Marguerite was overjoyed to see Lee. He was not quite as happy to see her. “She’s gotten fat,” he apologized. “She’s changed a lot. She didn’t used to be that fat.”
“What do you expect?” Marina asked. “She’s not a girl of fifteen.”
Marguerite and Lee were arguing before the weekend was over. “She thinks that she did it all,” Lee grumbled. “She thinks she’s the one who got us out.”
Marguerite told Lee that she was planning to write a book about his defection. She had been working on it for some time. The year before, she had been to Washington and had asked to see President Kennedy as part of the background. “Mother,” Lee said emphatically, “you are not going to write a book.”
“Lee, don’t tell me what to do,” Marguerite replied. “I cannot write the book now because, honey, you are alive and back. It has nothing to do with you and Marina. It is my life, because of your defection.”
“Mother,” Lee said again, “I tell you, you are not to write the book. They could kill [Marina] and her family.”5
But on another matter mother and son agreed. Both criticized the US Department of State for the “red tape” that had delayed Lee’s return. Spontaneously, both made the same complaints, both used identical expressions, and both made the same errors of fact. Robert took no part in the airing of complaints by his mother and Lee and did not seem to look at things the same way.
While old relationships were being renewed, Vada Oswald and her sister, Gloria Jean, were busy transforming Marina, tailoring her to the brilliant Texas sun. They produced a pair of shorts and urged her to try them on. Marina did—and was horrified at the sight of her own legs. Then Vada cut her hair and gave her a permanent wave. Marina emerged into the backyard wearing shorts for the first time in her life, and with short, wavy hair. Robert and Lee rose to their feet. “You’re a real American now,” Lee said. “You won’t stick out any more.”
Robert was more gallant. He paid Marina many compliments, so many that it finally dawned on her that to Robert at least she was not just a “little Russian fool.” Emboldened, she asked Lee to inquire whether Robert was sorry that his brother had married a Russian.
“Oh, no,” Robert answered. “I was afraid he would marry a Japanese.”6
Lee, meanwhile, had already abandoned the baby’s Russian name, Marina, and was calling her “Junka” or “June.” And he told Marina to please call him “Lee,” not “Alka,” or Robert would think she did not know his name. She eventually came to use both names; later, looking back on their life together, she realized that “Alka” was the name she used when she was thinking of their happier, Russian days. “Lee,” his American name, was the name she used when she was angry, the name he wrung from her when he was spiteful. Those mean, spiteful moods, when it seemed as if there was no wound he was incapable of inflicting, came upon him at Robert’s. They began, it seemed to Marina later, when he started looking for a job. They got worse as time when on, and as being in his old environment again simply got Lee down.
But at first there was gaiety and laughter. Marina loved to laugh. She loved looking at things in a humorous way and was not above clowning now and then. Although Lee often laughed at Marina, he did not always laugh with her. He seemed edgy in the presence of her laughter, wary that it might be directed at him and might belittle him somehow.
Other strains in their relationship began to show almost immediately. Lee was irritated at constantly having to translate for her. He scolded Marina because she had not studied English. “But, Alka,” she said, “you didn’t let me.” He answered that she should have studied English anyway and would have if she really cared.
After a long weekend talking and getting reacquainted with Robert and Vada, Lee was out on the streets of Fort Worth. The first thing he did was check the Yellow Pages for a public stenographer, and on the morning of Monday, June 18, Miss Pauline Virginia Bates glanced up from her typewriter to see a young man walk in clad in dark trousers and a dark blazer with only a T-shirt underneath.7
Lee asked her to do some typing. Out of a large manila folder, he took a sheaf of notes and explained that they had been smuggled out of Russia under his clothes. “Some are typed on a little portable, some of ’em are handwritten in ink, some in pencil. I’ll have to sit right here and help you with ’em because some are in Russian and some are in English.”
They spent a total of eight hours together on three successive days. Miss Bates typed, and Lee sat next to her, deciphering his own handwriting, translating Russian phrases here and there, answering her questions about Russia. Not that Miss Bates found him talky. “If you asked him a question, no matter how simple it was, if he didn’t want to answer it, he’d just shut up. If you got ten words out of him at a time, you were doing good.” She noticed, too, that “he had the deadest eyes I ever saw.”
She found his notes “fascinating” but “bitter.” His comments about Russia were just as bitter. And each afternoon, when he left, he grabbed up everything and took it with him, even the carbon paper. Finally, on Wednesday, June 20, Miss Bates noticed that he was “nervous.” Instead of sitting by her desk, he paced up and down, peered over her shoulder, and kept asking how far she had gotten. The moment she finished the tenth page, a third of the manuscript by her reckoning, he stopped her. She had done $10 worth of work, and that was all he had to give her.
Miss Bates offered to finish up for free.
“No,” Lee said. “I don’t work that way.” And he took a $10 bill from his pocket, handed it to her, and walked out. That was the last she ever saw of him.
On their second afternoon of work together, Lee told Miss Bates that he had met a Russian-speaking engineer in Fort Worth. He flourished a piece of stationery with the man’s letterhead on it. This man, he said, had read all the notes and offered to help get them published. None of this was true, except for the central fact that Lee had met a Russian-born engineer.
