The crossfire into Trotsky’s bedroom lasted for several minutes. When the guns fell silent, one of the raiders entered Seva’s room and threw down a Thermos bomb, the force of the explosion blowing open the door to Trotsky’s bedroom and igniting a small fire. Standing on the threshold and peering into the room illuminated only by the faint glow of the flames at his feet, the intruder emptied his handgun into Trotsky’s and Natalia’s beds. Then he turned and ran out.
The gunfire became intermittent and more distant, as the raiders covered their retreat. They had been in control of the grounds for about fifteen minutes. Robins raced up to the roof, where he was fired on by the assailants from the street as they fled. He called down to the police in the casita, who appeared in the doorway, hands tied behind their backs. Charley entered the garage and found Bob’s serape lying on the floor, neatly folded. The garage doors were wide open and both cars were gone. The alarm system had been turned off.
All the members of the household assembled in the patio. Seva’s foot was bleeding. When the attack began he dove under his bed. A bullet fired into the bed passed through the mattress and struck him in the big toe. After the raiders withdrew, he ran out into the patio. Natalia had minor burns from smothering the fire with blankets. Trotsky received only a couple of light scratches on his face from flying glass. Everyone marveled at the family’s good fortune. The Rosmers, the cook, and the housekeeper were all unharmed, as were four of the five guards. The only cause for distress was the disappearance of Bob Harte.
Within a half-hour, the chief of the Mexican secret service, Colonel Leandro Sánchez Salazar, and a team of investigators arrived on the scene. Introducing himself to Trotsky, Salazar was struck by the incongruity between the exile’s famously Mephistophelian features and his bathrobe and pajamas. Salazar’s men counted seventy-three bullet holes in the doors, windows, and walls of Trotsky’s bedroom. Altogether well over 300 shots had been fired.
A check of the yard revealed two homemade bombs that were broken but unexploded and a third one that remained intact. On the riverbank the police found a wooden extension ladder, a manila rope ladder, a crowbar, and a portable electric saw with a very long extension cord. This evidence seemed to indicate that the raiders were not counting on the complicity of Harte, who must have been tricked into opening the door. The Ford was found two blocks away, abandoned in the mud.
Counting the bullet holes and considering the shocking ineptitude of the attackers, who could easily have killed one another in their own murderous crossfire, Salazar grew suspicious. He wondered why the guards had not fired their weapons. He questioned the calm, even conspiratorial, demeanor of the members of the household under the circumstances. Salazar asked Trotsky if he knew the identities of the assailants. Walking the colonel over to the rabbit cages, Trotsky drew him near and told him what he knew to be a dead certainty: the perpetrator of the assault was Joseph Stalin, acting through the agency of the GPU. This statement, delivered with a dramatic flare, struck Salazar as fanciful. His suspicion mounted that Trotsky himself had staged the raid.
In the days following the assault on Trotsky’s home, the Mexican police guard was increased to twenty-five men on duty at all times. Every fifteen minutes through the night they signaled by whistle from each corner of the property. Inside the walls, the guards traded speculations about the fate of Bob. Was he a victim or an accomplice? They put the odds at fifty-fifty.
The testimony of the Mexican police guards was ambiguous. They saw Bob being led between two of the raiders, each one holding him by an arm as he muttered, “No, no, please don’t.” He was protesting but not resisting, and they could not say for sure whether he was taken against his will. The Dodge, which was discovered the following afternoon about ten miles away in the center of the city, had a tricky ignition switch, such that only Harte himself could have started it for the raiders.
Complicit or not, Harte must have opened the outside door when he heard a familiar voice. Suspicion fell on Sergeant Casas, who said he was home asleep at the time of the raid. On the day after the attack, he along with the five policemen on duty that night were arrested and held for questioning. Casas had told Trotsky’s cook that the raid was a self-assault, auto-asalto, an expression she did not understand but which she repeated to the police, prompting the arrests. Baffled, Trotsky released a statement saying that in light of his remark, Casas was compromised and may even have been part of the conspiracy.
Jesse Sheldon Harte, Bob’s father, arrived in Mexico City the day after the raid and offered a reward of 10,000 pesos, more than $2,000, for the location of his son. He met with the police investigators, and paid a call on Trotsky. He was surprised to learn that young Sheldon, who told him he had gone to Mexico on business, was one of Trotsky’s bodyguards.
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. Salazar 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.”
ON JUNE 17, Colonel Salazar broke the case. An overheard conversation at a bar led to the arrest and confession of Néstor Sánchez Hernández, 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.”
CHAPTER 11
Deadline
Two 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 Trots
ky’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.
Trotsky Page 30