Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (28 page)

Pacepa is convinced Moscow tried to deprogram Oswald to no avail and that despite Moscow’s instruction that Oswald should not assassinate JFK, Oswald proceeded with his original plans, convinced he was fulfilling his “historic” task. This would have meant Oswald had to find a way to convince the KGB that allowing him to go ahead with the original plan remained a good idea.

But first, Pacepa believes Oswald took a secret trip to Mexico in April 1963 to meet with the KGB in an effort to convince the Russians he was able to carry out the mission without adverse consequences to the Soviet Union. “In the dry run against Walker, [Oswald] had proved he could both shoot straight and escape cleanly, and Oswald was probably confident he could repeat this performance when Kennedy came to Dallas,” Pacepa wrote.
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During the weekend of November 9–11, 1963, Oswald drafted a letter for the Soviet embassy in Washington, in which he described a meeting he had just had with “comrade Kostin” in Mexico City, who he names elsewhere as Comrade Kostikov. The CIA identified Comrade
Kostin, a.k.a. Comrade Kostikov, as Valery Kostikov, an officer of the KGB’s Thirteenth Department responsible for foreign assassinations. Kostikov was assigned under diplomatic cover to the Soviet embassy in Mexico.

Pacepa notes that after the assassination, Oswald’s handwritten draft of the letter to the Soviet embassy was found among Oswald’s effects in the garage of Ruth Paine’s home. Oswald had re-written the letter several times before typing it. Pacepa quoted from the letter, putting earlier versions in italics within brackets:

This is to inform you of recent events since my meetings with Comrade Kostin [
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
] indefinitely because of my Mexican visa restrictions which was for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on requesting a new visa [
applying for an extension
] unless I used my real name, so I returned to the United States.
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“The fact that Oswald used an operational codename for Kostikov confirms to me both his meeting with Kostikov in Mexico City and his correspondence with the Soviet embassy in Washington were conducted in a KGB operational context,” Pacepa concluded. “The fact that Oswald did not use his real name to obtain his Mexican travel permit confirms this conclusion.”
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A CIA memo dated January 31, 1964, confirmed Pacepa’s conclusions that Oswald had met with Kostikov in Mexico City and confirmed Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy in Moscow, in which Oswald concluded cryptically, “had I been able to reach the Soviet embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business.”
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The disclosure of the Kostikov connection caused panic at the upper reaches of the US government. On November 29, 1963, in a taped telephone call convincing his old Senate mentor Richard Russell to join the Warren Commission, President Lyndon Johnson said, “And we’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans an hour.”
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While the Warren Commission had no knowledge of a meeting
Oswald may have had with Kostikov in April 1963, the Commission managed to deepen the mystery over Oswald’s subsequent trip to Mexico that Oswald took in September 1963, arriving in Mexico City on September 27. The Warren Commission reported Oswald went almost directly to the Cuban embassy and applied for a visa to Cuba in transit to Russia. Representing himself as the head of the New Orleans branch of the pro-Castro organization Fair Play for Cuba, Oswald noted his previous residence in the Soviet Union and indicated his desire to return there to live. The Cubans would not give Oswald a visa until he received one from the Russians, which would take several months. The Warren Commission reported that Oswald became agitated at being given the runaround, and that he left Mexico City on October 2, 1963, after having been rebuffed by both the Cuban and the Soviet embassies.
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US surveillance cameras outside foreign embassies in Mexico City photographed the person who was supposed to be Oswald.
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This Mystery Man photo was rushed to Dallas the evening of the assassination on a special Naval Attaché flight and shown to Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Oswald, who said the photograph was of Jack Ruby before Ruby killed her son. The Warren Commission was forced to publish the photo in order to quash her allegations. To this day, the person photographed by the CIA in Mexico has not been identified, but the person in the photograph is clearly neither Oswald nor Ruby.
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The possibility remains that someone was trying to frame Oswald given evidence that Oswald was impersonated in his September–October 1963 visit to Mexico. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to the White House and the Secret Service on November 23, 1963, the day following the JFK assassination, containing the following explosive paragraph:

The CIA advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald, who contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above, and have listened to a recording of his voice. These special agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.
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The US government has never produced any authenticated photograph of Oswald in Mexico City in the supposed September–October 1963 trip, despite the extensive use of surveillance cameras to document all entrance and exit activity at Mexico City embassies. Whether or not Oswald visited Mexico in 1963 remains one of the most hotly debated issues in the JFK assassination mystery. The person in the photograph the CIA released bears no resemblance whatsoever to Lee Harvey Oswald. The person in the photograph the CIA released has never been identified.

Still, Pacepa remains convinced that Oswald did connect with Kostikov in Mexico City. Pacepa focused on a Mexico City guidebook for the week September 28–October 4, 1963, found among Oswald’s effects, as well as a Spanish-English directory. The guidebook had the Soviet embassy’s telephone number underlined in pencil, with the names
Kosten
and
Osvald
written in Cyrillic on the page listing Diplomats in Mexico, as well as checkmarks next to five movie theaters listed on the previous page. In the back of the Spanish-English dictionary, Oswald wrote: “buy tickets for bull fight,” and the Plaza México bullring is circled on his map. Also marked on the map is the Palace of Fine Arts, a place Pacepa notes was a favorite place for tourists to assemble on Sunday mornings to watch the Ballet Folklórico.

