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CSI

Leon Trotsky, Dupe of the NKVD

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Trotsky, Dupe 

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and disarmed the inside guards. They placed machine guns at various points facing Trotsky's bedroom.
 
It was not immediately realized that Robert Sheldon Harte was missing. Trotsky was convinced that the young comrade had been abducted; but Colonel Salazar, the chief of the secret police who was at the compound within half an hour of the assault, had a strong suspicion that Harte too was an NKVD agent.61
 
The disappearance of Harte, whose body was exhumed about a month after the assault, lent temporary support to the Stalinists, who suddenly developed a propaganda story to the effect that the Trotskyists themselves had staged the attack, in which no one was hurt. The Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party issued two announcements about Harte's participation in the assault, implying thereby that the whole affair was executed on behalf of Trotskyist propaganda to smear the Communist Party. Even before the corpse was found, Trotsky wrote protests to President Cardenas requesting the release of several of his domestic servants whom the police suspected of complicity. In a letter of protest he wrote that the CPU used David Alfaro Siqueiros and Vincente Lombardo Toledano, and he urged that both of them be questioned about their complicity. The police followed Trotsky's lead by arresting several participants in the assault. As soon as Siqueiros' name was mentioned in the press, however, he disappeared; and the Mexican CP disowned him overnight as well as some other CP leaders. Their names were suddenly included among those published as Trotskyist-, and traitors.
 
Trotsky wrote in considerable detail about how the CPU manipulated the Mexican CP in order to cover the organizers of the assault. Several top leaders whose names had long been deleted from the Party records suddenly had to be proclaimed traitors in the Stalinist press. The purpose of the campaign (developed by the NKVD, according to Trotsky) was to divert all blame from the CP and to provide a basis for the rumors that Trotskyists themselves had staged the assault.
 
David Siqueiros was arrested in a hideout on 4 October 1940. He did not deny participation in the assault, but he insisted that the Mexican CP had nothing to do with it. He defended himself with a story that he wanted to produce a "psychological shock" in protest
 
                         
  61 Although the Mexican police refused to abandon the notion of Harte's complicity with the GPU, Trotsky was probably right in his conviction of man's innocence. Two days after his abduction, Harte was murdered and secretly buried. The body was found lying on a bed which, as the police found, had been purchased by the wife of the Mexican artist David Siqueiros, who was eventually tried for leading the assault.
 
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:33 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:33 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:33 AM