Pa.ce.pa

Just another Soviet agent

CIA about me: “Programmed to Kill presents a conceivable explanation of Kennedy’s assassination, but it is also implausible. Pacepa doesn’t connect the dots, he adds new ones. A health warning is warranted” Ufff…

The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf

Compiled and Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake

Ion Mihai Pacepa, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination – The Training of a Dedicated Agent (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 349 pp., endnotes, index.

In his first book, Ion Pacepa told of his life as a Romanian intelligence officer who achieved high rank and worked closely with the KGB before defecting to the United States in the late 1970s.[13] The present work applies his knowledge of KGB operational tradecraft to the case of Lee Harvey Oswald to determine whether Oswald was a KGB agent. As the title suggests, Pacepa is convinced Oswald was recruited. He concludes that Oswald most likely succumbed to a clever honey trap when he served with the US Marines in Japan, where he provided secret details about the U-2 and became a dedicated communist. After his discharge from the Marines, Pacepa says, Oswald made a “secret trip” to Moscow, which became public when he unexpectedly renounced his US citizenship and demanded to remain in the Soviet Union. Whether Oswald’s story, up to this point, was contrived by the KGB is not clear, but, according to Pacepa, he was later trained in the use of microdots and as a marksman before being dispatched on an assassination mission in the United States. Oswald’s marriage and dissatisfaction with life in the Soviet Union were part of his cover story to explain his return to to the United States, where he was handled by a KGB illegal. When Khrushchev decided not to conduct any more foreign assassinations, Oswald was ordered to stand down, but he declined and decided to show the Soviets what he could do by assassinating President Kennedy. Jack Ruby was then instructed to kill Oswald to keep him quiet, according to Pacepa.

What evidence does Pacepa provide for his imaginative story? Only his analytical skills and his experience with the KGB. The book is filled with terms like “must have,” “could very possible have,” and “of course, there is no way of knowing.” It also fails to account for Oswald’s frequent statements while in the service that he was a Marxist. They were so frequent, in fact, that Pacepa claims Oswald’s Marine buddies nicknamed him Oswaldovich. Equally baffling is Oswald’s retention of a security clearance in the mid-1950s, when, by most accounts, anyone openly espousing Marxist views would have lost his clearance and been dismissed from the service.

An equally likely explanation for Pacepa’s version is what R.V. Jones called Crabtree’s Bludgeon: “No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated.”[14] Programmed to Kill presents a conceivable explanation of Kennedy’s assassination, but it is also implausible. Pacepa doesn’t connect the dots, he adds new ones. A health warning is warranted.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol52no2/intelligence-in-recent-public-literature.html

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