Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  1. This is the KEY to the mailbox of the main post office, found in the city, on ERVAY street the same street where the drugstore is where you always stood. 4 blocks from the drugstore on the same street to the post office there you will find our box. I paid for the box last month so don’t worry about it.

  2. Send the embassy the information about what happened to me and also clip from the newspaper, (if anything is written about me in the paper) I think the embassy will quickly help you when it knows everything.

  3. I paid for the house on the 2nd so don’t worry about that.

  4. I also paid for the water and gas not long ago.

  5. It is possible there will be money from work, they will send to our box at the post office. Go to the bank and change the check into cash.

  6. My clothes etc. you can throw out or give away. Do not keep them. But my PERSONAL papers (military, factory, etc.) I prefer that you keep.

  7. A few of my documents are in the blue small valise.

  8. The address book is on my table in the study, if you need it.

  9. We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you. (Red Cross [sic] in English.)

  10. I left you money as much as I could, 60$ on the 2nd, and you and June can live on 10$ a week 2 months more.

  11. If I am alive and they have taken me prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of that bridge that we always rode over when we went into town (the very beginning of the city after the bridge).10

  As it turned out, Oswald succeeded in firing a shot at General Walker and getting away without attracting any attention to himself, just as he must have hoped. Marina would tell the Warren Commission that “[w] hen he fired, he did not know whether he had hit Walker or not,” and that when he learned from the newspaper the next day that he had missed only because Walker moved his head, Oswald “was very sorry that he had not hit him.”11 The fact that he fired only once12 supports the theory that this was primarily a test exercise for Oswald to prove that he would be able to escape clean from a real assassination in the U.S.

  It is also significant that on July 1, 1963, Oswald sent a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington asking to “Please rush the entrance visa for the return of Soviet citizen Marina N. Oswald. She is going to have a baby in October, therefore you must grant the entrance visa. I make the transportation arrangements before then. As for my return entrance visa please consider it separtably [sic].”

  The Warren Commission, however, stated with a straight face that there was no connection, whatsoever, between the Soviet Union and the assassination of President Kennedy.

  In the late 1970s, the U.S. House of Representatives, unhappy with the conclusions of the Warren Commission, formed the Select Committee on Assassinations and conducted its own investigations. In 1979 the House published twelve volumes of documents and hearings and one summary volume on the JFK assassination. This report does contain some important new, relevant factual material in the form of documents that had come to light after 1964 and interviews conducted by the committee that pointed more suggestively toward Moscow than the Warren Commission’s materials. But because of its lack of Soviet intelligence experience, the House, too, was unable to properly evaluate what it had uncovered.

  In its final report, the committee excluded a Soviet hand in the assassination by simply stating: “In fact the reaction of the Soviet Government as well as the Soviet people seemed to be one of genuine shock and sincere grief. The committee believed, therefore, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination.”

  Apparently the House committee, like the Warren Commission, did not remember that the Soviet government had always relied on deception—to the point of even falsifying the Moscow street maps and telephone books. Nor did anyone seem to remember that Khrushchev had boldly lied to President Kennedy in denying that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba.

  THE KGB PATTERN

  In essence, espionage is an accumulation of one-time operations (onetime recruitments, one-time agent meetings, one-time thefts, etc.) written in codes and carried out based on certain tried-and-true patterns rooted in the traditions of each espionage organization. In other words, espionage is a repetitive process like serial killing or serial bank robbery that follows predictable patterns generated by the idiosyncrasies of the perpetrator.

  Here is an example of the KGB modus operandi in killing President Kennedy: According to the sworn testimony of Oswald’s wife, Marina, after shooting at General Walker, Oswald put together a package, complete with photographs, showing how he had successfully planned the Walker operation. Afterward he traveled to Mexico City under a false identity (O. H. Lee) to show Soviet diplomat Valery Kostikov, whom Oswald called “Comrade Kostin,” what he could do without being caught.

  The CIA has publicly identified Valery Kostikov, aka “comrade Kostin,” as an officer of the KGB’s Thirteenth Department for assassinations abroad, known in the Soviet bloc’s intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs (wet being a euphemism for bloody). According to the CIA, Kostikov had been assigned under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassy in Mexico a short time before Oswald returned to the United States.

