Oswald's Tale (18 page)

That summer, Oswald made improvements in his apartment. Small ones, bit by bit. For example, he got a cheap case for his records and he bought a turntable.

When he learned that Pavel knew a lot about shortwave radios, he asked if Pavel could make him one. With local radios, you only received Soviet news. Pavel told him he could put together such an apparatus, but it wouldn’t look nice—all of its parts would be exposed—so Oswald then laid out his money and bought himself a shortwave radio that looked as pretty as a lady’s purse. It had only two frequencies, high and medium, but on MF, 257 meters, the Voice of America was transmitted. Since it was all in English, they didn’t even bother to jam it.

People talked about Oswald as if he might be a spy, but Pavel remembers Lee Oswald coming to him with a simple Soviet camera and he wasn’t able to put film into it. Pavel had to show him how. Once, Oswald bought a radio set and tried to insert its batteries, but even in trying to do that much, he ripped a few wires loose. To take another example, Oswald liked to listen to the Voice of America, but he didn’t know how to make adjustments for it on his radio set so it came in clearer. Pavel, using a penknife, had to play with one part and move it a little in order for Lee to be able to listen. Pavel assumed that if Oswald were James Bond, he would have arrived in the Soviet Union able to take care of such small details.

F
ROM
KGB C
HRONOLOGY

From September 4 to September 9 he saw five movies, one of them twice, and all but one were war movies. He had bought a single-barrel shotgun in August, and joined a hunting club organized by Horizon. But it was not until September 10, filled by now, one may assume, with images of himself as a participant in war movies, that he finally went out with a hunting club.

By now, Stepan had given his team of observers a code name for Oswald. It was Likhoi. That sounded like Lee Harvey, but the word meant valiant, or dashing. It was KGB humor. Likhoi never seemed to do anything but go to work, walk around, and shop.

F
ROM
KGB O
BSERVATION
F
ROM
13:00
TILL
15:20
ON
S
EPTEMBER
10, 1960

At 14:30 Likhoi left work and walked quickly home.

At 14:55 he left home carrying hunting rifle in cover, and grocery bag partly filled, and came back to entrance of radio factory.

There Likhoi came to group of 7 men, some of them also having rifles, and started talking with them.

After about 15 minutes, Likhoi and other men got into parked car no. BO 18–89 and at 15:20 left city via Storozhevskaya St. and Dolginovsky Trakt.

Upon agreement with head of department, surveillance of Likhoi is canceled at this point until September 17, 1960.

Leonid Stepanovich Tzagiko, a lathe operator all his life, became interested in hunting around 1955. Each year, after August 15, they could go out for fowl, then in September, ducks, partridge, waterfowl. By October, they started looking for fox. Wolves you could hunt all year round, but wild boar only with a special license, since such game was usually reserved for high Communist Party members.

At that time, maybe there were fifty people in his hunting club. There was a chairman, who collected dues and obtained licenses for elk and, on occasion, even wild boar, although you had to pay a lot for that, about 150 rubles.

In early 1960, when Lee Oswald came to work at the experimental shop, Tzagiko met him on the first day. It was almost a celebration. Everybody came up to the American immediately to get to know him. Then, at breaks, Oswald would often sit with his feet on a table, and once one of them said, “Why are you sitting like that?” and he said, “I am on strike. I am striking.” He was just joking. They decided that Americans put their feet up on a table. That’s what they do.

Now, at Horizon, they had what they called sections—people played basketball, soccer, volleyball, and on Sundays, some would go on hunting trips. It wasn’t that important whether they’d kill; it was to get out into nature. So when Oswald asked one of the metalworkers if they would take him along, he said, “Of course.” They didn’t bring much to eat and didn’t carry any vodka or brandy, because they were reasonably serious about coming back with something. They walked a lot on foot, passed through collective farms, fields, and villages, sparsely forested areas.

