The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  The Mother consisted of only two people: Caridad and Ramon Mercader. Mother and son were both Spanish agents working for Soviet intelligence. Caridad was a fierce personality. Born in Cuba, she had been the respectable wife of a wealthy textile industrialist in a small town near Barcelona and mother of five children before she left her husband and family during the Spanish Civil War to become a fighter and propagandist for the Republican cause. Now she was an agent run by Eitingon and also his lover.1

  Mother and son had been horrified by Franco’s devastating victory over the Republicans—horrified at a safe distance, since by then Eitingon had helped resettle them in Paris. There, the handsome Ramon was engaged in playing the joyful, debonair, apolitical Jacques with his new love, Sylvia Ageloff, until Sylvia regretfully took leave of Jacques in February 1939 and returned to New York.

  The following month, when Eitingon received Stalin’s order to organize the assassination of Leon Trotsky, he thought at once of the Mercaders. To Eitingon’s experienced eye, Sylvia’s lover was the best candidate for the job. Sylvia, another woman in the plot, would provide access to Trotsky, while Caridad would ensure that Ramon would not flinch and do the job of killing Stalin’s archenemy.

  Nonetheless, Eitingon decided to go ahead with plans for “The Horse” as well.

  Eitingon trained the two groups concurrently, with both The Mother and The Horse based in Paris. The summer was spent in preparations. Although the two groups were training within blocks of each other, according to the rules of konspiratsiya, neither had any idea the other existed.

  Before the first—ultimately unsuccessful—strike, a high-ranking secret service official was sent from Lubyanka to Paris. He met with the two groups separately to determine whether they were operational. Apparently, he was satisfied.

  The amount of time that all this preparation took almost torpedoed the operation. September came, and, as Stalin expected and abetted, Germany invaded Poland. France entered the war on the side of Poland, and Eitingon’s fake Polish passport, issued by Soviet intelligence, became a liability. There was a very real chance Eitingon could be drafted into the French army as a Polish citizen. If he refused to join the army, his movement could be restricted—he would be singled out as a “suspicious person” and put under surveillance or worse.

  The situation needed to be resolved quickly. To buy time, the chief of the Soviet intelligence section in Paris hid Eitingon in a psychiatric clinic run by a Russian émigré, disguising him as a mentally ill Syrian Jew—a trick that successfully kept him out of view of the French authorities. But Eitingon had yet to find a way to get to the United States to set the plot in motion.

  In the meantime, The Mother was getting closer to its target. While Eitingon was stuck in hiding in France, his agents Ramon and Caridad Mercader boarded a ship bound for New York.2

  When they landed, Ramon promptly called Sylvia. He explained to her that when the war broke out, he had been drafted into the Belgian army, but apolitical Jacques did not want to fight and left the country with a fake Canadian passport.3 That explanation provided a perfect cover for his trip to the United States.

  Back in Europe, Eitingon was finally issued an Iraqi passport, a French residency permit, and an American visa, thanks to the help of a Soviet agent in Switzerland. The most crucial part of the operation now began: Eitingon crossed the Atlantic in October and arrived in New York. He rented offices in Brooklyn and registered an export-import company there.4

  This became his operational base, as he shuttled between Mexico and New York. Now forty years old, Eitingon had lost some hair and gained a bit of weight. He also limped slightly—a consequence of a wound he’d received in 1921 during the Russian Civil War.5

  Ramon regularly dropped by the offices of Eitingon’s cover company, looking for instructions and money. Time was of the essence, and Eitingon moved quickly. At the end of the month, he ordered Ramon to move to Mexico. As Ramon/Jacques explained to Sylvia, his mother had arranged a job for him in a trading company there. Sylvia followed him to Mexico City in January 1940. Meanwhile, Eitingon and Caridad continued to travel between Mexico and New York.

  Caridad’s main task was to support and reassure Ramon. Anxiety over his double life and impending mission had pushed her son to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Things didn’t improve when he read in the local Mexican newspaper about the failed attempt on Trotsky’s life by Siqueros’s group.

