USA published the first part of the secret archives on the assassination of John F. Kennedy

The main sensation is that there is not a single secret paper showing the involvement of Soviet special services in the crime of the century.

Gennady Charodeyev

According to the official American version, Kennedy was mortally wounded by a rifle shot on November 22, 1963, while driving with his wife Jacqueline in an open limousine through the streets of Dallas. Texas Governor John Connally, who was accompanying the couple, was wounded.

A little over an hour later, the police detained Lee Harvey Oswald on suspicion of the Kennedy assassination. Oswald himself denied the charges against him and stated that he "turned out to be a puppet in the wrong hands."

Two days later, Oswald was taken out of the Dallas Police Department to be transferred to the county jail. At that moment, he was shot by the owner of the nightclub, Jack Ruby. Oswald was wounded in the stomach and died a few hours later in the same hospital where President Kennedy had died of his wounds earlier.

“And this is where the most interesting thing begins”, - wrote Soviet political scientist and TV presenter Valentin Zorin in November 1963, “How could it happen that Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who is believed to be the killer of John F. Kennedy, was allowed an outsider? After all, the United States has a strict witness protection system. The alleged assassin of the president is a witness who must be guarded as closely by the authorities as the president himself. It is simply impossible to imagine that the secret services accidentally let his killer approach Oswald, because this is absurd! After Oswald's death, 62 important witnesses passed away under strange circumstances within two years. Suddenly, people were dying who could have revealed a lot about the Kennedy assassination. By the way, the taxi driver who gave Oswald a lift home from the book depository lived only a week after the assassination of the president”.

Who is Oswald?

In dozens of books devoted to Oswald, 24-year-old Kennedy's killer is called "the weird guy". From a young age, Lee was obsessed with Marxism. And suddenly, for no reason, no reason, he entered the US Army. And he himself asked to join the Marines, where extraordinary physical training and endurance are required.

In the army, Oswald passed all the standards very average - in particular, in shooting - but he actively studied Russian. He also conducted communist propaganda almost openly - his colleagues knew that he read left-wing authors, but he never had any problems with this.

But the year was 1956. The "witch hunt" was in full swing - Senator McCarthy's commission was looking for leftists everywhere. And here, in the elite corps of the American army, a fighter is engaged in "red" propaganda, and no one bothers him. Strange, isn't it?

After retiring from the army in 1959, Oswald went by ship to France. From there he moved to England. Then he flew to Helsinki. There, literally in a day I made myself a visa to the USSR. And the next day I already rushed off by train to Moscow.

For more than ten years, the USSR was surrounded by an "iron curtain". How did an American citizen manage to instantly obtain a Soviet visa? There is no answer even in the declassified American archives.

As soon as he arrived in Moscow, Oswald demanded political asylum in bad Russian - he never really learned it. He was asked to wait, he was put in a hotel, and a few days later he received an official refusal. Oswald opened his veins right in the hotel room...

He was rescued by KGB officers and taken to a psychiatric hospital. Barely leaving the psychiatric hospital, the indefatigable Marxist went to the US embassy and announced that he was renouncing American citizenship for ideological reasons.

News of the crazy American spread all over the world. Stunned by this whole story, the KGB officers sent Oswald to Minsk to work at a factory and learn Russian. By the way, engineer Stanislav Shushkevich, the future first president of independent Belarus, became his mentor.

The gray Soviet way of life quickly bored Oswald. In 1962, he returned to the United States with his beautiful wife Marina Prusakova and their little daughter June.

In the USSR, Oswald was constantly grazed by people from the Lubyanka. It seemed that at home he should have come under an even tighter surveillance of the FBI. But none of this happened.

Oswald regularly fought with his wife, actively hung out with Russian émigrés and fought for the freedom of Cuba. He once printed a thousand "Hands off Cuba!" and distributed them in the heart of New Orleans. The police did not react in any way.

The FBI's indifference to Oswald is amazing. A convinced leftist who speaks Russian, just returned from the USSR, agitating citizens for Fidel Castro, Oswald would have to constantly be under the hood of the special services. But they regarded all his exploits with suspicious indifference.

FBI agents, according to the declassified archives, did follow him, especially when Oswald left for Mexico City. The operatives' report even indicated the time of each of Oswald's three visits to the Cuban embassy.

Former Marine Oswald was trying to get a transit visa, according to the BBC , whose reporters were able to leaf through archives. He claimed that he wanted to visit Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union. Cuban officials asked for confirmation of this from the Soviet side. Then Oswald went to the USSR embassy and demanded to give him an entry visa. There he was told that they would be able to answer this request within 3-4 months. As a result, Oswald traveled between the consulates for five days without achieving the desired result.

As established by the CIA officers, on September 26 or 28 (the date is not entirely legible in the documents), Oswald met in Mexico City with the Soviet diplomat Valery Kostikov. As follows from the declassified documents, Kostikov is an experienced KGB officer serving in the 13th department, which was engaged in assassination and subversive activities.

Kostikov came to the attention of the FBI during the surveillance of a certain citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany who lived in Oklahoma and was recruited by the KGB. Counterintelligence officers were able to turn this man over and assigned him the pseudonym "Tumbleweed".

And then information about the meetings of the double agent went straight to the CIA. So they learned the details of how Tumbleweed met Kostikov in Mexico City, and in New York contacted another Soviet intelligence officer, Oleg Brykin. According to the double agent, during these meetings the Chekists "pointed out to him the targets for sabotage".

