The Sword and the Shield

^FIVE TERROR

Though “special tasks” only began to dominate NKVD foreign operations in 1937, the problem of “enemies of the people” abroad had loomed steadily larger in Stalin’s mind since the early 1930s as he became increasingly obsessed with the opposition to him inside the Soviet Union. The most daring denunciation of the growing brutality of Stalin’s Russia was a letter of protest sent to the Central Committee in the autumn of 1932 by a former Party secretary in Moscow, Mikhail Ryutin, and a small band of supporters. The “Ryutin platform,” whose text was made public only in 1989, contained such an uncompromising attack on Stalin and the horrors which had accompanied collectivization and the First Five Year Plan over the previous few years that some Trotskyists who saw the document believed it was an OGPU provocation.¹ It denounced Stalin as “the evil genius of the Russian Revolution, motivated by vindictiveness and lust for power, who has brought the Revolution to the edge of the abyss,” and demanded his removal from power: “It is shameful for proletarian revolutionaries to tolerate any longer Stalin’s yoke, his arbitrariness, his scorn for the Party and the laboring masses.”²

At a meeting of the Politburo Stalin called for Ryutin’s execution. Only Sergei Mironovich Kirov dared to contradict him. “We mustn’t do that!” he insisted. “Ryutin is not a hopeless case, he’s merely gone astray.” For the time being Stalin backed down and Ryutin was sentenced to ten years in jail.³ Five years later, during the Great Terror, when Stalin had gained the virtually unchallenged power of life and death over Soviet citizens, Ryutin was shot.

During the early 1930s Stalin lost whatever capacity he had once possessed to distinguish personal opponents from “enemies of the people.” By far the most dangerous of these enemies, he believed, were the exiled Leon Trotsky (codenamed STARIK, “Old Man,” by the Centre)⁴ and his followers. “No normal ‘constitutional’ paths for the removal of the governing [Stalinist] clique now remain,” wrote Trotsky in 1933. “The only way to compel the bureaucracy to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard is by force.” Henceforth Stalin used that assertion to argue that the Soviet state was faced with a threat of forcible overthrow, which must itself be forcibly prevented.⁵

Opposition to Stalin resurfaced at the 1934 Party Congress, though in so muted a form that it passed unnoticed by the mass of the population. In the elections to the Central Committee, Stalin polled several hundred votes fewer than Kirov, who was assassinated, probably on Stalin’s orders, at the end of the year. What increasingly obsessed Stalin, however, were less the powerless remnants of real opposition to him than the gigantic, mythical conspiracy by imperialist secret services and their Trotskyist hirelings. Though the paranoid strain in what Khrushchev later called Stalin’s “sickly suspicious” personality does much to explain his obsession with conspiracy theory, there was an impeccable Leninist logic at the heart of that obsession. Stalin claimed Lenin’s authority for his insistence that it was impossible for the imperialists not to attempt to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state:

It was equally inevitable, Stalin argued, that the enemies without would conspire with traitors within. Only “blind braggarts or concealed enemies of the people,” he declared, would dispute this elementary logic.⁶ Those who disagreed thus automatically branded themselves as traitors.

Despite Stalin’s increasing obsession during the 1930s with Trotskyist conspiracy, Trotsky never really represented any credible threat to the Stalinist regime. He spent his early years in exile trying vainly to find a European base from which to organize his followers. In 1933 he left Turkey for France, then two years later moved on to Norway, but his political activity in all three countries was severely restricted by the reluctant host governments. In 1937, having finally despaired of finding a European headquarters, Trotsky left for Mexico, where he remained until his assassination three years later. The chief European organizer of the Trotskyist movement for most of the 1930s was not Trotsky himself but his elder son, Lev Sedov, who from 1933 was based in Paris. It was Sedov who, until his death in 1938, organized publication of his father’s Bulletin of the Opposition and maintained contact with Trotsky’s scattered supporters. Sedov’s entourage, like his father’s, was penetrated by the OGPU and NKVD. From 1934 onwards his closest confidant and collaborator in Paris was an NKVD agent, the Russian-born Polish Communist Mark Zborowski, known to Sedov as êtienne and successively codenamed by the Center MAKS, MAK, TULIP and KANT. Sedov trusted “Étienne” so completely that he gave him the key to his letterbox, allowed him to collect his mail and entrusted him with Trotsky’s most confidential files and archives for safekeeping.⁷

AS THE CHIEF headquarters of both the Trotskyist movement and the White Guards, Paris became for several years the main center of operations for the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks, headed by “Yasha” Serebryansky, which specialized in assassination and abduction. Serebryansky’s illegal residency in Paris had other targets, too. The most prominent was the mercurial Jacques Doriot, a rabble-rousing orator who during the early 1930s was considered a likely future contender for the leadership of the French Communist Party.⁸ In the early months of 1934, he aroused the ire of Moscow by calling on the Party to form an anti-fascist Popular Front with the socialists, still officially condemned in Moscow as “social fascists.” Doriot was summoned to Moscow to recant but refused to go. He was expelled from the Party for indiscipline in June 1934, ironically at the very moment when the Communist International, in a rapid volte-face instantly accepted by the French Communist Party, decided in favor of a Popular Front policy.

Doriot responded with a series of increasingly bitter attacks on both Stalin’s “oriental” despotism and the French Communist leadership, whom he derided as “Stalin’s slaves.” The Centre, fearing the effect of Doriot’s impassioned and now subversive oratory on the French left, ordered Serebryansky to keep him under continuous surveillance. In 1935, after almost the whole non-Communist press had publicized Doriot’s revelation that the French Communist Party received secret instructions and funds from Moscow, the Centre instructed Serebryansky to draw up plans for his liquidation.⁹ The order to go ahead with the assassination seems never to have been given, perhaps because of the triumph of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections and Doriot’s foundation soon afterwards of the neofascist Parti Populaire Français. Doriot’s public vindication of the Communist charge that he was a fascist collaborator provided the Centre with a propaganda victory which his assassination would have spoiled rather than enhanced.¹⁰

Among other assassinations which Serebryansky was ordered to organize was that of the leading Nazi Hermann Goering, who was reported to be planning a visit to Paris. The Administration for Special Tasks ordered its Paris residency to recruit a sniper and find a way of infiltrating him into the airport, probably Le Bourget, at which Goering was expected to land.¹¹ Goering, however, failed to visit France and the sniper was stood down. The files seen by Mitrokhin give no indication of the Centre’s motive in ordering an assassination which was undoubtedly authorized by Stalin himself. The probability is, however, that the main objective was to damage relations between France and Germany rather than to strike a blow against Nazism. The assassination on French soil in 1934 of the President of the Republic and the King of Yugoslavia by a non-Communist assassin doubtless encouraged the Centre to believe that it could avoid responsibility for the killing of Goering if an opportunity arose.

