Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (30 page)

A CIA report filed November 2, 1964, also gives a strange account of airplane activity the CIA investigators felt was possibly connected with the JFK assassination. A source identified only as “a well-known Cuban scientist” reported that by chance he was at the Havana airport on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, when at 5:00 p.m. local time an airplane with Mexican markings landed and parked at the far side of the field. “Two men, whom he recognized as Cuban ‘gangsters,’ alighted, entered the rear entrance of the administration building and disappeared without going through the normal customs procedures.” The scientist determined the aircraft had just arrived from Dallas, Texas, via Tijuana and Mexico City. Engine trouble had forced the airplane to land in Tijuana. “By combining the date, the origin of the flight, and the known reputation of the two men, he theorized that the two men must have been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy,” the CIA report continued. “He speculated that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted in the pay of Castro, and that the two Cubans had been in Dallas to organize or oversee the operation. He told the source that he had been greatly distressed by what he had seen and heard and had to tell someone about it.”
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Again, there is no indication the CIA did anything to further investigate or to verify this report.

Former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa has repeatedly insisted that the various conspiracy theories regarding who killed JFK originated in Moscow as disinformation the KGB planned to disseminate through US journalists, researchers, and other authors of various kinds in order to cover the role of the Russian government under Khrushchev
and the KGB’s culpability in sending Oswald to the United States to assassinate JFK.

Pacepa recounts how on the evening of November 26, 1963, four days after the assassination of JFK, he was paid a surprise visit in Bucharest by General Sakharovsky, the chief Soviet intelligence advisor for Romania. “It turned out that Bucharest was Sakarovsky’s first stop on a blitz tour of the main sister services,” Pacepa wrote. “His task was to instruct the management of these services to unleash a diversionary intelligence effort aimed at directing world attention away from the Soviet Union and focusing suspicion for the killing of President Kennedy on the United States itself.”
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As Sakharovsky detailed Oswald’s background, Pacepa became convinced the PGU had a hand in Oswald’s getting a Soviet wife while he was in the Soviet Union. He was told Oswald’s closest friend in the United States had been arranged to be a Russian émigré by the name of George DeMohrenschildt. This was enough to convince Pacepa that Oswald had been recruited to be a Soviet agent.

The next day, Pacepa and his intelligence colleagues in Romania began working on the ultra-secret directive Sakharovsky had brought with him. “Its bottom line was that we should immediately begin spreading the rumor in the West that President Kennedy had been killed by the CIA,” Pacepa summarized. “Operational guidelines were included in the PGU center’s directive, according to which the CIA hated Kennedy because, by toning down its plans to invade Cuba in 1962, he had compromised the CIA’s presence around the world.” That Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War was seen as a threat to the CIA’s power. “Hence, the PGU line went, the old CIA cold warriors had decided to get rid of Kennedy and to do it in such a manner as simultaneously to increase the ‘imperialist hysteria’ against the Soviet Union.”
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Pacepa related that the cover story was to focus on Lee Harvey Oswald, an enlisted marine the CIA had chosen for carrying out the operation. Moscow instructed Romanian intelligence to represent Oswald as a CIA agent who had been dispatched to the Soviet Union under cover as a defector, who was repatriated to the United States almost three years later, after completing his CIA-assigned espionage mission in Russia. The directive instructed Romanian intelligence to construct the story so as to make the world believe the assassination had been perpetrated by the United States government.

