THE KILLING OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
As a youth, paradoxically, Stalin attended a theological seminary—from which, however, he was expelled. Mass murder would only come later. Khrushchev rose to ultimate power because he too was willing to kill. Strongly supportive of Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s, Soviet documents show that during the years in which he was leader of the Ukraine, Khrushchev was responsible for killing over 30,000 people.1 From his memoirs we know that a few days after Stalin died, Khrushchev conducted a palace coup during the June 26, 1953, meeting of the Soviet Presidium aimed at killing off the powerful head of the Soviet Union’s political police, Lavrentiy Beria, who was now his rival for the vacant Soviet throne. As related in his own account, Khrushchev came to the meeting with a gun in his pocket and played the main role from beginning to end.
“I prodded [Premier Georgy] Malenkov with my foot and whispered: ‘Open the session and give me the floor.’ Malenkov went white; I saw he was incapable of opening his mouth. So I jumped up and said: ‘There is one item on the agenda: the anti-Party, divisive activity of imperialist agent Beria.’”2
According to Khrushchev, after proposing that Beria be relieved of all his party and government positions, “Malenkov was still in a state of panic. As I recall, he didn’t even put my motion to a vote. He pressed a secret button, which gave the signal to the generals who were waiting in the next room.”3 With Beria under arrest, Khrushchev easily wrested the top job away from his closest ally, Malenkov.
On December 24, 1953, the Soviet media announced that Minister of Interior Lavrentiy Beria, together with former chief of the secret political police Vsevolod Merkulov, chief of foreign intelligence Vladimir Dekanozov, and five other top members of the Soviet political police had all been found guilty of working for Western intelligence and had been executed.4 Khrushchev then appointed General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, formerly the brutal chief Soviet advisor for Romania’s political police, the Securitate, as head of this new PGU.
After crushing the Hungarian revolution and hanging Imre Nagy and its other leaders in 1956, Khrushchev promoted political murder as his primary foreign policy tool. Gen. Pacepa and the other leaders of the Soviet bloc intelligence community were told that Stalin had made one inexcusable mistake—he had aimed the cutting edge of his security apparatus against the Soviet Union’s own people. In his famous “secret” speech criticizing Stalin, Khrushchev said he intended to correct that error. Therefore he ordered his espionage service to form components in all “sister” services in the Soviet bloc to carry out secret assassinations in the West. Soviet satellites were useful at giving cover to Soviet-ordered operations. The Romanian assassination component was called “X,” the last letter of the alphabet. It was managed by DIE General Tanasescu, former chief of the DIE station in Austria.
Our real enemies were in the West, not in the Soviet bloc, Moscow informed the management of the Romanian espionage service of those days. One of the first killing operations conducted under the new rules was the secret kidnapping and execution of anti-Communist émigré leader Oliviu Beldeanu out of West Germany. This was carried out in September 1958 jointly among the KGB, the East German Stasi, and the Romanian espionage service. Official East German and Romanian newspapers blamed the CIA, repeating official communiqués stating that Beldeanu had been arrested in East Germany following a secret CIA infiltration to carry out sabotage and diversion operations. In reality, Beldeanu was kidnapped from West Berlin.
Then came the public trial of Bogdan Stashinsky in October 1962 by the West German Supreme Court. A KGB officer stationed in East Berlin, Stashinsky had defected to West Germany. He confessed to having assassinated two leading Ukrainian émigrés in 1957 and 1959 in West Germany on Khrushchev’s orders. Khrushchev had decorated him for these crimes with the highest Soviet medal, he said. It was, at least in Europe, a PR debacle for Khrushchev as the brutal criminality of his policy of international assassination was officially exposed to the world.