Despite the numerous other duties of Serebryansky’s Paris residency, its main task remained the surveillance and destabilization of French Trotskyists. Until 1937 Lev Sedov, thanks to his misplaced but total confidence in “Étienne” Zborowski, was such an indispensable source on the POLECATS (as the Trotskyists were codenamed by the Centre) that he was not marked down as a target for liquidation.¹² In the autumn of 1936 Zborowski warned the Centre that, because of his financial problems, Trotsky was selling part of his archive (formerly among the papers entrusted by Sedov to Zborowski for safekeeping) to the Paris branch of the International Institute of Social History based in Amsterdam. Serebryansky was ordered to set up a task force to recover it, codenamed the HENRY group. He began by renting the flat immediately above the institute in the rue Michelet in order to keep it under surveillance. On Serebryansky’s instructions, Zborowski, then working as a service engineer at a Paris telephone exchange, was ordered to cause a fault on the Institute’s telephone line in order to give him a chance to reconnoitre the exact location of the Trotsky papers and examine the locks. When the Institute reported the fault on its line, however, one of Zborowski’s colleagues was sent to mend the fault instead. Zborowski promptly put the Institute’s phone out of action once again and on this occasion was called to make the repair himself. As he left the Institute, having mended the fault and closely inspected the locks to the front and back doors, he was given a five franc tip by the director, Boris Nikolayevsky, a prominent Menshevik émigré classed by the NKVD as an “enemy of the people.”¹³

Serebryansky fixed the time for the burglary at two o’clock on the morning of November 7, 1936, and ordered it to be completed by 5 a.m. at the latest. Since his agents were unable to find keys to fit the Institute locks, he decided to cut them out with a drill powered by an electric transformer concealed in a box filled with sawdust and cotton wool to deaden the sound.¹⁴ The burglars broke in unobserved and left with Trotsky’s papers. Both Sedov and the Paris police immediately suspected the NKVD because of both the professionalism of the burglary and the fact that money and valuables in the Institute had been left untouched. Sedov assured the police that his assistant “Étienne” Zborowski was completely above suspicion, and in any case kept the main archive, which had not been stolen, at his home address. Ironically, Sedov suggested that the NKVD might have learned of the transfer of a part of the archive as the result of an indiscretion by the Institute director, Nikolayevsky.¹⁵

The extraordinary importance attached by the Centre to the theft of the papers was demonstrated by the award of the Order of the Red Banner to the HENRY group.¹⁶ The operation, however, was as pointless as it was professional. The papers stolen from the Institute (many of them press cuttings) were of no operational significance whatever and of far less historical importance than the Trotsky archive which remained in Zborowski’s hands and later ended up at Harvard University.¹⁷ But by the mid-1930s Stalin had lost all sense of proportion in his pursuit of Trotskyism in all its forms, both real and imaginary. Trotsky had become an obsession who dominated many of Stalin’s waking hours and probably interfered with his sleep at night. As Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, concludes:

The British diplomat R. A. Sykes later wisely described Stalin’s world view as “a curious mixture of shrewdness and nonsense.”¹⁹ Stalin’s shrewdness was apparent in the way that he outmaneuvered his rivals after the death of Lenin, gradually acquired absolute power as General Secretary, and later out-negotiated Churchill and Roosevelt during their wartime conferences. Historians have found it difficult to accept that so shrewd a man also believed in so much nonsense. But it is no more possible to understand Stalin without acknowledging his addiction to conspiracy theories about Trotsky (and others) than it is to comprehend Hitler without grasping the passion with which he pursued his even more terrible and absurd conspiracy theories about the Jews.

GENRIKH GRIGORYEVICH YAGODA, head of the NKVD from 1934 to 1936, was far less obsessed by Trotsky than Stalin was. Stalin’s chief grudge against him was probably a growing conviction that he had been deliberately negligent in his hunt for Trotskyist traitors.²⁰ His nemesis arrived in September 1936 in the form of a telegram from Stalin and his protégé, Andrei Zhdanov, to the Central Committee declaring that Yagoda had “definitely proved himself incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite- Zinovyevite bloc” and demanding his replacement by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.

As head of the NKVD for the next two years, Yezhov carried through the largest scale peacetime political persecution and blood-letting in European history, known to posterity as the Great Terror.²¹ One NKVD document from the Yezhov era, which doubtless reflected—and probably slavishly imitated—Stalin’s own view, asserted that “the scoundrel Yagoda” had deliberately concentrated the attack on the “lower ranks” of “the right-wing Trotskyite underground” in order to divert attention from its true leaders: Zinovyev, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Kamenev and Smirnov. Yagoda, it was claimed, had either sacked or sidelined NKVD staff who had tried to indict these former heroes of the Leninist era for their imaginary crimes.²² All save Tomsky, who committed suicide, were given starring roles in the show trials of 1936 to 1938, gruesome morality plays which proclaimed a grotesque conspiracy theory uniting all opposition at home and abroad by the use of elegantly absurd formulae such as: “Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovyevism is a variety of Trotskyism.” In the last of the great show trials Yagoda, despite a plea for mercy written “on bended knees,” was himself unmasked as a leading Trotskyist conspirator. The chief author of the gigantic conspiracy theory, which became undisputed orthodoxy within the NKVD and provided the ideological underpinning of the Great Terror, was Stalin himself.²³ Stalin personally proofread the transcripts of the show trials before their publication, amending the defendants’ speeches to ensure that they did not deviate from their well-rehearsed confessions to imaginary conspiracies.²⁴ NKVD records of the period proclaim with characteristic obsequiousness that, “The practical organization of the work exposing the right-wing Trotskyite underground was supervised personally by Comrade Stalin, and in 1936-8 crippling blows were delivered to the rabble.”²⁵

“Crippling blows” against both real and imaginary Trotskyist “rabble” were struck outside as well as inside the Soviet Union. The beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 opened up a major new field of operations for Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks and for INO as a whole. The struggle of the Spanish republican government to defend itself against the nationalist rebellion led by General Francisco Franco fired the imagination of the whole of the European left as a crusade against international fascism: 35,000 foreign volunteers, most of them Communist, set out for Spain to join the International Brigades in defense of the republic. In October 1936 Stalin declared in an open letter to Spanish Communists: “Liberation of Spain from the yoke of the Spanish reactionaries is not the private concern of Spaniards alone, but the common cause of all progressive humanity.” From the outset, however, the NKVD was engaged in Spain in a war on two fronts: against Trotskyists within the republicans and the International Brigades, as well as against Franco and the nationalist forces. The former illegal resident in London, Aleksandr Orlov, sent to Spain as legal resident after the outbreak of the Civil War, confidently assured the Centre in October, “The Trotskyist organization POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista] can be easily liquidated.”²⁶

