Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Lee undoubtedly would have been gratified to learn of the commotion he was causing, although, holed up in his room at the Metropole, he had no way of knowing about the cables flying back and forth between Moscow and Washington, or of the considerable traffic between agencies of the U.S. government on the one hand and those of the Soviet government on the other.

  Although there is no indication in the Warren Commission volumes that the Department of Defense, which oversees the nation’s military defense, received a copy of Snyder’s October 31, 1959, telegram to the Department of State about Oswald offering to furnish the Soviets with his radar knowledge, only that the FBI and CIA got copies,539 on November 3, 1959, the naval attaché at the American embassy in Moscow sent a confidential “message” to the chief of naval operations (CNO) at the Department of Defense at the Pentagon in Washington that Oswald had stated he “has offered to furnish Soviets info he possesses on US radar.”540 The following day, the CNO messaged back to the attaché that the department had found “no record of [security] clearance at HQ [Headquarters], Marine Corps, but possibility exists he may have had access to Confidential info…Request significant developments in view of continuing interest of HQ, Marine Corps, and U.S. intelligence agencies.”541 In view of what potentially was at stake, this seemed to be a rather tepid response to Oswald’s threat. A layperson would naturally expect his threat to be a bombshell to the military, in that at that time no one knew for sure just what confidential information Oswald might have stumbled on that might be of any use to the Soviets (that is, unless just a few quick calls from the Pentagon that we don’t know about to Oswald’s superiors at Atsugi revealed that he was, to be cruel, a military cipher). However, apparently the military did do something as a result of Oswald’s threat, but the only evidence I could find in the Commission volumes comes not from the Department of Defense or any military command, but from Lieutenant John Donovan, the officer in command of Oswald’s radar crew in Santa Ana, who recalled what happened when “we received word that he had shown up in Moscow. This necessitated a lot of change of aircraft call signs, radio frequencies, radar frequencies.”542 “We had to spend several thousand man-hours changing everything and verifying the destruction of the codes.”543

  Inasmuch as Donovan’s credibility has been severely thrown into question on another matter related to Oswald (see endnote), we cannot automatically accept his words here at face value.

  Donovan went on to say that Oswald’s low grade of clearance, confidential, gave him potential access to, in Donovan’s words, “the location of all bases in the West Coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for the Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding unit’s radio and radar.”544

  Much of this information was look-up stuff, not something anyone would be likely to remember several weeks after working with it, but if Oswald had written it down he might make it available to the Soviets. The authentication and identification codes were changed routinely anyway, and anything Oswald might reveal about them would be short-lived, but there was other information, Donovan said, that could not be changed. Oswald had worked with the new MPS16 height-finder radar, which vastly improved the service’s ability to determine the altitude of aircraft, which could not, like the codes could, be changed. He had also been schooled in a piece of gear called TPX-1, which transferred radio and radar signals over great distances, allowing the radar operators to be far away from the radar antennae, which would be electronically targeted by incoming aircraft and missiles. That fact could not be changed either.545

  If Donovan’s words are to be believed, Oswald’s defection had gone far beyond a mere teenage prank.

  After the flurry of activity in the first week of November 1959, things turned dismal for Lee Oswald. The penetrating, cold bleakness of a Moscow November had little on him. He heard nothing from his Soviet hosts. Out of money, and poorly clothed against Moscow’s weather, he rarely if ever left his room in the Hotel Metropole. Finally, on November 8, he wrote to his brother. The spelling and punctuation are so clearly better than his atrocious diary entries that we can assume he had some help, or simply spent a lot of time in its preparation, using a dictionary for spelling.

  Dear Robert

  Well, What shall we Talk about, the weatter perhaps? Certainly you do not wish me to speak of my decision to remain in the Soviet Union and apply for citizenship here, since I’m afraid you would not be able to comprehend my reasons. You really dont know anything about me. Do you know for instance that I have waited to do this for well over a year, do you know that I [a few words in Russian to illustrate knowledge of language] speak a fair amount of Russian which I have been studing for many months.

  I have been told that I will not have to leave the Soviet Union if I do not care to. This than is my decision. I will not leave this country, the Soviet Union, under any conditions, I will never return to the United States which is a country I hate.

  Someday, perhaps soon, and then again perhaps in a few years, I will become a citizen of the Soviet Union, but it is a very legal process, in any event, I will not have to leave the Soviet Union and I will never [do so].

  I recived your telegram and was glad [to hear] from you, only one word bothered me, the [word] “mistake.” I assume you mean that I have [made a] “mistake” it is not for you to tell me [that. You] cannot understend my reasons for this very [full word not shown] action.

  I will not speak to anyone from the United States over the Telephone since it may be taped by the americans.

  If you wish to corespond with me you can write to the below address, but I really don’t see what we could Take about, if you want to send me money, that I [could] use, but I do not expect to be able to send it back.

