8. Exhibit No. 934, Vol. 18, p. 136.
9. Exhibit No. 251, Vol. 16, pp. 702–704.
10. Exhibit No. 1085, Vol. 22, pp. 33–34.
Chapter 7. The Wedding
1. Marina’s translation. Exhibit No. 108, Vol. 16, p. 476.
2. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–105. In quoting correspondence and other writing by Oswald, spelling and punctuation have in some instances been corrected for the sake of clarity, and in others, such as this one, they have been left as Oswald wrote them.
3. Pavel seems to have understood Oswald very well, for in a letter he wrote both the Oswalds on September 15, 1962, when they were in the United States, he advised Marina that it was useless to complain about Lee’s lesser faults and that with some people it is a question of “remaking rather than repair.” He added, enigmatically, that there “are not equal standards about important things in this world.” (Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 928, Memorandum dated May 6, 1964, by Richard Helms, Deputy Director of Plans of the CIA, titled “Contacts Between the Oswalds and Soviet Citizens, June 13, 1962, to November 22, 1963.”)
4. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–105.
5. Testimony of Marine Captain George Donabedian, Vol. 8, pp. 311–315, and Donabedian Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 19, pp. 601–605.
Chapter 8. Journey to Moscow
1. Exhibit No. 252, Vol. 16, pp. 705–708.
2. Questions have been raised about the ease with which Oswald traveled to Moscow without official permission, a requirement for every foreigner traveling from one city to another. How did he purchase an air ticket or, for that matter, obtain a hotel room, when Soviet citizens as well as foreigners are required to surrender their passports at the front desk? The answer seems to be that while Soviet controls are strict, they are far from perfect; Oswald was watched, but he was not under heavy surveillance. He appeared reluctant to make the trip without authorization, yet his friends may have advised him that he could do so with impunity. Any one of them might have bought his ticket. But speaking reasonably fluent Russian and dressed in his working clothes, he probably bought it himself, and the agent for Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, simply did not bother to ask whether he had permission to travel. Foreigners often make unauthorized trips in the Soviet Union. Their success depends a great deal upon chance—who they are, where they are, and the vigilance of local officials. If they get caught, the worst that usually happens is that they are sent back to the city from which they came. Oswald also took his chances at the Hotel Berlin, where he had lived for about two weeks in 1959. The girls at the front desk remembered him, and since he presented Soviet documents instead of a foreign passport, it did not entail a great risk for them to assign him a room.
3. Letter from Richard E. Snyder to the author, February 9, 1969.
4. The Warren Commission Report states on p. 706 that Marina arrived in Moscow Sunday, July 9, citing as evidence Oswald’s diary, which is incorrect in several respects about the visit, and Marina’s testimony in Vol. 1, pp. 96–97. There Marina states that Oswald left Minsk “a day early and the following morning I was to come.” But Marina’s subsequent account to me is so clear as to appear conclusive: on Saturday, July 8, she worked as usual at the pharmacy and had her interlude with Leonid. On Sunday, July 9, Oswald telephoned, asking her to come to Moscow, and on the morning of July 10 she went.
5. Exhibits No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139, and No. 938, ibid., pp. 144–149, indicate that a Questionnaire and an Application for Renewal of Passport were executed at the embassy by Oswald on Monday, July 10, 1961.
6. Exhibit No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139.
7. Letters of Lee Oswald to Robert Oswald, May 31, 1961 (“… if I can get the government to drop charges against me …”), and June 26, 1961 (“I assume the government must have a few charges against me, since my coming here like that is illegal. But I really don’t know exactly what charges.”), Exhibit Nos. 299 and 300, Vol. 16, pp. 827–832.
8. Exhibit No. 100, Vol. 16, pp. 436–439.
9. Ibid.
10. Exhibit No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139.
11. Exhibits No. 25, Vol. 16, pp. 121–122, and No. 100, ibid., pp. 436–439.
12. Testimony of Richard Edward Snyder, Vol. 5, pp. 260–299, especially p. 290. See also Oswald’s diary and Exhibit No. 101, p. 440.
13. Marina laughed on hearing this particular statement of her husband’s and remarked that without an ulterior purpose he would never have said any such thing.
