That Trotsky was still alive was almost inexplicable. He had been sentenced to execution in absentia at the first Moscow public trial (August 1936), but the attempts to have him killed probably dated to 1929 in Turkey. He had been hunted all the while he had been in Paris (1933–35) and after his relocation to Norway. The most recent effort, in 1938, led by veterans of the Spanish civil war dispatched to the United States and then Mexico, had petered out after their NKVD espionage overseers in Moscow (Sergei Spigelglas) and New York (Pyotr Guttsait) were arrested as supposed foreign spies.165 A new plan would expressly forbid everyone previously involved in such efforts to take part, and would be put together by Pavel Sudoplatov (b. 1907) and Naum “Leonid” Eitingon (b. 1899), until recently the NKVD station chief in Republic Spain.166
Sudoplatov was a celebrated assassin, having liquidated Yevhen Konovalets, the leader of the fascistic émigré Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Sudoplatov hailed from Ukraine and spoke the language. The NKVD had penetrated the OUN and even ran its branches, but Konovalets, who had been born in Habsburg Galicia and studied in Lemberg (now Lwów), was viewed as a possible figurehead who could be used by foreign powers and had working ties to intelligence officers from Nazi Germany, as well as fascist Italy, Lithuania, and Poland.167 On May 23, 1938, Sudoplatov had managed to blow Konovalets up in a Rotterdam restaurant with a box of chocolates that concealed a time bomb, escaping undetected. It was bravura wet work. In November 1938, after yet another NKVD foreign intelligence chief was arrested, the thirty-one-year-old Sudoplatov had briefly shot up to acting chief. But when Beria took over the NKVD, he installed as foreign intelligence chief his Caucasus crony Vladimir Dekanozov, whose principal experience was in food processing and supply, including self-supply.
Sudoplatov was moved back down to section director. Someone in Beria’s entourage, perhaps Dekanozov, placed Sudoplatov under investigation for ties to “enemies” (i.e., the now-arrested NKVD bosses under whom Sudoplatov had worked). The assassin spent months fearing he was about to be liquidated. Damaging rumors were being spread about him, and he was not being shown documents or allowed to carry out assignments, even those Beria had expressly directed he be given. It appears that Beria contrived to firm up Sudoplatov’s position using Kremlinology: he invited him to a soccer match between Spartacus (the trade union team) and Dynamo (the NKVD team) and had him sit in the government loge; Malenkov was there, along with the full canopy of Beria cronies. “I didn’t utter a word,” Sudoplatov explained, “but my mere presence in that elevated place signaled Kruglov, Serov, Tsanava, and others to stop spreading rumors about evidence against me in the archives.”168
In March 1939, as Sudoplatov tells the story, Beria took him to the Little Corner to see Stalin and proposed that Sudoplatov be named deputy chief of NKVD foreign intelligence, in order to oversee global anti-Trotskyite operations. In this telling, as Stalin lit his pipe with a match and got up and paced, the assassin took note of “the simplicity of Stalin’s reactions. It was hard to imagine that such a man could deceive you, his reactions were so natural, without the slightest sense of him posing.” Stalin was indeed an actor, especially in the Little Corner. “There are no important political figures in the Trotskyite movement except Trotsky himself,” he was said to have advised. “If Trotsky is finished, the threat will be eliminated.” Obviously, the Nazis would never resort to using a Jew even as a figurehead. Nonetheless, Stalin supposedly added, “Without the elimination of Trotsky, as the Spanish experience shows, when the imperialists attack the Soviet Union, we cannot rely on our allies in the international Communist movement.”169
According to Sudoplatov, he and Beria debated innumerable scenarios for what Stalin had called the “action.” The chosen plan derived from events in civil war Spain, where, after murdering Konovalets, Sudoplatov had taken refuge and met up with Eitingon (the two knew each other from five years earlier, when they were “illegals,” operating without diplomatic cover, in Soviet foreign intelligence). The Spanish- and English-speaking Eitingon had in his circle the twenty-year-old Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born revolutionary who carried out sabotage missions behind Franco’s lines. Back in Moscow, Eitingon did not know that he had been denounced as a British spy by arrested officials, but, thanks to his acquaintance with Sudoplatov, he was chosen to lead the latest field unit, with Mercader as its centerpiece, to penetrate the Blue House, in Coyoacán, Mexico, where Trotsky lived.170
A “GUARANTEE” FOR POLAND