  Lee

  Lee Harvey Oswald

  Metropol Hotel RM 233

  Moscow U.S.S.R.546

  Oswald’s claim that he had been told that he could remain in Russia does not appear to be true—according to his own diary, he was not told until a week later that he could remain even temporarily in the Soviet Union.547

  Several days later, the U.S. embassy in Moscow received a cable from the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, forwarding a message for Lee from his half brother, John Pic, who had by now left the Coast Guard to join the U.S. Air Force and was stationed at Tachikawa Air Base in Japan. Pic had learned of his brother’s defection from an Armed Forces Network broadcast, which was confirmed the next morning by the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes. John found it all but unbelievable, although in the back of his mind was the grim thought that “ever since he was born and I was old enough to remember, I always had a bad feeling that some great tragedy was going to strike Lee in some way or another, and when this happened, I figured this was it.”548

  Eventually, John contacted the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, which forwarded to Moscow a few words for Lee: “PLEASE RECONSIDER YOUR INTENTIONS. CONTACT ME IF POSSIBLE.” On November 9, Snyder’s assistant John McVickar took a typed copy of the message over to the Metropole to deliver it by hand, at least partly in the hope of putting the lost sheep back in touch with his family and possibly dissuading him from his reckless course. Lee wasn’t in so McVickar sent it to Oswald by registered mail.549

  The following Saturday, November 14, Aline Mosby, who had broken the first story on Oswald for United Press International, finally managed to wangle a real interview with him.* She had given him her card at their first meeting but was surprised when he called and offered to talk. She drove straight over to the Metropole. When she met him in his hotel room and thanked him for the opportunity, he told her that indeed “other reporters have been trying to get up here,” but he thought she might “understand and be friendly because you’re a woman.”


  Mosby was also young, outgoing, and good-looking. A native of Montana, she had brought her white MG-A roadster to Moscow, which guaranteed her a great deal of interested attention. Her colleague, A. I. Goldberg from the rival Associated Press, speculated that Oswald had granted her the interview instead of him because Oswald fancied himself a “ladies’ man,” but Lee did not make a particularly favorable impression on Mosby. Scarcely out of cultural shock herself—she had arrived in Moscow only in February—there were times when the sheer frustration of life in Russia had reduced her to tears,550 but even so it was difficult to empathize with Lee Oswald. Mosby wrote,

  As he talked he held his mouth stiffly and nearly closed. His jaw was rigid. Behind his brown eyes I felt a certain coldness…Sometimes he looked directly at me, other times at the plush furniture. Now and then he gazed out the tall window, hung with lace curtains and gold draperies,* to Sverdlovsk Square and the Lenin Museum and the gold onion-shaped domes of the ancient Kremlin churches beyond. He talked almost non-stop like the type of semi-educated person of little experience who clutches what he regards as some sort of unique truth. Such a person often does not expect anyone else to believe him and is contemptuous of other people who cannot see his “truth.” A zealot, he is not remotely touched by what anyone else says. In fact, at times in my two hours with Lee Harvey Oswald I felt we were not carrying [on] a conversation, but that two monologues were being delivered simultaneously.

  Oswald seemed full of confidence, often showing a “small smile, more like a smirk.” He admitted his Russian was bad but was convinced it would improve rapidly. He told her a bit about his childhood in New Orleans, Fort Worth, and New York, and mentioned his discovery of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with fervor, eyes shining.

  Having grudgingly surrendered as much about his personal life as he cared to, Oswald, who she said was “inexpensively but well and neatly dressed in a suit, white shirt and tie,” launched into his standard disquisition on Marxism, which Mosby found as entertaining as recitations from Pravda. Since she took down his words in shorthand, her account, though written a few years later from the notes of her interview of Oswald, preserves much of the tone of the twenty-year-old’s mind:

  “I would not care to live in the United States where being a worker means you are exploited by the capitalists…I could not be happy.” Oswald said that in New York City, he “saw the luxuries of Park Avenue and the workers’ lives on the East Side” and could see

  “the impoverishment of the masses before my own eyes in my own mother…I could not live under a capitalist system. I would have a choice of becoming a worker under the system I hate, or becoming unemployed. Or I could have become a capitalist and derived my profit and my [living] under the exploitation of workers. I will live now under a system where no individual capitalist will be able to exploit the workers…

  “Capitalism has passed its peak. Unemployment is growing. An era of depression is on the way…The forces of communism are growing. I believe capitalism will disappear as feudalism disappeared…The hysteria in America has gotten worse. If practice makes perfect, the U.S. is getting better,” he said sarcastically. “You know, fashions, mode, clothes, food—and hating communists [and] niggers. You go along with the crowd. I am against conformism in such matters, such as fashionably hating minority groups. Being a southern boy, I’ve seen poor niggers. That was a lesson, too. People hate because they’re told to hate…People in the United States are like that in everything.”

