Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Marina had taken a pregnancy leave from her job early in January 1962, and in the middle of the night on February 15, her water broke. Lee and Marina hastily consulted their copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which had been obtained with some difficulty from England by Ernst Titovets, who had asked a pen pal to send it. Somehow they got the idea from the book that they still had fourteen hours before the birth, even though all the signs indicated it was going to happen a lot sooner. Lee wanted to go to the hospital, Marina felt they had time. They finally left at nine in the morning. There was snow on the ground, it was cold and slippery, they were unable to summon a taxi, and they finally had to take a bus to the hospital. Lee then went on to work, since fathers were not allowed in the maternity section of the hospital, but the news got there before he did—his coworkers congratulated him on the birth of his first child, a baby girl, who had been born at ten o’clock.

  The following day his colleagues presented Lee with a big box containing a baby blanket, a sweater, overalls, shirts, a yellow blanket, even some of the cloth in which Soviet newborns were customarily swaddled.813

  Lee wanted to name the child June Marina Oswald, but under Russian custom a child’s second name had to be some form of the father’s first name, or at least patronymic,* so the little girl was named June (for the month she was conceived) Lee. Both Lee and Marina had wanted a boy, but the fact that June Lee was not a male did nothing to dampen Lee’s enthusiasm—he even thought a girl might be better for the mother, and he was willing to wait for a son until the next child. He was so excited when Marina and June first came home he couldn’t even talk. He was also terrified that June might get cold, and Marina said that he “even forbade anyone to come into the room where the baby was kept [presumably the bathroom or kitchen since they only had a one-room apartment] until they got warm after coming from the street,” to avoid carrying a chill in to the child. Both Marina and Lee laughingly tried to stay awake at night for fear the baby might die without making a sound. June Lee was very quiet and very little trouble, and after two weeks or so the new parents lost their jitters and became, in Marina’s words, “normal parents.” Marina felt at that time that Lee was “a very good husband and a very good father,” and he helped Marina with the chores, even washing and ironing June’s diapers.814

  With the birth of the child, Oswald’s nervousness and sense of urgency about getting out of the Soviet Union relaxed.815 For one thing, he wanted little June to gain weight and strength before they undertook the trip.816

  Meanwhile, Oswald had received no response to his petition to the International Rescue Committee for a loan of one thousand dollars, and on March 3, the embassy received an undated letter from him applying for a repatriation loan of eight hundred dollars† and advising it of the birth of his daughter, who, of course, would have to come to America with them. The embassy replied that it was authorized to lend him no more than five hundred dollars.817

  On March 15, 1962, he finally received notification from the INS office in San Antonio, Texas, that Marina’s application for a visa had been approved,818 and on March 20, Marina, still on maternity leave, quit her job.819

  Things were falling into place for Lee and Marina’s new life in America, but Marina’s aunt and uncle were still urging her not to leave Russia. Valya feared that Marina’s leaving would harm her husband’s career. “He has so little time left until his pension. He’s done so much for you. What a blow if he loses it because of you,” she told Marina.820 The fear was not just paranoia—Ilya had been interviewed by the KGB as recently as February 23, the day baby June came home from the hospital with Marina, and he had assured the concerned agent that he had spoken to Marina about the necessity of her never doing anything in America that could be used as anti-Soviet propaganda.821

  Uncle Ilya and Aunt Valya were not Marina’s only relatives who found her plan to leave Russia with her husband repellant. One day Valya read to Marina a passage from a letter she had recently received from Marina’s Aunt Polina in Kharkov: “I’ve never been inside a church in my life. But the day Marina goes to America I’ll go to church. I’ll light a great big candle and pray that her soul may rest in peace. I’ll say a prayer for the dead. Then she’ll be dead to me. I’ll forget that I ever had a niece. As for her, she can forget that I was ever her aunt.”

  Marina was devastated. According to Priscilla McMillan, to whom she later told the story, Polina’s letter was a curse, and Marina was superstitious enough to believe it might have the power to kill. She went home, brooded, and finally told Lee that she would not accompany him to the United States. She could not jeopardize the positions of her relatives that way.

  “Okay, if that’s how you feel,” Lee said, “if you care more for them than for me, you can stay.”

  Hurt by the coldness of his response, Marina took the baby and fled to the Prusakovs, where she arrived in tears. Valya was sympathetic, Ilya forbidding—she might spend that night with them, he said, but she was not to come running to them every time she had a fight with her husband. She lay awake all that night, miserable at the thought that the two men, Lee and Ilya, cared so little for her, and that her two aunts, Polina and Valya, were sure to be deeply hurt by her defection. In the morning, things looked rosier though, and she set off for home. When she met Lee on the street, they returned to Valya’s, where they found her other aunt from Minsk, Musya. Musya scolded Lee bitterly for being so selfish as to take Marina off to America. When Lee decided to leave for his and Marina’s apartment, he wanted to take the baby with him. Aunt Musya grabbed little June and told him he had no right to take a child from its mother.

