Highest ranking Soviet defector to USA Arkady Shevchenko: the Russians had a widespread belief that Lyndon Johnson had orchestrated the JFK assassination

 

High ranking Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko in 1985 on the widespread speculation among Soviet diplomats that Lyndon Johnson had masterminded the JFK assassination. Arkady Shevchenko was the highest-ranking Russian ever to defect to the USA.

Arkady Shevchenko - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_Shevchenko

Arkady Shevchenko:

QUOTE

In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Everyone in the [Soviet] mission was stunned and confused, particularly when there were rumors that the murder had been Soviet-inspired … Our leaders would not have been so upset b the assassination if they had planned it and the KGB would not have taken upon itself to venture such a move without Politburo approval. More important, Khrushchev’s view of Kennedy had changed. After Cuba, Moscow perceived Kennedy as the one who had accelerated improvement of relations between the two countries. Kennedy was seen as a man of strength and determination, the one thing that Kremlin truly understands and respects. In addition, Moscow firmly believed that Kennedy’s assassination was a scheme by “reactionary forces” within the United States seeking to damage the new trend in relations. The Kremlin ridiculed the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald had acted on his own as the sole assassin. There was in fact widespread speculation among Soviet diplomats that Lyndon Johnson, along with the CIA and the Mafia, had masterminded the plot. Perhaps one of the most potent reasons why the U.S.S.R. wished Kennedy well was that Johnson was anathema to Khruschev. Because he was a southerner, Moscow considered him a racist (the stereotype of any American politician from below the Mason-Dixon line), an anti-Soviet and anti-Communist to the core. Further, since Johnson was from Texas, a center of the most reactionary forces in the United States, according to the Soviets, he was associated with the big-time capitalism of the oil industry, also known to be anti-Soviet.

UNQUOTE

[This passage from Arkady N. Shevchenko appears in Jim Marr’s Crossfire, p. 133, 1989 edition and published by Basic Books. In 1985 Shevchenko wrote Breaking with Moscow and it was published by Knopf on 1/12/85. This is where the passage above originally came from.]