I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want. It will require a little more contact and discussion, but I think she could come around... Basically, if approached with sympathy in the cause she considers most vital, I believe she would be interested in helping us in many ways. It would be important to avoid making her think that she was being used as a propaganda tool and expected to write what she is told. I don't think she would go along with that idea at all. On the other hand, she is searching for both more information and more understanding of the problem of the Soviet intellectual and is consequently subject to influence.

In accordance with the DDO's notice of 9 December 1974, I have reviewed the 201 file on (Priscilla Johnson) and have determined that it can most accurately be categorized as indicated below "witting collaborator" 01 Code A1.

On November 13 Lee telephoned Aline Mosby, a reporter for United Press International; she came to see him, and he talked to her "non-stop" for two hours. And, on November 16, a Soviet official came to his room and informed him that he could remain until a decision had been made what to do with him. It was virtually a promise that he could stay, and Lee was vastly relieved.

I happened to be the beneficiary of his relief. I was a newspaper and magazine reporter in Moscow in 1959. I had just returned from a visit to the United States and, on November 16, I went to the consular office of the American Embassy, as the American reporters did, to pick up my mail. John McVickar welcomed me back with these words: "Oh, by the way, there's a young American in your hotel trying to defect. He won't talk to any of us, but maybe he'll talk to you because you're a woman."

McVickar turned out to be right. At the Hotel Metropole I stopped by Oswald's room, which was on the second floor, the floor below my own. I knocked, and the young man inside opened the door. Instead of inviting me in, he came into the corridor and stood there, holding the door open with his foot. I peeked into his room, and saw that it was exactly like mine, right down to its shade of hotel blue. To my surprise, he readily agreed to be interviewed, and said that he would come to my room at eight or nine o'clock that evening. Good as his word he appeared, wearing a dark gray suit, a white shirt with a dark tie, and a sweater-vest of tan cashmere. He looked familiar to me, like a lot of college boys in the East during the 1950s. The only difference was his voice-he had a slight Southern drawl.

He settled in an armchair, I brought him tea from a little burner I kept on the floor, and he started talking fairly easily. He spoke quietly, unemphatically, and only rarely betrayed by a gesture or a slight change of tone that what he was saying at that moment meant anything special to him. He began by complaining about Richard Snyder and his refusal to accept on the spot his oath of renunciation. I had no idea what he was talking about, since I had not discussed him with Snyder or McVickar, nor heard about the stormy scene at the embassy two weeks before."

During our conversation Lee returned again and again to what he called the embassy's "illegal" treatment of him, which he termed a "prestige and labor-saving device." He spread out two letters on my desk: one his letter of protest to the American ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, and the other his letter from Snyder, which said that he was free to come to the embassy at any time and take the oath. Well, I said, all you have to do is go back one more time. He swore he would never set foot there again. Once he became a Soviet citizen, he said, he would allow "my government," the Soviet government, to handle it for him.

Lee's tone was level, almost expressionless, and while I realized that his words were bitter, somehow I did not feel that he was angry. Moreover, he did not seem like a fully grown man to me, for the blinding fact, the one that obliterated nearly every other fact about him, was his youth. He looked about seventeen. Proudly, as a boy might, he told me about his only expedition into Moscow alone. He had walked four blocks to Detsky Mir, the children's department store, and bought himself an ice cream cone. I could scarcely believe my ears. Here he was, coming to live in this country forever, and he had so far dared venture into only four blocks of it.

I was astounded by his lack of curiosity and the utter absence of any joy or spirit of adventure in him. And yet I respected him. Here was this lonely, frightened boy taking on the bureaucracy of the second most powerful nation on earth, and doing it single-handedly. I wondered if he had any idea what he was doing, for it could be brutal to try to stay if the Russians did not want you-futile and dangerous. I had to admire Lee, ignorant, young, and even tender as he appeared, for persisting in spite of so many discouragements.

I was sorry for him, too, for I was certain he was making a mistake. He told me that he had been informed that morning that he did not have to leave the country. So I supposed that he would soon be granted citizenship, vanish into some remote corner of Russia, and never be heard from again. He would not be allowed to see any Americans, much less reporters, and he would be unable to signal his distress. Like every Westerner in Moscow, I had heard innumerable tragic stories about foreigners who had come to Russia during the 1930s, crossed the Rubicon of Soviet citizenship, and never been allowed to leave. I assumed that Lee would regret his choice and that he, like the others, would be trapped. As young as he was, he would have a lifetime to be sorry.

Things began to go wrong when John F. Kennedy was murdered in November 1963, but not in the way you might think. We recovered from Kennedy's loss quickly enough, but we're still suffering from the questions left open by his death. Everybody has his own theory about the murder, some of them baroque in their conspiratorial complexity, some pugnaciously dismissive. My own theory is that Kennedy's murder marked the moment when we stopped thinking about what we might become as a nation, and start looking for whom to blame.

It is not just easy, but almost irresistible, to make fun of the Kennedy assassination skeptics, with their Oswald doubles and triples, the ectoplasmic gunmen on the grassy knoll, the phantom C.I.A. agents hovering over Oswald's shoulder, the logical proof that and war; now they are hunting villains among the ectoplasm. If that strikes you as funny, well ... it doesn't me.

I realize this is a long preamble for another hook about the Kennedy assassination, but I wish it were miraculous hook Priscilla Johnson McMillan has written, miraculous because McMillan had the wit, courage and perseverance to go hack to the heart of the story, and the art to give It life.

The Oswald who emerges in McMillan's book was a young man badly put together - erratic, lonely, proud, impatient and violent. His ambitions were soaring, his abilities uncertain, his education limited to what he had picked up in public libraries despite a reading disability called dyslexia. From the age of 15 he considered himself a Marxist-Leninist. His "ideas" were unsophisticated, bits and pieces of naive leftism, but he treasured them the way a lonely boy might treasure his collection of baseball cards.

Often unemployed, fired from the only job he ever liked and bored to distraction with the rest, Oswald spent hundreds of hours working on his "ideas," drawing up manifestoes and political programs, analyzing the failures of Soviet society as he saw them, working in a radio factory in Minsk after his defection to Russia in 1959. His dyslexia forced him to copy and recopy everything he wrote, and even then his letters and half-finished essays were riddled with what appear to be the spelling errors of a near illiterate.

In Russia Oswald had married Marina for reasons of convenience. Marina liked Oswald because he was neat and polite, because he was an American and made her girlfriends envious and because he was the only man she had ever known with an apartment of his own. This was no small matter in overcrowded Russia. Marina's uncle, a colonel in the M.V.D. (Ministry of Internal Affairs), had already rejected one of Marina's suitors out of hand because he had no apartment; the colonel resented Marina's presence in his home and made it clear that he certainly didn't want a nephew-In-law moving in as well. Looked at from the outside, the marriage was a disaster from the beginning. Oswald was secretive, overbearing and short-tempered. After he returned to the United States with his wife and young daughter in the summer of 1962, a streak of physical cruelty emerged. He horrified the Russian community of Dallas, where they moved, by the ferocity with which he sometimes beat his wife, by his cruel refusal to let Marina learn English or make friends of her own, and later, in 1963, by his threat to send her back to Russia alone.

Life with Oswald was so bad Marina frequently threatened to leave him for good, but at the same time she loved him, blamed herself for their arguments, pitied his loneliness, forgave his violence, hoped Oswald would outgrow the "ideas" that no one but he took seriously. Once, in the summer of 1963, when their relationship was strained to the snapping point, Marina found Oswald in the kitchen, sobbing inconsolably. Life defeated him at every turn; he didn't know what to do. She took him in her arms, comforted him, told him it would be all right, they would find a way. Twisted and painful as it was, Oswald's relationship with Marina was the closest to being normal of any throughout his life.

Marina was familiar enough with Oswald's "ideas" but she did not grasp his desperate readiness to act on them until April 1963. Earlier that year Oswald had ordered a pistol by mail, and later a rifle and four-power telescopic sight, in the name of "A. J. HideII," apparently chosen because it rhymed with Fidel, the name he wanted to give the son he expected.

On Wednesday, April 10, 1963, Oswald confessed to Marina with tears in his eyes that he had lost his job in a photo studio, the only one he had ever liked. That night he failed to come home at the usual time. Marina found a note in Russian on his desk, giving meticulous instructions about how she was to live in his absence. "If I am alive and taken prisoner." the note concluded, "the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town...."

"At 11:30," McMillan writes, "Lee walked in, white, covered with sweat, his eyes glittering.

"'What's happened?' Marina asked.

"'I shot Walker.' He was out of breath and could hardly get out the words.

"'Did you kill him?'

