It was true the President was killed, but it was also true that the assassin missed his target for no man could take away years of lightning with a single day of drums. The voice of America, the voice still telling and selling the same story. Almost 40 years after the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, America has not forgotten the handsome young king it elected on November seventh, 1960.
A living myth surrounded by a family whose legend only grew with each successive death, disaster, and scandal. I am absolutely flabbergasted to see that after all these years, there continues to be so much interest in the Kennedys. It's like atomic waste.
It will never die. The story of the Kennedys is a dramatic combination of classical tragedy and vaudeville, brilliantly staged and played by the clan itself, their court, their vessels, and their enemies. It is a plain several acts with twists and turns and behind-the-scenes manipulations of a tale of dangerous liaisons, outrageous alliances, murder mysteries, and constant betrayal.
When you play touch football with the Kennedys, you must play very hard, but you must never win. He was burning the candle at both ends. The recklessness or the risk far belayed the promise that that man had.
I think his promise, had he gone through, would have been fulfilled in a greater sense than the people who are his supporters have tried to hide because in trying to hide whatever was in the Kennedy administration, whatever was in his phone calls, whatever was in his schedule, they've created more questions that do greater harm to the image of JFK. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a scoundrel as far as his moral capacity was concerned. From the origins of the clan through its pursuit of power, underworld associations, tales of debauchery, and foreign policy errors, the Kennedy Odyssey today has to be re-examined page by page.
He was too young, too feeble, and too inexperienced, very hard for us to take seriously. For the first time, a clearer and more pertinent light can be shared on the Kennedy realm, illuminated by revelations from former servants of America's most formidable adversary, the Soviet Union. In the United States and in Russia, memories are today finally revived.
Tongues are loosened, documents appear, and witnesses emerge from the shadows as if by magic. The hidden face of the Kennedys is finally visible. Act one.
As the First World War unleashes its devastation over Europe, a small-time speculator and banker, the son of an Irish barkeeper, harbors dreams of social advancement. He marries Rose Fitzgerald, the mayor's daughter, breaks into the movie business, and makes his fortune in a few years. He is Joseph Kennedy, to all appearances, an exemplary figure.
Joe is the boss of all the Kennedy affairs, and a tough guy and very wealthy, had been an ambassador to Great Britain. . .
that sort of thing. Knew all the politicians and had a lot of money, as we all knew. He was always in the background when they'd be picking up the ticket.
Joseph Kennedy was a man of many talents, and one of the talents that history is going to have to write, that he had, was a portion of his money, and he was a wealthy man, was raised during prohibition, by dealing in illicit alcohol. This is the testimony of men like Frank Costello, a major figure in organized crime, and others, Doc Stacher, a major figure in organized crime, all told people in the latter part of their life that they had worked with Joseph Kennedy in the liquor business. Joe Kennedy, a shady businessman and friend to gangsters.
Joe would never be troubled for these offenses. On the contrary, in 1937, he was appointed as the US Ambassador to Great Britain, before being urgently recalled in 1941. If I am called an appeaser because I oppose the entrance of this country into the present war, I cheerfully plead guilty, and so must every one of you who wants to keep America out of this war.
Joe played the outraged, courageous victim of his own convictions, but in reality, he was no diplomat. In war-torn Britain, his position in favor of American neutrality won him no friends. It was a serious error, fueling the suspicions of anti-Semitism and his repeated pre-war contacts with extreme right-wingers in England and with Nazi dignitaries.
If his diplomatic blunders were unjustifiable, so were his continued activities in the liquor trade, as he brought 200,000 cases of whiskey to the USA. The British counter-espionage service MI5 had their eye on Joe's affairs and their ears on the American Embassy's wiretaps. This is still a sensitive subject.
MI5's archives remain classified, and so, unavailable. A failed diplomat, but highly successful businessman, Joe Kennedy would soon become at least officially persona non grata in the American political arena. Joe Kennedy was a big man, and in the United States politics, he was almost, in my opinion, a collaborator with the Nazis.
