Lee forgot his promise to say goodbye, and I never saw him again.
Why was Lee Harvey Oswald permitted to remain in the Soviet Union? Was he the pitiful, slightly unbalanced boy Soviet officials had at first taken him for, or was he a determined and single-minded individual who would go to any lengths to get what he wanted? The question was a crucial one, and the answer Soviet officials seem to have reached may have determined the outcome of his case. Oswald’s suicide attempt was proof that in order to get what he wanted he would stop at nothing—he would even try to take his own life. And his willingness to talk to reporters showed that he would not hesitate to embarrass either the Russians or the Americans publicly.
Oswald told me that Soviet officials had warned him that his case would be decided according to the “international atmosphere.” In that sense he could hardly have timed his arrival more propitiously, for on September 26 and 27, while Oswald was on the high seas on his way to Russia, Premier Khrushchev and President Eisenhower were meeting in the Maryland woods to christen what became known as the “Spirit of Camp David.” After Khrushchev’s return to Moscow, even minor questions affecting Americans in the USSR began to be decided, to a greater degree than before, according to whether they would help or hurt Soviet-American relations.
Yury Nosenko, a Soviet secret police officer who later defected to the West, told the CIA and FBI that the initial decision to expel Oswald was taken by the KGB, working through Intourist, the agency that handles travel by foreigners inside the USSR.[17] Nosenko was unable to say who reversed that decision, although he speculated that it was overruled by the Soviet Red Cross or Foreign Ministry. The speculation appears poorly founded unless one of these organizations was fronting for another that was politically more powerful, either the KGB at a very high level, or some special party body or official whom Khrushchev entrusted with overseeing implementation of the Spirit of Camp David.
Thus Oswald’s suicide attempt appears to have been pivotal. First, it came at a moment, late in October, when the new policy began to be effected. Second, it appears to have altered the Russians’ estimate of Oswald’s character and of the damage he could do. Evidently, they decided that it would be less harmful to their image abroad to accept this young American who claimed to be motivated by Marxist ideals than to reject him with the risk that he might embarrass them with a very public suicide. During the long weeks he was kept in limbo, until after the first of the year, they no doubt hoped that he would become disenchanted and would quietly go away.[18]
But Lee, by his self-imposed sequestration in the Metropole, avoided any confrontation with reality that might conceivably have caused him to change his mind. Instead, he spent his emotions writing angry letters to his brother Robert. He told Robert that he “would like to see the capitalist government of the US overthrown,” and “happiness is taking part in the struggle.” He added that Robert and Marguerite were “not objects of affection” and he had to come to Russia “to find freedom.” And in December, even before he had been told what his future would be, he wrote to Robert that he chose to break all ties with his past and would not be writing to him or to their mother again. “I am starting a new life,” he said, “and I do not wish to have anything to do with the old.”[19]
On January 4, 1960, he was informed what his new life would be: He could stay in the USSR, not as a citizen, but as a “stateless person.” He was to be sent to Minsk, capital of Belorussia, where he would be a metalworker at the Belorussian Radio and Television Plant. Through the Soviet Red Cross he was given 5,000 old rubles, or $500, with which he was able to pay his hotel bill and his train fare to Minsk and still have some rubles left.
Lee started his job in Minsk on January 13, and in March he was awarded a pleasant one-room apartment with a view overlooking the river. His financial situation was superb. He earned $70 to $90 a month at work and received an additional $70 a month in the form of a Red Cross subsidy. He had as much monthly income as the director of his factory. Lee did not particularly like his job. It was mere manual labor, while he had hoped for a place in an institute and a chance to study full time. But as the object of much attention and the recipient, like every foreigner, of many favors, he was at first reasonably content.
Lee made friends at the factory, and in his free time he studied Russian and went to the opera with Rosa Kuznetsova, an Intourist interpreter. He bought a 16-gauge single barrel shotgun that summer, joined a hunting club, and went on hunting trips in the countryside. His fellow workers, who called him “Alik” because “Lee” sounded Chinese, peppered him with questions about America, and Lee liked that. And in the fall he began to have love affairs. He soon discovered that some of the girls cared passionately about him because he was an American, the only one in Minsk, and he had an apartment. Others, however, seemed to care about him for himself. But the woman he wanted turned him down. She was Ella Germann, a dark-haired Jewish girl whom he had met at the factory. They saw each other for a few months, and Lee celebrated the New Year of 1961 with Ella and her family at their apartment. He decided that he was in love with her and, more or less on impulse, proposed to her the following evening. To his astonishment Ella rejected him; first, because she did not love him and, second, because relations between Russia and America might someday grow worse and he would be arrested as “an American spy.”
