Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  In 1962, Oswald worked for a short time at a graphic arts company in Dallas, where he discussed the making of microdots with another employee. He also used the company’s equipment to make identity documents for himself under the alias O. H. Lee, which he used for travel to Mexico, in fake documents certifying his vaccinations, and to receive weapons at post office boxes, including the rifle that would kill Kennedy.

  “Anton” also became an excellent marksman by practicing at a special firing range on targets depicting a man’s upper body.

  When Oswald was arrested after the assassination, he still had in his proud possession a hunting license issued to him in Minsk, a membership certificate in the Belorussian Society of Hunters and Fishermen, and a gun permit, all issued in the summer of 1960.

  “Anton” had studied the vulnerabilities of sabotage targets and on the side had endured a little academic instruction in Marxism.

  Oswald did not need sabotage instruction, as he knew what his assignment was, but he undoubtedly had plenty of morale-building brainwashing sessions.

  Unlike Oswald, “Anton” never knew what his exact assignment would be, although he was told that “if a need for a weapon develops, one will be provided.” After “Anton” completed his training, his principal Department Thirteen training officer was assigned to the United Nations in New York so as to be available to “Anton,” but for the time being “Anton” simply remained in Canada awaiting further instructions. In 1972 “Anton” was arrested by Canadian authorities, with whom he then fully cooperated.3

  In Moscow, it took over a year for the U.S. embassy, on May 24, 1962, to issue proper papers for the Oswalds (now including daughter June, born February 15, 1962) to travel to the U.S. On June 1, 1962, the family finally left the Soviet Union on their long trip to Fort Worth, Texas, where Oswald’s brother Robert took them in.

  Materials found after Oswald’s death indicate that he knew Department Thirteen officer Valery Kostikov by the operational pseudonym “Comrade Kostin” before meeting him in Mexico City in 1963. It is very likely that Kostikov participated in Oswald’s training in the Moscow area and then went to Mexico City, just as “Anton’s” training officer from Moscow was assigned to the United Nations in New York when “Anton” repatriated to Canada. Kostikov was assigned as a Soviet diplomat to Mexico City in September 1961 shortly before Oswald’s anticipated repatriation to the United States.

  PGU illegal officer George de Mohrenschildt moved back to the Dallas area in October 1961, evidently in order to help the Oswalds settle down there at that time. Oswald’s departure from the Soviet Union was delayed simply as the result of bureaucracy at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in getting its paperwork to the Oswalds.

  A SECRET PROMISE TO KHRUSHCHEV

  It is hard for normal citizens to understand what it was like to be Oswald, enthralled, some would say brainwashed, by the Soviets. The whole focus of his life during his “temporary” return to the United States was to carry out the very secret mission that Khrushchev had personally entrusted to him—to kill President Kennedy, who had destroyed Khrushchev’s international prestige. Then Oswald could return to his own life with his beloved new family in the Soviet paradise.4

  We do not know if Khrushchev ever spoke to Oswald in person, but he very well might have. We do know that Khrushchev personally decorated Bogdan Stashinsky for having killed two prominent Soviet émigrés living in West Germany. Oswald did Khrushchev a huge favor in 1960 in enabling the Soviets to bring down Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane. So during his training for the mission in the United States, Oswald was certainly told that Khrushchev had personally asked him to perform a top secret assassination for him. Marina, Oswald’s wife, would tell her biographer that her husband had once complained that Kennedy’s “papa bought him the presidency,” an echo of Khrushchev’s oft-repeated disdain for Kennedy as “the millionaire’s kid.” Yet nothing indicates that Oswald himself had ever developed any personal animus against Kennedy.

  Soon after the Oswalds’ arrival in Texas in 1962, they sought out other Russian émigrés. According to one young man who used to visit the Oswalds to practice his Russian, Lee described Khrushchev as “simply brilliant.” He also liked President Kennedy; on their living room table, the Oswalds “more or less permanently” displayed a copy of Life magazine with a photo of Kennedy on the cover. Marina Oswald would testify to the Warren Commission in 1964 that her husband had once said: “If someone had killed Hitler in time, it would have saved many lives.” That could well have been the theme-song of Oswald’s Department Thirteen training.