14. Exhibit No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139.
15. Marina remembers only one visit to the embassy, on Monday, July 10, and she thinks that both sets of interviews, hers and Oswald’s, were completed that day. Her memory, however, is in error, for Exhibits No. 944, Vol. 18, p. 158, and No. 959, ibid., pp. 335–338, indicate that her visa petition was filled out by McVickar and executed by Lee Oswald on Tuesday, July 11, 1961.
Chapter 9. Marina’s Ordeal
1. Exhibit No. 1122, Vol. 22, p. 87.
2. Exhibit No. 301, Vol. 16, p. 833.
3. Exhibit No. 985, Vol. 18, p. 477.
4. Oswald reported to his brother Robert: “I went hunting last weekend.… I shot a couple of birds with my single-barrel 15 gauge shotgun, but I couldn’t find them” (Exhibit No. 303, Vol. 16, p. 836). The letter was dated Monday, August 21, so the expedition must have taken place on Saturday or Sunday, August 19 or 20, 1961.
5. “The Collective” appears in Oswald’s handwriting in Exhibit Nos. 94–96, Vol. 16, pp. 347–421. For the version typed for Oswald in June 1962 by Miss Pauline Virginia Bates, a public stenographer in Fort Worth, Texas, see Exhibit No. 92, Vol. 16, pp. 285–336.
6. Later he admitted that he had actually been initiated into oral sex much earlier, by an older woman (probably a prostitute) in Japan.
Chapter 10. The Long Wait
1. Letter from Robert Oswald to the author, April 26, 1965.
2. After the assassination a fragment of the aria was found among Oswald’s belongings. It is in Oswald’s handwriting, in Russian, and it contains omissions, mistakes, and indecipherable phrases. It is probably an attempt to reproduce the words by listening to the recording (Exhibit No. 53, Vol. 16, p. 191). Author’s translation.
3. After the assassination, when Oswald had indeed performed a deed of “unheard-of prowess,” Marina again thought that he had done it to impress Rimma. It was a thought that may have been an unconscious attempt to repress the fear that he had done it to impress her. It is possible, however, that Oswald did, as Marina suspects, associate the opera, and the aria, with Rimma; it is quite likely that when he first saw The Queen of Spades in Moscow, Rimma went with him as his interpreter.
4. Oswald’s blood was tested November 25, 1961 (Exhibit No. 1391, Vol. 22, p. 718).
5. When the Warren Commission asked Marina whether she had been hospitalized for nervous difficulty during 1961, she denied it (Testimony of Marina Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 97). Only later did she remember that she had been hospitalized because of gas fumes on a bus. Because of her denial, and because medical records handed over by the Soviet government after the assassination contained only Marina’s outpatient record, not her hospital record, the Commission erroneously concluded that Marina had not been in the hospital at all and that Oswald had probably been lying (Warren Commission Report, p. 708).
6. Exhibit No. 307, Vol. 16, pp. 845–848.
7. Oswald was so impressed by the demolition of Stalin’s monument in Minsk that he wrote the second of the two essays he composed in Russia. Titled “The New Era,” it briefly describes the destruction of the “10 ton bronze figure of a man revered by the older generation and laughted at by the sarcastic younger generation.” He ends, however, on a pessimistic note: “But Bellerussia as in Stalin’s native Georgia is still a stronghold of Stalinism, and a revival of Stalinism is a very, very, possible thing in those two republics” (Exhibit No. 96, Vol. 16, p. 421).
8. In an FBI interview dated February 28, 1964 (Warren Co
mmission document number and declassification date not legible), the defector Yury Nosenko stated that the KGB had no objection to Marina’s leaving the USSR. This was a crucial determinant
