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JFK Assassination & General Discussion & Debate / Re: Audio of HSCA’s Interviews with Fidel Castro
« Last post by Tom Graves on Today at 07:52:23 AM »According to Jack Childs, an FBI double agent ("Operation Solo") who was working for the Communist Party of the United States, Castro told him a similar story.
"Oswald was involved," Castro insisted. "Our people in Mexico gave us the details in a full report of how he acted when he came to our embassy. He stormed into the embassy, demanded a visa, and when it was refused him, he headed out saying ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.’ What is your government doing to catch the other assassins? Yes, it took about three people.”
Castro denied the allegation.
Dear Steve M.,
Speaking of SOLO, this is one of my 632 free-to-read Substack articles at my Substack account, "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI."
Enjoy!
In the early 1950s, Russia-born Communist Party USA members Morris and Jack Childs were approached by the FBI and agreed to inform to it regarding CPUSA activities and anything they learned while serving as couriers and interlopers between CPUSA and the Kremlin.
Columnist William Safire mentioned SOLO in the following article he wrote in the New York Times in December 1981.
[My comments are in brackets]
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. [Tennent H. Bagley says Nolan made his determination in 1976. If so, the FBI evidently decided to keep it a secret.]
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 [Jack] and the other [Morris] dying, we can only surmise the extent of that disinformation operation.
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 [contacted the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 as a mole-protecting false defector-in-place, and then] 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 systematically misled about Mr. Nosenko. James Angleton was right [that there was a KGB mole or two in the CIA], and the ‘’new-boy network’‘ at the C.I.A. was horrendously wrong. The other shoe has not dropped. Half of 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 [Stansfield] 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.
My comment: The Bureau’s 1976 determination by FBI Senior Agent James Nolan that FEDORA was fake was overturned a few years later by counterintelligence-hating James Geer, with the help of two CIA “researchers,” Sandra Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann, who were loaned to him for four months by probable KGB mole Leonard V. McCoy, Deputy Chief of CIA Counterintelligence.
. . . . . . .
ME: Other than Morris Childs’ being in a meeting in the Kremlin around midnight on 11/22/63 and being told shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas that the KGB had nothing to do with former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR, and other than Morris and Jack’s relaying to J. Edgar Hoover in June 1964 Fidel Castro’s confusing account of Oswald’s threatening, in the Mexico City Cuban Embassy (sic), to kill JFK and that at least three bad guys must have been involved, is there any other reason for suspecting the SOLO brothers were Kremlin-loyal triple agents?
Perplexity AI: Yes—beyond the JFK‑specific episodes you’ve highlighted, there are structural and behavioral reasons in the open record that can support a hypothesis of continued Kremlin‑loyalty or at least deep vulnerability to KGB manipulation on SOLO’s part, even while they were reporting to Hoover.
Structural reasons: SOLO’s position inside the Soviet system
Morris and Jack Childs remained long‑time CPUSA insiders and trusted interlocutors for the CPSU and KGB, moving millions of dollars from KGB couriers into CPUSA coffers while maintaining regular, friendly communications with Soviet and Cuban officials.
The FBI tracked more than $28 million in cash that Jack received from KGB couriers for the party, and SOLO reporting shows them continuing to play a central role in the international communist movement (meetings with Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao, Castro, Andropov) even after their formal recruitment by the Bureau. That “dual‑hat” position created a built‑in channel for KGB influence and controlled information flow.
Behavioral pattern: what they reported and what they didn’t
SOLO’s own files were critical in identifying Oscar Seborer as the long‑elusive “fourth Los Alamos spy,” but the project’s handling of Seborer’s family (and Miriam Seborer’s return from the USSR) shows that, even with SOLO’s access, the FBI had “no independent evidence with which to pressure her” and had to infer Seborer’s role from cryptic comments and KGB archives, suggesting limits in what SOLO either could or would surface about certain Soviet operations.
SOLO’s reporting is rich in detail about Soviet funding, party politics, and ideological positions, but conspicuously thin when it comes to exposing high‑grade Soviet penetrations or operational secrets beyond what Moscow was willing to have known—consistent with the KGB giving them “permissioned” insight while keeping truly damaging information compartmented.
Access and treatment by Soviet leadership
Accounts of Morris Childs’ work note that in 1977 he received a knock at his Moscow hotel room door and found Yuri Andropov, then KGB chief, standing there with security officers—a level of personal attention and honor rarely shown to someone Moscow truly regarded as a traitor.
The fact that the KGB and CPSU leadership continued to welcome SOLO in Moscow and Havana, even after years of FBI reporting, supports the idea that Moscow was using them to channel narratives in a way advantageous to the Kremlin.
