Reclaiming History (139 page)

Oswald’s diary entries during this period are interesting. During his first day, October 21, at Botkin, he writes, “Poor Rimmea stays by my side as interrpator (my Russian is still very bad) far into the night, I tell her ‘go home’ (my mood is bad) but she stays, she is ‘my friend’ She has a strong will.” He adds that “only at this moment I notice she is preety.” His entry for October 22 reads, “Hospital I am in a small room with about 12 others (sick persons.) 2 ordalies and a nurse the room is very drab as well as the breakfast. Only after prolonged (2 hours) observation of the other pat. do I relize I am in the Insanity ward. This relization disquits [disgusts? disquiets?] me.”
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As seen, Rimma did not abandon him. She visited him faithfully over the next days, partly to scold him for his foolishness, partly to help get him transferred to an ordinary ward, partly to interview him for the KGB. She also began to develop a sisterly affection for him, and started calling him “Alik”—the Russian nickname for Alexei that he started using for himself throughout his stay in the Soviet Union—since the name Lee didn’t sound Russian at all.
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After his three-day stint in the psychiatric ward, Oswald found the hospital more pleasant. The new ward, which he shared with eleven other patients, was, he wrote, “Airy, good food.” He noted in his diary, “Afternoon. I am visited by Roza Agafonova of the hotel, tourist office who askes about my health, very beautiful, excelant Eng., very merry and kind, she makes me very glad to be alive.”
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When he was released from Botkin on October 28, Oswald was driven back to the Hotel Berlin in what appeared to be an Intourist car. His doctor thinks not. Dr. Mikhailina told PBS’s
Frontline
in 1993 that he was taken away by the KGB. She says that she received a call from the KGB just before he was to be discharged, asking her to keep him there until they arrived. “Sometime later,” she said, “about forty minutes, a large black car arrived and three young men came in. They confiscated his medical history, his discharge paper, and all his documents, and then they told me they were taking him away.”
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Frontline
asked Vladimir Semichastny, the then chairman of the KGB, about this, and although the KGB had never previously acknowledged any direct contact with Oswald, he admitted that “there were conversations, but this [what Oswald told them] was such outdated information, the kind we say the sparrows have already chirped to the entire world, and now Oswald tells us about it. Not the kind of information that would interest such a high-level organization like ours.” The KGB did, however, consider recruiting Oswald as a spy. “Counterintelligence and intelligence—they both looked him over to see what he was capable of, but unfortunately, neither could find any ability at all,” Semichastny said.
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If Semichastny was telling the truth and if his memory of what happened thirty years earlier was accurate, what we don’t know is whether Oswald was aware, in these “conversations,” that he was speaking to the KGB. His Historic Diary has no mention of any such conversations, nor even a reference to any discussion with those who removed him from the hospital.

Nearly out of money and technically in the country illegally since he had outstayed his visa by several days, Oswald moved to the Hotel Metropole, a large hotel under the same administration as the Hotel Berlin, probably by order of the government. He was impressed that the authorities returned his watch, ring, and money “to the last kopeck,” and with the farewell he received from Lyudmila Dmitrieva, head of the Intourist Office at the Berlin, and Roza Agafonova, her assistant who, per his diary, invited him to “come and sit and take [talk] with them anytime.” At the Metropole, by contrast to the Berlin, where he had started to make friends, he felt lonely, but he must have been cheered by the fact that Rimma told him on the day he was released from the hospital that the “pass & registration office whshes to see me about my future.”
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Oswald later thought that the interview with the Passport Office, which, per KGB records, took place on October 29 (Oswald’s diary records it as October 28), the day after his release from the hospital, did not go well. According to his diary, “We entered the officies to find four ofials waiting for me (all unknown to me) they ask How my arm is, I say O.K., They ask ‘Do you want to go to your homeland. I say no I want Sovite citizen I say I want to reside in the Soviet Union. They say they will see about that. Than they ask me about the lone offial with whom I spoke in the first place (appar. he did not pass along my request at all but thought to simply get rid of me by not extending my Soviet visa…[They asked me] what papers do you have to show who and what you are?”

