— 8 —

Journey to Moscow

Less than three weeks after his marriage, in a letter postmarked May 16, 1961, Lee Harvey Oswald wrote for the third time to the American embassy in Moscow.¹ “… I wish to make it clear,” he said in the demanding tone of his earlier letters,

that I am asking not only for the right to return to the United States, but also for a full guarantee’s that I shall not, under any circumstance’s, be persecuted for any act pertaining to this case.… Unless you think this condition can be met, I see no reason for a continuance of our correspondence. Instead, I shall endeavour to use my relatives in the United States, to see about getting something done in Washington.

Oswald repeated his reluctance to come to Moscow for an interview: “I do not care to take the risk of getting into a [sic] awkward situation unless I think it worthwhile.” And he informed the embassy that he had gotten married. “My wife is Russian … and is quite willing to leave the Soviet Union with me and live in the United States.” He said, moreover, that he would not leave Russia unless arrangements were made for his wife to leave at the same time. “So with this extra complication,” he wrote, “I suggest you do some checking up before advising me further.”

At least two events may have crystallized Oswald’s resolve to return to the United States. Early in May, just after his marriage, he received a letter from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow rejecting his application for admission. It meant to Oswald that the road to a higher education in Russia was closed to him. It spelled the end of his hopes of escape from the dreary, provincial town of Minsk. He was doomed to remain a factory worker forever. So keen was Oswald’s disappointment that he did not tell Marina about the rejection until months later, and when he did tell her, he was still so disappointed that she got the impression that the wound was fresh.

On May 5, probably on the same day he learned that his application to attend Lumumba University had been denied, Oswald wrote a letter to his brother Robert in Fort Worth. He announced matter-of-factly that he had married but said nothing about wanting to come home. Nevertheless, Robert rightly took the letter as a signal that his brother had tired of life in Russia. He wrote a letter in reply, and they resumed their correspondence. In a later letter Oswald confided that he wanted to return to the United States but doubted that it would be possible. He also wrote a letter to his mother, the first in a year and a half.

A second disappointment came two weeks after his marriage when Oswald was excluded from the bus excursion to Leningrad. He often complained to friends about the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union. Apparently, he now felt that the many privileges he received as a foreigner were outweighed by the restrictions that were placed on him, for only a day or so later, he resumed his correspondence with the American embassy. As in the case of Ella Germann, a rejection seemed to demand an act of rejection in return. It was a response by Oswald that was to recur again and again.

Alik still had said nothing to Marina about his desire to return to the United States, despite the statement in his letter to the embassy that she was willing to leave Russia with him. It was, under the circumstances, an irresponsible statement for him to make. Fearful of what the Soviet and the American reactions to his request might mean for him, he was unconcerned about what such a declaration, made through the open mails where it could be seen by Soviet officials, might mean for Marina—pressure on her and perhaps even danger for her family. In fact, he did not tell Marina of his intentions until five or six weeks after he wrote to the embassy.

It was an evening late in June, and Marina and Alik were taking a walk after dinner. They passed several lighted storefronts and saw nothing they wanted to buy. “In America,” Alik said tentatively, “the storefronts are huge. They’re all lit up, and you can find anything you want inside. If I were able to go back, would you come?”

“But you told me you couldn’t,” Marina said.

“If I tried?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You’re trying to trick me,” Marina said. “You want to see if I married you to go to America. That’s enough of your nonsense now.”

But that was not the end of it. In bed that night, gazing up at the ceiling, Alik asked, “You mean that if I go, you’ll stay?”

Marina sat upright in bed. “Are you kidding?”

“I’m not kidding, Marina. I’m serious.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Marina said. But he persisted, and she promised to think it over.

Next morning he asked if she was afraid of going.

“I don’t know the language, Alka,” she said. “I don’t know what your family will think of me. They won’t like me, maybe. And then you won’t love me anymore.”

“I’ve seen your country, Marina,” he said. “Now I’d like you to see mine. Please, please come with me.”

For three days he begged her. He showered her with kisses and affection. Marina says that “he literally stood on his knees.” Finally, she agreed. He made her sit down at once and write a letter to the American embassy asking to go to the United States.

The next day he told her he had mailed the letter. But he never did, and his motive in making her write it is obscure, unless he was trying to commit her so that she would not change her mind. Or perhaps he wanted to keep it in reserve, to send the embassy if it became necessary. A week or so after “mailing” her letter, Alik told Marina that he had received a “reply” inviting the two of them to pay a visit to the embassy. There had been no such reply. In fact, he had not yet received a reply to the letter he had written more than a month earlier.

