Early in September 1939, Jacques Mornard arrived in New York on the liner Ile de France travelling with a false passport in the name of Frank Jacson. He immediately made contact with Miss Sylvia Ageloff and her family, living at 50 Livingston Avenue, Brooklyn. “In September 1939 he came here,” she recalled later. “That was a few days or weeks after the war broke out. He came with a forged passport as Frank Jacson. The reason he gave for using a forged passport was that he was in the Belgian army and would not have been permitted to leave the country.” Before the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee on December 4, 1950, she was asked about his arrival.
Q: He confided in you that he was in the United States illegally?
Miss Ageloff: Yes.
Q: How long a period of time did he remain in New York City?
Miss Ageloff: About three weeks, or maybe less.
Q: Did he tell you where he was going after he left New York City?
Miss Ageloff: Yes. He said he was going to Mexico, that his mother had arranged a job for him with—I don’t remember the man’s name now; he was supposed to be head of the Allied Purchasing Commission, and through his mother’s connections this man was going to employ him, and he was to work for him in a general capacity.
He told her he had bought the passport for the sum of $3,500 and he claimed to have another $10,000 from his mother, whom he always painted as being a member of the Belgian bourgeoisie. The assassin left New York for Mexico about October 1, 1939. He wrote letters to Miss Ageloff telling her about his “boss” and the fact that he was waiting to start work. In January 1940, Miss Ageloff arrived in Mexico and it was then that he became friendly with the Rosmers, Alfred and Marguerite, who were living at the Trotsky household at Coyoacan. She noticed that his attitude to politics was changing. “When I was in Mexico from January to March,” she said, “he showed a little more interest in politics as a concession to me, but nothing that would give a clue to his feelings.”
Q: Do you feel he used you in any way?
Miss Ageloff: I think it is very obvious from what happened.
Mornard began to ingratiate himself with members of the Trotsky household, his principal targets being the Rosmers. As he had a car, he would place himself at the disposal of the Rosmers to make long drives. This led to the Rosmers inviting Mornard and Sylvia to dinner on a number of occasions.
His chance to infiltrate deeper inside Trotsky’s fortressed residence came after Sylvia returned to New York. Alfred Rosmer fell ill and various visits had to be made to and from the hospital. The willing Mornard volunteered himself. He wrote to Sylvia in New York saying that he had driven the Trotskys to Vera Cruz. “I was surprised to hear it, because when I left in March he had never even been inside the house,” she said.
Albert Goldman, Trotsky’s US lawyer, has described Mornard’s infiltration into the household in his pamphlet, The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: The Proof of Stalin’s Guilt:
Sylvia Ageloff left Mexico in the early part of March 1940, returning to New York. The Rosmers continued to see Jacson now and then, and while Alfred Rosmer was in the hospital in Mexico City, Jacson showed a willingness to serve the Rosmers in different ways. When he found out that the Rosmers intended to go by boat from Vera Cruz to New York, he offered to take them to Vera Cruz in his car, claiming that he had business there, and that he went there about once a week or so. The Rosmers accepted the offer. On May 28 when the Rosmers were scheduled to leave Mexico City for Vera Cruz, Jacson appeared at the Trotsky house early in the morning. He was admitted into the yard, and then, for the first time, he met Trotsky. He was invited to have breakfast. The Rosmers, Natalia (Trotsky), Jacson, and a woman secretary of Trotsky’s all went to Vera Cruz. Thereafter, the records kept by Trotsky’s guards of the persons entering the yard show that Jacson came to the Trotsky household altogether ten times. Although none of the guards liked him, they had no suspicions about him and readily admitted him whenever he came to the household.
Although there may have been no suspicions, definite grounds for it existed. On several occasions Sylvia asked Jacson where he worked. He told her that it was in Room 820 of the Ermita Building in Mexico City. Albert Goldman relates that one day Sylvia’s sister went to find him in the building and found that there was no such room. Jacson explained that he had made a mistake in the room number, and that it was Room 620 instead of 820. Sylvia became suspicious about the nature of his work, and asked Marguerite Rosmer to find out whether Jacson actually had an office in Room 620.
