Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  To Priscilla Johnson several things stood out about Oswald, the callow American who “seemed lonely…very, very young. He seemed lost in a situation that was beyond him,”564 among them being that “he was the first and, as it turned out, the only ideological defector I met in Moscow.” There weren’t many, and none claimed to be motivated by a belief in Communism. “All appeared to be fleeing some obvious personal difficulty, such as an unhappy marriage back home.” But Oswald, whom Johnson saw “as a little lost boy,” insisted that “my decision is not an emotional one.” He was acting, he maintained, solely out of an intellectual conviction that Marxism was the only just way of life. “For this alone he was memorable,” she would later write. Also, in the contemporaneous notes she took as they talked, there was the repeated marginal reminder to herself that “he’s bitter.” Finally, she sensed in him “the desire to stand out from other men,” that he saw himself as “extraordinary.” For instance, she said this “came out unexpectedly when I asked him why he had been willing to grant me an interview. I expected a simple response. That he was homesick, maybe, and wanted somebody to talk to. Instead, he surprised me. ‘I would like,’ he replied, ‘to give the people of the United States something to think about.’”565That he would eventually do, in spades, but it would have nothing to do with his beliefs or defection to Soviet Russia. When he left at two that morning to return to his own room, she felt a twinge of pity for him: “I felt that I had failed,” she wrote later. “I had reached out, and my fingers had not touched anyone.”566

  Four Americans—Snyder, McVickar, Mosby, and Johnson—had tried, in their way, to help Lee Oswald. But help doesn’t visit those who do not welcome it.

  Near the end of the week, Priscilla Johnson paused on the second floor on her way back to her own room on the third floor of the Metropole. She stopped to ask the dezhurnaya, a diminutive concierge in white who sat on the landing, “How about Number 233? Is he in?” The woman checked her drawer of room keys and her arms flew up. “Out,” she said. Lee had forgotten his promise to say good-bye and she never saw him again.567

  Johnson told McVickar that Oswald was no longer at the Metropole, and on December 1, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Llewellyn Thompson, informed the State Department that “Lee Harvey Oswald believed departed from Metropole Hotel within last few days…apparently quickly and with no forwarding address.”568

  Oswald had ostensibly vanished into Russia, a country twice the size of the United States, practically a continent in its own right, and no one on the American side had any idea of what happened to him.

  In fact, Lee Oswald, his funds all but depleted, had gone no farther than another, smaller room in the Metropole—a chambermaids’ cubbyhole room on the top floor arranged for by Rimma’s superiors. For the next six weeks he did little but wait for the Soviet authorities to decide what they were finally going to do with him.

  Moscow in December is brutally cold, and Oswald did not have clothes warm enough to permit explorations in the city, so he mostly sat in the little room for which he was no longer able to pay rent and waited, even taking his meals there, though they were of poorer quality than the regular hotel fare. The reliable Rimma continued to visit him.569 He later covered the whole period from November 17 through December 30 in a paragraph entry in his Historic Diary. He wrote that “I have bought myself two self-teaching Russian Lan. Books I force myself to study [them] 8 hours a day. I sit in my room and read and memorize words…I have $28. left,” he said, from the fifteen hundred dollars he had managed to save over the previous two years for his Russian adventure. “It is very cold on the streets,” he wrote, “so I rarley go outside at all…I see no one speak to no-one accept every-now-and-than Rimmea.”570

  On November 26, he undertook a very long, handwritten reply to a letter from his brother Robert. It is a shockingly cold, fanatical document. In one of the softer, early paragraphs he writes,

  I will ask you a question Robert. what do you surpport the american government for? What is the Ideal you put forward?…Ask me and I will tell you I fight [“fight” is encircled] for communism. This word brings to your mind slaves or injustice. This is because of american propaganda. Look this word up in the dictionary or better still, read the book which I first read when I was fifteen, “CAPITAL,” which contains economic theorys and most important the “communist manifesto.”

