Trotsky was not arrested on a whim. He was recognized as a threat to the best interests of England, Canada's mother country in the British Commonwealth. Russia was an ally of England in the First World War which then was raging in Europe. Anything that would weaken Russia—and that certainly included internal revolution—would be, in effect, to strengthen Germany and weaken England. In New York, on the night before his departure, Trotsky had given a speech in which he said: "I am going back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government and stop the war with Germany."3 Trotsky, therefore, represented a real threat to England's war effort. He was arrested as a German agent and taken as a prisoner of war.
With this in mind, we can appreciate the great strength of those mysterious forces, both in England and the United States, that intervened on Trotsky's behalf. Immediately, telegrams began to come into Halifax from such divergent sources as an obscure 1- "Mayor Calls Pacifists Traitors,"
2. See Anthony C. Sutton, Ph.D.,
3. A full report on this meeting had been submitted to the U.S. Military Intelligence. See Senate Document No. 62, 66th Congress,
attorney in New York City, from the Canadian Deputy Postmaster-General, and even from a high-ranking British military officer allinquiring into Trotsky's situation and urging his immediate
The head o the British Secret Service in America at the time was
William Wiseman who, as fate would have it, occupied theapartment directly above the apartment of Edward Mandell Housejmd who had become fast friends with him. House advisedWiseman that President Wilson wished to have Trotsky releasedWiseman advised his government, and the British Admiraltyissued orders on April 21st that Trotsky was to be sent on his wa J
It was a fateful decision that would affect, not only the outcome ofwar, but the future of the entire world.
SCHIFF WAS NOT ALONE
It would be a mistake to conclude that Jacob Schiff acted alonem his drama. Trotsky could not have gone even as far as Halifaxwithout having been granted an American passport, and this wasaccomplished by the personal intervention of President WilsonProfessor Anthony Sutton says:
President Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother who
provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to "carry forward" the revolution.... At the same time careful State Department bureaucrats, concerned about such revolutionaries entering Russia were umlaterally attempting to tighten up passport procedures2
MASQUERADE IN MOSCOW 267
What emerges from this sampling of events is a clear pattern of strong support for Bolshevism coming from the highest financial and political power centers in the United States; from men who, supposedly, were "capitalists" and who, according to conventional wisdom, should have been the mortal enemies of socialism and communism.
Nor was this phenomenon confined to the United States.
Trotsky, in his book,
