http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=414054&version=1&template_id=43&parent_id=19
Trotsky assassination planned from US drug store, says former CIA agent
Publish Date: Saturday,5 February, 2011, at 01:08 AM Doha Time
AFP/Santa Fe, New Mexico
The assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, where he was famously killed
with an ice pick to the head, was organised from a drugstore in the US,
according to a former CIA agent. The KGB agent who planned the Bolshevik
revolutionary's 1940 assassination first established a safe house in Santa Fe,
1,200 miles away in New Mexico, says a new book by intelligence expert E B
Held.
A Spy's Guide to Albuquerque and Santa Fe by Held -- who is now director of
intelligence at the US Department of Energy -- appears to confirm years of
speculation about a spy hideaway here. In a 1994 memoir, Special Tasks, KGB spy
master Pavel Anatolievich Sudoplatov wrote that a Santa Fe pharmacy served as a
safe house for Trotsky's assassins. Held's new book identifies the hideaway as
Zook's Pharmacy, visible in archive photos although it was replaced in 1990 by
a Haagen-Dazs ice cream shop. "CIA operations officers just have to be students
of local history because we have to know the environment that we're operating
in," said Held, who began researching New Mexico's spy history in 2002 after
retiring as a CIA agent. Fifty-eight year-old Held's book covers atomic spying
at Los Alamos, 1943-45; CIA turncoat Edward Lee Howard's defection in 1985 and
accusations against Los Alamos engineer Wen Ho Lee in 2000.
But its most provocative chapter concerns KGB hit man Josef Grigulevich's
hideaway from 1940-41.
Born in Lithuania, Grigulevich immigrated as a child with his family to
Argentina where his father founded a chain of pharmacies. He was recruited by
Soviet strongman Josef Stalin's secret police as a university student in Paris
and learned the assassin's trade during the Spanish civil war.
When he arrived in Santa Fe, he was 27, "cosmopolitan, and a ladies' man akin
to James Bond," Held wrote. Katie Zook, 33 and single, was running Zook's
Pharmacy, established by her father, son of Lithuanian immigrants. She had long
braids, loved fancy hats and traveled widely. Held speculates that Grigulevich
insinuated himself with the Zooks through their common roots and professions,
and told them he was researching Latin American history.
That would explain his trips to Mexico. After he left the KGB, Grigulevich
published 58 books on Latin American history. After establishing himself in
Santa Fe, Grigulevich left for Mexico City to implement two separate plans to
assassinate Trotsky, a leader of Russia's 1917 October Revolution forced into
exile after falling out with Stalin. One involved the Mexican painter David
Siqueiros, a founder of the Mexican Communist Party. The other relied on Ramon
Mercader, a Spanish aristocrat. In the pre-dawn hours of May 23, 1940,
Siqueiros and two dozen armed men stormed Trotsky's home in the elegant
Coyoacan district of the Mexican capital.
They machine-gunned the bedroom where Trotsky and his wife were sleeping, but
the two escaped injury. According to Held, Grigulevich had tricked Sheldon
Harte, an idealistic young American serving as Trotsky's volunteer secretary
and bodyguard, into leaving the gate open to the fortified compound. Harte,
who might have identified Grigulevich, was later kidnapped and executed.
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