Someone at the Committee had goofed when they
sent an American nutcase named Lee Harvey Oswald
to prove his love for the Workers’ Paradise
at the Gorizont radio factory in Minsk. Whoever
made this tragic mistake thought of Minsk as a
backwater where nothing worth CIA’s attention
had ever happened. In that, the KGB was just another
bureaucracy, whose left hand was only dimly aware
of the right one’s existence.
By now, the Oswald surveillance files have been
successfully marketed to American checkbook media,
so that the entire world — or, rather, the
few who care — could see how the whole thing
had been overplanned, overmanned, and ultimately
overdone. I do not question the authenticity of
yawning descriptions of poor Lee, with his ejaculation
and liquor-holding problems, being bandied about
from one factory girl to another, from one over-orchestrated
picnic to another, like so many episodes of Laverne
& Shirley without the laugh track. The Yankee
nerd’s private life was mishandled by the
old Party farts, whose ideas of what goes on between
men and women came from chirpy ’30s Socialist-Realist
comedies: a worker meets a farmer girl at the
Heavy Industry Pavilion of the People’s
Achievements Exhibition, they listen to the nightingale
trills in the moonlight, he gently drapes his
coat, festooned with clinking Socialist Labor
medals, over her shoulders, she responds with
the most bovine of smiles, their mouths move at
each other with all the passion of Train A and
Train B, never mind the sad, way too sad, Oystrakh
violin in the background — cut to the moon
and fade out. In short, a BelarusFilm production.
What they needed to handle Lee’s private
life was Colonel Dolly Levy. There had been Dollies
aplenty in the old OGPU, but then they were all
purged in the ’30s. By the ’60s, when
this story takes place, the KGB had no room for
her kind.
There’s always a conspiracy afoot, and always
more than one; enough of them are run by complete
goofballs, so that eventually all the conspiracies
cancel one another out.
In this case, the wrench in the works was thrown
by KGB Captain Anatoly Yermilov, a freckled twig
of a kid in bottle-thick glasses who had never
outgrown his childhood passion for Jules Verne,
H. G. Wells, and their Russki counterpart Aleksandr
Belyayev. How people like Yermilov ever find their
way into the ranks of the most powerful secret
police in the world is another mystery wrapped
in an acrostic. In the eyes of Personnel, Yermilov
had certain assets: (a) his impeccably proletarian
roots; (b) his better-than-proletarian roots,
his father being a beat cop in a small blue-collar
Volga town; (c) his Aryan — Russian, that
is — extraction. But Comrade Yermilov had
never shown much fervor for the Cause or any inclination
to write reports on his fellow cadets. About his
performance at the firing range, the less said
the better: he was a danger to anyone within fifty
meters — except for the target, that is.
It took an eagle eye of someone like my de facto
godfather, General Kogan, to discover this working-class
prodigy who was more fascinated by The War of
the Worlds than by Das Kapital.
. . .
Formally, Yermilov was
never a part of Lab 52. Hell, we were never even
in the Committee’s phone book. But Anatoly
was a curious kid, though he was working for an
agency that did not encourage this quality. Every
scientist is a Casanova dying to tell of his exploits,
or, to get morbid, a Raskolnikov dying to spill
his guts. This is why they have conferences and
seminars; but if you’re working for the
KGB, this avenue is closed. So where else would
Yermilov go to shoot the breeze but to a certain
basement in Andrei Rublev Street?
Yermilov had no psychological workup on Oswald;
to him, psychology was as obscure (and possibly
as much of a sham) as Party History. But he sensed
that one day Lee Harvey would go back. No sane
person could imagine that someone who had grown
up in the West would willingly spend the rest
of his life in Minsk.
According to Timur, who had just joined the Lab,
he helped Yermilov test the tarakan —
the “cockroach” — on prison
inmates. “The politicals had been mostly
gone by then,” he would explain to me later,
“and whatever ones were left would soon
be gone, too; but what Ivan the Pickpocket would
refuse a free fiksa, a gold tooth?”
They started with sending the simplest instructions:
Walk to the left — to the right —
pick your nose — put the booger in your
mouth. The latter was just an amusing bit at the
end of a long working day. They were not sadists.
They never transmitted anything to Ivans’
tarakans that would suggest killing one
another or even exposing themselves to the guards.
