After Moscow’s May Day, the
ASSASSINATIONS
Voroshilov approved a long list of medals for service in Spain, but the grind there was taking its toll on Soviet personnel.190 Meanwhile, attempts to use death squads to assassinate Franco came to naught.191 Still, Soviet intelligence officials in Moscow did not relinquish the fantasy. Theodore Maly, the Soviet spy chief in London, operating without diplomatic cover, had been instructed to send Kim Philby, the British-born Soviet agent, as a freelance war correspondent to Spain to infiltrate Franco’s entourage so as to assassinate him. Philby (code-named “Söhnchen,” “Little Sonny” in German) was to observe all details of Franco’s bodyguard retinue. He expressed enthusiasm, but after some three months in Spain he was recalled to London. “The fact is that Little Sonny has come back in low spirits,” Maly, who had doubted Moscow’s scheme from the start, reported on May 24, 1937. “He has not even managed to get near to the ‘interesting’ objective.” Maly added that even if Philby had somehow gotten near Franco, “he would not have been able to do what was required of him. Though devoted and ready to sacrifice himself, he does not possess the physical courage and other qualities necessary for this attempt.”192
In the Barcelona cauldron, the assignments were more serious. The NKVD assassin Josifas “Juzik” Grigulevičius, known as Grigulevich, born in Wilno (Vilnius) in 1913 to a Russian mother and a Lithuanian-Jewish father and raised a Karaite, had assassinated police informers in his youth, been imprisoned in Poland in 1932–33 for Communist subversion, and then joined his émigré father in Argentina and picked up Spanish, to go with his native Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian, as well as French. “Max,” as he would be known in Spain, had flown into Barcelona from Toulouse back in the fall, then made his way to Madrid, where he trained saboteurs and arsonists for work behind Franco’s lines. He also liquidated “Trotskyites.”193 Grigulevich had arrived in Barcelona with his death squad on May 3, 1937.194 His primary target was Andreu Nin. The Soviet NKVD station chief Orlov forged a letter from a Nazi agent to Franco detailing Nin’s supposed “infiltration” of the POUM for the Nationalists. An agent for the Soviets persuaded a bookshop known to support the POUM to take custody of a suitcase for a few days; government police promptly arrived and found the suitcase, which contained the supposed secret documents—the Orlov forgery of a POUM conspiracy with the “fascists.” On May 23, Orlov pressed the case against the POUM, adducing the captured “document” he had fabricated, which was written in invisible ink and in code but was said to have been “deciphered” thanks to the capture of some of Franco’s codebooks. Koltsov played up the “evidence” of the POUM treachery in
After Nin was arrested, Orlov’s thugs kidnapped him from Spanish prison and took him to a secret place of confinement maintained by the NKVD at Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. There, they tortured him to get him to confess he was a “fascist agent.” With much of the POUM leadership awaiting trial, such testimony was thought necessary to persuade the public to support death sentences. Nin refused to confess to treason, Trotskyism, or other crimes. He was executed in secret by Grigulevich’s death squad on the Alcalá de Henares highway and buried there.196 When people continued to inquire about his whereabouts, the Soviets replied that he must have gone off with his fascist hirelings. Orlov wrote a pamphlet, attributed to Nin, denouncing Trotskyism.197 The NKVD operative had worked extra hard to prove his bona fides to Stalin. In carrying out Stalin’s no-holds campaign against “Trotskyites” and “enemies” in Spain, the NKVD contingent there—which numbered no more than forty, and sometimes half that—gave the impression, wrongly, of attempted Sovietization.198