The Kennedy Half-Century (34 page)

The younger Powers remembers a story his father told about his time in captivity. “There was some guy dressed in a Russian uniform that looked American and spoke with an American accent,” he says. “He would have been considered an American for all intents and purposes if he had been in the States. But he was dumber—my dad would have said ‘dumber than a doorknob’—asking the wrong questions, and just didn’t know what to ask.” Powers Sr. came to believe that person was Lee Oswald. When Captain Powers returned home—he regained his freedom in a spy swap in February 1962—he went to the family farm in Pound, Virginia. While watching television one day in 1962 or 1963, prior to JFK’s assassination, Powers saw a news story on Oswald. “My dad got very agitated and said, ‘I’ve got to tell someone about him.’ That’s what I’ve heard from my Aunt Joanne.”
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Powers does not know if his father followed through.
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The Gary Powers saga leads to a logical question: Did Oswald cooperate with, or work for, the Soviet authorities during his time in the USSR? According to Nosenko, the answer is no. “The KGB didn’t want Oswald from day one,” he insisted during a 1992 interview. And yet Soviet officials were willing to provide Oswald with an identity card, a rent-free apartment, and a job at a radio and television factory in Minsk. He was living better than most Soviet citizens, who were paid low salaries and forced to live in ramshackle housing. Oswald’s extra income also made him a more attractive marriage prospect, and in April 1961, he wed a young pharmacology student named Marina Prusakova. The couple had met at a trade union dance held at the Palace of Culture in Minsk. Oswald’s accent convinced Marina that he was from one of the Baltic states.
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When the former Marine fell ill, she visited him in the hospital. They married less than two months after they met. Marina’s uncle (also her guardian) was a high-ranking member of the Communist Party and a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.

On the surface, Oswald seemed to have a good life in the USSR—a beautiful wife, a decent job, and privileges above the average. In reality, ever the malcontent, Oswald was chafing under the Soviet system. In the late summer of 1961, he made the following entry in his diary:

As my Russian improves I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of a society I live in. Mass gymnastics, compulsory after-work meeting, usually political information meeting. Compulsory attendance at lectures and the sending of the entire shop collective (except me) to pick potatoes on a Sunday, at a state collective farm: A “patriotic duty” to bring in the harvest. The opinions of the workers (unvoiced) are that it’s a great pain in the neck … [Misspellings corrected here].

Convinced that the Soviets had perverted the teachings of Karl Marx, Oswald began searching for a way to get back to the United States, the nation he had loudly denounced a couple of years earlier. He contacted the U.S. embassy in Moscow and explained that his decision to defect had been a big mistake. He also encouraged Marina to apply for a visa. Lee and Marina’s applications were approved in a little over a year by both American and Soviet officials. The State Department helpfully provided him with a loan to cover his travel expenses.
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In June 1962, the family arrived in the United States.
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Thus, an ex-Marine defector—in those days, they were openly referred to as traitors—who might have provided the Soviets with vital information about U.S. military assets received relatively easy clearance back into the United States, with financial help from the taxpayers. Not surprisingly, some people find this suspicious and wonder whether Oswald was sent back to the United States for a reason—by either superpower. The CIA says that it did not keep track of Oswald while he was in the USSR because its spies were busy working other cases. But the agency admits that it did “read the FBI reports on him” and “watched as the State Department did its job of screening him for repatriation.”
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It is also possible that Oswald was part of a top secret “fake defector” program. The CIA has never admitted that such a program existed, but congressional documents show that one of Langley’s operatives who went by the pseudonym “Thomas Casasin” had at one time “run an agent into the USSR.”
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“Casasin” acknowledged an awareness of Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and his job at a radio factory in Minsk, but he said no more than that. We may never know whether the agency ever approached Oswald, in or out of Russia, but this little-known anecdote adds a modicum of credibility to the idea that the CIA may have had designs on Oswald at some point before, during, or after his defection.
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The FBI began tracking Oswald ten days after his defection “to evaluate him as a security risk in the event [that] he returned” to the United States. When the Oswalds arrived in Texas, the bureau decided to interview Lee to find out if he had ever been approached by the KGB. Oswald said no, but also refused to take a lie detector test. Apparently satisfied despite the lack of full
cooperation from Oswald, the FBI put the Oswald case on the back burner. The CIA claims that it never debriefed the former Marine, even though he had once bragged about sharing military secrets with the KGB.
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Only a handful of Americans were recorded as defecting to the Soviet Union during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was an extraordinarily rare event, and the overall lack of urgent interest in Oswald’s case by the FBI and especially the CIA is remarkable, assuming it is true.

Law enforcement agencies and assassination researchers have focused on Oswald’s connections since he was arrested in 1963. There is no absolute proof of any conspiratorial association—whether with the CIA, FBI, Mafia, or Communists—but there are hints that Oswald could potentially have been in league with one or more groups.

Since the 1970s the public has known of the Kennedy administration’s energetic, highly classified efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro. The Marxist dictator of Cuba had seized power from a corrupt despot, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959. During the Batista years, powerful crime figures from the United States turned Cuba into the Las Vegas of the Caribbean. They set up casinos and brothels, bribed Cuban officials, and used the country as an entrepôt for the narcotics trade. Most Cubans were disgusted with Batista’s crime and vice, and many rejoiced when Castro came to power. Others fled to the United States, especially south Florida, and immediately began plotting to overthrow the new left-wing dictator, who declared his regime socialist and chose to associate it with the Soviet Union.

