JFK ASSASSIN CONTACTED KGB AGENT
LEE Harvey Oswald met a KGB agent just two months before the Kennedy assassination, it emerged.
He spoke to Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, an agent who worked in the Soviet spy organisation’s notorious 13th department, which was responsible for assassinations.
The meeting at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City was revealed when Oswald called the embassy a few days later, identifying himself by name and saying he had met Kostikov.
Oswald spoke in ‘ broken Russian’, according to a US interception of the phone call, and said he had visited the embassy on September 28, 1963.
A document in the JFK files stated: ‘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”.’
It was not clear what the telegram was about, but the FBI believed that the meeting related to a visa or passport application, possibly for Oswald’s Soviet-born wife.
Oswald, a former US Marine, defected to the Soviet Union after he was discharged from the Marines in 1959 and met and married a Russian woman, Marina Prusakova.
A Senate committee later questioned why Oswald – a known Soviet sympa- thiser – was not interviewed by the FBI after he returned from Mexico City, after authorities knew he had met Kostikov.
The files also revealed that a plot to kill Oswald was reported to the FBI the day before he was shot dead.
FBI director J Edgar Hoover relayed the threat to the Dallas police and was told Oswald would be protected.
But he was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby the next day while being transferred between jails – two days after the president’s assassination.
Hoover noted: ‘Last night we received a call from our Dallas office from a man talking in a calm voice and saying he was a member of a committee organised to kill Oswald.’
Oswald was arrested on the day of the assassination and later charged with his murder, although he insisted he was a ‘patsy’ – meaning he had been coerced.