position, some are not. His training – which, after all, had been five full years previous – was entirely restricted to the iron-sighted M-1 Garand rifle. Swagger remembered his own M-1, even to the serial number, 5673326, built by Harrington & Richardson. Oswald’s had to be about the same: a nine-and-a-half-pound semi-auto with well- calibrated aperture sights, heavy recoil, and no necessary manipulation between shots. Both men had to master the fundamentals, as universally, the Marine Corps does a good job of building them in.
Swagger presumed Oswald had mastered the most basic of basics: solid position, bone-on-bone support, sling management, focus on sights, trigger s-q-u-e-e-z-e, breath control. Would that be enough? For one shot, possibly. But he missed his first, not his last, shot. Baffling. You would think it the opposite. Because after the first shot, it’s all new again.
He’s got to manipulate the bolt, which takes him out of position, he’s got to refind the position on the fly, he’s got to reassert his concentration, his breath control, his trigger squeeze. Rather than fighting him, the Carcano with its cheap-jack Japanese sights is overresponsive to his commands, because it is so much lighter than the Garand, at under six pounds. Then he has to reacquire the target through the lens of the scope. And since Garands aren’t scoped, he’s used to seeing the target in his peripheral vision as he brings the recoiling rifle back toward it on the shooting range. With the Carcano, after the first shot, he is looking at blur, so he has to do two things quickly. First of all, he has to refind the proper eye position so he’s able to see through it clearly, and then he has to reacquire the target, which, being transported by vehicle at unknown speed, is in a different place. Still, Swagger had to admit, much of this is instinctive, and a relatively competent Marine-trained shooter such as Oswald, especially with a little practice time, ought to be able to bring it off. It was not likely he made the shot, but it was at least possible. You couldn’t deny that reality.
Still, the scope presented a whole host of problems. For example, the FBI gun expert Robert Frazier testified that when the rifle and scope arrived in FBI HQ on Tuesday, November 27, 1963, the plate holding the scope to the rifle was extremely loose. Moreover, it was secured to the receiver by only two screws, although the metal of both the scope and the rifle receiver had been machined to accept four.
Why was the scope loose? Was that the condition under which Oswald fired the rifle? Frazier testified that he assumed it had been loosened in Dallas for fingerprinting; that is, disassembled, fingerprinted, then reassembled somewhat haphazardly. Yet no inquiry to Lieutenant Carl Day, the Dallas fingerprint expert, was ever made, so it is unknown in what condition Day received the rifle. It seemed odd that Day would have disassembled the rifle, because he was a salty old pro and would have known it was highly unlikely to find prints on the few centimeters of metal that the scope rings covered, and that the integrity of the piece as a whole was more important. It was also unlikely that, had he disassembled the rifle, he would have reassembled it haphazardly. It wasn’t his nature.
Swagger knew that the screw-tightness issue was important because the looser the scope, the more it deviates from the point of impact. At each shot, it resets itself. Even a slightly loose scope equates to misses in the field, so a remarkably loose scope would make accurate shooting almost impossible.
However, at a certain point, the FBI was required to make accuracy tests with the rifle. According to everything Swagger had read, the rifle could not be zeroed – that is, its point of aim indexed to its point of impact – under any circumstances, as it was presented to the FBI shooters. A machinist had to grind out two spacers – called “shims” – that were inserted at some point, between the mount and the receiver or between the ring and the scope, to provide extra metal that would align the scope at an angle otherwise unattainable. Then the whole thing was tightened up for shooting. If that was so, it was highly improbable that Oswald, lacking those adjustments, could have hit the head shot.
Bugliosi suggested that it was a moot point, since Oswald would have diverted to the iron sights he was used to from his Garand experience. Highly unlikely. The nonadjustable battle sights on the Model 38 were set to the anticipated distance of engagement, which was three hundred meters. To hit the small and diminishing target in the back of the limo with iron sights, Oswald would have had to know the distance, would have needed much experience discovering the relationship of the point of impact to the point of aim, would have had to display unusually sound, to say nothing of quick, math skills in estimating how much below the target he would have to hold to hit at 263 feet with sights regulated to 875 feet, known where that spot was on the blank of the limo trunk behind the president – it would have been a low hold, a very low hold – and squeezed off the shot precisely. Very few people could make that shot on the first try.
Sitting there in his room, vodkaless and cigaretteless, Swagger came to a conclusion: it was not impossible but was highly unlikely that the shot could have been made by Oswald. And that led him to another key question: why did Oswald’s shooting, over the course of the engagement, as his own desperation increased and the distances expanded, improve radically?
Same meat, different restaurant. This one was a sort of porch to a classic old-Moscow property on a busy downtown street, open-air, and the patrons sat on cushions instead of chairs, lounging like pashas as the skewers loaded with animal were brought, along with spices and other vivid treats. Hookahs were available, and the Russians, not having received the cancer memo yet, greedily sucked on them or on cigarettes. Meanwhile, just outside, a backhoe struggled with the hard earth; to get into the restaurant, you had to walk on a wooden board over the shattered concrete. If the backhoe happened to squash you, it wasn’t your day. It was like a Panzer out there, hard to ignore.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Swagger, showing up at five after the hour.
“It’s not a problem,” said Kathy Reilly, putting away her Black-Berry.
“Were you followed?”
She laughed. “I wish. My days are so routine, a little excitement like that couldn’t hurt.”
“It could,” he said, “and I hope to spare you that. You were followed – by me. That’s why I’m late. I tailed you back to your building a few nights ago, then picked you up tonight as you left and was with you on the subway and everything.”
“I– I never saw you,” she said, a little nonplused.
“I followed you to see if anyone else was following you. The answer, both the first time and tonight, was no. So we’re clean, I think. We can continue, if you’ll still play.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s so Cold War. I love it. Have you arranged for the files?”
“Absolutely. I know they’ll be there.”
“Great. And where is there?”
“The ninth floor. They centralized their archives a few years ago, with the idea of moving them all to digitalization. But the budget never caught up, so it’s still old paper, some of it a century or two old. Very delicate. Fortunately, we don’t have to do a lot of digging. We’re just going to look at one month, one year.”
“You said 1963.”
“September. Maybe October, maybe November.”
“Of 1963.”
“That’s right.”
“And where is this archive? Ninth floor of?”
“Lubyanka.”
He waited. Her eyes stayed calm, maybe fell out of focus for a fraction of a second, then returned to the full- on gaze.
“I take it you’re not joking?”
“No. Please, it takes some getting used to.”
“You’ll have to explain.”
“We’re not parachuting onto the roof or shooting our way in. We’re not blowing a vault or tunneling up from underground. We’re traveling by that glamorous transportation means called the elevator.”
“I don’t–”
“Money. I’ve bribed, through my friend Stronski, an SVR lieutenant colonel. To show you how serious I am about this, I’m giving him forty thousand, American cash. Mine. Not the FBI’s; mine, hard-earned.”
“Swagger, you spent forty thousand dollars of your own money on this?”
“I did. I’d do it again. I gave a woman my word I’d look into the death of her husband. I ain’t near where I have to be on that one. There’s other issues too. Anyhow, to me, the money don’t mean a thing. I’ll spend it all if I have to. I gave my word, I got myself engaged, and maybe there’s some other memories yelling at me. I’ll do what I have to do.”
