Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Although Lee was probably never more than fleetingly aware of it, one feature of his new life was that he would never walk alone. A few weeks earlier, on December 21, 1959, the KGB opened an espionage file on him. As alluded to earlier, the Central Committee had given the KGB one year to “resolve the questions of his permanent residency in the USSR and Soviet citizenship,” and the spy agency was frankly puzzled as to why he had come to their country at all. Opening a file on him under the rubric of espionage, a very serious matter, guaranteed that whatever manpower, equipment, and resources were needed to keep him under surveillance would be available.600

  Curiously, or perhaps not so, they never chose to confront Oswald openly. According to Vladimir Semichastny, then chairman of the KGB, “those who met with him were under the cover of different organizations: Belorussian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, OVIR [passport office],” but there were no direct contacts.601

  Indirectly or directly, however, the KGB had determined that Oswald’s knowledge of radar was “very primitive and did not extend beyond the textbooks.” The head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, saw no particular use for him, but the intriguing possibility remained that he might have been planted on them by the CIA. He would, therefore, according to Semichastny, be handled “with the usual control measures. Routine surveillance, involving agents, observation, and standard operative techniques.” Even then, however, “we didn’t…involve our most skilled surveillance agents, because we didn’t want to risk compromising them for future, more important use.”602

  Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who studied the KGB files on Oswald and interviewed the KGB operatives and their superiors charged with his control and surveillance, thought that the intelligence agency might have taken a different attitude toward him if they had known that the U-2 spy plane had been housed at Atsugi when Oswald was stationed there.603 Though Oswald apparently never mentioned that to anyone in Moscow (in spite of his silly threat at the American embassy), it appears likely that the KGB, as effective as well as incompetent as virtually all official bodies are, never knew that Oswald was even stationed at Atsugi. Oswald made no reference to this in the questionnaire he completed for Russia’s Passport Office in Moscow on January 4, 1960,604 or the earlier questionnaire he filled out when he applied for a Soviet visa at the consulate in Helsinki on October 12,1959.605 Indeed, KGB defector Yuriy Nosenko told author Gerald Posner, “as for Atsugi, we didn’t know he had been based there.”606 And Nosenko told the HSCA back in 1978 that the KGB “didn’t know” Oswald had any connection with the U-2,607 which he, in fact, did not.

  But surely Soviet intelligence was well aware of the fact that U-2 missions had been flown from Atsugi, whether or not they knew it was, along with Adana in Turkey, one of the aircraft’s two main bases. It didn’t take any military intelligence capacity to know about the U-2 at Atsugi. As indicated earlier, not only was the unique plane clearly visible to anyone in the vicinity at Atsugi, which, unlike Adana, is in a populated area, but in September 1959, just before Oswald’s arrival in the Soviet Union, the pilot of U-2 plane number 360, outfitted with the new and more powerful engine that increased its range and altitude, decided to test the machine by setting a new altitude record. He did, but at the cost of too much fuel. The plane ran out of gas and landed ten miles short of Atsugi at the airstrip of the Japanese Glider Club, where it bogged down in mud. The pilot, wearing the uncomfortable rubber bodysuit and unable to get out of his jammed cockpit unaided, radioed to Atsugi for help. Military police quickly arrived to cordon off the area and drive onlookers away at gunpoint, but not before hoards of Japanese with omnipresent cameras had crowded around the plane and snapped innumerable photos, some of which appeared the next day in Japanese newspapers and magazines. Editorial writers wondered in print why, if the U-2 was engaged only in high-altitude weather research, it bore no distinguishing identification marks and occasioned such elaborate security.608

  After CIA U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk on May Day (May 1) 1960, his interrogators at Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison showed him articles about plane 360’s crash near Atsugi and asked him whether he knew about it. He did, but he didn’t bother to tell them that it was the same plane they had just shot down, the remains of which they had put on display in nearby Gorky Park.609

  In any case, there is no suggestion in the Soviet intelligence documents that have become available since the collapse of the USSR that Oswald ever gave the Soviets intelligence information or that they were interested in him as a source. One of the great, eternal problems of intelligence gathering is and always has been the reliability of the information acquired—false or faulty information is often more harmful than no information at all—and the Soviets simply did not believe that a disturbed youth had anything to tell them that they could trust.

