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Lee Harvey Oswald's Letter Requesting USSR Citizenship

[Editor's Note: At the 1999 Cologne summit, Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented US President Bill Clinton with some 40 documents pertaining to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The document printed below-Lee Harvey Oswald's handwritten 16 October 1959 letter requesting Soviet citizenship and the other documents were made accessible to the public later that year. Engaging in "archival diplomacy," the Russian president had selectively released historical documents on other occasions, such as in the mid-1990s when he brought top secret Politburo documents on the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary to Budapest or provided the South Korean government with high-level Soviet documents on the Korean War. The documents on the JFK assassination include

& LEE HARVEY OSWA!H, REQUEST THAT I BE
GRANTed Citizenship in The SOVIET UNION MY
VISA BEGAN ON OCT. 15, AND Will EXPIRE ON
OCT. 21, I MUST BE GRANTED ASYLUM BEFORE
This dATE. WHit I writ For The Citizenshif DECIS.AN.

AT PRESENT I AM A CITIZEN OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

I WANT CITIZENship BECAUSE;
I AM A COMMUNIST AND A WIRKER, I
Have lived iN A DECADENT CAPITALIST
Society where The WORKERS PRE STAVES,
I AM TWENTY YEARS old, I HAVE
completed ThRES YEARS IN THE UNITed
STATES MARINE CORES, I sevel with The
ECCUPATION FORCES IN JAPAN I HAVE
SEEN AMERICAN MiliTARY IMPERialism
IN All its FORMS,

I do NOT WANT TO RETURN TO ANY
COUNTRY COTSide of The Soviet UNION.
I AM willing To eve of my AMERICAN
citizenship And Assume The Responsibilities
OF A Soviet citizen.

I had saved my money which I EARNEY
AS A PRIVATE in The AMERICAN M. PRY FOR
TWO YEARS, IN ORDER TO COME TO RUSSIA FOR
Citizenship

The EXPRESS PURPOSE OF SEEKING
HERE. I do NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY THEFT TO
Live IN deFiNTRY HERE, OR TO RETURE TO ANY
OTHER COUNTRY, I HAVE NO DESIRE TO RETURN
TO ANY OTHER COUNTY. I ASK THAT MY
REQUEBE GIVEN QUICK CONSORPTION.

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Soviet envoy Anastas Mikoyan's emotional cable on his meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy at the funeral of the slain president; and a personal letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, dated 1 December 1963, in which Mrs. Kennedy emphasized "how much my husband was concerned about peace and how important the relations between you and him were to him in this concern. Much of the documentation deals with Moscow's and Washington's concern over the political fall-out of the assassination for Soviet-American relations in light of allegations that Oswald had had a Soviet connection, though his request for citizenship was denied in 1959. ("Judging from everything," Mikoyan cabled to Moscow, "the US government does not want to involve us in this matter, but neither does it want to get into a fight with the extreme rightists.") The documents are available at the National Archives (College Park, MD). CWIHP has published the documents (and translations) on its website at http:// cwihp.si.edu.-Christian F. Ostermann]

New Evidence on the Iran Crisis 1945-46

From the Baku Archives

[The following documents were provided to CWIHP by Dr. Jamil Hasanli (Baku State University). Hasanli, who has conducted extensive research on Soviet policies with regard to Iranian Azerbaijan in the early Cold War, obtained these documents from the State Archive of Political Parties and Social Movements of the Republic of Azerbaijan in Baku. Only a sample of a much larger collection to be published in future issues of the CWIHP Bulletin and CWIHP Working Papers, these documents allow unprecedented insight into Stalin's systematic efforts to sponsor a separatist movement in Northern Iran. Some of the documents have also been consulted by Dr. Fernande Scheid (Yale University), who presented her findings for the first time at the September 1999 CWIHP Conference on "Stalin and the Cold War" at Yale University and who is the author of a forthcoming CWIHP Working Paper. Previous CWIHP publications on the subject, based on Russian archival materials, include Natalia Egorova, The 'Iran Crisis' of 1945-1946: A View from the Russian Archives (CWIHP Working Paper No. 15, Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1997).

Hasanli contributed the documents in the framework of a new initiative on "The Caucasus in the Cold War," co-sponsored by the National Security Archive and CWIHP. The initiative aims at unearthing new evidence from archives in the Southern Caucasus on important Cold War issues, such as Stalin's plans for territorial expansion in 1945-46 with regard to Turkey and Iran; ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus in the context of Stalin's imperial calculations; "flashpoints" in the Southern Caucasus during de-Stalinization (e.g., Tbilisi, March 1956); and the collapse of the USSR (irredentist movements in Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia, and clashes between Soviet troops and nationalist protesters in April 1989 in Tbilisi and in January 1990 in Baku).

In a first step towards planing collaborative exploration of the archives, the "The Caucasus in the Cold War" initiative brought together some thirty Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, US and Russian scholars and archivists for a workshop in Tbilisi in October 2000 to discuss archival holdings and research agendas. Among the most noteworthy issues brought out by the discussion was the signifigance of inter-ethnic tensions in the immediate post-World War II period (which later exploded as the Soviet Union collapsed). Workshop participants also made clear that in Cold War historiography on topics such as the territorial disputes and war scares between Iran and Soviet Azerbaijan (1945-46) and between Turkey and Soviet Georgia and Armenia (1945-47), concurrent tensions within and among the Soviet Caucasus Republics during that period have often been overlooked. Placing regional ethnic and inter-republic tensions within the larger Cold War context will likely be a major theme of the new initiative. For further information on the Caucasus Initiative, contact CWIHP or Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya at the National Security Archive (phone: 202994-7000).

