Reclaiming History (148 page)

Even if the United States granted his request to return with his wife, there was still another considerable obstacle. Would the Soviets permit Marina to leave? At some time within a month or two thereafter—exactly when is not clear—Marina began to seek the permission of the Soviet authorities to leave for the United States. She wrote to a government department in Minsk, which forwarded her request for exit documents to the Foreign Office in Moscow. Marina also wrote a letter to the American embassy in Moscow for documents to request permission for herself to emigrate to the United States.
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Around this time, Lee started to correspond, after a two-year lapse, with his brother Robert, without apology and as if the 1959 letters had never been written. In a May 5, 1961, letter, he advised Robert he was now married.
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In a May 31, 1961, letter he hinted, without giving a tad of reason for his 180-degree turnaround, that he might want to return to the United States. He wrote, “I can’t say wether I will ever get back to the States or not, if I can get the government to drop charges against me, and get the Russians to let me out with my wife, than maybe I’ll be seeing you again.
But
, you know it is not simple for
either
of those two things. So I just can’t say for now.”
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Meanwhile, in Moscow, Richard Snyder wrote to the State Department on May 26 (the day after receiving Oswald’s letter) noting Oswald’s threat to create problems for the department in the United States, and asking for guidance. “In view of the possibility that the Department may receive further inquiries from Oswald’s mother or from other persons in his behalf concerning his case, the Embassy would be glad to have the Department’s comments before replying to Oswald.” Snyder did include his proposal to State that “should [Oswald] be found not to have lost American citizenship, he would be entitled to return to the United States under the laws and regulations applicable to all American citizens.”
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State wrote back to approve, with circumspection, Snyder’s proposal. “The Embassy’s careful attention to the involved case of Mr. Oswald is appreciated,” they said. “It is
assumed
*
that there is no doubt that the person who has been in communication with the embassy is the person who was issued a passport in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald…In the absence of evidence showing that Mr. Oswald has definitely lost United States citizenship he
apparently
maintains that technical status.”
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On July 8, 1961, Oswald, impatient at the lack of a response from the U.S. embassy to his last letter, appeared without warning at the embassy in Moscow. It was a calculated risk for him, since, as a resident alien, he was not supposed to travel without authorization.
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Marina was anxious and tearful about the trip, but Lee, who as a southern boy (Louisiana and Texas) didn’t like Russia’s harsh climate, told her, “One more winter in Russia and I’m going to die.”
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And there was now a new factor in the equation: Marina was pregnant. In a narrative of her life with Oswald for the Warren Commission, she wrote, “Lee was very anxious to have a child and was very grieved when the honeymoon was over and there was no sign of a baby. Sometime in the middle of June we were out on a lake near Minsk with one of his friends who spoke English very well, lying in the sun and swimming. That was a wonderful day, and that evening Lee told me that he was sure that after the required time, starting from that day, we would have a baby. I did not believe it, but a week later we were eating in a café and I fainted. I think this was the first sign of the baby.”
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This news was much on their minds as he boarded an Aeroflot airliner for the two-and-a-half-hour flight to Moscow. He was, according to Marina, quite fearful when he said good-bye to her, and neither of them were able to eat their breakfast at the airport. He told Marina that officials at the embassy were “entitled” to arrest him because he had tried to renounce his citizenship—they weren’t, of course, but Oswald seemed to believe they might. He was equally fearful of the Soviet authorities and begged Marina to say nothing to her Uncle Ilya about his risky trip. He sought to minimize that risk by taking a two-week vacation and traveling during it so as not to be missed at work.
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But he miscalculated slightly. When he finally arrived at the embassy in the city center at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, July 8, he found the offices closed. Fortunately he was able to reach Snyder by phone. Snyder, like other embassy employees, lived in the building, and he came downstairs to meet him, advising him to return on Monday.
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The pregnancy had made Marina topsy-turvy with emotions she did not understand and could not control. She bristled at his attempts to dominate her. During Lee’s whirlwind courtship of her, she had been very much in control, but with their marriage the rules began to change and he asserted himself more and more and Marina hadn’t been altogether sure that she liked that. And his jealousy and suspicions were oppressive. “Where have you been?” he would ask her when she was only a few minutes late in coming home from her work. “I called the pharmacy and they said you had already left.” And their sex life wasn’t quite what she expected. She thought there would be more romance to it, but it was mostly, for Lee, just sex, and she started to feel used by him physically, and started, every now and then, to resist his advances. She also began to become a little distrustful of him when she found out (when he received a letter from Marguerite) that his mother was still alive. Here she had thought that “God sent me an orphan like myself.” When she asked him why he had lied to her about his mother being dead, his explanation, which he had no time to formulate, was entirely inadequate—something about if people knew he had a mother it might cause his mother some unpleasantness. He then proceeded to tell Marina he didn’t love his mother and added another lie to the tableau, that the reason was the way his mother treated his brother Robert’s wife. If he did not tell Marina about Marguerite, Lee
