Authors: John Newman
Indeed, there was a detail that Oswald withheld from Mosby: his brazen declaration to tell the Russians about radar and something "special." It would have been reasonable for Oswald to think it was not "safe" to tell this to a reporter before receiving the assurance he could stay. There is no escaping the question that this leads to: Did Oswald feel it was "safe" for him to unburden himself about this with Priscilla after he received Soviet assurance? This overriding question strikes at the very heart of the entire story of Oswald's defection in Moscow.
Neither Priscilla Johnson's 1959 contemporaneous notes nor her 1963 written recollection mentions that Oswald told her he had threatened to reveal radar secrets. Her book Marina and Lee makes no mention of radar secrets. Her newspaper articles then and since make no mention of radar secrets. Under oath, however, she told a very different story. Here is the bombshell she dropped during her sworn testimony to the Warren Commission:
MR. sLAwsoN: Miss Johnson, I wonder if you would search your memory with the help of your notes and make any comments you could on what contacts Lee Oswald had had with Soviet officials before you saw him, any remarks he made or things you could read between the lines, and so on.
MISS JOHNSON: I had the impression, in fact he said, he hoped his experience as a radar operator would make him more desirable to them [the Soviets]. That was the only thing that really showed any lack of integrity in a way about him, a negative thing. That is, he felt he had something he could give them, something that would hurt his country in a way, or could, and that was the one thing that was quite negative, that he was holding out some kind of bait.36 [Emphasis added]
In a 1994 interview with the author, Priscilla McMillan found the contradiction between her Warren Commission testimony and other writings troubling.
How could Priscilla not have written about such a startling part of her interview with Oswald? "I know, that it is terrible," she remarked in 1994, "that is so unprofessional." Her recollection was at first indecisive, and she wondered if it had not been "wrong to tell the Warren Commission that." At length, however, she stuck with her testimony.37 Not surprisingly, Priscilla's revelation about radar secrets startled her Warren Commission interrogator, W. David Slawson. This is what happened next:
MR. sLAwsoN: Could you elaborate a little bit on that radar point. Had you been informed by the American Embassy at the time that he had told Richard Snyder that he had already volunteered to the Soviet officials that he had been a radar operator in the Marine Corps, and would give the Russian government any secrets he had possessed?
MISS JOHNSON: I had no idea that he had told Snyder that, but he did tell me-I got the impression, I am not sure that it is in the notes or not, I certainly got the impression that he was using his radar training as a come-on to them, hoped that that would make him of some value to them, and I-
MR. SLAWSON: This was something then that he must have volunteered to you, because you would not have known to ask about it?
MISS JOHNSON: Well, again I am not very military minded, and I couldn't have cared less, you know. But somehow along the line, if it is not in my notes then it is a memory, then it is one of the things I didn't write-well, one thing is you know I tend to write what I thought I might use in the story. But I wasn't going to write a particularly negative story about him. I wasn't going to write that he was using it as a come-on so I might not have transcribed it simply for that reason, that it wasn't a part of my story.
But it definitely was an impression that he-and it was from him, certainly not from the embassy, that he was using that as a comeon, and I sure didn't like that. But it didn't occur to me he might have military secrets. I just felt, well hell, he didn't have much as a radar operator that they need, although even there I didn't know. Maybe there was some little twist in our radar technique that he might know. It showed a lack of integrity in his personality, and that I remembered. What he might or might not have to offer them I didn't know" [emphasis added].
What emerges from this testimony is that Priscilla was predisposed against doing a critical story on Oswald, so much so that contrary to a reporter's instincts to get the most dramatic story, she deliberately ignored Oswald's stated intent to commit a disloyal act.
"I felt very sorry for him," Priscilla says now.39 "We were both comparatively young and up against it alone." In a 1994 interview with the author, Priscilla elaborated on this feeling in the following words:
Oswald was the only believer I met and I respected him for it. Also he and I were in the same boat: I was the least credentialed reporter in Moscow-lowest on the totem pole. So we were sort of alone together. I was interested in the Soviet Union, and he was there because he believed in it.
