Headline July 22nd, 2012 / The Armies of the Night

"The Armies Of The Night!"

So Mailer and Schiller attacked the hidden Russian years with a powerful new lens, a set of spectacles as magically pickled as Lenin. Now who will fault these great researchers and authors for a lack of enterprise. They drew up a practical plan and went after Marina's relatives, schoolmates, and boyfriends; Oswald's early minders from Intourist; his girlfriends; and his coworkers at the Minsk Radio Factory where the Soviets decided to put, and watch, him. 

Little emphasised to the outside world is the solid happening, that Oswald was so determined to stay in Russia, that he slashed his wrists when permission wasn't forthcoming; and yet, during his first weeks in Moscow, he never ventured more than a few blocks beyond his hotel, to buy an ice cream cone at a children's department store. 

The highest authorities, --including Anastas Mikoyan, who four years later would represent the U.S.S.R at Kennedy's funeral, --were in on the decision to let Oswald remain and thereby provide the police ''Organs'' with a chance to explore some possibilities: ''Had some American Intelligence Service, especially the CIA, sent Lee Harvey Oswald here to check out their Soviet legal channels??

Was Oswald a test case to determine how future 'moles' might be implanted for special tasks!'' KGB is one of the most professional Intelligence Agency in the World. As feared as you can imagine. The KGB followed Oswald with mad thoroughness. July 3, 1960: ''Outside he looked around, went to movie theatre Centralny, bought a newspaper, browsed at through and turned back. 

At corner of Prospekt Stalina and Komsomolskaya street he stopped, looked through newspaper again, crushed it and threw it away in trash bin.'' In July, 1961, Lee and Marina's apartment was bugged, and now, decades and decades later, a world later, Mailer could reproduce, careful transcripts of their bureaucratized rows; 

Wife(cries):  Why did I get married !?
LHO: Well, what am I supposed to do? Is it my fault that you have a lot of work to do? I mean you don't ever cook, but other woman cook.

It seems clear that Marina married Oswald not because her uncle ILya Prusakov, an Intelligence officer, saw Cold War opportunity in the match but because, with his soft drawl and starched shirts, Lee was more intriguing than most of the Vodka Belching ''Vanyas'' on the assembly line.

But as time went on Oswald beat Marina with all the petty viciousness she could have found in a homegrown spouse, but before that, an awareness of the wiretapping was one of a handful of attachments giving the two of them an edge solidarity. 

The Oswalds, with their small circle of friends, were a fairly cheap surveillance operation, and when, in 1962, Lee sought permission to return to the US, the Organs were inclined to let him go, since all their tedious tracking had produced no evidence, that he was a spy! It was American organs, the State Dept and INS, who couldn't agree on whether to let this ''unstable'' character come back with his Soviet wife.

In the end, the U.S. government loaned him money to sail home!

Good night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice of the Voiceless