  During the long holiday weekend of November 9–11, 1963, Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington in which he described the meeting he had just had in Mexico City with “comrade Kostin,” whom he also named elsewhere as “Comrade Kostikov.” After the assassination, a handwritten draft of that letter was found among Oswald’s effects in the garage of Ruth Paine, an American at whose house Oswald had spent that weekend.

  Ruth testified under oath that Oswald rewrote that letter several times before typing it on her typewriter. It was important to him. A photocopy of the final letter Oswald sent to the Soviet embassy was recovered by the Warren Commission. Let us quote from that letter, in which we have also inserted Oswald’s earlier draft version in brackets:

  “This is to inform you of recent events since my meetings with comrade Kostin [in draft: “of new events since my interviews with comrade Kostine”] in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico. I was unable to remain in Mexico [crossed out in draft: “because I considered useless”] indefinily because of my mexican visa restrictions which was for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on requesting a new visa [in draft: “applying for an extension”] unless I used my real name, so I returned to the United States.”

  The fact that Oswald used an operational codename for Kostikov confirms to us that both his meeting with Kostikov in Mexico City and his correspondence with the Soviet Embassy in Washington were conducted in a KGB operational context. The fact that Oswald did not use his real name to obtain his Mexican travel permit confirms this conclusion.

  Now let us juxtapose this combined letter against the free guidebook Esta Semana (This Week) for September 28–October 4, 1963, and against a Spanish-English dictionary, both found among Oswald’s effects. The guidebook has the Soviet embassy’s telephone number underlined in pencil, the names Kosten and Osvald noted in Cyrillic on the page listing “Diplomats in Mexico,” and checkmarks next to five movie theaters on the previous page.13 In the back of his Spanish-English dictionary, Oswald wrote: “buy tickets [plural] for bull fight.”14 The Plaza México bullring is encircled on his Mexico City map.15 Also marked on Oswald’s map is the Palace of Fine Arts,16 a favorite place for tourists to assemble on Sunday mornings to watch the Ballet Folklórico.

  Contrary to what Oswald claimed, he was not observed at the Soviet embassy at any time during his stay in Mexico City, although the CIA had surveillance cameras trained on the entrance to the embassy at that time.17

  All of the above facts taken together suggest to us that Oswald resorted to an unscheduled or “iron meeting”—zheleznaya yavka in Russian—for an urgent talk with KGB officer Valery Kostikov in Mexico City. The iron meeting was a standard KGB procedure for emergency situations, “iron” meaning ironclad or invariable
.

  In Pacepa’s day his DIE approved quite a few iron meetings in Mexico City—a favorite place for contacting important agents living in the U.S.—and Oswald’s iron meeting looks to us like a typical one. That means the following likely took place: a brief encounter at a movie house to arrange a meeting for the following day at the bullfights (in Mexico City they were held at 4:30 every Sunday afternoon), a brief encounter in front of the Palace of Fine Arts to pass Kostikov one of the bullfight tickets Oswald had bought, and a long meeting for discussions at the Sunday bullfight.

  Of course, we cannot be sure that everything happened exactly that way. But in whatever way they connected, it is clear that Kostikov and Oswald did secretly meet over that weekend of September 28–29, 1963. The letter to the Soviet embassy that Oswald worked so hard on irrefutably proves that.

  There is also plenty of proof that Oswald’s Soviet wife, Marina, was also connected with the KGB. No assassination investigator has been able to decode this evidence because no one has ever built a KGB wife. General Pacepa did. In the mid-1980s, historian Michael Ledeen and Pacepa published a long article, (“La Grand Fauche”) in the French magazine L’Éxpress, describing how Romania’s foreign intelligence service, the DIE, had built a wife for a German adviser to NATO. The adviser threatened to sue the magazine, but L’Éxpress did not blink, and the NATO adviser disappeared from sight. The Library of Congress retranslated that L’Éxpress article into English and distributed it within the U.S. government.

