Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America

THE “DRAGON” OPERATION

For fifty-six years, most of the world has believed that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by America. Much of the world has been told that the CIA, FBI, right-wing businessmen, and the Italian Mafia were the main perpetrators. This is a lie, set off fifty-six years ago by the KGB’s worldwide disinformation campaign called “Operation Dragon.”¹ President John F. Kennedy was not killed by the American government. The lie that JFK was assassinated by the CIA or the FBI is the result of a concerted KGB disinformation operation to divert attention away from the KGB’s extensive connections with Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was a twenty-four-year-old American Marine infatuated with Marxism who defected to Moscow in 1959, returned to the U.S. four years later with a Russian wife given to him by the KGB, shot President Kennedy, and was arrested by the Texas police before being able to escape back to Moscow. In a letter Oswald sent to the Soviet embassy in Washington on July 1, 1963—a couple of weeks before killing President Kennedy—Oswald had asked for an “urgent” entrance visa for his wife and another one, “separtably,” (spelling as in the original text) for himself.²

In 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, Pacepa was a deputy director of Romania’s espionage service, the DIE. On the night of November 22, 1963, a few hours after President Kennedy had been killed, the DIE’s chief razvedka adviser asked the DIE management to put the DIE on “code C alert” and to order its rezidenturas abroad to report everything they could learn about Kennedy’s assassination. All Soviet and Eastern European embassies in the U.S. and Western Europe had been instructed to take similar measures.

On the evening of November 26, 1963, Soviet foreign intelligence chief Aleksandr Sakharovsky unexpectedly landed in Bucharest, his first stop on a blitz tour of the main “sister” services to coordinate an intelligence effort to divert world attention away from the Soviet Union by focusing suspicion for the killing of President Kennedy on the United States itself.

Beating the Warren Commission Report to the stores by several weeks, the first book to be published on the Kennedy assassination was Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? by former German Communist Party member Joachim Joesten. Without providing any evidence whatsoever, it alleges that Oswald was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background.” It was in essence the KGB’s own first public report on Kennedy’s assassination for U.S. publication—and it became a bestseller.

The United Kingdom’s MI6 later documented from highly classified documents smuggled out to England by the respected KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin that Joesten’s publisher, Carlo Aldo Marzani (codenamed Nord), had been funded via the KGB since before World War II to churn out pro-Soviet propaganda. In the 1960s alone, Marzani was subsidized by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party to the then-quite-hefty tune of $672,000.

Joesten’s book was dedicated to Mark Lane, an American leftist and one-time New York state representative who would soon publish a number of conspiracy theory books himself. Mark Lane’s 1966 bestseller was entitled Rush to Judgment. In it he alleged that Kennedy was assassinated by a right-wing American group. Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive show that the KGB sent Mark Lane money at this time. According to KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky (former KGB station chief in London), a KGB operative, Genrikh Borovik, was in regular contact with him. Borovik was the brother-in-law of General Vladimir Kryuchkov, who in 1988 became chairman of the KGB and in August 1991 led the coup in Moscow aimed at restoring the Soviet Union.

The first review of Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? was a rave that spread the sensational suggestion that Oswald must have been an agent of the FBI or CIA. Signed by Victor Perlo, a member of the Communist Party USA, it was published on September 23, 1964, in New Times, a KGB front widely distributed in several languages. At one time the New Times had been printed in communist Romania.

In a December 9, 1963, article, I. F. Stone, a prestigious American journalist, praised the Joesten book and speculated about why America might have wanted to murder its own president. Stone blamed the assassination on the “warlike Administration” of the United States that was trying to sell Europe a “nuclear monstrosity.” Stone has been identified as a paid KGB agent, codenamed “Blin.”

These big bestsellers generated scores of imitators as well as hundreds of wild-eyed articles and reviews. Most pushed far-fetched theories while studiously ignoring Soviet and Cuban involvement.

In 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison arrested a man in his home district. Garrison accused this person of conspiring with U.S. intelligence agencies to murder Kennedy for his dovishness. The accused was acquitted in 1969, but Garrison kept promoting his story, first with A Heritage of Stone (Putnam, 1970) and later in On the Trail of the Assassins (Sheridan Square, 1988), one of the books that inspired Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK.

