Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Some have pointed out the seeming contradiction in Oswald being both a communist and a Marine—or, to put it another way, reasonable minds doubted he ever truly believed in communism because anyone who did could not have joined the Corps, which was “always prepared” to fight communism. But at a deeper level, there was no contradiction at all, any more than there was a mystery about why Oswald so wanted change—a profound change from his present circumstances, whatever they were, so that he could find acceptance and peace: the proper home he never had.

  Code Name: “Nalim”—Oswald In Moscow

  “I think Oswald wanted to be exceptional, to be famous. It was the main goal of his life, and he was striving for it But he could not achieve it in a usual way: to be a prominent businessman, or be a prominent musician or so forth. So he decided to find the only way for him to be very extraordinary—to do something which all ordinary people would never dare to do.”

  —Oswald’s Russian tour guide, Rimma Shirakova, in 1993

  By the summer of 1959, Oswald had become known to his fellow Marines as a “commie.” And in his own mind, he believed he was. On August 17, 1959, he applied for a dependency discharge, saying he had to return to Fort Worth, Texas to care for his ill mother. His stated reason was a lie. After only three days in Texas, he went on to New Orleans, and on September 17th gained passage on the SS Marion Lykes on the first leg of his journey to the USSR. He would later write his brother, Robert, that he had planned to defect for a year.56

  Arriving in Moscow on a six-day tourist visa obtained in Helsinki, the young American visitor was assigned an Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, for the usual routine of carefully routed sightseeing from limousines and totally untypical meals in the handful of expensive Intourist restaurants into which almost all Western tourists were herded. Rimma would become a genuine friend, who would maintain contact with young Oswald during his entire two-and-a-half year stay in Russia.

  Rimma recalls, “He was a very modest, serious young boy. He was wearing military shoes, and didn’t correspond at all to my views of an American tourist. I had him driven around town, although he showed no interest in seeing the sites. He wanted to change his life.”57 On his second day with the (sympathetic) Rimma, he announced his intention to remain in the Motherland of Socialism. “Oswald explained that he was a communist who did not approve of the American way of life. . . or the policy of the United States abroad, with its wars. He wanted to live in the Soviet Union, where people were very good to each other, ‘like brothers and sisters.’”

  Rimma recalls being shocked. Because Oswald could neither write nor speak Russian, she agreed to help him draft letters to the passport office and the Supreme Soviet in furtherance of his desire.58 While awaiting the Soviet decision, Oswald was interviewed by Aline Mosby an American journalist in Moscow. “He appeared totally disinterested in anything but himself,” she later recalled. “He talked almost non-stop like the type of semi-educated person of little experience who clutches at what he regards as some sort of unique truth.”59

  Five days later, Oswald received the news that his citizenship request had been turned down. Rimma would remember the news’ devastating effect—a “very tragic feeling”—on him. He “couldn’t believe his ears. He said, ‘No, it’s impossible.’” Oswald then begged Rimma Shirokova to help him see the Soviet authorities. He revealed that he had served in the Marines and had something to tell them. When Rimma reported this, a middle-aged woman she assumed to be a KGB officer saw Oswald—in her presence. “He told her everything she asked about”—his parents, his life, his political views, his reasons for wanting to stay, his military service—“but did not produce a good impression on the lady. That was my opinion.”

  Inconsolable, Oswald wrote in his diary, “I am shocked! My dreams! I have waited two years to be accepted. . . my fondest dreams are shattered.” He attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. Rimma remembers, “That same afternoon, we were to meet downstairs as usual. Some time passed and he didn’t appear. Certainly I was nervous and wanted to know what had happened. So that’s when I rushed upstairs and knocked on the door, but there was no answer.”60

  Accompanied by hotel security, who broke down the locked door, Rimma found Oswald in his underwear, lying unconscious in a bathtub filled with a mixture of blood and water. He was rushed to Botkin Hospital, where he was placed in the “psychosomatic” ward.

