5

“I’ll Never Go Back to That Hell”

Short on money, and without a job, Lee moved with Marina and June into Robert’s Fort Worth home. The brothers had a “tacit” agreement not to discuss politics, and Robert said they got along well, almost as though Lee had “not been to Russia.”1 Marina, who spoke no English,* was introduced to American novelties, like her first hair permanent and a pair of shorts that would have been scandalous in Russia. She was given a whirlwind tour of Dallas by Robert and his wife, Vada. Marguerite arrived Friday, the day after Marina and Lee settled in. She told Lee she intended to write a book about his defection, and they were arguing before the end of the weekend. “She thinks that she did it all,” Lee complained to Marina. “She thinks she’s the one who got us out.”²

Four days after arriving in Fort Worth, Oswald appeared at the office of a public stenographer, Mrs. Pauline Bates. He located Bates through the Yellow Pages and wanted her to type a manuscript from scraps of paper on which he had scribbled his recollections of the USSR. Oswald had smuggled the notes out of Russia, and told her he wished to publish them as a memoir.3* She was intrigued by the young man just returned from the Soviet Union and discounted her normal fees for him. For the next three days, Oswald sat in her office helping her decipher his writing. When Bates had typed ten pages, about a third of his notes, he said he was out of money, but turned down her offer of continuing the work for nothing. “No, I don’t work that way. I’ve got $10,” she recalled him saying. “And he pulled a $10 bill from his pocket and walked out.”⁴ About the three days they spent together, Bates said, “If you got ten words out of him at a time, you were doing good.”⁵ She also noticed that he never showed any emotion and “he had the deadest eyes I ever saw.”⁶

The manuscript, titled The Collective, is a dreary and pedestrian commentary on the lives of average Russian workers. Oswald’s discontent with the USSR is evident throughout. To obtain some feedback on his “memoirs,” he found Peter Gregory, a Russian-born petroleum engineer who worked part-time as a language teacher at the Fort Worth Public Library. Dressed in a poorly cut heavy flannel Russian suit, he visited Gregory twice at his office, not only to show his memoirs, but also to inquire about possible work as a translator. Through Gregory, Oswald’s presence became known to a local Russian community of emigres, most of them middle- or upper-middle-class, politically conservative, and staunchly anti-Communist. There were a couple of dozen families living between Fort Worth and Dallas, and most of them attended the area’s single Eastern Orthodox church. They were always curious about current conditions inside the USSR, and after Oswald met Gregory, the word quickly spread that an American who had lived there for a couple of years had returned with a young Russian wife and baby. Within a week, Gregory and his son, Paul, visited Marina and arranged for her to earn some money by giving Paul Russian-language lessons over the summer.

Members of the émigré community were not the only ones talking about the couple from Russia. Oswald was right that the local media would be interested in him. A week before he arrived in Fort Worth, the Star-Telegram had run a story titled “Ex-Marine Reported on Way Back from Russia,” based on information released by the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Several journalists called Oswald after he settled into Robert’s home, but he refused to be interviewed, still piqued because no one had met him at the airport. But he received another call during the first week that was more difficult to refuse. It was from the FBI. They wanted to see him at the Fort Worth office Tuesday, June 26.*

The FBI had opened a file on Oswald when he defected. Special agents John Fain and B. Tom Carter conducted the two-hour interview. According to Fain, the purpose of interviewing him was “to determine whether or not he had been contacted by the Soviet Intelligence Agencies, whether he had been given an assignment or not, whether they had made any deal with him, and whether … for permitting his wife to accompany him … the Soviets had demanded anything of him in return …”⁷ Fain found Oswald “kind of drawn up, and rigid.” When asked why he went to Russia, Oswald “got white around the lips and tensed up, and I understood it to be a show of a temper … and he stated he did not care to relive the past.”8* The agents questioned him on the contents of State Department reports about his activities in Russia. Oswald denied he had had any contacts with the KGB or that he had threatened to disclose military secrets, and even disavowed his attempt to renounce his citizenship.⁹ He also flatly disowned any effort on his part to become a Soviet citizen, and promised to inform the FBI if any Soviet agents approached him in America.

Fain was not entirely satisfied with these answers. He found Oswald’s demeanor “arrogant, cold, and inclined to be just a little insolent.”¹⁰ Carter thought Oswald was uncooperative and evasive.¹¹ Fain recommended he be interviewed again.¹²

Oswald was both furious and nervous about the confrontational interview with the FBI. He resented authority and its interference in his life. He did not tell Marina or his relatives about the meeting.

