About the recent post on KGB officer Nikolai Leonov’s encounter with Lee Oswald, former Warren Commission attorney David Slawson comments:
“I had read Kostikov’s version of the same story, which included his disarming of Oswald loaded pistol. Kostikov also wrote this after he had retired – and the Soviet Union had collapsed and effectively ended the cold war. Kostikov said nothing about Oswald’s extreme nervousness or his statement about shooting everyone in the hotel at which he was staying, but maybe this was not recorded in what I read about the incident. I did not read his statements in Russian, of course, and for all I know, maybe the newspaper or magazine article I read about it simply did not include this part. In any event, Leonov’s story lends credence to Kostikov’s, and vice versa.”
**************
The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.
“The Ghost is the compulsively readable, often bizarre true-life story of American spymaster James Jesus Angleton – the CIA’s poetry-loving, orchid-gardening mole-hunter for almost 20 years. Capturing the extent of Angleton’s eccentricity, duplicity and alcohol-fueled paranoia would have challenged the writing skills of a Le Carre or Ludlum, and Jefferson Morley has done it with flair. This important book depicts the trail of wreckage left behind by Angleton in a CIA career that involved him in virtually every major spy-versus-spy drama of the Cold War and drew him deeply into the mysteries of the Kennedy assassination and the murder of one of JFK’s mistresses.”
—Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act
Click here to pre-order: The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.
The only problem with Slawson’s assertion that Leonov’s alleged meeting with an emotional, revolver-brandishing Oswald tended to support the Kostikov-Nechiporenko version the story is that Leonov claimed his one-on-one unscheduled meeting with Oswald happened on Sunday, September 29, whereas Kostikov and Nechiporenko both say their surprise visit from Oswald had taken place the previous day, Saturday, September 28?
What are the chances that Oswald would have visited the Soviet Consulate/Embassy complex three days in a row, and that he would become emotional (according to Nechiporenko and Leonov) and potentially gun-dangerous there during the (improbable, imho) Saturday and Sunday “visits”?
Similarly, as Jesse Curry said when asked about Oswald’s guilt, “No one has been able to put Oswald on the 6th floor with a gun in his hand,” I also doubt this Russian’s story about him meeting Oswald. Hoover, on his phone call to Johnson soon after the assassination, said that the man in custody is not the same man recorded and photographed at the embassy in Mexico City.
For serious researchers of this case, it’s important to try to not believe everything you hear and to stick with the basic pertinent facts of the case. Otherwise, if you fall for everything that’s being said, you’ll end up believing that the limo driver shot JFK, or LBJ’s mistress saw a gaggle of high officials (LBJ, Nixon, Hunt, Hoover et. al.) making final plans of the shooting the night before 11/22.
Hoover said this because: 1) LHO was impersonated by phone in Mexico City on September 28 and October 1, 1963 (See CIA transcriptions of the phone calls); 2)The CIA Station sent a photo of somebody else suggesting it was LHO.
Both facts do not matter for establishing that the very LHO who broke the news in Dallas was actually the LHO trying to get visas at both the Cuban and the Soviet consulates in Mexico City on September 27, as the Cuban intelligence has proven even by expertise of the photo and signature in the visa application. In his own handwriting, the telephone number given by Sylvia Duran, Mexican employee at the Cuban consulate, appears in LHO’s address book. And the phone calls tapped by the CIA on September 27 prove that he was in both diplomatic compounds that day.
Another KGB man at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, Pavel Iatskov, recounted he “was planning to have a game of volleyball with [his] comrades when [he] received news from the consulate guard that a North American was insisting on an interview”. The rest of his account reads simply thus:
“I attended to him and he told a strange story. He said that he had been in the Soviet Union and was married to a Soviet woman, with whom he had two children. He said he was a member of the Communist Party of the USA and of a Cuba support committee. I explained to him that he had to make an official application, but that the authorization of any visa to US citizens was granted in Moscow, and the procedure took from four to six months. When I told him this, he seemed very upset and left without even filling in the form. To me it all whiffed of a provocation, and I immediately informed Moscow of the incident”.
Again, Oswald is considered to be an intelligence provocateur, and by a professional intel officer. The US embassy guy in Russia, DRE, DPD, KGB – all felt Oswald was running some playbook he had been taught to do.
It was also felt by Alfredo Mirabal, himself an intelligence officer, who was the Cuban consul attending to LHO in Mexico City on September 27, 1963.
An anti-Castro conspirator, Antonio Veciana, handled by some Maurice Bishop (CIA officer David Phillips), recounted that the latter asked him about how to get a Cuban visa in Mexico City, were a Veciana´s sister, Hilda, was working along with her husband Guillermo Ruiz, who was in charge of the commercial office.