Next month will mark 44 years since Lee Harvey Oswald committed the crime of the century — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Why did two official U.S. government investigations fail to focus on the very obvious indications in their own research materials that Oswald had a very close relationship with the Soviet KGB?
The answer is that both the Warren Commission (1964) and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-79) received compelling information from a reliable and extremely sensitive FBI source, documenting that the Soviet government was not involved in the assassination, nor did it ever have an operational relationship with Oswald.
Does Moscow today realize how incredibly lucky it was that Morris Childs, the “secretary of state” of the American Communist Party, was a highly trusted FBI agent?
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Russia has always been a country built on lies, but under the Soviet regime deception was fine-tuned to an exquisite pitch. When it was learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated President Kennedy, the Kremlin pulled out all the stops to assure the world — starting with its international communist friends — that the Soviets had nothing to do with that crime of the century. Under Soviet tutelage, I learned that the trick for such operations was to let your deception target see for himself what your message was, rather than for you to give him an official lecture. That is exactly how the Kremlin acted on this occasion.
On November 22, 1963 (the day of the assassination), Boris Ponomarev, the august chairman of the International Department of the Communist Party, hastened to “consult” with Morris Childs (a senior representative of the American Communist Party), who was on his annual visit to Moscow. (All information on Morris Childs is taken from John Barron, Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin) Ponomarev was discussing the news with Morris, when a couple of party underlings burst in breathlessly, their faces ashen. In Russian, which Morris had never admitted to understanding — although the Soviets must have known he had spent the first nine years of his life in Russia and three subsequent years at the party’s Lenin School in Moscow — they briefed Ponomarev on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested for Kennedy’s murder. In a state of near panic, they blurted out that Oswald was a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union and re-defected to the U.S. According to the excited speakers, the KGB had, however, just sworn to the Kremlin that they had never had any operational relationship with him.
Suddenly the storytellers noticed Morris — “the American” — and asked what he should be told. Ponomarev vouched for him and said he should be told the truth. So the talented actors retold the same story in English — which they just happened to fluently speak. The Soviets earnestly pleaded with him to believe they had nothing to do with the assassination.
Eventually Ponomarev and Mikhail Suslov — the party ideologue, who had befriended Morris ever since his student days in Moscow — agreed that Morris should immediately fly back to inform the chairman of the American Communist Party that the KGB had nothing to do with Oswald, and to convey Moscow’s instructions to limit the party’s statements to expressions of regret and abhorrence of political violence.
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Morris arrived back in New York on December 2 and immediately met with his FBI case officer — for what the Soviets did not know, was that Morris had been a highly valued and extremely sensitive FBI agent since 1951.
Within two weeks, the FBI had disseminated a highly classified eyewitness report, from a source that had provided reliable information in the past, to the effect that high-ranking Soviet officials in Moscow swore they had had nothing to do with the assassination and had never had any operational relationship with Oswald. The FBI report, which did not reveal the identity of the source, was shown in great secrecy to President Lyndon Johnson, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to a few other top members of the administration, and to the Warren Commission. (Years later, the substance of the report would also be provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.)
The result was that in their reports neither the Warren Commission nor the House committee ever seriously considered that the Soviet government might have had a hand in Oswald’s assassination of President Kennedy, despite evidence showing that Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union only temporarily. They also ignored documents handwritten by Oswald proving that, just before killing President Kennedy, Oswald had traveled under a false name to Mexico City where he had secretly met “Comrade Kostin,” whom he also referred to as Comrade Kostikov. The latter was identified by the CIA as an officer of the KGB’s department for assassinations abroad.
The Warren Commission held only 14 days of hearings, because its task was no longer to investigate the assassination, but rather to use the collective authority of its distinguished members to authenticate the FBI source’s information without compromising him. For its part, the House committee scarcely even considered the possibility of Soviet involvement — the CIA was the main target of its investigation, and it was quickly exonerated.
Both investigations into the possibility of Soviet involvement were therefore essentially pro forma, relying primarily on the perceived grief and consternation of the Soviet government and population, and on statements from the heads of other U.S. government departments and agencies — who had also received the FBI source’s information — that all available evidence pointed to Oswald’s having acted alone. Their conclusions were:
‐ “The Commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or [Oswald’s murderer] Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”
‐ “The conclusion that there is no evidence of a conspiracy was also reached independently by [the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the secretary of the Treasury, the attorney general, the director of the FBI, the director of the CIA, and the chief of the Secret Service], on the basis of information available to each of them.”
‐ “Careful analysis…led to the Commission’s conclusion that there is no credible evidence that Oswald was an agent of the Soviet Government and that he did not receive unusually favorable treatment in entering or leaving the Soviet Union or in returning to the United States.”
‐No one remembered that the Soviet government had routinely relied on deception, to the point of even falsifying the Moscow street maps and telephone books.
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Over the years the FBI successfully ran Morris — and would continue to run him until 1981 — with artful professionalism and unique attention to security. His political reporting on the Soviet Union was very selectively disseminated, without identifying him, and was always eagerly received, particularly by the secretary of state and the director of the CIA.
