POLITICS AS MURDER Chapter Two

 

I can sum up Joseph Stalin in a single sentence: he rose to leadership in the International Communist Party as a bank robber, financing Lenin's political activities. His intended Pièce de résistance sent twenty bomb throwing Communists into a crowded Yerevan Square (above) in the center of the Georgian capital of Tilfis, in broad daylight, to hijack a cash shipment. 

The resulting carnage killed forty people and wounded another fifty. The condemnation over the blood bath was unanimous, even from within the communist ranks. Worse, it netted 340,000 rubles, but most of those were brand new 500 ruble notes, which could not be spent.  

An embarrassed Vladmir Lenin (above, born Vladmir Ulyanov), leader of the bolshevik wing of the Communist Party,  had to distance himself from the bloody operation.

Lenin even had to disguise himself (above) and flee from Russia, escaping first to Finland and finally to Switzerland. 

The mastermind of the disaster, Stalin, also escaped to Finland, but was later arrested by the Czar's secret police, tried for subversion and banished to Siberia. There he was cut off from advancement in Communist Party politics.  If they had only executed the man, tens of millions of people might have been saved.

The young Stalin (above) had been born in Georgian, and spoke Russian with an accent, marking him as a “country bumpkin” to the party intellectuals, like Trotsky and Lenin.  He had two webbed toes on his left foot, a sign of fetal alcohol syndrome.  He was raised by an alcoholic father who regularly beat his mother. At seven he caught smallpox, which left his face scared.  Shortly thereafter, he was struck by a carriage which broke his left arm.  It was set badly, and healed permanently shorter than the right. Everything set him off as an outsider. 

 He fell in with street gangs, until his desperate mother secured him a scholarship to a Georgian Orthodox seminary.  But his father refused to pay a tuition hike, and abandoned his wife and son. 

 But Stalin persevered, switched his religion to revolutionary politics and rose to replace Lenin himself in the later 1920's. But he never forgot how Trotsky had belittled him. 

In contrast, Jewish Leon Trotsky (Above, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was born into wealth. He spoke fluent French, English and German.  His writing for and editing of revolutionary newspapers, like kept him close to Lenin. However it also led to repeated arrests by the Czarist secret police. 

Twice he was sentenced to Siberia, and twice he escaped to rejoin with Lenin.  Come the 1917 revolution, Trotsky was the number two man in the Communist party. When Lenin needed to end the war with German and the Austria-Hungarian empire, Trotsky negotiated the treaty. And post revolution, when civil war broke out, Trotsky became head of the Red Army.    

All of Trotsky's power flowed from Lenin (above, center), but beginning in 1920 the communist leader suffered a series of strokes. And increasingly Stalin inserted himself into the leadership, slowly pushing Trotsky (above, right center) aside. By the time Lenin died in 1924, Stalin had isolated Trotsky. Stalin had him expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. His supporters within Russia were eliminated during the purges of 1934 to 1938.

Hounded by Soviet agents from Turkey to France, to Norway and at last,  in 1937, to Mexico, Trotsky continued to write articles denouncing Stalin's version of communism, 

Best estimates are that during the 1930's Stalin ordered the murder or imprisonment in Siberian “Gulags” of over 2 million Russians, and starved to death another 4 million through his inept collective farm programs. By the time the 57 year old Trotsky arrived in Mexico his was the only Communist voice still critical of the paranoid 5 foot, five inch tall Stalin.  But in their article noting his arrival, Time Magazine wrote, “Today Trotsky is in Mexico — the ideal country for an assassination”.

In the winter of 1938, Stalin personally ordered that Trotsky “...should be eliminated within a year.” The assignment, given the code name “Pato”, or, in English, “Duck”,  eventually fell to NKVD agent Leonid Eitingon's (above),  budget for the murder of this one man was $300,000.  First, Leonid needed a trusted agent in Mexico, where Trotsky now lived.  He recruited a Mexican veteran of the Spanish Civil War, painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.  Leonid then moved to New York City with his Cuban mistress, Caridad Mercader, They were followed soon afterward by her adult son Ramon. 

Ramnon Mercader (above) had also fought in Spain on the Republican side,  trained as a spy in Russia and already had two NKVD developed identities.  One was a stolen Canadian passport in the name of American Frank Jackson, who had died in Spain.  

