Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Soon after Ella’s rejection, Oswald would write that he was reconsidering his desire to stay in the USSR. In retrospect, his proposal to Ella represented one of his several attempts to live a “normal” life with a stable woman. For the second time in his life, an important female figure had refused to rescue him from his inner demons.

  One last woman would have the opportunity to “rescue” Oswald. However, she would be more psychologically akin to Lee and his mother than to the mature, stable Ella. Her name was Marina Prusakova.

  Lee and Marina

  I may curse you later

  Your features;

  To love you is like a disaster

  To which there is no end

  There is no friend, no comrade

  Who could drag me out of this conflagration

  In the broad light of day.

  Despairing of salvation

  I dream in the daytime

  And live near you

  As near an earthquake.

  —From a poem Marina Oswald kept in her notebook

  On March 16, 1961, six weeks after being rebuffed by Ella, and consumed by depression over the rejection, Alik/Lee met Marina Prusakova. Marina had told two young men (without each other’s knowledge) she would be their date to the Trade Union dance. Her biographer says that this was typical behavior for her—that she reveled in the attention and jealousy this situation induced. However, she left the dance with a third young man she had been introduced to that night as Alik. Of course, his real name was Lee Harvey Oswald. One month later, Lee proposed marriage and Marina accepted. Within another two weeks, the couple received official approval and were married on April 30, 1961. Lee was 21 years old (although he told Marina he was older), and Marina was 19.

  The uncommon speed with which they were able to obtain the marriage license has held sinister implications for some writers. However, KGB Chief Semichastny says that the government’s position was: “Let the poor devil marry. The [Minsk authorities] even thought that he might calm down and wouldn’t jump up and down so much.”

  “Soon after we broke up, I learned that he had got married,” Ella now says. “I thought on the whole that he did it that quickly to get [back] at me. I feel that kind of behavior is quite normal in people who are in love and are rejected.”87 Lee himself would write in his diary that he was still in love with Ella after marrying Marina—that he did it “to hurt Ella.”88 Both Lee and Marina would have many second thoughts about the wisdom of the marriage, often calling it a mistake.

  That is not to say there was no attraction between Lee and Marina. In fact, it is universally agreed that Marina Prusakova was an uncommonly beautiful woman. The man who introduced them, Yuri Merezhinski, recalls:

  She was the most attractive woman in the room. She was surrounded by lots of admirers. She didn’t pay any attention to him, but he still wanted to get to know her better. . . He [Oswald] fell in love with her at first sight. He was under her spell. He had fallen for her in a big way because she was going with a lot of men and was having sex with them.89

  The Lee/Marina mix was certain to be volatile. Marina, like Lee and his mother before him, was a one-parent child. Born illegitimate, she never knew the identity of her father. Her mother told her that her father had died in the war, and that she was the legally adopted daughter of her stepfather, Alexander Medvedev. Both were lies. When Marina was fifteen, her mother died. One year later, when she obtained her birth records, Marina learned that she was the illegitimate daughter of someone named Nikolai, and worse, her stepfather never legally adopted her. Her feeling of loneliness was overwhelming. It was only then that she learned that her legal last name was Prusakova, her mother’s maiden name. To her great embarrassment, she had to change her last name back to Prusakova in order to obtain work permits. This only added to the scorn she now felt for her mother.

  After Marina’s mother’s death, her “stepfather” felt unrestrained to express his true emotions about the young girl. “Don’t come to me bringing a baby in your skirts.” he warned her. “Go to Minsk. You’re in my way. I don’t want any prostitutes around me!”90 With these words, the second husband of Marina’s mother threw sixteen-year-old Marina out of their Leningrad house. He had spread the word to other relatives throughout Russia that Marina was a prostitute. In many cultures, a beautiful woman who likes to have carnal fun is often branded a prostitute, but such a characterization may have been unfounded in Marina’s case.

