Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  As if the foregoing were not enough, Marina, because of her pregnancy, became inordinately sensitive to odors. Even the walls of their tiny apartment seemed to smell to her, and when she tried to escape to the balcony, she smelled everything on the stoves of the neighboring apartments, and she had trouble eating. She even noticed Lee’s body odor, which was persistent. She began to wonder if she had erred in marrying him so quickly.741

  The Saturday afternoon that Lee arrived in Moscow, Marina got a phone call at the pharmacy from a former boyfriend, Leonid Gelfant, a young architect she had seen before she met Lee. She told him she was now married, but he offered her dinner and champagne at a friend’s apartment where he was staying for a few days while the friend was away. Marina somewhat foolishly agreed, thinking that the evening might reveal to her whether she had made a mistake in marrying Lee. They first saw a movie together and afterward repaired to his borrowed flat, eventually winding up in bed, although, according to the story Marina told Priscilla McMillan years later, Leonid, making love to a woman for the first time, proved inadequate. Nevertheless, Marina felt dirty afterward. She ran home, where she nearly threw up. She knew she had seriously betrayed Lee.742 In the evening Marina went to the central post office in Minsk to receive a call from Lee, who asked her to join him in Moscow. She went, arriving on Monday morning.743 She took the bus into Sverdlov Square and went to the Hotel Berlin, where Lee was staying and where they made love. When Lee returned to the embassy that Monday afternoon, Marina waited outside in the waiting room744 while her husband was searchingly interviewed by Snyder, who asked to see Oswald’s Soviet papers and questioned him closely about his life in Russia and any possible expatriating acts that would preclude his returning to America. Oswald stated he was not a citizen of the Soviet Union, had never applied for citizenship (dubious, since we know he did request it, though not by formal application),745 had never taken an oath of allegiance to the Soviet Union, and had never become a member of a Soviet trade union, the latter being untrue.746 He also said that he had never given Soviet authorities any confidential information gleaned from his service in the military, had never been asked to give such information, and doubted that he would have done so had he been asked.747

  Snyder felt that Oswald had matured while he was in Russia and did not show the bravado and arrogance that characterized his first contact with the embassy. Oswald told him that he had “learned a hard lesson the hard way” and had acquired a new appreciation of the United States and the meaning of freedom.748

  Lee clearly feared prosecution and lengthy imprisonment if he returned to the United States, but Snyder, speaking unofficially, told him he saw no reason for such fear if everything he had told Snyder was true. He added, however, that there was no way the embassy had the power to grant him any sort of blanket immunity from prosecution.* Oswald appeared to understand but explained that he did not want to apply for an exit visa back to the United States from the Soviet authorities until he “had this end of the thing straightened out.”749

  Snyder had Oswald complete and sign an “Application for Renewal of Passport,” and then fill out a questionnaire, under penalty of perjury, on which he wrote what he essentially had told Snyder, including that he had only a residence permit in the Soviet Union and was still an American national. Snyder reviewed his application and questionnaire and, finding everything in order, returned (not renewed) Lee’s passport, amended for travel only back to the United States, knowing that Lee could make little headway with the Soviets for his exit visa without it.750 Oswald’s passport was scheduled to expire on September 10, 1961, and when Warren Commission counsel asked Snyder, “And you felt he would not be able to get out of the Soviet Union prior to September 1961?” Snyder answered that in his estimation “there was no prospect of his leaving the Soviet Union at that time, and probably not for quite some time to come.”751 Though Snyder didn’t explain why, we can only assume that he knew from experience that it would take the Soviets far beyond September to issue Oswald the exit visa he needed to leave the Soviet Union. And ultimately, the State Department would have to conclude whether Oswald had expatriated himself, and if not, renew his passport and allow him to return to America.

  The next day, Lee, elated by the return of his passport and the fact that his darkest fears of arrest, at least in Moscow, had not come to pass, went back to the embassy with Marina, where John McVickar took them through the procedures for admitting her to the United States as an immigrant, although there was little McVickar could do but take official notice of her intent until she obtained her exit visa from the Soviet Union. With an exit visa, Marina, being the wife of an American citizen, would have the right to enter the United States under a non-quota status.752 Pushed by Lee, Marina had not mentioned to McVickar her pregnancy, which might have caused a delay, and she had lied when he had asked her if she was a member of Komsomol. She was, although she took no interest or active role in the communist youth organization.753 McVickar typed out an immigrant visa application for Marina, which Lee signed.754

  After Lee and Marina returned to Minsk, he wrote to his brother Robert on July 14, 1961:

  Dear Robert,

  On the 8th of July [it had been the 10th] I and my wife went into The american Embassy, I cannot write you what went on there, because the Russians, read all letters going in and out. But anyway I have the American Passport, and we are doing everything we can to get out…

  The Russians can be crule and very crude at times. They gave a cross eximanation to my wife on the first day we came back from Moscow, They knew everything because they spy, and read there mails. but we shall continue to try and get out. We shall not retreat. As for your package we never recived it, I suppose they swiped that to, the bastards.

