Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  *At the trial in London, Delgado said that Castro ended up executing an American, Major Morgan, who had assisted him in the revolution, and whom Oswald and he had spoken of emulating, and that execution in particular disillusioned Delgado about Castro (Transcript of On Trial, July 24, 1986, p.593–594).

  † A much more famous remark of this nature has been attributed to Oswald, but he may not have made it. Kerry Thornley told the Warren Commission that Oswald “looked upon history as God. He looked upon the eyes of future people as some kind of tribunal, and he wanted to be on the winning side so that ten thousand years from now people would look in the history books and say ‘Well, this man was ahead of his time.’” Oswald, he said, “was concerned with his image in history.” (11 H 97–98) From the context it is not clear whether Thornley came up with the ten-thousand-year observation himself, or Oswald mentioned it to him first.

  *He was transferred to the Marine Corps Reserve, in which he was expected to serve until December 8, 1962, his unit headquartered at the Naval Air Station in Glenview, Illinois (WR, pp. 688–689; Folsom Exhibit No. 1, 19 H 679).

  *Where Oswald spent the night of October 9 is not known, but it’s likely he spent it in an airport waiting room. The Warren Report (p. 690) says, “On the same day [he arrived at Southampton] he flew to Helsinki,” but the visas in his passport (CE 946, 18 H 162–163) showed that he arrived at Southampton on October 9 and left London Airport (now Heathrow) for Helsinki on October 10.

  *Oswald told UPI reporter Aline Mosby in November in Moscow, “For two years I’ve had it in my mind, don’t form any attachments, because I knew I was going away. I was planning to divest myself of everything to do with the United States. I’ve not just been thinking about it, but waiting to do it. For two years, saving my money” (CE 1385, 22 H 705).

  *The reader will note in reading the many writings of Oswald in this section that his dyslexia caused various degrees of errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, ranging from really bad to almost passable. The only explanation that makes sense for why his dyslexia was not as obvious in some of his letters is that, like the above referred-to letter to the Supreme Soviet, he had third-party help, or he deemed a particular letter important enough to rewrite it several times to make it better. For instance, Marina told the Warren Commission that with respect to the envelope alone on his November 9, 1963, letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., “Lee retyped it some ten times or so” (1 H 45), although she later told her biographer Priscilla McMillan it was more like four times (McMillan, Marina and Lee, p. 624 note 17). The Warren Commission noted the varying quality of his letters and dismissed a third possibility, at least as to the letters coming from Oswald in the United States. “There is no evidence,” the Commission’s report said, “that anyone in the United States helped Oswald with his better written letters or that anyone else wrote his letters for him” (WR, p. 666).

  *In a memorandum dated October 22, 1959, the KGB also decided that “it was not advisable to give [Oswald] refugee status in the Soviet Union” (Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination, p. 34).

  *Thirty years later, Rimma told Frontline that “I saw Lee in the bath. It was water there and it was reddish, so it was blood. Lee cut his wrist” (Transcript of “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline, PBS, November 16, 1993, p. 8). But two years later she told author Norman Mailer that she stayed out in the hallway and did not see Lee in the tub, and was told he had “cut his wrists.” When they brought him out on a stretcher she said he was unconscious, his cheeks were hollow, his face was bluish, and he looked like a person about to die. (Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, p. 50)

  *It is not known if Oswald ever made this offer, or if he was just bluffing Snyder. As indicated earlier, Oswald made no reference to offering the Soviets anything in return for citizenship, although Semichastny claims Oswald, in one or more conversations with the KGB, offered the Soviets information he called “outdated.”

  *Of course, the situation was rife with other considerations and possibilities. Though Oswald couldn’t be expected to know the complex law of subversive activity by U.S. citizens, even treason, surely he had to know that what he was threatening to do was flirting with a violation of some federal law, although in his unschooled mind he probably felt safe since he knew he hadn’t actually passed any information to the Soviets yet. And then there is the possibility that Oswald may very well have assumed that the Soviets had bugged the U.S. embassy and Snyder’s office and he was speaking to them and attempting to establish his bona fides.

