Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  MR. JENNER. What other things?

  MR. THORNLEY. Well, for one thing, the idea he felt—as did Marx—that under capitalism workers are exploited, [but] that under the present Soviet system, for example, that the money was spent for the benefit of the people rather than going to the individual who happened to be running the enterprise . . .

  MR. JENNER. Did you raise with him the price the individual had to pay . . . in terms of individual liberty as against the capitalistic or democratic system?

  MR. THORNLEY. You couldn’t say this to him. Because he would say: “How do you know?” . . . he would challenge it on the grounds that we were probably propagandized in this country and we had no knowledge of what was going on over there . . .

  MR. JENNER. Did you have any impression at any time that he . . . might like to experience by way of personal investigation what was going on in Russia?

  MR. THORNLEY. . . . It was the farthest thing from my mind. Although I certainly will say this: When he did go to Russia it did seem to me a much more likely alternative for Oswald than, say, joining the Communist Party in the United States.

  MR. JENNER. Excuse me.

  MR. THORNLEY. It seemed to fit his personality . . .

  MR. JENNER. Would you elaborate, please?

  MR. THORNLEY. Well, Oswald was not militant. At the time it didn’t seem to me he was . . . at all a fighter, the kind of person who would glory in thinking of himself as marching along in a great crusade of some kind. He was the kind of person who would take a quiet . . . approach to something. For example, going to the Soviet Union would be a way he could experience what he thought were the benefits of communism without committing himself to storming the Bastille, so to speak.12

  Thornley, however, is quick to explain that he doesn’t pretend to understand Oswald past a certain point . . .

  MR. THORNLEY. He was extremely unpredictable. He and I stopped speaking before I finally left the outfit [in June].

  MR. JENNER. How did that arise?

  MR. THORNLEY. It was a Saturday morning. We had been called out to march in a parade for [some] staff NCOs who were retiring from the Marine Corps. This was a common occurrence. Every now and then we had to give up our Saturday morning liberty to go march in one of these parades and everybody, of course, having just gotten up, . . . and having to look forward to a morning of standing out in the hot sun and marching around, was irritable . . . We were waiting at the moment, in a parking lot by the parade ground. Oswald and I happened to be sitting next to each other on a log [and he] turned to me and said something about the stupidity of the parade . . . how angry it made him, and I said, I believe my words were, “Well, comes the revolution you will change that.”

  At which time he looked at me like a betrayed Caesar and screamed definitely, “Not you, too, Thornley.” And I remember his voice cracked as he said this. He was definitely disturbed at what I had said to him and I didn’t really think I had said that much. He put his hands in his pockets and pulled his hat down over his eyes and walked away and went over and sat down someplace else alone, and I thought, well, you know, forget about it, and I never said anything to him again and he never said anything to me again.

  MR. JENNER. You mean you never spoke to each other from that time on?

  MR. THORNLEY. No; and shortly thereafter I left the outfit for overseas.13

  It is possible that Oswald was engaged again on the periphery of espionage. Epstein makes a close calculation of what it cost Oswald to travel to Moscow14 against what he had saved in the Marine Corps, and ends with the estimate that there was not enough money to account for the Deluxe arrangements Oswald purchased from Intourist. There seems a shortfall of at least five hundred dollars; the possibility can certainly not be ignored that he had made up the difference by selling information in Japan, and there is some indication that he was doing it again in Los Angeles.

  Epstein: As Oswald’s tour of duty neared completion, Delgado noticed a stack of “spotter” photographs showing front and profile views of a fighter plane among Oswald’s papers. He realized that they had probably been used as a visual aid in training classes, and wondered why Oswald had them in his possession.

  Oswald stuffed the photographs into a duffel bag with some other possessions and asked Delgado if he would bring the bag to the bus station in Los Angeles, put it in a locker, and bring him back the key. According to Delgado’s recollection, Oswald gave him two dollars for doing this.15

  This is hardly hanging evidence, but if Oswald did give away radar-spotting codes in Japan, he could also have taken up such activities again in California. Such a premise does help to explain his fears in Minsk when walking with Ella that he could be ambushed by hostile Americans. It also accounts for his fear of arrest on his return to America. He could certainly have defected to Russia without committing any acts of espionage in Japan or America, and we could still follow his motives—but not quite as well. It is his character rather than hard evidence which enables us to assume that he did play at the edges of espionage with Japanese Communists.

  In any event, he shows considerable skill with his next moves. He applies to Albert Schweitzer College, in Switzerland, thereby freeing himself of the obligation to remain in America for two years on Marine Corps inactive reserve. On this college application, he lists Hemingway and Norman Vincent Peale as favorite authors, speaks of studying philosophy and psychology, and of becoming “a short story writer on contemporary American life”16—yes, he had enough material for that—and at the same time is arranging for an early hardship discharge from the Marines by instructing Marguerite on what steps she has to take. Having been injured on her job by a can of candy that fell off a shelf onto the bridge of her nose, she manages to obtain affidavits from her doctor, her lawyer, and two friends: The accident has incapacitated her, she claims; she needs her son back from the Marines to support her.

