The Interloper by Peter Savodnik

Author:Peter Savodnik
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780465029075
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-05-04T19:47:50+00:00

9

“HER NAME IS MARINA”

THE WINTER CHANGED EVERYTHING. HE HAD CLOSED OUT 1960 holding onto some of his early affection for Russia, and, in fact, New Year’s Eve at Ella German’s house had left him with a warm and romantic feeling, not only for German but also for Russia. It’s true that he had grown weary of the Soviet Union and daily life in Minsk, but he had not determined just yet that it was time to go. Indeed, he must have known that, had German agreed to marry him, she would never have agreed to leave Minsk. Her family and friends were there, and she had no intention of saying good-bye to them. By asking for German’s hand, Oswald was signaling his willingness to stay. But she had said no, and almost immediately after that, all the doubts and angers that had been coalescing inside his head for the past several months sharpened into a desire to leave.

Sometime in January 1961, Oswald confronted a stark truth: the grand vision that he had laid out after he had arrived in Russia—“I want to, and I shall, live a normal happy and peaceful life here in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life,” he had written to his brother, Robert—was in a shambles. He had escaped nothing—not his mother, not his country, not his constant fleeing from wherever he was. He was the same person he had been when he arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Helsinki.

On February 28, according to Oswald’s diary, American embassy officials replied to his February 1 letter stating that he wanted to go home. “I recive letter from Embassy,” Oswald wrote. “Richard E. Soyeydeck [Snyder] stated ‘I could come in for an interview any time I wanted.’” There is no evidence that Oswald was approached by the KGB, the CIA, or any other intelligence agency. We can assume that the Russians opened his mail and certainly knew of his correspondence with the US embassy in Moscow, but they did not do anything about it, one way or the other.1

It’s unclear how much Oswald knew about the people he spent most of his time with. Were they real friends, or were they befriending him to funnel information to the security organs? There was no way for Oswald to have known for sure, though he surely had suspicions. There are signs that Titovets never gained his full confidence; in his March 1962 diary entry, Oswald noted that he had not informed Titovets of his impending departure from the Soviet Union: “I’m afraid he is too good a young Communist leage member so I’ll wait till last min.” As for Golovachev, Oswald offered no indication of whether he thought him trustworthy, although Anna Zhuravskaya said that her brother was unaware until shortly before Oswald’s departure that he planned to return to the United States. Oswald appears to have learned not to speak freely at work (his coworkers at the Experimental Department said that not only was Oswald lazy and sometimes disagreeable, but that he also did not talk a lot).

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