Oswald and the KGB — Part I

The Russians know something about JFK’s accused assassin that we don't

Left to Right: Soviet Vice Consul Valery Kostikov in Mexico City in the early 1960s; Soviet Vice Consul Oleg Nechiporenko in Mexico City in 1963; Soviet Consul Pavel Yatskov in Mexico City in 1963 (Credit: Oleg Nechiporenko)

“We came close to an agreement to copy the entire KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald that is maintained in Minsk, Belarus,” said Judge John Tunheim, former chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on May 20, 2025. Sadly, “last-minute disputes” prevented that from happening. “Copies of the files are in Moscow,” he added.

Chairwoman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) immediately said her panel would be “following up on getting the KGB file in Minsk,” and that “with peace talks right now it might be a prime time for that.”

Oswald resided in Minsk, U.S.S.R., from October 1959 to June 1962. The post-Soviet Russian and Belarusian governments still possess records on surveillance of the young ex-Marine during his time there — where he went, whom he met, etc. That means Americans are still deprived of that relatively big chunk of Oswald’s short life.

But there is another file supposedly generated by the KGB that few ever mention.

The Other KGB Files

The KGB also claimed it created a report on Oswald outside the Soviet Union. Specifically, according to the official record, Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City repeatedly from Friday, Sept. 27 to Wednesday, Oct. 2, 1963. Ex-KGB officers say they made a record of these contacts, but the rest of the world has never seen it.

As it stands, therefore, we lack proof that Oswald even went to Mexico. Before Mob-linked Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him to death in police custody, Oswald told interrogators he had never visited Mexico City in his life. No photos of him or recordings of his voice there have ever surfaced, only inconsistent eyewitness accounts of meetings and transcripts of phone calls he allegedly made.

Official U.S. government investigators never deposed any Russians, whether friends of Oswald from the U.S.S.R. or diplomatic officials who interacted with him. Most are now dead. A memorandum from the CIA’s deputy director for plans (today’s operations), Richard Helms, to Warren Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin, dated July 2, 1964, attributes a paragraph to “Soviet Consul Pavel Antonovich Yatskov in Mexico City”:

I met Oswald here. He stormed into my office and wanted me to introduce and recommend him to the Cubans. He told me that he had lived in the USSR. I told him that I would have to check before I could recommend him. He was nervous and his hands trembled, and he stormed out of my office. I don’t believe that a person as nervous as Oswald, whose hands trembled could have accurately fired a rifle.

The memo then says “it is quite possible that Oswald thought he had talked with Valeriy Kostikov when he had actually spoken to Yatskov,” or that Oswald had first spoken to Vice Consul Kostikov, who then referred him to Yatskov. The CIA described its source only as “a confidential contact of this Agency in Mexico City who is believed to be reliable.”

Three decades later, Yatskov, Kostikov, and two other ex-KGB officers gave public accounts of meeting Oswald in Mexico City that differed in key ways from the CIA’s.

Oswald Confronts the Chekists

In 1993, retired KGB Col. Oleg Nechiporenko published a memoir of his life in Soviet intelligence, “Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him.” It devotes several chapters to his time in Mexico, where he worked as a vice consul in the Soviet Embassy. Nechiporenko, Kostikov and Yatskov, all KGB under cover as consular officials, claimed they met Oswald inside their embassy’s compound over that weekend, either on Friday or Saturday — or both.

Nechiporenko claims that Oswald rang the buzzer at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 27. The sentry (no name given) then alerted Kostikov, also a vice consul, who met Oswald inside, spoke to him, and directed him to Nechiporenko’s office.

Oswald “mentioned his fear that the FBI would arrest him” for contacting the Soviet Embassy in Washington, so he had decided to fulfill his travel plans in Mexico. Nechiporenko was ready to “make an exception and give him the necessary papers to fill out,” but that typically “all matters dealing with travel to the USSR were handled by the embassies or consulates in the country in which a person lived.” Even if Oswald filled out the forms in Mexico, Nechiporenko explained, the embassy would still send the application to Moscow, which would send its answer to his permanent U.S. address. This would take four months “at the very least.”

