Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  Finally, we find in Operation SOLO a wonderful explanation for the above altercation between the PGU and Gus Hall. In April 1958, after CPUSA relations with the CPSU were reestablished and Morris went to Moscow for his first meeting with International Department chairman Boris Ponomarev, Ponomarev offered the CPUSA $75,000 for 1958 and $200,000 for 1959 to be sent through the Canadian party for Jack to retrieve. The amount went up and down somewhat, but starting in 1963 it began growing by leaps and bounds, reaching over $1 million in 1967 and over $2 million by 1978, where it remained for most of the 1980s. In 1987, Gus Hall asked for an increase and got over $3 million. When told this, Morris commented only that the Soviets vastly overestimated the influence of the American party.

  Instead, we coauthors believe that Gus Hall was being paid off for managing to keep the Childs brothers working for the CPUSA for so many years, in spite of all the PGU’s suspicions about them. Because the Soviets knew that Morris and Jack were such trusted FBI agents, they succeeded in using them to persuade the American government—and the world—that the Soviet Union had not been in any way involved with the assassination of President Kennedy and incidentally to turn the focus of lingering investigations toward Cuban émigrés. With Gus Hall’s blessing, the Childs brothers had unwittingly made a major contribution to a vitally important Soviet disinformation campaign.

  In short, we coauthors are firmly convinced that the leaders of the Soviet Union and of today’s Russia were well aware all along that the Childs brothers changed loyalty in the 1950s and became FBI agents. The CPSU not only kept them as agents and close friends, it used them selectively to disseminate false information to the FBI with the knowledge that it would be judged as reliable and passed to the highest levels of the U.S. government.

  FIDEL CASTRO JOINS THE PLOT

  We now know the real reason why Morris and Jack Childs were treated so royally by the bigwigs of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Not only were the brothers themselves agreeably gullible, the FBI leadership itself would swallow any disinformation fed to the brothers, vouch for it, and disseminate it to the top leaders of the U.S. government. Not in their wildest dreams could the Soviets have wished for better assets.

  We need to keep that in mind when we examine the interesting contacts between Jack Childs and Cuban leader Fidel Castro as masterminded from behind the scenes by the CPSU.

  As earlier discussed, it must have been in April 1963, after Lee Harvey Oswald showed the Soviets in Mexico City how he planned to accomplish the assassination of the American president, that the Soviet leadership realized it needed to act. If Oswald couldn’t be talked out of it, a very sophisticated disinformation operation would have to be mounted. The most important thing would be to disclaim any Soviet connection with Oswald convincingly, even though he had lived in the Soviet Union for some three years and was known to be an ardent and vocal supporter of Soviet communism and had a Russian wife.

  The Soviets evidently decided to turn Oswald into a visible supporter of Cuban communism. When he returned from Mexico in April 1963, Oswald immediately left for New Orleans, where he set himself up as secretary of a Fair Play for Cuba group. For the next few months, he energetically pursued this track, giving speeches to anyone who would listen, talking on the radio, getting into the newspapers, even having fights with Cuban émigrés. Although Oswald went through the suggested motions, he was clearly not in the least deterred from what he considered his patriotic mission—killing President Kennedy—and then escaping back into the arms of Mother Russia.

  Meanwhile, for its part, the KGB disinformation experts were figuring out how Oswald’s vehement communism could be slanted toward Cuba instead of the Soviet Union should the unthinkable actually come to pass. Evidently, they suggested that KGB officers in Mexico send Oswald off to New Orleans and to the Fair Play for Cuba charade.

  In any case, at some point Fidel Castro was brought into the disinformation planning. Fidel gave quite a performance on November 22 to ensure that the world would know that it had not been he who was behind the assassination and suggested who might have been, and this was naturally in his own self-interest. But Fidel was called upon to assist the Soviet International Department (which had taken on the responsibility for managing Oswald) after the KGB’s earlier efforts to deter Oswald from going through with his plan had failed.

  The annual international Communist Party meeting was scheduled for May 1963. Normally, Morris Childs would have attended, but he was ill. According to Operation SOLO, the Soviets asked to see Jack Childs, so Gus Hall sent him instead. (We suspect the International Department specifically arranged this with Hall. Morris was perennially unwell, so it would not have been a problem to replace him with Jack.) Jack was very impressed by the reception he got in Moscow: the greetings at the airport, the limousine, the hotel suite, audiences with Suslov and Ponomarev, and dinners with members of the Central Committee and International Department collectively testified to Jack’s new status. He was a personal emissary of Hall, the American head of state “temporarily out of power,” and therefore above the KGB.

