Soviets feared nuclear strike by rogue US general

THE Soviet Union was convinced it would be blamed for JFK’s assassination and might even be targeted in a nuclear strike by a rogue US general, the documents show.

Kremlin officials believed that a domestic conspiracy, probably a Right-wing coup aided by Dallas police, was behind President Kennedy’s death.

The Soviets have been a favourite target of JFK conspiracy theorists but US intelligence documents suggest America’s great Cold War foe was neither involved in his death nor pleased by it. According to a ‘Top Secret’ FBI memo documenting reactions in the USSR to the assassination, the Kremlin considered Lee Harvey Oswald a ‘neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else’.

The FBI’s unnamed ‘sources’ in Moscow reported that communist officials ‘believed there was some well-organised conspiracy on the part of the “ultra-Right” in the United States to effect a “coup”’.

It added: ‘They seemed 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.’

The Russians believed that ‘elements’ in the US intent on exploiting Kennedy’s death to blame the Soviet Union would then ‘stop negotations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war’.

The Soviet officials, who were anxious to know how the US would react under new president Lyndon Johnson, were ‘fearful that without leadership, some irresponsible general in the United States might launch a missile at the Soviet Union’.