JFK Assassination Forum

Operation SOLO required a huge expenditure of FBI time, money, and ingenuity. The Bureau had to cut ethical and legal corners, deceive other government agencies, and even facilitate the operations of the CPUSA by transferring Soviet money that enabled the US party to pay its fulltime staff, publish its newspapers, and subsidize travel overseas by its cadres.

— Pro-SOLO Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes in 2022


If you’ve been reading my "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI" Substack posts, you know I’m convinced that Bruce Leonard Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and George Kisevalter were KGB “moles” at CIA, that putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko and KGB Colonel Vitali Yurchenko were false defectors, that Top Hat (GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov) and Fedora (KGB Major Aleksei Kulak) at the FBI’s NYC field office were Kremlin-loyal triple agents, and that Kitty Hawk (KGB Major Igor Kochnov) was a KGB “dangle.”

What about J. Edgar Hoover’s highly valued “penetrations of CPUSA and the Kremlin,” those two Russian Empire-born brothers, Jack and Morris Childs, collectively known as SOLO? Did they really spy for the Bureau while acting as bagmen and couriers for the Kremlin, or were they, like Nosenko, Kulak, Kochnov, Yurchenko, and (before he flipped abroad to CIA) Polyakov — Kremlin-loyal, too?


On 17 September 1981, NYT columnist William Safire seemed to think it was the latter.

My comments are in brackets.

By 1976, I am informed, the FBI 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 FBI, and misleading our CIA. In the current Reader’s Digest, Henry Hurt breaks the news of the FBI’s decision to disbelieve FEDORA, dating the decision in 1980 [Tennent H. Bagley says 1977]. We now know (1) that the men in charge of American counterespionage had been hoodwinked for 15 years, and (2) that the FBI 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 [Morris and Jack Childs] 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. 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 CIA that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a Soviet agent. FEDORA told us to believe Mr. Nosenko. For nearly two decades, our CIA 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 CIA, teaching counterintelligence to our spies, which the writer Edward Jay Epstein rightly calls ‘’the crowning absurdity.” Here is the significance: if the FBI’s FEDORA tricked us, as the FBI has believed for some years and now quietly admits, then we were systematically misled about Mr. Nosenko. James Angleton was right, and the ‘’new-boy network’‘ at the CIA was horrendously wrong. The other shoe has not dropped. Half the Soviet disinformation plot stands revealed, the other half sits in place. At the CIA, a wholesale reevaluation 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. [Note: See my article “Angleton on Edwin Wilson, Nosenko, and the Sino-Soviet Split” regarding THAT can of worms.] I think that is part of his cover-up for being suckered by Mr. Nosenko, FEDORA and the disinformation scheme.


My comment: FBI agent James Nolan's 1977 determination that FEDORA was fake was overturned in 1983 by counterintelligence-hating James Geer with help from a couple of Nosenko-loving / Angleton-and-Golitsyn-hating CIA "researchers" (Sandra Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann), provided to him by probable KGB mole, Leonard V. McCoy.

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Factoid:

Morris Childs was conveniently in the Kremlin on the day of the JFK assassination, and that night, right after word came in that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested in Dallas, he was told that the KGB had already determined that it had had nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-a-half years he’d lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

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More factoids:

After the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover sent one (or both?) of the Childs brothers to Havana to learn about Oswald’s interactions with Cuban diplomats in Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination.

Morris and/or Jack reported back that Castro had told him/them that Oswald had gone to the Cuban Embassy and offered to kill JFK, and that the diplomats had turned him down.

Problem is, Oswald (or an imposter; I'm guessing KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov, aka "The Blond Oswald in Mexico City") visited the Cuban Consulate, not the Cuban Embassy, and did so on a Friday (and, according to CIA wiretappers, possibly the next day when it was supposed to be closed), and, supposedly furious that the Cubans wouldn't give him a visa, was thrown out by Consul Eusebio Azcue — but here's the deal -- neither Azcue nor his secretary, Sylvia Duran, said anything to the authorities in Mexico City or Washington about Oswald’s threatening to kill JFK.

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In his 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, Mark Riebling wrote that, having discredited Nicaragua intelligence agent Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte's claim to have seen Oswald accept $6,500 from a "tall, redheaded Negro who spoke with a Cuban accent" at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, but fearing that CIA's preliminary determination regarding KGB officer Valery Kostikov might be true, i.e., that Kostikov, with whom Oswald had met in Mexico City, was a Department 13 officer, the FBI announced that it had uncovered no evidence to suggest that the assassination was a conspiracy.

Riebling: That conclusion, reached officially by the FBI on December 9, 1963, had in fact colored the Bureau’s investigation from the start. As Mexico City [FBI] legat Anderson later said, he proceeded at all times under the “impression,” conveyed to him by Bureau headquarters, that Oswald was the sole assassin and not part of any conspiracy. He therefore “tried to stress,” to the skeptical ambassador and to his CIA contacts, “that every bit of information that we had developed in Washington, at Dallas, and elsewhere, indicated that this was a lone job.” That conclusion was bolstered around the turn of the year, when the Bureau sent Jack and Morris Childs, two FBI moles working in the American Communist Party as part of an operation code-named SOLO, to visit the Cuban Embassy. The Childses reported that Oswald had indeed discussed assassination with the Cubans, but that the offer had been turned down. This report matched most FBI agents’ intuitions. Neither the KGB nor its Cuban offshoot, the highly professional DGI, would have hired an unstable loser like Oswald, the Bureau’s reasoning ran. Nor would Castro or Khrushchev have risked U.S. discovery and retaliation — such as an invasion of Cuba, or even world war — merely to replace a liberal like Kennedy with the more conservative Lyndon Johnson. Nor would speculation about a communist role serve either the country or the Bureau well. Therefore, William Sullivan leaked, on what he later said were Hoover’s orders, the news that “An exhaustive FBI report now nearly ready for the White House will indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and unaided assassin of President Kennedy.”