  However, what does become important is that Marina was widely regarded as an easy woman to bed, and more importantly, her friends say she wanted out of the USSR. One of the young men Marina dated, Oleg Tarusin, says that Marina was “desperate to leave the USSR.”91 This exact sentiment is reinforced by Vanda Kuznetsova, a roommate of Marina, who remembers Marina as anxious to marry a foreigner and leave the country.92 Another of the roommates, Galia Printseva, says that the thing she remembers most about Marina was her desire to marry an American.93 KGB officer Oleg Kalugin refers to Marina as a “light” woman (meaning low sexual morals) who was looking for a “good thing” in a western man.94

  Feeling unloved and totally alone, Marina became apathetic and passive. She was mischievous in school, where she was known as “matchstick” because of her slim body and because “she would flare up in an explosion of words whenever anyone addressed her.”95 She was expelled from pharmacy school for academic failure and poor attendance. All of this curiously parallels the childhood of young Lee. Predictably, Marina became, according to her biographer, a rebel. Dirt poor, she survived by her wits and, by many accounts, her good looks. Marina said, “I simply lived off chance acquaintances.”96 She had an unending stream of boyfriends, mostly foreigners, to whom she felt more attracted than Soviet natives.

  That the beautiful Marina wanted to leave Russia, and that she behaved like a totally liberated female, would certainly help explain their whirlwind courtship and marriage. It would also explain the many violent rows that their brief marriage would endure. Like Ella, Marina would catch Lee in lies about his background: saying he was older, claiming his mother was dead, etc. And Marina’s influence was anything but calming. A Communist Party archivist who has seen the Oswald file says that Marina was a “complete slag” and that Lee tried to strangle her. Other officials agree, adding, however, that Marina held her own physically and would often beat up Lee. These rows were all overheard by the KGB. A KGB official who is privy to the surveillance tapes says, “She hurt him too. They had active [physical] fights.”97

  The marriage turned sour almost from the start, and both partners spoke of divorce, but tried to reconcile when they learned that Marina was pregnant. By this time, Lee had already initiated the arduous process of convincing authorities in both the U.S. and the USSR to allow him to repatriate to America. According to his diary entries, he told Marina in late June 1961 that he was eager to return to the United States.

  In fact, as early as January 4, 1961, precisely a year after he had been issued his residence permit in Moscow, he was summoned to the passport office in Minsk and asked whether his request for Soviet citizenship remained valid. It didn’t, he said. He asked only for an extension of his residence permit, confiding to his diary: “I am stating [sic] to reconsider my disire [sic] about staying. The work is drab. The money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling allys [sic] no places of recreation acept [sic] the trade union dances. I have had enough.”

  Less than a month after visiting the passport office, Lee wrote the American Embassy in Moscow, stating his desire to return to the United States. He wanted to be assured that any legal proceedings against him would be dropped. Richard Snyder, a U.S. Embassy official, was not surprised. On the basis of his experience with Oswald more than two years earlier, he felt absolutely certain he would hear from the young man again. “I heard from him a little sooner than I had expected,” Snyder recalls. Actually, Oswald had written the Embassy even earlier, but the first letter, and many others, were apparent
ly intercepted by the Soviet authorities. Current KGB Chief Vacheslav Nikonov describes the tone of the letters: “We really have the story of a man whose heart is breaking. Between the wife, the life in Minsk, which he didn’t very much like, and his family, his brother. . . he was really homesick at this point.”98

  However, according to KGB surveillance, it was unclear if Marina would accompany her husband to the U.S. “You idiot!” she was heard to scream.” I’m not going anywhere with you. . .(sobbing) Out of my sight, you dog! You scoundrel! . . .Go to hell, you bastard! You can go to your America without me, and I hope you die on the way.”99 History shows that Marina had a change of heart, and on June 1, 1962, both Lee and Marina were finally able to leave for the United States.