  Shortly before the Oswalds left the Soviet Union, the pregnant Marina visited “two aunts in Kharkov” for three or four weeks. This was undoubtedly time spent with Department Thirteen officers, who trained her how best to support her husband physically and emotionally and in clandestine communications. Marina was not, however, told what her husband’s secret mission was. Oswald understood the extreme secrecy of his mission, and he was also very protective of his wife and did not want her to suffer from sharing his life. Upon arriving in Texas in 1962, Oswald told his mother: “Not even Marina knows why I have returned to the United States.” He also did not want his wife to hang out with Russian-American women, going shopping, or practicing speaking English, because he was determined to see his family return to live out the rest of their lives in the Soviet paradise, where she would have no need for American products or the English language. Neither did he want Marina’s life complicated by his own frequent changes of residence, so he was happy when she became friends with the kindly American Ruth Paine over Russian lessons and began staying with her as Oswald became preoccupied with his mission. Starting on February 17, 1963, he had Marina write to the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, to say that she wanted to return to the Soviet Union. She wrote again with the same request on March 17. On July 1 Oswald himself wrote to the embassy, asking for separate visas, with a plea to rush Marina’s so that she could give birth to her second child in the Soviet motherland. Then Marina herself wrote again on July 8. The embassy fudged in every case, saying it had to check with Moscow or asking for more documents.

  The only other person who was close to Oswald after his return to the United States was the supposedly wealthy and aristocratic Russian émigré George de Mohrenschildt. He became Oswald’s best friend and mentor, but no one could ever really explain how they had come to know each other. Actually, de Mohrenschildt was an old, experienced KGB illegal officer who had become an American citizen and whose main job since at least 1938 had been to collect military intelligence.

  On December 22, 1958, Oswald was assigned to El Toro Base in Texas. That was most likely when the KGB first assigned de Mohrenschildt to guide the inexperienced, nineteen-year-old Oswald both in the everyday logistics of being an agent and in the kind of intelligence Moscow needed. De Mohrenschildt’s role in Oswald’s story is fascinating, but it is clear that in 1962 he did not know why Oswald had returned to the United States.

  Let us look briefly at the illegal officer George de Mohrenschildt himself. Allegedly born in 1911, he was handsome, charming, changed his background story many times during his lifetime, had many love affairs, and was married four times. His last wife, Jeanne, was also an illegal officer and had been publicly denounced as a communist spy by a previous husband. George first came to the United States in 1938 on a Polish passport documenting him as Baron George von Mohrenschildt, the son of a German director of the Swedish “Nobel interests” in the Baku oilfields. His intelligence assignment was to mix with conservative German-Americans and try to pick up Nazi military information. When it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, he became the French George de Mohrenschildt, who had attended a commercial school in Belgium founded by Napoleon. After the war he claimed his father had been a Russian engineer working in the Ploesti oilfields in Romania who was captured and executed by the Soviet army. In whatever guise, de Mohrenschildt’s job was to collect military intelligence.

&
nbsp; De Mohrenschildt was most likely the PGU illegal officer who collected Oswald’s information on U.S. Air Force planes from bus station lockers in the U.S. and at personal meetings in Tijuana when Oswald was assigned to El Toro Base in Texas. As an American citizen, de Mohrenschildt could freely move around in the United States. He and his wife, Jeanne, are known to have been in Mexico at the time of Oswald’s meetings with “friends” in Tijuana. Oswald wasn’t yet twenty years old when he decided he wanted to defect to the Soviet Union. For all his bravado, until then he’d been moved around on instructions from his peripatetic mother or the U.S. Marine Corps, so he badly needed advice from the older and more experienced de Mohrenschildt. When Oswald was discharged from the Marines on September 11, 1959, he immediately went to New Orleans, booked passage for Le Havre on an unlisted freighter of the Lykes Lines, and sailed for Le Havre the next day, September 20. (On his own, the inexperienced Oswald would not have known about the Lykes Line freighter that took him to Europe, but it was an inconspicuous and inexpensive line often used by de Mohrenschildt.)

