Free Republic

It may have been a mystery at one time, but not 50 years later. The fingerprints of the Soviet intelligence service and its Cuban affiliate are all over Oswald. One of the main controversies covered superficially in the program was Oswald’s trip to Mexico City—a favorite place for foreign communist governments to contact communist agents living in the U.S. PBS claimed that Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies looking for a visa, but was rebuffed by communist officials. It said, “…in the end both the Russians and the Cubans rejected him. All his plans to fight for Castro and...

MOSCOW AND BOSTON — Lee Harvey Oswald’s Russian was still shaky in 1961, when he was working as a factory metalworker in the provincial Soviet city of Minsk. It fell to a young student engineer named Stanislav Shushkevich to help him out. "He was a simple martinet, and I found nothing in common with him. His Russian at that point was passable. We had about a dozen lessons in all, after that we had no contacts,” Mr.Shushkevich told the Monitor in an interview. “My main concern later on was that he would be given the task of fabricating equipment I...