  In Mexico, Ramon was also faced with an unexpected obstacle. Sylvia, as Trotsky’s former secretary, was invited to Trotsky’s villa right away and continued to visit frequently, but she never suggested that Jacques come with her. It seemed he was not on the guest list. He offered to drive his lover to see her friends and thus developed a routine: he drove Sylvia there, then parked his Buick and waited for her outside, chatting with the guards.

  After several months, Sylvia’s friend Jacques had become a familiar face to the inhabitants of the villa. They liked him: Ramon was handsome, polite, and obliging. When he offered Trotsky’s guests at the villa a ride to the port of Vera Cruz, they agreed. The morning Ramon came to pick them up, they invited him into the courtyard. Less than a week had passed since Siqueiros’s attack, and Ramon felt he was making progress.

  When he went inside, the first thing Ramon saw was Trotsky feeding his rabbits in their hutches. Ramon was introduced, and Trotsky shook his hand. But rather than trying to talk with the Old Man, Ramon walked over to Seva’s room and gave Trotsky’s grandson a toy glider. It may not have been a very sophisticated move, but it worked: Ramon was invited to breakfast with the family.

  Mercader was off to New York for a few weeks, but when he came back, the Trotskys invited Ramon and Sylvia for tea. Ramon was in—and he spent more than an hour with the Old Man. A few more visits were enough for him to learn all he needed to know to carry out his plan.6

  Eitingon thought they couldn’t wait any longer, and Caridad gave her blessings. Now they had to decide how to kill Trotsky. Ramon, drawing from his wartime experience, offered various options: he could shoot Trotsky, stab him, or hit him in the head. Finally, after a long debate, Eitingon and Caridad chose an ice axe and a knife. These could be easily hidden under Ramon’s clothes and, unlike a gun, would not make much noise.

  On August 20, Ramon knocked on the gate of the villa. It was a sunny day, but he had on his hat and raincoat. He was alone. The guards let him in. Ramon asked Trotsky to read the updated draft of his article on the politics of the Left, which Trotsky had previously found “confused and full of banal phrases.”7 Trotsky agreed, and they went to a study. Ramon put his overcoat on a chair. While Trotsky was reading, the assassin reached for his overcoat and pulled out his ice axe.

  Outside the villa, two cars were waiting. One was Ramon’s Buick. Eitingon and Caridad sat in the other car, holding their breath. This time, Eitingon wanted to stay close to the events. Police cars began arriving at the villa. Something had happened. But what? Soon it became clear that Ramon had been caught.8 “They made me do it… They’ve got my mother!” he cried out when the guards knocked him to the ground.

  In an instant, Eitingon and Caridad were gone. They had a long way ahead, first to Cuba, then to New York, across the United States and sailing to China, and finally reaching the Soviet Union.

  It was officially announced the next day that Trotsky was dead. Eitingon sent another encrypted cable to Moscow. Once again, his message came too late. Stalin learned the news from a news report, but this time the news was pleasing to him: the job was done.

  By then, World War II had been tearing Europe apart for almost a year. The Soviet Union was already mired in it, with Soviet soldiers occupying part of Poland. Russia was a belligerent power, even if not yet officially so—and the leader of the country kept wasting the precious resources of his intelligence services, its most able and capable operatives, in the hunt for their exiled compatriots scattered all over the world. Stalin made Ramon, now in Mexican jail, a Hero of the Soviet Union,
the highest national award his secret order could confer. Stalin bestowed Eitingon and Caridad with the Order of Lenin—a clear indication to others in Soviet intelligence of what was expected of them. Stalin also honored the Soviet vice consul in New York who supervised Jacob Golos and John Rich.9

  In decades to come, Russian exiles would continue to be at the top of the priority list for the country’s intelligence services. Meanwhile, thanks to Eitingon’s prowess, Jacob Golos’s spy networks in New York were also safe and fully operational. They would continue to be ready and waiting for the moment when they would be most needed.