Other titles such as Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report (Vintage, 1976) accused reactionary elements in the Cuban exile community. Meagher suggested there may have been a “second Oswald” in line with the Oswald sightings that had begun to surface. One Richard H. Popkin even wrote a book entitled The Second Oswald (Avon, 1966), and Marina Oswald agreed to have her former husband’s grave reopened to see who was buried there. It was Lee.

After the Senate’s Church Committee released its report in 1976 showing that the CIA had been working with the Mafia and Cuban exiles on plans to assassinate Fidel Castro, a flood of new books began coming out to link those elements with the JFK assassination, such as Seth Kanthor’s Who Was Jack Ruby? (Everest, 1978), Anthony Summers’s Conspiracy (Paragon, 1980), and David E. Scheim’s Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy (Shapolsky, 1988, reprinted by Kensington).

Theories involving the CIA and other elements of the U.S. government were fueled by new material that began to be obtainable in the 1970s under the Freedom of Information Act, although those materials provided no particularly relevant facts to add to the Warren Commission Report. These theories continued to attract imaginative books such as Henry Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt (Henry Holt, 1987), Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone’s High Treason: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: What Really Happened (Conservatory, 1989), and Philip H. Melanson’s Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence (Praeger, 1990).

In the late 1970s, Edward Jay Epstein conducted his own investigation, published as Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (Reader’s Digest/McGraw Hill, 1978). This book introduced new and useful material on Oswald and was conscientiously documented but generally ignored by other assassination analysts. Epstein claimed to have interviewed over four hundred persons who had been, in one way or another, associated with Oswald. Among them were “about seventy Marines Oswald had served with in Japan and the Far East,” most of whom “had never been previously interviewed by the FBI, or the Warren Commission.” Epstein’s book was centered around suspicions that Oswald had ties to Soviet (or Cuban) intelligence and provided significant new information showing that Oswald had indeed been manipulated by Moscow. Epstein’s information strongly suggested that George de Mohrenschildt, the wealthy American oilman who had reportedly come from the old Russian nobility and who became Oswald’s “best friend” after Oswald returned to the United States, was in fact Oswald’s KGB “handler.”

Like everyone else who has written about the JFK assassination, however, Epstein, too, lacked the inside intelligence background knowledge that would have helped him fit his bits and pieces together into a whole from which to come to a firm conclusion. His well-documented story is left hanging in midair.

The popularity of books on the JFK assassination has encouraged all kinds of people to join the party to speculate based on their own backgrounds and perspectives. Many witnesses to the JFK assassination claimed to have heard more shots, seen more assassins, or observed different wounds than as stated in the Warren Commission report, even though the latter’s forensic conclusions have repeatedly been declared accurate by responsible analysts. For example, a ballistics expert supplied the information that led to Bonar Menninger’s Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK (St. Martin’s, 1992), which concluded that a Secret Service agent probably killed JFK by accident. Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation (Thunder’s Mouth, 1993) was written by a journalist who worked with a House committee and claimed to have “personal” knowledge of a CIA/Oswald link through investigations he conducted in places like Miami. Computer expert David S. Lifton wrote Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Macmillan, 1980), in which, on the basis of his own examination of photographs, he concluded that JFK’s wounds had been altered before he was buried, although no purpose for doing so was offered. Dr. Charles A. Crenshaw also wrote a book questioning the wounds, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence (Signet, 1992).

In 1993 journalist Gerald Posner published Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Random House). Posner’s book does a good job documenting that the U.S. government was not involved in Kennedy’s assassination. To a professional intelligence investigator, however, Case Closed leaves quite a few essential operational details entirely unanswered. The book, for instance, accepted the Soviet explanation for how Oswald “defected” to the Soviet Union without questioning two stamps in his passport—provided by Moscow—indicating that on October 9, 1959, Oswald took a flight to Helsinki from London’s Heathrow Airport that was in fact fictitious; there was no direct flight from London to Helsinki on that day. Nor did Oswald’s name appear on the passenger manifest of any other flight from Heathrow that day or on any flight arriving in Helsinki from other European cities within this travel window.

