Trotsky (35 page)

On May 27, after Harte senior returned to New York, the local papers published the sensational story that a photograph of Stalin, warmly inscribed, had been discovered in the missing guard’s room in New York City. The source of this story was Jesse Harte. In a confidential interview conducted by a Mexican police official in the American embassy, he testified that a photograph of the Soviet dictator had been found on display in his son’s room. Someone then leaked this information to the press, with the clinching detail of Stalin’s inscription inserted somewhere along the way. Trotsky sent a telegram to Jesse Harte asking him to confirm the story. Harte, who was mortified to discover that this unsavory fact about his errant son was making headlines, cabled a reply that was meant to bury the story for good: “DEFINITELY DETERMINED STALINS PICTURE NOT IN SHELDONS ROOM.”

Meanwhile, Colonel Salazar’s investigation took a new turn. On May 28, Trotsky’s household servants—the cook, Carmen, and the maid, Belem—were taken in for questioning, as they were again on the following day, when they were held for nearly twelve hours and given the third degree. With this encouragement, the cook remembered that on the eve of the attack there had been a secret meeting at Trotsky’s house, from half-past three to six o’clock, and that two of the guards, Charley and Otto, had seemed very anxious the entire day. Both women signed statements declaring their belief that the raid was an
auto-asalto.

On May 30, Salazar arrested Charley and Otto, the two guards who
spoke intelligible Spanish. They were held incommunicado for two days while their interrogators pressured them to confess that Trotsky had ordered them to carry out a self-assault. During this time, the police came to arrest Robins, but decided against it when Trotsky objected, and perhaps also because Robins made it clear that he would not go willingly. Meanwhile, Trotsky had addressed an urgent letter to President Cárdenas, protesting that he was being deprived of the means to defend himself. Cárdenas intervened and Salazar released the guards.

Trotsky was greatly surprised when Salazar told him of his cook’s testimony. “We are always holding conferences,” he told the colonel. “Even at table at mealtimes we discuss questions of international politics. My study, in addition, is always open to any of my collaborators.” As it happened, however, on May 23 Trotsky did not follow his usual routine, as he was busy all day preparing an article for the comrades in New York and worked unusually late, until eleven at night. In that case, Salazar told Trotsky, the cook lied and ought to be fired. Trotsky at first resisted this advice, but then agreed that it was the only thing to do. The maid quit a few days later.

By now, the Communist press in Mexico was portraying the raid as a put-up job, staged by Trotsky in order to malign his enemies. Trotsky countered that it was absurd to believe he would risk his Mexican asylum through such a reckless act. He turned the tables, accusing the editorial boards of the daily
El Popular
and the monthly
Futuro,
both organs of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, of taking part in the “moral preparation of the terrorist act,” with the organization’s president, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, orchestrating the campaign from behind the scenes. “Permit me also to assume that David Alfaro Siqueiros, who took part in the civil war in Spain as an active Stalinist, may also know who are the most important and active GPU members, Spanish, Mexican, and of other nationalities, who are arriving at different times in Mexico, especially via Paris.”

On the question of Harte, Trotsky remained on the defensive. Salazar believed he was a conspirator. In his quarters the police found a key to Room 37 at the Hotel Europa, where he had spent the night of May 21 with a prostitute. She was interviewed and told Salazar that Harte was carrying a large amount of money on him that night. Sala
zar also learned from one of the guards that Harte had a sizable sum in American Express traveler’s checks. Salazar suspected that this was payoff money.

Trotsky countered that Harte, whose family occupied a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, could not have been bought. Of course, Trotsky allowed, it was possible that the GPU had wormed its way into his guard, but he insisted that the facts of the raid did not support this conclusion. Assuming that Harte was beholden to the GPU, why organize twenty to thirty raiders with machine guns and bombs when a single agent could quietly enter his bedroom and knife him to death? And if Harte himself was not up to it, then why not just let in one or two attackers to do the job? Why all the commotion?

Nonetheless, Trotsky could not ignore Harte’s peculiar behavior on the day before the attack. At about five o’clock that afternoon he had entered the study saying that he needed to check the alarm system. Trotsky expressed annoyance at the needless interruption and asked to be left alone. Harte was also suffering from intestinal problems that day, and Natalia gave him a hot water bottle and some medicine. This might have been nothing more than the usual Mexican flu, but the thought must have crossed Trotsky’s mind subsequently that its cause was a nervous stomach.

