Authors: John Newman
The Missing Letter
The HSCA did have another crucial piece of evidence that fit perfectly with the Kalaris memorandum's statement that Oswald had made "queries" in 1960 about coming home. The committee failed to consider that these two pieces fit together. This second piece was not obscure: It was published in the Warren Commission volumes as Commission Exhibit number 245, the first letter American Consul Snyder received from Oswald-after more than a year of not knowing where he was. Snyder received the letter on February 13, 1961. The first sentence of this letter contains a key piece of evidence: In that sentence Oswald wrote, "Since I have not received a reply to my letter of December 1960, 1 am writing again asking that you consider my request for the return of my American passport"22 [emphasis added].
The February 1961 letter was itself a momentous communication from Oswald to a U.S. government official. Coming at the end of a fourteen-month silence, this letter serves as the documentary turning point of Oswald's stay in Russia: It placed him in Minsk and began the eighteen-month saga of his return to America. The reference in the first sentence to an earlier letter presents historical inquiry with an interesting fork in the road, for it seems to contradict an entry in his diary. Traveling down one path, we accept the diary entry as true, which then requires us to accept that Oswald's February 1961 letter and the Kalaris 1975 memorandum are not. The other path at the fork leads us deep into the CIA labyrinth again. Kalaris's memo indicating the CIA had learned of Oswald's queries by December 9, 1960, raises the question of the source of this information. This path becomes even darker when we discover the true fate of the missing letter.
First, the Warren Commission's handling of Oswald's February 1961 letter deserves our attention. The Warren Report said Oswald "asked for the return of his passport," initially screening the other part of Oswald's sentence, which said, "I am writing again" to ask for the passport.23 Similarly, the Warren Report went on to discuss nearly every detail of Oswald's letter, leaving the first sentencethe one explaining that he had written before-for last. "In this letter," the Warren Report added, almost as an afterthought, "Oswald referred to a previous letter which he said had gone unanswered; there is evidence that such a letter was never sent."24
The "evidence" that Oswald's December letter was "never sent," does not hold up well under close scrutiny. Just two pieces of evidence were offered by the Warren Commission. First, Oswald's diary entry for February 1, 1961: "Make my first request to American Embassy, Moscow for reconsidering my position," [emphasis added] Oswald had written. This was hardly conclusive since, by his own hand, Oswald had also informed the embassy about the request in December.
The other piece of evidence the Commission offered to show that there had been no earlier letter was Richard Snyder's testimony. The former Moscow Embassy Consul had this exchange with Allen Dulles and William Coleman:
MR. COLEMAN: Had you received a letter from Mr. Oswald at a date of December 1960, the way he mentioned in the first paragraph of this letter?
MR. SNYDER: No, Sir; we did not.
MR. COLEMAN: This [February 1961 letter] is the first letter you received?
MR. SNYDER: This is the first communication since he left Moscow.
MR. DULLES: When you say he left Moscow, that was in-
MR. SNYDER: November 1959, sir.
MR. DULLES: November 1959?
MR. SNYDER: That is what we presume was the date.
MR. COLEMAN: Mr. Dulles, we have other evidence that he didn't leave until January 7, 1960.
MR. DULLES: The last the embassy heard from him was in November 1959?
MR. SNYDER: Yes, Sir.25
The fact that Snyder had not received the letter is not hard evidence that it was not sent. Reading this part of Snyder's testimony does little to inspire confidence in the Warren Commission's analysis of this point. On the other hand, it does conjure up an image of Allen Dulles puffing on his pipe as he pondered the implications of this lengthy period where Oswald was out of touch.
During the Warren Commission's investigation of Oswald's foreign activities, William T. Coleman, Jr., and W. David Slawson wrote a report (dated March 6, 1964) about Oswald's life in Russia.26 In a short paragraph blemished by a typographical error about the date of Oswald's second letter," the report contained this solitary sentence on the missing letter: "In the letter received February 13, 1961, he [Oswald] said that he had written an earlier letter but apparently the embassy never received the earlier letter." The implied acceptance of the letter in this sentence does not fit with the final report's suggestion that it never existed in the first place.
