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 USSR[7] 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.
7
Letters of Lee Oswald to Robert Oswald, May 31, 1961 (“…if I can get the government to drop charges against me…”), and June 26, 1961 (“I assume the government must have a few charges against me, since my coming here like that is illegal. But I really don’t know exactly what charges.”), Exhibit Nos. 299 and 300, Vol. 16, pp. 827–832.