The testimony of Trotsky’s Russian secretary, Fanny Yanovitch, was especially unsettling. She usually worked only three to four hours a day, but on May 23 she stayed late so that Trotsky could complete his article. Harte, who was supposed to drive her home, seemed rattled by this change in the routine. From six in the evening he became increasingly nervous, several times asking her when she would finish and warning her to stay away from the alarmed wires at the window. On the drive home he pestered her with questions about the contents of Trotsky’s biography of Stalin, which he could not decipher because it was in Russian. When this evidence was presented to Trotsky, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Pure coincidence.”

O
N
J
UNE
17, Colonel Salazar broke the case. An overheard conversation at a bar led to the arrest and confession of Néstor Sánchez Hernán
dez, a twenty-three-year-old former captain in the International Brigade in Spain and the author of a vicious attack on Trotsky published just days before the assault. Hernández identified Siqueiros as the leader of the operation, which he recounted in detail. His confession confirmed Salazar’s suspicions about the complicity of Robert Sheldon Harte.

Harte had indeed opened the door for the raiders, Hernández testified. During the getaway, a man called Felipe, who spoke Spanish with what sounded like a French accent, ordered Hernández to accompany him in the Dodge, where Harte sat behind the wheel. The brothers Arenal joined Hernández in the backseat. Harte was greatly agitated. He must have assumed, like the escaping raiders, that Trotsky and Natalia were dead. He drove fast and erratically, and Felipe had to yell at him to calm down, instructing him in Spanish even though the American repeatedly asked him to speak English. “I had the feeling that I was taking part in a film adventure,” said Hernández, whose best guess was that Felipe was a French Jew. It was obvious that Felipe and Harte had already known each other before the attack.

The Hernández confession led to the arrests of some two dozen people, all of them members or close sympathizers of the Mexican Communist Party. Among them were two women who occupied separate apartments in a building on Calle Abasolo, a few yards from Trotsky’s house. Their assignment was to observe the comings and goings at the house and to become intimate with the guards, which they succeeded in doing. This information led to the rearrest of Casas and his crew of police.

The search for Siqueiros led to a farmhouse in the village of Santa Rosa, along the Desierto de los Leones road, on the evening of June 24. It was an adobe structure of three rooms, one of which overlooked the village. In the middle of this room stood an easel holding a blank canvas, alongside which were two brushes and two open pots of paint. There were several .22 caliber gun cartridges scattered on the floor, which was littered with cigarette butts. A policeman found an empty packet of Lucky Strike, which aroused suspicion because it was a luxury brand affordable only to Americans and wealthy Mexicans unlikely to inhabit such a humble dwelling.

Descending to the basement, the detectives entered a small kitchen, whose dirt floor had recently been upturned. A neighboring peasant was persuaded to use his pickax to dig up the soil. Two feet down, he uncovered the stomach of a human corpse, and within moments the investigators were overwhelmed by the stench of rotting flesh. A forensics team was brought in and the corpse was exhumed. It had been covered with quicklime, which had caused it to turn bronze. There were two bullet wounds in the head. Additional evidence, in the form of a bloodstained folding cot and quilt, indicated that the victim had been killed in his sleep.

Shortly after midnight, Colonel Salazar arrived at Trotsky’s house. He brought with him a chunk of hair taken from the corpse, as well as a section of its underwear. All the guards assembled in the garage. They immediately recognized Bob’s kinky red-brown hair, and they were able to produce an identical pair of underwear. Charley accompanied the police to Santa Rosa to identify the body.

Early that morning, the guards informed Natalia, who immediately went in to tell Trotsky. He emerged in his bathrobe and slippers. “Poor Bob,” they heard him say. Not long afterward, the guards saw him tending to the rabbits, his expression grave and his face streaked with tears. A telegram was sent to Harte’s father, who called a few hours later and asked Trotsky to identify the body personally. Trotsky went to the morgue in San Angel and performed this disagreeable duty, struggling to contain his emotions.

