Marines do not defect. They plant flags on Iwo Jima. Oswald had injured one of our Cold War certainties. By contrast, the effect upon Moscow Center can better be described as a series of small but continuing disturbances. Over the length of a six-month sojourn in Moscow and Minsk, the interviewers (Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer and their translator, Ludmila Peresvetova) had conversations with seventeen KGB officers. Some were active, most had retired, and of these seventeen men, there were five, including Igor and Stepan, who agreed to be interviewed in some depth. Within the limits of seeking to obtain answers from people who belong to what is, among other things, a closed club, the interviewers did acquire a reasonable amount of information. Whether these five officers were forthcoming or merely gulling the American visitors into acceptance of one more KGB legend can be debated, but if the interviewers, highly skeptical at first, ended by accepting the larger part of what was told to them, it is because an internal logic began to present itself.
