The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  In October 1956, Oswald—barely seventeen and less than a month into his tenth grade year—followed the same path as his older brothers, throwing off Marguerite’s “yoke of oppression,” as they put it, and joining the Marines. The following year, he was sent to Atsugi, a naval air base outside of Tokyo, which served as a takeoff point for the CIA’s top secret U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union. The Atsugi base was also one of the centers for the CIA’s LSD experimentation. A CIA memo titled “‘Truth Drugs’ in Interrogation” revealed the agency practice of dosing agents who were marked for dangerous overseas missions. An operative who had tripped on acid before, the memo noted, would be less likely to crack up if subjected to hallucinogenic treatments by his captors. Some chroniclers of Oswald’s life have suggested that he was one of the young marines on whom the CIA performed its acid tests.

  Oswald’s overseas tour of duty was a troubled one. He shot himself in the arm with a derringer, apparently by accident. He was court-martialed twice, once for the illegal possession of a firearm, the second time for pouring a drink over a sergeant in a bar brawl. He suffered a nervous breakdown. But he also continued to be defined by his intelligence and inquisitiveness. He began expressing an interest in traveling to Russia, to see for himself what it was like. In short, he was the sort of boy-man—unfinished, angry, defiant, and hungry to experience life—who stands out from the ranks and gets attention.

  At some point, Oswald’s growing curiosity about the Soviet Union—the forbidding land beyond the Iron Curtain that an entire generation of Americans had been taught to fear and hate—began to receive support and guidance. Transferred to El Toro Air Station in Southern California in December 1958, he applied himself to learning Russian, a challenging language difficult to master on one’s own. J. Lee Rankin, the chief counsel for the Warren Commission, would later suggest that Oswald had received training at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, which was known for giving military and intelligence personnel crash courses in a wide range of languages and dialects.

  Oswald was now launched on a grand adventure not entirely of his own making. He quit the Marines, claiming—falsely—that his mother was injured and required his help. On September 20, 1959, nine days after receiving his discharge, he set off for Russia, sailing first to England—where he disembarked at Southampton on October 9—and flying to Helsinki shortly thereafter. Oswald later told his wife, Marina, that he had taken a “hop”—a U.S. military transport flight—to get to Finland, which was the easiest point of entry to the Soviet Union.

  There was a magical element to Oswald’s journey. Despite the fact that he was a broke ex-serviceman who had only $203 in his bank account when he left America, Oswald enjoyed the best accommodations. In Helsinki, he stayed in two of the city’s finest hotels, the Torni and the Klaus Kurki. After checking out, he still had enough money to buy a ticket on the overnight train to Moscow.

  If Oswald was being moved by an unseen hand, his performance at the U.S. embassy in Moscow—where he arrived on a Saturday morning in October to theatrically announce his defection—seemed a particularly awkward piece of staging. There was a scripted quality to the way he renounced his citizenship and declared his intention to turn over military secrets to the Soviets. Listening to the slightly built young man, American consul Richard Snyder had the distinct feeling that “this was part of a scene he had rehearsed before coming into the embassy. It was a preplanned speech.”

  But Oswald never seemed certain of the role he was playing during his two and a half years in the Soviet Union. He clearly was not a genuine defector, since the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies reacted to his provocative performance at the U.S. embassy with a studied nonchalance, even though he threatened to hand over classified information from his tour of duty at the top secret U-2 base. It took a full year before Angleton’s counterintelligence department finally bothered opening up a standard 201 file on the defector. Oswald did not seem particularly threatening to the Soviets either. While KGB officers found him puzzling, they did not regard him as a master CIA spy. He did not snoop around secure areas. And despite his military service, the Russians learned that he was a bad shot. When Oswald went on expeditions with his factory hunting club in Minsk, he never could hit anything. A co-worker took pity on him once and shot a rabbit for him.

  A KGB official described Oswald in one document as “an empty person.” He was the type who could be used as a “dangle” by a sophisticated puppet master like Angleton, someone to flush out moles, to find out what the Soviets knew about the U-2 program. In the Kabuki theater of Angleton’s mind, people played parts whose significance only he understood. It was the paper record—the “legend”—that mattered most to Angleton. Under the covert wizard’s direction, a person’s file sometimes took on a life of its own, full of actions and dialogue that bore no relation to the subject’s real life. To Jim Angleton, the young, pliable American playing the role of defector was a performer who had not yet reached his full potential. He was someone to watch over time.

  If there was a real Oswald, the picture emerged in flickering light, only to be seen by the very few people he allowed to get close to him. Nobody was in a better position to observe Lee as he went about his new life in Minsk—where Soviet authorities had given him a sparsely furnished but comfortable apartment and a job in a radio factory—than Ernst Titovets, the medical student who would become Oswald’s best friend in Russia. The two young men spent much of their free time together, pursuing women, playing records in their apartments, going to the opera, and debating the positive and negative aspects of life under capitalism and Communism. Titovets would become Oswald’s Boswell, chronicling the young American’s quotidian life in a revealing memoir that would be published in Russia a half century later, but remain largely unknown in the United States.