  As soon, however, as he obtains this hardship discharge in September 1959, he will stop off in Fort Worth just long enough to tell Marguerite that he is in the import-export business and is shipping out. He stores most of his gear in her apartment, leaves her a hundred dollars, and from New Orleans, a few days later, writes to her with restraint worthy of Hemingway:

  I have booked passage on a ship to Europe. I would have had to sooner or later and I think it’s best I go now. Just remember above all else that my values are different from Robert’s or yours. It is difficult to tell you how I feel. Just remember this is what I must do. I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand.17

  Next day he embarks on the SS Marion Lykes, a freighter that carries passengers from New Orleans to Le Havre. There he lands on October 8. Then come London and Helsinki. On October 15, visa in hand, he leaves by overnight train for Moscow, where he arrives on the morning of October 16, and falls into the not inconsiderable company of Rimma, our Soviet guide from Intourist.

  Endless debates have gone on about how he obtained his visa and whether his entrance into the Soviet world was routine or had been stage-managed in advance by the KGB. It is best to avoid such debates, and indeed, as our next chapter—a quick tour of Moscow and Minsk—will try to point out, it is almost irrelevant how he arrived.

  Rather, let us note the reaction at MACS-9 in Santa Ana.

  MR. DONOVAN. Shortly before I got out of the Marine Corps, which was mid-December 1959, we received word that he had showed up in Moscow. This necessitated a lot of change of aircraft call signs, codes, radio frequencies, radar frequencies.

  He had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units’ radio and radar.

&n
bsp; If you had asked me a month after I had left that area, I could not have told you any [codes] but our own. Had I wanted to record them I certainly could have done so secretly, and taken them with me. Unless he intentionally with malice aforethought wrote them down, I doubt if he would have been able to recall them a month later, either . . .

  MR. ELY. Are authentication codes changed from time to time as a matter of course?

  MR. DONOVAN. They are changed from time to time, that is right.

  MR. ELY. Are they changed even if there is no specific incident that elicits the change?

  MR. DONOVAN. They are methodically changed anyway.18

  This may indeed be one reason that the KGB showed no quick interest in debriefing Oswald on military matters. Soon enough we will discuss whether they were concealing much or little from the interviewers who approached them for this book, but if, as the KGB would have known, all spotter codes would have been quickly changed on news of Oswald’s defection, then, of course, they could afford to be patient with Oswald and study him.

  One last word from the Marines; it is in the affidavit of Peter Francis Connor: “ . . . He claimed to be named after Robert E. Lee, whom he characterized as the greatest man in history . . .”19

  8

  Return to Moscow and Minsk

  For Americans, the most astonishing aspect of Oswald’s defection was that he had been a Marine. Marines do not defect. They plant flags on Iwo Jima. Oswald had injured one of our Cold War certainties.

  By contrast, the effect upon Moscow Center can better be described as a series of small but continuing disturbances.

  Over the length of a six-month sojourn in Moscow and Minsk, the interviewers (Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer and their translator, Ludmila Peresvetova) had conversations with seventeen KGB officers. Some were active, most had retired, and of these seventeen men, there were five, including Igor and Stepan, who agreed to be interviewed in some depth. Within the limits of seeking to obtain answers from people who belong to what is, among other things, a closed club, the interviewers did acquire a reasonable amount of information. Whether these five officers were forthcoming or merely gulling the American visitors into acceptance of one more KGB legend can be debated, but if the interviewers, highly skeptical at first, ended by accepting the larger part of what was told to them, it is because an internal logic began to present itself.

  For example, Oswald, by way of his Historic Diary, chooses eight o’clock in the evening as the hour at which he cuts his wrist, whereas Rimma, Rosa, the Botkin Hospital doctors, and a number of medical reports have him coming to Reception at around 4:00 P.M., subsequent to making his attempt an hour and a half earlier. Now it could, of course, have been possible for the Organs to coordinate some twenty witnesses and falsify their reports, but to what end? What conceivably could be gained? Which dire purpose concealed? It seemed safe to conclude that these hospital accounts were correct and that Oswald had, once again, misremembered, or was lying.

  Obviously, not everything related by the KGB officers resolves itself so neatly. Moreover, there was a collective desire among them to remain anonymous. Of the five main KGB sources, none wished his name to be used. “Please don’t,” said one, “or all my peace in retirement will be lost. The media will come to me.”

  Their requests were honored. Igor and Stepan are pseudonyms, and three of the others will be gathered into one voice. Unlike Igor and Stepan, these three officers were outspoken—their own reputations, after all, were not connected to the case. Besides, they were of high rank and seemed to enjoy the curious nature of the inquiry. Their response to the interviewers was usually in direct relation to the intelligence of the queries. An etiquette soon developed: An incisive, well-placed question produced signally better results than an off-balance lunge. Lack of incisiveness was a cardinal sin. It must be kept in mind that what we perceive as the brute work of KGB interrogations—physical torture, gulags, overt intimidations in public places—were acts usually performed by MVD and were scorned by KGB as practices that lacked finesse, even as CIA officers would look askance at the more brutal activities of high-security prisons like Marion and Attica and feel no identification with security guards.

