JFK’s Assassin Described as Moscow Agent

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WASHINGTON — When the Romanian spy chief, Ion Mihai Pacepa, defected to America in 1978, he wanted to tell the world two things: that his country’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was a terrorist, and that President Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Soviet agent.

Nearly 30 years later, Mr. Pacepa’s portrayal of Oswald is being disclosed in a new book, “Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination.”

At a talk yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute here, Mr. Pacepa said he had been researching the book for nearly 20 years and that he has come to the conclusion that Oswald was initially recruited and turned by the KGB’s foreign operations division, known as the PGU, in 1957, while Oswald served as a Marine sergeant in Japan.

Mr. Pacepa said that in 1959, Oswald came to Moscow, where he was debriefed and then trained and programmed as an assassin. In 1962, Nikita Kruschev ordered the plot to assassinate the American president to be called off. By then, however, it was too late and Oswald went ahead and murdered Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, with neither the blessing or support of the Soviets.

Two days later, Jack Ruby, also working for the Soviets, murdered Oswald on behalf of the Soviets. The Soviets then irradiated Ruby in 1967 right before he was about to be released from jail.

This theory of the Kennedy assassination clashes with the one popularized by Oliver Stone in his 1991 movie, “JFK,” which posits that the CIA had Kennedy killed because he was on the verge of shutting down the agency. Mr. Pacepa said yesterday in an interview that the theory that the Kennedy assassination was an inside job originated as Soviet disinformation in an a book, “Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy,” by Joachim Joesten, one of only two books on the event published before the release in 1964 of the findings of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination.

Mr. Pacepa’s 1988 book, “Red Horizons,” documented from his own firsthand experience the horrors of Ceausescu’s Romania. Mr. Pacepa’s new book is based on his own analysis of American and East German documents.

“You have to think like an intelligence officer to understand the plot,” he said in the interview. “The FBI had a source they believed who said the Soviet officials after the assassination claimed no knowledge of it. But this was used by the official investigations to not pursue the question.”

For example, Mr. Pacepa says that Oswald’s diary of his time in the Soviet Union matched similar fabricated legends he used for his American agents when he ran foreign intelligence for Romania. He also says Ruby lied to the Warren Commission when he said he visited Cuba only once. Mr. Pacepa says Ruby in fact visited Cuba 11 times before killing Oswald.

A former CIA operations officer who oversaw European operations at the time of Mr. Pacepa’s defection, Duane Clarridge said his information then was considered reliable. “The data at that point was pretty good,” he said. “But like all defectors, you’ve got to be careful as time goes by that they don’t quote remember things about this and that, that they didn’t remember at the time.”

Mr. Clarridge said he did not go in for the Kennedy conspiracies. “Oswald killed Kennedy, he did not do it for the Russians, the Cubans, the Mafia or the Republican Party. Forget it people, get on with life,” he said.

An author who has written extensively on the Kennedy conspiracy theories, Edward Jay Epstein, said he thought the Pacepa book was a good read. “It is an analysis by an intelligence officer of parallel intelligence operations and he applies it to this case,” he said. “There is nothing implausible about what he writes, nothing factually problematic that I can see. The readers should judge for themselves.”

Not all reviews have been kind. Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Even those inclined to suspect a conspiracy was behind JFK’s murder will likely remain unpersuaded by Pacepa’s circumstantial, speculative case.”


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