Trotsky (34 page)

For their protection, Grigulevich and others involved in this “wet” operation were then withdrawn from Spain and brought to Moscow, where they underwent an NKVD training course. In the spring of 1938, Grigulevich and a colleague were sent to Mexico City to conduct surveillance of Trotsky, and if possible to penetrate his circle. They rented an apartment a few blocks from the Blue House and set up an observation point from which they could watch the comings and goings.

In the first months of 1939, Grigulevich, using the code name
“Felipe,” recruited Siqueiros, an acquaintance in Spain, as well as Siqueiros’s wife and her brother Leopoldo Arenal, brother of the artist Luís. Leopoldo Arenal was a fanatical anti-Trotskyist. He came up with a plan to deliver Trotsky a booby-trapped potted cactus: the bomb concealed in its soil would be triggered to explode during the transplanting. This proposal was passed on to the NKVD resident in New York, who rejected it for fear that the bomb might not reach its intended target.

After Operation Duck was launched in the summer of 1939 and as its principal agents were being maneuvered into position in Mexico, “Felipe” was summoned to Moscow. This might have been the end of the road for Grigulevich, whose name was closely associated with that of the defector Orlov. But in Moscow he impressed his superiors with his detailed knowledge of the Mexican terrain and of Trotsky’s situation on Avenida Viena. He brought with him a plan to storm the villa, and urged that Siqueiros be named to lead the fighting group. He was taken to meet with Beria, who approved the idea and ordered him to return to Mexico to see to its execution. Grigulevich arrived back in Mexico City in February 1940 and sat down with Eitingon to coordinate the operational details.

As these preparations were under way, Trotsky had once again become the object of a vicious slander campaign in Mexico’s left-wing press. He had unwittingly provided the pretext for this latest and most ferocious onslaught, by agreeing to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress, better known at the time as the Dies Committee. Trotsky was asked to testify about the history and methods of Stalinism, and his decision to accept this invitation caused great consternation among his American followers.

As an anti-Communist, Martin Dies, a Democrat from Texas, was the Joseph McCarthy of his day, a self-promoting, red-baiting opportunist who was bent on tying the American Communist Party to the Kremlin in order to expose the party’s leaders to prosecution. Trotsky justified his decision to testify by saying he would use the reactionary Dies Committee as a tribune, much as he had used the liberal Dewey Commission two years earlier. There was more to it, however, because Trotsky saw Dies as his laissez-passer into the United States, where he might be able to turn a six-month visa into permanent residence.

Stories in the American and Mexican press claimed that Trotsky was to testify about Mexican and Latin American Communism and on the sensitive subject of Mexico’s oil industry. This gave an opening to the Mexican Communists and their sympathizers to portray Trotsky not only as a meddler in Mexican politics, but as a tool of the oil companies and Wall Street. Until recently, Trotsky had been caricatured as an agent of the Gestapo, a Judas branded with a swastika, just as he was in the Moscow papers. In the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, however, he had to be recast as an agent of Yankee imperialism. Even though Congressman Dies eventually withdrew his invitation, the episode facilitated the transformation of Trotsky from a tool of the Gestapo into a tool of the FBI.

In the winter and spring of 1940, the tone of the anti-Trotsky campaign in Mexico turned violent. Meetings of the Communist Party and its front organizations were punctuated by shouts of “Death to Trotsky!” This slogan was adopted by the party during its congress in March, when it conducted a sweeping purge of its top leadership, which was accused of Trotskyism. Trotsky understood that such a purge could only have been ordered by Moscow. He guessed that the man acting as the Comintern’s supervisor on the scene was Carlos Contreras, the GPU enforcer in Spain who now surfaced in Mexico City as a member of the Communist Party’s honorary presidium.

On May Day, the party organized a march through the city of some 20,000 uniformed men and women shouting slogans such as “Throw out the most ominous and dangerous traitor Trotsky.” Reliable reports from Trotsky’s Mexican friends told of a concentration in the city of Stalinist killers from Spain. Trotsky called a meeting of the guard to warn of the danger that an armed attack was in preparation.

