Oswald and the KGB — Part II

Another former Soviet intelligence officer tells a tale about the accused assassin of President Kennedy that contradicts his colleague.

In Part I, we looked at how a retired Soviet KGB colonel, Oleg Nechiporenko, recounted meeting the man who would be accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy seven weeks before the ambush in Dallas. This one looks at how one of Nechiporenko’s colleagues recalled his own encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald.

The ‘Third Visit’

On Nov. 23, 1993, an article appeared in The National Enquirer tabloid based on an interview with Nikolai Leonov. At the time of Oswald’s visit, Leonov was also a KGB officer under diplomatic cover, though not consular. Leonov’s official title was Third Secretary and Assistant Cultural Attaché. The 1993 article runs in part that on Sunday, Sept. 29, 1963, an embassy guard (unnamed) “told Leonov that an American was at the front gate.” Leonov said he went to see the visitor “in case he was offering secret documents.”

Oswald rushed in and Leonov recalled: “When we shook hands, I could feel that his hand was shaking and wet with sweat.

“He introduced himself as Lee Harvey Oswald and I took him to a small interview room where he said immediately, ‘I want to go to the Soviet Union and live there forever.’

“He said he was in danger and was being pursued by people he couldn’t name. He was quite clearly in terror.”

As the Soviet consular officials said they had done on Friday, Leonov explained to Oswald that he would have to fill out an application and wait “at least four months before he received an answer.” As in Nechiporenko’s account, Oswald starting shouting.

“I can’t wait that long,” Oswald insisted. “I’m going to be killed!”

According to Leonov, Oswald thought people at his Mexico City hotel were “spying on him,” including a desk clerk and a maid he had “caught searching his belongings.” Leonov said he tried to calm his distraught visitor down and gave him an application to fill out, but it was no use. Oswald started screaming again that he couldn’t wait four months.

Without warning, Oswald pulled a revolver out of his left pants pocket and waved it around as he threatened to kill the maid and the desk clerk. Leonov saw the gun was loaded and was terrified Oswald was going to shoot him.

Despite his fear, Leonov explained to Oswald that he could not go to Russia immediately under any circumstances, causing Oswald to yell: “You’re just a lousy bureaucrat!”

“He stood, picked up the application and tore it into little pieces.

“Then, to my relief, he shoved the gun back in his pocket and told me he was going to try the Cuban Embassy.

“I gave him directions and accompanied him to the gate.”

Just as Nechiporenko claimed to have done, Leonov “reported details of the incident to his superiors in Moscow,” the Enquirer article says. But the most significant differences between the Nechiporenko and Leonov versions are that Leonov said he met Oswald on Sunday and dealt with him alone. Also, Oswald never mentioned the FBI, according to Leonov, but he did threaten to kill hotel personnel. Nechiporenko never said that.

Clearly, unless Nechiporenko and Leonov really were visited on different days by Oswald, who performed a near-exact repetition of his hot-headed act, either Nechiporenko or Leonov (or both) lied in 1993 and thereafter, either in whole or in part. No one has ever resolved this strange discrepancy, which only augments the Mexico City mystery. Neither Nechiporenko nor Leonov ever changed their respective stories.

Gunman or Patsy — or Both?

Nechiporenko expresses his opinion that Oswald was JFK’s actual assassin, and that he acted alone. Having appeared repeatedly in interviews that can be found on YouTube, Nechiporenko offers the eccentric (or harebrained) opinion that Oswald killed JFK because the U.S. head of state reminded him of one of his wife’s ex-lovers.

Leonov, by contrast, was adamant from his Enquirer interview onward that Oswald could not have pulled off the murder as a “lone gunman.” The young man was a nervous wreck, said Leonov, agreeing with many Warren Report skeptics that Oswald was a dupe or patsy.

“Given his mental and emotional state, it would have been impossible for him to carry out an assassination of such precision,” he told the Enquirer. “Soviet intelligence never doubted that Oswald was manipulated by conspirators.”

Leonov speaks for “Soviet intelligence” that Oswald was a “poor, ill man” and a “puppet,” while Nechiporenko — also a representative of Soviet intelligence — eagerly embraced the Warren Report’s “lone nut” theory. So what did Soviet intelligence really think?

Excerpt from National Enquirer article, “Oswald Did Not Act Alone in JFK Assassination” (Nov. 23, 1993)

Leonov repeated his version several times in print. While he never published a book in English, he did evidently publish at least 16 in Russian from 1990 to 2020. Five made up a series he called “Likholetye” (“Hard Times”), in 1994, 1997, 2005, 2015 and 2020. These memoirs deal with changes to the Soviet intelligence services attendant to the U.S.S.R.’s collapse. In his books, Leonov repeated the tale he told the Enquirer, with embellishment.

In the 2015 edition of “Hard Times,” Leonov says that after the scene he had endured alone with Oswald, he escorted the American out of the embassy compound and “informed the consular section about everything that had happened.” There is no mention of informing superiors in Moscow, as the 1993 National Enquirer interview claims.

