The JFK files
Cubans, the KGB and the mystery phone call
Lee Harvey Oswald met a senior KGB agent months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, according to National Archives documents released yesterday.
According to the documents on Kennedy’s assassination released by President Donald Trump, Oswald met agent Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov in Mexico City's Soviet embassy two months before Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The documents say Oswald was intercepted calling the embassy on October 1, speaking in broken Russian, identifying himself by name, and letting it be known he had met with Kostikov on September 28.
He asked if there was “anything new concerning the telegram to Washington”, and was told there wasn’t.
Kostikov was a senior agent in the 13th Department which was responsible for assassinations.
The details are among many emerging from the records released under law yesterday. But Trump blocked the release of hundreds of other records, bending to CIA and FBI appeals.
Trump placed the files held back under a six- month review while letting 2800 others come out, racing a deadline to honour a law mandating their release.
The documents approved for release capture the frantic days after the assassination, during which federal agents madly chased after tips, however thin, juggled rumours and sifted through leads worldwide.
They include cables, notes and reports stamped “secret” that reveal the suspicions of the era — around Cubans and Communists. They cast a wide net over varied activities of the Kennedy Administration, such as its covert efforts to upend Fidel Castro’s Government in Cuba.
There was also a report that a journalist at Britain’s Cambridge Evening News received an anonymous call telling him to ring the US embassy for some big news, 25 minutes before the murder.
A memo written to the director of the FBI from a senior official at the CIA reads: “The British security service ( MI- 5) has reported that at 18: 05 GMT on 22nd November an anonymous telephone call was made in Cambridge, England, to the senior reporter of the Cambridge News. The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American embassy in London for some big news and then hung up.”
For historians, it’s a chance to answer lingering questions, put some unfounded conspiracy theories to rest, perhaps give life to other theories.
Experts will be poring through a mountain of minutiae and countless loose threads in search of significant revelations.
In the chaotic aftermath of the assassination, followed two days later by the murder of the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, while in police custody, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover vented his frustration in a formerly secret report found in the files.
It opened: “There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead.”
But, reflecting on Oswald less than an hour after he died, Hoover already sensed theories would form about a conspiracy broader than the lone assassin.
“The thing I am concerned about, and so is ( Deputy Attorney General) Mr Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin,” he said.