The (Fake) Reaction of Soviet and Communist Party Officials to the JFKA

[Tom Graves]

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=147375

Note: J. Edgar Hoover's source, Pravda "journalist" Boris Orekhov (SHAMROCK), was expelled from the U.S. in 1970 for espionage.

His other source, Nosenko-supporting KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (FEDORA) at the Bureau's NYC field office, was the Kremlin-loyal triple agent who duped the FBI for at least ten years and was instrumental in Mexico City's Valeriy Kostikov's being prematurely* deemed Department 13, ergo the JFKA "cover up."

*CIA's official historian, David Robarge, wrote a few years ago that the Agency was never able to determine whether or not Kostikov was Department 13.

[Benjamin Cole]

There are some naive enough to believe any info out of Moscow regarding the JFKA. Then, or now.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

The FBI had a top covert agent - Morris Childs - who was in Moscow at the time of the assassination. My guess he was one of the anonymous sources, the first one, mentioned above. Childs and his brother Jack had joined the CPUSA as young men but later broke with the party. Both brothers then went to the FBI and agreed to spy for them (codename: SOLO). Morris rose through the ranks of the CPUSA and was used as a trusted courier between the CPUSA and Moscow where he would deliver messages/orders and money (almost $30 million) from Moscow to the CPUSA. During his time as an agent Childs secretly met Khrushchev, Mao, Brezhnev, Chou En-lai and other top Soviet and Chinese officials.

Childs was meeting with top Soviet/Politburo officials when the assassination was reported. As soon as he returned to the US he was rushed by the FBI for a debriefing about what he heard. He gave this account below of how the Soviets reacted (this is from "Operation Solo" by John Barron). Note: the Ponomarev mentioned was Boris Ponomarev who was one of top leaders of the Soviet CPUSA.



And this (the interpreter part is odd; Morris spoke fluent Russian):

 

[Tom Graves]

You can read more about "Solo" here: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Article-FBI-Project-Solo.pdf

And here: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB375/

And you can read the Barron book online for free here: https://john-barron.freenovelread.com/288149-operation_solo

Dear Steve M.,

(Please don't run away, now, like you always do.)

SOLO, the Russia-born quadruple-agent brothers who delivered millions of dollars from the Kremlin to CPUSA?

LOL!

How convenient for Morris (or was it Jack?) to be in Moscow in consultation with Party functionaries around midnight, Moscow time, on 11/22/63 when they found out not only that Oswald had just been arrested, but that the KGB had already determined that it had had absolutely nothing to do with him during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk!

And to have the news delivered to them by other Kremlin functionaries who spoke English so well!

Here's a New York Times William Safire article from September 1981 in which he's spot on.

Note: The FBI's 1976 determination by James Nolan that your boy FEDORA was fake was overturned a few years later by counterintelligence-hating James Geer who was loaned two CIA "researchers" by probable-mole DC/CI Leonard V. McCoy -- Sandra Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann -- the former of which took nine years to uncover Aldrich Ames and the latter of which helped McCoy and probable mole Bruce Leonard Solie "lose" former defector Nicholas Shadrin to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in 1975.

. . . . . . .

On July 6, 1972, William Sullivan - who had been removed from the top echelons of the F.B.I. by J. Edgar Hoover - sat in the office of the new F.B.I. Director, L. Patrick Gray. Mr. Sullivan wanted to get back into law enforcement, and passed on to Mr. Gray his suspicions about ''Fedora,'' a Russian at the U.N. who was supposedly passing secrets on to the F.B.I.

By 1976, I am informed, the F.B.I. had largely concluded that ''Fedora'' [KGB Major Aleksei Kulak] was not their double agent, but was the Russians' triple agent - passing on disinformation to the F.B.I., and misleading our C.I.A.

In the current Reader's Digest, Henry Hurt breaks the news of the F.B.I.'s decision to disbelieve ''Fedora,'' dating the decision in 1980.

Another Soviet defector, the former U.N. Under Secretary Arkady Schevchenko, tells me that ''Fedora'' must have been an amalgam of several sources. We'll be learning more from him on other matters, as well as from our most reliable defector, Anatoly Golitsyn.