He was firmly against the United States going to war against Germany to the detriment of his reputation, his family, and everything else. Great Britain was so glad to get rid of Kennedy, it's unbelievable. He kept telling Roosevelt not to get involved in World War II just at the time when England desperately needed our help.
Perhaps a strange statement from a former mob mouthpiece, but no, McDonnell knows what he's talking about. He knows that this time, Joe has to pay for his misdemeanors. If the patriarch apparently abandons his own political pretensions, the flame will burn anew through his sons with the weight of their father behind them.
The climb to the top of the political ladder will take many long years, but the family stops at nothing, not even linking their fate with that of another family, the family of organized crime, the Mafia, in the shape of Sam Giancana, the Chicago godfather, one of Al Capone's heirs and descendants. Why is it that Joe Kennedy did almost the same things that my father did, yet he is so revered and respected by a lot of the public? We don't have a dynasty, and the reason we don't have our dynasty is because my father did not have boys, he had girls.
As you know, the organization is not an equal-opportunity employer. I guarantee you that if my father had boys, we would have had our own dynasty as the Kennedys. Joe, the Kennedys, and the underworld.
Joe and Sam Giancana, alias Mooney or Moon Face. Like Joe, Mooney made his fortune thanks to prohibition. Despite a record of over 60 arrests, the Chicago Godfather also runs illicit gambling clubs in Las Vegas and Havana.
At the end of the 1950s, his business was worth millions and he had all of Chicago's labor unions in his pocket. Act two. Kennedy and Giancana behind closed doors.
They first meet in the winter of 1959, in Chicago, on the fifth floor of this building, none other than the Hall of Justice. In just a few weeks, decisive primary elections for John Kennedy's nomination against Hubert Humphrey will take place in Illinois. It's a Protestant stronghold that Catholic Kennedy had to seize in order to rally the Democratic Party to his cause.
To guarantee victory, Joe asks Giancana to round up every last man in the syndicate. That discussion was strictly about what Mooney Giancana could do to help Kennedy get elected president. Mooney could put workers into all the wards and the precincts in the West Side wards of Chicago.
He did all that. He must have had 200 men out with their cars, driving voters to polling places, helping out any way they could. That's how Kennedy won Illinois by carrying Chicago.
Did the mob play a role in the '60 election? Yes, West Virginia, Illinois, primary election. But, for the mob, Kennedy probably would have lost.
He thought that, in cooperating and doing things for the Kennedys, the Kennedys would get off of his back and just leave him alone and let him run things as he should have or wanted to. The Mafia goes beyond mere logistical aspects. Votes are bought, voters are invented, slush funds are created, the mob support is total.
The election fixing has been confirmed by journalists who, along with others, tried to reveal the scandal at the time without success. His paper, The Wall Street Journal, refused to publish the story. Today, all that Roscoe C.
Born has left is an unpublished file, the final remains of a five-week investigation. We discovered that there was no question that huge amounts of money had been paid by Kennedy representatives to control these local machines. We can say, what person.
We can show that he was the Kennedys' representative, but we don't know. We did not have the passing of money from A to B at a given time and place that a person would swear to under oath, which normally you don't have to have. You can interview people, they tell you the information they have, and you can make a judgment about the truth of what they're saying, and you can write a story.
I think they must have been very reluctant to undertake it in the first place, to set a standard that high. Roscoe was unable to bring candidate Kennedy down. The proof he lacked was in the hands of the FBI.
Proof of collusion between the future president of the US and the Crime Syndicate, proof that democracy had been ridiculed. The FBI did not intervene. The bureau's second-in-command, J.
Edgar Hoover's right-hand man, today feels free to talk. It had been reported very clearly on an FBI microphone in Chicago that the Mafia gave approximately $25,000 to the Kennedy campaign. $25,000 was a lot of money at the time and could buy a lot of manipulation.
Why didn't the FBI pursue the Kennedys or the Mafia? Perhaps it was a way for the bureau supremo, John Edgar Hoover, to hold compromising files in reserve for any future Kennedy interference against him. The weary president-elect makes his first address in his new capacity, reading aloud his answer to MrNixon's message of congratulations.
