4

“The Lesser of Two Evils”

The day after Oswald received his Soviet identity document, a government agency called the Red Cross gave him 5,000 rubles (about $500).* He paid his hotel bill of 2,200 rubles and used 150 to buy a rail ticket to Minsk.¹ He arrived in the provincial capital on January 7 and was met by Roza Kuznetsova, an Intourist worker who would become a friend. There, he discovered that as the only American defector in the city, he was a minor celebrity. The next day he met the mayor and was promised a rent-free apartment, something that normally took years to achieve.² On January 13, Oswald began his job as a metalworker at the Belorussian Radio and Television Factory, an enormous complex that employed over five thousand workers. He was initially disappointed with his work, since he had told Soviet officials he was instead interested in going back to school to study economics, philosophy, and politics.³†

Oswald’s discontentment with his factory job faded through the spring and summer of 1960. His monthly income, between his salary and a Red Cross subsidy, was a very comfortable $150.4 By March, extraordinarily fast by Soviet standards, he was placed in a one-room apartment in a middle-class complex at 4 Kalinin Street. Although his room had no telephone or television and neighbors described it as sparsely furnished and dismal, it was in a good building and afforded a fine view from two small balconies of the Svisloch River.⁵ Henry Hurt says Oswald received “extraordinary VIP treatment,”⁶ and Jim Marrs claims he had a “lavish lifestyle.”⁷ But his conditions, while better than those of the average Soviet worker, were not different from those of other defectors. “There was nothing special about his arrangement,” says Nosenko.

As an American defector at the height of the cold war, he was an oddity, and Russians, who called him Alik, because Lee sounded too Chinese, went out of their way to ask him questions about America and to help him settle into his new homeland. He liked the attention.⁸ Oswald was more social and contented than at any other time in his life. From his first days at the factory, he formed a friendship with the plant’s deputy engineer, Alexander Ziger, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to Argentina in 1938, and then to Russia in 1955. Ziger spoke English, and he and his wife, Maria, often entertained Oswald at their home. Eventually Lee briefly dated the Zigers’ daughters, Anita and Eleonora.⁹

For several months, Oswald took Roza Kuznetsova, the In-tourist worker who also acted as his interpreter, to the movies, opera, or theater almost every night.¹⁰ He formed two friendships with contemporaries. One was Pavel Golovachev, a young co-worker and son of a highly decorated World War II pilot; also, Kuznetsova introduced him to Ernst Titovets, a medical student who spoke English.¹¹ By the summer, he bought a 16-gauge shotgun, joined a hunting club, and went on several excursions in the countryside. “I am living big and am very satisfied,” he wrote in his diary.12

Not all of those who befriended him did so because they liked him. Some, like Kuznetsova, were KGB informants. Within two weeks of meeting Oswald, KGB agent Aleksandr Kostyukov approached eighteen-year-old Golovachev outside his apartment building and pressured him to meet with agents several times a week to supply information about Alik.¹³ Oswald’s KGB file, No. 31451, reveals that he was code-named Likhoy and that the local KGB kept him under constant surveillance.* To determine whether he was a foreign spy, Oswald’s reactions were observed when he was put in contact with people who pretended to possess secret information.¹⁴ At other times the KGB used informants to engage him in anti-Soviet conversations.¹⁵ When Oswald went hunting in the nearby woods, KGB agents followed to ensure he did not try to observe military or restricted sites.¹⁶ Even drugs may have been used. Eduard Shirkovskiy, the current chairman of the KGB in Belorus, said, “Well, maybe they did drop a few tablets in his glass, but just the kind to make him let down his guard and be a little more talkative.”¹⁷ Local operative Kostyukov said that as many as twenty agents were used to shadow Oswald, bug his apartment, and check informants at the factory and his apartment building. “The KGB of Belorussia conducted more surveillance of Oswald than was probably necessary,” says Yuriy Nosenko. “But, for the local KGB, Oswald was an extraordinary case. They never worked on an American case by themselves, and this one belonged to them.”¹⁸

Although Oswald was oblivious to the extent of the surveillance, he suspected that the KGB watched him (Golovachev says he warned Oswald to be careful).¹⁹ He seemed more conscious of the KGB’s interest as he had some second thoughts about his defection as early as summer 1960. “He tried hard to adapt to this country,” Ernst Titovets told the author, “but he never did. When you know someone, you can tell how they feel. He was never really in touch with Russia, never really part of it.”20 His diary reflects his changing attitudes as he complained that he was becoming “increasingly concious of just what sort of a sociaty” he lived in.²¹*

