Reclaiming History (181 page)

Nechiporenko knew that Oswald could possibly be a plant or an agent provocateur sent by the CIA or some other intelligence agency. On the other hand, he could equally be utilized by the Russians as an asset—the problem was to figure out which was which as quickly as possible. When Oswald cooled down a bit, Nechiporenko went straight to the heart of the matter. He asked for specific information on why the FBI might be following him.

Oswald had no convincing explanation. He said that the bureau had started interrogating him and Marina shortly after he returned to the United States from the USSR. His wife was still being questioned in his absence, and the FBI had now started making inquiries among his friends. When Nechiporenko, conversing with Oswald primarily in Russian, asked Lee why he had returned to the United States, Lee flunked the test. (Since he left voluntarily—because he couldn’t stand Russia—why did he want to go back?) For all his months of obsessive preparation, he had never invented a persuasive answer to this question by any Communist inquisitor. Nechiporenko would later recall that “Oswald fidgeted, changed the subject, and avoided answering the question.” That was all the colonel needed to know. Although it went without saying, Nechiporenko thought that his colleagues in the USSR would have kept Oswald under close surveillance during his stay in the Soviet Union. The only question was whether there had been any deeper contact with the KGB. And actually, from virtually the start of their conversation, Nechiporenko realized that any such operational connection was clearly out of the question—Oswald was in no way suitable agent material.

Nechiporenko had seen Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., among his documents, but he asked Oswald anyway whether he had appealed to the Washington embassy for help. Oswald had to admit that he had and that it had turned him down, then launched into a cockamamie story about his fear that the FBI would arrest him for having written that letter. That was why, he told Nechiporenko, he had decided to come to Mexico City, because the FBI wouldn’t be able to seize him here. He added, as an afterthought, that he also wanted to visit Cuba on his way back to the USSR.

Nechiporenko recalled an earlier drop-in at the consulate, an American who claimed to be in communication with Premier Khrushchev and suddenly said, “Just a minute…Khrushchev is speaking to me again.” The more the colonel saw of Oswald, the less he wanted to talk to him. He silently cursed his friend Kostikov for having offloaded Oswald on him. He decided to put an end to the interview. He explained to Lee that all matters concerning travel to the USSR had to be handled by the Soviet embassy in the country where the applicant resided. They could make a minor exception in Oswald’s case by allowing him to file the necessary application in Mexico City, but Moscow’s response would be sent to him at his permanent address in the United States. It would take, at the least, Nechiporenko told him, four months.

Oswald snapped. He leaned forward and practically shouted in Nechiporenko’s face, “This won’t do for me! This is not my case! For me it’s all going to end in tragedy!”

The colonel shrugged and stood up. He noticed that Oswald’s hands were shaking as he put his documents back into his jacket. Nechiporenko led him through the reception area out into the grounds and saw him off at the gate. The visit had lasted nearly an hour. Over a beer in a nearby cantina that evening, Kostikov wondered out loud if the young American were “schizoid.”

“I don’t think so,” Nechiporenko said, “but there’s no doubt he’s neurotic. That’s for sure.”
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Oswald returned to the Cuban consulate with four photographs after the two o’clock closing time, but somehow managed to get in to see Señora Duran.
*
Duran typed Oswald’s visa application for him in four copies, fastened a photograph to each copy, and had Oswald sign each one. He told her again he needed the visa urgently. She again called Azcue, who again explained that he could do nothing without the proper visa from the Soviet Union. Oswald told them he had succeeded in getting a Russian visa, but when Duran asked to see it, Oswald, of course, had nothing to show Duran. Yet, remarkably, Oswald kept insisting that he had a Russian visa, so Duran called the Russian embassy and Nechiporenko told her that Oswald did not, that Oswald was told it would take around four months.
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Azcue proceeded to tell Oswald that he simply would not give him the visa he was demanding, and Oswald, at this point, was at his wit’s end. In a rage of frustration, he became abusive. He contemptuously referred to the Cubans as “bureaucrats.” Azcue, who had not liked Oswald from the beginning, finding him “never friendly, persistent, not pleasant,” was provoked and threw Oswald out, perhaps “somewhat violently or emotionally,” as he later admitted to the HSCA. Oswald, mumbling to himself, slammed the door behind as he left.
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*