In reply to the Vice President. Act three. Democracy deceived.
On November 7th, the man now known as JFK wins the presidential election. The Kennedy clan has won its bet, and the White House is theirs. The man who staked everything on John's destiny can rejoice in the shadows.
As an expert in vice, Joe Kennedy is now virtual vice president. Joe Kennedy picked out the old man, picked pretty much who was going to be Jack Kennedy's cabinet. The picture was that was the day that Joe said to Jack, "Bobby will be attorney general," "and I don't want to hear any word to the contrary.
" Bang, just like that. Jack said, "Yes, sir," and Bobby became attorney general. By appointing his son, Robert, as Attorney General, the second most powerful man in the country, Joe kills two birds with one stone.
He protects the clan from inquiries into election rigging and their underworld connections, and he holds the reins of power. At the peak of their triumph, the Kennedys must confront the arrival of a giant. The new masters of America from now, are in the sights of a formidable and invisible enemy, the Soviet Union.
From public crisis to private scandal, the Kremlin spies, double agents, and tacticians never let up on the Kennedys from start to finish. For the first time, a former officer from the Soviet Army's Secret Intelligence Service, the GRU, agrees to testify. Victor Liubimov's mission in the United States was to recruit informers.
He is still a good GRU advisor, but their files remain confidential. It was important for the new American administration to establish contact with the Soviet Union. When we asked the Kennedy brothers, whom we should speak to, they told us, to the president's father, Joe Kennedy, who you can find in France on the Riviera.
He was the one who dealt with America's economic interests. For the Kennedys, America's economic interests are now under serious threat, and the danger lies a mere 40 miles off the coast of Florida, Devil's Island, Castro's Cuba. In power for just a year, Castro expelled all American influence, particularly the mob, who'd transform the island into a gigantic casino and brothel.
From the outset, the Kennedys are outraged and prioritize the Cuban problem. It'd been a campaign issue, and the Soviets had already taken a stronghold. [Russian spoken audio] Then, I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations, which are to the security of our nation.
Should that time ever come, we do not intend to be lectured on intervention by those whose character was stamped for all time on the bloody streets of Budapest. Get rid of Castro and the Castro regime. That was the phraseology.
When I asked my boss at that time, Dick Bissell, "What do you mean, get rid of? " He said, "No holds barred, use your imagination. " "You put any definition you want to it.
" They wanted him out of the way, but nobody ever used the word kill, assassinate, murder, or anything like that. That was never used. It's the language you don't use at all.
You don't have to. Strange language indeed. They asked us.
They want him to disappear. They are the Kennedys, but there's no way that killing, assassinating the leader, Maximo, and eradicating the communist threat can be spoken of in official terms. Castro is protected by his Soviet big brother, and discretion is called for by fair means or foul.
Even if the Kennedy clan has to again engage the dark forces that have already proved cooperative. The CIA asked me if I would contact Mr Roselli, and find out if he would consider getting some of his associates in the Mafia to get involved in the assassination of Fidel Castro. I have to tell you right now that I was not very enthusiastic about any of this until the representatives of the CIA convinced me that Mr Castro was in the process of building and launching platforms that could be very detrimental to the security of our country, and that in fact, we were at war with Cuba at that time.
Robert Mayhew is speaking of Johnny Roselli, one of the Chicago mob's top hitmen. His boss is an old Kennedy acquaintance, Mooney or Sam Giancana. Roselli, Giancana, and Mayhew meet on several occasions in the restaurant at Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel.
Between drinks, they set out the details of a plan to assassinate Castro. First, they talked about doing it with rifles, and then they couldn't get anyone to take the calculated risk. They came up with the idea that if you could get poison that would have a delayed action.
. . Without a doubt, Sam Giancana received money from somewhere in Washington to assassinate Castro because they used to laugh about it.
Mooney was getting all this money and laughing. The poison pills in the plastic were given to me by the CIA, and I gave them to Roselli. As a former FBI and CIA secret agent, Robert Mayhew was questioned in 1975 by the commission investigating and assessing Kennedy's role in assassination attempts made against various heads of state regarded as hostile to Uncle Sam.