9. Report of Minsk Radio Plant Director P. Yudelevich, December 11, 1961 (Exhibit No. 985, Vol. 18, p. 433–434).
Chapter 11. Birth of June
1. Exhibits No. 1124, Vol. 22, p. 90, and No. 1079, ibid., p. 27.
2. Exhibit No. 256, Vol. 16, pp. 717–718.
3. Exhibit No. 247, Vol. 16, pp. 691–692.
4. On February 6, 1962, the New York Times ran a UPI story from Rome, citing the Italian Communist Party newspaper, L’Unita, which was highly reliable on Soviet affairs, as follows: “L’Unita reports today unconfirmed rumors circulating among Western correspondents in Moscow that there has been an attempt on Nikita S. Khrushchev’s life … the assassination attempt was reported to have taken place at Minsk, on the Soviet-Polish frontier, two weeks ago.” I was in the Soviet Union the following summer and heard rumors about an attempt in Moscow, Stalingrad, Sochi, and Kislovodsk—one that Khrushchev was grazed on the arm and slightly wounded, and another that the bullet missed Khrushchev but hit the Minister of Finance, Zverev. In fact, Khrushchev left Minsk for Sochi and did not reappear in public for three weeks, a very good sign that an attempt on his life had occurred.
5. Exhibit No. 256, Vol. 16, pp. 717–718.
6. Warren Commission Report, p. 710.
7. Exhibit No. 314, Vol. 16, pp. 865–868.
8. Exhibit No. 315, Vol. 16, pp. 870–873.
9. In a memorandum to the FBI entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Access to Classified Information About the U-2,” written after Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Helms, the deputy director for plans, conceded indirectly that Oswald may have seen the U-2: “Even if Oswald had seen a U-2 aircraft at Atsugi or elsewhere, this fact would not have been unusual nor have constituted a breach of security. Limited public exposure of the craft was accepted as a necessary risk.” Helms added, however, that Oswald could have heard “rumors and gossip” but that it was most unlikely that he knew the plane’s name or its mission, or that he “had the necessary prerequisites to differentiate between the U-2 and other aircraft which were similarly visible at Atsugi.” This is hard to believe, since the wingspan of the U-2 was so enormous that almost anyone would have seen instantly that its mission was aerial reconnaissance. (Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 931, dated May 13, 1964, declassified January 4, 1971.)
10. Oswald claimed in a letter to Robert that he “saw” Powers in Moscow at his trial. This is almost certainly a lie. There were American reporters and embassy officials at the trial who had seen Oswald at the time of his defection and would have recognized him had he been there. The trial was televised in Russia, and Oswald probably “saw” Powers on television in Minsk.
11. Powers was not arrested or tried when he returned to America. After lengthy interrogation by military, intelligence, and government officials, he was allowed to go back to civilian life. But in writing of his experiences in 1970, long after Oswald himself had become a cause célèbre, Powers suggested that Oswald, a former radar technician with access to special height-finding gear, might have betrayed the great secret, the U-2’s maximum altitude, thereby enabling Russian SAMs to bring down his plane.—Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry, Operation Overflight (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 375–379. In an interview with the Times of London on April 20, 1971, Powers noted further that Oswald at Atsugi “had access to all our equipment. He knew the altitude we flew at, how long we stayed out on any mission, and in which direction we went.”
It is impossible to say how much Oswald learned about the aircraft at the three U-2 bases at which he was stationed. It is hard to keep information narrowly confined at some bases, and Oswald later did show himself to be accomplished at picking up on his jobs’ extracurricular information that he was not entitled to have. It is conceivable that at least after the Philippine period (1957), he wanted to acquire classified information that he could trade for Soviet citizenship. But despite offers of radar information which he made from the moment of his arrival in Moscow, the Russians were not impressed.
At about the time of Oswald’s arrival, the Russians had tried, and failed, to bring down a U-2 over Soviet territory. They tried, and nearly succeeded, on the next U-2 overflight in mid-April 1960. And on May 1 they brought down Powers. Their problem throughout this time appears not to have been lack of information about the U-2—its maximum flying altitude or its cruising altitude—but lack of the missile capacity to shoot it down.
Powers’ allegations to the contrary, the best guess remains that the Russians knew all they needed to know about the U-2 from various sources, and that Oswald, a former Marine Corps private with the lowest security clearance, was at no time viewed as a possible purveyor of needed information. Indeed, all the Soviet decisions regarding Oswald appear to have been made on negative grounds—which way of handling him would be least damaging to the USSR—and in a declassified memorandum to the Warren Commission, the CIA described five other defector cases that occurred within a year or two of Oswald’s, in which all five received quicker answers and better treatment than did Oswald.