Again we have to believe that this "same boat" psychology would override good journalistic sense. This Priscilla herself admits, but insists she wanted to be Oswald's friend:
There again I was not very professional; I wanted him to know that he had somebody there, because I thought he was going to get stuck out in the provinces and have a hard time. So I said to him ... let me know before you leave Moscow." He said, "Yes I will." I said, "I will be writing my story tomorrow, and would be glad to show it to you for mistakes, and he said, "No. I trust you."
Perhaps it is helpful to think-as Priscilla might have then-what the impact might have been had she printed the story about radar secrets. It might well have angered Oswald and would have led to no more interviews.40
This exercise quickly becomes too speculative, for we must begin making assumptions about why Oswald told Johnson about radar secrets in the first place. There is, however, another dimension to Priscilla's interview with Oswald that needs to be further explored. That dimension concerns someone who was her friend and whose story was as mysterious then as it is now. That person was John McVickar.
CHAPTER SIX
Flni
The Thin Line of Duty
"I took a typed copy of the message from Pic," John McVickar wrote in a memo on November 9, 1959, "down to the Metropole Hotel today to deliver to Oswald."' John Edward Pic was a twentyeight-year-old staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Ta- chigawa Air Base, Japan. He was also the son of Marguerite Oswald from her first marriage to Edward J. Pic, Jr.,' and thus a half brother to Oswald. Sergeant Pic's message read, "Please reconsider your intentions. Contact me if possible. Love. John."' The message arrived early Monday morning in Moscow, and Snyder asked McVickar to "contact Oswald"4 and deliver it. "I went directly to the room (233) and knocked several times," McVickar said in his memo afterward, "but no one answered." McVickar checked with the hotel staff on the second floor, only to find conflicting stories about whether or not Oswald was in the room. "On the way out I phoned from downstairs," McVickar said, "but no answer."
"He might talk to you because you're a woman," McVickar told Priscilla Johnson the following Monday.' "I did ask John to go over," Richard Snyder later recalled regarding McVickar's November 9 trip to Oswald's hotel room, "but I didn't ask him to talk to Priscilla."6 When McVickar approached Priscilla as she collected her mail on November 16, he was distinctly out of bounds. "I definitely remember being upset with John," Snyder says. "I was annoyed, particularly because it was at the beginning of the case when I was sort of feeling my way along." Oswald was Snyder's case, and Snyder was naturally upset that McVickar had decidedwithout permission or consultation-to take matters into his own hands.
McVickar's contemporaneous accounts of his actions are as trou bling as the actions themselves. "I also pointed out to Miss Johnson that there was a thin line somewhere between her duty as a correspondent and as an American," he wrote of his November 17 dinner conversation with Priscilla. But that was the day after her interview with Oswald, and the truth is that he had issued this "reminder" four hours before the interview. Today McVickar claims he does not remember what he meant by this "thin line" of duty. One can reasonably excuse a memory lapse thirty-five years after an event. But we may be justifiably skeptical of such a convenient loss of memory about the timing of this patriotic exhortation just twentyfour hours after it was given. Such an oddity in the written recordmade at the time of the events themselves-invites one to compare Priscilla's account of the November 17 dinner with the McVickar memo which followed it.
Dinner at a shashlichnaya
"I wrote up the story of my interview the next day," Priscilla recalls, "and I called Snyder because I wanted to get his version too, because Oswald was so critical of him. I probably talked to Snyder between 12:00 and 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, the 17th." She finished the piece "and then took it to the Central Telegraph at 2:00 or 3:00. The Soviet censor did not cut a word from my story. I took it there, to the Central Telegraph, on the afternoon of the 17th-it was on Gorky Street."
"I probably went to a store on the ground floor of the Moscow Hotel and bought some cheese or milk and took it back to my room." Sometime that afternoon after she returned, John McVickar called, "probably around 2:30 to 3," she thinks. "It would surprise me if Snyder hadn't reported on my talk with him at lunchtime.
