Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  Later, Eastern and Northern Europe began to notice significant radioactive contamination of their farm products. Only then did the West start to see through Gorbachev’s disinformation campaign. It took many more years for the world to uncover that, in fact, eight tons of deadly radioactive material had escaped from the Chernobyl reactor, and an estimated 370,000 people had suffered various degrees of radiation.18 In the end, continued Russian obfuscation may mean we may never learn the true dimensions of the disaster.

  No wonder the first page of the KGB manual on dezinformatsiya proclaimed on its first page, all in upper case letters, “IF YOU ARE GOOD AT DEZINFORMATSIYA, YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING.”

  THE WEALTHIEST MAN ON EARTH

  “I looked the man [Russian President Vladimir Putin] in the eye” and “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” President George W. Bush said at the end of the 2001 summit meeting held in Slovenia. “I looked into Putin’s eyes and I saw a stone-cold killer,” stated former CIA director Robert Gates. Knowing the widely unknown Russian “science” of disinformation and its understudy, glasnost, could change night into day.

  In our view, Colonel Vladimir Putin is a twentieth century Russian tsar. The position of a tsar is that of the owner of a country and its people. Putin has occupied Russia’s throne for twenty-one years. Yet Russia’s Constitution only allows a person to be president for a maximum two terms of four years. Putin has served three full tours as president and two as vice president and is now serving his fourth term as president.

  During Putin’s twenty-eight years in the Kremlin, his personal wealth has secretly risen from a few thousand Russian rubles to an estimated $200 billion, making Putin more than twice as wealthy as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, with a fortune of $79.2 billion, once the world’s richest known person but no longer.19 It was certainly no coincidence that in 2002 Putin was able to buy Gerhard Schroeder, chancellor of the traditionally pro-American Federal Republic of Germany, who agreed to join Putin in opposing most U.S. foreign policy initiatives. It was no accident that in 2005, when Schroeder lost elections for his third term as chancellor, he became one of the top officials of Gazprom, a giant state-owned Russian company then headed by today’s Russian Vice President Dmitry Medvedev. Each intelligence service has a limited budget. The published CIA budget for 2018 was $59.4 billion. Putin’s intelligence budget for the same year was unlimited.

  President Putin is the latest in the long line of Russian tsars who have upheld the tradition of lifetime rule by expropriating the country’s wealth and killing all who try to stop him, dating back at least to the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, who killed thousands of boyars and others, including Metropolitan Philip and Prince Alexander Gorbatyl-Shuisky, for the crime of refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to his eldest, infant son. The first freely elected president in the millennial history of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, tried to distance himself from the Soviet Union. Putin, who deposed Yeltsin in a coup d’état, does the opposite: he struggles to rebuild confidence in Soviet institutions, the only ones he has ever known. His long experience with the KGB “science” of dezinformatsiya put him into power and is what keeps him there.

  On September 11, 2001, President Putin expressed sympathy to President George W. Bush for what he called “these terrible tragedies of the terrorist attacks.”20 He pretended to aid the United States by passing information to the FBI about two Russian immigrants in the U.S. who later perpetrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. But these were gestures, not a break with Russia’s anti-American past. In 2014, former KGB General Oleg Kalugin was charged with “high treason in the form of betraying a state secret” by Putin’s chief military prosecutor for moving to the United States and publishing an autobiography21 describing old KGB operations against the U.S.22 Former KGB officer Lt. Colonel Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated for revealing Russia’s key role23 in forming ISIS and Al Qaeda in Iraq, starting with training Ayman Al-Zawahiri to conduct terrorist operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina during Yugoslavia’s civil war, run out of Sofia, Bulgaria, which is now run by Rumen Radev, a member of the Communist Party until 1990 and backed in 2016 by the Socialist Party. As a result, the British have now forbidden any travel by Putin to the United Kingdom. For decades Bulgaria served as a primary surrogate for Soviet training and sponsor of terrorism. The Russians were playing both sides in the conflict, openly supporting the Serbs while covertly helping the Iranian-backed Muslims.24