  Lee went into the other room and stood by the window, quietly crying, while Valya shuttled back and forth as the peace emissary. “Look what you’ve done,” she told Marina. “He’s as pale as a ghost by the window. The tears are streaming down his face. I even heard him say, ‘What have I to live for? What am I to do now?’”

  In the end, Lee’s distress proved to be far more eloquent than anything he might have said. Marina wanted proof that he cared for her, and she agreed to leave with Lee for America when she realized that she had no more right to separate him from their child than he had to take June from her. Back at their own apartment, Lee took off June’s swaddling and kissed her tiny hands and feet. “Bad mama,” he said. “She wanted papa to never see his good girl again.”822

  On May 10, the U.S. embassy in Moscow wrote Oswald that it was “pleased to inform” him that it was “now in a position to take final action on your wife’s visa application.” Telling him to have Marina gather up a few more documents (such as one more copy of her marriage certificate and a certification of smallpox inoculation), the letter suggested that Oswald come to the embassy with his wife to sign the final papers.823

  The days were winding down before they would leave for Moscow, then America, but Lee hadn’t quit his job yet. One day he approached Ella German at work. She had recently married a fellow worker, Max Prokhochik. Lee had not spoken to her in the fifteen months since they broke up and even pretended not to know her, but he turned up at her workbench just as she was preparing to go to lunch with her husband. “Can we meet today?” he asked. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Ella, fearful that Max would be jealous, shook her head and explained, “I just got married.” Lee asked if it was anyone he knew. “Yes,” she said. Lee walked away without another word.824 Marina, too, had an encounter with an old attachment, Anatoly Shpanko, whom she ran into in a shop by the Oswalds’ apartment. He had heard that she was leaving. “Take me with you,” he joked. “Write. Let me know where I can find you. One day I’ll get to America, too. You’ll have money over there. You’ll come back for a visit. Someday we will see one another again.”

  Marina, uneasy, told him she had to go home to feed her baby. That, he had not heard about. He was surprised, since the last time he had seen her, about three months ago, she had not appeared to be pregnant. “You didn’t see right,” Mari
na said, although she recalled that at the time she had carefully arranged her coat to conceal her pregnancy.825

  On May 22, Lee picked up his exit visa at the MVD office in Minsk,826 and wrote to Robert with the news that they would be leaving for Moscow by train the following day and that he expected to depart for England, also by train, ten to fourteen days later. They would then travel by ship, probably to New Orleans, so it might be nearly a month before they arrived home. He now took up a theme that was to preoccupy him over the next few weeks—how to deal with the press:

  Dear Robert,…

  In case you hear about our coming, or the newspapers hear about it (I hope they won’t), I want to warn you not to make any comment whatsoever about us. None at all!! I know what was said about me when I left the U.S. as Mother sent me some clipping’s from the newspaper, however I relize that it was just the shock of the news which made you say all those things. however I’ll just remind you again not to make any statements or comments if you are approuched by the newspapers, between now and the time we actally arrive in the U.S. Hope to see you soon.

  Your Brother

  Lee827

  When the Oswalds finally did leave by train for Moscow on May 23, 1962, after spending their last night in friend Pavel’s apartment, it appeared that none of Marina’s family turned up to say good-bye, only a number of friends. Some of them brought flowers, reminding Marina of a funeral.828 The ubiquitous KGB spy, without which no Soviet social gathering would be complete, may have turned up as well. At least Eleonora Ziger thought so. She focused on a fellow half hidden behind a pillar and told him, “Listen in if you like. We have no secrets here.” Eventually, Marina noticed that her Uncle Ilya and Aunt Valya had indeed come. They stood a long way off, by themselves, in a corner, forlorn and furtive. Marina and Lee went over to them. “We didn’t want to be in the way,” Valya said. The Prusakovs kissed Marina, the baby, and even Lee, whom they begged to take good care of Marina, and then scuttled away.829

  The Oswalds came to the Moscow embassy on May 24, where Marina picked up her American visa.830 And Lee’s passport was finally renewed, for thirty days, and amended to include little June Lee.831 They spent much of the next ten days waiting around in embassy lobbies of several countries for the transit visas that would allow them to travel by train across Poland, East and West Germany, and the Netherlands.832

  The American embassy made arrangements for them to sail from Rotterdam to New York on a Dutch passenger ship, the Maasdam, on June 4, and approved of a repatriation loan to Lee of $435.71, which, with their savings, was just enough to cover the cost of their hotel room in Moscow, the train trip, one night in unpretentious but clean lodgings in Rotterdam before boarding the ship, and the ocean passage to New York, where they would arrive all but penniless.833

  The Oswalds spent their last evening in Moscow visiting Marina’s friends from Minsk, Yuri and Galina Belyankin, at their apartment. The following morning, June 1, 1962, Lee went back to the U.S. embassy, signed a promissory note, and received Russian money equivalent to $435.71, the amount of his State Department loan, to cover the purchase of two railroad tickets from Moscow to Rotterdam (Baby June traveled free), for which Lee contributed ninety rubles, and three steamship tickets (June’s ticket only cost $20.00) from Rotterdam to New York.834* Late that afternoon when they boarded their train at Moscow’s Belorussian Station, Galina was the only one to see them off.835 And with that, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Soviet odyssey came to a close.

