Authors: John Newman
Fourteen and a half months later, Priscilla Johnson was on her way back to Moscow again, as a reporter for the North American News Alliance (NANA). While she was in an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic, another reporter, Aline Mosby, managed to land the first formal interview with Lee Harvey Oswald.
"We Never Got Together for Dinner"
The day Oswald defected, many reporters tried to pry his story loose from him. However, it was not until the attractive Aline Mosby "murmured some pleasantry" to Oswald that he not only spoke more than two sentences to a reporter but also flattered her because she was "a woman." 17 UPI Bureau Chief Bob Korengold probably sent Mosby to Oswald's room with that very thought in mind. After Mosby's brief but successful encounter that Saturday, Korengold explained that "I subsequently telephoned Mr. Oswald, who finally agreed to give an interview with Miss Mosby." 18 (Mosby recalls that it was she who arranged over the telephone for the interview.") Newsweek war correspondent Albert Newman interviewed Mosby in Paris in 1964, and fixed the date of her twohour interview with Oswald as Friday, November 13, 1959.20
"I speculated whether he was flattering me," Mosby later wrote, "because he was eager for publicity, or if he preferred to talk to women because he resented men and the authority they stood for." For her part, Mosby said she found Oswald "attractive," and noted how he was "neatly dressed in a suit, white shirt and tie, that had the air of his `Sunday best.' " Aline Mosby noticed a lot more about defectors than their politics. She classified them into different categories, tried to psychoanalyze them, and seemed to enjoy the personal interaction with them more than their stories.
Mosby triumphantly entered Oswald's room that Friday, the first reporter to succeed in doing so. "I selected a red plus[h] chair by the window," Mosby later wrote, and "he sat opposite me in another chair in the baroque room resplendent with gilt clocks and chandeliers." Mosby was soon disappointed, however. "He talked almost nonstop," she complained. "He sounded smug and self-important. And so often was that small smile, more like a smirk ..."
Oswald's self-absorption was frustrating for Mosby. "I felt we were not carrying out a conversation," she said, and remarked how she had difficulty getting "a word in edgewise." Oswald droned on and on about his ideology and the Soviet Union, while Mosby "tried to steer his conversation back to his mother and his early childhood." Oswald, only too happy to talk about himself, disclosed information freely about his past, until Mosby asked him what his mother thought about his decision to defect. Mosby recalls this anxious response:
"She doesn't know," he said. "She's rather old. I couldn't expect her to understand. I guess it wasn't quite fair of me not to say anything, but it's better that way. I don't want to involve my family in this. I think it would be better if they would forget about me. My brother might lose his job because of this."
Clearly, Oswald was sensitive about his family, and especially about his mother, Marguerite Oswald, whose address he only reluctantly gave to Snyder the day of the defection.
Other aspects of Oswald's behavior similar to what both Snyder and McVickar noticed during the defection scene in the embassy caught Mosby's attention. When Oswald spoke about his plans for the Soviet Union, it "sounded to me as if he had rehearsed these sentences," Mosby said. As Oswald's monologue progressed, her attention drifted from listening to the words he was saying to analyzing the person behind them. Her 1964 retrospective essay of the interview contains this passage:
As he spoke he held his mouth stiffly and nearly closed. His jaw was rigid. Behind his brown eyes I felt a certain coldness. He displayed neither the impassioned fever of a devout American Communist who at last had reached the land of his dreams, nor the wise-cracking informality and friendliness of the average American.
This description fit nicely with Snyder's dispatch, in which he said Oswald put on the "airs of a new sophomore party-liner."
There was one very big difference between what Oswald told Snyder and Mosby. When, in his discourse with Mosby, Oswald spoke about what he had done in the Marine Corps, he mentioned he had been a "radar operator" but said nothing of his intention to give radar data to the Soviets. Mosby did not find out this crucial detail until more than four years later. Her essay, written in Paris well after the assassination, makes clear the fact that she learned about this from what "American embassy officials" had said of the defection."
