The KGB tried to stir up racial tensions in the United States during the Cold War and stoked conspiracy theories that blamed the CIA for President John F. Kennedy's assassination, a new book on the Soviet intelligence service says.

"The Sword and The Shield," by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, is based on information smuggled out by Mitrokhin, a former KGB officer who defected to Britain in 1992.

The book says grocery stores, mo-vie theaters and train stations were among 1960s KGB meeting places in U.S. cities from Boston to Seattle.

A favorite Mitrokhin meeting place was a telephone booth near the Hot Shoppes Restaurant in the center of Hyattsville, Maryland, a Washington, D.C. suburb.

The 700-page book says the KGB saw the Watergate scandal and revelations of CIA assassination plots against several foreign leaders in the mid-1970s as an opportunity to fuel theories that the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination.

The break-in at the Democratic national headquarters at Watergate hotel led to President Richard Nixon resigning in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974.

The KGB forged a letter to E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who ended up as a Watergate conspirator, from Lee Harvey Oswald, supposed to have been written two weeks before Kennedy was killed.

Photocopies of the letter were sent to three conspiracy buffs in 1975 but did not receive publicity until 1977.

The KGB was initially disappointed that instead of focusing on Howard Hunt, early press reports suggested the letter may have been intended for the late Texas oil millionaire H.L. Hunt. The KGB "believed there had been a CIA plot to disrupt its own plot" of disinformation, the book said.

The U.S. Communist Party hoped to influence and guide the U.S. civil rights movement by placing secret party members in the entourage of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the book said.

When it became clear King was seeking fulfillment of the American dream rather than backing a fight against U.S. imperialism, the KGB decided to try to discredit the civil rights leader and replace him with someone more radical and malleable.

The KGB aimed to discredit King and his lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in U.S. newspapers, portraying King as secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement, the book said.

The KGB reversed course and attempted to exploit King's assassination by portraying him as a martyr. It spread conspiracy theories that his murder was planned by white racists with the knowledge of authorities.