They were hunting for rabbit that day. There was no snow as yet, so they had to flush the rabbits with their feet. Walking single file, Oswald was next to last, Tzagiko was last, and Oswald was holding his gun crooked in his arm. Then, a rabbit practically jumped out from under his foot, and he went, “Aooaoh!” and shot into the air. Tzagiko said, “God, Oswald, you’re going to kill me with that gun!” And Oswald said, “Your rabbit scared me.” Later, he had another try, and missed again.

The fact that he was a bad shot and could not fix his radio tended to alert Igor and Stepan. How was it that a former Marine with a Sharpshooter rating back in his U.S. Marine Corps—yes, KGB had information that he was not a bad shot—could miss his targets so?

Certainly, when the Organs were informed that Oswald had bought a gun for hunting, and so would have opportunities to travel as part of a hunting party to an area where there were also military objects, they were on guard. Hunters were prohibited from walking into forbidden areas in specified regions; they weren’t even allowed to approach certain fences. If Oswald was an agent, he might have special equipment and use it to record nuclear activities or military broadcasts—with the right technology, you could collect a lot of information.

Reports came in, but were puzzling. He had been such a bad shot. If they had had any inkling that he would later be suspected of carrying out a crime of high magnitude—of highest magnitude!—they would have studied his marksmanship in a more detailed manner. As it was, however, what with everything else involving him, they made no special attempt to find out whether he was an excellent shot trying to create the impression he was a bad shot or had been naturally incompetent that day.

August–September

As my Russian improves, I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of society I live in. Mass gymnastics, compulsory after-work meet ing, usually political information meeting. Compulsory attendance at lectures, and the sending of the entire shop collective (except me) to pick potatoes on Sunday in a state collective farm. “A patriotic duty” to bring in the harvest. The opinions of the workers (unvoiced) is that it’s a great pain in the neck. They don’t seem to be especially enthusiastic about any of the “collective” duties, a natural feeling . . .

October

The coming of fall, my dread of a new Russian winter, mellowed in splendid golds and reds of fall in Byelorussia. Plums, peaches, apricots and cherries abound for these last fall weeks. I have a healthy brown color and am stuffed with fresh fruit, at other times of the year unob tainable.

October 18

My twenty-first birthday sees Tanya, Pavel, Ella and a small party at my place. Ella [is] a very attractive Russian Jew I’ve been going walking with lately. [She] works at the radio factory also. Tanya and Ella are jealous of each other. It brings a warm feeling to me. Both are at my place for the first time. Ella and Pavel both give ashtrays (I don’t smoke). We have a laugh.

9

Ella and Lee

After Ella had known him for a half year, he actually invited her to his apartment, and Pavel was there with a girl named Tanya from Intourist. Then a girl named Inna Tachina arrived. Pavel had disappeared for a short period of time, and when he came back, this girl was with him. And he said, “Okay, Lee, dance! Look who I’ve brought for you. Inna!”

Ella was shocked. At her factory all these months, Lee had never dated anyone but herself. So, she didn’t know he was seeing other women. She assumed he did—she understood that—but then, by the manner in which Inna’s arrival was announced, it was clear that Lee dated her in another way. That hurt Ella. By October, Lee was already hinting that they were going to have a serious relationship, but if it was so serious, what was he doing with this girl?

It started a quarrel. Ella was very emotional, very angry, and when she left the party, Lee had to walk out with her. She told him, “Listen, if you wanted to have a nice time with Inna, I was not needed. I would have felt more comfortable staying home.” He said, “Inna was brought by Pavel. You saw I was with you all evening, and now I’m leaving Inna and Pavel behind.” He persuaded her. He said, “Look, I left all my guests. I’m walking you to work at the plant.” She was on night shift then and had come to his party before going to her job. “That ought to prove you are a most special person to me.”

Afterward, Inna was often mentioned by Ella. She would tease him: “So there’s another woman in your life?” and he would answer, “Don’t you understand that you are my true love? She’s just passion.” Ella’s attitude was, “Well, if I don’t want to, this young man still needs some kind of physiology. If he gets it elsewhere, that’s normal.” She certainly had never loved anyone so much as to be possessive about everything they did, including their physical relationship. That was not as important as real love to her.