One of the conspirators told the police that he had been brought to the house in Santa Rosa by the painter Luís Arenal and hired to stay with Harte—not to guard him, but rather to keep him company. Harte, in other words, was not a prisoner, although common sense could have told him that he was a doomed man. Five days later, Arenal and his brother Leopoldo returned to the house, where they paid off and dismissed the minder. The police were now looking for the brothers in connection with Harte’s murder.

To Colonel Salazar, it seemed evident that Harte had been eliminated as an inconvenient co-conspirator. To Trotsky, however, Harte’s corpse was definitive proof of his innocence, a refutation of all the Stalinist slander about his being an agent of the GPU. “Bob perished
because he placed himself in the path of the assassins,” Trotsky said in a statement released later that same day. “He died for the ideas in which he believed. His memory is spotless.”

Trotsky now added another victim to the pantheon of his fallen secretaries—eight in all, all victims of Stalin and the GPU. At some level, Trotsky must have understood that the discovery of Harte’s decomposing corpse was convincing proof neither of the ill-starred American’s ideas nor of his loyalties. But under the circumstances, the only acceptable version of events was that Harte was an innocent victim. To honor his memory, Trotsky arranged to have a stone plaque placed upon the wall inside the patio near the entrance to the garage. Its dedication affirmed what even Colonel Salazar could now agree was a dead certainty: “In Memory of Robert Sheldon Harte, 1915–1940. Murdered by Stalin.”

T
wo weeks after the May 24 commando raid on Trotsky’s home, James Cannon and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party came down to Coyoacán to inspect the crime scene and consult with Trotsky on what measures needed to be taken in order to improve the defenses at Avenida Viena 19. “It was a real attack—the escape was a miracle,” Cannon wrote to Trotsky’s lawyer in New York, Al Goldman. “It’s obvious the assailants thought they had finished the job.” Another attack was certain to come, and it was believed that bombs, not bullets, now posed the greatest danger.

Cannon advised New York headquarters that several thousand dollars would be required in order to meet the threat. Concrete and steel fortifications must replace wood; steel shutters must protect the interior windows; steel nets must be raised to defend against bombs. An appeal letter went out from New York to the nineteen party branches across the country, urging comrades to do their part and reminding them that Bob Harte had “made the supreme sacrifice.”

Contributing to the sense of urgency in Coyoacán was fear of the political instability and civil unrest that seemed likely to accompany Mexico’s long-anticipated presidential election, set for July 7. The government enforced a “depistolization” program in the days surrounding the election in order to limit the potential for trouble in what had become a rugged contest marked by sporadic violence. President Cárdenas had refused to name a successor or throw his support behind the candidate from his own party, Manuel Ávila Camacho, his minister of defense. Camacho was
a center-right candidate who ran with the support of the left, including the Communists and Lombardo Toledano’s labor unions.

Camacho’s opponent was Juan Almazán, an army general who had retired from the military a year earlier when he announced his candidacy for the presidency as leader of his own right-wing political party. Conservative opinion was ascendant in Mexico, and because Almazán’s prospects were good, his campaign was subject to dirty tricks by his enemies on the left. At the start of the May 24 assault, Siqueiros let out a cry of “Viva Almazán!” This was intended to help obscure the identities of the assailants by drawing suspicion to Almazán’s supporters, but no one was fooled. Nor did it inhibit the Mexican Communists from accusing Trotsky of conspiring with Almazán behind the scenes, part of the unceasing effort to compromise his asylum by portraying him as a meddler in Mexico’s national politics.

As it happened, the election went through without any violence. Officially Camacho won an overwhelming victory, but the polling was marred by vote-rigging and intimidation of Almazán’s supporters. Almazán at first refused to concede defeat, then left for the United States, where he continued to make vague threats about challenging Camacho’s claim to victory. Ultimately, Almazán yielded, and fears of widespread unrest, even civil war, proved unwarranted.

At the house on Avenida Viena, where these developments were closely monitored, Camacho’s victory brought a measure of relief, though it took none of the steam out of Cannon’s fund-raising drive in the United States. In the two and a half months following the Siqueiros raid, the Socialist Workers Party raised over $2,250 toward improving Trotsky’s security. Trotsky’s household finances were a separate matter. With no further income expected from the Stalin biography until its completion, Trotsky placed his hopes on the sale of his archives, an idea that had percolated for more than two years before it was finally realized in the spring of 1940.