"'I don't know.' "

The next day - half relieved, half disappointed � Oswald learned he had missed. Typically, he blamed his target. At the last moment, he told Marina, Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, U.S.A. (Ret.), a champion of the John Birch Society, had moved his head. There was a flurry of notices in the press, but no evidence turned up to implicate Oswald. Later he showed Marina the elaborate plan he'd drawn up for Walker's murder complete with maps and photographs and a statement of Oswald's political "ideas." Marina made him bunt the incriminating documents, but she kept his note of instructions and made him swear never to do such a thing again

McMillan's description of this episode is characteristic of her hook, rich in brilliant detail, passionate and compelling. Oswald's desperate personal unhappiness before his attempt. the emotional aftershock (tot one whole night ht was literally in convulsions), the rain; that followed, are all on a piece. They describe a man with capacity - not reasons - for murder. McMillan; painstaking, intimate account of Oswald's last months prove one simple, important point: he was no phantom but a man with an hour-by-hour-existence like any other. If she does not know exactly why he wanted to kill Walker or Kennedy - how is one to extract a reason from the irrational?

Or made me see, at any rate. The skeptics, I suspect, are in no mood to be convinced: The word is already out on McMillan in buff circles. Her book can he dismissed. She is unreliable, not to he trusted. She may have been working for the "State, Department" - of worse - when she had an interview with Oswald in Moscow back in October 1959, On top of that McMillan's principal source was Marina Oswald, who was the niece of a colonel in the M.V.D. (Marina believes he was in charge or convict labor working on timber projects in Byelorussia.) How can you trust the work of someone working for the "State Monument based on information iron, the niece of a colonel ii the M.V.D.?

The people who are taking this position ought to be ashamed of themselves; they are accusing McMillan of the same failings - either secret motives or ad-hominem arguments - so often brought against themselves. The argument is confusingly circular: you can't trust the book because you can't trust McMillan, and you can't trust McMillan because you can't trust Marina. That follows only you assume Marina was a witting party to conspiracy to kill Kennedy. If you don't believe that - and very few assassination buffs do; they look tot the villains elsewhere - then tier testimony is as good as anyone's else....

McMillan never seems ever to have doubted for a moment that Oswald did it, or that he did it for reasons of his own. He had his "ideas" - he seems to have rationalized the assassination as a salutary shock for a complacent public - but his real motive emerges as a desperate desire to transcend the obscurity and impotence to which fate was inexorably confining him. A failure in every job he held, in danger of driving away his wife and child, ignored or condescended to whenever he brought up his "ideas," reluctantly acceptors by the Russians in 1959 and rejected by the Cubans in 1963, Oswald refused to slip under with only a whimper. He killed Kennedy for the same reason he fired a shot at Walker: to prove he was there, and counted.

It is not at all easy to describe the power of Marina and Lee. Its texture is rich and convincing, as painful as the events it describes. It is far better than any book about Kennedy, with the unsettling result that the assassination is experienced from the wrong end. McMillan follows Oswald's life with such fidelity and perception that it is his death which hurts in her final pages, not Kennedy's. Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire, "Marina and Lee" burns. If you can find the heart to read it, you may finally begin to forget the phantom gunmen on the grassy knoll.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan may be called to discuss her contacts with Oswald in Moscow at which time her CIA "witting source" affiliation may be exposed. She gave executive session testimony last week, and staff indicated that they had follow-up issues as a result but would not share their issues. If the CIA relationship is presented, Gary Coit (retired, DCD) may be subpoenaed.

In August, 1993, thousands of pages of CIA documents were made available to researchers at the National Archives that had been previously classified, including several documents associated with Priscilla Johnson McMillan, author of Marina and Lee, and the subject of several earlier articles by this writer.

The first document, dated December 11, 1962 (and numbered 17456), is a "contact report," previously classified "secret," written by Donald Jameson, Chief SR/CA, which possibly stands for "Soviet Russia/Covert Actions." The report is based on a 90- minute meeting with Priscilla Johnson in her room at the Brattle Inn, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was pointed out that, according to Mr. Butler at the "OO Office" in Boston, Priscilla was "... allowed to use the Harvard-Russian Research Center for her own work, mainly the writing of articles and a book, but that she has no other official relationship to the center."

Jameson described Priscilla as being "able, astute and conscientious," reflected also in her writing, but at the same time, was "rather nervous and shy," suggesting a "lack of self-confidence." He noted, however, that she certainly had a large number of Soviet contacts, and knew how to meet and talk to people. Jameson indicated at the outset of his report that Priscilla had been "selected as a likely candidate to write an article on Yevtushenko in a major U.S. magazine for our campaign." He recognized that Priscilla was "concerned about making her articles accurate as to fact and free from any external influence," but believed that "she might be worked around to writing an article in which she genuinly (sic) believed, but would also further our purposes for Yevtushenko" (a popular Russian poet).

Much of the report is a summary of Jameson's discussion with Priscilla about various Russian poets and Yevtushenko especially, whom the CIA seemed to be particularly interested in. Priscilla informed Jameson that she had arranged to write several articles for The Reporter - including one on Yevtushenko - and emphasized that "she thought she must write only the truth, without defining exactly what that was to me."

In conclusion, Jameson pointed out that, despite what she had stated: "I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want. It will require a little more contact and discussion, but I think she could come around ... Basically, if approached with sympathy in the cause she considers most vital, I believe she would be interested in helping us in many ways. It would be important to avoid making her think that she was being used as a propaganda tool and expected to write what she is told. I don't think she would go along with that idea at all. On the other hand, she is searching for both more information and more understanding of the problem of the Soviet intellectual and is consequently subject to influence."

It is certainly clear that the CIA intended to make full use of Priscilla Johnson's talents as a Soviet researcher and writer in an ongoing attempt to destabilize conditions in the Soviet Union, apparently without her complete knowledge.

The next document, dated February 5, 1964, and numbered 17458 (suggesting that there might be a document still classified in between), is a lengthy memo based on a meeting with Priscilla on Jan. 30 and 31,1964, this time written by Gary Coit (SR/CA). Although the report was prepared two months after the assassination of JFK, there is no mention of the subject, including Priscilla's revised report of Nov. 24, 1963 about having interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald. However, in the initial four line paragraph, two full lines and a partial line have been blacked out.

Intriguingly, there is a reference to Priscilla having written to "...her former boss, President Kennedy..." in regard to the fact that her notebooks had not been returned to her by the Soviet Union; they had been removed from her luggage as she was leaving Leningrad (Priscilla pointed out that none of the material was "...particularly sensitive ... and would not have really seriously compromised any of her contacts in the USSR.") Presumably, Coit's reference to JFK as Priscilla's "boss" dates back to the mid-1950s when he was a senator. Nevertheless, she was able to obtain the President's assistance, as press secretary Pierre Salinger had made contact with the Soviet Ambassador about her notebooks, "...which produced no result."

The overall purpose of the Jan. 30-31 meetings (which lasted a total of 11 hours) was to "...debrief Johnson on her flaps with the Soviets when she was in the USSR, notably at the time of her last exit." Much of the memo deals with some of the problems Priscilla encountered with Soviet officials related to her visa and attempts to have it extended. She was able to meet with a Soviet lawyer and, later, his boss in the Foreign Office, and was asked to prepare "...a complete curriculum vitae on herself" - which Priscilla refused to produce. She was also asked about certain issues such as NATO and Soviet-American trade, and "...whether or not she would be interested in writing articles for Soviet publications."

An attempt was made during the debriefing to learn about Priscilla's "contacts" while in the USSR, but she was unwilling to provide names (one of her contacts had been exiled for a year); therefore "...no effort was made to attempt to force the issue of a debriefing on her contacts." However, Coit indicated during the interview that he would "...probably be back to see her from time to time to see what she knows about specific persons whose names might come up, and she at least nodded assent to this."

Reference was made to a reporter/translator named Victor Louis associated with both McGraw-Hill and NANA, whom Priscilla felt had a "...lousy reputation in Moscow;" she attempted unsuccessfully to get NANA to "drop Louis." She also encouraged NANA to hire "...Ruth Danilov, the wife of another correspondent" (possibly Victor Danilov, author of Rural Russia: Under the New Regime (Univ. of Indiana Press, 1988), but more likely Nicholas Daniloff, a Newsweek correspondent who wrote Two Lives: One Russia (Avon Publishing, 1990) - Coit might have misspelled Ruth's last name.) However, the Soviets refused to accredit her. Priscilla pointed out that NANA subsequently hired "Dick Steiger" who was immediately accredited, due to his "left wing past." Brief reference was also made to Frieda Lurye, a liberal Russian who had spoken at Harvard, as well as Yelena Romanova, whom Priscilla "thoroughly dislikes and thinks ought to be discredited."

Priscilla raised the question during the interview of the likelihood of being able to return to the Soviet Union as a "correspondent." Coit felt it depended on whether the Soviets believed she could be "...useful for some of their plans." Coit felt that her chances were good, since she had not been in any "...serious trouble or done anything especially bad." However, to the best of my knowledge, Priscilla never again returned to the USSR.