did
tell her—and it made her jealous—about the first woman he ever physically knew, a Japanese girl whom Lee spoke glowingly of in terms of beauty and how she had catered to his every need.
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As if the foregoing were not enough, Marina, because of her pregnancy, became inordinately sensitive to odors. Even the walls of their tiny apartment seemed to smell to her, and when she tried to escape to the balcony, she smelled everything on the stoves of the neighboring apartments, and she had trouble eating. She even noticed Lee’s body odor, which was persistent. She began to wonder if she had erred in marrying him so quickly.
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The Saturday afternoon that Lee arrived in Moscow, Marina got a phone call at the pharmacy from a former boyfriend, Leonid Gelfant, a young architect she had seen before she met Lee. She told him she was now married, but he offered her dinner and champagne at a friend’s apartment where he was staying for a few days while the friend was away. Marina somewhat foolishly agreed, thinking that the evening might reveal to her whether she had made a mistake in marrying Lee. They first saw a movie together and afterward repaired to his borrowed flat, eventually winding up in bed, although, according to the story Marina told Priscilla McMillan years later, Leonid, making love to a woman for the first time, proved inadequate. Nevertheless, Marina felt dirty afterward. She ran home, where she nearly threw up. She knew she had seriously betrayed Lee.
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In the evening Marina went to the central post office in Minsk to receive a call from Lee, who asked her to join him in Moscow. She went, arriving on Monday morning.
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She took the bus into Sverdlov Square and went to the Hotel Berlin, where Lee was staying and where they made love. When Lee returned to the embassy that Monday afternoon, Marina waited outside in the waiting room
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while her husband was searchingly interviewed by Snyder, who asked to see Oswald’s Soviet papers and questioned him closely about his life in Russia and any possible expatriating acts that would preclude his returning to America. Oswald stated he was not a citizen of the Soviet Union, had never applied for citizenship (dubious, since we know he did request it, though not by formal application),
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had never taken an oath of allegiance to the Soviet Union, and had never become a member of a Soviet trade union, the latter being untrue.
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He also said that he had never given Soviet authorities any confidential information gleaned from his service in the military, had never been asked to give such information, and doubted that he would have done so had he been asked.
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Snyder felt that Oswald had matured while he was in Russia and did not show the bravado and arrogance that characterized his first contact with the embassy. Oswald told him that he had “learned a hard lesson the hard way” and had acquired a new appreciation of the United States and the meaning of freedom.
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Lee clearly feared prosecution and lengthy imprisonment if he returned to the United States, but Snyder, speaking unofficially, told him he saw no reason for such fear if everything he had told Snyder was true. He added, however, that there was no way the embassy had the power to grant him any sort of blanket immunity from prosecution.
*
Oswald appeared to understand but explained that he did not want to apply for an exit visa back to the United States from the Soviet authorities until he “had this end of the thing straightened out.”
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Snyder had Oswald complete and sign an “Application for Renewal of Passport,” and then fill out a questionnaire, under penalty of perjury, on which he wrote what he essentially had told Snyder, including that he had only a residence permit in the Soviet Union and was still an American national. Snyder reviewed his application and questionnaire and, finding everything in order, returned (
not
renewed) Lee’s passport, amended for travel only back to the United States, knowing that Lee could make little headway with the Soviets for his exit visa without it.
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Oswald’s passport was scheduled to expire on September 10, 1961, and when Warren Commission counsel asked Snyder, “And you felt he would not be able to get out of the Soviet Union prior to September 1961?” Snyder answered that in his estimation “there was no prospect of his leaving the Soviet Union at that time, and probably not for quite some time to come.”
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Though Snyder didn’t explain why, we can only assume that he knew from experience that it would take the Soviets far beyond September to issue Oswald the exit visa he needed to leave the Soviet Union. And ultimately, the State Department would have to conclude whether Oswald had expatriated himself, and if not, renew his passport and allow him to return to America.