  Marina Nikolayevna Oswald looks like a carbon copy of “Andrea,” the wife described in L’Éxpress. Here is one such similarity. In May 1961, Oswald wrote to his brother Robert in the U.S. and to the U.S. embassy in Moscow telling them that he had gotten married and that his wife was born in the city of Leningrad. But the birth certificate Marina brought with her when she immigrated to the U.S. (issued on July 19, 1961, although she would have needed one for her marriage the previous April), shows that she was born in the remote northern town of Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) in the northwest of the USSR.

  Andrea’s birthplace (Braşov, Romania) was also changed to a remote area where it would be unlikely for anyone in the West to be able to check. This practice was widely used by the KGB—and by General Pacepa’s DIE.

  Pacepa approved many other DIE biographies for “wives,” and he can spot a few other holes in Marina’s legend. In the U.S., for example, she claimed that her father had died before she was born and that she did not know anything about him, not even his name. She therefore allegedly took the name of her stepfather, Aleksandr Medvedev. In that case, her patronymic should have been Aleksandrovna, not Nikolayevna. Some of Gen. Pacepa’s case officers also lost sight of such details.

  Then there is her “uncle” in the KGB—a stock character who was en vogue at that time in the bloc foreign intelligence community. Those “uncles” were used to explain how the “wife” was able to rush the approval for her marriage and for her exit visa. “Andrea’s” “uncle” was DIE Colonel Cristian Scornea, who had recruited her supposedly German husband. Marina had “Uncle Ilya,” an NKVD colonel named Ilya Prusakov, who allegedly helped speed up the approval of her marriage to an American and to obtain her exit visa.

  The “uncle in the KGB” continued for many years to play various roles in foreign and domestic KGB operations. Several Marines stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1986 and carrying on affairs with local Soviet girls were eventually introduced to an “Uncle Sasha,” who was actually a KGB officer who tried to recruit them. One of those Marines, Sgt. Clayton J. Lonetree (eventually sentenced for espionage), described how his relationship with Violetta Aleksandrovna Seina, a Soviet translator for English, grew from a chance meeting in a Moscow subway station into a series of clandestine rendezvous in a house ostensibly owned by her “Uncle Sasha.” A few months later, Violetta introduced Lonetree to her “Uncle Sasha” himself at another meeting that also took place “in a subway station.”18 Another of those Marines, Corporal Arnold Bracy, was for his part accused by American authorities of failing to report personal contacts with an attractive Soviet cook and with her “Uncle Sasha.”19

  THE END OF KHRUSHCHEV

  Russia can be unpredictable, but its past is prologue. During the years in which we coauthors still managed our countries’ foreign intelligence communities, the world was flooded with official Russian news and intelligence information that Khrushchev had nothing to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.

  In reality, Khrushchev himself was quietly arrested by the KGB a few months after the JFK assassination, and he never again became a free man.

  On October 12, 1964, when Khrushchev and his close friend Anastas Mikoyan returned to Moscow from a long vacation in Pitsunda (Abkhazia), the KGB chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, was waiting for him at Vnukovo Airport. Semichastny informed Khrushchev that he was under arrest and asked him not to resist.

  A few days later, the Politburo quietly accused Khrushchev of “harebrained schemes, hasty decisions, actions divorced from reality, braggadocio, and rule by fiat.”20 For the rest of his life, Khrushchev was kept under virtual house arrest.

  When he died in 1971, the Soviet Politburo decreed that Khrushchev’s erratic leadership had badly harmed the country. Therefore he was not worthy of burial inside the Kremlin Wall next to the other former leaders. The Soviet government even refused to pay for Khrushchev’s gravestone. In 1972, Pacepa visited Khrushchev’s grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery. There was only a small, insignificant marker identifying it.

  CHAPTER 7

  GHEORGHIU-DEJ, CEAUSESCU, AND “RADU”

  Seven days after Khrushchev was arrested by the KGB, Romania’s communist ruler, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, concluded that the Kremlin was in a rout. He decided to take advantage of the confusion. On October 21, Dej called in the Soviet ambassador to Romania and asked him to withdraw the KGB advisors from Romania. Dej was tormented by the idea that the Kremlin was quietly using the KGB advisors in Romania to plan to kill him, just as the KGB had killed the communist leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was in Dej’s interest to have that potential source of danger closed off.

