A few days after the assassination of President Kennedy, Deriabin wrote a lengthy memorandum for the CIA, in which he claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was a KGB agent who either was dispatched to kill Kennedy or was sent to the United States on a different mission and then committed the assassination on his own. Deriabin contended that the Soviets would have accomplished several objectives by eliminating Kennedy. Among them was removing the West's preeminent cold warrior from the scene, constraining US covert actions against Cuba, which would be stigmatized as acts of vengeance, as well as divert the Soviet people's attention from their many domestic problems.