The Stashinsky trial received substantial publicity in the West, including a discussion in a previous book by Pacepa dealing with the KGB’s worldwide disinformation operation, codenamed Dragon, about how it sought to conceal its hand in President Kennedy’s assassination.5 The Stashinsky trial turned into a trial of Khrushchev, refuting Khrushchev’s carefully constructed effort to depict the Soviet Union and its KGB as having sharply departed from Stalin’s practices. The Stashinsky trial showed that this image was definitively untrue. Khrushchev had merely turned assassinations abroad. He had personally ordered the killings committed by Stashinsky and had personally decorated him with the Order of Lenin, the highest Soviet medal.6
In January 1961 Gen. Sakharovsky informed the management of the DIE that President Kennedy had become a puppet in the hands of the CIA. A few months later, Kennedy humiliated Khrushchev into abandoning his efforts to gain control of all of Berlin, which meant that instead of walling off the Soviet sector, Pacepa’s DIE was now tasked to “throw mud on the Pig”—the PGU’s new code name for Kennedy.
On October 26, 1959, a few weeks after visiting the United States, Khrushchev landed in Bucharest for what would become known as his six-day vacation in Romania, his longest vacation abroad. However, his stay in Romania was not really a vacation. Khrushchev’s secret goal during his trip to Washington was to snatch West Berlin from Eisenhower’s hands. At that time Pacepa was chief of Romania’s intelligence station in West Germany and was minutely informed about the conversations with the Soviet leader. After the death of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower had assumed a more personal role in the conduct of American foreign policy.
“We’ll get [West] Berlin,” Khrushchev assured Romanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Khrushchev had inherited his obsession with Germany from Stalin. Germany was the cradle of Marxism, Karl Marx’s birthplace, and it was a matter of personal pride for Khrushchev to see that it be communist. Khrushchev did not get West Berlin. On August 13, 1961, he was forced to erect the infamous Berlin Wall and to proclaim it a great victory.
In October 1962, the United States learned from Oleg Penkovsky, a heroic Soviet military intelligence officer who had volunteered his information to the United States, that in payback for his failure to get West Berlin, Khrushchev was trying to turn Cuba into a Soviet nuclear base from which to attack the U.S. Gheorghiu-Dej happened to be in Moscow during the critical days of the Cuban crisis following a state visit to Indonesia and Burma. Dej stopped off in Moscow for a couple of hours to inform Khrushchev about the results of his visits. And there he stayed.
Just before Dej’s trip, President Kennedy had publicly warned Moscow to refrain from any dangerous adventure in Cuba. Khrushchev, who at critical moments always reached out for an audience, needed to vent his anger on somebody. Without even asking Dej what his program for the day was, Khrushchev commanded that a state luncheon and festive evening at the opera be held in Dej’s honor, both to be attended by the whole Soviet Presidium and widely publicized by the Soviet media as a display of communist unity. During that state luncheon, Khrushchev swore at Washington, threatened to “nuke” the White House, and cursed loudly every time anyone spoke the words “America” or “American.”
The next morning, Dej was having breakfast with Khrushchev when KGB chairman General Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny handed Khrushchev a KGB cable from Washington. It stated that Kennedy had ordered a naval “quarantine” to prevent the eighteen Soviet cargo ships heading toward Cuba from reaching their destination. According to Dej’s account, when Khrushchev finished reading the cable, he “cursed like a bargeman,” threw it on the floor, and ground his heel into it. “That’s how I’m going to crush that viper,” he spat, meaning Kennedy. Back in Bucharest, Dej, in describing Khrushchev’s rage, said, “If Kennedy had been there, the lunatic would have strangled him dead on the spot.”
On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev backed down in the face of fierce American resistance and ordered his ships loaded with nuclear rockets to turn away from the confrontation. It happened to be Pacepa’s birthday, and Dej celebrated both events with champagne. “That’s the end of the lunatic,” Dej predicted. He hated Khrushchev.
The following year, John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 20, 1963, sent the United States into shock. An age of peace and innocence had abruptly come to an end. Then Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s accused assassin, was himself killed by Jack Ruby two days later, live in front of national television cameras. The Dallas police and the FBI quickly identified Oswald as the lone assassin of the president. But the whole truth about this odious crime of the century is still in the dark.
