A MOB HIT Chapter Two

I can sum up Joseph Stalin (above) 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 in the center of the Ukrainian 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 just 340,000 rubles, but most of it was new 500 ruble notes, which could not be spent. An embarrassed Lenin  had then distanced himself from Stalin, and the Czars secret police arrested and banished Stalin to Siberia, where he was cut off from advancement in Communist Party politics.

The young Stalin (above) had been born 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.  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, and rose to replace Lenin himself in the later 1920's. But he never forgot how Trotsky had belittle him.

In the winter of 1938, Stalin personally ordered that Trotsky “...should be eliminated within a year.” The assignment, given the code name “Pato”, in English, “Duck”,  eventually fell to NKVD agent Leonid Eitingon, (above),  who was living in Spain with his Cuban mistress, Caridad Mercader. Eitingon's  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 Caridad, They were followed soon afterward by her adult son Ramon. 

 Ramnon Mercader 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 Frank Jackson, who had died in Spain.  This easily pierced identity was used to make Ramon/Jackson  more believable when he claimed to actually be Jacques Mornard,  the Communist son of a Belgium diplomat.  Ramon had used both identities before,  in Paris,  to seduce a young American communist, whose sister was a typist for Trotsky.  The seduction had led nowhere operationally,  but illustrated Stalin's determination to infiltrate Trotsky's inner circle 

After the 1917 revolution, Lenin rewarded Stalin with the job of editor of the party newspaper “Pravda” - Truth. The Georgian used that as a base to win election to the parties' powerful Central Committee. Then, after the Red Army, which Trotsky (above) had founded and led, had defeated the last of the Czarist holdouts in 1919, Lenin saw an opportunity in the power vacuum in Poland.  In 1920 he dispatched the Red Army to spread the revolution beyond Russia's borders. Operations aimed at Warsaw were, of course,  commanded by Trotsky, while Stalin commanded troops in southern Poland. The Poles managed to defeat the Soviets, in part because Stalin refused to cooperate with Trotsky's forces. At the next party conference, Trotsky criticized Stalin in a public speech.

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 after Ramon arrived in New York,  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, using his old Frank/Jacques cover.

During 1921 Stalin (above, left) managed to re-ingratiate himself with the boss, always siding with Lenin (above, right)  in petty squabbles with Trotsky and other party leaders. In response, in 1922, Lenin named Stalin General Secretary of the party. Shortly thereafter Lenin suffered the first of several strokes, and began to withdraw from leadership. When Lenin finally died in January of 1923, control of the Communist Party and national leadership quickly fell under Stalin's control. 

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 and grandson Seva, a servant girl, Trotsky's three male assistants and his two American bodyguards, as well as the newest bodyguard, Robert Harte.  But Harte was also 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.

It took three years for Stalin to isolate and then have Trotsky expelled from the Communist Party, and another year to have him exiled from the Soviet Union.  Over the next six years Trotsky was forced to move to first Turkey, then to France, and then Norway, always writing criticisms of Stalin, always the inspiration for the hated "fellow travelers" to the International Communist Party.   At the same time, in a series of “show trials”, Stalin eliminated all domestic opposition to his rule. Best estimates are that during the decade Stalin ordered the murder or imprisonment in Siberian “Gulags” of over 2 million Russians, and starved to death another 4 million through his collective farm programs. By the time the 57 year old Trotsky arrived in Mexico, in February of 1937,   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 Mexico Leonid Etington avoided all contact with the Russian embassy. All his communications with Moscow were made through Berlin. Nazi agents kept watch on Trotsky's movements outside the villa, while two agents, Julia Barrados and Anita Lopez,  took an apartment three blocks from 19 Avenida Viena, 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 began writing what was to be his ultimate anti-Stalinist work, a biography of the Georgian himself.  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 biography that finally convinced Stalin to murder Trotsky as soon as possible.