  While the couple waited for the paperwork to be processed, and it was determined that “Likhoy/Nalim” was not an American operative, one would expect the KGB authorities to lessen their surveillance of him. But considering Oswald’s increasingly bizarre behavior, it can now be seen why that was impossible. In 1992, the KGB began granting western journalists limited access to their Oswald file. With this information, the position in which the KGB had been placed can be better understood. The KGB files also shed new light on Oswald’s ability to obtain an exit visa when he was ready to return to the U.S. KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who has reviewed the entire Oswald file, writes of a most unsettling episode:

  Days before the new year [1962], operatives uncovered that Nalim had a new pastime. He had decided to build bombs. This was not a hypothetical hobby, since he had already built two iron casings, one box-shaped and the other cylindrical. Each contained two compartments; one filled with shot and the other with explosives. He had also prepared paper-tube fuses, 4-5 centimeters long and 2 millimeters in diameter. They were to be filled with gunpowder, with the fuse designed to last approximately two seconds. Nalim concealed his new toys from his wife and stored them at home. Nothing related to the construction of the bombs was done at the factory, where it would have undoubtedly attracted attention.100

  The file reflects the KGB’s satisfaction when Oswald gave up the bomb project because he couldn’t acquire the amount of gunpowder required. The operatives were, however, unsettled by Oswald’s attachment to his rifle, which he prominently displayed on the wall of his apartment (this in a household rife with domestic abuse). The KGB held its collective breath when Oswald boarded a crowded streetcar with his rifle in plain sight—something that might have gone unnoticed in the deep south of the U.S., but was unheard of in Russia. The KGB operatives, expecting the worst, breathed a sigh of relief when Oswald ended up taking the rifle to a local shop and pawning it.101

  Still more bizarre activity was emanating from the Oswald sphere. Oswald spent much time with his friend Ernst Titovets, helping him with his English. Lee would read from Shakespeare, or ad lib being interviewed into a tape recorder for Titovet’s future phonetic studies. In one such interview, Oswald played the role of a mass murderer. The tape was broadcast for the first time in 1993 on PBS’ Frontline. Excerpts from the interview are chilling in retrospect:

  Titovets: Tell us about your last killing.

  Oswald: Well, it was a young girl under a bridge. She came in carrying a loaf of bread and I just cut her throat from ear to ear.

  Titovets: What for?

  Oswald: Well, I just wanted the loaf of bread of course.

  Titovets: What do you take to be your most famous, ah, in your life?

  Oswald: Well, the time I killed, ah, eight men on the Bowery mat were on the sidewalk there. They were just standing there loafing around. I didn’t like their faces so I just shot them all with a machine gun. It [the murder] was very famous. All the newspapers carried the story.102

  Considering all of Oswald’s unsettling activity and the burden he placed on his KGB “babysitters,” it comes as no surprise that the Soviets approved his exit visa. Former KGB Chief Semchastny recalls, “He was always changing his jobs [assignments within the factory] and behaving in a rather unsatisfactory way. So when he eventually asked to go back, I said, ‘By all means let him—I mean, put no obstacles in his way’.”103

  The American response to Oswald’s return request, like most everything else, has been viewed with skepticism. When the Americans not only granted Oswald’s request, but also assisted him financially, suspicions were fueled that Oswald was a spy. However, this treatment was, in fact, unremarkable, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1977-1979) later learned. HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey summed up U.S. practices during a 1993 interview:

  One of the most troubling things for me, on the hypothesis that Oswald was connected to American intelligence, was the seeming ease with which he got out of the Soviet Union. The American government gave him a visa to get out, financed him, facilitated it all the way. I was deeply troubled by that because it seemed to me unusual. To test that hypothesis, we did a defector study. We analyzed 22 American defectors—found that what happened with Oswald wasn’t unusual. Incredibly, that was the way the American government treated all its defectors.