  † McVickar, possibly being influenced by the occurrence of later events, in responding to a request after the assassination from Thomas Ehrlich, a special assistant to the legal adviser to the Department of State, to set forth his impressions of Oswald in Moscow, wrote, “I recall thinking at the time that Oswald was behaving with a great deal of determination and purpose for such a young and relatively uneducated person. He was certainly very independent and fearless in a rather blind way and it seemed to me that he could have acquired all these ideas himself…On the other hand, there also seemed to me to be the possibility that he was following a pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by person or persons unknown…It seemed to me that there was a possibility that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him and encouraged him in his actions” (CE 941, 18 H 155; 5 H 384, WCT Frances G. Knight).

  *Oswald may have conflated (a poor conflation at that) the names Korengold and A. I. Goldberg, a reporter for the Associated Press, to come up with “Goldstene.” Goldberg did try to interview Oswald at the Metropole, he says before Mosby, and Oswald, speaking to him through the slightly opened door of his room, refused to talk, confining himself to “I’ve got my reasons” in response to Goldberg’s “Why?” Goldberg never saw him again. (CE 2719, 26 H 99–100)

  *Though he was lonely, he apparently was not alone. A June 4, 1964, internal memorandum of the CIA on KGB operations against foreign tourists noted that “Rm 233, Hotel Metropole, Moscow” [Oswald’s room] was “equipped with infra-red camera for observation of occupants” (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 9, 531 note 46).

  Meanwhile, on November 2, the U.S. State Department (even before receiving a November 2 Moscow embassy dispatch to them from Snyder proposing “to delay action on Oswald’s request”) sent a telegram to its Moscow embassy that read in part, “If Oswald insists on renouncing U.S. citizenship, Section 1999 Revised Statutes precludes Embassy withholding right to do so” (CE 908, 18 H 97–99; CE 916, 18 H 114).

  *Although Oswald’s diary entry of November 15, 1959, says he was interviewed by Mosby that day (CE 24, 16 H 97), and in his handwritten account of the interview, which was found among his personal effects, he also says it was on November 15 (CE 2717, 26 H 91), this has to be incorrect, since Mosby’s published story on the interview in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (“Fort Worth Defector Confirms Red Beliefs”), published on Sunday, November 15, 1959, was datelined “Moscow, November 14 (UPI),” and in the article Mosby said she interviewed Oswald the previous day, “Saturday” (CE 2716, 26 H 90).

  *Though this sounds like an elegant suite, something Oswald could not be expected to be able to afford, Mosby says the room was the standard “thirty dollar a day room with meals that all tourists must buy” (CE 1385, 22 H 702).

  *Oswald ended his letter lightheartedly: “It is snowing here in Moscow now, which makes everything look very nice from my hotel window. I can see the Kremlin and Red Square and I have just finished a dinner of meat and potatoes. So you see the Russians are not so different from you and I” (CE 295, 16 H 822).

  *How did the decision on Oswald come about? Former KGB colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, with access to KGB files, writes in his book Passport to Assassination that “the news of Oswald’s visit to the [U.S.] Embassy, in conjunction with his attempt at suicide, upset the people who ran Intourist…Now the Western mass media were clued into events, which could lead to reports that in the Sovie
t Union tourists are ‘driven to commit suicide.’ This could damage the image and the commercial interest of Intourist by scaring away potential tourists to the USSR. Therefore, the Intourist brass again began to sound all the alarms. This time it sent another strictly confidential message on November 12 straight to Anastas Mikoyan, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. As First Deputy Chairman, Mikoyan was in charge of all Soviet foreign trade organizations, including Intourist. In this capacity he could issue orders to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chairman of the KGB. Mikoyan forwarded the letter to the head of the Seventh Department of the Second Chief Directorate, the division of counterintelligence that handled tourists” (Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination, p. 39). The implication is that the mere forwarding of the letter carried the imprimatur of Mikoyan that he was not opposed to Oswald being permitted to stay in the Soviet Union.