WHILE ORLOV COORDINATED the NKVD’s secret two-front war within Spain, Serebryansky conducted operations from abroad. Serebryansky organized training courses in Paris for saboteurs from the International Brigades, run by GIGI, a French Communist mechanic who usually worked without pay, FRANYA, a female Polish student paid 1,500 francs a month, and LEGRAND, on whom no further details are available. The greatest sabotage success reported by Serebryansky was the claim by the ERNST TOLSTY group of illegals, based in the Baltic and Scandinavia, to have sunk seventeen ships carrying arms to Franco.²⁷ One of the leading saboteurs was a young German Communist, Ernst Wollweber, who twenty years later was to become head of the Stasi in East Germany.²⁸ An NKVD inquiry after the Civil War concluded, however, that some of the reports of sinkings were fabrications.²⁹

The main NKVD training grounds for guerrillas and saboteurs were within Spain itself at training camps supervised by Orlov at Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao and Argen. Orlov later boasted of how his guerrilla platoons succeeded in blowing up power lines and bridges and in attacking enemy convoys far behind the nationalist lines. As an SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov acknowledges, his larger purpose was “to build up a secret police force under NKVD control to effect a Stalinization of Spain.” The chief Soviet military adviser in republican Spain, General Jan Berzin, formerly head of Red Army intelligence, complained that Orlov and the NKVD were treating republican Spain as a colony rather than an ally.³⁰

In the spring of 1937 Orlov and Serebryansky were ordered to move from the surveillance and destabilization of Trotskyist groups to the liquidation of their leaders. While Serebryansky began preparing the abduction of Sedov,³¹ Orlov supplied the republican government with forged documents designed to discredit POUM as “a German-Francoist spy organization.” On June 16 the head of POUM, Andreu Nin, and forty leading members were arrested, its headquarters closed and its militia battalions disbanded. Less than a week later Nin disappeared from prison. An official investigation announced that he had escaped. In reality, he was abducted and murdered by a “mobile squad” of NKVD assassins, supervised by Orlov. Nin was one of many Trotskyists in Spain, both real and imagined, who met such fates. Until Orlov defected to the United States in 1938, fearing that he too had been placed on an NKVD death list, he lived in some luxury while organizing the liquidation of enemies of the people. A young volunteer in the International Brigades summoned to his presence was struck by how strongly he reeked of eau de cologne, and watched enviously as he consumed a large cooked breakfast wheeled in on a trolley by a whitecoated servant. Orlov offered none of it to the famished volunteer, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours.³²

Though unusually forthcoming about Orlov, who, because of his defection, never qualified for the KGB Valhalla, the SVR has been much more reluctant to release material on the Spanish Civil War which might damage the reputation of the traditional heroes of Soviet foreign intelligence: among them Hero of the Soviet Union Stanislav Alekseyevich Vaupshasov, long celebrated for his daring exploits behind enemy lines during the Second World War. With four Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Great Patriotic War and a chestful of other medals, Vaupshasov was probably the Soviet Union’s most profusely decorated intelligence hero. As recently as 1990 he was honored by a commemorative postage stamp. Vaupshasov’s murderous pre-war record, however, is still kept from public view by the SVR. In the mid-1920s he led a secret OGPU unit in numerous raids on Polish and Lithuanian border villages, dressed in Polish and Lithuanian army uniforms. In 1929 Vaupshasov was sentenced to death for murdering a colleague, but managed to have the sentence commuted to ten years in the gulag. He was quickly released and resumed his career as one of the NKVD’s leading experts in assassination. Among Vaupshasov’s duties in Spain was the construction and guarding of a secret crematorium which enabled the NKVD to dispose of its victims without leaving any trace of their remains. Many of those selected for liquidation were lured into the building containing the crematorium and killed on the spot.³³

The NKVD agent in charge of the crematorium was José Castelo Pacheco (codenamed JOSE, PANSO and TEODOR),³⁴ a Spanish Communist born in Salamanca in 1910, who was recruited by Orlov’s deputy resident, Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon, in 1936.³⁵ In 1982, some years after Castelo’s death, the KGB received a letter from a female relative appealing for a pension and claiming that he had told her before his death, “If you have any problems and there is no other way out, I mean only in extreme circumstances, then contact my Soviet comrades.” Though Castelo’s file showed that he had promised never to reveal any details of his work as a Soviet agent, there was an obvious risk that his relative had discovered his work in the NKVD crematorium. The Centre therefore concluded that to refuse her request might have “undesirable consequences.” In January 1983 she was summoned to the consular department of the Soviet embassy in Madrid by the resident and told that, though she had no legal right to a pension, it had been decided to make her an ex gratia payment of 5,000 convertible roubles, then the equivalent of 6,680 US dollars. No reference was made to Castelo’s work for the NKVD.³⁶

REMARKABLY, MANY OTHERWISE admirable studies of the Stalin era fail to mention the relentless secret pursuit of “enemies of the people” in western Europe. The result, all too frequently, is a sanitized, curiously bloodless interpretation of Soviet foreign policy on the eve of the Second World War which fails to recognize the priority given to assassination. Outside Spain, the main theater of operations for the NKVD’s assassins was France, where their chief targets were Lev Sedov and General Yevgeni Karlovich Miller, Kutepov’s successor as head of the White Guard ROVS. In the summer of 1937 Serebryansky devised similar plans to liquidate both. Sedov and Miller were each to be kidnapped in Paris, smuggled on board a boat waiting off the Channel coast, then brought to the Soviet Union for interrogation and retribution. The first stage in the abduction operations was the penetration of their entourages.

Like Sedov’s assistant “Étienne” Zborowski, Miller’s deputy, General Nikolai Skoblin, was an NKVD agent. Probably unknown to Skoblin, Serebryansky also used an illegal, Mireille Lyudvigovna Abbiate (codenamed AVIATORSHA, “aviator’s wife”), to keep Miller under surveillance. Abbiate was the daughter of a French music teacher in St. Petersburg, born and brought up in Russia. When her family returned to France in 1920, she had stayed in Russia and married the aviator Vasili Ivanovich Yermolov (hence her later codename). In 1931, when she traveled to France to visit her parents, she was recruited by the NKVD. During her visit she recruited her brother, Roland Lyudvigovich Abbiate, who also became an illegal with the codename LETCHIK (“pilot”). AVIATORSHA rented a flat next to General Miller, secretly forced an entry, stole some of his papers and installed a hidden microphone which enabled her to bug his apartment.³⁷ On September 22, 1937, like Kutepov seven years earlier, Miller disappeared in broad daylight on a Paris street. The Sûreté later concluded that Miller had been taken to the Soviet embassy, killed and his body placed in a large trunk which was then taken by a Ford truck to be loaded on a Soviet freighter waiting at Le Havre. Several witnesses reported seeing the trunk being loaded on board. Miller, however, was still alive inside the trunk, heavily drugged. Unlike Kutepov in 1930, he survived the voyage to Moscow, where he was interrogated and shot. Skoblin, who fell under immediate suspicion by Miller’s supporters, fled to Spain.³⁸ Mireille Abbiate, whose role went undetected, was awarded the Order of the Red Star, then reassigned to the operation against Sedov.³⁹

