Why Russia Thought LBJ Killed JFK DD

November 22nd, 1963. 12:30 p.m. Dallas, Texas. Three gunshots. A president slumped in his motorcade and within minutes, the news was racing across the Atlantic. When it reached the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership didn’t celebrate. They panicked, not because they were guilty, because they feared they were about to be accused.

The shooter, the man already being named on American radio, had defected to the Soviet Union, had lived there for 3 years, had married a Soviet woman, had worked in a Soviet factory. For Moscow, this was a nightmare scenario. A Marxist ex-defector murdering an American president during the Cold War with nuclear missiles pointed at each other.

He is 24y old Lee Oswald of Dallas, a former marine who spent some time in Russia, who at one time had applied for Soviet citizenship. He has been associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. >> Soviet officials immediately feared that some irresponsible American general might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.

According to declassified US intelligence files, the Communist Party believed the assassination was an ultraright coup aimed at overthrowing the government, invading Cuba, and starting World War II. The order went out across the Soviet military. Halt all field exercises immediately. Don’t give the Americans any excuse. Church bells toll across Moscow in memory of Kennedy.

This was not the reaction of a government that had ordered his death. Here’s what America didn’t know in November 1963, but Moscow did. The KGB had a file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a thick one. When Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, he walked into the American embassy in Moscow and announced he wanted to renounce his citizenship.

He was a 20-year-old former Marine who claimed to have secrets about US radar systems. He seemed like exactly the kind of asset Soviet intelligence would love. They didn’t want him. KGB officers interviewed Oswald extensively during his time in Minsk. Their conclusion documented in internal files, he was a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.

Unstable, erratic, unreliable, a man who couldn’t even handle a weapon properly. The KGB rejected him as an agent. When the news of the assassination broke, former KGB officer George Lesnik, who was in Moscow that day, immediately ran to his office to pull Oswald’s file. He reviewed it and confirmed.

Oswald had never been recruited, approached, or used by Soviet intelligence in any way. Lessnic called colleagues across the organization. The answer was the same everywhere. The man accused of killing the president of the United States was someone the KGB had looked at, evaluated, and decided wasn’t worth their time.

Soviet officials wasted no time making this clear. Their position documented in US intelligence reports, Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. He was a lone neurotic, and they wanted nothing to do with him, dead or alive. While Washington was still processing the shock of the assassination, Moscow was opening a different kind of investigation.

The KGB activated its intelligence networks. Not to cover up Soviet involvement, they had none, but to find out who actually did it. Because if the answer pointed in the wrong direction, the Cold War could turn hot overnight. Soviet intelligence analysts began working through what they knew. Oswald was too unstable to have planned and executed this alone.

Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with organized crime connections, had killed Oswald in the middle of a police station on live television 2 days after the assassination. That wasn’t the act of a concerned citizen. That was the act of someone silencing a loose end. The Soviet Communist Party’s early assessment this was a wellorganized conspiracy on the part of the ultraright right-wing extremists, oil money, military hawks who had despised Kennedy’s willingness to negotiate with Moscow.

Men who believed Kennedy was soft on communism and had nearly handed Cuba to the Soviets. The Soviets weren’t wrong that these people existed. Kennedy had enemies on the American right who considered him a traitor. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion had humiliated CIA operatives in Cuban exiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis resolution, in which Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, had enraged military hardliners who wanted to finish the job.

Then the KGB’s analysts turned their attention to someone closer to power. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the vice president who had become president within hours of the assassination, the Texas politician who had been politically marginalized under Kennedy, the man who now held all the power that Kennedy had kept from him. KGB headquarters in Moscow sent a directive to its New York residency.

develop all available information on Johnson, his background, his relationships, his financial connections, his history with Texas oil interests. By 1965, less than 2 years after the assassination, the KGB had reached a formal internal conclusion. Documented in a memo that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would later forward directly to the White House.

The KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate that President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. Read that again. The most sophisticated intelligence organization on Earth, an organization with assets embedded throughout the United States, had concluded that the sitting American president had ordered the murder of his predecessor.

KGB headquarters ordered its agents to investigate the personal relationship between Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between Johnson and Robert Kennedy. They wanted to understand the power dynamics, who knew what, who suspected what. Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, meeting with American journalist Drew Pearson in Cairo in May 1964, expressed his personal disbelief in the Warren Commission’s findings.

He couldn’t accept that both Oswald and Ruby had acted entirely alone. The chain of events made no sense to him as a political calculation. He wasn’t the only one. While the Soviets were building their case against Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover was doing something else entirely. On November 24th, 1963, 2 days after the assassination, the same day Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Hoover dictated an internal memo.

It contained a line that would remain classified for over 50 years. The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Kenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. Not find the truth. Convince the public. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach reinforced the directive the next day.

The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin that he did not have Confederates who were still at large. The official narrative was being built in real time before any serious investigation had been conducted before the Warren Commission had even been assembled. Hoover knew that the international complications were severe. Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy in Washington.

He had met with a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. A man Hoover’s own files identified as the embassy’s specialist in assassinations and similar activities. Making any of this public would muddy the waters internationally, Hoover dictated. So it was suppressed. The Warren Commission was convened.

It concluded what Hoover had decided it would conclude 2 days after the shooting. Oswald acted alone, three shots from behind, no conspiracy. The KGB file pointing at Johnson remained classified. The Soviet military assessment of an ultraright coup remained classified. The memo Hoover forwarded to the White House detailing the Soviet conclusion that the sitting president was responsible remained classified for over 50 years.

In October 2017, President Trump ordered the release of nearly 2,800 previously classified documents related to the Kennedy assassination. [snorts] The KGB’s conclusion was in there in black and white, forwarded by Hoover himself under the title reaction of Soviet and Communist Party officials to the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy. The documents revealed that from the very first hours after the shooting, Soviet officials believed the assassination was a right-wing coup. They believed Oswald was being used as a psy, a convenient communist fall guy designed to inflame public opinion against the Soviet Union and Cuba. They noted that the real organizers of the assassination would have been people who benefited from Kennedy’s death, oil interests, military hawks, and the man who inherited the presidency.

The documents also revealed something darker about Hoover’s operation. He knew the Soviets believed Johnson was involved. He forwarded that intelligence directly to the White House, to Johnson’s office, to Johnson’s assistant, Marvin Watson. The man accused of ordering the assassination was personally informed that Soviet intelligence believed he had done it and the Warren Commission proceeded exactly as Hoover had planned from day two.

The KGB’s conclusion about LBJ was never proven. Soviet intelligence was not infallible. Their analysis was filtered through cold war ideology, limited assets, and the natural tendency to see American capitalist conspiracies in any major political event. But the pattern they identified was real.

Johnson had the most to gain from Kennedy’s death. He went from being a politically humiliated vice president, one Kennedy was reportedly considering dropping from the 1964 ticket, to the most powerful man on earth. He escalated the war in Vietnam that Kennedy had been quietly planning to wind down. He served the Texas oil interest that Kennedy’s tax policies had threatened.

He presided over an investigation that his own FBI director had decided the outcome of before it began. The Soviets saw all of this. Khrushchev couldn’t believe one man had done it alone. The KGB built a file pointing at Johnson and Hoover, who knew about that file, sent it directly to Johnson’s desk.

The Warren Commission said, “One shooter, no conspiracy.” The KGB said, “Organized coup, right-wing money, and the vice president who became president.” 50 years later, the classified files are open. You can read them yourself and ask the same question the KGB was asking in 1965. Who had the motive? Who had the means? And who, when it was all over, had the power? If you think these questions deserve better answers than the ones we’ve been given, hit that like button.

Because when the most secretive intelligence agency in the world builds a file pointing at the sitting American president and that file stays classified for 50 years, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a document.

