John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee

[Jim Hargrove]

Rimma Shirakova, Oswald's Intourist guide told the author Norman Mailer that Oswald "didn't seem to know a word of Russian," when she was with him. Mailer also reported that employees at the Minsk Radio Plant also believed him to speak little or no Russian when he first arrived there. (Norman Mailer, Oswald's Tale, pp. 43, 85.)

According to Mailer, "Igor Ivanovich Guzman," a pseudonym of a KGB official the author interviewed in 1993, was tasked to "make certain that the Americans had not schooled him [Oswald] in Russian and he was concealing the knowledge. That was difficult to determine, but could be examined by observing closely how he proceeded to acquire more language proficiency. So, that would also become a task for any person teaching him Russian. The monitor would have to be able to determine whether Oswald was jumping from lesson to lesson with suspicious progress, or, taking the contrary case, was he experiencing real difficulty?"(ibid, p. 71)


Mailer wrote that KGB officials interviewed LHO's friends, co-workers, and acquaintences regularly to see if there was any sign Oswald was proficient in Russian, concluding that he had no training in Russian.

(If anyone has a copy of Oswald's Tale, I'd appreciate confirmation of the above. I took the excerpts above off the Web.)

Jim