  I will not say your grandchildren will live under communism, look for yourself at history, look at a world map! america is a dieing country, I do not wish to be a part of it, nor do I ever again wish to be used as a tool in its military aggressions.

  He tells Robert that “happiness” for him “is taking part in the struggle” for Communism.

  He later gets into the heart of his letter: “I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I have been in the military as you know, and I know what war is like: 1. In the event of war I would kill any american who put a uniform on in defense of the american government—any american. 2. That in my own mind I have no attachment’s of any kind in the U.S. 3. That I want to, and I shall, live a normal happy and peaceful life here in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life.” In case Robert missed the import of “no attachment’s,” Lee’s fourth paragraph spelled it out: “4. That my mother and you are (in spite of what the newspaper said) not objects of affection, but only examples of workers in the U.S.”

  After this diatribe, he writes, “You should not try to remember me in any way I used to be, since I am only now showing you how I am. I am not all bitterness or hate, I come here only to find freedom, In truth, I feel I am at last with my own people.”571

  Unless Oswald was lying to himself in his own diary entry covering the period of November 17 to December 30, in which he said he had twenty-eight dollars to his name, he tells Robert in the letter the lie that “I have no money problems at all. My situation was not nearly as sable [stable?] then, as it is now, I have no troubles at all now along that line.” He also made it clear in the letter that he was disappointed that his grand gesture had put him in the spotlight for only two days before he was plunged once again into obscurity. “I wish you would do me a favor since that other bad newspaper story went [out], I have been thinking I would like to give people, who are interested [in] the real reasons,” he wrote. “If you would, give the contents of this letter…to some reporter, it will clarify my situation, use your own judgement, however.”572*

  Oswald seemed to realize that his fifteen minutes of fame had come and gone, and he knew his life was presently even gloomier than it had been before. He might have been cheered had he known anything of the progress of his case through the Soviet bureaucracy, but he did not. On November 27, Andrei Gromyko, minister of foreign affairs, and Aleksandr Shelepin, chairman of the KGB, addressed a joint memo to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that concluded with a recommendation: “Considering that other foreigners who were formerly given Soviet citizenship (Sitrinell, Afshar) left our country after having lived here for awhile and also keeping in mind that Oswald has not been sufficiently studied, it is advisable to give him the right to temporary residence in the USSR for one year, with a guarantee of employment and housing. In this event, the question of Oswald’s permanent residency in the USSR and granting of Soviet citizenship can be decided during the course of this term.”573*

  Sometime in December, the Central Committee, not having yet ruled on the recommendation, once again called Oswald to the Soviet Passport Office, where he met three new officials who put to him the same questions the others had asked a month before, as though his case were only then being taken up for the first time. “They appear not to know me at all,” he wrote, disconcerted, in his diary.574

  Rimma, during her visits, didn’t even try to help him with his Russian, as she felt he was too distraught to learn very much, and she noticed no particular improvement in his skills from all the hours of study he put in alone. He kept asking her for news about h
is case, but when she passed his query on to her chief at Intourist, he said to her, “What can he do for a living?” She had no answer to that.575

  Robert received a third letter on December 17 in which Oswald said that he would be moving from the hotel and would not be writing again. He asked Robert not to write to him. The letter concluded, “I’m sure you understand that I would not like to recive correspondence from people in the country which I fled. I am starting a new life and I do not wish to have anything to do with the old life. I hope you and your family will always be in good health.”576

  Within a week or two, his mood had softened, if all but imperceptibly. Marguerite had mailed him a personal check for twenty dollars dated December 18. He returned it to her on January 5 with a note terse to the point of insult, scribbled on the torn-off flap of her envelope: “I can’t use this check, of course. Put the $20 bill in an envelope and send it to me I’m also short of cash and need the rest. Love Lee.”577 The “rest” may have been in reference to the hundred dollars he supposedly had given, not lent, her in September. In any case, she did send him a twenty-dollar bill, and almost immediately thereafter a money order for about twenty-five dollars, both of which failed to get through and were eventually returned to her.578