  Dr. Lydia Mikhailina, the psychiatrist who treated him, describes Oswald’s action in terms usually reserved for a petulant child. “It was my impression that this was a ‘show suicide’ attempt since he was refused political asylum, which he had been demanding.”61

  Oswald’s KGB file shows that he was given the code name “Nalim,” which is Russian for turbot, or river fish.62 For thirty years after the Kennedy assassination, the KGB maintained that they never talked to (or “debriefed”) Lee Harvey Oswald, or had any interest in recruiting him. However, in 1993, after the fall of communism, the former head of the KGB who handled the Oswald case, Vladimir Semichastny, finally came clean and admitted the obvious. Oswald, in fact, was contacted in Botkin Hospital. Semichastny recalls:

  There were conversations, but what he had to say was hardly useful information. There was nothing new in it. It was the kind of information we had been talking about for a long time already and then Oswald tells us about it. It was of no interest to a high level organization like ours. . . . The general impression was that he wasn’t bilking about anything that, as we say in Russia, “the sparrows on the trees aren’t already singing about.”63

  Oswald offered the KGB secrets of America’s new spy plane, the U-2. Stationed in Atsugi, Japan, he had been assigned to the radar “bubble” that tracked the new plane. But soon after Oswald’s defection, the Soviets would shoot down a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. Of Oswald’s proffer, Semichastny says, “Oswald knew very little. We knew a lot more than he was able to tell us. He didn’t have any operational knowledge. He knew his own number at the U-2 base, but that was all. . . By the time we were fucking around with Oswald, he’d been here some months. Then the U-2 was shot down, we had Powers in jail, and he was a far better source than Oswald could have ever been.”

  The CIA agrees wholeheartedly about Oswald’s lack of useful information. “That’s the biggest pile of bull,” laughs the CIA’s chief U-2 photo analyst of the period, Dino Brugioni. “The Soviets already knew how to track the U-2’s, so what the hell could he tell them? All he could give them was the fact that there were U-2’s at Atsugi, and they already knew that. The actual photo targets were a tightly-held secret, and there is no way a radar operator had that information.”64

  Semichastny says Oswald was nonetheless considered for recruitment by both the KGB’s intelligence and counter-intelligence divisions. We now know that the name of the man who had to make the final decision on whether to recruit Oswald was Vasili Petrov, the head of the Belarus KGB. According to his son, Petrov determined that Oswald “didn’t have the intellectual capacity to be a professional agent.” (After the Kennedy assassination, Petrov would tell his son, “Thank goodness I made the right decision.”)65

  Operatives tracking Oswald in the field were said to be offended that there were serious deliberations on the subject. KGB agent Nechiporenko recalls, “They wondered if the enemy considered us so stupid that they would send us this ‘garbage.’”66 Eduard Shirkovsky, the present Bylorussian KGB Chairman, read the Oswald file, then went so far as to admit that drugs may have been used on “Nalim,” saying, “Well, maybe they did drop a few tablets in his glass, but just the kind to make him let down his guard and be a little more talkative.”67 Semichastny elaborates on just what the KGB wanted to know:

  If he [Oswald] were going to live here, could he be used against the Americans? Would he have the ability to he used against the Americans, and those Americans living here? And espionage was interested in whether he could work over there, and could he be of interest to Intelligence? They both studied
him but unfortunately could not find any abilities at all, in either field.68

  The Second Chief Directorate, responsible for counterintelligence, made his decision without any equivocation, saying, “Who the hell needs Oswald?”69

  Semichastny asserts that Oswald wasn’t working for American intelligence either. His “intellectual training and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and CIA in a good light if they used people like him.”70

  One of Oswald’s best Russian friends, Pavel Golovachev, later said, “I would say that he wasn’t a spy because when he bought a camera, he couldn’t even put film in it. And it was a very basic camera, a Smena-2, which even a Soviet school-child could use, and he couldn’t.” Regarding his work in the Minsk Byelorussian Radio and Television Factory, Pavel also said that Oswald couldn’t repair the simplest defect in a radio. “He locked up the condensers.”71 His childhood friend Allen Campbell remembers, “Lee was the biggest geek in the whole world. That the CIA or the KGB would hire him is ludicrous.”72

