Reclaiming History (137 page)

The Churches, a couple in their forties, saw less of Oswald, since they met him only at dinner in the officers’ mess, where they dined at the same table, and Lee missed a number of meals, possibly owing to seasickness. George B. Church Jr. had retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel and was teaching junior high school in Tampa. He thought Lee “rather withdrawn,” and said Lee did not participate in any of the social activities onboard. But he did hear Lee talk of his plan to attend a college in Switzerland. He also heard that Lee was just out of the Marines and had not liked the service. Oswald apparently displayed his bitterness about the hard time his mother had suffered during the Depression of the 1930s, but Church himself had survived the Depression, along with millions of other Americans, an observation that apparently “made no impression” on his fellow passenger. Church indicated he wasn’t too interested in getting to know Oswald.
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Mrs. Church made more of an effort but also found that Lee “did not enter into friendly conversations.” She thought him “peculiar.” Lee evaded naming the Swiss college he meant to attend and had no very clear educational goal in mind—Mrs. Church noted the contrast to Billy Joe, who worked on his French and was exuberant about his course of study and purpose in life. When Billy Joe dropped off at La Rochelle-Pallice, three days before the ship reached its final destination of La Havre, Mrs. Church got Billy Joe’s address so she could send him Christmas cards, but only with some reluctance did Lee give her Marguerite’s address in Fort Worth.
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Lee’s sympathy for the workingman did not appear to extend to stewards—he rebuked Frank Mijares for not mopping the floor of his cabin to his satisfaction and failed to tip him when he left the ship after it berthed at the Cotton Dock in Le Havre on October 8,1959.
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Oswald left Le Havre that day, and after an overnight trip, he entered England at Southampton on the ninth.
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He told British custom officials there that he had seven hundred dollars and that he planned to remain in the UK only one week before going on to school in Switzerland,
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but the next day, October 10, he flew on to Helsinki,
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where he registered at the Torni Hotel, located in the center of the city, the same day. The following day he registered at another Helsinki hotel, the nearby Klaus Kurki,
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where he stayed for five days and four nights.