His testimony was ignored and buried. The Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, came and briefed Mr Hoover thoroughly on what the CIA was trying to accomplish and having a liaison with Mooney Giancana and organized crime in Chicago to affect the assassination of Castro.
We were against it. It was reprehensible as far as we were concerned. Why?
We were dealing with a snake, we were dealing with the enemy. Furthermore, it thoroughly disrupted FBI cases that we had hoped to bring to indictment and then the prosecution, at least enable the Department of Justice to do that, To become closely associated with organized crime and to be beholden to them looked very bad as far as we were concerned, and we were glad we had nothing to do with it. They went forward and found, I believe, it was a lady who they thought was able to do that and at the last minute, it did not happen.
She lost her courage. Act four. Castro, the CIA, the Mafia, and the Kennedys playing a dangerous and disturbing two-faced game.
On one hand, Robert Kennedy leads a well-publicized and pitiless crackdown on organized crime, while the other hand works with the Mafia to plot a political assassination. The first attempt is a failure, which soon becomes a fiasco, the Kennedy's Caribbean D-Day or the Bay of Pigs. The operation in the spring of 1960 was prepared by the CIA and the ever-present mob.
The American government and organized crime invested millions of dollars with the objective of conquering Cuba. We were sure that President Kennedy was going to save the world from communism, that he was going to bring democracy back to Cuba, and that we would be able to resolve the Cuban nation's problems. At that time we believed that either we would be dead or we would win.
We never thought that we were going to lose. They lost because they were abandoned and betrayed by the White House. The anti-Castro army made up of a few thousand Cuban exiles trained by the CIA, fell victim to a succession of errors, totally inexcusable for those Bay of Pigs survivors who accept to speak out today.
Kennedy's great mistake, the treason, was not to have followed the military plan. It is to have canceled the air cover. After such a decision, it was obvious that he had to cancel the landing.
It was an evident disaster. It was a criminal and cold-blooded decision against the brigade completely dedicated to him. It was treason, it was cowardly, and that was Kennedy.
We were almost guaranteed that we would have air cover to be able to land, and that the Cuban Air Force would be destroyed on the ground. Therefore, we had nothing to fear from the Cuban Air Force. That never happened.
The Cuban Air Force started bombarding us from the very beginning. It sank several ships where we had our ammunition and storage, and it attacked us on the beach. We really were never able to form a cohesive fighting unit.
The cancellation of the air raid and the proper air cover had come from Kennedy at the last minute. When that decision was made, we also inherited the obligation I felt to stop the invasion. We allowed these kids to be lined on the beaches and it was a foregone conclusion that the invasion could not be successful without these two elements in place.
That's an assassination of sorts. When we got back to the beach, we also realized that we would not be evacuated. That we were on our own, and we had to take a last stand there.
A last stand that could not be taken because we had nothing to fight with. Glory to the new victory of communism and socialism. Long live Cuba.
Our homeland until death. . .
We salute you! Our propaganda department was delighted, and we were jumping with joy. We managed to walk all over the Americans who became the world's laughing stock.
We were over the moon. Some were angry, some incredulous, some exultant. Others knew that the Kennedys had other obsessions apart from Castro.
Kennedy got me to do a lot of unofficial trips for him. Our State Department would arrange for me to go and meet with the heads of the various countries. I went all through Central and South America to figure out, makeup, and try to determine who would be friendly with us and who wasn't.
That's who was going to be a dictator, who wasn't going to be a dictator, who should we be cultivating, and who we shouldn't. Kennedy spoke to the American people about progress, a new social contract, respect for minorities, and civil rights. That was one side of the coin.
The other was that these ideas were not applicable abroad. It was handled by Dick Bissell, who was then the head of the Clandestine Service, to create an executive action capability for any part of the world in terms of if some leader turned up who was making trouble for the United States, it'd be up to the president to decide whether he wanted to get them out of the way or not. In 1961, he approved the creation of the ZR Rifle Unit, a foreign policy version of the Crime Syndicate, a CIA murder squad entrusted with eliminating certain figures in the emerging Third World.
