The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

13. The best and fullest account of Oswald’s period in the Soviet Union is in Mailer, Oswald’s Tale. Mailer had access to many of the voluminous KGB files on Oswald, which include transcripts of conversations in his bugged flat in Minsk and surveillance reports from KGB personnel who followed him wherever he went, even spying on him and his wife through a peephole in the bedroom wall to record their “intimate moments.”

14. Childs’s warning about Oswald’s letter was cited in a report by KGB chairman Semichastny to the Central Committee on December 10, 1963, of which an extract appears in Yeltsin, The View from the Kremlin, appendix B, p. 307. Yeltsin identifies the CPUSA informant as “Brooks,” but does not reveal that this was the CPUSA alias of Jack Childs. For the text of Oswald’s letter to the CPUSA of August 28, 1963, see Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, pp. 594-5.

15. Posner, Case Closed, disposes of many of the conspiracy theories. Norman Mailer, the author of the best-documented study of Oswald, admits that he “began with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists” but finally concluded both that Oswald “had the character to kill Kennedy, and that he probably did it alone.” The most difficult unsolved question is not whether Oswald shot the President but why he did so. Oswald was both a self-obsessed fantasist and a compulsive liar. There is general agreement, however, that he had no personal hostility to Kennedy himself. The best clue to Oswald’s motives is probably that provided by the Intourist guide who first introduced him to Russia. “The most important thing for [Oswald],” she recalls, “was that he wanted to become famous. Idea Number One. He was fanatic about it” (Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, p. 321). In Dallas on November 22, 1963 Oswald seized the opportunity to become one of the best-known Americans of the twentieth century.

16. Marzani was born in Rome in 1912 and emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1923. After graduating from Williams College, Mass., in 1935, he worked for a year in publishing, then studied at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1938. According to his KGB file, while at Oxford University (perhaps during the 1937 long vacation) he served in an anarchist brigade in the Spanish Civil War, then joined the Communist Party. On his return to the United States (probably in 1938), he became a member of the CPUSA, using the Party alias “Tony Wells.” In 1942 Marzani joined the Office of the Co-ordinator of Information (shortly to become OSS, which contained a number of other Communists and Soviet agents). When OSS was closed in September 1945, Marzani’s section was transferred to the State Department. According to his KGB file, Marzani was first recommended to the New York residency by its agent, Cedric Belfrage (CHARLIE), who during the Second World War worked for British Security Co-ordination in New York (vol. 6, ch. 14, part 2). On his transfer to the State Department, Marzani signed a sworn statement that he did not belong to, or support, “any political party or organization that advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence.” When later discovered to be a member of the CPUSA (officially considered to advocate that policy), he was sentenced in 1948 to two and a half years’ imprisonment. Marzani gave some details of his pre-war and wartime career in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws on June 18, 1953, but cited the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer the main questions put to him.

17. vol. 6, ch. 14, part 2.

18. Boffa, Inside the Khrushchev Era, p. 227.

19. The total advertising budget funded by the KGB during the seven-year period 1961-8 was 70,820 dollars. vol. 6, ch. 14, parts 1, 2.

20. Kalugin, Spymaster, p. 45. Marzani published over twenty books and pamphlets, written either by himself or by authors he had selected, on subjects chosen by the KGB. Several concerned the Vietnam War. Other active measures organized by Marzani included an attempt to discredit Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (codenamed KUKUSHKA), after her flight to the United States in 1967. The KGB helped to refinance Marzani’s publishing house after it was seriously damaged in a fire in 1969. During the early 1970s, however, the KGB became increasingly dissatisfied with Marzani. According to Mitrokhin’s later notes on his file:

The [New York] Residency began to notice signs of independent behavior on the part of NORD. He began to overestimate the extent to which the Residency depended upon him, and deluded himself in thinking that he was the only person in the country capable of carrying out Soviet intelligence tasks.

Since 1974 NORD has been living in Puerto Rico; it has been difficult to communicate with him there, and he lost many intelligence opportunities.