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As can be seen in the following FBI memo from A. H. Belmont to W. C. Sullivan on January 1, 1965, the Bureau was desperate to convince CIA that Nosenko was a true defector and that FEDORA was truly spying for it. (Note: "NY 694" was Jack Childs)

Yuri Nosenko defected in Geneva, Switzerland, to the Central Intelligence Agency in January, 1964. This Agency on conducting an exhaustive analysis and interrogation of Nosenko is convinced that he is “a plant” and not a genuine defector from the Soviets to the United States. CIA does make a substantial case to support this conclusion. During the course of CIA's analysis, because of information furnished by our own defector in place, FEDORA, which is quite similar to some information furnished by Nosenko, it was inevitable that the question of FEDORA’s own legitimacy would eventually come up. CIA plans to ultimately present its case to the White House concerning Nosenko, and, therefore, it is imperative to clarify from our standpoint our position that the evidence we have indicates that FEDORA is a legitimate defector and not a plant sent to us by the Soviets. In order to do this, it is necessary to relate FEDORA to information which we have already given CIA in various espionage cases carrying code names of NICKNACK, GUNSON, GLEME, etc. GLEME, a woman Soviet agent, is now dead, and both GUNSON and NICKNACK have returned to Soviet Russia. Further, to show CIA convincingly that FEDORA, as far as we know, is legitimate, we should also refer to NY 694 of our SOLO operation and because FEDORA has furnished us information concerning meetings between NY 694 and a Soviet who provides our informant NY 694 with money for the Communist Party, USA. Judging from what CIA “let drop” over a period of years, it is already aware of the identity of NY 694, although we have never officially advised CIA. As a matter of fact, CIA would have to be a total failure as an intelligence agency not to have identified NY 694, in view of information disseminated and trips which in NY 694 has made to Russia. Because the Nosenko case of CIA will ultimately go to the White House, now is the time to clarify the issue on the FEDORA on our own terms rather than probably being forced to do so later on terms other than our own. Further, this information is very material and important in adjudicating this serious national security case involving Nosenko. The FBI should not be put in a position of withholding material facts from another government agency which has asked FBI assistance in.

The FBI's Robert Frazier examined the limo and the windshield.  He testified that the windshield was actually two separate sheets of glass molded together to form one windshield.  He stated that the inner sheet, the side facing the limo's interior, had a crack in it.  The outer sheet, the side facing outside the limo, was smooth.  This was not a through and through hole; only a crack.

  People do Not realize that the TSBD Landing where Prayer Man was standing has been changed. That landing was Not as deep back on 11/22/63. The narrowness of that landing makes it difficult to believe that Frazier would Not have seen Oswald standing there at some point. Also, there was only 1 glass door that permitted TSBD entry/exit. And Frazier was standing in front of that 1 glass door. If Prayer Man/Oswald had entered the TSBD via that front glass door in order to get himself a soda pop, Frazier would have seen Oswald at that point.

So it was Hosty and his testimony drew no questions from it.
So not many.  A few FBI agents informally not expected to comment on it

Google AI says:

“Yes, the windshield from the JFK assassination limousine was brought into the Warren Commission's hearing room and accepted as evidence on March 9, 1964.
The item, designated Commission Exhibit (CE) 351, was carried into the room wrapped in a blanket for examination by the commission members. Secret Service agents, including Roy H. Kellerman, who was in the front seat of the limousine during the shooting, were present to testify.
The windshield was a key piece of physical evidence in the investigation, particularly regarding the path of the bullets. FBI experts determined that an abrasion on the inner surface of the glass was caused by a bullet fragment impacting it from the inside of the car, corroborating the conclusion that all shots came from behind the limousine.
Today, the windshield is preserved as evidence and held by the National Archives. You can view images of the windshield through the National Archives catalog.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=was+the+windshield+from+the+JFK+assassination+limo+displayed+in+the+hearing+room+of+the+Warren+Commission+during+the+hearings&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari

So, it was brought into the room on March 9, 1964 and was still there in May when Hosty testified. I would assume that many other witnesses saw the windshield in that room.

Cite your source.

Why would any witness be expected to comment in the record on something sitting there but was not asked about?
Most witnesses in Dallas gave depositions to one attorney and stenographer at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the local Post Office Building.

“Assignment: Oswald” by James Hosty, page 193:
On the day of his testimony to the commission (May 1964 if I remember correctly):

In the middle of the room was a long conference table. At the far end was a large executive-type desk, and sitting on it was the windshield from President Kennedy’s limousine. The day before, Stern had shown this windshield to Belmont, Fain, Quigley, and me. We could see pock-marks on the inside of the windshield. Stern explained that forensic experts had determined that the pockmarks were consistent with highspeed bullet fragments hitting it.