Oswald's Tale (11 page)

December 31

New Year’s Eve, I spend in the company of Rosa Agafonova at the Hotel Berlin. She has the duty. I sit with her until past midnight. She gave me a small Boratin clown.

January 5

I go to Red Cross in Moscow for money [and] receive 5,000 rubles, a huge sum!! Later in Minsk, I am to earn 700 rubles a month at the factory.
⁴

January 7

I leave Moscow by train for Minsk, Byelorussia. My hotel bill was 2,200 rubles and the train ticket to Minsk 150 rubles, so I have a lot of money and hope. I wrote my mother and brother letters in which I said, “I do not wish to ever contact you again. I am beginning a new life and I don’t want
any part
of the old.”

Rimma remembered that on this day he left for Minsk, it was snowing when she said goodbye to him. He was crying and she was crying.

But she did not write to him. It was understood that an Intourist girl was not to write letters to tourists she had guided, and Rimma could not violate such a principle.

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
If you had known that Oswald was in Minsk, what would your reaction have been?

MR. SNYDER.
Serves him right.

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
Why do you say that?

MR. SNYDER.
You have never been in Minsk . . . Provincial towns in the Soviet Union are a very large step below the capital and the capital, believe me, is a fairly good-sized step down from any American populated place.

But the difference between large cities and minor cities, and between minor cities and villages, is a tremendous step backward in time. And to live in Minsk, or in any other provincial city in the Soviet Union, is a pretty grim experience to someone who has lived in our society . . .

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
Have you ever been in Minsk?

MR. SNYDER.
I spent about an hour walking around Minsk, between trains, one time.
⁵

PART III

OSWALD’S WORK, OSWALD’S SWEETHEART

1

Igor

How Igor Ivanovich Guzmin looked when young would be hard to decide in 1993, because his presence spoke of what he was now—a retired general from KGB Counterintelligence, a big man and old, with a red complexion and a large face that could have belonged to an Irish police chief in New York, impressive from his sharp nose up, with pale blue eyes ready to blaze with rectitude, but he looked corrupt from the mouth down—he kept a spare tire around his chin, a bloated police chief’s neck.

Guzmin, Igor Ivanovich, born in 1922, had worked in Minsk for the KGB from 1946 to 1977, and had first been dispatched there by Moscow Center to undertake a “strengthening of cadres,” and in Minsk he had remained for more than half of his fifty years in service. Having walked in as Deputy Chief in Counterintelligence, Minsk, he became Deputy Chief of Branch, and was finally promoted to Chief of Department in Byelorussia. While his arrival came more than a year after the Nazi occupation of Minsk had ended, he could inform his interviewers that one out of every four persons in that republic had died in combat, or in German concentration camps, or
under other circumstances.
He said no more. His point was that rebuilding had been done in Minsk under difficult conditions. There was not only physical disruption, but a population compromised by collaboration. Certainly, all standing policemen, local army, village headmen—all the persons installed by Germans—had to be seen as collaborators or fascist agents. His State Security office had, therefore, to cleanse everything that you could call an obstruction to reconstruction. Many people didn’t want to take responsibility for their collaborative actions with the Nazis and so had gone underground, which gave the Organs a further task of freeing society from their concealed presence. It was a good deal of work. They weren’t finished dealing with all of that until 1953.

Igor Ivanovich does not, however, recall an episode in any of their security tasks that had been remotely similar to the problems initiated by Oswald’s arrival. Repatriates might be scattered around Ukraine and Byelorussia, but they were Byelorussians, whereas Oswald had been sent here to Minsk as a political immigrant for permanent residence. Of course, foreign agents had been dispatched to Minsk before, members of British or American or German intelligence, sent by air, smuggled across borders—in one manner or another, implanted. Much local KGB work had been concerned with exposing, arresting, and putting such people on trial. Four American agents had been dropped by parachute into Byelorussia in 1951 alone, but Oswald was obviously different and special.

On Oswald’s arrival in Minsk in January of 1960, some reports from Intourist Moscow guides and officials had already come to Igor Ivanovich’s office, so he was furnished with materials on why this young American had been allowed to stay in Soviet territory. It was a small dossier, however. Oswald was being sent to Minsk for permanent residence, and other branches of the local government would take care of settling him in. Igor’s function would be to find out whether Oswald, Lee Harvey, was who he claimed to be. So the most significant document was the one which stated that it had been decided at highest levels to grant Oswald permission to stay after his suicide attempt, even though his attempt may have been staged. There was then, as could be expected, a directive from Moscow Center: Start investigation of this person.

