Reclaiming History (149 page)

But the psychological obstacles for Marina and Lee were much more difficult. He wrote in his diary, “On Aug 20th we give the papers out they say it will be 3½ months before we know wheather they’ll let us go or not. in the meantime Marina has had to stade [stand?] 4 different meeting[s] at the place of work held by her Boss’s at the direction of ‘someone’ by phone. The young comm. leauge headquthers also called about her and she had to go and see them for 1½ hours. The purpose (expressed) is to disaude her from going to the U.S.A. Net effect: Make her more stubborn about wanting to go Marina is pregnet, we only hope that the visas come through soon.”
⁷⁶¹

For the period from August 21 through September 1, 1961, Oswald’s diary reads, “I make expected trips to the passport & visa office also to ministry of for. affairs in Minsk, also Min. of Internal affairs, all of which have a say in the granting of a visa. I extracked promises of quick attention to US.”
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For the period from September through October 18, he wrote, “No word from Min. (They’ll call us.)”
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If Marina thought her reception by her bosses at work was bad, what she received at the Komsomol was worse. She was harangued not only by the city’s Komsomol leader, but also by representatives of every department in the hospital, and even two of the girls from the hospital pharmacy where she worked. She was bitterly offended by the questioning and even more so by the fact that the Komsomol chairman told her they knew everything about her and her husband. “We knew each time you had a date. We knew when you applied for your marriage license,” he told her. When they suggested that Lee was a spy, she did not handle it diplomatically. “Actually, what he does every night,” she said, “is tap out messages in Morse Code about how the Komsomol is trying to brainwash me.” After the meeting she was warned that there would be another meeting to determine whether she should be expelled from the organization. It took place a week later, she refused to attend, and she was indeed expelled and told she had “anti-Soviet views,” which Marina did not feel she had. But it didn’t matter. “Fine,” the defiant Marina told her coworkers at the pharmacy. “Now I’ll have money for the movies.”
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Even more painful was the reaction of her Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya. Lee had tried to visit them, and Ilya had turned him away at the door, telling him he was no longer welcome there. Marina had not told them of their plans, but Ilya, of course, had already been fully informed by the KGB. It took Marina a week to get up the courage to call him. She was invited over—without Lee—and subjected to a grilling by her appalled uncle. “A fine niece you are,” he said. “You’re here all the time, then you fly off to Moscow without a word and leave me to hear it from others.” Valya interceded and eventually invited both Marina and Lee over, at which time Ilya subjected Lee to an even more heated and thorough third degree. Colonel Prusakov wanted to know everything about Lee’s contacts with the American embassy, their trip to Moscow, everything. Lee was infuriated. Marina, who considered her sneaking off to Moscow without telling her aunt and uncle the same as a lie, was angry that she had been forced into a position of lying to her own family. “I can’t live like that,” she told Lee. “I can’t open my mouth without giving you away as a liar. You lied about your mother and your age. You lied when you said you couldn’t return to America. Now you’re making me lie. When will there be an end to it?”
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Years later, in the United States, she would tell Paul Gregory, to whom she gave Russian language lessons, that this period of her life in Minsk was “a very horrible time.”
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Not long after, Marina discovered yet another deception—Lee had been hoarding five thousand rubles, about five hundred dollars, apparently saved from the days when he was still enjoying the regular stipend from the Soviet Red Cross. He had also started writing something shortly after their return from Moscow, which, he told her only after she insisted, were his “impressions of Russia,” but he refused to show her the pages, even though, given her lack of English, there wasn’t much she could have made of them. She began to wonder whether he was not in fact a spy. It was already clear to her that her husband was secretive by nature, secretive even when there seemed to be no purpose served. He lied not because he needed to but because he liked to—it was his character.
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Lee’s suspicions, expressed in a letter to his brother Robert on July 14, that he and Marina were being spied on were, as we already know, far more justified than he knew. Norman Mailer was never able to find out from KGB contacts when the visual surveillance of Oswald extended to an electronic surveillance (bugging) of their apartment (the Oswalds had no telephone to tap), but the earliest transcripts date from mid-July of 1961. Mailer speculated that the microphones were installed during the Oswalds’ four-day trip to Moscow. In any case, listeners in a space above the apartment started recording everything that happened in the tiny flat, day and night. Later they moved the operation into a room next door. Mailer believes the KGB may have also inserted a sophisticated fiber-optic viewing device, one that required inserting a special lens into a tiny hole in the wall.
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Whatever the Soviet authorities might have been hoping to learn, the transcripts tell us mostly that the young marriage was in trouble from the outset. There was endless bickering, as in this example from a KGB transcript of July 19, 1961:

Wife: All you know how to do is torture…

(LHO goes out, yells something from the kitchen)

Wife: Go find yourself a girl who knows how to cook…I work, I don’t have time to prepare cutlets for you. You don’t want soup, you don’t want kasha, just tasty tidbits, please!

LHO: I can go eat at a restaurant.

Wife: Go to hell! When are you ever going to leave me alone? I’ll probably never live to see the day when you leave me alone.

LHO: But you don’t know how to do anything.

Wife: Leave me alone!
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And from August 3:

Wife: (yells) I’m tired of everything! And what about you? Can’t you wash? I suppose you want me to wash floors everyday?

LHO: Yes, wash these floors every day!

Wife: You don’t do anything and I’m supposed to spend all day cleaning up. A decent man would help. Remember you used to say: I’ll help! You did wash once, and now you talk about it endlessly, and I wash our clothes every time and it doesn’t count for anything…

LHO: You have to make something to eat.

Wife: (yells) I can’t. I’m not going to cook.

LHO: You could make cutlets, put on water for tea…

Wife: I won’t.

LHO: You haven’t done anything.

Wife: Well, what have you done for me?

LHO: Silence!

Wife: I’m not going to live with you.

LHO: Thank God!…

LHO: This house has to be cleaned every day. There’s dirt in our kitchen, dirt everywhere. What good is that? You sleep until ten in the morning and you don’t do anything. You could be cleaning up during that time.

Wife: I need my sleep.
If you don’t like it, you can go to your America
.

LHO: (calmly) Please, thank you.

Wife: You’re always finding fault; nothing’s enough, everything’s bad.

LHO: You’re ridiculous. Lazy and crude…

Wife: Get out! I’m not your housekeeper…

LHO: Don’t cry. I’m just saying that you don’t want to do anything.

Wife: So? I never washed our floors?

LHO: You’re not a good housewife, no, not a good housewife.

Wife: You should have married a good one…

(they’re silent)

Wife:…If you don’t like it, you can go to your America.

LHO: I’ve told you for a long time that you don’t do anything.

Wife: I wash floors every day.

LHO: It’s dirty.

Wife: What’s dirty to you is clean to me. I washed floors yesterday and you walk around in shoes…

LHO: Calm your nerves.

Wife: Just say: “Marina, it has to be done.” Don’t yell; it’s hurtful…Alka,
*
do you hate me when you yell at me?

LHO: Yes.

Wife: Yes?

LHO: Yes.

Wife:…Why are you afraid of people? What scared you?

LHO: (yells angrily) Shut up, shut up…You stand there and blab.

Wife:
You’re afraid of everybody!
…

LHO: Shut up!

Wife: Are you afraid that they’ll steal everything from you, a pot of gold that you have? (laughing) At times like this you could kill me. You have to have some kind of strong will…
⁷⁷⁰