Coit had brought up the name "Alex Dolberg" during the debriefing, whom Priscilla knew and talked to at length when he was "...at Harvard." The CIA were quite certain that he was "...working for Sovs and therefore advised her to be careful in any dealings with him." Priscilla had been equally suspicious, although her discussions with him had "...developed her understanding of the Soviet machine ... and (she) now understands power as used by the Sovs."

In his final paragraph, Coit stated that he was "...vaguely uncomfortable after this long discussion with Johnson...", even though he found her to be "...intelligent and well informed on the Soviet Union" (although with "...an air of naivety and innocence, which is really only a mannerism"). Coit felt that Johnson's interest in the Soviet Union was "...an intellectual thing," and that she was "...not out to destroy the Communist system" (the major goal of the CIA). Having spoken to another U.S. correspondent named Patricia Blake (who later wrote a glowing review of Marina and Lee for Time magazine), Coit had noted two "...apparent contradictions" related to Priscilla:

1) she had defended Dolberg to Blake, who for years she had thought was "...no good;" and

2) according to Blake, Miss Johnson had developed a "...low opinion of Lurye after the Boston press conference," in contrast to comments made by Priscilla during the debriefing.

In conclusion, Coit felt that "...we cannot expect to use Johnson actively in operations. She obviously doesn't want to get involved in deep plots. She is unlikely to be the type of informant who will volunteer information; but she will supply info she has acquired, if asked and if it's not too sensitive, such as the identies (sic) of her friends in the USSR."

There is no indication whether the CIA encouraged Priscilla to contact Marina Oswald through its publishing connections, or whether she provided any feedback based on her extensive interviews later that year, but such information could very well be included in another, still classified document.

The third document that I received, dated February 23, 1965, is also a memo written by Gary Coit, based on a phone call from Priscilla in regard to Alex Dolberg. By now Dolberg was living "...in London's demi-monde with homosexuals, drunks, beatniks, etc." and had become "...terribly paranoid", convinced that he was being "...followed everywhere." Priscilla had heard from several sources that Dolberg might be considering going back to the USSR because of the death of his mother and the condition of his father. Coit indicated that Priscilla had reported this information because of her belief that Dolberg "...could do more harm to followers of Soviet intellectual affairs, both in the West and in the USSR, than anyone else she can think of." They both agreed that "someone" should have a talk with Dolberg, and encourage him to recognize the fact that returning to the USSR would be a mistake. At the same time, Coit felt it was important to emphasize to Dolberg that no one trusted him in the West, believing he was a "...Soviet agent," but if he told the CIA everything he knew, he could be "...rehabilitated" and have his name cleared.

Based on the fact that Priscilla had made the call to the CIA, regardless of her motivation, it would appear that she had become an informer for the Agency, although it is impossible to know how much other information she provided, and whether any of it related to her contact with Marina Oswald.

It should be noted that the CIA's interest in Priscilla Johnson began at an early date, based on the fact that a "201 file" was opened most likely in the mid-1950s(2) and, according to a fourth document declassified in 1993 entitled, "Review of 201 File on U.S. Citizen," Priscilla's file had not been closed as of Jan. 28, 1975. She was listed as a "witting collaborator," although the nature of her collaboration was not described.(3)

In addition to the four documents described above, I also received a copy of Priscilla's HSCA Executive Session interview that took place on April 20,1978, although 40 out of 113 pages of transcript have been withdrawn by the CIA. It was clear that the committee members did not entirely trust her.

While awaiting word of his acceptance into Russian society, Oswald gave two interviews to American journalists in Moscow. Priscilla Johnson would later testify that her interview with Oswald left her with the feeling that "the plight of the U.S. Negro brought him to the USSR."' This is a difficult thesis to reconcile, given Oswald's later relationships with Guy Banister et al. (hardly civil rights fanatics), Oswald's seeming absence of civil rights concerns in the United States (the "Clinton, Louisiana" posturing aside), and finally, what could Oswald possibly do about the plight of the U.S. Negro from far off Russia?

When Aline Mosby interviewed him, she indicated, "Beyond his brown eyes [emphasis added], I felt a certain coldness." She also indicated that some of Oswald's statements sounded rehearsed (a claim that others would make), and she told of Oswald's boast that he saved the $1,500 necessary for the trip. She concluded that she considered defectors to fall generally within one of two categories, but "Oswald appeared to be a one-man third category." Indeed.

Both journalists tended to agree that Oswald was overplaying his "defector" role and that the Soviets wouldn't buy it. Oswald, however, had to go through the ritual, as he had to know, or have been taught, that the Soviets were listening.

To reinforce his credentials, Oswald staged a performance for the benefit of consuls Snyder and McVickar at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, conveniently attempting to renounce his citizenship at a time when the embassy was closed. Documents from this event suggest Oswald would offer secrets, or "has offered"' secrets to the Russians understanding of the problem of the Soviet intellectual and is consequently subject to influence.

Neither Priscilla Johnson's 1959 contemporaneous notes nor her 1963 written recollection mentions that Oswald told her he had threatened to reveal radar secrets. Her book Marina and Lee makes no mention of radar secrets. Her newspaper articles then and since make no mention of radar secrets. Under oath, however, she told a very different story. Here is the bombshell she dropped during her sworn testimony to the Warren Commission:

MR. SLAWSON: Miss Johnson, I wonder if you would search your memory with the help of your notes and make any comments you could on what contacts Lee Oswald had had with Soviet officials before you saw him, any remarks he made or things you could read between the lines, and so on.

MISS JOHNSON: I had the impression, in fact he said, he hoped his experience as a radar operator would make him more desirable to them [the Soviets]. That was the only thing that really showed any lack of integrity in a way about him, a negative thing. That is, he felt he had something he could give them, something that would hurt his country in a way, or could, and that was the one thing that was quite negative, that he was holding out some kind of bait.

In a 1994 interview with the author, Priscilla McMillan found the contradiction between her Warren Commission testimony and other writings troubling. How could Priscilla not have written about such a startling part of her interview with Oswald? "I know, that it is terrible," she remarked in 1994, "that is so unprofessional." Her recollection was at first indecisive, and she wondered if it had not been "wrong to tell the Warren Commission that." At length, however, she stuck with her testimony." Not surprisingly, Priscilla's revelation about radar secrets startled her Warren Commission interrogator, W. David Slawson. This is what happened next:

MR. SLAWSON: Could you elaborate a little bit on that radar point. Had you been informed by the American Embassy at the time that he had told Richard Snyder that he had already volunteered to the Soviet officials that he had been a radar operator in the Marine Corps, and would give the Russian government any secrets he had possessed?

MISS JOHNSON: I had no idea that he had told Snyder that, but he did tell me-I got the impression, I am not sure that it is in the notes or not, l certainly got the impression that he was using his radar training as a come-on to them, hoped that that would make him of some value to them, and I

MR. SLAWSON: This was something then that he must have volunteered to you, because you would not have known to ask about it?

MISS JOHNSON: Well, again I am not very military minded, and I couldn't have cared less, you know. But somehow along the line, if it is not in my notes then it is a memory, then it is one of the things I didn't write-well, one thing is you know I tend to write what I thought I might use in the story. But I wasn't going to write a particularly negative story about him. I wasn't going to write that he was using it as a come-on so I might not have transcribed it simply for that reason, that it wasn't a part of my story. But it definitely was an impression that he-and it was from him, certainly not from the embassy, that he was using that as a come on, and I sure didn't like that. But it didn't occur to me he might have military secrets. I just felt, well hell, he didn't have much as a radar operator that they need, although even there I didn't know. Maybe there was some little twist in our radar technique that he might know. It showed a lack of integrity in his personality, and that I remembered. What he might or might not have to offer them I didn't know.

What emerges from this testimony is that Priscilla was predisposed against doing a critical story on Oswald, so much so that contrary to a reporter's instincts to get the most dramatic story, she deliberately ignored Oswald's stated intent to commit a disloyal act.

William L. Joyce: Ms. McMillan, there have been several statements to the effect that you might have had a connection to the Central Intelligence Agency. I was wondering if you could elucidate the nature of them and whether you might have had any conversations with the CIA concerning Oswald in connection with the Soviet Union or Cuba.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan: Thank you for asking, Mr. Joyce. My government service was 30 days as a translator in Moscow in the winter of -- early 1956, when I was a translator for the Joint Press Reading Service -- American, British, Canadian -- I think there was a fourth country.

It was an English-language translating service, and my boss there asked for my continued employment but was refused, because I did not have a security clearance from the U.S. Government.

My conversations with CIA officials about Oswald came only following the assassination. I think it was the FBI who came to see me over the weekend of November 22nd-23rd. I'm not sure if I ever did talk to CIA people about Oswald after the assassination. I talked to State Department, Warren Commission.

I did have a conversation once in Grand Central Station with a CIA official, and until recently, I couldn't remember why I had that conversation, but I think I do remember now that it was in 1959, before I was returning to the Soviet Union after covering Khrushchev's visit to President Eisenhower in the fall of '59.

