Trotsky (33 page)

Shortly after Young arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico in late April 1940, he wrote to Dobbs in New York to brief him on the state of affairs he left behind at Avenida Viena. In his letter, Young felt duty-bound to report a strain in relations between the guards and the household over the quality of the food. None of the staff thought very highly of the meals served at the Trotsky ranch, but some of the guards were tactless in complaining about it at the dinner table in the Old Man’s presence. Most of this American slang sailed right over Trotsky’s head, though he caught its drift. Young called this “the height of folly.” If any ill will was intended, it must have been meant for Natalia, who set the menu and whose attitude toward the guards fluctuated wildly. Robins complained, “at one time we are the cream of the earth, at another the crumb.”

Whatever lay behind this uncouth behavior, its effect was poisonous. “I do know that the OM was really fed up,” Young told Dobbs. “A week previous and up to my departure he hardly spoke with anyone because of this.” Among the culprits was Young’s replacement, Bob Shields, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker and graduate of Duke University. Dobbs himself had recommended him as a dedicated comrade and a hard worker, notwithstanding the fact that he was the son of a wealthy businessman. Dobbs made no mention of the new man’s driving ability. In this case, the main consideration was his willingness to pay
his own way to Mexico and to cover his board and personal expenses in Coyoacán.

Shields was his party name. His legal name was Robert Sheldon Harte, and his family called him Sheldon. To the NKVD, which recruited him in New York, he was known by the code name “Amur,” after the prodigious river in the Russian Far East. He traveled to Mexico City by airplane. When he took up his duties in Coyoacán on April 7, 1940, the NKVD had a mole inside Trotsky’s stronghold.

By the time Harte arrived in Coyoacán, the NKVD had two networks in place in Mexico City. The first group was called “Mother,” the code name of Caridad Mercader. Its chief asset was her son Ramón, now posing as a Canadian businessman named Frank Jacson. This change of identity, which took effect in Paris the year before, was an unforeseen development that complicated his mission. Sylvia Ageloff, his lover and the NKVD’s gull, had returned to New York from Paris in February 1939. Ramón was to follow her there, but a problem with his identity papers as the Belgian Jacques Mornard resulted in the United States rejecting his application for a visa. The NKVD then provided him with a passport in the name of the fictitious Frank Jacson, a Canadian citizen who was Yugoslav by birth.

Ramón received his U.S. visa and left France on September 1 as war broke out in Europe, arriving a week later in New York. There he explained his change of identity to Sylvia as a necessary step to avoid being drafted into the Belgian army. She apparently never questioned him about the unorthodox spelling of his new last name, which he pronounced in the French style, with the accent on the second syllable. It proved to be a felicitous choice: This would allow her, they agreed, to continue to call him Jacques—spelled simply “Jac”—without compromising his new identity. He explained to Sylvia that he was now a businessman, working for an international entrepreneur named Peter Lubeck, who traded in oil and sugar. This was all a fiction, of course.
Ramón’s real boss was Leonid Eitingon, the operational commander of Operation Duck and the lover of Caridad Mercader.

On October 1, Ramón said goodbye to Sylvia and left for Mexico City on a business trip. Eitingon followed in mid-November, around the same time as Caridad. As the Christmas holidays approached, Sylvia contrived to get sick leave from her job as a New York City social worker on the strength of a doctor’s note saying she suffered from a sinus condition and required a warm climate in order to convalesce. She flew down to Mexico City on New Year’s Day 1940, and moved into Ramón’s apartment there. This unfolded in accordance with the NKVD’s optimal scenario, as did Sylvia’s next move, which was to contact Trotsky and, using the connection of her sister, receive an invitation to his house.

During her second visit to Avenida Viena, early in February, Sylvia encountered Alfred Rosmer in the patio as she was leaving. The two had met in Paris in the summer of 1938 at the founding congress of the Fourth International. Sylvia invited Rosmer and his wife, Marguerite, to visit the apartment, where they were introduced to Jacson.

