THE EXPERIMENTAL SHOP: HORIZON RADIO & TV PLANT -
MINSK 1992
Photo Copyright ©Peter
Wronski 1992
It is possible that Oswald worked at two locations during his term of employment at the Horizon Minsk Radio & TV Plant. Prior to being posted in a metal lathe shop, Oswald was first assigned to the "Experimental Shop", where parts were produced for new technologies and components in research and development.
In 1992, we were not allowed to film inside the Experimental Shop, due to its sensitive work for the Russian Air Force, but we were allowed to film the exterior. The Horizon Factory, not only produced and produces today, consumer radios and televisions, but also electronic components for the Russian military and space program. The factory official giving us the tour of the facilities, could not confirm for us if the Experimental Shop was a high a security zone in 1960, when Oswald was assigned there.
However, It should be noted that in an essay on the Minsk factory,
Oswald describes the experimental shop as "a two-story building with no
particular mark on its red brick face."
[ CE 3134,
Volume XXVI Warren Hearings ]
The shop in which he was
later employed, is indeed located in a two story building. If
it had a red brick face, it had been plastered over by the time I saw it
in 1992.
I could not determine the date on which Oswald might have been transferred away from the Experimental Shop, if he was indeed transferred; I was told by witnesses that they thought it was "six weeks to several months" after his arrival; early in his Minsk part of the journey. If the Experimental Shop was a high security area in Oswald's time, then he might have been deliberately first assigned there in an attempt to "flush" him out as a spy. When after at least six weeks in a sensitive area, Oswald did not compromise himself in any manner, the KGB and factory officials probably concluded:
- A. Oswald is too cautious an operative to
immediately expose himself to the obvious intelligence temptations of the Experimental Shop,
therefore, he should be moved out of there before he out waits the KGB
surveillance;
B. Oswald is a genuine defector, but is unskilled, uneducated, and suffers from a bad work attitude, and therefore, should be moved out of the sensitive Experimental Shop before he breaks something or drags behind important production plan quotas.
(For the record, Minsk KGB officers deny that they had anything to do with Oswald's work assignments.)
In a strange way, Oswald's employment in the Experimental Shop, eerily foreshadows his brush with another industrial security perimeter at work, that of Jaggars-Chiles- Stoval in Texas, the photo-lithography firm with military contracts, where Oswald worked from October 12, 1962 to April 6, 1963.
CE
985