JFK Assassination Forum

Well, who knows?

KGB Col. Valery Vladimirovich KOSTIKOV (aka “Comrade Kostin”)
Brian D. Litman--Medium

·
Oct 27, 2017


An Incomplete Biography
In March of 1992, and in the wake of a most curious set of circumstances (which I intend to address in a future set of monographs), I became party to a most unexpected — if not mind-bending — new business relationship made possible by the systemic disarray concurrent with the Collapse of the Soviet Union.

Having arrived in Moscow (from Leningrad) in January of 1992, I began to engineer the first marketing relationships ever between major Soviet media entities and Western commercial interests.

My first client was the eminent Pravda, Lenin’s preeminent megaphone of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to … the World.

This relationship inevitably led to my personage becoming a rather large blip on the radar of the Party’s “Sword and Shield”. The Russian name for these esteemed defenders, translates to English as the “Committee for State Security”.

However, most know this organization by its (sometimes literally) arresting Russian to Latin abbreviation — KGB.

In a latter missive (someday), I will describe how I befriended an undercover KGB officer (deployed to one of my client newspapers) who was assigned to surveil me. I shall convey how I persuaded him to get me inside the greatly-feared Lubyanka HQ of KGB, for a meeting with some decision-makers.

The Soviet Union, America’s principal adversary had just disintegrated and I was standing in the rubble. But, I had ideas. Big ideas rooted in my long history in media. And I wanted to seize what I perceived to be a historic opportunity to make good business out of the chaos unfolding before me.

I succeeded.

After experiencing a set of meetings inside that foreboding edifice with a select group of KGB Generals, (whose own exploits have been featured prominently in major motion pictures), I made the Powerpoint presentation of my life.

To my amazement, this led to an agreement to represent the entirety of KGB veterans through their official / internal fraternity known as FIVA: “The Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association”.

The resulting press conference made international headlines and the man who sat next to me at the dais was a “Hero of the Russian Federation” who masterminded the exfiltration of the secrets of Los Alamos technology to Stalin. Anatoly Antonovich Yatskov … leader of the Atom Bomb espionage operation.

In that period, I became acquainted with not only Anatoly, but some of the most formidable and legendary Cold Warriors in the 20th Century.

Given the proposed release of more documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I thought I would illuminate the background of one of them.

He was a critical, yet very opaque character in the lore of the JFK Assassination.

His name was Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov (Colonel, KGB).

Or … as the dyslexic and forlorn Lee Harvey Oswald misremebered him: “Comrade Kostin”.

I will, in a deeper way, write more about this bull of a man whom I had become connected to on both a professional and personal basis — along with other high level KGB operatives whom I came to know.

All in good time.

But, for the immediate edification of those researchers and academics so interested in this particular moment — the below is actually a draft biography I had prepared, resulting from several meetings I had with Valera pursuant to my representation of him as an intelligence operative of not-small historical significance.

Kostikov was an intelligence officer for Первое Главное Управление or First Chief Directorate of KGB. This was the division responsible for foreign intelligence operations. The analog in the West would be like Israel’s Mossad or the UK’s SIS. KGB was reorganized in 1991 and now this unit is known as SVR which resolves to “Foreign Intelligence Service” in English.

Valera’s brief included what KGB referred to as both “active measures” (активные мероприятия) and … “special tasks”.

These “tasks” included such chores as assassination, destabilization operations, propaganda operations, sabotage and the targeting and destruction of strategic infrastructure of an Adversary.

Valera organized some things that you have heard about … but don’t quite know who was behind them.

And that not quite knowing is what separates the professionals from the amateurs.

(At some point, I will dust off some other documents and notes to complete the bio and post it.)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

BIOGRAPHY (in progress): COLONEL VALERY VLADIMIROVICH KOSTIKOV, KGB (Ret)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Two weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald wrote the following in a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C.:

“I am writing to inform you of recent events since my meetings with Comrade Kostin.”

The CIA later confirmed to the Warren Commission that the man to whom Oswald was refering was Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov.

Kostikov was the only KGB officer confirmed to have met with Oswald in the Warren Report.