  Christmas came and went. On New Year’s Eve 1959, Roza Agafonova was on duty in the hotel, and Oswald sat up with her to see the new year in. He had only just learned that she was married and the mother of a child born crippled, which was why, he wrote in his diary, “she is so strangly tender and compeling.” She gave him a small “Boratin” clown as a New Year’s present.579

  Still unknown to him, on November 27, 1959, his fate had already been decided by the highest entity in the Soviet Union, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which passed a resolution on his behalf:

  In regard to the petition by the American citizen Lee Harvey Oswald for Soviet citizenship, let it hereby be resolved: 1. To agree with the proposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the KGB to grant U.S. citizen Lee Harvey Oswald temporary residence status for one year and to resolve the questions of his permanent residency in the USSR and Soviet citizenship during this period. 2. To oblige the Belorussian National Economic Council to place Oswald in a job in electronics and the Minsk City Council of Worker’s Deputies to assign him his own small apartment. 3. To instruct the executive committee of the Societies of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent to assign five thousand rubles for equipping the apartment for Oswald and to issue him an allowance of seven hundred rubles a month over the course of one year.580

  KGB defector Yuriy Nosenko told author Gerald Posner, “After years of cold relations between the superpowers, they were just starting to warm up. We didn’t want to do anything to hurt this new atmosphere or to give a pretext to those who wanted to ruin better relations. By telling Oswald he had to leave, he was so unstable he might try and succeed in killing himself. Then we would be criticized for a KGB murder of an American tourist. If we forced him onto a plane for deportation, there was still an image of a student being manhandled by the Soviet security forces. Considering the options, we decided to let him stay. He seemed harmless enough. We could decide where he worked and lived, and maintain surveillance over him to insure he did not cause any trouble or was not an American sleeper agent.”581

  Finally, on January 4, 1960, Oswald was summoned to the Soviet Passport Office and given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479, although he was technically not stateless—he had never returned to the American embassy either to renounce his citizenship or to recover his passport.582 He was told he was being sent to Minsk in the Soviet republic of Belorussia (also spelled Byelorussia—Belorussia became known as Belarus following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991). He asked the official, “Is that in Siberia?” The official laughed.583 Minsk is in the opposite direction, an industrial city located about 450 miles southwest of Moscow with a population of about 510,000 in 1959.584 Further, he was told that a factory job had been arranged for him there. His disappointment that he had not been granted Soviet citizenship and was not going to remain in Moscow, where he wanted to be, was balanced by relief that the uncertainty was ended; he told Rimma Shirokova that he was happy.585

  The next day he went, by direction of the Passport Office, to an agency the Russians called the Red Cross, although it was not a private charity like the International Red Cross or the Muslims’ Red Crescent, but an organ of the Soviet government. They gave him five thousand rubles, or about five hundred dollars at the official exchange rate, a not inconsiderable sum. Oswald thought it “a huge sum!” He used 2,200 rubles to pay his hotel bill and 150 rubles to purchase his railroad ticket to Minsk.586

  Always faithful Rimma saw him off at the station. He was depressed and wanted her to accompany him on the overnight train trip, but by now he understood that such things were not as simple in the Soviet Union as they might have been in the states. It was snowing as they said their good-byes. Both of them were crying.587 But through the tears there was a sense of defiance and renewal. After writing in letters to his mother and brother that “I do not wish to every contact you again,” he wrote in his diary, “I am beginning anew life and I don’t want any part of the old.”588 Oswald was met at the station in Minsk by two Soviet Red Cross workers who took him to the Hotel Minsk, an impressive five-hundred-room establishment built less than three years before at the direct order of Khrushchev589—Rimma had been there and thought it especially nice.590 Two women from Intourist, both of whom spoke English, were waiting there for him. One, Roza Kuznetsova, would become a close friend and attend his twenty-first birthday party later that year. “Excellant English,” Oswald wrote as his first impression of her, “we attract each other at once.”591