Planning for the abduction of Sedov was at an advanced stage by the time Miller disappeared. A fishing boat had been hired at Boulogne to take him on the first stage of his journey to the Soviet Union.⁴⁰ The operation, however, was aborted—possibly as a result of the furor aroused in France by the NKVD’s suspected involvement in Miller’s abduction. A few months later Sedov met a different end. On February 8, 1938 he entered hospital with acute appendicitis. “Étienne” Zborowski helped to persuade him that, to avoid NKVD surveillance, he must have his appendix removed not at a French hospital but at a small private clinic run by Russian émigrés, which was in reality an easier target for Soviet penetration. No sooner had Zborowski ordered the ambulance than, as he later admitted, he alerted the NKVD. But, for alleged security reasons, he refused to reveal the address of the clinic to French Trotskyists. Sedov’s operation was successful and for a few days he seemed to be making a normal recovery. Then he had a sudden relapse which baffled his doctors. Despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain on February 16 at the age of only thirty-two. The contemporary files contain no proof that the NKVD was responsible for his death.⁴¹ It had, however, a sophisticated medical section, the Kamera, which experimented with lethal drugs and was capable of poisoning Sedov. It is certain that the NKVD intended to assassinate Sedov, just as it planned to kill Trotsky and his other leading lieutenants. What remains in doubt is whether Sedov was murdered by the NKVD in February 1938 or whether he died of natural causes before he could be assassinated.⁴²

Sedov’s death enabled the NKVD to take a leading role in the Trotskyist organization. Zborowski became both publisher of the Bulletin of the Opposition and Trotsky’s most important contact with his European supporters. While unobtrusively encouraging internecine warfare between the rival Trotskyist tendencies, Zborowski impeccably maintained his own cover. On one occasion he wrote to tell Trotsky that the Bulletin was about to publish an article entitled “Trotsky’s Life in Danger,” which would expose the activities of NKVD agents in Mexico. In the summer of 1938 the defector Aleksandr Orlov, then living in the United States, sent Trotsky an anonymous letter warning him that his life was in danger from an NKVD agent in Paris. Orlov did not know the agent’s surname but said that his first name was Mark (the real first name of “Étienne” Zborowski), and gave a detailed description of his appearance and background. Trotsky suspected that this letter and others like it were the work of NKVD agents provocateurs. Zborowski agreed. When told about one of the accusations against him, he is reported as having given “a hearty laugh.”⁴³

Following the death of Sedov, the NKVD’s next major Trotskyist target in Europe was the German Rudolf Klement, secretary of Trotsky’s Fourth International, whose founding conference was due to be held later in the year.⁴⁴ On July 13, 1938 the NKVD abducted Klement from his Paris home. A few weeks later his headless corpse was washed ashore on the banks of the Seine. The founding conference of the Fourth International in September was a tragicomic event, attended by only twenty-one delegates claiming to represent mostly minuscule Trotskyist groups in eleven countries. The Russian section, whose authentic members had probably been entirely exterminated, was represented by Zborowski. The American Trotskyist Sylvia Angeloff, one of the conference translators, was accompanied by her Spanish lover, Ramón Mercader, an NKVD illegal posing as a Belgian journalist who was later to achieve fame as Trotsky’s assassin in Mexico City.⁴⁵

BY 1938 SEREBRYANSKY’S Administration for Special Tasks was the largest section of Soviet foreign intelligence, claiming to have 212 illegal officers operating in sixteen countries: the USA, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and China. After Trotskyists, the largest number of “enemies of the people” pursued abroad by the NKVD during the Great Terror came from the ranks of its own foreign intelligence service.⁴⁶ When receiving reports from Moscow of show trials and the unmasking of their colleagues as agents of imperialist powers, intelligence officers stationed abroad had to pay careful attention not merely to what they said but also to their facial expressions and body language. Those who failed to respond with sufficiently visible or heartfelt outrage to the non-existent conspiracies being unveiled in Moscow were likely to have adverse reports sent to the Centre—frequently with fatal consequences.

After the trial of Lenin’s former lieutenants Zinovyev, Kamenev and other “degenerates” in August 1936, the Centre received an outraged communication from the Paris legal residency regarding the unsatisfactory level of indignation displayed by the military intelligence officer Abram Mironovich Albam (codenamed BELOV):

Albam’s subversive sigh helped to convict not merely himself but also a number of his colleagues of imaginary crimes. His file lists thirteen of his acquaintances who were subsequently arrested; at least some, probably most, were shot. Albam’s wife, Frida Lvovna, tried to save herself by disowning her arrested husband. “The most horrible realization for an honest Party member,” she wrote indignantly to the NKVD, “is the fact that he was an enemy of the people surrounded by other enemies of the people.”⁴⁸

Both at home and abroad the Great Terror favored the survival of the most morally unfit. Those who were quickest to denounce their colleagues for imaginary crimes stood the greatest chance of being among the minority of survivors. The fact that Yakov Surits, ambassador in Berlin at the beginning of the Great Terror, was one of the few senior diplomats to survive may well have owed something to his expertise in denunciation. Surits sought to head off denunciation by the head of the legal residency in his embassy, B. M. Gordon, by denouncing Gordon first. At the outset of the Terror, Surits drew to the attention of the Centre that a Soviet diplomat with whom Gordon was on friendly terms was a former Socialist Revolutionary who frequently visited relatives in Prague “where other SR émigrés reside.”⁴⁹ After the show trial of the “Trotskyite-Zinovyevite Terrorist Center” in January 1937, Surits reported disturbing evidence of Gordon’s Trotskyite sympathies:

Surits, however, was unaware that he was himself being simultaneously denounced for similar failings by one of his secretaries, who wrote virtuously to the Centre:

In 1937-8, following the recall and liquidation of all or most of their officers, many NKVD residencies ceased to function. Though the residencies in London, Berlin, Vienna and Tokyo did not close, they were reduced to one or, at the most, two officers each.⁵² Most of the Great Illegals were purged with the rest. Among the first to fall under suspicion was the London head of probably the NKVD’s most successful illegal residency, Teodor Maly, whose religious background and revulsion at the use of terror made him an obvious suspect. He accepted the order to return to Moscow in June 1937 with an idealistic fatalism. “I know that as a former priest I haven’t got a chance,” he told Aleksandr Orlov. “But I have decided to go there so that nobody can say: ‘That priest might have been a real spy after all.’”⁵³ Once in Moscow he was denounced as a German spy, interrogated and shot a few months later. Moisei Akselrod, head of the illegal residency in Italy and controller of DUNCAN, the most productive source of intelligence on Britain during the previous decade, was also recalled to Moscow. After a brief period in limbo, he too was executed as an enemy of the people.⁵⁴

Amid the paranoia of the Great Terror, Arnold Deutsch’s Jewish-Austrian origins and unorthodox early career made him automatically suspect in the Centre. After the recall of Maly, Akselrod and other illegals, he must have feared that his own turn would not be long in coming. In an effort to extend his visa he had recently contacted a Jewish relative in Birmingham, Oscar Deutsch, president of a local synagogue and managing director of Odeon Theatres. Arnold sometimes visited his Birmingham relatives for Friday night sabbath dinners, and Oscar promised to provide work to enable him to stay in Britain.⁵⁵ These contacts doubtless added to the suspicions of the Centre.

