Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  It worked. The application passed up the chain of command swiftly, and on August 28, 1959, the Dependency Discharge Board recommended that Oswald “be released from active duty…for reasons of dependency.”405 When the men in Oswald’s squadron learned about his mother’s financial hardship, they offered to pitch in, but Oswald turned down their offer.406

  On September 4, he was transferred out of MACS-9 to the H & HS MCAS Squadron, which would process the discharge.407 That same day he left the base to apply at the Superior Court in Santa Ana for a passport. He gave as his purpose for travel “to attend the college of A. Schweitzer, Chur, Switzerland, and the Uni of Turku, Turku, Finland. To vist [visit] all other country as a tourist.” His proposed destinations were Cuba, the Dominican Republic, England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, and Russia; his length of stay four months. He expected to depart from New Orleans by ship on the Grace Lines on September 21.408

  The passport, requested on September 4, was granted on September 10, 1959.409 The next day, September 11, Lee Oswald was released from active duty* on a “Dependency Discharge” and was on his way home to Fort Worth.410

  Lee arrived at Marguerite’s apartment in Fort Worth at two in the morning on September 14. Marguerite wanted to stay up and talk about their future, but Lee said they could talk in the morning. She set up half of a studio couch in her tiny apartment for him, and in the morning, Marguerite, who was not working because of her “injury” at work, excitedly told Lee of her plan to find a better place with more room for them. “We will be able to manage,” she said. “I can babysit or pick up a few dollars,” and Lee could “get a job.” But Lee had no intention of staying in Fort Worth or, for that matter, helping to support her. He told her he was going to get a job on a cargo ship. She was let down and didn’t like the idea, even when he proposed a crafty inducement—he would make much more money on a ship than he could hope to make in Fort Worth and would consequently be able to send money home to her.411

  Lee spent a day with Robert and Vada at their house, where they did little but sit and talk, but he told them a different story from what he had told Marguerite. He was going to New Orleans to work for an export firm—no mention of shipping out himself. Late that afternoon they went out to the yard to take pictures. Cathy, Robert and Vada’s two-year-old, wanted to show her uncle her birthday present, the swings Robert had erected in the backyard. The photo Robert took of Lee and little Cathy shows a decent-looking, smiling young man with a trim haircut, well dressed in shined shoes, slacks with a razor-sharp crease, and a plaid sport shirt, holding a blissful toddler in his arms amid the lengthening shadows. He looks like a young man with a real future.412

  Oswald moved quickly. The same day he had arrived in Fort Worth he registered his dependency discharge and transfer to the Marine Corps Reserve with the Selective Service Board in Fort Worth. Two days later, on September 16, he emerged from Marguerite’s kitchen with his suitcase and told her he was leaving for New Orleans. He showed Marguerite his passport, gave her a hundred dollars, and ignored her entreaties.

  “Lee, why don’t you stay?” she said, “we can get along” financially.

  “Mother, I am off,” he said, and left.413

  The following day he presented himself at a New Orleans travel agency, Travel Consultants Inc., where he answered questions for a “Passenger Immigration Questionnaire,” giving his occupation as “shipping export agent” and saying he would be abroad for two months on a pleasure trip. He booked passage on SS Marion Lykes, due to leave for Le Havre, France, the next day, and paid his one-way fare, apparently in cash, of $220.75.414 The travel agent, Lewis Hopkins, thought him ill-informed about travel in Europe and, had he known where Oswald really intended to go, could and would have recommended a ship that would have docked at a port more convenient to Russia than Le Havre.415 That night Lee registered at the Liberty Hotel on South Liberty Street in New Orleans.416

  The next afternoon, still carrying his simple suitcase, he boarded the Lykes docked at “Army Base Berth 2” in New Orleans. The departure was delayed until early the next morning, 6:24 a.m. on September 20.417 Before departing, Lee posted a letter to Marguerite:

  Dear Mother:

  Well, I have booked passage on a ship to Europe, I would of had to sooner or later and I think It’s best I go now. Just remember above all else that my values are very different from Robert’s or your’s. It is difficult to tell you how I feel, Just remember this is what I must do. I did not tell you about my plans because you could harly be expected to understand.