At four the next morning, 24 May, Sequeiros, 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, gag and tie 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 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 Siqueiros, 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, intending on destroying 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.  The Russian realized he could no longer trust Harte, and so 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, 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.

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A MOB HIT Chapter One

I am certain Robert Harte died knowing he had made a terrible mistake. But by then it was too late to fix.  He should have acted before the man came around the corner from Morelos Street, and approached the two Mexico Police officers guarding the single story hacienda at 19 Avenida Viena (below). It was just after four on Friday morning, 24 May, 1940, in the quiet farming suburb of Carranza, at the edge of the arroyo of the Churubusco River.  The man raised an arm in greeting. The officers were deceived for a moment by his large military looking overcoat.  And then, as he came closer, his huge, almost comical mustache.  But before they could say anything, the man suddenly shouted “Viva Almazan!”, and pulled his pistol.  The right wing revolutionary Juan Almazan was one of the richest and most famous men in Mexico, and currently an unpopular candidate for the Presidency.  The use of his name kept the two officers bewildered just long enough to be disarmed.

A half dozen men appeared out of the darkness and shoved the officers through the front door of the villa (above).  In the reception hall were three more police officers, sleeping.  At the same time the telephone lines into the villa were cut. All five prisoners were quickly gagged and tied up, and left on the floor, under guard, while another score of armed men filed silently into the dimly lit foray. The mustached man knocked heavily on the left hand inside door.  After a moment, a voice was heard from inside the villa, asking “Qué es ?” The mustached man demanded, “Abra la puerta! La policía de la ciudad de México.” There was a hesitation, and then the voice said, “Un momento”, followed by the sound of a bolt being lifted, and a lock being turned.

The second it began to move the door was violently shoved fully open, bowling over the young man with his hand on the inside door knob.  Instantly, eager hands lifted him up and spun him around. Without pause he was hustled across the Villa's 100 yard long garden (above) There was a seven foot wall to the left (above, left), topped by barbed wire, and a series of doors to the villa's separate rooms to the right (above, right).  At the end of the garden stood a small, two story red brick guest house, painted white (below). 

With military precision the men divided. Several spread out in front of the guest house (above), while others filtered to the gate beyond, which opened on Churubusco street. Still  more men ran to a Ford pickup and a Dodge passenger car, parked against the back gate.  At that moment, the electrical power to the villa was cut off.  At the same time  a new handful of armed men men raced through the front door, turned left in the hall and out into the garden, where they split up, one man stopping in front of each of the villa's doors.  Just as they did so, a voice called out from the guest house, “Es que usted , Roberto?. Lo que está mal?” A loud blasts of automatic gunfire ripped the suburban night apart.  Over the next two minutes, the only exit from the guest house was blocked by a continuous hail of lead.

As soon as they heard the gunfire, the figure outside the farthest door bent down and crashed through the five foot high door and into the study beyond (above). As he did so the man in front of the middle room, stood and pulled the bolt of his MP 35 German made machine gun, and the third man bent over and crashed through the remaining door into a bedroom. (below) 

 Immediately all three men opened fire, blasting the adobe and plaster walls separating them, filling the bedroom sandwiched between with 200 deadly 9mm lead missiles. The firing went on for less than fifteen seconds, while over 70 bullets thudding into the wall and the bed's headboard. Then the middle gunman dropped his weapon, pulled a pistol and burst through the french doors, emptying a clip directly into the lumps on the bed (below).

As he did so the men in the foray silently filtered toward the back gate, followed in their turn by the kill squad, who dropped incendiary grenades behind them, and then the squad assigned to suppress the guards in the guest house. The raiding party then piled into the two stolen vehicles and disappeared into the night. Within five minutes of the two police officers being surprised at the front door, the raid was over.  It would be some hours before the raiders realized they had failed.

The target had survived. His wife Natalia had been awakened by the crash of the inner door. She shook her husband and then pulled him onto the floor beside her. The hail of bullets, when it came, passed over their heads, and the pistol fire punctured the mattress they had been sleeping on, but the two elderly intended victims were safe, unseen, on the floor of their dark bedroom.