  Jack had essentially been serving as a mere bagman for the KGB, and he was a far less complicated man than Morris. That certainly played a role in his contacts with Fidel Castro, and it must also be kept in mind that we learn only Jack’s version of these contacts.22

  Jack was told that Fidel Castro was in Moscow and that all might benefit if they got together. He was warned that Fidel could be mercurial and was told not to tell Fidel anything about Soviet-CPUSA contacts to which the Morrises were privy. The Soviets then arranged for Jack and Fidel, as if by chance, to be seated next to each other at a dinner. They spoke at length in English, ignoring everyone else. Jack was flattered. Fidel said he hoped they would meet again, perhaps in Havana. The Soviet hosts were happy. (Coauthor Pacepa remembers visiting Cuba at about this time in his other life. His main contact there was Raúl Castro, who was the brains of political maneuvers and intelligence operations. Fidel was more the figurehead who followed Raúl’s advice. Fidel acted very important, kept people waiting for days to see him, and could rattle on about nothing for hours at a time, but he did as Raúl asked. Here he did as Ponomarev wanted of him.)

  In early November 1963, Morris was in Moscow for his annual discussions with the top Soviet leaders about politics and for funding for the CPUSA. Among other things, the Soviets expressed their worries about Fidel Castro, who was supporting revolutionary movements in Latin America haphazardly. Moscow was afraid he didn’t know what he was doing and was just self-promoting. The Politburo hoped to use the CPUSA to influence Fidel. International Department chairman Ponomarev observed that Jack and Fidel seemed to hit it off together when they had met in Moscow. They hoped to use this budding relationship for spying on and influencing Fidel, and they confirmed this later.

  Ponomarev proposed that Jack travel to Havana under the pretext of delivering a formal message from Gus Hall about cooperation between the communist parties of Cuba and the United States. The Soviets would arrange Jack’s travel from Moscow to and from Cuba, so as to avoid U.S. travel restrictions, as well as brief and debrief Jack about his meetings with Fidel.

  Jack arrived in Moscow in April 1964. The Soviets stressed that Fidel should be told nothing about their interest in his meeting with Jack. (This was a fishy request since Jack would be flying to and from Moscow in a Soviet airplane. We believe it should be read as a sop to Jack’s ego and as deniability in anticipation of Fidel’s personal comments on the assassination.)

  Jack flew to Havana in mid-May 1964, and as was Fidel’s wont, it took him about a week to grant Jack an audience. But when Fidel eventually came over to the villa where Jack was lodging, he was very cordial. They talked about Cuban and American Communist Party relations and setting up better ways to communicate with each other.

  Out of the blue, Fidel suddenly asked: “Do you think Oswald killed President Kennedy?” He went on to explain that Oswald could not have done it alone and tha
t there must have been about three people involved. He explained that he and a sharpshooter had tested a rifle like the one Oswald had used, and they concluded that one man could not have done it alone. (This is in accordance with the Soviet disinformation line. Based on Dallas police records, the Warren Commission concluded that on that day, a total of three shots were fired at the president, all from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository, where the three empty shells were found.) Fidel also remarked that, when Oswald was refused a visa at the Cuban embassy in Mexico, he had stormed out saying, “I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.” Fidel asked when the Americans were going to catch the other assassins and accepted Jack’s suggestion that he write a letter to the American people about it. The discussion then turned to other matters.

  Jack left Havana very pleased with himself. He had accomplished all his objectives, establishing a direct link with Fidel Castro for the CPUSA and the hidden link that the Soviets had wanted.

  We view all of Jack Childs’s contacts with Fidel Castro as having been orchestrated by Boris Ponomarev and one of the many-pronged Soviet disinformation operations designed to reassure the world that the Soviet Union never had anything to do with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination of President Kennedy.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE DESIGNATED HIT MAN

  Oswald was recruited by Soviet foreign intelligence (the PGU) when he was serving in Japan as a young Marine. What feels hard for people to swallow, however, is that another PGU department subsequently trained Oswald as an assassin and so thoroughly brainwashed him that not even the PGU itself could deter him from accomplishing his very secret and special “mission for Khrushchev.” (For details see Pacepa’s book Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the KGB, and Kennedy’s Assassination.)

  Flash back to Oswald’s life.1 Following the example of his two older brothers, as soon as he turned seventeen, Oswald enlisted in the Marine Corps, eager to escape from the impoverished and chaotic life imposed on them by their dysfunctional mother. After being trained in the United States, he arrived in Japan on September 12, 1957, for assignment as a radar operator at Atsugi Air Base (which also had a U-2 reconnaissance plane unit). As a lonely child, Oswald’s only pleasure had been devouring books in the public library, where he had become hooked on the fairytale descriptions of Marxism and the Soviet Union. In Japan, unlike his teammates, he showed no interest in sports and girls, but he did begin going with his teammates to the local bars. There he spouted off about his favorite subjects, the Soviet paradise and the Russian language.

  It would not have taken the PGU long to recruit a person such as this. At that time Pacepa was urged by his PGU advisors to focus on recruiting an American “serzhant” stationed at Atsugi or Wiesbaden, important Soviet targets for high-altitude radar intelligence. Oswald was soon dating one very expensive bar girl and later seeing another girl for Russian lessons.