  When Mosby “got a word in edgewise” and asked Oswald if he was a member of the Communist Party, Oswald seemed surprised. “Communist?” he said. “I’ve never met a communist. I might have seen a communist once in New York, the old lady who gave me the pamphlet, ‘Save the Rosenbergs.’” Oswald acknowledged he had been “influenced by what I read” about Marxism, and had made “careful plans to go to Russia…to observe that which I had read.” He said intensely, “When I was working in the middle of the night on guard duty [in the Marines] I would think how long it would be and how much money I would have to have. It would be like being out of prison. I saved about $1,500.”

  After two hours, Mosby had enough. When he started on “the ebb and flow of communism” again, she took her leave. At the door, though, she finally had a twinge of sympathy for him, someone she perceived as still “a boy,” and a stranger in a strange land, without a family or friends, trying to digest the Hotel Metropole’s food every night. She thought it might do him some good to meet some other westerners in Moscow. She invited him to dinner at her place—she lived in an apartment with a TASS Teletype, as it was also her office—in a building where many of the other foreign press also lived and worked, a kind of ghetto for foreign journalists. She thought he might enjoy it.

  He thanked her but declined. It was obvious to her that he had no intention of ever seeing her again.551

  For the date of November 16, Oswald wrote in his diary, “A Russian official comes to my room askes how I am. Notifies me I can remain in USSR till some solution [is] found with what to do with me, it is comforting news to me.”552

  During the month he waited to hear from the Soviets, Rimma came to see him faithfully—she had been assigned the task as her job and she wrote reports to her chief whenever it seemed useful. She always tried to give a good impression of Lee. She and Roza Agafonova worried about his clothing, which was not weighty enough for the steadily worsening weather. Together they broached the problem to Alexander Simchenko, head of the Passport Office, and he authorized them to purchase a good hat from the GUM (State Universal Store) Department Store. Lee was delighted with it, became emotional, and kissed them both.553

  The day before Lee finally heard that he would be allowed to stay in the Soviet Union, Priscilla Johnson returned to Moscow from a visit to the United States, where she had been covering Premier Khrushchev’s dramatic and colorful tour of America, his second visit there. Johnson was then a thirty-one-year-old expert in the Russian language. At college she had been a World Federalist, out of hope that the Soviet Union could be persuaded to join a world government, and toward that goal she had majored in Russian at Bryn Mawr and received an MA in Soviet area studies from Radcliffe College in 1953. Because of her background in Russian studies, she applied for employment at the CIA in the summer of 1952 as an intelligence analyst. It was one of a number of places she applied for work at the time. She was eventually turned down by the CIA after a long check on her background, her association with the liberal United World Federalists almost assuredly proving fatal to any hopes of a career in the CIA. But by the time of her rejection in March of 1953, she had already started to work elsewhere—as a researcher for a dashing newly elected senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy.554

  By 1959 she was the Moscow correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Having just returned from the states, she stopped in at the American embassy late on Monday afternoon, November 16, to pick up mail that might have landed there in her absence.555 When she walked past John McVickar’s office, he came out to welcome her back to Moscow. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “there’s a young American in your hotel trying to defect. He won’t talk to any of us, but maybe he’ll talk to you because you’re a woman.”556 McVickar pointed out to her that there was a narrow line between her duty as a correspondent and her duty as an American, the message being McVickar and Snyder needed help with Oswald.557 She went straight back to the Metropole and when she knocked on the door to Oswald’s room, which was one floor below her own, he did not invite her in but agreed to come upstairs to her room to be interviewed later that evening.

  He appeared around “eight or nine,” she would later write, neatly dressed in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and dark tie, with a tan cashmere sweater vest, looking not unlike college boys she had known on the East Coast in the 1950s. Johnson, living on a shoestring in Moscow—about fifty dollars a week—often cooked in her room to save money. She made him a cup of tea on a little burner she kept on the fl
oor, and they settled down for what was to become the longest interview anyone ever had with Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald staying until “two o’clock in the morning.”558

  She was startled, almost above all else, by his youth—he seemed no more than about seventeen to her—and like Mosby, referred to him as “a boy.”559 Also like Mosby, she found his ideological spiel heavy going, but she liked him and wanted to establish communication with him, and she realized his incantations about the exploitation of the American worker by the capitalist system were practically the only means he had for speaking about himself. Ever mindful that her room might be bugged, she nonetheless tried to suggest to him that life in the Soviet Union was not going to be a rose garden. There is, she told him, poverty and injustice everywhere. She hoped that if she could at least meet him partway on his own ground, she might encourage him to hesitate, to think his decision over, but it didn’t work.560 Seeing he was interested in economics, she tried to engage him in a discussion on economic principles but quickly came to the conclusion that he really didn’t have the capacity for “a logical sustained argument about an abstract point on economics or on non-economic political matters, or any matter philosophical,”561 observing he had “a very primitive understanding of economics,”562 which, ironically, was virtually the entire reason for his defection. She wondered what socialist literature he might have read, and he came up with his standard response, Marx and Engels, but was then unable to name any work by Engels. He claimed to have read the work of American Marxists, but couldn’t name any of them either.563