  When Oswald returned to the United States in 1962, his contacts with Russian-Americans in the Dallas area provided a pretext for how he might have met de Mohrenschildt. But every time either of them was asked about it, the story changed. De Mohrenschildt kindly helped the Oswalds get settled and resettled, but he mistakenly assumed that Oswald’s KGB job was more or less the same as his own had been, i.e., to collect military intelligence, as Oswald had done when he was in the Marines. Upon Oswald’s return to the United States, de Mohrenschildt went to a lot of trouble to find ways to introduce him to interesting military people but then was completely baffled when Oswald made no effort to follow up on any of those attractive leads. Clearly, not even de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s “best friend” and mentor and PGU advisor, knew the real reason Oswald had come back to the United States.

  Only Oswald knew what Khrushchev wanted him to do, and although Oswald was only twenty-three years old, he was determined to accomplish his secret mission for his idol Khrushchev and, at all costs, to keep it entirely secret.

  The Soviet embassy in Washington was not involved in Oswald’s return to the United States. The PGU station there was responsible for keeping track of the Oswalds’ whereabouts in the United States, for replying to the Oswalds’ letters—which it did coldly—and finally for preventing their return to the Soviet Union, just as Moscow had instructed it to do. That was surely all until further instruction if the inconceivable (or the inevitable) occurred.

  Department Thirteen had assigned its officer Valery Kostikov to Mexico City in September 1961 to provide Oswald with moral support and operational advice. After his unsuccessful trip to Mexico City in April 1963, Oswald understood that he would have to rely on his own wits to accomplish his mission, but he still needed official assistance to return legally and safely to the Soviet motherland. When the Soviet embassy in Washington kept giving him and his wife the runaround about getting visas for the Soviet Union, he decided to try getting visas in Mexico for Moscow via Havana. After unsuccessfully seeking to visit his case officer Kostikov in Mexico City again in September–October 1963, and with unfriendly officials at the Cuban embassy, he gave up and retreated to Texas, hoping to be able to work out an escape mechanism by himself when the time came.

  Oswald’s working draft of a letter dated November 9, 1963, addressed to the Soviet embassy in Washington was found after the assassination at Ruth Paine’s house, where Oswald had gone to join his wife and children after his second fruitless visit to Mexico. In it, he explains that he talked to “Comrade Kostine” at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City but that the embassy was unprepared and couldn’t help him with the visas he and his family needed, stressing that the Soviet embassy was not to blame but was simply unprepared for him. He complains, however, that the Cuban consulate was “guilty of a gross breach of regulations.” Once again he asks for the entrance visas “as soon as they come” while informing the embassy of the birth of his second daughter on October 20, 1963.

  Oswald tried hard to be polite with Soviet officialdom, but by this time he must have understood that no help would be forthcoming from them. Left hanging high and dry, he was still convinced that he alone understood what Khrushchev wanted him to do. He had made a solemn promise to the Soviet leader, and he was going to fulfill that promise even if none of the stupid KGB bureaucrats would cooperate. Taking matters into his own hands, Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

  Fidel Castro was already prepared to do his part, so two days later, Cuban agent Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald at the Dallas Police station. On October 5, 1966, Ruby’s death sentence was overturned and a new trial ordered. That December, Ruby was diagnosed with acute lung cancer, and he died on January 3, 1967.

  The Russians have used radioactive weapons to kill their enemies in the West often. On July 22, 1978, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu ordered Pacepa to have a Romanian émigré in the West, Noel Bernard, killed. Bernard directed the Romanian program at Radio Free Europe in Munich, whose broadcasts constantly attacked the Romanian dictator. Bernard was to be administered a lethal radioactive substance the Romanians had gotten from the Soviets. Instead, Pacepa defected the next day and sent a warning to Bernard. Bernard insisted on continuing with his job. On December 23, 1981, three years after Pacepa was granted political asylum in the U.S., Noel Bernard died of a galloping form of cancer later confirmed as the result of a radioactive poison administered by Romanian foreign intelligence.

