30 The Young Broz
organization that, in his opinion, would dominate the world. This was a his-
torical imperative, considering that capitalism, according to Marx’s prophecy,
was doomed and Fascism/Nazism was just one of its last and most aggressive
manifestations.^118
Less than ten years had passed since the 1928 trial when his photo had been
published by all the newspapers and Walter had not changed all that much. He
therefore decided to dye his hair black, although sometimes with less than
perfect results in terms of functioning as a disguise. A year later during a trip to
Belgrade, the young journalist Vladimir Dedijer, upon meeting him for the first
time, called his attention to this. Broz nonchalantly answered: “You know, I
was in a hurry, and besides I didn’t have enough dye.” Dedijer’s mother consid-
ered the newcomer strange: “He seems dangerous. Look, he has French tooth-
paste and Czech soap!”^119 It was not only Broz’s toiletries that were strange.
His speech was even stranger, for he spoke Serbo-Croatian with a foreign
accent that was difficult to identify. In addition to German and Russian, which
he spoke more or less fluently, he also knew some Slovene, French, Czech,
Hungarian, and Kirghiz. Later, he improved his English, which he had begun
studying in jail, by reading The Economist.^120
His linguistic ability, on the one hand, and his strange accent while speaking
Serbo-Croat, on the other, caused doubts for years about his origins. Shortly
before his death, America’s National Security Agency published an expert
analysis in its internal bulletin Cryptologic Spectrum, in which it was asserted
that on the basis of phonologic and morphologic characteristics, Tito was not
Josip Broz, but a Russian or a Pole who probably took over the latter’s identity
in the thirties.^121 Outlandish though it may sound, the only firm objection to
this study, written by a specialist, is that no information about such a switch of
identities exists in the Comintern documents regarding Josip Broz, where it
should be. Even so, Moscow had no qualms about stirring up doubts about
Tito’s identity when it suited them. In 1948, for instance, when he was an out-
cast because of his quarrel with Stalin, Radio Moscow told the fol lowing
story: the real Josip Broz fell in 1915 on the Russian front. His uniform and
documents were taken by a deserter from the tsarist army, probably a “Jewish
bourgeois,” the son of an Odessa furrier. “As his father cheated customers, so
this adventurer, who has seven different passports, today tries to cheat the
working people of Yugoslavia.”^122
Provisional Leadership of the CPY and
Tito’s Role in the Spanish Civil WarFrom the Croatian capital, Broz organized regular meetings in Samobor, eigh-
teen kilometers west of Zagreb, where there were no political police but only