When a U-2 was shot down over Sverdlovsk six months after his arrival in Russia, and then became the cause of an international scandal, Oswald may have felt that he had had, for the first time, a brush with history. And in Powers he may have seen a little of himself. Powers was much bigger than he was, but both men had dark hair and slightly receding hairlines. Both had high-pitched voices and spoke with slight Southern accents. Powers was a highly skilled “spy in the sky,” a man at the center of world attention who had had to defend himself in a klieg-lit trial. Oswald would have liked to be a spy, and he might have enjoyed the spotlight as well.[10]
Oswald may have thought he was like Powers in another way. Nearly all Russians—including Pavel Golovachev, the son of a Soviet air ace, and other men that Oswald knew at the factory—considered Powers a “disgrace.” No Russian would have allowed himself or his super-secret aircraft to fall into unfriendly hands. Powers had “betrayed” the United States. That was the core of Oswald’s concern. He believed that he, too, had betrayed his country by defecting and denouncing it. And if America sought revenge against Francis Gary Powers, might it not do the same to Lee Harvey Oswald?[11]
The snags in the way of the Oswalds’ return had been cleared away on the Russian side; both had been granted permission for their exit visas, and Marina now had permission to receive a passport to go abroad. But the delays continued on the American side. First of all, there was the question of money. In addition to his other demands, Alik had informed the embassy that he could not afford the fare to the United States. He could contribute $200, and he expected the embassy to give, not loan, him the rest, preferably $800 or $900, enough to travel by air. The Department of State attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise the money from private relief agencies and asked Marguerite Oswald to help. When Alik learned of it, he was outraged. He had written his mother that he did not want her to contribute, and now he told her to ignore the State Department. To the embassy he wrote: “I request that solicitations toward my relatives be stopped.”[12] The embassy, however, had found another solution. It was authorized by the State Department to loan Oswald the amount necessary to cover the costs of the least expensive means of travel back to the United States. As they did for many others whom they considered trapped in Russia, the embassy and the State Department bent over backward to help Oswald.
In Marina’s case they did the same. Her problem was her entrance visa. For proof that she would not become a public charge, embassy officials, surprisingly, accepted an affidavit of support from Oswald himself. They did so on the grounds that he had a place to live, with his mother, and that in the Marine Corps he had been trained in a trade, radar technician, that made him readily employable. The embassy was taken off the hook, however, when Marguerite Oswald’s employer later filed an affidavit of support for Marina.
As the wife of an American citizen, Marina was entitled to an entrance visa, if other conditions had been met. But her husband was not just any American. He was a defector. The State Department had no objections to the Oswalds’ reentry. But the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Justice Department did. Its field officer in San Antonio, Texas, after investigating Oswald’s history, recommended that Marina be denied a visa because there was doubt as to Oswald’s loyalty to the United States.
The State Department intervened. In the opinion of the Office of Soviet Union Affairs, “We’re better off with the subject in the US than in Russia.”[13] Its ruling was based on a policy that held that it was potentially less embarrassing for the United States to have its unpredictables and malcontents at home than drifting about in foreign parts. In short, the State Department was not acting solely for humanitarian reasons. If Soviet authorities had granted Marina an exit visa partly to be rid of Oswald, American authorities were prepared to give her an entrance visa partly to get him back and out of harm’s way.
The State Department made its position clear by its handling of the one legal technicality that remained. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, United States consuls abroad are forbidden to issue immigrants’ visas inside any country that resists the return of nationals whom the United States wants to deport. The USSR was considered such a country. It was a technicality that was easily surmounted, for Marina could obtain a visa from the American consular office in another country, and the embassy in Moscow had already made arrangements with the embassy in Brussels. Once again the State Department intervened. It requested a waiver for Marina. Oswald was considered an “unstable character, whose actions are entirely unpredictable.”[14] Like the Soviet authorities, the American authorities were afraid that he might do something politically embarrassing.
