JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (79 page)

Here the letter deepens the Soviet involvement in the plot and extends the complicity to Cuba. “Oswald’s” original intention had been “to complete our business” at the Soviet Embassy in Cuba, which he says was more prepared to deal with him (prior to his return to Dallas for the plot’s countdown). However, in lieu of his failure to obtain a Cuban visa, Oswald is saying he was forced to take up “our business” directly with Soviet assassinations manager Kostikov in Mexico City. As we have already seen, a melodramatic, CIA-monitored Oswald in Mexico City had tried to obtain an immediate Cuban visa. His letter arriving at the Soviet Embassy in Washington on November 18 now attempts to document the presumed assassin’s frustrated objective in Mexico City in September—to travel then to the much safer environment of Communist-controlled Havana in order “to complete our business” with the Soviets.

The letter’s fourth paragraph states:

“Of corse [
sic
] the Soviet embassy was not at fault, they were, as I say unprepared, the Cuban consulate was guilty of a gross breach of regulations, I am glad he has since been replced [
sic
].”

“Oswald” here displays his insider’s awareness of Cuban diplomatic business. The Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, had vigorously ejected provocateur Oswald (or an impostor) from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City on September 27. In his letter to the Russians, the offended Oswald expresses his righteous indignation at “the Cuban consulate” for his “gross breach of regulations.” However, he is satisfied that Azcue is now no longer the consul. Eusebio Azcue was in fact replaced as the Cuban consul in Mexico City on November 18,
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the same day on which the Oswald letter arrived at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Oswald, set up to be the scapegoat in Dallas, is here telegraphing his accurate foreknowledge of the workings of Cuba’s Communist government—another strike against him.

As was true of all mail sent to the Soviet Embassy, the Oswald letter was intercepted, opened, and copied by the FBI before its eventual delivery to the embassy. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described the secret process to the new president, Lyndon Johnson, in a phone call at 10:01 a.m., Saturday, November 23. This was the same call in which, as we saw in chapter 2, Hoover presented Johnson with evidence from Mexico City of either a Cuban-Soviet plot with Oswald to kill Kennedy or (more likely) the CIA’s impersonation of Oswald in its own plot. In the midst of his trying to deal with those unpalatable alternatives, Johnson also heard Hoover say:

“We do have a copy of a letter which was written by Oswald to the Soviet Embassy here in Washington inquiring as well as complaining about the harassment of his wife and the questioning of his wife by the FBI. Now, of course, that letter information, we process all mail that goes to the Soviet embassy—it’s a very secret operation. No mail is delivered to the Embassy without being examined and opened by us, so that we know what they receive.”
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Hoover may have suspected already that the Oswald letter, like the Mexico City story that it furthered, was a CIA fabrication with dangerous implications. In his conversation with Johnson, he soft-pedals the letter by characterizing it in terms of its less significant passages, in which “Oswald” complains about the FBI’s “questioning of his wife.”
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Hoover leaves unmentioned the presumed assassin’s “Kostin”/Kostikov connection in Mexico City that on the face of it indicates a Soviet-Oswald conspiracy.

When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas and was fingered by the U.S. media as the president’s assassin, top-level Soviet officials realized that the Oswald letter that had arrived at their Embassy on November 18 had probably been designed to set them up. The Soviets’ response to the predicament that they recognized right after Dallas was not revealed until the end of the twentieth century, after the Soviet Union had fallen. It was the highlight of long-secret Soviet documents on the JFK assassination that Russian president Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly gave to U.S. president Bill Clinton at their meeting in Germany in June 1999.
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As revealed by those archival Soviet documents that Clinton received, it was on Tuesday, November 26, 1963, the day after President John F. Kennedy’s funeral, that Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin sent a “Top Secret/Highest Priority” telegram from Washington to Moscow. Its subject was the suspicious Oswald letter received by the Soviet Embassy four days before the assassination.

Dobrynin cabled Moscow:

“Please note Oswald’s letter of November 9, the text of which was transmitted to Moscow over the line of nearby neighbors [for security reasons].

“
This letter was clearly a provocation
: it gives the impression we had close ties with Oswald and were using him for some purposes of our own. It was totally unlike any other letters the embassy had previously received from Oswald. Nor had he ever visited our embassy himself. The suspicion that the letter is a forgery is heightened by the fact that it was typed, whereas the other letters the embassy had received from Oswald before were handwritten.

“One gets the definite impression that the letter was concocted by those who, judging from everything, are involved in the President’s assassination. It is possible that Oswald himself wrote the letter as it was dictated to him, in return for some promises, and then, as we know, he was simply bumped off after his usefulness had ended.

“The competent U.S. authorities are undoubtedly aware of this letter, since the embassy’s correspondence is under constant surveillance. However, they are not making use of it for the time being. Nor are they asking the embassy for any information about Oswald himself; perhaps they are waiting for another moment.”
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(emphasis in Russian original)

“The competent U.S. authorities,” beginning with Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, were indeed aware of the provocative letter that the Soviets, for their part, knew had passed under U.S. intelligence agencies’ constant surveillance of their correspondence. As we know, Hoover brought the letter to Johnson’s attention in the midst of LBJ’s first morning as president. Dobrynin not only identified the letter as a clear provocation, forged by Kennedy’s assassins (or perhaps dictated to Oswald “in return for some promises” before “he was simply bumped off”). The Soviet ambassador also discerned the momentary uncertainty in “the competent U.S. authorities” as to how to handle the dubious Mexico City evidence represented by the letter. Would the U.S. government, now under Lyndon Johnson’s leadership, go along with scapegoating the Soviet Union for Kennedy’s assassination, as the planners of the murder scenario had apparently arranged?