Pacepa noted that Sakharovsky’s directive had been transformed into a disinformation operational plan under the code name Operation Dragon. Soon, Pacepa found himself drafting an attachment to Operation Dragon containing guidelines for another rumor that was to be circulated, that Lyndon Johnson had orchestrated the JFK assassination because the vice president feared JFK would replace him with a member of the Kennedy clan for the 1964 elections. “The bottom line of this interpretation was that Johnson had seen though the clan’s plot and had lured Kennedy to Texas, where Johnson could play on his home turf,” Pacepa recalled. As proof, Russian intelligence sent Pacepa and his Romanian disinformation team an article that appeared in the Dallas newspapers the morning JFK was assassinated, reporting that former vice president Nixon, in a visit to Dallas the preceding day, had predicted JFK might drop LBJ from the 1964 Democratic Party presidential ballot.
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In December 1963, Moscow added to Operation Dragon the theme that JFK was killed by the “military industrial complex” in the United States because he had become discouraged with waging a war in Southeast Asia and was making it known he wanted to begin withdrawing US advisors from Vietnam. Pacepa was bombarded with nearly frantic cables from the KGB demanding that Operation Dragon be put into high gear.
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Pacepa’s assertion that a Soviet disinformation campaign was the origin of the various “conspiracy theories” that have sought to explain the JFK assassination in the last fifty years got strong support in 1992 when the British Secret Intelligence Service extracted retired KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin, along with some twenty-five thousand pages of notes Mitrokhin had made in the course of twelve years, describing top-secret KGB files. “Among the most important revelations provided by the
Mitrokhin Archive
are the highly classified KGB documents proving that the so-called Kennedy assassination conspiracy, which so far generated thousands of books all around the world, was born in the KGB, and that some of it was financed by the KGB,” Pacepa noted. “Equally significant are the documents in the
Mitrokhin Archive
showing that the KGB had constructed this conspiracy using some of the same paid KGB agents who were called upon to promote the disinformation operation designed to frame Pope Pius XII as having been pro-Nazi.”
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In their 1999 book,
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive
and the Secret History of the KGB
, history professor Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin listed a number of prominent books financed by the KGB to promote JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
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Included on the list are books published in the 1960s that are referenced in earlier chapters:
Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy
? by Joachim Joesten and
Rush to Judgment
by Mark Lane. Joesten was a former member of the German Communist Party, whose book was published in the United States by KGB agent Carlo Aldo Marzini, who, according to documents in the
Mitrokhin Archive
, had received subsidies from Moscow totaling $672,000. The KGB identified New York lawyer Mark Lane as the most talented of the first wave of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, citing his ties with the Democratic Party in the United States and his liberal views on a number of then-current American political problems. Together with student assistants and other volunteers, Lane founded what he called the “Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry” in a small office in Manhattan and rented a small theater at which he gave nightly renditions of what became known as “The Speech,” a rendition of Lane’s conspiracy theories that Lane updated nightly, as his research progressed. Through a trusted intermediary, the KGB sent Lane fifteen hundred dollars to help finance his research. The same intermediary also provided five hundred dollars to pay for Lane to travel to Europe to continue his research.

Remarkably, neither Khrushchev nor LBJ wanted a thorough and honest investigation. Conveniently, Lee Harvey Oswald was dead. Better to declare Lee Harvey Oswald the guilty party and move on, free of the risk that a trial could embarrass either Russia or the United States. So remarkably the Warren Commission’s result—that neither the CIA, the FBI, nor the KGB knew anything about Oswald—was exactly the result the United States government wanted. The Soviets preferred a result that put the blame on the CIA, but in the final analysis, the Soviets were satisfied as long as the Warren Commission did not blame the Russian government or the KGB for having ordered and arranged that JFK be murdered. Neither Khrushchev nor LBJ wanted to go to war over JFK’s assassination.

That Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and acted alone was a good story,
and both Khrushchev and LBJ were sticking to it. According to Pacepa, Soviet disinformation was aimed at putting the blame back on the USA, as a defensive policy, just so no one would take too seriously Oswald’s KGB ties. As demonstrated by the memo that Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach wrote LBJ presidential assistant Moyers, dated November 25, 1963, and referenced at the start of this chapter, the Warren Commission disinformation was aimed at making sure the American public did not blame either the CIA or the KGB.