As soon as he was certain the raiders had left, the intended target, the old man man (above, center), asked Natalia (above left) to check on their 14 year old grandson Seva (above, right) , who was sleeping in the bedroom next to theirs. Even after pushing aside a burning chest of drawers, Natalia could not find her grandson. Her first panic was that he had been kidnapped. But then she heard his voice from the library at the end of the house, beyond, calling out in Russian, “Ded?” - grandfather? She found Seva clutching his bleeding foot. He had been awakened when the gunfire at the guest house erupted, and had hidden under his bed.  A ricochet had clipped his toe. And that was the only blood spilled that night at 19 Avenida Viena.

Meanwhile, the bearded old man retrieved his wire rimmed glasses, and then ran into his study, next to the bedroom. Inside he found two small fires, which he quickly extinguished. That saved the secondary target of the would-be assassins – the biography he was writing of his old rival. Then he joined his wife and grandson in the library. He warmly hugged them both, and told his wife, “Natalia, they have given us one more day of life.” It was a phrase the old man, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, more popularly known as Leon Trotsky, would repeat every morning for the rest of his life.

There was one resident of the villa missing after the raid,  25 year old New Yorker, Robert Harte (above).  But had he left with his fellow conspirators , or was he the victim of a kidnapping?   The day after the raid the Communist newspaper in Mexico City reported the shooting had been staged to garner public sympathy for Trotsky.  The next day the police brought in   “The Old Man's” bodyguards for two grueling days of questioning.  But at the same time they began taking a hard look at the communist members of the International Brigade,  veterans of the Spanish Civil War.  First step in this line was to interview the chauffeurs for the Mexican Communist Party. And the name that kept popping up here was the then famous Mexican painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros. 

Siqueiros had recently been paying visits to an isolated farm a few miles south of Carranza, rented by Siqueiros' sister. And the morning after the attack, not far from the farm, the stolen pickup truck had been found abandoned and burned. A week after the assault, the farm house and property were searched by the Mexican government. On the property, beside the road from Carranza, recently disturbed earth was spotted. A month after the attack, in a shallow grave, the police found the disfigured corpse of Robert Harte (above).  He had been shot twice, and then quick lime had been poured over the body.  It burned some his features, but it also preserved most of the flesh and bones.

A warrant for Siqueiros' arrest was issued. But rather than surrender, Siqueiros (above) began issuing written statements to the communist newspaper, at first protesting his innocence, and condemning police incompetence. But as member after communist member of the International Brigade was arrested, until the number reached 27, and their confessions and connections to Siqueiros appeared in the general press,  Siqueiros' statements to the Communist press began to shift to defiant and arrogant,  justifying the attempted murder of Leon Trotsky. And then, finally, when Sisqueiros turned himself in.  He was immediately released without bail. And then promptly disappeared.

Trotsky was not surprised by the ease with which his attempted assassin escaped justice. Nor was he in any doubt that Sisqueiros was the actor but not the author of the murderous attack on his home and family. As “Bugs” Moran had insisted after the Chicago St. Valentines Day Massacre that “Only Al Capone kills like that”,  four years before the May 1940 attack on his own life,  Leon Trotsky had prophetically written, "(Joseph) Stalin...seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent,  but at his skull.”

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VICKSBURG Chapter Forty

The 200 blue clad troopers from the 6^th Missouri Volunteer Cavalry reached the New Orleans and Jackson railroad line about a mile and a half north of Crystal Springs, Mississippi just after 9:00am on Monday, 11 May, 1863. They began their destructive work at once. 

Under orders from their commander, Colonel Thomas Clark Wright (above),  half stood guard while the other 100 stripped a mile and a half of telegraph wire from its poles and piled it atop bridges over Vaughn and Rhodes Creeks, which they then set ablaze. The Yankees also tore up 3 short sections of rails between the creeks. These were heated over their own burning cross ties and 125 bales of cotton, labeled “Property of the Confederate States of America”. The softened rails were warped enough to make them unusable.

