Remembering Edward M. Kennedy and his KGB connection
The death of US Senator Edward M. “Teddy” Kennedy this week is the reason for different recollections about his character. Online magazine Human Events recalls that Ted Kennedy who, by any measure, led an extraordinary life, was also willing to use US arch enemy’s secret police to harm his political enemies.
Kennedy’s private outreach to the KGB Soviet intelligence agency in attempts to undermine first President Jimmy Carter then President Ronald Reagan speaks about Edward Kennedy as about the man who appeared to have no moral restraints whatsoever on his personal pursuit of raw political power, according to Human Events.
It marks that documents found in Soviet archives after the fall of the Iron Curtain revealed a great deal about Ted Kennedy. One of the KGB reports to bosses in the USSR Communist Party Central Committee, revealed that “in 1978, American Sen. Edward Kennedy requested the assistance of the KGB to establish a relationship” between the Soviet apparatus and a firm owned by former Senator John Tunney (D-Ca.). KGB recommended that they be permitted to do this because Tunney’s firm was already connected with a KGB agent in France named David Karr. This document was found by the knowledgeable Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats.
Another KGB report to their bosses revealed that on March 5, 1980, John Tunney met with the KGB in Moscow on behalf of Sen. Kennedy. Tunney expressed Kennedy’s opinion that “nonsense about ‘the Soviet military threat’ and Soviet ambitions for military expansion in the Persian Gulf… was being fueled by [President Jimmy] Carter, [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski, the Pentagon and the military industrial complex.”
Kennedy offered to speak out against President Carter on Afghanistan and shortly thereafter he made public speeches opposing the President on this issue. This document was found in KGB archives by KGB officer Vasily Mitrokhin who copied documents from the files and then defected to the West.
Tim Sebastian from the London Times found contemporaneous KGB documentation and published a story in February, 1992, of an additional communiqué by Ted Kennedy to the Soviet intelligence agency through Tunney. This time it was President Reagan in Kennedy’s crosshairs as he attempted to arrange a meeting between Kennedy and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Yuri Andropov.
In the May 14, 1983, letter written by the then KGB head Viktor Chebrikov to his boss Yuri Andropov, Chebrikov explained that Kennedy blamed poor American-Soviet relations on President Reagan. According to Chebrikov’s letter, Kennedy said he wanted to stop Reagan’s re-election effort in 1984.
Chebrikov’s letter claimed that Kennedy himself had offered to travel to Moscow to meet with Andropov if he would extend an invitation. Kennedy also suggested the Soviets reach out specifically to Barbara Walters and Walter Cronkite to counter in the American media what he said Kennedy considered Reagan “propaganda,” Human Events adds.