Although the quarreling continued and was very heated, Marina told the Warren Commission he had never struck her in Russia.
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But author Norman Mailer suggests (presumably from interviews of Marina) that “he hit her…three or four times.”
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As if their arguments were not enough, their sex life was not fulfilling to Marina, who did not achieve orgasm, and she blamed it on him for always ejaculating before she was ready, making her furious.
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The American consul at the U.S. embassy in Russia, Richard Snyder, had already indicated that he believed Oswald had not lost his U.S. citizenship,
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and a July 11, 1961, Foreign Service dispatch from the Moscow embassy to the Department of State suggested as much.
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On August 18, 1961, the State Department, after a review of all pertinent documents as well as Oswald’s history by the Passport Office of the State Department, stated in an “Operations Memorandum” to the Moscow embassy that “we concur in the conclusion of the Embassy that there is no information and/or evidence to show that Mr. Oswald has expatriated himself under the pertinent laws of the United States,” and ruled that his application for the renewal of his passport to return to the U.S. “is authorized.”
⁷⁷⁶
†
It was okay with America for Oswald to come home. Now it was up to the Soviets to decide when they would let him and Marina leave Russia.

O
n September 25, 1961, Lee made a special effort to listen to the live broadcast of a complete speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City by America’s new young president, Jack Kennedy, then in office less than nine months. According to Marina, Lee was rigid with attention as he listened to the often faint and fading signal, and he indignantly hushed her if she dared to make the slightest noise. After Kennedy’s speech, Marina asked Lee what it was about.

“War and peace,” he said, and quoted a few of Kennedy’s remarks.

“That’s funny,” Marina observed. “Everybody wants peace here. They want peace there, too. So why do they talk about war?”

“Politics,” Lee smiled.

Several days later, Lee hotly defended the president’s speech in a discussion with Marina’s Uncle Ilya, denouncing the Soviet press for attacking the speech without printing a full and fair account of it. The colonel defended his own government with equal fervor, but on one thing both of them agreed—the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which had failed so ignominiously right after Kennedy took office. Lee was still an ardent defender of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution.
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Two and a half months having elapsed without the Soviet government doing anything on his and his wife’s application to leave the country, Oswald wrote to the U.S. embassy in Moscow on October 4 to ask that his government intervene with the Soviet government to facilitate getting exit visas for Marina and himself. He began to revert to that odd mixture of whining and bullying which he had adopted in his initial dealings with the embassy on his arrival in the country and which was to become increasingly his tone whenever he dealt with authorities:

Dear Sirs,…

I believe there is justification for an official inquiry, directed to the department of “Internal Affairs, Prospect Stalin 15, Minsk,” and the offices of the “address and passport office,” Ulitsa Moskova, Colonel Petrakov director.

Also, I believe it is doubley important for an official inquiry, since there have been systematic and concerted attempts to intimidate my wife into withdrawing her application for [a] visa. I have notified the Embassy in regard to these incidents by the local authorities in regard to my wife, these incidents had resulted in my wife being hospitalized for a five day period, on September 22, for nervous exhaustion…

I think [it] is within the lawful right, and in the interest of, the United States government, and the American Embassy, Moscow, to look into this case on my behalf.

Yours very truly

Lee H. Oswald
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Marina later testified before the Warren Commission that she was not hospitalized over this matter,
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and since Lee failed to mention it either in his diary or in letters to his family, the Commission concluded Oswald probably lied in his letter.
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However, near mid-August Marina had, indeed, at least undergone a special medical examination because of “unpleasant sensations in the heart region,” probably because of the pregnancy and the heavy strain she was under.
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Then, in late September, as Marina later told Priscilla McMillan, she was overcome by gas fumes from the bus taking her to work, and after stepping off the bus, she fainted in the street. She was taken to the Third Clinical Hospital, which was right above the pharmacy where she worked, and remained there for about five days. (Oswald obviously got the “five day” reference in his letter to the U.S. embassy from this hospital stay by Marina.) Marina’s doctors found that she was rundown, deficient in iron and vitamins, and, worse, had RH-negative blood. Fearing for her pregnancy, they tested Lee’s blood and found, to everyone’s relief, that he too was RH-negative.
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The American consul at the U.S. embassy in Moscow replied about a week later to Lee’s letter of October 4 and counseled patience, as the embassy had no way to pressure the Soviet government, which seldom acted rapidly on visa matters. The embassy clearly had no interest in Lee’s attempt to set up a fight between the Soviets and American officials. They would have to live with the Soviet government long after Lee Harvey Oswald was gone.
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