Lee was stunned. Ella’s refusal helped to crystallize the many criticisms—the provincial drabness, the cold climate, the officiousness of the party secretary in his workshop—that had been quietly taking shape in Lee’s mind ever since his arrival in Minsk. He no longer considered Russia a paradise. On January 4, two days after Ella’s refusal and a year to the day after he had been assigned to Minsk and given his documents as a “stateless person,” the visa authorities in Minsk inquired whether he still wanted Soviet citizenship. It was not an offer, simply a pulse taking. Lee replied that he did not and asked merely to have his documents extended for another year. And he confided to his diary, “I have had enough.” In February he wrote the American embassy in Moscow asking to have his passport back. He rudely reminded the embassy that he was still an American citizen and said he would like to go home.
It was in such a mood of disappointment in love and with Russia that Lee Harvey Oswald met Marina Prusakova.
PART TWO
Russia, 1961–1962
— 6 —
Courtship
On Saturday night, March 25, 1961, Marina and a girlfriend from the pharmacy went to another dance at the Palace of Culture. Wearing a simple gray dress and her best Czechoslovak shoes, Marina was walking down the stairway to the dance floor when she met Alik coming up.
“Hello,” he said, grinning happily. “I’m very glad you came. I was afraid you might not be here.”
He was dressed differently from the last time she saw him. He was wearing black trousers, a blue button-down shirt without a tie, and a charcoal gray V-neck sweater. Marina noticed that his eyes were a deep blue. She was pleased that he had been looking for her.
They danced and talked all evening long. Strolling home together down Ulitsa Kalinina, the broad thoroughfare on which Ilya and Valya had their apartment, Alik pointed out the building in which he lived. It was on the same street, about a seven-minute walk away. Outside Marina’s building, Alik asked: “May I see you again?” She agreed to a date on the following Thursday. He asked for her phone number, “just in case.”
17
The information conveyed by Nosenko, who in 1959 was a KGB officer assigned to Intourist in Moscow, is to be found in numerous Warren Commission memoranda based on CIA and FBI interviews with him in 1964. Many of these memoranda were declassified in 1973 and 1975. Thus, according to an FBI memo dated February 28, 1964, Nosenko stated that Oswald from the time of his arrival in Moscow was regarded by the KGB as not “completely normal mentally” and not “very intelligent.” The KGB’s interest in Oswald was therefore “practically nil” and, when he was sent to Minsk in January, 1960, the KGB office there was merely told to keep a “discreet check” to make sure that he was not a “sleeper agent” for American Intelligence.
According to another interview with Nosenko (Commission Document No. 451, an FBI memorandum dated March 4, 1964), the KGB did not know about Oswald’s Marine Corps service when he arrived in Russia and, had it known, the information would not have been of interest or significance.
18
According to a memorandum from Allen Dulles, a member of the Warren Commission, to J. Lee Rankin, its chief counsel (Commission Document No. 1345, dated July 23, 1964), Henry Brandon, Washington correspondent of the London
The rumor may have been purposely planted to discredit Khrushchev, for he was known to be personally and politically close to Furtseva, and if, through her, he could be linked to handling of the Oswald case, he might then be made to suffer political damage in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Khrushchev did, in fact, fall from power less than one year after Kennedy’s death. On the other hand, the rumor Brandon heard may have been true. It is not unusual for Soviet leaders to concern themselves with individual cases: on one occasion my own visa was extended through the intervention of Anastas Mikoyan, then the number two or number three Soviet leader, who was close to Khrushchev and was identified with his pro-American policy. Khrushchev may have entrusted some very high party body, or one or more party leaders who were especially close to him, with seeing to it that the Spirit of Camp David was implemented, or at least not sabotaged, by his own bureaucracy. If something of the sort occurred, then Mme Furtseva would have been a logical choice to have supervised the handling of “humanitarian” cases.
The dates are worth noting. Khrushchev returned from the United States in early October 1959 and quickly departed on a trip to the Soviet Far East. It would have taken a few weeks for a new policy in handling Americans to be established. Oswald was told that he would have to leave the USSR on October 21, and he attempted suicide that day. On October 28, only one week later, he was interviewed by four new officials who, according to him, apparently knew nothing about his case. It is possible that Oswald was the beneficiary of blind luck in his timing and that that one week at the end of October, plus the suicide attempt itself, was sufficient for his case to be bucked to a higher level and decided in accordance with the new Spirit of Camp David.