The KGB and the Assassination of JFK and MLK

[John Simkin]

In 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired senior KGB archivist, provided the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) with six large cases of top-secret material from the KGB's foreign intelligence archive. Some of this material deals with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It includes the claim, from Polish sources, that Clinton Murchison and H. L. Hunt had been involved in the funding of the assassination.

The KGB archives show that the Soviet Union helped fund the publishing the books claiming that Kennedy was killed as a result of a right-wing conspiracy. Some of this money was sent to Carl Marzani (codenamed NORD). Among the books published by Marzani in 1964 was Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? by the German writer, Joachim Joesten. The KGB also arranged for Mark Lane to receive $1,500 to help his research. However, the document makes it clear that Lane was not told the source of the money. The same person arranged for Lane to receive $500 to help pay for a trip in Europe in 1964. KGB agent, Genrikh Borovik, was also assigned to help Lane with his research for Rush to Judgement (1965).

Probably the most interesting material from this archive concerns the KGB assessment of the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Ever since the Soviets started sending agents into the United States in the 1920s they had been encouraging members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) to become involved in the struggle for civil rights. For example, they enjoyed great success in their propaganda campaign for the Scottsboro Boys in 1931.

After the Second World War the Soviets used the way that African-Americans were treated in the United States as an attempt to gain influence in the Third World. At first they welcomed the campaigns of Martin Luther King against the Jim Crow Laws as it provided evidence of the worldwide struggle against American imperialism. However, to the dismay of the KGB. King repeatedly linked the aims of the civil rights movement to the fulfilment of the American dream and "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence".

After King's inspirational letter from Birmingham Jail on 16th April, 1963, where he argued "We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America, is freedom", it was decided by the KGB to mount a smear campaign against the leader of the civil rights movement. The task was given to Yuri Modin, deputy head of Service A (KGB's disinformation unit). Modin is an interesting character who has been largely ignored by historians. Modin was the man who in 1947 he was sent to London and became the main contact of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Modin also arranged the flight of Maclean and Burgess in 1951 and was in Beirut when Philby went missing in January 1963.

One of the great ironies in history is that while the KGB were trying to portray King as betraying African-Americans, J. Edgar Hoover was telling William C. Sullivan, the head of the Intelligence Division of the FBI, that “King was an instrument of the Communist Party” and posed “a serious threat to the security of the country.” Hoover instructed Sullivan to get evidence that “King had a relationship with the Soviet bloc”. Despite an intensive surveillance campaign, Sullivan was unable to find a clear link between King and the Communist Party of the United States. This did not stop Hoover from using his contacts in the press to write stories giving the impression that King was a communist.

The KGB campaign against King was stepped up with the passing of civil rights legislation under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Modin arranged for articles to appear in the African press which could be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an "Uncle Tom" who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration.

One of the most interesting documents in the KGB archive is dated August 1967 and authorizes Modin: "To organize, through the use of KGB residency resources in the US, the publication and distribution of brochures, pamphlets, leaflets and appeals denouncing the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question - and exposing the brutal terrorist methods being used by the government to suppress the Negro rights movement. To arrange, via available agent resources, for leading figures in the legal profession to make public statements discrediting the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question. To forge and distribute through illegal channels a document showing that the John Birch Society, in conjunction with the Minuteman organization, is developing a plan for the physical elimination of leading figures in the Negro movement in the US."

http://spartacus-educational.com/Yuri_Modin.htm

[Pat Speer]

Re: the KGB's attacks on MLK.

There was a recent documentary series on The Roosevelts. Teddy Roosevelt, while an unabashed imperialist, was quite progressive in his domestic policies, and felt he had to moderate capitalism in order to save it. I wonder if there was communist resistance to his presidency, even though he was pushing many of the same workers' rights programs they supported. It wouldn't surprise me at all.

As we've seen, there are many in the JFK research community who will fight against anyone with a shared agenda, should that someone not share ALL of their agenda. It's only human nature, I suppose. But it sure seems short-sighted.

[John Simkin]

It should be pointed out that the full Mitrokhin Archive has never been published. We have only seen what the British intelligence wanted us to see.

Vasili Mitrokhin joined the KGB in 1954. He worked in the archives, where his main job was answering queries from other departments. During this period Mitrokhin became aware that secret files were being removed. For example, he discovered that Nikita Khrushchev had ordered Beria's personal archive to be destroyed so as to leave no trace of the compromising material he had collected on his former colleagues.