Remarkably, however, Deutsch survived. He may well have owed his survival to the defection in July 1937 of a Paris-based NKVD illegal, Ignace Poretsky (alias Reiss, codenamed RAYMOND). Poretsky was tracked down in Switzerland by a French illegal in the “Serebryansky Service,” Roland Abbiate (alias “Rossi,” codenamed LETCHIK), whose sister Mireille, also in the “Serebryansky Service,” was simultaneously preparing the abduction of General Miller in Paris.⁵⁶ To lure Poretsky to his death, Abbiate used one of his friends, Gertrude Schildbach, a German Communist refugee who was persuaded to write to Poretsky to say that she urgently needed his advice. Schildbach refused a request to give Poretsky a box of chocolates laced with strychnine (later recovered by the Swiss police), but enticed him into a side-road near Lausanne where Abbiate was waiting with a machine-gun. At the last moment Poretsky realized that he was being led into a trap and tried to grab hold of Schildbach. His bullet-ridden body was later discovered, clutching in one hand a strand of her greying hair.⁵⁷

The NKVD damage assessment after Poretsky’s defection concluded that he had probably betrayed Deutsch, with whom he had been stationed in Paris a few years earlier, to Western intelligence services.⁵⁸ Deutsch’s classification as a victim of Trotskyite and Western conspiracy helped to protect him from charges of being part of that conspiracy. He was recalled to Moscow in November 1937, not, like Maly, to be shot, but because the Centre believed he had been compromised by Poretsky and other traitors.

The liquidation of Maly and recall of Deutsch did severe and potentially catastrophic damage to the NKVD’s British operations. All contact was broken with Captain King (MAG), the cipher clerk in the Foreign Office recruited in 1935, since the NKVD damage assessment absurdly concluded that Maly “had betrayed MAG to the enemy.”⁵⁹ The files noted by Mitrokhin do not record what the damage assessment concluded about the Cambridge recruits, but, since Maly knew all their names, there were undoubtedly fears that they too had been compromised. Those fears must surely have been heightened by the defection in November of Walter Krivitsky, the illegal resident in the Netherlands. Though Krivitsky seems not to have known the names of any of the Cambridge Five, he knew some details about them, including the fact that one of them was a young journalist who had been sent to Spain with a mission to assassinate Franco.⁶⁰

After Deutsch’s recall to Moscow, the three members of the Five who remained in England—Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross—were out of direct contact with the Centre for nine months. They were so highly motivated, however, that they continued to work for the NKVD even as the illegal residency which had controlled them was disintegrating. Burgess, who had been allowed by Deutsch and Maly to consider himself an NKVD officer rather than an agent wholly dependent on instructions from his controller, continued recruiting agents on his own initiative. He saw himself as continuing and developing Deutsch’s strategy of recruiting bright students at Oxford as well as Cambridge who could penetrate Whitehall.

Burgess intended his chief talent-spotter at Oxford to be Goronwy Rees, a young Welsh Fellow of All Souls and assistant editor of the Spectator. Rees had first met Burgess in 1932 and, though resisting Burgess’s attempt to seduce him, had none the less been deeply impressed by him: “It seemed to me that there was something deeply original, something which was, as it were, his very own in everything he had to say.”⁶¹ It was probably a book review by Rees late in 1937 which persuaded Burgess that he was ready for recruitment. The misery of mass unemployment in south Wales, wrote Rees, was

One evening, probably at the beginning of 1938, sitting in Rees’s flat with, as usual, a bottle of whiskey between them, Burgess told him that his Spectator review showed that he had “the heart of the matter in him.” Then, according to Rees, he added with unusual solemnity, “I am a Comintern agent and have been ever since I came down from Cambridge.”⁶² In later years Rees was to try to give the impression that he did not agree to become an agent. His KGB file makes clear that he was recruited—though it confirms that Burgess asked him not to work for the NKVD but “to help the Party.”⁶³ As an NKVD case officer with whom Burgess made contact later in the year reported to the Centre, he regarded Rees (henceforth codenamed FLEET or GROSS) as a key part of his Oxbridge recruitment strategy:

Though unhappy with Burgess’s undisciplined recruiting methods, the Centre regarded Rees as potentially an important agent. Three of Britain’s leading appeasers—Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary; Sir John Simon, then Home Secretary; and Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times—were nonresident Fellows of All Souls. The Center attached exaggerated importance to the fact that Rees met all three from time to time on high table. It also overestimated the influence of Rees’s friend Sir Ernest Swinton, a retired major-general who had been Chichele Professor of Military History since 1925 and was referred to by the Centre as “General Swinton.”⁶⁵

WHILE BURGESS WAS pressing ahead enthusiastically with his Oxbridge recruitment strategy, INO was in turmoil. On February 17, 1938 its head, Abram Slutsky, was found dead in his office, allegedly from a heart attack. But at his lying in state in the NKVD officers’ club, his senior staff noticed on his face the tell-tale signs of cyanide poisoning.⁶⁶ Yagoda, meanwhile, was confessing at his trial to working for the German, Japanese and Polish intelligence services, to poisoning his predecessor, Menzhinsky, and to attempting to poison his successor, Yezhov.⁶⁷ By the end of the year, Slutsky’s two immediate successors as head of INO, Zelman Pasov and Mikhail Shpigelglas, had also been shot as enemies of the people.⁶⁸ INO collapsed into such confusion during 1938 that for 127 consecutive days not a single foreign intelligence report was forwarded to Stalin.⁶⁹ In December Yezhov was replaced as head of the NKVD by Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria; a few months later he was accused of treasonable conspiracy with Britain, Germany, Japan and Poland.⁷⁰ As NKVD officers went home in the evening, each one must have wondered whether the knock at the door in the early hours would signal that his own doom was nigh.

Most of the INO officers who were interrogated and brutally tortured during the late 1930s in the name of the vast conspiracy theories of Stalin and his NKVD chiefs did not live to tell the tale. One of the few who did was the first of the Great Illegals, Dmitri Bystroletov. In 1937 Bystroletov had been sent on a mission to Berlin to contact a Soviet agent on the Reichswehr general staff. He later claimed that, before he left, he was embraced by Yezhov. “Be proud that we have given you one of our best sources,” Yezhov told him. “Stalin and your fatherland will not forget you.”⁷¹ Early in 1938, however, Bystroletov was suspended from duty and transferred to the Moscow Chamber of Commerce, where he worked until his arrest in September.⁷² During Bystroletov’s interrogation by Colonel Solovyev, Yezhov entered the room and asked what he was accused of. When told he was charged with spying for four foreign powers, Yezhov replied “Too few!”, turned on his heels and left.⁷³

When Bystroletov refused to confess to his imaginary crimes, Solovyev and his assistant, Pushkin, beat him with a ball-bearing on the end of an iron rope, breaking two of his ribs and penetrating a lung. His skull was fractured by one of the other instruments of torture, a hammer wrapped in cotton wool and bandages, and his stomach muscles torn by repeated kicks from his interrogators. Convinced that he would die if the beating continued, Bystroletov signed a confession dictated to him by Solovyev. For most INO officers, torture and confession to imaginary crimes were followed by a short walk to an execution chamber and a bullet in the back of the head. Bystroletov, however, survived to write an account of his interrogation. Though sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in 1939, he was rehabilitated during the Second World War. By the time he was released, his wife, Shelmatova, sent to the gulag as the spouse of an enemy of the people, had killed herself by cutting her throat with a kitchen knife. His elderly mother poisoned herself.⁷⁴

AFTER THE DISINTEGRATION of the London illegal residency following the liquidation of Maly and the recall of Deutsch, the Centre planned to hand over the running of its main British agents to the legal residency at the Soviet embassy in Kensington. In April 1938 a new resident, Grigori Grafpen (codenamed SAM), arrived to take charge.⁷⁵ The massacre of many of the most experienced INO officers had a dramatic effect on the quality of NKVD tradecraft. Deutsch, Orlov and Maly had taken elaborate precautions to avoid surveillance before meeting their agents. But an inexperienced emissary from the Centre who came to inspect Grafpen’s residency had so little idea about tradecraft that he assumed it was safe to operate in the immediate environs of the embassy. He reported naively to Moscow, “Next to the Embassy there is a park [Kensington Gardens] which is convenient… for holding meetings with agents, as one can simply give the appearance of having gone out for a walk in this park.”⁷⁶

Grafpen’s first priority was to renew contact with Donald Maclean, then the most productive of the Cambridge Five and able to smuggle large numbers of classified documents out of the Foreign Office. On April 10 a young and apparently inexperienced female NKVD officer, codenamed NORMA, met Maclean in the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. A few days later Maclean came to NORMA’s flat with a large bundle of Foreign Office documents which she photographed, before giving the undeveloped film to Grafpen for shipment to Moscow. Either on that occasion or soon afterwards, the young British agent and his Soviet case officer followed the photography session by going to bed together. In defiance of her instructions, NORMA also told Maclean, probably in bed, that his current codename (which he was not supposed to know) was LYRIC.⁷⁷

In September 1938 Maclean left for his first foreign posting as third secretary in the Paris embassy, preceded by an effusive testimonial from the Foreign Office personnel department:

As Maclean was leaving for Paris, the Munich crisis was reaching its humiliating climax with the surrender of the Czech Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. On September 30 the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned to a hero’s welcome in London, brandishing the worthless piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature which, he claimed, meant not only “peace with honor” but “peace for our time.” For the Cambridge Five, incapable of imagining that less than a year later Stalin would sign a pact with Hitler, Munich was further confirmation of the justice of their cause.

During the Munich crisis Cairncross had access to Foreign Office files containing what Burgess described as “the very best information imaginable” on British policy, which he passed to the NKVD via Klugmann and Burgess.⁷⁹ Cairncross’s documents on the attempted appeasement of Germany, which reached its nadir with the Munich agreement, were used by the Centre to provide further evidence for the conspiracy theory that the secret aim of British foreign policy, supported by the French, was “to lure Germany into an attack on Russia.” Though the chief advocate of this theory was Stalin, it was also fervently espoused by INO. Throughout the Cold War, the claim that Britain’s aim at Munich had been not merely to appease Hitler but also to drive him into a conflict with the Soviet Union remained unchallenged orthodoxy among KGB historians. As late as the mid-1990s, Yuri Modin, the post-war controller of the Five, was still insisting that, “This claim was neither propaganda nor disinformation but the unvarnished truth, proven by the documents obtained for us by Burgess” (chiefly, no doubt, from Cairncross).⁸⁰

After Maclean’s posting to Paris during the Munich crisis, Cairncross was intended by the Centre to succeed him as its chief source within the Foreign Office. The London resident, Grafpen, bungled the transition. Cairncross’s prickly personality and lack of social graces had not won the same encomiums from his colleagues or the Foreign Office personnel department as Maclean’s more patrician manner. In December 1938 he moved to the Treasury.⁸¹ At almost the same moment as Cairncross’s departure for the Treasury, though for unconnected reasons, Grafpen was recalled to Moscow. Given the atmosphere of the time, he may actually have been relieved, after being “unmasked” as a Trotskyist on his arrival, to be sentenced to only five years in a labor camp rather than being led to an execution cellar in the Lubyanka basement.⁸² En route for Moscow in December 1938, Grafpen accompanied NORMA (renamed ADA since her earlier indiscretion) to Paris where she was due to resume contact with Maclean. ADA reported that Maclean was having an affair with an American student at the Sorbonne, Melinda Marling, whom he was later to marry. She also discovered that Maclean, now drinking heavily, had admitted that while drunk he had told both his mistress and his brother that he was working for Soviet intelligence.⁸³ ADA remained in Paris, filming the documents provided by Maclean from embassy files, then passing the film to an illegal codenamed FORD for transmission to the Centre.⁸⁴

The news in December 1938 of Maclean’s drunken security lapse was balanced by a spectacular success. In the same month Burgess reported, probably via Paris, that he had succeeded in joining the Secret Intelligence Service. He had been taken on by SIS’s newest branch, Section D, founded earlier in the year to devise dirty tricks ranging from sabotage to psychological warfare (delicately described as ways of “attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military force”) for use in a future war.⁸⁵ Instead of being elated by the news, however, the Centre appeared almost paralyzed by fear and suspicion.

