JFK's Assassination from the Texas Schoolbook Depository to the Mitrokhin Archive

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc, states:

In the 1990s, retired KGB officer Vasily Mitrokhin, helped by the British MI6, smuggled ca 25,000 pages of highly confidential KGB documents out of Moscow. They represent a minuscule part of the KGB archive, estimated to be some 27 billion pages (the East German Stasi archive had 3 billion). Nevertheless, the FBI described the Mitrokhin Archive as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." According to this archive, the first American book on the assassination, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?, which blames the CIA and the FBI for the crime, was masterminded by the KGB. The book's author, Joachim Joesten, a German-born American communist, spent five days in Dallas after the assassination, then went to Europe and disappeared from sight. A few months later Joesten's book was published by American communist Carlo Aldo Marzani (New York), who received $80,000 from the KGB to produce pro-Soviet books, plus an annual $10,000 to advertise them aggressively. Other documents in the Mitrokhin Archive identify the first American reviewer of this book, Victor Perlo, as an undercover KGB operative.

Joesten's book was dedicated to American Mark Lane, described in the Mitrokhin Archive as a leftist who anonymously received money from the KGB. In 1966 Lane published the bestseller Rush to Judgment, alleging that Kennedy was killed by a right-wing American group. These two books encouraged people with any remotely related background expertise to join the fray. Each viewed events from his own perspective, but all accused elements in the U.S. of that crime. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison looked around his home district and in 1967 arrested a local man, whom he accused of conspiring with elements of U.S. intelligence to murder Kennedy in order to stop the latter's efforts to end the Cold War. The accused was acquitted in 1969, but Garrison clung to his story, first writing A Heritage of Stone (Putnam, 1970) and eventually publishing On the Trail of the Assassins (Sheriden Square, 1988), one of the books that inspired Oliver Stone's movie JFK.

The Kennedy assassination conspiracy was born—and it never died. According to another document, in April 1977 KGB chairman Yury Andropov informed the Politburo that the KGB was launching a new desinformatsiya campaign to further implicate "American special services" in the Kennedy assassination. Unfortunately, the Mitrokhin Archive is silent on the subject after that.

As I said a few months ago, "the answer that resulted from the process of investigation and trial was correct, but not politically correct according to the Marxist paradigm of the hippie left." Now we have an ex-Soviet intelligence officer who states that the reason for the conspiracy theorizing is a Soviet disinformation operation.


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