Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich

Grigulevich was born on 5 May 1913. His birthplace is usually given as Vilnius, though his personnel file says Trakai. His parents are said to have belonged to the small Lithuanian Karaite minority, while the historian Boris Volodarsky holds that his mother was Russian. He himself gave Karaite as his nationality in his Soviet passport.

The family lived in Panevėžys in independent Lithuania, and in 1926 his father left for Argentina in search of work. At 13 the boy joined the communist underground at his gymnasium and handed out leaflets, and in 1927 he was expelled at the demand of the police. His mother moved with him to Vilnius, then in Poland, where he kept up the work until the Polish security police arrested him on 25 February 1932. His mother died in April 1933 while he awaited trial, and on 17 May he received a two-year suspended sentence.

Leaving Poland, he went to Paris, studied at the Sorbonne and came into contact with the Comintern. In August 1934 its representative proposed sending him to Argentina on International Red Aid business, and he left with his mandate sewn into his jacket lining. Volodarsky believes the OGPU had already recruited him in Paris.

Going to Spain in 1936, he passed through the International Brigades and at the end of November moved to the security service of the Madrid Defence Junta. In December his unit stormed the Finnish, Chilean and Peruvian embassy premises one after another, where Franco's supporters were hiding, and arrested large numbers of people.

According to Soviet records he worked under Alexander Orlov and Naum Eitingon with the code name Max. On 3 May 1937 he was sent to Catalonia with a ten-man unit to take part in the suppression of the POUM and the anarchists, and the Mitrokhin papers credit him with an important role in eliminating Trotskyists. English-language studies also connect him with the murder of the POUM leader Andreu Nin and with the forged dossier that painted the POUM as Franco's spies. Half a century later he recalled the operation almost as a farce, a memory that does not fit what the documents show.

Orlov's The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes barely touches on the Spanish operations and does not name him. Orlov's defection still threatened him all the same, since Orlov knew his face and his work.

Back from Spain, he trained as an illegal at Malakhovka from October 1937 and, under Sergei Shpigelglas, was given Mexico, where Trotsky was living in exile.

At about four in the morning on 24 May 1940, some twenty Spanish Civil War veterans in police and army uniforms burst into Trotsky's house in Coyoacán. The painter David Alfaro Siqueiros led them, and Grigulevich was with them. They fired into the bedroom for ten to fifteen minutes, but Trotsky and Natalia Sedova survived by lying on the floor. Only their grandson was hurt, in the foot. The guard Robert Sheldon Harte, who had opened the gate, was taken away and killed.

He hid in a psychiatric clinic, got away, and in June 1941 received the Order of the Red Star by a secret decree. Three months after the raid Trotsky was killed by Ramón Mercader, who had reached him by a different route.

In 1940 he went to Buenos Aires under the code name Artur to set up an illegal station. His Mexican wife Laura Araujo later joined him on a forged passport. When the German–Soviet war began, his 'D group' went after South American strategic goods bound for Germany.

In December 1941 a Polish member of the group set up a workshop near the port to make delayed-action incendiaries, which were carried onto the docks disguised as packets of maté. According to his reports to Moscow, two Atlantic freighters carrying 10,000 tonnes of saltpetre each were sunk and about 150 fires were set, though these figures come from his own reports.

In 1949 he settled in Rome as Teodoro Castro, the supposed illegitimate son of a deceased Costa Rican coffee grower, and built up an import-export business. His business and social contacts, along with the patronage of former president José Figueres, made him chargé d'affaires of the Costa Rican embassy in 1951 and a member of its delegation at the UN General Assembly. In 1952 he became ambassador to both Italy and Yugoslavia. He had fifteen audiences with Pope Pius XII and was even made a knight of the Order of Malta.

After the split with Yugoslavia, Stalin approved operations to eliminate Tito. In autumn 1952 State Security Minister Ignatiev sent Stalin a handwritten paper naming 'Max', meaning Grigulevich, as the best man for the job. According to Pavel Sudoplatov's memoirs, the plan had him release pneumonic plague bacteria at an audience with Tito after being vaccinated in advance. Sudoplatov wrote that Grigulevich himself proposed it, while Grigulevich's own account, relayed by Yuri Paporov, differs: the task was close to suicide, so he offered alternatives to gain time.

Stalin died in March 1953 and the plan was cancelled. That December he left with his family through Vienna for Moscow. In Rome the sudden disappearance of Costa Rica's ambassador and his family set off all kinds of rumours.

Back in Moscow, he was distrusted by the new leadership. In 1956 he finished the Higher Party School and was dismissed from illegal intelligence after nineteen years and seven months. He then turned to the Vatican and Latin America, taking a candidate's degree in 1958 on his 1957 book The Vatican: Religion, Finance and Politics. From 1960 he worked at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ethnography and helped found its Latin America Institute. He took a doctorate with The Cultural Revolution in Cuba and on his fourth attempt, in 1979, became a corresponding member of the Academy.

Under the pen name I. Lavretsky, from his mother's maiden name, he wrote widely read biographies of Che Guevara, Simón Bolívar, Pancho Villa, Salvador Allende and Siqueiros. Colleagues found it odd that he had no career to speak of before his forties and shied away from cameras. The details of his intelligence career came out only after the Soviet collapse.