The planning of the attempts on Trotsky was now entrusted to a large staff, who made minute preparations. The Trotsky dossier in the NKVD registry at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street occupied three floors.94
We can certainly deduce a main motive of Stalin’s as the simple physical destruction of all alternative leaderships. No further blackening of Trotsky’s character was necessary or possible. In every sense except that of killing his great enemy, Stalin could only expect a political debit from the operation. It was the same concern as was to be shown in the execution of long lists of military and other men already serving in camps, at precisely the two defensive crises of the Second World War.
The organization of Trotsky’s murder was assigned to Leonid Eitingon, a high NKVD officer, who was given virtually unlimited funds for the purpose. Eitingon had been sent to Spain to work under Orlov, taking the pseudonym Kotov, in 1936. He had already had considerable experience of terrorist activity abroad. He continued with this career for many years. The agent Nikolai Khokhloy, sent to Germany to assassinate anti-Soviet émigré leaders, who defected to the West in April 1954, had worked under him. (Eitingon seems to have been sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment after the fall of Beria in 1953, but to have been released in the late 1960s, getting a job in publishing.)
Eitingon set off for Mexico, taking with him Vittorio Codovilla (a founder of the Argentine Communist Party and a trusted Stalinist, who had been involved in the murder of Andres Nin) and Vittorio Vidali, another of the most formidable of the killers from Spain.
The Mexican Communist Party, under its leader Herman Laborde, had been a genuine political trend, and was lukewarm about such action against Trotsky. As part of the move against Trotsky, Laborde and his followers were purged and an intransigent group, including the painter Siqueiros, placed at the head of the Party.
Taking the name of Leonov, Eitingon organized his first attempt on Trotsky on a lavish scale. The central figure was Siqueiros.
On 23 May 1940 Siqueiros and two accomplices collected a number of submachine guns, police and Army uniforms, and some ladders and incendiary bombs, together with a rotary power saw. He dressed himself as a major in the Mexican Army and put on a disguise. At about 2:00 A.M., he assembled the twenty men he had chosen, and they drove in four cars to Trotsky’s fortified villa. Some of the police had already been lured away; the others were trussed up at gunpoint. The telephone lines were cut, and the sentry on duty, an American called Harte, was rushed and overwhelmed. The force broke into the patio and swept the bedrooms with tommy guns for several minutes. They then pulled out, leaving several incendiaries and a large dynamite bomb. The latter failed to explode. Trotsky was slightly wounded in the right leg; his ten-year-old grandson was also hit. His wife received some burns from the incendiaries. Otherwise, the attack was a failure.
The body of Harte was found, shot, buried in the grounds of a villa rented by Siqueiros.
The Mexican Communist Party disowned the attack and dissociated itself from Siqueiros and Vidali. By 17 June, the identity of the attackers had been established by the Mexican police.
Siqueiros was arrested in a hideout in the provinces in September 1940, but although the facts were established, great political pressures were now brought to bear. At the same time, “intellectuals and artists” urged the President to take into account the fact that “artists and men of science are considered as the bulwark of culture and progress.”95
As a result, the court accepted Siqueiros’s plea that the firing of 300 bullets into the bedrooms had been for “psychological purposes only,” without any intention of killing or hurting anyone. Evidence that when Siqueiros heard of Trotsky’s survival he had exclaimed, “All that work in vain!” was disregarded. The facts about Harte’s death were found not to constitute a prima facie case of murder. The judge claimed that the accused did not form a “criminal conspiracy,” since a conspiracy could not be made for a single temporary job but must have “stability and permanence.” They were even acquitted of impersonating police officers, on the grounds that though they had dressed up in uniforms, they had not actually attempted to usurp any police functions.
While Siqueiros was still out on bail, a convenient invitation to paint some murals in Chile, at the instance of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, led to his decamping thither. So even the light sentence he might have got for the crime still attributed to him—stealing the two automobiles outside the Trotsky house—was avoided.
On the failure of Siqueiros, Eitingon had put his second plan into operation. Four days after the first attempt, Ramon Mercader was introduced to Trotsky for the first time.
