Return to Main Page
Russian President Boris Yeltsin has given President Clinton a report on declassified Russian information relating to the assassination of President John Kennedy. The report was handed over during an economic summit in Cologne, Germany in mid-June.
Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, termed the report a "very interesting gift." But he refused to speculate on whether it contained any new information on the Kennedy assassination, saying it was in Russian and U.S. officials had not reviewed it.
The documents will "be reviewed carefully and all interesting elements will be made public," Berger initially told reporters. Later statements indicated all of the documents would be released.
About eighty documents are said to be involved. They include a handwritten letter Lee Harvey Oswald sent to Soviet authorities seeking asylum in 1959, and material gathered on Oswald by Soviet authorities while he lived in Minsk. Also included are records of high-level reaction to the Kennedy assassination in which Soviet officials expressed fears that Moscow would be blamed.
Alexander Feklisov, a KGB representative in Washington when President Kennedy was shot, said he collected KGB documents on Oswald immediately after he was linked to the killing. "We photographed the documents, there were no Xerox machines back then, and gave the (photos) to the State Department," he said in an interview broadcast on Russian TV. "As far as I know, the State Department never reacted to our correspondence."
Feklisov added that to find the culprit for the "crime of the century," Americans would be better off looking "inside themselves."
The Warren Commission identified Oswald as a sole gunman who killed Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. The Commission's own evidence, however, contradicts the findings published in the single-volume Warren Report. Many researchers consider evidence in the 26-volume Hearings and Exhibits conclusive proof there was a conspiracy in the assassination.
The mainstream media turned to the usual "experts" for their views on the new Russian material. "The key question that [the documents] could answer," said Robert Blakey, "is about Oswald's intentions in the months immediately before the assassination." Blakey headed the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.
William Joyce, former member of the Assassination Records Review Board, said, "One hopes that whatever is released will provide maybe a bit more information --- fill in a few more gaps --- and help us come to a more confident understanding of what happened."
Sandy Berger said the Russian report was the result of Yeltsin's order several years ago for various Russian agencies to review all of their material related to Kennedy, covering military, civilian and private archives.
In 1991, Russia's intelligence agency declassified its files on Oswald. In 1992, the files were shipped to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, so that Belarusian officials could review them. Oswald lived in Minsk in the early 1960s.
The newspaper Izvestia reported in 1992 that the reformist Russian intelligence chief Vadim Bakatin wanted to release the files but was blocked by veteran spies who feared disclosure of their names and tactics.
Return to Main Page
* * *