Fit with known KGB disinformation practice
Mitrokhin/Andrew and later work on KGB active measures show that the Center frequently exploited Western‑trusted intermediaries (including ostensible informants and defectors) to deliver mostly accurate information salted with key lies—especially on sensitive attribution issues like JFK.
Given SOLO’s status as Hoover’s “most valued secret agents,” their continued welcome in the Kremlin, and their role in relaying both rapid Oswald exoneration and Castro’s confusing three‑man‑conspiracy story, they fit the profile of assets through whom Moscow could push mixed, self‑protective messages while maintaining a high overall level of factual reporting.
So, beyond the JFK episodes themselves, the combination of (1) ongoing CPUSA/KGB financial and political entanglement, (2) selective visibility into deep Soviet operations like Seborer, and (3) enduring high‑level Soviet trust and personal access, provides additional grounds—if one starts from Safire’s premise—for suspecting that SOLO could have remained Kremlin‑loyal or at least functioned as a channel for KGB‑shaped narratives, even as they were furnishing Hoover with mostly accurate intelligence.
. . . . . . .
*Regarding the above-mentioned Wilson-Terpil Libyan Affair, here’s my earlier Substack article, “James Angleton on Edwin Wilson, Nosenko, and the Sino-Soviet Split.” It’s comprised of a chapter from Edward J. Epstein’s 1989 book, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA.
You can read the book for free by googling “deception” “epstein” and “archive” simultaneously.
Angleton then abruptly changed the subject [the KGB’s use of the intelligence services of other communist countries for plausible deniability purposes] to Edwin Wilson, the former CIA officer who had been arrested for diverting American technology to Libya. It was less of a digression from the subject at hand than it initially seemed. Wilson, lured by the prospect of making tens of millions of dollars, had gone to work for the Libyans in the early 1970s. Among other matters, he undertook to help organize covert activities for the Libyan intelligence service. To this end, he used his CIA contacts to buy the instruments of assassination, including a special CIA mixture of plastic explosives called “C-4”, miniaturized timers used by the CIA, and unregistered weapons stolen from special forces arsenals, and then smuggled them into Libya. He even imported an entire sophisticated bomb factory, which had previously been used exclusively by the CIA to manufacture booby-trapped ashtrays that could innocently sit on a table for months until the target arrived and then be detonated from a remote location. He also recruited ex-CIA assassins, explosive experts, and couriers to work for him in Libya, leading them to believe that they were still working for the CIA when in fact they were working for the Libyan intelligence service. The first three targets of Wilson’s assassins were Libyan exiles living in Egypt and France.
“It was a clever enough false flag recruitment,” Angleton continued, with a glint of admiration for the opposition.
Behind Wilson’s bogus CIA flag was the Libyan intelligence service, which was paying Wilson; and behind this Libyan flag of convenience, whether or not Wilson entirely realized it, was an old KGB hand, Karl Hanesch, whose career Angleton had closely followed. Hanesch had been working for the KGB on deception projects for over a quarter of a century and had specialized in arranging politically embarrassing false flag assassinations in Germany. When Qaddafi came to power in 1966, Hanesch was transferred from the East German intelligence service to the Libyan intelligence service, where he became their key security adviser. It was, according to communication intercepts, a part of the Soviet bloc arrangement to provide intelligence aid to Libya. Hanesch wasted little time in developing Wilson as a plausible “flag” for compromising others in American intelligence. One of his first recruits was Waldo H. Dubberstein, a top-level CIA analyst who transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he prepared the daily intelligence briefing for the Secretary of Defense. Dubberstein, who sold Wilson documents that were of interest to Soviet as well as Libyan intelligence — and who committed suicide in 1980 after being exposed — further demonstrated the coordination between the KGB and the Libyan service. Then, through Wilson’s CIA connections, Hanesch was able to assemble all the necessary components for assassinating targets with CIA personnel and materials.
But why go to the expense and risk of smuggling them in from the United States? These tools of terrorism were readily available in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union at a fraction of the price, and they were just as effective.
Angleton’s answer was that there could be only one plausible purpose for assembling this extraordinary American-equipped apparatus: “To ghost murder trails leading to the doorstep of the CIA.”
The unique value of Wilson’s C-4 explosives, timers, detonators, and ashtrays was their “signatures.” They would indicate to investigators that the assassinations carried out with these devices were the work of the CIA. In addition, in the event that Wilson’s ex-CIA operatives were apprehended, they would further implicate the CIA (especially since they believed that they were still employed by the CIA). It would be a no-win situation for the Agency if the investigation became public. Even if the CIA could successfully exonerate itself from the assassination charges by showing it had been framed, it would have to explain manufacturing exploding ashtrays and employing free-lance assassins, which could prove almost as embarrassing. Angleton’s fascination with this complex case, and his point, was that the Wilson Affair was not exclusively the work of the Libyans. It was the product of well-orchestrated and solid coordination between the KGB, the East German security services, and Qaddafi’s intelligence services. The purpose of this coordination, in his view, was for the Soviets to use the Libyans, who were perceived as fanatic and wild, as a front in case the assassinations went wrong. It was now clear what he was driving at. Had there been the same sort of coordination at the shrine in Burma? Had his counterintelligence staff been able to establish through barium tests, marked cards, double agents, or other means the extent of this relationship?