  I did not see aunt Lilian while I was here. I will write again as soon as I land.

  Lee418

  The Lykes was a freighter that, as many such ships did, also provided a half-dozen cabins for passengers, and there were three others on this crossing: a retired army officer and his wife, and a boy who had just graduated from high school in Midland, Texas, and was on his way to France to continue his education in Tours and Paris.419

  Eighteen-year-old Billy Joe Lord and nineteen-year-old Lee Oswald were assigned to the same cabin, introduced to each other by a ship’s officer, and left to their devices. Billy Joe found Lee “standoffish” and even unfriendly. Although they didn’t “hit it off,” they were thrown together for the next two weeks, and Billy Joe heard that Lee was recently separated from the Marine Corps where he worked with radar, was planning to travel in Europe, possibly to attend school in Sweden or Switzerland, and would probably return to the United States to get a job. He mentioned with some bitterness that his mother had to work in a drugstore in Fort Worth and was having a hard time, but oddly, they did not discuss politics. Lee got off on another hobbyhorse, though, possibly because he noticed Billy Joe’s Bible. Lee informed his young cabin mate that there was no supreme being and that it should be apparent to anyone with intelligence that nothing existed but physical matter.420

  The Churches, a couple in their forties, saw less of Oswald, since they met him only at dinner in the officers’ mess, where they dined at the same table, and Lee missed a number of meals, possibly owing to seasickness. George B. Church Jr. had retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel and was teaching junior high school in Tampa. He thought Lee “rather withdrawn,” and said Lee did not participate in any of the social activities onboard. But he did hear Lee talk of his plan to attend a college in Switzerland. He also heard that Lee was just out of the Marines and had not liked the service. Oswald apparently displayed his bitterness about the hard time his mother had suffered during the Depression of the 1930s, but Church himself had survived the Depression, along with millions of other Americans, an observation that apparently “made no impression” on his fellow passenger. Church indicated he wasn’t too interested in getting to know Oswald.421

  Mrs. Church made more of an effort but also found that Lee “did not enter into friendly conversations.” She thought him “peculiar.” Lee evaded naming the Swiss college he meant to attend and had no very clear educational goal in mind—Mrs. Church noted the contrast to Billy Joe, who worked on his French and was exuberant about his course of study and purpose in life. When Billy Joe dropped off at La Rochelle-Pallice, three days before the ship reached its final destination of La Havre, Mrs. Church got Billy Joe’s address so she could send him Christmas cards, but only with some reluctance did Lee give her Marguerite’s address in Fort Worth.422

  Lee’s sympathy for the workingman did not appear to extend to stewards—he rebuked Frank Mijares for not mopping the floor of his cabin to his satisfaction and failed to tip him when he left the ship after it berthed at the Cotton Dock in Le Havre on October 8,1959.423

  Oswald left Le Havre that day, and after an overnight trip, he entered England at Southampton on the ninth.424 He told British custom officials there that he had seven hundred dollars and that he planned to remain in the UK only one week before going on to school in Switzerland,425 but the next day, October 10, he flew on to Helsinki,* where he registered at the Torni Hotel, located in the cen
ter of the city, the same day. The following day he registered at another Helsinki hotel, the nearby Klaus Kurki,426 where he stayed for five days and four nights.

  What flight Oswald took out of London to Helsinki and what happened while he was in Helsinki are among the enduring puzzles of the assassin’s history and fertile ground for conspiracy theorists who are convinced Oswald was a U.S. intelligence agent, and holes in a story can only be explained and filled in by conspiratorial mush. The first problem here was that the only direct flight from London to Helsinki that day, October 10, arrived too late in the evening, at 11:33 p.m., for Oswald to have cleared customs and checked into the Torni by midnight, which we know he did. But unhappily for the conspiracy theorists, this fact was brought to the Warren Commission’s attention by Richard Helms, then deputy director of the CIA, someone whose agency most conspiracy theorists believe was involved in Kennedy’s murder.427 Moreover, the CIA failed to note that there were two indirect flights he could have taken out of London,428 one through Copenhagen, which would have landed him in Helsinki at 5:05 in the afternoon, and the other through Stockholm, which arrived only a half hour later.429 But Oswald’s change of hotels is also curious, since there seems to have been no particular advantage to do so. The fact that the Torni and Klaus Kurki are each quality hotels seemingly beyond the finances of Oswald has also raised suspicions in some.430