  While the KGB obsessively followed Lee around on his first, tentative forays into the cityscape of his new home, American security services were also showing an interest in him. Although they didn’t actually know where he went after they lost track of him in Moscow, they were beginning to open files on him. Eventually, CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and State Department files would be opened, closed, reopened, neglected, and stuffed with odd bits of information of very little use to anyone, but they would testify to a continuing interest in their subject.

  In the meantime, the subject of all this scrutiny was getting acquainted with Minsk and meeting the people who would become his new circle of friends. On January 11, 1960, he visited the Belorussian Radio and Television factory, referred to by everyone as the “radio factory” or “Horizon,” where he would be working,610 a massive facility on a twenty-five-acre site two miles north of the center of town. This haphazard collection of buildings, workshops, and sheds reminded author Norman Mailer of a rundown movie studio.611 About five thousand employees produced radio and television sets there for Russian consumers. Lee noticed that there were no “pocket radios”—the tiny “transistors” that had recently become the rage in America. These were not available anywhere in the Soviet Union.612

  On Oswald’s first visit to the factory he met Alexander Ziger, a Polish Jew who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938, where he worked for an American company until he returned to Poland in 1955. His Polish homeland had been annexed by the USSR and was now a part of Belorussia. Ziger, an engineer in his forties who headed a department in the factory, spoke English well, and both he and his family, including two daughters born in Argentina, would become good friends to Oswald.613

  Two days later, Oswald began work at the factory as some sort of machinist. In his diary he described the job as a “checker,” in quotation marks. One of his work documents describes him as an “adjuster,” another as a “locksmith or metal worker.”614

  He was assigned to an “experimental shop,” a drab two-story red-brick building in the center of the factory complex. While in other parts of the plant, workers, three out of five of them women, toiled at long assembly lines, the experimental shop employed only fifty-eight hands, five of whom were foremen, and a commissar from the Communist Party. Work began at eight sharp with the ringing of a bell. Ten operators worked on lathes on the lower floor, the rest upstairs. Apparently the work involved the construction of prototypes. Oswald later wrote that they often worked directly from blueprints.615 Oswald’s base pay was seven hundred rubles per month (about seventy dollars on the official exchange rate), normal pay for his type of work. However, he also received seven hundred rubles monthly from the Soviet Red Cross, and he thought his total of fourteen hundred rubles per month was about as much as the director of the factory made.616 Since he was paid based on his production, he could make up to nine hundred rubles per month.617

  Oswald found his coworkers “friendly and kind,” almost too friendly at times—some offered to call a mass meeting so he could tell everyone about himself. Oswald declined the honor. The first small hin
t of a collision between his uncommonly independent nature and the antithetical climate for this in Soviet life surfaced in his diary entry for January 13 to 16, where he writes, “I don’t like” the fact that there was a picture of Lenin which “watchs” the workers from up above, and the fact that there was “complusery” physical training “at 11-11.10 each morning.” But he seemed otherwise content. He was taking Roza, one of the two Intourist representatives who had met him at his hotel when he first arrived in Minsk, to the movies, theater, or opera almost every night. “I’m living big…and very satisfied,” he wrote in his diary.618 He came to rely on the other official who had met him at the railroad station, Stellina (named for Stalin), a twenty-eight-year-old married woman with a year-old daughter. She was the head of the Service Bureau at the hotel and lived only two blocks away. Since her job required her to be on call at all hours, she didn’t mind Lee dropping in for help with a problem, and she even dubbed him “Aloysha,” a name she believed to be rather distinguished. She thought him oddly secretive, but she was well disposed toward Americans. She remembered, when she was living in an orphanage after the Great Patriotic War (the Russian name for the Second World War), the good things the Americans had sent the children: beds, clothes, sugar, chocolate, and nuts. She was also touched by Lee’s helplessness and began to mother him a bit. She tried to teach him Russian, sometimes on walks with him out to the Dynamo Sports Stadium with her child in a stroller.619

