Oswald’s letter to Marguerite says quite a bit about his nature, for he never intended to live in Fort Worth and help support his mother. Immediately after his discharge was approved he applied for a passport, indicating he planned to sail from New Orleans within three weeks to attend the colleges in Europe. Under countries to be visited he listed Cuba, the Dominican Republic, England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, and Russia. Before being discharged he signed the customary statement promising not to divulge any secret or confidential information he may have gained during his military service.
The day after he arrived at his mother’s one-room apartment in Fort Worth, he informed her that he was going to “board a ship and work in the export-import business.” When she tried to talk him out of it, he told her his mind was made up and, “If I stay here, I will get a job for about $35 a week, and we will both be in the position that you are in.” He visited Robert and his family at their home—where he altered his explanation somewhat by saying he had plans to go to New Orleans and “work for an export firm.” He said nothing about boarding a ship. After two days at home he left for New Orleans, where he booked passage on the freighter Marion Lykes bound for France. On the steamship company’s application form he described himself as a “shipping export agent.” From New Orleans he wrote Marguerite:
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.
During the first days at sea Oswald spent most of his time pacing back and forth on deck. There were only three other passengers aboard: a retired army colonel and his wife, and a 17-year-old student, Billy Joe Lord. They found their fellow passenger to be vague about his travel itinerary and bitter about life in the United States. He complained about his mother’s circumstances, the fact that she had to work in a drugstore to get by. When he saw that Billy Joe, his roommate, had brought a Bible, he said he couldn’t see how anyone could believe in God in light of the findings of modern science, since “anyone with intelligence would recognize there was only matter.”
From Le Harve, France, Oswald sailed to Southampton, England, where he told customs officials he planned to stay in Britain for one week before proceeding to school in Switzerland. On the next day he flew to Helsinki.1
Oswald arrived in Moscow around the time of his twentieth birthday, in October 1959. Shortly thereafter, he told his Intourist interpreter, Rimma Shirokova, that he wanted to become a Soviet citizen. She helped him write a letter to the Supreme Soviet requesting citizenship. But at that point the Soviet bureaucracy took control. When his six-day visa expired, Oswald was informed he would have to leave the country immediately. And since the Russians were not interested in him, he would have to return to the United States. Oswald went back to his hotel room, considered the situation for a few hours, and cut himself above his left wrist.
Although the Warren Report cautiously called it “an apparent suicide attempt,” there is reason to believe that this incident was another one of Oswald’s dramatic manipulations. He knew that Rimma was scheduled to arrive at his hotel room within the hour and would find him. The hospital records, provided by the Soviets after the assassination, state that his injury was “light” and that Oswald told his doctor he had cut his wrist to “postpone his departure” from the Soviet Union. In fact, this “apparent suicide attempt” was similar to the minor gunshot wound Oswald had inflicted on himself in Japan. Each incident seemed to have had the same purpose—to avoid being sent where he did not want to go. The emotion expressed was probably not suicidal despair but an extraordinary willfulness—a determination to act decisively and even violently to manipulate events.
The strategem worked, at least for a while. After being released from the hospital, Oswald was transferred to another hotel, although his tourist visa had expired. His diary claims he was interviewed by a new set of Soviet officials the same afternoon. They asked him to describe the other officials he had seen, and took notes. But these bureaucrats also put him off. Several factors must have entered into their decision—among them, Oswald’s evident unpredictability and the overall political situation. While Oswald was sailing to Europe, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had been touring the United States after meeting with President Eisenhower at Camp David. The world press was heralding a potential thaw in the Cold War.
Priscilla Johnson thought the Soviets were suspicious of all foreigners, including those whose ideological credentials were unquestionable—as, of course, Oswald’s were not. Having never joined the Communist party, he had no ideological record. One of the questions the second group of officials asked him was, “What documents do you have to show who and what you are?” The only thing Oswald could produce was his Marine Corps honorable discharge.
After waiting for three days without getting an answer, Oswald decided to take action again. He went to the American Embassy and attempted to sign away his citizenship. As a non-American he couldn’t have been forced to return to the United States—it would have made it impossible for Soviet officials to tell him, as one already had, “Go home.” Although he didn’t get to sign the papers that day, he eventually got what he wanted. When he spoke to Priscilla Johnson two weeks later, he said the Russians had assured him he would be allowed to stay.
Toward the end of November the embassy lost track of him in Moscow. He surfaced in Minsk the following January. Some writers suspect that during the interim Oswald was being questioned by the KGB.