What flight Oswald took out of London to Helsinki and what happened while he was in Helsinki are among the enduring puzzles of the assassin’s history and fertile ground for conspiracy theorists who are convinced Oswald was a U.S. intelligence agent, and holes in a story can only be explained and filled in by conspiratorial mush. The first problem here was that the only direct flight from London to Helsinki that day, October 10, arrived too late in the evening, at 11:33 p.m., for Oswald to have cleared customs and checked into the Torni by midnight, which we know he did. But unhappily for the conspiracy theorists, this fact was brought to the Warren Commission’s attention by Richard Helms, then deputy director of the CIA, someone whose agency most conspiracy theorists believe was involved in Kennedy’s murder.
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Moreover, the CIA failed to note that there were two indirect flights he could have taken out of London,
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one through Copenhagen, which would have landed him in Helsinki at 5:05 in the afternoon, and the other through Stockholm, which arrived only a half hour later.
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But Oswald’s change of hotels is also curious, since there seems to have been no particular advantage to do so. The fact that the Torni and Klaus Kurki are each quality hotels seemingly beyond the finances of Oswald has also raised suspicions in some.
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More of a problem is that Oswald was issued a visa to the Soviet Union in just two days, which ostensibly seemed unlikely in that era. Oswald’s passport is stamped with an exit visa showing he left London Airport on October 10,
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which is highly unlikely to be wrong, so he probably did arrive in Helsinki that day, a Saturday, but not in time to deplane and get to the Soviet embassy at noon, when it closed for the weekend.
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Thus, his first chance to apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate in Helsinki would have been Monday, October 12, 1959.
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The questionnaire he filled out, probably at a Finnish travel agency, and that was handed in at the Soviet consulate in Helsinki and preserved by the KGB in Belarus, is dated in Oswald’s hand, October 13.
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And his six-day tourist visa was issued by the Consular Section of the Soviet embassy in Helsinki on October 14, just two days after he applied for it.
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Passport stamps show his exit from Finland and entry into the Soviet Union on October 15.
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The problem of how Lee Oswald might have gained an entry visa for the Soviet Union in two days troubled the Warren Commission. J. Lee Rankin asked both the State Department and the CIA for information, and both told the Commission that it normally took five days to a week at the Helsinki embassy or elsewhere to obtain permission for any stay in Russia longer than twenty-four hours.
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Eventually, the HSCA took up the question by reviewing classified information about Gregory Golub, the Soviet consul in Helsinki who issued Oswald’s visa. Golub was suspected of being a KGB official—which was hardly surprising. But quite apart from the fact that if the KGB were facilitating Oswald’s travel to Russia, why would it have taken Oswald even two days—why not only one—to get his visa, the HSCA came up with two communications from the American embassy in Helsinki to the State Department concerning Golub’s handling of visas. The first disclosed that Golub had once told his counterparts at the American embassy during a luncheon conversation that “Moscow had given him the authority to give Americans visas without prior approval from Moscow.” Golub stated that this would make his job much easier, and as long as he was convinced the American was “all right” he could give them a visa in a matter of minutes.
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Here, Oswald being only nineteen, and listing his present job as “student,” Golub probably had no trouble issuing the visa.
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A second dispatch, dated October 9, the day before Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, mentioned a case involving two American businessmen that occurred about a month earlier. The U.S. consul “advised them to go directly to Golub and make their request, which they did. Golub phoned [the U.S. consul] to state that he would give them their visas as soon as they made advance Intourist reservations. When they did this, Golub immediately gave them their visas.”
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In addition to Golub’s practices, Oswald, per a KGB official, also seems to have benefited from the fact that the Helsinki consulate was partial to granting visas to the Soviet Union owing to the “geographical proximity of Finland to the Soviet Union as well as the good relations between Intourist, the Soviet national travel bureau, and the local Finnish travel agencies.”
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In any case, Oswald left Helsinki by train the following day, October 15, crossed the Finnish-Russian border at Vainikkala, and arrived in Moscow on October 16, 1959. He was met at the Leningradsky station by an Intourist representative who took him by car to the Hotel Berlin, where he registered as a student on a “five-day luxury” tour.
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Very soon after his arrival he was introduced to the Intourist guide assigned to him for that period, a young Russian woman named Rimma Shirokova, who would take him sightseeing.
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Lee Oswald’s dream of defecting to the Soviet Union, the plan he seems to have first contemplated two years before,
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was within his grasp, and Rimma was going to play a part in it. He was on the eve of his twentieth birthday.

R
imma Shirokova, slender, blond-haired, and good-looking, was only about two years older than Oswald. A student at Moscow’s Foreign Language Institute, she spoke English, which was just as well, since Lee seemed to speak hardly passable Russian. She was surprised that a client on the “deluxe tour” (which meant that she would guide only him over the next few days—no group activities) looked so unprepossessing. Those who took the deluxe tour were usually rich and looked it. She started by listing all of the things they might do in the next five days and explained that she could get tickets for the theater or the ballet, but he seemed withdrawn and uninterested in anything she had to offer. Nevertheless, they went for a chauffeured drive around Moscow and they saw what Rimma regarded as the most important sights the city had to offer, like the Tretyakov Gallery, the cathedrals, and Red Square, saving the Kremlin, the highlight of the tour, for the afternoon.
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At midday, she dropped him back at the Hotel Berlin, where he lunched by himself, and she came back for him later, but he did not really want to see the Kremlin. They sat outdoors on a bench, where he began to talk a little about himself,
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one of the few times in the detailed record where he seems to have wanted to do so. By contrast, the reports of conversations in which he railed about capitalist exploitation of the workingman are so numerous as to be almost unworthy of mention. On the other hand, this was the first time in his life where he realized that pontificating to someone about the evils of capitalism and virtues of Marxism would be about as pointless as watering one’s lawn in the rain.

