Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Nearly out of money and technically in the country illegally since he had outstayed his visa by several days, Oswald moved to the Hotel Metropole, a large hotel under the same administration as the Hotel Berlin, probably by order of the government. He was impressed that the authorities returned his watch, ring, and money “to the last kopeck,” and with the farewell he received from Lyudmila Dmitrieva, head of the Intourist Office at the Berlin, and Roza Agafonova, her assistant who, per his diary, invited him to “come and sit and take [talk] with them anytime.” At the Metropole, by contrast to the Berlin, where he had started to make friends, he felt lonely, but he must have been cheered by the fact that Rimma told him on the day he was released from the hospital that the “pass & registration office whshes to see me about my future.”496

  Oswald later thought that the interview with the Passport Office, which, per KGB records, took place on October 29 (Oswald’s diary records it as October 28), the day after his release from the hospital, did not go well. According to his diary, “We entered the officies to find four ofials waiting for me (all unknown to me) they ask How my arm is, I say O.K., They ask ‘Do you want to go to your homeland. I say no I want Sovite citizen I say I want to reside in the Soviet Union. They say they will see about that. Than they ask me about the lone offial with whom I spoke in the first place (appar. he did not pass along my request at all but thought to simply get rid of me by not extending my Soviet visa…[They asked me] what papers do you have to show who and what you are?”

  It seems likely that they wanted some proof of Lee’s vaunted Marxism—membership in the Communist Party in the United States, or something like that, but all he had to offer them was his discharge papers from active duty in the Marine Corps. By his own account they were not impressed. “They say wait for our ans. I ask how long? Not soon.”497

  The KGB report of the interview notes that “Comrade Ryazantsev [head of the Passport Office] said that the matter was still unresolved and that he [Oswald] could remain for the time being in Moscow and wait for a definitive answer from the Supreme Soviet…At the present time Oswald resides at the Hotel Metropole, does not go out, and spends whole days in his room. He has to pay thirty rubles a day for his room [and] has eight hundred rubles in his possession. The translator Shirakova R. S. continues to work with Oswald.” The author of the report also thought that “Oswald left OVIR [the Passport Office] in a good mood. He said he hoped his request would be granted.”498

  That’s not the way Oswald remembered it. He said the interview left him in a rotten mood. Rimma dropped by the Metropole that evening to check on him, and he wrote that “I feel insulted and insult her.”499

  Over the next couple of days he remained worried and edgy. He wrote in his diary, “Oct.29. [probably October 30] Hotel Room 214 Metropole Hotel. I wait. I worry I eat once, stay next to phone worry I keep fully dressed.” The entry for the next day reads, “I have been in hotel three days, [it] seems like three years I must have some sort of showdown!”500

  When he met Rimma around noon on October 31, she must have sensed that he was loaded for bear. Although he told her nothing of his plans, she warned him to stay in his room “and eat well.”501 A few minutes after she left, though, he took a taxi to the American embassy, where one of two Russian guards asked to see his passport, then waved him in. Inside, he found a receptionist on duty typing. When he asked to see the consul, she asked him to sign the “tourist register,” and went back to her typing. “Yes, but before I’ll do that, I’d like to see the consular.” He laid his passport on her desk and, as she looked up, puzzled, he added, “I’m here to dissolve my American citizenship.”502

  It was a half hour past noon that Saturday and the embassy was already closed for business for the weekend, but the receptionist, Jean Hallett, alerted Richard E. Snyder, the senior consulate official, who had her show Oswald into his office.503

  Oswald selected an armchair to the left front of Snyder’s desk. Snyder’s assistant, John McVickar, was also in the room. Oswald’s diary reads, “I wait, crossing my legs and laying my gloves in my lap. He finishes typing, removes the letter from his typewriter and adjusting his glasses looks at me. ‘What can I do for you he asks’ leafing through my passport. ‘I’m here to dissolve my U.S. citizenship and would like to sing the legle papers to that effect.’ have you applied for Russian citizenship? yes.”504

