Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (26 page)

“For the last ten years of my military intelligence career I also supervised Romania’s ultra-secret equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, thus becoming familiar with Soviet ciphers and codes,” Pacepa wrote.
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Analyzing the innocuous-sounding letters from Oswald and his wife to the Soviet embassy, Pacepa recognized the letters as veiled intelligence messages.
Pacepa is convinced Oswald’s mission upon his return to the United States was to assassinate President Kennedy in retaliation for his forcing Russia to erect the Berlin Wall in 1961 and withdraw their missiles from Cuba in 1962. Pacepa believes Oswald had been dispatched to the United States on a temporary mission and that Oswald planned to return to the Soviet Union once he had accomplished his task of assassinating JFK.

The analysis starts with former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Pacepa saw Khrushchev as a crude politician. “Khrushchev belonged to the meanwhile heroicized proletariat, an insignificant social category made up of urbanized Russian peasants—the most backward peasantry in all of Europe,” Pacepa wrote. “The grandchild of a serf and the son of an indigent miner, Khrushchev grew up in a deeply ignorant peasant environment and started his working life as an unskilled manual laborer.”
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Unlike Lenin, who was a lawyer, and Stalin, who had studied at a theological seminary, Khrushchev had no formal education whatsoever. He was violently destructive. “Khrushchev had an eminently destructive nature,” Pacepa explained. “He smashed Stalin’s statues, shattered the Soviet Union’s image as the workers’ paradise, and broke up the Sino-Soviet alliance all without building anything new to fill the vacuum he had created.” Khrushchev was Pacepa’s supreme boss for nine years, as he was promoted up to the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community. His final assessment was that Khrushchev was “brutal, brash and extroverted,” noting that Khrushchev “tended to destroy every project he got his hands on, and ended up with an even more personal hatred for what he called the ‘Western bourgeoisie’ than Stalin had.” Pacepa commented that Stalin died in ignominy on September 11, 1971, “but not before seeing his memoirs published in the West giving his version of history.”
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During the Cuban missile crisis “Khrushchev flew into a rage, yelling, cursing, and issuing an avalanche of conflicting orders,” Pacepa wrote, describing the moment when Soviet electronic monitoring confirmed the Pentagon was planning a naval blockade of Cuba. “During a state luncheon, Khrushchev swore at Washington, threatening to ‘nuke’ the White House, and cursed loudly every time anyone pronounced the words
America
or
American
.” The next morning Romanian head of state Gheorghiu-Dej was having breakfast with Khrushchev when General Vladimir Yefimovich Semichansky, the new chairman of the KGB, presented the
Soviet leader with a cable Soviet intelligence sent from Washington informing the Kremlin that Kennedy had canceled an eighteen-day trip to Brazil so he could personally manage a naval quarantine designed to block Russian cargo ships from reaching Cuba. Pacepa recounted Dej’s astonishment when Khrushchev turned purple reading the cable. Khrushchev cursed violently as he threw the cable on the floor and ground his heel into it. “That’s how I’m going to kill that viper.” Khrushchev declared.

On Sunday, October 28, 1962, Pacepa was with Dej in Bucharest when Khrushchev decided to recall the Russian ships, avoiding a challenge to the US naval blockade and bringing an end to the Cuban missile crisis. “That’s the greatest defeat in Soviet peacetime history,” Dej told Pacepa. The day also happened to be Pacepa’s birthday. He and Dej celebrated both events with caviar and champagne. Pacepa commented that Dej’s reaction was that while Kennedy had won this standoff, his life was now in danger. “Kennedy won’t die in his bed,” Dej predicted to Pacepa. While Dej appeared to enjoy witnessing Khrushchev’s humiliation, he was also troubled. “The lunatic could easily fly off the handle and start a nuclear war,” Dej warned Pacepa.
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The defeat Kennedy handed Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis would have been enough reason for the KGB to order Oswald to return to the USA, after having programmed Oswald to assassinate Kennedy.

