Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  A few workers were hostile to Oswald, but just a few. There was one, Viktor, a zhlob, medium-sized guy, real strong. And Viktor always used to say, “Those American imperialists—if I had a machine gun, I would shoot them.” A real zhlob. Viktor had a clear image of his enemy, and he once picked a fight with Lee, although it was broken up immediately. Pavel’s recollection is that Lee was not pugnacious. Maybe he had such qualities hidden inside him, but he was not very big in the bones.

  Of course, if Viktor had gone further, Pavel would have gotten in between. It was the very least he could do. While he would not call Oswald a “friend,” it is only because that word in Russian is so holy that not only can you give up your last shirt, but you are ready to die for a friend. If you think in this way, obviously you don’t have a lot of friends. In fact, you are lucky to have one. All others are “pals.” In that sense, Lee was his pal. Maybe more, but still not his friend.

  In fact, for a long time Pavel did not see a great deal of Lee other than at work. He did not go for walks with him or hang around with him. Pavel had had to take a job at Horizon in order to earn enough of a new reputation to enter his Institute. Pavel had been kicked out of Komsomol. So, when he left Moscow to go to Minsk, his last school had written such a résumé that he’d even be lucky to get into prison with it.

  He could say therefore that for a long time he only saw Lee at work. Once in a while they would meet at lunch, or at the home of some Argentinians named Ziger. But that was all. Since the physical distance between their tables was not much more than five meters, they never did have much desire to meet after closing. After all, they were able to talk to each other through the working hours of each day. If Oswald went out at night, it was to his own places. A cat who walked by himself.

  One night that winter, not two weeks after he met Lee, a stranger came up to Pavel on his way home from work. There, right outside his apartment entrance, this stranger showed an identification card from KGB.

  Pavel said, “Can we go up to my apartment and talk? It’s winter.”

  The stranger said, “Let’s talk here.”

  It was too cold, however. Pavel was frozen. So he convinced the man to come upstairs.

  They conversed in Pavel’s room. His visitor took out about five pictures, and started off by saying, “Do you know this fellow?” He went through each one of these five pictures, and Pavel said, “No. I don’t know any of them. Who are they?” And received for a reply: “They are state criminals.” At which point his visitor looked at him hard, as if maybe he really did know them well.

  Pavel said, “I don’t want you to waste your time. I have never met these men in my life. It’s strange you ask me these questions.”

  Then the man from KGB brought out a photograph of Oswald and said, “You know, you took on a relationship with this American guy so easily, but we would like to tell you that your Motherland now asks that you give us some information so that we know what kind of person he is. We need your help.” Pavel didn’t feel anything like a patriot, but knew for sure they would get cooperation. It was a demand. People senior to himself became nervous if they saw a KGB card in a man’s hand. It was not that Pavel felt any kind of obligation to his Motherland; he was eighteen, and scared to death. That was, Pavel would say, a strong substitute for obligation: being scared to death.

  Pavel never looked at a clock during this interview, but it must have taken an hour. A lot of questions went by. The KGB man kept going around and around for quite a while before he touched their main subject. Then he explained, “Oswald is from another country, a hostile country.” It could not be more clear what he was saying. He must have been twice as old as Pavel, short, compact, sharp eyes—one Byelorussian who didn’t show any feelings or emotions, just a small trim fellow with a smooth round face, a long thin pointed nose, and small dark eyes as sharp as his nose. He would depend on that nose. It seemed to sniff out everything inexact that Pavel was saying.

  He didn’t threaten Pavel, however, just stated, “From time to time, I’d like to meet with you. My name is Stepan Vasilyevich.”

  From Igor: “We can say it now—there were surveillants assigned to be Oswald’s tails, and certain people were assigned to work with him, to become his associates and friends. We were especially careful to check if he was looking for personal contact with another agent. We were interested to see whether there were any signs of a prearranged meeting.”

  According to Igor’s plan, various hypotheses were going to be tested in order to find out if Oswald was looking for secrets of a military, political, or economic variety, and also they would look to learn if he had developed any means of communication with foreign intelligence by radio, mail channels, or messenger. KGB would also attempt to find out if he had any means of cryptography to use for secret writing. Igor Ivanovich himself was ready to study Oswald’s letters, should he send any, in order to make certain there was no chemical writing between the lines. Later, when Oswald bought a radio, they checked that equipment, and they were always alert for signs of his ability to communicate through special codes.

  Nothing showed up that was suspicious in the first two months, but if Oswald was an American intelligence agent, he certainly would not make quick moves. Sometimes a man who is not an agent will do things that arouse suspicion; that happens often; but not even unfounded suspicions were stirred by Oswald. Studying him with close attention, they began to have a feeling that he was at the least semi-lazy; and very frugal; he didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, went to theatre and cinema within his budget, and had an income of 70 rubles a month in new money for salary and an increment of another 70 rubles a month from the Red Cross, or 140 rubles in all. This was, after all, 1400 rubles a month by the old measure, and so a good amount. Stepan, for example, was only earning 80 rubles in new money, and that was enough for him to get by. There was, for example, no telephone in Oswald’s apartment, and KGB never received information that he wanted one. On those occasions when he wished to make a call, he went outside to a pay phone. It would be better if he had wanted his own instrument, but they couldn’t install it for him, could they?