  Two days before his arrival in Minsk, KGB officers in that city were informed of Oswald’s pending arrival. They were given minimal details about how he had arrived in Moscow, his alleged suicide attempt, and how he had insisted on remaining in the Soviet Union. Their mission was to determine if Oswald was an American intelligence plant. Surveillance began the moment he got off the train in Minsk.592*The following day Oswald met the mayor, Comrade Sharapov, who welcomed him to Minsk, promised him a nearly rent-free apartment, and warned him against “uncultured” persons who sometimes insulted foreigners.593

  The new life for which Lee Oswald had yearned and planned so long was finally to begin—in the city of Minsk, a town about the size of Tucson, Arizona. It had been destroyed twice during World War II, once when the Germans swept through on their advance on Moscow and again when the German army pushed back toward Poland and their homeland by the Red Army. Ninety percent of the town, originally a warren of small, ramshackle wooden buildings, had been destroyed, so the city that presented itself to Oswald in the frosty January of 1960 was, by Russian standards anyway, quite modern.594 After he returned to America he eventually wrote a description of it for a book he hoped to write.595

  The tallest building was still only nine stories, and the more distant landscape of factory chimneys and construction cranes testified to its largely industrial character. The main street, the Prospekt Stalinskaya, contained most of the city’s attractions—the five-hundred-room hotel Lee was staying at, the stuffy four-hundred-seat cinema, and the big GUM Department Store, where you could sign on to a three-month waiting list for a refrigerator or vacuum cleaner or even a car, a Moskvich (one year’s wait) or a Victory or a Volga (six or seven months’ wait). In a society where there was no commercial competition, Minsk had mostly just one of everything, except restaurants—there were five of those, including two almost identical stand-up cafeterias across the street from each other where Stalinskaya ended in Stalin Square. Stalinskaya was the longest, straightest street in the state of Belorussia, while its cross-streets were narrow, cobbled, and picturesque, ending at the end of the outskirts in pleasant public parks.596

  Among the prominent public buildings were the Ministry of Internal Affairs, run by a tough MVD col
onel, and right around the corner, the headquarters of the Belorussian KGB. A building Lee would come to know well was the Trade Union Building, which was used more for education and entertainment than business—real union affairs were handled in the factories. A large Greek revival building, it housed offices and work spaces for the performance groups that entertained there, an auditorium, and a small dance hall that Lee would come to frequent. Its architrave bore, in place of Greek heroes and gods, a surveyor with his transit, a bricklayer, a sportswoman in a track suit, and a man in a double-breasted suit carrying a briefcase, “either a bureaucrat or an intellectual, apparently,” Oswald wrote.597

  On January 10, his third day in the city, Oswald’s diary is confined to a single, terse, run-on sentence: “The day to myself I walk through city, very nice.”598

  Here is the KGB’s more detailed account of his day:

  At 11 o’clock, Lee Harvey left Hotel Minsk and went to GUM. There he came up to the electrical department, asked a salesperson some question, then took money out of his pocket and went to a cashier of this department. He did not pay for anything but just put money back into his pocket and started pacing first floor of department store up and down looking at different goods. Then he went back to electrical department, paid 2 rubles 25 copecks for electrical plug, put it into his pocket and went up to second floor. There he spent some time in department of ready-made clothes, looked through available suits, then left GUM store walking fast. He was back at his hotel by 11:25. At 12:45 he came out of his hotel room and went to restaurant. He took seat at vacant table and began to eat. (No observations were made during this meal because no other people were in there.) 13:35 [1:35 p.m.] Lee Harvey left restaurant and went back to his room. 18:10 [6:10 p.m.] he left his room and went to restaurant. He took vacant table, had his meal, left restaurant at 18:45, and took elevator to fourth floor where he went to his room. He did not leave his room up to 24:00 [midnight] after which time no observation was made until morning.599