  Moscow did not react well. The very next day, KGB chairman Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny sent a scathing letter to his Romanian vassal, Minister of Interior Alexandru Draghici, pointing out that Romania was living under Moscow’s “protective nuclear umbrella” and demanding that the KGB advisors be kept in place. A similar letter, couched in even harsher terms and signed by Soviet foreign intelligence chief Sakharovsky, landed on the desk of General Nicolae Doicaru, Romania’s foreign intelligence chief at that time. In November, on just two hour’s notice, General Sakharovsky arrived in Bucharest. Then General Semichastny himself put in an appearance. The discussions between Bucharest and Moscow regarding the withdrawal of the KGB advisors from Romania dragged on until the end of November 1964.

  “We created the Securitate,” was General Sakharovsky’s refrain during those November days. According to him, the Romanian request had set off a whole chain of explosions, from the KGB’s Romanian desk all the way up to the KGB chairman. “Semichastny is raging mad,” Sakharovsky emphasized. “He’s ready to tear him limb from limb with his own two hands.” “Him” meant Dej, who had good reason to believe Sakharovsky in this instance.

  General Pacepa never met Semichastny, but on two separate occasions Sakharovsky told him that he was a wild and ambitious man who had recriminated harshly against Boris Pasternak and several other Soviet dissidents. “Iron Shurik” was also seeing red, Sakharovsky added, referring to Aleksandr Shelepin, the former KGB chairman, who by then was a Politburo member and secretary of the Central Committee with responsibility for the Red Army and the KGB.

  In the end Dej got his way. In December 1964, the Romanian DIE became the first foreign intelligence service in the Warsaw Pact community to function without KGB advisers. To the best of our knowledge, it remained the only one until the 1989 revolutionary wave changed the face
of Eastern Europe. Pacepa accompanied the KGB advisers in the DIE to the Bucharest North train station a couple of days before Christmas. There he ran into the Romanian minister of interior, Alexander Draghici, who was saying farewell to the KGB advisers in the domestic Securitate.

  On Sunday, February 24, 1965, Pacepa paid his last visit to Gheorghiu-Dej, who had just come back from another trip to Moscow. As usual Pacepa found him with his best friend, Chivu Stoica. “This is for you,” Dej said, handing Pacepa a leather-bound book by Karl Marx entitled Notes on Romanians. In his customary violet lead, Dej had inscribed the first page to Pacepa: “Well done!”

  That was Dej’s thanks to Pacepa for an intelligence operation that had paid off politically for Dej. In 1963 a DIE agent had come across four unfinished and never published manuscripts of Karl Marx’s in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam that provided ammunition to contest the Soviet territorial claim to Romania’s Bessarabia and Moldova. Dej ordered the manuscripts printed in the form of a booklet issued by the Romanian Academy but was reluctant to let it go on the open market, afraid it might blow too cold in Moscow’s face.

  Now, on that early spring day, Dej and Stoica decided to go for a walk in the garden. General Pacepa tagged along behind them. Dej complained of feeling weak, dizzy, and nauseous. “I think the KGB got me,” he said, only half in jest.

  “They got Togliatti,” Stoica squeaked ominously. Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communist Party, had died on August 21, 1964, while on a visit to the Soviet Union. There was a rumor going around at the top of the bloc’s foreign intelligence community that he had been irradiated by the KGB on Khrushchev’s order while vacationing in Yalta.

  Togliatti’s assassination was rumored to have been provoked by the fact that, while in the Soviet Union, he had written a “testament” in which he had expressed profound discontent with Khrushchev and suggested the need for fundamental changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign policies. Togliatti reportedly questioned Khrushchev’s honesty and criticized him for failing to understand the genesis of Stalinism using these words: “The most serious thing is a certain degree of scepticism with which some of those close to us greet reports of new economic and political successes. Beyond this must be considered in general as unresolved the origin of the cult of Stalin and how this became possible. To explain this solely through Stalin’s serious personal defects is not completely accepted.” Togliatti’s frustrations were rumored to echo those of Leonid Brezhnev. In September 1964, Pravda published portions of Togliatti’s testament. After that, Khrushchev was overthrown. This was seen as confirmation of those rumors.