Part of his early disillusionment was that after six months, the novelty of his defection had worn off, and he had lost his celebrity status. He heard nothing about his request to attend a university, and the factory work had become tedious. Max Clark, a Russian immigrant who befriended Lee when he returned to America, recalled: “He didn’t want to be among the common people; he wanted to stand out. He wanted everybody to know he was the defector.… While he was in Russia … he was completely disgruntled by the fact they only made him a common sheet metal worker; that he thought since he was a defector and a former Marine Corpsman that he would be given special attention …”²² Valentina Ray, another Russian acquaintance in the U.S., recalled, “When he defected to Russia … he expected them to give [him the] presidency job; he was [an] American and should have a job like that and I think his hopes went down the drain.”²³ George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s closest friend in Dallas, noted, “He was a fellow who needed attention, he was a new fellow in Minsk, a new American, so they were all interested in him. And they lost interest in him eventually. So he became nothing again. So he got disgusted with it.”²⁴

But Oswald’s personal fortunes suddenly took an upturn in June 1960, when he met a co-worker, Ella Germann. In his diary, he described her as “a silky, black haired Jewish beauty with fine dark eyes, skin as white as snow, a beautiful smile, and a good but unpredictable nature.” He later said he “perhaps fell in love with her the first minute” he saw her.25 They dated through the fall of 1960 and spent New Year’s Eve of 1961 with her family. As he wrote in his diary, “Passing the river homeward, I decide to propose to Ella.”²⁶ She shocked him by saying no. “Standing on the doorstep I propose’s,” he wrote in his diary entry for January 2, 1961. “She hesitates than refuses, my love is real but she has none for me.… I am stunned she snickers at my awkarness in turning to go (I am too stunned too think!) I realize she was never serious with me.… I am misarable!”²⁷

Ella’s refusal highlighted many nagging problems, including the bitterly cold winter, the drudgery of his work, and the dullness of Minsk. It was another of his failures, following on the footsteps of school and the Marines. His diary entry for January 4, only two days after Ella’s rejection, reveals his disillusionment with Russia was now pronounced. “I am stating to reconsider my disire about staying The work is drab the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling allys no places of recreation acept the trade union dances I have have had enough.”²⁸ That same day the Minsk visa authorities, to update their files, asked if he still wanted Soviet citizenship. He told them no, asking only that his temporary papers be extended a year.²⁹

His changing opinions about the Soviet Union were reflected in his deteriorating performance at the factory. The KGB file reveals that while initially Oswald was productive and industrious, his supervisors soon noted he had an attitude problem, and his work was unsatisfactory. Over several months Oswald became increasingly lazy, and took to propping his feet on a table and complaining about not being paid enough.³⁰ In his diary, he whined about the trade-union meetings and the compulsory mass gymnastics, attendance at political lectures, and weekend crop work.³¹ Always rebellious against authority, he slowly discovered the Soviet system was much more regimented than he had ever imagined. Expecting to find a classless society, the fulfillment of Marxist theory, he instead recognized that the Soviets promoted a privileged Communist party class while forcing most of the population into compliant workers’ collectives. Oswald later griped that the oppressive discipline “turn to stone all except the hard-face communists with roving eyes looking for any bonus-making catch of inattentiveness on the part of any worker.”32 He railed against the central ministries, the power of the state, and the crippling bureaucracy.³³

But instead of abandoning his Communist philosophy, he merely concluded that the Soviet system was a perversion of Marxist goals. For the rest of his life, his only identity was as a “Marxist.” He considered himself the pure ideologue, not corrupted by petty desires for privilege and material accumulation.

As Russia’s luster dimmed, Oswald found America less objectionable than when he had defected. In early February 1961, a month after Germann’s devastating rejection, Oswald wrote the American embassy in Moscow, stating, “I desire to return to the United States.”³⁴* He had completely reversed himself from a letter to his brother, a year earlier, when he adamantly announced, “I will not leave this country, the Soviet Union, under any conditions, I will never return to the United States which is a country I hate.”³⁵ The same young man who had attempted to renounce his citizenship now urged the embassy to do everything it could to help him since he was still an “American citizen.”³⁶

On February 28, consul Richard Snyder wrote Oswald, informing him that he should come personally to the embassy to discuss the matter.³⁷ Oswald answered a week later, March 5, saying he could not leave Minsk without Soviet approval and requesting that everything be resolved through the mail.³⁸ On March 24, the embassy again wrote that he would have to visit Moscow.³⁹ The State Department, already notified of Oswald’s change of heart, had decided to return his passport only if he personally appeared at the embassy and the consular staff was satisfied, after talking to him, that he had not renounced his U.S. citizenship.40*

It was during the period Oswald was exchanging letters with the embassy that he met his soon-to-be wife. In his diary entry for March 17, he wrote: “I and Ernst went to trade union dance. Boring but at the last hour I am introduced to a girl with a French hair-do and red-dress with white slipper I dance with her.… Her name is Marina We like each other right away.”⁴¹ Marina Prusakova was a striking nineteen-year-old pharmacology student who worked at a local hospital. Born out of wedlock, she remained unsure of her father’s real identity throughout her childhood. Her mother died when Marina was fifteen, and unable to endure a terrible relationship with her stepfather, Marina had moved from Leningrad to Minsk in August 1959.