In 1964 the CIA drafted a set of questions for the Soviet government designed to elicit data from the Soviets about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and the procedures under which he had been processed and controlled during the two and a half years he had spent in that country. The draft was, however, rejected by the Warren Commission. A commission memorandum dated February 24, 1964, explained that, according to the State Department, the CIA’s draft would have had serious adverse diplomatic effects and that the State Department “feels that the CIA draft carries an inference that we suspect that Oswald might have been an agent for the Soviet Government and that we are asking the Russian Government to document our suspicions.”3 Instead, the State Department proposed that the commission send to Moscow “a very short and simple request for whatever information the Russian authorities” had available on Oswald. The Warren Commission complied.⁴ It also asked the Soviet Union for statements from Soviet citizens who might have met Oswald during his residence in that country, but none were ever provided. Later, in response to a request from the House Select Committee on Assassinations relayed by the State Department, the Soviet government “informed the committee that all the information it had on Oswald had been forwarded to the Warren Commission, a statement that the committee greeted with skepticism, based on the advice it had received from a number of sources, including defectors from the KGB.”⁵

After the Soviet Union collapsed, substantial new evidence proving KGB involvement in killing President Kennedy came to light. The next chapters of this book deal with this new evidence.

HARD PROOF: YELTSIN’S DISINFORMATION

Ever since the glory days of the tsars, Russian leaders have always loved a good hoax. Joseph Stalin took the game a step further, inventing the elegant, Frenchified name of dezinformatsiya and turning deception into the most important weapon of Russian statecraft, as it still is today.

When carefully examined, disinformation can often reveal far more than was intended if the purpose for the cover-up can be deciphered. The tangle of threads can be unraveled.

Before embarking on our new look at the assassination of President Kennedy in light of the scattered details that have emerged in the more than fifty years since, it is most useful to review the significant revelations made by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Appendix B of his remarkable memoir entitled The Struggle for Russia.6 In December 1991, at his last meeting with his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin says he received a huge treasure trove of ultra-secret KGB documents that had been passed down from Soviet leader to Soviet leader. From this material Yeltsin chose (i.e., was instructed) to publish a few of what he calls “relatively old and not especially hot documents” in order to show the “routine, bureaucratic side of the KGB’s activity.”

These three documents were directly related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Though Yeltsin says he included them precisely because of their “mundane, ordinary tone,” they turn out to be a revealing collection of disinformation. They purport to be highly secret letters and memoranda sent by KGB bosses to top levels of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and International Department immediately after the assassination. All these documents, and Yeltsin’s comments on them, point to various elements in the United States that are supposedly the real instigators behind the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Oswald himself is merely described as a onetime supporter of the Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and the American Communist Party (CPUSA) who was diagnosed as suffering from psychiatric illness.

President Kennedy was shot at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, and Oswald, who was publicly known to have lived in the Soviet Union for a few years, was taken into custody a couple of hours later by the Dallas police as the suspected perpetrator. In Yeltsin’s first letter, on the very next day, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny hastens to send the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) a nice, clean story about Lee Harvey Oswald, an American tourist who in 1959 applied to remain permanently in the Soviet Union, was given an apartment and a good job at a radio factory in Minsk along with a monthly stipend of seventy rubles, married a Russian girl, and then, as was usual in such cases, after a time decided to go back to the U.S., although a year later he was asking permission to return to the Soviet Union.

The above story is the kind of routine disinformation that the Soviets have passed out to everyone—in Russia and abroad—who was not privy to information about the KGB’s earlier, very sensitive operational connection with Oswald. In addition, Semichastny includes the new disinformation that says that when Oswald visited the Soviet consulate in Mexico in October 1963 and asked for political asylum, he claimed that the FBI was persecuting him because he had been secretary of a pro-Cuba organization. The Cuban angle was not particularly stressed in early Soviet disinformation about the assassination, but as we shall see, it came to be considered an excellent way to downplay Oswald’s well-known interest in communism by emphasizing his support for Fidel Castro and Cuban (rather than Soviet) communism.