I had been under a good deal of pressure from the KGB to be an informer when I was a reporter, and I was frightened in going back, and I thought somebody -- the American ambassador was aware of my difficulties, but I was afraid that something could happen to me, and I wanted someone on the outside to know, and that was the fall of '59.

His name was Gary Coite, and I believe I was asked about that by the House Assassinations Subcommittee, but I am not sure whether I remembered at that time why I spoke with him, and then, in the autumn of '62, Mr. Donald Jamenson, who I thought was named Mr. James McDonald, came to see me in Cambridge, and I spoke to him about my observations on a visit I had just made for The Reporter magazine about the intellectual atmosphere.

I was writing about the de-Stalinization and Soviet painters and writers, and my notes had been confiscated when I left Leningrad airport, 18 notebooks, and President Kennedy had helped me with that matter. That is, Carl Kazen - he had had Kazen speak to me.

And so, I felt that I should speak to Mr. Jamenson, and I did not - my effort then - I assumed that anything one intelligence service knew, the other intelligence service knew and that their files were inter-penetrated - and of course, my concern was for my Soviet friends.

So, I didn't name names except of, I think, Yveta Chenko, people who were so well-known in the west that I couldn't hurt them, but otherwise I gave him the mood - I don't think I mentioned names of anyone I thought could be hurt.

And those were the extent of my witting contacts with the -- I, of course, knew people in the American embassy, the British embassy, the French embassy, and the Israeli embassy, but I only saw them -- contacts about things I was particularly interested in, like the British had someone who knew a lot about the parasite laws passed by Khrushchev in 1959, but the Israelis knew a lot about intellectual circles and so did the French, more than the Americans did, and the Americans I would go to for agriculture and economy.

But if I thought somebody was in the intelligence of either side, I avoided them. It was just a demimonde - and I avoided them, but of course, I would have talked to people that I didn't know, and in that situation, the only thing that saved you and made you able to write and have any spontaneity in your life is to be a somewhat open person, and so, I tried to be like that, but of course, you don't know everything you're dealing with, and it was a rapidly-changing situation.

Another author favored by the intelligence community, was George McMillan, whose book The Making of an Assassin was favorably reviewed by no less than Jeremiah O'Leary. Mark Lane tells us "On November 30, 1973, it was revealed that the CIA had forty full-time news reporters on the CIA payroll as undercover informants, some of them as full-time agents." Lane adds, "It seems clear than an agent-journalist is really an agent, not a journalist." He then tells us: " In 1973, the American press was able to secure just two of the forty names in the CIA file of journalists. The Washington Star and the Washington Post reported that one of the two was Jeremiah O'Leary."

On March 2 of 1997, the Washington Post ran not one but two articles condemning Ray and the calls for a new trial, written by longtime CIA-friendly journalists Richard Billings and Priscilla Johnson McMillan, wife of George

McMillan. In another paper the same Sunday, G. Robert Blakey, the architect of the cover-up at the HSCA, also made his voice heard for the case against a new trial. And a week later, Ramsey Clark - the man who within days of the - assassination was telling us there was no conspiracy in the King killing - had also recommended the formation of yet another government panel in lieu of a trial for Ray. The only voice missing was Gerald Posner. But his too would come. Posner's next book, Killing the Dream, was about the King assassination.

Is the presence of such people commenting on the James Earl Ray case just coincidence? Or is it indicative of a continuing cover-up? Examine their back grounds and decide for yourself.

It's predictable, really, that Priscilla would be writing in defense of the official myths relating to the MLK case. "Scilla," as her husband called her, has been doing the same in the John Kennedy assassination case for years. She just happened to be in the Soviet Union in time to snag an interview with the mysterious Lee Harvey Oswald. Later, she snuggled up to Marina long enough to write a book which Marina later said was full of lies, called Marina and Lee. Priscilla's parents once housed one of the most famous and high-profile defectors the CIA ever had - Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin. Evan Thomas - father of the current Newsweek mogul of the same name and the man who edited William Manchester's defense of the Warren Report - assigned Priscilla to write the defector's biography. Alliluyeva later returned to the Soviet Union in dismay, saying she was under the watch of the CIA at all times.

Is Priscilla CIA? She applied for a job there in the '50s, and her 201 file lists her as a "witting collaborator," meaning, not only was she working with the agency, she knew she was working with the agency. And how independent was she? In a memo from Donald Jameson, who was the Soviet Russia Branch Chief and who in the same year handled CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's prize (and the CIA's bane) Anatoliy Golitsyn, wrote of Priscilla: "Priscilla Johnson was selected as a likely candidate to write an article on Yevtushenko in a major U.S. magazine for our campaign ... I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want."

If you appreciate gazing into the darkness, that's all the more reason to gather around the fire. This is a story about ghosts and spooks that haunt the United States of America. When it's over, I'm going to suggest that we talk to the people in Washington who can help us make sure we can get the end of the story right. Some of the last chapters are written down and sitting in cold, unlit basements. And though this story is filled with ghosts, some of the spooks are still alive and can still talk.

With millions of documents released in the years since the JFK Act was passed in the nineties, the intelligence backgrounds of the twelve who built the Oswald legend have come into focus. A legend maker can range from a "babysitter" who just keeps an eye on the subject to someone handing out unequivocal orders. I count twelve of them, and I'll tell you about them here in this series of essays.

Many of these legend makers did not know each other, and some of them know nothing about the JFK assassination itself, but their stories when put together can solve important puzzles. A couple of them are integral to the plot. Now is the moment to sum up what we have, demand the rest, and ask the right questions to those still alive. Although we may never know who fired the shots at JFK, you may agree that the new documents reveal who called the shots.

Priscilla Mary Post Johnson was identified with a CI/OA (counter-intelligence/operational approval) number in a 1956 CIA application (C-52373) four years after her initial 1952 application.

The response from the Office of Security in 1956 was odd, because it stated that C-52373 was "Priscilla Livingston Johnson", not "Priscilla R", and that "she was apparently born 23 September 1922 in Stockholm, Sweden, rather than 19 July 1928 at Glen Cove, New York."

During the formation of the HSCA, Johnson wanted to review what was in the records. "Priscilla Johnson McMillan aka Priscilla Mary Post Johnson" submitted a sworn FOIA request to the FBI asking for all records "indicating my employment in your agency". This statement revealed not only her previously unknown relationship with the Bureau, but also that the 1928/Glen Cove data is her authentic birthdate and birthplace. Now we have some reliable data on Johnson that should offer light when studying her path.

When Johnson's 1956 application was withdrawn in 1957, the memo from SR/10 contradicted the 1956 application with the claim that the birthdate for C-52373 was 19 July 1928. A game is being played with Johnson's identity and birthdates, a game that continues to this day. It's probably a holding action to protect Johnson's reputation, because her book Marina and Lee is now a central pillar in the continuing political battle about what happened in Dallas that day. (I would agree with Thomas Powers' assessment in the New York Times Book Review that Marina and Lee is a "miraculous book".)

What we do know is that on April 10, 1958, Cord Meyer sent a cable to Western Europe expressing interest in Johnson, right after Johnson applied for a Soviet visa in Paris. A couple weeks later, a request went out seeking approval for Johnson to become a "REDSKIN traveler and informant", and that "SR/2 (Soviet Russia Division #2) will have primary responsibility of handling agent."

Johnson was supposedly rejected in June 1958 because her "past activity in USS4, insistence return and indefinite plans inside likely draw Sov suspicions". Nonetheless, she decided to return to Moscow and study Soviet law under a fellowship grant from either Columbia or Harvard universities. By 1962, she was being vetted by the notorious anti-communist professor Richard Pipes and the CIA's Office of Security for a position in a "Soviet survey".

Other memos, one sent by "SR/RED/O'Connell", illustrate that three Priscillas have now emerged: Besides the original Priscilla Mary Post Johnson, we now also see the names "Priscilla McClure Johnson, Priscilla McCoy" that are not identical with the original. To top it off, if you add in the references to "Priscilla Livingston Johnson" and "Priscilla R. Johnson", there are now five Priscillas competing for space in the same case file.

These five Priscillas are corroborated by the four CI/OA numbers for Priscilla Johnson seen on her "approval work record" form.

After all this smoke and fog, the American public has no reason to assume that the US government has done anything but confuse everyone about the role of Johnson.

I did find what is described as a "true name dossier" in the Office of Security files that lists Priscilla Johnson with the biographical file number 201-102798. Furthermore, the Office of Legal Counsel made it plain that it had reviewed "documents from Priscilla Johnson McMillan's 201 file (201-102798)." By the 1970s, Priscilla Johnson McMillan was her married name. We can see with our own eyes that a close-out document for the CIA's 201-102798 file describes "Johnson" as a "witting collaborator" in 1975.

Is it any surprise that Johnson responded in an interview with Anthony Summers and his wife Robbyn that "the Johnson in the 1975 document is someone other than herself?"

