Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, according to the conclusions of two government investigations into the assassination. The 1964 Warren Commission concluded Oswald acted alone; the House Select Committee on Assassinations, during the late 1970s, concluded that while Oswald was the shooter, President Kennedy "most likely was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy". Some critics of the official accounts have claimed that Oswald was not involved at all and was framed, and many conspiracy theories have been developed, but no single compelling alternative suspect has emerged.

The Soviet Union

Oswald's October 1959 trip to the Soviet Union, at the age of nineteen, was well planned in advance. In addition to his studies of Russian, he saved his Marine Corps salary, he got an early "hardship" discharge by claiming he needed to care for his ailing mother in New Orleans (a lie), and submitted several falsified applications to foreign universities to aid in his quest to get a student visa and to apparently help him avoid Marine Corps reserve duty. After spending one day with his mother in New Orleans, he departed for the Soviet Union by ship via France, England and eventually Finland as part of a package tour,http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/journey.htm and declared to the US Embassy in Moscow immediately upon arrival in the USSR his intent to renounce his US citizenship.http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/moscow1.htm Once the Navy Department learned of this, it changed Oswald's Marine Corps discharge from "hardship/honorable" to "dishonorable." Although Oswald's effort to remain in the country was initally appaluded by the Soviets, Oswald (despite his technical knowledge acquired in the Marines) had soon turned out to be of little real value to the Soviet Union and so his application for Soviet residency had been rejected.http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/kgb.htm In the face of this setback, a determined Oswald feigned a suicide by a bloody but minor slash to his left wrist in his hotel room bathtub and was hospitalized.http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/moscow2.htmhttp://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/moscow3.htm With authorities fearing an international incident should Oswald attempt suicide again, Oswald was eventually allowed to remain in the USSR and shipped off to Minsk, where he was kept under nearly constant surveillance during his three-year stay in the country.

Related Topics:
Soviet Union - New Orleans - Reserve - Finland - USSR - Citizenship - Bathtub - Minsk

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The Minsk KGB office had never had its own American case and they threw themselves into the task with gusto, the result being the lengthy KGB file no. 31451, a largely mundane daily account of Oswald's life.http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/minsk2.htm The KGB assigned Oswald the codename "Lehoy" -- ironically meaning "slick" but also a phonetic play on his name Lee Harvey. Oswald was spied upon by a close friend and fellow worker, Pavel Golovachev, the son of Red Air Force General Golovachev, a senior air defense district commander in Siberia at the time and a fomer World War II fighter pilot ace, a Hero of the Soviet Union famous for downing a Nazi aircraft by ramming his plane into it when he ran out of ammunition. Pavel Golovachev took many of the intimate photos of Oswald at home and at play in Minsk, copies of which he gave to Oswald and many of which surfaced during the Warren investigation and which no doubt were primarily intended for KGB consumption. In 1991-1992 interviews, Golovachev said that at first he agreed to spy on Oswald, believing that he might indeed be a US intelligence officer, but after getting to know Oswald and on KGB instructions unsuccessfully tempting Oswald with information from his father's air defense command, he concluded that Oswald was exactly who he said he was: an American wanting to temporarily taste life in the Soviet Union with the intention of writing a book about it upon his return. (Something that Oswald indeed began doing almost immediately upon his return to the USA.)

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Golovachev stated that Oswald never talked about the dramatic circumstances of his arrival in Moscow, his "suicide attempt" or that he sought Soviet citizenship. He gave the impression that his arrival in the Soviet Union was not contentious and did not speak ill of the USA and refrained from talking about politics in general. When asked by Russians where life was better, in the USA or the USSR, Golovachev recalls that Oswald would reply that there were pros and cons to both places in his opinion and tried to steer the conversation away from political issues. Golovachev eventually warned Oswald on a visit to his apartment in the spring of 1961 that he was being reported upon by people close to him, including himself, a warning probably recorded by KGB microphones planted in Oswald's apartment.

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Initially, Oswald seemed to thrive. He had a job as a metal lathe operator at the Gorizont (Horizon) Electronics Factory in Minsk, a huge facility which produced not only radio and televisions in the Soviet Union but military and space electronic components as well. He was given his own rent-subsidized fully furnished studio apartment in a prestigeous buidling under Gorizont's administration and monetary subsidies from the Red Cross (a Soviet organization not to be confused with the international medical aid organization) above his factory pay, an idyllic existence by Soviet-era working-class standards.http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/minsk3.htm He was called "Alek" by his friends, who thought his name "Lee" sounded too Chinese. He owned a small bore shotgun, went bird hunting with friends, frequently attended the opera and symphony concerts and dated women he met at trade union dances and the nearby Foreign Language School. However, Oswald soon tired of his comparatively monotonous Soviet life. The oppressive bureaucracy of the Soviet Union eventually caused Oswald to believe the country was a poorly implemented perversion of Marxist goals; he believed himself to be a pure Marxist. He felt unappreciated when he was assigned factory work in Minsk instead of being admitted to study at the University of Moscow as he had requested. He grew bored with the limited recreation that Minsk offered and was stunned when a co-worker he proposed to, Ella Germann, rejected him. In 1992, Ella Germann stated that Oswald talked with her about going to live in Czechoslovakia, where Communism was more liberal according to him. He also told her that he was "hiding out" in Minsk because the US had "hunted" him in Moscow and that if he returned to the US he would be "shot" (executed). In reality, at the time that Oswald was saying these things to her, he had made his first attempt to contact the US embassy in Moscow about a possible return to the USA, except that the KGB intercepted his first letter and never forwarded it to the embassy.