At any rate, we now know (1) that the men in charge of American counterespionage had been hoodwinked for 15 years, and (2) that the F.B.I. had been persuaded that its Soviet source was a phony for the last five years. In 1977 New York agents urged that ''Fedora'' be arrested before slipping back to the Soviet Union; they were overruled.

One of these days a story of a similar operation will come out: in ''Solo,'' we thought we had two men penetrating the Communist Party apparatus. With one of these triple agents dead and the other dying, we can only surmise the extent of that disinformation operation. [emphasis added]

With new eyes, we can now look back and change black to white, correcting the disinformation. What were ''Fedora'' and ''Solo'' sent here to mislead us about?

The most important use we made of our Soviet ''spy'' in New York was to establish the bona fides of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came to us shortly after the Kennedy assassination to assure the C.I.A. that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a Soviet agent. ''Fedora'' told us to believe Mr. Nosenko.

For nearly two decades our C.I.A. has been split between those who distrusted Mr. Nosenko and suspected he was a ''plant'' - among them James Angleton, and to some extent Richard Helms - and those who believed Mr. Nosenko, including William Colby and Stansfield Turner.

In recent years the disbelievers at the agency were labeled ''paranoid'' and pushed out, while analysts who embraced Mr. Nosenko were promoted. Mr. Nosenko has been a lecturer at the C.I.A., teaching counterintelligence to our spies, which the writer Edward Jay Epstein rightly calls ''the crowning absurdity.''

Here is the significance: if the F.B.I.'s ''Fedora'' tricked us, as the F.B.I. has believed for some years and now quietly admits, then we were systematic ally misled about Mr. Nosenko. James Angleton was right, and the ''new-boy network'' at the C.I.A. was horrendously wrong. The ot her shoe has not dropped. Half the Soviet disinformation plot stands revealed, the other half sits in place. At the C.I.A., a wholesale re-evaluation should be taking place -- not only reversing the verdicts of the past, which assured us that Soviet missiles were not accurate, but to question the judgment of those who were taken in.

Former Director Turner's friends are now spreading the word that the reason he fired a flock of hard-liners in his 1977 purge of realists was somehow connected to an investigation of renegade agents selling terrorist techniques to Libya. I think that is part of his cover-up for being suckered by Mr. Nosenko, ''Fedora'' and the disinformation scheme.

The Senate Intelligence Committee should demand the dropping of the other shoe in the Fedora-Nosenko affair and should find out whether the three-man White House Intelligence Oversight Board did its duty in the Wilson-Terpil Libyan affair.

In the Ford years, the Oversight Board was set up to deal with intelligence abuses and its members were active; in the Carter years, the three men met every three weeks and rocked no boats; since June 5, when Mr. Reagan accepted the board's resignation, it has been out of business entirely.

Someday the President will appoint a new triumvirate to check abuses, probably headed by Glenn Campbell, at the time he appoints the 15-member Advisory Board to be headed by Anne Armstrong to review intelligence quality. Wrangling over the Executive Order on Intelligence is understandable, but to permit four or five months to go by with no Oversight Board in place makes a mockery of oversight.

The F.B.I. knows it was misled and moved to correct its evaluations. Now the C.I.A. must go through the pain of finding out exactly how it was deceived to make sure it is not still being victimized by a mole or a triple agent.


-- Tom

*Another account states that the Soviet functionary who rushed into the meeting to relay the news of Oswald’s arrest spoke to his Russian colleagues in Russian and to Morris Childs in perfect English.

PS It’s worth noting that on Yuri Nosenko’s 1966 polygraph exam, he “reacted” when he said “No” to the question, “Were you happy to hear that JFK had been assassinated?”

FWIW, he also “reacted” when he answered “No” to the question, “Have you been in secret communication with CIA officer (and probable mole) George Kisevalter?” (in so many words)

[Steve M. Galbraith]

There are some naive enough to believe any info out of Moscow regarding the JFKA. Then, or now.

It's not a question of believing information from Moscow (or anywhere else). It's whether that information can be corroborated by/with other evidence. Does it fit with what else you have? You don't accept OR reject information simply because the source is questionable (yes some sources are more/less credible than others). You look at it, weigh it, consider it in totality and make a judgment.