All this suggested to Pacepa that Oswald and Kostikov had a secret “iron meeting” in Mexico City. Iron meetings, or invariable meetings, were meetings the KGB used as standard procedure for emergency situations. “In my day, I approved quite a few ‘iron meetings’ in Mexico City—a favorite place for contacting our important agents living in the U.S.—and Oswald’s ‘iron meeting’ looks to me like a typical one,” Pacepa wrote. “This means: 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.”
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Pacepa, in a backhanded way, did not blame the Warren Commission for missing these clues, noting that none of the Warren Commission members had
any experience in the techniques of professional counter-intelligence.

Since Oswald knew too much about the original KGB plan, Moscow arranged for him to be silenced forever, fearing that sooner or later Oswald would break down and begin talking to the police more openly and honestly. “That was another Soviet pattern,” Pacepa pointed out, noting seven of the eight first chiefs of the Soviet political police were secretly or openly assassinated to prevent them from incriminating the Kremlin.
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Inevitably, the KGB had no choice but to silence Oswald, or so Pacepa would argue. Pacepa believes that by the time of the September–October 1963 meeting in Mexico City, the KGB had realized there was no way to dissuade Oswald from going forward with his mission to assassinate JFK. “By this time the PGU had evidently realized there was no way the obsessive Oswald could be dissuaded from attempting to kill Kennedy, so to be on the safe side, it had already set in motion measures to ‘neutralize’ him,” Pacepa concluded. “Meanwhile the PGU’s only course would have been to keep Oswald believing that the Soviets were his friends, in order to ensure that no matter what happened, he would not compromise the PGU’s connection with him.”
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Pacepa insists Oswald acted alone. “The Soviets may have used assassination gangs inside the Soviet bloc, but they used only lone assassins in the West,” he wrote in an e-mail to encourage the single-gunman theory.
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Most likely, Pacepa is correct that Oswald was on a mission only he truly understood. Even if Oswald were a double agent compromised by the CIA before he defected to Russia, Pacepa is correct that “connecting the dots from the mountain of evidence that has accumulated proves KGB involvement.”
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Besides, even if Pacepa is right that Oswald was a lone assassin, Pacepa does not necessarily identify with the Warren Commission theory that characterized Oswald as a psychologically weak ex-Marine who acted out his own hateful motives by assassinating JFK. Pacepa continues to believe Oswald was a well-trained and highly committed KGB agent who was determined to carry out his mission to assassinate JFK. For all Oswald knew, as Pacepa argues, the information that Khrushchev had lost his nerve and called off the JFK assassination might just be disinformation best disregarded. Even if Pacepa is right in arguing that Oswald followed the KGB methodology of acting alone, we must draw a distinction
between what Pacepa means by “lone-gun assassin” and what the Warren Commission meant by using the same term. The Warren Commission clearly intended to dismiss the idea Oswald had accomplices in order to rule out the possibility of a conspiracy. Pacepa understands that Oswald was carrying out a KGB-ordered foreign assassination that by definition involved an international conspiracy tracing back to Moscow.

Still, nothing about unraveling the mystery surrounding the JFK assassination is so easy as to lay all the blame on the KGB alone. Not unless we want to make the KGB responsible for launching multiple look-alike plans to assassinate JFK, and we are willing to turn a blind eye to the recently discovered evidence of the involvement of the mob and the CIA in the assassination plots.

In their ground-breaking 2005 book,
Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK
, assassination researcher Lamar Waldron and syndicated radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann documented that in addition to the plan to assassinate JFK in Dallas, two earlier plots were thwarted: one in Chicago on November 2 and one in Tampa on November 18.
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The three plans to assassinate JFK were remarkably similar in design.

The assassination attempt in Chicago was scheduled for Saturday, November 2, 1963. JFK was scheduled to proceed from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport via motorcade to Soldier Field, where he was to watch the Army-Air Force football game with Mayor Daley. The eleven-mile motorcade was planned to proceed down what was then known as the Northwester Expressway to the Loop in downtown Chicago. At Jackson Street, the motorcade would make a difficult left-hand turn off the exit ramp onto the street to the stadium. The Jackson Street turn, like the turn from Houston onto Elm, involved a ninety-degree turn that would bring the presidential limousine to a virtual standstill. From there, the limo would travel through the warehouse district where numerous warehouses had empty or near-empty floors similar to the Texas School Book Depository. According to Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, the FBI sent a teletype message on October 30, 1963, to the Secret Service in Chicago, stating
that an attempt to assassinate JFK would be made on November 2, by a four-man team using high-powered rifles.
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The shooters in Chicago consisted of a four-man team equipped with military M-1 rifles, staying in a Chicago rooming house until the day planned for the assassination attempt. On November 2, Secret Service agents in an unmarked car tailed two of the four men after they left the rooming house together. The two men being tailed caught onto the surveillance after they doubled back and overheard the agent’s radio. With their cover blown, the Secret Service agents apprehended the two men, bringing them to the Chicago Secret Service office for questioning. When no weapons were found in their possession or back at the rooming house, they were ultimately released. “The fact that the two men detained by the Secret Service had nothing illegal on them—or in their rooming house—like illegal weapons, traceable stolen cash or property, drugs, etc.—shows that they were experienced professionals,” concluded Waldron and Hartmann.
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The patsy in the Chicago assassination plot was Thomas Arthur Vallee, a Chicago resident who, like Oswald, was an ex-marine. Vallee was awarded the Purple Heart for wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War. A member of the John Birch Society at the group’s zenith, Vallee was known in Chicago for his outspoken criticism of JFK’s foreign policy views. Vallee worked for a printing company located in a warehouse building along the JFK motorcade route. “The view from 625 Jackson Street was strikingly similar to the view … from the Texas School Book Depository.”
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