  More of a problem is that Oswald was issued a visa to the Soviet Union in just two days, which ostensibly seemed unlikely in that era. Oswald’s passport is stamped with an exit visa showing he left London Airport on October 10,431 which is highly unlikely to be wrong, so he probably did arrive in Helsinki that day, a Saturday, but not in time to deplane and get to the Soviet embassy at noon, when it closed for the weekend.432 Thus, his first chance to apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate in Helsinki would have been Monday, October 12, 1959.433 The questionnaire he filled out, probably at a Finnish travel agency, and that was handed in at the Soviet consulate in Helsinki and preserved by the KGB in Belarus, is dated in Oswald’s hand, October 13.434 And his six-day tourist visa was issued by the Consular Section of the Soviet embassy in Helsinki on October 14, just two days after he applied for it.435 Passport stamps show his exit from Finland and entry into the Soviet Union on October 15.436

  The problem of how Lee Oswald might have gained an entry visa for the Soviet Union in two days troubled the Warren Commission. J. Lee Rankin asked both the State Department and the CIA for information, and both told the Commission that it normally took five days to a week at the Helsinki embassy or elsewhere to obtain permission for any stay in Russia longer than twenty-four hours.437 Eventually, the HSCA took up the question by reviewing classified information about Gregory Golub, the Soviet consul in Helsinki who issued Oswald’s visa. Golub was suspected of being a KGB official—which was hardly surprising. But quite apart from the fact that if the KGB were facilitating Oswald’s travel to Russia, why would it have taken Oswald even two days—why not only one—to get his visa, the HSCA came up with two communications from the American embassy in Helsinki to the State Department concerning Golub’s handling of visas. The first disclosed that Golub had once told his counterparts at the American embassy during a luncheon conversation that “Moscow had given him the authority to give Americans visas without prior approval from Moscow.” Golub stated that this would make his job much easier, and as long as he was convinced the American was “all right” he could give them a visa in a matter of minutes.438 Here, Oswald being only nineteen, and listing his present job as “student,” Golub probably had no trouble issuing the visa.439

  A second dispatch, dated October 9, the day before Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, mentioned a case involving two American businessmen that occurred about a month earlier. The U.S. consul “advised them to go directly to Golub and make their request, which they did. Golub phoned [the U.S. consul] to state that he would give them their visas as soon as they made advance Intourist reservations. When they did this, Golub immediately gave them their visas.”440

  In addition to Golub’s practices, Oswald, per a KGB official, also seems to have benefited from the fact that the Helsinki consulate was partial to granting visas to the Soviet Union owing to the “geographical proximity of Finland to the Soviet Union as well as the good relations between Intourist, the Soviet national travel bureau, and the local Finnish travel agencies.”441

  In any case, Oswald left Helsinki by train the following day, October 15, crossed the Finnish-Russian border at Vainikkala, and arrived in Moscow on October 16, 1959. He was met at the Leningradsky station by an Intourist representative who took him by car to the Hotel Berlin, where he registered as a student on a “five-day luxury” tour.442 Very soon after his arrival he was introduced to the Intourist guide assigned to him for that period, a young Russian woman named Rimma Shirokova, who would take him sightseeing.443

  Lee Oswald’s dream of defecting to the Soviet Union, the plan he seems to have first contemplated two years before,* was within his grasp, and Rimma was going to play a part in it. He was on the eve of his twentieth birthday.

