JFK files contain explosive new claims Russia 'had information' that Vice President Lyndon Johnson was behind assassination

President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline in the motorcade moments before his assassination
AP
David Gardner27 October 2017

The KGB had ‘data’ indicating Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, according to a top secret memo sent to the White House by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The 1966 FBI note - forwarded to Johnson’s aide Marvin Watson - quoted a Russian mole as reporting that Moscow believed JFK’s murder was a ‘well-organised conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’

‘They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part,’ says the memo.

The potentially explosive document is just one of 2,981 never-before-seen records relating to the JFK assassination released early today.

Hopes that the files would finally lay to rest the enduring mystery of the president’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were crushed when President Trump said he had ‘no choice’ but to withhold some of the more sensitive papers because of fears they could harm national security or relationships with foreign powers.

CIA and FBI agents have been given an additional six months to comb the remaining documents and make possible redactions.

But the files published today still offer an intriguing insight into history’s most beguiling unsolved murder.

It’s not the first time LBJ, who was sworn into office on Air Force One in Dallas before the presidential plane carried JFK’s body back to Washington, has been linked to a murder conspiracy.

JFK’s widow Jackie, famously pictured alongside Johnson at the inauguration, still wearing her blood-spattered pink Chanel suit, is said to have had her own suspicions about her husband’s successor.

Lyndon B. Johnson takes the oath of office as President of the United States
National Archive/Newsmakers/Getty Images

But this is the first time Johnson has been connected with the conspiracy in a government document.

The seven-page note forwarded to the Oval Office by Hoover claims that Kennedy’s death was greeted with ‘shock and consternation’ in the Soviet Union, not least because the Kremlin feared it would be blamed for the tragedy and it would heighten the possibility of a nuclear attack.

‘Soviet officials were fearful that without leadership, some irresponsible general in the United States might launch a missile at the Soviet Union,’ the FBI quoted its Russia-based spy.

The Warren Commission, convened by Johnson days after the assassination to investigate the shooting, ruled that the alleged shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a lone wolf killer who acted alone and the panel controversially claimed it found no concrete evidence of a conspiracy.

Bill and Gayle Newman, civilian eyewitnesses to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy
Cecil W. Stoughton/White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum/Reuters

The Russians dismissed Oswald as a ‘neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else,’ said the memo. They rubbished any suggestion that Oswald was part of a Soviet Cold War plot to kill JFK.

The FBI wrote that on November 25, 1963, Colonel Boris Ivanov, the Soviet spy chief in New York, ordered KGB agents to launch an urgent investigation into then President Johnson’s background.

Nearly two years later, the note continues, the same US intelligence source said that instructions came through from KGB headquarters in Moscow, dated September 16, 1965, saying that ‘now’ the KGB was ‘in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.

JFK: John F Kennedy Assassination - In pictures

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‘KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly that between President Johnson and Robert and ‘Ted’ Kennedy.’

Following the assassination, the memo continues, the Soviets passed on to Washington its complete consular file on Oswald and his wife, Marina.

In another document released today, CIA Director Richard Helms, who served under both the Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations, claimed in April 1975 that Johnson blamed Kennedy’s killing on an act of revenge for the killing of a Vietnamese leader.

John F Kennedy and wife Jackie just hours before the assassination
Cecil Stoughton/JFK Library/The White House//Reuters

‘President Johnson used to go around saying that the reason President Kennedy was assassinated was that he had assassinated President Diem,’ Helms said in a deposition.

Another file said Oswald spoke with a KGB agent just two months before the assassination.

During a call between him and the Russian embassy in Mexico City, flagged by the CIA, Oswald was heard speaking to an ‘identified KGB officer’ Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikova ‘in broken Russian.’

No details were given about what they discussed.

In a memo penned on November 24, 1963, the day Oswald was gunned down in apparent retribution by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, J. Edgar Hoover, the long-serving FBI chief, wrote that the agency had received a death threat on Oswald’s life the previous night.

He said it was ‘inexcusable’ that Dallas police had allowed Oswald to be killed. He added there were rumours that Ruby had ‘underworld’ connections in Chicago. One of the many theories surrounding JFK’s assassination is that it was carried out on the orders of the American mafia because the Kennedys had vowed to crackdown on their illegal activities.

‘There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead,’ Hoover wrote in the same memo, but added that he was worried about public unrest in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination.

‘The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach, is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin,’ he wrote.

Some files were not directly connected to the assassination.

One memo was sent to Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother, warning him about the looming release of a book containing information on his ‘close relationship’ with Marilyn Monroe.

According to the memo, ‘The strange death of Marilyn Monroe,’ a 1964 book by Frank Capell, alluded to the pair frequently. ‘Throughout the book … Capell claims that you had a close relationship with Miss Monroe,’ the then-attorney general was warned.

There is also more insight into the elaborate plots to kill communist leaders in Latin America, including Cuban President Fidel Castro.

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