  Putin strikes traditionalist, “conservative” chords, preserving the worst parts of the old Soviet Union, its nativism and xenophobia. He speaks fondly about his years in the KGB,25 asking the nation to understand that KGB “agents work in the interest of the state” and arguing for patience with them on the grounds that “90 percent” of all KGB intelligence was collected with the collaboration of ordinary citizens.26 That kind of verbal spin may work with many as disarmingly honest. But it also ignores the brutal, lawless oppression solely at the whim of an autocrat that is the historical record of the Russian political police.

  The New York Times dedicated its “Book Review” issue of November 30, 2014, to the publishing industry’s reluctance to bring out judgmental books about Russian president Putin, in particular Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha, a highly respected American scholar of Soviet and Russian politics. This book was rejected by one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious publishers, Cambridge University Press, for fear of retribution. The publisher explained to Dawisha: “The decision has nothing to do with the quality of your research or your scholarly credibility. It is simply a question of risk tolerance.”27

  Indeed, in post-Soviet Russia alone, over three hundred political figures and newsmen who dared publicly criticize President Putin have been assassinated.28 The criminal tactics to consolidate power by Putin are the same as those used by Ceausescu. Each were educated at a military school in Moscow, and each supervised his country’s secret police before becoming his country’s president. Ceausescu was eventually executed during an upsurge of popular disgust. He clearly shares the traditional Russian faith in the political police over party politics as a means to power—as well as the traditional Soviet-style anti-Americanism.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE “DRAGON” OPERATION

  For fifty-six years, most of the world has believed that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by America. Much of the world has been told that the CIA, FBI, right-wing businessmen, and the Italian Mafia were the main perpetrators. This is a lie, set off fifty-six years ago by the KGB’s worldwide disinformation campaign called “Operation Dragon.”1 President John F. Kennedy was not killed by the American government. The lie that JFK was assassinated by the CIA or the FBI is the result of a concerted KGB disinformation operation to divert attention away from the KGB’s extensive connections with Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was a twenty-four-year-old American Marine infatuated with Marxism who defected to Moscow in 1959, returned to the U.S. four years later with a Russian wife given to him by the KGB, shot President Kennedy, and was arrested by the Texas police before being able to escape back to Moscow. In a letter Oswald sent to the Soviet embassy in Washington on July 1, 1963—a couple of weeks before killing President Kennedy—Oswald had asked for an “urgent” entrance visa for his wife and another one, “separtably,” (spelling as in the original text) for himself.2

  In 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, Pacepa was a deputy director of Romania’s espionage service, the DIE. On the night of November 22, 1963, a few hours after President Kennedy had been killed, the DIE’s chief razvedka adviser asked the DIE management to put the DIE on “code C alert” and to order its rezidenturas abroad to report everything they could learn about Kennedy’s assassination. All Soviet and Eastern European embassies in the U.S. and Western Europe had been instructed to take similar measures.

  On the evening of November 26, 1963, Soviet foreign intelligence chief Aleksandr Sakharovsky unexpectedly landed in Bucharest, his
first stop on a blitz tour of the main “sister” services to coordinate an intelligence effort to divert world attention away from the Soviet Union by focusing suspicion for the killing of President Kennedy on the United States itself.

  Beating the Warren Commission Report to the stores by several weeks, the first book to be published on the Kennedy assassination was Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? by former German Communist Party member Joachim Joesten. Without providing any evidence whatsoever, it alleges that Oswald was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background.” It was in essence the KGB’s own first public report on Kennedy’s assassination for U.S. publication—and it became a bestseller.

  The United Kingdom’s MI6 later documented from highly classified documents smuggled out to England by the respected KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin that Joesten’s publisher, Carlo Aldo Marzani (codenamed Nord), had been funded via the KGB since before World War II to churn out pro-Soviet propaganda. In the 1960s alone, Marzani was subsidized by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party to the then-quite-hefty tune of $672,000.