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At the time his official title was Vice Consul of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. But this was just part of his responsibility at the Soviet enclave.

In fact, Kostikov was attached to the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB responsible for foreign intelligence. This Directorate included all the functions of the American CIA … and more.

Specifically, he was a Captain in the elite “13th Department”. This department was responsible for the planning and execution of paramilitary operations known as “special actions” — including assassination or “liquid affairs” and sabotage — against the United States and other Soviet adversaries in the event of hostilities.

Kostikov was a trained “neutralizer” and he was located in one of the most strategically important KGB stations in the World - Mexico City - on the doorstep of the United States (the “Main Adversary”).

Kostikov had two chance encounters with Lee Harvey Oswald on 27 and 28 September 1963 -solely in the course of his diplomatic duties.

The blowback from the confirmation of these encounters have engendered much wild speculation amongst the many theorists and investigators of the JFK murder. It also had a profound effect on the career of the masterspy.

For the greater part of his career in Soviet Intelligence, Kostikov was a KGB specialist on Latin America.

He participated in many high level diplomatic negotiations and worked closely with Soviet Premier Nikolai Podgorny in the 70's.

In 1950, Kostikov entered the First Moscow-State Teachers Institute of Foreign Languages. He graduated in 1955 as a translator, fluent In Spanish, English and French.

In 1957 he was coopted into Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate of KGB, working out of its Moscow headquarters on Lubyanka Square.

His first secret mission was to Spain in 1958, acting as an “interpreter” for delegates of the International Congress of Railways.

In 1959–1960 he went on his next foreign mission as a “staff member” of the exhibition, of Soviet achievements in Mexico and Cuba.

From 1961 to 1965 he went on extended assignment in Mexico. He was attached to the Mexico City KGB “Rezidentura” (equivalent of a CIA “Station”) as a principal in the Rezidentura’s “Line F” — responsible for — amongst other things — the organization of Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups called “diversionnye razvedyvatelnye gruppy” or DRGs.

But in between planning kidnappings, assassinations and sabotage of targets like dams, oil pipelines and military bases in the U.S., Kostikov actually conducted duties as a consular officer. It was during this posting in Mexico City that he had his two extraordinary encounters with Oswald on 27 and 28 September 1963 — almost 2 months before the assassination.

Oswald was looking for an immediate visa for return to the Soviet Union to where he had defected in 1959 and resided for over two years. His principal reason? He stated that he was tired of he and his wife, Marina, being harassed by the FBI. This, in the course of Oswald being a “defector-returnee” from the Soviet Union after having resided there for two and a half years.

Kostikov (joined by colleague Pavel Yatskov, a Rezidentura counter-intelligence operative) disarmed (Oswald had a defensive pistol) and calmed down the nearly-hysterical Oswald after informing him he would have to wait up to four months. After Oswald left the Rezidentura on Saturday, September 27th (yes, Yatskov returned him his pistol thinking maybe he really needed it) Kostikov thought he was done with this “strange gringo”.

Less than two months later he was horrified to learn that this thin, shaky-handed, nervous American had just been accused of assassinating the American president.

Major damage control ensued between the Rezidentura and Moscow Center. Kostikov achieved a level of very unwanted fame for an intelligence operative. He had been referenced in a letter to his embassy in Washington by the accused assassin of the president of the United States. In 1964 this was magnified by the inclusion of the letter (intercepted by FBI) in the official Warren Commission report on the assassination. Kostikov laid low in Mexico for several months after that.

The years 1965 to 1968 found Kostikov going on a number of “special missions” from Germany to Bulgaria. He also remained an advisor to the 13th Department (renamed in 1965 to Department V). He returned for another 3-year-tour ‘of duty in Mexico City from 1968 to 1971.

In 1971, he was forced to come “in from the Cold” and returned to Moscow due to the defection in London to the British of a member the 13th Department, Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin.

Kostikov was “compromised” and forced to “cool off” over a period of seven years.

By 1978, Moscow Center felt Kostikov had cooled sufficiently to be posted to one of the hotspots of the World — Beirut.

