Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (25 page)

In the fall of 1917, hoping to pull Russia out of the war, the Germans
encouraged the return of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin,
leader of the radical Bolsheviks. After the October Revolution, Russia fell
under control of the Bolsheviks, who declared themselves dedicated to the
ideals of communism.

In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in
Russia. On January 21, 1924, after suffering three strokes, Lenin died. It
has been rumored he may have been helped along by poison ordered by his
successor, Joseph Stalin. Stalin, who may have murdered as many as
twelve million people in his drive to power, held Russia in his dictatorial
grip until his death in 1953.

In the five years following Stalin's death, there was a quiet but deadly
struggle for power in the USSR, with former secretary of the Communist
Party Nikita Khrushchev coming out on top. Khrushchev continued to take
the offensive against Stalinist hard-liners, first by denouncing Stalin's
purge of Secret Police Chief Lavrenti Beria in 1953 in return for Russian Army support and then by staging a series of impressive foreign visits
during the late 1950s.

Both Khrushchev and his Western counterpart, U.S. President Dwight
Eisenhower, seemed sincere in wanting to ease the tensions between their
two countries. In the summer of 1959, Khrushchev visited the United
States. Newsweek described the results:

After two private days with Eisenhower at Camp David, Khrushchev
lifted an ultimatum on Berlin, announced that the President had "captivated" him and praised [Eisenhower's] wisdom and love of peace in
terms no cold-war Soviet leader has used either before or since. The
stage was set for a full-fledged negotiation at the summit in Paris.

This summit, scheduled for mid-May 1960, might have produced a
limited nuclear-test-ban treaty, already foreseen as the first major accord of
the cold war.

But it was not to be. On May 1, traditionally celebrated in Russia as
May Day, CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured alive after his U-2
spy plane crashed in the Soviet Union following an explosion.

Khrushchev was furious, yet he tried to give Eisenhower latitude in
disclaiming any knowledge of the incident. He stated that the U-2 flight
may have been the work of "American aggressive circles" trying to "torpedo the Paris summit, or, at any rate, prevent an agreement for which the
whole world is waiting."

After days of half-truths and evasions, Eisenhower finally admitted that
the spy plane was acting on his orders and took responsibility for the
fiasco, just as John Kennedy would take responsibility for the disastrous
Bay of Pigs invasion a year later.

However, questions still surround the U-2 incident, and some students
of history such as David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace in The People's
Almanac note: "It is possible that certain U.S. military leaders deployed
Powers purposely to sabotage the peace talks which Eisenhower himself
acutely desired."

Francis Gary Powers and his ill-fated U-2 spy plane were brought down
six months after a former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in
Moscow and told an American embassy official he planned to give the
Soviets classified information he had gained as a radar operator in the
Marine Corps.

Richard E. Snyder, a CIA intelligence operative serving as senior
consular officer at the Moscow embassy, recalled that Oswald went so far as to state that he knew something that would be of "special interest" to
Soviet intelligence.

What "special interest" information did Oswald have? The Russians
had known about the U-2 program for some time and their antiaircraft
missiles were capable of shooting down the high-flying craft. What the
Soviets lacked was detailed altitude information on the U-2 that would
have allowed them to accurately control their missiles at great altitudes.
Oswald, who served as a radar operator at Atsugi, Japan, one of the
staging bases for the U-2 flights, had that information.

After being swapped for a Soviet spy, Powers returned to the U.S. and
wrote a book about his ordeal entitled Operation Overflight. He pointed
out Oswald's claim that he had information for the Soviets and implied
that if indeed Oswald gave information pertaining to U-2 operational
altitudes and radar techniques used during its flight, the Russians may have
learned enough to enable them to shoot down the U-2. Powers also said his
Soviet interrogators seemed to have special knowledge about the Atsugi
base, although Powers maintained he had never been stationed there.

Files detailing Oswald's connection with the U-2 flights have been
withheld from the American public for years by the Warren Commission.

Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who served as focal point officer between the
CIA and the Air Force, was particularly concerned with the U-2 flights.
He has stated that it is preposterous to assume that information Oswald
might have given the Russians could have led to their shooting down the
craft. Prouty told author Anthony Summers: "The Russians simply had
nothing that could touch a plane flying that high." Prouty concluded that,
based on his interpretation of U-2 technical evidence, Power's plane was
flying below its operational altitude when brought down.

Some people familiar with the U-2 incident believe the plane may have
been downed due to sabotage. In 1977, Powers told a radio audience that
he believed his U-2 had been brought down by a bomb placed on board.
Shortly after making this statement, he was killed when his helicopter,
used to report news for a Los Angeles television station, ran out of gas and
crashed.