  *Author Norman Mailer, in research for his book Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, spent six months in Russia in 1993. While there he tracked down and interviewed the KGB agents who were assigned to monitor Oswald’s every move. Undoubtedly aided by his international stature as an author, he was also given access to the Belarus KGB files on Oswald, including transcripts of conversations overheard by the KGB (through electronic surveillance) in the apartment in Minsk that Oswald shared with his wife, Marina. I have availed myself, in this book, of some of Mailer’s seminal research on Oswald in Russia along with that of KGB colonel Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko, who also had access to KGB files on Oswald, which he used for his book Passport to Assassination.

  *Meanwhile, since Marguerite hadn’t heard from Lee for several months, she became worried, and wrote her congressman in Fort Worth, Jim Wright, on March 6, 1960, asking him for help in locating Lee (CE 1138, 22 H 118). Wright forwarded her inquiry to the Department of State, which in turn sent it to the American embassy in Moscow. The embassy responded to the Department of State on March 28 that embassy officials had had no contact with Oswald since November 9, 1959, and had “no clue as to his present whereabouts.” The embassy suggested that Mrs. Oswald write a personal letter to Lee, send it to the embassy, and they’d forward it to the Soviet Foreign Office. (CE 923, 18 H 122; CE 927, 18 H 126) There’s no evidence that Marguerite did that, but the day after she wrote to Wright she wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter, also asking him for assistance in locating Lee. “Lee is probably stranded,” she wrote Herter, “and even if he now realizes that he has made a mistake he would have no way of financing his way home. He probably needs help.” (CE 206, 16 H 594–595; see also CE 928–930, 18 H 128–130)

  *Author Norman Mailer was told by the KGB agent in charge of Oswald’s detail that by now the agency had given Oswald a new code name. Mailer writes, “It was Likhoi. That sounded like Lee Harvey, but the word meant valiant, or dashing. It was KGB humor. Likhoi never seemed to do anything but go to work, walk around, and shop.” (Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, p. 114)

  *It is not clear how many times Oswald went hunting with the club. Although Tzagiko suggested only once, Lee suggested it was several times, later telling a group of college students in Alabama that the group of hunters he went with sometimes spent the night in outlying villages, which were so poor that they “often” left their bag with the villagers, who did not seem to have enough to eat (CE 2678, 26 H 34–35; CE 2679, 26 H 35–36; WR, p. 699).

  *In a typed narrative to a book he was contemplating writing on Russia and his experiences there, Oswald described life in Russia, and at the factory, as centered around the “Kollective.” He wrote that the head of the Kollective in his factory, Comrade Lebizen, saw to it that everyone maintained shop discipline, attended party meetings, and received all the new propaganda as it came out. Meetings of the Kollective were “so numerous as to be staggering.” In a single month were scheduled one meeting of the professional union, four political information meetings, two young Communist meetings, one meeting of the production committee to discuss ways of improving work, two Communist Party meetings, four meetings of the “School of Communist Labor,” and one sports meeting. All but one of the fifteen meetings were compulsory for Communist Party members and all but three were compulsory for everyone. They were scheduled so as to not to interfere with work (meaning at lunch or after work), and were anywhere from ten minutes to two hours in duration. “Absenteeism,” he said, “is by no means allowed.” Oswald said that no one liked the meetings. (CE 92, 16 H 285, 290–292)

  *In the same interview Marina acknowledged that when she wed Oswald, she was not a virgin, that she was terrified he might ask but he did not.

  *In Russia, an a is added to a last name for a wife. When a husband and wife are spoken of as one, the husband’s name is used—hence, “the Prusakovs.”