  George de Mohrenschildt and his wife stayed in Haiti until 1967, when they quietly sailed for the U.S. with their household effects and some $250,000 from a mysterious deposit that had been made to his Haitian bank account. The Warren Commission had already absolved de Mohrenschildt of any connection with the JFK assassination. Pacepa knew in Romania that George de Mohrenschildt was a KGB asset but nothing more about him or his activities. On March 29, 1977, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed by the writer Edward Jay Epstein about Oswald at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. There de Mohrenschildt learned from Epstein that the House Select Commission on Assassinations was scheduled to interview him. At the lunch break, de Mohrenschildt went to his daughter’s home in nearby Manalapan (where he was staying) and shot himself in the head.

  De Mohrenschildt’s widow provided some materials he had left behind, including a manuscript in which the alleged German baron praised Khrushchev: “He is gone now, God bless his Bible-quoting soul and his earthy personality. His sudden bursts of anger and beating of the table with his shoe, are all gone and belong to history. Millions of Russians miss him.”5 The manuscript also described Oswald as a nervous marksman who admired Kennedy and could not have killed him. It suggested that President Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination because he hated the whole Kennedy clan. In other words, de Mohrenschildt was doing his best to support the post-assassination disinformation narratives.

  The House Commission concluded its investigation without accusing anyone of conspiring with Oswald in the Kennedy assassination. The CIA was specifically absolved of any responsibility.

  In the end, there is no doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald was trained by the KGB’s Department Thirteen to commit the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, as ordered by Nikita Khrushchev. Even after the Russian political scene had changed and the KGB ordered Oswald to stand down, Oswald stubbornly went ahead with what he considered his personal mission as bestowed upon him by his hero, Khrushchev.

  Ultimately, the Russian government must bear the responsibility for President Kennedy’s death.

  THE COVER-UP: A DISINFORMATION EMPIRE IN THE WEST

  “Dezinformatsiya works like cocaine,” KGB chief Yuri Andropov preached in his days at the Lubyanka. “If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. Use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man.” During the Cold War, non-communist Western information outlets willing to publish the KGB’s fabricated stories witho
ut sourcing them were hard to find. To solve that problem, the KGB created its own organizations and masqueraded them as Western. Persuading the rest of the world that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Kennedy’s assassination became one of the most important tasks of its secret intelligence service’s vast disinformation machinery that eventually commanded more undercover intelligence officers than the rest of the KGB had.

  The first Russian international disinformation organization was founded under the respectable name of the World Peace Council. At first its main function was to document that America was a war-mongering, Zionist country financed by Jews and their money, run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (a derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress, a “Trilateral Commission,” or other secretive cronyist society), the aim of which was to convert the globe into a Jewish fiefdom. This material was all concocted by the Soviet foreign intelligence service.

  To make the World Peace Council seem to be an indigenous Western organization, the Kremlin headquartered it in Paris and persuaded the leftist French Nobel prizewinner Frédéric Joliot-Curie to chair it. Back in those days, however, the French government saw through the ruse, accused the World Peace Council of being a Russian dezinformatsiya front, and kicked it out of France. One of Russia’s most trusted influence agents of that period, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, tried to persuade the French government to recant its decision. Sartre publicly vilified the United States as a racist nation suffering from political rabies,6 but that didn’t do the trick. A few months later, the World Peace Council was moved to Soviet-occupied Vienna.

  It is no wonder the WPC was expelled from France. Behind its supposedly French façade, the WPC was as purely Soviet as it gets. Its daily business was conducted by a Soviet-style secretariat, whose twenty-one members were undercover intelligence officers from seven Soviet bloc countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and East Germany). The WPC also had twenty-three vice presidents, all undercover intelligence officers or agents. Four represented Soviet bloc countries (USSR, Poland, East Germany, and Romania), three represented communist governments loyal to Moscow (North Korea, North Vietnam, and Angola), one represented the African National Congress—which was financed and manipulated by Moscow—four represented non-ruling communist parties (in the United States, France, Italy, and Argentina), and eleven represented national-level WPC affiliates in the Soviet bloc and other Soviet puppet countries.