On the other hand, it had been Pavel who had brought over Inna Tachina, and Ella didn’t really like Pavel. There had been a little trouble at Horizon, which left Pavel with a bad reputation. He had been in a tuning process in another part of their factory along with several girls doing an equal job. Occasionally, workers who tuned radios would come across one that was very difficult to adjust; it didn’t receive well and sometimes was dead. Such an inert radio was called a “coffin,” and it took a good deal of time to get one to sound better. When your salary and your bonus depended on how many radios you could tune in a day, substandard sets pulled your level down. One evening, a girl working at Pavel’s station realized that she had left a set on her table at quitting time that was almost ready, yet now it was dead. And all the while Pavel kept delivering a good number of well-adjusted radios. So they suspected that Pavel, when he came to work on the day shift, might exchange his device, a complete coffin, for hers. He wouldn’t do it to another man, these girls felt, because men are more precise. A man would remember what he had tuned yesterday. But girls forget. Their minds were not really on such a subject. So it was easier to fool girls, Ella felt.

This got to be a bad story. There was a big meeting, and a group came to check Pavel’s behavior. His father, the General, was even present, and with tears in his eyes said at this meeting, “Please, forgive him. Please, people, don’t spoil his biography. He will never do it again.”

So, of course, after this, Ella’s estimate of Pavel was not high. If he had had a large family and had been really poor, she could understand—you could justify such an act for your children; but Pavel was robbing poor girls who made less than him. So he was not, in her opinion, a decent man, and now he had come with Inna, and said, “It’s a girl for you, Lee.” Ella also had some feeling that maybe Pavel didn’t approve of her because she was Jewish. She had been told that in his private circle, among military people in Russia, there was more anti-Semitism than among civilian people.

November finds the approach of winter now. A growing loneliness over takes me. In spite of my conquest of Inna Tachina,
¹
a girl from Riga, studying at the Music Conservatory in Minsk. After an affair which lasts a few weeks, we part.

EXTRA PAGE
(not included in formal diary)

Inna Tachina . . . I met her in 1960 at the Zigers’, her family (who sent her to Minsk) apparently well off. Inna likes fancy clothes, well-made shoes and underthings. In October 1960 we begin to get very close cul minating in intercourse on October 21. She was a virgin and very interesting. We met in such fashion on 4 or 5 occasions ending November 4, 1960. Upon completion of her last year at Minsk Conservatory she left Minsk for Riga.

10

Zdradstvy

Sometime that fall, Albina realized that a problem had developed for the Zigers. They suddenly became very suspicious of everybody. They even acted as if somebody were reporting on them. Here is how it began. They had a cousin in Vilnius, in Lithuania, who wanted to visit them in Byelorussia, but Ziger’s cousin didn’t have permission to go to Minsk. So the Zigers took their car, a Moskvich, and drove to Vilnius in order to bring their cousin back to Minsk. But on this return trip, some highway police demanded their documents, and their cousin did not have the necessary papers. So, they lost a day at a provincial police office taking care of that. Not to mention how much worse it could have been. It left the Zigers very angry. How did these police know to stop them? Somebody among their friends had probably told somebody else that they were going to Vilnius to get their cousin. Albina noticed that they stopped inviting Ernst to their place, and after a while stopped inviting a good many other people, too. Ernst was not even surprised at what had happened, but then, he was not much interested in the Zigers. To be introduced to Alik had been his goal, and that had certainly been achieved, Albina could see, exactly because she was not seeing much of either of them now.

Their first need in this Oswald case, Igor remarked, was, of course, to find people who knew English. “While Oswald had some increasing capacity in Russian, we had to connect him to people who could exchange intimate conversations with him in English. After all, how can you develop a person under suspicion without knowing his language? So people were taken on who could speak to Oswald in his native tongue.”

There had been a need to find a person who knew English well enough to go out with Oswald socially, be friends with him, and have insight into some of his thoughts. “And we also were ready to look for people at our Minsk Institute of Foreign Languages.” So, those students who were studying English attracted Service attention. “You would have to assume,” said Igor, “that Foreign Institute girls were in a position to inform us how Oswald was behaving. Counterintelligence monitored this entire process and was kept informed.” Titovets, of course, had helped Lee make and widen his contacts with women there and had also recorded tapes while the two men were alone, in order, as he told Oswald, to be able to study his accent in English and so improve his own colloquial abilities.

T
RANSCRIPT FROM TELEVISION PROGRAM:

Frontline,
“Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” broadcast on PBS stations, November 1993

Igor would not exclude the possibility that Oswald’s English-speaking tapes had been gone over carefully to determine whether his Southern accent was bona fide; his Russian-speaking tapes were also studied to explore any possibility that he was concealing a better knowledge of their language than he pretended to have.

Stepan added: “It’s important that information from a source can be double-checked. We always tried to combine surveillance with reports from human sources, plus what we could learn from other technical possibilities. That way, trust in our human sources can be built. However,” he went on, “to create an artificial situation, to set up an experiment to determine whether a person gives ground for suspicion, is risky. The person might show interest by accident or out of curiosity, and that would still pique Counterintelligence’s concerns. Thereby, we could lead ourselves astray.” Stepan considered it fortunate that he had an opportunity to study Oswald in a natural manner. “If, for example, it had become known to us that Likhoi was taking steps to meet a scientist in a certain field, then we might have arranged such a meeting.” But Oswald made no such efforts. So, they studied the incidents that arose naturally, monitored them thoroughly, and generally found little that was suspicious. He never made attempts to make special acquaintances or to penetrate some secret military object; he didn’t exhibit such desires. Not yet, at any rate.

November 15

In November I make the acquaintance of four girls rooming in the Foreign Languages dormitory in Room 212. Nell is very interesting, so are Tomka, Tomis, and Alla. I usually go to the Institute dormitory with a friend of mine who speaks English very well. Erich Titovets is in the fourth year at the Medical Institute. Very bright fellow. At the dormitory, we six sit and talk for hours in English.

As Pavel saw it, maybe some girls at Foreign Languages Institute were more available, sexually speaking. Their psychology was different. They dealt with other languages, had to think a little in a different culture, and so wanted to explore more. They could see foreign films. In general, these woman were more relaxed—they smoked, they drank, they read literature. Erich Maria Remarque was very popular, and Hemingway wrote about women being free before marriage in
The Sun Also Rises.
So maybe they were trying to take on such an image. Some of them.

Inna Pasenko, not to be confused with Oswald’s friend Inna Tachina, was in her first year at Foreign Languages Institute, and she was mad about English. Anytime she heard somebody speaking, she was happy just to stand and listen. (She was also mad about swimming and was, at that time, champion of Byelorussian swimming in freestyle and butterfly.)

On a given Saturday, she went with her friend Galya to the Philharmonic Society, and during the first concert break, they heard two men conversing in English. One of them was dark-haired and dressed in a gray jacket, the other was in a dark suit, the first, Oswald, as she learned later, and the second, Erich Titovets. Inna went to Titovets and said, “Excuse me—am I right or wrong: You, sir, are just Russian speaking English, and you are a real Englishman or—I don’t know—American?” And Erich said, “We are both British,” and Oswald said, “No, no, no, don’t believe him.” It was obvious he didn’t want to be mixed up in this “we.” He had his own identity. Inna said, “Don’t tell me lies,” and Erich said, “No, no, we are both”—but she could hear his accent, because phonetics was her favorite subject. She even did a Ph.D. in English Phonetics later.