November 22nd, 1963. 12:30 p.m. Dallas, Texas. Three gunshots. A president slumped in his motorcade and within minutes, the news was racing across the Atlantic. When it reached the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership didn’t celebrate. They panicked, not because they were guilty, because they feared they were about to be accused.

The shooter, the man already being named on American radio, had defected to the Soviet Union, had lived there for 3 years, had married a Soviet woman, had worked in a Soviet factory. For Moscow, this was a nightmare scenario. A Marxist ex-defector murdering an American president during the Cold War with nuclear missiles pointed at each other.

He is 24y old Lee Oswald of Dallas, a former marine who spent some time in Russia, who at one time had applied for Soviet citizenship. He has been associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. >> Soviet officials immediately feared that some irresponsible American general might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.

According to declassified US intelligence files, the Communist Party believed the assassination was an ultraright coup aimed at overthrowing the government, invading Cuba, and starting World War II. The order went out across the Soviet military. Halt all field exercises immediately. Don’t give the Americans any excuse. Church bells toll across Moscow in memory of Kennedy.

This was not the reaction of a government that had ordered his death. Here’s what America didn’t know in November 1963, but Moscow did. The KGB had a file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a thick one. When Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, he walked into the American embassy in Moscow and announced he wanted to renounce his citizenship.

He was a 20-year-old former Marine who claimed to have secrets about US radar systems. He seemed like exactly the kind of asset Soviet intelligence would love. They didn’t want him. KGB officers interviewed Oswald extensively during his time in Minsk. Their conclusion documented in internal files, he was a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.

Unstable, erratic, unreliable, a man who couldn’t even handle a weapon properly. The KGB rejected him as an agent. When the news of the assassination broke, former KGB officer George Lesnik, who was in Moscow that day, immediately ran to his office to pull Oswald’s file. He reviewed it and confirmed.

Oswald had never been recruited, approached, or used by Soviet intelligence in any way. Lessnic called colleagues across the organization. The answer was the same everywhere. The man accused of killing the president of the United States was someone the KGB had looked at, evaluated, and decided wasn’t worth their time.

Soviet officials wasted no time making this clear. Their position documented in US intelligence reports, Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. He was a lone neurotic, and they wanted nothing to do with him, dead or alive. While Washington was still processing the shock of the assassination, Moscow was opening a different kind of investigation.

The KGB activated its intelligence networks. Not to cover up Soviet involvement, they had none, but to find out who actually did it. Because if the answer pointed in the wrong direction, the Cold War could turn hot overnight. Soviet intelligence analysts began working through what they knew. Oswald was too unstable to have planned and executed this alone.

Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with organized crime connections, had killed Oswald in the middle of a police station on live television 2 days after the assassination. That wasn’t the act of a concerned citizen. That was the act of someone silencing a loose end. The Soviet Communist Party’s early assessment this was a wellorganized conspiracy on the part of the ultraright right-wing extremists, oil money, military hawks who had despised Kennedy’s willingness to negotiate with Moscow.

Men who believed Kennedy was soft on communism and had nearly handed Cuba to the Soviets. The Soviets weren’t wrong that these people existed. Kennedy had enemies on the American right who considered him a traitor. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion had humiliated CIA operatives in Cuban exiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis resolution, in which Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, had enraged military hardliners who wanted to finish the job.

Then the KGB’s analysts turned their attention to someone closer to power. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the vice president who had become president within hours of the assassination, the Texas politician who had been politically marginalized under Kennedy, the man who now held all the power that Kennedy had kept from him. KGB headquarters in Moscow sent a directive to its New York residency.

develop all available information on Johnson, his background, his relationships, his financial connections, his history with Texas oil interests. By 1965, less than 2 years after the assassination, the KGB had reached a formal internal conclusion. Documented in a memo that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would later forward directly to the White House.

The KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate that President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. Read that again. The most sophisticated intelligence organization on Earth, an organization with assets embedded throughout the United States, had concluded that the sitting American president had ordered the murder of his predecessor.

KGB headquarters ordered its agents to investigate the personal relationship between Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between Johnson and Robert Kennedy. They wanted to understand the power dynamics, who knew what, who suspected what. Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, meeting with American journalist Drew Pearson in Cairo in May 1964, expressed his personal disbelief in the Warren Commission’s findings.

He couldn’t accept that both Oswald and Ruby had acted entirely alone. The chain of events made no sense to him as a political calculation. He wasn’t the only one. While the Soviets were building their case against Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover was doing something else entirely. On November 24th, 1963, 2 days after the assassination, the same day Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Hoover dictated an internal memo.

It contained a line that would remain classified for over 50 years. The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Kenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. Not find the truth. Convince the public. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach reinforced the directive the next day.

The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin that he did not have Confederates who were still at large. The official narrative was being built in real time before any serious investigation had been conducted before the Warren Commission had even been assembled. Hoover knew that the international complications were severe. Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy in Washington.

He had met with a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. A man Hoover’s own files identified as the embassy’s specialist in assassinations and similar activities. Making any of this public would muddy the waters internationally, Hoover dictated. So it was suppressed. The Warren Commission was convened.

It concluded what Hoover had decided it would conclude 2 days after the shooting. Oswald acted alone, three shots from behind, no conspiracy. The KGB file pointing at Johnson remained classified. The Soviet military assessment of an ultraright coup remained classified. The memo Hoover forwarded to the White House detailing the Soviet conclusion that the sitting president was responsible remained classified for over 50 years.

In October 2017, President Trump ordered the release of nearly 2,800 previously classified documents related to the Kennedy assassination. [snorts] The KGB’s conclusion was in there in black and white, forwarded by Hoover himself under the title reaction of Soviet and Communist Party officials to the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy. The documents revealed that from the very first hours after the shooting, Soviet officials believed the assassination was a right-wing coup. They believed Oswald was being used as a psy, a convenient communist fall guy designed to inflame public opinion against the Soviet Union and Cuba. They noted that the real organizers of the assassination would have been people who benefited from Kennedy’s death, oil interests, military hawks, and the man who inherited the presidency.

The documents also revealed something darker about Hoover’s operation. He knew the Soviets believed Johnson was involved. He forwarded that intelligence directly to the White House, to Johnson’s office, to Johnson’s assistant, Marvin Watson. The man accused of ordering the assassination was personally informed that Soviet intelligence believed he had done it and the Warren Commission proceeded exactly as Hoover had planned from day two.

The KGB’s conclusion about LBJ was never proven. Soviet intelligence was not infallible. Their analysis was filtered through cold war ideology, limited assets, and the natural tendency to see American capitalist conspiracies in any major political event. But the pattern they identified was real.

Johnson had the most to gain from Kennedy’s death. He went from being a politically humiliated vice president, one Kennedy was reportedly considering dropping from the 1964 ticket, to the most powerful man on earth. He escalated the war in Vietnam that Kennedy had been quietly planning to wind down. He served the Texas oil interest that Kennedy’s tax policies had threatened.

He presided over an investigation that his own FBI director had decided the outcome of before it began. The Soviets saw all of this. Khrushchev couldn’t believe one man had done it alone. The KGB built a file pointing at Johnson and Hoover, who knew about that file, sent it directly to Johnson’s desk.

The Warren Commission said, “One shooter, no conspiracy.” The KGB said, “Organized coup, right-wing money, and the vice president who became president.” 50 years later, the classified files are open. You can read them yourself and ask the same question the KGB was asking in 1965. Who had the motive? Who had the means? And who, when it was all over, had the power? If you think these questions deserve better answers than the ones we’ve been given, hit that like button.

Because when the most secretive intelligence agency in the world builds a file pointing at the sitting American president and that file stays classified for 50 years, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a document.