  We know, of course, that Oswald was not a KGB agent—my God, the KGB was spying on him in Russia—but those who believe Oswald had been infiltrated into the Soviet Union as an agent of some American intelligence agency—and there are many who do—would do well to ask themselves just what his mission could possibly have been. There’s no evidence that he had any social or professional contact with ranking officials or diplomatic or military people, nor access to restricted locations. He had no special expertise or experience, and only a marginal, though improving, competence in the Russian language, and what he did learn about the Soviet Union probably could have been gathered by an alert journalist in a few days. It is just about as plausible to imagine that the KGB would have taken pains to gather sensitive information about America by infiltrating an uneducated teenager who spoke virtually no English into the United States to work in a bicycle factory in Bakersfield, California. It could be done, of course, but what could possibly be the point?

  It should be noted that well over half of the time that Oswald was in the Soviet Union, he was trying very hard to get out of it. The Warren Report devotes thirty-two pages to “transactions between Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina Oswald, and the U.S. Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the U.S. Department of Justice,”836 an analysis based on the hundreds of documents, letters, cables, and reports generated by the government in dealing with Oswald, and there is no hint in any of them that Oswald was in any way encouraged to defect or given special help to reverse his defection by any of the agencies involved—indeed, it doesn’t appear that any of them even knew where he was for the first year of his two-and-a-half-year stay in the country. Apart from a few clerical errors and bobbles in administrative procedures, there are no noteworthy anomalies in the paper trail, no indication that Oswald’s case was handled differently from that of other defectors who wished to return, or indeed, from that of other American citizens who found themselves stranded abroad in other countries and needed State Department assistance to return. Given the temper of the times, there were no doubt some in the government who would have happily left Oswald to stew in his own juices by denying him a renewal of his passport, but two 1958 decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, Kent v. Dulles and Dayton v. Dulles, made it impermissible to deny passports to American Communists or any other American suspected of going abroad “to engage in activities which will advance the Communist movement.” The opinion in the Kent case made it clear that the right to travel was one of those liberties of which no American citizen may be deprived without due process of law. The majority held that “freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was a part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like travel within the country…may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values.”837

  For the Oswalds, leaving the Soviet Union was a momentous, life-changing event. Marina was leaving a country which, however repressive, was well known to her and with which she was comfortable. Her relations with her family had always been trying, at best, but she nonetheless maintained them assiduously, and she relied heavily on her relatives, particularly her aunts. As far as she knew, she was leaving these people forever to go to a country whose language she could not speak at all and where she would be surrounded by strangers. If she were to find any work at all, it would almost for sure not be as a pharmacist, and she would never again enjoy the easy camaraderie of coworkers who were young women very much like herself, with similar backgrounds and experience. In addition, Lee had already demonstrated a desire to control her, to make her live up to his image of what a wife should be. Even though he had already bullied Marina, according to the KGB transcripts of the goings-on in their apartment, Marina was not a shrinking violet (I would find this out firsthand years later) and she had always fought back stoutly or fled to her Aunt Valya, never capitulating. Her new life in America, with its isolation, would greatly exacerbate her problems.

  It was also an enormous change for Lee. He had arrived in the USSR as a nineteen-year-old and became a man in the two and a half years he lived there. He had lost his baby fat and prematurely some of his hair, and he had lived independently, out from under the yoke of his mother and the U.S. Marines, for the first time in his life. He had had a job—the longest one he would ever hold and the only one he would neither quit nor be fired from—that did not pay badly by Soviet standards, but his incompetence and insufferable at
titude had been tolerated in a way they would never be in a highly competitive and rough-and-tumble capitalist society. He had been exposed to communism in the raw and saw it was not the same as he had read about in the yellowing pages of Marxist literature from the New Orleans public library.

  Since the train’s route led back through Minsk, where they would stop briefly in the early morning of June 2, Marina wired ahead in the hopes that Valya would come for one last meeting. Marina and Lee walked up and down the platform looking for Valya, but she was not there. Lee grasped Marina, who was crushed and crying. “Don’t worry, don’t cry,” he said. “Everything will be alright.”838

  Later in the day, as the train passed the border at Brest crossing into Poland, one of the guards asked Lee and Marina whether they had any gold or other valuables to declare, and just grinned when Marina pointed to Baby June.839

  All that day the train plied its way across the broad expanse of Poland. They had a brief respite in Warsaw, where they bought beer and Lee took photographs. They crossed into East Germany at Frankfort on the Oder, and later that night Marina woke long enough to notice the stark contrast between East and West Berlin—the former dark, the latter brightly lit in the western manner. They were in the West at last. The next day the contrast was even greater, as the train crawled across the storybook landscape of Holland to Rotterdam, where they were scheduled to stay overnight. Although the shops in Rotterdam were closed for Sunday, Marina could see they were overflowing with what were to her unimaginable luxuries. Lee bought her the first Coca-Cola she ever tasted. That night, in the modest pension booked for them by the embassy, the sheets were so clean Marina didn’t want to lie down in the bed.840