It seems likely that they wanted some proof of Lee’s vaunted Marxism—membership in the Communist Party in the United States, or something like that, but all he had to offer them was his discharge papers from active duty in the Marine Corps. By his own account they were not impressed. “They say wait for our ans. I ask how long? Not soon.”
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The KGB report of the interview notes that “Comrade Ryazantsev [head of the Passport Office] said that the matter was still unresolved and that he [Oswald] could remain for the time being in Moscow and wait for a definitive answer from the Supreme Soviet…At the present time Oswald resides at the Hotel Metropole, does not go out, and spends whole days in his room. He has to pay thirty rubles a day for his room [and] has eight hundred rubles in his possession. The translator Shirakova R. S. continues to work with Oswald.” The author of the report also thought that “Oswald left OVIR [the Passport Office] in a good mood. He said he hoped his request would be granted.”
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That’s not the way Oswald remembered it. He said the interview left him in a rotten mood. Rimma dropped by the Metropole that evening to check on him, and he wrote that “I feel insulted and insult her.”
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Over the next couple of days he remained worried and edgy. He wrote in his diary, “Oct.29. [probably October 30] Hotel Room 214 Metropole Hotel. I wait. I worry I eat once, stay next to phone worry I keep fully dressed.” The entry for the next day reads, “I have been in hotel three days, [it] seems like three years I must have some sort of showdown!”
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When he met Rimma around noon on October 31, she must have sensed that he was loaded for bear. Although he told her nothing of his plans, she warned him to stay in his room “and eat well.”
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A few minutes after she left, though, he took a taxi to the American embassy, where one of two Russian guards asked to see his passport, then waved him in. Inside, he found a receptionist on duty typing. When he asked to see the consul, she asked him to sign the “tourist register,” and went back to her typing. “Yes, but before I’ll do that, I’d like to see the consular.” He laid his passport on her desk and, as she looked up, puzzled, he added, “I’m here to dissolve my American citizenship.”
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It was a half hour past noon that Saturday and the embassy was already closed for business for the weekend, but the receptionist, Jean Hallett, alerted Richard E. Snyder, the senior consulate official, who had her show Oswald into his office.
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Oswald selected an armchair to the left front of Snyder’s desk. Snyder’s assistant, John McVickar, was also in the room. Oswald’s diary reads, “I wait, crossing my legs and laying my gloves in my lap. He finishes typing, removes the letter from his typewriter and adjusting his glasses looks at me. ‘What can I do for you he asks’ leafing through my passport. ‘I’m here to dissolve my U.S. citizenship and would like to sing the legle papers to that effect.’ have you applied for Russian citizenship? yes.”
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Snyder, an experienced Foreign Service officer having served in Frankfurt, Munich, and Tokyo, examined Oswald’s passport and noticed that Oswald had inked out the space for his address in the United States. Snyder asked him where he lived, but Oswald refused to answer. Oswald, very presentable in Snyder’s eyes, is at once proper and extremely curt, although not insulting. Snyder could see from the passport that Oswald was only just twenty, still a minor hardly out of his teens.
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Snyder noticed that Oswald seemed to “know what his mission was. He took charge, in a sense, of the conversation right from the beginning…In general, his attitude was quite arrogant.”
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He presented Snyder with a note he had written out by hand on the printed stationery of the Hotel Metropole:

