Mikhail Mikhailovich Lebedev

Mikhail Mikhailovich Lebedev is a fictional character created by William Graham Stanton, in the thriller novel Treason For My Daily Bread.
The book purports to be Lebedev’s account of his life and dealings within the world of international espionage and crime, and climaxes with his involvement in the assassination of John F Kennedy.
Background
The book was published as a book by Lebedev and edited by Stanton. The account of how the book was written offered in the introduction of the book, like the book itself, is a fiction. The account is that the late Tom Todd, a publisher from Guernsey UK., was approached by Lebedev in Beirut, who at the time was stateless and desperate for money, and who sold Todd a manuscript in German outlining his life and his activities. It is suggested that later Todd had the manuscript translated and then approached Stanton to edit it, that is, to rewrite it in a more readable form.
Both the story and the character are the inventions of Todd and Stanton. The book was researched in meticulous detail from sources identified by Todd, and Stanton drafted the plot on the basis of this research and wrote the story. Their hope was that they would publish, that the book might create some controversy, and that they would attract interest from the film industry in much the same way as The Day of The Jackal had already done. However, the book failed to attract such interest and finally Todd arranged for the book to be published in a limited form by his own publishing company, Vallancey International.
JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theory
Neither Todd nor Stanton had any notion at the time they published the book of the impact the Internet would have in inflating conspiracies, or that Lebedev’s account of events would become widely quoted as supporting evidence to a number of alternative accounts to the Warren Commission. Although some of the accounts are clearly fanciful, there were occasions when respectable journalists were beguiled by the presentation of the book, viewed it as a historical account, and cited it as evidence Journalist Mae Brussell believed the book to be a genuine autobiography and used it as a source for a piece suggesting Nazi involvement in the assassination directed by Martin Bormann. This final assertion was fatally compromised in 1998 by the conclusive DNA evidence on a body found in 1972 near Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin that Bormann did not escape from Berlin in 1945.

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