Oswald took this very badly, Nechiporenko says, becoming very upset and shouting that it would all “end in tragedy” for him. Nechiporenko then led the teary-eyed American out of the compound. Still, supposedly, this wasn’t the end of Oswald’s contact with the KGB.

The Second Visit

At a little after ten o’clock in the morning on Saturday, Sept. 28, the Soviet Embassy “sentry” (again Nechiporenko gives no name) knocked on the door of Yatskov’s office and said there was a visitor, “not Mexican in appearance,” who wanted to speak to him. The unnamed guard said he “had explained to the visitor through the embassy gate that today was not a workday and refused to let him enter.” Nevertheless, Nechiporenko recounts, Yatskov “ordered the sentry to bring the visitor to the office.”

From there, Nechiporenko quotes his fellow KGB officer saying that a “thin subject, of medium height and nondescript appearance, age twenty-five to twenty-seven,” with “pale features” appeared in his doorway. Oswald, “carelessly dressed, in a gray suit,” had an “extremely agitated look on his face.”

Yatskov invited him to sit down at the desk adjacent to his own. The consul’s English was “limited,” but he understood his guest to be “an American, a Communist, pro-Cuban,” who wanted “a visa to Cuba and the USSR.” Yatskov gleaned that someone was “persecuting” this man, who “feared for his life” and “fidgeted in his chair” as “his hands trembled.”

At this point, fellow KGB officer Kostikov entered the room, smiling, “obviously looking forward to the upcoming volleyball battles.” Nechiporenko writes that a volleyball match was scheduled that day, and embassy employees were getting ready to play.

Nechiporenko then quotes Kostikov saying, he (Kostikov) “flung open the door” to Yatskov’s office and saw “the American who visited us the previous day.” Oswald wasn’t just “disheveled, rumpled, and unshaven,” but “had the look of someone who was hounded,” now “more anxious than the day before.” Yatskov, knowing Kostikov spoke decent English, turned to his subordinate for help in understanding the nervous American.

“Without engaging Oswald in conversation, and it was he, I explained to Pavel that the visitor had been here the previous day,” Kostikov is quoted saying. For this reason, Kostikov told Yatskov, he had turned Oswald over to Nechiporenko.

Nechiporenko italicizes “was” to dispel any notion of an impostor — as opposed to the real Lee Harvey Oswald — visiting the embassy,. Long before Nechiporenko had published his book, widespread suspicion that Oswald never visited Mexico City at all derived from (a) the lack of photographic evidence provided by the CIA, and (b) the fact that Oswald was — as FBI agents who heard tape recordings of CIA wiretaps said — impersonated on the phone to the Soviet Embassy during his alleged time in Mexico.

Supposedly, Oswald turned to Kostikov and “quickly began to retell his story,” which Kostikov “had already partially heard” the day before from Oswald and Nechiporenko. He told of traveling to the U.S.S.R. as a tourist after discharge from the military, remaining there “for political reasons,” marrying a Russian, and returning to America. He said “he was a Communist and a member of an organization that defended Cuba.”

Lee Harvey Oswald with friends in the USSR (National Archives)

Yatskov asked Oswald disapprovingly why he wasn’t communicating in Russian, at which point Oswald “switched over to broken Russian” and continued in that language except when he had trouble “expressing certain thoughts in Russian and inserted English words.”As far as we know, Lee Harvey Oswald was fluent in Russian by the time he returned to America in June 1962. Russian émigrés in Dallas had even complimented him often.

Oswald, according to Yatskov (through Nechiporenko), said he needed to quickly obtain a visa to live in the Soviet Union permanently. Life in America was “very difficult,” as “he was constantly under surveillance” and “even persecuted.” The FBI had even caused him to lose his job, so this version goes.