Just two days before the FBI interview, Oswald had hit Marina for the first time in one of their fights. He had been rude over the telephone to one of the local Russians, Gali Clark. At the dinner table with Robert and Vada, Oswald told Marina of the call, and she was angry with him. He kept smiling and told her in Russian that he did not want Robert to know they were fighting. When she walked away from the table, he rushed after her and had a cold look in his eyes she had never seen before.¹³ He slapped her hard around the face and threatened to kill her if she spoke a word to Robert or Vada. Marina was so stunned she ran from the house and wandered the neighborhood for two hours, wondering what to do. Since she spoke no English, she had to return to Robert’s house. It was the first time she ever feared Lee.¹⁴

Marina excused Lee’s outburst because she felt that without a high school diploma and with no job skills, he was under tremendous pressure to find work. To make things worse, his mother showed up again after he had been at Robert’s a month and announced she had given up her job and rented a small Fort Worth apartment that Marina and Lee could move into. She intended to live with them, sleeping in the living room and paying the rent. Lee was “not overjoyed” at the thought, Robert recalled, “but Mother had made up her mind, and when she made up her mind nobody could change it.”15 The Oswalds moved into Marguerite’s two-room apartment on July 14. Only three days later, after being referred by the Texas Employment Commission, Lee finally landed a job as a sheet-metal worker for the Louv-R-Pak division of Leslie Welding Company, a manufacturer of louvers and ventilators.¹⁶ He hated the menial work, and his foreman later remembered he never mixed with any of the other workers.¹⁷

Relationships in the small apartment quickly deteriorated.¹⁸ Lee, as usual, was very cool to his mother, but she now blamed Marina for alienating her son. She also suspected Marina really spoke more English than she indicated and speculated that her daughter-in-law, and maybe even her son, had become Russian spies. When Marina and Lee played a Russian version of tic-tac-toe, Marguerite worried they were passing secret codes. She began arguing with Marina, accusing her, “You took my son away from me!”¹⁹ Lee reacted by completely ignoring his mother, exacerbating a tense situation, and less than a month after they moved in with Marguerite, the Oswalds left. On the day Robert picked them up, August 10, Marguerite screamed and cried in front of the house, even chasing the car down the street as it drove away. Marina feared she might have a heart attack, but Lee coldly told her, “She’ll be all right. It’s not the first time.”²⁰

They moved into a bungalow at 2703 Mercedes Street.* Those who saw it described it as a “decrepit shack,” a “horrible” place to live.²¹ They had barely settled in when the FBI came to interview him again. On the evening of Thursday, August 16, agents John Fain and Arnold Brown drove to the end of the block on which Oswald lived and waited for him to return from work. At 5:30, as they saw him walking home, the agents slowly drove alongside. Fain rolled down the window and said, “Hi, Lee. How are you? Would you mind talking to us for a few minutes?”22 Oswald reluctantly got into the rear seat.*

The agents quizzed him for an hour. Fain noticed he had changed since the first interview, seven weeks earlier. He had “settled down … wasn’t as tense.… [and] he seemed to talk more freely with us.”²³ They covered the same questions as in their first meeting. Although Oswald still refused to say why he had defected to the USSR, he again promised to contact them if he heard from Soviet agents. Based upon his answers, together with information in reports from two confidential informants that Marina and Lee had nothing to do with the local Communist party, Fain recommended the case be closed. He recalled, “Even though he [Oswald] was arrogant and cold, from his answers, I couldn’t see any potential for danger or violence at that point.”²⁴ Since cases were easy to reopen, Fain had no compunction in closing the file.†

Oswald had no idea the FBI was essentially through with him. Instead, the second interview put him into a funk. He ate little at dinner that night and sullenly told Marina about the Bureau’s interest: “Now it’s begun. Because I’ve been over there [the USSR], they’ll never let me live in peace. They think anyone who’s been there is a Russian spy.”25 He began to wonder if he had made a mistake by coming home. Perhaps he should even go back to the Soviet Union. He wrote the Soviet embassy in Washington asking where he could obtain subscriptions to Pravda and Izvestiya, and requested the embassy send periodicals and bulletins published for the benefit of “your citizens living, for a time, in the U.S.A.”²⁶

Oswald’s reactions to the FBI interviews had an effect on his marriage as well. With Oswald more tense and withdrawn than usual, the arguments and his physical abuse of Marina increased. Their sexual activity was infrequent. Marina said: “I would say immediately after coming to the United States Lee changed. I did not know him as such a man in Russia. He helped me as before, but he became a little more of a recluse.… He was very irritable …”²⁷ Robert Oswald saw Marina with a black eye but did not say anything. Marguerite, who knew Lee was beating Marina, later defended her deceased son to the Warren Commission: “There may be times a woman needs to have a black eye.”²⁸

Paul Gregory had begun taking language lessons from her, and because of the deteriorating home life, Marina looked forward to their twice-a-week meetings.²⁹ Even in his brief contact with Oswald, Gregory realized he had a “bad temper,” was “mixed up,” and “seemed to be a small person that is always ready to flare up.”³⁰ Gregory once took the Oswalds on a tour of Dallas and, after passing through a wealthy neighborhood, had to endure a lecture from Lee about the horrors of capitalism. He told Gregory, “Well, I never want to be rich like that.”³¹

Gregory and other émigrés tolerated Oswald because they liked Marina and felt sorry for her predicament. At a dinner party on Saturday, August 25, the senior Gregorys invited the Oswalds for dinner. Also present were Anna Meller and George Bouhe, two other émigrés. Bouhe, a fifty-eight-year-old businessman originally from St. Petersburg, was the unofficial leader of the emigre community. He had hesitated about meeting a defector from the Soviet Union, but he wanted to hear from the Oswalds what was happening in Russia.

