Killing Kennedy

next to Oswald. Fain twists around to explain that they didn’t contact Oswald at work, not wanting to embarrass him with his new employer. And they don’t want to speak with him inside, for fear of rattling Marina. Thus the car.
    The three men talk for a little over an hour. The car windows are open just enough to take the edge off the stifling humidity. But the men still perspire—particularly the G-men, in their coats and ties. Oswald has already put in a hard day of blue-collar labor, and the smell of his body odor wafts through the car. Despite the discomfort, Oswald is friendlier than before, less defensive. He explains that he’s been in touch with the Soviet embassy, but only because it is required for Soviet citizens such as Marina to inform the embassy of their location on a regular basis. When pressed on whether this involved discussions with Soviet intelligence officials, Oswald is coy, wondering aloud why anyone would want to discuss spying with a guy like him. “He didn’t feel like he was of any importance to them,” Fain will later testify. “He said that he would cooperate with us and report to us any information that would come to his attention.”
    But Fain still is not satisfied. He presses Oswald again and again as to why he went to the Soviet Union in the first place. To the agent, it doesn’t make sense. U.S. Marines are known for their motto, Semper Fidelis, “Always Faithful.” Why would one of them willingly renounce America and take up residence in a nation that poses the greatest threat to the United States?
    It is the one question Oswald doesn’t answer. He dances around it, talking about “his own personal reasons” and that “it was something that I did.”
    At 6:45, Oswald is released from the car and goes inside his home. His time with the agents was actually a respite from tension in his household. He and Marina have been fighting, sometimes quite violently, for more than six months. The strife has become worse since they came to America. It used to be that Oswald was the only person Marina could talk to in America, because she doesn’t speak English. But now she’s made new friends within Dallas’s small local Russian expat community. Among these is a man named George de Mohrenschildt, who not only may have CIA connections, but also knew Jackie Kennedy when she was a child. De Mohrenschildt was a close friend of Jackie’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale. Marina’s new friends find her husband rude and take her side in their marital battles.
    And the battles are many. Oswald likes to be “the Commander” in their marriage, dictating the details of their life and refusing to let Marina learn English, for fear he’ll lose control over her. She is embarrassed by her bad teeth and wants corrective dental work, but he puts it off. He often plays out his need for power by hitting his wife in anger.
    But Marina is no shrinking violet. She screams at him for not making enough money and complains that he is indifferent to her. Their sexual relations are so infrequent that she accuses him of not being a man. She nags him constantly, and when he compares himself with the great men in the historical biographies he enjoys reading, she sarcastically derides him. Marina even writes to a former boyfriend in the Soviet Union, telling him she made a terrible mistake marrying Oswald. Unfortunately for her, the letter is returned for not having enough postage. Oswald opens and reads it, then beats her. Oddly, Marina condones Oswald’s violence. Even that little bit of passion, however misguided, is better than the cold side of his character that she finds so frustrating.
    The marital friction, coupled with his surprise FBI interrogation, would normally be enough to send Oswald into one of his trademark rants—the kind where he rails on and on about suppressive governments. But tonight his new copy of the Worker , the newsletter of the American Socialist Workers Party, awaits him. Oswald settles in to read.
    It is Special Agent Arnold J. Brown, not John Fain, who prepares the final report concerning the conversation in the car. The papers are submitted on August 30, 1962. But it is Fain, the twenty-year veteran, who will decide if there is any reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald is a secret agent for the Soviet Union, planted within the United States to do the nation harm.
    Content with the answers Oswald has given them, and looking forward to retirement, Special Agent John Fain