The newly released files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy didn’t drop the bombshell many thought the eagerly anticipated documents would contain. Instead, they carried a payload of duds.
Lee Harvey Oswald, the former Marine who murdered Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963, met with a Soviet KGB agent two months before he want to Dallas to kill the 35th president. New but prosaic details emerge about that previously known meeting. As well, the files contain letters and phone calls to U.S. embassies before and after the shootings that claimed the Soviets were behind the assassination. They were dismissed as “cranks.”
Beyond that, the Daily Mail suggests, the files contain nothing new, although some will not be released until next year.
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The 1,500 or so documents, released yesterday, show that Oswald met with Soviet Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov in Mexico City in September 1963, the Daily Mail reported:
“Oswald called the Soviet Embassy on 1 October, identifying himself by name and speaking broken Russian, stating the above and asking the guard who answered the phone whether there was ‘anything concerning the telegram to Washington,’” … CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley wrote on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination.
Another memo, handwritten six months after the murder in May, documents the “cranks” who passed “tips” to the CIA and State Department.
Two days after the murder, for instance, “the Naval Attaché in Canberra, Australia cabled the CIA that someone claiming to be a Polish chauffer at the Soviet Union embassy had telephoned to report that ‘probably’ the Soviet government had financed the assassination,” the newspaper reported:
The Naval Attaché said that a similar allegation had been made in an anonymous phone call on October 15, 1962, a year before the assassination, in which the caller stated that “Iron Curtain Countries” planned to pay $100,000 for Kennedy to be killed.
However, the memo notes that Australian security services considered the caller a “crank” and were unable to identify any Polish employees at the Soviet embassy. “Avail. evidence would tend to show caller was a crank but can’t confirm this,” the memo states.
Diplomats in Stockholm, Sweden, received a letter on November 23, 1963 that said the Red Chinese whacked Kennedy. But a “CIA analysis determined the anonymous letter was written by a Swede, using a Swedish keyboard typewriter.”
A letter to the U.S. embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, claimed the assassination was “part of a plot to kill all presidents of the free world.” That letter, too, came from a “crank.”
The documents also reveal that POTUS 35’s little brother, Robert, played a bigger role in Operation Mongoose — the CIA plot to assassinate Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro — than first thought.
Sirhan Sirhan murdered the younger Kennedy on June 4, 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had just won the California and South Dakota presidential primaries.
Cottage Industry
The documents won’t please conspiracy theorists who claim Lee Harvey Oswald could not have and did not act alone. Myriad theories abound. The mob did it. The Israelis did it. The CIA did it. And the latest, LBJ did it.
Roger Stone, a former advisor to President Trump and torpedo for Richard Nixon, said Nixon told him personally that LBJ arranged the murder.
In an interview with the Daily Caller, Stone explained:
Nixon said, “The damn thing is, I knew this Jack Ruby. Murray [Chotiner] brought him to me in 1947, said he was one of ‘Johnson’s boys’ and that LBJ wanted us to hire him as an informant to the Committee. We did.”
I think Nixon immediately recognized that LBJ was using one his operatives to do “clean up” work on the murder of John Kennedy. Nixon would also say to me “Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference was I wouldn’t kill for it.” At other times when I pressed the old man hard on who really killed JFK, Nixon would just shiver and say “Texas!”
Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge and Barry Goldwater were convinced that Lyndon Johnson murdered JFK. I mean absolutely convinced.
LBJ had to get rid of Kennedy because RFK was about to destroy the vice president politically and send him to prison, Stone explained:
Robert Kennedy was within days of destroying LBJ with a two-track program. One was a RFK-fed LIFE magazine exposé into LBJ’s epic corruption and ties to his protégé’s Bobby Baker’s scandals. The other was a Senate Rules Committee investigation, also fed by Robert Kennedy, into LBJ’s corruption and kickbacks. “Desperate” does not even begin to describe LBJ’s situation. LBJ was on the verge of not just national humiliation and being dropped from the 1964 Demo ticket, he was looking at the slammer.
Thus began the claim that Oswald was a communist and Castro sympathizer. In fact, he was a U.S. intelligence agent. LBJ floated multiple theories to cast suspicion elsewhere, Stone told the website.
In 2007, the late Vincent Bulgiosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and his family for the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, published Reclaiming History, a 1,600-page account of all the theories.
Bulgiosi concluded that Oswald acted alone.
