CIA told of Soviet financed plot to kill JFK according to documents
Newly released files reveal claim Russians offered $100K to JFK assassins
Newly released JFK Assassination files reveal a tipster contacted authorities about a Soviet financed plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy more than a year before the former president’s murder in Dallas, Texas.
The anonymous tip was referred to in a memorandum for Mr. J Lee Rankin.
Rankin was a lawyer for the Warren Commission; set up by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination.
The document reveals details of an anonymous phone call to the CIA Naval Attache in Canberra, Australia from a man claiming to be a Polish chauffeur for the Soviet Embassy in that city.
Australian authorities later dismissed the tipster as a “crank” but documents suggest the chauffeur may have been privy to, “matters of intelligence interest,” and told CIA staff the Soviets had financed the assassination of President Kennedy.
That call took place two days after the assassination but the newly released documents also referenced a “similar anonymous telephone call,” more than a year earlier on October 15th, 1962.
The earlier call took place around the time of the October Crisis, during which the US and Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war following the discovery of Russian missile sites in Cuba.
Referring to the Australian cables, the CIA later denied having received any warning about a Soviet financed plot to kill Kennedy more than a year before the events in Dallas.
“It should be noted the CIA had not previously known of the 1962 phone call,” the document reads.
In the October 1962 call, the tipster said, “Iron Curtain countries planned to pay $100,000 for the assassination of Kennedy.”
Those details were left out of the Warren Commission report which dismissed suspicions of an international conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy.
The omission supports the idea, The Warren Commission may have been trying to diffuse cold war tensions after the assassination of Kennedy when many Americans suspected Russian involvement.
If, as the Australians said, the anonymous tipster was a “crank,” why would this information be kept secret for almost 60 years.
The so-called lone gunman; Lee Harvey Oswald had strong links to the Soviet Union.
He had defected to that country in October 1959, married a Russian woman and had expressed Communist sympathies before eventually returning to the United States.