An idea that supported the "never-existed" hypothesis was sent to the Warren Commission during its investigation but was not used in the final report. This idea came, not surprisingly, from the CIA, where it was formulated by Lee Wigren, Chief of Research and Analysis for the Counterintelligence Office in the Soviet Russia Division and put in a January 1964 report for the commission. Wigren wrote: "One possible explanation for reference to a spurious letter may be that Oswald wished to give the Embassy the impression that he had initiated correspondence regarding repatriation before having renewed his identity document on 4 January 1961."28 Although this fit the commission's notion that the missing letter was fictitious, the final report did not use Wigren's theory or make any reference to it at all.
The State Department's own analysis of this problem after the Kennedy assassination went only as far as to state that the letter "was never received."' This is a far cry from the Warren Commission's suggestion that it was "never sent." In sum, the embassy's nonreceipt of an earlier Oswald letter and the contradiction between Oswald's diary and his February letter were all the evidence the commission could muster for the proposition that Oswald had not sent an earlier letter. Ironically, just twelve lines later on the same page, the Warren Report acknowledged that "the Soviet authorities had undoubtedly intercepted and read the correspondence between Oswald and the Embassy and knew of his plans."' Yet the report failed to consider whether the KGB might have intercepted and held on to Oswald's first letter.
In a December 9, 1963, FBI interview, Marina said Oswald had talked with her-prior to their marriage on April 30, 1961-about his unanswered mail. The FBI special agents who interviewed her, Anatole A. Boguslav and Wallace R. Heitman, described that part of Marina's interview in their report:
Marina said again that he had met Oswald in March and they had been married on April 30, 1961. At the time she met him and at the time she married him, she was of the impression that Oswald did not want to return to the United States. She said Oswald had prior to their marriage told her that he thought he could not return to the United States. He had told her he had written the American Embassy letters about returning to the United States, and they had not answered the letters. She said Oswald was therefore of the impression that he could not return. Marina said that if she had known of any desire on the part of Oswald to return to the United States at the time of their marriage, she probably would not have married him.31
At this point, Oswald wrongly suspected that it was the American Embassy, not the KGB, that was responsible for his letter's disappearance.
On February 28, 1961, the American Embassy in Moscow responded to Oswald's second letter, specifically mentioning his story about the December letter. Snyder wrote: "We have received your recent letter concerning your desire to return to the United States. Your earlier letter of December 1960 which you mentioned in your present letter does not appear to have been received at the Embassy" [emphasis added].32 This passage reflects Snyder's reaction to the story at the time, and makes it clear that Snyder had allowed for the possibility that it might have been sent.
This issue moved closer to resolution after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. For a moment, the remnants of the former KGB apparatus opened up, a process which allowed glimpses into the KBG's Narim file on Oswald. "Narim" is a Russian word for turbot, a river fish. The event that concerns our present discussion was an American television news broadcast. ABC aired a show on November 22, 1991, entitled "An ABC News Nightline Investigation: The KGB Oswald Files." During this program, hosted by Ted Koppel, the subject of Oswald's December 1960 letter to the American Embassy came up. Here is the pertinent portion of the transcript:
SAWYER: On February 13th, 1961, the U.S. embassy received a letter from Oswald that read, "Since I have not received a reply to my letter of December 1960, I am writing again." What letter was he referring to? Theorists have speculated he never did write it, that he was simply unstable, or lying. In fact, the KGB intercepted Oswald's missing first letter, and the original still exists inside the Oswald file. In subsequent correspondence, Oswald blustered, reminding Richard Snyder of U.S. obligations to an American citizen [emphasis added]."
Although there is still no copy of this letter in the U.S. National Archives, ABC claims to have verified its existence with the KGB. Thus it appeared that Oswald's story was true after all, and the Warren Commission's theory that Oswald had never sent such a letter was not.