One is struck by a peculiar irony of that Friday the thirteenth in November 1959. On one side of the planet Oswald spoke for hours with Mosby, and not once did he let slip the darkest detail of his defection. After the sun rose on the other side of the planet, Birch O'Neal, chief of the mole-hunting CUSIG unit in the CIA, got an eyeful of that dark detail when he read Snyder's dispatch. That was the first official document that fully described Oswald's threat to turn over both radar secrets and something "special" to the Soviets.23
Unlike Snyder, who had engaged Oswald in verbal combat, Mosby wanted Oswald to like her. Her failure to bring Oswald out of his defector role frustrated her. When, after what had seemed an eternity of monologue, he once again launched into the "ebb and flow of communism," Mosby decided it was time to leave. "I was tired of listening," she wrote later, "to what sounded like recitations from Pravda."24
Oswald had been sitting with Mosby for more than two hours and, although he sometimes looked at her, had not once given her a signal that he might be interested in her. Mosby got up to leave. "As I put on my coat," she wrote, "I thought about how Oswald had appeared totally disinterested in anything but himself." When reading Mosby's essay, one detects the possibility that this might have hurt her feelings. "He never once asked what I was doing in Moscow," she complained.
Yet the resourceful Mosby had not given up. As she moved toward the door she was struck by the idea that she might still get to Oswald through his stomach. Mosby asked Oswald to come to her apartment for dinner. Oswald did not say yes or give her an opening to set a date. He simply said, "Thank you." Mosby interpreted this as a polite rebuff. "It was obvious," she said, "he had no intention of seeing me again."
One senses in Aline Mosby's essay a lingering disappointmentperhaps even bitterness-at having been rejected by Oswald. "I had known other men of Oswald's type," she wrote, "they worked as cowhands ... married casually or not at all, got drunk and into fights, always seeking recognition and some way of expressing their frustrations." Oswald added insult to injury when, after reading Mosby's coverage of the interview, he called her up. "The defector immediately telephoned me," she wrote derisively, "not to suggest dinner, but to complain." Oswald was angry with Mosby because she had "stressed that he was affected by his mother's plight."
"We never got together for dinner," Mosby lamented. Indeed, for Mosby, that little detail, which she recorded almost as if it were a statistic, seemed to be the bottom line of the entire episode.
A Monday Meeting at Mail Call
It was Monday, November 16, and Priscilla Johnson, probably still feeling the effects of jet lag from arrival the day before from America, got up late. It was already dark by the time she made it to the mail room at the American Embassy. It was about four thirty P.M., but that was still half an hour before closing-plenty of time to get her mail. She walked through the lobby past Jean Hallett's desk to the corridor where the mail was kept. This path took Priscilla past the door to the consul's office, where Snyder and John McVickar were working. McVickar, whose desk was closer to the door, noticed Priscilla when she walked by.
Priscilla was busy looking through several days of mail. "Hello," John said with genuine enthusiasm, "I'm glad you're back."25 The two were good friends, and John had undoubtedly missed her in the oppressive and hermetic environment of the Moscow Mission. At this particular moment, however, McVickar's attention was focused on a serious bit of business, and he wasted no time in getting straight to the point. "Oh, by the way," he added as if it were an afterthought, "there's a guy in your hotel who wants to defect, and he won't talk to any of us here. He might talk to you because you're a woman."
Priscilla thought McVickar was giving her a break. She had not done stories on the other big defector cases because she was with the North American News Agency, a shoestring operation consisting of her and her hotel room at the Metropole. "I couldn't compete with the [other press] agencies," she later told the Warren Commission, but she was immediately interested in Oswald. "John McVickar said he was refusing to talk to journalists. So I thought that it might be an exclusive, for one thing, and he was right in my hotel, for another."26
By this time McVickar probably knew that Mosby had interviewed Oswald but, at the same time, felt constrained in passing the details of a rival reporter's interview to Priscilla. So he gave her a clue instead, dropping the name of Bob Korengold, the UP bureau chief. The following extract from her 1964 testimony to the Warren Commission clarifies this part of Priscilla's encounter with McVickar in the embassy that day;
MISS JOHNSON: I had been told he wasn't talking to people, and I hoped that he hadn't talked to anyone else.
MR. SLAWSON: Did you ever learn from Oswald that he had spoken to Miss Mosby earlier?
