Dulles: The record may not be on paper. But on paper, you would have hieroglyphics that only two people know what they meant, and nobody outside of the agency would know [author’s emphasis]; and you could say this meant the agent, and somebody else could say it meant another agent.
Asked whether, if Oswald was an agent, a CIA chief would know who had hired him, Dulles replied, “Someone might have done it without authority [author’s emphasis].” His response opens the door to another possibility, that Oswald could have been hired at low level, without formal backing, in a way that left no identifiable trace.
Confronted with these possibilities, some Committee staff continued to suspect the CIA was hiding something about its handling of the Oswald matter. Distrust of the CIA, though, may have diverted attention from another possibility—that Owald was used by another intelligence agency altogether.
There are oddities about the U.S. Navy’s response to his defection. At one level, the Marine Corps reacted as one might expect.5 In California, where Oswald last served, aircraft call signs, codes, and radio and radar frequencies were changed within weeks. Oswald’s former associates recalled being questioned about him by visiting officials in civilian clothes.
In another respect, however, the Oswald defection was not handled in the same way as those of other military enlisted men. “A net damage assessment, indicating the possible access Oswald had to classified information,” said Colonel Thomas Fox, former head of counterintelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, “would have to be undertaken.”
Damage assessments were conducted following the defections of the only two enlisted men known to have gone over to Communist nations before the Oswald episode—and of two others who defected soon after him. In spite of the fact that Oswald had worked on highly secret bases, however, the Navy admitted that—in his case—no “formal damage assessment was conducted.”
Some hypothesized that Oswald was part of a covert program to slip individuals into the Soviet Union in the guise of defectors, “sleepers” who could gather information of use to U.S. intelligence. There had been a sudden rash of turncoats in the eighteen months up to 1960, two former Navy men, five Army personnel stationed in West Germany, and two employees of the U.S. National Security Agency—the top-secret agency charged with breaking foreign codes and ciphers. Of civilians who went to the Soviet Union, one had—like Oswald—previously served as an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy.6
For all the speculation, however, the callow twenty-year-old that was Oswald was surely an improbable candidate to be sent on a mission behind the Iron Curtain. Could it be, though, that at a time of concern about the increased number of U.S. defectors, he was seen as a source of information on how the Soviets handled military defectors? Was Oswald an unwitting tool, a genuine leftist whose movements and communications could be monitored and in time—potentially—debriefed? Was he, perhaps unwittingly, primed with false information designed to deceive his Soviet hosts?
The concept of Oswald as agent is not merely the far-fetched notion of conspiracy theorists. A former Chief Security Officer at the State Department, Otto Otepka, said that in 1963 his office engaged in a study of American “defectors” that included Oswald. Five months before the Kennedy assassination, according to Otepka, the State Department was still uncertain whether Oswald was or had been “one of ours or one of theirs.”
Whether or not he was the lone renegade of the official account, Oswald certainly became a focus of interest for Soviet and American intelligence when he arrived in the USSR. The protestations of both nations’ intelligence services, made in the years that followed, only raise further doubt.
Chapter 10
Mischief from Moscow
“A Communist must be prepared to … resort to all sorts of schemes and stratagems, employ illegitimate methods, conceal the truth …”
—Lenin
Five days after his arrival in Moscow in fall 1959, Oswald tried to commit suicide—or acted as though he wished to kill himself. Here is his melodramatic account of the episode—complete with evidence of Oswald’s mild dyslexia—taken from an “Historic Diary” found in his effects years later:
Oct. 21
Eve. 6:00 Recive word from police offial. I must leave country tonight at 8.0 p.m. as visa expirs. I am shocked!! My dreams! I retire to my room. I have $100 left. I have waited for 2 year to be accepted. My fondes dreams are shattered because of a petty official; because of bad planning I planned to much!
7.0 p.m. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain. Than slash my left wrist. Then plaug wrist into bathtub of hot water. I think ‘when Rimma comes at 8. to find me dead it will be a great shock.’ somewhere a violin plays, as I wacth my life whirl away.
This entry in Oswald’s journal, apparently written long afterward, records his reaction when told that the Russians did not, at first—ostensibly—want him to stay in the country.1 The “Diary,” and Soviet hospital records, say Oswald was found bleeding in his hotel room by his Intourist guide Rimma Shirokova and rushed to the Botkin Hospital, where he spent a week recovering.
Some version of this episode evidently did occur. The “Diary” and relevant Soviet documents, however, contain clues indicating deception by both the Soviets and Oswald.2
The Botkin Hospital records, as released by Moscow after the assassination, state: “The patient does not speak Russian. One could judge only by his gestures and facial expression that he had no complaints.”
Oswald’s guide Shirokova, interviewed by this author, also said he could barely manage to say “Good morning” or “Thank you” in Russian. This does not sound like the Oswald who, months earlier in California, could converse in passable Russian for two hours.3
Also interviewed by the author, Dr. Lydia Mikhailina, a former Botkin Hospital psychiatrist whose name appears in the Soviet hospital file, recalled thinking at the time that Oswald did understand Russian—but acted as though he could not speak it.