Like his fellow radar operators, Oswald had a low security clearance. In 1964 John Donovan, his former crew chief at El Toro, listed the confidential information Oswald was known to have had access to: the location of every base in the West Coast area, their radio frequencies and call signs, their radar capabilities, and the relative strengths of all squadrons. (The radio frequencies and call signs were changed after Oswald’s defection.) He also had some knowledge of the U-2 and of a device called TPX-I, which was used to transfer radio and radar signals several miles away from their source, diverting missiles set to home in on them. And he had received instruction in the then-new MPS 16 height-finding radar equipment, which could locate planes, such as the U-2, at extremely high altitudes. But he would not have had the technical expertise to reveal very much about those devices.
When Oswald hinted to Snyder that he knew something of special interest, he may have been talking about the U-2. But the Russians already knew a good deal about the American “mystery plane.” One intelligence observer has said that the Soviets may have first learned about the U-2 from a Ukrainian-born scientist and aerial photography specialist who defected from the United States in 1956. The existence of the plane was no secret. In March 1958 the Japanese magazine Air Review published photographs of U-2S taken by a 16-year-old boy standing off-base near a runway of an American installation.
It was apparently standard practice for the Soviet intelligence services to debrief defectors, especially military personnel. As one CIA officer has remarked, if nothing else, “they will talk to a Marine about close order drill.” We may assume Oswald was debriefed. The important thing for our purposes, however, is not that he may have given away secrets but that he didn’t receive the favorable treatment he had clearly expected as a reward.
According to his wife Marina, he had come to her country hoping to get an education. He applied for admission to the Patrice Lumumba University of Friendship of Peoples in Moscow, where students from Third World countries learned Marxist ideology. He wanted to study philosophy, economics, and politics. But in May 1961 his application was turned down. Looking back, Kerry Thornley thought Oswald must have assumed that the Russians would accept him in a “much higher capacity” than they did. He thought Oswald expected them, “in his own dreams, to invite him to take a position
in their government, possibly as a technician, and I think he then felt he could go out into the world, into the Communist world and distinguish himself and work his way up into the party, perhaps.”
This hope was, of course, completely unrealistic. Even the most celebrated defectors were never given significant positions in the Soviet Union. Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, high-level members of British intelligence who had been KGB agents for many years, defected after learning they were under suspicion by the British. After being feted in Moscow, they were given work at the English Department of a government publishing house. Another defector, Morris Block, was sent to Odessa to work as a shipfitter. Lee Harvey Oswald was sent to Minsk to work in a radio factory. He lived there from January 1960 until May 1962, and for more than half of that time, he was trying to get out.
When Richard Snyder appeared before the Warren Commission he was asked what his reaction was when he heard Oswald had been sent to live in Minsk. Snyder, who had once taken a walk around the town while waiting for a train, replied, “Serves him right.” Minsk was heavily industrialized and unattractive. Its winters were long and severe, quite different from anything Oswald had ever experienced. He was given an expensive apartment and a monthly stipend—he lived well, by Russian standards—but he was assigned manual labor, which he disliked. The records supplied by the Soviet government indicate that he made a familiar impression on his employers: “Citizen Lee Harvey Oswald reacts in an over-sensitive manner to remarks from the foremen, and is careless in his work. Citizen L. H. Oswald takes no part in the social life of the shop and keeps very much to himself.”
While Oswald was in Minsk, the American plots to assassinate Fidel Castro began. The idea originated during the planning stages of the Bay of Pigs invasion, while Eisenhower was still in office. Just a few CIA officials were involved. The rationalization then was that Castro’s elimination might make the invasion less costly in lives, or possibly unnecessary.
From the moment President John F. Kennedy took office, Cuba was a troublesome burden. In his first State of the Union message he said, “In Latin America, Communist agents seeking to exploit that region’s peaceful revolution of hope have established a base on Cuba.… Our objection with Cuba is not over the people’s drive for a better life. Our objection is to their domination by foreign and domestic tyrannies.” He warned that such domination in Latin America “can never be negotiated.” The public was alarmed by this new Soviet ally—“only 90 miles from Miami,” as the popular expression went. A month after the Bay of Pigs debacle, the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that Cuba was “a clear and present danger” to the Western Hemisphere. Editorial writers cited the Monroe Doctrine and demanded that the administration do all it could to get rid of the Castro government. When other methods failed, the assassination idea bobbed to the surface again.
Nobody knows precisely who ordered the assassination attempts. Despite a thorough investigation in 1975, Senator Frank Church’s senate committee on intelligence activities couldn’t determine whether the CIA acted on its own or on orders from above. During the investigation Church predicted to the Baltimore Sun, “The people will recognize that the CIA was behaving during those years like a rogue elephant rampaging out of control,” and the phrase “rogue elephant” quickly embedded itself in the public mind. But that was not the conclusion reached by Church’s committee in its report four months later:
The picture that emerges from the evidence is not a clear one.… The Committee finds that the system of executive command and control was so ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what levels assassination activity was known and authorized. This situation creates the disturbing prospect that Government [i.e., CIA] officials might have undertaken the assassination plots without it having been uncontrovertibly clear that there was explicit authorization from the Presidents. It is also possible that there might have been a successful “plausible denial” in which Presidential authorization was issued but is now obscured.