THE EXPOSURE OF two London illegal residents, Reif and Maly, and the legal resident, Grafpen, as imaginary enemy agents, combined with the defection of Orlov, put the entire future of intelligence operations in Britain in doubt. The illegal residency had been wound up and, with one exception, the staff of the legal residency were recalled to Moscow.⁸⁶ The only remaining INO officer in London, Anatoli Veniaminovich Gorsky, was poorly briefed about even the most important British agents. In the summer of 1939, when Philby was due to return to London after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Gorsky told the Centre, “When you give us orders on what to do with SÖHNCHEN, we would appreciate some orientation on him, for he is known to us only in the most general terms.”⁸⁷

An assessment in the Centre concluded that intelligence work in Britain “was based on doubtful sources, on an agent network acquired at the time when it was controlled by enemies of the people and was therefore extremely dangerous.” It concluded with a recommendation to break contact with all British agents—the Five included.⁸⁸ Though contact was not yet broken, the Five seem to have been held at arm’s length for most of 1939. Intelligence from them was accepted, often without any visible interest in it, while the Centre continued to debate the possibility that some or all were agents provocateurs. ADA reported that Philby “frequently” complained to Maclean about the NKVD’s lack of contact with, and interest in, him.⁸⁹ Litzi Philby (MARY) and Edith Tudor Hart (EDITH), who were used by Burgess and others as couriers to make contact with the NKVD in Paris in 1938-9, grumbled that their expenses were not being paid. Gorsky reported to the Centre in July 1939:

The Centre replied:

To a remarkable degree, however, the ideological commitment of the main British agents survived the turmoil in the Centre. In 1938 Burgess recruited one of his lovers, Eric Kessler, a Swiss journalist turned diplomat on the staff of the Swiss embassy in London. Later codenamed OREND and SHVEYTSARETS (“Swiss”), Kessler proved a valuable source on Swiss-German relations.⁹¹ Probably in 1939, Burgess recruited another foreign lover, the Hungarian Andrew Revoi, later leader of the exiled Free Hungarians in wartime London. Codenamed TAFFY (“Toffee”), he was described in his KGB file as a pederast; the same source also claimed that he had “had homosexual relations with a Foreign Office official.” Ironically, in 1942 Burgess was also to recruit Revoi as an MI5 source.⁹²

Kim and Litzi Philby, still good comrades according to KGB files though they both now had different partners, made a probably even more important recruitment in 1939: that of the Austrian journalist H. P. Smolka, whom Litzi had known in Vienna. Soon after the Nazi Anschluss, which united Austria with Germany in 1938, Smolka became a naturalized British subject with the name of Peter Smollett. Codenamed ABO by the Centre, Smollett later succeeded in becoming head of the Russian section in the wartime Ministry of Information.⁹³

The signature of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow on August 23, 1939 was an even bigger blow to the morale of the NKVD’s British agents than the turmoil in the Centre. Exchanging toasts with Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Stalin told him, “I can guarantee, on my word of honor, that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.” The ideological agents recruited during the 1930s had been motivated, at least in part, by the desire to fight fascism. Most, after varying degrees of inner turmoil, overcame their sense of shocked surprise at the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Over the previous few years, they had become sufficiently indoctrinated, often self-indoctrinated, in Stalinist double-think to perform the intellectual somersaults required to sustain their commitment to the vision of the Soviet Union as the world’s first worker-peasant state, the hope of progressive mankind.

A minority of the ideological agents in the West, however, were so sickened by the Nazi-Soviet Pact that they ended their connection with the NKVD. The most important of those who broke contact in Britain was FLEET, Goronwy Rees. During a visit to Moscow in 1993, Rees’s daughter Jenny was informed, accurately, during a briefing by an SVR representative that Rees had refused to cooperate after the Pact: “We hear no more of him after that.” At the end of the briefing, Jenny Rees asked perceptively: “You know something else, do you, about Rees that you are not going to tell me?”⁹⁴ The SVR did indeed. The most important of the secrets that the SVR was unwilling to reveal was that Burgess, by now an SIS officer, panicked when Rees decided to break away, sent an urgent message to the Centre warning that Rees might betray both himself and Blunt, and asked for Rees to be assassinated. The Centre refused. Rees’s KGB file, however, records that he did not betray Burgess and Blunt because of his “old friendship” with Burgess. In an attempt to make betrayal less likely, Burgess told Rees that he too had been disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and had ended illegal work for the Communist Party.⁹⁵ Maclean was also deeply worried by Rees’s “defection.” Years later, as he was beginning to crack under the strain of his double life as British diplomat and Soviet agent, he spat at Rees: “You used to be one of us, but you ratted!”⁹⁶

The doubts about Moscow felt by some of the NKVD’s British agents after the Nazi-Soviet Pact were more than matched by the Centre’s doubts about its agents. The Center launched an investigation into the possibility that Philby was either a German or a British agent.⁹⁷ Since Philby had provided the original leads which led to the recruitment of Burgess and Maclean, and ultimately to all the Cambridge recruits, doubts about him reflected on the whole British agent network. The lowest point in the history of NKVD operations in Britain came at the beginning of 1940 when Gorsky, the last member of the London legal residency, was withdrawn to Moscow, leaving not a single NKVD officer active in Britain. A file in the KGB archives records, “The residency was disbanded on the instruction of Beria [head of the NKVD].”⁹⁸ Beria’s reasons are not recorded, at least in the files examined by Mitrokhin, but chief among them was undoubtedly the recurrent fear that the British agent network was deeply suspect. In February 1940 the Centre issued orders for all contact with Philby to be broken off.⁹⁹ Contact with Burgess was terminated at about the same time.¹⁰⁰

DURING THE LATER 1930s the hunt for “enemies of the people” replaced intelligence collection as the main priority of NKVD foreign operations. The NKVD’s most active foreign intelligence agency was Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks, whose persecution of INO officers steadily diminished the flow of foreign intelligence and degraded its analysis at the Center. Even the executioners abroad, however, were not immune from the Terror at home. Serebryansky himself became one of the victims of his own witch-hunt. Though he held the Order of Lenin for his many victories over enemies of the people, he was recalled to Moscow in November 1938 and exposed as “a spy of the British and French intelligence services.” An inquiry later concluded that his network contained “a large number of traitors and plain gangster elements.” Though the allegations of espionage for Britain and France were absurd, the charge that Serebryansky had inflated both the size of his illegal network and the scale of its accomplishments in reports to the Centre was probably well founded.¹⁰¹

Serebryansky’s successor was Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, who a few months earlier had assassinated the émigré Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevkhen Konovalets with an ingeniously booby-trapped box of chocolates. In March 1939 Sudoplatov became deputy head of foreign intelligence, thus bringing “special tasks” and INO into closer association than ever before.¹⁰² He was personally instructed by Stalin that his chief task was to send a task force to Mexico to assassinate Leon Trotsky. The killing of Trotsky, codenamed operation UTKA (“Duck”), had become the chief objective of Stalin’s foreign policy. Even after the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, discovering the intentions of Adolf Hitler remained a lower priority than arranging the liquidation of the great heretic. Sudoplatov’s task force was composed of Spanish and Mexican NKVD agents recruited during the Civil War, supervised by his deputy, Leonid Eitingon, whose long experience of “special actions” included the liquidation of “enemies of the people” in Spain.¹⁰³

