JFK files: House panel suspicious of defector
Committee investigating assassination had doubts about KGB agent’s claims
WASHINGTON – Members of the House committee investigating the assassination of President Kennedy had serious reservations about the testimony of a KGB defector who claimed the Soviet intelligence service made no attempt to recruit Lee Harvey Oswald when he defected to the Soviet Union, newly released documents show.
Several members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations challenged the testimony on June 20, 1978, by Yuri Nosenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964. Kenneth Klein, one of the committee’s chief lawyers who grilled Nosenko during the third day of his testimony before the panel, also expressed doubts.
The testimony was released Dec. 15 by the National Archives as part of a series of disclosures of documents related to the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
A deposition by CIA Agent David Murphy, a member of the team that interrogated Nosenko, was released. So was a 1964 memo by CIA Director John McCone that detailed a meeting in which he told President Johnson that the agency thought Nosenko was a KGB plant.
Members of the assassinations committee didn’t believe that Oswald was considered so insignificant by the KGB that it did not try to either recruit him or send him back to the USA because the Soviets considered him mentally unstable.
If Oswald was considered mentally unstable, Klein asked Nosenko, couldn’t the KGB have delivered Oswald to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and say, “You take care of him; we don’t want him”?
“It can be done, sure,” Nosenko said. “It can be done, but it wasn’t done.”
“Instead they elected to allow him to stay indefinitely in the Soviet Union, and they have to worry about him every single day, what an unstable American might do, is that correct?” a skeptical Klein asked.
Defections from the United States to the Soviet Union were rare.
Only two other Americans had moved from the USA to the Soviet Union during the time Oswald lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962.
The seven-member commission led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren that investigated the assassination concluded that Oswald acted on his own, but his defection to the Soviet Union and return to the USA inspired numerous conspiracy theories in the 53 years since Kennedy’s murder.
Committee members did not be- lieve that the Soviet government would allow Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, to move to the country, marry a Soviet woman, then move back to the USA without the KGB playing some kind of role.
“You said in your testimony American defection was very rare,” said Rep. Floyd Fithian, D-Ind. “All the more reason, if it only happens once every year or a couple times a year, or three times between ’56 and ’59, it is totally incredible to me that he would not have been interrogated. No reasonable person can believe that story.”
Nosenko’s defection and subsequent years of harsh interrogation by the CIA was one of the main U.S. intelligence controversies of the 1960s and fueled an intense rivalry between the CIA and the FBI.
The CIA’s counterespionage chief, James Angleton, considered Nosenko a KGB plant meant to destabilize the CIA, while FBI officials said Nosenko was probably legitimate.