We can point to a very different story of what Oswald was trying to accomplish on that trip to Mexico, documented in full in a book by coauthor Pacepa published in 2007.7 Any more recent information will be so identified and sourced.

During the summer of 1963, Oswald was in New Orleans, noisily promoting the Fair Play for Cuba organization, including getting into a fight with Cuban émigrés and being arrested for disturbing the peace. From jail he demanded an interview with the FBI, which complied but was mystified about why it had been called in. On September 25, Oswald left New Orleans by bus, traveling under the alias O. H. Lee. After accomplishing his mission for Nikita Khrushchev—killing the American president—he would need an escape route back to the Soviet Union, which he considered his new homeland. Since the Soviet embassy in Washington had been giving Oswald and his wife the runaround when they asked for visas, Oswald now hoped he would be able to fly from Mexico to Cuba and from there on to Moscow. He was not seeking asylum; he just wanted to go back home to Russia after accomplishing his heroic task for Russia’s leader.

After arriving in Mexico City on September 27, Oswald immediately made several visits to the Cuban embassy, which refused to give him a visa unless he had a Soviet one. There is no evidence that he actually visited the Soviet embassy, although CIA coverage did show that he made one phone call from the Cuban embassy to the Soviet embassy, saying he would be right over to see “Comrade Kostikov.” Found after Oswald’s death were notes suggesting clandestine meeting arrangements in Mexico City and the draft of a later letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington complaining about his unsuccessful encounter with Comrade Kostikov, aka Valery Kostikov, an officer of the KGB’s Department Thirteen (assassinations). A disappointed Oswald departed Mexico on October 2 for the two-day bus trip back to Dallas.

It is also interesting to consider what Semichastny says at the end of his memorandum to the Central Committee, keeping in mind that it is allegedly still November 23 when he writes this. He recommends publishing an article in “a progressive paper in one of the Western countries” so as to expose the attempt by reactionary circles in the United States to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, whom he describes as “the racists and ultra right elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence in the United States.” Significantly, in view of the fact that Oswald was still alive but was going to be shot dead at the Dallas police station the very next day by Jack Ruby, who had criminal and intelligence ties to communist Cuba, Semichastny adds that the article should illustrate the intent of “crazy men” related to the “provocateurs and murderers among counterrevolutionary Cuban émigrés to alter the foreign and domestic policies of the USA.” (The reference to Cuba is a little confused since Cuban émigrés would not have been backing Oswald, who had been noisily supporting Castro’s Cuba. No matter, however, because the point was simply to add another group of potential culprits behind the assassination.)

Then Yeltsin gives us the most fascinating disinformation tidbit of all. In Moscow, it would already have been evening before Soviet authorities received reports of the assassination and even later of Oswald’s arrest. Nevertheless, on the very next day, November 23, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny not only promptly sends a message to the Central Committee with the above fictitious information about that nice young man Oswald, but he goes on to recommend immediately starting, in effect, a full-bore disinformation campaign designed to point the finger at elements the Soviets want the world to view as the real criminals behind the assassination.