Marguerite Rosmer went to the building and actually found an office boy in this room who told her it was Jacson’s office. Later it turned out that this room was used by David Siqueiros, organizer of the May 24 assault on Trotsky.
At 4 a.m. on May 24, 1940, a group of Mexican and Spanish Stalinists dressed in police and military uniforms broke into Trotsky’s walled household at Coyoacan armed with guns and incendiary bombs. They fired through the window and door of Trotsky’s bedroom. Natalia had the foresight to push him to the floor seconds before the bullets ripped through his mattress. After the raiding party had made off, they discovered that Seva, their grandson, had been hit by a bullet in the foot. The guard who was on duty that night, Robert Sheldon Harte, a 25-year-old New Yorker, was found to be missing.
Despite the flagrant foot-dragging of the Mexican police, it took no time at all to discover who was responsible. It was an open secret that the Stalinists were behind it. The New York Times reported on June 16 that “21 persons who are believed to have participated in the attack (on Trotsky’s house) have been arrested.”
The article went on: “The police, however, are still searching for four persons, all of them members of the Communist Party, who are believed to have been the organizers and who, so far, foiled all attempts at capture. According to information in the hands of the police, the attack was financed by the Mexican Communist Party. General Nunez (head of the Mexican police) said the organizers were David Alfaro Siqueiros, a painter; his brother, Alfredo; Antonio Pujol, and Pedro Zuniga Camacho. They belong to the Mexican Communist Party and are Mexican citizens.”
Predictably, the Mexican Stalinists feverishly denied their involvement. Their original line was that Trotsky had organized the assault on himself! As Siqueiros’s name tore into the headlines they claimed that the raiders had been expelled from the party and still later they attributed the attack to “adventurous and uncontrollable elements.” With lie heaping on lie, the Stalinists then published an article which denounced Siqueiros as being “half mad.” From being a highly praised, long-standing member of the party, he became a reprobate and outcast. Combining through this assortment of lies, Trotsky remarked: “In all this there is an element of the insane asylum.” Much later Siqueiros was brought to court on lesser charges than the murder assault on Trotsky, members of his family and his guards. He skipped bail soon after. On October 9, 1972, Siqueiros gave an interview to the Dominican weekly magazine Ahora! He made a complete admission of his role in the attack.
On May 24, 1940, we said that it was time to break from our inertia. I got hold of an army major’s uniform and disguised myself as an officer. Twenty of my companions disguised themselves as soldiers. We took the police guarding the Coyoacan fortress by surprise and immobilized them. We captured the American Sheldon Harte who was Trotsky’s personal guard, and broke into the patio of the house. I confess that at that moment I was paralyzed by emotion. I had taken part in various clandestine operations and was used to danger. I had participated in political struggles in Central and South American countries. But despite this, I had never found myself faced with the necessity to kill anyone in cold blood.
One month after the Siqueiros raid, on June 25, the body of the guard, Robert Sheldon Harte, was found under the floor of a house on the outskirts of Mexico City. He had been executed by a bullet in the back of the head. His body was placed in a shallow grave and covered with lime to accelerate its decomposition. The small house, near the San Angel Inn, was rented a few weeks before the attack by well-known Mexican Stalinists, both painters. The US State Department and the FBI were clearly concerned about Harte’s disappearance. Official records show that a “rush” telegram was sent from Washington to the US Consulate on May 25, 1940, stating:
Please in your discretion make informal inquiry of (Mexican) Foreign Office regarding Harte’s rescue. According to application on which his father Jesse Samuel Harte was issued a departmental Passport March 6, 1926, Sheldon K. Harte who was also included was born at Brooklyn, New York, on April 6, 1917. Strictly confidential. Report to the department any information discreetly obtainable regarding Sheldon Harte’s activities.
