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.
AS 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.
THE 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 o
f 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.
For their protection, Grigulevich and others involved in this “wet” operation were then withdrawn from Spain and brought to Moscow, where they underwent an NKVD training course. In the spring of 1938, Grigulevich and a colleague were sent to Mexico City to conduct surveillance of Trotsky, and if possible to penetrate his circle. They rented an apartment a few blocks from the Blue House and set up an observation point from which they could watch the comings and goings.
In the first months of 1939, Grigulevich, using the code name “Felipe,” recruited Siqueiros, an acquaintance in Spain, as well as Siqueiros’s wife and her brother Leopoldo Arenal, brother of the artist Luís. Leopoldo Arenal was a fanatical anti-Trotskyist. He came up with a plan to deliver Trotsky a booby-trapped potted cactus: the bomb concealed in its soil would be triggered to explode during the transplanting. This proposal was passed on to the NKVD resident in New York, who rejected it for fear that the bomb might not reach its intended target.
After Operation Duck was launched in the summer of 1939 and as its principal agents were being maneuvered into position in Mexico, “Felipe” was summoned to Moscow. This might have been the end of the road for Grigulevich, whose name was closely associated with that of the defector Orlov. But in Moscow he impressed his superiors with his detailed knowledge of the Mexican terrain and of Trotsky’s situation on Avenida Viena. He brought with him a plan to storm the villa, and urged that Siqueiros be named to lead the fighting group. He was taken to meet with Beria, who approved the idea and ordered him to return to Mexico to see to its execution. Grigulevich arrived back in Mexico City in February 1940 and sat down with Eitingon to coordinate the operational details.
As these preparations were under way, Trotsky had once again become the object of a vicious slander campaign in Mexico’s left-wing press. He had unwittingly provided the pretext for this latest and most ferocious onslaught, by agreeing to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress, better known at the time as the Dies Committee. Trotsky was asked to testify about the history and methods of Stalinism, and his decision to accept this invitation caused great consternation among his American followers.
As an anti-Communist, Martin Dies, a Democrat from Texas, was the Joseph McCarthy of his day, a self-promoting, red-baiting opportunist who was bent on tying the American Communist Party to the Kremlin in order to expose the party’s leaders to prosecution. Trotsky justified his decision to testify by saying he would use the reactionary Dies Committee as a tribune, much as he had used the liberal Dewey Commission two years earlier. There was more to it, however, because Trotsky saw Dies as his laissez-passer into the United States, where he might be able to turn a six-month visa into permanent residence.
Stories in the American and Mexican press claimed that Trotsky was to testify about Mexican and Latin American Communism and on the sensitive subject of Mexico’s oil industry. This gave an opening to the Mexican Communists and their sympathizers to portray Trotsky not only as a meddler in Mexican politics, but as a tool of the oil companies and Wall Street. Until recently, Trotsky had been caricatured as an agent of the Gestapo, a Judas branded with a swastika, just as he was in the Moscow papers. In the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, however, he had to be recast as an agent of Yankee imperialism. Even though Congressman Dies eventually withdrew his invitation, the episode facilitated the transformation of Trotsky from a tool of the Gestapo into a tool of the FBI.
In the winter and spring of 1940, the tone of the anti-Trotsky campaign in Mexico turned violent. Meetings of the Communist Party and its front organizations were punctuated by shouts of “Death to Trotsky!” This slogan was adopted by the party during its congress in March, when it conducted a sweeping purge of its top leadership, which was accused of Trotskyism. Trotsky understood that such a purge could only have been ordered by Moscow. He guessed that the man acting as the Comintern’s supervisor on the scene was Carlos Contreras, the GPU enforcer in Spain who now surfaced in Mexico City as a member of the Communist Party’s honorary presidium.
On May Day, the party organized a march through the city of some 20,000 uniformed men and women shouting slogans such as “Throw out the most ominous and dangerous traitor Trotsky.” Reliable reports from Trotsky’s Mexican friends told of a concentration in the city of Stalinist killers from Spain. Trotsky called a meeting of the guard to warn of the danger that an armed attack was in preparation.
