JFK50 : Mark Lane of US Army Intelligence, and the KGB

"...he had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. 

When other Communist regimes later seemed at risk - in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981, he was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival."

In 1992, KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the UK with notes and copies of 30,000 classified files collected over the years of his lenghty service. As related to longtime espionage journalist Christopher Andrews, Mitrokhin's job had given him access to a great deal of information relating to Soviet propaganda and the John F. Kennedy assassination.

From Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, pp. 225-230:

 

It would have been wholly out of character had the Centre failed to interpret President Kennedy's assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on November 22, 1963 as anything less than conspiracy. The deputy chairman of the KGB reported to the Central Committee in December:

 

A reliable source of the Polish friends [Polish intelligence], an American entrepreneur and owner of a number of firms closely connected to the petroleum circles of the South, reported in late November that the real instigators of this criminal deed were three leading oil magnates from the South of the USA -- Richardson, Murchison and Hunt, all owners of major petroleum reserves in the southern states who have long been connected to pro-fascist and racist organizations in the South.

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."

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." Together 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." Though 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.

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. It was top of that year's hardback bestseller best and went on to become the best-selling 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.

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." CPUSA 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. In 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." The 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.

The centerpiece of the active measure against Howard Hunt, codenamed ARLINGTON, was a forged letter to him from Oswald, allegedly written a fortnight before the assassination. The letter used phrases and expressions taken from actual letters written by Oswald during his two years in the Soviet Union, was fabricated in a clever imitation of his handwriting.