In 1982 Kostikov was nearly killed when Israeli mortars struck the Soviet Embassy in Beirut — destroying his office.

He returned to FCD’s Moscow Center / Yasenevo in 1983 as Chief of the Middle East Section.

In 1986, Kostikov was named Department V’s Deputy Chief of Personnel and Operations for Europe. During this time he executed classified missions throughout Europe, Greece, Cyprus, Syria, South Yemen, Mozambique and Afghanistan.

Kostikov retired with distinction from KGB in January 1992.

He died 10 years later in October of 2002.

……………………………………………………………………… END BIO

Valera died before his time. No doubt, due to his 2-pack-a-day Marlboro addiction … and fondness for Stolichnaya (a bottle of which I would never arrive to his flat — without).

These two vices , the latter of which I would always join him in partaking, during many tasty dinners of pelmeni, vareniki and Chicken Kiev cooked by Kostikov’s attentive wife Rosa at their cozy home in the Kuzminki district of Moscow.

But especially after dinner, the Vodka would flow. As did captivating conversation on topics, events and some of his successful operations conducted against the US.

Some of these I will elaborate in the future.

Others are — dogs best left … sleeping.

###

This is too complicated for me to understand.

I suspect LHO was impersonated in MC, but also actually there.

CIA-hating Sandy Larsen's theory that evil, evil rogue CIA officers sent a 5' 7", skinny, blond-haired, blue-eyed, very-thin-faced, 30-something guy to Mexico City in late September 1963 to impersonate Oswald-impersonator Nikolai Leonov so that the FBI and the mainstream CIA would think the Soviets and the Cubans had collaborated with Oswald to kill JFK fails to take the following things into consideration:

The only two reasons the FBI and the CIA believed on 11/23/63 that a KGB officer at the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City by the name of Valery Kostikov was the Northern Hemisphere head of the KGB's assassinations and sabotage section, Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate, were

1) A Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office, Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) had told the FBI in 1962 that Kostikov's charge (pardon the pun) at the UN, Igor Brykin, was Department 13, and

2) The FBI's and CIA's TUMBLEWEED agent, a German national crop-duster from Snyder, Oklahoma, by the name of Guenther Heinz Schulz, told them in early 1963 that he had met with Kostikov and Brykin in Mexico City and that they had given him instructions regarding a sabotage operation (pinpointing targets) he was to fulfill for them in the US.

Schulz had been a recon pilot for Hitler, captured and interred in a POW camp by the Brits, recruited by the NKVD/KGB, and (ostensibly) recruited by the OSS/CIA after he was released.

I personally wouldn't trust him, would you?

It's interesting to note that in 2005, the CIA's official historian, David Robarge, wrote that the Agency never did determine whether or not Kostikov was Department 13.

Two other things to take into consideration in this whole Mexico City scenario is that:

1) the "Oswald" that Silvia Duran and Eusebio Azcue said they'd dealt on or about 9/27/63 at the Cuban Consulate was described by them in such a way that perfectly matched Raul Castro's and Che's mentor, short, blond-haired, very-thin-faced KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov, and

2) the Soviet Embassy Security Officer who "volunteered" the Department 13-radioactive name "Kostikov" to Oswald or "Oswald" over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phone line on 10/1/63, Ivan Obyedkov, was described by James Angleton in his Church Committee testimony as a Kremlin-loyal triple agent, i.e., the CIA mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited him.

You do know that Max Holland is claiming [sic] that the 1st shot fired from the Sniper's Nest missed?

Will-we?

My comment: Although Max Holland is probably wrong that the bullet glanced off the traffic signal's mast arm at hypothetical "Z-107," it's totally plausible that Oswald missed everything with his shot at hypothetical "Z-124" because it, like Holland's conjectured "Z-107" shot, was steeply-downward-angled and therefore Oswald had to stand and lean forward awkwardly while firing it.

Also, the HSCA claimed the 4th shot fired from behind the picket fence missed.

As you know, the only reason the HSCA concluded there had been a fourth shot (gasp . . . from the bushes) was because it misinterpreted some sounds on the infamous Dictabelt recording.

D'oh!