They spent a total of eight hours together on three successive days. Miss Bates typed, and Lee sat next to her, deciphering his own handwriting, translating Russian phrases here and there, answering her questions about Russia. Not that Miss Bates found him talky. “If you asked him a question, no matter how simple it was, if he didn’t want to answer it, he’d just shut up. If you got ten words out of him at a time, you were doing good.” She noticed, too, that “he had the deadest eyes I ever saw.”
She found his notes “fascinating” but “bitter.” His comments about Russia were just as bitter. And each afternoon, when he left, he grabbed up everything and took it with him, even the carbon paper. Finally, on Wednesday, June 20, Miss Bates noticed that he was “nervous.” Instead of sitting by her desk, he paced up and down, peered over her shoulder, and kept asking how far she had gotten. The moment she finished the tenth page, a third of the manuscript by her reckoning, he stopped her. She had done $10 worth of work, and that was all he had to give her.
Miss Bates offered to finish up for free.
“No,” Lee said. “I don’t work that way.” And he took a $10 bill from his pocket, handed it to her, and walked out. That was the last she ever saw of him.
On their second afternoon of work together, Lee told Miss Bates that he had met a Russian-speaking engineer in Fort Worth. He flourished a piece of stationery with the man’s letterhead on it. This man, he said, had read all the notes and offered to help get them published. None of this was true, except for the central fact that Lee had met a Russian-born engineer.
On Monday, June 18, the day he discovered Miss Bates, Lee had also visited the office of the Texas Employment Commission in Fort Worth. There, he scouted job opportunities and asked whether there was anyone in town who spoke Russian. He was given two names.
Thus, on the morning of June 19, the telephone rang in the office of Peter Paul Gregory, a consulting petroleum engineer in Fort Worth.[8] Gregory, then approaching the age of sixty, had been born in Chita, Siberia, fled Russia in 1919, and lived for a while in Japan. Eventually, he made his way to Berkeley, California, where he received a degree in petroleum engineering, and thence to Texas.
The voice on the other end of Gregory’s line was that of a young man who was looking for a job as a Russian-English translator and wanted a letter attesting that he was qualified. Falsely and for no apparent reason, the young man added that he had been given Gregory’s name at the Fort Worth Public Library, where Gregory taught a class, rather than by the employment commission.
Gregory had never met the young man and, since they were both speaking English, had no idea of his language qualifications. He suggested, therefore, that the caller come by the office to be tested. At eleven that morning the young man appeared at Gregory’s office in downtown Fort Worth, wearing clothes that looked ridiculous in the Texas heat: a flannel suit and “atrocious” Russian shoes. The young man’s name was Lee Oswald.
Gregory, a graying man with spectacles and mustache, had a grave and courteous air. Without saying a word or asking a question, he simply reached for the bookshelf and pulled down a standard Soviet secondary school history text. He selected a passage at random and asked the visitor to read aloud in Russian. He did, and very well, too. Gregory asked the young man to translate. He did, also very well. With that, Gregory wrote out a letter and gave it to the young man, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” and stating that Lee Harvey Oswald was qualified to be a translator or interpreter in the Russian and English languages.
Gregory was curious about Oswald. Noting to himself that he appeared to speak Russian with an accent, Gregory asked if he was of Polish descent? No, Lee answered. He had grown up in Fort Worth, but he had lived in Russia nearly three years and brought back a wife and a baby. Feeling more sympathetic every moment, the kindly Gregory told Lee that he knew of no job openings but would like an address where he might reach him. Then he took Lee to lunch.
Like every Russian who lives in exile, Gregory was intensely curious about conditions in his homeland. Over lunch he asked Lee about wages and prices, about the job he had held, and how people in the Soviet Union were getting on. As for the question of how he happened to go to Russia in the first place, Lee simply answered: “I went there on my own.” Gregory delicately shrank from asking more, sensing the question to be a touchy one. But he reflected that it was extraordinary that the young man had managed to get his wife out, for he had heard of countless cases in which exit visas had been refused.
When Lee showed up at Miss Bates’s that afternoon, it was Gregory’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter that he waved before her and Gregory who, he told her falsely, had read his manuscript and wanted to get it published. Lee would, in fact, on a later visit to Gregory’s office, show him typewritten sheets and say that he was writing memoirs of his life in the USSR. But Gregory did not read the sheets, and Lee never asked him to. Gregory did notice, however, that there were photographs attached to some of them.
Lee was elated by his first meeting with Gregory. “Mama, Mama,” he told Marina triumphantly that evening. “I’ve found you some Russians in Fort Worth. Now you won’t be lonely any more.” But again, lying to her for no apparent reason, he said that he had been given Gregory’s name at the public library and not at the employment commission.
When Gregory told his family that he had met a young American who had just arrived in Fort Worth with a Soviet wife, his youngest son, Paul, was especially interested. He was a student at the University of Oklahoma about to enter his junior year and engaged in the study of Russian. He told his father that he would like to meet the Oswalds, especially Marina, and perhaps arrange to take language lessons from her. Her Russian would be fresh and up to date, whereas that of his father, who had been forty years in exile, might no longer encompass the idiom of young people in Russia. Less than a week after their first meeting, therefore, the Gregorys, father and son, paid a call at the house of Robert Oswald.
Lee was proud as he introduced his wife to the Russian he had found for her. Marina at first was not so sure. She did not quite take to the elder Gregory, a Russian of the pre-Revolutionary generation, who seemed uncertain how to converse with a Soviet girl. Her reservations passed, however, and the four of them visited for an hour, with the Gregorys directing most of their questions to Marina. By the time they left, it was arranged that Paul, after a short visit to San Francisco, would take Russian lessons from Marina.
Lee, meanwhile, had already telephoned the other Russian whose name he was given at the employment commission. Her name was “Gali” Clark, the wife of Max Clark, a Fort Worth attorney. Lee told Mrs. Clark that he had just arrived with a Soviet wife and was looking for a woman for her to talk Russian to. Unlike Peter Gregory, however, Mrs. Clark already knew of Oswald. She had read about him in the Fort Worth paper, and her impression had not been favorable. She considered him a turncoat. She put him off by saying that her husband was not at home; she would consult him, and they would call back.
A few days later, on Sunday, June 24, Mrs. Clark telephoned Lee and invited him to drive over that afternoon with his wife and child. But Lee, offended that he had not been welcomed on the first call, was churlish to Mrs. Clark and told her that he could not make it.[9]
That evening at the dinner table with Robert and Vada, he told Marina about the call. She berated him for being rude, and angry words passed between them. They were speaking in Russian, of course, when suddenly, in a shift of mood, he told her to smile, be nice, and not let on to Robert that they were having a fight. Marina refused to pretend. He called her a dirty word, and she quickly got up and left the table. Lee followed her into the bedroom. He was pale with anger, and there was a cold, pitiless look in his eyes which Marina had not seen before. Quietly, very quietly, so that Robert would not hear, he cuffed her several times, hard, across the face. He told her to say nothing to Robert or he would kill her.
8
Testimony of Peter Paul Gregory, Vol. 2, pp. 337–347; and conversations between Mr. Gregory and the author in August 1964.