Three weeks later, Sylvia and Jacson were invited on a picnic to Mount Toluca, about fifty miles west of Mexico City, joining the Rosmers, Otto and Trude Schüssler, and Seva, with AlYoung along as chauffeur. Jacson was considered good social company, although he was regarded as a superficial person and a political lightweight. The Rosmers asked him why, if he was a Canadian, he spoke Parisian French, even the current slang terms, and he explained that he had been educated in Paris.

The Rosmer connection proved to be crucial to Ramón after Sylvia had to return to her job in New York City at the end of March. There, after hearing nothing from her lover for what seemed like an eternity but was in fact less than two weeks, she asked Marguerite Rosmer to check up on him. Marguerite met Jacson at a coffee shop in the city, and afterward she was able to notify Sylvia that her Jac was fine, just busy.

On May 1, Alfred was admitted to the French hospital in Mexico City to undergo a minor operation, remaining there for ten days. Jacson offered his services as chauffeur, driving Marguerite back and forth to the hospital, and he himself checked in on Alfred. He never inquired
about Trotsky or asked to enter the house, giving the impression that he understood why this would be impossible. His most effective weapons, for now, were his Buick Sedan and his patience.

A
S PART OF
its operation to assassinate Trotsky, the NKVD established a second and much larger network in Mexico City, this one called “Horse,” its code name for the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros, along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, was one of Mexico’s Big Three muralists. Born in 1896 in Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, the son of a well-known lawyer, Siqueiros attended the San Carlos Academy of art in Mexico City, until his education was cut short in 1913 by Mexico’s revolutionary upheaval. He joined the forces of Gen. Alvaro Obregón, a foe of Pancho Villa, becoming the general’s messenger and later rising to the rank of first lieutenant.

When it was over, the Mexican government gave Siqueiros the opportunity to resume his studies abroad, and he went to Paris late in 1919. There he got to know Rivera and fell under the influence of Cubism, counting Braque and Léger among his friends. He took in the art of Italy in the company of Rivera, then moved to Barcelona, where in 1921 he published an influential manifesto on the need for Mexican art to rediscover its native roots.

Siqueiros returned to Mexico in 1922, joining his fellow muralists in spearheading the country’s cultural renaissance. At the formation, that same year, of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, Siqueiros served as its general secretary and its strident mouthpiece. He was also co-editor of its publication,
El Machete,
and designed the paper’s famous masthead, a woodcut of a hand gripping a machete, with the paper’s name inscribed in bold letters along the blade.

Siqueiros was a swashbuckler by temperament, high-strung and bombastic, with a theatrical appearance to match. He had an unruly shock of curly black hair, gray-green eyes, and a Cupid’s bow mouth. His elongated face, of pallid complexion, was accentuated by a prominent nose whose nostrils were set in a provocative flare. It is easy to see why his friends called him Caballo, Spanish for the Horse. Siqueiros was a member of the Communist Party, and in the second half of the 1920s, when he was better known for his manifestos than his murals, he
put aside his art to devote himself to the labor movement, becoming a union organizer among the silver miners and peasants in the state of Jalisco, often based in its capital, Guadalajara. This union work brought him to Moscow in March 1928, as a delegate to the International Congress of Red Trade Unions.

Not long afterward, Siqueiros managed to run afoul of both the Communist Party and the law. In the spring of 1930 he was expelled from the party for a breach of discipline. On May Day, he was seized in a police sweep after an attempt on the life of the Mexican president. After six months in prison, Siqueiros was sent to live under house arrest in Taxco. There, for the next year and a half, he painted more than a hundred oils, including portraits of poet Hart Crane and composer George Gershwin, among other visitors to this popular vacation spot.

When his Taxco sentence had been served, in the spring of 1932 Siqueiros was forced to go abroad. He moved to Los Angeles to teach and to paint, and stirred up controversy by creating two politically charged outdoor murals, both of which were promptly whitewashed. The more infamous of these, at the Plaza Arts Center, was called
Tropical America
and depicted a Latino figure bound to a cross surmounted by an American eagle.