  FROM KGB REPORT: 18 FEBRUARY 1960

  By means of personal observation and in conversation, “L” did not notice that OSWALD aroused suspicion in his behavior. He was not particularly interested in his work, and often made comments such as, “Why should I saw away at this metal with this saw, I’m not going to become an engineer. My real dream is to learn foreign languages and learn them well.” (He did not say which ones in particular.) He is reserved in conversation, answers questions briefly, self-possessed manner.

  Once, according to “L,” he and OSWALD were reading President EISENHOWER’s speech in Pravda. In this speech, EISENHOWER attempted to demonstrate technical backwardness of Soviet Union compared to United States. OSWALD answered that EISENHOWER was lying, that USSR is not technically less advanced than U.S.

  OSWALD almost never talked about life in his country, or how he got here. Sometimes during a lunch break he will exchange two or three words with young people, girls and boys, and will compare life in USSR and U.S. But in those situations as well he speaks positively about position of workers in USSR.

  By other reports, however, Oswald soon proved to be one Humpty Dumpty worker. He did not treat his job well. Igor could see that he showed no interest, and his behavior and attitude caused complaints from other workers.

  Since Igor and Stepan were not satisfied by this image of him as lightweight, they deliberated whether his psyche was entirely normal. On the other hand, they were aware it could all be a pretense. Once again, they worked on two opposed hypotheses: Either Oswald was part of a foreign intelligence plan, or he was not but had some psychological difficulty. They began to study situations where Lee Harvey Oswald, if he were a spy, might expose himself.

  For example, now that he had established contact with Pavel Golavachev, Igor and his people would watch Oswald with Golavachev to see whether the American would try
to use him as a trampoline, so to speak, to gain access up to Pavel’s father, a General who knew large secrets.

  “You know,” Pavel said to his interviewers thirty years later, “we have class struggle and class hatred, but we also have normal envies. People are envious.” People were always telling him, “Oh, I would like to have had your father. I would have become Napoleon. I could have turned the earth around if I had had a father like yours!” Even at school, when they were all having fun and were all equally guilty of breaking some rule, Pavel would be blamed. He offered this as background for talking about his father. The war damaged a little bit of the General’s nervous system. Honestly speaking, his father liked his children; but honestly speaking, he was also a bit of a despot. A true military person: He wanted everything done punctually and properly, whereas Pavel was born, he would say, a democrat.

  During the Great Patriotic War, his father had been a Captain, a fighter-pilot with his one-seat plane, a Cobra, and most of his missions gave cover to bomber planes, but when Pavel read logs of his father’s flights, he saw that four or five times his father had chosen to go out just to enjoy “free hunting.”

  A pilot was recommended for his first gold star as Hero of the Soviet Union if he shot down fifteen German planes. To get your second award, to be decorated Twice a Hero of the Soviet Union, you had to perform some extreme kind of heroic deed, something extra-dimensional. For example, one Captain, when he saw that one of his men had to make an emergency landing in a field, managed to bring his plane down alongside his buddy’s crippled vehicle, and then he held off some German infantry long enough to carry the wounded pilot back to his plane and take off. For this he received Twice a Hero of the Soviet Union.

  Pavel’s father had been winning an aerial fight, at eleven thousand feet, but ran out of ammunition. Still, he succeeded in downing his opponent’s plane by chopping up its tail with his propeller. Then, damaged himself, he managed to get back safely. That brought him a second gold star.

  His father had become a Party member. It was necessary as a patriotic duty during World War II, but afterward, Pavel never knew whether his father felt disillusioned by the Party or was proud of it. He never talked of this. Of course, there were not many family conversations on such matters. Given their one-party system, one did not quit membership in the Party. One might as well quit everything and go straight up to heaven.

  On the other hand, his father told Pavel to join Komsomol. You lived with wolves, you howled like a wolf. So Pavel’s father was not a dissident, and did not want Pavel to be one. But there was never any political activity indoors. His parents’ attitude was: Read for yourself—don’t talk about it.

  While his father did not like to give him pocket money, he never restricted expenses for technical hobbies. So, Pavel built airplane models and ship models, and his father would purchase anything good for his technical development. He certainly never felt deprived of his father’s love, or his mother’s.

  Still, his father, being a military man, had his family moving all the time. In ten years, Pavel changed schools eleven times. He was in Monino, then Riga, then Tukums; then to the Kolski peninsula, and in Allakurti, Monino, Allakurti again, then Moscow by spring of 1957. In ten years, eleven schools. Upon completion of the tenth grade, he moved away from his family and came back to Minsk. Ever since, he had been on his own.

  To his father’s unspoken disappointment, he had not been interested in a military career. In 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, TV showed Russian bodies cut into parts by Hungarians. But two years afterward, in 1958, in Moscow there lived on the same floor of their apartment house another General, whose son had served in Hungary, and this young officer told Pavel how he was driving a tank during the uprising and, having been surrounded by a Hungarian crowd, had to move his tank quickly to get out, and later had the guts of people on his treads. When this young officer came back to Moscow, he was exactly the same color as a white bird, a dove. He was not a close friend, but he changed Pavel’s life for sure.