The JFK assassination was one of the few episodes in the Cold War where both sides had an interest in hiding the truth. After the humiliations of his erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the withdrawal of his nuclear missiles from Cuba in 1962, Khrushchev lost the confidence of the Soviet Union’s governing elite. The October 1962 trial of Stashinsky at the West German Supreme Court depicted Khrushchev to the West as just another odious butcher. It was not true that after the XXth Party Congress, Khrushchev had stopped the KGB’s killings—he had merely turned its focus abroad.
Lyndon Johnson’s and Khrushchev’s interests happened to coincide on the JFK assassination. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip in 1914 had set off the First World War; President Johnson reasonably feared JFK’s assassination might ignite the first nuclear war. Therefore, on November 29, he created a blue-ribbon commission, the Warren Commission, named after its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, invoking the integrity of its distinguished members to hush even the slightest rumor of “foreign complications” stemming from Oswald’s known defection to the Soviet Union and his connections with Cuba. Gen. Pacepa has described the KGB’s operation to hide its hand in the JFK assassination, codenamed on the Romanian end “Dragon,” in an earlier book.7 Thus, the interest of both the U.S. and the USSR in hiding the truth allowed a KGB disinformation operation, also aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s connection with Oswald, to achieve currency.8
The Warren Commission did not actually begin its field investigation on the JFK assassination until March 18, 1964, after the trial of Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin, had ended.
On June 15, 1964, when everyone had already learned from KGB disinformation that the Soviet Union had not been involved in JFK’s assassination, the Warren Commission finally announced that it had completed the investigation. Its final report was not written by intelligence experts but by three lawyers (Norman Redlich, Alfred Goldberg, and Lee Rankin) who had no experience in foreign counterintelligence and had never heard of KGB patterns and codes. It was like charging carpenters to perform heart surgery. The lawyers also worked under constant pressure from the commission to close doors rather than open them because of the time pressure to complete the report before the upcoming presidential election.
The Warren Commission report, published by the Government Printing Office on September 24, 1964, did not address the multitude of KGB-sponsored books already published in the West that accused the U.S. of killing President Kennedy, although these books had already become popular items. The Commission report consists of twenty-six volumes of testimonies to the commission, documents obtained primarily from federal and state authorities and from the Soviet government, plus one volume containing the summary report. The summary report, which can be found in most public libraries, is a disorganized hodgepodge of material assembled by various staff members, to which is attached an unsatisfactory index. Nevertheless, the complete publication contains a wealth of raw information that, to an informed analyst with Soviet intelligence experience, shows the Soviet hand.
SOVIET FINGERPRINTS
The FBI once told the U.S. Congress that only a native Arabic speaker could catch the fine points of an al-Qaeda telephone intercept, especially one containing doublespeak and codes. Both coauthors of this book are familiar with both doublespeak and codes. In the intelligence community, everything of even relative importance is expressed in doublespeak or in code. In the Soviet bloc intelligence community, even the names of the officers were in code. In 1955, when Pacepa became a foreign intelligence officer, he was told that his name there would be Mihai Podeanu, and Podeanu he remained until 1978 when he broke with communism. All his subordinates used codes in their written reports and even in conversations with their own colleagues. When Pacepa left Romania for good, his espionage service was the “university,” the country’s leader was the “architect,” Vienna was “Videle,” and so on.
Espionage operations can be easily isolated out by their particular codes if you are familiar with them. Counterintelligence experts call them “operational evidence” and accord them the same credibility as police investigators give to DNA and fingerprint evidence.
The twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission Report contain dozens of KGB codes and operational patterns. But to the best of our knowledge, none were identified by the Warren Commission because of its members’ lack of familiarity with KGB codes and patterns. Here is one example of codes published by the Warren Commission but ignored by its analysts and the writers of its final report, who were lawyers, not intelligence officers.
On April 10, 1963, a shot was fired at American General Edwin Walker at his home in Dallas, Texas. The incident was reported in the local American news, and the bullet was recovered, but no evidence turned up at the time that could help identify the perpetrator.
