The most serious problem for the Soviets was what to do if Oswald should pull off the unthinkable and actually assassinate the American president. Everyone knew President Kennedy would soon be visiting Dallas, the home of his vice president, and it eventually became public knowledge that the visit would take place on November 22, 1963.
This presented a problem way over the heads of Oswald’s usual case officers. It was high time for the KGB leadership to call upon its top disinformation experts. Normally they could have easily published some kind of fake news in a Calcutta newspaper and gotten it reprinted in Western Europe and the United States. But an attempted assassination of the president of the United States called for much more sophisticated planning. Knowledge of this top-secret dilemma obviously had to be kept extremely tight, perhaps limited to KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Communist Party ideologue and Brezhnev supporter Mikhail Suslov, and CPSU International Department chairman Boris Ponomarev, although Cuban leader Fidel Castro and CPUSA chairman Gus Hall would need to be brought in to a certain extent for their support. If the worst should indeed happen, the Soviets would have to be prepared to stage dramatic and convincing scenarios before gullible and carefully selected audiences who would need to convince the world that the neither the Soviet Union nor Cuba had any current connection with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Let us look chronologically at what happened on November 22, 1963.
First we have Florentino Aspillaga. He was a radio intercept officer with the Cuban intelligence service. His regular job was to monitor CIA transmissions from a communications hut on the shore near Havana. At about 9:30 that morning, he received a coded message to call his headquarters, which he then did from a secure phone. He was ordered to stop tracking the CIA, to listen instead to transmissions from Texas, and to report anything of interest back to headquarters. Two or three hours later, he picked up amateur radio bands reporting that President Kennedy had just been shot, and he reported this back to his headquarters. Kennedy was shot at 12:30 p.m. Dallas time, which would have been 1:30 p.m. Havana time. Aspillaga defected in Vienna in 1987 but was afraid to tell anyone about this incident, although he included it in his personal memoirs written soon thereafter when he came to the United States. He later recounted it to the CIA’s authority on Cuba, Brian Latell, commenting simply: “Castro knew. They knew Kennedy would be killed.” This did not become public knowledge until 2012, when Latell published it in his book Castro’s Secrets, based mainly on interviews with Cuban defectors. Latell describes Aspillaga as “the most knowledgeable Cuban defector ever to change sides.16
Next we must take a look at Fidel Castro himself. On this day he was at his Varadero beach house, where he was hosting a luncheon for his distinguished foreign visitor Jean Daniel, the lead correspondent for the Paris weekly L’Express. Daniel had been in Cuba for several weeks and had spent the past two days talking to Fidel about politics between the United States and Cuba. Present at the beach house were Daniel, his wife, Fidel Castro, and nine or ten other Cubans. They were all sitting around a casual table when the phone rang and Fidel answered. It was Cuba’s figurehead president calling with preliminary news of the assassination. Everyone present heard Fidel cry out: “¿Como? ¿Un atentado?” (What? An assassination attempt?) Fidel told his guests the news and called it an “amazing coincidence.” When it was soon thereafter learned that the president was dead, Fidel remarked: “They will have to find the assassin quickly, otherwise you watch and see, they will try to blame us.” The writer Brian Latell learned all of this later from Daniel, who said that his wife had thought Fidel seemed genuinely shocked. Latell commented that Fidel’s remark about being blamed was strange, since at that time Oswald’s Marxist and Cuban connections had not yet been made public. Daniel would later publish several articles in various French periodicals describing this scene.17 This whole scenario had clearly been carefully planned in order to demonstrate to the foreign visitors that Fidel Castro had nothing to do with the assassination and was taken completely by surprise when he learned the news. Daniel was undoubtedly selected to be the honored guest at the luncheon because he would be sure to write articles for publication in Europe about what he had personally witnessed.
But the truly most amazing stage performance taking place that day involved the influential American communist Morris Childs, who had been in Moscow since November 1, 1963, on his annual trip for the American Communist Party (CPUSA) to discuss politics and funding with Soviet party (CPSU) leaders.18 On November 22, as soon as news of the assassination started coming in, Soviet leaders in obvious consternation began talking to Morris about it, asking for his views on possible causes and advice on how the Communist Party should react.
