Trotsky (27 page)

At the time Orlov mailed his letter, he tried to reach Trotsky by telephone. He called in the evening asking for Natalia or for a secretary who spoke Russian. The call came on a different telephone system from the one installed in the new house. In order to take the call, Natalia would have had to go outside. It was after dark. Trotsky figured it was probably a hoax, and he had to assume it was a plot. Two days later the anonymous letter arrived from San Francisco in two copies, one each for Trotsky and Natalia.

Trotsky sent a copy to Frankel, saying it appeared to be legitimate. What possible motive could the GPU have in sending him such a letter? He supposed that the author was Walter Krivitsky, another Soviet defector living in hiding in the United States. If both anonymous letters came from the same source, Trotsky told Frankel, then the first letter merited more serious consideration. He wondered why he had not been informed of the results of the investigation of Zborowski he had ordered.

As Trotsky puzzled over the identity of his anonymous well-wisher, in room 735 of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD in Moscow, spymaster Sudoplatov was putting together a team of operatives to carry out the “action” Stalin had assigned to him. To head the task force Sudoplatov recruited Leonid Eitingon, Orlov’s deputy and successor as chief of Soviet intelligence in Spain. Eitingon was a logical choice because the operatives would be recruited from the agency’s Spanish network.

The details of the operation were finalized on July 9, 1939. The plan to assassinate Trotsky was code-named Operation Utka, Russian for Duck. It envisioned an assortment of possible methods: “poisoning of food, of water, explosion in home, explosion of automobile using TNT, a direct strike—suffocation, dagger, blow to the head, gunshot. Possibly an armed assault by a group.” Which is to say, whatever it took to achieve the stated goal: “the liquidation of Duck.” Sudoplatov and Eitingon identified the Spanish comrades who were to carry out this very special task. They requested a budget of $31,000 over six months. In the first days of August, Stalin authorized the operation.

O
n August 8, 1939, Trotsky’s grandson Seva arrived in Coyoacán from France. He was escorted by Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, old friends of Trotsky and Natalia. Alfred, Trotsky’s contemporary and one of the founders of the French Communist Party, was a supporter of the Left Opposition until he broke with Trotsky in 1930 and withdrew from politics. The two men, whose friendship survived their political break, had not seen each other since a visit to Prinkipo in 1929. Trotsky and Natalia felt relieved to be reunited with Seva, now thirteen years old and perhaps their sole surviving family member. And they were rejuvenated by the appearance of their old friends. There was much reminiscing about Paris at the turn of the century and much discussion about Europe in the looming shadow of war.

Two days later, the family and their guests headed to Taxco for an extended stay, taking advantage of an arrangement Trotsky had with the pioneering American historian of Latin America, Hubert Herring. Herring put his Taxco home at Trotsky’s disposal in exchange for his participation in Herring’s occasional Mexico seminars. The Taxco idyll was interrupted on August 21 by the shocking news that Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was headed to Moscow to conclude a nonaggression pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Two days later, in a festive late-night ceremony in the Kremlin, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, put their signatures on the Nazi-Soviet pact, as a beaming Stalin looked on
jubilantly. The world was stupefied. The Nazis and the Communists, supposedly ideological opposites, had declared their mutual friendship. The treaty cleared the way for Germany to invade Poland, whose security had been guaranteed by Britain and France. War in Europe, long anticipated, was now imminent.

Joe Hansen was at Trotskyist headquarters in New York City, having been replaced as Trotsky’s American secretary guard—driver by Irish O’Brien, Hansen’s close friend from Salt Lake City. O’Brien assumed that the news of the pact was the signal to break camp in Taxco and return to Coyoacán to monitor the crisis. To his surprise, Trotsky insisted that the pact was of secondary importance. He would not budge.

Back at the house on Avenida Viena, O’Brien’s wife, Fanny, was deluged with requests from news organizations all over the world for Trotsky’s analysis of Stalin’s treaty with Hitler. Unable to get through by telephone, she took a bus to Taxco in order to alert Trotsky to the urgency of his return. Nonetheless, and to O’Brien’s bafflement, “the OM refused to be disturbed.” Only when O’Brien showed him an anxious letter from Hansen saying that the American comrades were waiting for his assessment and his guidance did Trotsky snap to and give the order to start packing.

O’Brien, who was less inclined than Hansen to hero-worship the Old Man, was chagrined at his nonchalance. By delaying his return from Taxco he had squandered an opportunity to make a sizable sum of money from interviews and articles for the major newspapers, news services, and magazines. By the time the vacationers arrived back in Coyoacán on August 30, the offers were drying up. Two days later, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

There was a hint of smugness in Trotsky’s show of imperturbability at this historic moment. For years he had been predicting a rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler, a prospect that began to appear more likely after Germany’s absorption of Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, and especially after the Munich Agreement had sanctioned Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Munich failed to appease Hitler, of course, and when German troops marched into Prague in March 1939, Trotsky felt certain that a Nazi-Soviet accord was in the works.