By mid-March of 1962, Alik was informed that Marina had been granted a visa to enter the United States, and it was now only a matter of weeks before he and his family would be able to leave Russia. But as late as April, neither he nor Marina had said a word to Ilya or Valya, who were still convinced that the young couple had not received permission to leave from the Soviet side—and would never receive it. The deception was the more remarkable since Marina had quit her job at the pharmacy and now spent part of each day with the baby at Ilya and Valya’s apartment.
One day Valya casually asked whether Marina had news of her exit visa, and Marina answered falsely that she had not. Valya had often pointed out that Marina’s going might mean trouble for Ilya. “He has so little time left until his pension. He’s done so much for you. What a blow if he loses it because of you!” Now she added something new, a letter from Marina’s Aunt Polina in Kharkov that she had been withholding lest it upset Marina during her pregnancy.
Valya read a fragment aloud. “I’ve never been inside a church in my life,” the passage began. “But the day Marina goes to America I’ll go to church. I’ll light a great big candle and pray that her soul may rest in peace. I’ll say a prayer for the dead. Then she’ll be dead to me. I’ll forget that I ever had a niece. As for her, she can forget that I was ever her aunt.”
Marina knew that Polina’s letter reflected cowardice over her husband’s job and position. Still, she was profoundly upset. She went home and told Alik about the letter. Marina, like her mother, was superstitious. To her it was as if her aunt’s prayer for the dead, her wish that she were dead, truly had the power to kill her. After brooding a while, she announced: “Alka, I’m not going with you to America. My relatives have done so much for me. I just cannot do it to them.”
“Okay,” he said. “If that’s how you feel, if you care more for them than for me, you can stay.”
10
Oswald claimed in a letter to Robert that he “saw” Powers in Moscow at his trial. This is almost certainly a lie. There were American reporters and embassy officials at the trial who had seen Oswald at the time of his defection and would have recognized him had he been there. The trial was televised in Russia, and Oswald probably “saw” Powers on television in Minsk.
11
Powers was not arrested or tried when he returned to America. After lengthy interrogation by military, intelligence, and government officials, he was allowed to go back to civilian life. But in writing of his experiences in 1970, long after Oswald himself had become a
It is impossible to say how much Oswald learned about the aircraft at the three U-2 bases at which he was stationed. It is hard to keep information narrowly confined at some bases, and Oswald later did show himself to be accomplished at picking up on his jobs’ extracurricular information that he was not entitled to have. It is conceivable that at least after the Philippine period (1957), he wanted to acquire classified information that he could trade for Soviet citizenship. But despite offers of radar information which he made from the moment of his arrival in Moscow, the Russians were not impressed.
At about the time of Oswald’s arrival, the Russians had tried, and failed, to bring down a U-2 over Soviet territory. They tried, and nearly succeeded, on the next U-2 overflight in mid-April 1960. And on May 1 they brought down Powers. Their problem throughout this time appears not to have been lack of information about the U-2—its maximum flying altitude or its cruising altitude—but lack of the missile capacity to shoot it down.
Powers’ allegations to the contrary, the best guess remains that the Russians knew all they needed to know about the U-2 from various sources, and that Oswald, a former Marine Corps private with the lowest security clearance, was at no time viewed as a possible purveyor of needed information. Indeed, all the Soviet decisions regarding Oswald appear to have been made on negative grounds—which way of handling him would be least damaging to the USSR—and in a declassified memorandum to the Warren Commission, the CIA described five other defector cases that occurred within a year or two of Oswald’s, in which all five received quicker answers and better treatment than did Oswald.
Some experts on Soviet affairs have noted that, had the Russians received information of value from Oswald, their treatment of him would have been different from the very first day. They would not have allowed him to languish in Moscow hotels—within reach of Western reporters—for two and a half months before deciding what to do with him. They would probably have accorded him slightly better treatment than he received, a chance to study fulltime, for example, rather than a job as a factory hand. Lastly, and conclusively, they would not have allowed him to leave the country—ever. This they could have accomplished by granting him Soviet citizenship, which would have made him effectively their prisoner; or they could have given him a “stateless passport,” as they did, and then either refused outright, or simply declined any answer at all, when he requested an exit visa. As for Oswald, he, of course, would not have dared to go home had he given the Russians information of value but would have clung to the sanctuary he had.