International Department chairman Boris Ponomarev called Morris into his office and was asking about the kind of person Lyndon Johnson was when panic-stricken subordinates burst in and excitedly started telling in Russian about Oswald’s arrest for the murder. They described Oswald as a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, had attempted suicide, and had been judged by psychiatrists to be unbalanced. When Oswald had asked to go back to the United States, the Soviets were glad to be rid of him. When he later appeared at the Soviet embassy in Mexico and said he wanted to return to the Soviet Union via Cuba, the embassy asked KGB headquarters what to do and was told to brush him off. The Soviet embassy told Oswald it could not issue him a visa unless he had a Cuban visa, and the Cuban embassy cooperated by telling him he could not have a Cuban visa without showing that he had a Soviet one. Ponomarev’s intruders said the KGB had now sworn to the Politburo and to the International Department that it had never at any time used Oswald as an agent or informant. (All of this was the standard disinformation story that would soon be spread around everywhere.)
When the intruders noticed Morris and asked what they should do with “this American here,” Ponomarev told them to repeat their story for him in English. Remarkably, they just happened to speak English, and they did so. (Morris, who had been a loyal source of the FBI’s since the early 1950s, always claimed he had made a great effort not to let the Soviets know he spoke Russian, but of course they did know from his background. He had spent the first nine years of his life in the Kiev area, where his family spoke Russian at home. Furthermore, the CPUSA had sent him as a teenager to Moscow to study at the Lenin School for foreigners, where he had also become an informant for the KGB’s predecessor (OGPU) and was tutored by prominent Russians, notably Mikhail Suslov, who became his friend and mentor. (Coauthor Pacepa knew many Romanians who had attended the same school, and all came back speaking fluent Russian, even though the classes were given in their native languages.)
In short, it must be concluded that Ponomarev had planned this scenario well in advance, and he set Morris up for it. Indeed, Morris was impressed by the sincere concern and sympathy of all the Soviets he met with on this trip, and he was genuinely convinced that the Soviets had nothing to do with the assassination. When he got back to the United States on December 2, Morris immediately reported everything to the FBI, which transmitted the essence of it—it was described as being from an anonymous “source that has provided reliable information in the past”—to President Johnson, to a few other top administration leaders, and even in a secret summary to the Warren Commission, which had just been formed on November 29.
President Johnson was already familiar with earlier reporting from this source, whom he knew as a reliable FBI agent with access to top Soviet officials. The president and the FBI were enormously relieved to have confirmation that the Soviets had nothing to do with the assassination. The members of the newly formed Warren Commission were told not to look any more for a Soviet connection, and indeed they did not.19
We coauthors have, however, learned something quite different from these little stories. We have seen that Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the CPSU’s International Department chairman Boris Ponomarev were well aware that Lee Harvey Oswald would try to assassinate President Kennedy on his visi
t to Dallas in November 1963, and they prepared elaborate disinformation scenes to convince gullible foreign visitors of their utter shock and surprise if and when the worst were to happen. Castro fed his fake news stories to a French writer with suggestions for who was behind the deed (Texas oilmen, Cuban émigrés, the CIA, the FBI), and Ponomarev fed his fake news to a high-ranking CPUSA representative, demonstrating that the Soviets had no connection whatsoever with the deed (though maybe President Johnson, rich Texans, or the CIA did).
Of course, we know that in fact Morris was a trusted FBI agent, so the disinformation was immediately disseminated to top levels of the U.S. government as the truth. What no Americans suspected, however, was that Ponomarev and other top Presidium members had long been aware that Morris was cooperating with the FBI. (We coauthors discuss elsewhere how we reached this firm conclusion.) The FBI and Morris himself never believed that the Soviet leaders knew all about his loyalty to the United States and cooperation with the FBI, and that was the key to the brilliant performance hosted by Ponomarev. On November 22, 1963, the Soviet Union truly pulled off a hugely successful disinformation show, one that would absolutely convince the top levels of the American government that the Soviet Union bore no responsibility whatsoever for the assassination of President Kennedy.
The American population and the world would get the message from eminently reliable and respected sources. Nuclear war would not erupt from either West or East. Behind the scenes, Suslov and the Politburo could work to get rid of that madman Khrushchev and put Leonid Brezhnev in the driver’s seat.