In June 1972, the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate left its overcrowded central Moscow offices in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka and moved to a new building at Yasenevo. For the next ten years working from a private office in Lubyanka, Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing over 300,000 files in the FCD archive prior to their transfer to the new headquarters. Once reviewed by Mitrokhin, each batch of files was placed in sealed containers which were transported to Yasenevo.

Mitrokhin decided to take notes on the most interesting files in minuscule handwriting on scraps of paper which he crumpled up and threw into his wastepaper basket. Each evening, he retrieved his notes from the basket and smuggled them out concealed in his shoes. The security guards confined themselves to occasional inspections of bags and briefcases without attempting body searches. Each night when he returned to his Moscow flat, Mitrokhin, his hit notes beneath his mattress. At weekends he took them to his family dacha and typed up as many as possible. The dacha was built on raised foundations. The typescripts and notes were placed in aluminum cases and buried in the ground beneath the dacha.

Vasili Mitrokhin retired in 1984. He now spent his time typing up the rest of the notes he had smuggled out of the FCD. It was only with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the decline in security measures at the new borders of the Russian Federation at last open the way for Mitrokhin to take his archive to the West. In March 1992 he boarded an overnight train in Moscow bound for the newly independent republic of Latvia. With him he took a case full of clothes but included samples of his archive.

The next day he arrived at the American embassy in Riga and asked if he could defect. "CIA officials at the embassy, struggling to cope with hundreds of Russian exiles trying to flee the crumbling Soviet Union, were not interested. They reasoned that Mitrokhin was not a spy, just a librarian, and the handwritten documents were probably fakes." He was told to return at a later date. He now tried the British embassy and asked to speak to "someone in authority". The young woman diplomat who received him was fluent in Russian and soon became aware that he would be a valuable source of information on KGB activities in Britain.

MI6 arranged for Mitrokhin to bring his complete archive to Britain. Over the next few months MI6 shared details of its archive with other intelligence services. In August 1993, Ronald Kessler published his best-selling book, The FBI: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency, reported that the FBI had been interviewing a former KGB employee who had access to KGB files. "According to his account, the KGB had had many hundreds of Americans and possibly more than a thousand spying for them in recent years. So specific was the information that the FBI was quickly able to establish the source's credibility." Other journalists followed up the story and Time Magazine reported that "sources familiar with the case" of the KGB defector had identified him as a former employee of the First Chief Directorate, but described Kessler's figures of recent Soviet spies in the United States as "highly exaggerated". Kessler was indeed right about "many hundreds of Americans" spying for the Soviet Union but he was wrong to say they were "recent" as the numbers referred to those who had been spies since the 1920s.

MI6 decided that they would allow the publication of some of the Mitrokhin archive. In late 1995 Mitrokhin was introduced to Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5. As Andrew points out a "few months later, we began writing a lengthy volume, based chiefly on the material he had smuggled out of Yasenevo." The Mitrokhin Archive was published in 1999. It contained very little that had not been disclosed by others. The one exception to this was Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother, living in Bexleyheath, had been betraying British secrets to the Soviet Union for 40 years.

For example, according to The Mitrokhin Archive (1999) Deutsch recruited twenty agents and made contact with a total of twenty-nine. Christopher Andrew only names those agents who have been exposed from other sources. This included Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and Michael Straight. Yet we know that there was another high-level spy, who tipped off Philby in 1962 but he is not named.

Christopher Andrew admitted that Ronald Kessler was right about "many hundreds of Americans" spying for the Soviet Union but he was wrong to say they were "recent" as the numbers referred to those who had been spies since the 1920s. However, in the The Mitrokhin Archive he only published the names of those spies that had already been named in books such as Deadly Illusions (1993) and The Secret World of American Communism (1995), that had been based on access to KGB archives.

Some more of these spies have been named in books such as Allen Weinstein’s, The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999), Athan Theoharis’s, Chasing Spies (2002) and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2010). However, the numbers so far exposed do not match up to those contained in the Mitrokhin Archive.

http://spartacus-educational.com/Vasili_Mitrokhin.htm

[Thomas Graves]

On 10/7/2014 at 6:55 AM, John Simkin said:

It should be pointed out that the full Mitrokhin Archive has never been published. We have only seen what the British intelligence wanted us to see.

Vasili Mitrokhin joined the KGB in 1954. He worked in the archives, where his main job was answering queries from other departments. During this period Mitrokhin became aware that secret files were being removed. For example, he discovered that Nikita Khrushchev had ordered Beria's personal archive to be destroyed so as to leave no trace of the compromising material he had collected on his former colleagues.