Related Topics:
Chinese - Trade union - Bureaucracy - Marxist

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At a dance in early 1961, Oswald met Marina Alexandrovna Nikolayevna Medvedeva Prusakova, a troubled 19 year old pharmacology student from Leningrad living with her aunt and uncle in Minsk. While it is alleged that her uncle was a colonel in the KGB or MVD, he was in fact a lumber industry expert in the MVD -- the Ministry of Interior -- with a colonel's rank. The MVD at that time was equivalent to the US Department of Justice and Interior combined, and Marina's uncle worked in the administration of lumbering projects using inmate labor which by Khruschev's period consisted mostly of non-political criminal prisoners. Oswald and Marina were married less than a month and a half later. It was not the ideal basis for such a union, as Oswald was still on the rebound from his failed relationship with Ella. Marina, some believe, married Oswald for his high standard of living (his own apartment, etc.) or in order to immigrate to the U.S. "Maybe I was not in love with Alik as I ought to have been," she had later admitted. This seems possible, as she later wrote love letters to two of her ex-boyfriends while in the US, before the Kennedy assassination. Marina also soon became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, June. Oswald (who, contrary to popular opinion, never really renounced his US citizenship - the US Embassy in Moscow retained his US passport) and after nearly a year of paperwork and waiting, the family left the Soviet Union for the United States on June 1, 1962.

Related Topics:
Pharmacology - Soviet Union - June 1 - 1962

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In December 1961, approximately six months prior to his departure from the Soviet Union, it was reported by the KGB and confirmed by a friend of Oswald's in 1992, Eric Titovetz, a medical student at the time, that Oswald manufactured a pipe bomb using parts he took home from the metal shop at the factory and filled with gun powder presumably from ammunition he possessed for his shotgun. Oswald never explained why he made the bomb. This became of particular concern to the KGB when an assassination attempt (about which little is still known today) was made on the life of Soviet Premier Khrushchev several weeks later on a visit to a resort in the Minsk area. Oswald never detonated the pipe bomb but threw it out into the garbage, from where the KGB recovered it. Some speculate that Oswald, who knew he was under observation by the KGB, made the bomb to hasten the Soviets in issuing him an exit visa -- and indeed, within weeks of that incident, Oswald was informed that his exit visa had been approved. It could have been a move as dramatic as his "suicide attempt", this time with the exact opposite objective in mind.

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Most Russian witnesses to Oswald's time in the USSR, first interviewed in 1991 and 1992 by Peter Vronsky,http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald-in-russia.htm recall Oswald as a boyish, silly and immature youth (he was nineteen when he arrived in the USSR and twenty-two when he left.) He was described by some as being shallow and of limited intelligence and a poor and lazy worker but almost all who knew him, recall him as "sympathetic" -- ie. charming and friendly. He did not drink or smoke, which the Russians found strange. His only vice apparently were sweets and pastries. His girlfriends recall him as being annoyingly parsimonious with sweets. Most Russians who knew him recall that once the thrill of meeting an American wore off, Oswald was rather dull company with little of interest to say. His shelf in his apartment was filled with books on Marxism but his understanding of it appeared to be rudimentary. His neighbors who lived directly above him, and whose windows looked down onto his balcony below, were more critical in their 1991-92 recollections, describing him as a rude lout who was frequently heard berating Marina for her apparent lack of cooking and cleaning skills. According to the neighbors, Marina complained to them that Oswald had struck her on occasion.

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His Russian language ability has been a contentious issue. It was described by all the Russian witnesses as borderline coherent, although Russians in general are perfectionists when it comes to judging linguistic abilities. Those Russian who encountered him in Moscow upon his arrival, unanimously attest that his Russian was entirely incoherent beyond basic phrases such as, "I need a fork." Those Russians who knew him through the duration of his stay in Minsk from January 1960 to June 1962, stated that although Oswald's spoken Russian had improved over the years, his comprehension did not. Pavel Golovachev recalled how his wife Marina would occasionally bluntly berate and belittle Oswald in his presence to other Russians, without Oswald catching on. Letters written in Russian by Oswald, reproduced among the Warren Commission exhibits, including CE 1 -- the letter he wrote to Marina the day he is believed to have attempted to assassinate General Walker http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/walkernote1.jpg -- are all poorly written and ungrammatical. Nevertheless, considering Oswald's possible dyslexia and lack of formal education, however limited Oswald's Russian was, it was still a remarkable achievement.

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Oswald's return home from the Soviet Union would mark a new and final phase in his short life and a significant break in his previous psychological profile. Since his return as a teenager to New Orleans from New York City where he had a troubled history, Oswald had numerous friendships and acquaintances--in his later high school years, in the Marines, and most of all in the Soviet Union where he had a number of girlfriends, married, fathered a child, formed friendships, went on picnics, hunting trips, to parties, dances and socialized with a broad range of people. He was not by any stretch of the imagination a "loner" during those years. But upon his return to the USA in 1962, Oswald would have very few friends or acquaintances except for George de Mohrenschildt, and would grow to become deeply disillusioned and isolated from people including his family which he would last see in November 1962 on Thankgiving Day. He eventually separated from his wife and infant daughter, living so alone in distant rooming houses that there are periods where his movements and activities in the final months of his life remain undetermined and unwitnessed. Even physically, in the last year of his life, Oswald appeared to bald and age significantly beyond his twenty-four years.

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