Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The failure of the attack on Trotsky’s villa, followed by the dispersal of Siqueiros’s gunmen, led to the promotion of Ramón Mercader from penetration agent to assassin. Mercader succeeded partly because he was patient. Five days after the raid he met Trotsky for the first time. Amiable as ever, he gave Trotsky’s grandson a toy glider and taught him how to fly it. Over the next three months he paid ten visits to the villa, sometimes bringing small presents with him and always taking care not to overstay his welcome. Finally, on August 20, he brought an article he had written and asked for Trotsky’s advice. As Trotsky sat reading it at his study desk, Mercader took an icepick from his pocket and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the back of Trotsky’s skull. 122

Mercader had expected Trotsky to die instantly and silently, thus allowing him to make his escape to a car nearby where his mother and her lover, Eitingon, were waiting. But Trotsky, though mortally wounded, let out “a terrible piercing cry.” (“I shall hear that cry all my life,” said Mercader afterwards.) Mercader was arrested and later sentenced to twenty years in jail. 123Eitingon persuaded his mother to flee with him to Russia, promising to marry her if she did so. In Moscow Señora Mercader was welcomed by Beria, received by Stalin in the Kremlin and decorated with the Order of Lenin. But within a few years, abandoned by Eitingon and denied permission to leave Russia, she was consumed with guilt at having turned her son into an assassin and then leaving him to languish in a Mexican jail. 124

Ramón Mercader kept the Stalinist faith throughout his twenty years in prison. History, he claimed, would see him as a soldier who had served the cause of the working-class revolution by ridding it of a traitor. KGB files reveal (contrary to most published accounts) that when Mercader was finally released and traveled to Moscow in 1960, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, along with a general’s pension and a three-room apartment, and was personally congratulated by Khrushchev. Twenty years after the assassination of Trotsky, the liquidation of enemies of the people abroad still remained, on a reduced scale, a significant part of KGB foreign operations. 125

During the later months of 1940, with Trotsky dead and the worst of the blood-letting inside INO at an end, the Centre sought to rebuild its foreign intelligence network. Until the Great Terror, all new recruits to INO had been trained individually at secret apartments in Moscow and kept strictly apart from other trainees. By 1938, however, so many INO officers had been unmasked as (imaginary) enemies of the people that the Centre decided group training was required to increase the flow of new recruits. NKVD order no. 00648 of October 3 set up the Soviet Union’s first foreign intelligence training school, hidden from public view in the middle of a wood at Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow ringroad. Given the official title Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya (Special Purpose School), but better known by the acronym SHON, it drew its recruits either from Party and Komsomol members with higher education or from new university graduates in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and elsewhere. 1

Since most of the new recruits had experienced only the cramped, squalid living conditions of crowded city apartment blocks, collective farms and army barracks, an attempt was made to introduce them to gracious living so that they would feel at ease in Western “high society.” Their rooms were furnished with what an official history solemnly describes as “rugs, comfortable and beautiful furniture, and tastefully chosen pictures on the walls, with excellent bed linens and expensive bedspreads.” 2With no experience of personal privacy, the trainees would have been disoriented by being accommodated separately even if space had allowed, and so were housed two to a room. The curriculum included four hours’ teaching a day on foreign languages, two hours on intelligence tradecraft, and lectures on the CPSU, history, diplomacy, philosophy, religion and painting—an eclectic mix designed both to reinforce their ideological orthodoxy and to acquaint them with Western bourgeois culture. 3There were also regular musical evenings. Instructors with experience living in the West gave the trainees crash courses in bourgeois manners, diplomatic etiquette, fashionable dressing and “good taste.” 4During its first three years, SHON taught annual intakes totalling about 120 trainees—all but four of them male. 5

The most successful of SHON’s first intake of students was Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, whose early career had been spent in an agricultural publishing house. In February 1938 he had been recruited by the NKVD’s internal training school to fill one of the many vacancies caused by the liquidation of “enemies of the people” within its ranks. In October he was transferred to SHON, where, according to an official hagiography, his “high intellect and outstanding organizational ability” made an immediate impression. After only a few months, with his training still incomplete, he was drafted into foreign intelligence. In May 1939 he was appointed head of INO. At age thirty-one, Fitin was both the youngest and most inexperienced foreign intelligence chief in Soviet history. At the time of his sudden promotion his prospects must have seemed poor. During the chaotic previous fifteen months three of his predecessors had been liquidated and a fourth transferred. 6Fitin, however, proved remarkably tenacious. He remained head of INO for seven years, the longest period anyone had held that office since the 1920s, before losing favor and returning to provincial obscurity. 7

Towards the end of 1940, four INO officers were despatched to London on Fitin’s orders to reopen the legal residency. The new resident was Anatoli Veniaminovich Gorsky (codenamed VADIM), the last intelligence officer to be withdrawn from London before the residency had closed that February. 8Gorsky was a grimly efficient, humorless, orthodox Stalinist, a far cry from the Great Illegals of the mid-1930s. Blunt found him “flat-footed” and unsympathetic. 9Another of his wartime agents described him as “a short, fattish man in his mid-thirties, with blond hair pushed straight back and glasses that failed to mask a pair of shrewd, cold eyes.” 10Like Fitin, Gorsky owed his rapid promotion to the recent liquidation of most of his colleagues.

Gorsky returned to London, however, far better briefed than during his previous tour of duty, when he had been forced to ask the Centre for background material on Kim Philby. 11On Christmas Eve 1940 he reported that he had renewed contact with SÖHNCHEN. The Centre appeared jubilant at Gorsky’s report. In the summer of 1940 Burgess had succeeded in recruiting Philby to Section D of SIS, which soon afterwards was merged into a new organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), instructed by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through subversive warfare behind enemy lines. Following the six-week defeat of France and the Low Countries, the Prime Minister’s orders proved wildly optimistic. The Centre, however, warmly welcomed Gorsky’s report that Philby “was working as a political instructor at the training center of the British Intelligence Service preparing sabotage agents to be sent to Europe.” There was, however, one major surprise in Philby’s early reports. “According to SÖHNCHEN’s date,” Gorsky informed the Centre, “[SOE] has not sent its agents to the USSR yet and is not even training them yet. The USSR is tenth on the list of countries to which agents are to be sent.” Wrongly convinced that the Soviet Union remained a priority target, a skeptical desk officer in the Centre underlined this passage and placed two large red question marks in the margin. 12