Along with the other memoranda and comments related to the assassination published in Appendix B in Yeltsin’s book, the above letter must be considered pure disinformation for consumption by American and other Western readers. As we intelligence professionals can attest, Semichastny would never have written such bald lies to the Central Committee. The Central Committee certainly already knew about Oswald and his radar information that had famously helped the Soviets bring down a CIA U-2 plane intruder on May 1, 1960. (Oswald had even bragged to the American embassy in Moscow that he had told the Soviets all he knew about radar and American U-2 planes. As a Marine he had served at Atsugi in Japan, with its U-2s, and at El Toro in California, with its sophisticated new radars.) Furthermore, the sender of one memorandum is given as “Semichastny’s deputy, Zakharov.” We know, and the Central Committee also certainly knew, that this is really General Aleksandr Sakharovsky. Sakharovsky would not have written to the Central Committee in alias. Yeltsin also gives the codename “Brooks” as the source of information claiming that Oswald had written a letter offering to help American communists organize for the CPUSA and for Cuba, but the offer was considered an FBI provocation. “Brooks” is identified in the memorandum as “a well-known American Communist figure and KGB agent,” an unlikely indiscretion to describe a sensitive agent. In 1999, “Brooks” will be publicly identified in the Mitrokhin Archive as Jack Childs, an American communist who was indeed a KGB agent.8 By the time Yeltsin’s book was published, Childs was dead, having passed away on August 12, 1980, so no harm was done by Yeltsin’s outing him.⁹ The reference to “Brooks” is probably intended to reassure the FBI that Jack was indeed a trusted KGB agent. In fact, Jack was also a trusted FBI source, as the Soviets knew. (The complicated significance of this point will be clarified in another chapter.)

Compare that with what the New York Times reported from Dallas on the morning of November 23, 1963. Oswald was arrested the previous afternoon, charged with the murder of a policeman who had tried to stop him from escaping, then arraigned at 1:40 a.m. the following morning and charged with the murder of the president. The accused was described as a twenty-one-year-old leftist who had once lived in the Soviet Union and who currently worked at the Dallas School Book Depository, from where the shots had come that had killed the president. He was also identified as an adherent of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee but described as politically somewhat erratic.

Why should the KGB leadership know better than the Dallas police and the New York Times who was to blame for the assassination of the American president? It is even more remarkable that the KGB chairman so accurately anticipates Oswald’s murder the following day by Jack Ruby, who was not a Cuban émigré but had Cuban connections.

The KGB clearly had no trouble finding an appropriate “progressive paper in one of the Western countries” in which to launch its disinformation campaign about the Kennedy assassination. The first attack came in an article early in 1964 in the communist-controlled British journal Labour Monthly. Written by editor R. Palme Dutt, the article states that “most commentators” have surmised the assassination to have been a coup staged by the “Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas” by using a fall guy they then killed before he could spill the beans. The scenario is described as having “all the hallmarks of a CIA job” without providing any evidence whatsoever of that.10 In early 1964 the first book on the assassination was published in the United States. Written by German communist Joachim Joesten, it is entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? And it was published by Carlo Aldo Marzani, a known KGB agent (codename NORD), who had been generously funded since before World War II for churning out pro-Soviet propaganda. Joesten’s book also hewed to Semichastny’s line by blaming the assassination on a conspiracy of right-wing racists, especially oil magnate H. L. Hunt. It describes Oswald as an “FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background” who was used and then murdered to prevent his giving evidence.¹¹

Accusing the CIA—to this day the main adversary of Russian intelligence, with the FBI a close second—of assassinating President Kennedy became thereafter a worldwide theme song in a flood of disinformation books and articles. Yet as coauthor Woolsey can attest, the CIA never had any kind of operational connection with Oswald. Nevertheless, it is said even to this day that half of the American population believes the CIA was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Such is the formidable power of disinformation once it takes hold in the popular imagination.

Further, Yeltsin quotes a “Zakharov” memorandum to the International Department of the Central Committee in which “Zakharov” alleges that some intelligence data identify “the ultimate organizer of the murder of President Kennedy” as a politically powerful group of Texas oil magnates. He adds that a Polish [sic] intelligence source reported in November 1963 that the real instigators of the assassination were three prominent oilmen from the southern U.S. named Richardson, Murchison, and Hunt. Also noted is information privately given to “Ward, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun” in early December at the meeting of a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by the millionaire Hunt claiming that Jack Ruby “had proposed a large sum of money to Oswald for the murder of Kennedy.”