Trotsky initially hoped the sale of his papers might bring in upwards of $50,000, but in hard economic times this proved to be far too optimistic. The deal Goldman concluded on May 10 with Harvard University earned Trotsky a relatively modest $6,000, to be paid only after the materials were delivered and inspected. Two weeks later came the
Siqueiros raid, which appeared designed to destroy Trotsky’s archives as well as to end his life. The rush was now on to organize and catalogue these voluminous papers for shipment to Cambridge as soon as possible. The precious cargo, packed in three dozen crates and boxes, left Mexico City by train on the morning of July 17.

T
HE TRANSFORMATION OF
Trotsky’s home into a fortress began on the very afternoon of the assault. By a stroke of good fortune, there happened to be a man on the scene with the necessary wherewithal. He was Hank Schultz, a comrade from Minneapolis who had come to Coyoacán on vacation with his wife and child in order to meet Trotsky. Schultz was a railway brakeman by trade who volunteered to help Local 574 during the great Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike of 1934, when, as night picket dispatcher, he worked in close collaboration with Dobbs. Subsequently, he joined the Trotskyist movement and met his wife, Dorothy, who was also a party member. They arrived in Coyoacán four days before the raid but were out of town when it happened.

Schultz was a skilled mechanic and electrician, as well as an experienced organizer of men, assets that proved to be invaluable in the weeks after the assault. Had it not been for Schultz, Robins testified, they would have “all caved under the overload.” Trotsky called him “indefatigable, absolutely selfless, inventive, and in spite of sickness always in a good mood. Such people will build up the party.” Another enthusiast was Joe Hansen, now returned to Coyoacán to serve as a guard and help erect the fortifications. Schultz was due back at his job in Minneapolis in mid-July, so time was short.

Some of the renovations made to the house on Avenida Viena were visible from the street. The east windows were bricked in. The old wooden entrance to the garage was replaced with double iron doors: a heavy outer door that swung open and an inner folding gate, both secured by electronically controlled locks. The tower atop the roof at the northeast corner of the property was converted into a two-story bombproof redoubt, with cement floors and ceilings. Three new brick turrets appeared above the walls, each with loopholes overlooking the patio and the neighborhood. Two of these blockhouses—one at the northwest corner and another at the center of the north wall directly above the guards’ quarters—looked out onto the river. The one at the
southeast corner, built on the roof of the house and looking down on the police
casita
and Avenida Viena, served as the main guard station and housed the electronic switches to the garage doors.

Security measures inside the house were delayed by the police investigation of the raid. On June 24, Trotsky and Natalia, accompanied by a formidable police escort, were brought to the heavily guarded city courthouse to give sworn depositions. The judge planned to come out to the house to see the rooms as they were at the time of the attack, an inspection that was delayed until July 16. On that day, the judge and his associates took about five hours to examine the bullet holes and other evidence and to interview Seva. Also allowed to inspect the house, much to the consternation of its residents, were the Communist lawyers for the captured raiders. Trotsky’s guards, their hands on their guns, kept a close watch on these unwanted visitors.

Meanwhile, the hunt for Siqueiros and his artist-accomplices continued. The trail led to midtown Manhattan and the Museum of Modern Art, where five Siqueiros paintings were on display as part of an exhibit called “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.” It was there, at MOMA, that several witnesses spotted the Arenal brothers behaving like innocent museum-goers, a development that set the FBI on their trail and prompted the Mexican police to initiate a request for their extradition.

O
NCE THE JUDGE
had paid his visit, the security installations inside the house could proceed. Steel shutters went up on the interior windows. The Trotskys’ bedroom was equipped with new doors, each made with two layers of heavy iron encasing sand-filled centers. Along the north wall, a second level of guards’ rooms was under construction. An underground bunker was in the planning stage.

After several weeks of deliberation, it was decided not to install a photoelectric alarm system. The main reason was that the new fortifications would have necessitated an elaborate arrangement of mirrors in order to convey the light beam uninterrupted along the tops of the walls surrounding the property. And anyway, as Hansen wrote to Dobbs in New York on July 31, “the next attack will most likely be bombs.” The several hundred dollars designated for the photoelectric system would be spent instead on barbed-wire entanglements and bombproof wire netting.