The task force consisted of three groups. The first was an illegal network headed by the Spanish Communist Caridad Mercader del Rio (codenamed MOTHER), who was both recruited and seduced by Eitingon, one of the NKVD’s most celebrated womanizers.¹⁰⁴ The most important agent in Caridad Mercader’s group was her son Ramón (codenamed RAYMOND),¹⁰⁵ who traveled on a doctored Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jacson (an eccentric NKVD spelling of Jackson). Like Eitingon, Ramón Mercader employed seduction as an operational technique, using his affair with the American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff to penetrate Trotsky’s villa near Mexico City. His opportunity came when Ageloff began work as one of Trotsky’s secretaries early in 1940. Each day Mercader drove her to Trotsky’s villa in the morning and returned to collect her after work. Gradually he became a well-known figure with the guards and some of Trotsky’s entourage, who, in March 1940, allowed him into the villa for the first time. Mercader’s role at this stage was still that of penetration agent rather than assassin, with the task of reporting on the villa’s defenses, occupants and guards.¹⁰⁶

The attack on the villa was to be led by a second group of agents drawn from veterans of the Spanish Civil War, headed by the celebrated Mexican Communist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (codenamed KONE),¹⁰⁷ who was animated by an exuberant ideological mix of art, revolution, Stalinism and exhibitionism. Both Mercader and Siqueiros were later to become well known for their involvement in operation UTKA. KGB files, however, also reveal the involvement of a shadowy third group of assassins headed by one of the most remarkable of all Soviet illegals, Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (then codenamed MAKS and FELIPE), who had taken a leading role in liquidating Trotskyists during the Spanish Civil War, as well as training saboteurs and arsonists to operate behind Franco’s lines.¹⁰⁸ It is a measure of Grigulevich’s skill in assuming false identities that, though born a Lithuanian Jew,¹⁰⁹ he was to succeed, a decade later, in passing himself off as a Costa Rican diplomat.¹¹⁰ Early in 1940 he recruited Siqueiros’s former pupil, the painter Antonio Pujol (codenamed JOSE), whom he later described as lacking in initiative but “very loyal, exceptionally reliable and quite bold,” to act as Siqueiros’s second-in-command in the assault on Trotsky’s villa.¹¹¹ Grigulevich’s other recruits included his future wife and assistant, the Mexican Communist Laura Araujo Aguilar (codenamed LUISA).¹¹²

A key part of the assault plan was the infiltration in April 1940 of a young American agent, Robert Sheldon Harte (codenamed AMUR), posing as a New York Trotskyist, as a volunteer guard in Trotsky’s villa. Harte’s role was to open the main gate when the assault group staged its surprise attack in the middle of the night.¹¹³ Though enthusiastic, he was also naive. Grigulevich decided not to brief him on what would happen after he opened the villa gate.

KGB records identify Grigulevich as the real leader of the assault on Trotsky’s villa.¹¹⁴ Grigulevich’s role in the attack was two-fold: to ensure that Siqueiros’s assault group gained entrance to the villa compound, and to try to inject some element of discipline into the attack. Left to his own devices, Siqueiros would have led the assault with all guns blazing but probably have made few attempts to cover his tracks. On the evening of May 23, 1940 Siqueiros and a group of about twenty followers put on a mixture of army and police uniforms and armed themselves with pistols and revolvers. As they did so, according to one of their number, they “laughed and joked as if it were a feast day.”¹¹⁵ Then, with Pujol carrying the only machine-gun, Grigulevich and the assault group set off to assassinate Trotsky.¹¹⁶

On arriving at the villa in the early hours of May 24, Grigulevich spoke to the American volunteer guard, Harte, who opened the gate.¹¹⁷ The assault group raked the bedrooms with gun fire to such effect that the Mexican police later counted seventy-three bullet holes in Trotsky’s bedroom wall. Remarkably, however, Trotsky and his wife survived by throwing themselves beneath their bed. Though an incendiary bomb was thrown into the bedroom of their small grandson, he too escaped by hiding under his bed.¹¹⁸ Harte was shocked by the attack—particularly, perhaps, by the attempt to kill Trotsky’s grandchild. He angrily told the assault group that, had he known how they would behave, he would never have let them in. To prevent Harte revealing what had happened, he was taken away and shot.¹¹⁹ A few months later, Siqueiros was tracked down and arrested.¹²⁰ Grigulevich, however, managed to smuggle himself, Pujol and Laura Araujo Aguilar out of the country without his identity being discovered by the Mexican police. From 1942 to 1944 he ran an illegal residency in Argentina which, according to KGB files, planted more than 150 mines in cargoes and ships bound for Germany.¹²¹

The failure of the attack on Trotsky’s villa, followed by the dispersal of Siqueiros’s gunmen, led to the promotion of Ramón Mercader from penetration agent to assassin. Mercader succeeded partly because he was patient. Five days after the raid he met Trotsky for the first time. Amiable as ever, he gave Trotsky’s grandson a toy glider and taught him how to fly it. Over the next three months he paid ten visits to the villa, sometimes bringing small presents with him and always taking care not to overstay his welcome. Finally, on August 20, he brought an article he had written and asked for Trotsky’s advice. As Trotsky sat reading it at his study desk, Mercader took an icepick from his pocket and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the back of Trotsky’s skull.¹²²

Mercader had expected Trotsky to die instantly and silently, thus allowing him to make his escape to a car nearby where his mother and her lover, Eitingon, were waiting. But Trotsky, though mortally wounded, let out “a terrible piercing cry.” (“I shall hear that cry all my life,” said Mercader afterwards.) Mercader was arrested and later sentenced to twenty years in jail.¹²³ Eitingon persuaded his mother to flee with him to Russia, promising to marry her if she did so. In Moscow Señora Mercader was welcomed by Beria, received by Stalin in the Kremlin and decorated with the Order of Lenin. But within a few years, abandoned by Eitingon and denied permission to leave Russia, she was consumed with guilt at having turned her son into an assassin and then leaving him to languish in a Mexican jail.¹²⁴

Ramón Mercader kept the Stalinist faith throughout his twenty years in prison. History, he claimed, would see him as a soldier who had served the cause of the working-class revolution by ridding it of a traitor. KGB files reveal (contrary to most published accounts) that when Mercader was finally released and traveled to Moscow in 1960, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, along with a general’s pension and a three-room apartment, and was personally congratulated by Khrushchev. Twenty years after the assassination of Trotsky, the liquidation of enemies of the people abroad still remained, on a reduced scale, a significant part of KGB foreign operations.¹²⁵