After Kennedy's assassination, the CIA established round-the-clock surveillance of Kostikov, as well as several members of the Cuban and Soviet intelligence. But, according to the report, the surveillance "showed nothing unusual."

On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald walked up to the sixth floor of a book store in Dallas and fired three rifle shots at the presidential motorcade as it passed the street.

By the way, in the army, Oswald's results in shooting were frankly weak. But then he managed to make three shots from a rifle with manual reloading within five seconds (!). Only one bullet went into the asphalt. The other two punctured President Kennedy's chest and head, as well as the back of the Governor of Texas sitting in the front seat of the car.

How two bullets inflicted three serious wounds is unclear. The Warren Commission, which investigated the case, refused to even discuss the version of the existence of the second shooter.

Oswald's motives were also unclear. If he killed the president for some ideological reason, he would have to take this opportunity and agitate the public. However, he did not shout any slogans, but simply denied his guilt.

"People's Avenger" did not act of their own free will

And Lee Harvey Oswald was shot at point-blank by the "people's avenger" - the owner of the nightclub Jack Ruby. After his arrest, Ruby demanded a meeting with the Warren Commission, created specifically to investigate the Kennedy assassination, and promised to provide important evidence if he was transferred to Washington. However, the Warren Commission did not meet with him. It looks like the investigators appointed by the new president, Lyndon Johnson, were only busy blaming Oswald on everything. Their version of the lone shooter, "who hated American society", and entered the official historiography.

The greatest interest in the declassified archive among the BBC journalists was aroused by the CIA reports, which partially disclose the versions about those who ordered the assassination. Judging by the general array of documents, the US intelligence services have been working on the theory for many years that Soviet intelligence could be involved in the Kennedy assassination.

But KGB informants of the American special services argued that the USSR had nothing to do with Oswald and Moscow was not involved in the assassination of the American president. According to informed sources of the FBI in the Soviet Union (as can be seen from the documents), "The Kremlin was in disarray and shock" upon learning of the attempt on Kennedy's life.

Interestingly, a new batch of declassified reports from the agent network mentions anonymous calls made to the US Embassy in Australia in 1962 and 1963.

For the first time, an unknown person who called himself "the Polish driver of the USSR Embassy in Australia" called the CIA and said that there was a plan to kill President Kennedy, the executor was ready to pay 100 thousand dollars. According to the caller, the plan was developed by "the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain," as well as "the communists in England, Hong Kong and possibly other countries".

On November 24, 1963, that is, two days after the assassination of Kennedy, a man who again introduced himself as a chauffeur called the US embassy again and said that the Soviet government had financed the assassination of the US president. The "chauffeur" claimed that on the morning after the assassination of Kennedy, vodka was poured at the USSR embassy and drank "for having achieved what we wanted".

Diplomats and CIA officials took note of these incidents and consulted with colleagues in Australia.

“Australian officials in charge of this case think the caller is crazy. They note that the Soviet missions in Australia use only Soviet drivers, and there is no evidence of the use of Polish drivers, ”the agent's report says.

The Warren Commission in 1964 concluded that the President was killed by a bullet from Oswald, who acted alone for unknown reasons.

In a previously declassified 73-page CIA report, a number of intelligence officials doubted that Oswald was the only participant in the crime. “The agency and its stations, especially in Mexico City and Miami, did not lose sight of the possibility that Oswald was not acting alone”, - the report says.

At the same time, in one of the now declassified documents, the BBC reports, it is noted that the CIA refused to provide more detailed information about Oswald's visit to Mexico to representatives of the Special Committee of the US House of Representatives (SCPC), created in 1976 to investigate the Kennedy assassination.

The committee was prevented from meeting with former CIA officers and informers and some other people who allegedly spoke with Oswald in Mexico City.

“There is a possibility that a certain US government agency has asked the Mexican authorities to refrain from assisting the Committee in this regard,” the UPC said.

And one more curious fact. Immediately after Kennedy's assassination, US Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann wrote to Washington, recalling Oswald's recent visit to Mexico City and expressing his suspicions that Oswald might not have acted alone. However, Mann, he said, was ordered to cease all actions that could "confirm or deny rumors of Cuban involvement" in the Kennedy assassination.

More than 20 years later, speaking in front of the UPC, Mann said that he received this order, classified "top secret" from US Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Mann believed that the head of the CIA station in Mexico, Winston Scott, received a similar order. In his memoirs, declassified after his death, Scott does not mention anything about this.

Many researchers agree that at the moment we know quite a bit about what exactly Oswald did in Mexico two months before the assassination of Kennedy and what his motives were. It is hoped that the answers to at least some of the questions can be found in the documents, which should be declassified in the coming years.

So there was no breakthrough in 2021. Of the nearly 1,500 declassified documents, the overwhelming majority are duplicates of previously published papers. The only difference is that earlier, many of the names or names of the CIA stations mentioned in the reports were edited (covered with black stripes), and now they are made public.

“Biden is the first president to come close to recognizing what conspiracy theorists have cynically talked about for a long time. Some of the archives of the Kennedy affair may never be made public. Or they will not be published, at least as long as those who remember where they were on November 22, 1963, when the shocking news came from Dallas, are still alive, ”wrote the author of books on the Kennedy assassination Philip Chenon.

Be that as it may, the publication of the second part of the archive on the "Kennedy case" for some reason asked to postpone the current head of the White House Joe Biden. It is planned to be made public by December 15, 2022. We are talking about 15 thousand more documents, where the USSR, the KGB and Soviet intelligence are mentioned more than once.