chapters of this book deal with this new evidence.
HARD PROOF: YELTSIN’S DISINFORMATION
Ever since the glory days of the tsars, Russian leaders have always loved a good hoax. Joseph Stalin took the game a step further, inventing the elegant, Frenchified name of dezinformatsiya and turning deception into the most important weapon of Russian statecraft, as it still is today.
When carefully examined, disinformation can often reveal far more than was intended if the purpose for the cover-up can be deciphered. The tangle of threads can be unraveled.
Before embarking on our new look at the assassination of President Kennedy in light of the scattered details that have emerged in the more than fifty years since, it is most useful to review the significant revelations made by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Appendix B of his remarkable memoir entitled The Struggle for Russia.6 In December 1991, at his last meeting with his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin says he received a huge treasure trove of ultra-secret KGB documents that had been passed down from Soviet leader to Soviet leader. From this material Yeltsin chose (i.e., was instructed) to publish a few of what he calls “relatively old and not especially hot documents” in order to show the “routine, bureaucratic side of the KGB’s activity.”
These three documents were directly related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Though Yeltsin says he included them precisely because of their “mundane, ordinary tone,” they turn out to be a revealing collection of disinformation. They purport to be highly secret letters and memoranda sent by KGB bosses to top levels of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and International Department immediately after the assassination. All these documents, and Yeltsin’s comments on them, point to various elements in the United States that are supposedly the real instigators behind the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Oswald himself is merely described as a onetime supporter of the Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and the American Communist Party (CPUSA) who was diagnosed as suffering from psychiatric illness.
President Kennedy was shot at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, and Oswald, who was publicly known to have lived in the Soviet Union for a few years, was taken into custody a couple of hours later by the Dallas police as the suspected perpetrator. In Yeltsin’s first letter, on the very next day, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny hastens to send the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) a nice, clean story about Lee Harvey Oswald, an American tourist who in 1959 applied to remain permanently in the Soviet Union, was given an apartment and a good job at a radio factory in Minsk along with a monthly stipend of seventy rubles, married a Russian girl, and then, as was usual in such cases, after a time decided to go back to the U.S., although a year later he was asking permission to return to the Soviet Union.
The above story is the kind of routine disinformation that the Soviets have passed out to everyone—in Russia and abroad—who was not privy to information about the KGB’s earlier, very sensitive operational connection with Oswald. In addition, Semichastny includes the new disinformation that says that when Oswald visited the Soviet consulate in Mexico in October 1963 and asked for political asylum, he claimed that the FBI was persecuting him because he had been secretary of a pro-Cuba organization. The Cuban angle was not particularly stressed in early Soviet disinformation about the assassination, but as we shall see, it came to be considered an excellent way to downplay Oswald’s well-known interest in communism by emphasizing his support for Fidel Castro and Cuban (rather than Soviet) communism.
We can point to a very different story of what Oswald was trying to accomplish on that trip to Mexico, documented in full in a book by coauthor Pacepa published in 2007.7 Any more recent information will be so identified and sourced.
During the summer of 1963, Oswald was in New Orleans, noisily promoting the Fair Play for Cuba organization, including getting into a fight with Cuban émigrés and being arrested for disturbing the peace. From jail he demanded an interview with the FBI, which complied but was mystified about why it had been called in. On September 25, Oswald left New Orleans by bus, traveling under the alias O. H. Lee. After accomplishing his mission for Nikita Khrushchev—killing the American president—he would need an escape route back to the Soviet Union, which he considered his new homeland. Since the Soviet embassy in Washington had been giving Oswald and his wife the runaround when they asked for visas, Oswald now hoped he would be able to fly from Mexico to Cuba and from there on to Moscow. He was not seeking asylum; he just wanted to go back home to Russia after accomplishing his heroic task for Russia’s leader.
After arriving in Mexico City on September 27, Oswald immediately made several visits to the Cuban embassy, which refused to give him a visa unless he had a Soviet one. There is no evidence that he actually visited the Soviet embassy, although CIA coverage did show that he made one phone call from the Cuban embassy to the Soviet embassy, saying he would be right over to see “Comrade Kostikov.” Found after Oswald’s death were notes suggesting clandestine meeting arrangements in Mexico City and the draft of a later letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington complaining about his unsuccessful encounter with Comrade Kostikov, aka Valery Kostikov, an officer of the KGB’s Department Thirteen (assassinations). A disappointed Oswald departed Mexico on October 2 for the two-day bus trip back to Dallas.
