In my never-ending quest to present all Kennedy assassination theories, both real and crackpot, comes the latest tome to add to the pile: "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB and the Kennedy Assassination" by Ion Mahai Pacepa.     He's not just some guy launching a JFK Hail Mary--he's a former high ranking KGB official, one of the top guys ever to defect.  

      I haven't read it, but I found a review of it on the Internet.       It admits Pacepa offers no smoking guns that prove the Soviet intelligence community got its hands on the defector Oswald, wired him to do the unspeakable, gave him a Russian wife to seal the deal, then sent him off to the U.S. to pull the trigger.       But, the reviewer admits it's a fascinating read with solid info on how the KGB was wired.     And, here's a recent Q-and-A he did to support the book.

      It's a fact that Oswald defected after being bounced from the Marines.      It's a fact that he came back to the U.S. with wife Marina, with the conventional wisdom being that Oswald was disappointed with the brand of Communism being practiced by Moscow.     At least, that's what he told anyone who asked him.       He became a pro-Castro supporter, heading up a one-man "Fair Play For Cuba" committee while failing to recruit a single like-thinker.

       One of the biggest fears in the hours immediately following Kennedy's murder was that there'd somehow be a Kremlin link--freshly sworn in successor Lyndon Johnson worried about just that in his many post-assassination phone calls to the likes of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, among others.     What would he do, he wondered, if Moscow's fingerprints were on the Kennedy caper?      What could he possibly do to respond, he asked, without igniting World War III?

       I don't know if I'll buy this one--my bookcases are already bulging with all manner of assassination books, some very solid and others admittedly batty.       The one that sealed the deal for me, Gerald Posner's "Case Closed"  is my bible, categorically and scientifically proving the assassination to be the work of a lone, unprogrammed gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.      Vincent Bugliosi's weighty tome, "Reclaiming History" , is another worthy, if incredibly thick, variation on the same theme.     Add to that the late Peter Jennings' final ABC documentary on the subject, "Beyond Conspiracy" which includes an incredible computer-generated picture of the murder from every conceivable angle, proving many of the Posner/Bugliosi/Warren Commission findings: one man, one gun. 

       Kennedy will be dead 45 years this November 22nd.     The conspiracy theories don't get much of an airing any more, but that doesn't seem to stop authors from trying to get them out in the open again.