At the dinner party, no one discussed Lee’s politics or his defection. Since Marina had lived in Bouhe’s birthplace, she told him what she could about the city since his departure. Frail and caring constantly for her infant daughter, she evoked both sympathy and affection. As for Oswald, they found him well mannered but cold.32 In Russia, Oswald had, for a time, been the center of attention. The Soviets were initially fascinated to hear his stories about the U.S. But now the emigres’ interest in Russia was satisfied by Marina. They avoided his favorite subject, politics, and he had no use for them.

After the dinner party, Bouhe telephoned other emigres. Katya Ford remembered, “I had heard of them [the Oswalds] … from Mr. George Bouhe … who had told us that there was a young Russian girl came to Fort Worth.… And she had a baby and so forth.”³³ Soon, the emigres appeared regularly at the Oswalds’ residence, bringing Marina small gifts for June, as well as stocking her refrigerator and helping her get new clothes.

Their efforts seemed to challenge Oswald’s ability to care for his own family: “He passed a remark shortly after the second or third visit to their house,” recalled Bouhe, “when the ladies and I brought the clothes to Marina and such … that is where I saw him for the first time trying to show his displeasure over me.”³⁴ Bouhe had brought him two shirts. He refused them. “I don’t need any,” he said.³⁵ Another time he objected when Bouhe bought groceries for Marina. Elena Hall, another emigree, was at the Oswald home and says he got “real mad” and yelled at Bouhe and Marina.³⁶ Anna Meller, another Russian, also saw Oswald get “mad [as] people tried to help Marina.… He was against everything …”³⁷ Once Oswald came home when Bouhe arrived with a playpen for the baby. “He was furious,” Meller recalled, “why we did all that and buy all that and he said, ‘I don’t need [it]’; he was in a rage …”³⁸

It was evident among the emigres there were problems with Lee Oswald. Katya Ford told others that he was “unstable.… Something was rather wrong with the man.”³⁹ “[He was] a mental case.… We all thought that at some point.”⁴⁰ Meller, who had seen him explode at Bouhe, thought he was “absolutely sick. I mean mentally sick; you could not speak with him about anything.”41 The most authoritative opinion probably belonged to Bouhe, who felt Oswald “had a mind of his own, and I think it was a diseased one.”⁴²

The Russian community also became disturbed by Oswald’s politics. Paul Gregory reported that during his Russian lessons, Lee sat on the sofa reading Lenin and later praised both Khrushchev and Castro.⁴³ Meller, on her third visit, noticed Das Kapital and Communist literature on a small table. “It caught my eye and I was real upset,” she remembered.⁴⁴ Bouhe saw an assortment of Communist books, including works by Marx and Lenin. He was “aghast,” and flipped open the covers and noticed some were Fort Worth Public Library books.⁴⁵

All of this only created more sympathy among the emigres for Marina. They thought that it would punish Marina if they cut him out of the community, and none of them wanted to do that. Gossip had already spread that Lee beat Marina. Anna Meller noticed Marina had “a terrible blue spot over her eye.” Marina told Meller she had walked into the door during the middle of the night, but Meller knew the “girl [was] trying to hide something …”⁴⁶ George Bouhe also saw Marina with a black eye, but when he asked what happened, she told him that Lee hit her.⁴⁷ He was shocked, and discussed what to do with the other Russians. Max Clark, an attorney, remembered his advice to his fellow Russians: “I said, ‘In my opinion he is a defector and you know what he is. You should not hold that against the girl Marina. She’s having a hard time. He’s beating her up, everything is strange to her, she can’t speak the language, I don’t think you should ostracize her because of Oswald.’ Most of them had absolutely no use for Oswald and they discussed all the time [how] they hated to let this girl get beat up and kicked around by this Oswald without at least trying to look after her.”⁴⁸

It was about this time, in mid-September, that Oswald first met another of the emigres, someone on the fringe of the Russian group, George de Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt simply stopped at the Mercedes Street apartment and introduced himself. He remembered the Oswalds lived in “the slums of Ft. Worth”; their house was “very poorly furnished, decrepit, on a dusty road.”49 Marina greeted him with a baby who appeared sickly: “It was kind of a big head, bald big head, looked like Khrushchev, the child—looked like an undergrown Khrushchev.”⁵⁰ He admitted his initial attraction to the couple was out of sympathy.⁵¹ But eventually he was the only person who grew to like the introverted youngster. “I liked the fellow, and I pitied him all the time,” said de Mohrenschildt. As opposed to many others who met Oswald, de Mohrenschildt never found him arrogant. Because he was nice to Oswald, he saw a side no one else did. “There was something charming about him, there was some—I don’t know. I just liked the guy—that is all.”⁵²

De Mohrenschildt and Oswald seemed a most unlikely pair of friends. Oswald had a ninth-grade education, was humorless and introverted, and, at the age of twemy-two, had a provincial view of the world despite his time in Japan and Russia. For most people, it was difficult to get more than a few sentences out of him during a conversation, and he disliked socializing. De Mohrenschildt, an oil geologist, was a handsome six-foot-two-inch, fifty-one-year-old sportsman and adventurer who had been involved in diverse business ventures on five continents. Perennially tanned, he was a womanizer and partygoer who also happened to hold numerous university degrees and had the right to call himself a baron since he was born into an aristocratic Russian family. Married four times, friends of the Bouvier family, including the parents of Jacqueline Kennedy, he was loud and boisterous, able to drink heavily without ever showing the effect, and had a wild sense of humor. De Mohrenschildt made a lasting impact on all who met him.

