Authors: John Newman
A "Memo for the Files"
It was after 9:30, when Priscilla Johnson returned to her room in the Metropole, now fully caught up on the Oswald affair and the rest of the embassy gossip. John McVickar, however, still had work to do. He went back to the embassy to find a typewriter. Unless he postdated what he typed that evening and used the word "today" when it was "yesterday" or before, John McVickar had to have worked late that night on November 17, for he could not have begun much before 10:30. Whatever the time, McVickar wrote "A Memo for the Files."'
There would, over the next four years, be memos for the files written by various CIA and FBI observers, many of them interesting because of the element of intrigue they add. The McVickar memo is no exception. "Priscilla Johnson of NANA asked me today," McVickar's opening sentence began, "about Oswald." This was misleading, because it gave the impression that the subject of Oswald came up because Johnson initiated it. Which of the two mentioned it first during dinner is less important than the fact that McVickar had, the day before, approached Johnson about Oswald. The dinner only provided an opportunity for McVickar to learn about the outcome of her interview.
The second sentence of McVickar's memo was equally misleading. It read:
I gave her a general rundown of the outlines of the case, as I knew they were known to the public, suggesting that she also check with Korengold for any factual details I might have omitted and which were already generally known.'
If McVickar did make these comments at dinner, they were not helpful since Johnson's story was already filed. This sentence fits perfectly with the information-as recalled by Johnson-that McVickar had passed on to her the previous afternoon. That encounter in the embassy was on Monday, November 16.
The third sentence contained an error which is inexplicable under the circumstances. The sentence states: "She told me that on Sunday, November 15, she had spent several hours talking with Oswald and that she had left it with him that she was available if he wanted somebody to talk to again." This, of course, is impossible, since she arrived back in Moscow on Sunday, November 15, and learned about Oswald from McVickar only on the sixteenth. Because McVickar specified the day of the week as well as the numeric day of the month, a typographical mistake is out of the question. For whatever reason, McVickar placed Johnson's interview with Oswald before his meeting with her in the embassy.
The next two paragraphs contain the sort of information we would expect Johnson to have passed on to McVickar at their dinner. She told him of her impression of Oswald as naive, and how this impression agreed with "ours," presumably an impression from their discussion in the embassy before Priscilla's interview. McVickar's report after the dinner with Priscilla included these two sentences:
He [Oswald] told her [Johnson] that his Soviet citizenship was still under consideration, but that the Soviets had already assured him that he could stay here as a resident alien if he so desired. They are also looking into the possibility of getting him into a schooPo
This was all true, and tracks well with the notes Johnson made during her interview with Oswald. McVickar wrote that Oswald "had also told her that he did not intend to come back to the embassy, yet he seemed very much annoyed at the embassy for having prevented him from formally giving up his citizenship." This should have been good news, for it meant Oswald would not renounce his citizenship and, therefore, that Snyder's handling of Oswald might not have been so bad after all.
Then McVickar's memo again superimposes events and dialogue from Monday afternoon on to the Tuesday evening dinner conversation. The memo states this:
I also pointed out to Miss Johnson that there was a thin line somewhere between her duty as a correspondent and as an American. I mentioned Mr. Korengold as a man who seemed to have known this difference pretty well. I asked that if someone could persuade Oswald at least to delay before taking the final plunge on his American citizenship, or for that matter Soviet citship [citizenship], they would be doing him a favor and doubtless the USA as well. She seemed to understand this point. I beleive [sic] that she is going to try and write a story on what prompts a man to do such a thing."
We have discussed these lines previously, but they are reprinted here in full and we reexamine them because there is something very wrong about McVickar's memo: He presents his adjuration to Johnson as if he did it after her interview with Oswald. Of course, this was not true. At the time McVickar gave her this charge, she had never met Oswald; indeed, she was learning of Oswald for the first time from McVickar himself. Moreover, it makes no sense for McVickar to say such a thing to Johnson after the interview. It does make sense, however, if, as Johnson recalls, they spoke on Monday afternoon before the interview when the suggestion that Oswald might open up to her because she was a woman had some value.