We have a variety of sources - KGB defectors, files, interviews - that say the Soviets were stunned by the assassination, unsure what happened and why. They had no knowledge that it was going to happen. And sincerely believed it was US right wing militarists behind the act (they were Marxists; of course they would think that). If you believe from the start that all of the sources for this are double or triple or quadruple agents, that it's all disinformation, it's all a cover story then how can you fairly evaluate evidence? This is called confirmation bias or motivated reasoning.

Example: we have the Mitrokhin archive of the KGB files that were compiled by a Soviet defector. It's "from Moscow". Should we dismiss it out of hand? They show that the Soviets didn't recruit Oswald, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector (the KGB tried to find him to kill him), and that the Soviets were stunned by the assassination. So we simply say, "Well, it's from the KGB so it's disinformation. Mitrokhin was a KGB fake defector or he was misled"? Or do we consider it along with other information we have?

It seems to me that some people won't accept *any* evidence that the KGB didn't recruit Oswald, that they considered him too unreliable. Fine, just say so and we can move on.

Mitrokhin archive: https://tinyurl.com/594e5ws4. Note that there's all sorts of damning information about the KGB's activities in that archive. Did they let this incriminating information be released but included false information about Nosenko and Oswald? Does that make sense?

[Tom Graves]

We have the Mitrokhin Archives of the KGB files that were compiled by a Soviet defector. It's "from Moscow". Should we dismiss it out of hand? They show that the Soviets didn't recruit Oswald, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector (the KGB tried to find him to kill him), and that the Soviets were stunned by the assassination. So, we simply say, "Well, it's from the KGB so it's disinformation. Mitrokhin was a KGB fake defector or he was misled"? Or do we consider it along with other information we have?

Dear Steve M.,

Take The Mitrokhin Archive with the proverbial grain of salt, because it, like any good double-agent, is no more than 98% true and no less than 2% false.

Its mission seems to have been to convince gullible people like you that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector and that all of the "defectors," "agents-in-place," and "informants" who vouched for his bona fides were to be trusted.

Do you really think Mitrokhin hand-copied 25,000 KGB documents and smuggled them out of Russia?

If so, there's this bridge I'd like to show you . . . .

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362#d1e141


-- Tom

PS Was KGB Major Igor Kochnov really sent to the U.S. to try to assassinate both (true defector) Anatoliy Golitsyn and (false or perhaps rogue physical defector to the U.S.) Yuri Nosenko?

What do you know about Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov) and his mother-in-law, Yekaterina Furtseva?

Anything at all?

[Tom Graves]

It's not a question of believing information from Moscow (or anywhere else). It's whether that information can be corroborated by/with other evidence.

Dear Steve M.,

The problem with Nosenko's status as a true defector is that all of the "corroborating" sources are themselves suspect -- take Nosenko-protecting Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and Russia-born George Kisevalter, for example, and the espionage writers they influenced (Tom Mangold in McCoy's case, David Wise and Clarence Ashley in Kisevalter's case) -- which suggests that Anatoliy Golitsyn was correct to try to warn the CIA and the FBI about a 1959-on Sun Tzu-based "Master Plan" by which the KGB was waging disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies in order to get us to defeat ourselves.

And I give you President Donald John Trump.

The sad thing for JFKA students isn't that Nosenko possibly spread disinformation about Lee Harvey Oswald, but that he was hiding moles in the CIA and their enabling triple agents in the FBI (Polyakov in 1962, Kulak from 1962 to 1977, Kochnov from 1965 to 1975, Orekhov from 1966 to 1970, etc.)

Instead of looking for confirming narratives from a suspect source (the KGB), look for internal contradictions and implausible overlappings.

And look for incriminating events, like Nosenko's asking Bagley and Kisevalter about "Zepp" in June 1962, his showing Bagley and Kisevalter in February 1964 a KGB travel document signed by General Gribanov which stipulated that he was now a Lieutenant Colonel (Nosenko later confessed that he was only a Captain), and his telling Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in February 1964 not only that he had been Oswald's case officer in Moscow, but that . . . gasp . . . he'd just received a "Return to Mosco Immediately" telegram from KGB headquarters (he hadn't).

LOL!

-- Tom

[Benjamin Cole]

SMG:

There was a KGB officer in Minsk who said he had run LHO, and that his wife Marina was a swallow, but that he had nor connection to the JFKA.

G2 assets were in touch with LHO in New Orleans, and he met with KGB'ers in Mexico City.

