Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (95 page)

Lamont, however, continued to serve the Soviet cause. He chaired
the Friends of the Soviet Union, later renamed the National Council of
American-Soviet Friendship. During the 1950s he was one of the most
prominent defenders of American Communists facing political restrictions and investigations. He founded and chaired the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, was cited for contempt of Congress
(later overturned on appeal), served as plaintiff in landmark Supreme
Court cases that overturned inspection of foreign mail, and challenged
denials of passports by the State Department. While he denounced any
restriction on Communists in America, he justified and defended Stalin's
Terror, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the imposition of totalitarian regimes on
Eastern Europe by the USSR, and the suppression of all dissent in the
People's Republic of China and the People's Republic of Korea as necessary steps to bring about socialism. The author of numerous books on
the philosophy of humanism, Lamont always insisted that he was not himself a member of the CPUSA, although Louis Budenz testified that he
knew him to be a secret party member. He endowed the Corliss Lamont
Chair of Civil Liberties at Columbia University. He died in 1995, lauded
as a principled fighter for civil liberties and peace and apparently never
called upon to fulfill his late 1930s pledge to work for the KGB.84

The KGB devoted enormous resources to surveilling, infiltrating, and disrupting the American Trotskyist movement, the "Polecats" in KGB communications. James Cannon, a leader of the CPUSA, had attended the
Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1928
and been converted to Trotskyism. The CPUSA quickly expelled him and
a small group of his supporters, who wandered in the political wilderness
first as the Communist League of America (Left Opposition) and later as
the Workers Party and then the Socialist Workers Party.

The American Trotskyist movement had only a few hundred active
members in 1932 and no institutional base or financial resources, but the
KGB already had at least three sources reporting on its activities, two
unidentified, and one, John Spivak, a journalist. By 1935, it had added
another journalist, Frank Palmer, and a woman named Shifra Tarr, who attended Trotskyist meetings and was tapped to infiltrate the organization. (Spivak and Palmer are discussed in chapter 3.) For the rest of the
decade, as the purges gathered steam in Russia, work against American
Trotskyists intensified. In 1936 the KGB assigned Floyd Cleveland Miller
to listen to a wiretap on James Cannon's home, a task that lasted one year.
He then joined the Socialist Workers Party as Mike Cort, and from his
perch in the Sailors Union of the Pacific reported to the KGB on the
movements of Trotskyist seamen during World War II and spied on Trotsky's widow in Mexico."

The KGB recruited Robert Owen Menaker, a scion of a radical family and a traveling salesman for a company whose owner worked for the
KGB, for anti-Trotsky work in 1937. At the time, he was still a nominal
member of the Socialist Party. Ironically, leading Trotskyist activists, including Max Shachtman, approached Menaker and another secret KGB
asset, "Actor," and recruited them as "permanent informants there and to
conduct work on demoralization" of the Socialists. Recruited to spy on the
Socialists by the Trotskyists, Menaker and "Actor" actually spied on the
Trotskyists for the Communists. The station explained: "`Our idea boils
down to continuing to watch the Trotskyites through the Socialist Party,
since we don't yet have any seasoned agents within the Trotskyite organization."' Moscow was pleased: "`Your latest recruits ('Actor' [unidentified], `Bob' [Menaker]) and the transfer of a number of other sources to
shedding light on the Trotskyites have significantly advanced our cultivation of the Trotskyites. Continue cultivating at the same rate, taking into
account preparations for the upcoming trial."' (The "trial" likely referred
to a forthcoming investigation of Stalin's charges against Trotsky chaired
by John Dewey, an effort given significant support by American Trotskyists.) KGB documents in Vassiliev's notebooks indicate that Menaker
worked for the Soviets for nearly a decade, although they are largely silent
about his exact activities. "Actor" played a more sinister role. He had extensive connections with the Trotskyists and managed to travel to Trotsky's house in Mexico City, enabling him to give the KGB details about
Trotsky's surroundings and contacts. The KGB worried, however, that he
was "arousing the Trotskyites' suspicion with his curiosity.""

Originally recruited by the KGB as an industrial spy, Thomas Black
joined the Socialist Party (SP) in 1937 and became secretary of its Newark
branch. Assigned to spy on its Trotskyist faction, he supplied detailed personal information on Jack and Sara Weber, in whom the KGB was particularly interested. (Sara Weber had earlier been Leon Trotsky's secre- tart' and is a different person from the Sara Weber mentioned in chapter
6.) Black later testified that he was slated to travel to Mexico to infiltrate
Trotsky's household in late 1938 but avoided the assignment.87

