Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The internal conflict virtually tore the CIA in half, one side being led by Angleton, the other side, which accepted Nosenko’s bona fides, by eventual CIA director William Colby. The latter group ultimately prevailed. In a September 1, 1978, letter to the HSCA, written on behalf of the director of Central Intelligence, Scott Breckenridge of the CIA’s Office of Legislative Counsel wrote that “the final conclusion [of the CIA] was that [Nosenko] is a bona fide defector, a judgment that has been reinforced convincingly by 14 years of accumulated evidence.” Breckenridge said that the CIA was “unable to resolve satisfactorily the question of his bona fides until well after the Warren Commission had completed its work.”15

  Indeed, if the old expression “put your money where your mouth is” applies to the CIA, it seems very clear that the prevailing powers that be at the CIA came to the conclusion that Nosenko was bona fide a lot earlier than 1978, when they merely reported their conclusion. Apparently, when Nosenko defected on February 4, 1964, he was promised $25,000 a year in compensation by the CIA for future services. But “no effort was made to fulfill the promise until 5 years after Nosenko’s defection.” The CIA told the HSCA that “following acceptance of Nosenko’s bona fides in late 1968, an arrangement was worked out whereby Nosenko was employed as an independent contractor for the CIA, effective March 1, 1969. His first contract called for him to be compensated at a rate of $16,500 a year. As of 1978 he is receiving $35,325 a year. In addition to regular, yearly compensation, in 1972 Nosenko was paid for the years 1964–1969 in the amount of $25,000 a year…He also received…for March 1964 through July 1973 amounts totaling $50,000 to aid in his resettlement in the private [sector].”16

  Nosenko is not mentioned in the Warren Commission volumes. However, inasmuch as he defected in February of 1964, when the FBI was right in the middle of its assassination investigation, he naturally did not escape the attention of the bureau, which interviewed Nosenko twice in February and three times in March of 1964.17 The FBI told the HSCA it had “no direct access to Nosenko from April 3, 1964, until April 3, 1969” (nearly all of which time Nosenko was in CIA custody), and that on October 1, 1968, four years after the Warren Commission concluded its investigation, it had advised the CIA that it “found no substantial basis to conclude that Nosenko was not a bona fide defector.” The FBI further told the HSCA that “effective May 11, 1977, the FBI and CIA concurred that Nosenko was a bona fide defector” and it did not “perceive any credible evidence that Nosenko’s defection was a Soviet ploy to mask Soviet governmental involvement in the assassination.”18

  Unlike the Warren Commission, which did not feel it had the capacity back in 1964 to determine Nosenko’s bona fides (see endnote discussion), and despite the aforementioned CIA and FBI assurances, the HSCA made every effort to determine whether or not Nosenko was a bona fide defector, but eventually the committee threw up its arms and conceded it was “unable to resolve” this issue. The HSCA did conclude, however, that Nosenko was “an unreliable source of information about the assassination, or, more specifically, as to whether Oswald was ever contacted, or placed under surveillance, by the KGB.”19 But the matter of surveillance was conclusively put to rest by Norman Mailer’s book, Oswald’s Tale, published in 1995, in which Mailer was able to procure actual tapes and transcripts from the KGB’s surveillance of Oswald. (See Oswald biography section.)

  The reason why the HSCA concluded Nosenko was unreliable was that it caught him in too many inconsistencies. For example, Nosenko told the HSCA in 1978 that Oswald had been under extensive KGB surveillance, including mail interception, wiretapping, and physical observation. But in 1964 he told the CIA there had been no such surveillance. Nosenko also told the CIA in 1964 that Oswald never received any psychiatric examination in Moscow after his suicide attempt, but he told the HSCA in 1978 he had. The HSCA also tended to disbelieve Nosenko’s claim that the KGB never had any direct contact with Oswald because it was not interested in him and never even bothered to interview him. Nosenko said that although the KGB was interested in the U-2 plane, the spy agency did not know that Oswald might have knowledge about the plane.20 One clear piece of misinformation Nosenko gave the HSCA was that Oswald’s phone in Minsk was “tapped,”21 but Marina said they had no phone in their apartment in Minsk.22

  Nosenko, when confronted by the HSCA with contradictions between what he had told the CIA and what he told the committee, said that the transcripts he was shown of the CIA interrogations were inaccurate (the tapes showed they were not) and that nothing he told the CIA prior to 1967 could be relied on because he had been drugged by the CIA.23

  In any event, whatever dispute there is about the accuracy of several of Nosenko’s statements about Oswald, and although there is a residue of disbelief among some to this day about his bona fides, subsequent events have strongly enhanced his credibility on his two main points, that he was not a KGB mole but a bona fide defector, and that Oswald was never a KGB operative.

  In the wake of the failed, hard-line coup against Gorbachev in the late summer of 1991, when there was euphoria over the fall of Communism, there was a brief interlude of increased openness by the KGB, and ABC News Nightline correspondent Forrest Sawyer and senior producer Bob Haverill, after much lobbying on their part in Moscow, were allowed to look and take notes from, but not make copies of, Oswald’s KGB file (No. 31451) for several hours one day in mid-September.