  Under these conditions of collective anonymity, it was decided that one imaginary KGB officer named General Marov might as well become sole spokesman for these three separate KGB sources. While not all three were generals, they could still serve as a chorus of high-level KGB reflection on Oswald’s sojourn in Russia.

  General Marov, then. If one would look for a face to attach, let us assume he looks like the late William Paley, who directed affairs at CBS for decades. The KGB men of higher rank looked astonishingly like a good many Americans—William Phillips of Partisan Review, Irving Howe of Dissent, Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, Henry Miller, William Faulkner; one looked very much like the editorial director of Random House, Jason Epstein, and there was even one officer who could have been mistaken in a dim room for Norman Mailer at the age of seventy. Thomas Wolfe once remarked that people in the same occupation tend to look alike in all countries—waiters, for example, or taxicab drivers. The corollary is that there may be profound similarities of character and function between American intellectuals, writers, and media chiefs—and high KGB officers. What wit resides in the cosmos!

  Marov claimed not to know whether Oswald had given military information to the Japanese hostess at the Queen Bee in Tokyo. He did, however, say that if it were so, such information probably would have been available at Moscow Center late in 1959, when Oswald arrived.

  “Such a contact,” said Marov, “is, of course, precious. Any American in any form—military, merchant, scientist—any slight record of contact will be kept for years.”

  Oswald’s defection would not, however, have excited good reactions in Moscow Center. “If any such information had come over from Japan in 1957 or 1958 and had given us any cause to value this man as a possible future agent, such value collapsed entirely,” stated Marov, “in the moment Oswald declared that he wanted to remain here. The American community would know he had defected and his value would be zero as any kind of worker for us. Too tricky to play with. This,” said Marov, “is an absolute fact.”

  The suicide attempt augmented their certainty. “That was a small disaster for the gentleman if he still clung to any ambitions to be trained as an agent. The KGB would never recruit such a man.”

  Then, said Marov, there was Oswald’s adventure at the American Embassy. “He comes out of Botkin Hospital, visits his Embassy, and talks to the American official there in a loud, clear voice as if he is also speaking to any instruments, theirs or ours, that might be implanted in the wall. You know, my impression is that Oswald is not quite all right. A normal man would never come to such an Embassy and say, ‘Okay, I’ll give my secrets to the Russians.’ What for? What is to be achieved by such declarations? After this, no KGB man could accept his information. It is not precious enough to risk discrediting our Soviet authorities. Whatever is given to the KGB must be done secretly, deeply, and with very strong precautions. We would never take a person who tried to commit suicide and wanted to defect. This is an abnormality.”

  In intelligence work, however, second thoughts do arise. If Oswald’s suicide attempt was superficial, as the Organs could ascertain from the medical reports, then other suspicions were ready to follow. Had Oswald been given an unorthodox agenda by American intelligence? Had he been dispatched to the Soviet Union as a man programmed to appear irresponsible? “These were questions we had to pose to ourselves, because improbable as were his actions, nonetheless American intelligence could have sent him over as a probe, a monitor, to see how we would react to such a curious stimulus. It was an improbable hypothesis but not to be entirely discarded. Oswald might be something new under the sun.”

  Under such circumstances, they decided, therefore, not to react but to observe. They would, for example, not seek to debrief him overtly, for that would send too simple a
signal to the Americans. KGB had numerous sources for obtaining military information in Japan—it was highly unlikely, therefore, that they would lose anything of value by not moving quickly with Oswald.

  However, General Marov did not exclude the possibility that one of their people in Moscow might have had direct talks with Oswald, but never as an official representative of the Organs. It could have been some officer with a cover story—in the guise of a Soviet reporter, for example. “But certainly no official debriefing. This is not only my opinion but my information.”

  In the actual event, he remarked, three Soviet journalists had gone to interview Oswald on separate occasions. One of them could have been a bona fide journalist who was also serving as a source, but the other two had come from Moscow Center, and their stories never appeared in any newspaper. A well-employed game in his service, Marov remarked, was to have all three ask the same questions; you could compare the target’s varying answers as part of your evaluation.

  Since Oswald spent much of his time with an Intourist girl, Marov confirms that she, too, would have been coached on what to ask him.

  “Since she was young herself, and did not know as much about military and electronic units as would an expert, she was programmed each day, every day, with the next set of questions. Her case officer might ask for information on certain points, until she would come to understand more and more which kind of questions to ask.”

  There was another option as well. If, in fact, a former Marine had become so deeply displeased with the capitalist system that he defected, then this might serve to demonstrate that life in America was not as agreeable as the U.S. media suggested. Since there was a special department for propaganda in Moscow Center, they too would have made an evaluation and that would have gone to the top of the Central Committee, up to Mikoyan.