supporters were shot in jails and camps where they had been confined
for years, and the NKVDbegan a complex plot to kill Trotsky. In the
late 1930s, the NKVD would murder one of his sons inside the So-
viet Union and another in Paris.
Two NKVD specialists in assassination and chornaya rabota
(black work), Pavel Sudoplatovand Leonid Eitingon, were person-
ally directed by Stalin to organize Trotsky’s murder in his Mexican
exile. A number of agents were recruited in Trotsky’s entourage, and
one of them, Ramon Mercader, was assigned the job of killing Trot-
sky. On 20 August 1940, Mercader asked to meet Trotsky alone to
discuss a magazine article he was writing. When Trotsky’s back was
turned, Mercader struck him with a mountaineer’s ax, mortally
wounding him.
Trotsky’s death was celebrated by Stalin publicly and privately.
Sudoplatov and Eitingon were rewarded, and Stalin wrote an edito-
rial for Pravdatitled “Death of an International Spy.” Vengeance was
Stalin’s. But Trotsky never was a threat to Stalin in exile: in the words
of his most prominent biographer, he was the “prophet unarmed.”TRUBNIKOV, VYACHESLAV IVANOVICH (1944– ).One of the
most influential of modern Russian foreign intelligence officers,
Trubnikov entered the KGB First Chief Directorate in 1967. In the
1980s he served as rezidentin India and Bangladesh. In 1996 he was
made chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, succeeding
Yevgeny Primakov. Two years later he was promoted to the rank of
general of the army. Russian President Vladimir Putinused Trub-
nikov as a special ambassador within the Commonwealth of Inde-
pendent States. According to the Soviet media, he was an apostle of
a very hard line. In 2004 Putin appointed him Moscow’s ambassador
to India.
Trubnikov was an experienced intelligence officer, and a capable
administrator. While the Russian military was suffering major budget
cuts, the SVR was able to maintain the tempo of its operations, re-
maining a worldwide intelligence service. In his four years as chief
of the SVR, Trubnikov appeared frequently in the media, giving Rus-
sian foreign intelligence a human face.TRUST OPERATION. The most sophisticated counterintelligence
operation run by theCheka and the GPUinvolved their creation in268 •TRUBNIKOV, VYACHESLAV IVANOVICH (1944– )06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 268