The November 17 McVickar memo was not finished. Two days later, he added the following OFFICIAL USE ONLY postscript to the bottom of the second page:
PS (11/19/59) Priscilla J. told me since: that 0. has been told he will be leaving the hotel at the end of this week; that he will be trained in electronics; that she has asked him to keep in touch with her; that he has showed some slight signs of disillusionment with the USSR, but that his "hate" for the US remains strong although she cannot fathom the reason.'
The last three items of the five contained in this postscript-that she asked him to keep in touch, that he showed signs of disillusionment, and that she could not fathom his "hate" for the U.S.-were fully consistent with Johnson's notes and recollections. The first two, however, probably did not happen.
Oswald had not told her he was "leaving the hotel at the end of the week," and there was no reason she would make up a story about this. As previously discussed, all Oswald had said in the interview was that he felt "safe in the knowledge that I can have a prolonged stay." Johnson does recall, however, that a few days after the interview she asked the dezhurnaya, the lady on duty on Oswald's floor, "and what about number 233, is he there?" "No, he's gone," the hall monitor replied. "I thought she meant he had left for good," Johnson explains, "but he hadn't." This is hardly a clean fit with McVickar's claim in the postscript that Oswald had been told anything, let alone when he would be leaving the hotel. McVickar's memo leaves the reader with the impression that Johnson had met again with Oswald. She had not.
We need not parse the hotel departure issue further, as there is something far more enigmatic-and troubling-about the McVickar postscript. That is his claim that Johnson said Oswald "would be trained in electronics." Oswald did not say this to Johnson, and she has no recollection of saying this or anything like it to McVickar. Oswald had mentioned "studying" and "education," but not "training" or "electronics." Johnson's notes recorded his remarks that the Soviets were investigating the possibility of his studying in the U.S.S.R. and that "they have said they are investigating [the] possibilities of my continuing my education at [an] Institute." Johnson combined the two notes in her statement after the Kennedy assassination into this: "And he [Oswald] repeated `they are investigating the possibility of my studying.' "13
What is absorbing is that Oswald did go to work in an electronics factory. How could McVickar have known about that beforehand? At the time of Johnson's interview, Oswald did not yet know he would be going to Minsk, let alone receive any specific "training" or do any work in "electronics." Oswald had not so much as mentioned the word "electronics" in his interview with Johnson. All he said was that he had been a radar operator in the Marines. For McVickar's postscript to be true, Johnson would have to have imagined this intriguing detail all on her own, and then told McVickar at dinner, and then forgot all about it in all of her subsequent testimony.
The references in McVickar's November 19 postscript to Oswald's departure date from the hotel and his upcoming assignment in an electronics capacity are crucial evidence that raise the possibility that information from Oswald or from a Soviet source had come into McVickar's possession. After studying the postscript again today, Snyder finds it "fascinating," and has this to say: "How did McVickar find it out? It wasn't known to me. Since he purported to get it from Priscilla, where did she get it from? And if she didn't tell him, where the hell did John get it from?" All are important questions.
It is interesting to observe how, during the Warren Commission investigation, it appeared that Snyder's career, not McVickar's, might suffer because of the entire episode. Johnson recalls that "be hind the scenes" the Warren Commission didn't want McVickar to be too critical of Snyder. "The Warren Commission lawyers seemed to know," she adds, "and they did not put me on the record to say something that might have been damaging to his career, they made it clear to me that they knew." By this she meant that McVickar's view that Snyder had mishandled the Oswald case would be damaging to Snyder."
The same pattern occurred when Johnson testified to the HSCA, whose Final Report included this passage:
She believed that McVickar called her on November 17, the day after the interview, and asked her to supper. That evening they discussed the interview. McVickar indicated a general concern about Oswald and believed that the attitude of another American consular official might have pushed Oswald further in the direction of defection."
