Ground Report

According to everything I can figure out Lt. General Ion Michai Pacepa, the former chief of Romanian foreign intelligence service and then special adviser to then President Nicolas Ceausesau, during the later part of the 1970’s represents the “highest ranking defector to the U.S. ever had come over from a rival or hostile intelligence service.”

Even to this day much of the information regarding Pacepa’s defection remain highly classified.

In fact I must at least half a dozen or more FOI ( “Freedom of Information” ) requests sitting in my files on this one individual alone that were denied by the CIA, over the course of the twenty years.

As such Pacepa has always represented sort of an enigma to me.

Over the years l have read or tried to read everything l could get on this guy – even once going to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, Georgia to seek out any reference to this man, because it was during the Carter Administration when Pacepa actually defected and started working for the CIA.

So anyway in 2013 this guy writes a book called “Disinformation” (in Romanian “Dezinformarea”), which answered some of the important questions relating to his personal life, time in service within the Securitate (Secret Police) that you can imagine.

It also touched on certain area of history that most Americans don’t have any clue of, or could hardly begin to understand.

One such area, for example was the Kennedy assassination, which most people, even scholar just think they understand.

Pacepa’s insight in this matter alone, is enough for me to go back and re-examing everything l only thought I knew about this subject.

For example, according to Pacepa ( and I absolutely believe him by the way) the KGB had a role to play in the Kennedy assassination. Call it a hidden hand if you will.

I had always suspected it but it was refuted  in the Warren report and other official findings relating to the JFK assassination that I have read over the years.

Pacepa writes that the Kennedy assassination was in fact a KGB plot from the beginning, orchestrated by a high ranking but obscure spy by the name of Valery Kostikov (aka ” Comrade Kostin”) as he is referred to in Pacepa’s book.

Kostikov was working, under diplomatic cover at the time in the Russian Embassy in Mexico. And he was thought to be a member of the KGB’s infamous “Department Thirteen”.

Department Thirteen ( “Thirteenth Department”) was known to orchestrate “wet work” assassinations, among other things, abroad. “Wet”meaning ” bloody”.

Here is exactly what Pacepa writes on page 207 of his book:

“There was irrefutable proof that before the killing (of President John F.) Kennedy, Oswald had traveled to Mexico, under a false identity and there had secretly met with Comrade Kostin…”

He continues:

“There is also irrefutable evidence that Oswald’s Soviet wife Marina had been in touch with the Soviet Embassy in the United States and that she concealed evidence from U.S. authorities confirming her husband’s secret trip to Mexico and meeting with the KGB officer Valery Kostikov (Comrade Kostin).”

In another place in his book Pacepa writes:

“Making the operation complete (referring to the Kennedy assassination) in this case was the launch of a worldwide disinformation operation aimed at diverting public attention away from Moscow in respect to the Kennedy assassination, and at framing the CIA as the culprit.” Pg 231.

Deepening the conspiracy was mention of yet another disturbing aspect of the Soviet disinformation campaign – the implication by innuendo of the involvement of President Johnson in the conspiracy!

Pacepa writes:

“In late November 1963, a special KGB courier notified the management of the DIE that within the Dragon operation we should include mention of a jealous President Johnson as the instigator of the CIA plot which he, allegedly had personally arranged to take place in Texas on his home turf…”

Pacepa later summed it up this way:

“The Dragon operation has become one of the most successful disinformation operations in contemporary history. According to JFK, a 1991 movie made by Oliver Stone, the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy at the US government’s highest levels, implicating members of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Mafia and Lyndon Johnson. The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards and it won two. According to a later Gallup poll, between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans believed there had indeed been a CIA conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy…”

Pacepa cites his source as Alexander Tunzelmann, Oliver Stone’s JFK: A basket case for conspiracy.”, The Guardian, April 28, 2011.

Tragically in all this President Lyndon B. Johnson was always haunted by the fact that the public thought he might have had anything to do whatsoever with the Kennedy assassination. By all accounts he was an admirer of Kennedy and a support of Jackie both during and after her husband’s tragic death. This was reflected in various personal letters and correspondence that are now part of his own Presidential Library.