At the height of the Cold War, most Americans were instinctively anti-Castro, recognizing the dangers of a Communist state just ninety miles from America’s southernmost shore. The military and CIA had begun extensive planning to oust Castro during the Eisenhower administration, and one of President Kennedy’s first major decisions was to go forward with the U.S.-backed invasion of Cuban exiles in April 1961. After the Bay of Pigs, a chastened JFK and his brother Robert became obsessed with deposing Castro. RFK created a major program of subterfuge and disruption known as Operation Mongoose to bring about Castro’s downfall, and the Kennedys authorized the CIA to do whatever was necessary to engineer a coup d’état in Cuba. This led to serious assassination efforts but also cartoonish schemes such as exploding cigars since Castro was addicted to the tobacco leaf. The CIA even worked with Mafia chieftains to arrange for Castro’s demise; political bedfellows were rarely stranger, but La Cosa Nostra (another name for the Mafia)
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had lost many millions of dollars when Batista fell. The Cuban expatriates in south Florida were willing partners, too.
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Meanwhile, despite his disillusionment with the Soviet Union and return to the United States, Oswald made contact with the local Russian diaspora in Fort Worth, Texas. Oswald had personal reasons for doing so. Marina was homesick and did not speak much English, and Lee was now used to Slavic people and their ways. Soon Oswald became friends with a peripatetic baron named George de Mohrenschildt, whose life sounds like something out of a James Bond novel. His father, a wealthy Russian nobleman, managed to escape from a Soviet prison where he was sent after denouncing the Bolshevik Revolution. He then moved his family from Minsk to a posh estate in Poland, where George spent his youth. While still in his twenties, George left Europe to tour the United States and managed to become friendly with some of America’s East Coast elites, including a family named Bouvier, whose daughter Jacqueline would one day become First Lady, and another family named Bush. George H. W. Bush’s nephew roomed with de Mohrenschildt at Phillips Academy.
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In the years that followed, de Mohrenschildt became involved in intelligence operations. During World War II he gathered information on pro-German activity in the United States for the French government; there are allegations that he was spying for the Nazis at the same time, but these have never been proven. In 1942 he shared a house with a senior naval officer and a British intelligence agent in Washington and offered his services to the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA), which turned him down because of the double-agent rumor. During the 1950s, de Mohrenschildt worked for the International Cooperation Administration, a CIA-sponsored subsidiary of the Agency for International Development. In the early 1960s, while touring Central America and the Caribbean, he was photographed with the American ambassador to Costa Rica. In addition, de Mohrenschildt and his wife visited Guatemala, which was a strategic launching site for CIA-backed Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs.

Some think the CIA, which at times almost certainly had some sort of relationship with de Mohrenschildt, used him to make contact with Oswald. The baron himself, however, denied the connection, insisting that no “government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important.”
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The full truth is especially elusive, but de Mohrenschildt’s acquaintance with Lee Oswald is curious. For someone dismissed as an obvious loser of little consequence, Oswald kept popping up in the company of well-connected individuals such as de Mohrenschildt.
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De Mohrenschildt introduced Oswald to Michael and Ruth Paine, two political leftists who were out of place in Texas’s conservative milieu. Although separated, the Paines took an interest in Marina and Lee and began inviting them to social functions.
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Michael Paine worked as an engineer for Bell Helicopter,
a job that required a security clearance; his stepfather, Arthur Young, had designed the first Bell helicopter. His estranged wife was a Quaker pacifist who had reached out to Dallas’s Russian community in order to practice her language skills. The Paines were initially enthusiastic about their relationship with the Oswalds. Michael was keen to meet an American defector perhaps because his father was a devoted Trotskyite. Ruth was excited about conversing in Russian with a native speaker.

But the Paines soon realized the Oswalds were a family in crisis. Lee had a hard time keeping a job, and Marina began complaining to Ruth about her husband’s meager salary and low sex drive. Even worse, it became apparent that Oswald mistreated his wife to the point of physical abuse. Ruth felt sorry for Marina and did all she could to help.
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In early 1963 the mercurial Oswald went on a gun-buying spree. Using an alias (A. Hidell), he ordered a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver from a Los Angeles mail order company and a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from another mail order outfit in Chicago. Both guns arrived in March. One sunny afternoon, Oswald asked his wife to take a picture of him with his weapons. Although bemused and a little frightened by the request, Marina agreed and snapped at least three photos that have since become iconic images.
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Oswald is dressed in black, holding the rifle in one hand and two left-wing magazines in the other with the Smith & Wesson hanging from his hip. Over the years, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the photos were faked by someone attempting to frame Oswald. But in the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, assisted by photography experts, verified their legitimacy. By any measure, this is a disturbing picture: a troubled man who had perhaps already decided to promote his ideology, as Mao had argued, with the power that comes from the barrel of a gun.
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The same week that Oswald asked Marina to take the photograph, he learned that he had been fired from his job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, a Dallas cartography company that occasionally did classified work for the U.S. government. Unemployed, unhappily married, and at odds with American society and values, Oswald decided to act in dramatic fashion. On April 10, 1963, he left his apartment shortly after dinner without telling his wife where he was going. When he failed to return at a reasonable hour, Marina went to his room and found a note that contained a list of grim instructions.

“Send the information as to what has happened to me to the [Soviet] Embassy and include newspaper clippings,” the note read. “I believe that the Embassy will come quickly to your assistance on learning everything.” The note also said that she could “throw out” or give away his clothing, but requested that she hang on to his “personal papers.” Oswald had decided to end his life in a blaze of glory: “If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located …
right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge.” Where had he gone? Marina told the Warren Commission that Lee came home that night looking “very pale.” “And he told me not to ask him any questions,” she testified. “He only told me he had shot at General Walker.”
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