Reclaiming History (144 page)

Gregorieff wanted eighteen-year-old Pavel Golovachev’s cooperation in providing regular reports on the activities and attitudes of the American defector, and Pavel was not in a position to refuse, although he wasn’t happy about having to do it. Pavel was the son of a famous Soviet fighter pilot who had been twice decorated as a hero of the Soviet Union, which could have bought Pavel a certain level of privilege, but he had not done well on his own. Following his father around from base to base, he had attended eleven schools in ten years, and his last school report was a disgrace. He’d also been kicked out of Komsomol, the party’s youth organization. He was working at the plant only as a stepping stone to a career as an engineer—he was at the same time attending the Minsk Polytechnic Institute four nights a week. The KGB suspected him of small transactions in the black market as well. He didn’t want to tell his father that the KGB had spoken to him, and he thought it best to go along quietly with Gregorieff’s plan. Pavel, whose “first reaction to Oswald was that he looked like an extraterrestrial who had all of a sudden ended up in their factory,” felt that Oswald did not seem to be up to much that would interest the KGB in any case.
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“It was like this,” Pavel said. “He [the KGB man] said, ‘Your country asks you—your country demands. There is a foreigner here. It’s in the country’s interests for security, and so on.’”
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In the end, Pavel became Lee’s best and closest friend in the Soviet Union—although Pavel learned more English from Lee than Lee learned Russian from Pavel. “I told him [Oswald] about it [the KGB’s contact with Pavel] a year later,” Pavel says. “I had three or four meetings with the KGB people. They gave me little assignments to provoke him, saying try this out on him and see what he says.”
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By the time Marina entered Lee’s life the following year, the two men almost always spoke English with each other.
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Pavel wrote to Lee and Marina after they went off to America, the last time less than two months before the assassination.
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On March 16, Oswald was given a fourth-floor apartment in a riverside building reserved for employees of his factory that was surprisingly ornate for Minsk. Apartment number 24 was very tiny but attractive, and to get any apartment there at all was remarkable, since many of his coworkers spent months or even years on a waiting list for such an accommodation, sometimes delaying marriage for however long a time it took. Oswald knew he was getting special treatment, describing the one-room apartment with a kitchen, bathroom, and a balcony overlooking the Svisloch River, as “a Russian dream.”
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Pavel and some other friends from the factory helped Lee move in, with some furnishings provided by the factory: a bed, a table, some chairs, a gas cooker. The kitchen was very small and the room was only about ten by seventeen feet, but the building itself was very grand and located in the best part of town, and the view of the river four stories below and just across Kalinina Street was outstanding.
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Oswald described the place as “almost rent-free,” and with some justice—it cost him only sixty rubles, or about six dollars, a month. The preference shown him was not all that remarkable. Foreigners residing in the Soviet Union were often given financial subsidies and other aid, and foreign students were paid a stipend double that of Soviet citizens.
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Oswald’s Russian friends were in no way surprised that he was receiving certain advantages “below the waist,” as Pavel put it, since, as indicated, they knew it was normal in Russia for foreigners to be treated better than Russian citizens.
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It also went without saying that the place was bugged—the electric meter kept running even when all the appliances and lights were off, and surveillance was a common assumption. After Marina married Lee and moved in, she and Lee took it for granted that their mail was opened and read, and it was.
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As spring turned into summer, Lee enjoyed his new life, which involved a lot of new friends—it is the only period of his life where he was involved in social activities with others, many of whom were his own age. May Day 1960 was his first holiday in Russia, marked by the customary, spectacular parade of the region’s armed forces and workers, drawn from the ranks, passing the reviewing stand waving flags and large banners with Khrushchev’s portrait on them. That evening he went to the Zigers for a party with forty guests, many of them Argentinians, and there was a great deal of dancing and singing.
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His friend Pavel, who was also there, was impressed by the relaxed, joyful atmosphere and the Latin decor, music, and manners of the Zigers, who served coffee and wine on a tray—very unlike Russians. The Zigers’ daughters scandalized the neighborhood by sunbathing on their balcony, a barbarity put down to the fact that they were not only foreign but Jewish.