One committee member has said that pinning down responsibility for these activities was “like nailing Jello to a wall.” The committee ended up criticizing CIA officials for failing on several occasions “to disclose their plans and activities to superior authorities, or to do so with sufficient detail and clarity.” But it also criticized administration officials “for not ruling out assassination, particularly after certain Administration officials had become aware of prior assassination plans.”
That last statement was a reference to former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who served as a liaison with the CIA on Cuban policy for the White House. On May 7, 1962, Kennedy had been informed by CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston and another CIA officer, Sheffield Edwards, that an intermediary for the CIA had contacted Mafia leader Sam Giancana before the Bay of Pigs with a proposition of paying $150,000 to hire some hit men to go into Cuba and kill Castro. Kennedy was led to believe that this plot had been terminated, but that was untrue. Since Giancana’s association with the CIA complicated the attorney general’s ongoing attempt to prosecute Giancana, he was furious. Houston recalled Kennedy’s response: “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set … his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.”
One of the few things made clear by the Church committee report was that, following the Bay of Pigs humiliation, the Kennedy administration put considerable pressure on the CIA to “do something about Castro.” Robert Kennedy’s notes of a White House meeting on November 4, 1961, indicate that he wanted stronger covert action against Cuba: “My idea is to stir things up on [the] island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.”
On November 16 President Kennedy delivered a speech at the University of Washington in which he said, “We cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises.” But at the end of that month, the president authorized a major new covert action program called MONGOOSE, the purpose of which was to “use our available assets … to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime.” It was a project designed to use Cuban exiles in intelligence and sabotage activities aimed toward an internal revolt against the Castro government—the same idea Robert Kennedy had outlined earlier.
On January 19, 1962, a meeting of MONGOOSE participants was held in the attorney general’s office, and the notes taken by a CIA executive assistant contain the following account of what Robert Kennedy told them:
Conclusion Overthrow of Castro is Possible
“… a solution to the Cuban problem today carried top priority in U.S. Govt. No time, money, effort—or manpower is to be spared.”
“Yesterday … the President had indicated to him that the final chapter had not been written—it’s got to be done and will be done.”
Former CIA Director Richard Helms told the committee that during the MONGOOSE period “it was made abundantly clear … to everybody involved in the operation that the desire was to get rid of the Castro regime and to get rid of Castro … the point was that no limitations were put on this injunction.” As the pressure increased, he said, “obviously the extent of the means that one thought were available … increased too.” He added, “In the perceptions of the time and the things we were trying to do this was one human life against many other human lives that were being lost … people were losing their lives in raids, a lot of people had lost their life at the Bay of Pigs, agents were being arrested left and right and put before the wall and shot.” Helms testified that he received no direct order to assassinate Castro, but he told the committee: “I have testified as best I could about the atmosphere of the time, what I understood was desired, and I don’t want to take refuge in saying that I was instructed to specifically murder Castro.”
Other administration
officials backed up Helms’s picture of the crisis. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified, “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter, and … there was pressure from [President Kennedy and the attorney general] to do something about Castro.” But he added, “I don’t believe we contemplated assassination. We did, however, contemplate overthrow.”
Nevertheless, talk of assassination was in the air in 1961. George Smathers, former senator from Florida and an old friend of the president’s, told the Church committee that the subject came up during a conversation he had with Kennedy on the White House lawn. He testified that the president asked him “what reaction I thought there would be throughout South America were Fidel Castro to be assassinated.” After Smathers told him that it would only result in unfavorable publicity for the United States, Kennedy agreed with him. (It was Kennedy’s habit to ask people all manner of questions to obtain information.)
Later on, Kennedy let Smathers know he didn’t want to hear any more about Cuba. One evening when Smathers was a dinner guest:
I just happened to mention … something about Cuba, and the President took his fork and cracked the plate … and says, for Gods sakes, quit talking about Cuba.
On November 9, 1961, reporter Tad Szulc was asked by Robert Kennedy to meet with the president, off the record, to discuss the situation in Cuba. The president asked Szulc a number of questions about conversations he had had with Castro and what he thought the United States might do about Cuba, either in a hostile way or in establishing some kind of dialogue. Kennedy then asked, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” Taken aback, Szulc told him he would strongly disapprove of the idea for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Szulc said that Kennedy replied, “I agree with you completely.” The notes Szulc wrote shortly after the meeting continue:
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