Dr. Mikhailina, who had been in charge of Oswald’s case, said her patient had superficial cuts to his wrists. She did not, however, believe he had really attempted suicide. She described his psychiatric condition as “absolutely normal.”
Shown the hospital record as it was shared with the U.S. government, Dr. Mikhailina became first puzzled, then annoyed. Her own medical notes on Oswald had been omitted, and other entries appeared to her to have been forged—not to have been written by a medical professional. There were signatures by a “doctor” whose name meant nothing to Mikhailina, even though she had worked at the hospital for thirty years.
The Oswald “Diary,” to the extent it covered the period, merely sketched out his time in Russia. The intention, perhaps, had been to cover the ground in the barest possible terms—omitting anything that might reveal the involvement of Soviet intelligence.
Oswald’s first Soviet contacts, his Intourist guides, were typically sources of information for the KGB, the main Soviet intelligence agency. Other foreigners’ experiences, meanwhile, showed that hospitalization was on occasion used to cover a period during which the KGB questioned the new arrival. In Oswald’s case, we have no details as to where Oswald was or how he was handled for the six weeks after the end of November, when it became evident that he had left his hotel room.4
The Soviets decided in January 1960—in Oswald’s words, “after a certain time, after the Russians had assured themselves I was really the naïve American”—to move him out of Moscow. Though technically still an American citizen, he was issued with a stateless person’s identity card, given funds by the “Red Cross”—a euphemism at the time for a section of the MVD, the internal security organization—and dispatched by train to the city of Minsk, 450 miles away.
In Minsk, he began what was probably the most luxurious period of his life before or afterward. From the “Diary,” from witnesses interviewed in later years, and from photographs, we k
now Oswald was lodged in accommodation that, by 1960 standards, was beyond a lowly Soviet worker’s wildest dreams—a roomy apartment with balconies overlooking the river.
He was given employment on the assembly line of the nearby Byelorussian radio and television factory as an assembler, and paid wages that—combined with a continuing “Red Cross” allowance—provided Oswald with more money than he could spend. He spent many evenings at the movies, the theater, or the opera, often with a girl on his arm. He had dalliances of one sort or another with five young women. Oswald was, he wrote in the “Diary,” “living big.”
The last of the young women Oswald met in Minsk was to become his wife and would cause lasting concern after the assassination. In mid-March 1961, after just over a year in the city, he met Marina Prusakova, the woman he would marry just a few weeks later and take back to the United States with him, and who would bear his two children. Her story remains to this day a mass of contradictions.
Marina gave the Warren Commission the following sketch of her life. She had been a war baby, born in 1941, who never knew her father and whose mother died while she was still a student in Leningrad—today’s Saint Petersburg. At eighteen, in 1959, she had qualified as a pharmacist and moved to live with an uncle and aunt in Minsk. By 1961, she said, she was settled into a job in the pharmacy of a Minsk hospital and was enjoying a busy social life.
According to Marina, and by Oswald’s written account, the first encounter with the young American defector occurred by chance at a trade union dance. There was a further meeting a week later, again at a dance, and romance blossomed. When Oswald was admitted to the hospital in which she worked—to have his adenoids removed—Marina visited and brought little gifts. Oswald, on the rebound from his most recent affair, asked her to marry him even before his hospital stay ended. The registry office marriage took place on April 30, less than two months after the meeting at the dance.
The Warren Commission would have little choice but to accept this account of the whirlwind courtship. The record as released, however, shows the Commissioners and staff had serious doubts about Marina—on all fronts.
Though Marina has provided some of the most damning evidence against her husband, she has been hopelessly inconsistent. She won initial public sympathy with her comment in broken English: “Lee good man. Lee not shoot anyone.” Then she moved from saying he had been a good husband to claiming he had been violent toward her. She identified the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle as her husband’s “fateful rifle,” only to say later she was not sure that it had belonged to him.
Marina would identify her husband as having been—the President’s assassination aside—the would-be killer who had earlier fired at and missed Major General Edwin Walker, a right-wing extremist. She told a story, too, of Oswald having put a pistol in his belt when former Vice President Nixon came to Dallas. She had stopped him going out, she claimed, by locking him in the bathroom—an allegation that crumbled when it was found the bathroom door locked only from the inside. Nixon had not been in Dallas, moreover, at the relevant time.
From having given the impression that she thought her husband shot Kennedy, Marina would switch in later years to protesting his innocence. “I think he is not guilty,” she said in 1993, “he liked Kennedy … after his arrest he insisted that he did not shoot anybody… . I believe he spoke the truth.”
Marina’s reaction to difficult questions, Warren Commissioner Senator Russell commented, tended be along the lines, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Commission atttorney Norman Redlich, a future dean of New York University School of Law, formally recorded his concern that she had “repeatedly lied.”
Marina’s memory was foggy on points a woman could be expected to remember—like who had first introduced her to Oswald. On the basis of Marina’s early testimony and the Oswald “Diary,” Commission staff decided the Soviet Cupid was Yuri Merezhinsky, a student at the local medical institute. Years later, questioned by the Assassinations Committee, Marina said she remembered no one of that name, then that she did recall the name, then that she did not after all.
