A Cuban secret service agent claims in a German film that his colleagues chose Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

BY HUGH WILLIAMSON
Financial Times

BERLIN - Hoping to scoop the world on one of America's supreme historical puzzles, Germany's leading television broadcaster has claimed in a documentary film that it was the Cuban secret service that organized the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The 90-minute film, Rendezvous with Death, features an interview with Oscar Marino, a former agent of the Cuban G2 secret service, who says he knew before the assassination in November 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald -- Kennedy's killer -- had been picked by his colleagues to do the job.

''He offered to kill Kennedy, and we used him to do this,'' Marino says during the film, made by Wilfried Huismann, a prize-winning German director.

Marino claims that Oswald, a Communist who lived in the Soviet Union for three years, was identified to Cuba by the Russian KGB secret service.

In Havana, the official Granma newspaper Friday dismissed the documentary's claim, saying it was the latest chapter in the long history of efforts ``to annihilate the Cuban revolution.''

A Cuban involvement is one of the dozens of conspiracy theories that have long surrounded the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone.

Huismann, who worked on the project with Gus Russo, the Baltimore-based author of a book on Fidel Castro, told the Financial Times his exclusive interview with Marino provided ''decisive new evidence'' beyond the dozens of existing inquiries, books and films on the subject.

He admitted many Americans were ''very skeptical'' that he had solved the Kennedy assassination puzzle, but argued that his research focus on Mexico City -- which Oswald visited two months before the assassination in Dallas -- was his breakthrough. He interviewed Marino in the city, Huismann said, and gained exclusive access to parts of the country's secret service archive.

''I ask skeptical Kennedy assassination specialists - have you ever done research on the case in Mexico? Most, if not all, have not,'' he said.

Marino knew before the killing that Oswald had been recruited in Mexico City in September 1963 to do the killing, according to the filmmaker. In addition, in late 1962 the Cuban spy saw a list of about 100 foreign agents financed by the Cuban secret service. ''Oswald was on the list,'' Huismann said. The G2 decided to have Kennedy killed because it believed the U.S. government planned to kill Castro, according to the film.

Another key witness in the film is Lawrence Keenan, a retired FBI agent, who was sent to Mexico after the assassination to investigate Oswald's activities and says he was withdrawn after only a short time.