After Oswald’s arrest for the assassination of President Kennedy, the bullet taken from Walker’s house was examined by ballistics experts, who concluded that it could have been fired by Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.9
On December 2, 1963, ten days after Kennedy’s assassination, the Dallas police found, at the house where Oswald’s wife, Marina, was staying, an undated note in Oswald’s handwriting, which must have been written just before he took the shot at Walker on April 10, 1963. The note consists of instructions in Russian to his wife on what to do if he should be arrested or worse. Here is its English translation (emphasis as in the original):
1. This is the KEY to the mailbox of the main post office, found in the city, on ERVAY street the same street where the drugstore is where you always stood. 4 blocks from the drugstore on the same street to the post office there you will find our box. I paid for the box last month so don’t worry about it.
2. Send the embassy the information about what happened to me and also clip from the newspaper, (if anything is written about me in the paper) I think the embassy will quickly help you when it knows everything.
3. I paid for the house on the 2nd so don’t worry about that.
4. I also paid for the water and gas not long ago.
5. It is possible there will be money from work, they will send to our box at the post office. Go to the bank and change the check into cash.
6. My clothes etc. you can throw out or give away. Do not keep them. But my PERSONAL papers (military, factory, etc.) I prefer that you keep.
7. A few of my documents are in the blue small valise.
8. The address book is on my table in the study, if you need it.
9. We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you. (Red Cross [sic] in English.)
10. I left you money as much as I could, 60$ on the 2nd, and you and June can live on 10$ a week 2 months more.
11. If I am alive and they have taken me prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of that bridge that we always rode over when we went into town (the very beginning of the city after the bridge).10
As it turned out, Oswald succeeded in firing a shot at General Walker and getting away without attracting any attention to himself, just as he must have hoped. Marina would tell the Warren Commission that “[w] hen he fired, he did not know whether he had hit Walker or not,” and that when he learned from the newspaper the next day that he had missed only because Walker moved his head, Oswald “was very sorry that he had not hit him.”11 The fact that he fired only once12 supports the theory that this was primarily a test exercise for Oswald to prove that he would be able to escape clean from a real assassination in the U.S.
It is also significant that on July 1, 1963, Oswald sent a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington asking to “Please rush the entrance visa for the return of Soviet citizen Marina N. Oswald. She is going to have a baby in October, therefore you must grant the entrance visa. I make the transportation arrangements before then. As for my return entrance visa please consider it separtably [sic].”
The Warren Commission, however, stated with a straight face that there was no connection, whatsoever, between the Soviet Union and the assassination of President Kennedy.
In the late 1970s, the U.S. House of Representatives, unhappy with the conclusions of the Warren Commission, formed the Select Committee on Assassinations and conducted its own investigations. In 1979 the House published twelve volumes of documents and hearings and one summary volume on the JFK assassination. This report does contain some important new, relevant factual material in the form of documents that had come to light after 1964 and interviews conducted by the committee that pointed more suggestively toward Moscow than the Warren Commission’s materials. But because of its lack of Soviet intelligence experience, the House, too, was unable to properly evaluate what it had uncovered.
In its final report, the committee excluded a Soviet hand in the assassination by simply stating: “In fact the reaction of the Soviet Government as well as the Soviet people seemed to be one of genuine shock and sincere grief. The committee believed, therefore, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination.”
Apparently the House committee, like the Warren Commission, did not remember that the Soviet government had always relied on deception—to the point of even falsifying the Moscow street maps and telephone books. Nor did anyone seem to remember that Khrushchev had boldly lied to President Kennedy in denying that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba.
THE KGB PATTERN
In essence, espionage is an accumulation of one-time operations (onetime recruitments, one-time agent meetings, one-time thefts, etc.) written in codes and carried out based on certain tried-and-true patterns rooted in the traditions of each espionage organization. In other words, espionage is a repetitive process like serial killing or serial bank robbery that follows predictable patterns generated by the idiosyncrasies of the perpetrator.
Here is an example of the KGB modus operandi in killing President Kennedy: According to the sworn testimony of Oswald’s wife, Marina, after shooting at General Walker, Oswald put together a package, complete with photographs, showing how he had successfully planned the Walker operation. Afterward he traveled to Mexico City under a false identity (O. H. Lee) to show Soviet diplomat Valery Kostikov, whom Oswald called “Comrade Kostin,” what he could do without being caught.
