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 His citizenship had not been revoked in 1959, embassy officials knew, but they had to make sure that Oswald had not taken any action in the USSR, such as assuming Soviet citizenship, to forfeit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.
2
Questions have been raised about the ease with which Oswald traveled to Moscow without official permission, a requirement for every foreigner traveling from one city to another. How did he purchase an air ticket or, for that matter, obtain a hotel room, when Soviet citizens as well as foreigners are required to surrender their passports at the front desk? The answer seems to be that while Soviet controls are strict, they are far from perfect; Oswald was watched, but he was not under heavy surveillance. He appeared reluctant to make the trip without authorization, yet his friends may have advised him that he could do so with impunity. Any one of them might have bought his ticket. But speaking reasonably fluent Russian and dressed in his working clothes, he probably bought it himself, and the agent for Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, simply did not bother to ask whether he had permission to travel. Foreigners often make unauthorized trips in the Soviet Union. Their success depends a great deal upon chance—who they are, where they are, and the vigilance of local officials. If they get caught, the worst that usually happens is that they are sent back to the city from which they came. Oswald also took his chances at the Hotel Berlin, where he had lived for about two weeks in 1959. The girls at the front desk remembered him, and since he presented Soviet documents instead of a foreign passport, it did not entail a great risk for them to assign him a room.