Here is a post on LHO as possible G2/KGB asset:

Oswald as a KGB Asset or Double Agent?

(Due to recent stories that the Mexican government conducted a contemporary JFKA investigation, and concluded LHO had been a Cuban asset, I have bumped this thread forward. That investigation is evidently being withheld).

There is an interesting footnote in “The Man Who Knew Too Much” a book largely about Richard Case Nagell, by JFKA researcher Dick Russell:

 “A May 15, 1973, memo in the files of researcher Richard Popkin recounts a conversation with former CIA official Victor Marchetti in which Marchetti reportedly offered "a theory he claimed to have heard that fits with his own picture of the chaos in the CIA; namely that the KGB has infiltrated the CIA and the CIA has infiltrated the KGB so it is impossible at the present stage to tell who is who (he mentioned a case of having been sent to meet somebody and being shown all sorts of identification and then being totally unable to tell whether he was dealing with a U.S. or Russian agent). Marchetti thinks it is the KGB branch of the CIA that killed Kennedy and that the U.S. CIA is too embarrassed to investigate and reveal the real state of affairs."     

This long-ago revelation of Marchetti’s, now more than five decades old, has been re-vivified in recent years by John Newman’s book, “Uncovering Popov’s Mole,” which posits that senior CIA’er Bruce Solie was a KGB asset, and was running LHO.

(For background on Marchetti, see https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmarchetti.htm. Some of you may have memories jogged: Richard Popkin authored “The Second Oswald” book in 1966.)

It is difficult to challenge Marchetti’s observations as the mere fluff of an armchair historian or conspiracy buff.

Marchetti first worked for Army Intelligence in 1951, attended college, and then joined the CIA in 1955, rising to senior positions before retiring in 1969, and thereafter, perhaps most famously, writing about the JFKA for the Liberty Lobby’s “The Spotlight” publication.

Marchetti’s also wrote the book “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” and appears to have bona fides as an earnest JFKA researcher, and one who had actual “street cred.”

Marchetti’s and Newman’s observations also resonate with the narrative of still-enigmatic Richard Case Nagell, who claimed to be a double-agent (US-Soviet) who was assigned to interdict LHO’s mission, on assignment from Moscow, to assassinate JFK.

In 1992, Carl Oglesby, the nearly iconic leftist and author of many books, including several on the JFKA, authored a forward to Russell’s book, in which he wrote, “We do not yet know for example, whether Oswald was being run by the CIA or KGB, by the ONI or GRU or some as of yet unknown bureau of the Cold War, one side of the other. Nor do we know for a fact who Oswald himself believed was running him. All we may guess at, according to Russell, is that what Oswald believed to be true and the actual truth might in fact have been two very different things.”

There are other murky details linking Lee Harvey Oswald to the KGB, especially the Russian intel agency in Minsk, where LHO lived for two years while in the Soviet Union.

A KGB officer there said that he “ran” LHO, and that Marina Oswald has been a KGB asset, but that she snapped her ties to the spy agency after marrying LHO and going to the US.

From CIA files:

“IJDECANTER (a CIA asset) knew Yurshak as Belorussian KGB in Minsk in the early 1980s. Yurshak was in his late 50s then. When asked if Yurshak was bragging, he said, "no...I think that 100 percent he was involved in this Oswald case...He was stuck to his one point of view. First, never had any kind of task for Oswald to kill Kennedy. Second, that he was actually recruited and he ran him. And third, Marina was our swallow and then she rejected cooperation.”

Of course, just as one might suspect the CIA would scrub its files of connections to LHO, so one would expect the KGB or Belarus agencies to do the same.

Gimlet-eyed fans and critics of the “limited hangout” defense-tactic might believe this KGB admission that it was running LHO, but not involved in the JFKA, was in that category of dissembling.   

Add to the bubbling stew the more-recent book “Operation Dragon” written by former CIA Director James Woolsey in 2021, along former Romanian intel officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. The pair posit that LHO was KGB asset, had been brainwashed in Russia to perp the JFKA. Curiously, Woolsey and Pacepa echo Nagell’s narrative, that officials in Moscow wanted to recall LHO, but could not.

Of course, one could dismiss Woolsey’s book as written with a Cold War agenda in mind; indeed, it is the reverse mirror image of the Old Guard Left Wing and present-day MAGA-Moscow narratives of the JFKA, that blame the CIA and globalist cabals for the president’s murder.