  Valentin Kandurian, lieutenant colonel, KGB: “We are opening the door.”

  Sawyer: “The original material.”

  Kandurian: “The original, exactly, this is the original material.”

  Sawyer: “Is this everything?”

  Kandurian: “Yes. This is it.”

  Of course, to an agency whose highest virtue is deception, Kandurian’s assurances cannot be automatically accepted. However, Sawyer, for several reasons, was under the impression he was viewing the original file. “The reformers who are running the KGB have it not at all in their interest to protect the past. The file was voluminous. It was quite old. It was quite detailed and it was not self-contradictory, so if it was falsified, it had to be falsified, I think, sometime long ago, and the KGB never dreamed then that they would release their files. Finally, there is corroboration.” Sawyer said that Nosenko, back in 1964, “claims to have seen the file” and Nosenko said “virtually the same things” he, Sawyer, had found in it.

  One report in the file read, “Taking into account that the personality of the applicant [Oswald] is absolutely unclear to us and the fact that the first directorate of the KGB and counter-intelligence have no interest in Lee Harvey Oswald…he [was] refused citizenship.” But because there was some suspicion that Oswald was an American intelligence agent, the KGB monitored his movements throughout Russia, code-naming its target, in a play on Lee Harvey, “Likhoi.”24

  The issue of Nosenko’s credibility as a bona fide defector was virtually laid to rest by the publication, in 1999, of the book The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by British author Christopher Andrew and his coauthor Vasili Mitrokhin, who had worked for years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB. Before defecting to Britain through the British SIS in 1992, Mitrokhin spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of these highly classified files, which he smuggled out of the archives and kept beneath the floor in his dacha. Andrew had exclusive access to both Mitrokhin and his archive. Internal KGB documents provided by Mitrokhin showed that the KGB viewed Nosenko’s defection as a serious setback, made every effort to discredit him after he defected, and added him to its list of “particularly dangerous traitors” to be assassinated abroad if the effort would not carry an unacceptable risk. In 1975, the KGB actually found a gangster willing to kill Nosenko for $100,000, but before the contract killer could earn his fee, he was arrested for other crimes.25

  Vladimir Semichastny, the head of the KGB at the time of Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, told NBC through an interpreter in 1993 that
when Oswald first defected to the Soviet Union, the KGB took an interest in him. But “Oswald turned out to be a mediocre, uninteresting man. We had had high expectations of him as an informant, but nothing ever came of it. We soon learned we couldn’t put any hopes on him. We realized that Oswald was a useless man. I was told at some point in time that he didn’t like this country and was considering leaving. I told my workers immediately, ‘Let him go. Try to keep him from changing his mind.’”26 And Semichastny wasn’t just saying this to an American audience thirty years after the assassination. In an internal 1963 KGB memo from Semichastny to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he writes, “During the time of Oswald’s stay in the USSR, and after he left our country, the Committee for State Security exhibited no interest in him.”27

  This impression of Oswald as useless, and the notion of the KGB using him in any way being a bad joke, was widespread. UPI correspondent Aline Mosby, who interviewed Oswald in Moscow in 1959, says that she had a strong impression that Oswald was “emotionally unbalanced, and wanted to be a ‘big shot.’ I quickly sized him up as a little nobody that the Russians would not be interested in. My impression was confirmed when they shipped him off to Minsk.”28 That Mosby was not engaging in post-assassination revisionism is established by the fact that in her pre-assassination book about her Moscow experience, The View from No. 13 People’s Street, she was so unimpressed with Oswald she made no reference to him at all.29

  Former FBI assistant director Cartha DeLoach told CNN on November 21, 1993, “The Russians have an excellent intelligence operation. And they wouldn’t have dealt with Oswald. They wouldn’t deal with someone who was mentally unbalanced. They just wouldn’t do that.” When Paul Roderick Gregory, a member of the Russian community in Dallas who got to know Oswald and Marina well, was asked whether Oswald might have been an agent of the Soviet Union, he responded, “If the Soviets wanted to get someone, they could get someone a lot more reliable. They would have a lot more sense than to get him.”30

  One of the most prevalent beliefs among conspiracy theorists is that the KGB may have recruited Oswald as an agent for the Soviets as far back as when he was a radar specialist at Atsugi air base in Japan.31 But obviously, if the Soviets had, the very last thing they would have had him do is defect to their country. As a Marine radar specialist in Japan he may have eventually reached the point where he could have provided them with valuable classified information. By defecting to Russia and publicly speaking out against the United States, he would lose all possibility of ever being in a position to gain access to U.S. military information helpful to the Soviets.