The Soviet espionage service PGU under General Sakharovsky had a distinct methodology in training an assassin. The first requirement, Sakharovsky explained to Romanian intelligence, was that the officer working behind enemy lines must despise the “bourgeoisie” and regard its leaders as “rabid dogs.” Pacepa recalled distinctly how Sakharovsky described the programming process: “Even now my skin crawls when I remember Sakharovsky proclaiming in his soft, melodious voice: ‘There is just one way to deal with a rabid dog—shoot it!’ The next step was solidly to imprint in the officer’s mind a future vision of the wonderful life he would have in the ‘proletarian paradise’ after completing his mission abroad. Finally, we had to instill in him the firm idea that the very future of Communism depended on the success of his mission.”
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The Thirteenth Department of the KGB, the unit assigned the responsibility of preparing and implementing foreign execution operations, prepared a cover story for Oswald, creating a life for him working at a radio factory in Mimsk. It tested the waters by having
Oswald write a letter to the US embassy in Moscow, asking to return to the United States as a US citizen since he had become disillusioned with his experience in the USSR and had never become a Soviet citizen. The US embassy gave Oswald his passport back and initiated immigration procedures for his Soviet wife, Marina.
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One of the more enigmatic characters in the JFK assassination saga is George DeMohrenschildt, who together with his wife, Jeanne, befriended Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald’s wife, Marina, when the couple returned to the United States and settled in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Both Pacepa and assassination researcher and author Edward Jay Epstein concluded DeMohrenschildt was Oswald’s KGB “handler,” the person Russian intelligence assigned to watch over and monitor Lee Harvey Oswald in the United States.

Epstein, in his 1978 book,
Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
, reported that DeMohrenschildt remained a mystery to the FBI, CIA, and Office of Naval Intelligence that had investigated his activities since 1941. According to Epstein all that was known for certain about DeMohrenschildt was that he had arrived in the United States in May 1938 on the SS
Manhattan
, traveling under a Russian passport issued in Belgium.
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Pacepa catalogued that DeMohrenschildt became an American citizen in the 1930s, when he was Baron George von Mohrenschildt, son of a German director of the Swedish “Nobel interests” in the Baku oilfields. Toward the end of World War II, when it was clear the Nazis were going to be defeated, the German baron became the French DeMohrenschildt who claimed to have attended a commercial school in Belgium founded by Napoleon. After World War II, he claimed his father had been a Russian engineer in the Romanian Ploiesti oilfields where he was captured by the Soviet Army and executed. Epstein claims DeMohrenschildt worked first for Polish intelligence and then for French counter-intelligence in New York after arriving in the United States. Claiming to be a “petroleum” engineer, DeMohrenschildt worked for a series of American oil companies in Cuba and Venezuela.

In testifying to the Warren Commission, DeMohrenschildt was
remarkably vague about how he and his wife, Jeanne, met the Oswalds. “I tried, both my wife and I, hundreds of times to recall how exactly we met the Oswalds,” he testified under oath. “But they were out of our mind completely, because so many things happened in the meantime. So please do not take it for sure how I first met them.”
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Jeanne was equally vague in her testimony. “All of a sudden they arrived on the horizon,” Jeanne DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission. Her vagueness on recalling how she and her husband first met Lee and Marina Oswald strains their credibility to the breaking point. “I cannot even tell,” she said finally. “I would like to know myself, now, how it came about.”
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Then George and Jeanne DeMohrenschildt explained they were part of a Russian immigrant community in Dallas that tried to meet all new Russians coming into the area.

The vagueness may have been designed to hide a CIA connection. Attorney Bill Simpich has documented that DeMohrenschildts’s relationship to the CIA traces back to the 1950s when DeMohrenschildt was identified as part of an anti-Soviet movement known by its Russian initials “NTS,” standing for the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, a group founded in the 1930s by second generation Russian émigrés. In the 1950s, the CIA included NTS within the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty organization, a pet project of Cord Meyer, the CIA International Organization’s head who had a background of being a World War II hero with excellent connections in Boston society. Meyers reported directly to CIA Director Allen Dulles and his best friend in the CIA was Counterintelligence chief James Angleton.
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Curiously, DeMohrenschildt knew Jackie Kennedy’s father, John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III, when he was getting a divorce from Jackie Kennedy’s mother; in his associations with the Bouvier family, DeMohrenschildt met Jackie Bouvier, the future Jackie Kennedy, when she was a young girl. DeMohrenschildt got in touch with Oswald as a result of a request from Dallas CIA station chief J. Walton Moore.
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DeMohrenschildt admitted to Edward Jay Epstein that he had been “dealing with” the CIA from the 1950s.
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DeMohrenschildt had a tendency for showing up just where the CIA might have needed him, such as in Haiti just before a CIA-engineered effort by Cuban exiles to topple Duvalier and later in CIA training camps set up in Guatemala for Cuban exiles just before the Bay of Pigs invasion.
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When Warren Commission
attorney Wesley Liebeler asked Ruth Paine if Marina Oswald ever mentioned George DeMohrenschildt to her, Ruth Paine answered, “Well, that’s how I met her.”
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In February 1963 Ruth Paine attended a party in Dallas especially to meet Marina supposedly because Ruth was looking for someone with whom to practice her Russian. Marina Oswald subsequently moved into Ruth Paine’s home as a roomer, as noted earlier, and was living there at the time of the assassination. Later, Ruth Paine’s testimony would be particularly damaging to Lee Harvey Oswald, describing him as being a deeply disturbed individual, extremely unhappy with his life in the United States, and always potentially violent to his wife. The evidence that DeMohrenschildt’s CIA connections were the magnet that drew him to Oswald is a strong and important counterweight to Pacepa’s suggestion that DeMohrenschildt was a KGB agent assigned to be Oswald’s handler in Dallas.