I Lee Harvey Oswald do hereby request that my present citizenship in the United States of america, be revoked. I have entered the Soviet Union for the express purpose of applying for citizenship in the Soviet Union, through the means of naturalization. My request for citizenship is now pending before the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. I take these steps for political reasons. My request for the revoking of my American citizenship is made only after the longest and most serious considerations. I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Lee H. Oswald”
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Snyder groaned inwardly. He had recently had some headaches with a few American defection cases, and just three days earlier had written a thoughtful letter to the State Department in which he recommended a certain elasticity in dealing with them.
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Warily, he began to question Oswald, but he ran into a solid wall of refusal. “Don’t bother wasting my time asking me questions or trying to talk me out of my position,” Oswald told Snyder. He was cocksure. “I am well aware…of exactly the kind of thing you will ask me and I am not interested, so let’s get down to business.”
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Oswald told him his principal reason for his wanting to defect: “I am a Marxist.” In that case, Snyder said to Oswald, he was going to be very lonesome in the Soviet Union—a witticism that was lost on Oswald. The boy appeared to be “intense” and “completely humorless.”
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By way of a test, Snyder asked Oswald his opinion of Marx’s theory of labor value—a basic Marxist theory presented in the very early chapters of
Das Kapital
—and noted that Oswald did not know what Snyder was talking about. Snyder then spoke a little to Oswald in Russian, and concluded from Oswald’s responses that Oswald knew very little Russian. He guessed that Oswald’s Marxism was about as good as his Russian—in other words, he had no knowledgeable background at all.
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But Oswald suddenly became more talkative and offered that he had recently been separated from the Marine Corps and that his service in the Far East had given him “a chance to observe American imperialism.” Oswald went on to mention the hardships his mother had endured as a “worker” in America, and announced that he did not intend that to happen to him. It seemed to Snyder that Oswald felt little real affection for his mother—or much of any sense of obligation toward her—in spite of his complaints about her plight.
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Oswald, becoming exasperated by the chitchat, went over to the attack and told Snyder that he had been a radar operator in the Marine Corps and that he had already—voluntarily—told the Soviets that if they made him a Soviet citizen he would make known to them whatever knowledge he had.
*
He intimated to Snyder that he knew of something that would be of special interest to the USSR, though he did not claim to possess knowledge or information of a highly classified nature.
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For someone who many conspiracy theorists are convinced was a double agent for the CIA and KGB, this was not a very bright thing for him to do. Snyder could certainly be expected to send that information back to the State Department, giving the military authorities a chance to nullify the value of any information that Oswald might actually possess. And the Soviets, even if they took the kid seriously, would hardly appreciate his telling American officials that he was passing information on to them.
*

Snyder suggested that Oswald come back at a later time to discuss the matter, giving the reason that the embassy was closed and preparation of the documents required some time. Actually, Snyder was reluctant to allow Oswald to cash in his citizenship, an irrevocable step, and he felt Oswald fell into the category of “quixotic types of uncertain mentality and doubtful emotional stability” or those who do things on an “irrational impulse or other transient influence.” Snyder told the Warren Commission, “Particularly in the case of a minor [Oswald], I could not imagine myself writing out the renunciation form, and having him sign it, on the spot, without making him leave my office and come back at some other time, even if it is only a few hours intervening.”
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†

When Oswald left, he gave no indication to Snyder when, if at all, he would return.
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Years later, Snyder gave his impression of Oswald to author Gus Russo. Referring to him as a “flaky kid,” he said Oswald “had all the earmarks of a sophomore Marxist, someone who’d just discovered a religion” and didn’t have “the faintest idea of what this country [the Soviet Union] is about.”
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As soon as Oswald left the embassy, Snyder fired off a telegram to the State Department, outlining the interview and specifically mentioning Oswald’s threat to reveal information derived from his service as a radar operator for the Marine Corps.
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A copy of Snyder’s telegram was sent to the FBI,
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and the CIA received an expanded version of the telegram on November 2.
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Immediately after sending off his telegram, Snyder called Robert J. “Bud” Korengold, Moscow bureau chief for United Press International, “to try and get another line on Oswald.” He gave Korengold Oswald’s room number at the Metropole, and Korengold wasted no time—he knocked on Oswald’s door at two that afternoon. Oswald was astonished. “How did you find out?” he asked. Korengold told him he had been alerted by the embassy, but Oswald refused to say anything except that he knew what he was doing and did not want to talk to anyone.
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