  CHAPTER 6

  OPERATIONS AREA: UNITED STATES

  Soviet intelligence entered World War II with a unique advantage—an edge that, in fact, no other intelligence service had ever had. Approaching potential agents of other nationalities is always risky and uncertain. In any country, spying for another country is an act of treason, and very few people are ready to cross this line. But the Communist cause was different. Thousands of committed Germans, French, Spaniards, and Britons were happy to help Moscow. In some countries, particularly the United States, recent Russian emigrants who had fled the insane tsarist policy of encouraging pogroms were also sympathetic to the Soviet cause.

  Lubyanka took advantage of this pan-national goodwill, using every dirty trick in the book. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was the Comintern—an international organization of revolutionaries—that did the heavy lifting. The Comintern, whose aspiration was to set the world ablaze with revolution, was responsible for recruiting and training supporters of the Communist cause across the world. A truly global organization, the Comintern’s working language was German, and its headquarters were in Moscow. But it was exactly this Moscow headquarters that ultimately made the organization vulnerable: in the late 1930s, Stalin ruthlessly purged the Comintern leadership. Comintern workers, stripped of their leaders, were co-opted by the Soviet intelligence services.

  What the Soviet intelligence services wanted to do with the Comintern was problematic. It was one thing to plot a revolution—and few could object to working with comrades from abroad who shared a common idea of the future. It was quite another, even for a committed Communist, to provide classified information for the government of another country.

  And there was a more serious problem. Stalin had remade the Soviet secret police in his own image: paranoid, suspicious, and constantly on the hunt for traitors. This organization was uniquely ill suited to the challenge of running horizontal networks of comrades, none of whom were used to practicing unconditional obedience or subordination.

  On June 1, 1940, Muscovites crowded around the city’s newsstands. Hitler’s Germany was winning—Holland had capitulated in May, followed by Belgium, and now France was falling to pieces in the face of the unstoppable German blitzkrieg. This was what the people wanted to read about. But the top Soviet newspaper, Pravda, instead devoted its front page to an article about the need to improve the party’s propaganda and a report from the latest session of the Soviet Supreme Council.

  News about the war was banished to here and was restricted to cheerful communiqués like, “The chief of the First French army taken prisoner.” here, a short news item about a national convention of the Communist Party of the United States held in New York read, “General Secretary Earl Browder laid out a new platform for the upcoming presidential election: The United States must be prevented from entering the war. This is the task which requires [the US Communist Party’s] most intense struggle.”1

  In northeast Moscow, the news about the war filled the corridors of the newly built Comintern rectangular headquarters with anxiety. There, a small community of political exiles who had fled the Nazi and fascist regimes—pale-faced, middle-aged men and women—gathered in small groups and talked about the rumors. Their voices were low so as not to echo.

  Many of these people’s comrades had disappeared in the Great Purge, having been accused of being Trotskyites. Then, just a year earlier, Stalin had made the alliance that shocked Communists all over the world: he came to terms with Hitler and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. When Germany and Soviet Russia jointly invaded Poland, a terrible rumor spread among the small community of émigrés in Moscow—that the Soviet secret police had started handing over German and Austrian Communists to the Gestapo. (While you wouldn’t find it printed in any newspaper, the rumor was true.) Now the exiles whispering in the hallways of the Comintern’s two-year-old building wondered if they would live to see the autumn leaves change.

  But it was the Americans that the Soviet secret services came after next. Isaiah Oggins, an American member of the Comintern, was arrested in Moscow and sentenced to eight years in the gulag—“for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda.” He was promptly sent to Norilsk, eighteen hundred miles from Moscow, just above the Arctic Circle. There was also a rumor that the Center, as the Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow was called, tried to recall Jacob Golos, but he refused to come to Moscow, fearing repression. Starting in 1940, Lubyanka began to turn its attention not just to American Communists in Russia but toward America itself.