  I hope someday, I’ll see you and Vada but if and when I come, I’ll come with my wife. You can’t imagine How wonderful she stood up.

  Write offten

  Your Brother

  Lee755

  The secret was indeed out. The Soviet authorities, who usually check the papers of anyone entering the American embassy in Moscow,756 were perfectly aware that Lee and Marina had gone there, and the battle, particularly over Marina, was now openly joined. Lee, however, would not waver until he had accomplished his goal, to return to America with his wife and, as it turned out, his child.

  If Oswald’s diary is correct about the date—always a questionable supposition—Marina was ambushed at work on the very day after their return. She was, he wrote in his diary entry for July 15, “shocked to find out ther everyone knows she entered the U.S. embassy…The boses hold a meeting and give her a strong browbeating. The first of many indocrinations.”757

  In a letter to the American embassy dated the same day, July 15, he mentioned Marina’s difficulties at what he called “the usual, ‘enemy of the people’ meeting.” She was “condemed, and her friends at work warned against speaking with her.” But he also boasted that such “tactics” were “quite useless” since Marina had “stood up well, without getting into trouble.”758

  Lee and Marina’s attempt to leave Russia for the United States was not going to be easy. For starters, the Soviets required the completion of four documents, which were submitted by Lee and Marina in July and August of 1961: Lee’s application for an exit visa, backed by Marina’s application for permission for Lee to leave, Marina’s own application for an exit visa, and a statement by Lee guaranteeing Marina’s financial support.759 But Lee’s diary entry for the period from July 15 through August 20 suggested that so much more was involved, there being “about 20 papers” in all, including birth certificates and photos. Because of his dyslexia, filling out all the forms he had to was a real strain, and Marina recalls that he would pick up five or six blank forms for every one he was eventually able to complete reasonably well.760

  But the psychological obstacles for Marina and Lee were much more difficult. He wrote in his diary, “On Aug 20th we give the papers out they say it will be 3½ months before
we know wheather they’ll let us go or not. in the meantime Marina has had to stade [stand?] 4 different meeting[s] at the place of work held by her Boss’s at the direction of ‘someone’ by phone. The young comm. leauge headquthers also called about her and she had to go and see them for 1½ hours. The purpose (expressed) is to disaude her from going to the U.S.A. Net effect: Make her more stubborn about wanting to go Marina is pregnet, we only hope that the visas come through soon.”761

  For the period from August 21 through September 1, 1961, Oswald’s diary reads, “I make expected trips to the passport & visa office also to ministry of for. affairs in Minsk, also Min. of Internal affairs, all of which have a say in the granting of a visa. I extracked promises of quick attention to US.”762 For the period from September through October 18, he wrote, “No word from Min. (They’ll call us.)”763

  If Marina thought her reception by her bosses at work was bad, what she received at the Komsomol was worse. She was harangued not only by the city’s Komsomol leader, but also by representatives of every department in the hospital, and even two of the girls from the hospital pharmacy where she worked. She was bitterly offended by the questioning and even more so by the fact that the Komsomol chairman told her they knew everything about her and her husband. “We knew each time you had a date. We knew when you applied for your marriage license,” he told her. When they suggested that Lee was a spy, she did not handle it diplomatically. “Actually, what he does every night,” she said, “is tap out messages in Morse Code about how the Komsomol is trying to brainwash me.” After the meeting she was warned that there would be another meeting to determine whether she should be expelled from the organization. It took place a week later, she refused to attend, and she was indeed expelled and told she had “anti-Soviet views,” which Marina did not feel she had. But it didn’t matter. “Fine,” the defiant Marina told her coworkers at the pharmacy. “Now I’ll have money for the movies.”764

  Even more painful was the reaction of her Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya. Lee had tried to visit them, and Ilya had turned him away at the door, telling him he was no longer welcome there. Marina had not told them of their plans, but Ilya, of course, had already been fully informed by the KGB. It took Marina a week to get up the courage to call him. She was invited over—without Lee—and subjected to a grilling by her appalled uncle. “A fine niece you are,” he said. “You’re here all the time, then you fly off to Moscow without a word and leave me to hear it from others.” Valya interceded and eventually invited both Marina and Lee over, at which time Ilya subjected Lee to an even more heated and thorough third degree. Colonel Prusakov wanted to know everything about Lee’s contacts with the American embassy, their trip to Moscow, everything. Lee was infuriated. Marina, who considered her sneaking off to Moscow without telling her aunt and uncle the same as a lie, was angry that she had been forced into a position of lying to her own family. “I can’t live like that,” she told Lee. “I can’t open my mouth without giving you away as a liar. You lied about your mother and your age. You lied when you said you couldn’t return to America. Now you’re making me lie. When will there be an end to it?”765