It is also interesting to consider what Semichastny says at the end of his memorandum to the Central Committee, keeping in mind that it is allegedly still November 23 when he writes this. He recommends publishing an article in “a progressive paper in one of the Western countries” so as to expose the attempt by reactionary circles in the United States to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, whom he describes as “the racists and ultra right elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence in the United States.” Significantly, in view of the fact that Oswald was still alive but was going to be shot dead at the Dallas police station the very next day by Jack Ruby, who had criminal and intelligence ties to communist Cuba, Semichastny adds that the article should illustrate the intent of “crazy men” related to the “provocateurs and murderers among counterrevolutionary Cuban émigrés to alter the foreign and domestic policies of the USA.” (The reference to Cuba is a little confused since Cuban émigrés would not have been backing Oswald, who had been noisily supporting Castro’s Cuba. No matter, however, because the point was simply to add another group of potential culprits behind the assassination.)
Then Yeltsin gives us the most fascinating disinformation tidbit of all. In Moscow, it would already have been evening before Soviet authorities received reports of the assassination and even later of Oswald’s arrest. Nevertheless, on the very next day, November 23, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny not only promptly sends a message to the Central Committee with the above fictitious information about that nice young man Oswald, but he goes on to recommend immediately starting, in effect, a full-bore disinformation campaign designed to point the finger at elements the Soviets want the world to view as the real criminals behind the assassination.
Along with the other memoranda and comments related to the assassination published in Appendix B in Yeltsin’s book, the above letter must be considered pure disinformation for consumption by American and other Western readers. As we intelligence professionals can attest, Semichastny would never have written such bald lies to the Central Committee. The Central Committee certainly already knew about Oswald and his radar information that had famously helped the Soviets bring down a CIA U-2 plane intruder on May 1, 1960. (Oswald had even bragged to the American embassy in Moscow that he had told the Soviets all he knew about radar and American U-2 planes. As a Marine he had served at Atsugi in Japan, with its U-2s, and at El Toro in California, with its sophisticated new radars.) Furthermore, the sender of one memorandum is given a
s “Semichastny’s deputy, Zakharov.” We know, and the Central Committee also certainly knew, that this is really General Aleksandr Sakharovsky. Sakharovsky would not have written to the Central Committee in alias. Yeltsin also gives the codename “Brooks” as the source of information claiming that Oswald had written a letter offering to help American communists organize for the CPUSA and for Cuba, but the offer was considered an FBI provocation. “Brooks” is identified in the memorandum as “a well-known American Communist figure and KGB agent,” an unlikely indiscretion to describe a sensitive agent. In 1999, “Brooks” will be publicly identified in the Mitrokhin Archive as Jack Childs, an American communist who was indeed a KGB agent.8 By the time Yeltsin’s book was published, Childs was dead, having passed away on August 12, 1980, so no harm was done by Yeltsin’s outing him.9 The reference to “Brooks” is probably intended to reassure the FBI that Jack was indeed a trusted KGB agent. In fact, Jack was also a trusted FBI source, as the Soviets knew. (The complicated significance of this point will be clarified in another chapter.)
Compare that with what the New York Times reported from Dallas on the morning of November 23, 1963. Oswald was arrested the previous afternoon, charged with the murder of a policeman who had tried to stop him from escaping, then arraigned at 1:40 a.m. the following morning and charged with the murder of the president. The accused was described as a twenty-one-year-old leftist who had once lived in the Soviet Union and who currently worked at the Dallas School Book Depository, from where the shots had come that had killed the president. He was also identified as an adherent of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee but described as politically somewhat erratic.
Why should the KGB leadership know better than the Dallas police and the New York Times who was to blame for the assassination of the American president? It is even more remarkable that the KGB chairman so accurately anticipates Oswald’s murder the following day by Jack Ruby, who was not a Cuban émigré but had Cuban connections.
The KGB clearly had no trouble finding an appropriate “progressive paper in one of the Western countries” in which to launch its disinformation campaign about the Kennedy assassination. The first attack came in an article early in 1964 in the communist-controlled British journal Labour Monthly. Written by editor R. Palme Dutt, the article states that “most commentators” have surmised the assassination to have been a coup staged by the “Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas” by using a fall guy they then killed before he could spill the beans. The scenario is described as having “all the hallmarks of a CIA job” without providing any evidence whatsoever of that.10 In early 1964 the first book on the assassination was published in the United States. Written by German communist Joachim Joesten, it is entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? And it was published by Carlo Aldo Marzani, a known KGB agent (codename NORD), who had been generously funded since before World War II for churning out pro-Soviet propaganda. Joesten’s book also hewed to Semichastny’s line by blaming the assassination on a conspiracy of right-wing racists, especially oil magnate H. L. Hunt. It describes Oswald as an “FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background” who was used and then murdered to prevent his giving evidence.11
Accusing the CIA—to this day the main adversary of Russian intelligence, with the FBI a close second—of assassinating President Kennedy became thereafter a worldwide theme song in a flood of disinformation books and articles. Yet as coauthor Woolsey can attest, the CIA never had any kind of operational connection with Oswald. Nevertheless, it is said even to this day that half of the American population believes the CIA was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Such is the formidable power of disinformation once it takes hold in the popular imagination.
