by Jim Marrs
Through the 1980s, Nosenko continued to be an adviser on Soviet intelligence to the CIA and the FBI at a salary of more than $35,000 a year. He has been given a new identity as well as more than $150,000 as payment for his ordeal.
There appears to be evidence that Oswald continued to keep in touch with Soviet officials almost up until the time of Kennedy’s assassination. According to CIA documents, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City on September 23, 1963, and met with Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, who was described as a consul in the Soviet embassy. However, a CIA memorandum added, “[Kostikov] is also known to be a staff officer of the KGB. He is connected with the Thirteenth, or ‘liquid affairs’ department, whose responsibilities include assassination and sabotage.”
Of course, Oswald’s contact with this man, who was operating as a normal member of the Soviet embassy, may have been coincidental. However, it is significant that the Warren Commission, aware of the implication of this contact, failed to pursue the matter or include this information in its report, though this contact subsequently was used to paint Oswald as a would-be Soviet assassin.
Years later, FBI agent James Hosty, who was connected to Oswald prior to the assassination, said he was unhappy with the revelation about Kostikov’s KGB ties and that, had he been made aware of this connection by the CIA, he would have placed Oswald’s name on the bureau’s “Security Index” of individuals to monitor.
Two theories have emerged:
One, Oswald was recruited by the KGB while serving in Japan and was encouraged to defect to Russia, then sent back to the United States to kill President Kennedy. This theory is rejected by most students of the subject, including author Edward Jay Epstein, whose book Legend studied the Oswald-Soviet connections in detail. Epstein reasoned, “I think that the fact that Oswald traces so clearly back to the Russians makes it extremely unlikely that they would have recruited him as an assassin.”
Second, Oswald, whether genuine or substitute, was recruited into US intelligence as a spy and sent to Russia. There, the KGB attempted to turn him into their agent and sent him back to the United States, unaware that he would be blamed for Kennedy’s death. This would explain the extraordinary lengths by the Soviets to disavow any connection with Oswald.
In the overall view, Oswald obviously was mixed up in some sort of intelligence work. And while it is likely that the Soviets would attempt to recruit this lowly Marine and would-be defector, it is highly unlikely that they would consider using him in something so dangerous as assassinating the US president. In murdering Kennedy, the Soviets would have been risking all. World War III would be the likely result should a Soviet assassination plot be uncovered. And what would they have gained by killing Kennedy? Virtually nothing, except promoting Lyndon Johnson to be president. Johnson had far stronger anticommunist credentials than Kennedy with much closer ties to the military-industrial complex most feared by the Soviets.
Such thinking was confirmed in later years when it was learned that on the day after the assassination Nikolai T. Fedorenko of the Soviet Union Mission to the United Nations met with all Russian diplomatic personnel at the Soviet Mission. Fedorenko stated that Kennedy’s death had caused considerable shock in Soviet government circles and was very much regretted by the Soviet Union.
According to documents obtained by the Assassinations Records Review Board, by the fall of 1965, Colonel Boris Ivanov, chief of the Soviet Committee for State Security, told Soviet KGB personnel in New York City that the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. He ordered all operatives to obtain all the information available on Johnson, his background and associates.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, even after hearing the Nosenko story, concluded, “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
But perhaps the best argument against Soviet involvement comes from the memoirs of the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to defect to the West. In his 1985 book, Breaking with Moscow, Arkady N. Shevchenko wrote:
Our leaders would not have been so upset by the assassination if they had planned it and the KGB would not have taken upon itself to venture such a move without Politburo approval. . . . Moscow firmly believed that Kennedy’s assassination was a scheme by “reactionary forces” within the United States seeking to damage the new trend in relations. The Kremlin ridiculed the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald had acted on his own as the sole assassin. There was in fact widespread speculation among Soviet diplomats that Lyndon Johnson, along with the CIA and the Mafia, had masterminded the plot. Perhaps one of the most potent reasons why the U.S.S.R. wished Kennedy well was that Johnson was anathema to Khrushchev. Because he was a southerner, Moscow considered him a racist (the stereotype of any American politician from below the Mason-Dixon line), an anti-Soviet and anti-communist to the core. Further, since Johnson was from Texas, a center of the most reactionary forces in the United States, according to the Soviets, he was associated with the big-time capitalism of the oil industry, also known to be anti-Soviet.
A final argument against Soviet involvement is that while it is conceivable that the Russians somehow contrived Kennedy’s death and that high-level US government officials were forced to cover this up to prevent a devastating world war, it makes no sense that these facts would not have been leaked slowly to the American public in the late 1960s and early 1970s in an effort to gain support for the anticommunist war in Vietnam and to blunt the growing antiwar movement.
The fact that Russian assassination plans didn’t surface goes far to prove that hard evidence of Soviet involvement in Kennedy’s death is nonexistent. But if the Russians had nothing to do with the assassination, what about their protégés on the island of Cuba?