There are two tantalizing clues that Oswald may have indeed had some
connection with the U-2 incident. In a letter to his brother, Oswald wrote
regarding Powers: "He seemed to be a nice bright American-type fellow
when I saw him in Moscow." There is no explanation of how or when
Oswald might have seen Powers, particularly since officially Oswald never
returned to Moscow after being sent to Minsk in 1960.

Next, after his return to the United States, Oswald told Dennis Ofstein,
a fellow employee of Jaggers-Childs-Stovall who had worked for Army
security, that he had only seen Russian jets in Moscow on May Day. And
of Oswald's three May Days spent in Russia, the only one unaccounted for
is May 1, 1960-the day the U-2 was captured.

Because of the U-2 flights during this time, Soviet intelligence was
extremely interested in American defectors, both because of the knowledge
they might have and the suspicion that most, if not all, were spies.

Apparently American intelligence was equally curious in learning about
the Soviets. According to author Anthony Summers, who studied documents from both the State Department and the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, only two U.S. enlisted men defected to Russia between the
years 1945 and 1959. Yet in the eighteen months prior to January 1960,
no fewer than nine defected, five of them U.S. Army men from West
Germany and two Navy men.

All these defectors, including at least three civilians, had backgrounds in
the military or in sensitive defense work. It is known that, like Oswald, at
least four of these returned to the United States after a few years.

The case of Robert E. Webster, an American who told officials he was
defecting to Russia less than two weeks before Oswald, is worth considering since there appear to be many similarities between the two.

Webster, a former Navy man, was a young plastics expert who simply
failed to return home with colleagues after working at an American trade
exhibition in Moscow. He had been an employee of the Rand Development Corporation, one of the first U.S. companies to sell technical products to Russia.

Although Rand Development was thought to be separate from the more
notorious Rand Corporation-the CIA "think-tank" front where Daniel
Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers-there is some evidence of connections between the two. The firms were at one time located across the street
from each other in New York City; Rand Development held several CIA
contracts and several top officials of Rand Development-President Henry
Rand, George Bookbinder, and Christopher Bird-were later connected
with the CIA.

While in Russia, Webster took a Soviet girl as common-law wife (he
was already married to a woman in the United States) and the couple had a
child.

Like Oswald, Webster claimed to have become disenchanted with Soviet life and he returned to the United States about the same time as
Oswald. But now the story turns even stranger. Although Webster is said
to have told American officials he never had any contact with Lee Harvey
Oswald, when Oswald was arranging his return to the United States in
1961, he "asked [U.S. Embassy officials] about the fate of a young man
named Webster who had come to the Soviet Union shortly before he
did..."

Furthermore, there are some intriguing connections between Webster and Oswald's wife, Marina. Years later in America, Marina told an
acquaintance that her husband had defected after working at an American
exhibition in Moscow. This, of course, reflects Webster's story, not
Oswald's. After the assassination, when American intelligence was looking into Marina's background, they discovered an address in her address
book matching that of Webster's Leningrad apartment.

Were Webster and Oswald two of several fake defectors being sent into
Russia during 1958 and 1959? The parallels of their stories are striking.
Author Summers talked with former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, who
analyzed the Soviet military during the time Oswald went to Russia, and
was told:

At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in
acquiring information out of the Soviet Union; the technical systems
had, of course, not developed to the point that they are at today, and we
were resorting to all sorts of activities. One of these activities was an
ON! [Office of Naval Intelligence] program which involved three dozen,
maybe 40, young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor,
American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what
Communism was all about. They were sent into the Soviet Union or into
eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them
up and "double" them if they suspected them of being U.S. agents, or
recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations both here and abroad, but the operation was being run out of Nag's
Head, North Carolina.

This is particularly interesting because this Navy program sounds exactly like Oswald's experience.

During the years Oswald was in Russia, the State Department was
engaged in a study of U.S. defectors to Russia. Otto Otepka, the official in
charge of the study, said one of its goals was to determine which defectors
were genuine and which may have been U.S. intelligence operatives.

In June 1963, five months prior to the Kennedy assassination, Otepka
said he was ousted from his job and, in fact, barred from access to his
study material on defectors, one of whom was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Asked if Oswald was a real or fake defector by a researcher in 1971,
Otepka replied: "We had not made up our minds when . . . we were
thrown out of the office."

This incident is especially troubling, for if the shutdown of the State
Department investigation was because of Oswald, this is evidence of
someone within the U.S. government having prior knowledge of the
assassination.

Oswald's attempted defection to Russia was as strange as many other
aspects of his life.

The Marion Lykes arrived in Le Havre, France, on October 8, 1959.
Oswald arrived in Southampton, England, October 9 and, according to the
Warren Commission, set off for Helsinki, Finland, arriving and checking
in to the Torni Hotel that same day.

However, in Oswald's passport, the British immigration stamp reads,
"Embarked 10 Oct. 1959."