Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Summers, Anthony

  In retirement, Richard Helms was to characterize Nosenko’s claims as to what the KGB had supposedly not done about Oswald as “odd,” “highly unlikely.” The former deputy chief of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division told the Assassinations Committee it was “absolutely unthinkable” that Oswald would not have been questioned.

  As a marine who had served on a base for the CIA’s U-2 spy plane, Oswald would have been of special interest—and that may be the key to Soviet deception about him.

  On May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy plane under CIA control had crashed near the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, an event that led to heightened tension between America and the USSR.8 The plane’s pilot, Gary Powers, was captured alive and flown rapidly to Moscow. Equipment in the wreckage left no doubt that his mission had been espionage.

  Even today, the full truth about the U-2’s downing has not been fully established. Later, after his release, Powers voiced the suspicion that Oswald may have given the Soviets technical data that helped target the airplane. Whether or not he did so, the Soviets may have thought—after Powers’ capture—that the young Marines defector could be helpful.

  Powers recalled the Soviets having questioned him intensively about operations at the U-2’s base in Atsugi, Japan. To his interrogators, it may have seemed logical to bring in another American familiar with Atsugi to comment on the captive’s responses. Did Oswald play such a role?9

  In a letter home after the U-2 shootdown, Oswald wrote: “He seemed to be a nice bright American-type fellow when I saw him in Moscow.” Powers, for his part, recalled spotting a peephole through which he was observed during his incarceration. The Oswald “Diary,” however—for what it is worth—places him far from Moscow, at a May Day party in Minsk, on the day Powers was shot down. Nevertheless, an acquaintance who knew Oswald later back in the States quoted him as having said he “was in Moscow for the May Day parade at one time.” Of the three such national holidays Oswald spent in Russia, the only one unaccounted for is the May Day on which Powers was shot down.10

  All this aside, some would suggest in years to come that the Soviets were behind the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission, and later the Assassinations Committee, found no evidence for such a notion. All responsible analysts have said as much. There is no reason to suppose that Soviet leaders ever considered such folly, or that the removal of President Kennedy would have served Soviet political ends. Nevertheless, the questions about the KGB’s handling of Oswald remain.

  In a 1993 interview, the man who headed the agency while Oswald was in Russia, Vladimir Semichastny, offered fresh information—though almost certainly less than the truth. The former KGB chief guardedly conceded, for the first time, that Oswald had been interrogated. “There were conversations,” he said, but Oswald had “outdated information … not the kind of information that would interest such a high-level organization like ours.”

  Credibly enough, Semichastny said Oswald was seen as poor potential agent material. His counterintelligence and intelligence departments “looked him over to see what he was capable of, but unfortunately neither could find any ability at all.” The KGB chief said, too, that the Russians “concluded he was not working for American intelligence.” As for Marina having been planted on Oswald, Semichastny flat out denied it.

  The denial, however, runs contrary to the credible information summarized in this chapter. Semichastny’s lofty dismissal of the idea that Oswald was of much serious interest to the Soviets, moreover, can now be discounted.

  The Assassination Records Review Board, which in 1996 was at last granted access to the contemporaneous Minsk KGB file, reported that the dossier “details over two years of extensive surveillance and analysis by the KGB of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  It is unlikely that the full reality of how the Soviets handled Oswald has yet surfaced. The same, however, remains true of the role of U.S. Intelligence. All these years later, a whole world of Intelligence has stayed the way its masters wished—through the looking glass.

  Chapter 11

  An “Intelligence Matter”

  “Intelligence-gathering activities … have a special and secret character… . These activities have their own rules and methods of concealment which seek to mislead and obscure.”

  —President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960

  In Washington, DC, on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy took the oath of office. Hatless and coatless in the biting cold, he made the stirring speech that marked the start of his presidency: “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom… . Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

  In early February, on the other side of the world, Lee Harvey Oswald began the move that was eventually to link Kennedy’s savage fate with his own. “I desire,” he wrote in a letter to the American Embassy in Moscow, “to return to the United States.”1

  Oswald was launched on more than a year of bureaucratic exchanges that were to culminate in U.S. and Soviet authorities approving his return to the United States with his wife, Marina, and their first child. On a trip to the U.S. Embassy, Oswald said he had “learned a hard lesson” and now better appreciated the United States and its freedoms. He was anxious, as well he should have been, that he might be prosecuted and jailed on return to America. As though to preempt that, he claimed that he had not after all—as he had initially asserted—shared with the Soviets information acquired during his Marine Corps stint.

  Oswald’s passport would be renewed and returned to him by Consul Snyder, the official with a CIA background who had seen him at the time of his defection. The public record, as it appears in the Warren Report, seems as normal as an unusual process could be—obscuring another of the inconsistencies that so dog the Oswald saga.