In the latter half of the 198os Dr. Grigory Rabinovich, head of the
American office of the Soviet Red Cross, oversaw the KGB's anti-Trotsky
work, using Louis Budenz, who provided the KGB with its most successful spy within the American ranks of the Socialist Workers Party. Budenz recruited Sylvia Callen, a young Communist social worker. Sylvia
joined the SWP in Chicago as Sylvia Caldwell, moved to New York, and
eventually succeeded in becoming James Cannon's personal secretary.
For years, she turned over copies of SWP leaders' correspondence, information about the finances of Trotskyist groups, and details about the
Trotsky household in Mexico. She continued her assignment until 1947.
Named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Soble espionage case, she
cooperated with a federal grand jury in 1958.88

Nor was infiltration of the Trotskyists the only route used by the KGB
to gather information or harass Stalin's political rivals. The KGB New
York station instructed Congressman Samuel Dickstein to get "`materials on the activities of Trotskyite organizations here. These materials
could serve as a basis for dealing a powerful polit. blow to the Trotskyites,
compromising them on the line of their ties with German and Japanese
fascist organizations."' Convinced that the Trotskyists were flirting with
Ukrainian and Japanese "`counterrevolutionaries,"' the KGB planned to
use Dickstein and the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities "`to prove that the isolationist position of the Amer. Trotskyites is
no accident, that the Trotskyites' propaganda about removing America
from Europ. and Asian problems, etc., is an outright betrayal by the Trotskyites, who are carrying out the orders of Japanese and German imperialism. The congressional committee can find the relevant documents
in the CC [Central Committee] of the Trotskyites during a search. We
have keys to all the entrances to the offices of the Trotskyite CC."' Dickstein provided the KGB with shorthand copies of Dies Committee hearings that it hoped to use to identify individual Trotskyists, as well as copies
of the correspondence between the Dies Committee and Trotsky about
the possibility of Trotsky testifying. The KGB also hoped that it could use
Dickstein's influence as chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization to induce the U.S. government to hand over emigres in whom it was interested: "`We intend through C. ["Crook"/Dick-
stein] to sound out the possibilities of arranging, with his participation, the deportation to our country on our instructions of White Guard and
Trotskyite elements who are living in this country and could be of operational interest to us."' Akhmerov pressed Laurence Duggan for State
Department information about Trotsky's situation in Mexico, but Duggan
responded that the State Department took little interest in Trotsky.
Ovakimyan, however, obtained four pages of U.S. Justice Department
material on Trotsky's activities in Mexico from Abraham Glasser, the KGB
agent in the justice Department (see chapter 4). Moscow Center directed
that John Spivak, who covered the activities of pro-Nazi groups in the
United States, "'should look for their connection to Trotskyites, both in
America and against the USSR."'s9

A report records that as of January 1939, the KGB counted fifteen
agents as the valuable sources in its American station. Three had infiltrated the Trotskyists: Sylvia Callen, Robert Menaker, and Floyd Miller.
But having one-fifth of its most valuable sources reporting on a few thousand Trotskyists (of whom only a few hundred were activists) was not
enough since the three were judged not suitable "for active struggle,"
rather than simply informing on Trotskyist activities. So at a time when it
was deactivating technical and governmental sources, "`the station has
been asked to acquire agents through whom we could wage an active battle to defeat the Trotskyites."' In his memoirs, Pavel Sudoplatov recounts
that he was summoned to meet with Stalin and Beria in March 1939; appointed deputy director of KGB foreign intelligence and head of the
"fifth department"; and ordered to assassinate Trotsky, then in exile in
Mexico. A report to Beria probably prepared sometime in 1939 identified
the American branch of the Trotskyist movement as the linchpin of its
worldwide efforts: "`In number of people and in financial capabilities,
the American Trotskyite organization is the most powerful of all the Trotskyite groups that exist in European countries. In his counterrevolutionary work managing the 4th International and individual Trotskyite groups
in China and European and South American countries, Trotsky relies first
and foremost on his American cadres."' The report went on to explain:
"`Our intelligence operations in the fight against American Trotskyites
have until now been only informational. All the conditions are in place to
destroy the American Trotskyite organization; all that we lack are workers in the station who specialize in that line and who would organize this
operation."' The memo proposed sending employees of the fifth department to carry out the operation.90

Sudoplatov recounted how he had enlisted Leonid Eitingon, who had served an earlier tour in the United States, to supervise the murder. Eitingon in turn recruited two separate groups of potential assassins and arrived illegally in New York in October 1939 to oversee both projects. The
first-unsuccessful-attempt to kill Trotsky took place on 24 May 1940,
when, led by painter David Siqueiros and KGB officer losif Grigulevich,
a group of Spanish and Mexican Communists (many veterans of the Spanish Civil War) stormed Trotsky's villa. Two of the gunmen were Leopolo
and Luis Arenal, both of whom had connections to Jacob Golos. Luis's
wife, Rose Arenal, an American Communist, later told the FBI she had
acted as a mail drop for the brothers; her messages were picked up by
Elizabeth Bentley.91