  Joesten’s book was dedicated to Mark Lane, an American leftist and one-time New York state representative who would soon publish a number of conspiracy theory books himself. Mark Lane’s 1966 bestseller was entitled Rush to Judgment. In it he alleged that Kennedy was assassinated by a right-wing American group. Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive show that the KGB sent Mark Lane money at this time. According to KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky (former KGB station chief in London), a KGB operative, Genrikh Borovik, was in regular contact with him. Borovik was the brother-in-law of General Vladimir Kryuchkov, who in 1988 became chairman of the KGB and in August 1991 led the coup in Moscow aimed at restoring the Soviet Union.

  The first review of Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? was a rave that spread the sensational suggestion that Oswald must have been an agent of the FBI or CIA. Signed by Victor Perlo, a member of the Communist Party USA, it was published on September 23, 1964, in New Times, a KGB front widely distributed in several languages. At one time the New Times had been printed in communist Romania.

  In a December 9, 1963, article, I. F. Stone, a prestigious American journalist, praised the Joesten book and speculated about why America might have wanted to murder its own president. Stone blamed the assassination on the “warlike Administration” of the United States that was trying to sell Europe a “nuclear monstrosity.” Stone has been identified as a paid KGB agent, codenamed “Blin.”

  These big bestsellers generated scores of imitators as well as hundreds of wild-eyed articles and reviews. Most pushed far-fetched theories while studiously ignoring Soviet and Cuban involvement.

  In 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison arrested a man in his home district. Garrison accused this person of conspiring with U.S. intelligence agencies to murder Kennedy for his dovishness. The accused was acquitted in 1969, but Garrison kept promoting his story, first with A Heritage of Stone (Putnam, 1970) and later in On the Trail of the Assassins (Sheridan Square, 1988), one of the books that inspired Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK.

  Other titles such as Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report (Vintage, 1976) accused reactionary elements in the Cuban exile community. Meagher suggested there may have been a “second Oswald” in line with the Oswald sightings that had begun to surface. One Richard H. Popkin even wrote a book entitled The Second Oswald (Avon, 1966), and Marina Oswald agreed to have her former husband’s grave reopened to see who was buried there. It was Lee.

  After the Senate’s Church Committee released its report in 1976 showing that the CIA had been working with the Mafia and Cuban exiles on plans to assassinate Fidel Castro, a flood of new books began coming out to link those elements with the JFK assassination, such as Seth Kanthor’s Who Was Jack Ruby? (Everest, 1978), Anthony Summers’s Conspiracy (Paragon, 1980), and David E. Scheim’s Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy (Shapolsky, 1988, reprinted by Kensington).

  Theories involving the CIA and other elements of the U.S. government were fueled by new material that began to be obtainable in the 1970s under the Freedom of Information Act, although those materials provided no particularly relevant facts to add to the Warren Commission Report. These theories continued to attract imaginative books such as Henry Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt (Henry Holt, 1987), Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone’s High Treason: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: What Really Happened (Conservatory, 1989), and Philip H. Melanson’s Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence (Praeger, 1990).

  In the late 1970s, Edward Jay Epstein conducted his own investigation, published as Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (Reader’s Digest/McGraw Hill, 1978). This book introduced new and useful material on Oswald and was conscientiously documented but generally ignored by other assassination analysts. Epstein claimed to have interviewed over four hundred persons who had been, in one way or another, associated with Oswald. Among them were “about seventy Marines Oswald had served with in Japan and the Far East,” most of whom “had never been previously interviewed by the FBI, or the Warren Commission.” Epstein’s book was centered around suspicions that Oswald had ties to Soviet (or Cuban) intelligence and provided significant new information showing that Oswald had indeed been manipulated by Moscow. Epstein’s information strongly suggested that George de Mohrenschildt, the wealthy American oilman who had reportedly come from the old Russian nobility and who became Oswald’s “best friend” after Oswald returned to the United States, was in fact Oswald’s KGB “handler.”