  In December 1958, Oswald was assigned to El Toro Air Base in California, which did not have U-2s but did have new height-finding radar gear. For security reasons, the PGU did not allow personal meetings with its agents in the United States, but Oswald found ways to go to Tijuana, Mexico, to meet “friends” and also to deposit classified material in bus station lockers that could be retrieved by PGU illegal officers. The Soviets were clearly impressed with his radar information, and Oswald was happy to have found people who appreciated him. Oswald soon developed a determination to spend the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. He managed an early discharge on September 11, 1959, allegedly to care for his sick mother, and on September 20 sailed for Europe on a freighter out of New Orleans. The Soviets did not really want him as a defector, but the PGU arranged to bring him to Moscow “black” for a week in order to debrief him fully on the U-2 flights. It then planned to send him back out as its agent at an international school in Switzerland that it had already arranged for Oswald to contact in March 1959.

  Oswald got to Moscow sometime in early October 1959. He was thoroughly debriefed of his information on the U-2. Its most secret attributes were the height at which it flew (thirty thousand meters, or roughly ninety thousand feet) and the new radar used to track it. Oswald was able to provide detailed data on both. Security concerns had caused the U.S. to suspend U-2 flights temporarily, but they were started up again on April 9, 1960, enabling the Soviets to confirm the accuracy of Oswald’s reporting. Pacepa learned around this time from PGU chief Aleksandr Sakharovsky that “a defector” had provided the checkable information on the U-2’s flight altitude and that the Soviets were ready to shoot down the next flight.

  Finally, on May 1, 1960, the Soviets succeeded in bringing down an American U-2 plane. Khrushchev bragged to the world that his rockets had shot it down. In fact, the Soviets did not have rockets able to reach a target at that altitude. If they did, the rocket would have blasted the U-2 and its pilot to smithereens. What the Soviets had actually done was build a special lightweight plane, whose pilot was able to maneuver into the U-2’s slipstream and cause it to fall. Thus, both the pilot, Gary Powers, and parts of his U-2 were saved for Khrushchev’s exultant show trial and public display.2

  Khrushchev was riding high, the KGB took all the credit, and Oswald secretly became the hero of the day. Plans to send Oswald to the school in Switzerland were scrapped. At this time, Pacepa heard PGU chief Sakharovsky claim that the downing of the U-2 was “the most valuable May Day present we’ve ever given the Comrade,” meaning Khrushchev.

  On November 7, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States, taking office in January 1961. At first Khrushchev merely disdained Kennedy as the spoiled son of a millionaire. But in late January, reliable PGU spies reported that Washington was preparing an assault on Cuba (which would become the Bay of Pigs debacle). Khrushchev exploded with rage. The PGU’s Department Thirteen (assassination and sabotage) was called into play. Pacepa recalls that in January 1961, the PGU tasked his Romanian foreign intelligence service to provide the PGU with American English speakers (officers and agents) who could conduct diversion and sabotage operations in the United States. (Up until then, the KGB had trained its officers and agents in British English.)

  The hot-headed Khrushchev demanded Kennedy’s head. This was how he had always dealt with his enemies. It would not be an easy job for the PGU to pull off in the United States. But in Oswald it already had one devoted and loyal agent who spoke American English and could be trained for the assignment. Oswald was told that his idol Khrushchev had specially asked for him to be sent temporarily to the United States on a very secret mission, after which he would of course return home to the Soviet Union. Flattered, Oswald could not refuse.

  Then things started to heat up. The U.S. embassy in Moscow received an undated letter from Oswald in Minsk on February 13, 1961, in which he stated that he wanted to return to the United States. On April 17, the Bay of Pigs fiasco took place. The PGU immediately ordered its satellite services, including Pacepa’s in Romania, to “throw mud” on “the Pig,” Khrushchev’s new name for President Kennedy. On May 25 Oswald wrote the U.S. embassy in Moscow that he had gotten married and wanted to take his Russian wife with him to the U.S. Pacepa’s PGU advisors always insisted that every illegal officer or agent have a trained wife to help him with communications and to bolster his morale. On June 2 and 3, Khrushchev met Kennedy in Vienna—a meeting that reinforced his hatred for him. Just after that event, coauthor Pacepa saw a letter Khrushchev had sent to Ceausescu and probably to the other satellite leaders calling Kennedy a puppet of the CIA and the American military-industrial complex. Khrushchev stepped up tension over Berlin, and on August 13, the Berlin Wall was built overnight.

  After persuading him to return to the U.S. on a very secret, temporary mission, Department Thirteen would have put Oswald through some intensive training as he was not a trained agent. Our best guide to his training would be the example of “Anton,” a case very similar to Oswald’s. Born in Canada, “Anton”
returned with his family to his fanatical communist father’s native Czechoslovakia at the age of sixteen. There “Anton” was recruited by the Czech secret police and in 1957 was turned over to the Soviet PGU’s Department Thirteen for assassinations abroad and sent to Moscow for training. His assignment was to return to Canada to perform “special tasks,” which would be specified after he was settled in Canada.

  In 1958 “Anton” entered training near Moscow, where he was comfortably lodged in a safe house, by officers of Department Thirteen. Pacepa’s Romanian DIE also had its own such division, known as Group Z—the last letter of the alphabet, standing for the final solution—which similarly had its own training facilities. “Anton’s” instruction focused on all kinds of clandestine communications: ciphers, codes, invisible writing, microdots, recognition signals, and radio procedures.