In June 1972, the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate left its overcrowded central Moscow offices in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka and moved to a new building at Yasenevo. For the next ten years working from a private office in Lubyanka, Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing over 300,000 files in the FCD archive prior to their transfer to the new headquarters. Once reviewed by Mitrokhin, each batch of files was placed in sealed containers which were transported to Yasenevo.

Mitrokhin decided to take notes on the most interesting files in minuscule handwriting on scraps of paper which he crumpled up and threw into his wastepaper basket. Each evening, he retrieved his notes from the basket and smuggled them out concealed in his shoes. The security guards confined themselves to occasional inspections of bags and briefcases without attempting body searches. Each night when he returned to his Moscow flat, Mitrokhin, his hit notes beneath his mattress. At weekends he took them to his family dacha and typed up as many as possible. The dacha was built on raised foundations. The typescripts and notes were placed in aluminum cases and buried in the ground beneath the dacha.

Vasili Mitrokhin retired in 1984. He now spent his time typing up the rest of the notes he had smuggled out of the FCD. It was only with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the decline in security measures at the new borders of the Russian Federation at last open the way for Mitrokhin to take his archive to the West. In March 1992 he boarded an overnight train in Moscow bound for the newly independent republic of Latvia. With him he took a case full of clothes but included samples of his archive.

The next day he arrived at the American embassy in Riga and asked if he could defect. "CIA officials at the embassy, struggling to cope with hundreds of Russian exiles trying to flee the crumbling Soviet Union, were not interested. They reasoned that Mitrokhin was not a spy, just a librarian, and the handwritten documents were probably fakes." He was told to return at a later date. He now tried the British embassy and asked to speak to "someone in authority". The young woman diplomat who received him was fluent in Russian and soon became aware that he would be a valuable source of information on KGB activities in Britain.

MI6 arranged for Mitrokhin to bring his complete archive to Britain. Over the next few months MI6 shared details of its archive with other intelligence services. In August 1993, Ronald Kessler published his best-selling book, The FBI: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency, reported that the FBI had been interviewing a former KGB employee who had access to KGB files. "According to his account, the KGB had had many hundreds of Americans and possibly more than a thousand spying for them in recent years. So specific was the information that the FBI was quickly able to establish the source's credibility." Other journalists followed up the story and Time Magazine reported that "sources familiar with the case" of the KGB defector had identified him as a former employee of the First Chief Directorate, but described Kessler's figures of recent Soviet spies in the United States as "highly exaggerated". Kessler was indeed right about "many hundreds of Americans" spying for the Soviet Union but he was wrong to say they were "recent" as the numbers referred to those who had been spies since the 1920s.

MI6 decided that they would allow the publication of some of the Mitrokhin archive. In late 1995 Mitrokhin was introduced to Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5. As Andrew points out a "few months later, we began writing a lengthy volume, based chiefly on the material he had smuggled out of Yasenevo." The Mitrokhin Archive was published in 1999. It contained very little that had not been disclosed by others. The one exception to this was Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother, living in Bexleyheath, had been betraying British secrets to the Soviet Union for 40 years.

For example, according to The Mitrokhin Archive (1999) Deutsch recruited twenty agents and made contact with a total of twenty-nine. Christopher Andrew only names those agents who have been exposed from other sources. This included Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and Michael Straight. Yet we know that there was another high-level spy, who tipped off Philby in 1962 but he is not named.

Christopher Andrew admitted that Ronald Kessler was right about "many hundreds of Americans" spying for the Soviet Union but he was wrong to say they were "recent" as the numbers referred to those who had been spies since the 1920s. However, in the The Mitrokhin Archive he only published the names of those spies that had already been named in books such as Deadly Illusions (1993) and The Secret World of American Communism (1995), that had been based on access to KGB archives.

Some more of these spies have been named in books such as Allen Weinstein’s, The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999), Athan Theoharis’s, Chasing Spies (2002) and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2010). However, the numbers so far exposed do not match up to those contained in the Mitrokhin Archive.

http://spartacus-educational.com/Vasili_Mitrokhin.htm

 

John,

 

The fact that The Mitrokhin Archive claims, according to "The Sword and the Shield," that Mark Lane was paid by the KGB, that Cherepanov was a true defector, and that Nosenko was a true defector, etc, tells me, from what I've learned from reading Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars," that The Mitrokhin Archive is nothing but a big clever KGB/FSB "disinfo" job.

 

--  TG

 

Edited April 12, 2018 by Thomas Graves