Authors: John Newman
Oswald came to view the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as corrupt. Only party members could afford luxuries, he said, while common workers could afford only food and clothing. Party members were all "opportunists," Oswald said, who "shouted the loudest" but were interested only in their own welfare. Oswald expressed similar views in a manuscript which he worked on in Russia.' The "spontaneous" demonstrations for Soviet holidays or distinguished visitors were "organized," he said, and elections were "supervised" to ensure a high turnout and continued Communist Party control.
On January 4, 1961, one year after he had been issued his "stateless" residence permit, Oswald was summoned to the passport office in Minsk and asked if he still wanted to become a Soviet citizen. He replied that he did not, but asked that his residence permit be extended for another year. The entry in his diary for January 4-31 reads: "I am starting to reconsider my desire about staying. The work is drab. The money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation accept [sic] the trade union dances. I have had enough."
Because the opening of Oswald's 201 file on December 9, 1960, was after his decision to return home but before the embassy knew of his whereabouts, it is reasonable to think seriously about the possibility that someone in America knew how to communicate with Oswald or to learn what the Soviets were saying about him. Is there any evidence that Oswald was in communication with someone outside of Minsk or Russia during the "lost" period? The answer might be yes to both. It is possible, but by no means firm, that Oswald had contact with someone in Moscow or outside of the Soviet Union.
There was a person in Moscow that Oswald could have telephoned if he had wanted to. This person slips through relatively unnoticed during the period of Oswald's defection, but it appears Oswald did try to contact him in 1961. When Oswald, accompanied this time by Marina, visited the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in July, he looked up the name of this individual in his address book. According to an FBI report by Special Agents Heitman and Griffin about their interview with Marina, that is what occurred in 1961:
At the time of Marina's first visit to Moscow with Oswald, he referred to his address book to find the name of an individual. It was Oswald's intention to call this person on the telephone. He showed the name to Marina. This name she has identified from a photograph of one page of Oswald's address book which contains the name written in the Latin alphabet, "Leo Setyaev."6S
Marina said the written name and associated writing in the address book were not hers or Oswald's. The leading candidate would appear to be Leo Setyaev himself.
Whether this handwriting in Oswald's address book was Setyaev's or someone else's, Oswald behaved as if Setyaev were a person he might call on for help. The Heitman-Griffin FBI report explains:
Marina said Oswald tried to contact this person, but had been unsuccessful. Marina asked Oswald who this individual Leo Setyaev was. Oswald replied he was a man who had helped him make some money after his arrival in Moscow by assisting him in a broadcast for Radio Moscow. Marina asked Oswald what he had said, and he told her he had criticized the United States and said Russia was a better place in which to live. Marina asked him why he said this, and Oswald replied it was necessary to make this propaganda because at the time he had wanted to live in Russia.
This apparent connection to Setyaev was interesting indeed, as was this additional detail provided by Marina: Oswald said Setyaev had visited him at the "Hotel Metropole in Moscow." There has been a great deal of misunderstanding about the date of Setyaev's visit to Oswald, most notably, that the visit was on October 19 at the Berlin Hotel. Setyaev, however, has been interviewed and described the room in which he made the visit with Oswald. The room he describes appears to be the one described by Aline Mosby.
In the FBI interview with Heitman and Griffin, Marina recalled other relevant information about Setyaev's visit to the Hotel Metropole, including a photograph of Oswald:
She advised further Setyaev had taken a photograph of Oswald during his visit to the latter at the Hotel Metropole. This photograph is one of the photographs of Oswald presently in possession of investigators of the assassination as Marina recalls seeing it. It is the photograph of Oswald standing in a room, in which he wears a black suit, a white shirt, and a tie. Marina said Oswald looks quite serious in the photograph. The photograph is about 5" by 7" in size. Marina said it was obvious to her Oswald was quite worried in this photograph because she noticed that a vein was standing out very noticeably on the right side of his face.
This attire sounds almost identical to what Snyder said Oswald was wearing during the October 31 defection at the Embassy, only this time the oddity was not the pair of white gloves, but a vein on his face. Heitman and Griffin just happened to have on hand for the interview with Marina ten photographs of Leo and Anita Setyaev.'