The CIA has publicly identified Valery Kostikov, aka “comrade Kostin,” as an officer of the KGB’s Thirteenth Department for assassinations abroad, known in the Soviet bloc’s intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs (wet being a euphemism for bloody). According to the CIA, Kostikov had been assigned under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassy in Mexico a short time before Oswald returned to the United States.
During the long holiday weekend of November 9–11, 1963, Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington in which he described the meeting he had just had in Mexico City with “comrade Kostin,” whom he also named elsewhere as “Comrade Kostikov.” After the assassination, a handwritten draft of that letter was found among Oswald’s effects in the garage of Ruth Paine, an American at whose house Oswald had spent that weekend.
Ruth testified under oath that Oswald rewrote that letter several times before typing it on her typewriter. It was important to him. A photocopy of the final letter Oswald sent to the Soviet embassy was recovered by the Warren Commission. Let us quote from that letter, in which we have also inserted Oswald’s earlier draft version in brackets:
“This is to inform you of recent events since my meetings with comrade Kostin [in draft: “of new events since my interviews with comrade Kostine”] in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico. I was unable to remain in Mexico [crossed out in draft: “because I considered useless”] indefinily because of my mexican visa restrictions which was for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on requesting a new visa [in draft: “applying for an extension”] unless I used my real name, so I returned to the United States.”
The fact that Oswald used an operational codename for Kostikov confirms to us that both his meeting with Kostikov in Mexico City and his correspondence with the Soviet Embassy in Washington were conducted in a KGB operational context. The fact that Oswald did not use his real name to obtain his Mexican travel permit confirms this conclusion.
Now let us juxtapose this combined letter against the free guidebook Esta Semana (This Week) for September 28–October 4, 1963, and against a Spanish-English dictionary, both found among Oswald’s effects. The guidebook has the Soviet embassy’s telephone number underlined in pencil, the names Kosten and Osvald noted in Cyrillic on the page listing “Diplomats in Mexico,” and checkmarks next to five movie theaters on the previous page.13 In the back of his Spanish-English dictionary, Oswald wrote: “buy tickets [plural] for bull fight.”14 The Plaza México bullring is encircled on his Mexico City map.15 Also marked on Oswald’s map is the Palace of Fine Arts,16 a favorite place for tourists to assemble on Sunday mornings to watch the Ballet Folklórico.
Contrary to what Oswald claimed, he was not observed at the Soviet embassy at any time during his stay in Mexico City, although the CIA had surveillance cameras trained on the entrance to the embassy at that time.17
All of the above facts taken together suggest to us that Oswald resorted to an unscheduled or “iron meeting”—zheleznaya yavka in Russian—for an urgent talk with KGB officer Valery Kostikov in Mexico City. The iron meeting was a standard KGB procedure for emergency situations, “iron” meaning ironclad or invariable.
In Pacepa’s day his DIE approved quite a few iron meetings in Mexico City—a favorite place for contacting important agents living in the U.S.—and Oswald’s iron meeting looks to us like a typical one. That means the following likely took place: a brief encounter at a movie house to arrange a meeting for the following day at the bullfights (in Mexico City they were held at 4:30 every Sunday afternoon), a brief encounter in front of the Palace of Fine Arts to pass Kostikov one of the bullfight tickets Oswald had bought, and a long meeting for discussions at the Sunday bullfight.
Of course, we cannot be sure that everything happened exactly that way. But in whatever way they connected, it is clear that Kostikov and Oswald did secretly meet over that weekend of September 28–29, 1963. The letter to the Soviet embassy that Oswald worked so hard on irrefutably proves that.