This easily pierced identity was used to make the Ramon/Jackson identity more believable when he claimed to actually be Jacques Mornard (above),  the Communist son of a Belgium diplomat.  Ramon had used both identities before, in Paris,  to seduce Slyvia Ageloff, a young American communist , whose sister, Ruth,  was a typist for Trotsky.  The seduction had led nowhere operationally,  but illustrated Stalin's determination to infiltrate Trotsky's inner circle via as many paths as possible. 

Once in America, Leonid  set up "Amtorg Corporation",  a Brooklyn based import-export business, which allowed him to transfer funds to Mexico City for Trotksy's assassination. Shortly after he arrived, Ramon (above)  re- reignited his affair with the young American typist.  It was a short interlude. 

Three months later, in September of 1939,  Leonid traveled to Mexico City,  to check on Siqueiros' preparations for the assassination.  He was followed a month later by Ramon (above), using his old Frank/Jacques covers.

Siqueiros reported that he already had an agent inside Trotsky's villa (above) -  the cook Carman Palma. She  had supplied detailed floor plans, daily schedules and personal habits of the residents – “The Old Man”, his wife Natalia,  grandson Seva, and a servant girl, 

There was also Trotsky's three male assistants and his two American bodyguards, as well as the newest bodyguard, American Robert Harte - who was in fact an NKVD operative, code named “Amur”.   Leonid was impressed, but did not share with Siqueiros any information about Ramon, nor that the operation was receiving  funds and technical support from Adolf Hitler's anticommunist Nazi Germany.

In Mexico Leonid Etington avoided all contact with the Russian embassy. All his communications with Moscow were made through Nazi German diplomatic channels. Nazi agents kept watch on Trotsky's movements outside the villa.

Meanwhile two attractive female communist agents, Julia Barrados and Anita Lopez,  took an apartment three blocks from 19 Avenida Viena (above, side and back), and befriended the police officers guarding the place, often hosting parties for them. 

On Thursday afternoon, 23 May, 1940, a few hours before the actual assault, they even stopped by to confirm everything was as usual and no alarm had been given inside the villa.

Once in Mexico, Trotsky had begun writing what was to be his ultimate anti-Stalinist work, a biography of the Georgian murderer.  Prophetically, Trotsky observed “Stalin...seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent, but at his skull.”  And in detailing Stalin's command of the Tilfis massacre, Trotsky wrote that “Others did the fighting; Stalin supervised them from afar”.  It was this intended biography that finally convinced Stalin to murder Trotsky as soon as possible.

At four the next morning, 24 May, Sequeiros (above), code named “Horse”, and dressed in an over sized coat, and a over sized fake mustache, got the drop on the two police guards. He led the first team into the foray to capture the three sleeping guards, gaged and tied up all five of them. The second team, lead by Russian, Iosif Grubgykevich, code named “Felipe”, knocked on the inner door. Hart opened the door because he recognized “Felipe's” voice.  Hart had been compromised.

Once the guards in the guest house had been pinned down, the operation turned artistic. 

It was Spanish painter Antonio Pujol (above) who burst into the study, and fired into Trotsky's bedroom from the left side.

And Mexican painter Luis Arenal who burst into Seva's room and fired into Trotsky's bedroom from the right.

But it was David Alfaro Siqueiros (above), the most famous painter and biggest ego of the trio, who at the end burst through the French doors and emptied his pistol directly into Trotsky's bed. Then Pujol set off a grenade in the study, intended to destroy Trotsky's biography of Stalin. But it was Arenal who drew the only actual blood, a ricochet from the bedroom wall, which struck 14 year old Seva in the toe.

And then there was the problem of Robert Harte. It appears that he, like many of those who helped the conspirators, had been told the object was only to destroy Trotsky's work, not the man himself.  During the escape Harte became “agitated and upset” with his handler “Felipe” because of the murder attempt.

Iosif Grubgykevich, the Soviet agent, realized they could no longer trust Harte, and after they arrived at the farm rented by Siqueiros' sister, Grubgykevich shot the American once at the base of the skull and once into the temple, the standard NKVD execution method.  The next night his body was dumped into a grave dug along the main road.  It seems certain it was the Mexican communists did the heavy work, because Harte was covered in quick lime (above), under the mistaken belief it would hasten the decay. In fact quick lime preserves flesh. Any trained NKVD agent would know that. Stalin certainly did.  In any case the attempted murder had been a bust. There was going to have to be another attempt. 

- 30 -