  After being released from the hospital seven days later, Oswald visited the American Embassy to request revocation of his American citizenship. He went in person, probably because he wanted to impress the Soviet authorities. With good logic, he reasoned they would hear his statements through bugging devices, and calculated they would be more inclined to permit him to stay. The consular official Oswald saw was Richard Snyder, who, by his own admission in 1993, served for a time in a clandestine branch of the CIA. Due to those connections, Snyder’s assessment of the “very, very uptight” Oswald was telling. “Here’s a dumb kid. Twenty years old and he hasn’t got the faintest idea of what this country [the Soviet Union] is about. . . He said he was a Marxist and I told him he was going to be a lonely man in the Soviet Union because Marxism was already a faded religion there.”73

  According to Semichastny and other KGB officials, Oswald’s suicide attempt was seen as “political blackmail” by a person they viewed as “very simple or primitive, not a very interesting person.” Once it was determined that Oswald was not working for U.S. intelligence,74 the sentiment was, “Let him stay! [We wanted] to avoid an international scandal over such a character,” Semichastny explains. The KGB officer continues:

  We decided to send him further away from Moscow since we were not convinced that this would be his last effort at blackmail. We were sure that he would try something again, and we didn’t want to deal with that in Moscow, and so we decided to send him to Minsk.

  Code Name: “Likhoy”—Oswald in Minsk

  Oswald’s transfer to the industrial city of Minsk, 450 miles to the southwest of Moscow, did not occur instantly, however. He spent two lonely months in the Metropole Hotel in Moscow waiting for his Stateless Persons ID and financial assistance to arrive.

  On January 4th, 1960, two days after 42-year-old Senator John Kennedy announced he was a candidate for president, Oswald was given papers granting him temporary residency in the Soviet Union. During Kennedy’s nine months of campaigning and first 17 months as President, the ex-Marine would be in Minsk, at first buoyed by the novelty of living Soviet life somewhat like a Soviet citizen—and by the perks and privileges that distinguished his life from the average—but then chafing with disillusionment and personal disappointment.

  Lee Oswald, called “Alik,” the nearest Russian equivalent to Lee, was eventually given work at the Byelorussian Radio and Television Factory, which employed between 5,000 and 10,000 workers. Combining his salary and his regular Red Cross stipend, Oswald was making as much as the factory’s director. This relative affluence for the unskilled Oswald led some to suspect a special relationship between Oswald and the Soviet government. However, documents later released by the Soviets, and interviews with former KGB officers, make it clear that all defectors were initially given this sort of special treatment.75 Oswald was also given, by Minsk standards, a very nice (if modestly furnished) apartment overlooking the Svisloch river.

  Oswald was initially distressed to learn he would be working as a metalworker in a factory. He had hoped to become an influential political spokesman. But as time progressed, and as he began to relish his celebrity (he was referred to by a co-worker as “the man from Mars”), Oswald seemed, for the first and perhaps only time in his life, to be genuinely happy. He seemed to actually be living the “American dream” instead of the revolutionary Marxist one. He dated often, had numerous girlfriends, and spent his spare time at the movies, opera, and going on picnics. The KGB file says that he showed no interest in politics—“he only wants to have a good time.” His letters home to his brother Robert attested to his new-found tranquility.