Owald’s threat to invoke his relatives “to see about getting something done in Washington” led the embassy to seek advice from the Department of State. But there were other causes for delay, for technically, Oswald’s situation was a tricky one. The embassy first had to ascertain whether or not he was still an American citizen. His citizenship had not been revoked in 1959, embassy officials knew, but they had to make sure that Oswald had not taken any action in the USSR, such as assuming Soviet citizenship, to forfeit his standing as an American. Despite the fractious tone of his letters, the embassy sympathized with Oswald’s desire to leave Russia, and with the difficulties he might have in obtaining permission from the Minsk authorities to travel to Moscow. But it had to insist upon a personal interview and answers to questions about his status in the USSR. Then, and only then, could his American passport be returned to him. After that, he would be free to apply for a Soviet exit visa, and as an American citizen he had at least a chance of receiving it.

Whether or not Oswald would be able to get one for himself—and for his Russian wife—was a question for Soviet authorities to decide. During the Stalin era, defectors to the Soviet Union who desired to return to their homelands invited, at best, refusal and, at worst, imprisonment or even death, whatever the status of their citizenship. But this was the Khrushchev era, and no new policies had yet taken shape. There were no precedents, although there was a fair possibility that someone who had not assumed Soviet citizenship, was not needed in the USSR, and was not in a position to know secrets or possess particularly sensitive information about Soviet life might well be permitted to leave.

Oswald’s concern at the moment, however, was not with the Soviet reaction to his request, but with the American. To him the embassy’s delay in responding to his application and its insistence on a personal interview meant only one thing. A trap was being laid for him, and he would be arrested the moment he passed through the embassy gates. Hence his insistence in all his letters that the embassy guarantee he would not be “persecuted”; i.e., prosecuted. The embassy could make no such guarantee. Its officials knew nothing of Oswald’s history in Russia or, for that matter, of his history in the United States before his defection. But they were required by rules of the Department of State to resolve any doubts about reentry in favor of an American citizen. Moreover, American embassies abroad have no procedure for arresting anyone. Oswald, who, a year and a half before, had known in detail the procedures for swearing an oath renouncing his citizenship, was ignorant of the facts that now concerned him most. Thus he was fearful and suspicious, but the tone of his letters was also full of bravado, as if he expected the embassy to give him everything he asked.

During the first week of July, just after he learned of Marina’s pregnancy, Alik still had no word from the embassy, and his fears gave way to impatience. He decided to take his vacation and fly to Moscow.² He did not inform the embassy he was coming.

Before he left, Alik told Marina that he would telephone to let her know if she was needed. But on no account was she to say a word to Ilya or Valya about his absence. Above all, not a word about his going to the embassy. “If they find out and nothing comes of it,” he said, “they’ll only make fun of me.” Marina was baffled by her husband’s desire for secrecy since she supposed they had nothing to hide. Later, she realized that he was wary lest her uncle forbid her to go to the American embassy.

Alik made no secret of his fears. He told Marina that the embassy was “entitled” to arrest him and might do so. Why? “I threw my passport on the table and said I didn’t want to be a citizen any more.” Thus their journey to the airport in the dawn hours of Saturday, July 8, was an anxious one. They ordered breakfast while waiting for his flight to be announced, but both were too nervous to eat. Alik was afraid he might never come back, might never see her again. But he tried to keep their courage up: “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.” Incongruously, he added, “I’ll let you know if anything goes wrong.”

Breakfast forgotten, Alik took Marina to a deserted corner of the waiting room, clutched her apprehensively by the hand, and kept repeating: “My God! It’s the first time we’ve ever been apart.” He was the last to board the plane. He led her to the gate, kissed her, to her great embarrassment, in full view of the woman dispatcher, then begged Marina to wait so that he could see her from the plane. He glanced back several times as he strode to the waiting aircraft, and Marina saw tears in his eyes. “He loves me,” she thought. “It’s hard for him to go.”

“Is he your husband?” the dispatcher asked.

Marina nodded.

“Is it the first time you’ve been apart?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

At two o’clock that afternoon Richard Snyder was eating lunch in his apartment in the American embassy. A forty-one-year-old, bespectacled Foreign Service officer with sharp, pointed features and an inquisitive air, Snyder had spent most of his career overseas and was known for his fluency in Russian. Like most members of the embassy staff, he lived as well as worked in the tight little compound on the Sadovoye Ring, Moscow’s biggest thoroughfare, which was forever reverberating with the traffic of heavy trucks. His apartment was on the second floor, directly over the consular office. The duty of a diplomat was literally never far away. But Dick and Anne Snyder were at the end of their two-year tour of duty. In three days, on July 11, they would be sailing from Leningrad for home.

