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

On arriving at the villa in the early hours of May 24, Grigulevich spoke to the American volunteer guard, Harte, who opened the gate.¹¹⁷ The assault group raked the bedrooms with gun fire to such effect that the Mexican police later counted seventy-three bullet holes in Trotsky’s bedroom wall. Remarkably, however, Trotsky and his wife survived by throwing themselves beneath their bed. Though an incendiary bomb was thrown into the bedroom of their small grandson, he too escaped by hiding under his bed.¹¹⁸ Harte was shocked by the attack—particularly, perhaps, by the attempt to kill Trotsky’s grandchild. He angrily told the assault group that, had he known how they would behave, he would never have let them in. To prevent Harte revealing what had happened, he was taken away and shot.¹¹⁹ A few months later, Siqueiros was tracked down and arrested.¹²⁰ Grigulevich, however, managed to smuggle himself, Pujol and Laura Araujo Aguilar out of the country without his identity being discovered by the Mexican police. From 1942 to 1944 he ran an illegal residency in Argentina which, according to KGB files, planted more than 150 mines in cargoes and ships bound for Germany.¹²¹

The failure of the attack on Trotsky’s villa, followed by the dispersal of Siqueiros’s gunmen, led to the promotion of Ramón Mercader from penetration agent to assassin. Mercader succeeded partly because he was patient. Five days after the raid he met Trotsky for the first time. Amiable as ever, he gave Trotsky’s grandson a toy glider and taught him how to fly it. Over the next three months he paid ten visits to the villa, sometimes bringing small presents with him and always taking care not to overstay his welcome. Finally, on August 20, he brought an article he had written and asked for Trotsky’s advice. As Trotsky sat reading it at his study desk, Mercader took an icepick from his pocket and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the back of Trotsky’s skull.¹²²

Mercader had expected Trotsky to die instantly and silently, thus allowing him to make his escape to a car nearby where his mother and her lover, Eitingon, were waiting. But Trotsky, though mortally wounded, let out “a terrible piercing cry.” (“I shall hear that cry all my life,” said Mercader afterwards.) Mercader was arrested and later sentenced to twenty years in jail.¹²³ Eitingon persuaded his mother to flee with him to Russia, promising to marry her if she did so. In Moscow Señora Mercader was welcomed by Beria, received by Stalin in the Kremlin and decorated with the Order of Lenin. But within a few years, abandoned by Eitingon and denied permission to leave Russia, she was consumed with guilt at having turned her son into an assassin and then leaving him to languish in a Mexican jail.¹²⁴

Ramón Mercader kept the Stalinist faith throughout his twenty years in prison. History, he claimed, would see him as a soldier who had served the cause of the working-class revolution by ridding it of a traitor. KGB files reveal (contrary to most published accounts) that when Mercader was finally released and traveled to Moscow in 1960, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, along with a general’s pension and a three-room apartment, and was personally congratulated by Khrushchev. Twenty years after the assassination of Trotsky, the liquidation of enemies of the people abroad still remained, on a reduced scale, a significant part of KGB foreign operations.¹²⁵

SIX WAR

During the later months of 1940, with Trotsky dead and the worst of the blood-letting inside INO at an end, the Centre sought to rebuild its foreign intelligence network. Until the Great Terror, all new recruits to INO had been trained individually at secret apartments in Moscow and kept strictly apart from other trainees. By 1938, however, so many INO officers had been unmasked as (imaginary) enemies of the people that the Centre decided group training was required to increase the flow of new recruits. NKVD order no. 00648 of October 3 set up the Soviet Union’s first foreign intelligence training school, hidden from public view in the middle of a wood at Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow ringroad. Given the official title Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya (Special Purpose School), but better known by the acronym SHON, it drew its recruits either from Party and Komsomol members with higher education or from new university graduates in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and elsewhere.¹