As previously noted, on October 12, 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was recalled from his vacation, arrested at the Moscow airport, and forced to resign, giving way to Leonid Brezhnev as Communist Party leader.
THE CHILDS BROTHERS
It must finally be acknowledged that with Morris Childs and his brother Jack, the Soviet Union pulled off a brilliant disinformation operation, one that still distorts all efforts to analyze the assassination of President Kennedy. Who were these men, and why in all the thousands of books and articles written about the assassination is there hardly any mention of them?
Here we need not recount the whole story of the Childs brothers’ remarkable lives. It has been well told in John Barron’s book Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin (Regnery, 1996).20 Briefly, both Morris Childs (1902–1991) and Jack Childs (1907–1980) were longtime, trusted members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), Morris an overt and senior member responsible for policy and Jack an underground member responsible for obtaining the money Moscow sent through the KGB to support the CPUSA.
After World War II, the CPUSA went through a rough period of internal squabbles and U.S. government investigations, and it lost contact with and funding from the CPSU. The FBI seized the opportunity. In 1951 it recruited first Jack and then Morris, both of whom remained proud and loyal FBI agents for the rest of their lives. Beginning in 1958, Morris made lengthy annual trips to Moscow for meetings with leading members of the Soviet government to discuss political tactics and funding, and he also sometimes met with party leaders in other communist countries. As a KGB agent, Jack clandestinely retrieved the cash dollars that the CPSU sent through the KGB’s Toronto and later New York stations to fund the CPUSA. Morris and Jack occasionally substituted for each other when one or the other was ill.
Until the end of their lives, both Childs brothers were highly regarded by both the American and the Soviet/Russian governments. In 1977, at a surprise seventy-fifth birthday party hosted by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and attended by KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and about half of the Politburo, Brezhnev himself pinned an Order of the Red Banner medal on Morris’s lapel, and Morris was told that Jack would also get the same medal when he next came to Moscow. Although Morris believed that the Soviets overestimated the work done by the CPUSA, he felt that the medal was also a personal tribute from the Soviet leadership.
In 1987 President Ronald Reagan ordered that the National Security Medal be awarded to Morris and posthumously to Jack, who had died in 1980. For security reasons, Morris received his award from Director William Sessions at FBI headquarters.
The FBI, and Morris and Jack themselves (and their wives, who sometimes traveled with them), always firmly believed no one ever knew that after the early 1950s the brothers had changed loyalties and were working for the FBI. Outside the FBI, no one was believed to know—not CPUSA leaders, not American government authorities, not the KGB, not the CPSU. American leaders knew them as reliable anonymous sources. Communists knew them as trusted colleagues both in the U.S. and Moscow and in other communist countries. When visiting communist countries, these loyal Americans were sometimes terrified that their secret might be discovered and that they would be arrested, but in fact they were always warmly welcomed everywhere as old friends.
Unfortunately, we coauthors must beg to differ. After very careful study, we have firmly concluded that the Soviet Politburo, as well as CPUSA chairman Gus Hall and later even Fidel Castro, had long known that the Childs brothers had been cooperating with the FBI since the 1950s. That sheds an entirely new light on how we must view the reporting from these very secret and reliable anonymous FBI sources, particularly with regard to the assassination of President Kennedy. Over the years, the reporting from the Childs brothers was in fact Soviet-generated disinformation (although built around a kernel of truth for credibility’s sake), and it distorted the conclusions reached by the FBI, by President Johnson, and by the Warren Commission, with ripple effects throughout Washington and much of the Western world.
The most authoritative evidence that top Soviets were aware of the Childs brothers’ loyalty to the FBI comes from a close examination of the Mitrokhin Archive.21 When reading this material, it must be remembered that the defector Vasili Mitrokhin had access only to documents in the archives of the KGB’s PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniya, the first or foreign intelligence chief directorate), roughly similar to the American CIA. He did not have access to material on cases run by any of the other KGB directorates or other elements of the Soviet government or to very sensitive cases known only to the KGB chairman. The Childs brothers were not a PGU case, although during the period 1958 to 1980, Jack and occasionally Morris did have clandestine contact with the PGU in connection with the transfer of CPSU funds to the CPUSA. The PGU knew that the brothers were working for CPUSA chairman Gus Hall and that in Moscow the CPSU’s Politburo and International Department held them in high regard.