Among the guards listening to Trotsky was Robert Sheldon Harte, the quiet, bookish, intense young man with the kinky red-brown hair, acne-scarred face, and cleft chin. At Duke, Harte had published politically conscious short fiction, and even now he harbored literary aspirations. Still, he was unable to see the plot line of the real-life thriller in which he had become entangled. He failed to fully grasp the connection between Trotsky’s warning of mortal danger and Harte’s own clandestine meetings with a Soviet agent named Felipe. The NKVD’s
real objective, Harte understood from Felipe, was the destruction of Trotsky’s archives—together with the manuscript of the slanderous biography of Stalin that Trotsky was preparing, based in part on forged documents supplied by Hitler.

The rain fell heavily at times during the night of May 23–24, and the dirt roads of Coyoacán turned muddy. At 10:00 p.m. Siqueiros and a half-dozen confederates, including fellow artists Luís Arenal and Antonio Pujol, gathered at a house on Calle de República de Cuba. Toward midnight, several men arrived with police uniforms and weapons, including a Thompson submachine gun, four revolvers, and two Thermos bombs, along with rubber gloves to prevent fingerprints. Siqueiros told his comrades to try on the police uniforms, while Pujol put on the lone military uniform, that of a lieutenant. The men laughed and joked as though it were a costume party.

Siqueiros then went out. He returned toward 2:00 a.m. dressed in the uniform of an army major. Dark glasses and a fake mustache completed the disguise. He modeled his uniform for his comrades, provoking great hilarity. “How does it suit me?” asked the
pintor a pistola.
“Very well,” they replied with laughter.

An hour later, these uniformed and well-armed men crammed themselves into Siqueiros’s car and drove toward Trotsky’s home. Siqueiros assured them that all would go well because one of the guards had been bought. “And if this guy betrays us and we get machine-gunned?” one of them asked. Siqueiros smiled and replied, “There’s no danger of that!” En route, he handed each man an envelope containing 250 pesos, about $50. They parked one street over from Avenida Viena and waited, as Siqueiros kept looking at his watch.

Toward 4:00 a.m. “Major” Siqueiros ordered his men to get out of the car. They surprised and overpowered the five policemen in the
casita,
three of whom were asleep, and tied them up. They then made their way toward the southwest corner of the property, where three other
groups of men, all armed and dressed in police uniforms, converged from different directions on the entrance to the garage. Hearing Felipe’s voice, Harte delivered his end of the bargain by sliding away the heavy bolt that joined the doors, as twenty raiders poured into the garage and then out into the patio.

One man stationed himself alongside the eucalyptus tree, in the vicinity of the guards’ quarters. Others took up positions outside the door to Seva’s room and the French windows to Trotsky’s bedroom. A third contingent entered the house through the library, at the top right of the T, and made their way into the dining room, where, with a mighty heave, they forced open the locked door to Trotsky’s study and continued toward the bedroom.

A burst of automatic fire tore through the bedroom door. A raider armed with a submachine gun then entered Seva’s room and opened fire through the closed door connecting to Trotsky’s bedroom, while a third assailant fired through the wooden shutters on the French windows, creating a crossfire from three directions. Trotsky had taken a sedative to help him sleep and was slow to realize the danger, but Natalia grabbed him from his bed and the two fell into the corner of the room beneath the window, as ricocheting bullets flew in all directions above them.

In their quarters, the guards were awakened by the gunfire and began to react. Robins opened the door to his quarters and in an instant caught sight of a man in a police uniform alongside the eucalyptus tree who turned and fired a submachine gun in his direction, spattering lead around the entrance and forcing him back inside. He heard this man—almost certainly Leopoldo Arenal—say in accented English, “Keep your heads out of the way and you won’t get hurt.”

Jake Cooper, who had arrived from Minneapolis only three days earlier, also heard this warning. He opened his door slightly and was met by a hail of bullets. He heard Robins yelling, “Keep your heads down!” Charley Cornell, in the room between those of Cooper and Robins, heeded this advice. Up in the tower, Otto opened the blinds of his bedroom window overlooking the patio, and as he did so, gunfire sprayed the bricks around the window, sending him to the floor. The guards could hear machine guns firing on the other side of the house—
even inside the house—and feared the worst. “Bob, where are you?!” Robins kept yelling.

