Reclaiming History (143 page)

The tallest building was still only nine stories, and the more distant landscape of factory chimneys and construction cranes testified to its largely industrial character. The main street, the Prospekt Stalinskaya, contained most of the city’s attractions—the five-hundred-room hotel Lee was staying at, the stuffy four-hundred-seat cinema, and the big GUM Department Store, where you could sign on to a three-month waiting list for a refrigerator or vacuum cleaner or even a car, a Moskvich (one year’s wait) or a Victory or a Volga (six or seven months’ wait). In a society where there was no commercial competition, Minsk had mostly just one of everything, except restaurants—there were five of those, including two almost identical stand-up cafeterias across the street from each other where Stalinskaya ended in Stalin Square. Stalinskaya was the longest, straightest street in the state of Belorussia, while its cross-streets were narrow, cobbled, and picturesque, ending at the end of the outskirts in pleasant public parks.
⁵⁹⁶

Among the prominent public buildings were the Ministry of Internal Affairs, run by a tough MVD colonel, and right around the corner, the headquarters of the Belorussian KGB. A building Lee would come to know well was the Trade Union Building, which was used more for education and entertainment than business—real union affairs were handled in the factories. A large Greek revival building, it housed offices and work spaces for the performance groups that entertained there, an auditorium, and a small dance hall that Lee would come to frequent. Its architrave bore, in place of Greek heroes and gods, a surveyor with his transit, a bricklayer, a sportswoman in a track suit, and a man in a double-breasted suit carrying a briefcase, “either a bureaucrat or an intellectual, apparently,” Oswald wrote.
⁵⁹⁷

On January 10, his third day in the city, Oswald’s diary is confined to a single, terse, run-on sentence: “The day to myself I walk through city, very nice.”
⁵⁹⁸

Here is the KGB’s more detailed account of his day:

At 11 o’clock, Lee Harvey left Hotel Minsk and went to GUM. There he came up to the electrical department, asked a salesperson some question, then took money out of his pocket and went to a cashier of this department. He did not pay for anything but just put money back into his pocket and started pacing first floor of department store up and down looking at different goods. Then he went back to electrical department, paid 2 rubles 25 copecks for electrical plug, put it into his pocket and went up to second floor. There he spent some time in department of ready-made clothes, looked through available suits, then left GUM store walking fast. He was back at his hotel by 11:25. At 12:45 he came out of his hotel room and went to restaurant. He took seat at vacant table and began to eat. (No observations were made during this meal because no other people were in there.) 13:35 [1:35 p.m.] Lee Harvey left restaurant and went back to his room. 18:10 [6:10 p.m.] he left his room and went to restaurant. He took vacant table, had his meal, left restaurant at 18:45, and took elevator to fourth floor where he went to his room. He did not leave his room up to 24:00 [midnight] after which time no observation was made until morning.
⁵⁹⁹

A
lthough Lee was probably never more than fleetingly aware of it, one feature of his new life was that he would never walk alone. A few weeks earlier, on December 21, 1959, the KGB opened an espionage file on him. As alluded to earlier, the Central Committee had given the KGB one year to “resolve the questions of his permanent residency in the USSR and Soviet citizenship,” and the spy agency was frankly puzzled as to why he had come to their country at all. Opening a file on him under the rubric of espionage, a very serious matter, guaranteed that whatever manpower, equipment, and resources were needed to keep him under surveillance would be available.
⁶⁰⁰

Curiously, or perhaps not so, they never chose to confront Oswald openly. According to Vladimir Semichastny, then chairman of the KGB, “those who met with him were under the cover of different organizations: Belorussian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, OVIR [passport office],” but there were no direct contacts.
⁶⁰¹

Indirectly or directly, however, the KGB had determined that Oswald’s knowledge of radar was “very primitive and did not extend beyond the textbooks.” The head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, saw no particular use for him, but the intriguing possibility remained that he might have been planted on them by the CIA. He would, therefore, according to Semichastny, be handled “with the usual control measures. Routine surveillance, involving agents, observation, and standard operative techniques.” Even then, however, “we didn’t…involve our most skilled surveillance agents, because we didn’t want to risk compromising them for future, more important use.”
⁶⁰²

Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who studied the KGB files on Oswald and interviewed the KGB operatives and their superiors charged with his control and surveillance, thought that the intelligence agency might have taken a different attitude toward him if they had known that the U-2 spy plane had been housed at Atsugi when Oswald was stationed there.
⁶⁰³
Though Oswald apparently never mentioned that to anyone in Moscow (in spite of his silly threat at the American embassy), it appears likely that the KGB, as effective as well as incompetent as virtually all official bodies are, never knew that Oswald was even stationed at Atsugi. Oswald made no reference to this in the questionnaire he completed for Russia’s Passport Office in Moscow on January 4, 1960,
⁶⁰⁴
or the earlier questionnaire he filled out when he applied for a Soviet visa at the consulate in Helsinki on October 12,1959.
⁶⁰⁵
Indeed, KGB defector Yuriy Nosenko told author Gerald Posner, “as for Atsugi, we didn’t know he had been based there.”
⁶⁰⁶
And Nosenko told the HSCA back in 1978 that the KGB “didn’t know” Oswald had any connection with the U-2,
⁶⁰⁷
which he, in fact, did not.

But surely Soviet intelligence was well aware of the fact that U-2 missions had been flown from Atsugi, whether or not they knew it was, along with Adana in Turkey, one of the aircraft’s two main bases. It didn’t take any military intelligence capacity to know about the U-2 at Atsugi. As indicated earlier, not only was the unique plane clearly visible to anyone in the vicinity at Atsugi, which, unlike Adana, is in a populated area, but in September 1959, just before Oswald’s arrival in the Soviet Union, the pilot of U-2 plane number 360, outfitted with the new and more powerful engine that increased its range and altitude, decided to test the machine by setting a new altitude record. He did, but at the cost of too much fuel. The plane ran out of gas and landed ten miles short of Atsugi at the airstrip of the Japanese Glider Club, where it bogged down in mud. The pilot, wearing the uncomfortable rubber bodysuit and unable to get out of his jammed cockpit unaided, radioed to Atsugi for help. Military police quickly arrived to cordon off the area and drive onlookers away at gunpoint, but not before hoards of Japanese with omnipresent cameras had crowded around the plane and snapped innumerable photos, some of which appeared the next day in Japanese newspapers and magazines. Editorial writers wondered in print why, if the U-2 was engaged only in high-altitude weather research, it bore no distinguishing identification marks and occasioned such elaborate security.
⁶⁰⁸

After CIA U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk on May Day (May 1) 1960, his interrogators at Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison showed him articles about plane 360’s crash near Atsugi and asked him whether he knew about it. He did, but he didn’t bother to tell them that it was the same plane they had just shot down, the remains of which they had put on display in nearby Gorky Park.
⁶⁰⁹

In any case, there is no suggestion in the Soviet intelligence documents that have become available since the collapse of the USSR that Oswald ever gave the Soviets intelligence information or that they were interested in him as a source. One of the great, eternal problems of intelligence gathering is and always has been the reliability of the information acquired—false or faulty information is often more harmful than no information at all—and the Soviets simply did not believe that a disturbed youth had anything to tell them that they could trust.

While the KGB obsessively followed Lee around on his first, tentative forays into the cityscape of his new home, American security services were also showing an interest in him. Although they didn’t actually know where he went after they lost track of him in Moscow, they were beginning to open files on him. Eventually, CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and State Department files would be opened, closed, reopened, neglected, and stuffed with odd bits of information of very little use to anyone, but they would testify to a continuing interest in their subject.

