I am finally getting around to the latest Kennedy Assassination files posted on the National Archives. These include a 1964 Central Intelligence Agency document in which some CIA informer summarized a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Drew Pearson and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. According to this informant, Khrushchev allegedly asked “What really happened?” to which “Mr. Pearson said . . . ”
“ . . . in effect that the whole affair had taken place just as had been reported in the newspapers and presumably by the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. Chairman Khrushchev was utterly incredulous and his attitude was summarized by Mrs. Pearson as being archetypical ‘of every European I have ever talked to about this subject’. That is, that there was some kind of conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and then murder the assassin with the Dallas Police Department as an accessory.”
Drew Pearson was a famous syndicated columnist of the 1950s and 1960s. The memo claims that he and Khrushchev had a bit of a tussle at one point:
“When Mr. Pearson said that we Americans are a peculiar people, it [sic] understandable that foreigners had difficulty comprehending this fantastic episode, but Oswald was mad, had acted on his own, ditto Ruby, Chairman Khrushchev said flatly that he did not believe this.”
I get the sense that the above part of the discussion was summarized by Drew Pearson’s wife Luvie Butler Moore Pearson. She was a Washington D.C. bon vivant, activist, and movie reviewer. According to the CIA report:
“Mrs. Pearson got the impression that Chairman Khrushchev had some dark thoughts about the American Right Wing being behind this conspiracy although Chairman Khrushchev did not articulate this in any clear fashion. Mrs. Pearson was a bit vague on this point in distinguishing between what Chairman Khrushchev said and what she thought he believed.”
JFK Facts has a summary of this alleged conversation which accepts it ad pedem litterae (“as it is written”). But I would like to know who summarized the discussion (the identity of the informer is redacted). The source was a husband and wife couple who had some kind of conversation with the Pearsons in Cairo (Egypt, presumably) on May 24, 1964. The chat lasted 45 minutes and then continued the next morning (May 25), suggesting to me that the Pearsons stayed at the informer’s house. The couples may have been friends.
The snitch in question was very quick to relay a summary of the discussion to someone at the CIA, who typed it up and gave it to soon-to-be CIA director Richard Helms, who delivered it into the hands of J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel to the Warren Commission on May 27. “Nothing in the cable quoted below should be construed as obviating any desirability the Commission may feel about securing testimony directly from Mr. and Mrs. Pearson,” an introduction to the summary concludes.