Trotsky tragically underestimated Stalin, but from early on he was keenly sensitive to the danger posed by Hitler. His writings of the early 1930s that sounded the alarm about the Nazi menace were among the most perceptive and prescient he ever produced. He denounced the Comintern’s policy of labeling the German Social Democrats “social fascists,” which he predicted would facilitate the rise of the National Socialists. He took
Mein Kampf
seriously, warning that if Hitler came to power, the Red Army should immediately be mobilized.

As the Nazis consolidated dictatorial control in 1933, Trotsky changed his mind about remaining inside the Comintern as the Left Opposition. The only way forward, he decided, was to build a Fourth International, to replace the Communist Third International, which had superseded the Socialist Second International, the successor to Karl Marx’s original. The goal was to unite the Trotskyists—the self-styled “Bolshevik-Leninists”—into an organization that would become the true standard-bearer of proletarian internationalism.

Although for the next several years Trotsky and his comrades referred to themselves as members of the Fourth International, formally the organization came into existence only in the summer of 1938. The moment was hardly propitious. Worldwide there were only a few thousand Trotskyists, spread out among numerous marginal organizations in many countries and often riven by factionalism. The French Trotskyists, the most important “section” of the embryonic Fourth International in the early thirties, had been crippled by a factional split. By the time Trotsky arrived in Mexico in 1937, the United States was home to what was easily the largest of the Trotskyist groups, although its total membership probably never exceeded two thousand.

Nor did the movement’s growth prospects appear at all promising in that summer of 1938. In the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists had been either liquidated or banished to the camps. In Germany, Austria, and Italy, fascism reigned. In Spain, where Franco’s Falangist armies were pressing their offensive against the Republican Loyalists, the Trotskyists had been purged or forced to flee the country. In Asia, the Trotskyists were without a significant foothold, least of all in China, which had been fighting for its independence since the full-scale Japanese invasion the year before. It is no wonder, given this depressing state of affairs, that
many Trotskyists were skeptical that this was an appropriate moment to launch a new International.

Trotsky himself, however, was the voice of supreme optimism. Western capitalism was in the throes of an economic depression from which it could not recover. Just as Marx had predicted, capitalism’s internal contradictions were ripening, most portentously in the United States, where President Roosevelt’s New Deal could only postpone the inevitable. Just as the First World War had carried the Bolshevik Party to power in 1917 on a wave of revolution, the next world war would precipitate a revolutionary tidal wave that would sweep the Bolshevik-Leninists to victory. Trotsky’s view of the matter was summed up by the title he gave to his new organization’s programmatic statement: “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International.”

The scene of the founding congress belied such optimism. It took place at the home of Alfred Rosmer in Périgny, a village outside Paris, on September 3, 1938. Twenty-one delegates were in attendance, representing Trotskyist sections in eleven countries. Max Shachtman, of the American group, presided. The delegates elected Lyova and two of Trotsky’s one-time secretaries, Rudolf Klement and Erwin Wolf—all three presumed murdered by the GPU within the past year—as honorary presidents. As a security precaution, it was arranged for the conference to complete its business in a single day. Votes were taken on various reports and resolutions, most of them written by Trotsky, with little time for genuine discussion. Only the Polish delegates openly questioned the wisdom of establishing a new International at a time when the political outlook was so grim.

At the end of the day, a press release announced the historic initiative, although in order to keep the GPU off the trail of the dispersing delegates, the congress was said to have taken place in Lausanne. This deception accomplished nothing, though, because the Russian section was represented at the congress by the Soviet spy Mark Zborowski, who provided Moscow with a complete report, which included his own canny contribution to the proceedings. Upon the election of the International’s executive committee, Zborowski protested that the Russian section had not been given a seat. In response, the congress designated Trotsky as a secret and honorary member of the executive. Since
Trotsky could not directly participate in the executive’s work, his place was filled by the GPU provocateur.

T
HE
F
OURTH
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NTERNATIONAL
was not the only historic congress involving the Trotskyists who gathered in Paris that summer. Among them was Sylvia Ageloff, a Brooklyn native in her late twenties. A short, frumpy dishwater blonde, with a pointed nose and a broad, lipless smile that suggested a smirk, Sylvia was the oldest of three Ageloff sisters, daughters of a Russian émigré father, all of them active in the Trotskyist movement. She was accompanied to Europe by a friend named Ruby Weil, who invited herself along as Sylvia’s traveling companion. The Ageloffs were aware of the rumor that Ruby had joined the Communist Party. What they did not know was that she was working for the GPU.