Igor Ivanovich Guzmin had a man in his department who would serve as the developer on this case, that is, would, on a daily basis, conduct their inquiry—an intelligent, efficient man named Stepan Vasilyevich Gregorieff. Igor Ivanovich Guzmin’s reasons for choosing him were as follows: Stepan Vasilyevich was pure Byelorussian, born in the Mogilev region, and knew local ways of life, habits, and such specifics very well. Even more important was his professionalism. He had handled interrogations of captive German spies and British spies; he had been specifically adept at locating and then defining suspect people who had stayed in the West after 1945 but, for various reasons, had now repatriated themselves, and had to be checked. Stepan also knew a little English, and where he would lack fluency, an English-speaking deputy could assist in the translation of documents—as, for example, any letters Oswald might receive from America.

Besides, Stepan’s professionalism was known. He was approved right away. Stepan was seen, after all, as a serious person, cool-minded, with steady character and patience, who liked to develop questions down to their essence. “The work of our officers has no limit on its hours, and Stepan Vasilyevich was able to work a day and a night, as much as work required, never capricious, a good fellow officer. Besides,” said Igor, “I knew him well. We lived in the same apartment house and I knew his wife and children, so his domestic side was spoken for.” Stepan would report directly to Igor, who would communicate with the Chief of Counterintelligence in Byelorussia, and that officer, in turn, would report to the head of Moscow Center. It could be said, then, that there were only three steps in this chain of command before it reached the apex in Moscow.

Igor Ivanovich would add that there was a reason for such extreme attention and arch-secrecy concerning Lee Harvey Oswald. Preliminary analysis in Minsk had already suggested opposing hypotheses. There was, for example, Oswald’s service as a Marine to account for. Among people in Counterintelligence, it was taken for granted that CIA and FBI would recruit some of their cadre from Marines. Oswald had also told some of their Moscow sources that he had experience in electronics and radar. Such knowledge was not alien to those serving in intelligence.

Their next variant was that he had a pro-Communist attitude, was Marxist. Yet, closer examination disclosed that he was not proficient in Marxist-Leninist theory. That elicited considerable suspicion.

It was still another matter to make certain that the Americans had not schooled him in Russian and he was concealing his knowledge. That was difficult to determine, but could be examined by observing closely how he proceeded to acquire more language proficiency. So, that would also become a task for any person teaching him Russian. The monitor would have to be able to determine whether Oswald was jumping from lesson to lesson with suspicious progress, or, taking the contrary case, was he experiencing real difficulty? That was certainly a question to clarify.

Now came another variant: Lately, KGB had been testing another country’s legal channels to ascertain how difficult it would be to insert their agents into that nation. Igor now had to consider a possibility in reverse: Had some American intelligence service sent Lee Harvey Oswald here to check out their Soviet legal channels? Was he a test case to determine how moles might be implanted for special tasks?

Yet, in addition to all this, looking at it in human terms, Oswald was also being accepted as a potential immigrant. It was considered desirable, therefore, to create good conditions for him so that he would not be disillusioned about life in the Soviet Union. By 1960, Minsk did have a living standard that might not disappoint him about Communist society. Besides, for their own purposes, the Organs needed a city as big as Minsk, with many people circulating in the streets. Watching a person was thereby facilitated.

Be it said, their investigation was deeply prepared. They had a complex and double goal: not to miss anything suspicious in Lee Harvey Oswald’s behavior, yet not to limit his personal freedom. They also were most interested to talk to him personally, but given their ultimate objective—to discover whether he was or was not a spy—they had to abandon this possibility. Direct contact would disrupt their attempt to elicit objective answers through more delicate methods of investigation.

2

Developer

Stepan Vasilyevich received his notice of Oswald’s arrival in Minsk just two days before the man was on their doorstep.

Details of where he had served while in the U.S. armed services were also minimal. Instead came information of when he had arrived in Moscow, how he had behaved after slashing his wrist, how insistent he was on remaining in the Soviet Union.

In Minsk they had a special postal channel by which they corresponded with Moscow Center, and Stepan did receive word that Oswald had served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Japan, but he felt he did not have to pay too much attention to this matter. Obviously, Military Counterintelligence had already looked into it and was not requesting more.

On the other hand, Oswald was certainly special: “As we could see by materials received from those doctors who treated him in Botkin Hospital, it was clear,” said Stepan, “that since his intentions to reside in our country could not be altered, Oswald, if once again refused residence in the USSR, could, given such a strong will, repeat his suicide attempt.” Of course, it was equally possible that Oswald’s insistent desire to remain was connected to some special American task—but what kind of task? He had gone into the U.S. Marines when he was seventeen. Now, suddenly, he was angry at the whole American way of life. Very suspicious. It was possible he represented some new phenomenon in American intelligence methods.

In their work, if they studied a person with the intention of eventually unmasking him, then they were not supposed to take any actions that might alert their target. Stepan was in accord with Igor’s decision to make no attempt to debrief Oswald formally about his service in U.S. Marines. It was more important to discover whether he was or was not an agent. There was certainly no urgency to obtain minor military information that the Soviet military, without doubt, already possessed. And if there was useful information he might be able to offer, that would have to be sacrificed in order not to make him suspicious.

This much understood in advance, Stepan prepared to develop his case.