There is also plenty of proof that Oswald’s Soviet wife, Marina, was also connected with the KGB. No assassination investigator has been able to decode this evidence because no one has ever built a KGB wife. General Pacepa did. In the mid-1980s, historian Michael Ledeen and Pacepa published a long article, (“La Grand Fauche”) in the French magazine L’Éxpress, describing how Romania’s foreign intelligence service, the DIE, had built a wife for a German adviser to NATO. The adviser threatened to sue the magazine, but L’Éxpress did not blink, and the NATO adviser disappeared from sight. The Library of Congress retranslated that L’Éxpress article into English and distributed it within the U.S. government.
Marina Nikolayevna Oswald looks like a carbon copy of “Andrea,” the wife described in L’Éxpress. Here is one such similarity. In May 1961, Oswald wrote to his brother Robert in the U.S. and to the U.S. embassy in Moscow telling them that he had gotten married and that his wife was born in the city of Leningrad. But the birth certificate Marina brought with her when she immigrated to the U.S. (issued on July 19, 1961, although she would have needed one for her marriage the previous April), shows that she was born in the remote northern town of Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) in the northwest of the USSR.
Andrea’s birthplace (Braşov, Romania) was also changed to a remote area where it would be unlikely for anyone in the West to be able to check. This practice was widely used by the KGB—and by General Pacepa’s DIE.
Pacepa approved many other DIE biographies for “wives,” and he can spot a few other holes in Marina’s legend. In the U.S., for example, she claimed that her father had died before she was born and that she did not know anything about him, not even his name. She therefore allegedly took the name of her stepfather, Aleksandr Medvedev. In that case, her patronymic should have been Aleksandrovna, not Nikolayevna. Some of Gen. Pacepa’s case officers also lost sight of such details.
Then there is her “uncle” in the KGB—a stock character who was en vogue at that time in the bloc foreign intelligence community. Those “uncles” were used to explain how the “wife” was able to rush the approval for her marriage and for her exit visa. “Andrea’s” “uncle” was DIE Colonel Cristian Scornea, who had recruited her supposedly German husband. Marina had “Uncle Ilya,” an NKVD colonel named Ilya Prusakov, who allegedly helped speed up the approval of her marriage to an American and to obtain her exit visa.
The “uncle in the KGB” continued for many years to play various roles in foreign and domestic KGB operations. Several Marines stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1986 and carrying on affairs with local Soviet girls were eventually introduced to an “Uncle Sasha,” who was actually a KGB officer who tried to recruit them. One of those Marines, Sgt. Clayton J. Lonetree (eventually sentenced for espionage), described how his relationship with Violetta Aleksandrovna Seina, a Soviet translator for English, grew from a chance meeting in a Moscow subway station into a series of clandestine rendezvous in a house ostensibly owned by her “Uncle Sasha.” A few months later, Violetta introduced Lonetree to her “Uncle Sasha” himself at another meeting that also took place “in a subway station.”18 Another of those Marines, Corporal Arnold Bracy, was for his part accused by American authorities of failing to report personal contacts with an attractive Soviet cook and with her “Uncle Sasha.”19
THE END OF KHRUSHCHEV
Russia can be unpredictable, but its past is prologue. During the years in which we coauthors still managed our countries’ foreign intelligence communities, the world was flooded with official Russian news and intelligence information that Khrushchev had nothing to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.
In reality, Khrushchev himself was quietly arrested by the KGB a few months after the JFK assassination, and he never again became a free man.
On October 12, 1964, when Khrushchev and his close friend Anastas Mikoyan returned to Moscow from a long vacation in Pitsunda (Abkhazia), the KGB chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, was waiting for him at Vnukovo Airport. Semichastny informed Khrushchev that he was under arrest and asked him not to resist.
A few days later, the Politburo quietly accused Khrushchev of “harebrained schemes, hasty decisions, actions divorced from reality, braggadocio, and rule by fiat.”20 For the rest of his life, Khrushchev was kept under virtual house arrest.
When he died in 1971, the Soviet Politburo decreed that Khrushchev’s erratic leadership had badly harmed the country. Therefore he was not worthy of burial inside the Kremlin Wall next to the other former leaders. The Soviet government even refused to pay for Khrushchev’s gravestone. In 1972, Pacepa visited Khrushchev’s grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery. There was only a small, insignificant marker identifying it.