The cable was sent at 5 p.m. on May 25, a day after the raid. It was sent in “confidential code” from the State Department to the US consul and FBI men on the staff who were working under diplomatic cover. (The FBI was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency in Latin America.)
Harte was the son of Jesse S. Harte, president of Intermediate Factors Corporation. Before Mr. Harte, Sr., left for Mexico to join the search for his missing son, the State Department sent a message to the US consul advising him to meet him and take care of him since he was a friend of Mr. Hoover’s—J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Reports appeared in the New York newspapers that when police visited the missing guard’s flat in New York, they found a photograph of Stalin on his wall. He had been a former member of the Communist Party, but then so had many of those freshly joining the Trotskyist movement.
When the chief of the guards at Coyoacan, Harold Robins, searched Harte’s room, he found a Spanish-English dictionary. Inside the front cover he was surprised to find the signature of Siqueiros. Other evidence has emerged to show that while he was in Mexico, Harte became friendly with Ramon Mercader, alias Jacques Mornard, alias Frank Jacson. They went out drinking together. On August 20, 1940, surrogate James A. Delehanty of New York granted letters of administration on the estate of Harte, aged 25. He left a total of $25,000 in personal property to close relatives.
In his article on the Siqueiros raid, “Stalin Seeks My Death,” Trotsky deals with the suspicion that was aroused in Harte:
Despite all precautions, it is, of course, impossible to consider as absolutely excluded the possibility that an isolated agent of the GPU could worm his way into the guard. The investigation placed under suspicion from the very beginning Robert Sheldon Harte, the kidnapped member of my guard, as an accomplice in the assault. I replied to this: if Sheldon Harte were an agent of the GPU he could have killed me at night and gotten away without setting in motion 20 people all of whom were subjected to a great risk. Moreover, in the days immediately prior to the assault, Sheldon Harte was busy with such innocent things as buying little birds, repairing a bird cage, painting it, etc. I have not heard a single convincing argument to indicate that Sheldon Harte was a GPU agent. Therefore I announced from the outset to my friends that I would be the last one to give credence to Sheldon’s participation in the assault. If, contrary to all my suppositions such a participation should be confirmed, then it would change nothing essential in the general character of the assault. With the aid of one of the members of the guard or without this aid, the GPU organized a conspiracy to kill me and to burn my archives. That is the essence of the matter.
The failure of the Siqueiros raid convinced Trotsky that it would drive the Stalinists to launch fresh attempts on his life. It prompted Jacques Mornard to say to Sylvia Ageloff, “The GPU will use different methods.” No one knew better than he.
By August 1940, Ramon Mercader had been in Mexico nine months. He had ingratiated himself with members of the Trotsky household and was able to go in and out of Coyoacan pretty much as he pleased. The records kept in the guardhouse show that in August he made an unusually large number of visits—August 8, 10, 17, and 20. When he visited Trotsky in his study on Saturday, August 17, Mercader was on a rehearsal for the murder he carried out three days later. He brought an article he had written. It was poor stuff and Trotsky made a number of critical points. Shortly after 5 o’clock on the 20th, he returned in his Buick and parked it in unaccustomed fashion—so it was pointing in the direction he would have to drive off.
From the balcony Natalia saw Trotsky in the grounds feeding the rabbits. Beside him, with his back to her, was an unfamiliar figure. As they turned and walked towards the house she recognized Mercader. He asked for a glass of water and she offered to make him tea. He declined, saying that he had lunched late. He muttered about feeling unwell. Trotsky looked at him carefully and said, “Your health is poor, you look ill. That is not good ...” Slowly and silently they walked towards Trotsky’s study to go over the article. A few minutes later a fearful cry echoed through the house and the guards rushed in to find Trotsky wrestling with his assassin. At 25 minutes past seven the following evening Trotsky died.