In Paris, Ruby looked up a friend of her sister, a Belgian in his mid-thirties by the name of Jacques Mornard, and introduced him to Sylvia. This encounter led to others, as Jacques took the ladies sightseeing in his Citroën and entertained them lavishly. In his excellent English, Jacques told them that he was studying journalism at the Sorbonne, that his generous supply of spending money came from his aristocratic parents, and that his father was a high-ranking Belgian diplomat. He proved to be the perfect dilettante, with a smattering of knowledge about art, music, and literature—only politics did not interest him.

Before long, Ruby decided to return to New York, leaving the field to Sylvia. Jacques was tall, lean, and muscular, with swarthy good looks. He took Sylvia to his favorite restaurants, always insisting on ordering the finest wines. The Belgian playboy intoxicated the homely Brooklyn social worker, and he seduced her. In other words, he did exactly what was expected of a penetration agent.

Jacques Mornard’s real name was Ramón Mercader. He was born in Barcelona in 1914, the son of a Catalonian father and a Cuban-born mother, Caridad. She acquired a taste for radical politics not long after she left her husband and moved to Paris with her four children in 1925. The children were shifted back and forth between mother and father, France and Spain. At age fourteen, Ramón entered a hotel management school in Lyon; he later returned to Barcelona and became assistant chef at the Ritz, the city’s premier hotel.

After the Spanish revolution in 1931, when the monarch fled the country and the Republic began its precarious existence, Ramón enlisted in the Spanish army, where he remained for two years and attained the rank of corporal. In 1934, he took part in the Catalonian uprising against rule by Madrid, serving with the Communist forces. After this rebellion was suppressed, Ramón was active in an underground cell of Communist youth in Barcelona. Arrested in June 1935, he was released when the Popular Front government was elected in Madrid at the beginning of 1936.

That summer, Franco and his generals launched their military assault on the Republic from Spanish Morocco. Ramón’s flamboyant mother, now a fervent Communist, distinguished herself by leading an impromptu attack on Francoist machine gun positions in a central plaza in Barcelona, a ferocious onslaught with homemade grenades and rifle fire that wiped out the Francoist units at the cost of many lives. Caridad and her sons Ramón and Pablo were among the first to enlist in the Republican people’s militia. Ramón served as a political commissar with the 27th Division on the Aragon front, with the rank of lieutenant.

The Spanish civil war became the NKVD’s training ground for political terrorism. It organized six schools for saboteurs, the largest with upwards of 600 students. Leonid Eitingon, the NKVD’s deputy resident in Spain, was responsible for training new recruits for commando and sabotage operations and for organizing detachments to carry out sabotage and terrorist acts deep inside enemy territory. Eitingon and Caridad Mercader became lovers, which made Ramón, who was recruited by the NKVD in February 1937, one of his special students. After serving for several months with a commando unit, Ramón was brought back from the front with a wounded arm.

Late in 1937 Eitingon sent Ramón to Paris. His forged Belgian papers identified him as Jacques Mornard. His NKVD code name was “Raymond.” Sylvia’s visit to Paris was a windfall for Ramón’s handlers. Although she had come as a tourist, after making contact with American Trotskyist friends there, she was asked to serve as a translator at the founding congress of the Fourth International. Jacques was absent from Paris at the time, which was a relief to Sylvia, because she was worried
that her Trotskyism might alienate her lover and had, for the time being, chosen to conceal it from him.

The fact that Sylvia was keeping such a secret—or thought she was—made her less inclined to question some things about Jacques that did not add up: stories about his family in Belgium, his life in Paris, and his sudden absences. Sylvia had a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia, and when she expressed an interest in finding a job in Paris, Jacques arranged for her to ghost-write weekly synopses of books on psychology for a French newspaper syndicate. She was handsomely paid for her work, although she never saw the published results and Jacques refused to put her in direct contact with the syndicate. Sylvia sensed that her “job” was merely a tactful way for her lover to support her in Paris.

For the NKVD, it was money well spent. Sylvia herself was an insignificant figure in the Trotskyist movement, but Trotsky was especially fond of Sylvia’s sister Ruth. Ruth had been in Mexico at the time of the Dewey hearings and proved to be of enormous help as a translator, typist, and researcher. She did not live at the Blue House, but she visited almost daily and was considered a reliable and devoted comrade. Ramón’s NKVD controllers understood that Ruth’s sister would be welcomed into Trotsky’s home. Now they had to maneuver Sylvia—and Ramón—to Coyoacán. And the road to Coyoacán led through New York City.