After six months, Siqueiros left Los Angeles for South America, where his union activities got him expelled from Argentina. He then returned to the United States, this time to New York, where he set up an experimental studio that pioneered the use of synthetic paints and spray guns, and encouraged other unorthodox practices, such as dripping and flinging paint onto the canvas. One of the workshop participants was Jackson Pollock, who pioneered the application of these materials and techniques in the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism. It was during this New York sojourn, in May 1934, that Siqueiros published a savage attack on Rivera, in
New Masses,
accusing him of pandering to commercial tastes and attributing the inferiority of his art to his political support for Trotsky.

In January 1937, Siqueiros sailed to Spain and enlisted in the International Brigade. For a time he served in the 5th Regiment, whose political commissar was Carlos Contreras, the nom de guerre of the Italian Communist Vittorio Vidali, whom Siqueiros had known in Mexico a
decade earlier and who was fast acquiring a reputation as a Stalinist executioner. Siqueiros later commanded a brigade and then a division of the Republican Army, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. When he returned to Mexico in January 1939, he became chairman of the Mexican section of the Society of Veterans of the Spanish Republic, and spent a great deal of his considerable energy lobbying President Cárdenas to throw open Mexico’s doors to Spain’s civil-war refugees.

In August 1939, Siqueiros was commissioned to paint a mural for the new headquarters of the Mexican Electricians’ Union. He assembled a team of Mexican and Spanish artists to help design and carry out the project, which left him time to prepare for an exhibit of his new oil paintings scheduled to open in January at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Among his collaborators on the mural were Luís Arenal and Antonio Pujol, both of whom had worked with him at his New York studio. Arenal, who first met Siqueiros in Los Angeles, was an artist for
New Masses
when he lived in New York. Siqueiros was married to his sister Angelique. Pujol had accompanied Siqueiros to Spain and served with him in the International Brigade.

Siqueiros and his team chose as the site of their mural the landing of the building’s main staircase, in part for the technical challenge of creating a unified composition on four surfaces—three walls and a ceiling—at right angles to each other. As originally conceived, the mural’s theme was antifascist, but in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet pact this had to be reworked into a more generic anticapitalism, as suggested by its innocuous title,
Portrait of the Bourgeoisie.
This “portrait” is the stuff of nightmares. The photomontage-like imagery, dark and violent, offers an apocalyptical vision of fascism armed with the modern machinery of warfare. The swastikas are missing, but the symbolism is nonetheless unmistakable.
Portrait of the Bourgeoisie
is a quintessential work of the late 1930s and, in the words of art historian Desmond Rochfort, “one of the great moments in twentieth-century mural art.”

A decade earlier, in her classic study of the Mexican renaissance,
Idols behind Altars,
Anita Brenner remarked of Siqueiros that he did not distinguish between his artistic and his political endeavors, passing from one to another “without noting a difference between a brush and a gun.” In May 1940, he had not yet completed work on
Portrait of the
Bourgeoisie
when he was called away to lead a different kind of undertaking, this one commissioned by the NKVD.

T
HE MAN HOLDING
the reins of the Siqueiros network was Iosif Grigulevich, an ethnic Jew born in 1913 in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. He had learned his Spanish living in Argentina, where he was a Comintern activist in the mid-1930s, and then in Spain, where he arrived in 1936 after the outbreak of the civil war. His facility in several languages—including Lithuanian, French, German, Polish, and Russian—led to his rapid advancement. Initially assigned to the 5th Regiment as adjutant to commissar Carlos Contreras during the defense of Madrid, he later came to the attention of Alexander Orlov and was recruited to the NKVD.

Grigulevich participated in the bloody suppression of the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. When the POUM leadership was rounded up in mid-June on trumped-up charges of spying for Franco, he took part in the operation to arrest Andrés Nin, who was taken to a Republican jail in a suburb of Madrid. After Nin refused to confess to his “crimes” under a brutal interrogation conducted by Orlov and Contreras that left him severely beaten, Stalin, who may have actually believed the Soviet propaganda line that Nin was Trotsky’s agent, ordered the POUM chief’s liquidation.

On the night of June 22–23, a group of men dressed in Republican Army uniforms burst into the heavily guarded prison and kidnapped Nin. Grigulevich assisted Orlov in the operation and served as his translator. Orlov and Grigulevich were part of a mobile group that included three Spanish NKVD agents who tortured and murdered Nin; his body was buried in an unmarked grave along a country road.