Why would the aristocratic baron waste his time in a friendship with Lee Oswald? There is also the question of de Mohrenschildt’s alleged intelligence connections—that he might have controlled Oswald for the CIA (or, depending on the theory, maybe for the KGB).* Summers says there was “speculation” that de Mohrenschildt had worked for the Nazis during World War II, while he claimed he worked for French intelligence against the Germans.⁵³ Following a 1957 geological survey in Yugoslavia, the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division (DCD) interviewed him.* The DCD agent, J. Walton Moore, liked him and contacted him on several other occasions after de Mohrenschildt’s extensive trips abroad. Summers postulates that de Mohrenschildt monitored Oswald for the CIA, at Moore’s request.⁵⁴ De Mohrenschildt himself said that he asked Moore in 1962 if it was all right to know Oswald, and Moore told him that Oswald was “a harmless lunatic.”⁵⁵ But that seems unlikely because Moore apparently did not see or speak to de Mohrenschildt after 1961, more than a year before Oswald even returned to the U.S.⁵⁶

A closer look at de Mohrenschildt reveals understandable, rather than sinister, motivations for his friendship with Oswald. Although extremely different on the surface, the two men had a similar rebellious streak that often made them outsiders. De Mohrenschildt liked being provocative. Emigres remember that if he was talking to someone who was a right-winger, he advocated Communism, and in front of leftists, he praised fascism.⁵⁷ He knew his friends the Voshinins hated Hitler, so he constantly greeted them with a “Heil Hitler.” At a local Dallas social club, whose members included some of the city’s most prominent Jewish businessmen, he gave a speech where he praised the Nazi SS chieftan Heinrich Himmler.⁵⁸ Katya Ford said he was “an oddball … [who] was always doing something unusual.” George Bouhe said he came “from an excellent family … [but is] a nonconformist, meaning if you invited him to formal [black-tie] dinner, he might arrive there in a bathing suit and bring a girl friend which is not accepted.”⁵⁹ Sometimes de Mohrenschildt dropped into parties uninvited, bare-chested and without shoes.⁶⁰ He and his wife, Jeanne, often walked Dallas streets, or drove their convertible, attired only in bathing suits, even during the winter months.⁶¹ Paul Raigorodsky, a friend of de Mohrenschildt, said he acted like an immature adolescent, “liable to do anything,” and would “never grow old.”⁶² Igor Voshinin found him “neurotic,” “extremely bitter … toward life,” and “absolutely unpredictable.”63 Mrs. Voshinin said he was constantly trying to pose as “a big shot” and she normally discounted 30 to 40 percent of what he said because of exaggeration, and some 90 percent of his wife’s stories.

Instead of being the aristocratic baron portrayed in many books, totally at odds with the lowly Oswald, it is evident that de Mohrenschildt shared with Oswald an outcast’s perspective on life. And the politics of both de Mohrenschildt and his wife was another common bond with Oswald. Not only were the de Mohrenschildts aggressive atheists,⁶⁴ but Igor Voshinin considered both of them leftists.⁶⁵ Declan Ford, the husband of emigree Katya Ford, said de Mohrenschildt had “a reputation for being a leftwing enthusiast …”⁶⁶ In his own Warren Commission testimony, de Mohrenschildt admitted he was politically the furthest left of the Dallas Russians.⁶⁷ He said that Communism “is a system that can work and works, and possibly for a very poor man, and a very undeveloped nation it may be a solution.… I have seen through my life that communism in certain places has developed into a livable type of an economy, a way of life.”⁶⁸

Oswald took to de Mohrenschildt as he had no other person. Marina said he quickly became Lee’s best friend.⁶⁹ De Mohrenschildt was his mentor, almost a political and social guide whom Oswald respected. Oswald had never had anyone of such status pay attention to him. He relished the opportunity to talk to someone he viewed as his intellectual equal. And de Mohrenschildt cultivated Oswald by doing something few had ever done—he was attentive to him. “He [Oswald] was a fellow who needed attention,” de Mohrenschildt later said. “If somebody expressed an interest in him, he blossomed, absolutely blossomed. If you asked him some questions about him, he was just out of this world.… I think that is his main characteristic. He wanted people to be interested in him, not in Marina.”⁷⁰ While the rest of the emigres fawned over Marina and shunned Oswald, de Mohrenschildt had time for both, especially Lee. He noticed Oswald was egocentric, and “that is probably the reason he was clinging to me.… He would call me. He would try to be next to me—because let’s face it, I am a promoter and a salesman. So I know how to talk to people.… I am interested in them. And he appreciated that in me. The other people considered him, well, he is just some poor, miserable guy, and disregarded him.”71

De Mohrenschildt, of course, also noted less admirable sides of Oswald’s nature. “He was not particularly nice with her [Marina],” he noted. “He didn’t kiss her. It wasn’t a loving husband.… He was just indifferent with her.”* As he talked with Oswald about politics and social issues, he discovered not only an atheist and “idealistical Marxist,” but someone who desired power.⁷² “One conversation I had with him—I asked him, ‘Would you like to be a commissar in the United States,’ just teasing him. And he said—he sort of smiled—you could see that it was a delightful idea. To me, it was a ridiculous question to ask. But he took me seriously.”⁷³ De Mohrenschildt said Oswald “was a semi-educated hillbilly,” and thought he was “an unstable individual, [and] mixed-up.”⁷⁴ When asked after the assassination if Oswald could have been an intelligence agent, de Mohrenschildt dismissed the thought: “I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important.”⁷⁵