Kostikov and Nechiporenko had naturally assumed that they had seen the last of the strange American. They had no idea of how tenacious he was. The Soviet embassy was closed on the weekends, but all three of the consuls turned up there on Saturday morning, September 28, for a serious volleyball match between two groups working at the embassy, mostly KGB members on one side and GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) on the other side. The KGB side was called “the diplomats,” because of their cover jobs. The embassy teams did well in Mexico City’s annual volleyball tournament, and were very competitive with college and university teams of men ten years their junior despite the fact that the latter were more used to the area’s heat and altitude—7,415 above sea level. The Soviet sportsmen were dangerous opponents.

Pavel Yatskov was the first to show up. Though considerably older than Kostikov and Nechiporenko, he kept himself extremely fit and played both tennis and volleyball like a professional. While he was getting ready for the game, which would start about ten, the gate sentry came to tell him that someone at the gate—not Mexican by appearance—wanted to speak to the consul. The sentry had refused him entrance, since the embassy was officially closed. Yatskov told the sentry to bring the man to the office.

A young man dressed in a gray suit was brought to him. Yatskov, who had not met Oswald the day before, could see that he was pale and extremely agitated. Without waiting for questions, Oswald launched into his story in English, which was difficult for Yatskov, whose English was limited, to follow. Nevertheless, he understood Lee was American, a Communist, a pro-Cuban, and that he was being persecuted and feared for his life. His hands trembled as he spoke. Yatskov was considerably relieved when Valeriy Kostikov walked in.

Kostikov briefly outlined for Yatskov what he knew of Oswald from the interview of the day before, and Oswald began telling his story all over again to Kostikov. Eventually, Yatskov broke in and suggested that, since Oswald had lived and worked in the Soviet Union, he could probably explain himself in the language. Oswald complied and continued his story in his ragged Russian for the rest of the interview.

In Oswald’s trembling state, he proceeded to betray, perhaps unwittingly, what he really was up to, and it had nothing to do with going to Russia,
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the whole purpose of why Oswald was supposedly at the Russian consulate. He told them he wanted to help the Cuban people “build a new life.”

Oswald, already nervous and agitated, suddenly became hysterical when he started to tell of his persecution by the FBI. He sobbed, “I am afraid…they’ll kill me.” He was, he said, even being followed here in Mexico. Suddenly, he stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a revolver. “See, this is what I must now carry to protect my life.” He put the gun on the desk between himself and Kostikov. Yatskov went pale. Kostikov was dumbfounded.

“Here,” Yatskov said to Kostikov, “give me that piece.”

Kostikov handed the pistol, a Smith & Wesson revolver, to Yatskov, who broke it open, shook the bullets into his hand, and put them into his desk drawer. He handed the gun back to Kostikov, who put it back on the desk.

Oswald went on sobbing for a while and Yatskov, to calm Oswald down, poured him a glass of water. Oswald took a sip and put it on the table in front of him. At that moment, Nechiporenko, thinking he was late for the volleyball game—it was already after ten—burst into the room with his athletic bag, but stopped in his tracks when he saw who his colleagues’ guest was. Oswald barely took notice of him. Nechiporenko saw that his eyes were reddened from crying, and that Oswald was even more disturbed than he had been the day before. Nechiporenko backed out of the room, went to the courtyard, and warned the sentry not to let anyone else in. If any of the other volleyball players asked the sentry where they were, he was to tell them that they were occupied in the consulate and the others should start without them. He then went back into the consulate office next to the one where Oswald was still talking with Yatskov and Kostikov. The door was ajar, and Nechiporenko listened to the conversation.

Yatskov offered Oswald application forms for a visa and explained the rules once again—the application had to be sent to the USSR, and if the visa were granted, it would be at least four months. Nevertheless, they would, if he wished, forward his application to Moscow. Oswald tried another tack. He wanted them to tell the Cubans to give him a visa. That, they explained, was simply not possible. Notwithstanding his ardent desire to “help the Cubans build a new life,” Cuba was a sovereign nation that issued its own visas according to its own rules. The Soviet consulate had no influence over the Cubans in that regard.