Cubans
In a 1952 military coup, former Cuban army sergeant Fulgencio Batista seized control of Cuba, which had been under US trusteeship since the Spanish-American War of 1898. A dictator and a despot, Batista nevertheless was supported by the United States and worked closely with many American groups, especially organized criminals.
By the late 1950s, Cuba was a mecca for American gamblers, tourists, investors, and offshore banking speculators.
Only one man seemed determined to overthrow Batista—a young attorney named Fidel Castro.
Fidel Castro
Born the son of a Spanish-born plantation owner on August 13, 1926, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz had an active boyhood in rural eastern Cuba. He once threatened to burn the house down if his parents didn’t send him to school.
In 1952, he ran for Parliament but was stymied when the dictator Batista canceled the elections. From that time on, Castro devoted himself to ousting Batista.
Gathering some followers, Castro made his first assault on Batista on July 26, 1953, attacking the dictator’s Moncada Barracks. The attack was a military disaster. Captured and tried, the youthful Castro proclaimed, “Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Castro was released after twenty-two months. He then fled to Mexico, where he began reorganizing his guerrilla fighters. He used the brutality displayed by Batista at the Moncada Barracks as a rallying point and named his revolution the “26th of July Movement” after the disastrous attack. Since 1959, this date has been celebrated as Cuban Independence Day.
In 1956, Castro swam the Rio Grande and entered the United States to arrange the purchase of a dilapidated yacht named the Granma. Returning to Mexico, he began planning the next stage of his revolution—the invasion of his homeland. Confident that he would rapidly gain followers, Castro even made his invasion plans public.
On December 2, 1956, when he and eighty-two guerrillas waded ashore on the swampy coast of his native Oriente Province, Batista’s soldiers were waiting in ambush. Only twelve guerrillas, including Castro, survived a
nd escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains.
After Batista proclaimed his death, Castro invited a reporter for the New York Times to his camp to show he was very much alive, and he predicted that final victory would be his.
After several years of basic survival in the mountains—during this time, Castro grew his now-famous beard—the young revolutionary and his followers began to take the initiative. By the summer of 1958, his guerrilla band had grown to more than eight hundred, and later that year a detachment led by Ernesto “Che” Guevara captured the provincial capital of Santa Clara in central Cuba.
Although backed by an army of some 30,000, Batista panicked and decided to quit the island. Taking bags of cash, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic in the first few hours of 1959.
Castro’s fantasy revolution had suddenly become a dream come true. For two weeks, Castro slowly moved toward Havana. The excitement and passions of the moment were almost overpowering. Veteran news correspondents could not recall a more jubilant scene since the liberation of Paris in World War II. For a period of weeks, the jubilation continued, but then became subdued in the wake of trials and executions of prerevolution “war criminals.”
With the defeat of Batista, Castro became the undisputed leader of Cuba, even proclaiming himself “Jefe Maximo” (maximum leader). And he began making drastic changes in the island.
Castro closed down the gambling casinos and houses of prostitution that had been the source of an estimated $100 million a year for organized crime in the United States. He nationalized the sugar industry, the backbone of Cuba’s economy, and by the summer of 1960, he had seized more than $700 million in US property, including banks that had been accused of laundering money for American interests. (Even his parents’ plantation was nationalized, angering his own mother and prompting his younger sister Juanita to leave Cuba and become an anti-Castroite.)
Some social gains were made on the island. Within a few years, illiteracy had been reduced from 24 percent to 4 percent. But Castro also proclaimed that he was the leader of socialist revolution in South America, although he strongly maintained that he was not a communist. American interests were quick to respond. The US government abruptly restricted sugar imports and began encouraging its allies not to trade with Castro.
With his trade restricted and hearing rumors that the United States might invade the island at any time, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for support. He began selling sugar to Russia in 1960 and soon Soviet technicians and advisers began to arrive on the island. This confirmed the suspicions of American interests, who began to brand Castro a communist who subverted the status quo in Central and South America.
As Castro’s social, economic, and agricultural reforms continued, often with brutal effectiveness, Cubans began to split into two factions—the Fidelistas (supporters of Castro) and the anti-Castroites, many of whom fled Cuba. By the end of the first year of Castro’s takeover, more than 100,000 Cubans were living in the United States.
As the United States stepped up its program of isolating Cuba—first with cutting off the island’s sugar markets and oil supplies, then through diplomatic maneuvers with other South American countries, and finally by introducing arms and saboteurs into Cuba—Castro grew more and more fearful of an armed invasion by the United States.
On January 3, 1961, the United States ended diplomatic relations with Cuba after Castro demanded the US embassy staff be cut to only eleven persons. Castro charged that 80 percent of the staff was “FBI and Pentagon spies.” In 1961 most Americans had never heard of the CIA, a then little-known and super-secret organization, much like the National Security Agency today. Two weeks later, the United States forbade its citizens to travel to Cuba. In the same month, the month that John F. Kennedy took office as president, Castro placed his militia on twenty-four-hour alert, proclaiming that the “Yankee invasion” was imminent.
In February, Soviet deputy prime minister Andrei Gromyko arrived in Cuba to arrange large-scale economic and military assistance to Castro.