Suddenly, the telephone rang. Lee Harvey Oswald was calling from downstairs. Snyder remembered him immediately; he was one of the most obnoxious young men he had ever met. Snyder was not surprised that Oswald had tired of life in his adopted country, and the embassy was currently awaiting an opinion on his case from Washington. In keeping with the State Department’s recommended procedure of giving a possibly angry or unbalanced defector time to cool down before taking the irrevocable step of renouncing his citizenship, Snyder had put Oswald off during their stormy interview in November 1959, and Oswald had been so furious at the delay that he refused to set foot in the embassy again. Now he was back, and ironically, it was due to Snyder’s tactics, and the fact that Oswald had never officially renounced his citizenship, that he owed whatever chance he still had of returning to America. Yet Snyder had rather hoped, if he thought about it at all, that this particular “bad penny” would not turn up again until after the eleventh.³

With a vague feeling of annoyance, Snyder stepped into the elevator and rode the single flight down to the lobby. He greeted Oswald with precisely calibrated coolness and led him directly to his office. There they chatted for a few minutes, and Snyder noticed that the young man seemed chastened compared to his behavior during their earlier encounter. He asked Oswald to return on Monday. Oswald left the embassy, and Snyder went back to his lunch. Once again, Oswald had chosen to appear unannounced on a Saturday, when the consular office was closed for business.

Marina, meanwhile, was facing a dilemma of her own in Minsk. Although she had been married more than two months, some of her old beaux continued to call her at work, and she permitted it. Sasha, who had branded her a prostitute, had the nerve to telephone her there. So did Yury, the young man who had introduced her to Alik. Even Anatoly Shpanko called to ask if he might see her. But Marina had refused. With a pang of disappointment she felt that Anatoly had given her up too easily. He must not have loved her after all.

Yet Marina had her regrets. Since her pregnancy she had felt a strange sexual aversion to her husband, and she wondered if she had made a mistake. During the third month of her marriage it was not Anatoly on whom her doubts converged but Leonid, her Jewish suitor of the summer before.

On the morning of July 8, she went straight to the pharmacy after seeing her husband off. There she received a phone call from, of all people, Leonid, asking if he might see her. How on earth, she inquired, had he known her husband was out of town? “Sheer intuition,” he replied enigmatically. Marina agreed to meet him that evening. Halfhoping something might come of it, she went home after work and washed her hair. She took a nap, then rose and carefully put on her best dress. Perhaps the evening would show whether she had made a mistake getting married or not.

Lonya certainly knew the script. He had an empty apartment at his disposal; he even had a bottle of French apéritif. Once they were in bed, however, his sophistication proved to be a matter of appearances only. He was making love to a woman, or trying to, for the first time. It was all over before it had begun. Marina was furious. She insisted on walking home by herself—at two o’clock in the morning.

The following evening, Sunday, she went to the central post office to receive a long-distance telephone call. It was from Alik in Moscow. “I went to the embassy,” he told her with a breathless, conspiratorial air. “It was okay. They didn’t arrest me.” He wanted her to fly to Moscow the next morning. She was to call him at his hotel the moment her plane touched the ground.

Marina now faced a new dilemma. She would have to get out of work for several days and must explain the reason for her absence, or under the regulations she would be fired. Yet Alik had commanded her to tell no one where he had gone. What excuse could Marina give? She decided to tell the truth. “Evgenia,” she told her supervisor over the telephone, “Alik’s been called to the embassy. He wants me to join him there.”

Marina boarded the plane to Moscow on Monday morning, July 10.⁴ It was her first flight, and she was deliciously apprehensive. She threw up twice on the plane. From Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow she took a bus to Sverdlov Square, in the heart of town. Alik was there to meet her. “I missed you so!” he greeted her. “I had no idea I’d miss you so much in two days.” He rushed her to the Hotel Berlin, only three blocks away. Their room was filled with blue cornflowers, which he had bought to welcome her. They made love right away. “I feel as if we’d been apart for a year,” he said. There was a mirror at the foot of the bed, and he liked that very much indeed. Later he often said that he wanted a bedroom with mirrors on every side.