  Snyder, an experienced Foreign Service officer having served in Frankfurt, Munich, and Tokyo, examined Oswald’s passport and noticed that Oswald had inked out the space for his address in the United States. Snyder asked him where he lived, but Oswald refused to answer. Oswald, very presentable in Snyder’s eyes, is at once proper and extremely curt, although not insulting. Snyder could see from the passport that Oswald was only just twenty, still a minor hardly out of his teens.505

  Snyder noticed that Oswald seemed to “know what his mission was. He took charge, in a sense, of the conversation right from the beginning…In general, his attitude was quite arrogant.”506 He presented Snyder with a note he had written out by hand on the printed stationery of the Hotel Metropole:

  I Lee Harvey Oswald do hereby request that my present citizenship in the United States of america, be revoked. I have entered the Soviet Union for the express purpose of applying for citizenship in the Soviet Union, through the means of naturalization. My request for citizenship is now pending before the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. I take these steps for political reasons. My request for the revoking of my American citizenship is made only after the longest and most serious considerations. I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  Lee H. Oswald”507

  Snyder groaned inwardly. He had recently had some headaches with a few American defection cases, and just three days earlier had written a thoughtful letter to the State Department in which he recommended a certain elasticity in dealing with them.508 Warily, he began to question Oswald, but he ran into a solid wall of refusal. “Don’t bother wasting my time asking me questions or trying to talk me out of my position,” Oswald told Snyder. He was cocksure. “I am well aware…of exactly the kind of thing you will ask me and I am not interested, so let’s get down to business.”509

  Oswald told him his principal reason for his wanting to defect: “I am a Marxist.” In that case, Snyder said to Oswald, he was going to be very lonesome in the Soviet Union—a witticism that was lost on Oswald. The boy appeared to be “intense” and “completely humorless.”510

  By way of a test, Snyder asked Oswald his opinion of Marx’s theory of labor value—a basic Marxist theory presented in the very early chapters of Das Kapital—and noted that Oswald did not know what Snyder was talking about. Snyder then spoke a little to Oswald in Russian, and concluded from Oswald’s responses that Oswald knew very little Russian. He guessed that Oswald’s Marxism was about as good as his Russian—in other words, he had no knowledgeable background at all.511

  But Oswald suddenly became more talkative and offered that he had recently been separated from the Marine Corps and that his service in the Far East had given him “a chance to observe American imperialism.” Oswald went on to mention the hardships his mother had endured as a “worker” in America, and announced that he did not intend that to happen to him. It seemed to Snyder that Oswald felt little real affection for his mother—or much of any sense of obligation toward her—in spite of his complaints about her plight.512

  Oswald, becoming exasperated by the chitchat, went over to the attack and told Snyder that he had been a radar operator in the Marine Corps and that he had already—voluntarily—told the Soviets that if they made him a Soviet citizen he would make known to them whatever knowledge he had.* He intimated to Snyder that he knew of something that would be of special interest to the USSR, though he did not claim to possess knowledge or information of a highly classified nature.513 For someone who many conspiracy theorists are convinced was a double agent for the CIA and KGB, this was not a very bright thing for
him to do. Snyder could certainly be expected to send that information back to the State Department, giving the military authorities a chance to nullify the value of any information that Oswald might actually possess. And the Soviets, even if they took the kid seriously, would hardly appreciate his telling American officials that he was passing information on to them.*

  Snyder suggested that Oswald come back at a later time to discuss the matter, giving the reason that the embassy was closed and preparation of the documents required some time. Actually, Snyder was reluctant to allow Oswald to cash in his citizenship, an irrevocable step, and he felt Oswald fell into the category of “quixotic types of uncertain mentality and doubtful emotional stability” or those who do things on an “irrational impulse or other transient influence.” Snyder told the Warren Commission, “Particularly in the case of a minor [Oswald], I could not imagine myself writing out the renunciation form, and having him sign it, on the spot, without making him leave my office and come back at some other time, even if it is only a few hours intervening.”514†

  When Oswald left, he gave no indication to Snyder when, if at all, he would return.515 Years later, Snyder gave his impression of Oswald to author Gus Russo. Referring to him as a “flaky kid,” he said Oswald “had all the earmarks of a sophomore Marxist, someone who’d just discovered a religion” and didn’t have “the faintest idea of what this country [the Soviet Union] is about.”516

