On a rainy Wednesday afternoon during the spring of 1962, Spas Raikin waited at the Fifth Street pier in Hoboken for a cruise liner sailing in from Rotterdam.

Raikin was a case worker with the Travelers Aid Society of New York, a social welfare group that provided assistance to immigrants, stranded tourists and ex-pats.

The organization had received word from the U.S. State Department that a 22-year-old American citizen was returning from the Soviet Union with his Russian bride and their infant daughter.

Raikin was a stranger to the family. He had a sheet of paper with the name of the traveler he was assigned to meet: Lee Harvey Oswald.

On June 13, 1962, the former Marine marksman returned to America after living behind the Iron Curtain for nearly three years. Raikin had been dispatched to escort him off the boat and take him to the Travelers Aid office in New York.

It was a seemingly simple task, but Raikin had a sense that the man he’d been sent to meet could be a political operative in the guise of an impoverished traveler.

As the SS Maasdam approached the pier, Raikin looked around to see if there were any investigators waiting to question Oswald. It was eerily quiet on the dock, however.

Lee Harvey Oswald in a file photo.

“I wondered why there weren’t any government officials to meet him,” said Raikin, 91, a retired Bulgarian-American scholar and anti-communist activist. He now lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., with his wife.

Raikin said, “In my mind, there was the idea he could be a spy, and God knows what instructions he may have received from the Soviets if he’s in their service. I had suspicion, but I did not want to get further involved into this thing.”

Raikin did his job. He found the pale, dour young man and helped him through customs. Oswald’s petite wife spoke only Russian and her infant daughter was swaddled in cloth. They were apparently alone in the world. No one was there to welcome them except for Raikin. Oswald had $63 in cash and six small pieces of luggage.

Raikin spent about two hours with Oswald and his family en route from Hoboken to New York. It was a quiet ride into the city. The afternoon mist, the awkward silence, the sullen gaze, these memories haunt Raikin to this day.

"OSWALD LIED TO ME"

“In my instructions, there was a little note to ask as many questions as I could to find out about his return from Russia but he apparently did not want to speak with anybody,” said Raikin. “Oswald lied to me that he had been serving in the American embassy in Russia.”

Raikin said that Oswald initially avoided him. He paged Oswald on the ship’s public address system.

“He did not respond to any of the calls,” said Raikin. “He did not want to meet me, but we had a way of finding people. This way was to go to the baggage on the pier. Eventually, they came to get their baggage. That’s when I met them.”

Despite his doubts about the mysterious traveler, Raikin wrote up a routine report and the paperwork was filed away. A year later, Raikin got his first teaching job as a history professor at Rio Grande College in Ohio. On Nov. 22, his wife woke him up from an afternoon nap to tell him President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Lee Harvey Oswald, suspected assassin of President John F. Kennedy, grimaces as he is shot to death at point-blank range by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters Nov. 24, 1963.

“That evening, CBS news flashed a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald and I immediately recognized him,” said Raikin, who completed a 20-volume memoir last year and donated it to the Hoover Institution archive at Stanford University.

The collection includes a Lee Harvey Oswald binder with notes and news clippings.

Raikin said, “I was trying to figure out how I could get to the authorities to tell them my connection with this man. Eventually, at about 11 p.m., I was able to get in contact with an agent of the FBI. I told him that my report of this man is in the office. They went right away.”

Oswald’s quiet demeanor in Hoboken may have sprung from fear that Raikin was connected to the government in some way, said Priscilla Johnson McMillan, author of “Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” published in 1977.

McMillan, a former newspaper correspondent, interviewed Oswald in 1959 after he first traveled to Moscow. His defection to the Soviet Union earned him national notoriety. “Reds Ponder Citizenship Bid of Texan,” was the headline of an article in an Illinois paper, the Register-Republic. Oswald’s homecoming, however, was not the media event he anticipated. He was hoping to be greeted like a celebrity, but there was no scrum of newsmen on the dock.

"He boasted to his wife that reporters would meet them when they arrived in America, and he was disappointed that no one was there,” said McMillan. “The press had been helpful to him in 1959, and he may have thought it would be a protection again in 1962. He was afraid of being prosecuted because he offered the Russians radar secrets, and he knew in his heart that he’d been disloyal.”

