Mr. DULLES. Could I ask, did she seem to know him at all well?
Mr. FAIN. No; she didn't, she hadn't met them, but she just said some
people had moved in, and that was enough for me. Robert had told me,
had indicated pretty much where it was, and the fact is he gave me
pretty good directions as to where to go. As a matter of fact, he had
been down there himself in the apartment apparently, but he just didn't
have the house number.
Mr. STERN. What did you do after you located the house, Mr. Fain?
Mr. FAIN. After I located the house on the 15th, and I made
arrangements to have another agent and I go out there and reinterview
him. I didn't want to go to his house. I didn't want to contact his
wife. I knew from the background we had conducted that she could not
speak English. She could speak Russian only, and I didn't know any
Russian, so it wouldn't have been any point in my contacting her and
upsetting her.
So this agent and I in an automobile took up a surveillance at the end
of the street out of sight of the house and away from the house, and
waited until he came from work.
We observed him toward the end of the day, and I suppose it must have
been around 5:30, something like that, in the late afternoon, walking
down the street, and we then moved up in front of his house.
Of course, I knew him and he knew me from a previous interview, and I
spoke to him, "Hi, Lee. How are you?" I said, "Would you mind talking
with us just a few minutes?" So he got in the back seat. I remained
in the front seat. Arnold J. Brown, the other agent, was in the back
seat with him, and we talked with him there, and the results of the
interview are set out here on page 4.
Mr. STERN. Was it your normal practice to conduct an interview in teams?
Mr. FAIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. STERN. This interview you conducted with Agent Brown, and your
previous interview you conducted with Agent Carter, I believe?
Mr. FAIN. Yes, sir; Agent Carter was with me on the first one, and
Arnold Brown was on the second one.
Mr. STERN. Why is that, Mr. Fain?
Mr. FAIN. Well, in case something comes up in these important interview
cases which might have some evidentiary value, we like to have two
agents present.
Mr. STERN. Is your general rule always to have two agents when you
interview any subject?
Mr. FAIN. Subject, particularly if it is something other than routine;
yes, sir.
Mr. STERN. This, as far as you were concerned, was something other than
routine?
Mr. FAIN. In internal security cases, in a case of this magnitude and
this importance, we would always have two agents present.
Mr. STERN. When you say a case of this magnitude and a case of this
importance, what do you have in mind?
Mr. FAIN. Well, this man had been to Russia, and we wanted to try to
find out whether he had been recruited by the Russians to do a job
against the United states.
Mr. STERN. So this, in relation to your other cases, was an important
case?
Mr. FAIN. It was important.
Mr. DULLES. Do you often conduct interviews in a car or was this rather
unusual?
Mr. FAIN. We felt that in this case we could get his cooperation better
if we could show to him that we weren't trying to embarrass him. I
explained to him that afternoon, "We didn't contact you at your place
of employment; we didn't want to embarrass you before your employer,"
and didn't want to upset his wife and, therefore, I hadn't bothered his
wife, and we just felt if we talked to him there in the car informally,
he would better cooperate with us.
Mr. DULLES. It wasn't because he showed reluctance to have you go in
the house or didn't invite you or anything of that kind?
Mr. FAIN. Oh, no; no. Actually he invited us in when we stopped him. He
said, "Won't you come in the house?" And I said, "Well, we will just
talk here. We will be alone to ourselves and we will be informal, and
just fine." So he got in the car with Agent Brown.
Mr. McCLOY. Was he actually less truculent than he had been before?
Mr. FAIN. Yes; he had actually settled down. He had gotten a job at
Leslie Machine Shop, and he wasn't as tense. He seemed to talk more
freely with us.
Mr. McCLOY. He indicated that he had been or his wife had been in
constant communication with the Soviet Embassy here?
Mr. FAIN. Well, he told me on the previous interview that he would have
to get in touch with the Russian Embassy and let them know that his
wife was in this country, and to let them know his address, and I asked
him if he had done that, and he said he had in this second interview.
He said he would have to contact them. The way he termed it, his
phraseology was, that the Soviet law was that a person in her position
coming over here, a citizen from Russia, must notify the Soviet Embassy
of her current address, and he said that should be done periodically.
Mr. STERN. Did you discuss his discharge from the Marine Corps?
Mr. FAIN. We actually went over substantially everything we had asked
him before.
Mr. STERN. Did he seem concerned about that?
Mr. FAIN. The fact that he had been given the unfavorable discharge? I
believe now, I don't recall just exactly whether I asked him right at
that time whether there had been any disposition of that, and maybe I
did.
Mr. STERN. The third paragraph on page 4 refers to that, and I just
wondered if you could say more about it.
Mr. FAIN. Yes; he just advised about the matter of having been given
an undesirable discharge had not been reviewed. We did ask him that
because he brought it up and mentioned it before.