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

[Tom Graves]

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.”

I have some bad news for you and John Newman.

IJDECANTER (Sergey Papushin) was a false defector, as indicated even by "useful idiots" like Milton Bearden in his book, The Main Enemy, and Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille in their book, Circle of Treason.

Bearden, page 438-39

Langley, August 16, 1990. During his sober moments, Papushin was clearly frustrated by the fact that he was largely being ignored by the CIA and FBI. So he did something he knew was guaranteed to once again grab attention: he gave one of his handlers an urgent message to be taken immediately to the top levels of the CIA. There is a mole in your there is a mole in the agency, Papushin declared. The KGB has one of your people. The CIA now gave Papushin their full attention and listened carefully to his story. He said that the KGB had a penetration of the CIA in Moscow. He had friends in the American department of the Second Chief Directorate, and he'd overheard enough from his colleagues to conclude that they had an agent in the CIA station. But as he was questioned further, it became apparent that he was scrambling with a fabricated story. Nothing he told his debriefers checked out, and eventually we concluded that he had come up with this story out of desperation. Another dead end in the search for an answer, any answer, to the problems five years earlier.

Grimes and Vertefeuille, page 210:

At one point in this phase, we became seriously sidetracked for a while. We received a report from an officer in one of our overseas stations that he had been in contact with a KGB officer and that this KGB officer had told him that the KGB was running a mole inside the CIA. As the story was told to us, the mole was an ethnic Russian who had served in Moscow. Based on this report, we began to concentrate on CIA employees who fit the parameters of this lead, although we did not discontinue examining information on employees, like Rick Ames, who did not. Eventually we discovered that there were major flaws in this story, and that it was probably a total fabrication. During this same period, we also received some misleading reporting from Sergey Papushin, the defector from the KGB's internal counterintelligence component [i.e., the Second Chief Directorate], to the effect that this component was running a CIA officer who had been assigned to Moscow. In other words, there was some similarity between populations statements and those recounted in the above statement. Unfortunately, Papushin had a severe alcohol problem which shortly thereafter caused his death. We ultimately decided that his reporting could not be relied upon. We then started to refocus on our shortlist as originally compiled. However, we had lost valuable time.