The crossfire into Trotsky’s bedroom lasted for several minutes. When the guns fell silent, one of the raiders entered Seva’s room and threw down a Thermos bomb, the force of the explosion blowing open the door to Trotsky’s bedroom and igniting a small fire. Standing on the threshold and peering into the room illuminated only by the faint glow of the flames at his feet, the intruder emptied his handgun into Trotsky’s and Natalia’s beds. Then he turned and ran out.

The gunfire became intermittent and more distant, as the raiders covered their retreat. They had been in control of the grounds for about fifteen minutes. Robins raced up to the roof, where he was fired on by the assailants from the street as they fled. He called down to the police in the
casita,
who appeared in the doorway, hands tied behind their backs. Charley entered the garage and found Bob’s serape lying on the floor, neatly folded. The garage doors were wide open and both cars were gone. The alarm system had been turned off.

All the members of the household assembled in the patio. Seva’s foot was bleeding. When the attack began he dove under his bed. A bullet fired into the bed passed through the mattress and struck him in the big toe. After the raiders withdrew, he ran out into the patio. Natalia had minor burns from smothering the fire with blankets. Trotsky received only a couple of light scratches on his face from flying glass. Everyone marveled at the family’s good fortune. The Rosmers, the cook, and the housekeeper were all unharmed, as were four of the five guards. The only cause for distress was the disappearance of Bob Harte.

Within a half-hour, the chief of the Mexican secret service, Colonel Leandro Sánchez Salazar, and a team of investigators arrived on the scene. Introducing himself to Trotsky, Salazar was struck by the incongruity between the exile’s famously Mephistophelian features and his bathrobe and pajamas. Salazar’s men counted seventy-three bullet holes in the doors, windows, and walls of Trotsky’s bedroom. Altogether well over 300 shots had been fired.

A check of the yard revealed two homemade bombs that were broken but unexploded and a third one that remained intact. On the riverbank the police found a wooden extension ladder, a manila rope ladder,
a crowbar, and a portable electric saw with a very long extension cord. This evidence seemed to indicate that the raiders were not counting on the complicity of Harte, who must have been tricked into opening the door. The Ford was found two blocks away, abandoned in the mud.

Counting the bullet holes and considering the shocking ineptitude of the attackers, who could easily have killed one another in their own murderous crossfire, Salazar grew suspicious. He wondered why the guards had not fired their weapons. He questioned the calm, even conspiratorial, demeanor of the members of the household under the circumstances. Salazar asked Trotsky if he knew the identities of the assailants. Walking the colonel over to the rabbit cages, Trotsky drew him near and told him what he knew to be a dead certainty: the perpetrator of the assault was Joseph Stalin, acting through the agency of the GPU. This statement, delivered with a dramatic flare, struck Salazar as fanciful. His suspicion mounted that Trotsky himself had staged the raid.

In the days following the assault on Trotsky’s home, the Mexican police guard was increased to twenty-five men on duty at all times. Every fifteen minutes through the night they signaled by whistle from each corner of the property. Inside the walls, the guards traded speculations about the fate of Bob. Was he a victim or an accomplice? They put the odds at fifty-fifty.

The testimony of the Mexican police guards was ambiguous. They saw Bob being led between two of the raiders, each one holding him by an arm as he muttered, “No, no, please don’t.” He was protesting but not resisting, and they could not say for sure whether he was taken against his will. The Dodge, which was discovered the following afternoon about ten miles away in the center of the city, had a tricky ignition switch, such that only Harte himself could have started it for the raiders.

Complicit or not, Harte must have opened the outside door when he heard a familiar voice. Suspicion fell on Sergeant Casas, who said he
was home asleep at the time of the raid. On the day after the attack, he along with the five policemen on duty that night were arrested and held for questioning. Casas had told Trotsky’s cook that the raid was a self-assault,
auto-asalto,
an expression she did not understand but which she repeated to the police, prompting the arrests. Baffled, Trotsky released a statement saying that in light of his remark, Casas was compromised and may even have been part of the conspiracy.

Jesse Sheldon Harte, Bob’s father, arrived in Mexico City the day after the raid and offered a reward of 10,000 pesos, more than $2,000, for the location of his son. He met with the police investigators, and paid a call on Trotsky. He was surprised to learn that young Sheldon, who told him he had gone to Mexico on business, was one of Trotsky’s bodyguards.