Under her married name of Priscilla Johnson McMillan, she muddied the waters further by releasing her book Marina and Lee - after fourteen years of writing and re-writing - in the midst of the reopened investigation of the JFK case by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

This exercise in game-playing will probably continue with the CIA refusing to reveal Johnson's files until after her death. Johnson could easily resolve these questions by releasing her own copies of the files to the public - and by squarely addressing further questions while she is still alive....

At this point, Johnson had been accepted by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) in Moscow. For good reasons, NANA has a bad reputation as a hotbed of intelligence.

Ernest Cuneo purchased NANA in the mid-1950s and was its owner and president until 1963. Cuneo started out as an aide to a World War I veteran, New York progressive mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who served in World War I. Cuneo served with the OSS during World War II and was its liaison to the White House, State Department, FBI, and British intelligence. NANA's vice president was the well-known author Ian Fleming. Fleming later credited Cuneo with more than half the plot for Goldfinger and all of the basic plot for Thunderball. The dedication page in Goldfinger reads, "To Ernest Cuneo, Muse."

McMillan grew up in the New York City area and went to Bryn Mawr College, where she studied Russian. She went on to get a master's degree in Soviet Studies from Radcliffe College in 1952. Eager to put her Russian to use, she had gotten a tourist visa to the U.S.S.R. in December 1955, going by rail. "I loved being on the train from Helsinki through to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). I loved the fir trees and the snow and I think I had a great sense of anticipation," she said. In the back of her mind was Lenin's famous journey in a closed train to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg when he returned from exile in Switzerland in 1917.

She managed, perhaps through sheer ignorance of the fact that she shouldn't do these things, to infiltrate parts of Soviet society where you wouldn't assume a young American woman would necessarily go on her own during the Cold War. She observed the Soviet court system and a class at Moscow University in Soviet literature taught by one S.I. Stalin, Svetlana Stalin, Joseph's daughter, but such excursions were infrequent..

McMillan is now 85. She's lived in the same house in Cambridge for 40 years, a big, roomy place that has the feel of a home in a children's book, a warren of hiding places. Her voice has a delicate, still-girlish pitch and she wears a pale green cardigan over a cream-colored blouse. She has an unexpectedly youthful laugh, a chortle. Her bookshelves are lined with histories and political science. She married George McMillan in 1966, but they divorced in 1980, and he has since died. After his death she took in his second wife and the child he'd had with her, and they lived with her for a time...

From 1964 to 1977, McMillan devoted her life to researching and writing a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina, the young Russian woman he courted and married while he was living in the Soviet city of Minsk, after he'd been granted permission to stay in the Soviet Union. In 1961, Oswald returned to the U.S. with Marina, moving to the Dallas area, where he gradually drifted, with tortured logic, toward what he viewed as the defining act of his life....

After 13 years of living with the Oswalds, both as real people - she spent months with Marina in 1964 - and as puzzles she had to take apart and put back together, McMillan's conclusion was that Oswald was the lone assassin. "I'm just as sure now as I was then that he did it, and also that he couldn't have done it with anybody else. He wasn't somebody who, in his life, had ever done anything with anybody else."

The head of Security of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russell Langelle, had been expelled from the USSR two weeks before Oswald's defection due to his exposure as the CIA's Moscow cutout for Pyotr Popov.  Langelle was one of half a dozen CIA officers working under "deep cover" inside the Moscow Embassy.  That many boots on the ground in Moscow would have been very helpful to Angleton's ability to understand how Oswald had handled the defection and something about the initial Soviet reaction.

Journalists were also helpful, and the work of one reporter in particular, Priscilla Johnson, allowed Angleton to understand early on that the defection had gone well. As I have documented at length in this chapter, her handy work was inextricably intertwined with all of Oswald's early files at the CIA. Johnson swore that she only worked for the U.S. government for six months in 1956, and that she never worked with the CIA.  That is what she told me when I interviewed her in July 1994. She said that I was "going to be her savior" because I believed her. CIA records demonstrate a long history of on-again off-again CIA interest in using her operationally. In the end, the CIA Security Office did approve a Covert Security Approval (CSA) for the Soviet Russia Division (SRD) to use her covertly in the liberal Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF) and to debrief her about her contacts in the USSR - including Oswald.

As early as 1952, the SRD wanted to hire Johnson as an intelligence officer in the division's Office of Reports and Requirements (ORR), where she would have needed a Special Intelligence (NSA) clearance.  The CIA Security Division's (SD) Personnel Security Branch (PSB) indicated interest in placing her, and asked the SD Project and Liaison Section (PLS) to review Johnson from a counterespionage (CE) angle. In May 1953, Bruce L. Solie, working in PLS at that time, recommended that she be "security disapproved."  According to a later CIA document, her application was rejected because some of her associates and memberships "would have required more investigation than thought worthwhile."

In 1956, SRD again requested clearance to use Johnson, this time as a legal traveler - a "spotter" - in the USSR. However, the request was disapproved, this time by Counterintelligence Operational Approvals (CI/OA). Yet, that did not end the Johnson CIA saga. The SRD would keep asking OS for clearance to use her and would inevitably succeed in doing so.

In April 1958, Pyotr Popov had warned his Soviet Russia Division (SRD) case officer, George Kisevalter, about a Soviet mole who had betrayed the technical details of the CIA U-2 plane (see Chapter One). As fate would have it, Priscilla Johnson just happened to be leaving for an assignment in Moscow at that very moment. On 28 April, SRD, once again, submitted a request to CI/OA to obtain operational approval for SR/2 to use her as a legal traveler.  On 5 May, the SR/2 Chief followed up the request with this additional information:

Subject [Johnson] has applied for a visa to study or work in the USSR. The visa has been granted and subject intends to depart for Moscow within the next two weeks. We wish to recruit subject before her departure and brief her on positive and operational intelligence requirements. Priority clearance is requested because of the time element involved.  [Emphasis added]

CI/OA immediately alerted CI/Liaison, Jane Roman, to expedite an FBI check on Johnson.

From the fragmentary documentary record, it is not clear whether the Security Office denied the request or SRD cancelled their own request. Apparently, it was a tough decision as the request was left hanging fire for forty-five days. SR/2/FI (Foreign Intelligence) notified the CIA station where Johnson was located - London - about the cancellation with this explanation:

"Subject's past activity in USSR, insistence to return and indefinite plans inside [USSR], likely to draw Soviet suspicions. Do not wish to use subject. Regret delay. Appreciate station efforts."

This time the decision not to use Priscilla Johnson was different than the occasions in 1953 and 1956. Those previous occasions did not trigger the opening of a 201 file on her. The day before the above cable was sent (18 June 1958) to the London Station, SR/10, the branch that handled legal travelers to the USSR, requested RID to open a 201 file on Johnson.  More than two months went by before SR/10 requested CI/OA to cancel the request for Johnson's operational approval.

Johnson did go to Moscow. An index control card about Johnson and her residence at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow makes reference to a memo about her for the CI Staff on 30 October 1958.  Even though Johnson had (apparently) not been given an operational approval (OA) for contact and use in Moscow by the time Oswald showed up there.  An OA was not necessary. The embassy was crawling with CIA officers working under cover. There were also several American journalists whose mailboxes were located in the foyer just outside of the embassy's consular office. And there was a consular officer working there, John McVickar, who was only too happy to dispatch Johnson on her way to contact Oswald and, at the same time, to suggest the she remember she was an American - inferring that this brought with it certain responsibilities. Her 26 November 1959 news article was published around the world, and was the trigger for the soft files opened on Oswald in both SR/6 and CI/SIG.

One month before Lee and Marina Oswald arrived in the U.S. (13 June 1962), the eminent professor of Russian studies at Harvard, Richard Pipes, recommended Priscilla Johnson for a position in a CIA "Soviet Survey." Johnson was living in Paris at the time, and Cord Meyer, Chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division (IOD), informed the Paris Station that an appropriate clearance request would be initiated on her and that a decision would be deferred until the Security Office (OS) concluded the investigation.  The survey position was part of the CIA's QKOPERA program, operated by IOD. QKOPERA was a project to counter Soviet activities in international organizations. More specifically, it was designed to unite and promote anti-communist intellectuals in organizations such as the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF).  The CCF was an international organization sponsoring Western intellectuals, artists and musicians.

On 25 May 1962, the chief of the CIA's Covert Action (CA) Staff sent a request to the CI/OA Support Division for a proprietary operational approval to use Johnson as news editor and writer for a publication under QKOPERA.  On 24 July and again on 18 October, the OS Investigations and Operation Support (IOS) Division requested the CA Staff Chief to provide the OS with up-to-date information on Johnson.  Apparently, the CA Chief did not respond and dropped the matter. But that did not stop Johnson from traveling to London, Moscow, and Leningrad, to collect information for future use on the project. At least some of the information gathered on her trip made its way into two CIA intelligence Information Reports on 19 and 24 October 1962.  The first IR revealed that a Soviet journalist and friend of Johnson had reported an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Khrushchev. In the second IR, Johnson reported information she had collected in the USSR on intellectual and artistic affairs.

