Digesting the newly released JFK files
DIGESTING THE JFK FILES
President Donald Trump ordered the release of more than 2,800 records related to the John F. Kennedy assassination on Thursday, but bowed to pressure from the CIA, FBI and other agencies to delay disclosing some of the most sensitive documents for six months. The thousands of pages published online describe decades of spies and surveillance, informants and assassination plots. Here are some details.
OSWALD WAS ON FBI RADAR
The FBI had discussed Oswald about a month before the shooting, according to a document marked 10/25/63.
An agent said: “Will maintain contact with Cuban sources for any indication of additional activity on the part of subject organization which appears to have become inactive since the departure from New Orleans of Lee Harvey Oswald.”
OSWALD’S MEETING WITH SOVIET AGENT
One file states that Lee Harvey Oswald met Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, a KGB agent who worked for the KGB’s 13th department, which was responsible for assassinations, about two months before Kennedy’s killing. The document, dated Nov. 23 1963, states: “According to an intercepted phone call in Mexico City, Lee Oswald was at the Soviet Embassy there on 28 September 1963 and spoke with the consul, Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov. This was learned when Oswald called the Soviet Embassy on 1 October, identifying himself by name and speaking broken Russian, stating the above and asking the guard who answered the phone whether there was ‘anything new concerning the telegram to Washington’. The guard told Oswald that a request had been sent, but nothing had as yet been received.”
The FBI believed the meeting related to a visa or passport application of Oswald.
CONCERNS THAT OSWALD WAS KGB AGENT
Yuri Nosenko was, on the surface, a senior KGB defector. Nosenko had told the Warren Commission that Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was never an agent of the KGB.
Tennent Bagley was one of Nosenko’s main handlers as chief of counterintelligence for the CIA’s Soviet division. Bagley wrote: “If Nosenko is a KGB plant, as I am convinced he is, there can be no doubt that Nosenko’s recited story about Oswald in the USSR is a message from the KGB. That message says, in exaggerated and implausible form, that Oswald had nothing whatever to do with the KGB, not questioned for his military intelligence, not even screened as a possible CIA plant … By sending out such a message, the KGB exposes the fact that it has something to hide … That something may be the fact that Oswald was an agent of the KGB.”
OSWALD WAS A ‘MANIAC’ IN SOVIET EYES
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote: “According to our source, Soviet officials claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. They described him as a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else. They noted that Oswald never belonged to any organization in the Soviet Union and was never given Soviet citizenship.”
SOVIETS FEARED COUP, WAR
“According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some wellorganized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’ They seem convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part.”
“Our source further stated that Soviet officials were fearful that without leadership, some irresponsible general in the United States might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.”
ASSASSINATING JFK ‘NOT WORTH IT’ FOR CUBA
A draft report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations found it unlikely that Cuba would kill Kennedy as retaliation for CIA’s attempts on Castro’s life “because such an act, if discovered, would have afforded the United States the excuse to destroy Cuba. The risk would not have been worth it.”
JFK’S REAL KILLER WAS ...
The records reveal a deposition given before the presidential Commission on CIA Activities in 1975 by Richard Helms, the agency’s former director. David Belin, an attorney for the commission, asked Helms: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or agent …?
Then, suddenly, the document cuts off.