The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The task force consisted of three groups. The first was an illegal network headed by the Spanish Communist Caridad Mercader del Rio (codenamed MOTHER), who was both recruited and seduced by Eitingon, one of the NKVD’s most celebrated womanizers.¹⁰⁴ The most important agent in Caridad Mercader’s group was her son Ramón (codenamed RAYMOND),¹⁰⁵ who traveled on a doctored Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jacson (an eccentric NKVD spelling of Jackson). Like Eitingon, Ramón Mercader employed seduction as an operational technique, using his affair with the American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff to penetrate Trotsky’s villa near Mexico City. His opportunity came when Ageloff began work as one of Trotsky’s secretaries early in 1940. Each day Mercader drove her to Trotsky’s villa in the morning and returned to collect her after work. Gradually he became a well-known figure with the guards and some of Trotsky’s entourage, who, in March 1940, allowed him into the villa for the first time. Mercader’s role at this stage was still that of penetration agent rather than assassin, with the task of reporting on the villa’s defenses, occupants and guards.¹⁰⁶

The attack on the villa was to be led by a second group of agents drawn from veterans of the Spanish Civil War, headed by the celebrated Mexican Communist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (codenamed KONE),¹⁰⁷ who was animated by an exuberant ideological mix of art, revolution, Stalinism and exhibitionism. Both Mercader and Siqueiros were later to become well known for their involvement in operation UTKA. KGB files, however, also reveal the involvement of a shadowy third group of assassins headed by one of the most remarkable of all Soviet illegals, Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (then codenamed MAKS and FELIPE), who had taken a leading role in liquidating Trotskyists during the Spanish Civil War, as well as training saboteurs and arsonists to operate behind Franco’s lines.¹⁰⁸ It is a measure of Grigulevich’s skill in assuming false identities that, though born a Lithuanian Jew,¹⁰⁹ he was to succeed, a decade later, in passing himself off as a Costa Rican diplomat.¹¹⁰ Early in 1940 he recruited Siqueiros’s former pupil, the painter Antonio Pujol (codenamed JOSE), whom he later described as lacking in initiative but “very loyal, exceptionally reliable and quite bold,” to act as Siqueiros’s second-in-command in the assault on Trotsky’s villa.¹¹¹ Grigulevich’s other recruits included his future wife and assistant, the Mexican Communist Laura Araujo Aguilar (codenamed LUISA).¹¹²

A key part of the assault plan was the infiltration in April 1940 of a young American agent, Robert Sheldon Harte (codenamed AMUR), posing as a New York Trotskyist, as a volunteer guard in Trotsky’s villa. Harte’s role was to open the main gate when the assault group staged its surprise attack in the middle of the night.¹¹³ Though enthusiastic, he was also naive. Grigulevich decided not to brief him on what would happen after he opened the villa gate.

KGB records identify Grigulevich as the real leader of the assault on Trotsky’s villa.¹¹⁴ Grigulevich’s role in the attack was two-fold: to ensure that Siqueiros’s assault group gained entrance to the villa compound, and to try to inject some element of discipline into the attack. Left to his own devices, Siqueiros would have led the assault with all guns blazing but probably have made few attempts to cover his tracks. On the evening of May 23, 1940 Siqueiros and a group of about twenty followers put on a mixture of army and police uniforms and armed themselves with pistols and revolvers. As they did so, according to one of their number, they “laughed and joked as if it were a feast day.”¹¹⁵ Then, with Pujol carrying the only machine-gun, Grigulevich and the assault group set off to assassinate Trotsky.¹¹⁶