  Titovets was better educated and more culturally sophisticated than his American friend. The Russian had to explain to Oswald who George Gershwin was. But in spite of the high school dropout’s education gaps, Titovets recognized that Oswald was an innately smart young man. “I had ample opportunity to observe during our debates how quick he was to grasp the essence of an abstract philosophical idea,” Titovets later wrote in his memoir. “I carried away an impression of him as a very intelligent, quick-witted person.”

  Oswald, whose childhood hardships had made him sensitive to the exploitation of the poor and weak, was drawn to Marxism’s egalitarian promise and seemed genuinely intrigued by the Soviet system. But, American to the core, he soon began to chafe under the regimentation of life in Minsk, making fun of the omnipresent Lenin posters that loomed over his radio factory and grumbling about the compulsory exercise sessions and propaganda meetings in which workers had to participate. He once staged a one-man strike to protest what he said were the factory’s outdated work practices. Work life in the United States was no paradise, Oswald acknowledged to Titovets, and racism was a national disgrace. But all in all, American workers enjoyed a higher standard of living and more freedom, he said. “You live like slaves!” Oswald once yelled during a particularly heated discussion with his Russian friend.

  On the whole, Oswald did not strike Titovets as being the political extremist that he was widely portrayed to be after the Kennedy assassination. “Oswald did not produce the impression of a narrow-minded political zealot . . . nor would he push his ideas on others. A good listener, he was ready to learn new things and kept his mind open to new ideas.” Titovets saw his American companion as a work in progress, someone trying to bridge the chasm between East and West, and develop his own political philosophy. As he prepared to return to America, Oswald began drafting his vision of the ideal society, one that combined the best features of capitalism and socialism, which he called the “Athenian system.” One biographer would later describe Oswald as a “pioneer . . . a lonely American anti-hero a few years ahead of his time,” working out his social theories thousands of miles away from home—ideas that mirrored the gra
ssroots, participatory democracy that would soon be advocated by the New Left.

  Nothing about the Oswald that Titovets knew conformed to the profile of the angry loner in the Warren Report. He was popular with women and he had an easy way with children. When tense confrontations arose with other men—like the time he got into an argument with a fellow worker named Max over a shop machine—Oswald seemed to go limp. Even after Max grabbed a fistful of his shirt and shoved him against a steel pillar, Oswald simply stood quietly contemplating his antagonist until the man’s rage spent itself. “Judging by what I learned about Oswald,” concluded Titovets, who studied psychiatry in medical school, “it would have been a psychological impossibility for him to kill a man.”

  While living in Minsk, Oswald displayed a sharp awareness of Soviet surveillance that seemed to indicate some prior training. Oswald kept his apartment in spartan condition, as if carefully refraining from giving his living quarters any identifying characteristics. He would painstakingly examine his room for KGB bugs, and play his record player loud during some conversations to frustrate any eavesdroppers. Visiting his apartment always gave Titovets a vaguely uneasy feeling. “I wondered what particular feature about the room generated that uncanny feeling of loneliness mixed with an unreasonable, animal-like feeling of being constantly watched. Nice to discover a sort of creeping paranoia coming over you!”

  As when he was a boy, Oswald continued to be interested in the make-believe world of spies. Perusing Titovets’s collection of English-language books one day, he chose to borrow The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s mordant tale of a U.S. agent in French colonial Vietnam who wreaks havoc through his shiny idealism. Nonetheless, Titovets doubted that Oswald was an American spy. He seemed to show no interest in intelligence gathering during his years in Russia. And there was no evidence that he was turned by the KGB. “Oswald maintained his allegiance to his native country throughout his Russian period,” Titovets later wrote. “His loyalty was evident in small gestures he made rather than in flashy bombastic pronouncements. He was proud of his service with the U.S. Marines. Whenever we compared Russia with the United States, he invariably defended the American side. . . . He would defend the American Army, American English, American girls, American food and American ways—you name it.”

  But if Oswald was not acting as a paid operative, he was being acted upon. By early 1961, when Oswald notified the U.S. embassy in Moscow that he wanted to return to America, he was the subject of an enormous amount of secret paperwork in the deep recesses of the CIA, FBI, State Department, and Office of Naval Intelligence.

  Years later, Richard Schweiker—the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who was one of the first legislators to try to unravel the mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald, while serving with the Church Committee—eloquently summed up the strange malleability of Oswald’s life. “Everywhere you look with him,” said Schweiker, “there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

  Oswald’s reentry into the United States was absurdly easy, considering his treasonous track record. He had tried to renounce his citizenship; he had declared his intention to betray his country by handing over some of its most zealously guarded military secrets; he had lived as if he were a Soviet citizen for well over two years. And to top it off, he was bringing back with him a Russian wife, Marina, who had been raised by an uncle who was a KGB officer.