DeMohrenschildt is an important link to several pieces of evidence the Warren Committee used to conclude Oswald killed JFK. Oswald posed in two backyard photographs holding a rifle, which the Warren Commission assumed was the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle Oswald bought by mail order, and wearing a holster containing a handgun that the Warren Commission assumed was the mail-order weapon used to kill Officer Tippit. In the photographs, Oswald was holding up a March 24, 1963, issue of the newspaper
The Worker
and the March 11, 1963, issue of
The Militant
, two Communist publications to which Oswald subscribed.

The Militant
was published by the Socialist Workers Party and was clearly viewed as a Trotskyite publication. In contrast,
The Worker
was considered a Stalinist publication. By holding these two papers, Oswald made a statement that he supported the Trotskyite/Maoist side of the Sino-Soviet. Had Oswald been killed in the process of being apprehended, it could have been argued that Oswald was a Trotskyist/Maoist revolutionary, in line with the Progressive Labor Party support for Cuba. However, during his interrogation after being arrested by the Dallas police, Oswald claimed the photographs were doctored, with his head placed on someone else’s body. Curiously, Marina gave DeMohrenschildt a copy of
the photograph, which was signed “For George, Lee Harvey Oswald” and dated April 5, 1963. Marina had scribbled on the photograph in Russian, “Hunter of Fascists. Ha. Ha.” The joke became more serious when on April 10, 1963, DeMohrenschildt heard on the radio that a sniper had taken a shot at the conservative firebrand General Edwin Walker.
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On Sunday, March 10, 1963, Oswald photographed the alley behind Walker’s home in the wealthy Turtle Creek suburb of Dallas. Oswald also took careful measurements of various points around the house, using a nine-power hand telescope. Oswald collected bus timetables from the area, putting the photographs and other information into a journal he kept in his study. Epstein further reported it was two days after Oswald’s reconnaissance of Walker’s home that he ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a scope from Klein’s Sporting Goods Store in Chicago, using the alias A. Hidell and his post office box in Dallas. Then, on April 10, 1963, Oswald left Marina a note in Russian instructing her to contact the Red Cross for help if he was apprehended by police, he was killed, or he had to flee. Marina, while largely kept in the dark about most of Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities when he was away from her, certainly had knowledge of her husband’s intelligence agency connections, especially with regard to the Soviet Union. At 9:00 p.m. that evening, Walker was working on his income taxes when a bullet penetrated the window and slammed into the wall, narrowly missing his head. According to the story as told by Epstein, Oswald got home around 11:30 p.m., breathing hard and appearing extremely tense. Oswald evidently told his wife he had just attempted to kill Walker.
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In his testimony to the Warren Commission, DeMohrenschildt recalled that he had seen the rifle in a closet at the home Oswald was renting from Ruth Paine, when George and Jeanne DeMohrenschildt stopped by on Orthodox Easter Sunday 1963 to leave off a rabbit toy for their young daughter. When DeMohrenschildt confronted Oswald as to why he had the gun, Oswald explained it was for target shooting. For some unexplained reason, DeMohrenschildt associated this rifle with the attempt on General Walker. Consider this testimony to the Warren Commission, under questioning from Warren Commission assistant counsel Albert Jenner: