-
- MOSCOW (Agence France Presse) - KGB files handed by President Boris
Yeltsin to his U.S. counterpart Bill Clinton will clear Moscow of involvement
in the unresolved assassination of John F. Kennedy, a former KGB officer
said Monday.
-
- Retired KGB colonel Mikhail Lyubimov
told Echo Moscow radio station that the 1963 killing in Dallas, Texas,
had sent Soviet leaders into shock and left Moscow fearful that it would
be blamed for the murder.
-
- "(Nikita) Khrushchev rushed in terror
to the U.S. ambassador to say we were not involved," Lyubimov said
of the then Soviet leader.
-
- "The only sensation that will hit
the world (following release of the latest documents) is that we (the Soviet
Union) had nothing to do with the assassination of Kennedy," he said.
-
- "I rule it out 100 percent. Even
under Stalin we didn't assassinate foreigners and after his (Stalin's)
death the politburo banned terrorist acts," Lyubimov said.
-
- He dismissed suggestions that a rogue
KGB unit could have gone in alone and carried out the operation, saying
"the KGB was strictly under the control of the politburo and the party
leadership."
-
- Some of the declassified documents from
Soviet archives had been made available to the U.S. side at the beginning
of the 1990s, he added.
-
- On Sunday, Yeltsin handed Clinton a thick
stack of KGB files on the assassination which White House officials said
would be translated, analyzed, and eventually released to the public.
-
- The gift was made during a bilateral
meeting in Cologne, Germany, on the sidelines of a summit of Group of Eight
states (Russia plus the world's seven leading industrial democracies).
-
- The documents are believed to contain,
among other items, files on President Kennedy's alleged killer Lee Harvey
Oswald, who lived for a time in the Soviet Union.
-
- Lyubimov said Soviet intelligence would
never have considered recruiting Oswald, who worked in factory in Minsk,
the capital of the now independent Belarus.
|