Marina’s comments about her first encounter with Oswald have mistakenly raised suspicion that he must have had “official” help to be so fluent in the Russian language. Summers says that when they first met, “Oswald spoke Russian so well … she thought he merely came from another part of the Soviet Union.”⁴² Marrs says after Marina and Lee spoke Russian, she thought he was a “Soviet citizen.”⁴³ Did he have government help to learn such a difficult language, perhaps a “crash course” at the U.S. Army’s Monterey Language School (now the Defense Language Institute)? Such conjecture was fueled when Lee Rankin, the Warren Commission’s chief counsel, once indicated he was trying to “run down” a report that Oswald had studied at the Monterey School. After investigation, the Commission was convinced Oswald had never been there. The Monterey School is not an intelligence facility, and its student rosters show Oswald was never enrolled there and never attended a single class.

Since the autumn of 1957, however, when he was in the Marines, he had been studying the language, sometimes with the help of an officer in his unit who shared his interest.44 This coincides with the time he initially thought of defecting. By the end of 1958, Oswald was so disillusioned with his Marine service that he flaunted his interest in Russian while posted to the El Toro air base. On February 25, 1959, seventeen months after he began his “crash course,” Oswald took an Army Russian equivalency examination. In reading, writing, and understanding the language, he scored “poor” in all categories, with his overall language marks also “poor.”⁴⁵ When he took the Russian exam, he also took an extensive aptitude test. He finished in the bottom of the lowest category.

Oswald redoubled his efforts at Russian after the dismal test results. He often sat in the barracks testing himself against the dictionary, a Russian paper, or a textbook.⁴⁶ But even another half year of study made little difference. By the time of his defection in October 1959, two years of efforts produced meager results. Richard Snyder, the embassy consul, said, “He did not know very much Russian. I don’t think he could have gotten along on his own in Russian society. I don’t think he could have done more than buy a piece of bread, maybe.”⁴⁷ Correspondent Priscilla Johnson recalled, “He indicated considerable helplessness in the language,” and he told Aline Mosby, “I can get along in restaurants but my Russian is very bad.”⁴⁸

Oswald’s own diary reveals the remedy for his shortcomings. From the middle of November to the end of December 1959, while in Moscow, he wrote, “I have bought myself two self-teaching Russian Lan. Books I force myself to study 8 hours a day I sit in my room and read and memorize words.”⁴⁹* After he was sent to Minsk, his Intourist friend Roza Kuznetsova gave him lessons.50 But his studies produced mixed results. It was not until the fall of 1960, nearly a year after his arrival, that Oswald wrote in his diary that his Russian was improving.⁵¹ But even after two and a half years in Russia, his language ability was limited. In Minsk, his upstairs neighbor Mayya Gertsovich said he spoke Russian poorly.⁵² Ernst Titovets told the author that his Russian was “rather inadequate, only several hundred words, really nothing.”⁵³ Titovets spoke to him as much as possible in English.

But what of the reports that Marina thought Oswald spoke so well she believed he was a Russian when she first met him in 1961? What Marina told the author was that she did not know Oswald was from America and that she thought he might be from one of the Baltic states, because “they speak with accents and do not speak Russian.”⁵⁴ According to Marina, those from the Baltics “don’t speak Russian very well, they have different nationalities than Russians.”⁵⁵

Although Marina may not have been impressed by Oswald’s command of Russian, she liked him. The day after the dance, Oswald was admitted to a hospital to have his adenoids removed. He asked Marina to visit, and feeling sorry for him, she stopped by daily. Her association with a foreigner carried a certain prestige, and she liked the attention from her friends. When he was released, she started seeing him regularly. A month after they met, Oswald proposed. They were married twelve days later, April 30, 1961, in the Minsk registry office. The speed of the marriage has, of course, prompted suspicions. Henry Hurt writes “Nothing about Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union is more peculiar and beguiling than his marriage to Marina.… The extraordinary haste with which they married … raises the question of whether Marina might have played some intelligence role in terms of Oswald.”⁵⁶ The KGB file, however, does not show she was even an informant, much less an operative.*

Furthermore, the marriage is only “peculiar” if the personal motives and emotions of Marina and Lee are ignored. Oswald was on the rebound from Ella. He confided to his diary that he married Marina “to hurt Ella,” and even after their marriage wrote, “The trasition of changing full love from Ella to Marina was very painfull esp. as I saw Ella almost every day at the factory but as the days and weeks went by I adjusted more and more [to] my wife mentaly.”57 It was not until June, two months after he married Marina, that he wrote in his diary, “We draw closer and closer, and I think very little now of Ella …”⁵⁸ As for Marina, marrying Oswald was a move up the Minsk social ladder.⁵⁹ While she says she liked him more than any of her other boyfriends, she admits that a great inducement was that he had his own apartment.⁶⁰ Priscilla Johnson said the “great lottery of Soviet life was to find a man you loved—who had an apartment.”⁶¹ Until she married Oswald, Marina never even had a room of her own. George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s good friend, later said, “She [Marina] said it was her dream some day to live in an apartment like that.… [It] was one of the greatest things she desired … and she finally achieved her dream. It sounds ridiculous, but that is how in Soviet Russia they dream of apartments rather than of people.”⁶² De Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jeanne, said Marina also had larger goals than a small Minsk apartment. “She was always dreaming to come to the United States. She looked at those pictures with big, big houses and everything.”⁶³ Two of Oswald’s Minsk friends, Titovets and Golovachev, accuse Marina of being a sly woman who, while she pretended she did not want to go to America, at the same time encouraged Oswald to leave Russia.⁶⁴

