JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate > JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate

Was SOLO a Kremlin-loyal triple agent?

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Tom Graves:

--- Quote from: Michael T. Griffith on January 07, 2026, 07:21:17 PM ---The Soviets and the Cubans were the last people on Earth who had any motive to kill JFK. Khrushchev had grown to like JFK and saw a real possibility for detente with JFK.

--- End quote ---

From Mark Riebling's 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA:

But what would the Soviets possibly gain from Kennedy’s death that would be worth the risk of U.S. retaliation? From a pragmatic Western perspective, there seemed little profit indeed, but James Angleton thought about the problem with more subtlety. First of all, the nuclear age precluded any massive U.S. retaliation — as Johnson’s craven cover-ups of all possible communist connections were already demonstrating. Second, if the Soviets had truly penetrated the Soviet Division at CIA, as Angleton believed, the KGB might even have hoped to steer U.S. investigation of the crime. As for the Soviet motive: Out was Kennedy, a charismatic leader who could “sell” a socially conscious anticommunism in the Third World and even to Western liberals. In was Johnson, who would only “heighten the contradictions” between East and West and therefore hasten (by Leninist dialectical reasoning) the ultimate collapse of late capitalism. Angleton also took seriously the observations marshaled in a November 27 memo by defector Pyotr Deriabin, who cited the Kennedy administration’s opposition to long-term credits to the Soviets, which he said were vital to survival of the USSR. Johnson, by contrast, came from an agricultural state and had always supported grain sales to Russia. Moreover, Western pressure on the USSR “would automatically ease up” if the KGB murdered the president. As evidence, Deriabin noted a “conciliatory telegram” by a frightened and disoriented Lyndon Johnson to Khrushchev. A more amenable America would “strengthen Khrushchev’s hand” at a time when the Soviet leader was under intensifying internal pressures because of mismanagement of the 1963 harvest and disputes with China. Kennedy’s death, as Deriabin put it, thus “effectively diverts the Soviets’ attention from their internal problems. It directly affects Khrushchev’s longevity.” Finally, Deriabin ventured that “the death of President Kennedy, whether a planned operation or not, will serve the most obvious purpose of providing proof of the power and omniscience of the KGB.” Much later, Angleton would obliquely compare the Soviets’ probable motivation to a famous scene in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, in which a Mafia chieftain puts a horse’s head into the bed of a stubborn film producer, in order to demonstrate “pure power.”

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