PRESS RELEASE

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RFK Author: His Russia Back-Channel Saved All Our Lives

June 4, 2017 (EIRNS)—Amid continuing, McCarthyite-cartoonish hysteria of liberal media and political figures about any Trump associates talking to Russians, the author of a new book about Robert F. Kennedy wrote an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, "We may owe our lives to a back-channel with Russia."

The back-channel discussed by Evan Thomas, author of Robert Kennedy: His Life, is the famous one which led to the resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missiles Crisis which had put the world on the brink of thermonuclear war.

Thomas’s additional findings, beyond what was once known to all informed Americans, are interesting. He finds similarity between President John F. Kennedy and President Donald Trump in that Kennedy made his brother a critical cabinet member—considered a "high-handed" move by many—and entrusted him with extremely sensitive missions including, for example, covert operations against Cuba’s Fidel Castro. And that Robert Kennedy in 1961, just after inauguration, unhesitatingly took a meeting with a Soviet spy, GRU Col. Georgi Bolshakov. In a series of meetings with Bolshakov, Robert Kennedy revealed the conclusions of sensitive U.S. reports about the military balance of power between the superpowers. President Kennedy had specifically told Robert Kennedy to avoid the State Department bureaucracy in these dealings.

In 1993, historians found Bolshakov’s cable to Moscow of Oct. 23, 1962:

"R. Kennedy and his circle consider it possible to discuss the following trade: The U.S. would liquidate its missile bases in Turkey and Italy, and the U.S.S.R. would do the same in Cuba."

This ended the Cuban Missiles Crisis four days later, in a meeting between RFK and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Author Thomas concludes his op-ed by wondering to what extent Henry Kissinger, of the 1972-73 back-channel to China, is today advising Jared Kushner.