  Comrade Libezin, the party secretary at the plant, was solicitous of Oswald’s inability to speak passable Russian and assigned two coworkers of Oswald’s to help improve his Russian, one working with Oswald on the job, the other after work.620 Neither of the two men “hung out” with Oswald, but the relationship changed for one of them, Pavel Golovachev, one night when he was accosted by a KGB agent who showed his ID and asked for a talk. The agent was Stepan Vasilyevich Gregorieff (to borrow the pseudonym used by Norman Mailer). He was the main agent in the Minsk headquarters of the KGB who had been assigned the task of watching Oswald. His job was to keep his distance and to try to determine whether Oswald was an agent or some kind of CIA plant. He had several questions he wanted answers to. One had to do with the nature of Oswald’s service in the Marine Corps and his experience with radar and electronics. Another was the nature of his commitment to Marxism, since Oswald seemed to know so little of Marxist-Leninist theory. Yet another was his proficiency in Russian—was he really as inept and unskilled as he seemed, or only pretending to be?

  Gregorieff wanted eighteen-year-old Pavel Golovachev’s cooperation in providing regular reports on the activities and attitudes of the American defector, and Pavel was not in a position to refuse, although he wasn’t happy about having to do it. Pavel was the son of a famous Soviet fighter pilot who had been twice decorated as a hero of the Soviet Union, which could have bought Pavel a certain level of privilege, but he had not done well on his own. Following his father around from base to base, he had attended eleven schools in ten years, and his last school report was a disgrace. He’d also been kicked out of Komsomol, the party’s youth organization. He was working at the plant only as a stepping stone to a career as an engineer—he was at the same time attending the Minsk Polytechnic Institute four nights a week. The KGB suspected him of small transactions in the black market as well. He didn’t want to tell his father that the KGB had spoken to him, and he thought it best to go along quietly with Gregorieff’s plan. Pavel, whose “first reaction to Oswald was that he looked like an extraterrestrial who had all of a sudden ended up in their factory,” felt that Oswald did not seem to be up to much that would interest the KGB in any case.621

  “It was like this,” Pavel said. “He [the KGB man] said, ‘Your country asks you—your country demands. There is a foreigner here. It’s in the country’s interests for security, and so on.’”622

  In the end, Pavel became Lee’s best and closest friend in the Soviet Union—although Pavel learned more English from Lee than Lee learned Russian from Pavel. “I told him [Oswald] about it [the KGB’s contact with Pavel] a year later,” Pavel says. “I had three or four meetings with the KGB people. They gave me little assignments to provoke him, saying try this out on him and see what he says.”623 By the time Marina entered Lee’s life the following year, the two men almost always spoke English with each other.624 Pavel wrote to Lee and Marina after they went off to America, the last time less than two months before the assassination.625*

  On March 16, Oswald was given a fourth-floor apartment in a riverside building reserved for employees of his factory that was surprisingly ornate for Minsk. Apartment number 24 was very tiny but attractive, and to get any apartment there at all was remarkable, since many of his coworkers spent months or even years on a waiting list for such an accommodation, sometimes delaying marriage for however long a time it took. Oswald knew he was getting special treatment, describing the one-room apartment with a kitchen, bathroom, and a balcony overlooking the Svisloch River, as “a Russian dream.”626 Pavel and some other friends from the factory helped Lee move in, with some furnishings provided by the factory: a bed, a table, some chairs, a gas cooker. The kitchen was very small and the room was only about ten by seventeen feet, but the building itself was very grand and located in the best part of town, and the view of the river four stories below and just across Kalinina Street was outstanding.627 Oswald described the place as “almost rent-free,” and with some justice—it cost him only sixty rubles, or about six dollars, a month. The preference shown him was not all that remarkable. Foreigners residing in the Soviet Union were often given financial subsidies and other aid, and foreign students were paid a stipend double that of Soviet citizens.628 Oswald’s Russian friends were in no way surprised that he was receiving certain advantages “below the waist,” as Pavel put it, since, as indicated, they knew it was normal in Russia for foreigners to be treated better than Russian citizens.629 It also went without saying that the place was bugged—the electric meter kept running even when all the appliances and lights were off, and surveillance was a common assumption. After Marina married Lee and moved in, she and Lee took it for granted that their mail was opened and read, and it was.630