  Within a matter of months, however, his celebrity wore off, and so did his enthusiasm for life in Russia. “Some of his friends had begun to see him as much less a figure than they believed when they first met him, when they assumed that an American would be well educated and highly cultured,” says his Russian friend Ernst Titovets.76 Soon his co-workers and his KGB babysitters were aware of his deficiencies. “He really did not work hard, and some of his colleagues noticed that he was not a radio technician at all,” says present KGB Chief Vacheslev Nikonov.77 According to co-worker Leonid Botvenik, Oswald even complained about the food in the canteen. Botvenik recalls, “Honestly, he was not a good worker. He would bring all kinds of magazines to read at work, and he was always dissatisfied.”78

  Another co-worker, Leonid Tsagoikov, said, “Oswald was a lazybones who always put his feet up on his worktable”—a shocking breach of etiquette in the Soviet Union.79 Other workers spoke of Alik’s growing disillusionment at the job, citing his “sit down strikes, minor incidents in the cafeteria, and general indifference.” KGB Chairman Vadim Bakatin added that Oswald was a “slacker at work.”80 The KGB file suggests that the factory wanted to fire Oswald, but was prevented from doing so because of his perceived instability.81

  “He was a fellow who needed attention. He was a new fellow in Minsk, a new American, so they were all interested in him. And they lost interest in him eventually. So he became nothing again. So he got disgusted with it.”

  —Oswald’s friend George DeMohrenschildt, to the Warren Commission

  The KGB was in a tough spot. It was clear that Oswald knew next to nothing about Marxism, and his time in Minsk didn’t enhance his knowledge or interest. Oswald’s close friend Pavel Golavachev says, “He never talked politics. He avoided the subject.” Ivan Lunyov, an official archivist for the Communist Party and the KGB, says, “Oswald was a radish: red on the outside and white on the inside.” This was in fact the way he was referred to by the KGB at the time—“the radish.”82 Vacheslav Nikonov was the first post-communist KGB official to review the Oswald file. According to him, “He [Oswald] didn’t attend any Marxist classes, he didn’t read any Marxist literature, and he didn’t even attend the labor union meetings. So the question was: what was he doing here?”83

  There was some possibility, the KGB reasoned, that Oswald, now code-named “Likhoy” by the Minsk KGB office (a play on the name “Lee Harvey”), might be a “sleeper agent,” programmed without his own knowledge. CIA officials, while claiming never have to have perfected the capability, nonetheless admit that the Soviets were worried that the U.S. possessed it and would someday attempt to deploy it.84

  Consequently, the KGB assigned over a dozen full time agents to watch “Likhoy” Oswald. His apartment was bugged from above, below, and inside. His phone was tapped. Surveillance photos were taken constantly. His co-workers, including his best friends, were reporting back to the KGB. This would continue, at no small cost to the KGB, for Oswald’s entire stay in Russia. Conversations were monitored until Lee left the apartment for good in 1962. Photos would be taken of him until he boarded the train bound for the border on his way out of the country.

  Oswald’s increasing discontent with his situation was put on temporary hold when he met Ella Germann, arguably the first true love of his life. She was a dark-haired, fair-skinned Jewish
girl he had met at the factory. His diary reflects the fact that he fell for her the minute he saw her. Although they would date for over six months, the feeling of love was never mutual. Ella was interested in having an American friend, and someone with whom she could enjoy the symphony and opera, but nothing more. She remembers:

  I saw him more out of habit than love. I didn’t have a deep feeling for him. And then I felt that he fancied me. I didn’t want to upset him. I had in mind that he was here alone, he had no relatives here or any close friends to turn to, to give him support when he needed it. And it went on like that until he pushed me into saying “yes” or “no.”85

  After spending New Year’s Eve 1961 with Ella and her family, Oswald proposed marriage. The subject of marriage had come up before, but only in passing. Ella recalls that she would ask Alik about his background, and she became aware of what others would refer to as Oswald’s lifelong predilection for lying. “All the answers that he gave me were not satisfactory and this created an atmosphere of mistrust between us,” Ella remembers. “Because of that, I wasn’t able to agree to marry him.” Oswald wrote in his diary, “She hesitates than [sic] refuses, my love is real but she has none for me. . . I am stunned she snickers at my awkwardness in turning to go (I am too stunned to think) I realize she was never serious with me. . . I am miserable [sic].”86