November 22nd, 1963. 12:30 p.m. Dallas, Texas. Three gunshots. A president slumped in his motorcade and within minutes, the news was racing across the Atlantic. When it reached the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership didn’t celebrate. They panicked, not because they were guilty, because they feared they were about to be accused.

The shooter, the man already being named on American radio, had defected to the Soviet Union, had lived there for 3 years, had married a Soviet woman, had worked in a Soviet factory. For Moscow, this was a nightmare scenario. A Marxist ex-defector murdering an American president during the Cold War with nuclear missiles pointed at each other.

He is 24y old Lee Oswald of Dallas, a former marine who spent some time in Russia, who at one time had applied for Soviet citizenship. He has been associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. >> Soviet officials immediately feared that some irresponsible American general might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.

According to declassified US intelligence files, the Communist Party believed the assassination was an ultraright coup aimed at overthrowing the government, invading Cuba, and starting World War II. The order went out across the Soviet military. Halt all field exercises immediately. Don’t give the Americans any excuse. Church bells toll across Moscow in memory of Kennedy.

This was not the reaction of a government that had ordered his death. Here’s what America didn’t know in November 1963, but Moscow did. The KGB had a file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a thick one. When Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, he walked into the American embassy in Moscow and announced he wanted to renounce his citizenship.

He was a 20-year-old former Marine who claimed to have secrets about US radar systems. He seemed like exactly the kind of asset Soviet intelligence would love. They didn’t want him. KGB officers interviewed Oswald extensively during his time in Minsk. Their conclusion documented in internal files, he was a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.

Unstable, erratic, unreliable, a man who couldn’t even handle a weapon properly. The KGB rejected him as an agent. When the news of the assassination broke, former KGB officer George Lesnik, who was in Moscow that day, immediately ran to his office to pull Oswald’s file. He reviewed it and confirmed.

Oswald had never been recruited, approached, or used by Soviet intelligence in any way. Lessnic called colleagues across the organization. The answer was the same everywhere. The man accused of killing the president of the United States was someone the KGB had looked at, evaluated, and decided wasn’t worth their time.

Soviet officials wasted no time making this clear. Their position documented in US intelligence reports, Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. He was a lone neurotic, and they wanted nothing to do with him, dead or alive. While Washington was still processing the shock of the assassination, Moscow was opening a different kind of investigation.

The KGB activated its intelligence networks. Not to cover up Soviet involvement, they had none, but to find out who actually did it. Because if the answer pointed in the wrong direction, the Cold War could turn hot overnight. Soviet intelligence analysts began working through what they knew. Oswald was too unstable to have planned and executed this alone.

Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with organized crime connections, had killed Oswald in the middle of a police station on live television 2 days after the assassination. That wasn’t the act of a concerned citizen. That was the act of someone silencing a loose end. The Soviet Communist Party’s early assessment this was a wellorganized conspiracy on the part of the ultraright right-wing extremists, oil money, military hawks who had despised Kennedy’s willingness to negotiate with Moscow.

Men who believed Kennedy was soft on communism and had nearly handed Cuba to the Soviets. The Soviets weren’t wrong that these people existed. Kennedy had enemies on the American right who considered him a traitor. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion had humiliated CIA operatives in Cuban exiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis resolution, in which Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, had enraged military hardliners who wanted to finish the job.

Then the KGB’s analysts turned their attention to someone closer to power. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the vice president who had become president within hours of the assassination, the Texas politician who had been politically marginalized under Kennedy, the man who now held all the power that Kennedy had kept from him. KGB headquarters in Moscow sent a directive to its New York residency.

develop all available information on Johnson, his background, his relationships, his financial connections, his history with Texas oil interests. By 1965, less than 2 years after the assassination, the KGB had reached a formal internal conclusion. Documented in a memo that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would later forward directly to the White House.

The KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate that President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. Read that again. The most sophisticated intelligence organization on Earth, an organization with assets embedded throughout the United States, had concluded that the sitting American president had ordered the murder of his predecessor.

KGB headquarters ordered its agents to investigate the personal relationship between Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between Johnson and Robert Kennedy. They wanted to understand the power dynamics, who knew what, who suspected what. Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, meeting with American journalist Drew Pearson in Cairo in May 1964, expressed his personal disbelief in the Warren Commission’s findings.

He couldn’t accept that both Oswald and Ruby had acted entirely alone. The chain of events made no sense to him as a political calculation. He wasn’t the only one. While the Soviets were building their case against Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover was doing something else entirely. On November 24th, 1963, 2 days after the assassination, the same day Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Hoover dictated an internal memo.

It contained a line that would remain classified for over 50 years. The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Kenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. Not find the truth. Convince the public. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach reinforced the directive the next day.

The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin that he did not have Confederates who were still at large. The official narrative was being built in real time before any serious investigation had been conducted before the Warren Commission had even been assembled. Hoover knew that the international complications were severe. Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy in Washington.

He had met with a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. A man Hoover’s own files identified as the embassy’s specialist in assassinations and similar activities. Making any of this public would muddy the waters internationally, Hoover dictated. So it was suppressed. The Warren Commission was convened.

It concluded what Hoover had decided it would conclude 2 days after the shooting. Oswald acted alone, three shots from behind, no conspiracy. The KGB file pointing at Johnson remained classified. The Soviet military assessment of an ultraright coup remained classified. The memo Hoover forwarded to the White House detailing the Soviet conclusion that the sitting president was responsible remained classified for over 50 years.

In October 2017, President Trump ordered the release of nearly 2,800 previously classified documents related to the Kennedy assassination. [snorts] The KGB’s conclusion was in there in black and white, forwarded by Hoover himself under the title reaction of Soviet and Communist Party officials to the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy. The documents revealed that from the very first hours after the shooting, Soviet officials believed the assassination was a right-wing coup. They believed Oswald was being used as a psy, a convenient communist fall guy designed to inflame public opinion against the Soviet Union and Cuba. They noted that the real organizers of the assassination would have been people who benefited from Kennedy’s death, oil interests, military hawks, and the man who inherited the presidency.

The documents also revealed something darker about Hoover’s operation. He knew the Soviets believed Johnson was involved. He forwarded that intelligence directly to the White House, to Johnson’s office, to Johnson’s assistant, Marvin Watson. The man accused of ordering the assassination was personally informed that Soviet intelligence believed he had done it and the Warren Commission proceeded exactly as Hoover had planned from day two.

The KGB’s conclusion about LBJ was never proven. Soviet intelligence was not infallible. Their analysis was filtered through cold war ideology, limited assets, and the natural tendency to see American capitalist conspiracies in any major political event. But the pattern they identified was real.

Johnson had the most to gain from Kennedy’s death. He went from being a politically humiliated vice president, one Kennedy was reportedly considering dropping from the 1964 ticket, to the most powerful man on earth. He escalated the war in Vietnam that Kennedy had been quietly planning to wind down. He served the Texas oil interest that Kennedy’s tax policies had threatened.

He presided over an investigation that his own FBI director had decided the outcome of before it began. The Soviets saw all of this. Khrushchev couldn’t believe one man had done it alone. The KGB built a file pointing at Johnson and Hoover, who knew about that file, sent it directly to Johnson’s desk.

The Warren Commission said, “One shooter, no conspiracy.” The KGB said, “Organized coup, right-wing money, and the vice president who became president.” 50 years later, the classified files are open. You can read them yourself and ask the same question the KGB was asking in 1965. Who had the motive? Who had the means? And who, when it was all over, had the power? If you think these questions deserve better answers than the ones we’ve been given, hit that like button.

Because when the most secretive intelligence agency in the world builds a file pointing at the sitting American president and that file stays classified for 50 years, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a document.