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Lee took notice of both of the daughters. Eleonora, twenty-six, divorced, was a talented singer. He thought he “hit it off” with the younger Anita, who was twenty and “not so attractive” but a gifted pianist who was studying music and played everything from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to Argentine tangos on the Zigers’ piano.
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He was also attracted to a friend of Anita’s, a girl who worked in the central post office, Albina, at whom he made an unsuccessful pass. She in turn introduced him to Ernst Titovets, also called Erich, a handsome, blond charmer who was drawn to Lee at least in part because of the opportunity it gave him to improve his English. Erich was a bit of a nerd. He spoke a cultured English, played chess, and was going to medical school. He would become another of Lee’s pals.
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N
eedless to say, none of this escaped the notice of the KGB, whose dogged appetite for banality was insatiable. Their account of Lee’s first holiday in the USSR runs as follows:

At 10:00 Lee Harvey came out of house N4 on Kalinina Street [Lee’s apartment], came to Pobedy Square where he spent 25 minutes looking at passing parade. After this he went to Kalinina Street and began walking up and down embankment of Svisloch River. Returned home by 11:00. From 11:00 to 13:00 [1:00 p.m.] he came out onto balcony of his apartment more than once. At 13:35 Lee Harvey left his house, got on trolley bus N2 at Pobedy Square, went to Central Square, was last to get off bus, went down Engelsa, Marksa and Lenina Streets to bakery store on Prospekt Stalina. There he bought 200 grams of vanilla cookies, then went to café Vesna, had a cup of coffee with patty at self-service section and hurried toward movie theater Central. Having looked through billboards he bought newspaper
Banner of Youth
, visited bakery for second time, left it immediately, and took trolley bus N1 to Pobedy Square and was home by 14:20 [2:20 p.m.]. At 16:50 Lee Harvey left his house and came to house N14 on Krasnaya Street (Residence of immigrant from Argentina—Ziger). At 1:40 Lee Harvey together with other men and women, among whom there were daughters of Ziger, came home. Observation was stopped at this point till morning.”
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Apparently, the KGB missed something by not going to the party. “Zeber [Ziger] advises me to go back to U.S.A.,” Lee wrote in his diary, “its the first voice of oppossition I have heard. I respect Zeger, he has seen the world. He says many things, and relats many things I do not know about the U.S.S.R. I begin to feel uneasy inside, its true!”
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Something else happened on that May Day in 1960—the aforementioned shooting down of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk by Soviet rockets, an event that stunned the world, although it would be almost a week before ordinary citizens in either the Soviet Union or the United States would hear about it. The worldwide press was full of the international incident for months. Lee, with his still awkward Russian and little if any access to English news sources, could not have failed to notice the way the story galvanized his friends—it was the Soviet Union’s greatest propaganda triumph since the beginning of the cold war. However, when Lee got around to making entries in his diary for the months of May, June, and July, although he apparently was disturbed about the U-2 incident, fearing it might hurt him since he was an American (see later text), he didn’t mention one word about it, writing instead of the May Day parade, the party at the Zigers, picnics and drives in the countryside with Anita and the Zigers’ “mos.vick” car, summer months of “green beauty,” and pine forests that were “very deep.” Unfortunately, Anita Ziger’s Hungarian boyfriend Alfred always came along.
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By this time, though, Lee’s eye had already been caught by a new worker at the factory, Ella German, a slim, pretty Jewish girl who had worked at the factory before. She had always wanted to attend Minsk University but had trouble getting accepted, possibly because she was Jewish, possibly because she didn’t bribe the right people. However, when a law was passed that factory workers were to be given priority, she finally got into the university on a scholarship. Two years later she got a low grade on an important exam, lost her scholarship, and had to switch from full-time study to night classes—and she had to return to the assembly line at the factory.
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“A silky black haired Jewish beauty with fine dark eyes skin white as snow a beauifel smile and good but unpredictable nature,” Lee would write of her. “Her only fault was that at 24 she was still a virgin, due entirely to her own desire. I met her when she came too work at my factory. I noticed her, and perhaps fell in love with her, the first minute I saw her.”