They were ready to progress to more complex instructions
that would require an Ivan to be released and
function in the uncontrolled environment. Although
they had selected the mildest, nonviolent cases
— a pickpocket, an embezzler, a black-market
trader in Finnish-made socks — springing
them free while keeping our reasons secret required
a lot of red tape. And then they heard that Oswald
had rebelled, asking to go back to the States.
And the top brass were prepared to wash their
hands off him and let him go!
Yermilov was desperate. Implanting the transmitter
in Lee’s dental work was not a problem,
though he would have to fly in a Moscow anesthesiologist
to make sure his patient woke up. But there was
no telling how the tarakan would work once
its carrier was outside the huge controlled environment
called the USSR.
“Shouldn’t you take it up with the
Chairman?” Timur asked Yermilov. “Surely
the KGB could take time off from harassing abstract
painters and vers-libre poets —”
Yermilov’s eyes opened wide, as if Timur
had spoken French. Whatever happened outside the
Lab was of little interest to him. He had no idea
what a vers-libre poet was, nor why the KGB should
harass him, nor that the KGB in effect had.
“— and detain the Yank for a while?
. . . you could ask the Chairman for an extension
—”
Yermilov lowered his head. By then, Timur knew
what it meant.
“Assym bakhur lukum,” Timur
cursed. A rusty nail in your mama’s ass.
“You — never — told —
the Chairman?”
Yermilov stared into the wall, as if facing the
Politburo or, rather, the Grand Inquisition —
and looking quite Galileo-like at that. Eppure
se torna! “I’m not letting the
sonuvabitch out of the country without a tarakan.”
. . .
The rest of the story reached
me from different sources, and evaluating their
veracity could take the rest of my life. Even
Kogan, who stayed on the sidelines of Yermilov’s
project, could not claim he knew exactly who had
messed up at what stage. Whenever the late American
president’s name came up, Kogan only sighed
and knitted his bushy eyebrows. A “tragedy
of errors,” he called it.
The KGB was a Soviet institution, meaning no one
really wanted to work. But in Oswald’s case,
they had to do something. Which, according to
Kogan, made the Yank a major pebble in the KGB’s
shoe. The idea of a former U.S. Marine moving
to the Soviet Union and not being a spy —
it did not compute. Yet, whether one used Occam’s
or a Remington razor in the morning, there was
no other explanation. The guy was a simple, corn-fed
lunatic.
“What I’m saying,” Kogan said,
“is that it was well-nigh impossible for
Yermilov to secure any kind of official sanction
to monitor LHO’s movements, to say nothing
of transmitting instructions to his tooth.”
“Which tooth was it, by the way?”
I asked.
Kogan looked at me as if I were an idiot. “What
am I, a dentist? A tooth is a tooth.”
Kogan lent a hand, using informal channels, bypassing
the station chiefs, mislabeling assignments.
“It was nothing but trouble. None of our
agents wanted to go to Texas. San Francisco, L.A.,
Miami — they’d go in a minute. Fort
Worth, they want to go the first thing in the
morning, do the transmission, catch the next plane
back East. Then, pad the expense report and pocket
the hotel money. With these goniffs, you don’t
even know if they actually did the transmission.
Besides, it is not enough to send him instructions
to go out and have two vodka tonics at Carousel
Club; you have to follow up, to make sure he goes
there, he buys the drinks — it’s a
full-time job. All these bastards wanted to do
was seduce UN secretaries on the expense account.”
He shook his head with so much conviction, it
touched my heart. Like any true believer, Kogan
never stopped blaming the failure of the Soviet
system on people’s laziness.
. . .
Yermilov’s lucky
break came when a Soviet agent sent to Dallas
got drunk and left the transmitter on when ordering
two shots of Johnny Walker. Shortly thereafter,
the somewhat confused Oswald drove up to the house
of Major General John E. Walker, and fired two
shots through the window. Neither one hit the
target — Oswald was a notoriously poor marksman
— but the incident convinced Kogan that
a hands-on policy was required.
“So, in the fall of ’63, I sent our
boychik to New Orleans,” Kogan said. “Don’t
even ask what kind of stupid excuse I made up,
recruiting Cajuns or something. Had to make a
big withdrawal from my favor bank. Had I known
what this meshugga would come up with —”
A dedicated scientist, Yermilov tailed Lee with
a vengeance and finesse, never hurtling his subject
too far out of the orbit. Go to the drugstore
— buy a shampoo — return the shampoo.
He needed to develop full control over the receiver.
Sooner or later, the opportunity to do something
spectacular would present itself.
Yet something was wrong. Either the signal was
not clear enough, or Lee was not flossing properly,
or — on the contrary — he had had
some dental work done that damaged the receiver.
Or, perhaps, Yermilov was smoking too much dope
or took one trip too many. Away from Timur’s
constraints, the bad habits he had acquired at
the Lab blossomed in the Big Easy.
Whatever it was, on September 27, Lee showed up
at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and declared
he wanted to go back to the U.S.S.R. and thus
escape the constant surveillance and harassment
on the part of the FBI. (Anatoly had flunked street
surveillance at the Academy.)
“It was like a bad trip,” Yermilov
would tell me later, “sitting in the next
room, listening to this freak going on about Socialism.”
I imagine how red his ears must have been. But
then Oswald began to rant about U.S. policies
towards Cuba, and a lightbulb went up. Lee Harvey
would go to Cuba and attempt to assassinate Castro!
In vain, of course, considering Oswald’s
abovementioned lack of marksmanship. So what?
It would be one for the books.
Yesss! Following the transmitted suggestion, Oswald
hotfooted it to the Cuban Embassy, where he was
. . . told to wait.
Here, Anatoly’s nerves must have given out,
or he must have been out of pot, for he burst
into the embassy, looking for a Cuban colleague
who could issue the stupid Yanqui a visa pronto.
“I don’t even remember what stupid
story I came up with,” Anatoly told me later,
“but it must have been really dumb, like
saving the sugar cane crops from poisoning. The
Cubans looked at me . . . boy, they just stared
and stared. I realized it was time to get beamed
back to the mother ship.”
Frustrated, confused, and — correctly —
suspicious that his odd visit had been duly reported
to Moscow, Anatoly cut himself loose. He behaved
like a Russian Hussar in the days of Napoleonic
wars: he returned to New Orleans and visited every
bordello he could find.
He awakened in the bleak, damp dawn, in an alley
behind Bourbon Street, his shirt torn, his money
gone — jes’ lahk in dem Delta blues.
The difference was that, besides the money, he
was also missing his transmitter; and, with it,
the possibility of controlling the movements of
Mr. Oswald. Whose last instruction, I’ll
remind you, was “You must kill the Top Guy.”
Cuba was closed; he was in America; the rest was
history.
In the days predating satellite phones, Yermilov
could not call Kogan and get him to send a replacement.
He had the station chief wire him the airfare
— which took a week — but when he
returned to Moscow, Kogan was on vacation, and
who else would get this mad scientist back into
the U.S.? On the other hand, Yermilov was not
in a rush: up to then, everything Mr. Oswald had
attempted to achieve in this life had failed miserably,
so why should assassination of the president be
any different?
The salty Black Sea air was doing miracles for
Kogan’s goiter, and the general was not
in a hurry to return to Moscow either. When he
did return, his desk was buried in the reports
on the conspiracy to replace Khrushchev.
No wonder he took a dim view of Yermilov’s
request. Especially after the latter made a full
confession regarding the circumstances.
“You’re a shikker and a druggie,”
Kogan said. “I should send you back to that
den of iniquity? You should thank your lucky stars
no one knows the real reason you went there, or
you would already be living on a hundred rubles
a month fixing watches. Go buy some alcoholic
from Alias Development a bottle of cognac, have
him write you a novel about how you tried to infiltrate
Mardi Gras or any damn bullshit about how you
managed to waste the Party’s money. Dismissed!”
. . .
Years later, Kogan would
shrug: the psychopath was able to find a job at
the book depository, and you know the rest. Who
knew.
“Was it possible that the Feds picked up
the transmitter? If someone passed a word to them?
Then they could have —”
Kogan yawned. “You’ve been reading
too many thrillers.”
“Did you know Jack Ruby?”
“Yosik Rubinshteyn?” Kogan curled
his lower lip in disgust. “Club owner, hah.
A lousy Polish pimp. First, he spends our money
as if it was rubles. Then he thinks he’ll
do us a favor, he’ll get us to forgive his
debts, so he picks up his gun and . . . who asked
him?”