Finally, on 17 December 1962, Donald Jameson, Chief of Soviet Russia Covert Action (C/SRD/CA), sent CI/OA and OS/Security Support Division (SSD) up-to-date information on Johnson in a new request for a provisional covert security approval (PCSA) for use in the AE/DINOSAUR Project.  AE/DINOSAUR was a project under which SR would be able to debrief Johnson concerning her contacts in the USSR.  However, before she was eventually cleared for use on 3 May 1963,  someone else (possibly in IOD) submitted a contact report about a meeting with Johnson because she had been "selected as a likely candidate to write an article on Yevtushenko (a popular Russian poet) in a major U.S. magazine for our campaign."

After the Covert Security Approval (CSA) was approved in May 1963, Priscilla Johnson became "a casual contact, cleared, and used by SR/Covert Action." So much for Johnson's claim never to have worked with the CIA. On a 3 March 1964 Routing Slip by CI/SIG Chief Birch O'Neal, this comment was typed by Paul Hartman:

I spoke with the case officer, Gary Coit, and asked him whether Priscilla Johnson had ever mentioned the meeting with Oswald. He said she had made casual mention of it so I asked him to set that down on paper as best he could. A copy of his memorandum is attached.

Gary Coit worked in SR/CA. His 3 March memorandum about his conversation with Johnson contained this passage:

During the conversation, Priscilla Johnson mentioned in passing her having interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow. She said she had had a long talk with him during which it became evident that he had very confused ideas, of economics in particular. … She didn't realize at the time that he was nuts enough to kill the president, though obviously he was strange.

Johnson's work with CIA continued at least through the end of 1965.  A CIA review of her 201 file indicated that she had been a "witting collaborator" for the CIA.  A 26 April 1978 CIA Office of Legal Counsel memorandum on upcoming HSCA interviews stated, "Priscilla Johnson McMillan may be called to discuss her contacts with Oswald in Moscow at which time her ‘witting source' affiliation may be exposed."  HSCA Staff notes indicate that it was exposed, along with her contacts with Gary Coit.

Fresh out of graduate school, Priscilla Johnson McMillan worked briefly as a researcher for US Senator John F. Kennedy, whom she then befriended while he was hospitalized in the mid-1950s. A few years later, as a journalist in Moscow in 1959, she met and spent hours interviewing Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just defected to the Soviet Union.

Those disparate parts of her life intersected on Nov. 22, 1963, when she was in Harvard Square and heard someone say President Kennedy had been shot. A short time later, she recalled in a 1977 Globe interview, when she asked if anyone had been caught, a man "started to say Lee Harvey . . . and I gasped . . . and I filled in the last name: Oswald!"

Widely believed to be the only person who personally knew both JFK and his assassin, Mrs. McMillan died Wednesday in her Cambridge home. She was 92.

After Kennedy was slain, and Oswald murdered a couple of days later, she conducted extensive interviews with Marina Oswald, even living with the assassin's widow for several months. She granted such access because Mrs. McMillan was fluent in Russian (Marina spoke little English), had known Lee, and had known JFK, who had been a source of fascination for the Oswalds.

In 1977, Mrs. McMillan published Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy, a deeply reported portrait of the couple and the time leading up to the fatal day.

"The clarity of her understanding, the effort and meticulous care of her work, and the extent of her research clarified a major event in American history," said Thomas Powers, an author and Pulitzer Prize recipient in journalism who reviewed the book for The New York Times and subsequently became one of Mrs. McMillan's close friends.

Powers said that among the scores of books about the assassination, many of which focus on conspiracy theories, hers endures because of the quality of the writing and of the writer - her attention to detail and her empathy.

"That's why I put her on top of the tallest mountain. Few people ever do anything as significant as she did," Powers said, adding that "she wrote, in my opinion, the most significant book about the assassination. It's as fascinating and rich as a Russian novel."

Powers, a founding publisher of Steerforth Press, which reissued Marina and Lee in 2013, said her "portrait of what actually happened, of course, won endless numbers of enemies for Priscilla," including many who tried to claim she was part of a conspiracy and had worked for the CIA. ("No, I haven't," she told The Atlantic magazine in 2013.)

While Marina and Lee remains her most powerful work - "Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire. Marina and Lee burns," Powers wrote in the New York Times - Mrs. McMillan published two other books.

Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture appeared in the mid-1960s. The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race followed years later.

Mrs. McMillan also was the English translator for Twenty Letters to a Friend, by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter, and she published hundreds of articles and book reviews in numerous publications, including the Globe, about assassinations, US-Soviet relations, and politics.

In 1961, she wrote an evocative essay for Harper's magazine about attending the funeral and burial a year earlier of Boris Pasternak, the Russian writer and Nobel Prize recipient.

Joining the mourners who walked from Pasternak's house to the grave, she watched as "the pallbearers emerged onto the porch and went down the steps with their burden. Parting obediently to make way, the crowd followed them over the lawn and out onto the winding dirt road that led to the churchyard. The open, papier-mâché coffin, with the wasted old body inside, could not have been very heavy. Nevertheless, at nearly every step of the way, young men sprang out of the crowd to help the six pallbearers carry Pasternak to his rest. Some, in their haste, dropped the flowers they had brought for the grave, so that a trail of flowers came to mark the path of the funeral procession."

The third of four siblings, Priscilla Johnson was born in Glen Cove, N.Y., on July 19, 1928, and grew up in nearby Locust Valley, an affluent hamlet on Long Island.

Her father, Stuart H. Johnson, was a financier; her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp Johnson, was a homemaker.

Mrs. McMillan graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1950, the first at the school to major in Russian language and literature. She also received a master's in Russian studies from Radcliffe College.

In 1966, she married George McMillan, a journalist and author who wrote the The Making of an Assassin, about James Earl Ray, who murdered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The couple divorced in 1981, and he died in 1987.

For the remainder of her life, Mrs. McMillan's Cambridge home became a way station for family members and friends.

"I think she's the pioneer of the constructed family," said her niece Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is writing a biography of Mrs. McMillan.

"Along with generations of graduate and undergraduate students, researchers and writers, who were her lodgers, almost every one of her nieces and nephews came for extended stays at 12 Hilliard Street at some point," she added. "The door was literally always open. You might wander into her kitchen for a cup of coffee and find a couple of nuclear physicists and a civil rights attorney discussing the day's headlines."

Though a fall in the spring contributed to the decline in Mrs. McMillan's health, she had "convened a democracy study group in the aftermath of the 2020 election that met by Zoom through the last half of the pandemic to evaluate American democratic institutions and potential reforms in the wake of the Trump presidency," said another niece, Eunice Panetta, who is known as Nicie.

She added that her aunt also was "well-known for her endless supply of chocolate, cookies, and ice cream."

The family will hold a service on Long Island for Mrs. McMillan, who leaves no immediate survivors, and a celebration of her life and work will be announced.

Just out of graduate school in 1953, Priscilla Johnson McMillan joined the Senate staff of John F. Kennedy, then a newly elected Democrat from Massachusetts. He was "mesmerizing," she later said; while she worked only briefly on Capitol Hill, she visited him in the hospital when he underwent spinal surgeries, and posed as one of his sisters to get past a line of nurses and bring newspapers to his bedside.

Mrs. McMillan, who was then known as Priscilla Johnson, later went into journalism and moved to Moscow, where she drew on her fluency in Russian to file stories for the North American Newspaper Alliance. In November 1959, a friend at the U.S. Embassy mentioned that "a boy named Oswald" was in town trying to defect. He was staying at her hotel, the Metropol, where she spent five hours interviewing him over tea.

The young man seemed excited, nervous, a little frightened. He was 20, a former Marine with a light Southern accent, and wanted to talk about Marxist economics and complain about the U.S. Embassy, which he said had tried to dissuade him from renouncing his citizenship. "I want to give people in the United States something to think about," he said.

Mrs. McMillan in Moscow in 1955. She later returned to the Soviet Union as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Four years later, on Nov. 22, 1963, Mrs. McMillan was suddenly jolted back to their conversation, not long after learning that Kennedy, as president, had been assassinated in Dallas. Walking through Harvard Square, near the university where she was a visiting scholar, a friend told her that authorities had arrested the shooter. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

"My God," Mrs. McMillan recalled saying. "I know that boy."

Indeed, she was one of the only people who knew both Kennedy and his killer, who died two days later after being shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Their deaths launched her on a 14-year odyssey, as she tried to find out why the quiet young man she met in Moscow had decided to shoot the president.

Mrs. McMillan persuaded Oswald's Soviet-born widow, Marina, to sit for an exclusive book interview in exchange for a share of the royalties. They wound up speaking for nearly seven months, providing Mrs. McMillan with the core of Marina and Lee (1977), a critically acclaimed account of the Kennedy assassination, told through the lens of Oswald and his wife.