  The U.S. Passport Office should have posted a “lookout card” on Oswald following his defection, a flag to alert officials should he apply for fresh documentation at any American Embassy in the world. In his case, and because the government was paying the expense of getting him home, a lookout card should have been mandatory until such time as the loan was repaid. No such card was placed in the file—an omission the State Department has explained away as human error.2

  If such laxness were common, this might seem a trivial detail. During the period of Oswald’s time in the USSR, however, the State Department kept close tabs on American travelers with apparent Communist sympathies, catching quite innocuous people in the net. How did a person like Oswald escape the net? There are clues that may indicate what went on beneath the surface.

  In 1959, following Oswald’s defection, U.S. Vice-Consul McVickar had suggested to an American journalist, Priscilla Johnson, that she go to his hotel to interview him—telling her, as he did so, that “there was a thin line between her duty as a correspondent and as an American.” Johnson, who was in Moscow for the North American News Agency (NANA), was not the average reporter. Seven years earlier, she had applied to join the CIA and—though she had not gotten the job—the Agency maintained interest and repeated contact with her for years.

  In testimony to the Warren Commission after the assassination, Johnson would say that—in the interview with her—Oswald said he “hoped his experience as a radar operator would make him more desirable” to the Soviets. This was clearly news, yet Johnson’s published story, when it appeared in the Washington Evening Star, made no mention of it at all. “I think,” a CIA official would note three years later, “that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want.”

  By the 1970s, Priscilla Johnson would be listed in CIA documents as a “Witting Collaborator 01 code A1.” An FBI document had cited a State Department security officer as saying her 1959 contact with Oswald had been “official business.”3

  On November 5, 1959, w
ithin a week of Oswald’s defection, U.S. Navy headquarters sent Moscow a message asking for updates on any developments “in view of continuing interest [author’s emphasis] of HQ, Marine Corps and U.S. intelligence agencies.” This, the document stated in capital letters, was an “INTELLIGENCE MATTER.”

  Did a U.S. agency take a look at or make contact with Oswald in the later stages of his stay in the Soviet Union? Photographs of Oswald, standing beside a British-registered car, in Minsk’s Central Square, may point to that (see Photo 10). The Warren Report noted that two photos had been “taken by American tourists” in August 1961—a few months after Oswald’s marriage to Marina. The tourists, according to the Report, “did not know Oswald, nor did they speak with him; they remembered only that several men gathered near their car.” The Commission had been supplied with the photographs by the CIA.

  Background documents and interviews enlarge on the Warren account. Three American women, on a motoring tour, had exchanged “small talk” with Oswald while taking the photographs. On their return, according to the CIA, the three were contacted in line with a then-common Agency custom of contacting Americans fresh home from Iron Curtain countries. Of more than 150 photographs borrowed from the women by the CIA, just five were copied and filed. CIA staff supposedly realized only after the assassination that Oswald featured in one of them. One of the women later supplied another photo in which he appeared.

  The way the Oswald photo just happened to have been culled in the original selection—out of 150 available—strains belief. One CIA employee said the choice was made because an Intourist guide appeared in the shot, another that it “showed a crane in the background.” One of the three former tourists, contacted by the author, cast a whole new light on the episode.

  Rita Naman, who is of British origin, said that while she and a friend, Monica Kramer, were touring the Soviet Union by car—a rare expedition in those Cold War years—they encountered Oswald not once but twice. First in Moscow, in early August, when he alarmed their Intourist guide by addressing them through the open window of the car. Later, in the square in Minsk, he had again approached the car, and been photographed. Is it likely that the two meetings, in the space of ten days and in cities more than four hundred miles apart, happened merely by chance?4

  The identity and role of the third of the woman tourists turns out to be intriguing. She was Marie Hyde, an older American who struck up an acquaintance with Naman and Kramer at their hotel in Moscow. Hyde, Naman recalled, was not the average tourist. She seemed familiar with Russia, knew her way around the Moscow subway and, in general, came over as “a very sharp cookie.” Kramer, Naman told the author, remarked early on, not too seriously, that Hyde could be some sort of American agent.

  The author could not trace Hyde or find out anything much about her background. Naman, however, added curious details of how she came to be with them on their tour in the first place. Hyde had approached them in Moscow, saying she was “separated from her tourist group” and wanted to join them on the trip to Minsk, then—through Poland—back to the West. Such a deviation from the prearranged schedule was very much out of the ordinary in the Soviet Union of those Cold War days. Hyde managed it, though, and in Minsk—when they encountered Oswald in the square—it was very much at her initiative that photographs were taken. Hyde took one photograph herself, using Kramer’s camera, then gave her own camera to Naman to get a second shot.5

  Naman and Kramer appeared to the author to have been ordinary tourists, but was Marie Hyde? Were the two meetings with Oswald, in cities far apart, both fortuitous? Was it merely a whim that prompted Hyde to have the photographs taken in the square? Or was she prompted to do so by a branch of U.S. intelligence?6

  “We had no contact with Mr. Oswald,” William Colby, CIA Director in the 1970s, would insist in an interview with CBS’ Dan Rather. “No contact with him before he went to the Soviet Union, and no contact with him after he returned from the Soviet Union. No contact with him while he was in the Soviet Union.” Pressed by Rather, Colby maintained that—prior to 1963—all the CIA had on Oswald was an FBI report on his defection, a report from the U.S. Navy, and “some material from the Embassy in Moscow.”