Alik had an appointment that afternoon at the embassy.⁵ He was nervous as they careened up to the big boxlike fortress in a taxicab, for despite his easy reception by Richard Snyder two days before, he still thought he might be arrested. Marina had cause to be nervous, too, for without being aware of it, she, as a Soviet citizen, was forbidden to enter a foreign embassy without permission from her country’s authorities, which was practically unobtainable. Even though she was unaware that what she was doing might be dangerous, she was nonetheless apprehensive as they approached the building. What was her astonishment, then, when uniformed militiamen, far from stopping them to examine their papers, actually snapped to a stiff salute as they sauntered through the embassy gates. It was like going to a palace to be decorated, Marina thought, when you had done nothing to deserve it.

Marina was wearing her best cotton dress and her wedding shoes, made in England, and the militiamen apparently took her for American. Indeed, whenever she saw anyone in the offices and corridors of the American embassy that afternoon, Marina’s eyes traveled as if magnetized to their feet. For no matter how clever a Soviet girl might be at procuring things from abroad, her shoes, her heavy Russian clodhoppers, seldom failed to give her away. The first person she saw was the pretty young receptionist who greeted them as they walked in the front door. The girl was so poised in manner and her hair so neatly done that Marina was thoroughly awed.

She was gratified and intrigued by something else. As they were walking down the hallway to the consular offices, she saw a whole row of glassed-in cubicles with Russian girls seated at the desks inside. Marina felt distinctly relieved. If anything went wrong here, if she was kidnapped or forced to sign some paper she did not understand, one of these girls would help her. Besides, it was good to see Americans and Russians working together in this fashion. But then another thought struck her. If those girls were working for the Americans, they must also be working for the KGB. Marina did not like that at all. Disgusting as it was for a man to be a spy, it seemed even worse for a girl. The very thought made Marina’s flesh crawl.

When they reached the large office shared by the consul and vice-consul, Marina sat in the waiting room while Alik went inside. He was gone a long time, and Marina was able to compose herself and look around. She found the place a revelation. It was filled with gadgets, for one thing, and all of them seemed to work. Out on the street it was hot, but there was something whirring in the window, a fan or a ventilator or something, and inside it was practically cold. Everything seemed designed for simplicity and convenience: even the telephone wires appeared to be laid out differently from those she was accustomed to in Minsk.

But the best was still to come. During her husband’s long absence, Marina had to go to the toilet. On the way she paused at the water cooler and had only to press a knob and cold water came cascading out. But the washroom itself—that was a work of art! It was immaculate and as fragrant as a garden. There was even real toilet paper. Marina had seen that, instead of small squares of newspaper, only once in her life before, at the Hotel Metropole in Leningrad. There were paper towels, too, and green liquid soap. Again, she had only to press a knob.

The girl who took her to the toilet was also a revelation. She was one of the Soviet girls who worked at the embassy, although she was all dressed up like an American and might not be taken for Russian at all. Marina had been fearful that the girl would be suspicious of her motives or reproach her for wanting to leave Russia. But the girl chatted pleasantly with her and never once alluded to the touchy subject. Marina returned from the toilet in much better spirits, reassured that nothing bad would happen to her. Yet she was still stunned to think that she was here at all.

Alik emerged from the consul’s office chewing gum and well pleased with himself. Since his case involved a decision by the State Department as to whether he had forfeited his American citizenship, his interview had been conducted by Snyder, the senior consular officer. Once it was over, Alik and Marina sat in the waiting room, and Alik began to fill out a long questionnaire. He was relaxed and playful. “I wish I could make the Zigers my relatives and take them out with me, too!” he commented as he poured over the questionnaire.

Marina’s reply was tart. “Okay. Divorce me and marry Eleonora if you like!”

Alik had done a favor for the Zigers when he entered the embassy. He had carried with him to Moscow a letter from Alexander Ziger to the embassy of Argentina, presumably a request to the Argentine government to bring pressure on the Russians to grant him an exit visa. Either Ziger was afraid to write to the Argentine embassy through the open mails, or he had already done so and because he had dual citizenship—Soviet citizens are forbidden even to have contact by mail with a foreign embassy—his letters had been intercepted. On a table downstairs in the American embassy there were two wooden boxes, one for outgoing and the other for incoming diplomatic mail of a routine nature, such as invitations. Alik dropped Ziger’s letter into the outgoing box. In a day or so it would be picked up by a US embassy chauffeur and delivered to the embassy of Argentina. It was one of the few occasions Marina remembers when Alik did a favor for somebody else.