In a review for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Powers wrote that Mrs. McMillan's book "achieves with art what the Warren Commission failed to do with its report," offering a persuasive case that Oswald acted alone as the assassin.

"It is far better than any book about Kennedy," he added, "with the unsettling result that the assassination is experienced from the wrong end. . . . If you can find the heart to read it, you may finally begin to forget the phantom gunmen on the grassy knoll."

Mrs. McMillan, who went on to an accomplished career as a historian of the Cold War and U.S. nuclear weapons policy, was 92 when she died July 7 at her home in Cambridge, Mass. Her health had declined after a fall about eight weeks ago, said her niece and biographer, Holly-Katharine Johnson.

While writing her Oswald book, Mrs. McMillan translated Twenty Letters to a Friend, a 1967 memoir by Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the United States earlier that year. She later spent more than two decades researching and writing The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), about the father of the atomic bomb, whose career unraveled after he was accused of being a Soviet spy during the McCarthy era.

But she remained best known for her book on Oswald. His widow, who remarried and went by Marina Oswald Porter, described him as a fame-obsessed liar with a short temper and violent mood swings. "He was a lonely person," she told Mrs. McMillan. "He trusted no one. He was too sick. It was the fantasy of a sick person, to get attention only for himself."

By the time Mrs. McMillan published her book, conspiracy theories had proliferated about the killing. There seemed to be little appetite for her relatively straightforward account of a wayward, self-described Marxist; sales were modest, although Marina and Lee was reissued in 2013.

"The argument over Kennedy was a kind of national madness for decades - but that is largely over now, and I would argue that Priscilla's book stands firm as balanced and persuasive," Powers wrote in an email. Mrs. McMillan's interviews with Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald, he added, formed a key part of the historical record.

"Imagine that some Roman had done the same with Brutus before the assassination of Julius Caesar, and then followed it with a similar history of the countdown to the killing - if you wanted to understand the politics and the life of Rome in those years, that is where you would start."

Priscilla Mary Post Johnson was born in Glen Cove, N.Y., on July 19, 1928, and raised in nearby Locust Valley, on the North Shore of Long Island. Her father was a financier who inherited a textile company, and her mother was a homemaker.

After graduating from the private Brearley School in Manhattan, she studied Russian at Bryn Mawr College, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1950. Three years later, she earned a master's in Russian studies from Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard.

Mrs. McMillan translated Russian newspaper articles before traveling to the Soviet Union for the first time, in 1955, paying her way by working as a translator for the New York Times. In Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, she palled around with newspaper columnist Leonard Lyons and novelist Truman Capote, who recounted some of their experiences in a 1956 nonfiction book, "The Muses Are Heard."

In 1966, she married George McMillan, an author and journalism instructor. They later divorced. She had no immediate survivors but had a vast "chosen family," often letting near-strangers and mutual friends stay at her home in Cambridge, where she was an associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

"More than anyone I've ever met, she created something like a 19th-century European salon at her home," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists. "You'd never know who you'd meet - government officials, academics, writers, artists. It was a kind of intellectual chemistry experiment."

In recent years, Marina Oswald insisted that her husband was actually innocent, and blamed the Mafia and CIA for Kennedy's killing. Mrs. McMillan remained convinced that Oswald acted alone, telling the Atlantic that "Marina's change of views may stem from her daughters' reluctance to accept their father as the assassin."

She had long believed that the assassination would prompt conspiracy theories, in part for psychological reasons. "The killing of a President, or a king or father, is the hardest of all crimes for men to deal with," she wrote in a 1975 Washington Post essay. "As Freud pointed out, it is this crime that stirs the deepest guilt and anxiety.... No matter what steps are taken, what investigation may be authorized or what autopsy material made public, I suspect that the doubts about President Kennedy's murder are going to be with us forever."

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, believed to be the only person to have conversed extensively with both John F. Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, died on July 7 at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 92.

Her niece Holly-Katharine Johnson confirmed the death. She said Ms. McMillan had been in hospice care since injuring her spine in a fall several months ago.

Like nearly everyone, Ms. McMillan was shocked on Nov. 22, 1963, by reports that President Kennedy had been murdered. But walking through Harvard Square when she heard that the president - who was also her former boss - had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, she was one of a very few who had another thought as well.

"My God," she told a friend. "I know that boy."

Several other people had briefly encountered both men, but Ms. McMillan had conferred with both. She had dealt with Kennedy in Washington as an adviser on Indochina in 1953, when he was a senator. And as a journalist, she had interviewed Mr. Oswald, a 20-year-old disillusioned Marine veteran, in Moscow in 1959 about why he was defecting to the Soviet Union.

She would later spend seven months interviewing Mr. Oswald's Russian-born widow, Marina, and 13 years researching and writing a book, "Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy," which was published in 1977.

Mrs. Oswald received two-thirds of the advance for the book and a share of the royalties.

Thomas Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that "Marina and Lee" persuasively challenged conspiracy theories involving Cubans, Communists, American intelligence agents and multiple gunmen firing on the presidential motorcade from several locations.

Instead, Mr. Powers wrote, Ms. McMillan's book made a convincing case that Mr. Oswald was a lone gunman who "rationalized the assassination as a salutary shock for a complacent public" - although "his real motive emerges as a desperate desire to transcend the obscurity and impotence to which fate was inexorably confining him."

"Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire," Mr. Powers continued. "‘Marina and Lee' burns. If you can find the heart to read it, you may finally begin to forget the phantom gunmen on the grassy knoll."

Ms. McMillan said she remembered Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the president's sister, asking her at a Washington dinner party, "Why did Oswald hate my brother so?" To which she replied: "He didn't. Oswald liked him. And he liked Jackie, too."

But Ms. McMillan revealed Mr. Oswald as a confused, self-tutored Marxist who had soured on the American government's aggressive prosecution of the Rosenberg atom spy ring and its lax enforcement of civil rights, and on capitalism's exploitation of workers like his mother.

Ms. McMillan later told The Christian Science Monitor that while Mr. Oswald never mentioned Kennedy in that 1959 interview, he indicated that he had no qualms about resorting to murder as a political weapon. "From our conversation," she added, "I could see that he was a man capable of a whole lot."

In addition to writing Marina and Lee, Ms. McMillan translated Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), a memoir by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter, who had defected to the United States, and wrote The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (2005), about the scientist behind the atomic bomb who was falsely labeled a Soviet spy during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

"Priscilla combined the best traits of an investigative reporter, a scholar and an inquisitive citizen, pursuing exhaustive research and doing her best to be fair to all parties," said Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, where Ms. McMillan was an associate.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists, said that in the 1990s, "Priscilla helped inspire and support efforts to accelerate the declassification of Cold War U.S. government records." He added, "She was a wonderfully generous colleague who was always ready to share her own findings and to support other authors and students in their research."

In Ms. McMillan's later years, her home in Cambridge, near Harvard, became something of a hostel for wayward students and scholars, a literary and political salon in the European tradition and a base for her campaigns on behalf of Soviet dissidents and other causes.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who has died aged 92 after a fall, was the only person who could claim to have known both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As a young college graduate, Johnson was befriended by Senator Kennedy while she worked in his office; a few years later she interviewed the young Oswald soon after he showed up in Moscow wishing to defect to the Soviet Union.

After the assassination, Johnson was given exclusive access to Oswald's Russian widow, Marina, and her ensuing book, Marina and Lee (1977), became a key document in establishing Oswald as a lone disturbed assassin. It also prompted many researchers to point to Johnson's close ties to the US intelligence community, not least when she received similarly exclusive access to Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defected to the US, and worked with her through translating her bestselling 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend.

Johnson's career grew from her unexpected interest in Russian language and culture. Her father, Stuart Johnson, a financier, was heir to a textile fortune; he was her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp's, second husband. Patricia was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on the family's estate, Kaintuck Farm, in Locust Valley, Long Island.

She was educated at Brearley school in New York, then at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, one of the elite "seven sisters" female colleges, where she became the first graduate majoring in Russian studies and was active in the United World Federalists (UWF), dedicated to effective world cooperation, primarily to prevent nuclear war.

After an MA at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University), in 1953 she joined the staff of the newly elected senator Kennedy, researching French Indochina. They became friends; he would call her regularly for chats. She denied any romance, "I didn't love him; he was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew." She was rejected when she applied to join the CIA, ostensibly because of her ties to the UWF. Oddly, her interviewer was Cord Meyer, who in 1947 had been the first president of the UWF; now he headed the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, aimed at influencing media.

She did translation work for a review of the Soviet press, spending much time in Russia. On Kennedy's recommendation, she received a grant to study the Soviet legal system, and again did translation work at the US embassy. She met Truman Capote, travelling with a US production of Porgy and Bess, and is mentioned in his book The Muses Are Heard.