In JFKA-land, too often the ideology writes the agenda, and the agenda writes the narrative.

But there is more on LHO as a KGB asset: During his visit to Mexico City in late September 1963, LHO met Valerie Kostikov, senior KGB’er said to be in charge of “wet work’ in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, that includes assassinations. (There were two other KGB’ers who met with LHO at the same time, all were filmed and recorded for a 1993 PBS special, in which they confirmed they met the real LHO).

Not only that, it is now known that Kostikov had assets in the US, assets that Kostikov also met down in Mexico.

“Kostikov himself was a known Soviet intelligence agent, suspected of contact with covert Soviet assets, including Americans, operating inside the United States. He had been under CIA observation and surveillance in Mexico City, as well as during his travels in Mexico, and was known to have met with a Soviet asset (designated as “Tumbleweed”/a European then living in the United States) that the FBI was monitoring inside the United States. As recently as September 1963, Kostikov had even been placed under surveillance while traveling in northern Mexico,” report Larry Hancock and David Boylan in their recent superb book, “The Oswald Puzzle.”

(It should be noted that Alan Dale recently related, within the Education Foundation-JFK assassination forum, that Newman does not suspect LHO of a role in the JFKA. Additionally Hancock and Boylan do not regard LHO as a suspect in the JFKA, although he may have been manipulated in surrounding events.)

A circumspect JFKA assassination buff does not blithely challenge Newman, nor Hancock and Boylan, the latter two who contend LHO was not a CIA asset, but only a misfit and a Marxist who wanted transit to Cuba. All three are serious researchers, intelligent, earnest and non-partisan, and appear lacking in agendas—the best investigators we have, IMHO.

And yet—how it is possible to understand the JFKA without explaining LHO’s involvement in the JFKA? And after 60 years of researchers hunting for a CIA operational connection to LHO or the JFKA, why has nobody found one?

One might also ponder why does the pub crawler, returning to home at night, look for his lost keys under the street lamps? That’s where the light is. But perhaps not where the keys are.

JFKA researchers pursue leads under the CIA street lamp—because  there is no light under the KGB street lamp, or that of G-2, the Cuban intel service said to have infiltrated the Cuban exile community with agents (or double agents). But the keys could be there, in the dark.

Even Marchetti, embedded with the CIA during the very years that, some contend, elements with the agency had plotted JFK’s demise, was unsure if the CIA had been involved in the JFKA, or CIA assets working for the KGB.

The HSCA

Many dismiss the WC, and justifiably so. It strikes me as more of a prosecution than an investigation.

That said the HSCA, full of smart and skeptical staffers, concluded it was LHO who fired the lethal shots on 11/22, and that there was likely a second gunman, on the GK, who either missed or fired a diversionary shot.

I happen to disagree with the HSCA. Nased upon my layman's review of the Z film, I think Gov. Connally was shot a Z-295 and JFK at Z-313...less than one second apart. Both from behind. Draw your own conclusions.

Angleton

As noted by many, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief and putative mole-hunter, was the WC’s main contact or source of information at the agency. This has raised suspicions, but also makes sense in light of the observations of Newman and Marchetti.

If LHO was being run by KGB moles inside the CIA, then it would be Angleton who could best find that out, and massage information flowing to the WC to hide that reality—as suggested by Marchetti.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, there are many captivating versions of the JFKA, both LN and CT, but none compelling.

The problem started on 11/22, when LHO’s confederates were not apprehended, and the problem was compounded on 11/24, when LHO was shot dead.

The WC was a posthumous prosecution, although the HSCA tended to confirm many of the WC findings.

As a result, the only JFKA suspect known beyond reasonable doubt to be in Dealey Plaza on 11/22 was LHO, so this leaves open speculation as to the ID of his co-conspirators or manipulators.

Serious researchers have ventured LHO’s confederates or handlers on 11/22 were Mafia, CIA, KGB, G-2, working for LBJ, anti-Castro exiles, splinter groups such as Alpha 66, or former spook Ed Lansdale on a revenge mission for the Diem assassinations.

After 60 years of reading about the JFKA, and maybe a dozen years reading primary documents, I have never reached a conclusion.

But the fact that CIA files are open, but not those of the KGB or G-2, should merit caution.