  Years later, in the United States, she would tell Paul Gregory, to whom she gave Russian language lessons, that this period of her life in Minsk was “a very horrible time.”766

  Not long after, Marina discovered yet another deception—Lee had been hoarding five thousand rubles, about five hundred dollars, apparently saved from the days when he was still enjoying the regular stipend from the Soviet Red Cross. He had also started writing something shortly after their return from Moscow, which, he told her only after she insisted, were his “impressions of Russia,” but he refused to show her the pages, even though, given her lack of English, there wasn’t much she could have made of them. She began to wonder whether he was not in fact a spy. It was already clear to her that her husband was secretive by nature, secretive even when there seemed to be no purpose served. He lied not because he needed to but because he liked to—it was his character.767

  Lee’s suspicions, expressed in a letter to his brother Robert on July 14, that he and Marina were being spied on were, as we already know, far more justified than he knew. Norman Mailer was never able to find out from KGB contacts when the visual surveillance of Oswald extended to an electronic surveillance (bugging) of their apartment (the Oswalds had no telephone to tap), but the earliest transcripts date from mid-July of 1961. Mailer speculated that the microphones were installed during the Oswalds’ four-day trip to Moscow. In any case, listeners in a space above the apartment started recording everything that happened in the tiny flat, day and night. Later they moved the operation into a room next door. Mailer believes the KGB may have also inserted a sophisticated fiber-optic viewing device, one that required inserting a special lens into a tiny hole in the wall.768

  Whatever the Soviet authorities might have been hoping to learn, the transcripts tell us mostly that the young marriage was in trouble from the outset. There was endless bickering, as in this example from a KGB transcript of July 19, 1961:

  Wife: All you know how to do is torture…

  (LHO goes out, yells something from the kitchen)

  Wife: Go find yourself a girl who knows how to cook…I work, I don’t have time to prepare cutlets for you. You don’t want soup, you don’t want kasha, just tasty tidbits, please!

  LHO: I can go eat at a restaurant.

  Wife: Go to hell! When are you ever going to leave me alone? I’ll probably never live to see the day when you leave me alone.

  LHO: But you don’t know how to do anything.

  Wife: Leave me alone!769

  And from August 3:

  Wife: (yells) I’m tired of everything! And what about you? Can’t you wash? I suppose you want me to wash floors everyday?

  LHO: Yes, wash these floors every day!

  Wife: You don’t do anything and I’m supposed to spend all day cleaning up. A decent man would help. Remember you used to say: I’ll help! You did wash once, and now you talk about it endlessly, and I wash our clothes every time and it doesn’t count for anything…

  LHO: You have to make something to eat.

  Wife: (yells) I can’t. I’m not going to cook.

  LHO: You could make cutlets, put on water for tea…

  Wife: I won’t.

  LHO: You haven’t done anything.

  Wife: Well, what have you done for me?

  LHO: Silence!

  Wife: I’m not going to live with you.

  LHO: Thank God!…

  LHO: This house has to be cleaned every day. There’s dirt in our kitchen, dirt everywhere. What good is that? You sleep until ten in the morning and you don’t do anything. You could be cleaning up during that time.

  Wife: I need my sleep. If you don’t like it, you can go to your America.

  LHO: (calmly) Please, thank you.

  Wife: You’re always finding fault; nothing’s enough, everything’s bad.

  LHO: You’re ridiculous. Lazy and crude…

  Wife: Get out! I’m not your housekeeper…

  LHO: Don’t cry. I’m just saying that you don’t want to do anything.

  Wife: So? I never washed our floors?

  LHO: You’re not a good housewife, no, not a good housewife.

  Wife: You should have married a good one…

  (they’re silent)

  Wife:…If you don’t like it, you can go to your America.

  LHO: I’ve told you for a long time that you don’t do anything.

  Wife: I wash floors every day.

  LHO: It’s dirty.

  Wife: What’s dirty to you is clean to me. I washed floors yesterday and you walk around in shoes…

  LHO: Calm your nerves.

  Wife: Just say: “Marina, it has to be done.” Don’t yell; it’s hurtful…Alka,* do you hate me when you yell at me?

  LHO: Yes.

  Wife: Yes?

  LHO: Yes.

  Wife:…Why are you afraid of people? W
hat scared you?

  LHO: (yells angrily) Shut up, shut up…You stand there and blab.

  Wife: You’re afraid of everybody!…

  LHO: Shut up!

  Wife: Are you afraid that they’ll steal everything from you, a pot of gold that you have? (laughing) At times like this you could kill me. You have to have some kind of strong will…770

  Although the quarreling continued and was very heated, Marina told the Warren Commission he had never struck her in Russia.771 But author Norman Mailer suggests (presumably from interviews of Marina) that “he hit her…three or four times.”772 As if their arguments were not enough, their sex life was not fulfilling to Marina, who did not achieve orgasm, and she blamed it on him for always ejaculating before she was ready, making her furious.773