Clark Wright's uncivil war – he preferred the name Clark - began just a week after Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter. In a coup on 20 April, 1861, on the border with “Bleeding Kansas”, pro-slavery militia had captured the Federal arsenal in Liberty, Missouri – also Jesse James' hometown. A similar attempt at the St. Louis arsenal was foiled, and pro-Federal forces quickly took control the state government, and its bank accounts. 

On 1 August, on the Iowa border, 500 pro-union militiamen, lead by 44 year old Colonel David Moore, “put the bayonet” to 2,000 poorly equipped pro-slavery men in Athens, Missouri. Two of the rebels sent running were Colonel Moore's own sons. A week later, Colonel Thomas Clark Wright participated in the Battle of Wilson's Creek (above), which proved emblematic for Missouri's entire war.  It was a bloody tactical defeat for the Federals and a bloody strategic defeat for the Confederates - in short, everybody lost.

The war in Missouri saw more fighting than any other states except Virginia and Tennessee, and more division than most. A year later, after the Federal victory in the 3 hour battle in the town square of Kirksville, in northeastern Missouri, Colonel John McNeil (above) ordered 15 surrendered rebels executed, and Lieutenant Colonel Frisby McCullough shot as a “Bushwhacker”, even though he was wearing a Confederate uniform and had papers confirming his rank.

Peremptory violence such as this, and that of terrorists “Bloody Bill” Anderson and William Quantrill ate at discipline, until the war in Missouri descended into an endless series of raids, ambushes, torture, murders, kidnappings, lynchings, barn burnings, poisoned wells, rapes and robberies, more often criminal as militarily motivated. Often the perpetrators knew the victims. Often they were neighbors. Occasionally, they were even related.

Missouri's war would not end until 3 April, 1881, when Jesse James would be murdered in his St. Joseph parlor. Before then, perhaps 40,000 men, women and children would die – 27,000 from 1861 to 1865 alone. And Colonel Thomas Clark Wright rose from this moral swamp. As he finished his 11 May, 1863 raid on the New Orleans And Jackson railroad, Colonel Wright released 18 prisoners on parole. But 15 others were trussed up and and tied to mules, to suffer the bruising 25 mile ride back headquarters of the XVII Corps, north of Utica, Mississippi on the Old Port Gibson Road, at the Roach Plantation. Colonel Wright reported he believed it would take the rebels 5 or 6 days to repair all the damage his men had done to the railroad. But things in Mississippi were changing much faster than that.

Owner of the plantation he called Woodville was James P. Roach, banker and a partner in the firm of Wirt Adams and Company on Crawford Street in Vicksburg (above). James, his wife Loulie and their 6 children had lived on Depot street for a decade, 

To James his plantation and the human beings who toiled and suffered on it were an “investment property”, collateral for loans and a status symbol. But he did not live to see the war fought to defend his wealth. In 1860, after a long illness, James Roach had died at 50 years of age. He left behind an 18 year old son Tom, 15 year old Nora, 12 year old Mahala, 5 year old Sophy and John, and 4 year old Jim.

In 1860 Vicksburg had a population of 4,600 white souls. With the slowly closing Federal noose around the city, 3 years later it had swollen to perhaps 10,000. 

After Pemberton left for his first field command, the man in charge of Vicksburg was 42 year old Alabamian, Major General Martin Luther Smith (above). Besides commanding the division which had withstood Sherman's January Chickasaw Bayou assault, he was generally considered the best engineer in the Confederacy. But Smith was also responsible for the river batteries Joe Johnston had criticized the previous December. And in the event, that criticism had been proven prophetic.

