Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, reported in September 1964 that it had found “very persuasive” evidence that Oswald had acted alone and none of a conspiracy. Though the report was flawed, its main conclusions are probably accurate. 15Service A, which may well have been genuinely persuaded that Kennedy was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy, succeeded in sponsoring its first counterblast even before the Warren Report appeared. The publisher was Carl Aldo Marzani (codenamed NORD), an Italian-born American Communist and Soviet agent, probably recruited before the Second World War, who was extensively used by the KGB for active measures. 16Early in 1960 the New York residency recommended to the Centre that Marzani be given 6-7,000 dollars to enable his Liberty Book Club to continue publishing pro-Soviet material:

NORD is an extremely energetic person and is quite devoted to his task. Despite his financial difficulties, he is struggling to keep SEVER [North, the Liberty Book Club publishing company] afloat. SEVER, together with its commercial bookselling network, the Prometheus Book Club, has been in existence for fourteen years. During this time it has published and distributed more than 200 titles of a progressive nature, by both American and foreign authors. The catalogue of the SEVER publishing firm lists around fifty titles, and the Prometheus Book Club has 7,000 members. Books are also sent to 8,000 addresses on an individual basis.

The international department of the Central Committee was plainly impressed. In May 1960 it approved a secret grant of 15,000 dollars, more than twice the sum suggested by the New York residency. 17

Marzani’s productions during 1960 included his own translation of a rapturous endorsement of the Soviet system by an Italian Communist:

It is the duty of every Socialist, of every democrat, of every modern man, to deepen his understanding of the USSR… We are today capable of continuing to transform the world, thanks to the successes of the USSR, thanks to the successes in a series of other countries, thanks to the struggles which we all wage in our own lands. We can, and we will, extend the civilization that was born in October 1917. 18

In September 1961 the CPSU Central Committee allocated another 55,000 dollars for the next two years to allow Marzani to expand his publications. He was given a further 10,000 dollars a year to cover advertising costs. 19When the young KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, stationed in New York in the early 1960s under cover as a Radio Moscow reporter, paid his first visit to one of Marzani’s receptions, he found his apartment “filled with a motley assortment of Communists, liberals, and KGB spooks—all of them watched, undoubtedly, by FBI informers in attendance.” 20

Among the books published by Marzani in 1964 was the first volume on the Kennedy assassination to appear in the United States, Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy? by the German writer Joachim Joesten. At the beginning of the book Joesten expresses his “heartfelt thanks… to Carl Marzani, a shrewd and hard-hitting publisher in the finest American tradition, who put his whole heart and soul in this book;” Marzani succeeded in publishing it within five weeks of receiving the manuscript. 21Joesten supported Moscow’s line in pinning the blame for the assassination on a conspiracy by right-wing racists, chief among them “oil magnate H. L. Hunt:”

They all feared that Mr. Kennedy, with his test-ban treaty, his neutralization of Laos, his dislike of Latin-American militarists, and his quiet feelers towards Castro, intended to put an end to the Cold War, cut back the arms budget and bring under control the Warfare State—that “military-industrial complex” which President Eisenhower had excoriated, and warned the nation about, in his farewell address. 22

According to Joesten, Oswald was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background” who had been judged expendable, used as a fall guy and murdered to prevent him giving evidence. 23 Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy? thus established two themes which were to recur in Soviet and Russian active measures for the next thirty years: a plot by Hunt and other right-wing fanatics; and the involvement of the CIA. At the time, however, Joesten’s book was overshadowed by the publication of the Warren report and further undermined by the publicity given to Joesten’s Communist background. 24

The KGB correctly identified the New York lawyer Mark Lane as the most talented of the first wave of conspiracy theorists researching the JFK assassination. According to one report made on him, probably by the New York residency:

Mark Lane is well known as a person with close ties to Democratic Party circles in the US. He holds liberal views on a number of current American political problems and has undertaken to conduct his own private investigation of the circumstances surrounding the murder of J. Kennedy. 25

Joesten praised Lane as “brilliant and courageous” and dedicated his own book to him: “Neither the ‘police state tactics’ of the FBI—to use [Lane’s] own words—nor the conspiracy of silence of the press magnates, could sway him from doggedly pursuing the truth.” 26Together with student assistants and other volunteers, Lane founded the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry in a small office on lower Fifth Avenue and rented a small theater at which, each evening for several months, he gave what became known as “The Speech,” updating the development of his conspiracy theory. “This alternative method of dissent was required,” writes Lane, “because not a single network radio or television program permitted the broadcast of a word of divergence from the official view.” 27Though it dared not take the risk of contacting Lane directly, the New York residency sent him 1,500 dollars to help finance his research through the intermediary of a close friend whom Lane’s KGB file identifies only as a trusted contact. While Lane was not told the source of the money, the residency suspected that he might have guessed where it came from; it was also concerned that the secret subsidy might be discovered by the FBI. 28

The same intermediary provided 500 dollars to pay for a trip by Lane to Europe in 1964. While there, Lane asked to visit Moscow in order to discuss some of the material he had found. The Centre regretfully concluded that inviting him to Russia would reveal its hand in too blatant a way and his proposed trip was “tactfully postponed.” Trusted contacts were, however, selected from among Soviet journalists to encourage him in his research. Among them was the KGB agent Genrikh Borovik, who later maintained regular contact with Lane. Lane’s Rush to Judgment, published in 1966, alleged complicity at the highest levels of government in the Kennedy assassination. 29It was top of that year’s hardback bestseller list and went on to become the bestselling paperback of 1967, as well as enjoying what Lane modestly describes as “enormous success around the world” and causing “a dramatic change in public perception” of the assassination. 30

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lane’s success was less enormous. The most popular books on the assassination were now those that exposed some of the excesses of the conspiracy theorists. 31CPUSA leaders who visited Moscow in 1971, though describing Rush to Judgment as “advantageous to the Communists,” claimed that Lane’s main motive was his own self-aggrandizement. 32In the mid-1970s, however, the dramatic revelations of real conspiracy in the Nixon White House and of CIA assassination plots against several foreign statesmen gave the conspiracy theorists a new lease on life. 33The KGB, predictably, was anxious to lose no opportunity to promote active measures which supported the increasingly popular theory that the CIA was behind Kennedy’s assassination. Its chief target was the former CIA officer turned Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt (sometimes confused with the Texan oil millionaire H. L. Hunt), who had been wrongly accused of being in Dallas on the day of the assassination.