Marina denies she married Oswald for a passport, although she admits, “Maybe I was not in love with Alik as I ought to have been.”⁶⁵ She says he lied to her that he intended to stay in Russia At the time they met in March, Oswald had already written the U.S. embassy a month earlier requesting to return to America. In his diary, he says he finally told Marina about his plans at the end of June, and that she was “slightly startled.”⁶⁶ But he had written the U.S. embassy in mid-May, informing them he had married and that his wife wanted to accompany him home.⁶⁷ In that letter, he also asked for assurances that he would not be prosecuted for any crimes if he returned to the U.S.

Around the time that Oswald told Marina of his intention to return home, she had begun complaining about him to some friends. She confided to her neighbor Mayya Gertsovich that he was a tyrant, fought constantly with her, brought home little money from his job, and was demanding in peculiar ways.68 He refused to allow her to wear makeup and was obsessed that she stay ultra-thin, almost boyish, in her figure.⁶⁹* She felt he did not love her.⁷⁰

But those early problems were temporarily diverted when Marina discovered in June that she was pregnant. Oswald was elated and for the first time said he loved her. Yet the pregnancy strained their relationship in other ways. Marina had learned about Ella, felt ambivalent about having the child, was repulsed by sex with him, and thought she had made a mistake by marrying. In their first serious argument he asked if she wanted a divorce. Marina said, “Maybe.” “I ought to have married Ella after all,” Oswald retorted.⁷¹

His changeable nature was evident not only in his relationship with Marina but even in small matters. While in Russia, he initially attended dances with Ernst Titovets, and then tired of them.⁷² He bought a camera, started developing a photo hobby, and then just as quickly dropped the project. Oswald purchased a radio so he could listen to Voice of America (which was not being jammed at the time), but his listening became sporadic over the months, † He was extremely enthusiastic when he had purchased a single-barreled TOZ shotgun and joined the plant’s hunting club.⁷³ But after a few outings, he tired of the sport and sold the gun to a secondhand store for 18 rubles.‡

The one issue on which he did not change his mind during this time was his desire to leave Russia and return to the States. By the beginning of July, the embassy had still not answered his May letter disclosing his marriage and his wife’s desire to join him. Oswald decided to visit Moscow, obtained Soviet permission to travel, and unexpectedly arrived at the embassy on Saturday, July 8, 1961. It was the same day of the week he had arrived in 1959 to try and revoke his U.S. citizenship, and again he was asked to return Monday. This time he did.

Oswald telephoned Marina in Minsk, and she joined him in Moscow,* waiting outside the embassy while he met with American consul Richard Snyder, the same official who had encountered him in 1959.⁷⁴ Snyder found him remorseful. Unknown to Snyder, Oswald told him several lies—that he had never applied for Soviet citizenship, had not made derogatory statements about the U.S., and was not a member of the factory trade union. He truthfully told Snyder that he had never given the Soviets any military information and that the KGB had not debriefed him.

Convinced Oswald had learned his lesson, Snyder had him fill out an application for renewal of his American passport. The renewal was necessary since his passport was set to expire on September 10, 1961, and Snyder considered it very unlikely that the Soviets would issue an exit visa in the next two months. On the questionnaire, Oswald repeated that he was still an American citizen, †

Satisfied Oswald was still a U.S. citizen and had not violated any prohibitions, Snyder returned his passport, stamped with the restriction: “This passport is valid only for direct travel to the United States.”75 Although he had physical possession of the travel document, Oswald could not use it until the State Department also gave its approval and the Soviets granted him an exit visa. Independent of Snyder’s decision, Bernice Waterman, an employee for thirty-six years in the Passport Office in Washington, later reviewed Oswald’s file and also decided he had not expatriated himself and was entitled to the passport renewal. Waterman’s decision was further reviewed and approved by the chief of the Passport Office’s foreign operations division, as well as the legal division.⁷⁶

