We can certainly deduce a main motive of Stalin’s as the simple physical destruction of all alternative leaderships. No further blackening of Trotsky’s character was necessary or possible. In every sense except that of killing his great enemy, Stalin could only expect a political debit from the operation. It was the same concern as was to be shown in the execution of long lists of military and other men already serving in camps, at precisely the two defensive crises of the Second World War.
The organization of Trotsky’s murder was assigned to Leonid Eitingon, a high NKVD officer, who was given virtually unlimited funds for the purpose. Eitingon had been sent to Spain to work under Orlov, taking the pseudonym Kotov, in 1936. He had already had considerable experience of terrorist activity abroad. He continued with this career for many years. The agent Nikolai Khokhloy, sent to Germany to assassinate anti-Soviet émigré leaders, who defected to the West in April 1954, had worked under him. (Eitingon seems to have been sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment after the fall of Beria in 1953, but to have been released in the late 1960s, getting a job in publishing.)
Eitingon set off for Mexico, taking with him Vittorio Codovilla (a founder of the Argentine Communist Party and a trusted Stalinist, who had been involved in the murder of Andres Nin) and Vittorio Vidali, another of the most formidable of the killers from Spain.
The Mexican Communist Party, under its leader Herman Laborde, had been a genuine political trend, and was lukewarm about such action against Trotsky. As part of the move against Trotsky, Laborde and his followers were purged and an intransigent group, including the painter Siqueiros, placed at the head of the Party.
Taking the name of Leonov, Eitingon organized his first attempt on Trotsky on a lavish scale. The central figure was Siqueiros.
On 23 May 1940 Siqueiros and two accomplices collected a number of submachine guns, police and Army uniforms, and some ladders and incendiary bombs, together with a rotary power saw. He dressed himself as a major in the Mexican Army and put on a disguise. At about 2:00 A.M., he assembled the twenty men he had chosen, and they drove in four cars to Trotsky’s fortified villa. Some of the police had already been lured away; the others were trussed up at gunpoint. The telephone lines were cut, and the sentry on duty, an American called Harte, was rushed and overwhelmed. The force broke into the patio and swept the bedrooms with tommy guns for several minutes. They then pulled out, leaving several incendiaries and a large dynamite bomb. The latter failed to explode. Trotsky was slightly wounded in the right leg; his ten-year-old grandson was also hit. His wife received some burns from the incendiaries. Otherwise, the attack was a failure.
The body of Harte was found, shot, buried in the grounds of a villa rented by Siqueiros.
The Mexican Communist Party disowned the attack and dissociated itself from Siqueiros and Vidali. By 17 June, the identity of the attackers had been established by the Mexican police.
Siqueiros was arrested in a hideout in the provinces in September 1940, but although the facts were established, great political pressures were now brought to bear. At the same time, “intellectuals and artists” urged the President to take into account the fact that “artists and men of science are considered as the bulwark of culture and progress.”95
As a result, the court accepted Siqueiros’s plea that the firing of 300 bullets into the bedrooms had been for “psychological purposes only,” without any intention of killing or hurting anyone. Evidence that when Siqueiros heard of Trotsky’s survival he had exclaimed, “All that work in vain!” was disregarded. The facts about Harte’s death were found not to constitute a prima facie case of murder. The judge claimed that the accused did not form a “criminal conspiracy,” since a conspiracy could not be made for a single temporary job but must have “stability and permanence.” They were even acquitted of impersonating police officers, on the grounds that though they had dressed up in uniforms, they had not actually attempted to usurp any police functions.
While Siqueiros was still out on bail, a convenient invitation to paint some murals in Chile, at the instance of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, led to his decamping thither. So even the light sentence he might have got for the crime still attributed to him—stealing the two automobiles outside the Trotsky house—was avoided.
On the failure of Siqueiros, Eitingon had put his second plan into operation. Four days after the first attempt, Ramon Mercader was introduced to Trotsky for the first time.
Mercader’s mother, Caridad, a Spanish Communist, seems to have become sexually entangled with Eitingon during the Civil War in Spain, when she had worked in the liquidation squads. The NKVD made a practice of securing the passports of members of the International Brigade who had been killed. Mercader was given one which had originally belonged to a Yugoslav-Canadian volunteer killed in action early in the war. It had been reforged under the name of “Jacson’—a curious example of the absurd slips which crop up in these otherwise highly skilled operations, though in fact this attracted no attention.
The plot now reached into the world of outwardly respectable New York Leftism, which at the time was seething with intra-Communist intrigue, and provided a ready recruiting ground for Yezhov’s men. In fact, general supervision of the murder seems to have come under the purview of the permanent Resident of the NKVD, the Soviet Consul-General in New York, Gaik Ovakimian, who was later exposed, in May 1941, and expelled from the country.
The details—some of which are even now a little obscure—do not concern us here. But it is at least interesting to note—in this, as in the great espionage cases of the 1940s and 1950s—how many people, of whom their non-Party acquaintances would have certainly denied any possibility of their joining in such activity, were, from factiousness, revolutionary romanticism, and even idealism, to become willing or half-willing accomplices in a vulgar murder.
These put Mercader in touch with Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyite who was a social worker. He seduced her and entered into a relationship with her which passed for marriage. She was entirely innocent of the planned crime. Through her, he was admitted to the Trotsky household.
Over the next few months, Mercader made five or six visits and, as Sylvia Ageloff’s husband, became reasonably established. On 20 August, he arrived at Trotsky’s villa, ostensibly to have an article he had written criticized. He wore a raincoat. A long dagger was sewn into the lining. A revolver was in his pocket. But his actual weapon, a cut-down ice axe, was in his raincoat pocket. (An NKVD murder—of a Soviet Ambassador—by a strong assassin using an iron bar is reported by the Petrovs.) Mercader was an experienced mountain climber, and his choice of the ice axe as an assassination weapon was based on considerable experience of its use and power. Outside, his car was parked facing the right way for a quick move, and around the corner another car with his mother and an agent was waiting. Eitingon, in yet a third car, was a block or so away.
Trotsky had two revolvers on his desk, and the switch to an alarm system within reach. But as soon as he started to read Mercader’s article, the assassin took out his ice axe and struck him a “tremendous blow” on the head.
Mercader had planned to leave quickly. But the blow was not immediately lethal. Trotsky screamed for “very long, infinitely long,” as Mercader himself put it, “a cry prolonged and agonized, half-scream, half sob,” according to one of the guards—who now rushed in and seized the assassin.
Trotsky was operated on, and survived for more than a day after that, dying on 21 August 1940. He was nearly sixty-two.