Elated by the way things were going for him at the embassy, Alik inquired about the fate of a young man named Webster who had come to the Soviet Union shortly before he did, fallen in love with a Russian waitress, married, and gone to work in Leningrad in a glassworks or plastics factory. He, too, was trying to go back to America and was having a difficult time.

After he had completed the questionnaire, Alik handed it to an embassy typist, one of the Russian girls Marina had noticed earlier in the afternoon, so that she could fill out an application to renew his American passport, which, even if he received it back that day, was still due to expire on September 10. He then returned to Snyder’s office with the questionnaire and the renewal forms.

Snyder inspected the questionnaire. Oswald’s responses were routine. The two of them had already had a long talk, and it appeared to Snyder that Oswald had done nothing to forfeit his citizenship. His Soviet passport, for one thing, was of the type issued to “stateless” persons. That, on the face of it, was evidence that he was not a Soviet citizen. Moreover, Oswald’s letters from Minsk had been delivered to the embassy; had he become a Soviet citizen, the letters would not have gone through. Oswald had also responded to Snyder’s queries with an air of frankness. He appeared to have nothing to hide.

There was, however, one concern that seemed uppermost in Oswald’s mind. He confessed to Snyder that he was worried that he might face several years in prison in the United States for having chosen to live in Russia. What was Snyder’s view? Snyder advised him, as he later phrased it in a dispatch to the State Department, that he knew no grounds on which Oswald might have to face “punishment of such severity as he had in mind.” Oswald answered that he realized that Snyder could make no promises, but he was reluctant to return home if it might mean going to jail. He had refrained from approaching the Soviet authorities about letting him go until he “had this end of the thing straightened out.”⁶

Oswald had not been arrested the moment he set foot inside the embassy, as he had feared. His fear was probably the reason he had appeared, unannounced, on a Saturday and why he had today taken the precaution of bringing Marina, although the embassy had not suggested it, nor was it essential for her to appear so early in the proceedings. But if Oswald was reassured by his reception at the embassy, he was still afraid that he would be arrested when he returned to the United States. In his own mind he had committed a catalogue of crimes against his country by coming to live in the USSR⁷ and accepting a job in a Soviet factory (working for a foreign state);⁸ and he was under the illusion that he had taken a formal oath of allegiance to the USSR.⁹ Moreover, he had offered the Soviet government any radar secrets that he might have learned in the Marine Corps, and he had granted an interview criticizing the United States to Radio Moscow for use in its propaganda transmissions abroad. Finally, from January 1960 until his desire to return to the United States became known to the Soviet authorities, he had received a subsidy from the Soviet Red Cross, which he believed had been arranged by the secret police as payment for the interview denouncing his country.

Oswald had all of this very much on his mind. Nevertheless, up to this point every one of his fears was groundless, since they were based on acts he had either not committed or that were not crimes under United States law. As of lunchtime on July 10, he had done nothing for which he could reasonably expect to face prosecution on his return to the United States, much less arrest in the American embassy. The fears that haunted him, motivated by feelings of guilt and perhaps by his attributing to the government of the United States the anger toward him that he had felt toward it, were altogether unrealistic.

But on this very day, Oswald altered his condition of juridical innocence. For the first time he did, in fact, commit what could have been construed as a crime. Several times that afternoon, he knowingly lied to Richard Snyder. He claimed that he had at no time applied for citizenship of the USSR, yet he had done so on October 16, 1959. He stated that he did not belong to the trade union at his factory, when at that very moment he was carrying a membership card in his pocket and could not have been employed without one. He claimed that Soviet officials had never questioned him about his life before his arrival in the USSR, and that, too, was probably false. Finally, he dismissed the significance of his Radio Moscow interview and claimed that he had “made no statements at any time of any exploitable nature concerning his original decision to reside in the Soviet Union.”¹⁰ His own notes written later make perfectly clear that in giving the interview, and accepting his subsidy, he believed that he had “sold himself” and betrayed the interests of the United States.¹¹

The irony was that all his falsehoods were unnecessary. Even had he told the truth on every point, he would not have been subject to prosecution. Nor, apparently, would the truth have affected the ultimate finding that he was still an American citizen, for he had not crossed either of the Rubicons: he had not renounced his US citizenship nor become a citizen of the USSR. By telling these falsehoods he had, however, laid himself open for the first time to a criminal charge: that of knowingly lying to an official of the United States. And on the next day he would persuade his wife to do the same. But there is not a shred of evidence that he ever realized that these were crimes—and the only ones he had committed.