De Mohrenschildt was the one bright spot for Oswald during his first months in the U.S. The strain continued in his marriage, he disliked the emigres, and he thought his job was demeaning. Oswald wanted a change, and the opportunity came in early October. Several of the emigres, and Marguerite, dropped by on a weekend. Oswald said that he was behind in his rent and complained he couldn’t find a higher-paying job. They advised him that Dallas would have better prospects than Fort Worth.⁷⁶ Before the day had finished, Elena Hall invited Marina and June to stay in her home while Oswald looked for work in Dallas. (He later told Marina he was discharged from Leslie Welding, but instead he just failed to appear after Tuesday, October 9.) Marina and June moved to Hall’s home, while Oswald went to Dallas looking for work.†

When Elena Hall first met Marina, she had noticed “black and blue over half of her face and I didn’t ask at that time …” But when Marina moved into Hall’s home, she inquired, “‘What was that on your face?’ And she told me that he beat her.”77 During the following week Marina confided in Hall as she had to no one since arriving in America. Hall learned that Oswald was “cruel to her, and they would argue for nothing, just nothing. And he would beat her all the time.”⁷⁸ Marina seemed relieved to be able to talk about her problems. Living in a strange country, unable to speak the language, and without her family, she felt trapped. Now she told Hall of how “cold” Lee was to her, and that she never wanted another child with him. Marina admitted they “very seldom” had sex, and concluded Lee was “not a man … not a complete man.”⁷⁹ On October 16, Hall took Marina to an Eastern Orthodox church in Dallas to baptize June. Marina assumed Lee would oppose it, and decided to do it before they reunited. Two days later, Hall was hospitalized from an auto accident. Over the next two weeks, Oswald spent weekends at Hall’s house with Marina and June.

Both de Mohrenschildt and Bouhe tried to find work for the unskilled Oswald. But even with their wide business contacts, they were unable to help. Oswald scored well on tests given by the Texas Employment Commission, indicating aptitude for clerical work. Knowing he needed money badly, Helen Cunningham, a counselor in the commission’s clerical and sales division, decided to get him any job she could find.⁸⁰ She sent him first to an architect’s firm to be a messenger, but he was not hired. On October 11, she referred Oswald to Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall Co., a graphic-arts company, to fill the post of a photoprint trainee. He was hired, and was delighted since he had a longstanding interest in photography. He began work the following day, October 12, at $1.35 an hour.

His employment at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall has created considerable controversy. The company prepared advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and trade publications and was also under contract to the Army’s Map Service. Jim Garrison said that Oswald thus “had access to a variety of classified materials.”81 Oswald did write the term micro-dots next to Jaggars’s listing in his address book.⁸²

But Jaggars’s work for the government was almost entirely unclassified.⁸³ The small percentage that was confidential involved the setting of words, letters, and figures for maps, but at no time did the company have any idea of what the material correlated to—the actual maps were never at Jaggars.⁸⁴ The employees who worked in the map section had security clearances. Oswald did not have one, did not work with the Army maps, and never had access to that section.⁸⁵ Jaggars never did work involving microdots.⁸⁶

Garrison is correct that Oswald learned a good deal about photographic techniques at Jaggars, but mistakenly assumes it was for an intelligence employer. Oswald worked hard, but his efforts were part of a fantasy world he slowly invented, one that made it increasingly difficult for him to differentiate reality from illusion. When he lived in Russia, he once told Marina he “would love a life” of a spy. “I’d love the danger,” he told her.⁸⁷ He also daydreamed about being a secret agent.⁸⁸ “I think that he had a sick imagination,” Marina recalled. “I already considered him to be not quite normal …”⁸⁹ Back in the States, he digested a steady stream of Ian Fleming espionage novels. One of the emigres, Lydia Dymitruk, once noticed a book, How to Be a Spy, on his living room table.⁹⁰ According to his brother, Robert, Lee loved intrigue and mystery.⁹¹*

At Jaggars, Oswald set out to fulfill his fantasy world. He asked another co-worker, Dennis Ofstein, to teach him advanced photographic techniques. He constantly requested overtime, and tried to stay late on many days to practice with the plant’s equipment. At first, he tried his talents at making calling cards for himself and de Mohrenschildt.⁹² Then he created samples of his work and sent them to two leftist publications to which he had subscribed shortly after his return to the U.S., The Worker, the Communist party newspaper, and The Militant, the Socialist Workers party paper. He offered his services to both. The Worker thanked him and said it would occasionally call on him.93 Oswald tried to join the Socialist Workers party, but it did not have a Texas branch.

