New evidence has come to light that lends more credence to the possibility that the KGB orchestrated the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Official investigations have tended to discount the likelihood of a Soviet hand in the assassination, and few outside investigators have pursued this line of inquiry. However, some observers have always considered the Soviets a likely suspect. The Soviets, it is argued, had a palpable motive: to gain revenge for the humiliation of the USSR in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Certainly, the idiosyncratic odyssey of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald into the Soviet Union and a Russian marriage as well as his contacts with Soviet diplomatic offices preceding the assassination afforded the KGB many opportunities to interact with him. In a sense, therefore, the KGB is the elephant in the living room of suspects in this case. Yet repeated investigations have failed to turn up specific evidence that would implicate the KGB.
Now a new report (at www.scientiapress.com/findings/kgbmeyer.html [1]) details the evidence and logic for believing that, one year after the Kennedy assassination, the KGB used a contract killer to murder Mary Pinchot Meyer, JFK's main girlfriend during his White House years. If we accept this conclusion, and there is telling circumstantial evidence of its accuracy, then we must ask what it suggests about the assassination of JFK himself.
Four aspects of the Meyer case deserve consideration. Several of them are just straws in the wind, but cumulatively they become more interesting.
First, the KGB must have had a powerful reason to murder Mary Pinchot Meyer. Otherwise, it is hard to see why they would have taken the risk of exposure. While something that occurred during Kennedy's presidency could have provided a reason, it is clear that disguising the role of the KGB in the Kennedy assassination would have constituted such a motive. For instance, JFK might have told Meyer, in a session recorded by a clandestine KGB microphone, that CIA had learned of a KGB plot to assassinate him.
Second, the clever use of a contract killing designed to look like a sexual assault that went awry, and presumably arranged by a cut-out, would have found a rough parallel in the putative KGB method in the assassination of JFK. The assumption is that Jack Ruby's subsequent killing of Lee Harvey Oswald was not a part of a conspiracy but was rather a self-propelled act. Ruby's track record of aggressive assaults would support this.
Third, the timing of both killings was right. Meyer was not murdered several years before or after the JFK assassination, but 11 months after--enough time for it not to seem too closely connected, but not any more time than this. So, too, Kennedy was murdered 13 months after the Cuban missile crisis, not a year sooner or later. One of these intervals could easily have been by chance, but it is less likely that both were by chance.
Fourth, the divorced husband of Meyer was senior CIA official Cord Meyer. When questioned by a reporter as he neared death in 2001, he said that his ex-wife was murdered by "[t]he same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy."[2] This statement has been taken to refer to the CIA, but that makes no sense. There is no good reason to think that CIA was involved in the murder of Kennedy, despite strained efforts by conspiracy theorists to show otherwise. Nor is there any reason to think that the CIA had any motive to murder Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a long-standing friend of Agency officials.
But, if one assumes that CIA knew that the KGB had murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer (perhaps it had learned this from a defector), then Cord Meyer's remark takes on a very different meaning. It is a statement by a former senior CIA official that the Agency had found out that the KGB had murdered John F. Kennedy--again, possibly from a defector. Considering the source, this statement carries a good deal of weight, perhaps the more so because it requires proper interpretation.
The Soviets repeatedly denied that the KGB had any contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. But as a Marine radar specialist in Japan and California, Oswald had access to extensive classified information regarding radars, flight patterns, and in particular the new US height-finding radar that would have been of exceptional interest to the KGB in regard to the U-2 spy flights. Oswald told US Embassy officials in Moscow that he intended to reveal sensitive information to the Soviets. Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2 flight downed in May, 1960, suggested that Oswald might have betrayed to the Soviets information that they used to shoot down the U-2 [3]. This seems very believable, and it would mean that Oswald had proved himself a loyal communist and one who had provided precious information to the USSR. So the KGB would have trusted him.
Given Oswald's aggressive mentality and track record (well known to the KGB), it would require very little for the KGB to insert into his mind the suggestion that he should assassinate Kennedy. Indeed, virulent communist hate propaganda during Oswald's years in the Soviet Union might have instilled in his impressionable brain the need to take action against those like the American president who thwarted the progress of communism. Or some oblique KGB suggestion could have activated Oswald. However, given the importance of the target, it seems more likely that the KGB carefully orchestrated the assassination with Oswald to maximize the chances of success.
At a minimum, therefore, a consideration of these pieces of evidence and logic should lead to a reinvestigation of the possibility that the KGB organized the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as it did the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. Rather than revisiting the old evidence, one could start by requesting CIA to tell what it knows. The evidence here suggests that CIA has known for many years that the KGB arranged the assassination of President Kennedy [4].
[1] Kenneth J. Dillon, www.scientiapress.com/findings/kgbmeyer.html
[2] C. David Heymann. The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club. New York: Atria Books, 2003, p. 168. In his 1980/82 book Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982, Cord Meyer denied reports that he was convinced that his ex-wife had been murdered by the Soviets. He wrote that he trusted the D.C. police's conclusion that the crime had been a sex or robbery case (p. 144). But this would not apply to Kennedy's assassination, so his denial is not to be believed, especially since he later contradicted it.
[3] Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry. Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, pp. 357-9.
[4] For a parallel instance in which a U.S. Government agency appears to have solved major crimes years ago, see www.scientiapress.com/findings/mailer.htm. That case involves the FBI and the Anthrax Mailer and Flight #587 crash cases of 2001.