The reference is unmistakably to Richard Snyder, whose anonymity in this passage supports Johnson's recollection that the Warren Commission and HSCA agreed that McVickar's views might damage Snyder's career.
It is now apparent that more attention need be paid to McVickar's role in the story. In the previous chapter we discussed Johnson's testimony to the Warren Commission that she knew-and had not written about-Oswald's threat to give up radar secrets. When asked directly if she told this story to McVickar at their dinner, this was her spontaneous response:
I can't remember. If he knew it and I knew it then I know we discussed it. My guess is that I was wrong to tell the Warren Commission that. With what I now know and thinking back on it, my guess would be that Oswald did not tell me and that I learned it from John McVickar.16
If true, that would explain how she could have learned of Oswald's threat without it appearing in her story. She had already filed her story by the time she had dinner with McVickar.
When and how Johnson found out about the radar story is important, but speculative. What is a fact is McVickar's knowledge before he should have known-that Oswald was to leave Moscow for electronics training. That he attributed it to information obtained from Johnson troubles her, as does the fact that he wrote this report at all: "If I thought he was going to write it up I would not have said anything to him about the interview. I would not have liked the idea that it was going out as a report from me.""
"I definitely remember being upset with John," Snyder says today. "I was annoyed, particularly because it was at the beginning of the case when I was sort of feeling my way along." 8 Snyder's inference here is that McVickar had no business interfering in Snyder's handling of the case. Indeed, by getting Johnson to do the interview, then inviting her to dinner to talk about it, and then writing it in a memo as if Oswald had continued to speak with Johnson, McVickar had muscled his way into the case. His actions affected the official record beyond his own "memo for the files."
On December 1, Snyder sent a cable to the State Department to update them on Oswald, who, Snyder said, was "believed departed from the Metropole Hotel within the last few days." 19 This may not have been true, but the source was McVickar's November 17 postscript. Snyder said an American "correspondent" had "maintained contact" with Oswald. This was not true either, and was also based on the McVickar postscript. "Correspondent states that Oswald appeared in last conversation last week" not to have changed his position, said the cable, leaving the impression that a second Johnson-Oswald discussion had been the source of this information. This was again not true. The source was the November 19 postscript.
Johnson was recently asked whether she had ever knowingly discussed Oswald with the CIA. "No, I did not," she responded.20 The McVickar postscript raised the possibility that someone else had access to Oswald in Moscow. Could that someone have been working for U.S. intelligence? We will return to this question in Chapter Eleven. But before leaving Oswald's defection in Moscow, it is pertinent to recall that the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff and, in particular, the mole-hunting CI/SIG office, was interested in Oswald at this point. Therefore, we need to ask: What about the Counterintelligence Chief himself? What might James Angleton's interest in Oswald have been?
Angleton's Molehunt in the Soviet Russia Division
By the time of Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union, Angleton was obsessed by a traitor, a mole who might have penetrated deep enough to have acquired and betrayed secrets about the U-2 program to the Soviet Union. James Jesus Angleton was the chief of the Agency's Counterintelligence Staff, and he had created the Special Investigations Group, SIG, principally for finding double agents inside the CIA. The origin of Angleton's molehunt goes back to an event in 1958, but the hunt focused on and narrowed to the Soviet Russia Division in October 1959. Both events intersect with the Oswald story and so it is safe to say that Angleton noticed the confluence.
The first revelation of a possible KGB mole came from the Agency's top defector-in-place*
in the Soviet Union, Petr Popov. Code-named ATTIC, Popov had been silently funneling high-quality intelligence to the CIA since 1952, including the Soviet Field Army Table of Organization, and Soviet battlefield tactics developed during nuclear tests with live troops .21 This time, however, Popov's news was about an American espionage asset: the CIA's sensitive U-2 program. According to a study of FBI-CIA rivalry by Mark Riebling: