Reclaiming History (140 page)

Korengold, stymied, went back to his bureau and talked with another UPI correspondent, Aline Mosby. Within minutes, she was on her way to the Metropole. “I went up in the creaky elevator to the second floor and down the hall,” Mosby wrote in her notes, “past the life-sized nude in white marble, the gigantic painting of Lenin and Stalin and the usual watchful floor clerk in her prim navy blue dress with brown braids wrapped around her head. An attractive fellow answered my knock on the door of Room 233.”
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She didn’t get much from Oswald on her first visit, but it was enough for UPI to file the story that went out over the wires on October 31, 1959, that Oswald had applied to renounce his citizenship and intended to become a Soviet citizen for “purely political reasons.” He also told UPI he would never return to the United States.
⁵²²
The story of Oswald’s defection appeared the next day in many papers throughout the United States. The young American who always wanted to make a splash was not starting out poorly. That Sunday he made page 3 of the
New York Times
, the paper of record of the nation he was leaving behind, with a six-paragraph article captioned “Ex-Marine Requests Soviet Citizenship.”
⁵²³

Oswald’s October 31 entry in his diary reads, “From this day forward I consider myself no citizen of the U.S.A…. I leave Embassy, elated at this showdown, returning to my hotel I feel now my enorgies are not spent in vain. I’m sure Russians will except me after this sign of my faith in them. 2:00 a knock, a reporter by the name of Goldstene
*
wants an interview I’m flabbergassed ‘how did you find out? The Embassy called us.’ He said. I send him away I sit and relize this is one way to bring pressure on me. By notifing my relations in U.S. through the newspapers…A half hour later another reporter Miss Mosby comes. I ansewer a few quick questions after refusing an interviwe. I am surprised at the interest. I get phone calls from ‘Time’ [magazine] at night a phone call from the States I refuse all calles without finding out who’s it from. I feel non-deplused because of the attention 10:00 I retire.”
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L
ee’s brother, Robert, was halfway through his milk delivery route for Boswell’s Dairy in Fort Worth on Halloween and was writing up a customer’s order in his ledger when a man got out of a taxi and walked up to his truck. “Are you Robert Oswald?” the man asked. He said he was a reporter for the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
. “I have a report here that your brother is in Russia…I have a copy of the teletype and thought you might want to read it and comment.” Robert read it and felt his stomach tighten as he said, “Oh no.” He was floored, taken completely by surprise. The reporter asked him if he believed the story. “There doesn’t seem to be any doubt,” Robert said. “Lee is awfully young. He’s looking for excitement. I don’t believe he knows what he is doing.” Robert wasn’t entirely sure of that, though. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how carefully Lee had planned his defection.
⁵²⁵

Robert finished his milk route and rushed home, where he found that Marguerite had already heard the news on the radio. Among the reporters besieging him and Marguerite was one who suggested he send two telegrams, one to Secretary of State Christian Herter and the other to Lee at the Metropole.
⁵²⁶
Robert agreed, and the next morning sent the telegrams, the one to Herter asking to have his office get Lee to call Robert,
⁵²⁷
and the one to Lee, which was personal and beseeching. Thinking Lee would remember his many admonitions, when Lee was little, to keep his nose clean, Robert wired, “
LEE, THROUGH ANY MEANS POSSIBLE CONTACT ME. MISTAKE. KEEP YOUR NOSE CLEAN
.” Both he and Marguerite tried to call Lee in Moscow, but they failed to get through.
⁵²⁸

A couple of reporters from the
Fort Worth Press
, Kent Biffle and Seth Kantor, went to extraordinary lengths to arrange a three-way conference call among Marguerite at her home, the two reporters in their city room, and Lee at the Metropole. It took hours to set up on the primitive international phone network—it was 1959—but eventually Biffle heard Lee come on the line, he recalls, with “two husky hello’s.” The moment Lee heard that reporters set the call up so he could talk to his mother, he clanked down the receiver as Marguerite was pleading, “Hello! Hello! Lee?” A shattered fifty-two-year-old Marguerite wept softly.
⁵²⁹
“All those hours,” Kantor would later write, “down the drain.”
⁵³⁰
Robert Oswald also attempted to reach Lee on the phone, but Lee refused to talk to him.
⁵³¹

The aborted calls gave Lee a lift, though. He wrote in his diary on November 1, “More reporters, 3 phone calls from brother & mother, now I feel slightly axzillarated, not so lonly.”
⁵³²
*

Oswald’s “axzillaration” was short-lived. He covered the next two weeks of his sojourn in the Metropole in a single diary entry for November 2 through 15: “Days of utter loneliness I refuse all reports phone calls I remaine in my room. I am racked with dsyentary.”
⁵³³
Nor did he return to the American embassy, contenting himself with a handwritten letter to the embassy:

I, Lee Harvey Oswald, do hereby request that my present United States citizenship be revoked.