This exceptional document reveals the existence of this secret unit. They are extracts from the Investigative Commission into Kennedy's involvement in this assassination unit. The assassination of Castro.
Bissell testifies, "I do not remember instructing him to revive that operation. " "I remember instructing him" "to proceed with the project called ZR Rifle," "which was to plan for and develop a capability. " The chairman asks, "Would it be fair to say you assumed the director, Mr Dulles," "had informed the president about the assassination attempt?
" Bissell replies, "I assumed that he had at least intimated that some such thing was underway. " They asked me to find a way to assassinate him, assassinate Lumumba. They sent me some poison and some other things of that to use.
It was to put in his toothpaste or food or something like that. I don't remember the details now, exactly how I would use it, because I never had any intention of using it. In fact, I threw it in the Congo River.
Lawrence Devlin did not use the poison, but perhaps someone else did. Patrice Lumumba was mysteriously murdered on January 17th, 1961. Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic dictator, was also killed.
The day before he was shot to death, he received a visit from George Smathers, the president's secret emissary, a coincidence, no doubt. Lumumba, Trujillo, and then Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam, who was shot several times in the head. His murder has never officially been explained.
Bodies fell, but not the killers. Act five. In the public eye, the family portrait remained idyllic and the burden of power was born with a smile.
The Kennedys worked hard to maintain an image of a house that was whiter than white. Mr. Kennedy has been showing us about the White House and the changes that she's made therein.
What do you think of the changes that you've made? I think the great effort that she's made has been to bring us much more intimately in contact with all the men who lived here. Mr.
Kennedy, do you spend time in the Lincoln Room? We did in the beginning. It was where we lived when we first came here when our rooms at the other end of the hall were being painted.
I loved living in this room. It's on the sunny side of the house, and one of Andrew Jackson's magnolia trees is right outside the window. The candidates were far from devoting their time to running the country.
During their 1,055 days in power, the White House often resembled a house of ill repute. In the White House, there is a swimming pool, and people don't really know. As a general public, they don't ever think about that.
He'd get these pretty girls, and he'd get them to take off their bathing suits. He was always after them. He said, "Well, get in the pool.
" These girls said, "No, I don't want, I don't want to be naked. " He said, "Get in the pool and take the bathing suit off" "while you're in the pool and throw them up on the side. " He'd go collect them, saying, "Let's see, this one's yours, and this one's yours.
" "This is yours, come over here and over here. " He'd have a good look at every one of them, over and over. He loved that, he'd laugh.
They'd finally get on to it and giggling. He had a lot of fun, but that was right in the White House. How could Jacqueline know anything about people opening a car door for her and telling her, it's good to have you back to the White House when they've opened another car door for a woman, another White House staff member who has come from the White House pool.
I never liked that. I never liked how it looked. I never liked how she was treated in that regard.
As a Secret Service agent responsible for the president's protection at close quarters, Larry Neuman has never revealed what he saw and heard. Forty years of good and faithful service, keeping quiet but not forgetting. It was surprising, more than shocking with some of this behavior.
Beyond that, it was surprising how many of his friends or staff members seemed to encourage this type of activity to merely satisfy the president's whims and fancies. Kennedy used every woman he came in contact with. They were not personal to him.
They were playthings, so from his perspective, there was no commitment to any of them. There were so many and on so many occasions. One of the organizers of the president's social life was Pierre Salinger.
He was really one of his closest friends. He would organize strictly private parties among friends. There was a whole group of them, always the same, the in-crowd, and he loved it.
Another well-informed Soviet. He fingers Pierre Salinger, the great orchestrator of the Camelot saga and eternal promoter of that cult film, The Good Side of the Kennedys. Leonid Zamyatin's statement is read to him.
"There was a whole group of them, always the same, and he loved it. " -How do you react to that? -Are you talking about Jackie?