According to the Mitrokhin Archive, by at least 1974, the PGU officers in the United States had become suspicious of the Childs brothers, especially Morris. The Childs brothers had not suffered during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, nor had they been arrested for traveling on false passports the FBI was believed to have been aware of. (Indeed, we know from Operation SOLO that the FBI had provided them with false passports.) Furthermore, a 1967 U.S. Senate Judiciary report had named one of Morris’s earlier aliases and mentioned his prewar links with Soviet intelligence. (From Operation SOLO we also know that the CPUSA sent Morris to study in Moscow from 1929–1932 and that he became an informant for the KGB predecessor OGPU during that period.) In March 1974, Vladimir Kazakov, the head of the PGU’s North American department, reported these suspicions to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and to the CPSU’s Central Committee, saying that even though CPUSA chairman Gus Hall trusted Morris, the PGU suspected that Morris was “possibly being used by U.S. intelligence.” The PGU also urged that Hall find a substitute for Jack, who was absent-minded and in poor health.
When there was no reaction to its letter, the PGU on May 8, 1974, had its chief, Boris Ivanov, personally meet in Moscow with Gus Hall in an effort to persuade him that the long involvement of both Childs brothers in secret work was increasingly putting PGU officers in danger of FBI surveillance. Ivanov suggested some other ways to transfer funds to the CPUSA. Hall said he had found a reliable replacement for Jack, but in the end he took no action. The PGU co
ncluded that the CPSU’s International Department “evidently did not take [the PGU’s] warning very seriously and did not insist.”
In November 1977, PGU headquarters tried again, sending a memorandum to the Central Committee to complain that the Childs brothers had still not been replaced. The PGU was particularly unhappy that Jack had recently become ill and had been replaced by Morris, who might be under “covert FBI surveillance” because of what the Senate Judiciary Committee had previously written about him. Following up on the memorandum, on November 10 the PGU’s Ivanov and Kazakov had another meeting with Gus Hall in Moscow. Hall told the PGU men that he had three candidates in mind to replace Jack, and he elaborated with a complicated plan for how he would let the PGU know which one he had selected. Once again, however, Gus Hall did nothing, and Jack continued his clandestine contacts with the PGU in the United States.
As reported in Operation SOLO, by the spring of 1980 the FBI had become afraid that the Childs brothers were in imminent danger of being compromised. Morris told Hall (the cover story) that unidentified men had been asking his neighbors about him. He was afraid he might have to go into hiding to avoid arrest. He gave Hall whatever CPSU funds he had, then he and Eva retired under FBI protection to a luxury condominium in Florida, where he died on June 2, 1991. Jack, who had been ill for some time, had already died in a New York hospital on August 12, 1980. In effect, the FBI’s Operation SOLO ceased to exist after 1980.
We do not believe that in 1980 the Childs brothers were in any danger of being compromised, because we are convinced that the Soviets had known since the 1950s that they were FBI agents. Apart from the PGU’s real concerns (as reported in the Mitrokhin Archive), over the years the case shows too many suspicious moments. The brothers always traveled in alias, but when they sometimes used passports given to them by the FBI, the Soviets would have noticed. They certainly would have secretly observed them in their Moscow apartments, where Morris and his wife crawled under the bedclothes with a flashlight to make secret notes for the FBI that Eva tied around her body under her clothes when they left Moscow. On a visit to Moscow in 1964, Jack borrowed an International Department typewriter to send messages “to comrades back home,” but he also used it for an encoded letter to an FBI mail drop in New York. In the long run, PGU officers in New York must have observed that whenever the brothers arrived back in the United States, they were swept up by FBI officers to avoid customs and then taken to a special room for immediate debriefing. The New York PGU challenged Jack once when it noticed that he himself had not written down the numbers of the banknotes he had received from the KGB, nor had his wife, as he weakly claimed, because the FBI had done it for him. And so on and so forth. We realize that the FBI was only trying to make things easier for Jack and Morris and that the Childs brothers and their wives were only trying to do a good job for the FBI and the American government. Even so, amateurs should not hope to put one over on yesterday’s Soviets or today’s Russians.
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