  One reason was the war. As a high-ranking intelligence general put it, “Now we realized we needed to know American intentions because America’s participation in the war against Hitler would be decisive.”2

  Beyond the war, Moscow still focused on getting rid of any Trotskyites who might be hiding out in the United States plotting revenge. In January 1941, the Moscow Center sent a secret cable to the chief of the Soviet intelligence station in New York: “We agree with you regarding the need to intensify the struggle against the Trotskyites by making use of the disarray among the Trotskyites since the death of the ‘Old Man,’ the departure of many of them and the uncertainty and disillusionment among them.”3

  Even as the United States came into focus as the Soviet secret service’s most important target, the Moscow Center seemed to be anything but sure-footed in its approach. In another private communiqué sent in 1941, a note of hysteria can be heard in Moscow’s reprimand of the New York station’s chief: “We have repeatedly written you regarding the need to seriously address the cultivation of White and nationalist organizations, but to date we don’t have any reports or specific suggestions from you.”4 The Soviets could not forget their old enemies.

  As World War II gathered pace, Stalin ordered his secret services to step up their activities in the United States. Moscow’s spymasters badly needed people on the spot.

  Then in June 1941, the Germans attacked Russia. Eitingon was given an assignment that was particularly well suited to him: organizing diversionary activities at the rear of the German troops. In other words, the master spy was to supervise a savage guerilla war in the occupied territories.

  In October, when Moscow was under siege by the Germans, the chief of foreign intelligence telephoned Zarubin. The two men were to report to Stalin that evening, Zarubin was informed. They hastened to the Kremlin. There, Stalin instructed Zarubin to take over political intelligence collection in the United States. The career spy was the new chief of the legal Soviet intelligence station in the United States.

  Zarubin and his wife, Liza Gorskaya, departed Moscow on October 20. They traveled by train to Uzbekistan, then across China by air to Hong Kong. From there they went to Manila, where they boarded an American liner bound for San Francisco. They arrived in California on Christmas day 1941. From there, the spy couple crossed the country to the East Coast, ready to meet the new year of 1942 fully operational in the United States.5

  June 13, 1942, dawned bright and sunny in New York City. Beginning in the early morning, hundreds of thousands of people gathered, waving paper flags. They lined both sides of Fifth Avenue, from Washington Square Park to Seventy-Ninth Street, as the parade began. Army servicemen in green uniforms, nurses in white, policemen in black marched past, along with a dragon the size of a dinosaur on a float that read, “Hitler The Axis War Monster,” decorated with the flags of Germany, Italy, and
Japan. By the end of the day, half a million people had marched for eleven straight hours in what would be the largest military parade ever held to support the US war effort.6

  By now, 1942, the United States and the Soviet Union were military allies. Still, on that beautiful June day, most New Yorkers would have been surprised to learn that their patriotic parade was marching through an area dense with Soviet spies. The rectangle between Twelfth Street and the south end of Central Park housed, among others, the office of the Communist Party of the United States; Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition offices (which had moved to New York from Paris in 1939 because of the war); and, in the high-rise on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Ninth Street, the offices of Amtorg—the Soviet trade organization that had traditionally provided cover for spies. Finally, at the southern end of Central Park, a fancy four-story villa was leased to the Soviet Consulate-General. This building was, unsurprisingly, packed with smaller and larger offices frequented by Soviet agents.

  These Soviet agents had been in New York for more than twenty years. After the Russian Revolution, US president Woodrow Wilson had been reluctant to formally recognize the Bolshevik government—nor was he ready to hand them the property of the Russian embassy in Washington. Instead, he agreed to let the Soviets open an official office in New York, at the World Tower building on Fortieth Street—a Gothic high-rise in the middle of midtown. (There was some irony in this: during World War I, the World Tower had been used by film companies to produce patriotic movies.) In early 1919, the Soviet Government Bureau rented out the third and fourth floors, with a mission, ostensibly, to promote the new Bolshevik state. The office had been operational for only a few months when the police raided it in search of illegal seditious activity, sent the boss packing for Russia, and shut the bureau. This unimpressive start nonetheless helped launch a number of pro-Soviet organizations in New York with activities that ranged from collecting donations to establishing commercial contacts, providing assistance to those who decided to re-emigrate to Soviet Russia, and publishing propaganda magazines. And, of course, these pro-Soviet organizations were a good way to give cover to spies.