Uncredited/AP
- Nearly 1,500 pages of documents related to the JFK assassination were made public Wednesday.
- One document details Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to a Soviet Embassy a few weeks before killing Kennedy.
- Oswald spoke to a KGB officer at the embassy about getting a visa to travel to the USSR, the report says.
Just a few weeks before killing President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to Mexico City, where he spoke with a KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy, a new document released Wednesday details.
Nearly 1,500 documents related to the investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination were released to the public by the National Archives on Wednesday, the second major batch of assassination documents to be released since 2017.
Among the documents are notes about a call Oswald made to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City on October 1, 1963, on which the CIA was secretly listening.
The CIA report says the agency learned via this call that Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City a few days prior, on September 26, where he met with Consul Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov. Kostikov, the CIA notes in the document, was an “identified KGB” officer involved with a branch of the secret service responsible for “sabotage and assassination.”
During the call, Oswald spoke to a guard and asked whether there was “anything new concerning the telegram to Washington.”
“The guard checked and then told Oswald that the request had been sent but nothing new received,” the CIA notes on the call revealed.
The CIA report noted that the FBI had reason to believe Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy was to get support on a “US passport or visa matter.”
The CIA official who wrote the memo also appeared skeptical that Oswald would have showed up to the Soviet Embassy if he were a KGB spy.
“Of course it is not usual for a KGB agent on a sensitive mission to have such overt contact with a Soviet Embassy. However, we have top secret Soviet intelligence documents, describing Military Intelligence doctrine, which show that very important agents can be met in official installations using a cover for their presence there,” the report said.
That is not to say that US officials believed the Soviet Union was involved in the assassination.
A top secret memo written in 1966 by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, released during the Trump administration, states that Soviet leadership was shocked by the killing and feared what it portended for the US, as NPR reported.
“According to our source,” Hoover wrote, “officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.'”
That belief was informed by the fact that Kennedy’s killing oc cured after a far-right campaign painted him as a traitor, with flyers distributed across Dallas by the John Birch Society declaring him “Wanted for Treason.” Despite his committement to anti-communism, Kennedy had been pilloried for overseeing the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
The Soviets, according to Hoover, feared the assassination would strengthen “anticommunist sentiments” in the US and lead to war.
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