Further, Yeltsin quotes a “Zakharov” memorandum to the International Department of the Central Committee in which “Zakharov” alleges that some intelligence data identify “the ultimate organizer of the murder of President Kennedy” as a politically powerful group of Texas oil magnates. He adds that a Polish [sic] intelligence source reported in November 1963 that the real instigators of the assassination were three prominent oilmen from the southern U.S. named Richardson, Murchison, and Hunt. Also noted is information privately given to “Ward, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun” in early December at the meeting of a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by the millionaire Hunt claiming that Jack Ruby “had proposed a large sum of money to Oswald for the murder of Kennedy.”
The Texas oil magnates pop up frequently in post-assassination disinformation, most notably in a “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter dated “Nov. 8, 1963” and signed by “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Copies of this letter were anonymously mailed out in 1975 to three conspiracy advocates in the U.S., accompanied by a note alleging that the FBI had the original. Oswald provocatively asks for “information concerning my position” and suggests discussing the matter “before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.” The handwriting was authenticated by several Western experts. In 1999 the “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter was identified in the Mitrokhin Archive as a KGB fabrication.12 We can even tell how the fabrication was done, based on information supplied by the defectors Lazló and Hanna Sulner, who had perfected a copy machine that seamlessly combined individual letters actually written by a target person. This machine was used by the Hungarians to compromise Cardinal József Mindszenty in 1948–1949 and was made available to the Soviets.13
In the end, Yeltsin’s very secret KGB documents in Appendix B that were supposedly written just after the assassination of President Kennedy turn out to be much later concoctions. They were evidently composed in order to have Yeltsin bring a little new life into the old Soviet disinformation campaign to absolve Russia of any operational involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination. The Yeltsin documents also add a few new twists, mainly by directing somewhat more attention toward Cuban affairs.
THEY KNEW
By at least April 1963, the KGB had to face up to the probability that it might not be able to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from going ahead with his idée fixe that he had to assassinate President Kennedy. Oswald knew that Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of Oswald’s paradise and new home, the Soviet Union, had entrusted him with that task, and he was confident he could pull it off. In April he had demonstrated to the KGB officers in Mexico how carefully and successfully he had planned to take a shot at General Edwin Walker on April 10 without leaving any telltale evidence, and he was certain he could do just as good a job against Kennedy.
By this time, however, the KGB and the Soviet Union’s Communist Party leaders realized that Khrushchev’s crazy ideas were giving their country a terrible reputation. In October 1962, he had lost face before the world by backing down over the Cuban Missile Crisis and when the Soviet Union was named as the murderer of two Russian émigrés at the Bogdan Stashinsky trial in West Germany. Another false step by the hot-headed Khrushchev, and there might be nuclear war. By at least April 1963, rumors were afloat that Politburo ideologue Mikhail Suslov was leading a revolt to oust Khrushchev and replace him with Leonid Brezhnev.14
For its part, the KGB’s disinformation experts began planning what to do about Oswald if he should resist all efforts to change his mind. At home the Soviets might have staged their usual fatal hunting or automobile accident, but they could not risk attempting such a solution in the United States. Apparently the next best choice was to divert public attention away from any Russian contact with or interest in him. Fidel Castro was brought into the picture and agreed to help focus Oswald’s enthusiasm for communism more toward Cuba than as before toward Russia. In the process, Oswald might even forget about what Khrushchev had asked him to do.
On April 13, just before Oswald traveled to Mexico to show the KGB what a good shot he was, he had been visited for the last time by his best friend and mentor, George de Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt was actually a KGB illegal officer assigned to help Oswald get settled in the United States, but he was evidently not aware of Oswald’s assassination assignment. Oswald showed
off the guns (rifle and pistol) that he had just received at the post office box he had opened in alias, and his wife took his picture with them. De Mohrenschildt must have used his own communications channel to tell the KGB about this alarming visit, because on April 19 he and his wife suddenly, without even saying goodbye to the Oswalds, packed up and left Dallas for Haiti, where they had previously lived.
Sometime between April 14 and April 24 (when there is no other record of his whereabouts), Oswald took a bus trip to visit the KGB in Mexico City. On his September 1963 bus trip to Mexico City, he told fellow passengers that on an earlier trip he had stayed at the Hotel Cuba. After the assassination a chambermaid recognized Oswald from a photograph as a previous guest at that hotel.15 Otherwise, no facts are available about this April trip. In any case, Oswald certainly alarmed the KGB by describing his shot at General Walker and showing off the photographs of himself with his guns.
On April 24, Oswald sent his wife and child off to live with their kindly and unwitting friend Ruth Paine in the Dallas suburb of Irving. That same day he caught a bus for New Orleans, where he moved in with his aunt and started to organize some pro-Cuban activities.
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