Soviets believed Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson could have been behind the killing of John F. Kennedy, according to a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The note, from December 1, 1966, quotes a U.S. intelligence mole in Russia as saying that the KGB was ‘in possession of data purporting to indicate Johnson was responsible for the assassination’.
But the Kremlin feared it would get the blame for JFK’s death and even be targeted in a retaliatory nuclear missile attack by the Americans, says the note.
The potentially explosive document is just one of 2,981 never-before-seen records relating to the JFK assassination released early today.
It was forwarded in a message to the White House called ‘Reaction of Soviet and Communist Party officials to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy’.
The Soviet Union believed Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (pictured center, being sworn into office after JFK’s assasination) may have ordered President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a newly-released memo reveals
The note, from December 1, 1966, quotes a U.S. mole in Russia as saying that the KGB has ‘data purporting to indicate Johnson was responsible’. President Kennedy is pictured above right before he was assassinated
It said: ‘KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly that between President Johnson and Robert and “Ted” Kennedy.’
The message, forwarded by Hoover to Johnson’s aide Marvin Watson, says Moscow believed JFK’s murder was a ‘well-organized conspiracy on the part of the “ultraright” in the United States to effect a “coup.”
‘They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part,’ says the memo.
It’s not the first time LBJ, who was sworn into office on Air Force One in Dallas before the presidential plane carried JFK’s body back to Washington, has been linked to a murder conspiracy.
JFK’s widow Jackie, famously pictured alongside Johnson at the inauguration, still wearing her blood-spattered pink Chanel suit, is said to have had her own suspicions about her husband’s successor.
She reportedly told friends that she believed Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons had orchestrated the Dallas shooting and a series of books have theorized that the Vice President was the mastermind.
Kennedy was shot in the back and head while riding in an open motorcade through Dallas, Texas, with his wife and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy by his side
Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s closest political advisers, wrote a 2013 book called: ‘The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.’
Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured) was blamed for the president’s assassination. He was shot dead by Jack Ruby shortly after being arrested
However, this is the first time Johnson has been connected with the conspiracy in a government document.
The FBI wrote that on November 25, 1963, Colonel Boris Ivanov, the Soviet spy chief in New York, ordered KGB agents to launch an urgent investigation into then President Johnson’s background.
Nearly two years later, the note continues, the same U.S. intelligence source said that instructions came through from KGB headquarters in Moscow, dated September 16, 1965, saying that ‘now’ the KGB was ‘in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.
‘KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly that between President Johnson and Robert and ‘Ted’ Kennedy.’
Following the assassination, the memo continues, the Soviets passed on to Washington its complete consular file on Oswald and his wife, Marina.