They all started speaking, and Inna said, “Let’s meet after this concert,” which they did, and walked from Philharmonic to Victory Square, near the Foreign Languages Institute. Her house was just five minutes’ walk away. She gave her telephone number, and Erich said, “Certainly we will phone you and we will come and see you.” And she and Galya were excited at the fact that they had spoken in English for half an hour. Galya roomed at her Institute dormitory, but Inna lived in her father’s apartment, where she and her mother and her entire family still dwell at present.

Next day, Sunday, Erich phoned and asked if they could come around, and Inna arranged for Galya to be there as well. She had one difficulty, however. Inna’s father was a high Party figure, and a Colonel. A very patriotic man. He would not have put up with anyone from abroad being in his house. Even listening to a radio caused suspicion. But her mother was at home, not her father, so Erich and Lee came over that afternoon, and Galya joined them.

On introduction, Lee happened to say
zdradstvy
to Inna’s mother instead of
zdradstvuytye
and her mother took Inna into her kitchen and said, “Where do you find such rude boys, who don’t even know how to address grown-ups?” and Inna said, “Mother, he’s not a Russian; he’s an American.” Her mother became pale, then said, “Take him away because Father will be home soon.” But Inna said, “Mama, no, that will not do. We will stay on the first floor. We will not make noise. We will look through our dictionary and listen to some music.” And her mother said, “All right, but only for a little while before Father comes home.”

And so they did listen to music and had tea and spoke a good deal. She remembers that she asked how he had come here and he said that he had chosen Minsk because it was a nice city. At first he wanted to go to Leningrad but then decided otherwise. “It’s quieter here, the climate is better. I wanted Minsk.” When they asked where his apartment was located, he said it was also off Victory Square, and added, “Why don’t you come to see my apartment? I’ve got a lot of English books.” Galya and Inna said, Yes, of course. And managed to get their visitors to leave before Inna’s father came back.

Lee had wanted Inna to visit alone, but her upbringing was such that she could not go to anyone’s place in that manner. She said, “I’ll bring Galya,” and he agreed, and so they went a few days later.

She remembers they had walked over before dark, and she still recalls her excitement. She had thought, “Here I am coming to a place that will be full of English books”—indeed, that was her main reason for seeing him, since he didn’t produce any other sort of vital impression on her. She was expecting to find Hemingway and Faulkner in his bookcase, or something forbidden, some knowledge that wasn’t easily obtainable, but she remembers so well that when he opened the door and they entered, there was just a small kitchen plus a small room to their left, and in a corner of this second room was a little—you couldn’t call it a bookcase, but a few planks of wood. Its lowest level had some newspapers, the next shelf was empty, and the top level held Karl Marx and Lenin, both in English. That was all. His bed almost filled the room, a military bed of iron covered with a gray blanket that had white stripes. Since the girls were just standing there, they finally sat down on his bed, and he made tea. He did have good tea, that she remembers, and he put it on a little stool in front of his bed.

After a while, she asked, pointing to Marx and Lenin, “Is this what you read?” and he said, “I find it really interesting, don’t you?” She said, “We studied all this in Russian—why should we read it in English?” and he said, “Well, I haven’t read it before, and I find it very interesting.”

He was neat. She recalls there was no mess scattered around. He was wearing gray slacks and a blue tie and a striped shirt, and he was so pleased with the apartment, said he paid only 7 rubles for it. She, of course, was less impressed, because her family lived in a large, fine apartment, with three rooms for four people.

All the same, their visit did impress her. For the first time in her life she had seen a real American, and Inna was fascinated with all these variations in accent between American English and British English. This American, in turn, was paying a lot of attention to Inna. Even Galya said as much later. Inna, however, had no real interest in the man. She was fascinated but not attracted, and when he complained that he was lonely and didn’t have anything to do, Inna said, “Let’s go to my place once again,” but he replied, “Your father’s too strict.” She remembers him adding, “No, no more at your house.” Then he said to Galya, “I’d like to visit your Foreign Languages Institute.” That pleased Inna, because she would now have more practice in English.