It appears that Setyaev was known to both the CIA and the FBI. A sensitive June 24, 1960, LINGUAL intercept, "60F24," was addressed to Leo Setyaev by Charles John Pagenhardt, and a May 1964 CIA report on LINGUAL intercepts related to the "Oswald case" explained that the Agency's interest in this letter was based on the fact that Setyaev was listed in Oswald's address book and also because Pagenhardt was known to have "contemplated defecting to the USSR."67 The CIA document also states: "Setyaev and Pagenhardt are known to the FBI." This sidesteps, however, the issue of what the interest in Setyaev was at the time this letter was intercepted-June 24, 1960.
The Warren Commission appears not to have bothered to consider whether Setyaev had was an informant for the CIA. This was the commission's assessment:
On October 19, Oswald was probably interviewed in his hotel room by a man named Leo Setyaev, who said that he was a reporter for Radio Moscow seeking statements from American tourists about their impressions of Moscow, but who was probably also acting for the KGB. Two years later, Oswald told officials at the American Embassy that he had made a few routine comments to Setyaev of no political significance. The interview with Setyaev may, however, have been the occasion of an attempt by the KGB, in accordance with regular practice, to assess Oswald or even to elicit compromising statements from him; the interview was apparently never broadcast'
The CIA checked Setyaev's name with a KGB informant of their own, who said he had "never heard the name."' Setyaev claimed to have made a tape recording of the interview with Oswald in his room in the Metropole Hotel," but "erased it immediately because Oswald's remarks were too political for the light tourist chatter that he needed for his show."71
More important is the circumstantial but credible evidence that Oswald had a contact outside the Soviet Union. It comes from his friends in Minsk, especially the girlfriend he originally wanted to marry, Ella German. During his research into Oswald's stay in Minsk, investigative journalist Peter Wronski interviewed Oswald's first flame in Russia-Ella German. This passage is from Wronski's 1991 interview with Ella:
PETER wRONSKI: Did he tell you about his relatives?
ELLA GERMAN: No. You know ... I was surprised. He didn't tell me he had a mother. He only used to speak about a cousin....
PETER wRONSKI: Did he correspond with America?
ELLA GERMAN: He only said that he used to get some letters from his cousin. He received a package of books, he told me once. I said, "why not with things?" He said, "no, the customs duty is very expensive here. And on books there is no customs duty." .. .
PETER WRONSKI: And from whom did he get these books?
ELLA GERMAN: From his cousin.
PETER WRONSKI: Did he name him?
ELLA GERMAN: No, he didn't name him..... He just said a cousin."
His cousins had no idea where Oswald was and sent no packages, let alone letters, to Russia. Yet this passage suggests that Oswald was receiving mail from someone outside Russia, and that somebody might have been from the United States. Whoever it was, Oswald evidently decided to lie about it. In addition, Oswald gave his friend Titovitz a book-possibly during the "lost in Minsk" period-but then momentarily pulled back the book to razor out a dedication on the corner of the first page.73
Did Oswald go to the trial of Francis Powers? Dr. Lawrence Haapanen framed the case for such a visit about as incisively as it has been recently. With the understanding that the following is circumstantial and speculative, here is the "base case" for Oswald's presence at the Powers U-2 trial August 17-18, 1960. There are three pre- and one post-assassination pieces of evidence. First, that in a room full of distinguished observers from around the world, virtually all of whom are dressed in suits, we have one young man sitting, coatless, in a shirt that looks a great deal like the one Oswald was wearing when photographed in Minsk in 1961. Second, in a now-well-known letter written to his brother dated February 15, 1961, Oswald said that Francis Gary Powers "seemed to be a nice, bright American-type fellow, when I saw him in Moscow."74 The CIA took this seriously enough to pin down the dates Powers spent in Moscow. And third, several of the words highlighted in Oswald's English-Russian dictionary could have been related to an interest in the U-2, e.g., "radar," "range," and "eject," as well as a phrase he wrote in himself, "radar locator." The U-2 carried a radar locator that could determine "the location of ... radar installations."75
Finally, after the assassination, Allen Dulles sent Lee Rankin a memo and a brief article from the Saturday Review of May 9, 1964. Dulles's July 23, 1964, memo and associated documents became Warren Commission CD 1345. In the SR article, the writer (Henry Brandon) said that he talked to one of the Intourist guides who had met Oswald when he first came to Moscow in the fall of 1959. This guide said that several Intourist guides felt sorry for Oswald and, when winter came, brought him a fur cap. "But when they saw him again in Moscow several months later, he completely ignored them--didn't even speak to them." Incredibly, the WC seems to have never followed up on this.