The Texas oil magnates pop up frequently in post-assassination disinformation, most notably in a “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter dated “Nov. 8, 1963” and signed by “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Copies of this letter were anonymously mailed out in 1975 to three conspiracy advocates in the U.S., accompanied by a note alleging that the FBI had the original. Oswald provocatively asks for “information concerning my position” and suggests discussing the matter “before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.” The handwriting was authenticated by several Western experts. In 1999 the “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter was identified in the Mitrokhin Archive as a KGB fabrication.12 We can even tell how the fabrication was done, based on information supplied by the defectors Lazló and Hanna Sulner, who had perfected a copy machine that seamlessly combined individual letters actually written by a target person. This machine was used by the Hungarians to compromise Cardinal József Mindszenty in 1948–1949 and was made available to the Soviets.¹³

In the end, Yeltsin’s very secret KGB documents in Appendix B that were supposedly written just after the assassination of President Kennedy turn out to be much later concoctions. They were evidently composed in order to have Yeltsin bring a little new life into the old Soviet disinformation campaign to absolve Russia of any operational involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination. The Yeltsin documents also add a few new twists, mainly by directing somewhat more attention toward Cuban affairs.

THEY KNEW

By at least April 1963, the KGB had to face up to the probability that it might not be able to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from going ahead with his idée fixe that he had to assassinate President Kennedy. Oswald knew that Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of Oswald’s paradise and new home, the Soviet Union, had entrusted him with that task, and he was confident he could pull it off. In April he had demonstrated to the KGB officers in Mexico how carefully and successfully he had planned to take a shot at General Edwin Walker on April 10 without leaving any telltale evidence, and he was certain he could do just as good a job against Kennedy.

By this time, however, the KGB and the Soviet Union’s Communist Party leaders realized that Khrushchev’s crazy ideas were giving their country a terrible reputation. In October 1962, he had lost face before the world by backing down over the Cuban Missile Crisis and when the Soviet Union was named as the murderer of two Russian émigrés at the Bogdan Stashinsky trial in West Germany. Another false step by the hot-headed Khrushchev, and there might be nuclear war. By at least April 1963, rumors were afloat that Politburo ideologue Mikhail Suslov was leading a revolt to oust Khrushchev and replace him with Leonid Brezhnev.14

For its part, the KGB’s disinformation experts began planning what to do about Oswald if he should resist all efforts to change his mind. At home the Soviets might have staged their usual fatal hunting or automobile accident, but they could not risk attempting such a solution in the United States. Apparently the next best choice was to divert public attention away from any Russian contact with or interest in him. Fidel Castro was brought into the picture and agreed to help focus Oswald’s enthusiasm for communism more toward Cuba than as before toward Russia. In the process, Oswald might even forget about what Khrushchev had asked him to do.

On April 13, just before Oswald traveled to Mexico to show the KGB what a good shot he was, he had been visited for the last time by his best friend and mentor, George de Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt was actually a KGB illegal officer assigned to help Oswald get settled in the United States, but he was evidently not aware of Oswald’s assassination assignment. Oswald showed off the guns (rifle and pistol) that he had just received at the post office box he had opened in alias, and his wife took his picture with them. De Mohrenschildt must have used his own communications channel to tell the KGB about this alarming visit, because on April 19 he and his wife suddenly, without even saying goodbye to the Oswalds, packed up and left Dallas for Haiti, where they had previously lived.

Sometime between April 14 and April 24 (when there is no other record of his whereabouts), Oswald took a bus trip to visit the KGB in Mexico City. On his September 1963 bus trip to Mexico City, he told fellow passengers that on an earlier trip he had stayed at the Hotel Cuba. After the assassination a chambermaid recognized Oswald from a photograph as a previous guest at that hotel.¹⁵ Otherwise, no facts are available about this April trip. In any case, Oswald certainly alarmed the KGB by describing his shot at General Walker and showing off the photographs of himself with his guns.

On April 24, Oswald sent his wife and child off to live with their kindly and unwitting friend Ruth Paine in the Dallas suburb of Irving. That same day he caught a bus for New Orleans, where he moved in with his aunt and started to organize some pro-Cuban activities.

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 visit 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 concluded 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.