But Leonov does repeat his view that Oswald was a patsy, saying that when he “saw on the TV screen the moment of his murder in a Dallas prison,” he understood that the young ex-Marine “was an obvious scapegoat.”

Never would a man with such a frayed nervous system, whose fingers could not hold a pen firmly, have been able to so calculatedly, cold-bloodedly, and accurately make fatal shots from a great distance.

He also acknowledges the lack of any identifiable motive on Oswald’s part to kill JFK, noting that he “never once spoke badly of the President or the US government.”

All his fears were connected with someone from his immediate local circle, although he could not explain exactly who was persecuting him and for what. I feel sorry for such people, hounded by life and becoming victims of a big political game.

Thus, two ex-KGB men not only gave divergent accounts of Oswald’s weekend visit but also went so far as to express divergent opinions on Oswald’s capacity to commit the crime. I can find no evidence of anyone confronting Nechiporenko about Leonov’s contradictory version of events during Nechiporenko’s appearances at conferences in the U.S. in the 1990s to promote his book. Maybe he did, but he never mentions Leonov in his book. He only features him in a single picture, without identifying him in the caption.

Soviet Embassy soccer team. Leonov stands on far left, and Nechiporenko stands next to him. Squatting, 2nd from right, is Kostikov. (Credit: Oleg Nechiporenko)

One possibility is that Oswald did indeed visit the Soviet Embassy twice, once on Friday, and once on the weekend, but interacted with the three consular officials on one day, and with Leonov on the other. That would still mean that the Soviets allowed an American into the compound on a weekend day, when their embassy was closed to foreign visitors.

Speaking from experience in dealing with Russian officialdom, I seriously doubt any of these men would have allowed a frantic and fearful young American into their embassy on a weekend. Bureaucracy, protocol, and the possible consequences for their careers if their superiors found out would have made it extremely unlikely. On top of that, they had already dealt with him, supposedly, and knew he was emotionally unstable.

Worse, these tales expect us to believe that a frazzled-looking American entered a foreign diplomatic compound carrying a loaded revolver, waved it around inside, and was then allowed to walk out into the streets of central Mexico City with that same firearm and all the bullets it carried. Even in the era before ubiquitous metal detectors, this feels like a stretch. Mexican government officials in 1963 would likely have been outraged to find out.

Another possible scenario — which feels most likely to me — is that Oswald did visit the Soviet Embassy on Friday, Sept. 27, but never appeared there again, meaning both Nechiporenko and Leonov made up their stories about the Saturday/Sunday encounter.

The Missing File

Prolific JFK researcher and author Prof. Peter Dale Scott suggested in a January 1994 essay, published in his collection entitled, “Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics: Revelations from CIA Records on the Assassination” (2013), that in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the two retired KGB men may simply have been trying to “cash in”:

The near duplication of the story, far from increasing its credibility, makes us realize how easy it would be, in the year of Posnermania, for penurious KGB officers to pick up a little hard currency by joining the Warren Commission chorus. (p. 13)

Indeed, Oliver Stone’s conspiratorialist movie, “JFK” (1991), did unleash a torrent of establishmentarian Warren Report defenses and rejections of “conspiracy theory,” as if gearing up for the ARRB in 1994 after the passage of the JFK Records Act of 1992 . Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” (1993) led the charge with the book that launched his career — and he certainly cashed in.

But while Posner appears to accept Nechiporenko’s word without question, he cites a proposal for an unpublished book, “Tourist Non Grata: The KGB and Lee Harvey Oswald,” which the Russian had begun working on by 1992 when he appeared at a Moscow press conference to reveal himself as the man who confronted JFK’s accused assassin-to-be in Mexico City in 1963. Even his finished work, “Passport to Assassination,” appeared before “Case Closed,” so “Posnermania” might not explain Nechiporenko’s motivation entirely.

Furthermore, in contrast to Nechiporenko, Leonov didn’t fully join the “Warren Commission chorus.” By the time he gave his National Enquirer interview, Leonov had seen both Nechiporenko and Posner publish their versions of events, upholding the Warren Report’s conclusion that Oswald was a “lone nut” who had killed JFK single-handedly, with no ties to any government or criminal organization. Leonov then emphatically and repeatedly rejected the “lone gunman” theory.

Something prompted Leonov to contradict Posner and Nechiporenko publicly, and while it is possible — as Prof. Scott speculates — that he simply sought a bit of extra cash from a high-circulation American tabloid, it is also true that such money would not have guaranteed him an income stream, as “Passport to Assassination” did for Nechiporenko.

There is a very small fringe of the JFK assassination research community that attributes the murder of President Kennedy to a Soviet KGB plot, by which Soviet intelligence manipulated Lee Harvey Oswald — a former resident of the U.S.S.R. — into killing JFK. The strange Leonov-Nechiporenko discrepancy has fed this marginal strand of thinking.

There is no logical connection, however, between that discrepancy and any plan or motive on the part of the Russians to kill JFK. As we will see in the next installment of this series, Leonov had other reasons to publicly reject the Warren Report’s “lone gunman” theory.

[Part III of the six-part series, “Oswald and the KGB, can be read here.]