Snyder, of course, did not know that the young man sitting opposite him was lying. Snyder had no sympathy for Communism or the Soviet Union and very little sympathy for those who were taken in by either. On the first meeting almost two years before, he had taken a harsh line, some said too harsh, toward this very same young man; he had even poked fun at his Marxist convictions.¹² Still, Snyder’s record was replete with evidence that he had compassion for anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped in this inhospitable land. He had found Oswald “aggressive,” “overbearing,” “insufferable” during their initial interview, but now, as he would report to the State Department:

Twenty months of the 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.¹³ Much of the arrogance and bravado which characterized him on his first visit to the Embassy appears to have left him.¹⁴

Snyder reread the answers to the completed questionnaire that Oswald brought in to him. He glanced at the application for renewal of Oswald’s American passport. Carefully, he signed both copies and placed a stamp, “Valid only for direct travel to the United States,” in the green document that Oswald had left with him nearly two years before.

Then, in what must have been almost the last official act of his two long years in Moscow, Richard Snyder leaned across his desk and handed back his American passport to Lee Harvey Oswald.

As he led her through the embassy gate back to the street, Marina could see that Alik was elated by their visit. He was overjoyed that Snyder had received him, welcomed him back to the fold, and even returned his passport. Alik was so reassured by his visits to the embassy that the following day, Tuesday, July 11, he and Marina returned, this time to initiate the steps that might enable her to enter the United States. Nevertheless, he was nervous as they again approached the building, and he coached Marina on what not to say. She was not to admit that she was pregnant; that could cause a delay. If anyone asked, she was to say that she did not know. Above all, on no account was she to admit that she belonged to the Komsomol. That might ruin things for good.

They walked through the embassy gates without hindrance and headed for the consular office. “Go on in,” Alik said to Marina when her turn came. “Only don’t say anything about the Komsomol.”

“How can I lie?” Marina said. “They’ll find out anyway. They’ll say I can’t have a visa for lying.”

“It’ll help your visa if you shut up,” he replied.

Marina was received by John McVickar, the vice-consul, whose job it was to handle applications by foreigners seeking to enter the United States. McVickar had brown hair, a round face, a gentle manner. Marina sat in front of him shaking like a leaf. He sat very straight in his chair, she noticed, and offered her chewing gum.

“I don’t speak Russian very well,” McVickar began, smiling at her. “Please correct me if I make a mistake.”

Here she was, Marina thought, talking to practically an ambassador or a minister of the American government, and he was asking her to correct his Russian! It was in keeping with the rest of this whole incredible journey. Marina liked McVickar immediately. He was simple and direct, and she was grateful for his lack of airs. The office, too, was wonderful. It was neat, compact, convenient. But Marina was feeling unwell. If she had one thing on her mind, apart from her extraordinary surroundings, it was the fact that she was pregnant.

“Excuse me, are you feeling all right?” McVickar asked.

“Oh, oh, yes!” she stammered, terrified that she had given her secret away.

McVickar asked her to take an oath promising to tell the truth. Then he asked a whole string of questions: where was she born, where had she lived as a child, where did she go to school, were her parents alive, and so forth? Do you belong to the trade union, he asked, and Marina answered that she did. Finally, the question she was dreading: “Are you a member of the Komsomol?” Lying, she told him that she was not, trying to comfort herself, meanwhile, with the thought that she had, after all, never bothered to pick up her membership card. If there was one thing she did not like, it was Alik’s forcing her to lie. You have to support a husband and back him up, she knew, and Alik wanted to go home. But Marina would have preferred to tell the truth and take her chances.

McVickar was having trouble understanding her, for she spoke rapidly, out of one corner of her mouth, allowing the ends of words and even sentences to trail away. He went to the waiting room door and asked her husband to come in to translate.

“Have you relatives in the United States?” the questioning proceeded.

“Oh, no,” Marina protested. It was a frightening thought.

“She doesn’t understand,” Alik interrupted quickly. “She has a mother-in-law and a brother-in-law there.”

Marina was puzzled, to say the least. For a Russian it could be a calamity to have a relative abroad. It was always cause for suspicion and sometimes even for arrest. Naturally, she had been quick to deny it. How could she know that for Americans it was just the opposite? It not only helps to have a relative in America, the authorities practically require it. Without one, you may fail to get into the country.

Marina’s interview was satisfactory. McVickar filled out a visa petition for her to be allowed to enter the United States, and Alik signed it.¹⁵

Afterwards, happy and hopeful, they returned to the Hotel Berlin and spent the day enjoying Moscow. On Wednesday night or Thursday, they returned to Minsk by air.