On the next day, Tuesday, July 11, Oswald reappeared at the embassy, this time with Marina. She completed the paperwork necessary to start the process for obtaining an entrance visa to the U.S. Her interview with Snyder’s assistant, John McVickar, was routine and centered on three issues: 1) was she the wife of an American; 2) had she voluntarily joined any Communist organizations; and 3) would she become a “public charge” if allowed into the U.S.⁷⁷ Marina was a member of Komsomol, the Communist youth league, but at Lee’s insistence, she lied to McVickar, denying her Komsomol affiliation.⁷⁸ Even if Marina had told the truth, it was not an automatic disqualification, as some Russian wives of American citizens had previously been admitted to the U.S. although they were Komsomol members.⁷⁹ As for Marina’s membership in a Communist trade union, McVickar concluded it was mandatory and did not adversely affect her application.⁸⁰*

Oswald wrote to his brother, Robert, on the same day Marina visited the embassy. He informed him that they were doing everything possible to leave the Soviet Union.81 Marina and Lee returned to Minsk on July 14 and then began the work of obtaining permission to leave the country from Soviet authorities. When the news of their effort spread in Minsk, Marina was pressured to change her mind. Only four days after their joint appearance at the U.S. embassy, Oswald wrote to the embassy, complaining “there have been some unusual and crude attempts on my wife at her place of work.… Then there followed the usual, ‘enemy of the people’ meeting, in which … she was condemned and her friends at work warned against speaking with her.”⁸² In his July 15 diary entry, Oswald was upset that Marina had received a “strong browbeating. The first of many indoctrinations.”⁸³ The Komsomol expelled her that same month.

The Soviet bureaucratic obstacles were formidable. Besides an exit visa, Marina also needed a passport. The Russian officials had reams of forms to fill out, all in triplicate, and Marina recalls that her apparently dyslexic husband had to bring five or six blank forms home for each one he managed to complete error-free. It took him a month to complete the twenty forms. In his diary he wrote, “On August 20th we give the papers out they say it will be 3½ months before we know wheather they let us go or not.… We only hope that the visas come through soon.”⁸⁴

After submitting his paperwork, Oswald tried to speed the process by repeatedly visiting the passport and visa office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “I extrackted promises of quick attention to us.”⁸⁵ For his diary entry for September through mid-October, he wrote, “No word from Min [Ministry]. (They’ll call us.”)”⁸⁶

By October, Oswald pleaded with the American embassy to intervene with Soviet authorities to expedite the exit visas. Calling upon his “lawful right” as an American citizen, he asked that the embassy make an official inquiry to the Russian Interior Ministry, “since there have been systematic and concerted attempts to intimidate my wife into withdrawing her application for on visa.”87 Marina’s uncle, who worked in the local militia, feared the loss of his job, apartment, and pension if his niece was branded an “enemy of the state” for wanting to go to America. Two of her aunts tried to scare Marina by telling her that the U.S. was racked with poverty and unemployment. “You’ll cry,” said her aunt Polina, “and no one will hear you.”⁸⁸

On his twenty-second birthday, on October 18, which he celebrated alone because Marina was visiting an aunt in the Ural Mountains, Oswald worried about whether the Soviets would allow him to leave Russia with his wife and expected child. In his diary entries for November and December, he wrote: “Now we are becoming anoid about the delay Marina is beginning to waiver about going to the US. Probably from the strain …”⁸⁹ Marina was increasingly nervous and depressed, often sobbing at night as she fretted about her decision to leave Russia⁹⁰*. In December, Oswald wrote a letter to Senator John Tower of Texas, seeking his assistance in budging the Soviets. “[T]he Soviets refuse to permit me and my Soviet wife … to leave the Soviet Union.… I bessech you, Senator Tower, to rise the question of holding by the Soviet Union of a citizen of the U.S., against his will and expressed desires.”⁹¹ But by the time Tower’s office received the letter, on January 26, 1962, the Soviets had informed the Oswalds their exit visas were approved. Oswald marked the event in his diary, Christmas Day, 1961: “It’s great (I think!).”⁹² Vladimir Semichastny, then chief of the KGB, was unequivocal as to why the Soviets agreed to grant him an exit visa: “We realized that Oswald was a useless man.” Yuriy Nosenko commented on the Soviet decision to grant Marina a visa: “There was no reason to keep her. She was not the daughter of a prominent family or a government official. She was not considered so wonderful herself …”⁹³

A little over a month after the news of Soviet approval, Marina gave birth to a daughter, June. Although Oswald had told no one at the factory but his friend Golovachev about Marina’s pregnancy, all his co-workers knew of the birth, congratulated him, and even gave him a box of baby clothes. As he concentrated on his daughter, his mania to return to the States subsided, and in February and March his regular flow of letters to the U.S. embassy dropped to only one.*

Although the Soviets had given their approval for the Oswalds to leave the country, the process for approving Marina’s U.S. immigration visa was still under way. After she interviewed with consul John McVickar at the embassy in July, he recommended to the State Department on August 28, 1961, that her visa application be approved.⁹⁴ His decision was prompted “principally because she was the wife of an American citizen.”⁹⁵†