Beneath Smith was the 42 year old New Yorker Colonel Edward Higgins. He had spent half his life at sea, which seemingly made him the perfect commander for the 3,600 gunners who had defended the Vicksburg river front up to this point. But Major Higgins had also commanded the guns of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, on the river below New Orleans. And those forts and guns had been “run”, and bypassed, much the same way the Vicksburg batteries had. The delta forts held out until late April, 1862 when they and Higgins surrendered. While on parole, Higgins had been promoted to Colonel, and when officially exchanged in September, he had been assigned to Vicksburg.

Commanding a division beneath Major General Smith was 32 year old Major General Horace Forney (above).  An 1852 graduate of West Point, Forney had returned there in 1858 after the the Mormon Expectation, to teach tactics. He had resigned his commission when Alabama seceded. As the colonel of the 10^th Alabama regiment, he had been solely responsible for the defense of the Shenandoah Valley, while the rest of the Confederate army concentrated at Mananas Junction to defeat the first Yankee invasion of Virginia. Badly wounded in the arm at the skirmish at Dransville, he was promoted to first Brigadier General and then, in October 1862 to Major General, and given command of the District of the Gulf.

His rapid promotion was primarily politically and romantically inspired, since while recovering he had courted and married 22 year old Miss Septima Sexta Middleton Rutledge, great granddaughter of Edward Rutledge and Arthur Middleton – both signers of the Declaration of Independence. Her politically powerful Alabama family insisted her husband be a great soldier. Finally sent to Vicksburg, his duties were limited to the garrisoning of a prepared position.

Smith's own division occupied a mile of artillery redoubts with connecting trenches behind the Military Road running from Fort Hill (above)  at the far left of the line,  to its junction with Graveyard Road.  

From the Stockade Redoubt south to the Jackson Road was defended by Forney's division. From there the line bent inward to the Baldwin Ferry Road and the Southern Railroad line, to Hall's Ferry Road, and terminated at the South Fort, and the Mississippi River.

The troops intended to occupy the line south of the Jackson road to the River if need be, including the divisions of 45 year old Major General Carter Littlepage Stevenson, 32 year old Major General John Stevens Bowen, and 44 year old Major General William Wing Loring, were gathered 7miles to the east of Vicksburg, at the railroad stop of Bovina, under 49 year old Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton, as an offensive force.

General Smith acknowledged that the defense line he had constructed might have been stronger, if it had occupied an equally high ridge some 600 yards further east. But that idea, “increasing as it did the length of the entire line of defense, was abandoned for want of sufficient force to occupy it.” In other words, the Gibraltar of the Confederacy was not the strongest position on the Mississippi River. It was the strongest position possible.

That evening, when Colonel Thomas Clark Wright's exhausted troopers fell into their sleeping bags on the Roach Plantation, Wright's day was not yet done,  He had to write out his report to his superiors - , the damage to the rail line and the prisoners he had taken. And then he added that he had been told a brigade of Confederate infantry  had passed down the rail road to Jackson a few hours before his arrival. And, he added,  there were reports of a second brigade which was supposed to be passing on to Jackson in a few hours. 

The first Brigade had been Greeg's 4,600 men. The Yankees now knew they would be waiting for them in Jackson or Raymond.  But the following brigade , under 38 year old Brigadier General Samuel Bell Maxey (above), was south of the break Wright's men had made in the New Orleans and Jackson rail line.  Delayed because of the break, those 4,000 men were ordered to return to Port Hudson. Thus Wright's cavalry raid handed McPherson's Corps the victory at on 12 May, before a shot was even fired.

But there was also another effect of the raid. Later in the month, while acknowledging  that Colonel Wright had always been following his orders,  Lieutenant General Grant would suggest to subordinates, that the Missourian's actions with regard to taking and treating of prisoners was excessive.  And before the month of June was over, before Vicksburg had surrendered, Colonel Thomas Clark Wright would quietly resign his position in the Federal army.   This was a war for the future soul of the nation. And the leadership of the Federal Army agreed there must be limits to the actions of the winners, else what was won would prove not worth the price that was paid. 

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