"McVickar invited me out. He had known my brother and sister in the past, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. John remembered dancing with my sister, and my brother's manner on the dance floor." Sometime between 6 and 7 p.m. on November 17, Johnson and McVickar met for the second time in as many days. "I had supper with John that evening, and we went to an ordinary restaurant. Not a fancy one. It was also in keeping with our pocketbooks. It was a shashlichnaya-lamb-on-a-skewer type restaurant-sort of cafeteria style. No waiter. It was very informal. It was a kind of eating that had just started in Moscow under Khrushchev.
If it had not been for Khrushchev, the two of them would not have been eating dinner together at the shashlichnaya that night. In fact, Priscilla would not have been allowed to return to the Soviet Union. She had been the victim of a familiar Soviet technique, which involved giving her visa extensions for only a thirty-to-ninetyday period, at the end of which the KGB would attempt to recruit her. But Cord Meyer's "mixed up" girl from Long Island refused to cave in, and her reward at the end of a year was expulsion by fiat-Soviet officials told her in the summer of 1959 that her visa would no longer be renewed. Her friends in the Moscow press corps complained to Mikoyan, the Soviet foreign minister, at American Ambassador Thompson's Fourth of July reception. They asked the minister to let Johnson stay to cover the upcoming Nixon visit.
"With a snap of the fingers," Mikoyan ordered it done, but when the Nixon visit was over and Priscilla left for America to cover Khrushchev's return visit, she went with the idea that she might not be coming back anytime soon. Ambassador Thompson accompanied Khrushchev on his American journey, and during the trip confronted Khrushchev about the harassment of Priscilla Johnson and another American journalist in Moscow, McGraw Hill. Khrushchev said he "didn't believe in that kind of thing and sent a message back to Moscow ordering it stopped." Priscilla later heard from Soviet journalists in Moscow: "We knew you'd be back." It took two months for her visa to be processed by the Soviet Consulate in Washington, D.C., but she returned on November 15, and forty-eight hours later was able to share lamb-on-a-skewer with McVickar at the shashlichnaya.
"We had a lot to catch up on," Priscilla says of her dinner engagement. Indeed they did. "He took me there because he figured it wasn't bugged," she remembers. There was so much to talk about, and none of it fit for KGB ears. "There was the embassy gossip, who was doing what to who," and "we bitched about Snyder, who was giving him a hard time, the usual." Then there was the incredible saga of the Khrushchev trip, how she had managed to get into his hotel room in Iowa and how surprised .she was that she had gotten a Soviet reentry visa. And there was also the problem of Lee Harvey Oswald.
"We talked about Oswald's personality and how the Embassy had handled him. John and I, out of sympathy for Oswald, were talking about how Snyder goaded Oswald. To tell you the truth," Priscilla says of Snyder, "I did not like him at the time-he could be very snide. I like him very well now," she says today. As that evening with McVickar progressed, the two of them sat there in the little cafeteria-style restaurant, with its damp cement floor, no waiters to bother them, and relaxed with the comforting thought that they were alone and free to speak candidly.
"We felt that Snyder had mishandled Oswald," Priscilla recalls, "and this got Oswald heated up and angry. John's concern was that Dick need not have responded in such an ascerbic way to Oswald's ugly remarks." For his part, Snyder says he "was told at some point that John had criticized my handling of the case." Snyder recalls that McVickar's actions with Priscilla were "very unprofessional," and that this kind of information "should not have been given to the press." In a recent interview Snyder further elaborated:
It you give out specific information of this kind it does help the [Soviet] decryptors if you give a clue to the content, the name, or especially something really specific, it helps a lot for the decoders. So that's one reason alone you're not going to give out any hard specifics; it's part of your security briefing before you go there.'
Security considerations aside, Snyder also thinks that the reason John told Priscilla about Oswald was largely because of their "relationship." That may be true. It was also true that, like it or not, Priscilla's relationship with Oswald had become a part of the official story.
That part of the story is an important document written by McVickar after the dinner with Johnson. This document deserves our close attention because it is one of the first major stumbling blocks in the Oswald files.