When my father mentioned in the early 1960s that Great Uncle Loren and Aunt Marie went to Russia it sounded highly suspicious to an Army kid like me. As the family component of the occupation forces in Germany in the early 1950s, we lived primed for a Russian invasion. Going to the store or for a ride in the country? Mom frisked me like a cop with a shoplifter. Didn’t find my dog tags dangling around my neck under my shirt? Unpleasant recriminations about being separated when the Russians rolled in. Then ensued a quarters hunt for the tags. And while we’re at it, Mom would say, let’s check the bug out bags. Yep, packed and ready to fling into the car or whatever the Army sent to pick us up if Dad had to stay at work late to exchange gun fire with the Russians. Required full gas cans in the car trunk? No, but don’t tell anyone, kids. Dad said they could explode if we got rear ended.

When we returned to the States, the Russians still wouldn’t leave us in peace. Nikita Khrushchev promised to bury us, and we figured he would do it, if he could. He looked like a guy who kept those kind of promises, and he carried on like a madman at the United Nations, banging his shoe on his desk and screaming. Then he put up the Berlin Wall practically overnight. No telling what that guy would do. Then the Russians beat us into space, which our teachers said was our fault for being spoiled kids who let the Russian kids beat us in fourth-grade arithmetic. This accusation didn’t compute for me, but a lot of what the teachers said didn’t seem relevant to anything important, so I didn’t take it to heart.

After my father’s startling announcement, I puzzled a bit over my mercurial, foolish relatives, but Dad didn’t seem eager to speculate with me. Sometime in 1964, while pouring coffee for my father, my grandmother mentioned that the FBI had paid a visit to Great Uncle Loren and Aunt Marie and confiscated a picture of my aunt with Lee Harvey Oswald. The agents also expressed a natural curiosity about Auntie hanging with Oswald in Russia. Believe me, I wondered the same thing. I asked Dad, but he looked pretty upset and said he didn’t know anything about it. It dawned on me much later that considering my father’s highly classified work, which shaped the contours of our lives as well as his, Loren’s and Marie’s antics could cast suspicion on him. As it turns out, it never did.

So, what the heck was going on? Well, with the declassification of Auntie’s pictures and other documents, I have some guesses. Stay tuned.

(Aunt Marie is on the far left . Lee Harvey is to the far right.)