One of the minor mysteries of the affair was the precise role played
by Robert Sheldon Harte, a twenty-five-year-old American Trotskyist who
served as a guard at Trotsky's villa. He had joined the SWP in 1939 and
in early 1940 volunteered to go to Mexico. Harte had opened the gate to
the assault team, which raked Trotsky's residence and bedroom with gunfire and threw incendiary bombs, wounding the former Soviet leader's
fourteen-year-old grandson. When the would-be assassins withdrew, they
took Harte with them. He was found dead a few weeks later. Trotsky believed that he had been tricked into opening the gate, kidnapped, and
murdered. He commissioned a plaque and had it placed next to the house
with the text: "In Memory of Robert Sheldon Harte, 1915-1940, Murdered by Stalin." But others suspected that Harte might have been a
plant. His father was surprised that his son had gone to guard Trotsky because he had a picture of Stalin in his room.92

KGB archival material brought to the West by Vasili Mitrokhin confirmed that Harte had collaborated with the attackers. A history of the
KGB published in Russia in 1997 noted that Harte willingly opened the
gate and left with the assailants, asserting that he had been recruited by
the New York station and given the cover name "Cupid." The overall organizer of the Trotsky operation, Eitingon, later testified during an internal KGB probe that Harte had turned out to be a "traitor." After the
assault, upset that Trotsky's grandson had been wounded, he had told the
raiding party that "had he known all this, as an American he never would
have agreed to participate in this raid. Such behavior served as the basis
for deciding on the spot to liquidate him. He was killed by Mexicans."
There is one mention of "Cupid" in a document in Vassiliev's notebooks.
Moscow Center directed in November 1939 that in light of the recall of
Rabinovich, who had handled anti-Trotsky work, several of his agents should be temporarily deactivated; one of them was "Cupid." Grigulevich appears to have met Harte, perhaps in New York, reactivated him,
and sent him to Mexico late in March 1940 .93

The KGB finally succeeded in killing Trotsky through the help of an
undercover American Communist, Ruby Weil. Weil worked for the
CPUSAs secret apparatus and had been cultivating an ardent young Trotskyist, Sylvia Ageloff. Budenz transferred Weil to Grigory Rabinovich and
the KGB in 1938. On a trip to Paris to attend a Trotskyist meeting Weil
introduced Ageloff to Jacques Mornard, the alias of Ramon Mercader,
the son of a prominent Spanish Communist, who worked for Eitingon.
Mercader established a romantic relationship with her. Later Ageloff volunteered to work at Trotsky's residence in Mexico, enabling Mercader
through her to gain access to Trotsky's house, arrange a private meeting
with Trotsky in August 1940, and smash his skull with a small axe.94

Trotsky's murder did little to slow down the KGB's efforts to destroy
his organization. Moscow instructed Ovakimyan in January 1941 "to intensify the struggle against the Trotskyites by making use of the disarray
among the Trotskyites since the death of the "Old Man" [Trotsky], the
departure of many of them, and the uncertainty and disillusionment
among them." It was "essential that we acquire agents who are capable
of vigorous actions to demoralize their ranks." A later message from
Moscow suggested three candidates for recruitment and included specific
tactics to use with them. Sara Weber, one of Thomas Black's targets several years before, remained of interest: "`The strategy toward Sara Weber
should be designed on the basis that her relatives are in our territory. We
have found out the particulars about her mother and sister here and
begun actively cultivating them. Get started on the most meticulous study
of Sara, her attitudes, connections, acquaintances and personal life, her
feelings about her relatives, her financial situation, and so forth. It is imperative to ascertain whether she will agree to be recruited under threat
of repression of her relatives or will `consent' to work for us at her
mother's `request,' etc."' The KGB also targeted Rose Karsner, wife of
SWP leader James Cannon: "`She has a sister here [in the USSR] (who
has been repressed [imprisoned]), and maybe in order to `ransom' her
freedom she will agree to cooperate with us. Can we get her on her `love'
for her husband, who is currently in a `mental depression,' etc. Cannon
himself could be cultivated for the same purpose."' The third target was
Harry Frankel, the SWP party name of Harry Braverman, whom KGB
agents had been cultivating: "`Now that the work with him has started, it
needs to be taken to a definite conclusion-either recruit him or com promise him. According to the latest reports, he is suffering a `disaster'
both psychologically and financially. Take note of this."' Finally, Moscow
was intrigued by reports from Sylvia Callen that items incriminating Soviet citizens might be found among Trotsky's papers, located in a bank
vault, and suggested that "`if the opportunity presents itself, we need to
obtain these archives."' It also wanted Trotsky's papers at Harvard pho-
tographed.95