Not of Jack, but the president. What about Jackie, his wife? That was an interesting thing that was going on at that time.
She was a great friend of mine. We did a lot of work together. She didn't want the journalists to do the photos of John Jr and Caroline because they would be outside, and she wanted me to stop them from doing any photos of them.
However, John Kennedy wanted the photos to be done. When Jackie went to India and Pakistan, Kennedy called me into the office and said, "Now we can do a lot of photos. " That's when the photos were done in the White House.
In fact, in his room where you have those photos showing John Jr and Caroline together with John Kennedy. You did that to give the image of a good father? -Yes.
-A family image. Exactly. -That's your answer to the Soviets?
-Yes. Another way to cheat on your wife and country. Your friends participate or keep quiet, and the press is carefully contained.
Stories of discarded and carefully concealed mistresses are not on the agenda. A legendary scene and a legendary liaison. The history books would recognize Kennedy's relationship with Marilyn Monroe.
History recalls that she was merely one among hundreds of actresses, starlets, and high-class hookers used to relieve Kennedy's frenetic sexual appetites and his health problems? Do the history books reveal the existence of Judith Campbell, a mistress that JFK shared with an old family friend, none other than Sam Giancana? A shared mistress and a shared objective.
At the time, Giancana was actively participating in the preparations for the invasion of Cuba. She was sleeping with both men. That also is on the record.
She's admitted it. She was one of the very most beautiful women when she was in her early 20s. I don't blame President Kennedy, of course, he went after anything, but he did have some beautiful women.
I believe she was much in love with Kennedy instead of Sam. There happened to have been some transferring of something in briefcases to both Washington and Washington back to Chicago. It's still a mystery to me as to what had been in those briefcases.
Years later, Judith would admit that one of these suitcases contained money. Another hypothesis evoked today is they also contain documents about Cuba sent by the Mafia via Campbell to the White House. The mob believed that they not only gave Kennedy money and votes, they also gave him women.
What did he do? He turned on them. I think you can say that the Judith Exner escapade in particular, not the others, but that one because it was mob-connected, may have contributed in part to their attitude of betrayal.
Her closeness to the mob, to organized crime, and her relationship with President Kennedy caused considerable consternation and puzzlement. After the president had repeated meetings with Judith Exner, Mr Hoover told Bobby Kennedy about it, and later mentioned it to the president. The president indicated he would stop seeing Judith Exner.
He did for a while, but he saw her several times after that. We knew all that, but we didn't descend to that level with the KGB. We'd never have blackmailed a president for sleeping with another woman.
Also, we weren't going to provoke the Americans about that because we didn't want them to provoke us in return. With respect to the head of the KGB, this is not true. Recently declassified FBI archives show that the Soviets were able to exploit JFK's escapades.
This is the file on a certain Ellen Romesh, a regular visitor to the White House poolside parties. The file is not classified, but has been severely amended by the censors. The man in charge of the investigation was the FBI second in person, Carter DeLoach.
The FBI knew that Ellen Romich, let me put it this way, there's considerable evidence that Romich was an East German espionage agent. Consequently, we were following her activities very closely. We knew the association between the president and Ellen Romesh.
We were cut out completely of what happened to Ellen Romesh. In other words, being spirited out of the country and back to East Germany. Frankly, I have no facts on that other than what was rumored at the time, and I don't repeat rumors.
There was an earlier situation when Kennedy was in the Navy during World War II, and he was dating an individual by the name of Inga Arvad. Inga Arvid, at that time was a reported German espionage agent. She was never indicted.
There wasn't sufficient evidence to do so. Kennedy had Inga Arvad visit him in various places, Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, and South Carolina. It probably was the reason that John F.
Kennedy, while he was in the Navy, was transferred from the base of operations in Charleston, South Carolina to Florida, and later on to the South Pacific. It also was a serious breach at times of security because we knew nothing about the unannounced, off-the-record people who were in the president's suite. We didn't know what the women who came in were carrying.
We were in the middle of the Cold War. If President Kennedy wanted to invite Mr. Khrushchev to the White House pool and take her up to the mansion, there was nothing the Secret Service could do about it.