On Monday, June 18, the day he discovered Miss Bates, Lee had also visited the office of the Texas Employment Commission in Fort Worth. There, he scouted job opportunities and asked whether there was anyone in town who spoke Russian. He was given two names.
Thus, on the morning of June 19, the telephone rang in the office of Peter Paul Gregory, a consulting petroleum engineer in Fort Worth.8 Gregory, then approaching the age of sixty, had been born in Chita, Siberia, fled Russia in 1919, and lived for a while in Japan. Eventually, he made his way to Berkeley, California, where he received a degree in petroleum engineering, and thence to Texas.
The voice on the other end of Gregory’s line was that of a young man who was looking for a job as a Russian-English translator and wanted a letter attesting that he was qualified. Falsely and for no apparent reason, the young man added that he had been given Gregory’s name at the Fort Worth Public Library, where Gregory taught a class, rather than by the employment commission.
Gregory had never met the young man and, since they were both speaking English, had no idea of his language qualifications. He suggested, therefore, that the caller come by the office to be tested. At eleven that morning the young man appeared at Gregory’s office in downtown Fort Worth, wearing clothes that looked ridiculous in the Texas heat: a flannel suit and “atrocious” Russian shoes. The young man’s name was Lee Oswald.
Gregory, a graying man with spectacles and mustache, had a grave and courteous air. Without saying a word or asking a question, he simply reached for the bookshelf and pulled down a standard Soviet secondary school history text. He selected a passage at random and asked the visitor to read aloud in Russian. He did, and very well, too. Gregory asked the young man to translate. He did, also very well. With that, Gregory wrote out a letter and gave it to the young man, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” and stating that Lee Harvey Oswald was qualified to be a translator or interpreter in the Russian and English languages.
Gregory was curious about Oswald. Noting to himself that he appeared to speak Russian with an accent, Gregory
asked if he was of Polish descent? No, Lee answered. He had grown up in Fort Worth, but he had lived in Russia nearly three years and brought back a wife and a baby. Feeling more sympathetic every moment, the kindly Gregory told Lee that he knew of no job openings but would like an address where he might reach him. Then he took Lee to lunch.
Like every Russian who lives in exile, Gregory was intensely curious about conditions in his homeland. Over lunch he asked Lee about wages and prices, about the job he had held, and how people in the Soviet Union were getting on. As for the question of how he happened to go to Russia in the first place, Lee simply answered: “I went there on my own.” Gregory delicately shrank from asking more, sensing the question to be a touchy one. But he reflected that it was extraordinary that the young man had managed to get his wife out, for he had heard of countless cases in which exit visas had been refused.
When Lee showed up at Miss Bates’s that afternoon, it was Gregory’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter that he waved before her and Gregory who, he told her falsely, had read his manuscript and wanted to get it published. Lee would, in fact, on a later visit to Gregory’s office, show him typewritten sheets and say that he was writing memoirs of his life in the USSR. But Gregory did not read the sheets, and Lee never asked him to. Gregory did notice, however, that there were photographs attached to some of them.
Lee was elated by his first meeting with Gregory. “Mama, Mama,” he told Marina triumphantly that evening. “I’ve found you some Russians in Fort Worth. Now you won’t be lonely any more.” But again, lying to her for no apparent reason, he said that he had been given Gregory’s name at the public library and not at the employment commission.
When Gregory told his family that he had met a young American who had just arrived in Fort Worth with a Soviet wife, his youngest son, Paul, was especially interested. He was a student at the University of Oklahoma about to enter his junior year and engaged in the study of Russian. He told his father that he would like to meet the Oswalds, especially Marina, and perhaps arrange to take language lessons from her. Her Russian would be fresh and up to date, whereas that of his father, who had been forty years in exile, might no longer encompass the idiom of young people in Russia. Less than a week after their first meeting, therefore, the Gregorys, father and son, paid a call at the house of Robert Oswald.
Lee was proud as he introduced his wife to the Russian he had found for her. Marina at first was not so sure. She did not quite take to the elder Gregory, a Russian of the pre-Revolutionary generation, who seemed uncertain how to converse with a Soviet girl. Her reservations passed, however, and the four of them visited for an hour, with the Gregorys directing most of their questions to Marina. By the time they left, it was arranged that Paul, after a short visit to San Francisco, would take Russian lessons from Marina.
Lee, meanwhile, had already telephoned the other Russian whose name he was given at the employment commission. Her name was “Gali” Clark, the wife of Max Clark, a Fort Worth attorney. Lee told Mrs. Clark that he had just arrived with a Soviet wife and was looking for a woman for her to talk Russian to. Unlike Peter Gregory, however, Mrs. Clark already knew of Oswald. She had read about him in the Fort Worth paper, and her impression had not been favorable. She considered him a turncoat. She put him off by saying that her husband was not at home; she would consult him, and they would call back.