  Like everyone else who has written about the JFK assassination, however, Epstein, too, lacked the inside intelligence background knowledge that would have helped him fit his bits and pieces together into a whole from which to come to a firm conclusion. His well-documented story is left hanging in midair.

  Other books related to the JFK assassination provide useful new information but in varying degrees refrain from analysis. These include William Manchester’s The Death of a President: November 22–25, 1963 (Harper & Row, 1967), Robert L. Oswald’s (with Myrick and Barbara Land) Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (Coward-McCann, 1967), and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1978). The latter book is badly flawed because of the author’s unquestioning attitude toward everything Marina told her, much of which was not true. Similarly, Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (Random House, 1995) was essentially based on information fed to him by the Soviets. Mailer concluded that Oswald probably acted alone, although there might have been some CIA and FBI involvement. Taking the opposite view was John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA (Carroll & Graf, 1995), which conjures up a fictitious account of Oswald’s involvement in CIA operations through extensively footnoted but only marginally relevant new U.S. government releases.

  The popularity of books on the JFK assassination has encouraged all kinds of people to join the party to speculate based on their own backgrounds and perspectives. Many witnesses to the JFK assassination claimed to have heard more shots, seen more assassins, or observed different wounds than as stated in the Warren Commission report, even though the latter’s forensic conclusions have repeatedly been declared accurate by responsible analysts. For example, a ballistics expert supplied the information that led to Bonar Menninger’s Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK (St. Martin’s, 1992), which concluded that a Secret Service agent probably killed JFK by accident. Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation (Thunder’s Mouth, 1993) was written by a journalist who worked with a House committee and claimed to have “personal” knowledge of a CIA/Oswald link through investigations he conducted in places like Miami. Computer expert David S. Lifton wrote Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Macmillan, 1980), in which, on the basis of his own examination of photographs, he concluded that JFK’s wounds had been altered before he was buried, although no purpose for doing
so was offered. Dr. Charles A. Crenshaw also wrote a book questioning the wounds, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence (Signet, 1992).

  In 1993 journalist Gerald Posner published Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Random House). Posner’s book does a good job documenting that the U.S. government was not involved in Kennedy’s assassination. To a professional intelligence investigator, however, Case Closed leaves quite a few essential operational details entirely unanswered. The book, for instance, accepted the Soviet explanation for how Oswald “defected” to the Soviet Union without questioning two stamps in his passport—provided by Moscow—indicating that on October 9, 1959, Oswald took a flight to Helsinki from London’s Heathrow Airport that was in fact fictitious; there was no direct flight from London to Helsinki on that day. Nor did Oswald’s name appear on the passenger manifest of any other flight from Heathrow that day or on any flight arriving in Helsinki from other European cities within this travel window.

  In 1964 the CIA drafted a set of questions for the Soviet government designed to elicit data from the Soviets about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and the procedures under which he had been processed and controlled during the two and a half years he had spent in that country. The draft was, however, rejected by the Warren Commission. A commission memorandum dated February 24, 1964, explained that, according to the State Department, the CIA’s draft would have had serious adverse diplomatic effects and that the State Department “feels that the CIA draft carries an inference that we suspect that Oswald might have been an agent for the Soviet Government and that we are asking the Russian Government to document our suspicions.”3 Instead, the State Department proposed that the commission send to Moscow “a very short and simple request for whatever information the Russian authorities” had available on Oswald. The Warren Commission complied.4 It also asked the Soviet Union for statements from Soviet citizens who might have met Oswald during his residence in that country, but none were ever provided. Later, in response to a request from the House Select Committee on Assassinations relayed by the State Department, the Soviet government “informed the committee that all the information it had on Oswald had been forwarded to the Warren Commission, a statement that the committee greeted with skepticism, based on the advice it had received from a number of sources, including defectors from the KGB.”5