As far as Pacepa is concerned, the success of the argument that the CIA was behind the JFK assassination is evidence not in the facts of the CIA’s involvement but in how well designed and effective the Soviet disinformation campaign to blame the CIA turned out to be. “As Andropov once told me, after you start a disinformation story, it can gather momentum and then take on a life of its own. That’s how so many innocent and imaginative dupes later picked up the multiple bullet/gunmen line and then promulgated it for their own purposes,” Pacepa suggested in an e-mail he wrote me on January 13, 2012.
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In the same e-mail, Pacepa explained that he and his wife, an American intelligence analyst, have spent ten years sifting through the several thousand books written on the JFK assassination, and they have concluded that there are only three substantive
sources
of
factual
information on JFK’s assassination: the Warren Commission documents, the House committee documents, and Epstein’s book
Legend, The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
.

Pacepa’s assessment was that Epstein unfortunately bought into some of the conspiracy theories later in his career. As noted earlier, Pacepa also felt “Epstein lacked the inside background knowledge that would have helped him to fit his bits and pieces together into one whole and reach a firm conclusion.” As a consequence, Pacepa felt Epstein’s “very well documented story is left hanging in mid-air,” a defect Pacepa felt he could correct in a future manuscript, simply by providing insights gained from his years of experience with the techniques, codes, and ciphers common to agents communicating within the KGB sphere of intelligence operations.

In the end, the Warren Commission’s disinformation campaign failed because the disinformation effort demanded manipulating the available evidence and sworn testimony to fit the investigation’s pre-determined conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was alone guilty for killing JFK. That
conspiracy theorists like Joesten or Lane knowingly or not knowingly accepted funding from Soviet intelligence sources does not disqualify the value of the questions asked. A particular argument or theory is not wrong simply because it can be traced to a KGB disinformation directive. Had the Warren Commission case against Oswald been ironclad, conspiracy theorists, no matter how creative, would not have been interesting enough to command an audience. The truth is, LBJ and the US Justice Department assigned the Warren Commission a fool’s errand when assigning it the mission of finding Oswald guilty as the lone-nut gunman. LBJ wanted the Warren Commission to reach that conclusion as soon as possible, so a final report could be published before the 1964 presidential election. LBJ clearly wanted to run for president in 1964 as the successor to JFK determined to carry forth the JFK legislative agenda, not as a suspect under examination by a US public about to realize in a
Life
magazine exposé about to be published that revealed JFK planned on dumping LBJ from the 1964 Democratic Party ticket.

In the final analysis, the Warren Commission failed in its disinformation efforts to pin all the guilt on Oswald because the case against Oswald is not ironclad, while the Soviets succeeded in their disinformation campaign because the evidence supporting the conclusion the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination is more convincing than the official Warren Commission cover story.

In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, the CIA brokered a substantial financial pay-off to Marina Oswald. The broker in the deal was C. D. Jackson who worked as the publisher of
Life
magazine. The anti-communist journalist and author Isaac Don Levine befriended Marina Oswald shortly after the JFK assassination. In response to a request from former CIA director Allen Dulles, Jackson helped broker a twenty-five-thousand-dollar book deal with New York publisher Meredith Press to publish Marina’s life story, with Levine agreeing to be the ghost-writer. The book was never written, and Marina Oswald reportedly ended up receiving over $200,000 in what has been described as a “payoff” that Levine arranged.
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Both Jackson and Levine had extensive CIA ties. Frank Wisner, who had worked during World War II with Jackson in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA, had transitioned to become the director of counter-intelligence for the CIA. In 1948 Wisner recruited Jackson to participate in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project in which respected journalists were secretly paid by the CIA to publish stories favorable to the CIA. In 1948 Jackson had become managing director of Time-Life International. Jackson subsequently became the publisher of
Fortune
magazine, another Henry Luce creation. In February 1953 Jackson was appointed as a special assistant to President Eisenhower in a role that included coordinating with the CIA and advising Eisenhower on cold war planning and the tactics of psychological warfare.
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As publisher of
Life
magazine, Jackson purchased the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, from which he published only selected frames shown as still photographs. Jackson suppressed making the Zapruder film available for the public to view, arguing the film was too graphically violent for widespread distribution. None less than Carl Bernstein, the former
Washington Post
reporter of Watergate fame, dubbed C. D. Jackson as “Henry Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA.”
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