All of these renovations were paid for by the contributions of the American comrades, but also thanks to the generosity of a few wealthy sympathizers in the U.S. who were stirred to action by the attempted murder of Trotsky and his family. One of these benefactors, a certain “Mr. Kay” who wished to remain anonymous, was rewarded with a personal letter from the grateful beneficiary. “The only thing I know about you, through my friends Jim Cannon and Farrell Dobbs, is that you are a very sure and generous friend,” Trotsky wrote on August 3. “We live here, my family and my young friends, under the permanent threat of a new ‘blitzkrieg’ assault on the part of the Stalinists and, as in the case of England, the material aid comes from the States.”

Trotsky was referring to the intensifying Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe’s massive bombing raids designed to knock out the Royal Air Force and prepare the way for a German invasion. “During the past two months the house has been undergoing a transformation into a kind of ‘fortress’ in a few more weeks we will be very well protected against new ‘blitzkrieg’ assaults.”

One generous supporter who had the opportunity to witness the transformation was Frank Jacson, Sylvia Ageloff’s “husband,” who was becoming a familiar figure within Trotsky’s tight circle of comrades. Around the time that Trotsky wrote to thank his American benefactor, he asked Jacson what he thought of the new fortifications. Hansen and Cornell were standing there in the patio with Trotsky, admiring their handiwork. This was all fine, they heard Jacson say, but “in the next attack the GPU will use other methods.” “What methods?” he was asked. Jacson just shrugged his shoulders, but he now spoke as an authority on these matters. Thanks to the incompetence of the Siqueiros gang, the NKVD penetration agent had been promoted to assassin.

Jacson had met Trotsky for the first time four days after the assault. Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer were leaving Mexico for France and had
booked passage on a ship sailing to New York from Veracruz on May 29. Jacson was to drive them to their ship.

Trotsky in the winter of 1939–40.

Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Sylvia had returned to New York City eight weeks earlier, after an extended sick leave from her job as a social worker. In her absence, the Rosmers had proved to be an invaluable connection for Jacson. Marguerite Rosmer was very close to Natalia, so Jacson’s friendship with the couple put him in good standing with Natalia, and thus indirectly with Trotsky. The Rosmers’ departure, therefore, was a setback for the Soviet operative, but he maneuvered to take maximum advantage of their send-off. Jacson told them he traveled to Veracruz on business every two weeks and would be happy, once again, to serve as their chauffeur.

On the eve of the departure, Natalia decided that she would like to accompany the Rosmers to Veracruz. That would mean returning alone with Jacson, with an overnight stop along the way, and nobody at the house thought this was a good idea. Instead, it was agreed that Evelyn Andreas, Trotsky’s American typist and the companion of one of his guards, would drive Natalia in her car.

Jacson entered the patio on May 28 at 7:58 a.m., the time recorded
in the log kept by the guards. Trotsky, who was tending to the chickens, greeted him and the two men shook hands. Jacson presented Seva with a toy glider, and he was invited to the breakfast table for a cup of coffee while the Rosmers finished packing. When they appeared, he carried their luggage out to the car. Evelyn, meanwhile, had arrived for Natalia. At the moment of departure, Trotsky surprised everyone by walking several steps out into the street to see them off, the only time he had ever done this.

The travelers stopped overnight at Jalapa, a couple of hours’ drive from Veracruz. In accompanying Evelyn to park the cars in the garage for the night, Jacson discovered that her car was in need of a major repair and that it would be unsafe to continue driving it. The garage attendant seconded this opinion, according to Jacson, so the next morning everyone made room in his car for the last leg of the trip. Reaching the outskirts of Veracruz, Jacson, who had claimed to be a regular visitor to the city, did not seem to know his way around and had to stop to ask directions to the ship. Natalia wondered about this, but not enough to question it.

The Rosmers sailed for New York and Jacson drove Natalia and Evelyn back to Coyoacán. The guards’ log shows that Natalia was returned to the house on May 30 at 3:42 in the afternoon. Jacson then drove Evelyn to her apartment in the city. There he was introduced to Dorothy Schultz, who together with her two-year-old daughter was staying with Evelyn. For Jacson, the connection to Evelyn and Dorothy would now prove to be extremely advantageous after the departure of the Rosmers.