Act six. Neither Judith Campbell nor a 60-style Mata Hari like Ellen Romich could seriously worry the Kennedy establishment, not even the presence of a certain Gyorgy Bulgakov. The CIA told me that Bulgakov was a KGB agent because they had seen he was a KGB agent in the Soviet Union.
I don't think he was doing any work in the United States. He was doing a newspaper. His intentions were different, however.
He was to infiltrate the Kennedy clan. Introduced by the Soviet embassy in Washington, Bulgakov would enable Jack and Bobby to indulge one of their passions, secret diplomacy. Bulgakov would be the intermediary between the world's two most powerful Ks, Kennedy and Khrushchev.
In this case, the brother's handling of subterfuge and deception was naive. The friend they invited to the White House was a Red Army Secret Service mole. He was a good journalist.
He knew the terrain, and he provided a lot of information, but that wasn't the point. Bulgakov was, first and foremost, a GRU secret agent who was interested in everything, and then he was asked to concentrate exclusively on Robert Kennedy. In a few months, Bulgakov became a trusted and privileged friend to the Kennedys.
Officially, he didn't exist, and yet all the diplomatic reports between Kennedy and Khrushchev went through him. Bulgakov died in Moscow in July 1989 without speaking about his years at the White House. In his place, one man can provide valuable information.
A former friend and GRU colleague who was, for the first time, able to consult Bulgakov's file still classified as top secret. They were in touch almost every day, either on the telephone or at the ministry, or Robert Kennedy and Bulgakov would go to the Kennedys country house together to talk alone. That's how they became good friends.
All the information that Bulgakov gathered went straight to military intelligence in Moscow. It was then passed on to the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Our embassy in the United States only received a copy that had been cleaned up by Gromyko in person.
Was this merely naivety, thoughtlessness, or incompetence? The peak was reached at the Vienna summit on June 3rd, 1961, and there would be a price to pay. The eyes of the world were opened wide as they gazed on at an apparently historic moment.
The first handshake between the two Ks after months of secret dealings. The key issue at the meeting was the delicate problem of the repartition of Germany in Berlin. The man shaking hands with Kennedy just before the meeting is none other than Viktor Sukhodrev, a crucial witness.
What Khrushchev didn't like about Kennedy were his intellectual affectations. He was too polite, too soft in the way he spoke, and in his gentlemanly attitudes. He saw him as someone too weak.
Kennedy was always trying to smooth things over. He wanted an agreement, a kind of coexistence, even if he never pronounced the word. He was trying to find a way to divide the world fairly based on each bloc's principal zones of influence.
Khrushchev became absolutely furious. "What, we have to share the world? " "Who can stop us helping Cuba?
" "Do you want to make us stop all our aid to Cuba and Castro? " "What will the other countries think? " "All the various people struggling for national liberation against America?
" Then, he began a long speech about America's imperialism. The Vienna summit was a bitter failure. According to some Kennedy aides, the president wept.
What would he do if he'd known that, on this occasion, he couldn't even bluff? GRU agents who had infiltrated Washington and Europe provided Khrushchev with NATO's plans for an attack on the Soviet Union. Kennedy was checkmated.
Khrushchev clearly heard Kennedy's message that he wanted to taunt the Soviet Union at any price. The documents in his possession demonstrated a huge difference between Kennedy's words and the printed facts presented in the documents. After the meeting, we went with Khrushchev and Gromyko, to our Austrian ambassador's residence.
We went for a walk in the garden, and Khrushchev gave us his impressions. He suddenly came out with the following sentence. "I really pity the American people for having such a president.
" Europe was also to be pitied. In August 1960, the Iron Curtain was drawn. War seemed imminent.
Every week, 10,000 sought freedom from the snare. The source of world trouble and tension is Moscow, not Berlin. If war begins, it will have begun in Moscow and not Berlin.
The choice of peace or war is largely theirs, not ours. An unambiguous statement defining that the URSS as solely responsible for the wall of shame. JFK looks the free world straight in the eye.