After months of honing his skills, and enrolling in an evening typing course, he was ready to try more sophisticated applications.⁹⁴ Although there is no direct evidence, it appears likely that it was at Jaggars, where he had the necessary equipment, that he could produce poor forgeries of a Selective Service Notice of Classification and Marine Corps Certificate of Service, both in the name of Alek Hidell.⁹⁵* It was a play on the Russians’ nickname for him, Alik, and the surname of a Marine with whom he had served, Heindel. The document experts who examined the forgeries said Oswald had made photographic reproductions of his own Selective Service and Certificate of Service cards, blotted out the information he did not want, made new copies on which he typed the Hidell data, and prepared another print as the final copy. Oswald feared the FBI had him under surveillance, but he felt safe using Hidell and the supporting documents whenever he thought his own name might attract government scrutiny that he wished to avoid. †

From his instructional book How to Be a Spy, Oswald began to adopt the trappings of the espionage world in which he fantasized himself. He rented a post-office box, and in Dallas, in the fall of 1962, began a habit that was to carry through during his later stay in New Orleans, the occasional use of false addresses.* In his job applications before he landed the Jaggars work, he used Bouhe and Meller as character references, without their knowledge, and he gave a false address for Bouhe.⁹⁶ He later told Bouhe he was temporarily staying at the Carolton Boarding House in Oak Cliff, but records show he was never there. It was part of what Bouhe later said was Oswald’s “incessant mysterymaking.”⁹⁷

On Friday, November 2, Oswald called Marina and told her he had found an apartment for them at 604 Elsbeth Street, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. The next day, the Oswalds, with the help of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter, Alexandra, and son-in-law, Gary Taylor, packed their meager belongings at Hall’s house. Alex Kleinlerer, who also arrived to help, witnessed yet another outburst aimed at Marina. Oswald noticed Marina’s skirt zipper was not completely closed. He summoned her “in a commanding tone of voice just like … you would call a dog,” recalled Kleinlerer.⁹⁸ He screamed at her in Russian and, while she had the baby in her arms, slapped her twice, hard across the face. Kleinlerer recalls, “I was very much embarrassed and also angry but I had long been afraid of Oswald and I did not say anything.”⁹⁹

On Sunday, November 3, the Oswalds moved to Elsbeth Street. Marina, who called it a pigsty, so hated the new apartment that when she first saw it she almost refused to move in. The Taylors, who had come along in the rented van, thought the place was terrible. But Oswald persuaded her to try it—they could fix it up, and it was three rooms for only $68 a month. They started fighting almost immediately. On Monday, November 5, they had a violent argument and Marina ran from the house. From a nearby gas station, she called Anna Meller and, sobbing, pleaded for help. The Mellers paid for a taxi to bring her to their one-bedroom apartment. Marina arrived with June, and “was very nervous … shaking.” She told the Mellers that Oswald had beaten her. The following day, the emigres held a conference regarding Marina’s predicament. Bouhe told her that if she left Lee, the community would help her, but if she went back, she was on her own. “I’ll never go back to that hell,” she promised herself.100

De Mohrenschildt—probably the only person who could even have attempted it—drove to the Elsbeth Street apartment the next morning to fetch Marina and June’s belongings. Lee greeted his friend by telling him, “By God, you are not going to do it [move Marina]. I will tear all her dresses and I will break all the baby things.”¹⁰¹ De Mohrenschildt got angry and said, “If you don’t behave, I will call the police.” Oswald threatened him in return, “I will get even with you.” It was the first time de Mohrenschildt had ever seen him angry, but it drove de Mohrenschildt to even greater fury. Eventually, Oswald “submitted to the inevitable.” Before de Mohrenschildt finished packing Marina’s goods, Oswald even helped. De Mohrenschildt again showed his affinity for Oswald by later being the only person to take his side in the marital abuse: “Having had many wives, I could see his point of view. She was annoying him all the time—‘Why don’t you make some money?,’ why don’t they have a car, why don’t they have more dresses, look at everybody else living so well, and they are just miserable flunkies. She was annoying him all the time. Poor guy was going out of his mind.”¹⁰²* According to de Mohrenschildt, Marina sometimes ridiculed Oswald by saying, “He sleeps with me just once a month, and I never get any satisfaction out of it.”103

After five days with the Mellers, during which time a doctor examined her and found she was undernourished, Marina left for the larger home of Katya and Declan Ford. Three days later, Oswald began telephoning. Marina was initially hesitant to speak to him, but Katya Ford said Marina finally took the phone to tell him “not to call on her again, and not to bother, she was not going to return to him.”¹⁰⁴ Marina confessed to the Fords how badly Lee mistreated her and told Katya that she originally “felt sorry for Oswald because everybody hated him, even in Russia.”¹⁰⁵ There was talk of divorce. After a week with the Fords, Marina and June moved to the home of an emigre couple, Frank and Valentina Ray. That same day, Oswald called Mrs. Ray and asked if he could come to their house and visit Marina. She acquiesced. He arrived in the late afternoon, and Marina and Lee went into a guest bedroom and spoke for an hour. Oswald begged her to return. “He cried, and you know a woman’s heart,” Marina recalled. “He said he didn’t care to live if I did not return.” Marina relented. Before leaving the Rays’, the Oswalds stayed for dinner. Lee engaged Frank Ray in a discussion on economics, and eventually gave Ray a lecture about the shortfalls of capitalism. “My husband just came in huffing, puffing, and said he never met anybody dumber in his life, doesn’t understand simple economics or how anything works in this country,” recalled Valentina Ray. “He considered him a complete idiot.”¹⁰⁶