  If Colby was economical with the truth, fragments of information may give us a glimpse of how Oswald may have been handled. In late May 1962, while in Moscow completing the formalities involved in leaving the Soviet Union—and getting clearance for his wife and baby to accompany him—Oswald again visited the U.S. Embassy. One of those he saw there, Dr. Alexis Davison, was the Embassy physician—and somewhat more than that. The following year, Davison, who was also Assistant Air Attaché, would be expelled from the Soviet Union for his role in the CIA’s handling—in an operation directed by James Angleton—of the Soviet traitor Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.

  The U.S. phone number and address of Davison’s mother would be found in Oswald’s address book after the assassination (see facsimile on facing page). Asked about the entry years later by the Assassinations Committee, the former diplomat said he “assumed” he had supplied the Oswalds with his mother’s address as a kindness. His mother was Russian-born, he explained, always hospitable toward fellow Russians coming to the United States for the first time—as was Marina. To volunteer the address, he claimed, was “not unusual.” Given that Davison was a diplomat linked to highly sensitive intelligence activity, given that Oswald was at very least a suspect character, and given that the episode occurred at the height of the Cold War, it is not unreasonable to question that statement.7

  The Oswalds and their baby began their return to the United States on June 1, 1962, starting with a wearisome forty-three hour train journey that took them from Moscow, through Poland and divided Germany, to the port city of Rotterdam in Holland (see Photo 11). Oswald’s address book, and the notes he made in it, again offers a puzzling detail.

  It has been supposed that Lee and Marina both entered the West through the strictly monitored checkpoint at Helmstedt, then a key crossing point between Communist East Germany and West Germany. Though Marina’s passport was stamped at the checkpoint, Oswald’s was not—perhaps because he had an American passport. There is, though, the hint of a possibility that his movements were not as long assumed.

  Amid the jumble of notes in his little book is a hand-drawn map (see facsimile on next page) of a portion of the then divided city of Berlin, which is more than a hundred miles east of Helmstedt. On this rough map, prominently marked, was the train station that—for travelers alighting from long-distance trains running east to west—was the main access point to West Berlin.

  What need did Oswald have for information on that access point? It seems highly improbable, on the known data, that Oswald broke his journey for any significant amount of time in West Berlin—unless, remote possibility, he continued west by other means. Did he have time, though, for a meeting with someone during a Berlin stopover? Had there perhaps been a plan for a meeting there, a plan that was later abandoned? During the Cold War, West Berlin was a hive of intelligence activity.

  In Holland, before leaving for the United States, the Oswalds stayed in the city of Rotterdam. Not at a hotel but in accommodation recommended—and according to Marina Oswald arranged for—by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Marina was to describe it variously, after the assassination, as a “private apartment” or “boardinghouse.” The documentary record of the Oswalds’ journey shows a stay in Holland of only one night. Marina, for her part, said the stay lasted two or three days.

  The Rotterdam stay worried Warren Commission Chief Counsel Lee Rankin, who said at an executive session, “… it is unexplained why they happened to go there and stay, and got a place to live, some little apartment, and what they were doing.” Clues in Oswald’s notes may again throw light on the matter.

  Scribbled on one page (see facsimile below) is the jotting: “Holl—TRAM n. 11, Left to Right, Mathenesserlaan 250.” Research in Holland established that this was a lodg
ing house, Huize Avila, and that—according to its former landlord—he would not have rented a room for just one day or even for a few days. The Huize Avila, or Avila House, catered for monthly rentals. If the advance arrangements for the Oswalds’ stay were made by the U.S. authorities, was this a place the Americans rented on a long-term basis—a place suitable for a debriefing session?

  The Oswalds apparently crossed the Atlantic by sea aboard the liner SS Maasdam, arriving at Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 13.8 Defector and self-declared traitor though Oswald supposedly was, no representative of a U.S. intelligence agency was on the pier to meet him. Instead, the couple were met and assisted by Spas Raikin, described in the Warren Report as “a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society, which had been contacted by the Department of State.” That was something of a simplification.

  Raikin was also secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an émigré group in direct touch with the FBI and U.S. Army Intelligence. The group also had contacts with anti-Communist activists in New Orleans, headquartered in the very building where, in months to come, Oswald’s name was to be linked with CIA-backed anti-Castro activists.

  Oswald traveled on to Texas, to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, paying the airfare with money advanced by his brother, Robert. There followed the difficult process of adjusting to life in American society, a process made more uncomfortable by Oswald’s mother meddling in her son’s affairs. The couple soon found a place to themselves, a rented bungalow in Fort Worth, and Oswald took a job as a manual worker at a metal factory. This was a mundane phase of his life—but for the glaring apparent omissions that have bothered, and still bother, virtually everyone interested in the case. The way the American military and intelligence authorities treated his return, or claimed they did, remains inexplicable.