At this point, Kostikov’s tale — as Nechiporenko tells it — becomes alarming. Oswald “suddenly became hysterical” and began sobbing, “I am afraid … they’ll kill me. Let me in!”

Repeating over and over that he was being persecuted and that he was being followed even here in Mexico, he stuck his right hand into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a revolver, saying, ‘See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life,’ and placed the revolver on the desk where we were sitting opposite one another. (p. 77)

“Here, give me that piece,” Yatskov then reportedly told Kostikov. The vice consul passed the consul the handgun, and Yatskov “opened the chamber, shook the bullets into his hand, and put them back in a desk drawer” before handing the weapon back to Kostikov. Oswald “seemed indifferent” to the fate of his firearm but “continued to sob” until Yatskov poured him a glass of water. The American took a sip, pulling himself together in seconds.

A drawing in “Passport to Assassination” depicting Pavel Yatskov (left), Valery Kostikov, and Lee Harvey Oswald (holding a gun) inside the consulate of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City on Sept. 28, 1963 (Credit: Oleg Nechiporenko)

As Oswald calmed down, his mood changed from “extreme agitation” to “depression.” He stood up, grabbed the gun, and put it “somewhere under his jacket,” again telling Kostikov “something about being followed.” Yatskov then reopened the desk drawer, removed the bullets, and “handed them to Oswald, who dropped them into a pocket of his jacket.”

At that moment Nechiporenko, according to Kostikov, “literally flew into the room with his athletic bag and stopped in his tracks when he saw all of us sitting there.” Nechiporenko writes that he had arrived earlier, spotted his colleagues with Oswald through the open door, and returned to the front gate to tell the sentry “not to let anyone into the consulate” and to tell the volleyball players to “start without us,” because he, Yatskov and Kostikov had been detained by “certain consulate matters.”

As Nechiporenko remembers it from there:

When I led Oswald out of the reception area into the courtyard and showed him the way to the gate, he pulled his head down and raised the collar of his jacket to conceal his face and thus attempt to avoid being clearly photographed. After he walked outside the gate I saw him turn to the right.

The CIA had given the Warren Commission no day or date for when Yatskov met Oswald. It did not mention any revolver, to say nothing of unloading it. In contrast to the CIA’s account, Oswald never “stormed” in or out of Yatskov’s office either.

If the CIA really did get its information from a “confidential contact” inside the Soviet Embassy who overheard it, then that contact mistook Nechiporenko for Yatskov and reported the Friday encounter only. Otherwise, the CIA knew it was Yatskov but withheld the loaded revolver story from investigators to heighten suspicion that Oswald was working with or for the Soviet KGB, thus spurring a cover-up.

President Lyndon Johnson set up his “blue ribbon” panel (the “Warren Commission”) to investigate the murder and used the “Johnson method” to cajole certain men to serve on it, including its namesake, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. He scared them into thinking any hint of a conspiracy involving the Soviets or Cubans could spark WWIII.

What LBJ probably believed was that the assassination resulted from a domestic plot, and he needed the commission to conclude that a “lone nut" was responsible.

Conceivably, the CIA made up the whole story about Oswald in Mexico City, and Nechiporenko decided to align his account with the Warren Report in 1993, after the Soviet collapse, to get his manuscript past U.S. censors and secure a U.S. book deal.

Report to the Lubyanka

Finally, according to Nechiporenko, the three undercover KGB officers decided to “put off” the volleyball game and “inform Moscow Center” about Oswald’s visits. The report, he claims, went out by telegram that day (Saturday) to KGB headquarters in Moscow, and Nechiporenko describes this in his book as a “‘life preserver’ which we had thrown to ourselves.” With hindsight, it proved more important than a volleyball game. The three men also informed the chief of the KGB rezidentura (station) in the embassy.

Nechiporenko’s account is totally coherent and slots neatly into the historical record established in America up until the publication of his book in 1993. However, as we will see in the next installment, at least part of his account may be what the British traditionally call a “cock and bull story.”