In the meantime, the subject of all this scrutiny was getting acquainted with Minsk and meeting the people who would become his new circle of friends. On January 11, 1960, he visited the Belorussian Radio and Television factory, referred to by everyone as the “radio factory” or “Horizon,” where he would be working,
⁶¹⁰
a massive facility on a twenty-five-acre site two miles north of the center of town. This haphazard collection of buildings, workshops, and sheds reminded author Norman Mailer of a rundown movie studio.
⁶¹¹
About five thousand employees produced radio and television sets there for Russian consumers. Lee noticed that there were no “pocket radios”—the tiny “transistors” that had recently become the rage in America. These were not available anywhere in the Soviet Union.
⁶¹²

On Oswald’s first visit to the factory he met Alexander Ziger, a Polish Jew who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938, where he worked for an American company until he returned to Poland in 1955. His Polish homeland had been annexed by the USSR and was now a part of Belorussia. Ziger, an engineer in his forties who headed a department in the factory, spoke English well, and both he and his family, including two daughters born in Argentina, would become good friends to Oswald.
⁶¹³

Two days later, Oswald began work at the factory as some sort of machinist. In his diary he described the job as a “checker,” in quotation marks. One of his work documents describes him as an “adjuster,” another as a “locksmith or metal worker.”
⁶¹⁴

He was assigned to an “experimental shop,” a drab two-story red-brick building in the center of the factory complex. While in other parts of the plant, workers, three out of five of them women, toiled at long assembly lines, the experimental shop employed only fifty-eight hands, five of whom were foremen, and a commissar from the Communist Party. Work began at eight sharp with the ringing of a bell. Ten operators worked on lathes on the lower floor, the rest upstairs. Apparently the work involved the construction of prototypes. Oswald later wrote that they often worked directly from blueprints.
⁶¹⁵
Oswald’s base pay was seven hundred rubles per month (about seventy dollars on the official exchange rate), normal pay for his type of work. However, he also received seven hundred rubles monthly from the Soviet Red Cross, and he thought his total of fourteen hundred rubles per month was about as much as the director of the factory made.
⁶¹⁶
Since he was paid based on his production, he could make up to nine hundred rubles per month.
⁶¹⁷

Oswald found his coworkers “friendly and kind,” almost too friendly at times—some offered to call a mass meeting so he could tell everyone about himself. Oswald declined the honor. The first small hint of a collision between his uncommonly independent nature and the antithetical climate for this in Soviet life surfaced in his diary entry for January 13 to 16, where he writes, “I don’t like” the fact that there was a picture of Lenin which “watchs” the workers from up above, and the fact that there was “complusery” physical training “at 11-11.10 each morning.” But he seemed otherwise content. He was taking Roza, one of the two Intourist representatives who had met him at his hotel when he first arrived in Minsk, to the movies, theater, or opera almost every night. “I’m living big…and very satisfied,” he wrote in his diary.
⁶¹⁸
He came to rely on the other official who had met him at the railroad station, Stellina (named for Stalin), a twenty-eight-year-old married woman with a year-old daughter. She was the head of the Service Bureau at the hotel and lived only two blocks away. Since her job required her to be on call at all hours, she didn’t mind Lee dropping in for help with a problem, and she even dubbed him “Aloysha,” a name she believed to be rather distinguished. She thought him oddly secretive, but she was well disposed toward Americans. She remembered, when she was living in an orphanage after the Great Patriotic War (the Russian name for the Second World War), the good things the Americans had sent the children: beds, clothes, sugar, chocolate, and nuts. She was also touched by Lee’s helplessness and began to mother him a bit. She tried to teach him Russian, sometimes on walks with him out to the Dynamo Sports Stadium with her child in a stroller.
⁶¹⁹

Comrade Libezin, the party secretary at the plant, was solicitous of Oswald’s inability to speak passable Russian and assigned two coworkers of Oswald’s to help improve his Russian, one working with Oswald on the job, the other after work.
⁶²⁰
Neither of the two men “hung out” with Oswald, but the relationship changed for one of them, Pavel Golovachev, one night when he was accosted by a KGB agent who showed his ID and asked for a talk. The agent was Stepan Vasilyevich Gregorieff (to borrow the pseudonym used by Norman Mailer). He was the main agent in the Minsk headquarters of the KGB who had been assigned the task of watching Oswald. His job was to keep his distance and to try to determine whether Oswald was an agent or some kind of CIA plant. He had several questions he wanted answers to. One had to do with the nature of Oswald’s service in the Marine Corps and his experience with radar and electronics. Another was the nature of his commitment to Marxism, since Oswald seemed to know so little of Marxist-Leninist theory. Yet another was his proficiency in Russian—was he really as inept and unskilled as he seemed, or only pretending to be?