The reunion was not a happy one. Within days, they were fighting again. “It seems to me that it was at that time that Lee began to talk about his wanting to return to Russia,” remembered Marina. “I did not want that and it is why we had quarrels.”¹⁰⁷ Although he now liked his job, he did not get along with most of his co-workers, had completely alienated the local Russian community, and had concluded, according to Marina, that “it was very hard for him here [in the U.S.].”¹⁰⁸ He took his frustrations out on her. Mrs. Mahlon Tobias, a next-door neighbor of the Oswalds, remembered there was an “awful lot of trouble.”¹⁰⁹ As the apartment complex’s manager, Tobias’s husband often listened to other tenants complaining they could hear thumping sounds “as if Mrs. Oswald was hitting the floor.”110 Tobias had to replace a window after Oswald smashed it when shoving Marina around the rooms, and another time rushed to their apartment when a neighbor excitedly reported, “I think that he’s really hurt her this time.”¹¹¹ Marina, with a black eye and bruised cheek, answered the door clutching her housecoat.¹¹²

Marina admitted that Lee became more violent as the weeks passed in Dallas, at times being “brutal” and “cruel.”¹¹³ She told de Mohrenschildt that Oswald threatened to kill her.¹¹⁴ He beat her if he caught her smoking.¹¹⁵ He punched and slapped her one night when she had not drawn his bath.¹¹⁶ Marina was even more distraught because now she had lost the support of the emigres by returning to him. “George Bouhe said he was not going to help them anymore,” recalled Katya Ford. “He was through, since Marina, he tried to help her very hard, and she did not hold her word about not going back to him. So he said since she went back, so now it is her problem.”¹¹⁷ Oswald still refused to teach her English, and that made her feel more dependent on him. “And I did not have any choice, because he was the only person that I knew and I could count on,” she said, “the only person in the United States.”¹¹⁸

Toward the close of 1962, the Oswalds’ only remaining friends were the de Mohrenschildts. Jeanne told Katya Ford that “she felt it was their duty now since everybody else dropped them and they needed help.”¹¹⁹ But even their visits were less frequent, down to every other week.¹²⁰ For Thanksgiving, Oswald tried to break out of the isolation by reaching out to his own family. Marina, Lee, and June went to Robert and Vada’s house for the holiday, and Lee saw and spoke to John Pic for the first time in ten years.¹²¹ It was the last time Pic ever saw him, and Robert would not see Lee again until after the assassination.

De Mohrenschildt brought the embattled couple to a December 28 celebration of the Russian New Year at the Fords’ house. For the provocative de Mohrenschildt, it was an ideal way to crash the party. They arrived late in the evening, and George Bouhe recalled, “I could almost hear a gasp among some of the people who were around me.”¹²² Marina tried to mingle, but no one was warm to her. Oswald spent most of the night talking to Yaeko Okui, a Japanese woman who had been brought to the party by Lev Aronson, the first cellist of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Oswald talked to her about Japan and briefly discussed economics with Aronson. After the party, Aronson commented, “My God, what an idiot that is.”123

On New Year’s Eve, Oswald went to bed at 10:00 P.M., leaving Marina alone, sobbing in the bathroom. That night she wrote an old boyfriend in Russia, complaining how Lee had changed, that she was lonely, and that she wished she had married him instead. The letter was returned within a week for insufficient postage and Oswald discovered it. He was enraged and again battered her.¹²⁴ “I’ll never trust you again,” he told her. Marina’s future letters had to be approved by Lee before he gave her postage money.

One note that had his full approval arrived at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., at the end of the year. It was a holiday card written in Russian. It wished the embassy staff New Year’s greetings and wishes for “health, success and all of the best.” The card was signed “Marina and Lee Oswald.”¹²⁵

*Through the assassination, seventeen months later, Marina understood and spoke very little English. Despite the prodding of acquaintances and his family, Oswald steadfastly refused to teach her, claiming he was afraid he would lose his weak mastery of Russian.

* The notes he had Bates transcribe were in addition to the writing he kept in his diary. On the application for Albert Schweitzer College, Oswald listed his vocational interest: “To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.” He also told a reporter in Moscow that he wanted to write about the Soviet Union. But five months after having Bates type the notes, the fickle Oswald told an acquaintance that he had no intent to publish his memoirs, as they were not meant for people to read.

* For years the CIA officially denied that it debriefed Oswald. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that while the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division considered interviewing him, it finally decided against it, since he was of “marginal importance.” Between 1958 and 1963, the CIA did not automatically debrief returning defectors, instead allowing the FBI to report significant results from its interviews. Of the twenty-two American defectors who returned to the U.S. during those five years, the CIA only interviewed four, and all interviews related to particular intelligence matters. However, in 1993, documents discovered at the National Archives indicated that the Domestic Contact Division, through a CIA employee, Andy Anderson, had probably debriefed Oswald in 1962. As of early 1994, neither the interview notes nor Anderson had been located. Yet other CIA employees confirmed they knew of the debriefing and those familiar with its contents described it as innocuous, showing that Oswald knew nothing about Soviet intelligence. After the death of JFK, the CIA evidently feared that any pre-assassination contact with Oswald might be embarrassing and therefore denied the existence of the file. As discussed further in Chapter 17, the desire to protect their reputations led both the CIA and the FBI to often hide or destroy the extent of their early contacts to Oswald, actions that were later misinterpreted by critics as the cover-up of a murder conspiracy.

