"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (39 page)

"Better still. Now, Lee, figure this out yourself: Why do we no longer want ‘the defector' to spread ‘disinformation'?”

Lee paused, taking a swig from his beer. “We do not want the confrontation to occur. Therefore, the big stick—the U2—only works if the other guy knows it exists. Not being fools, they can then do only one thing: back down.”

Maybe I underrated this guy. Lee actually could become one of our top men, the agent to whom I will someday assign the most difficult, dangerous mission of all—whatever that might be.

“Congratulations, Lee. You
get
it!”

Realizing he was on a roll, Lee couldn't stop the words from pouring out. “My job: make certain they know everything. Their possession of such knowledge will serve as deterrence. Yet our security forces must appear to be effectively protecting such secrets. If not, American citizens would panic. On the other hand, if some rogue-traitor turns over such information ...”

“And you will be that rogue traitor. Or pretend to be.”

Lee's eyes lit up brightly. “Meaning I'll do more good for my country than perhaps anyone ever has before?”

George smiled. “A wonderful thought, isn't it?”

“Wonderful, yet horrible. To achieve this in reality I must go down in history as the worst villain since Benedict Arnold.”

*

On September 16, 1959, Lee bid farewell to his mother and brother Robert and boarded another bus, this one to New Orleans. On arrival he was met by George. With money supplied by the CIA, Lee booked passage on a small freighter, the
Marion Lykes
, paying $220.75 (cash) for a one-way-ticket to Le Havre, France.

Subsequently, a letter was mailed to Fort Worth only after George carefully edited Lee's words down to an absolute minimum: “It is difficult to tell you how I feel. Just remember this is what I must do. I did not tell you my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand. Love to you both, Lee.”

Four other passengers traveled aboard the small boat. They took meals together adjacent to the galley. Lee's fellow travelers wanted to learn all about each other, but Lee offered no details as to his reason for making the journey. When one woman asked him to join them for a group photo before disembarking, he refused.

Without so much as a farewell, Lee took the boat-train to Southampton, England. Once there, he booked a flight from Heathrow Airport to Helsinki, remaining there for five days.

At the Soviet Consulate Lee obtained a travel visa (# 403339), allowing him to visit Russia for six days.

On arrival in Moscow, Lee checked into the upscale Hotel Berlin. Shortly, he was met by Rima Shirokova, a pretty employee of Intourist, the relatively new organization created to aid foreigners. (The Soviets had just relaxed their previously tight standards, encouraging more visitors).

The moment Lee glimpsed Rima, it was love at first sight.

*

Considered the most personable of all those hostesses at Intourist, Rima also happened to be the most beautiful. A natural blonde, she boasted a tight figure and dancing eyes. Fluent in English, Rimma was assigned to greet rare American tourists. Lee had purchased a five-day DeLuxe ticket; Rimma assumed ‘Mr. Oswald' must be wealthy. As such he intrigued her.

But when Rima arrived for their initial meeting in the hotel lobby she found herself face to face with a short, sad-eyed youth. He wore ordinary clothes. Lee, simply, was nothing like what she expected. Moreover, he remained surprisingly quiet during their morning odyssey around the city. Rima attempted to make all her carefully rehearsed anecdotes about Red Square, the Bolshoi, and other places of interest sound spontaneous.

Hard as she tried, she could not get a response. Lee only stared straight ahead, occasionally considering the sights.

“Mr. Oswald, I fear I am boring you.”

“No, no, no. It is not you, Rima. It's
me
.”

However, she could not help but notice Oswald cautiously checking out her feminine attributes. Rima did not join him at his hotel during the lunch break; that was considered intrusive on a visitor's privacy. When she returned at two p.m. to pick Lee up for his tour of the Kremlin, he asked if they might take a walk instead in the nearby park. Fearful that what he really wanted was to invite her back to his room, Rima tried to dissuade Lee. But he remained insistent and she agreed.

To her surprise, Lee, seated beside Rima on a bench, grew teary-eyed: he hadn't come to Moscw to visit but to defect. “I've had it with America, Rima. I want to become a Russian citizen. Don't try to convince me otherwise. I've made up my mind.”

Taken aback by his passion, Rima agreed to help Lee in any way she could. They spent the rest of that first afternoon composing a letter from Lee to the Supreme Soviet. In it, he requested political asylum, in time Soviet citizenship.

“Don‘t try to dissuade me. I know what I'm doing. I've thought it through and this is the right thing for me.”

They parted three hours later, Rima again wondering how such a seemingly ordinary fellow could afford a two-room suite, with attached private bathroom, in Moscow's most splendid hotel.

During the next two days, Rima continued the tour. Lee bounced back and forth between periods of elation—he would soon be a part of this mighty union!—and sudden bouts of depression, fearing he would be told to pack.

Rima repeatedly made clear that while she had personally approached Alexander Simchenko, head of the IVIR/Passport and Visa Office, the routine treatment of such a request was to explain to any would-be defector that he must go back to his homeland and there apply for Soviet citizenship at the Embassy.

“Rima? I think I love you.”

“Lee! I'm doing this as a friend. Please? Nothing more.”

On Lee's fifth day in Moscow, Rima appeared in the hotel lobby at nine p.m. sharp, as per schedule. Lee, anxious as ever, had been waiting for an hour. Turning to greet her, Lee noticed that Rima was now accompanied by another young woman, also from Intourist. Rima introduced the brunette as Rosa Agafonova.

One look at this shorter, darker, charmingly lush beauty and Lee Harvey Oswald fell in love at first sight.

*

“You know,” Alexander Simchenko told Lee after listening to the earnest (though in Simchenko's perception unbalanced) young American's pleas for citizenship, “we're not able to do anything here.” By that he meant his division, the IVIR.

“Isn't there
anything
we can try?” Rima asked.

“Someone you might call for help?” Rosa added.

“I'm being honest with all three of you,” Simchenko said. They sat close together in his medium-sized office, adorned only by a framed photograph of Nikita Khrushchev on one wall. “I have only so many ‘special requests.' My superiors do not like to be bothered by ordinary, doomed appeals. Can you understand?”

At that moment, Lee changed tactics, much to the surprise of the two women, one seated on either side, who had thought of him up to this point as something of a milk-toast. “How's this? I am a former United States Marine. I studied radar, worked at Atsugi aircraft base in Japan. While there, I passed on military secrets to Red agents in Tokyo. Contact them; they will vouch for me. Most of the classified information was relatively minor. That's because I was saving the big stuff for such a crisis as this. I can provide the KGB with photographs of the U2 that they have been so desperate for. I know everything about its inner workings and surveillance capabilities. I am in possession of dossiers of classified information about placement of Allied nuclear weapons in Europe. I know where the Naval fleet is and where it will be routed next. All this information is yours. In return I do not want rubles, only to be allowed to remain here.”

Simchenko, whose throat had gone dry, did not hesitate to reach for the phone, dialing his immediate superior. Momentarily that executive called the KGB. Lee grinned from ear to ear.

That night, October 18-—Lee's birthday—the two beauties celebrated with him in his room. Rima brought Lee a copy of her favorite Dostoevski novel,
The Idiot,
as a present. They drank champagne and toasted what they hoped would be his welcome to the Soviet Union. While speaking so, Lee had become ‘sexy.'

*

Lee spent most of the next several days in his room, at times reading
The Idiot
, occasionally growing so frustrated with the extended wait for a phone call that he couldn't concentrate. Every afternoon after lunch at the hotel's restaurant, Lee would exercise
by taking a walk. Exiting the lobby he turned right and continued on for five blocks, turning right again, following this pattern to create a perfect square. Twenty-five minutes later he arrived at the spot where he began.

On the first day Lee was approached by a tall man with a severely rounded face and big hound-dog eyes. The stranger wore an expensive black fur overcoat and, atop his head, a ragged peasant's cap, presenting an incongruous image. He stopped Lee and asked if he were an American. Lee said he was, but hated his country. The other fellow roared good-naturedly, explaining he achieved Soviet citizenship five years earlier. As he strolled this area daily, they would chat again. The two shook hands.

Lee walked away with a missive from George in his palm, passed along by his assigned CIA contact. Likewise, the other fellow now had in hand a piece of paper in which Lee reported back to George. No sooner had this secret agent returned to his apartment than he drew out his concealed high-tech radio and sent a coded message to America, waiting for a reply.

“What am I to do?” Lee asked George on his contact's radio set several nights later, supposedly arriving to share a cup of tea. Earlier, he had been informed by Rima that his request was denied. A police officer had arrived, insisting Lee pack and leave the country immediately. Rima felt deeply for the American and couldn't grasp why his potential had been rejected.

She could not know that those in power were eager to have Oswald remain. However, they'd agreed on the likeliness that he might be a CIA plant. So they must take every precaution. And so the chess game continued. Refusing Lee constituted a feint, a decision arrived at to discover what he would do next and, based on that, allow them to consider this man's dubious sincerity.

“Stay, stay,
stay,”
George insisted, his voice barely audible. “Whatever it takes, whatever you have to do: Stay!”

Lee returned to his hotel room and sat on the bed, trying to determine his course of action. Clearly, George was not going to move Lee, his pawn; he had to play the game himself. Only an extreme gesture would serve this purpose. That had to be suicide.

I've considered it so often. Now, it's natural ...

The Soviets must be made to believe he earnestly would prefer to be dead than not Red. Lee would slit his wrists, allow his blood to trickle into the bathtub. But he must be careful so as not to actually end everything. Rima was scheduled to arrive in the lobby for a sad farewell at eight. If he were not there, she would sense something wrong and alert the manager.

First, Lee scrawled on a note pad:

 

October 21, 1959; 7:00 P.M.

My fondest dreams are shattered ... I decided to end it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist. Then plunge into bathtub of hot water ... somewhere a violin plays as I watch my life whirl away ...

 

The final line, Lee borrowed from an old movie. When he heard the orchestra playing down below in the tea room, that sequence came to mind. He appropriated it, giddy at experiencing a transcendence between a classic Hollywood scene and real life.

Lee applied all the skills he had learned in the service so as to prick himself slightly, drawing blood, careful not to come near the vein. He did this at 7:45. That way, he should survive, if only Rima followed her usual pattern of promptness.

At ten after eight, having borrowed the master key, Rima entered and saw Lee. He played his role as if going for an Oscar, twisting up his body into a pretzel-like shape, gasping incongruous words. Rima screamed for help.

An ambulance arrived minutes later, speeding Lee off to Botkin Hospital. The doctors took one look at the cut, three centimeters in length, and laughed at the idea that anyone might seriously take this as a suicide attempt. They packed Lee off to the insane ward. Rima remained with him that night, stroking his hair, attempting to comfort this sad man-child.

The honesty of her concern never in doubt, Lee resented that Rimma repeatedly uttered the word
svaie.
That indicated, from the little Russian he'd learned, a baby brother—hardly how he wanted to be perceived by this beautiful blonde.

Though Lee appreciated Rimma's arranging for him to shortly be transferred to, in Lee's own words, “an ordinary ward,” he asked if she could send Rosa around to visit him next time.

*

Upon his dismissal days later, Lee transferred to the Hotel Metropole, Room 233. His suite at Hotel Berlin had been assigned to an arriving tourist the morning after his ‘suicide attempt.' Even more spacious, the rooms were full of antique furniture, apparently left over from before the Revolution; remnants of an age known for luxury for the elite, poverty for all others.

Lee spent much of his time waiting to discover the impact his supposed little theatrical piece would have on those who made decisions. He devoured
The Idiot,
heading off to purchase other books by Dostoevsky.
Crime and Punishment
turned out to be one of those rare volumes that change a person's life.

The notion of a murder committed by a man who sees himself as ‘above the law' spoke directly to Lee. He had after all been licensed to kill. The author's questioning of moral issues in a modern, amoral world proved impactful on Lee, who realized great literature could speak to him even as a Sinatra film once had.