Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet Kgb, and the Kennedy Assassination

Did the Kremlin order a hit on President John F. Kennedy in 1962? The former chief of Communist Romania's foreign intelligence service thinks so. And he lays out his case in a recently published book with the title Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, "all Soviet-bloc espionage services were identically organized and had an identical modus operandi." Pacepa also explained that, "Soviet espionage operations ... can easily be identified by their particular patterns, of you are familiar with them." Looking at the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, Pacepa sees a KGB pattern. In the mid-to-late 1950s the Soviet bloc intelligence services were ordered to recruit American servicemen. To this end, loose women were used as "spotters" at bars and nightclubs located near U.S. military bases in Germany and Japan. They were told to watch for U.S. servicemen sympathetic to left-liberal or Marxist ideas. Lee Harvey Oswald was not only an America serviceman stationed in Japan in 1957. He was fascinated by Marxism. As a Marine Corps radar operator Oswald also possessed clues to the flight altitude of the American U-2 spy plane. It was no accident, therefore, that the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960. It was noteworthy that Oswald seemed to live beyond his means while in Japan. He dated a hostess from one of the most expensive nightclubs, whose attentions for one night would cost a month's pay. How could he afford such a woman? The answer becomes obvious, says Pacepa, if we realize that Oswald had "Soviet spy" written all over him. When his work in Japan was finished, Oswald didn't want to be in the Marine Corps any longer. What he wanted was to live in the worker's paradise - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. So Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. After helping the Soviets to track and shoot down the U-2 spy plane, Oswald was trained by the KGB as an assassin and returned to the United States. According to Pacepa, it was standard practice for an agent like Oswald to carry a fake diary (created by disinformation specialists) as part of his "legend." Oswald had such a diary, an obvious fabrication with British spellings and expressions (due to the fact that Russian special services were not trained in American English until 1964). Another standard practice was to pair recruited American agents with wives from Soviet bloc countries, so that the wives could keep watch on them. As it happens, Oswald returned to the United States with a Russian wife. As for Pacepa's sensational assertion about Khrushchev dispatching Oswald to kill Kennedy, the following points are offered by the former Soviet bloc insider: First, Pacepa's superiors in Romanian intelligence thought that Khrushchev intended to kill JFK. What was Khrushchev's motive? First there was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which earned Kennedy the KGB

I have read a great deal about the Kenendy assassination, but I have never seen anything with such a unique perspective about Oswald's motives. No one has bothered to look at the situation from his viewpoint, which is odd, considering that Oswald is the only one to date who has been formally accused of the crime. Of course it is based on existing evidence, but Pacepa's position inside the Soviet intelligence machine gives him far more credibility than your average conspiracy researcher. This book does not end the debate, of course, but it competently addresses the most seldom-investigated theory in the canon -- that of Soviet involvement. The CIA is the organization everyone loves to hate in this conspiracy, but isn't it possible that this was deliberate disinformation fueled by the KGB, as found in the Mitrokhin archive?

Pacepa's proofs that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Soviet agent, along with the standard KGB ploy of providing their nerdy recruits with a sexual-cookie wife, are irrefutable. Pacepa's speculation that the evil Khrushchev, Stalin's lickspittle, who hated the young and suave Kennedy, assisted the assassination plans by sponsoring Oswald's return to the US after rifle and spy training are also credible. What is curious is Pacepa's exculpation of Yuriy Nosenko from having been sent deliberately by the USSR, after Kennedy's assassination, to defect with misinformation about the Soviet Union's involvement. Pacepa alleges that Nosenko, who was not in the KGB but the VGU, did not know Oswald's task because the VGU's files did not have all the pertinent information on Oswald. Nosenko however was the major reason that the US accepted the lie that the KGB was not involved in Oswald's plot. Is Pacepa making an honest mistake about Nosenko's phony defection? or is Pacepa creating what amounts to a legal brief for Nosenko's innocence? And if he is, why? Welcome to the House of Mirrors that is spyworld. In most cases, only the very inside "players" ever get to know the whole truth. For more information on the circumstances surrounding Nosenko's highly suspicious defection and exculpation of the Soviet Union, read the book, "Spy Wars," by retired CIA agent, Tennent Bagley.

General Ion Mihai Pacepa has given us a new and very different point of view of the JFK assassination, clarifying what has been the conspiracy theorists' haven in the 20th century. In the FBI we taught that 'the truth is in the details,' and the General exquisitely reveals the truth-with verifiable, consistent, meshing-together, and incontrovertible facts about the involvement of the Soviet leadership and the KGB in this tragedy from start to finish, and even afterward in covering up their malfeasance. The General's credibility-from the time of his initial debriefings and to the present-continues to ring true. He speaks the 'language of intelligence' and admirably translates it for those who lived through that time but were unaware of how to interpret what the plethora of facts really meant. A younger generation can now also profit from the General's insight to see this historic event clearly.