MISS JOHNSON: No; I never heard from anyone until November the 22nd, 1963, although Mr. McVickar had said I could ask Mr. Korengold about him [Oswald]. That was a tip that perhaps he had talked to somebody at UPI, but I didn't want to tip the UPI that I was on to it because I thought that would reinvigorate their efforts.27
"John may have been doing me a favor," Priscilla recalls. "However, John also had in mind it was not in the U.S. interest for Oswald to defect." McVickar wanted Priscilla to handle Oswald in a special way, one that she might not have used if she were treating the situation as if she were purely a journalist. "John wanted me to `cool off Oswald so he would not defect," Priscilla remembers of her coaching session in the hall that afternoon. "He felt that Snyder had mishandled Oswald and that Oswald was heated up and angry. John's concern was that Dick need not have responded in such an ascerbic way to Oswald's ugly remarks."
Snyder was the senior man in the consular office and Oswald was, after all, his case. McVickar, for reasons which we will have cause to examine further, was taking events into his own hands when he sent Priscilla on this mission of mercy to Oswald. McVickar was very insistent with Priscilla that day. In her 1978 testimony in executive session of the HSCA, "she recalled that as she was leaving, McVickar told her to remember that she was an American.' 121
We now know even more about this last remark. McVickar told Priscilla that "there was a thin line somewhere between her duty as a correspondent and as an American," and "mentioned Mr. Korengold as a man who seemed to have known this difference pretty well." There was also a thin line between taking actions approved by the responsible consular official and taking matters into one's own hands, and McVickar was stepping over this line. We will return to this "thin line" remark and how it applied to Korengold shortly. For the moment, we will leave this scene with a comment by Richard Snyder. "I have a recollection of being annoyed at John McVickar," Snyder recalls, "for having told Priscilla to interview Oswald without having asked if I had any objection to it."29
Room 319, the Metropole
"So I went back to the hotel, mail in hand, and I asked the lady at the end of the hall on the second floor if there was an Oswald there," Priscilla recalls. "Yes, he is in Room 233," the lady answered. "And I went to his room and knocked on his door, and there he was." It was about five-twenty P.M. Priscilla describes what happened next this way:
So the door opens and Oswald came out, and he stood in the door, not letting me in his room but talking to me. I said, "My name is Priscilla Johnson and I work for the North American News Alliance. I am a reporter here and I live in your hotel, and I wonder if I could talk with you. He said "Yes," and I said, "Well, when can I come and see you?" He said, "Nine tonight. I'll come to your room."30
Oswald showed up on time. He talked with Priscilla until one or two in the morning.
In December 1963 Priscilla wrote her recollections of the interview. Oswald began, she recalled, by saying he had dissolved his American citizenship, "as much as they would let me at that time," and he then complained that "they refused to allow me to take the oath at that time."31 Priscilla says she next put a question to him about "the official Soviet attitude," and he responded that the Russians had "confirmed" that he would not have to leave the country. Oswald then added, "They have said they are investigating the possibilities of my continuing my education at a Soviet institute." This 1963 description of the way the interview opened matches almost precisely her 1959 notes written during the interview with Oswald.32
Oswald explained that since the embassy had "released"" the story of his defection, he was granting this interview "to give my side of the story-I would like to give people in the United States something to think about." He continued. "Once having been assured by the Russians that I would not have to return to the United States, come what may, I assumed it would be safe for me to give my side of the story" [the underline was in Priscilla's contemporaneous notes and may have been Oswald's emphasis]." Again, Priscilla's 1963 account matched her 1959 notes, but what did Oswald mean by "safe"?
The answer is in Oswald's diary, and it concerns a visit he received over the weekend. His diary records that the day after his interview with Mosby,3S "A Russian official comes to my room [and] asks how I am. [He] notifies me I can stay in the U.S.S.R. till some solution is found with what to do with me." This visit occurred on Saturday, November 14, twenty-four hours after his interview with Mosby and a little more than forty-eight hours before his "safe" remark to Johnson. This sequence is crucial, and it provokes a new question: What was it in Oswald's "side of the story" about his episode in the embassy that was not safe to tell Mosby on Friday?