In 1958 she joined the North American News Alliance (NANA), and in November 1959 arrived in Moscow just a day after Aline Mosby of United Press International had filed a story on Oswald's defection. The US consul John McVickar, himself a CIA man, recommended she interview Oswald, who was at her hotel; her report on the four-hour session appeared in NANA-affiliated papers.

Mosby noted that Johnson lived in the Metropol, unlike other press in their state-assigned office/residence, saying "she was a very nice person and had good connections". Johnson was one of many journalists expelled from Russia in the wake of the Russians shooting down of an American U2 spy plane; Oswald had been a radar operator at the Atsugi, Japan base from which U2s flew.

She became a visiting fellow at the Russian research centre at Harvard, returning to Russia in 1962 and writing a memorable piece for Harper's magazine about the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak's funeral. On her return she was interviewed by Donald Jameson, the head of the CIA's Soviet Russia division, who described her in a memo as someone who could "be encouraged to write the articles we want ... but it's important to avoid making her think she's being used as a propaganda tool."

Then, in November 1963, came the news of Kennedy's assassination by Oswald; Johnson gasped as she realised: "I know that boy." Her 1959 profile of Oswald was immediately reprinted, but with a few changes, including a final line that did not appear in the original: "This was the stuff of which fanatics are made."

In 1964, when Marina was being held incommunicado, under threat of deportation, Johnson moved in with her. With her Russian and knowledge of Lee, she won Marina's trust, but her book did not appear until 1977. While researching it, Johnson co-edited a collection of essays, Khrushchev and The Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (1965). She returned to Kaintuck, where Alliluyeva lived while they worked on her memoir.

Johnson married the journalist George McMillan in 1966; he covered the civil rights movement in the south, and published, in 1977, Making of an Assassin, showing how Martin Luther King's alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, acted alone. They divorced in 1980.

Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F Kennedy finally appeared, coincidentally, just as the House select committee on assassinations reopened the case. Johnson testified in closed session; large sections of her HSCA testimony are redacted whenever she is asked about her intelligence connections. Her book was a major influence on Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale; Mailer blamed Oswald's killing of the president on his sexual frustration with Marina, and jealousy of JFK. By this time Marina began to distance herself from Johnson's conclusions, saying "it was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything".

In 1988, Johnson added another line to her Oswald interview, telling Dan Rather of CBS that Oswald had told her: "I want to give the people of the US something to think about." Eventually, Marina would claim she was "misled by the ‘evidence' presented to me by government authorities ... I am now convinced Lee was an FBI informant and did not kill President Kennedy".

Priscilla's obituary of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists led to her being asked to write about the hearings that declared J Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, a security risk when he opposed building an H-bomb.

She received extensive access to the archives of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory, but as with Marina and Lee, the research overwhelmed the writing. When The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race finally appeared in 2005, it was a year after a massive Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin had won a Pulitzer prize. But her portrayal of the political shift that left Oppenheimer on the outside won praise.

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Marina and Lee was reissued. Johnson wrote of Oswald's "unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head". Oddly enough, the description also would suit a hapless someone who was, as Oswald himself claimed, a "patsy".

Johnson is survived by a niece, Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is working on her biography.

On November 22, 1963, Priscilla McMillan, a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Russian research centre, suffered two severe shocks.

The first was President Kennedy's assassination. She had worked for Kennedy in 1953 when he was a senator, and had become a friend. At one point she had rebuffed a pass from the handsome young New Englander. "I thought, 'It just couldn't be'," she said of his death.

The second came as she walked across Harvard Square on the evening of that terrible day. She was told that his assassin was someone named Lee Harvey Oswald. "My God," she exclaimed to a friend. "I know that boy."

A few years earlier McMillan had been working as a journalist in Moscow. A friend at the US embassy told her about "a boy named Oswald", a 20-year-old former US marine who was staying in her hotel, the Metropol, and wanted to defect. "He won't talk to any of us here. Maybe he'll talk to you because you're a woman."

McMillan returned to the Metropol, a huge art deco building overlooking the Bolshoi Theatre. She knocked on Oswald's door and asked for an interview. He agreed, and they spent five hours talking about his conversion to Marxism and dislike of American capitalism...

McMillan remembered Oswald as little more than a boy, confused, lonely and angry. She filed an article that began with him stating: "For two years now I have been waiting to do this one thing. To dissolve my American citizenship and become a citizen of the Soviet Union." She also quoted him saying: "I want to give the people of the United States something to think about."

Oswald certainly achieved that latter goal when he shot Kennedy. In doing so, he rendered McMillan the only living person who had more than a passing acquaintance with both Kennedy and his killer, and that invidious claim to fame changed her life too...

Within a couple of months McMillan decided to write a book about assassination. "I wanted to understand for (Kennedy), why somebody would assassinate him," she said. Her publisher contacted Marina's lawyer, requesting an interview. Several months after that, the lawyer told McMillan's publisher. "Tell her to come down here." McMillan agreed to pay Marina two thirds of her advance, plus some of the royalties.

She moved to Texas and spent seven months talking to Marina, but the book took 13 years to complete due to the sheer volume of research. She testified before the Warren Commission, which President Johnson set up to investigate the assassination...

The book was finally published in 1977. Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy attracted glowing reviews but did not sell well, primarily because it offered no conspiracy theories. McMillan concluded that Oswald was working for no one and was merely a troubled, celebrity-seeking fantasist who was quite incapable of conspiring with others and believed that he could destroy capitalism by killing the president.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who has died aged 92 after a fall, was the only person who could claim to have known both president John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As a young college graduate, Johnson was befriended by senator Kennedy while she worked in his office; a few years later she interviewed the young Oswald soon after he showed up in Moscow wishing to defect to the Soviet Union.

After the assassination, Johnson was given exclusive access to Oswald's Russian widow, Marina, and her ensuing book, Marina and Lee (1977), became a key document in establishing Oswald as a lone disturbed assassin. It also prompted many researchers to point to Johnson's close ties to the US intelligence community, not least when she received similarly exclusive access to Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defected to the US, and worked with her through translating her bestselling 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend.

Johnson's career grew from her unexpected interest in Russian language and culture. Her father, Stuart Johnson, a financier, was heir to a textile fortune; he was her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp's, second husband. Priscilla was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on the family's estate, Kaintuck Farm, in Locust Valley, Long Island.

She was educated at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, one of the elite "seven sisters" female colleges, where she became the first graduate majoring in Russian studies.

After an MA at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University), in 1953 she joined the staff of the newly elected senator Kennedy, researching French Indochina. They became friends; he would call her regularly for chats. She denied any romance, "I didn't love him; he was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew."

On Kennedy's recommendation, she received a grant to study the Soviet legal system, and again did translation work at the US embassy. She met Truman Capote, travelling with a US production of Porgy and Bess, and is mentioned in his book The Muses Are Heard.

In 1958 she joined the North American News Alliance (Nana), and in November 1959 arrived in Moscow just a day after Aline Mosby of United Press International had filed a story on Oswald's defection. The US consul John McVickar, himself a CIA man, recommended she interview Oswald, who was at her hotel; her report on the four-hour session appeared in Nana-affiliated papers.

Johnson was one of many journalists expelled from Russia in the wake of the Russian shooting down of an American U2 spy plane; Oswald had been a radar operator at the Atsugi, Japan base from which U2s flew.

Then, in November 1963, came the news of Kennedy's assassination by Oswald; Johnson gasped as she realised: "I know that boy." Her 1959 profile of Oswald was immediately reprinted, but with a few changes, including a final line that did not appear in the original: "This was the stuff of which fanatics are made."

In 1964, when Marina was being held incommunicado, under threat of deportation, Johnson moved in with her. With her Russian and knowledge of Lee, she won Marina's trust, but her book did not appear until 1977. While researching it, Johnson co-edited a collection of essays, Khrushchev and The Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (1965). She returned to Kaintuck, where Alliluyeva lived while they worked on her memoir.

Johnson married the journalist George McMillan in 1966; he covered the civil rights movement in the south. They divorced in 1980.

Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F Kennedy finally appeared, coincidentally, just as the House select committee on assassinations reopened the case.

Johnson testified in closed session; large sections of her HSCA testimony are redacted whenever she is asked about her intelligence connections. Her book was a major influence on Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale; Mailer blamed Oswald's killing of the president on his sexual frustration with Marina, and jealousy of JFK. By this time Marina began to distance herself from Johnson's conclusions, saying "it was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything".

In 1988, Johnson added another line to her Oswald interview, telling Dan Rather of CBS that Oswald had told her: "I want to give the people of the US something to think about."

Eventually, Marina would claim she was "misled by the ‘evidence' presented to me by government authorities... I am now convinced Lee was an FBI informant and did not kill president Kennedy."

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Marina and Lee was reissued. Johnson wrote of Oswald's "unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head". Oddly enough, the description also would suit a hapless someone who was, as Oswald himself claimed, a "patsy".

Johnson is survived by a niece, Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is working on her biography.