Ernst Titovets, a former medical student in Minsk who would rise to become a professor of neurology, well remembered the night Oswald and Marina met. As a friend of the alleged future assassin, he recalled in a 2010 memoir, they had gone together to the soirée at the Trade Union Palace of Culture. First there was a talk by Professor Lydia Cherkasova, a Party member with entrée to the elite. Her son Yuri Merezhinsky, who apparently featured in Oswald’s first encounter with Marina, was indeed there that evening.
Watching Marina and Merezhinsky with his friend, Titovets had thought even then that there was “something funny about the whole situation,” something “fishy.” Years later, after talking with both Merezhinsky and his mother, he came to the conclusion that the KGB had engineered Oswald’s meeting with Marina. “Oswald,” he was to write, “was unattached at the time. To get him deeply involved with a pretty girl that the KGB must have had control over was a potential way to obtain a string to pull… . It might serve as a way of obtaining valuable information.”
The CIA had multiple concerns about Marina’s background. That uncle of hers in Minsk was not just any uncle but a lieutenant-colonel in the MVD, the Soviet internal security organization. There was a question mark, too, over the final stage of her life in Leningrad before leaving for Minsk.
The CIA doubted information that—fresh out of her training as a pharmacist in Leningrad—Marina had quit her very first job after just one day, then taken a supposed vacation that lasted several months. One of those months, she acknowledged, had been spent at a government “rest home.”
There was intense interest, too, in a name and Leningrad address found in Marina’s address book. The Russian name, she said, was of someone she had met at the “rest home.” A CIA computer trace on the address came up with a match to an apartment block where another American defector had stayed.5
A claim made years later by Yuri Merezhinsky, the key figure in the first Oswald-Marina meeting, may explain a good deal. Asked whether Marina would not have been afraid to meet a foreigner, he replied: “She had nothing to lose. She knew foreigners in Leningrad, from where she had been deported for prostitution [author’s emphasis].”
Merezhinsky learned this, he said in a taped interview, from both associates in Leningrad and from Marina herself. He made the same claim in an 1993 interview with the author Norman Mailer. If it is true, Soviet intelligence may indeed have had a hold on Marina—and may have hoped through her to learn more about Oswald.
Lee Oswald himself had shown he knew, or thought he knew, that he remained a KGB target. One evening in Minsk, Ernst Titovets remembered, Oswald “said he believed his place was bugged.” He spent time checking power points, a vent in the floor, and voicing the thought that there might be a device concealed in the ceiling.
The suspicion was well founded, vindicated after the fall of Soviet Communism by a Russian press report that the KGB had indeed bugged Oswald’s apartment. After men in plain clothes told the residents on the floor above to go away for a few days, microphones had been installed in the ceiling of the apartment below.
A Fairy Story from the KGB
After President Kennedy’s assassination, the Soviets were to admit none of this. Then something extraordinary occurred. Two months later, when the Warren Commission investigation was under way, a KGB agent defected to the United States and made claims that made the USSR seem all innocence.
The defector, Yuri Nosenko, said the KGB had considered Oswald “unstable” and not bothered to question him in depth. His Soviet colleagues, Nosenko insisted, never grilled Oswald about his knowledge of U.S. radar in the Far East, about the U-2’s spy missions, or about other military information he might have.
Thirty-six-year-old Nosenko, in the prime of his career at the time he defected, said he had been deputy chief of the American-British sec
tion of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, the department that handled counterintelligence. It had fallen to him, he said, to supervize the Oswald case. The KGB had initially known nothing of the young American’s military background, he maintained, and would not have been interested anyway.
In Minsk, according to Nosenko, agents merely maintained “a discreet check” on Oswald, in light of the possibility that he might be some sort of U.S. “sleeper agent.” In November 1963, on news of the assassination, Nosenko said, the file on Oswald had been flown from Minsk to Moscow for close analysis.
CIA inquisitors tried for years to break Nosenko, and in some ways his story did start to fall apart. He was to admit he had exaggerated his KGB rank to make himself seem more attractive to the Agency. Another KGB defector, moreover, said Nosenko had not held the positions he claimed.6
Senior CIA officers came to believe, nevertheless, that they were dealing with more than a defector’s ploys to ingratiate himself—he was, they suspected, a deliberate Soviet plant. The consequences would have been “staggering,” as Richard Helms put it in retrospect, “if Nosenko had been hurriedly briefed and dispatched to mislead us about any Soviet connection with the assassination.”
The issue never was resolved. The Warren Commission failed to mention Nosenko at all in its Report. Years later, even after questioning the defector and catching him in further apparent inconsistencies, the Assassinations Committee could not decide what had motivated him.7
Nosenko’s account defied belief, CIA veterans agreed. The Soviets had gone to great lengths all over the world, former officer Harry Rositzke wrote, to get information out of lowly American personnel who might be “unsophisticated and lonely”—including not least “enlisted men in the armed forces.” “Marines,” said Newton Miler, former head of the CIA section responsible for counterintelligence against the KGB, had been “prime KGB targets”—even if they merely served as guards at embassies.