  As spring turned into summer, Lee enjoyed his new life, which involved a lot of new friends—it is the only period of his life where he was involved in social activities with others, many of whom were his own age. May Day 1960 was his first holiday in Russia, marked by the customary, spectacular parade of the region’s armed forces and workers, drawn from the ranks, passing the reviewing stand waving flags and large banners with Khrushchev’s portrait on them. That evening he went to the Zigers for a party with forty guests, many of them Argentinians, and there was a great deal of dancing and singing.631 His friend Pavel, who was also there, was impressed by the relaxed, joyful atmosphere and the Latin decor, music, and manners of the Zigers, who served coffee and wine on a tray—very unlike Russians. The Zigers’ daughters scandalized the neighborhood by sunbathing on their balcony, a barbarity put down to the fact that they were not only foreign but Jewish.632

  Lee took notice of both of the daughters. Eleonora, twenty-six, divorced, was a talented singer. He thought he “hit it off” with the younger Anita, who was twenty and “not so attractive” but a gifted pianist who was studying music and played everything from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to Argentine tangos on the Zigers’ piano.633 He was also attracted to a friend of Anita’s, a girl who worked in the central post office, Albina, at whom he made an unsuccessful pass. She in turn introduced him to Ernst Titovets, also called Erich, a handsome, blond charmer who was drawn to Lee at least in part because of the opportunity it gave him to improve his English. Erich was a bit of a nerd. He spoke a cultured English, played chess, and was going to medical school. He would become another of Lee’s pals.634

  Needless to say, none of this escaped the notice of the KGB, whose dogged appetite for banality was insatiable. Their account of Lee’s first holiday in the USSR runs as follows
:

  At 10:00 Lee Harvey came out of house N4 on Kalinina Street [Lee’s apartment], came to Pobedy Square where he spent 25 minutes looking at passing parade. After this he went to Kalinina Street and began walking up and down embankment of Svisloch River. Returned home by 11:00. From 11:00 to 13:00 [1:00 p.m.] he came out onto balcony of his apartment more than once. At 13:35 Lee Harvey left his house, got on trolley bus N2 at Pobedy Square, went to Central Square, was last to get off bus, went down Engelsa, Marksa and Lenina Streets to bakery store on Prospekt Stalina. There he bought 200 grams of vanilla cookies, then went to café Vesna, had a cup of coffee with patty at self-service section and hurried toward movie theater Central. Having looked through billboards he bought newspaper Banner of Youth, visited bakery for second time, left it immediately, and took trolley bus N1 to Pobedy Square and was home by 14:20 [2:20 p.m.]. At 16:50 Lee Harvey left his house and came to house N14 on Krasnaya Street (Residence of immigrant from Argentina—Ziger). At 1:40 Lee Harvey together with other men and women, among whom there were daughters of Ziger, came home. Observation was stopped at this point till morning.”635

  Apparently, the KGB missed something by not going to the party. “Zeber [Ziger] advises me to go back to U.S.A.,” Lee wrote in his diary, “its the first voice of oppossition I have heard. I respect Zeger, he has seen the world. He says many things, and relats many things I do not know about the U.S.S.R. I begin to feel uneasy inside, its true!”636