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A former American spy’s book has reportedly thrown new light on the November 22, 1963 assassination of former U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Tennent H Bagley, a former CIA case officer, has suggested in his book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, that Russia’s KGB may have actually had a role in recruiting Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, 44 years ago. Bagley’s contention is likely to queer the pitch for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), reports Times Online. While the CIA has officially said that a Russian defector to the US—Yuri Nosenko—had told the agency that the KGB had never tried to recruit Oswald, as he was regarded as "too unstable" to be of use, Bagley, who helped in Nosenko’s defection process in 1964, months after Kennedy’s assassination, thinks otherwise. This suggests that America’s conclusion that Moscow was not behind the assassination of its president is once again in doubt. According to the Times report, James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counter-intelligence unit, who went to his grave in 1987 with the suspicion that Nosenko was a double agent is true. Bagley’s book "goes a long way towards rehabilitating (the idea) that Angleton was right in calling him (Nosenko) a KGB plant," says Ron Rosenbaum, a New York journalist, who spoke to Bagley earlier this year. Bagley, who now lives in Brussels, argues that the KGB’s aim was to steer the CIA away from realising that the Russians had recruited an American agent in Moscow in 1949 and perhaps two others later. The book raises the possibility that a KGB mole may have worked at the CIA during the cold war. Nosenko is believed to be now living under an assumed name somewhere in America. He never gave evidence to the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, but largely as a result of his assurances Washington never took seriously the idea that the KGB plotted to murder Kennedy. Bagley’s book seems certain to attract the attention of conspiracy theorists, some of whom are still convinced that Oswald did not act alone in November 1963. —ANI
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