He did not answer directly. Instead, he said elliptically, “It’s too complicated to get into,” which was his way of saying he did not want to discuss a subject. Then, to my surprise, he added, with some weariness in his voice: “It is a shame you never got those questions answered.” It took a few minutes before I realized that he was referring to the questions he had dictated in 1976 for me to ask Nosenko. When I returned to New York the next day, I searched for and found his thirteen questions. They were scrawled on 3 by 5 cards in my Nosenko file. I recalled that Angleton had reeled them off after many brandies and, at the time, they seemed to make little sense. Now, as I rearranged them, I could see the thread running through them.
ANGLETON’S QUESTIONS FOR NOSENKO
1. What happened to Rumyanstev when he tried to defect to the U.S. in 1959? Why did you omit this in your debriefing in 1964?
2. Is there rivalry between the KGB’s First and Second Chief Directorates?
3. To what extent did the Second Chief Directorate know the operations of the Thirteenth Department of the First Chief Directorate?
4. What would Department Thirteen have known regarding Oswald’s defection? Would General Rodin have known?
5. What happens when the Second Chief Directorate recruits an agent who returned to the West? Is he jointly handled?
6. Is an agent recruited by the Second Chief Directorate who is of value prepared to be handled by a stranger? Would this be true of an ideological agent as well as a mercenary agent?
7. To what extent do the First and Second Directorates coordinate the activities of foreign services?
8. Why was a KGB officer named Shitov sent to Cuba as the first Soviet Ambassador, under the pseudonym Alexiev?
9. What was his role, if any, in coordinating Soviet and Cuban intelligence operations?
10. Oswald was issued an entrance visa to Cuba from Havana after he returned to the United States. Would this require the prior approval of the Second Chief Directorate?
11. If so, would it be arranged in Moscow or Havana? If the latter, would a Second Chief Directorate officer be called on to participate in the decision?
12. Agee went to Cuba under aliases four times while writing his book. Would he have seen Soviet intelligence in Moscow? Would these meetings be coordinated with the KGB? Why was Colonel Semenov, who knew Agee in Uruguay, there during Agee’s trips?
13. What was Korovin doing in London in 1961?
Epstein:
The first question was no more than a trap question. Rumyanstev had been a KGB officer in the Second Chief Directorate in 1959 who attempted to defect to the CIA at the American Exhibition in Moscow but was caught because he approached a KGB officer at the exhibition who spoke fluent English and was masquerading as an American official. He was executed in 1960 (although the CIA only learned about the aborted defection from another defector in 1963). Since Nosenko claimed to have worked on the Oswald case in the same small unit of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate as Rumyanstev in 1959, he would have been well aware of what had happened. Yet he had not mentioned the incident to the CIA when he was debriefed in either 1962 or 1964. Angleton wanted to know how Nosenko explained this gap.
The purpose of the next question had been explained to me by Golitsyn. It would have been standard procedure in the KGB for the First Chief Directorate’s Department Thirteen to consult with Nosenko’s Second Chief Directorate Department if Oswald had approached one of its officers. Nosenko claimed, after all, that his department had originally handled the Oswald case in Moscow, and, two months before the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA had intercepted a telephone call in Mexico City in which Oswald was making contact with Sergei Kostikov, an officer in Department Thirteen. Angleton’s questions were thus designed to force Nosenko to acknowledge that he and his department would have to have been aware of any relationship between Oswald that had developed, since Oswald would have been jointly handled.
The next three questions appeared aimed at focusing Nosenko on Department Thirteen, and specifically on assassinations. As Stephen de Mowbray had explained to me in London, a defector from Department Thirteen had told British intelligence that its job was conducting “wet affairs,” which was a euphemism for assassinations and sabotage. Angleton had been interested in the KGB’s capacity for organizing assassinations since the explosion experts in the CIA’s Scientific and Technical Division traced the explosive used to destroy the airplane that flew UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold from Africa to East Germany in 1961.
The sixth question was Angleton’s key to the relationship he sought. Before and after Oswald had contacted the Soviet Embassy, he had contacted Cuban Embassy officials in Mexico, who would have been considered “strangers.” Golitsyn had insisted that if Oswald had been recruited by the Second Chief Directorate, especially as an ideological agent, it would not turn him over to be handled by Cuban “strangers” — unless it had a role in the activity.