At the same time, Morris successfully ingratiated himself with Soviet party officials, KGB officers and the leaders of the American Communist Party back home. The culmination of his relationship with the Soviets came in 1977, when they threw a party for his 75th birthday. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov personally escorted him to a special Kremlin dining room, where he was feted by Politburo members and his other Soviet friends, and where Leonid Brezhnev himself pinned the Order of the Red Banner — a great honor — on his jacket.
Not to be outdone, in 1987 President Ronald Reagan ordered the National Security Medal bestowed on Morris Childs. Out of security considerations he was secretly decorated by the FBI director at FBI headquarters.
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The assassination of President Kennedy was one of the rare Cold War episodes in which the leaders of both sides were vitally interested in hiding the truth. Khrushchev’s problem stemmed from the October 1962 public trial in West Germany of Bogdan Stashinsky, a defector from the KGB, who confessed to having been personally decorated by the Soviet leader for having secretly killed two Ukrainian émigré leaders in West Germany. The flamboyant ruler in the Kremlin, whose “secret” speech unmasking Stalin’s crimes was still fresh in everyone’s memory, now appeared before the world as just another butcher and flat-out liar. It was not true that after the 20th Party Congress Khrushchev had stopped the wave of KGB killings — he had merely turned the focus abroad. He had already lost the confidence of Moscow’s governing elite after his hasty and humiliating decision to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba, and any revelation of a Soviet hand in the assassination of the widely popular American president could have been fatal to him.
As for Lyndon Johnson, the new U.S. president, his interests coincided with Khrushchev’s with respect to the assassination. He was facing elections in less than a year, and any conclusion implicating the Soviet Union would have forced him to take unpopular political or even military action.
Morris Childs’s information may have convinced le tout Washington that the KGB had never been involved with Oswald, but the Kremlin had no way of knowing how successful that first brainwashing action would be. The Soviets therefore immediately inaugurated a full-scale propaganda offensive, especially in the U.S. On November 26 the New York Times published a TASS release accusing “ultra right-wing, fascist and racist circles” in the U.S. of the assassination. (See Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy) Over the next few days, Radio Moscow and its East European sisters flooded the airwaves with a multitude of similar reports.
Now we have hard proof of the KGB’s disinformation campaign. In the 1990s, retired KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin, helped by the British, smuggled some 25,000 pages of classified KGB foreign intelligence documents out of Moscow. The FBI described these documents as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.” (See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB) According to what has come to be known as the Mitrokhin Archive, the first book to appear in the U.S. on the assassination — Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? by Joachim Joesten, a German Communist — was published in New York by Carl Aldo Marzani, an American communist and KGB agent (codenamed NORD) who was regularly paid by the KGB to produce Soviet propaganda. In this book, Joesten calls Oswald “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background,” who was the fall guy for a conspiracy of right-wing racists, including Texas oil magnate H.L. Hunt. (Some years later a note surfaced allegedly written by Oswald to “Mr. Hunt” suggesting cooperation on the assassination. American graphological experts certified that it was genuine. As documented in the Mitrokhin Archive, that note was a KGB forgery.)
The Mitrokhin Archive also documents that Joesten’s book was enthusiastically reviewed in the KGB-financed magazine New Times/Novoye Vremya by Victor Perlo, an American Communist and KGB agent. (Perlo, codenamed RAIDER, was also identified as an espionage agent by former spies Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, and in the VENONA traffic intercepts.) Joesten’s book is dedicated to Mark Lane, who, according to other documents in the Mitrokhin Archive, was an American leftist indirectly financed by the KGB, who in 1966 wrote his own book on the assassination, the bestseller Rush to Judgment, alleging U.S. government complicity. Lane has gone on to write and speak extensively on the subject.
Mao Zedong used to say that a lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth. For once he was right. Those KGB-inspired books encouraged all kinds of people to come up with their own wild theories, based on their own background expertise and mostly blaming elements of the U.S. government for the crime.
The Kennedy assassination conspiracy was born — and it has never ended.
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Moscow’s luck still holds. The world’s attention is caught by the war in Iraq, by Iran’s new threat, by North Korea’s nuclear gamble, and nobody has the time or inclination to see that the Kremlin looks to be quietly preparing a new Cold War against the U.S. No one in the West batted an eye last July, when President Putin ordered his missile-carrying strategic bomber to be permanently airborne again after a 15-year hiatus. Nobody in Washington is upset that Russia’s state-controlled media increasingly portray the U.S. as the country’s No. 1 enemy. Nor is anyone paying attention to the Kremlin’s quiet efforts to convince the world that the U.S. is fomenting pro-American revolutions in countries neighboring Russia and secretly planning to seize Russia’s natural resources.
The Russians enjoy greater freedom than ever before in the long history of that autocratic empire. But after 2000, when former KGB officers took over the Kremlin, Russia started slipping back into her traditional samoderzhaviye, a form of autocracy traceable to the 14th century’s Ivan the Terrible, in which a feudal lord ruled the country with the help of his personal political police.
The 44th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination is an auspicious time to stop pretending that the Kremlin is moving Russia toward democracy, and to assess it for what it may really doing: transforming Russia into a mammoth KGB front organization. Some 6,000 former officers of the KGB — an organization that pulled off the largest genocide in contemporary history — now run Russia’s federal and local governments. With former Gestapo officers calling all the shots, Germany would never have become the stable democracy that it is.
— Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination (Ivan R. Dee), has just been published.