November 22nd, 1963.
Dallas, Texas
One can only imagine how Oswald felt on the morning of Friday, 22 November. He would have forced himself into a state of grim determination. He had to succeed; whether he was doing it for himself, or because he was under orders with dire consequences for failure and rich rewards for success.
The motorcade swung left into Elm Street at 12.30. Oswald then raised the rifle and fired three shots, the third shattering the President’s skull. He put the rifle back behind some boxes, walked quickly down the stairs, and left the building seconds before the police sealed it off.
After collecting his passport and a few other things from his lodgings, a bus took him a mile further away from the scene of the crime. He started to walk towards a cinema, which may have been a rendezvous point. Was he going to meet someone who would assist his escape to a safe place? That is what they would have told him; but he was too naïve to realise he could not be allowed to live to tell the tale.
Officer JD Tippit of the Dallas Police was on a routine patrol when he saw Oswald walking purposefully along the road. On seeing the police car Oswald hesitated, half turned as if to run away, but then – remembering to keep calm – he continued to walk in the same direction as before. The hesitation had been enough to make Tippit suspicious, so he approached Oswald with a view to satisfying himself that he was not up to something sinister.
Oswald panicked, drew his revolver, and shot officer Tippit dead.
He ran on to the cinema; but there had been witnesses to the shooting and the police soon arrived and overpowered Oswald. He was taken to Dallas jail where he was charged with the murder of Officer Tippit. Within half-an-hour of his arrest he was also suspected of murdering Kennedy. He was questioned for several hours with no lawyer present and no notes were taken.
Two days later, Oswald was shot dead by Jack Ruby when he was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail.
The Conspiracy
The evidence strongly suggests that Oswald’s time in New Orleans and, more particularly, his visits to the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City, were directed by the KGB. Oswald had been invited, or instructed, to go to the Consulate where he was briefed by Kostikov (the KGB assassin expert), Yatskov and Nechiporenko. From Mexico, he went straight to Dallas, where he had no home and to where the President would be paying a visit. His job at the Depository was fortuitous, but alternative arrangements would otherwise have been made to shoot from somewhere else along the President’s route.
Khrushchev would not, under any conceivable circumstances, have authorised or condoned the assassination of President Kennedy with whom he had been fostering a better relationship since the Cuban Crisis.
However, Ivan Serov was not part of the inner circle of Soviet leadership. He had lost his position as head of the GRU and no longer took orders directly from Khrushchev, the Politburo or the Central Committee.
In the course of the social meetings he would have had with his friends and fellow-Stalinists Andropov and Kryuchkov in the summer of 1963, Serov may well have raised the possibility of taking revenge on Kennedy for – as all Stalinists saw it – the Soviet Union’s humiliation over the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Did the idea develop into a plan that Andropov and Kryuchkov could put into action from their positions in the Central Committee? We know that Kryuchkov had already been active in relation to Oswald’s future after he returned to the United States. They would have identified the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City as the best place to operate from and it had the added attraction of not involving any of the KGB stations in the United States.
These three militant Stalinists had stronger motivation, better opportunity and greater resources to kill Kennedy than anyone else in the conspiracy line-up. As steadfast Stalinists they were dedicated to the elimination of all ‘enemies of the people’ and Kennedy – the brash representative of the United States and capitalism – was public enemy number one.
For a more detailed consideration of the KGB links to the Kennedy assassination read A Spy Like No Other – The Cuban Missile Crisis, The KGB and The Kennedy Assassination by Robert Holmes.
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