* Unknown to the FBI agents, Oswald was afraid his answers would be used against him in a criminal prosecution. Some contend that Oswald must have had U.S. government backing, since the Justice Department never charged him with any crime. But there was no evidence he ever gave military information to the Soviets—there was only his threat to do so when he first defected. His unsubstantiated assertion was not enough to build a case against him.

* When Marguerite visited them at their new apartment, Lee ordered Marina not to let his mother into the house. Marina refused to obey him. On one occasion, after she had let his mother in, he exploded and slapped Marina about the face and head. Marguerite noticed her black eye, and asked Lee about it. He told her, “Mother, that is our affair” (WC Vol. I, p. 140).

* The agents had decided not to interview Oswald at work for fear it might cost him his job. Fain later said he did not want to upset Oswald’s wife by talking to him in the house, so the car was the only alternative. FBI agents sometimes talk to informants in their cars. But the FBI agents parked the car directly in front of Oswald’s house and conducted the interview in full view of the neighborhood, not a very effective means of protecting an alleged informant. The House Select Committee, which reviewed the question of whether Oswald was ever an FBI informant, concluded there was no evidence the FBI even considered it, much less proposed it to Oswald. In spite of this, Robert Groden flatly claimed in his 1993 book: “He [Oswald] became an official FBI informant beginning in September 1962.”

† After the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover was furious with the Bureau’s handling of the case. Seventeen agents were secretly reprimanded for the preassassination investigation of Oswald. When some of the agents protested to Hoover that Oswald did not meet the criteria for the FBI’s security index, he replied “no one in full possession of all his faculties” could make such a claim. Hoover believed that agents with early contact to Oswald too willingly accepted his word that he was not in touch with Soviet agents or subversive elements and, at the very least, he should have been the subject of a more rigorous investigation. But Hoover kept this criticism private since he feared its disclosure would hurt the Bureau’s reputation.

* The KGB informed this author in 1992 that it had no file on de Mohrenschildt or his wife, Jeanne, indicating neither had worked for it.

* De Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the Domestic Contact Division is not evidence of a relationship with the CIA. The DCD was an overt CIA branch and annually interviewed over twenty-five thousand U.S. travelers who visited Communist-bloc countries during the cold war.

* Although de Mohrenschildt later speculated whether Oswald’s lack of attention to Marina was because he was homosexual, he concluded that instead he was asexual.

†He stayed at the YMCA at 605 North Ervay for part of the time he was in Dallas, but thought it too expensive at $2.25 a night (WR, pp. 718–19). Near the YMCA, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, there are many small rooming houses, where owners rent rooms at daily or weekly rates. Although he probably stayed at one of those houses, he never told Marina which one.

* Robert recalled that as a youngster, Lee’s favorite television program was I Led Three Lives, about an FBI informant who posed as a spy. “Lee’s imagination and love of intrigue was a lot like Mother’s,” he recalled. “She’s always had a wild imagination and I think it influenced Lee’s view of the world. Even now, she still sees a spy behind every door and tree” (Robert Oswald, Lee: A Portrait, p. 47).

* The signature of Alek J. Hidell on the notice of classification was later determined by handwriting experts to be Oswald’s, and document experts concluded that the forgeries “did not require great skill” and only an elementary knowledge of photography.

† Oswald also apparently altered his Uniformed Services Identification and Privilege Card (DD-1173), issued on the date he was discharged from the Marines, September 11, 1959. That card granted some medical and PX privileges. Since the 1960s, a DD-1173 has only been issued to reservists if they suffered an injury while on active duty, or were a civilian employee overseas. Although some critics try to attach importance to the card by questioning why it was issued to Oswald, they usually omit that such cards were routinely issued to reservists through most of 1959, the year of Oswald’s discharge. That Oswald was given such a card is more evidence that he had no relation to any U.S. intelligence agency, none of which could afford to risk exposing an undercover agent with a military privileges card valid for three years. Oswald used his DD-1173 to apply for his original passport, and it was his best legitimate form of identification (he did not have a driver’s license). It appears he later changed the card’s photo to one taken of him in Minsk, the same one he put on his forged Hidell Selective Service Notice of Classification. The DD-1173 also has an added stamped date, “October 23 [or 28] 1963,” as well as “JUL,” both of which give the appearance of extending the expiration date of December 7, 1962. Since the dates are clumsily stamped within a circle, some have interpreted them as part of a postmark, but they appear to have been done with Oswald’s cheap rubber-stamping kit. Since the original card is now in such poor condition, it is impossible to definitely settle forgery questions.

* As for his post-office boxes, Oswald could have been following the Communist Fair Play for Cuba Committee dictum that “a P.O. Box is a must … to guarantee the continued contact with the national [headquarters] even if an individual should move or drop out” (WC, Lee Exhibit 3).

* In de Mohrenschildt’s first marriage, his wife successfully sued on several grounds, including his physical cruelty to her. Regarding his statement that Marina nagged Lee, Marina told the author, “It’s a lie. I never asked Lee for those types of material things. They weren’t important to me then or now. All I kept asking him was to stay in work, because we had so little money, we couldn’t even afford to buy milk for June sometimes.”