Finally, we find in Operation SOLO a wonderful explanation for the above altercation between the PGU and Gus Hall. In April 1958, after CPUSA relations with the CPSU were reestablished and Morris went to Moscow for his first meeting with International Department chairman Boris Ponomarev, Ponomarev offered the CPUSA $75,000 for 1958 and $200,000 for 1959 to be sent through the Canadian party for Jack to retrieve. The amount went up and down somewhat, but starting in 1963 it began growing by leaps and bounds, reaching over $1 million in 1967 and over $2 million by 1978, where it remained for most of the 1980s. In 1987, Gus Hall asked for an increase and got over $3 million. When told this, Morris commented only that the Soviets vastly overestimated the influence of the American party.

Instead, we coauthors believe that Gus Hall was being paid off for managing to keep the Childs brothers working for the CPUSA for so many years, in spite of all the PGU’s suspicions about them. Because the Soviets knew that Morris and Jack were such trusted FBI agents, they succeeded in using them to persuade the American government—and the world—that the Soviet Union had not been in any way involved with the assassination of President Kennedy and incidentally to turn the focus of lingering investigations toward Cuban émigrés. With Gus Hall’s blessing, the Childs brothers had unwittingly made a major contribution to a vitally important Soviet disinformation campaign.

In short, we coauthors are firmly convinced that the leaders of the Soviet Union and of today’s Russia were well aware all along that the Childs brothers changed loyalty in the 1950s and became FBI agents. The CPSU not only kept them as agents and close friends, it used them selectively to disseminate false information to the FBI with the knowledge that it would be judged as reliable and passed to the highest levels of the U.S. government.

FIDEL CASTRO JOINS THE PLOT

We now know the real reason why Morris and Jack Childs were treated so royally by the bigwigs of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Not only were the brothers themselves agreeably gullible, the FBI leadership itself would swallow any disinformation fed to the brothers, vouch for it, and disseminate it to the top leaders of the U.S. government. Not in their wildest dreams could the Soviets have wished for better assets.

We need to keep that in mind when we examine the interesting contacts between Jack Childs and Cuban leader Fidel Castro as masterminded from behind the scenes by the CPSU.

As earlier discussed, it must have been in April 1963, after Lee Harvey Oswald showed the Soviets in Mexico City how he planned to accomplish the assassination of the American president, that the Soviet leadership realized it needed to act. If Oswald couldn’t be talked out of it, a very sophisticated disinformation operation would have to be mounted. The most important thing would be to disclaim any Soviet connection with Oswald convincingly, even though he had lived in the Soviet Union for some three years and was known to be an ardent and vocal supporter of Soviet communism and had a Russian wife.

The Soviets evidently decided to turn Oswald into a visible supporter of Cuban communism. When he returned from Mexico in April 1963, Oswald immediately left for New Orleans, where he set himself up as secretary of a Fair Play for Cuba group. For the next few months, he energetically pursued this track, giving speeches to anyone who would listen, talking on the radio, getting into the newspapers, even having fights with Cuban émigrés. Although Oswald went through the suggested motions, he was clearly not in the least deterred from what he considered his patriotic mission—killing President Kennedy—and then escaping back into the arms of Mother Russia.

Meanwhile, for its part, the KGB disinformation experts were figuring out how Oswald’s vehement communism could be slanted toward Cuba instead of the Soviet Union should the unthinkable actually come to pass. Evidently, they suggested that KGB officers in Mexico send Oswald off to New Orleans and to the Fair Play for Cuba charade.

In any case, at some point Fidel Castro was brought into the disinformation planning. Fidel gave quite a performance on November 22 to ensure that the world would know that it had not been he who was behind the assassination and suggested who might have been, and this was naturally in his own self-interest. But Fidel was called upon to assist the Soviet International Department (which had taken on the responsibility for managing Oswald) after the KGB’s earlier efforts to deter Oswald from going through with his plan had failed.

The annual international Communist Party meeting was scheduled for May 1963. Normally, Morris Childs would have attended, but he was ill. According to Operation SOLO, the Soviets asked to see Jack Childs, so Gus Hall sent him instead. (We suspect the International Department specifically arranged this with Hall. Morris was perennially unwell, so it would not have been a problem to replace him with Jack.) Jack was very impressed by the reception he got in Moscow: the greetings at the airport, the limousine, the hotel suite, audiences with Suslov and Ponomarev, and dinners with members of the Central Committee and International Department collectively testified to Jack’s new status. He was a personal emissary of Hall, the American head of state “temporarily out of power,” and therefore above the KGB.