While the Soviet leaders pondered this question and their own response to having been set up, Johnson decided to reject the CIA-doctored Mexico City evidence of a Soviet plot. He was intensely aware of the pressures for war that the disclosure of a Communist plot to murder Kennedy would bring. Just how much Mexico City was on Johnson’s mind his first full day as president is revealed in a memorandum that CIA director John McCone dictated two days later.
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After Hoover’s disturbing phone call at 10:01 a.m., the new president met at 12:30 p.m. with McCone specifically to be filled in further on “the information received from Mexico City.”
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Mexico City became Johnson’s jumping off point for the Warren Commission. Johnson cited the Mexico City information as the basis for his fear of nuclear war and his need for a Special Commission to both Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and newly appointed Warren Commission member, Senator Richard Russell.
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He told Russell: “And we’ve got to take this [question of Kennedy’s assassination] out of the [Mexico City] arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”
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The Warren Commission would ensure a lone-assassin cover-up of the conspiracy evidence the new president was facing. That would free Johnson from his dilemma arising from the Mexico City evidence of having to confront either the Soviet Union as the assassination’s biggest scapegoat or the CIA as its actual perpetrator. To Johnson’s credit, he refused to let the Soviets take the blame for Kennedy’s murder; to his discredit, he decided not to confront the CIA over what it had done in Mexico City. Thus, while the secondary purpose of the assassination plot was stymied, its primary purpose was achieved. The presidency was returned to the control of Cold War interests, priorities, and profits. Not only was JFK dead, but so was his breakthrough with Khrushchev. In allowing the assassination to go unchallenged, Kennedy’s successor in the White House consented to the total cover-up of both JFK’s murder and his turn toward peace with the Communists.

Ambassador Dobrynin recommended in his November 26 telegram to Moscow that the Soviet government pass on to U.S. authorities Oswald’s last letter, “because if we don’t pass it on, the organizers of this entire provocation could use this fact to try casting suspicion on us.”
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Anastas I. Mikoyan, first deputy chairman of the Soviet council of ministers, wired back his agreement with Dobrynin:

“You may send [U.S. Secretary of State Dean] Rusk photocopies of the correspondence between the embassy and Oswald, including his letter of November 9, but without waiting for a request by the U.S. authorities. When sending the photocopies, say that the letter of November 9 was not received by the embassy until November 18; obviously it had been held up somewhere. The embassy had suspicions about this letter the moment it arrived; either it was a forgery or was sent as a deliberate provocation. The embassy left Oswald’s letter unanswered.”
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By turning over the “Oswald letter” to the United States, the Soviets overturned its potential propaganda damage. The Soviet leaders served notice they would not be intimidated. The letter was an obvious counterfeit that pointed a finger in the opposite direction from the letter’s recipients. Langley had more to fear from its public disclosure than did Moscow.

The U.S. government had already recognized that unfortunate fact. Once Johnson and his government in tow had decided to reject the Mexico City evidence as too explosive, the Warren Commission was given a contradictory mandate. What Johnson told Russell he wanted the Special Commission to do was to “look at the facts and bring in any other facts you want in here and determine who killed the president.”
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However, as he emphasized to Russell, Johnson wanted even more to take the question of Kennedy’s assassination “out of the [Mexico City] arena,” where the evidence apparently implicated the Soviet Union in the foreground but in reality the CIA in the background. The Warren Commission’s impossible task, “for the sake of national security” (meaning the protection of U.S. intelligence agencies from national disgrace and their leaders from criminal indictments), was to make a convincing, heavily documented case for a lone-assassin conclusion. To do so, the commission would have to cover up especially the critical Mexico City evidence that had so alarmed Lyndon Johnson in his first hours as president.

The CIA-planted “Oswald letter” dated November 9, that the Soviet Embassy received on November 18 and recognized as a fraud, had backfired. The Soviet ambassador’s formal diplomatic return of the letter to the U.S. government made the document a part of the official record. If the Soviet leaders chose to do so, they could make that diplomatic process, and the letter itself, public. The U.S. government was in a bind. The (more and more obviously) phony letter had to be covered up or explained away. The American public it was originally designed to fool might be led instead to the real assassins. How could that cover-up, or cover explanation of a CIA-planted letter, be accomplished?

The Warren Commission’s star witness against Lee Harvey Oswald, other than his widow, Marina, was Ruth Paine. As we saw, it was Ruth and Michael Paine who became the Oswalds’ benefactors after George de Mohrenschildt left Dallas. It was Ruth Paine who arranged for Oswald’s job at the Texas School Book Depository in October 1963. And it was Ruth Paine whose Warren Commission testimony also put a different spin on the Oswald letter that was threatening to uncover the CIA in the president’s assassination.

In March 1964, four months after the Soviet Embassy turned over the letter to the United States, identifying it as a forgery or a deliberate provocation, Ruth Paine testified that on Saturday, November 9, 1963, she had seen Oswald type the letter in her home on her typewriter. Besides giving an eyewitness account of Oswald actually writing the letter, her testimony placed on record a different version of the letter from the one the Soviets had received. The new, U.S.-government-preferred version of the letter came, in Paine’s testimony, in the form of a rough draft that she said Oswald left accidentally on her secretary desk.

Paine testified that, although “my tendency is to be very hesitant to look into other people’s things,”
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she secretly read Oswald’s folded, handwritten draft of the letter left on her desk, while he was out of the room on the morning after he typed the final version. She copied the rough draft by hand while he was taking a shower. She said that, while “I am not used to subterfuge in any way,”
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she subsequently took his draft of the letter and hid it in her desk, so she could give it to the FBI the next time they came to see her.
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