The State Department conducted a security check on Marina through the CIA and FBI. Two months later, October 1961, State informed the U.S. embassy in Moscow that Marina was eligible for an immigrant visa. Despite this October approval, the State Department later gave Oswald a difficult time over the possibility that she might become a public charge once she was in the U.S. After considerable correspondence, all of which further embittered him about American bureaucracy, State decided to accept affidavits from Oswald and his mother’s Texas employer to guarantee Marina’s support in the U.S.⁹⁶ The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the final U.S. agency that had to approve Marina’s visa, did not receive her file from the State Department until October 1961. State told INS that it “believes it is in the interest of the U.S. to get Lee Harvey Oswald and his family out of the Soviet Union and on their way to this country soon. An unstable character, whose actions are entirely unpredictable, Oswald may well refuse to leave the USSR or subsequently attempt to return there if we should make it impossible for him to be accompanied from Moscow by his wife and child.”97 INS gave its final approval in May 1962.⁹⁸

A frequent misconception is that Marina and Lee had an easy and rapid repatriation, and that it is evidence of intelligence connections with one or both governments. In point of fact, their approval to come to the U.S. was not easily obtained from either government, nor was it speedy. Instead of providing evidence of conspiracy, it is a classic study of how bureaucracies strictly follow narrowly drafted regulations, mixed with some blunders and inefficiency. From the time Oswald visited the U.S. embassy in Moscow, it took nearly a year before he returned with his family to the States. That was well within the normal range. It took Marina six months to get an American visa, and since 1953, the average time for Soviet citizens seeking to immigrate had been between three and six months. The Soviet exit visas for both of them also took six months, with the average being four months. Oswald was frustrated by what seemed to him a snail’s pace. He frequently complained, blaming both Russian and American bureaucratic incompetence.

Several weeks after the INS approval, the State Department granted Oswald’s request for a repatriation loan so he could pay for transportation to the States. On June 1, he signed a promissory note for $435.71.⁹⁹*

On that same day, Oswald, Marina, and June left by train for Rotterdam, from where they had reserved passage on a ship to the U.S.100 The Zigers and Pavel Golovachev went to the train station to see them off. Before he left Minsk, Oswald handed his neighbor Mayya Gertsovich a note that said, “Build communism by yourselves! You do not even know how to smile like human beings here!”¹⁰¹ Marina also received some advice from her uncle, who warned her about the fickle Oswald. “He flits from side to side and is unhappy everywhere. Maybe he’ll go back and not like it there and then he’ll want to come back here. But he’ll never be allowed to come back. People are tired of nursing him over here.”¹⁰²

Even their return trip to America has prompted questions. Summers says, “The record of their journey is shot through with nagging inconsistencies.”¹⁰³ Marina’s passport was stamped at Helmstedt, West Germany, but Oswald’s passport had no stamp. Summers speculates that Oswald stopped over in West Berlin—without Marina—and then continued west on his own.¹⁰⁴ The divergence is because Berlin “had long served as an intelligence crossroads, and as a haven for operatives coming in from the cold.”¹⁰⁵ But a comparison of the visa stamps at border crossings shows the Oswalds entered and exited Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands together. They share the same visa stamps, with the exception that his passport is not marked on the entry to the West, at Helmstedt.¹⁰⁶ Marina’s passport, a Soviet document, would automatically be stamped at a crossing to the West. As for Oswald’s American passport, the decision to stamp it was at the discretion of the border guards. Moreover, Marina said Oswald was never out of her sight. “We traveled by train to Rotterdam [from the Soviet Union], and he didn’t leave, I mean there is no way you can leave anyway on the train. He was present all the time … except when he went, you know, for the bathroom and things like that.”¹⁰⁷ She testified to the House Select Committee that Lee was with her when they crossed Helmstedt. Senator Dodd asked her, “There is no question in your mind about that?” “Yes, sir, he was with me all the time.”*

During their nine-day voyage on the SS Maasdam, Marina recalls they did not often go on deck because she was poorly dressed and Oswald was ashamed of her. He was indifferent toward her for most of the journey, but occasionally they argued, with Marina again feeling he did not love her.108 They finally arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 13, 1962, in the midst of a heavy downpour. They were met by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society, which had been contacted by the State Department. He helped walk them through customs. Then, since the Oswalds only had $63 left, he put them in contact with the New York Department of Welfare, which found them a hotel room near Times Square. The next day, with a $200 wire transfer from his brother, Robert, they left by air for Texas.*

Oswald was severely dismayed at not attracting media attention on his arrival. He was as deflated as when the Russians initially ignored him after his defection. In Russia, he had boasted to Marina that a “whole bunch” of reporters would meet them in New York.¹⁰⁹ Marina recalls his face showed his dejection both in New York and again in Texas.¹¹⁰ Robert and his family met them at the Fort Worth airport. Robert recalled, “He seemed, perhaps the word is, disappointed, when there were no newspaper reporters around.… I believe his comment was something, ‘What, no photographer or anything?’”¹¹¹

Oswald wanted to tell the press that his return did not mean he had reversed himself and become pro-American. He wanted to announce his discovery that Russia was as bad as the U.S. Oswald later wrote his own questions and answers, the ones he had hoped to be asked.† Two are particularly revealing:

“7A Are you a communits? Yes have basically, allthough I hate the USSR and socialist system I still think marxism can work under different circumstances. 8. What are the othestanding differants between the USSR and USA? None …”112

When he had returned Oswald’s passport, consul Richard Snyder wrote the State Department: “Twenty months of realities of life in the Soviet Union have clearly had a maturing effect on Oswald. He stated frankly that he had learned a hard lesson the hard way and that he had been completely relieved of his illusions about the Soviet Union, at the same time that he acquired a new understanding and appreciation of the United States and the meaning of freedom.”¹¹³

Snyder had been fooled. In notes made during his return voyage to America, Oswald wrote: “But how many of you have tryed to find out the truth behind the cold-war clic’es!! I liv no man I, have lived under both systems, I have sought the answers and although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not. I despise the representatives of both systems weather they be socialist or cristan democrates, weath they be labor or conservative they are all products of the two systems”¹¹⁴ (emphasis and strikeout in original).

In a draft of a speech extremely critical of the United States, he said, “In returning to the U.S. I have done nothing more or less than select the lesser of two evils.”¹¹⁵

At twenty-two years of age, and angry over his Russian experience, Oswald began thinking beyond mere criticism. He wanted fundamental change and ruminated that a new world order would “become effective only after conflict between the two world systems leaves the world country without defense or foundation of government …”¹¹⁶ He speculated about the effects of anarchy: “I wonder what would happen it somebody was to stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the governments, but to the people, too the entire land and complete foundations of his socically.”¹¹⁷ His rebellious convictions against government and authority were slowly evolving toward violence and revolution.¹¹⁸

*Although called the Red Cross, it was not part of the international aid society of the same name. In his diary, Oswald wrote that he believed the money was authorized by the Soviet Interior Ministry to reward him for his anti-American statements.

†Oswald’s transfer to Minsk is sometimes cited as evidence that he had a special relationship with the Soviets. Some contend he was put to work in Shop Number 25, an experimental plant in a restricted area. But Shop Number 25 did not become a restricted plant for almost two years after Oswald left Russia (Izvestiya, August 11, 1992, p. 3). Summers also notes there was a Soviet intelligence school in Minsk, with the inference there is a connection with Oswald. Epstein believes that Oswald may have received Soviet training in propaganda and street demonstrations while there. Oswald’s KGB file, documenting every day of his life in Minsk, does not support such suppositions (Izvestiya, August 7, 8, 11, 13, 1992).

*Likhoy is Russian for “valiant” or “dashing” and was a play on the names Lee Harvey. Before his arrival in Minsk, the KGB external surveillance in Moscow had code-named Oswald Nalim, a Russian fish.

*Titovets made tape recordings of Oswald in order to help his own study of English. Titovets gave Oswald passages by Hemingway and Shakespeare, among others, to record on the tape. He also interviewed Oswald in improvised, mock dialogue. In one interview, Lee enthusiastically played the role of a killer.

TITOVETS:	“Will you tell us about your last killing?”
OSWALD:	“Well, it was a young girl under a bridge. She came in carrying a loaf of bread and I just cut her throat from ear to ear.”
TITOVETS:	“What for?”
OSWALD:	“Well, I wanted the loaf of bread of course.”
TITOVETS:	“And what do you think to be your most famous murder?”
OSWALD:	“Well, the time I killed eight men on the Bowery, on the sidewalk there. They were just standing there loafing around and I didn’t like their faces, so I just shot them all with a machine gun. It was very famous. All the newspapers carried the story.”

* The undated letter arrived at the American embassy on February 13. In it, Oswald referred to an earlier letter he said he had sent to the embassy, but none was ever received. When the Soviets intercepted his February letter, Oswald’s Red Cross subsidies were terminated. The only person he informed of his plans was his friend Alexander Ziger, who advised him not to tell any of his other acquaintances.

*Some mistakenly assume that since Oswald had defected, it was difficult for him to obtain permission to return to the U.S. But the process was routine. Records show that within two months of Oswald’s return, two other American defectors to Russia also returned. One of the Americans, Robert Webster, was an even more extreme case than Oswald in that Webster had successfully renounced his American citizenship. He was repatriated as a Soviet alien under the USSR’s immigration quota for 1962 and his application to return to the U.S. took less time than Oswald’s (The Washington Post, June 9, 1962, p. A7). By 1963, thirty-six defectors to Communist countries had come back to the U.S.

*During this six-week period, the KGB file, informants’ statements, and Oswald’s own writings confirm he stayed in his central Moscow hotel and worked on improving his Russian. For some, however, this period remains suspicious. Summers mistakenly writes: “There are no details of where the Russians kept Oswald for a period of at least six weeks, beginning around the end of November 1959.… During this early period Oswald was most probably interviewed by KGB officials, repeatedly and in depth.”