Some experts on Soviet affairs have noted that, had the Russians received information of value from Oswald, their treatment of him would have been different from the very first day. They would not have allowed him to languish in Moscow hotels—within reach of Western reporters—for two and a half months before deciding what to do with him. They would probably have accorded him slightly better treatment than he received, a chance to study fulltime, for example, rather than a job as a factory hand. Lastly, and conclusively, they would not have allowed him to leave the country—ever. This they could have accomplished by granting him Soviet citizenship, which would have made him effectively their prisoner; or they could have given him a “stateless passport,” as they did, and then either refused outright, or simply declined any answer at all, when he requested an exit visa. As for Oswald, he, of course, would not have dared to go home had he given the Russians information of value but would have clung to the sanctuary he had.
12. Exhibit No. 250, Vol. 16, pp. 700–701.
13. Warren Commission Report, p. 764.
14. Exhibit No. 1123, Vol. 22, p. 89.
Chapter 12. Departure for America
1. Exhibit No. 317, Vol. 16, pp. 877–879.
2. Exhibit No. 1315, Vol. 22, pp. 487–488.
3. Exhibit No. 196, Vol. 16, pp. 573–574.
4. Exhibit No. 1314, Vol. 22, p. 486.
5. Exhibit No. 42, Vol. 16, pp. 171–174.
6. Exhibit No. 950, Vol. 18, pp. 276–277.
7. In Exhibit No. 994, Vol. 18, p. 615, Marina wrote, soon after the assassination, that “we lived in an apartment in Amsterdam for 3 days.” As a result there has been confusion, and even speculation that the Oswalds were debriefed in a CIA “safe house” in Holland before leaving for the United States. Apart from the fact that such a procedure would have been highly unusual, the Oswalds’ documents make clear that they left Moscow on a two-day train trip on June 1, 1962, crossed the border at Brest into Poland on June 2, left East Germany on June 2, entered West Germany and Holland on June 3, and sailed on the Maasdam June 4. Thus they could have stayed in Holland only one night, Sunday, and Marina’s lament that all the shops were closed on the one day they were there fits the documentary record. (Exhibits No. 29, Vol. 16, pp. 137–145; No. 946, Vol. 18, p. 166; and No. 1099, Vol. 22, p. 48.)
8. Exhibit No. 100, Vol. 16, pp. 436–439, especially p. 439.
9. Ibid., p. 436.
10. Ibid., p. 439.
11. Exhibit No. 25, Vol. 16, pp. 121–122.
12. Exhibit No. 25, Vol. 16, pp. 106–112.
13. Ibid., pp. 112–116. Oswald’s writings suggest he had read Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and possibly Engels’s “Anti-Dühring,” or was at least familiar with their content
s.
14. Ibid., pp. 117–120.
Interlude and Part Three: Texas, 1962–1963
Sources
Affidavit of Edward John Pic Jr., Vol. 11, p. 82; Report of Dr. Irving Sokolow, Youth House psychologist (Exhibit No. 1339, Vol. 22, pp. 558–559); Testimony of John Carro, Vol. 8, pp. 202–214.
Interlude
1. John Pic learned while he was growing up that his father did contribute to his support, although his mother told him constantly that the amount was not enough, only $18 a month. But according to Pic’s father, the amount was actually $40 (Testimony of Edward John Pic Jr., Vol. 8, p. 199). Pic was not disabused of his other illusion, that he had been the cause of his parents’ divorce, until years later, after the Kennedy assassination, when he was thirty-one years old and read about his parents in Life magazine (Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 5).
2. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 106.
3. Siegel Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 491.
4. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 253.
5. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 19; Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 33; Warren Commission Report, p. 671.
6. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, pp. 254–255.
7. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 27.
8. Testimony of Robert Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 281.
9. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 36.
10. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 27.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 29.
13. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 113
14. Testimony of Myrtle Evans, Vol. 8, pp. 50–51 and p. 55.
15. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 28.
16. Exhibit No. 1874, Vol. 23, p. 680.
17. When Lee Oswald got into truant difficulty in New York, Marguerite told the social worker, Evelyn Stickman Siegel, that John had also been a truant and that she allowed him to go to work until he decided to return to school (Siegel Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 493). However, according to John, he was bitterly hurt when his mother forced him to leave school. He went back over her opposition and even had to forge her signature on his report cards, excuse slips, and other school documents (Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 33).
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