  The most recent revelations about Oswald in the Soviet Union occurred on August 5, 1999, when the National Archives released more than eighty pages of long-secret documents that Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, gave to President Clinton as a gesture of friendship when the two met at the “Big 8” summit in Cologne, Germany, in June of 1999. (Clinton had requested the file from Yeltsin back in 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of JFK’s death.) Among them was a November 26, 1963, internal memorandum stamped “Top Secret” and “Highest Priority” from the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, dealing with the November 9, 1963, letter Oswald had sent to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., the one he typed when he was at Ruth Paine’s house visiting his wife and daughters. Dobrynin thought the letter was a fake. “This letter was clearly a provocation,” Dobrynin says in the memo. “It gives the impression we had close ties with Oswald [in the letter, Oswald mentioned his visit with a KGB official at the Russian embassy in Mexico City when he was seeking a Russian visa] and were using him for some purposes of our own…The suspicion that the letter is a forgery is heightened by the fact it was typed, whereas the other letters the embassy had received from Oswald before were handwritten. One gets the definite impression that the letter was concocted by those who, judging from everything, are involved in the President’s assassination. It is possible Oswald himself wrote the letter as it was dictated to him, in return for some promises, and then, as we know, he was simply bumped off after his usefulness had ended.”

  That same day, November 26, another one of the Yeltsin documents shows that the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, and KGB chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, sent a letter classified “Secret” to the Soviet Central Committee stating that

  the American Press is spreading various slanderous allegations about “connections” between Oswald and the Soviet Union and Cuba. Oswald, accused of assassinating the President of the USA J. Kennedy, was later killed under mysterious circumstances. Some representatives of the American press are trying to justify their insinuations [by] referring to the fact that Oswald had been in the Soviet Union from October, 1959 till June 1962…After Oswald has been killed himself, the real face of those circles who are responsible for the killing of President Kennedy, and who are now trying to cover their tracks, is more evident…If American authorities contact the Soviet Embassy in Washington with a request to supply them with some information regarding Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, they can be provided with a relevant document relating to it.

  News of the death of Kennedy, who was widely hailed in the Russian media as an “outstanding American statesman” who was “striving for peace,” was greeted by great shock and consternation. Grief was felt throughout the Russian leadership and people, including the satellite nations, with tributes and commentaries about the fallen president dominating the news and airways for days.32 Church bells were tolled throughout the Soviet Union in memory of the fallen president. Even the KGB showed its respect, providing approximately twenty men who spoke English to handle duties in the immediate vicinity of the American embassy in Moscow to ensure that no disrespect was shown during this period.33 Moscow Radio had interrupted a concert of classical music at 10:55 p.m. to report Kennedy’s death, and played funeral music until it signed off at midnight.34

  Since, in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union, there is strictly enforced censorship and the people can hardly form any opinion opposite of what they are allowed to hear, what is the likelihood that the Soviet Union would permit its people to have a favorable view of someone whom they did not like and intended to assassinate? This is why it is instructive that, as the New York Times reported, “in death Mr. Kennedy was praised and mourned in Moscow as no Western statesman before him had been…There could be no doubt about the depth of the feeling that the death had evoked among plain Soviet citizens.” The Times’s Moscow bureau provided some representative quotes: “Here was a man who tried to do good, and they would not let him live.” “What will U.S.-Soviet relations be in the future? Will the hope of peace be diminished?”35 “Those wretches [referring to Kennedy’s killer or killers]. In his own country! Wasn’t he protected?”36 The outpouring of emotion appeared second only to that in the United States. Premier and Mrs. Khrushchev sent personal messages of condolence to Mrs. Kennedy, and when Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Gromyko went to the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Foy D. Kohler, on the morning after the assassination to pay their tribute and sign the condolence book, Gromyko “had tears in his eyes.”37 In a November 25 letter to President Johnson, Khrushchev said, “J.F. Kennedy’s death is a grievous blow to all people for whom the cause of peace and Soviet-American cooperation is dear.”38

  TASS, the official Soviet press agency, in its first announcement about the assassination on November 23, was of the firm view that Kennedy had been killed by “extreme rightwing elements” in the United States.39 On November 25, Moscow Radio stated its belief that the assassination “was a provocation by the Fascist forces and the reactionary circles who are madly resisting all steps leading to international relaxation. These are the elements that not only killed the U.S. President but strike at the interests of the U.S. people.”

  That this wasn’t just for public consumption is the fact that documents in several internal KGB files enunciated the same belief. For instance, a Dece
mber 1963 report from the deputy chairman of the KGB to the Central Committee reads, in part, “A reliable source…reported in late November that the real instigators of this criminal deed [assassination of Kennedy] were three leading oil magnates from the South of the USA—Richardson, Murchison and Hunt, all owners of major petroleum reserves in the southern states who have long been connected to pro-fascist and racist organizations in the South.”40

  The internal KGB documents further reflect the belief that Oswald was chosen as the assassin by the right wing because of his Russian-Marxist background so as to divert public attention away from the right wing and make the assassination appear to be the result of a Communist plot.41

  According to a top-secret FBI document (because of the importance of this document, I’m excerpting substantial portions of it) declassified in 1996, a “source who has furnished reliable information in the past and who was in Russia on the date of the assassination” gave the FBI the following information on December 4, 1963: Officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the informant said, believed that the assassination was the result of

  some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the “ultra-right” in the United States to effect a “coup.” They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part. They felt that those elements interested in utilizing the assassination and playing on anti-communist sentiments in the United States would then utilize this act to stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war. As a result of these feelings, the Soviet Union immediately went into a state of national alert.