No doubt many conspiracy theorists have been disappointed with the failure of the more than 2,000 files released this week to prove any of the favoured claims regarding who murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
There is no evidence of a second shooter, nor of the Mafia, CIA, FBI, KGB, or even aliens or Freemasons having been involved. Not that this will prevent ongoing speculation, and as the midnight oil burns on, and people sift through the reams of mostly procedural and mundane declassified intelligence, those who favour any of the above theories can always fall back on the default that, of course, they were never going to let people see anything that proves their theory.
The most interesting pages of the 80,000 or so now available have to do with matters only tangentially related to the Kennedy assassination. They concern the Soviet defectors Anatoli Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. The latter told the CIA – who eventually believed him after a rather horrendous debriefing due to James Angleton being convinced that Nosenko was a plant – that Soviet intelligence had nothing to do with the murder.
Which they did not. What they did have a part in was the creation of the elaborate web of false intelligence that has been the meat of reams of conspiratorial books, documentaries and partly of Oliver Stone’s ludicrous if entertaining and brilliantly-acted movie.
Why did the KGB go to such lengths? Well, for the simple reason that they realised more than anyone that if there had been an ideological motive for the assassination then its roots lay in Oswald being a communist. Such was Oswald’s devotion that he defected to the Soviet Union, was considered and then rejected by the KGB as a potential agent, but was clearly as once again proven by the newly released files still possibly attempting to offer himself as an agent through the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in September 1963.
Both the KGB and the CIA had their reasons for not wanting this to be at the centre of the investigation. The KGB obviously because it might imply involvement in the assassination, and the CIA because it raised, and raises still, questions about why they didn’t perhaps take a more hands-on approach to the lunatic who was planning to murder JFK.
Apart from the KGB and the CIA, the other grouping most anxious to distract attention from the possibility that they were even indirectly connected to Oswald was the Left. Not just the pro-Soviet Communist Party of the United States of America who Oswald had applied to join in 1956, but all of the Left, because it might be seen that he was one of their own.
Which he was. Oswald reopened contact with the Communist Party following his return from the Soviet Union in 1962. In a letter of September 1963, Arnold Johnson of the CPUSA wrote to Oswald advising him to join the Fair Play for Cuba committee in Baltimore where Oswald had told them he was planning to move, and that “we will find some way of getting in touch with you in that city.” The Fair Play for Cuba Committees of which Oswald was a leading member in New Orleans was a creation of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Hence the great efforts made over the past 60 years to claim that Oswald – even where his association with the far left are admitted – was being used as a “patsy” by any number of candidates depending on which conspiracy theorist you prefer; from vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, to the mafia, to Nixon, to the CIA or FBI, or Cuban freedom fighters, or aliens or the Ku Klux Klan, or a combination of some or all of the above.
Oswald’s first shooting was in April 1963 at the Dallas home of a retired army general who Oswald had decided was a fascist. He was then involved in New Orleans with support for the Castro regime in Cuba and made contact with the Soviet and Cuban consulates in Mexico of which the CIA concluded: “Although it appears that he was then thinking only about a peaceful change of residence to the Soviet Union, it is also possible that he was getting documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the president.”
It is entirely possible then, that Oswald decided to murder Kennedy in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs landing in Cuba in April 1961. For what 60 years of leftist disinformation obscures is that JFK was hated by the left in the United States and elsewhere for having attempted to overthrow Castro.
Whatever the military and intelligence failings of the Bay of Pigs, in the aftermath Kennedy approved an intensification of efforts to overthrow the Castro gang through Operation Mongoose, which the President authorised on November 30, 1961 and which included covert operations for internal sabotage and plans to kill Castro.
Kennedy had also faced down the Soviets during the missile crisis of October 1962, and in Berlin,where he made it clear that the United States would not tolerate any threat, as made by Khrushchev in June 1961, to take west Berlin. That threat was followed by the building of the wall to prevent more Germans escape the horrors on the other side; and not least Kennedy’s decision to intensify efforts to protect South Vietnam from the Soviet backed regime in the north.
FBI records also indicate that the CPUSA was terrified that the link between them and Oswald – one which they came to suspect erroneously had been initiated by the FBI – and the fact that it was generally perceived that Kennedy was a staunch and militant anti-Communist might lead to a reaction against them. This was also apparently felt by the CPUSA paymasters in Moscow.
The KGB were quickly alive to the benefits of promoting the right-wing conspiracy theory. That was discussed as early as December by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. They decided to back the conspiracy theory and the first book promoting the claim that the CIA and “oil magnates” had been the organisers was a 1964 book by Joachim Joesten published by KGB agent Carlo Marzani, codenamed NORD.
The KGB then for several years secretly funded Mark Lane who became the leading proponent of the right-wing conspiracy theory. Lane wrote the massive 1966 best seller Rush to Judgement, and four other substantial books on the same subject. Ironically, Lane had worked for the Kennedy campaign in New York in 1960 and was most likely unaware of the Soviet financial support. Lane denied the claims of Soviet funding made by former KGB agent Vasili Mitrokhin whose revelations have been substantiated on virtually every subject he commented upon by other sources.
The FBI and the CIA certainly withheld information from the Warren Commission but the intelligence that was suppressed would have strengthened the conclusion that Oswald was a lone assassin motivated by far leftism. The CIA and FBI were only worried that it might have been shown that they had good reason to suspect that Oswald was an active threat but had ignored the evidence.
So, it came to be that the American left – with the support of the Soviet intelligence agencies – created a myth that still survives. That myth has successfully deflected from the fact that, after 70 years of investigation, that the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Oswald had acted alone was correct. Nothing in this week’s intelligence releases suggests anything other than that.
Oswald’s own life and political activism and recorded views would suggest that if there had been a motivation, then it was that he as a self-declared communist was acting in retaliation against Kennedy for having approved the attacks on Oswald’s beloved Cuba. A sordid impoverished state run by nepotistic gangsters which is the icon of the Irish Left including the current President Michael D.
The oul Russians were always good at manipulating useful idiots, and there has never been a deficit in that department.
The newly-released files are interesting if you are interested in particular aspects of the case and more especially in how the assassination became the focus of subsequent intrigue and duplicity. Hopefully they will become more easily searchable too.