After 54 years and some 2,500 books written about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – promoting dozens of theories implicating everyone from the mafia and international drug lords to Cuba and the Soviet Union to the CIA and FBI to Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush – the issue has risen to the top of the news cycle again with the release, on President Trump's orders, of until-now classified documents relating to the assassination of America's 35th president.

One person uniquely situated to separate truth from wild speculation would be R. James Woolsey, the respected former director of Central Intelligence. When interviewed recently by Fox News, Woolsey singled out one theory as being the most plausible, compelling and consistent with all the known facts. And that is the scenario put forward by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the entire Cold War era. The former communist spy chief, now an American citizen, lives in the U.S. under deep cover due to ongoing security threats.

Today, WND is publishing an exclusive and in-depth update, written by Pacepa himself, to his unique analysis of the Kennedy assassination in light of the document release.

Following is a transcript of Woolsey's comments to Fox News' Dana Perino, in which the former CIA chief succinctly summarizes what Pacepa claims actually occurred, thereby clarifying what appears to be the Soviet Union's true role in the assassination of an American president.

TRENDING: Alan Dershowitz sues CNN to halt 'malicious' attacks on innocent people

Watch: Former CIA director on most likely Oswald-Russia theory

Perino (Referring to the trove of just-released Kennedy documents): In one of the documents, there is a statement from one of the attorneys, David Berlin. He asks, "Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent?" … What do you think that's about?

Woolsey: I think there is some possible information that he was a KGB, but not a CIA, officer or agent.

Perino: Why do you think that?

Woolsey: Well, Mike Pacepa – Ion Mihai Pacepa was the head of Romanian intelligence and defected in '79, the highest-ranking intelligence defector we got during the Cold War – Mike says that he can't tell you exactly what happened. But he can tell you what all of the Eastern Bloc nations' intelligence heads thought happened after the Kennedy assassination, which was this: That Khrushchev had gotten very, very furious about the Cuban missile crisis. He thought Kennedy made him look bad. He was mad. He ordered, shortly thereafter, that Kennedy be assassinated. Preparations occurred. For example, the trip to Mexico, where it looks from some material that has been turned loose that Oswald met with a KGB officer who specialized in assassinations. There are a number of things that look suspicious that happened during that time, before the assassination.

But it looks as if what happened – may have happened – is that Khrushchev got cold feet three months before the assassination was to occur, and realized he might be starting a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which he didn't want. And so he pulled back and said, OK, everybody call it off. And everybody did call it off – except Oswald, who was a deeply committed Marxist-Leninist, sniper and ideologue. And he started to become a Soviet, and decided the Soviets were too moderate, so he'd become a Cuban.

Perino: So he carried it out, even though they had said let's not do this?

Woolsey: Even though Khrushchev had ordered not to do it. Now this is one theory. It's one that I tend toward, but I'm still willing to listen to other possibilities. But it does seem as if it fits with what may have been the case.

'New hard proof of the KGB's hand'

In his widely acclaimed 2013 book, "Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism," co-authored with professor Ronald Rychlak and published by WND Books, Pacepa includes four chapters summarizing his unique knowledge and insights into the Kennedy assassination, and specifically the Soviet Union's role. As just one small example, in Chapter 32 of "Disinformation," titled "New Hard Proof of the KGB's Hand," Pacepa reveals:

The first piece of irrefutable evidence proving the KGB had launched a disinformation offensive with respect to the Kennedy assassination aimed at diverting public attention away from Moscow was released by Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first freely elected president. In his memoir, "The Struggle for Russia," Yeltsin revealed a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated November 23, 1963 – the day after Kennedy’s assassination – signed by KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny, which recommended publishing, in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries,” an article “exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,] the racists and ultra-right elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence and terror in the United States.” Semichastny’s request was approved. Two months later, R. Palme Dutt, the editor of a communist-controlled British journal called Labour Monthly, published an article that raised the specter of CIA involvement without offering a scintilla of evidence. “[M]ost commentators,” Dutt wrote, “have surmised a coup of the Ultra- Right or racialists of Dallas … [that], with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a CIA job.”

Read former spy chief Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa's latest revelations about the JFK assassination, exclusively on WND.

Readers can get the whole riveting story, not only about the Kennedy assassination, but about the huge impact communist disinformation has had – and which continues to this very day – on America and the free world, in "Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism." The book has also generated an award-winning film documentary, "Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West." And currently a major Hollywood film is in production based on the book "Disinformation."