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.
4
The Warren Commission Report states on p. 706 that Marina arrived in Moscow Sunday, July 9, citing as evidence Oswald’s diary, which is incorrect in several respects about the visit, and Marina’s testimony in Vol. 1, pp. 96–97. There Marina states that Oswald left Minsk “a day early and the following morning I was to come.” But Marina’s subsequent account to me is so clear as to appear conclusive: on Saturday, July 8, she worked as usual at the pharmacy and had her interlude with Leonid. On Sunday, July 9, Oswald telephoned, asking her to come to Moscow, and on the morning of July 10 she went.
5
Exhibits No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139, and No. 938,