This photo received October 16 courtesy of RR Auction shows Lee Harvey Oswald's Dallas Police mug shot after he was arrested for the assassination of former US president John F. Kennedy.

In 1964, McMillan interviewed Oswald’s widow, Marina, who was 20 years old when she resettled in America. Marina had been working as a pharmacist in Minsk when she met Oswald at a dance, according to McMillan. He told her his name was Alik.

Although Oswald spoke out against the United States during his stay in the Soviet Union, he didn’t formally renounce his citizenship, McMillan said. He was granted permission to live in the USSR as a stateless person while the American embassy held onto his passport. Because Oswald had never sworn an oath to the Soviets, he returned to the States with relative ease, McMillan said.

“It was unusual to let him go back to the U.S. with a Russian wife but I don’t think it was a case of slipping through the cracks,” said McMillan, who worked for Kennedy as a researcher when he was in the Senate. “The FBI caught up with him later and they had a car parked outside the house where he was living. They were tracking everybody who came back from the Soviet Union.”

Raikin’s written account of his meeting with Oswald was published in the Warren Commission Report, an 888-page study of the assassination that concluded Oswald was the lone culprit.

Raikin, who taught history at East Stroudsburg University from 1966 until 1991, said the Kennedy assassination wasn’t part of his curriculum.

A file picture dated 10 October 1963 shows US President John F. Kennedy and his son, John F. Kennedy Jr. at the White House, West Wing Colonnade, in Washington.

“There were certain things he wouldn’t say much about,” said Christopher Brooks, a former student and current East Stroudsburg history professor. “He spoke in concepts, and he would speak with passion about human rights. Here was someone who escaped from Bulgaria, who was at the heart of the Cold War, but he didn’t describe what he went through getting out of Bulgaria. He talked about international law and respect for treaties and justice. The Oswald story wasn’t common knowledge among students.”

While Raikin said his afternoon with Oswald was uneventful, JFK conspiracy theorists have offered up an array of alternate narratives. Some speculate Raikin actually worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“If I worked for the CIA, I’d have a government pension,” said Raikin. “There are many myths that have been associated with my contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. The biggest myth is that I had been an agent of the CIA. This is the most untrue myth that was created by writers. My obligation was to meet him, assist him through customs. Once I delivered him to the office, my job was finished with him. He was passed to another worker, and I had no more contact with him.”

Raikin acknowledged that he was politically active during the Cold War era, protesting human rights abuses by communist regimes. He was a member of the American Friends of Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a group that staged a demonstration when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited New York in 1959.

REBEL WITH A CAUSE

Raikin’s staunch opposition to communism was rooted in his experiences growing up in Bulgaria amid the upheaval of World War II. Raikin fled a socialist labor camp in 1951 and crossed the border into Greece. He studied theology in Europe before moving to New York in 1954 and receiving a graduate degree in political science from Columbia University. Raikin chronicled his journey to America in a book entitled “Rebel with a Just Cause.”

While working for Travelers Aid, Raikin’s specialty was taking care of émigrés from communist countries. He left Travelers Aid in September 1963 and moved from New York to Ohio to teach western civilization at Rio Grande College.

Raikin said Oswald and his family spent one night in New York, staying at a budget hotel near Times Square. The next day, they flew from Idlewild Airport to Texas, where Oswald’s mother and older brother lived.

What seemed like a promising new start curdled into months of unemployment, marital problems and political disillusionment, according to Warren Commission testimony by Marina Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald purchased a rifle in March 1963 and tried to assassinate Gen. Edwin A. Walker, a conservative Army officer who had run for governor of Texas. On April 10, 1963, Oswald fired at Walker and missed, according to the Warren Report.

Seven months later, Oswald brought his rifle to work at the Texas School Book Depository and pulled the trigger as the president's motorcade passed the building.

Oswald was killed two days after the assassination, gunned down by a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby.

“I regret that I did not put in my report my questioning and my doubts about Lee Harvey Oswald not being met by security officials at the ship,” said Raikin. “When I realized his resistance of talking to me, I kept the conversation on ordinary common things: ‘How was your trip?’ I thought I won his confidence, but I did not realize what kind of a man he was, that he was playing a game.”

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