Former CIA Director James Woolsey, the author of a new book that claims Lee Harvey Oswald was trained by the KGB to commit the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, insisted the theory is true because it came directly from his writing partner, the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, a two-star general of the secret police in Communist Romania.
"He was a remarkable man and followed this in great detail," Woolsey told Fox News' "America's Newsroom'' about Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978 after President Jimmy Carter granted him political asylum.
Pacepa, he added, died of COVID-19 on Feb. 14, just a little over a week before their book, "Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America" was released.
"To make it short, Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so because he was a fanatic," said Woolsey. "He felt as if he was doing, working the will of (Nikita) Khrushchev and doing exactly what the Soviets wanted."
However, Woolsey said the plan was not a personal order from Khrushchev, but a direction "from the leadership of the Soviet Union at the time."
He added that he and Pacepa "went into this in great detail in order to sort it out. I think we are in a very accurate position."
Khrushchev, he added, was "a fanatic. Shoe pounding, etc. And he pulled aside at the last minute give or take, you know, a week or two, but at the very tail end he decided he would move in the direction of common sense and he decided to back off."
But still, Woolsey said he doesn't think Oswald acted alone in the assassination.
"He was part of a system, a very detailed and complex system, KGB essentially, that got it going," said Woolsey. "It got the system going and then at the tail end backed off because they thought something might go haywire and he could have been right, it could have started a nuclear war. But he felt he had to kill Kennedy and so his way of dealing with the situation was to continue on to kill Kennedy as he did."
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