  As soon as Oswald left the embassy, Snyder fired off a telegram to the State Department, outlining the interview and specifically mentioning Oswald’s threat to reveal information derived from his service as a radar operator for the Marine Corps.517

  A copy of Snyder’s telegram was sent to the FBI,518 and the CIA received an expanded version of the telegram on November 2.519 Immediately after sending off his telegram, Snyder called Robert J. “Bud” Korengold, Moscow bureau chief for United Press International, “to try and get another line on Oswald.” He gave Korengold Oswald’s room number at the Metropole, and Korengold wasted no time—he knocked on Oswald’s door at two that afternoon. Oswald was astonished. “How did you find out?” he asked. Korengold told him he had been alerted by the embassy, but Oswald refused to say anything except that he knew what he was doing and did not want to talk to anyone.520

  Korengold, stymied, went back to his bureau and talked with another UPI correspondent, Aline Mosby. Within minutes, she was on her way to the Metropole. “I went up in the creaky elevator to the second floor and down the hall,” Mosby wrote in her notes, “past the life-sized nude in white marble, the gigantic painting of Lenin and Stalin and the usual watchful floor clerk in her prim navy blue dress with brown braids wrapped around her head. An attractive fellow answered my knock on the door of Room 233.”521

  She didn’t get much from Oswald on her first visit, but it was enough for UPI to file the story that went out over the wires on October 31, 1959, that Oswald had applied to renounce his citizenship and intended to become a Soviet citizen for “purely political reasons.” He also told UPI he would never return to the United States.522 The story of Oswald’s defection appeared the next day in many papers throughout the United States. The young American who always wanted to make a splash was not starting out poorly. That Sunday he made page 3 of the New York Times, the paper of record of the nation he was leaving behind, with a six-paragraph article captioned “Ex-Marine Requests Soviet Citizenship.”523

  Oswald’s October 31 entry in his diary reads, “From this day forward I consider myself no citizen of the U.S.A…. I leave Embassy, elated at this showdown, returning to my hotel I feel now my enorgies are not spent in vain. I’m sure Russians will except me after this sign of my faith in them. 2:00 a knock, a reporter by the name of Goldstene* wants an interview I’m flabbergassed ‘how did you find out? The Embassy called us.’ He said. I send him away I sit and relize this is one way to bring pressure on me. By notifing my relations in U.S. through the newspapers…A half hour later another reporter Miss Mosby comes. I ansewer a few quick questions after refusing an interviwe. I am surprised at the interest. I get phone calls from ‘Time’ [magazine] at night a phone call from the States I refuse all calles without finding out who’s it from. I feel non-deplused because of the attention 10:00 I retire.”524

  Lee’s brother, Robert, was halfway through his milk delivery route for Boswell’s Dairy in Fort Worth on Halloween and was writing up a customer’s order in his ledger when a man got out of a taxi and walked up to his truck. “Are you Robert Oswald?” the man asked. He said he was a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I have a report here that your brother is in Russia…I have a copy of the teletype and thought you might want to read it and comment.” Robert read it and felt his stomach tighten as he said, “Oh no.” He was floored, taken completely by surprise. The reporter asked him if he believed the story. “There doesn’t seem to be any doubt,” Robert said. “Lee is awfully young. He’s looking for excitement. I don’t believe he knows what he is doing.” Robert wasn’t entirely sure of that, though. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how carefully Lee had planned his defection.525

  Robert finished his milk route and rushed home, where he found that Marguerite had already heard the news on the radio. Among the reporters besieging him and Marguerite was one who suggested he send two telegrams, one to Secretary of State Christian Herter and the other to Lee at the Metropole.526 Robert agreed, and the next morning sent the telegrams, the one to Herter asking to have his office get Lee to call Robert,527 and the one to Lee, which was personal and beseeching. Thinking Lee would remember his many admonitions, when Lee was little, to keep his nose clean, Robert wired, “LEE, THROUGH ANY MEANS POSSIBLE CONTACT ME. MISTAKE. KEEP YOUR NOSE CLEAN.” Both he and Marguerite tried to call Lee in Moscow, but they failed to get through.528