Among the guards listening to Trotsky was Robert Sheldon Harte, the quiet, bookish, intense young man with the kinky red-brown hair, acne-scarred face, and cleft chin. At Duke, Harte had published politically conscious short fiction, and even now he harbored literary aspirations. Still, he was unable to see the plot line of the real-life thriller in which he had become entangled. He failed to fully grasp the connection between Trotsky’s warning of mortal danger and Harte’s own clandestine meetings with a Soviet agent named Felipe. The NKVD’s real objective, Harte understood from Felipe, was the destruction of Trotsky’s archives—together with the manuscript of the slanderous biography of Stalin that Trotsky was preparing, based in part on forged documents supplied by Hitler.
The rain fell heavily at times during the night of May 23–24, and the dirt roads of Coyoacán turned muddy. At 10:00 p.m. Siqueiros and a half-dozen confederates, including fellow artists Luís Arenal and Antonio Pujol, gathered at a house on Calle de República de Cuba. Toward midnight, several men arrived with police uniforms and weapons, including a Thompson submachine gun, four revolvers, and two Thermos bombs, along with rubber gloves to prevent fingerprints. Siqueiros told his comrades to try on the police uniforms, while Pujol put on the lone military uniform, that of a lieutenant. The men laughed and joked as though it were a costume party.
Siqueiros then went out. He returned toward 2:00 a.m. dressed in the uniform of an army major. Dark glasses and a fake mustache completed the disguise. He modeled his uniform for his comrades, provoking great hilarity. “How does it suit me?” asked the pintor a pistola. “Very well,” they replied with laughter.
An hour later, these uniformed and well-armed men crammed themselves into Siqueiros’s car and drove toward Trotsky’s home. Siqueiros assured them that all would go well because one of the guards had been bought. “And if this guy betrays us and we get machine-gunned?” one of them asked. Siqueiros smiled and replied, “There’s no danger of that!” En route, he handed each man an envelope containing 250 pesos, about $50. They parked one street over from Avenida Viena and waited, as Siqueiros kept looking at his watch.
Toward 4:00 a.m. “Major” Siqueiros ordered his men to get out of the car. They surprised and overpowered the five policemen in the casita, three of whom were asleep, and tied them up. They then made their way toward the southwest corner of the property, where three other groups of men, all armed and dressed in police uniforms, converged from different directions on the entrance to the garage. Hearing Felipe’s voice, Harte delivered his end of the bargain by sliding away the heavy bolt that joined the doors, as twenty raiders poured into the garage and then out into the patio.
One man stationed himself alongside the eucalyptus tree, in the vi
cinity of the guards’ quarters. Others took up positions outside the door to Seva’s room and the French windows to Trotsky’s bedroom. A third contingent entered the house through the library, at the top right of the T, and made their way into the dining room, where, with a mighty heave, they forced open the locked door to Trotsky’s study and continued toward the bedroom.
A burst of automatic fire tore through the bedroom door. A raider armed with a submachine gun then entered Seva’s room and opened fire through the closed door connecting to Trotsky’s bedroom, while a third assailant fired through the wooden shutters on the French windows, creating a crossfire from three directions. Trotsky had taken a sedative to help him sleep and was slow to realize the danger, but Natalia grabbed him from his bed and the two fell into the corner of the room beneath the window, as ricocheting bullets flew in all directions above them.
In their quarters, the guards were awakened by the gunfire and began to react. Robins opened the door to his quarters and in an instant caught sight of a man in a police uniform alongside the eucalyptus tree who turned and fired a submachine gun in his direction, spattering lead around the entrance and forcing him back inside. He heard this man—almost certainly Leopoldo Arenal—say in accented English, “Keep your heads out of the way and you won’t get hurt.”
Jake Cooper, who had arrived from Minneapolis only three days earlier, also heard this warning. He opened his door slightly and was met by a hail of bullets. He heard Robins yelling, “Keep your heads down!” Charley Cornell, in the room between those of Cooper and Robins, heeded this advice. Up in the tower, Otto opened the blinds of his bedroom window overlooking the patio, and as he did so, gunfire sprayed the bricks around the window, sending him to the floor. The guards could hear machine guns firing on the other side of the house—even inside the house—and feared the worst. “Bob, where are you?!” Robins kept yelling.
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