  Pavel did have discussions with his father about a military career, because at one high school he had taken first place in a shooting competition, and his father, naturally proud, wanted him to go on into the Air Force, but in his family nobody forced you to do things, and what settled matters for Pavel even more than the tank treads was that there was a good apartment in Minsk open to him. His father, as one of the Byelorussian republic’s national heroes—and there were only four Byelorussian-born soldiers who had become Twice a Hero of the Soviet Union—had been given his own cottage as a special honor; Pavel’s parents had then exchanged that house for an apartment just off the grand circle of Victory Square, a gracious four rooms in a building designed for the Minsk elite. The ceilings were high.

  When Pavel went to live there, it was occupied already by his mother’s sister, who of course remained with her two sons. But there was ample space for Pavel.

  He was interested in radio technology, and so work at Horizon was closest to his interests. Still, he found the factory kind of primitive. Real knowledge could only be obtained at a higher engineering school. He did want a more advanced technical education. While a well-qualified worker would earn higher wages than a person with an advanced degree (which to Pavel was a typical disproportion of their Soviet system), still, one’s education could extend one’s horizons.

  Pavel had seen a French film, The Wages of Fear, about an engineer arriving in a far-off village where people were afraid of spirits. This engineer was supposed to set up an explosion for a dam. But everybody was afraid to lay in the dynamite, because of angry spirits. So this engineer had to do it all by himself.

  Pavel wanted to be such an engineer, a man who could do things not only on paper but with his hands. He was working hard. He had three semesters where he not only had to do his factory work but was attending Minsk’s Polytechnic Institute; seven factory hours each day, six days a week, and an academic program four nights a week. So, when it came to sex, he had to wait for summer. At that time, he and friends his age would be sent out on agricultural assignments and could be free of parents. Sex came not in the backseat of an American automobile, remarked Pavel, but out in a field while picking mushrooms. Of course, in those days, he still had golden hair and a wonderful apartment, one full room to himself, but working so hard, he did not see much of girls, especially not in winter, not on the kind of cold night when a fellow like Stepan, his KGB man, would be waiting for him.

  It was a wild country, and you never knew how your parents would react. Peter the Great once tied a peasant to a bear and threw both into a pool. Everyone stood around and laughed. Pavel was tempted to tell his father about his KGB visitor, but decided not to. Pavel’s father could be as impulsive as Peter the Great.

  March 16

  I receive a small flat, one room, kitchen, bath, near the factory, with splendid view . . . of the river, almost rent-free. 6 rubles a month. It is a Russian’s dream.

  It was an exceptional move, thought Stellina, to give him an apartment. His factory, like every other industrial enterprise and plant, had people on a waiting list, so how did you jump to the head? This waiting list included veterans of wars, invalids, families with many children, and also took into account how many years you worked at Horizon.

  Then, after he moved, Stellina hardly heard from him. In fact, there was no word for more than a year, not until April 1961.

  For example, Stellina didn’t find out about his wife until then. Alyosha came to visit her one full year later, and said, “Ma, I’m getting married,” and she said, “How can that be? You don’t know Russian well enough. How can you communicate to this person? Does she know English?”

  Alyosha smiled and said: “Two phrases: ‘Switch off the light,’ and, ‘Kiss me, please.’”

  Igor stated that Oswald received his place through factory decisions; nothing to do with the Organs. Of course, it was not easy to find apartments, but since this was an American seeking political asylum
, the highest authorities decided to give him very good conditions. It was felt that Soviet institutions should show humanity to him.

  There had also been a directive from Moscow Center to Minsk KGB to “point Oswald in the right direction.” What did that mean? Igor replied, “When we check out a person, whether it is for suspicion of espionage or anti-Soviet dissident activity, we never put aside our capability to make a person of him, so to speak. Certainly, when Oswald came here to get knowledge about Communism and our socialist way of life, this side of the problem also had to be considered. Because, if indeed he came here to participate in improving socialism, then we had to direct him in this matter. That’s why Lee was given an extra monthly allowance from Red Cross, equal to his salary, and an apartment and a job. It was to enable him to find his place in our socialist regime. We did not wish to think only in negative terms. Give him some real possibilities to go in the right direction.”

  His lack of desire to work did, however, cause suspicions. “Labor is necessary for us, and absence of such a desire would take away his credibility that he was interested in our country,” said Igor.

  All the while that Oswald remained at his hotel, he never invited Pavel there. Their most memorable personal contact in such early days was when Oswald received his apartment in the middle of March, and Pavel and a couple of other fellows helped him move in some furniture. An interpreter from Intourist named Tanya came along. Pavel was not particularly surprised that Lee was given an apartment with a balcony and a beautiful view. “Below the waist,” as they say, they had given it to him, but that had nothing to do with Pavel. After all, his own living conditions were far more satisfactory.