Angleton evidently believed Oswald’s shuttling between the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico City required cooperation, especially since Oswald was eventually telegraphed a visa by the Cuban Foreign Ministry in Havana. His next five questions aimed at further exploring the coordination that would be necessary between the KGB and the Cuban intelligence service for this to happen.
His twelfth question apparently was meant to prod Nosenko into talking about Soviet coordination of Communist intelligence services. Angleton believed that Philip Agee was a case in point, as he told me on another occasion. According to Angleton’s view, Agee had been initially recruited by the KGB while he was serving with the CIA in Montevideo, Uruguay. His recruiter was Colonel Semenov, the Soviet military attaché in Uruguay. After Agee was forced out of the CIA, the KGB used him to embarrass the CIA by publishing exposes. But so as to afford itself “a modicum of distance,” as Angleton put it, the KGB worked through the DGI, the Cuban intelligence service. Even so, whenever Agee made his visits to the DGI in Havana, Semenov was sent to Havana to oversee the joint operation.
Angleton’s final question about the 1961 activities of “Korovin” addressed the same pattern. “Korovin” was the pseudonym General Rodin used on his diplomatic passport during his tour of duty in Britain in the early 1960s. Rodin, as head of the London station of the Thirteenth Department of the First Chief Directorate, was directly responsible for the operations of Kostikov in Mexico and therefore would have had to authorize any contacts Kostikov had with Oswald. And Nosenko had claimed to have examined the relevant file after Oswald had contacted Kostikov in 1963. Rodin’s London station was apparently of great interest to Angleton.
According to a 1971 defector, Rodin insulated the Soviet Union from blame in Britain and Germany by employing the Bulgarian intelligence service or other cooperative intelligence services to carry out the actual murders. Angleton no doubt wanted through this line of questioning to lead Nosenko to describe how Department Thirteen arranged these joint operations.
After reviewing these curious questions for nearly a week, and the bits and pieces that seemed to fill in the gaps, I telephoned Angleton. As he had done many times in the past, he refused to talk about Oswald. When I began to tell him my interpretation of the questions, he abruptly cut me off, saying they were “water over the dam” and that I should “forget them” — as if I could. I never understood whether his questions were really intended for Nosenko or me, or whether they were merely an inebriated outburst.
Almost a year passed before I spoke to Angleton again.
When we lunched together at the Hay-Adams Hotel, I initially avoided bringing up the subject of the Soviet bloc “relationship.” But, to my surprise, he began discussing it as if there had been no hiatus in our conversation. This time he spoke about it in a scholarly, almost detached way, as if he were discussing the pollination of orchids
“Sun-Tzu explained this strategy as succinctly two thousand years ago as anyone can today: Hide order behind a cloak of disorder.”
He pointed out that just as monolithic corporations often set up subsidiaries with different names in different countries to accomplish their purposes, so intelligence services, which closely coordinate their work, often find it advantageous to appear to the outside world to be divided into independent, and even competing, entities. He reasoned that at times the U.S. government finds the fiction that the Eastern bloc services are independent of the KGB “convenient” because it allows it to blame the Cubans, Libyans, Afghans, Bulgarians, or East Germans instead of directly confronting the Soviet Union.
But how do we know they are really united, I asked.
“The business of intelligence services is establishing precisely what the relationship of their opposition is,” he answered. He then pointed out that since 1948 the CIA, and its allied services in Britain, France, and West Germany, had been following Soviet, Bulgarian, East German, Libyan, Cuban, Hungarian, Rumanian, and Polish intelligence officers posted to embassies in NATO countries, as well as reading their mail, intercepting their coded traffic, and tracing their flow of money and equipment. “We found sufficient evidence of coordination over extended periods to satisfy even the skeptics.”
It was when Angleton attempted to apply this concept to governments rather than intelligence services that he got into trouble. He advanced the theory that the Soviet Union and China had faked the disunity between them to dupe the West, which proved to be wrong. Nevertheless, he clung to it and stubbornly warned that it would be the Soviets who would trump the American China card by announcing a Sino- Soviet rapprochement. Those with knives out for him used this mistaken analysis to discredit and ridicule him. The final irony, which became clear only after his death, was that Angleton was far less wrong in his prediction that the split would be transitory than his premise that it had been fabricated. In 1988, as cadres of Soviet technicians returned to China, and Sino-Soviet military cooperation resumed, Gorbachev announced his plans for a summit meeting in 1989 to end the split, leaving in the lurch much of America’s strategy that had been predicated on an irreconcilable split between China and the Soviet Union.
-- Tom