  On May 22, 1962 the Oswald family, which now included the couple’s three-month old daughter June, spent their last night in Minsk at their friend Pavel Golovochev’s apartment. Because the Oswalds were still under surveillance, the KGB tapes record Marina’s last words to Lee as they walked out the door: “You fucking guy, you can’t even carry a baby.”

  Oswald’s behavior patterns were clearly consistent: once he became disillusioned with his current sanctuary, whether with his mother, the Marines, Russia, or his wife, he soon became what his early psychological profiles had predicted all along—manic, schizoid, and passive-aggressive. Owen Dejanovich, who knew Oswald from his Marine days, saw him as a loner, an outsider, a seeker of attention by “being on the edge of discipline,” and flouting the Marine tradition of “all for one and one for all.” In Russia, Oswald had been a poor workman at a radio factory. When he returned to the U.S., and again found work, he again became a disciplinary problem.

  When Oswald returned to the U.S., he completed his break with his mother. After joining the Marines, he had had only minimal contact with her, and then not of his own volition. Now, he stopped seeing her entirely until she visited him in prison after the assassination. At that time, she was not even aware of the birth of Lee’s second child and Lee reacted strongly when he found that his wife had brought his mother to visit him in jail. He said to Marina, “Why did you bring that fool with you? I don’t want to talk to her.”104

  If Oswald served neither American nor Soviet intelligence in the Soviet Union, he did serve a powerful compulsion of his own: to be appreciated as an important person with great political and intellectual abilities and to make a mark on the world. And if the Soviet Union had failed to live up to his expectations, it only served to crystallize and focus his attention on his original idol: Fidel Castro.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BACK IN THE USA

  “I have lived under both systems, I have sought the answers and although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not. I despise the representatives of both systems, whether they be socialist or Christian democracies.”

  —Lee Oswald on the ship bearing him back to America after his years in Russia (spelling mistakes corrected)

  “Immediately after coming to the United States, Lee changed. I did not know him as such a man in Russia. . . He helped me as before, but he became a little more of a recluse. . . He was very irritable, sometimes for a trifle.”

  —Marina Oswald

  “Ever since he was born and I was old enough to remember, I always had the feeling that some great tragedy was going to strike Lee in some way or another. . . I figured, well, when he defected and came back—that was his big tragedy. I found out it wasn’t.”

  —John Pic, Oswald’s half-brother, to the Warren Commission

  By mid-June, 1962, Lee and Marina Oswald were back in Fort W
orth, Texas, staying temporarily with Oswald’s brother, Robert. Lee’s time was taken up with job-hunting, getting his Russian memoirs typed, and subscribing to various publications of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

  On July 17th, Oswald landed a job as a sheet metal helper at the Leslie Welding Company in Fort Worth. He would cease working by October, lying to Marina that he had been fired (he never even told his employers he was quitting—he just stopped showing up). At the time, the Oswalds were living in a shabby $60-per-month bungalow.

  This period is relatively unremarkable, except that all the previously established patterns in Oswald’s life continued: his fighting with Marina, his constant lying (for instance on job applications), and his interest in Marxism. Yet, despite the low-key nature of his life, Oswald became of interest to the U.S. government. For it was 1962, the height of the Cold War, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a pro-Marxist defector like Oswald had the potential to be a “sleeper” Soviet agent. He was monitored.

  The FBI and Oswald

  At the time of Oswald’s original defection to Russia, Fort Worth FBI agent John Fain conducted a routine investigation. Thus, it was considered appropriate that Fain reopen the file upon Oswald’s return. The agency was equally interested in Marina, who, as a young and well-educated immigrant from the Soviet Union, fit the bureau’s criteria for investigation. Agent Jim Hosty, who helped Fain review Marina’s Immigration file, says that the FBI had information that the Soviets were planning to use moles— “we called them sleepers”—to infiltrate the U.S. in their guise as refugees. In fact, Hosty claims to have uncovered a few sleepers. Thus, Marina was considered a potential mole.1