  Rimma Shirokova, slender, blond-haired, and good-looking, was only about two years older than Oswald. A student at Moscow’s Foreign Language Institute, she spoke English, which was just as well, since Lee seemed to speak hardly passable Russian. She was surprised that a client on the “deluxe tour” (which meant that she would guide only him over the next few days—no group activities) looked so unprepossessing. Those who took the deluxe tour were usually rich and looked it. She started by listing all of the things they might do in the next five days and explained that she could get tickets for the theater or the ballet, but he seemed withdrawn and uninterested in anything she had to offer. Nevertheless, they went for a chauffeured drive around Moscow and they saw what Rimma regarded as the most important sights the city had to offer, like the Tretyakov Gallery, the cathedrals, and Red Square, saving the Kremlin, the highlight of the tour, for the afternoon.444

  At midday, she dropped him back at the Hotel Berlin, where he lunched by himself, and she came back for him later, but he did not really want to see the Kremlin. They sat outdoors on a bench, where he began to talk a little about himself,445 one of the few times in the detailed record where he seems to have wanted to do so. By contrast, the reports of conversations in which he railed about capitalist exploitation of the workingman are so numerous as to be almost unworthy of mention. On the other hand, this was the first time in his life where he realized that pontificating to someone about the evils of capitalism and virtues of Marxism would be about as pointless as watering one’s lawn in the rain.

  Rimma recalls his telling her that he was from Texas, had served in the Marine Corps, hated the loss of American life in war, and spoke about the unjust wars caused by U.S. imperialism. He gave her the distinct impression that he had been in combat, and he told her as well that his mother had remarried and was no longer interested in him. In fact, he said, no one was interested in him in America. Whatever he told her, it worked. She was moved by him and eager to help when he told her that he wanted to remain in the Soviet Union. That seemed natural enough to her—after all, she felt the Soviet Union was the best country on earth—but she was nonetheless surprised. She asked him for his motives and “he said that it was his political views. He said that he was a Communist. He [didn’t] approve of the American way of life.”446

  Oswald set out his own recollection of the conversation in what he called his “Historic Diary” under the date of October 16, 1959, the day of his arrival: “I explain to her [Rimma] I wish to appli. for Rus. citizenship. She is flabbergassed but aggrees to help. She checks with her boss, main office Intour; then helps me add. a letter to Sup. Sovit asking for citizenship, mean while boss telephons passport & visa office and notifies them about me.”447

  The Historic Diary, Oswald’s handwritten account of his life in Russia, was completed before he left that country. The earlier entries were probably written, accordin
g to Marina, some time after the particular event occurred and may have been reconstructed from notes Oswald made at the time. However, in Minsk, it is believed he kept a more contemporaneous record of his experiences.448 The Warren Commission took the diary to be Oswald’s own record of his feelings and impressions, but with future readers in mind, and hence, the Commission relied whenever possible on independent evidence.449 The HSCA found Oswald’s diary to be “generally credible.”450

  The “passport & visa office” Oswald mentions in his diary was the Visa and Registration Department (OVIR, hereinafter “Passport Office”) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).451 The MVD was roughly equivalent to the American Justice Department. It was responsible for the enforcement of civil law (though not criminal, like the U.S. Department of Justice) and the administration of prisons and forced-labor camps.452

  Rimma’s boss at Intourist was not happy about her commitment to Oswald. “What have you done?” he barked. “He came as a tourist. Let him be a tourist.”453 Unfortunately for Lee, and ultimately for history, the Soviet Union was not particularly interested in defectors from the West who were not top-level scientists or intelligence agents. Their experience with so-called blow-ins had never been too encouraging, as the HSCA would discover from a “Defector Study” carried out by its staff. Of 380 Americans in the USSR between 1958 and 1964 whom the CIA knew of, the HSCA selected 23 whose situations most closely resembled Oswald’s for detailed study. Most of them were disgruntled people, some seriously disturbed, and some had simply chosen a spectacularly inappropriate way to solve personal problems. Many applied for Soviet citizenship, but few were granted it. In most cases the defectors experienced a change of heart and tried to return. The case histories strongly suggest that the Soviet Union gained nothing but trouble from its hospitality.454