Rimma recalls his telling her that he was from Texas, had served in the Marine Corps, hated the loss of American life in war, and spoke about the unjust wars caused by U.S. imperialism. He gave her the distinct impression that he had been in combat, and he told her as well that his mother had remarried and was no longer interested in him. In fact, he said, no one was interested in him in America. Whatever he told her, it worked. She was moved by him and eager to help when he told her that he wanted to remain in the Soviet Union. That seemed natural enough to her—after all, she felt the Soviet Union was the best country on earth—but she was nonetheless surprised. She asked him for his motives and “he said that it was his political views. He said that he was a Communist. He [didn’t] approve of the American way of life.”
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Oswald set out his own recollection of the conversation in what he called his “Historic Diary” under the date of October 16, 1959, the day of his arrival: “I explain to her [Rimma] I wish to appli. for Rus. citizenship. She is flabbergassed but aggrees to help. She checks with her boss, main office Intour; then helps me add. a letter to Sup. Sovit asking for citizenship, mean while boss telephons passport & visa office and notifies them about me.”
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The Historic Diary, Oswald’s handwritten account of his life in Russia, was completed before he left that country. The earlier entries were probably written, according to Marina, some time after the particular event occurred and may have been reconstructed from notes Oswald made at the time. However, in Minsk, it is believed he kept a more contemporaneous record of his experiences.
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The Warren Commission took the diary to be Oswald’s own record of his feelings and impressions, but with future readers in mind, and hence, the Commission relied whenever possible on independent evidence.
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The HSCA found Oswald’s diary to be “generally credible.”
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The “passport & visa office” Oswald mentions in his diary was the Visa and Registration Department (OVIR, hereinafter “Passport Office”) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).
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The MVD was roughly equivalent to the American Justice Department. It was responsible for the enforcement of civil law (though not criminal, like the U.S. Department of Justice) and the administration of prisons and forced-labor camps.
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Rimma’s boss at Intourist was not happy about her commitment to Oswald. “What have you done?” he barked. “He came as a tourist. Let him be a tourist.”
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Unfortunately for Lee, and ultimately for history, the Soviet Union was not particularly interested in defectors from the West who were not top-level scientists or intelligence agents. Their experience with so-called blow-ins had never been too encouraging, as the HSCA would discover from a “Defector Study” carried out by its staff. Of 380 Americans in the USSR between 1958 and 1964 whom the CIA knew of, the HSCA selected 23 whose situations most closely resembled Oswald’s for detailed study. Most of them were disgruntled people, some seriously disturbed, and some had simply chosen a spectacularly inappropriate way to solve personal problems. Many applied for Soviet citizenship, but few were granted it. In most cases the defectors experienced a change of heart and tried to return. The case histories strongly suggest that the Soviet Union gained nothing but trouble from its hospitality.
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Rimma’s boss told her that Oswald would have to request citizenship from the Supreme Soviet, and Oswald mailed such a letter, written with Rimma’s help,
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that same day, October 16:

To the USSR Supreme Soviet, 16th October 1959:

I, Lee Harvey Oswald, am asking to be granted citizenship of The Soviet Union. My visa is valid from 15th of October and expires on 21st of October. My citizenship should be granted before this date. In the mean time I am waiting for your decision about my citizenship. Currently I am a citizen of the United States of America. I want citizenship because I am a Communist and working class person. I have lived in a decadent capitalist society, where the workers are slaves. I am 20, I served in US marines for three years, I served in the occupation forces in Japan. I have seen American militarism in all its forms. I do not want to return to any other country outside of the Soviet Union’s borders. I wish to reject my American citizenship and accept the responsibility of a Soviet citizen…I do not have enough money to live here indefinitely or to return to any other country…I am asking you to consider my request as soon as possible.

Sincerely yours,

Lee Harvey Oswald
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