A reader asks
All available evidence points to the KGB realizing Lee Harvey Oswald was of little to no value to them and happily letting him leave the country for good in 1962.
ME: In addition to false defector Yuri Nosenko, one of the major proponents of that fallacious idea is “former” KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko. Oswald allegedly met with Nechiporenko and two other KGB officers masquerading as diplomats at the Soviet Consulate on Friday 9/27/63 and Saturday 9/28/63. In his book, Passport to Assassination, Nechiporenko says the KGB had no interest in “abnormal” Oswald in the USSR, and then dedicates fifty pages to how “stupid and sadistic” was Tennent H. Bagley, Nosenko’s primary CIA case officer from June 1962 to September 1967, even though Bagley had nothing to do with the ostensible subject of the book -- Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City in an unsuccessful attempt to get visas to Cuba and Russia.
There are many others, of course, but those are two of the most prominent ones.
If you’ve read John M. Newman’s 1995/2008 book, Oswald and the CIA, you know that the Soviets would have been all over the former Marine U-2 radar operator like piranhas on a bleeding pig.
What evidence do you have that supports in any way the notion that they got involved with him again as it pertains to the assassination?
ME: I don’t think Oswald killed JFK for the KGB.
However, there are some anomalies which suggest that it may have been involved in the assassination and/or the U.S. Government’s reaction to it.
Foe example:
KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov, aka “The Blond Oswald in Mexico City,” claimed in a 22 November 1993 National Enquirer article to have met one-on-one with weeping and revolver-brandishing Oswald at the Soviet Embassy on Sunday, 9/29/63, but failed to mention that Oswald had (allegedly) wept and brandished his revolver in front of Nechiporenko, Yatskov, and Department 13-radioactive Kostikov at the Soviet Consulate just the day before.
The KGB security officer, Ivan Obyedkov, who volunteered the Department 13-radioactive name “Kostikov” to a forgetful Oswald (or “Oswald”) over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phone line on Tuesday 1 October 1963 was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent — i.e., the CIA mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited him.
The only reason the CIA believed Kostikov was Department 13 was because J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA (KGB Major Aleksey Kulak) had told the FBI in 1962 that Kostikov’s charge at the U.N., Igor Brykin, was Department 13.
Before Oswald’s visit, a crop-dusting former Nazi pilot / former British POW / former KGB recruit, Guenther Heinz Schulz, aka TUMBLEWEED / AEBURBLE, had been sent by the FBI and the CIA to Mexico City to compromise or recruit Kostikov.
Oswald’s high-class mentor in Dallas, George DeMohrenschildt, was very likely a long-term KGB “Illegal” according to CIA Counterintelligence analyst Clare Edward Petty after reading some WW II VENONA decrypts in the early 1970s.
A day or two after the assassination, true defector KGB Major Pyotr Deriabin gave several reasons for why Khruschev would have wanted to kill JFK and said that Marina Prusakova had to be at least a low-level KGB informant to be allowed to marry Oswald and leave the USSR with him.