Libra (23 page)

In the evening he had a short talk with Kirilenko. They talked about Hemingway. The older man was the one who sat on the bed this time, still in his bulky coat, remembering lines from Hemingway stories.

“Someday when I’m settled here and studying,” Oswald said, “I want to write short stories on contemporary American life. I saw a lot. I kept silent and observed. What I saw in the U.S. plus my Marxist reading is what brought me here. I always thought of this country as my own.”

“One day I would genuinely like to see Michigan. Purely because of Hemingway.”

“The Michigan woods.”

“When I read Hemingway I get hungry,” Kirilenko said. “He doesn’t have to write about food to make me hungry. It’s the style that does it. I have a huge appetite when I read this man.”

Oswald smiled at the idea.

“If he’s a genius of anything, he’s a genius of this. He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry. You’ve never been to Michigan?”

“I went where I was told,” Oswald said.

Kirilenko looked tired in the dim light. His boots were salt-stained. He stood up, pulling his muskrat cap out of his coat pocket and smacking it in the palm of the opposite hand.

“We have large subjects to cover,” he said. “So: I would like you to call me Alek. ”

 

 

 

In the morning they talked about Atsugi. Oswald described a four-hour watch in the radar bubble. Alek wanted details, names of officers and enlisted men, the configuration of the room. He wanted procedures, terminology. Oswald explained how things worked. He talked about security measures, types of height-finder equipment. Alek took notes, looked out the window when his subject had trouble recalling something or seemed unsure of his facts.

Two men joined them to talk about the U-2. The weather plane, one of them called it, deadpan. They brought a stenographer with them. They wanted names of U-2 pilots, a description of the takeoff and landing. Not friendly types. The stenographer was an old man with a rosette in his lapel.

When Oswald didn’t know the right answer he made one up or tried to vanish in excited syntax. Alek seemed to understand. They communicated outside the range of the other men, silently, without gestures or glances.

The name of a single pilot. The name of a mechanic or guard.

Deadpan fellows leaning toward him. He described times when the radar crew received requests for winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, ninety thousand feet. He described the voice from
out there,
dense, splintered, blown out, coming down to them like a sound separated into basic units, a lesson in physics or ghosts. They pressed him for facts, for names. Many more questions. Air speed, range, radar-jamming equipment. He hated to say he didn’t know.

Alek said they would resume in the morning. Lee wanted a sign from him. How is it going? Will they let me stay, give me solid duties, allow me to study economics and political theory?

“I have a click in my knee when I bend,” Kirilenko said. “What do you think, old age?”

There is time for everything, he seemed to mean. Time to recall the smallest moment, time to revise your story, time to change your mind. We are here to help you clarify the themes of your life.

They spent many days on Oswald’s early experience in the military, many more days on the U-2 and Atsugi, dividing every compact topic into fractional details, then dividing these. They moved on finally to MACS-9, his radar unit in California.

Castro was exploding on the scene. Oswald had wanted to go to Cuba and train young recruits. He was a skilled technician and fighting man, sympathetic to Fidel.

He subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper and a socialist journal. He answered the guys in his quonset hut with
da
and
nyet.
It used to get them all worked up. They called him Oswaldovich.

He told Alek about the rumors he’d heard of a false defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. They inserted agents into the Eastern Bloc, a select number of men posing as victims of the American system, lonely and impressionable, eager to adopt another kind of life.

This was precisely at the time he was taking steps to defect. The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. He would tell them he was trying to make contact in his own way. They’d train him intensively. He’d be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha.

Alek sat across the table shaking salted nuts in his fist. He said something about getting a TV set brought in. Oswald was surprised to hear that broadcasting started at six in the evening. It was one of the strangest things he’d heard since crossing the ocean.

The guard showed up. He showed up every evening before Alek left. Alek never introduced him, didn’t seem to notice he was in the flat. The guard usually sat by the washbasin in the hall, his hat balanced on his knee.

There were things Oswald didn’t tell Alek, like details of the MPS-16 radar system, just integrated into the network. He wanted to see how their friendship progressed. It occurred to him that the U.S. military might have to spend jillions to change the system anyhow, now that he’d crossed to the other side. How strangely easy to have a say over men and events.

The other thing he didn’t tell Alek concerned the false defector program. When nobody contacted him, Ozzie decided to sign up for a foreign-language qualification test. Russian. Just to see if he’d get noticed.

His rating was P for poor throughout.

 

 

A doctor and nurse came to give him a physical. They listened to his heart, shined a light in his ears. They weighed and measured him and went away with samples of his urine and blood. Then three men arrived and took him to a concrete building about half an hour away. He walked into a modem apartment. They had him remove objects from his pockets. They sat him down in a chair that was attached to a console equipped with graph paper, pen recorders, dials, switches, etc. They told him to put his feet flat on the floor. Then they attached tubes and devices to the arms, chest and hands of Oswaldovich. One of the men sat facing him. Is your name such-and-such? Did you ever use another name or identity? Is your favorite color blue? Are you an agent of U.S. intelligence? Are you in secret contact with anyone in this country? Is your hair brown? Have you been sent here to assassinate some person or persons? Are you married? Are you homosexual? Do you smoke or drink?

Deadpan.

No sign of Alek. Oswald stood while they unplugged him from the console. He was lonely for his friend and had a sneaking suspicion he’d messed up the test something awful.

He told them Alek had promised TV.

Someone arrived with his belongings. He stayed in the new apartment for three days. They gave him intelligence tests, aptitude tests, personality profiles, tests in English and basic math, tests in the recognition of patterns and shapes.

He dreamed of walking into the house on Ewing Street, in Fort Worth, his hair sopping wet from a swim at the Y.

Lenin and Stalin in an orange glow. Caspian Sea, largest inland sea in the world, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. Kremlin means citadel.

 

 

He is telling the story of his stay in a guarded apartment somewhere in Moscow to a man in a suit and tie. Maybe it is Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick on TV.
I Led Three Lives.
Maybe it is the man at the U.S. embassy, the second secretary or consul, whatever he is called, adjusting his glasses, listening with interest to the story of an ex-Marine who has infiltrated the Soviet intelligence apparatus as part of the U.S. Navy’s false defector program.

 

 

Kirilenko stood on the parquet floor of his partitioned office in the First Section, Seventh Department, Second Chief Directorate at KGB headquarters, the Center, 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, a mass of elaborate stonework comprising an old main building, a postwar extension, a prison, Lubyanka, famous for exterminations, other, lesser buildings, and a courtyard visible through barred windows or screens of heavy-gauge mesh. He liked to think standing up.

The nice thing about the Center was the inexpensive caviar and salmon available in Building 12 across the square, and the J&B and Johnnie Walker at a dollar a bottle. The not-so-nice thing was the heavy sense of Stalinist terror. He also hated the chair they’d given him, a modern contour piece that looked ridiculous behind his old wooden desk.

All the more reason to stand. He kept his arms behind him, left hand clutching right forearm. He was thinking about the American boy, Lee H. Oswald. The lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy. It made him think of the classical axioms of his early training in geometry and arithmetic. Sad to learn that those self-evident truths,
necessary truths,
faltered so badly when subjected to rigorous examination. No plane surfaces here. We are living in curved space.

Alek liked the boy. Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective.

At twenty years old, all you know is that you’re twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact.

He slit his wrist to stay in Russia.

But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they’ve told themselves. Men who defect for practical reasons are easier to manage and maintain. Money, sex, frustration, resentment, vanity. We understand and sympathize. We get close to the edge ourselves sometimes.

They’d been watching him since Helsinki, where he registered at the Tomi Hotel, moved to the cheaper Klaus Kurki, applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, told a clerk in passing that he was an ex-Marine highly qualified in radar and electronics.

A walk-in. But not so sure of himself. Not certain how to go about it.

They made it easy for him to get in, providing a visa in forty-eight hours.

In Moscow his Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, reported his choicest remarks to the Fourth Section of the Seventh Department, where they were passed on to Kirilenko. Alek waited, let the low officials mix things up, let the boy pace his room; had him moved to a cheaper room; waited, waited.

There were one hundred and thirty listening devices in the U.S. embassy. In his combination safe Alek had a transcript of Oswald’s remarks about revealing military secrets. Through the efforts of a clerk in the consulate section he had a photograph of Oswald’s passport as well as a copy of a confidential telegram sent from AmEmb Moscow to the Department of State concerning the young man’s statement.

An easy case that left Alek wondering about Oswald’s procommunist career in the military. Didn’t U.S. intelligence pick this up? Wouldn’t they want to use his political sympathies to find out what they could about the people he contacted, about KGB recruitment methods, agent training? They would turn him when it suited their purpose. That’s when he would tell them everything he’d learned, just as he was telling us.

Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where he would be trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent back to the West as an illegal?

That’s what they all want, isn’t it, these people who live in corners inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity. Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else.

The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade. He tended toward emotional instability. Tended toward erratic behavior. Had some form of dyslexia or word-blindness. Scored fairly well in physical sciences, low in most other categories. The polygraph was more or less chaotic but then it almost always is.
Inconclusive owing to various factors.
Maybe the boy was scared.

An easy case—send him home—except that Alek had a quota. There was pressure to handle a certain number of recruitments, turn up beautiful information (or make it up yourself). The vital take was the U-2 data, which Alek did not wholly trust. Eighty thousand feet? Ninety thousand feet? Nothing flies that high. Fly to ninety thousand feet, you see the souls of the dead in rings of white light. The men who’d debriefed Oswald on the weather plane were officers of the GRU, military intelligence, and they hadn’t officially pronounced on the data they’d been given. What could they say? If the boy was word-blind, couldn’t he be number-blind as well?

Alek sat in the swooping chair.

A number of dangers cling to the slim figure of this Lee H. Oswald, an innocent who wanders into the outer rings of the Center, leaving thoughtful men to speculate. Are the Americans monitoring his progress? Would they let him fall into our arms if they thought he knew important things? Atsugi is a key base. There are reports from Hanna Braunfels, dredged from the files of the Seventh Department (Japan, India, etc.) of the First Chief Directorate. In a sense we have already gone too far with the boy, exposed too many of our methods. Despite all the tests and interviews, we may know less about him than he knows about us. In some office in the Pentagon, they are waiting to pick his brains.

Alek was paid to drive himself crazy.

One thing the tests confirmed. This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross—incentives to remain in this country. Alek had every reason to believe that Lee H. Oswald would eventually be given Soviet citizenship, become a genuine Marxist and contented worker, go to lectures and mass gymnastics, fit in, find his place in history, or geography, or whatever he was looking for. A true-blue Oswaldovich.