I appered [appeared] in person, at the consulate office of the United States Embassy, Moscow, on Oct 31st, for the purpose of signing the formal papers to this effect. This legal right I was refused at that time.

I wish to protest against this action, and against the conduct of the official of the United States consuler service who acted on behalf of the United States government.

My application, requesting that I be considered for citizenship in the Soviet Union is now pending before the Surprem Soviet of the U.S.S.R. In the event of acceptance, I will request my government to lodge a formal protest regarding this incident.

Lee Harvey Oswald
⁵³⁴

The fact that Oswald said the U.S. embassy had “refused” to let him renounce his U.S. citizenship when it hadn’t done this at all is revealing. Snyder merely told Oswald to return on another date, and when Snyder responded to Oswald’s November 3, 1959, letter on November 6, he informed Oswald that he did, in fact, have the “inherent right” to renounce his citizenship and all he had to do was return to the embassy during the hours the embassy was open (set forth in the letter) and follow the prescribed procedures, including the taking of an oath.
⁵³⁵
Yet Oswald elected not to return to the embassy, which perhaps speaks loudly for one point. Renouncing his citizenship was only ancillary to the main thing he wanted, becoming a Soviet citizen.

But since his interview at the Soviet Passport Office on October 29, Oswald had heard nothing from the Soviet authorities. Finally, on November 4, Oswald was visited by one “Andrei Nikolayevich,” ostensibly an employee at Intourist, who chatted with Oswald about his reasons for requesting Soviet citizenship and promised to help him get settled in the USSR after the November holidays—in five days. This was, of course, just another camouflaged interview by the KGB. When Oswald heard nothing further from Nikolayevich, he got Rimma to try to arrange a meeting with him, but they discovered that there was no such person at Intourist. That organization, alerted to the monkey business by Oswald’s attempt to locate “Nikolayevich,” asked the KGB for an explanation and was told that its spy had spoken to Oswald “on the subject of possible use abroad.”
⁵³⁶

But as indicated, since the KGB had no
use
for Oswald, the Nikolayevich meeting was most likely just another KGB contact with Oswald to check up on him, not to use him, and the fact that Oswald apparently never heard from Nikolayevich again supports this inference.

Oswald would have no further contacts with the Soviets for weeks to come. He did hear from the U.S. embassy, however. It had received Robert’s November 1, 1959, telegram to Christian Herter at the State Department, urging that State have Lee get in touch with his brother. Snyder had his secretary, Marie Cheatham, call the Metropole on November 2 to ask Oswald to come and pick up Robert’s telegram. He was not interested. Snyder told her to call back and ask Lee if she could read the telegram over the phone. “Not at the present time,” he said, and hung up.
⁵³⁷
Robert’s telegram was finally sent to Oswald from the embassy by registered mail.
⁵³⁸

Lee undoubtedly would have been gratified to learn of the commotion he was causing, although, holed up in his room at the Metropole, he had no way of knowing about the cables flying back and forth between Moscow and Washington, or of the considerable traffic between agencies of the U.S. government on the one hand and those of the Soviet government on the other.