  A couple of reporters from the Fort Worth Press, Kent Biffle and Seth Kantor, went to extraordinary lengths to arrange a three-way conference call among Marguerite at her home, the two reporters in their city room, and Lee at the Metropole. It took hours to set up on the primitive international phone network—it was 1959—but eventually Biffle heard Lee come on the line, he recalls, with “two husky hello’s.” The moment Lee heard that reporters set the call up so he could talk to his mother, he clanked down the receiver as Marguerite was pleading, “Hello! Hello! Lee?” A shattered fifty-two-year-old Marguerite wept softly.529 “All those hours,” Kantor would later write, “down the drain.”530 Robert Oswald also attempted to reach Lee on the phone, but Lee refused to talk to him.531

  The aborted calls gave Lee a lift, though. He wrote in his diary on November 1, “More reporters, 3 phone calls from brother & mother, now I feel slightly axzillarated, not so lonly.”532*

  Oswald’s “axzillaration” was short-lived. He covered the next two weeks of his sojourn in the Metropole in a single diary entry for November 2 through 15: “Days of utter loneliness I refuse all reports phone calls I remaine in my room. I am racked with dsyentary.”533 Nor did he return to the American embassy, contenting himself with a handwritten letter to the embassy:

  I, Lee Harvey Oswald, do hereby request that my present United States citizenship be revoked.

  I appered [appeared] in person, at the consulate office of the United States Embassy, Moscow, on Oct 31st, for the purpose of signing the formal papers to this effect. This legal right I was refused at that time.

  I wish to protest against this action, and against the conduct of the official of the United States consuler service who acted on behalf of the United States government.

  My application, requesting that I be considered for citizenship in the Soviet Union is now pending before the Surprem Soviet of the U.S.S.R. In the event of acceptance, I will request my government to lodge a formal protest regarding this incident.

  Lee Harvey Oswald534

  The fact that Oswald said the U.S. embassy had “refused” to let him renounce his U.S. citizenship when it hadn’t done this at all is revealing. Snyder m
erely told Oswald to return on another date, and when Snyder responded to Oswald’s November 3, 1959, letter on November 6, he informed Oswald that he did, in fact, have the “inherent right” to renounce his citizenship and all he had to do was return to the embassy during the hours the embassy was open (set forth in the letter) and follow the prescribed procedures, including the taking of an oath.535 Yet Oswald elected not to return to the embassy, which perhaps speaks loudly for one point. Renouncing his citizenship was only ancillary to the main thing he wanted, becoming a Soviet citizen.

  But since his interview at the Soviet Passport Office on October 29, Oswald had heard nothing from the Soviet authorities. Finally, on November 4, Oswald was visited by one “Andrei Nikolayevich,” ostensibly an employee at Intourist, who chatted with Oswald about his reasons for requesting Soviet citizenship and promised to help him get settled in the USSR after the November holidays—in five days. This was, of course, just another camouflaged interview by the KGB. When Oswald heard nothing further from Nikolayevich, he got Rimma to try to arrange a meeting with him, but they discovered that there was no such person at Intourist. That organization, alerted to the monkey business by Oswald’s attempt to locate “Nikolayevich,” asked the KGB for an explanation and was told that its spy had spoken to Oswald “on the subject of possible use abroad.”536

  But as indicated, since the KGB had no use for Oswald, the Nikolayevich meeting was most likely just another KGB contact with Oswald to check up on him, not to use him, and the fact that Oswald apparently never heard from Nikolayevich again supports this inference.

  Oswald would have no further contacts with the Soviets for weeks to come. He did hear from the U.S. embassy, however. It had received Robert’s November 1, 1959, telegram to Christian Herter at the State Department, urging that State have Lee get in touch with his brother. Snyder had his secretary, Marie Cheatham, call the Metropole on November 2 to ask Oswald to come and pick up Robert’s telegram. He was not interested. Snyder told her to call back and ask Lee if she could read the telegram over the phone. “Not at the present time,” he said, and hung up.537 Robert’s telegram was finally sent to Oswald from the embassy by registered mail.538