And on April 17, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy became president, Castro’s fears were realized. A force of anti-Castro Cubans backed by the United States landed at the Bay of Pigs.
Disaster at the Bay of Pigs
The plans to destroy Castro and regain control of Cuba began while Eisenhower was in office, more than a year before Kennedy became president.
By early 1960, the thousands of Cuban refugees in the United States had begun forming small groups dedicated to regaining their homeland, each claiming to be the one true voice of the exiles. To bring order to this situation, the CIA in May 1960 helped create a Cuban coalition that came to be known as the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Early on, this task was handled by CIA officer E. Howard Hunt—later to be involved in the Watergate affair and to be accused of being in Dallas the day Kennedy was killed.
Secrecy was the prime concern of everyone involved. Even CIA director Allen Dulles did not know many details of the plan. He had simply turned the whole project over to a deputy director, Richard M. Bissell Jr. Bissell, in turn, handed the project to the former CIA station chief in Caracas, who recruited various CIA personnel, such as Hunt, Tracy Barnes, and David Atlee Phillips.
Many of the CIA officers involved in the Bay of Pigs had participated in the 1954 overthrow of the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and their intent was to stage a similar low-key coup in Cuba.
Unknown to these CIA officers who began to create a Cuban-refugee fighting force, Bissell was working on a concurrent project—the assassination of Fidel Castro.
Bissell’s idea began to work its way through the CIA bureaucracy with unintended humorous results. Plans were conceived to poison Castro’s cigar, to slip him a depilatory so his famous beard would fall out, or administer an LSD-type chemical so that the Cuban leader would hallucinate. These schemes took on a more sinister aspect, however, with the suggestion that American gangsters be hired to do the job.
President Dwight Eisenhower knew none of this. All he knew was that on March 17, 1960, at the urging of a top-secret committee for covert operations—known as the 5412 Committee because it was authorized by National Security Council Directive 5412/2—he had authorized a CIA plan titled “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime.” This plan offered a four-point program: (1) creating a Cuban government in exile, (2) constructing a “powerful” propaganda offensive, (3) creating a “covert intelligence and action organization” inside Cuba, and (4) developing “a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla action.”
This “paramilitary force” was to evolve into Brigade 2506, a Cuban-exile expeditionary force supported by US air and sea power.
One man who did understand what all this might mean was Eisenhower’s vice president, White House action officer, and head of the 5412 Committee—Richard M. Nixon. Nixon had several reasons for supporting action against Castro. A year earlier, the anticommunist Nixon had met with Castro and concluded, “Castro is either incredibly naïve about communism or is under communist discipline.” As one of the congressmen who passed the legislation creating the CIA, Nixon undoubtedly wanted to support the men who through the years had passed along information politically helpful to him. Then, too, the November election was approaching and Nixon was eager to have the Republican administration get the credit for ending Castro’s reign. His close ties to organized-crime figures also may have played a role.
Whatever his reasons, Nixon kept exhorting his executive assistant for national security affairs, General Robert E. Cushman Jr., to press the CIA officers for action.
Meanwhile, Hunt and an associate, Bernard L. Barker (who later participated in the Watergate break-in under Hunt’s guidance), were wheeling and dealing in the Miami Cuban exile community, sometimes carrying as much as $115,000 in a briefcase to secure agents. Training camps were located, arms secured, and Cubans recruited. The plan was advancing into broader and grander stages and still the lower-lev
el operators were in charge.
On July 23, 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was first briefed by Dulles about the Cuban operation. At that time only guerrilla infiltration and air drops were contemplated; Kennedy did not learn of the full invasion plan until after his election, a key point to remember.
Shortly after the election, Dulles—along with Bissell—again briefed Kennedy on the Cuban plan. This briefing, too, was long on vague generalities and short on details.
It was not until near the end of 1960 that anyone outside of the CIA officers in charge were told that the plan had been expanded to include an invasion with air support. Even military brass, who were being asked for material assistance, were sworn to secrecy. Most of those ranking military officers brought into the plan thought the whole thing sounded “impractical.”
The invasion was indeed impractical, because first, it was predicated on a massive revolt against Castro by the Cuban people, a concept loudly advanced by the CIA analysts but doubted by most others involved. Second, it was apparent that to succeed, the invasion had to have the support of US naval and air power, a contingency both Eisenhower and Kennedy had opposed.
By mid-March 1961—with the invasion only a month away—Kennedy was having second thoughts. The Trinidad Plan, an invasion proposal hastily put together by the Pentagon, was rejected by the new president as “too spectacular,” with its amphibious assault, air strikes, and the landing of a provisional government. Kennedy wanted something quiet, something that would not reveal US involvement.
A week before the invasion, Kennedy left no doubt as to his position on using US military forces to help the Cuban exiles. The New York Times carried a two-column headline reading: PRESIDENT BARS USING US FORCE TO OUST CASTRO. The Cuban exiles were aghast, but their CIA officers quietly assured them that no one would stand by and watch them die. Miscommunication was rampant up and down the chain of command.
