NO. An emphatic No!
And for many reasons.
For starters, Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sixth floor assassin, was not on the sixth floor of the TSBD at the time of the assassination and therefore the false assumption made by former CIA director James Woolsey, is untrue, so his accusation that Khrushchev told Oswald to kill Kennedy is just as absurd as the on-going CIA disinformation campaign to blame the Dealey Plaza Operation on Fidel Castro.
Every covert intelligence operation has a cover-story, a believable but untrue distraction that is part of the deception aspect of every operation. The original cover-story for the Dealey Plaza Operation, as Peter Dale Scott has pointed out, was what he called the Phase One cover-story to blame the assassination of JFK on Castro Cuban Commies. Evidence of this not only comes from the “so-called evidence” – ie. rifle, that implicated Castro loving Oswald, but by the backgrounds of those who make this claim.
When HSCA investigator Dan Hardway compiled a list of dozens of people who tried to pin the tail on Castro’s donkey in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, he noticed that many if not most of them were friends, associates, agents, operatives or media assets of David Atlee Phillips, the CIA spymaster who specialized in psychological warfare and was the psych war director for Operation Success (Guatemala) and the Bay of Pigs. When Hardway asked Phillips about this when he testified under oath before the HSCA, Phillips acknowledged he knew those people but couldn’t understand why they did what they did.
The Phase One Cuban Castro Commie cover-story was squelched by LBJ himself on Friday evening, between 7 pm and 9 pm, from his Vice President suite in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House. That’s where he learned that the radio news was broadcasting the fact that Dallas D.A. Henry Wade was going to charge Oswald with being part of communist conspiracy, so he had his top aide call around Texas, beginning with Texas Attorney General and order them not to charge Oswald with anything to do with conspiracy. “It could lead to war,” was the excuse not to do it.
As Vincent Bugliosi describes in detail in his book Reclaiming History, Assistant Dallas D.A. William Alexander was being persuaded by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and editor Joseph Goulden to charge Oswald with “furthering a communist conspiracy,” and Alexander told Goulden he was considering just that.
By the Way, Joe Goulden was not only a media asset of David A. Phillips, he is now responsible for Phillips’ private papers.
Henry Wade was tracked down at a Dallas restaurant and he returned to his office immediately and confronted Alexander about the allegation and Alexander got the message and denied he was going to do that. So then the Phase Two and equally wrong cover-story of the assassination being arranged by a deranged lone nut case began to take shape.
Visit Bill Kelly online at JFK Countercoup to read the entire article
JFKcountercoup: Disinformation at Dealey Plaza
Black Propaganda & the JFK Assassination | JFKCountercoup
Now, as this silly game continues, we have former CIA director R. James Woolsey and a former Communist intelligence official Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, write a book that tries to blame Nikita Khrushchev for the assassination.
What this is proof of is that the CIA still continues to believe the real and total truth of the assassination is so important that it has to continue to deceive today.
While I have yet to read the book “Operation Dragon: Inside The Kremlin’s War on America”, and will review it in full ASAP, there were two mainstream newspapers that wrote sensational news reports with headlines like – “Lee Harvey Oswald was told by Soviet Leader to Kill JFK” and “Le Harvey Oswald ordered to kill JFK by Soviets, ex-CIA chief claims.”
For those seriously interested in such disinformation tactics I have posted both UK Daily Mail and the NY Post articles at my alternate blog, JFKCountercoup2:
JFKCountercoup2: Khrushchev and the JFK Assassination – CIA Disinformation Campaign Continues
As I point out in my list of the Top Ten Newly Released Records on the assassination, Khrushchev’s true feelings about the assassination were to ridicule investigative journalist Drew Pearson for believing the silly Phase-Two cover-story that a deranged lone nut case killed the President.
JFKCountercoup2: Kelly’s Top Ten Newly Released Records
3) Drew Pearson’s interview with Khrushchev – 104-10003-10064 DOCID-32105956.PDF. Khrushchev disbelieves the Warren Report and criticized American intelligence agencies. “Pearson repeated that the reaction of Chairman Khrushchev and his wife was one of flat disbelief and archetypical of the universal European belief that there was some kind of American conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Oswald….could not believe that the affair had happened as it apparently did and Mr. Pearson made no headway whatsoever in trying to change their belief that something was not on the level. Chairman Khrushchev greeted Mr. and Mrs. Pearson’s efforts with a tolerant smile…”
And thanks to Jeff Morley for promoting this entry in my list at JFK Facts – JFK Facts » #NewJFKfiles: In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev schooled Drew Pearson on the JFK conspiracy question
It is ironic and sad that Pearson would share the details of his dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Khrushchev with the FBI, but not with the readers of his Washington-Merry-Go-Round column, that was eventually taken over by his assistant Jack Anderson. And Anderson is not a disinterested party in all of this either, as he broke the story of mobster John Rosselli’s involvement in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro run out of JMWAVE.
The original docs thanks to the Blackvault.com
READ Drew Pearson’s report on Nikita Khrushchev‘s thinking about JFK: 5-27-64 Drew Pearson NK DOCID-32105956
RELATED:
By Gus Russo
Over the last four decades I have navigated the murky shoals of the JFK assassination, seeking to ascertain the truth with an open mind to all possibilities. The multitude of theories that have crossed my transom over all these years range from the ludicrous (Jackie did it) to the most plausible (Oswald did it.) On these treks, and in literally thousands of interviews, I have come to admire—with some exceptions—the men and women of our intelligence services.