The president's sincerity cannot be doubted, uncle Sam is the good guy. These boxes probably contain another version of the truth. They contain dozens of letters exchanged between Kennedy and Khrushchev.
Letters where history is written somewhat differently. The White House and the Soviet Union agreed to build the Berlin Wall, but against what? These documents remain confidential until the Kennedy family agrees otherwise, perhaps in a few centuries.
When Bulgakov gave Khrushchev's first letter to Salinger, Salinger opened it in front of him and said, "That's good, the Soviet Union has taken a step forward. " In his reply, Kennedy also took a step forward by acknowledging the East German border and the construction of the Berlin Wall. It was the status quo.
There were 45 letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and only five of those have been put out in the United States. The other 40 are still hidden. That's something that'd be absolutely important for the United States and the rest of the world to understand what Kennedy and Khrushchev were doing in writing these letters.
Act seven. Was the match tied? Not yet.
Victory is essential, whatever the cost. For the Kennedys, Cuba is once more the prime target. They felt they had to clean up their name somehow, and they were doing all kinds of things using the whole government.
It wasn't just the CIA, it was the whole government. Operation Mongoose, for example, which is just a crypto name for anti-Castro activities for the whole US government, it wasn't just the CIA. Everybody was involved.
The Defense Department, State Department, Commerce Department, Treasury Department, and all the rest of them. In early 1962, Operation Mongoose is launched with attacks inside Cuba, a simulated invasion in the Caribbean, and round-the-clock aerial spying of the island. In May, CIA planes located components for missile launch sites brought in by Soviet ships, but Operation Mongoose is infiltrated and gets nowhere.
Khrushchev still holds all the aces. The Cuban Missile Crisis starts here, and this time, Kennedy intends to hold firm. I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately.
First, to halt this offensive build-up, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. As the situation worsens, compromise appears impossible on both sides. The Third World War rears its nuclear warhead and America is put on full alert.
What was happening in Moscow? As Kuznetsov told me later, Khrushchev was crapping his pants. On Sunday morning, a message reaches the White House from Moscow.
Press Secretary Salinger announces that Chairman Khrushchev has agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, and reads Mr Kennedy's reply to the Soviet premier. The president already has left the White House to attend services at his church. In order to thank God, or to confess, that confrontation had become a negotiation.
In the public eye, Kennedy had won, and victory was total. The Soviets had lost face. That was the official version which allowed Kennedy to maintain his own dignity.
Once again, the true version is rather different. Khrushchev lost a great deal because after the crisis, the world's press wrote that he had given in, that he had withdrawn his missiles, and that was all, that it was a complete victory for the Kennedys. Nobody knew that in reality, there had been a real exchange.
Kennedy had demanded that this not be made public. He didn't want people to know that in exchange, American missiles would be withdrawn from Turkey. The fact of the matter was, we had to find a way out of the corner we had painted ourselves in with a blockade around Cuba, missiles in Cuba, and other missiles on the wire.
That's World War III. What do you pay to get out of that? Tell me what the price is because that's what I'll pay it.
If it's a couple of missiles out of Turkey for face-saving, they're out. For the retreat of the missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev not only got the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey and the continued presence of Soviet military advisers in Cuba but also the promise that the Kennedys would cease all attacks on the island. The promise was not kept.
We felt we were getting whiplash as if we were, I guess, in the galleys in terms of what the Kennedys wanted us to keep on doing and pushing and pushing. That's where the pressure came from. As I said, for two months, we were fine.
After the missile crisis, things quieted down. Then suddenly, we started all over again in January '63. One last document, recently declassified by the American Defense Department.
Its code name is OPLAN 38063. Its subject is Cuba. It contains execution methods, plans for infiltration, subversion, guerrilla operations, an organized reprisal attack on the Guantanamo base, and the destruction of the Castro regime.
The operation was planned for August 3rd, 1964. JFK thought he knew the date of the final act. In fact, it was played out on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
Too many compromises, too many lies, too many betrayals, too many enemies, but that is another story.