Yatskov stood up to signal that the interview was over. Oswald, who by now had gone from a state of agitation to one of frustration and disappointment, stood, grabbed the gun, and stuck it somewhere under his jacket. Remarkably, Yatskov retrieved the bullets from his desk drawer and handed them to Oswald, who put them in the pocket of his jacket. Kostikov took him to the door and followed him to the gate. Oswald, as though aware of the possibility that visitors to the Soviet embassy were photographed by nearby CIA cameras, turned up the collar of his jacket to conceal his face and left on foot.
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*

Norman Mailer writes, “It is painful to think of Oswald walking down the street, his documents in his ditty bag. All his striving had gone into collecting those documents, yet no one had been stirred by his deeds.”
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Nechiporenko later wrote that after Oswald left them that Saturday morning, “The three of us remained in the consulate and exchanged our impressions about this strange visitor…We decided we could not take Oswald seriously,…that his mental state was unstable, or that, at the very least, he suffered from a very serious nervous disorder.” But they nonetheless decided to report their two-day experience with Oswald in a coded cable (Special Communication 550) to KGB headquarters in Moscow dated October 3, 1963. Though Oswald had not completed an application for a Russian visa, the cable nevertheless mentioned Oswald’s request for reentry into Russia. A letter dated October 25 from KGB Deputy Chairman S. Bannikov to Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs V. V. Kuznetsov said, “It is our opinion it is inadvisable to permit Oswald to return to the Soviet Union.”
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O
swald’s attempt to enter his paradise of Castro’s Cuba had come, finally and irrevocably, to an end. In spite of his loutish behavior at the Cuban consulate, Señora Duran did forward his application for a Cuban visa to Havana, but the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied on October 15—long after Oswald had left Mexico City—that the visa could be issued only after Oswald had obtained a visa valid for travel to the Soviet Union.
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Oswald knew that his trip had been a complete failure and that it was unlikely he would be able to contrive any other means of getting to Cuba.
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Once again he had been thwarted by a government, only this time it was Cuba, the one on which he had fastened his dreams.

Lee, who, from his days as a teenager in New York City, liked to travel and see new places, lingered for several more days in Mexico City, a sprawling metropolis of five million people in 1963. Since he was alone, what he did there will never be known for sure.
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*

He did not spend much time at his hotel. The maid, Matilde Garnica, recalled that Oswald was usually gone by the time she arrived at nine in the morning—she only saw him twice—and a night watchman, Pedro Rodriguez Ledesma, said Oswald usually returned at or after midnight. He never appeared to have been drinking, was never accompanied by anyone, and did not use the only telephone at the hotel, which was located at the reception desk.
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He ate several times at a small restaurant immediately adjacent to the hotel, usually in the early afternoon. He ordered by pointing to items on the menu, would take the soup of the day, and rice with either meat or eggs, but refused dessert and coffee, possibly because he thought they might cost extra. The owner, Dolores Ramirez de Barreiro, guessed that he didn’t understand that they were included in the price, but no one spoke enough English to explain that to him. He took no soft drinks either, which was unusual in that class of restaurant, and she estimated he spent five to six pesos (forty to forty-eight cents) for his meals.
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Oswald was never seen with anyone else at the hotel or the restaurant.
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And one hotel guest who did sit at Oswald’s table once because there were no other places, Gabriel Contreras Uvina, did not exchange a single word with him. Contreras spoke no English.
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Oswald told Marina that he had attended a bullfight in Mexico City.
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One of the city’s two arenas, El Toreo, was closed in September and October of 1963, but on Sunday afternoon (the customary time for bullfights), September 29, 1963, Oswald could have seen a
cartel de novilladas
(literally meaning “baitings of young bulls”), training sessions for young toreadors that do not quite amount to bullfighting, and hence are much less expensive to watch (general admission of two pesos—sixteen cents), at the other arena, Plaza de México, believed to be the world’s largest bullfight arena with a seating capacity of fifty thousand.
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