We’re free to fight, which makes for good relations. Once or twice one of us would pursue a line of questioning the other hated, and we were finally screaming at each other. And the poor Russian interviewee is sitting there looking at us like we re madmen.
They were grimly fascinatedeven glumly fascinated. There were so many opportunities to make a big mistake. We have this idea of the KGB as the evil empire, but that’s not your typical working KGB man. They’ve got a family, they want to advance their career, they’re as bureaucratic as we are. And they had a hell of a chestnut with Oswald. If he’s CIA, he’s a most unusual agent. If he’s sincere, it would be a disgrace if they treated him abominably. So they decided to observe him. The KGB are chess players. They Play as much chess as the CIA plays tennis.
There was always the chance they were dissimulating. But you’d have needed a sophisticated writer to make up that legend.
I started with one book and ended with another. When [our work] was all over in Belarus, I got fascinated with, of all things, the Warren Report. Not that it was a good piece of investigative reporting; it wasn’t. But it’s a marvelous source of minimalist stories about life in America at that time.
I think he did it by himself, but I think he was leaned on by the FBI and CIA, which is why there was that tremendous effort at cover-up. Oswald was a do-it-yourself guy. it’s hard to see him giving his gun to someone else. It would have been like him giving his wife to someone else.