So it was with a degree of shock that I recently learned that former CIA Director R. James Woolsey had co-authored a new book that posits a conspiracy theory that resides much closer to the ludicrous side of the JFK spectrum than the plausible, i.e. Khrushchev did it.
In Operation Dragon, co-authored with a former head of Romanian intelligence, the writers channel Qanon-style nonsense by contending that the Warren Commission concluded that Khrushchev hired Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Kennedy, and the proof is in the secret “code words” embedded in the report.
Seriously? Please, Mr. Woolsey, say it ain’t so.
Now, I have to confess I’m relying only on a detailed New York Post review of the book. (I’m busy on Earth.) But according to the Post reportage, the “decoded” Warren Report says the following:
US Marine Oswald was recruited by the KGB when he was stationed in Japan in 1957, whereupon he gave his KGB case officers vital technical details on the CIA’s super-secret U-2 spy plane, info that would help the Sovs shoot down a U-2 flight in May 1960. After Japan, Oswald defected to Moscow, where he became a KGB assassin chosen by Nikita to murder Kennedy. In June 1962, Oswald and his KGB-assigned wife exfiltrated to the US in order to murder Kennedy. In September 1963, two months before doing the deed, Oswald went to Mexico to meet with his Soviet case officer to finalize details.
Note: There is zero evidence for the paragraph you just read.
As Carl Sagan famously said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Without even reading the book I feel safe in predicting that Woolsey and his co-author, defector and former Romanian spy chief Gen. Ion Pacepa, not only have no extraordinary evidence, they don’t even have mediocre evidence—that is unless you reside in the “everything is fake news” world, in which case I recommend the Jackie-did-it-with-help-from-aliens theory. It’s the most entertaining. However, if you believe that the Earth is round, let me throw out some actual historical facts.
First, this is not new territory for Gen. Pacepa, who authored a 2007 book, Programmed to Kill, which also named Nikita K. as the bad guy. I did read that book, whose publication was said to have sent Sagan’s poor corpse spinning so fast that there was some belief that it caused a rash of earthquakes that year. In that book, it is clear that Pacepa so desperately wanted Khrushchev to be the bad guy that he piled innuendo upon suspicion upon unfounded allegation upon hearsay in order to convict a man who by all actual accounts respected and admired President Kennedy. To wit:
• At the height of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev read JFK’s critical settlement proposal letter aloud to his advisers, then appealed to them for over an hour to trust the American president. Thankfully, they did. Khrushchev later wrote of the crisis: “I’ll always remember the late President with deep respect…he showed himself to be sober-minded…He showed real wisdom and statesmanship…”
• After Kennedy gave his landmark “Peace Speech” at American University in June 1963, Khrushchev called it “the greatest speech by an American President since Roosevelt.”
• Khrushchev’s son Sergei, who later became an American citizen and scholar at Brown University, said in a 2003 interview that his father trusted JFK much more than Nixon or Johnson, whom he considered more of a hawk.
• Sergei, a 28-year-old when Kennedy was killed, was with his father when the news came. He said that his father was so shaken that he wanted to attend the funeral himself, but decided that he didn’t know how the Americans would take it. So he and his wife sent a letter of condolence to Jackie, then he sent his top aide Anastas Mikoyan in his place. In the receiving line, Mikoyan was one of only two men who broke down weeping, so much so that Jackie had to console him as he cradled his head in both his hands. When Khrushchev learned that Kennedy’s killer Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for two years, Sergei watched as his father immediately picked up the phone and called the KGB to find who this man was and what they knew about him.
• Regarding Oswald, where to begin? Let’s start with the fact that Oswald’s radar assignment in Japan gave him zero information on the U-2 spy planes. His Marine Air Control Squadron-1 unit had nothing to do with them. That was also the conclusion of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, KGB Chief Vladimir Semichastny and numerous others.
• Why would the Soviets hire an unstable man such as Oswald for the murder of the century? Oswald slashed his wrists just five days after arriving in Russia; he had a horrible work record at a radio factory. When he returned to the U.S., Oswald did everything he could to draw attention to himself by going on the radio and television in New Orleans, preaching the gospel of Fidel—just what Nikita would want.
• And why would Oswald kill Kennedy for a country he had grown to despise? He left Russia because he hated Soviet Communism once he came into the thrall of Cuban Marxism. One of the biggest arguments he had with his pregnant Russian wife Marina was when he dictated that their child would be named Fidel if it were a boy. Fidel Oswald, there’s something to chew on. Later, when Marina tried to hang herself, Oswald caught her and beat her with his fists. Jason Bourne and James Bond had nothing on this assassin.
Oswald only went to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City because he was told they had to approve his travel to Cuba. There is zero evidence that the Soviet agents he met there were his “case officers.” Like everybody else, they thought he was nuts.
Woolsey and Pacepa seem to have no idea who Lee Oswald really was, a damaged 24 year old who had reached the end of his rope, so he thought he’d go out in a flash and do a simultaneous favor for his hero, Fidel Castro. I could go on for another 5,000 words on the errors just alluded to in the Post treatment of their book.
But here’s the thing: Woolsey has to know all this, and more. He’s no fool. He was a defense policy lifer with a specialty in arms control before Bill Clinton named him to the CIA. Some online critics assert that he is a Russophobe. Others say he just wants to make a buck. Then there’s that Turkey mess. I’ll let the Internet parse that out, but something fishy is going on here. Any former CIA director knows better.