Larry Hancock and David Boylan are intelligent, circumspect and diligent researchers, with decades of research and document-hunting under their belts.
In general, the many leads the pair have uncovered track back to the Cuban exile community and related American mercs, or possibly related CIA'ers. The Miami Station-JMWAVE, etc.
But Hancock is also broad-minded enough to know he does not know what is unknowable, a rare perspective in the otherwise omnicient JFKA research community.
So it is only a mild but pleasant surprise when Hancock tipped his hat, so to speak, to the Russian possibility in his excellent blog, I think partially in response to some of my questions.
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https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2026/05/06/soviet-suspects/
Anyone interested in the assassination of President Kennedy will have come across the idea that the Soviets were behind his assassination. His successor was perhaps the first to quickly float that suspicion – and that fear – ostensibly not because he believed it, but that simply the idea might force a devastating nuclear exchange. LBJ used that fear with Earl Warren, and with others. He leveraged it, and the issue of national security, to drive attention solely towards a ‘lone nut’ assassin rather than allowing Oswald to be positioned as a Soviet agent or under Russian influence in the attack.
History has also shown the Russians to have been seriously concerned about such suspicions. Quick denials of any relationship with Oswald were made and in later years Soviet embassy personnel related being assigned to carry out a telephone call and meeting campaign with everyone they could influence to push the message of non-involvement – urgently, beginning the night of the assassination.
The simple fact that Johnson used the threat of war with such force (even talking with the head of the Atomic Energy Commission to get a number to quote in terms of forecast deaths from atomic warfare to use in his conversations) has tended to lean most JFK research away from the Soviets as true suspects. Yet Oswald had been in Russia, he certainly could have been under Soviet influence and Premier Khrushchev and the Russian military had been deeply embarrassed by the events of the Cuban missile crisis the previous year. On the face of it risking nuclear war over a motive as simple as personal revenge seems highly unlikely, but with high emotions some might have settled on that as an understandable motive, especially with the Cold War being at its height.
I’ve not explored the ‘Russia did it’ suspicion in my own work but recently Matt Crumpton asked me to come on his Solving JFK show and give it a deep dive based on David and my work on Lee Harvey Oswald. Matt asks great questions and led us into areas not often discussed these days. If it sounds of interest you can find his show here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/recap-rebuttals-part-20-ep-90-94-soviet-union-with/id1652334113?i=1000766370682
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And here are my comments.
Certainly, in comparison to narratives that have somewhat become canon, that is the “CIA and/or Mossad did it,” the narrative that assets related to the KGB or G2 might have manipulated or helped LHO perp the JFKA have been less researched.
The nutshell-story is that LBJ didn’t want a nuke war with Russia, and told Warren/WC as much, thus the LN CT was born. (John Newman says this was tricky CIA’ers at work, planting the WWIII virus, so any JFKA investigation would be stunted. This is further complicated by Newman’s later belief that CIA’er Bruce Solie, a KGB asset, was manipulating LHO. Are you following this?)
Notable: The US Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, and a well-regarded State Department staffer, Charles William Thomas, both lost their jobs for merely wanting to pursue LHO-Cuba leads.
The KGB chief in Minsk regarded LHO as an asset, though perhaps not after LHO departed Russia.
Of course, LHO in September visited three KGB’ers in MC, including wet-works boss Kostikov. They all met LHO on a Saturday.
This was about the same time Castro publicly warned the Kennedy brothers that assassination attempts could go both ways. In a different time and place with different standards, the Kennedys tried to have Castro assassinated several times, and Castro knew it.
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I contend LHO likely had two accomplices or manipulators on 11.22, someone at the GK (the smoke and bang show) and another shooter behind JFK. (That is my read on the Z-film and doctor testimony, another topic.)
I doubt the JFKA conspiracy-plot was much more than that, and could have been two lower-level hotheads associated with G2 or Alpha 66, keeping in mind Alpha 66 was penetrated by G2. In other words, no instructions from above in Havana, Moscow or Washington.
What representations the Alpha 66’ers, G2’ers made to LHO—who knows?
But it is indisputable LHO’s rifle was found near the TSBD6 window, and LHO was invisible when shots rang out. A slender light-skinned male was seen in the TSBD6 window by Brennan, when shots were fired.
LHO acted like someone who was guilty, or thought he had been framed, in the immediate aftermath of the JFKA. LHO is a reasonable suspect as the TSBD6 sniper, maybe even the best suspect.
The JFKA research community has largely tried to totally exonerate LHO in the assassination, but that may be the wrong tack, and one rooted in ideological biases.
It is also possible LHO was part of a very small JFKA CT.
That’s my best guess.
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Also worth noting–
While perhaps the bulk of US documents regarding the JFKA have been made public, and excellent researchers such as Hancock and Boylan have perused such, we have no assurance regarding documents in Havana or Moscow; indeed both capitals are run by extremely autocratic and repressive successor regimes.
If there are bona fide JFKA documents in those capitals, they are likely sequestered.
It may be much of what the KGB and G2 were doing in 1963 was never put on paper anyway.
We can be assured that Havana and Moscow will only release documents, fabricated or otherwise, that reflect poorly on Washington, but not on Havana and Moscow.
In other words, in assessing the possible role of the G2 or KGB in the JFKA, we face an opaque scrim when it comes to Havana and Moscow.
LOL!
Although probable KGB mole Bruce Solie may have duped James Angleton into sending former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald to Moscow in October 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA, and although Oswald lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk for two-and-a-half years, he very likely killed JFK all by him widdle Marxist self by firing three shots at him (at hypothetical "Z-124," Z-222, and Z-313) in the echo chamber known as Dealey Plaza.
As if that wasn't a big enough tragedy for our country and the world, the KGB has been "making hay" out of the anomaly-replete assassination ever since, as evidenced by Joachim Joesten's "Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?," the work of Mark "KGB" Lane, the KGB's placing an anti-Clay Shaw / anti-CIA article in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper (Paese Sera) three days after overly ambitious, scandal-plagued, and revengeful Jim Garrison had arrested Shaw on suspicion of having masterminded a homosexual thrill-kill assassination, by Oliver Stone's 1991 self-described mythological ("to counter the myth of the Warren Report") film, "JFK," by Jimmy DiEugenio's and Comrade Stone's box-office-bombing sequel a few years ago, and by Democrat-hating ROGER Stone's "LBJ Did It!!!" book a few years ago, too, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