  *In September 1992, Marina told a Moscow correspondent for the Toronto Star, Jennifer Gould, “I was never in love with Lee.” Marina, fifty-one at the time and living as man and wife with Kenneth Porter, a rancher in Rockwell, Texas, was in Moscow for the filming of Marina’s Story, a $3.7 million NBC made-for-television movie about her life—ironically billed as a “love story.” (Jennifer Gould, “Oswald’s Soviet Friends Come to His Defense,” Toronto Star, January 31, 1993; “Marina’s Turn,” p. 71)

  † Tamara, an older coworker of Marina’s at the pharmacy, was convinced that of the two men Marina had been seeing, it was Anatoly whom she loved (McMillan, Marina and Lee, p. 101).

  *While Marina, as previously indicated, was not a virgin, the extent of her sexual freedom is somewhat unclear. Her chief accuser in Minsk, Yuri Merezhinsky, was a member of the small group of hip men and women Marina hung out with, and according to him, “everybody” in the group was having sex with Marina except for Sasha Piskalev, the one in the group who was “in love up to his ears” with Marina and “was ready to marry her.” Fine. But then it turns out that Yuri himself never had sex with Marina either. (Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, pp. 154–157)

  *The odd language “it is assumed” stems from a June 3, 1960, memorandum from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Department of State in which he said that the bureau had learned from Oswald’s mother that her son had taken his birth certificate with him to Russia and that three letters she had written to him had been returned undelivered, raising the possibility of something having happened to him and someone using his birth certificate. See discussion on the Second Oswald allegation in conspiracy section.

  *There was, of course, one governmental agency that could give Oswald the promise of immunity he wanted so badly. Indeed, if Oswald was the CIA agent or operative on a mission to Russia that conspiracy theorists are so convinced he was, the issue of immunity, and Oswald’s fears and anxieties with respect to prosecution, would never have arisen in the first place.

  *According to Marina’s biographer, Priscilla McMillan, Marina called Lee either “Lee” or “Alka.” She called him “Lee” when she was angry at him. “Alka” was a nickname Marina had given Lee (McMillan doesn’t say how she came up with it or its derivation) that was reserved for warm and sentimental moments, as when she was thinking of the happy days in Russia when they first met (McMillan, Marina and Lee, p. 221).

  † Although Oswald had verbally told the American embassy in Moscow in October 1959, and even confirmed in a note he wrote on hotel stationery that he had given to them, that he wanted to dissolve his American citizenship and wanted to become a Soviet citizen, this was not enough to constitute expatriation. What would have been? Among other things (none of which Oswald had done) being “naturalized as a citizen of a foreign state”; having “taken an oath or made an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state”; “entered or served in the armed forces of a foreign state”; having “made a formal renunciation of nationality…before a diplomatic or consular office of the United States in a foreign state” (recall that Oswald had not returned to the U.S. embassy in October 1959 to fill out the necessary formal documents for renunciation); et cetera. (CE 938,
18 H 144; for Oswald erroneously indicating on the Application for Renewal of Passport form that he had renounced his citizenship, or affirmed his allegiance to the Soviet Union, or it being a typographical error, see CE 938, 18 H 144; CE 947, 18 H 176–177; WR, pp. 755–756; and 5 H 282–283, 286, WCT Richard Edward Snyder)

  *Conspiracy theorists, ever suspicious, believe that Marina was granted an exit visa more quickly than normal, and they thus infer that she (and hence, her husband) was a KGB agent. Although Marina formally applied for her Soviet exit visa on August 21, 1961, she initiated her request in a letter to the Soviet authorities more than a month earlier, though the exact date is not known. However, we know that as early as July 17, 1961, her husband gave the Soviets a statement guaranteeing the support of his wife if they allowed her to leave for America. (CE 985, 18 H 405) So we know that at least five months transpired between when the Soviets received a document of some sort requesting an exit visa and when they granted her permission to leave on December 25, 1961. Of eleven cases examined by the CIA, Soviet wives of American citizens had to wait from five months to a year to obtain an exit visa. Of six cases examined by the U.S. Department of State after 1953, the liberalized post-Stalin era, the approximate waiting periods for Soviet wives of American citizens were, in decreasing order, approximately thirteen months, seven months, three months, one month, and ten days. (WR, pp. 279–280; CE 2756, 26 H 141–142)