A few days later, on Sunday, June 24, Mrs. Clark telephoned Lee and invited him to drive over that afternoon with his wife and child. But Lee, offended that he had not been welcomed on the first call, was churlish to Mrs. Clark and told her that he could not make it.9
That evening at the dinner table with Robert and Vada, he told Marina about the call. She berated him for being rude, and angry words passed between them. They were speaking in Russian, of course, when suddenly, in a shift of mood, he told her to smile, be nice, and not let on to Robert that they were having a fight. Marina refused to pretend. He called her a dirty word, and she quickly got up and left the table. Lee followed her into the bedroom. He was pale with anger, and there was a cold, pitiless look in his eyes which Marina had not seen before. Quietly, very quietly, so that Robert would not hear, he cuffed her several times, hard, across the face. He told her to say nothing to Robert or he would kill her.
Marina slipped out of the house in a state of shock. For two hours she walked alone around the neighborhood, trying to make sense of her situation. Now she knew what it was to be completely helpless. She did not speak a word of English. She knew no one. There was no one who could understand her even if she did try to explain her plight. Alka was all she had, her only friend and her support. And he was changing toward her. She was stunned by his capacity for hypocrisy: his ability to be nice to outsiders and at the same time cruel to her, behind their backs. She felt that she would never be able to count on him again.
As Marina walked alone that night, she glanced into the windows of people’s houses, saw them watching TV, saw them leading normal lives. Why on earth had she ever left Aunt Valya? She was unhappy about staying with Robert and Vada. It was wrong to live off other people and not know how to help them, how they cooked and cleaned house. She believed that Vada did not like her, and Robert had witnessed the angry scene at the dinner table without saying a word to defend her. But the main thing was Alka. She was beginning to be afraid of him.
She had no choice but to endure. She had the baby. The baby depended on her, and neither had anybody else. With a heavy, automatic feeling, Marina went back—back to Alka and the baby. He was awake in bed, but he did not speak to her.
The next day, things were smoothed over with Alka, somehow, and that day she met Peter Gregory. She did not think of it at the time, but it was her first encounter with someone who could rescue her, someone to whom she could, if she chose, explain her plight in her native tongue.
— 14 —
Summer in Fort Worth
Lee’s arrival in Fort Worth did not go unnoticed. He had several calls from newspapermen, with whom he declined to talk. And he had a call from the FBI, which he could not so easily put off. He agreed to an interview at 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday, June 26, at the FBI office in downtown Fort Worth.
Lee arrived ten minutes early, but Special Agent John W. Fain and his assistant, B. Tom Carter, sat him down and started pelting him with questions.1 From the outset they found him “tense, kind of drawn up, and rigid. A wiry little fellow, kind of waspy.” The question to which they returned again and again was why Oswald had gone to Russia. Finally, in what they took to be a “show of temper,” Lee said that he did not “care to relive the past.” He would say only what he had told the Russians when they asked him the same question: “I came because I wanted to.”
The agents’ real purpose that day was to try to find out whether Oswald had been recruited by Soviet Intelligence, possibly as the price for bringing out Marina. Again and again Lee denied it, stressing how hard it had been to get Marina out, how long it had taken, and how much paperwork it had required. He sketched Marina’s life for them but refused to give names and addresses of any of her relatives, lest it get them in trouble.
The interview lasted about two hours, and in the course of it, Lee repeated familiar untruths, among them that he never sought Soviet citizenship and never offered radar information to the Russians. He stated that because his wife held a Soviet passport, he would be getting in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Washington within a few days to give them her address. But he said that he held “no brief for the Russians or the Russian system” and promised to get in touch with the FBI if Soviet Intelligence made any effort to contact him.
When he filed his report a week or so later, Agent Fain described Oswald as “impatient and arrogant during most of the interview.” He felt that Oswald had been “evasive” and recommended that he be interviewed again. Later, looking back at a distance of two years, it occurred to Fain that behind the “arrogance” and the “coldness,” Oswald might have been “just scared.”
That night, Robert asked Lee how the FBI men had treated him. “Just fine,” Lee answered. He then told Robert the most staggering untruth he had perpetrated in quite a while. The FBI, he said, wanted to know whether he was an agent of the United States government. “Don’t you know?” Lee said he had asked them. And he laughed as he told Robert how he had turned the tables on the FBI.2
As for Marina, he told her nothing at all, not even that the interview had taken place. She thought he was putting all his energies into job hunting and asked every night how it was going. But after a few days she stopped, for she could see that he was getting nowhere. Marina was not surprised. She had heard all her life that unemployment was a problem of crisis dimensions in the United States, and Lee did nothing to disabuse her of the idea. He stressed it, in fact, since it gave him a built-in excuse. Marina did not hound him; she accepted his explanations and gave him her sympathy and support.
But Lee had liabilities in the job market. He had no high school diploma. He had an undesirable discharge. And he had spent three years in the Soviet Union, a fact he probably did not confide to would-be employers, which left him with an abbreviated job history. The skills he had—radar training, the ability to speak Russian—were not in demand in Fort Worth. He did not want blue-collar work of the kind he had had in Minsk, yet he lacked the education for the white-collar work he would accept, to say nothing of the intellectual work he really wanted. Nor is it clear how hard he was looking for a job. Vada noticed that he spent a good deal of time at home, working for “hours at a stretch going over his notes and adding to them.”3
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