Day: April 4, 2025

In June, 1964, a curious book was released contending that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated the previous fall by a monstrous conspiracy of government agents and reactionary zealots determined to prevent him from making peace with the Communist world. 

At the time, the Warren Commission was still assembling its report concluding that  Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone gunman who killed the president from his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. But the new book that summer, entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? argued that Oswald was in fact a “FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background,” whose well-documented Marxist sympathies—his defection to the Soviet Union, his efforts to form a chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee—were all a ruse to hide the fact that the real assassins were “officials of the CIA and FBI,” along with a wealthy Texas oil man, H.L. Hunt.   

But the book, authored by a German communist named Joachim Joesten, didn’t  pop up out of nowhere. As was revealed years later, it was a classic Russian disinformation ploy, published by an obscure New York-based outfit, the “Liberty Book Club,” which had been bankrolled with about $107,000 from the KGB.

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