According to the Warren Commission's findings, Oswald was in Moscow from October 1959 to early January 1960. While there is no "official" indication that Oswald was back in Moscow in August 1960, his reappearance at that time clearly could have been within the time frame mentioned in the SR article-" several months later"-when the Intourist guides found Oswald back in Moscow and strangely aloof. If it was Oswald, he would have had opportunities to contact someone, like Setyaev. However, there is no mention of an August 1960 visit with Setyaev, either in Oswald's accounts or Marina's.
If the hypothesis in this chapter is true, then the 1975 CIA memorandum stating that Oswald's 201 file had been opened because of his "queries" could have been considered a breach of security, revealing that the CIA had knowledge of Oswald's queries. This mistake might have resulted from Angleton's sudden firing due to public disclosure of the HT-LINGUAL mail intercept program. Indeed, there are hints in a heavily redacted part of an old register of the CIA's files of a security violation at the very moment the September 18, 1975, document was released to an official investiga- tion.76 Other information in this Kalaris memo is worthy of consideration as a security violation, information we will discuss in Chapter Nineteen. It is more likely that other information, concerning the Cuban Consulate, was the reason for the security violation. Nevertheless, the possible connection of the security compromise to a Soviet source should not be overlooked.
From the above, it appears that Oswald may have had a contact outside Minsk and perhaps outside the Soviet Union, and also that the CIA had some way of knowing about Oswald's desire to come home by the time they opened his 201 file in December 1960. These observations are highly speculative and, even if true, do not, in and of themselves, indicate Oswald was a CIA agent. There are other possibilities, however, and as promised, we will now address the question: Was Oswald manipulated into going to Russia? Again, our answer here flows from the perspective that develops in his files, which may not necessarily correspond to reality or to what was inside Oswald's head. The evidence is not firm or even particularly convincing, but that is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, enough information has accumulated where a crude case can be advanced.
To begin with, those who observed him at the time of the defection reported their judgment that Oswald had obtained some sort of help, at a minimum, to prepare for the defection. This piece is convincing, only it seems impossible to take it anywhere with any certainty. In Chapter Six we explored three salient points in the unfolding mole-hunt in the Soviet Russia Division. Goleniewski's letters-which were suggestive of a mole-may not have been written soon enough to relate to an Oswald dangle in the Soviet Union, though perhaps one or two might have been early enough. The KGB's arrest of Popov-a CIA mole-occurred on the day Oswald arrived in Moscow (October 16, 1959), and thus was too late to provide a motive for dangling Oswald. Thus, the character of the mole-hunt which was in existence as Oswald prepared for and traveled to the Soviet Union was the Popov information from 1958: that the U-2 had been betrayed in some way.
From the above, we can build a rather weak case for a dangle, an operation in which the Soviets might be tested to see how much interest there was in Oswald's U-2 past. The FBI liaison to the CIA, Sam Papich, remembers "discussions of a plan to have a CIA or FBI man defect to Moscow," but he states that the plan was not implemented "to his knowledge."" As we will see, throughout Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union, an Agency element which appears regularly on cover sheets for Oswald documents is CUOPS, which means "Counterintelligence Operations." If Oswald was a dangle, this might suggest that it was a counterintelligence operation run by Angleton.
Again, the evidence for this is hardly overwhelming. At the same time, however, whether or not the Agency ever considered seriously the damage that Oswald's knowledge might have had on the U-2 program if fully exploited, they could presume some level of Soviet interest. The existence of Oswald's SR/6 soft file-which had a page and a quarter worth of entries before the opening of Oswald's 201 file-confirms that Oswald was considered among a high-interest group of American military defectors to the Soviet Union.