Nazi connections in Mexico enabled Trotsky's assassination

An excerpt from the book "Los Nazis en Mexico", by Juan Alberto Cedillo

By Michael Parker-Stainback Original Print Publication: February, 2008

Juan Alberto Cedillo stumbled upon a surprising piece of information in 1986, while conducting research in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.: Nazi secret police had collaborated with Stalin�s men to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Coyoac�n, Mexico City. He began to wonder: just how active were the Nazis in Mexico in the period leading up to and during World War II? The answer, it turns out, is �very.� Last year Cedillo published a fascinating book on the subject (Los Nazis en M�xico, Debate, 2007). Though the book has not been published in English, Inside M�xico has translated and condensed the epilogue, which relates the bizarre plot to bump off Trotsky. If you read Spanish, we recommend the entire book.

On August 20 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City. His murder was planned by a special Soviet intelligence unit created to eliminate Stalin�s enemies abroad.

The Mexican secret service, aware of what was transpiring, didn�t merely complicate the operation; it caused the Russian agents to modify their plans. The Soviet operation had to call on new allies to help carry out its mission. Russian agents approached both the Gestapo [Nazi secret police] and the Abwehr [the German intelligence agency between 1921-1944], whose operatives circulated freely in Mexico City, cloaked by associations forged in corridors of power and money. Nazi agents were key to the Russian revolutionary�s murder.

One year before Trotsky�s death, on August 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The pact brought both countries� overseas agents closer together and allowed for the exchange of classified dispatches. By April 1940, the American embassy in Mexico had confirmed the existence of this undesirable alliance to Washington.

The principal source for information sent to Washington was world-renowned muralist Diego Rivera, who with a team of thirty agents, gathered information for US intelligence officials.

The artist collaborated with Washington diplomats for nearly six months, during which he delivered information about former Communist comrades and the alliance they forged with Nazi agents.

For Rivera, links between Stalin�s and Hitler�s agents constituted a worse threat than the United States, motivating him to collaborate with �imperialism�s representatives.�

Rivera�s connection with the Americans began at the end of 1939, after he convened a press conference in which he denounced various Mexican politicians, accusing them of collaboration with Soviet agents that had entered Mexico at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

Soon afterward, Rivera met with an American operative and delivered a list naming fifty Mexican Communist Party (PCM) members firmly installed in President L�zaro C�rdenas�s government.

The US diplomat who established contact with Rivera was Robert McGregor. In their interviews, the artist insisted Mexican Communist Party leaders and Nazi agents were collaborating, statements that the American intelligence community accepted with skepticism.

Time would pass before the information Rivera had delivered would be confirmed. His accusations regarding the arrival in Mexico of �Stalin�s thugs�, there to assassinate Trotsky, were not verified until 1994, when Pavel Sudoplatov, director of the KGB�s Foreign Intelligence service, published his memoirs. In them, he confesses that �[he] was the author of Trotsky�s murder,� and recounts the moment Stalin ordered �Operation Pato� (�Operation Duck�), the name Moscow used to identify the crime that ended the exiled leader�s life.

Towards the end of 1938, Stalin called Sudoplatov and Laurentis Beria, Interior Minister and head of the Soviet security apparatus, and informed them that �without Trotsky�s elimination [�]we won�t be able to trust our allies in the international Communist movement when the Imperialists attack the Soviet Union. If they have to worry about Trotskyite infiltrations in their ranks, their international role of destabilizing the enemy�s rear guard through sabotage and guerilla warfare will face major impediments.� Beria and Sudoplatov began to plan their crime immediately.

The team put together by Sudoplatov was led by Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov and Leonidas Eitingon. Orlov, a ferocious assassin, was Beria�s righthand man, whereas Eitingon was a personal friend of Sudoplatov. Eitingon�s mistress in Spain was Caridad Mercader, mother of Trotsky�s ultimate assassin, Ram�n Mercader.

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