The next day, Lee, elated by the return of his passport and the fact that his darkest fears of arrest, at least in Moscow, had not come to pass, went back to the embassy with Marina, where John McVickar took them through the procedures for admitting her to the United States as an immigrant, although there was little McVickar could do but take official notice of her intent until she obtained her exit visa from the Soviet Union. With an exit visa, Marina, being the wife of an American citizen, would have the right to enter the United States under a non-quota status.
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Pushed by Lee, Marina had not mentioned to McVickar her pregnancy, which might have caused a delay, and she had lied when he had asked her if she was a member of Komsomol. She was, although she took no interest or active role in the communist youth organization.
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McVickar typed out an immigrant visa application for Marina, which Lee signed.
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After Lee and Marina returned to Minsk, he wrote to his brother Robert on July 14, 1961:

Dear Robert,

On the 8th of July [it had been the 10th] I and my wife went into The american Embassy, I cannot write you what went on there, because the Russians, read all letters going in and out. But anyway I have the American Passport, and we are doing everything we can to get out…

The Russians can be crule and very crude at times. They gave a cross eximanation to my wife on the first day we came back from Moscow, They knew everything because they spy, and read there mails. but we shall continue to try and get out. We shall not retreat. As for your package we never recived it, I suppose they swiped that to, the bastards.

I hope someday, I’ll see you and Vada but if and when I come, I’ll come with my wife. You can’t imagine How wonderful she stood up.

Write offten

Your Brother

Lee
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The secret was indeed out. The Soviet authorities, who usually check the papers of anyone entering the American embassy in Moscow,
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were perfectly aware that Lee and Marina had gone there, and the battle, particularly over Marina, was now openly joined. Lee, however, would not waver until he had accomplished his goal, to return to America with his wife and, as it turned out, his child.

If Oswald’s diary is correct about the date—always a questionable supposition—Marina was ambushed at work on the very day after their return. She was, he wrote in his diary entry for July 15, “shocked to find out ther everyone knows she entered the U.S. embassy…The boses hold a meeting and give her a strong browbeating. The first of many indocrinations.”
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In a letter to the American embassy dated the same day, July 15, he mentioned Marina’s difficulties at what he called “the usual, ‘enemy of the people’ meeting.” She was “condemed, and her friends at work warned against speaking with her.” But he also boasted that such “tactics” were “quite useless” since Marina had “stood up well, without getting into trouble.”
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Lee and Marina’s attempt to leave Russia for the United States was not going to be easy. For starters, the Soviets required the completion of four documents, which were submitted by Lee and Marina in July and August of 1961: Lee’s application for an exit visa, backed by Marina’s application for permission for Lee to leave, Marina’s own application for an exit visa, and a statement by Lee guaranteeing Marina’s financial support.
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But Lee’s diary entry for the period from July 15 through August 20 suggested that so much more was involved, there being “about 20 papers” in all, including birth certificates and photos. Because of his dyslexia, filling out all the forms he had to was a real strain, and Marina recalls that he would pick up five or six blank forms for every one he was eventually able to complete reasonably well.
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