  Titovets had taken an immediate disliking to Marina, whom he regarded as a chain-smoking, foulmouthed woman with none of Oswald’s intellectual complexity. But Oswald immediately fell under the spell of the sad-eyed beauty with sensuous lips. “The girl emanated raw sexuality about her, repellent to me, but perhaps precisely the feature that attracted Lee,” observed Titovets. Lee and Marina were introduced at a dance at the Trade Union House, one of Minsk’s popular entertainment centers. “The low cut of her dress stressed the size of her breasts,” Titovets recalled. He immediately suspected she was KGB bait for Oswald. When he later asked around about Marina, Titovets was told that she had been run out of Leningrad by local authorities. “Taking into account her past history and her legal problems,” he concluded, “she certainly had given the KGB a sure hold over her.” A month after he met Marina, Oswald proposed to her.

  It was one more curious episode in Oswald’s life. And yet none of his suspicious past, or that of his bride, caused U.S. authorities to block his return, place him under detention, or subject him to rigorous interrogation. At the height of the Cold War—when paranoia about spies, subversives, and “brainwashed” GIs ran rampant throughout America—Oswald and his Soviet wife were allowed to pass smoothly into the country. The State Department even provided a $435 loan to help pay for the couple’s travel expenses. When the SS Maasdam, the cruise liner from Rotterdam carrying the Oswalds and their infant daughter, docked at a Hoboken pier on the rainy afternoon of June 13, 1962, there were no federal agents awaiting the defector.

  The Oswalds were greeted only by a Travelers Aid Society caseworker named Spas Raikin. Despite persistent rumors, Raikin has always vehemently denied that he was working for the CIA. But Raikin—a Bulgarian refugee who was active in anti-Communist politics—was politically sophisticated enough to realize that there was something strange about Oswald’s uneventful return to the United States. It was one more instance, in Oswald’s endlessly mystifying life, when the dog did not bark. “I wondered why there weren’t any government officials to meet him,” Raikin recalled late in his life. “In my mind, there was the idea he could be a spy. . . . I had suspicion, but I did not want to get further involved into this thing.”

  The day after arriving in the United States, the Oswalds flew to Fort Worth, where they moved in temporarily with Lee’s brother, Robert. It would take nearly two weeks before the FBI got around to interviewing Lee.

  Oswald was now entering the final act of his abbreviated life. Over the next year and a half, the young man seemed to lead an aimless existence, drifting to New Orleans, returning to Texas, taking a side trip to Mexico City, as he jumped from one job to the next, before finally ending up in the Texas School Book Depository. But on closer examination, there was a method to his movements. While in Texas, Oswald and his family came under the watchful care of people who in turn were being closely watched. He met quietly with a prominent CIA officer in Dallas. He staged public scenes in New Orleans and Mexico City that called attention to himself as a hotheaded militant, as he had done at the embassy in Moscow. There were invisible wires attached to Oswald—and some of the more intriguing ones led to Allen Dulles.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was given to grand daydreams. He had big ideas about how to change the world; he wanted to be part of a larger mission than his petty circumstances allowed. But there were others who had their own plans for him. “[Lee] did not know who he was really serving,” Marina said years later. “He was manipulated and he got caught. He tried to play with the big boys.”

  George de Mohrenschildt dropped into the Oswalds’ threadbare lives in Fort Worth like a beneficent fairy-tale prince. Tall, well groomed, cosmopolitan, with a network of high-placed friends that stretched from Dallas oil society to the European aristocracy, “Baron” de Mohrenschildt—as he enjoyed being called—was everything Oswald was not. He showed up one afternoon on the doorstep of the Oswalds’ humble home—which he later described as “a shack near Sears Roebuck, as far as I remember . . . very poorly furnished, decrepit, on a dusty road.” He was there, he said, on a mission of mercy—a White Russian émigré of noble birth who had done well for himself in America, lending a hand to an impoverished young couple recently arrived from his native land. De Mohrenschildt, a decadent old-world roué when it came to women, did not think much of Marina when he met her that day, finding her “not particularly pretty” and “a lost soul.” But he immediately took a liking to Oswald, whom he found “charming.”

  Over the following months, de Mohrenschildt and his equally sophisticated wife, Jeanne—a fellow high-born Russian whose father had run the Far Eastern Railr
oad in China—hovered over the Oswalds, finding Lee jobs, installing the family in new living quarters, making sure that Marina’s rotting teeth were fixed and their baby got her inoculations, taking the young couple to parties, and intervening in their quarrels when they became violent. Later, when people remarked on how unlikely the friendship between the sophisticated baron and the high school dropout was, de Mohrenschildt simply shrugged it off. “I believe it is a privilege of an older age not to give a damn what others think of you. I choose my friends just because they appeal to me. And Lee did.”

  De Mohrenschildt explained that he admired his young friend’s rejection of the segregationist values of his native South, as well as Oswald’s complete disinterest in the rampant materialism of American life—unlike Marina, whom the baron found crude and moneygrubbing. “I am not a turkey which lives only to become fat,” Oswald announced with a smile one day, lifting his shirt to show de Mohrenschildt his minimal belly. “Lee, your way of life is so un-American, it scares me to think what may become of you,” the older man responded.