Hasanli's work in the Azeri archives on the 1945-46 crisis first came to CWIHP's attention in connection with a National Security Archive project on "Iran and the Cold War." Together with the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), it was agreed to organize a series of workshops to gather sources and perspectives from various countries on the subject of “Iran, the Great Powers, and the Cold War." In September 1999, the National Security Archive organized a panel on the 1945-46 crisis at an Iranian studies conference in Tehran. This was followed in June 2000 by a major international conference in Tehran on the oil crisis of 195154, hosted by a new Iranian institute affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, the "Center for Documents and Diplomatic History." The conference agenda included the controversial overthrow (with U.S. and British intelligence support) of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and the reinstallation of the Shah in August 1953. The meeting, which received wide media publicity in Iran, coincided with the leaked publication of a classified CIA history of the coup. It was at the June 2000 session that Hasanli presented his findings from the Azeri archives on the earlier crisis, and agreed to cooperate with the Archive and CWIHP on both the Iran and Caucasus projects. CWIHP is planning to publish Iranian documentation (translated from Farsi) on the 1945-46 Azerbaijan crisis obtained in Tehran, as well as further materials from the Baku archives, in future issues of the Bulletin. For further information on the Iran project, contact its director, Malcolm Byrne, by e-mail at mbyrne@gwu.edu or by telephone at 202-994-7000. -Christian F. Ostermann.]

DOCUMENT No. 1

Decree of the [USSR] State Defense

Committee No. 9168 SS,

Regarding Geological Prospecting Work for Oil in Northern Iran, 21 June 1945

COPY

TOP SECRET

The State Defense Committee

Decree of the GOKO [State Defense Committee] No. 9168SS of 21 June 1945

Moscow, the Kremlin

Geological Prospecting Work for Oil in Northern Iran

With the objective of geological prospecting and drilling work for oil in northern Iran, the State Defense Committee DECREES:

1. Organize within the "Azneft"" [Azerbaijani Oil] Association of the Narkomneft' [the People's Commissariat for Oil] a Hydrogeological Directorate and entrust to this organization the supervision of geological prospecting for oil deposits in northern Iran.

2. To conduct this prospecting work in northern Iran hold Narkomneft' (Cde. Baybakov) and Azneft' (Cde. Vezirov) responsible for supplying the necessary quantity of workers from the oil industry for drilling and prospecting teams and sending them to the place of work in the form of a hydrogeological detachment created in the staff of the Soviet troops in Iran (Qazvin).

3. Establish a mission for the hydrogeological detachment to conduct the following work in northern Iran:

a) Drilling

10 pumps in 7 areas, including 3 stationary pumps (deep rotary drilling) in the areas of Shakhi, Bandar-Shah, and Mianeh;

4 stationary pumps (deep structural search drilling) in the areas of Shah, Bolgar-Chay, and Khoy;

3 mobile drilling units for structural search drilling in the areas of Bandar-Shah, Shaha-Babol'ser, and Pahlavi;

b) Geological Survey - one expedition comprising 10 teams in the areas of: the Gorgan Steppe, Ashraf-ShahaAmol', Khorramabad, Bolgar-Chai, Jul'fa-Zanjan, TabrizArdebil', and Ku-I-Gitcha-Siyakh-Ku;

c) Geological Prospecting - one expedition of 3 teams (gravimetric "Issing", variometric and resistivity prospecting) in the areas: Gorgan Steppe, Mazanderan and Rasht lowlands, and along entire southern shore of the Caspian Sea from the border with the Turkmen SSR to the border with the Azerbaijan SSR.

Hold the Narkomneft' (Cde. Baybakov) and Azneft' (Cde. Vezirov) responsible for transferring the required drilling and prospecting equipment by 1 September 1945 to conduct the work to the required degree and [for] beginning drilling and prospecting work in September of 1945.

4. Hold the Narkomneft' (Cde. Baybakov) responsible for organizing and dispatching by 1 August 1945: a geological survey expedition of 10 teams; a well-logging and electrometer team; a geophysical expedition of 3 teams (gravimetric "Issing", variometric ((2 instruments)) and resistivity prospecting) by removing these teams from the following regions: the gravimetric "Issing" [team] from Baku; the variometric [team] (2 instruments) from the Middle Volga Branch of the Narkomneft' Geophysical Trust; the resistivity [team] from the area of Krasnodar.

5. With the objective of equipping the hydrogeological detachment with the necessary equipment, instruments, and material hold [the following] responsible:

a) the Narkomneft' (Cde. Baybakov) is to allocate and ship to the Hydrogeological Directorate in August 1945: 5 sets of pumps, drilling equipment, and a rotary drilling instrument; 4 sets of ZV-750 frames, drilling equipment, and the instrument for them; 3 sets of rods (1200 meters) and an instrument for KA-300 pumps, and other necessary equipment and materials for the work of the hydrogeological detachment;

b) the Narkomvneshtorg [People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade] (Cde. Mikoyan) is to allocate to the hydrogeological detachment in June-July 1945 15 trucktractors and 120 trucks from imports from the unassembled ones in Iran;

c) the Commanding General of the Transcaucasus Front, Cde. Tyulenev, is to allocate to the hydrogeological detachment the necessary office space and living quarters in Qazvin and at work locations, and also render aid with personnel from military units in assembling the 120 vehicles allocated to the hydrogeological detachment;

d) the USSR NKO [People's Commissariat of Defense] (Cde. Vorob'yev [Marshal of Engineer Troops, M. P., Chief of Engineer Troops of the Soviet Army]) is, by 1 August 1945, to transfer to the disposition of the hydrogeological detachment in Iran two complete AVB-2-100 mobile drilling units in working order: a drilling machine AVB-2-100, a ZIS5 water tanker, a 1.5 ton vehicle with an instrument and one

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