Although there is no indication in the Warren Commission volumes that the Department of Defense, which oversees the nation’s military defense, received a copy of Snyder’s October 31, 1959, telegram to the Department of State about Oswald offering to furnish the Soviets with his radar knowledge, only that the FBI and CIA got copies,
⁵³⁹
on November 3, 1959, the naval attaché at the American embassy in Moscow sent a confidential “message” to the chief of naval operations (CNO) at the Department of Defense at the Pentagon in Washington that Oswald had stated he “has offered to furnish Soviets info he possesses on US radar.”
⁵⁴⁰
The following day, the CNO messaged back to the attaché that the department had found “no record of [security] clearance at HQ [Headquarters], Marine Corps, but possibility exists he may have had access to Confidential info…Request significant developments in view of continuing interest of HQ, Marine Corps, and U.S. intelligence agencies.”
⁵⁴¹
In view of what potentially was at stake, this seemed to be a rather tepid response to Oswald’s threat. A layperson would naturally expect his threat to be a bombshell to the military, in that at that time no one knew for sure just what confidential information Oswald might have stumbled on that might be of any use to the Soviets (that is, unless just a few quick calls from the Pentagon that we don’t know about to Oswald’s superiors at Atsugi revealed that he was, to be cruel, a military cipher). However, apparently the military did do something as a result of Oswald’s threat, but the only evidence I could find in the Commission volumes comes not from the Department of Defense or any military command, but from Lieutenant John Donovan, the officer in command of Oswald’s radar crew in Santa Ana, who recalled what happened when “we received word that he had shown up in Moscow. This necessitated a lot of change of aircraft call signs, radio frequencies, radar frequencies.”
⁵⁴²
“We had to spend several thousand man-hours changing everything and verifying the destruction of the codes.”
⁵⁴³

Inasmuch as Donovan’s credibility has been severely thrown into question on another matter related to Oswald (see endnote), we cannot automatically accept his words here at face value.

Donovan went on to say that Oswald’s low grade of clearance, confidential, gave him potential access to, in Donovan’s words, “the location of all bases in the West Coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for the Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding unit’s radio and radar.”
⁵⁴⁴

Much of this information was look-up stuff, not something anyone would be likely to remember several weeks after working with it, but if Oswald had written it down he might make it available to the Soviets. The authentication and identification codes were changed routinely anyway, and anything Oswald might reveal about them would be short-lived, but there was other information, Donovan said, that could not be changed. Oswald had worked with the new MPS16 height-finder radar, which vastly improved the service’s ability to determine the altitude of aircraft, which could not, like the codes could, be changed. He had also been schooled in a piece of gear called TPX-1, which transferred radio and radar signals over great distances, allowing the radar operators to be far away from the radar antennae, which would be electronically targeted by incoming aircraft and missiles. That fact could not be changed either.
⁵⁴⁵

If Donovan’s words are to be believed, Oswald’s defection had gone far beyond a mere teenage prank.

A
fter the flurry of activity in the first week of November 1959, things turned dismal for Lee Oswald. The penetrating, cold bleakness of a Moscow November had little on him. He heard nothing from his Soviet hosts. Out of money, and poorly clothed against Moscow’s weather, he rarely if ever left his room in the Hotel Metropole. Finally, on November 8, he wrote to his brother. The spelling and punctuation are so clearly better than his atrocious diary entries that we can assume he had some help, or simply spent a lot of time in its preparation, using a dictionary for spelling.

Dear Robert

Well, What shall we Talk about, the weatter perhaps? Certainly you do not wish me to speak of my decision to remain in the Soviet Union and apply for citizenship here, since I’m afraid you would not be able to comprehend my reasons. You really dont know anything about me. Do you know for instance that I have waited to do this for well over a year, do you know that I [a few words in Russian to illustrate knowledge of language] speak a fair amount of Russian which I have been studing for many months.

I have been told that I will not have to leave the Soviet Union if I do not care to. This than is my decision. I will not leave this country, the Soviet Union, under any conditions, I will never return to the United States
which is a country I hate
.

Someday, perhaps soon, and then again perhaps in a few years, I will become a citizen of the Soviet Union, but it is a very legal process,
in any event
, I will not have to leave the Soviet Union and I will never [do so].

I recived your telegram and was glad [to hear] from you, only one word bothered me, the [word] “mistake.” I assume you mean that I have [made a] “mistake” it is not for you to tell me [that. You] cannot understend my reasons for this very [full word not shown] action.

I will not speak to anyone from the United States over the Telephone since it may be taped by the americans.

If you wish to corespond with me you can write to the below address, but I really don’t see what we could Take about, if you want to send me money, that I [could] use, but I do not expect to be able to send it back.

Lee

Lee Harvey Oswald

Metropol Hotel RM 233

Moscow U.S.S.R.
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