As discussed in a previous section of this chapter, the HSCA's probe into Oswald's 201 opening repeated the Warren Commission's erroneous rejection of the December letter story. In so doing, however, the HSCA had to rebut not just Oswald's statement in his second letter, but also the memorandum written by the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, George Kalaris. Both government investigations thus dismissed the authenticity of Oswald's original query about coming home. It is more logical to conclude that Oswald did send the letter and that it was permanently impounded by the KGB.
The next question is: Did the CIA indeed find out about Oswald's December query? In order to answer this question, it might be useful to discuss how closely the CIA was able to monitor American defectors in Russia. We turn now to the Agency's level of interest in this unusual group of people.
American Defectors to the U.S.S.R.
For SR/6, American defectors in the Soviet Union were potentially rich repositories of information useful to the Agency's operations in the Soviet Union. From SR/6's point of view, each defector was a walking encyclopedia of his own "reality" in Russia. "Soviet Realities" was another way of referring to SR/6, because building retrievable encyclopedic descriptions of real places in Russia-down to the lampposts, buildings, mailboxes, street signs, and matchbooks-was one of its principal missions."34
Sometime in 1960, SR/6 set up a "soft file" on the Americans who had defected to the Soviet Union during the previous eighteen or so months. A "soft file" is an informal file that can be maintained just about anywhere, as opposed to a formal file bearing the name of the originating element, such as a Security (OS) file, which could be maintained only by the Office of Security. In 1960 SR/6 set up just such an informal file on these American defectors. In a 1966 memorandum for record, a CIA person, whose name is still classified,"35 wrote this about the SR/6 soft file:
The attached material was part of a soft file entitled "American Defectors to the USSR," which was set up by SR/6 (Support) around 1960 and maintained by various SR components until ca. 1963. The compilations were derived from a variety of sources, and contain both classified and overt data.36
"Attached material" meant the informal chronologies of each of the defectors, typed entries in chronological order with handwritten notes around them. The time period covered in this SR/6 soft file, "around" 1960 to "ca. 1963," overlaps perfectly the time between this group's defection and their return to the United States. All of this particular group of defectors redefected to the United States by 1963, except Dutkanicz, the most intriguing of the group, who died in the Soviet Union.;'
The 1966 memo about the 1960 SR/6 defectors file has other important clues in it. For example, this paragraph:
In the fall of 1966, the files were turned over to CIA Staff. In most instances, basic information was then extracted for the US Defector Machine Program. In all instances in which the material was unique, or represented a valuable collation effort, it has been incorporated into the appropriate 201 file, along with a copy of this memorandum.38
This memo indicates that there were instances where the CIA had information about these defectors between 1960 and 1963 that was not in their 201 files at the time and was not added to them until late 1966.
This filing system is an example of what is referred to in the intelligence community as "compartmentation." The whole picture is not kept in one place. Instead, pieces are kept in separate compartments because of the sensitive sources used to get those pieces of information. This presented a quandary for the CIA when the Kennedy assassination required a review of this kind of information. The 1966 memo about the SR/6 file complained about this problem in this way:
It is suggested that any dissemination of this data should be coordinated with SB [Soviet Bloc] Division and with CI staff (CU MRO), in view of the frequently inadequate sourcing and of the fact that disseminations have already been made through the US Defector Machine Program [emphasis added].J9
This pattern of inadequate source material in the 201 files of certain defectors would also befall Oswald's 201 file from the time of its opening and beyond.
We know that Oswald was in this group at the time the soft file was set up in 1960.40 He probably still was when the State Department passed the results of its own status check on this special group of defectors to the FBI and CIA on May 17, 1962,41 the time at which Oswald was preparing to depart for the U.S. In Oswald's case, the probable event triggering his 201 opening-his December queries about returning home-would likely not have been included in his 201 file in order to protect the Soviet source. On the other hand, the news of Oswald's decision to return to the U.S.-as reflected in his second letter to Snyder and routinely passed to the CIA by the State Department at the CONFIDENTIAL level-was placed in his 201 file.