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Ella recalled she was twenty-three when they met. She was introduced to Lee the first morning she came back to work, and one day she asked him to help her with some pages of English she had to translate. They began to walk to the park and go to the movies about twice a week. She thought he was a kindhearted person with a good sense of humor. Ella sensed that Lee was very lonely in Minsk and consequently pitied him enough that she didn’t want to reject him. But she didn’t like him enough to consider marrying him either.
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Soon after they met, information about the U.S. spy plane being shot down was in the news. “What do you think, Ella?” Lee asked her. “Can it damage me because I’m an American?” She reassured him that “no one can say you are responsible.”
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On June 18, 1960, Lee obtained a hunting license and soon after purchased a 16-gauge single-barrel shotgun.
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Lee joined a local chapter of the Belorussian Society of Hunters and Fishermen, a hunting club sponsored by his factory. But according to KGB records, it was not until September 10 that he actually went out with seven others to hunt for small game in the farm regions around Minsk.
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Coupled with his lukewarm (if that) Marxist activism, Oswald’s yen for hunting set off alarm bells at the KGB. Vacheslav Nikonov, an aide to the first KGB chief after the fall of Communism, reviewed the entire Oswald file and told PBS’s
Frontline
, “Oswald looked very suspicious to the KGB and to the factory authorities because he was not interested in Marxism. He didn’t attend any Marxist classes. He didn’t read any Marxist literature and he didn’t attend even the labor union meetings. So the question was, what was he doing there?”
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One of Oswald’s hunting companions, Leonid Sepanovich Tzagiko, a lathe operator at Oswald’s plant, said “We set off to hunt. There were five of us…Suddenly, a shot rang out. I asked Oswald, ‘Why are you shooting?’ He said, ‘Look! Look! A hare!’ The others fired, too, but missed. And then we all stopped and discussed why he had shot too soon. He explained that the hare had jumped from under his feet and he was startled and so he shot. I said, ‘You could have killed me. Your gun was pointing right at me.’”
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Being startled and firing wildly doesn’t mean you’re a bad shot, and missing a rabbit once when you shoot at it also obviously doesn’t mean you’re a bad shot, but somehow, from this meager evidence, conspiracy theorists have concluded Oswald was a poor shot as a hunter and, hence, an unlikely assassin of Kennedy. But his brother Robert doesn’t buy into Lee’s being a poor shot at shooting rabbits, maintaining that Lee had plenty of experience at varmint hunting and knew how to handle himself. “We have shot cottontail rabbits with .22’s on the run, okay? We’ve shot squirrels in the trees with .22’s,” he told ABC in 1993. “My experience with him in the field with a shotgun or a .22 was he usually got his game.”
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According to Tzagiko, “We didn’t take him [Oswald] again because the head of our group had been warned [presumably by the KGB] not to.”
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Although the military installations in the district were off limits to hunters, his KGB minders feared that Oswald might have some sort of sensing equipment that would allow him to spy on the facilities from a distance.
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But Pavel Golovachev told author Gus Russo in 1993, “I would say that he wasn’t a spy because when he bought a camera, he couldn’t even put film in it. And it was a very basic camera, a Smena-2, which even a Soviet schoolchild could use, and he couldn’t.” Pavel also said that Oswald couldn’t repair the simplest defect in a radio while working at the Belorussian Radio and Television factory in Minsk.
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Regarding a report in the KGB files that a coworker of Oswald’s at the radio factory, code-named Zorin, said that Lee was possibly working on a secret radio transmitter at the plant, Pavel says this is nonsense. “He bought one of the cheapest radio sets, and it only had short and long-wave frequencies. He complained that he couldn’t receive certain broadcasts. So, with a kitchen knife, I adjusted the capacitor and it worked fine. I have no doubt he was not a CIA agent. His knowledge was too primitive.” Pavel also reported that Lee managed to rip two wires out while trying to insert batteries into another portable radio.
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