To deflect attention from its ties to Oswald (who had defected to the USSR for several years), the [[Soviet Union]] fabricated a disinformation campaign to blame the assassination on US conservatives. On November 23, 1963–the day after Kennedy was killed–a memo from KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny asked the Kremlin immediately to publish an article in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries …exposing the attempt by [http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2013/11/20/the-new-proof-of-the-kgbs-hand-in-jfks-assassination/?singlepage=true reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,] the racists and ultra-right elements] guilty of the spread and growth of violence and terror in the United States.” [https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Struggle_for_Russia.html?id=GSyaAAAACAAJ According to Boris Yeltsin], the result was an article appearing two months later in the communist-controlled British journal ''Labour Monthly'', stating, “[M]ost commentators, have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas . . . [that], with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a CIA job.” Next, Joachim Joesten, a former member of the German Communist Party, wrote ''Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?'' claiming that Oswald was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background.”
To further link the assassination to the CIA, the [[KGB]]'s Section A for Disinformation and Active Measures produce a clumsy forgery of a letter supposedly from Oswald to CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, asking for information "[https://books.google.com/books?id=wVndU5P4V-8C&pg=PT207#v=onepage&q&f=false before any steps are taken by me or anyone else]," according to secret documents smuggled out of [[Moscow]] by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, and published by him and Cambridge University's Christopher Andrew, [http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2009/08/10/the-debate-over-soviet-espionage-what-nicholas-lemann-of-the-new-yorker-gets-wrong/ dean of British historians of Soviet espionage]. Agents passed the forged letter anonymously to unwitting US conspiracy theorists; it appeared in a self-published assassination book, and a Dallas newspaper even claimed that a handwriting expert [httphttps://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/12/world/kgb-told-tall-tales-about-dallas-book-says.html declared it to be genuine].
Joesten's book was published in the US in 1964 by KGB agent Carlo Aldo Marzani (code-named "Nord"), who was paid $672,000 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s, according to Mitrokhin's documents. The book was positively reviewed by [[Victor Perlo]] (an American KGB agent code-named "Raid") in ''New Times'', which was a KGB front at one time printed in Romania, according to Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the East bloc. [[I.F. Stone]], a Soviet "agent of influence" code-named "Blin," followed with an article suggesting that Oswald may have been "the tool of some rightist plot." In 1966 came Mark Lane's bestseller ''Rush to Judgment'', alleging that Kennedy was assassinated by a right-wing US group. Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive show that the KGB indirectly sent Mark Lane $2,000, and that KGB operative Genrikh Borovik was in regular contact with him. According to Pacepa, Semichastny’s memo thus "generated the Kennedy conspiracy that has never stopped."