*Some cite a vacation she once took to visit an acquaintance. Marina’s friend lived in the same apartment complex as another American defector. But Marina had no contact with the other defector. Henry Hurt admits, “It could, of course, be mere coincidence …”

*Oswald told Marina he had once slept with a peasant girl, Nella, and “there was so much of her” that it made him physically sick. When he saw a girl he liked, he commented to Marina, “She’d suit me fine. I could feel all her bones.”

†When his radio broke, Oswald could not repair it, although his friends fixed it by adjusting a small plate. To KGB counterintelligence, that meant the former Marine did not even grasp the fundamentals of simple radio devices and could not have had any intelligence training.

‡The KGB file reveals that his fellow workers considered Oswald a poor shot when he failed to shoot a rabbit during his one hunting excursion. After returning to the U.S., Oswald complained to his brother, Robert, that the firing pin on his rifle was defective. “I went hunting with Lee plenty of times,” says Robert. “He was a good shot who always got his game.”

* Unknown to Oswald, Marina, frustrated by their unsatisfying sexual contact since her pregnancy, slept with a former suitor, Leonid, on the day Oswald had left for the embassy (McMillan, Marina and Lee, p. 129).

† Some question why Snyder approved Oswald based upon his answers on the carbon copy of the questionnaire. At the bottom of the form, four acts were listed that would indicate a person had forfeited his American citizenship. All the prohibitions related to actions in a foreign state, including swearing allegiance, serving in the armed forces or the government, or voting in an election. Next to these prohibitions were the words have or have not. On Oswald’s form, have not was apparently stricken, indicating he had committed one or more of the prescribed acts. In approving Oswald, therefore, it appeared that Snyder had bent the rules. The real explanation is more mundane—a typing error. According to Snyder, the strikeout is between the have and have not, and only on the carbon is it directly over the have not (WC Vol. V, pp. 282–83). The author tried to examine both the original and the carbon at the National Archives in 1993, but neither could be located by the archive’s staff. But, in any case, Snyder had Oswald fill out a supplementary questionnaire, and his more detailed answers showed he had not violated any of the disqualifications (CE 938; WC Vol. XVIII). In any conflict between the short form and the questionnaire, the longer answers control (WC Vol. V, pp. 359–60).

*Marrs repeats an old allegation by Epstein that Marina was issued a new birth certificate on July 19, 1961, raising the possibility the KGB had furnished her with fresh documents for her trip to America. Marina needed a birth certificate for the U.S. authorities, and the “new” one was merely an official copy of her original.

* Oswald’s frustration over the Soviet delay was evidently so great that he startled his KGB watchers by taking steps to build two small, rudimentary bombs. Some in the KGB thought Oswald might try to use the bombs to force the issue of his exit visas. But he abandoned his project shortly after receiving permission to emigrate.

* June’s birth showed Marina another unusual aspect of her husband. When Marina ran a fever and had too much breast milk, he offered to suck the milk. She was startled, but he convinced her it was “quite natural.” She was further surprised when he swallowed it instead of spitting it out as she expected.

†Since 1953, through the time of Marina’s pending application, more than eight hundred Russian relatives of American citizens had left the USSR for the U.S. A defector’s wife fell into that group.

* Oswald had unsuccessfully sought a grant of $1,000 from the International Rescue Committee of the Red Cross. The State Department loan, together with $200 he had saved, was almost the exact amount needed for train and sea travel to America, the cheapest form of transportation. Oswald was disgruntled that he could not travel home by aircraft.

A lookout card, a warning tag attached to a person’s passport file, should have been posted to Oswald’s when he received the loan, to make sure he repaid it. One was not placed in his file. After the assassination, the State Department’s legal adviser, Abram Chayes, admitted that it was a bureaucratic mistake, which some view as evidence of wrongdoing and even conspiracy.

Garrison charges the loan was a sham since a prerequisite was that Oswald’s loyalty to the U.S. had to be proven “beyond question.” But that was not even considered in his case. Instead, State Department files show the loan was approved under a special clause covering situations that are “damaging to the prestige of the United States Government.” The State Department held the clause applied to Oswald since his “unstable character and prior criticisms of the United States” made his presence in the USSR damaging to U.S. prestige.

*Summers and Marrs also allege that when the Oswalds arrived in Rotterdam, they stayed, without paying, at a house that may have been connected to U.S. intelligence. There is no evidence that happened, and Marina rebuts it. She testified to the Select Committee that they stayed in a cheap boarding-house, and Oswald paid for the stay.

* Garrison says Raikin was the secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, “a private anti-communist operation with extensive intelligence connections.” There is no citation for the allegation. Raikin was actually chosen because he was a native Russian, and the State Department, unsure of the quality of Oswald’s Russian, thought it best to have a translator meet Marina. Raikin stayed with the Oswalds only long enough to send them on to the New York Department of Welfare.

† Oswald wrote two sets of questions and answers, one truthful and one facetious. The answers listed above are the truthful ones.