November 22nd, 1963. 12:30 p.m. Dallas, Texas. Three gunshots. A president slumped in his motorcade and within minutes, the news was racing across the Atlantic. When it reached the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership didn’t celebrate. They panicked, not because they were guilty, because they feared they were about to be accused.

The shooter, the man already being named on American radio, had defected to the Soviet Union, had lived there for 3 years, had married a Soviet woman, had worked in a Soviet factory. For Moscow, this was a nightmare scenario. A Marxist ex-defector murdering an American president during the Cold War with nuclear missiles pointed at each other.

He is 24y old Lee Oswald of Dallas, a former marine who spent some time in Russia, who at one time had applied for Soviet citizenship. He has been associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. >> Soviet officials immediately feared that some irresponsible American general might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.

According to declassified US intelligence files, the Communist Party believed the assassination was an ultraright coup aimed at overthrowing the government, invading Cuba, and starting World War II. The order went out across the Soviet military. Halt all field exercises immediately. Don’t give the Americans any excuse. Church bells toll across Moscow in memory of Kennedy.

This was not the reaction of a government that had ordered his death. Here’s what America didn’t know in November 1963, but Moscow did. The KGB had a file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a thick one. When Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, he walked into the American embassy in Moscow and announced he wanted to renounce his citizenship.

He was a 20-year-old former Marine who claimed to have secrets about US radar systems. He seemed like exactly the kind of asset Soviet intelligence would love. They didn’t want him. KGB officers interviewed Oswald extensively during his time in Minsk. Their conclusion documented in internal files, he was a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.

Unstable, erratic, unreliable, a man who couldn’t even handle a weapon properly. The KGB rejected him as an agent. When the news of the assassination broke, former KGB officer George Lesnik, who was in Moscow that day, immediately ran to his office to pull Oswald’s file. He reviewed it and confirmed.

Oswald had never been recruited, approached, or used by Soviet intelligence in any way. Lessnic called colleagues across the organization. The answer was the same everywhere. The man accused of killing the president of the United States was someone the KGB had looked at, evaluated, and decided wasn’t worth their time.

Soviet officials wasted no time making this clear. Their position documented in US intelligence reports, Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. He was a lone neurotic, and they wanted nothing to do with him, dead or alive. While Washington was still processing the shock of the assassination, Moscow was opening a different kind of investigation.

The KGB activated its intelligence networks. Not to cover up Soviet involvement, they had none, but to find out who actually did it. Because if the answer pointed in the wrong direction, the Cold War could turn hot overnight. Soviet intelligence analysts began working through what they knew. Oswald was too unstable to have planned and executed this alone.

Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with organized crime connections, had killed Oswald in the middle of a police station on live television 2 days after the assassination. That wasn’t the act of a concerned citizen. That was the act of someone silencing a loose end. The Soviet Communist Party’s early assessment this was a wellorganized conspiracy on the part of the ultraright right-wing extremists, oil money, military hawks who had despised Kennedy’s willingness to negotiate with Moscow.

Men who believed Kennedy was soft on communism and had nearly handed Cuba to the Soviets. The Soviets weren’t wrong that these people existed. Kennedy had enemies on the American right who considered him a traitor. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion had humiliated CIA operatives in Cuban exiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis resolution, in which Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, had enraged military hardliners who wanted to finish the job.

Then the KGB’s analysts turned their attention to someone closer to power. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the vice president who had become president within hours of the assassination, the Texas politician who had been politically marginalized under Kennedy, the man who now held all the power that Kennedy had kept from him. KGB headquarters in Moscow sent a directive to its New York residency.

develop all available information on Johnson, his background, his relationships, his financial connections, his history with Texas oil interests. By 1965, less than 2 years after the assassination, the KGB had reached a formal internal conclusion. Documented in a memo that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would later forward directly to the White House.

The KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate that President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. Read that again. The most sophisticated intelligence organization on Earth, an organization with assets embedded throughout the United States, had concluded that the sitting American president had ordered the murder of his predecessor.

KGB headquarters ordered its agents to investigate the personal relationship between Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between Johnson and Robert Kennedy. They wanted to understand the power dynamics, who knew what, who suspected what. Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, meeting with American journalist Drew Pearson in Cairo in May 1964, expressed his personal disbelief in the Warren Commission’s findings.

He couldn’t accept that both Oswald and Ruby had acted entirely alone. The chain of events made no sense to him as a political calculation. He wasn’t the only one. While the Soviets were building their case against Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover was doing something else entirely. On November 24th, 1963, 2 days after the assassination, the same day Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Hoover dictated an internal memo.

It contained a line that would remain classified for over 50 years. The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Kenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. Not find the truth. Convince the public. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach reinforced the directive the next day.

The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin that he did not have Confederates who were still at large. The official narrative was being built in real time before any serious investigation had been conducted before the Warren Commission had even been assembled. Hoover knew that the international complications were severe. Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy in Washington.

He had met with a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. A man Hoover’s own files identified as the embassy’s specialist in assassinations and similar activities. Making any of this public would muddy the waters internationally, Hoover dictated. So it was suppressed. The Warren Commission was convened.

It concluded what Hoover had decided it would conclude 2 days after the shooting. Oswald acted alone, three shots from behind, no conspiracy. The KGB file pointing at Johnson remained classified. The Soviet military assessment of an ultraright coup remained classified. The memo Hoover forwarded to the White House detailing the Soviet conclusion that the sitting president was responsible remained classified for over 50 years.

In October 2017, President Trump ordered the release of nearly 2,800 previously classified documents related to the Kennedy assassination. [snorts] The KGB’s conclusion was in there in black and white, forwarded by Hoover himself under the title reaction of Soviet and Communist Party officials to the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy. The documents revealed that from the very first hours after the shooting, Soviet officials believed the assassination was a right-wing coup. They believed Oswald was being used as a psy, a convenient communist fall guy designed to inflame public opinion against the Soviet Union and Cuba. They noted that the real organizers of the assassination would have been people who benefited from Kennedy’s death, oil interests, military hawks, and the man who inherited the presidency.

The documents also revealed something darker about Hoover’s operation. He knew the Soviets believed Johnson was involved. He forwarded that intelligence directly to the White House, to Johnson’s office, to Johnson’s assistant, Marvin Watson. The man accused of ordering the assassination was personally informed that Soviet intelligence believed he had done it and the Warren Commission proceeded exactly as Hoover had planned from day two.

The KGB’s conclusion about LBJ was never proven. Soviet intelligence was not infallible. Their analysis was filtered through cold war ideology, limited assets, and the natural tendency to see American capitalist conspiracies in any major political event. But the pattern they identified was real.

Johnson had the most to gain from Kennedy’s death. He went from being a politically humiliated vice president, one Kennedy was reportedly considering dropping from the 1964 ticket, to the most powerful man on earth. He escalated the war in Vietnam that Kennedy had been quietly planning to wind down. He served the Texas oil interest that Kennedy’s tax policies had threatened.

He presided over an investigation that his own FBI director had decided the outcome of before it began. The Soviets saw all of this. Khrushchev couldn’t believe one man had done it alone. The KGB built a file pointing at Johnson and Hoover, who knew about that file, sent it directly to Johnson’s desk.

The Warren Commission said, “One shooter, no conspiracy.” The KGB said, “Organized coup, right-wing money, and the vice president who became president.” 50 years later, the classified files are open. You can read them yourself and ask the same question the KGB was asking in 1965. Who had the motive? Who had the means? And who, when it was all over, had the power? If you think these questions deserve better answers than the ones we’ve been given, hit that like button.

Because when the most secretive intelligence agency in the world builds a file pointing at the sitting American president and that file stays classified for 50 years, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a document.