Oswald in Minsk

[David Lifton]

Marina's fluency in English is obvious from this January 1964 interview, at a time when she supposedly needed translators during questioning by authorities.



I suspect Marina was a "honey trap" assigned to Oswald so she could eventually go to the US with him and become a Soviet sleeper agent. She probably never did anything for the Soviets before the assassination, and they quickly cut her loose after 11/22/63, which is why she had to become so cooperative with US authorities.

Tracy,
Marina was a smart woman, but Oswald would not speak to her in English. He wanted to use her as his "conversationalist" and to preserve his own fluency in Russian. After the assassination, she had a sharp learning curve, upwards. Nonetheless, her vocabulary was limited--and her grammar and syntax was rather primitive. (This improved rapidly with the passage of time, and then she took the Michigan Course, and there was additional rapid improvement).

Bottom line: the authorities would of course want to interview Marina in Russian--no doubt about that; but that did not mean (and does not mean) that she couldn't answer questions in basic English, and certainly so by mid-January, 1964.

FWIW: I do not believe Marina had any connection with Soviet intelligence, nor do I believe she was a honey trap. Originally, I entertained all these possibilities, but after I met her, and had many conversations with her, it became clear to me that none of that was true. Of course, I can well understand why some people would believe otherwise--and to do justice to that discussion would require some rather long additional posts. No time for that, just now, but its an interesting subject, and leads to much interesting discussion.

DSL
6/21/13; 3:20 PM PDT
Los Angeles, California