Jack had essentially been serving as a mere bagman for the KGB, and he was a far less complicated man than Morris. That certainly played a role in his contacts with Fidel Castro, and it must also be kept in mind that we learn only Jack’s version of these contacts.22

Jack was told that Fidel Castro was in Moscow and that all might benefit if they got together. He was warned that Fidel could be mercurial and was told not to tell Fidel anything about Soviet-CPUSA contacts to which the Morrises were privy. The Soviets then arranged for Jack and Fidel, as if by chance, to be seated next to each other at a dinner. They spoke at length in English, ignoring everyone else. Jack was flattered. Fidel said he hoped they would meet again, perhaps in Havana. The Soviet hosts were happy. (Coauthor Pacepa remembers visiting Cuba at about this time in his other life. His main contact there was Raúl Castro, who was the brains of political maneuvers and intelligence operations. Fidel was more the figurehead who followed Raúl’s advice. Fidel acted very important, kept people waiting for days to see him, and could rattle on about nothing for hours at a time, but he did as Raúl asked. Here he did as Ponomarev wanted of him.)

In early November 1963, Morris was in Moscow for his annual discussions with the top Soviet leaders about politics and for funding for the CPUSA. Among other things, the Soviets expressed their worries about Fidel Castro, who was supporting revolutionary movements in Latin America haphazardly. Moscow was afraid he didn’t know what he was doing and was just self-promoting. The Politburo hoped to use the CPUSA to influence Fidel. International Department chairman Ponomarev observed that Jack and Fidel seemed to hit it off together when they had met in Moscow. They hoped to use this budding relationship for spying on and influencing Fidel, and they confirmed this later.

Ponomarev proposed that Jack travel to Havana under the pretext of delivering a formal message from Gus Hall about cooperation between the communist parties of Cuba and the United States. The Soviets would arrange Jack’s travel from Moscow to and from Cuba, so as to avoid U.S. travel restrictions, as well as brief and debrief Jack about his meetings with Fidel.

Jack arrived in Moscow in April 1964. The Soviets stressed that Fidel should be told nothing about their interest in his meeting with Jack. (This was a fishy request since Jack would be flying to and from Moscow in a Soviet airplane. We believe it should be read as a sop to Jack’s ego and as deniability in anticipation of Fidel’s personal comments on the assassination.)

Jack flew to Havana in mid-May 1964, and as was Fidel’s wont, it took him about a week to grant Jack an audience. But when Fidel eventually came over to the villa where Jack was lodging, he was very cordial. They talked about Cuban and American Communist Party relations and setting up better ways to communicate with each other.

Out of the blue, Fidel suddenly asked: “Do you think Oswald killed President Kennedy?” He went on to explain that Oswald could not have done it alone and that there must have been about three people involved. He explained that he and a sharpshooter had tested a rifle like the one Oswald had used, and they concluded that one man could not have done it alone. (This is in accordance with the Soviet disinformation line. Based on Dallas police records, the Warren Commission concluded that on that day, a total of three shots were fired at the president, all from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository, where the three empty shells were found.) Fidel also remarked that, when Oswald was refused a visa at the Cuban embassy in Mexico, he had stormed out saying, “I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.” Fidel asked when the Americans were going to catch the other assassins and accepted Jack’s suggestion that he write a letter to the American people about it. The discussion then turned to other matters.

Jack left Havana very pleased with himself. He had accomplished all his objectives, establishing a direct link with Fidel Castro for the CPUSA and the hidden link that the Soviets had wanted.

We view all of Jack Childs’s contacts with Fidel Castro as having been orchestrated by Boris Ponomarev and one of the many-pronged Soviet disinformation operations designed to reassure the world that the Soviet Union never had anything to do with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination of President Kennedy.