-Caveat Lector- Soviets Believed Oswald Letter Fake By DEB RIECHMANN .c The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - Officials at the Soviet Embassy in Washington had suspicions from the start about a chatty letter they received from Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before President Kennedy was assassinated. In it, Oswald detailed his visit with a top KGB official in Mexico City six weeks before being arrested for killing Kennedy in Dallas. He pleaded for visas so that he and his wife could return to the Soviet Union. He even told them about his new baby daughter. Privately, embassy officials suspected it was forged, perhaps to lay a phony paper trail to make it look like Oswald was working for the Soviets, according to long-secret Russian documents released by the National Archives on Thursday. ``This letter was clearly a provocation: It gives the impression we had close ties with Oswald and were using him for some purposes of our own,'' Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow's man in Washington for 24 years, wrote in an internal memo stamped ``Highest Priority.'' Dobrynin thought the letter was a fake because it had a different tone than previous letters the Soviets had received from Oswald, who lived in the communist nation between 1959 and 1962. Also, it had been typed, not handwritten like his earlier ones, Dobrynin noted. The letter was dated Nov. 9, 1963. The embassy received it nine days later, but never replied. Within a week, Kennedy was dead, and so was Oswald - shot down by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. ``One gets the definite impression that the letter was concocted by those who, judging from everything, are involved in the president's assassination,'' Dobrynin wrote. ``It is possible that Oswald himself wrote the letter as it was dictated to him, in return for some promises, and then, as we know, he was simply bumped off after his usefulness had ended.'' The Dobrynin memo was contained in more than 80 pages of long-secret Soviet documents that Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave to President Clinton in June when the two were in Germany. The documents offer details about what top-level Soviet officials were thinking and talking about when Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. ``They were convinced that there had been this massive plot to kill Kennedy. What they didn't know was who was a part of the conspiracy,'' said Timothy Naftali, director of the presidential recordings project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, a think tank and historical research institute at the University of Virginia. ``They thought they had received a false letter. They thought it was all part of an orchestrated affair to make it look like the Soviet Union was behind the gun.'' Following the assassination, the Soviets gave U.S. officials the Oswald letter as well as other information they had gathered during his stay in the Soviet Union. Oswald arrived there in October 1959 as a tourist and immediately asked to remain. Because no decision was made on his request before his five-day tourist visa expired, Oswald cut his arm in an apparent suicide attempt, the documents said. He was hospitalized for a week. According to the documents, his attending physician said that if Oswald's ``request for permission to remain in the USSR were turned down again, he might repeat his suicide attempt.'' The documents indicate the Soviets denied him citizenship but let him stay a year as a foreign national because of his persistent requests. He arrived in Minsk in January 1960 - the same month Kennedy announced he was running for president. He worked at a radio factory and married a Soviet woman. In 1962, Oswald returned with his wife and their baby to the United States. The following year, just days before Kennedy was assassinated, the Soviet Embassy in Washington received the letter that Oswald allegedly typed in Dallas on Nov. 9, 1963. ``The Russians get this letter from Oswald that makes him look like he's affiliated with them in some way, but he's not affiliated with the Russian government,'' said David Lifton, a Los Angeles-based researcher who is writing a book on Oswald. ``He's a phony Red. 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