54 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
He had come to the Soviet Union with a passport in the name of Tomašek, a
Czech engineer, and he left as Spiridion Matas, a Canadian citizen of Greek
origin.^15 Once in Istanbul, he remained there at length, since he did not deem
it safe to travel with a passport with a Soviet exit visa. Nor did he have the
Bulgarian or Yugoslav transit visas now requested by the authorities from sub-
jects of the British Empire.^16 He asked his comrades at home to get him a
new fake travel document, but something went unexpectedly wrong. “Both
[Vladimir] Velebit and Herta [Haas],” Tito later recounted, “brought me pass-
ports so badly made that the first gendarme would have noticed they were not
authentic, and would have arrested me.” And not without a hint of malevolence
toward Kardelj, he added: “Under the direction of Bevc (one of the latter’s
pseudonyms) we had such excellent technical service that we could have printed
money. In spite of this, they sent me passports that were clearly forged, as if
somebody wanted to get me into trouble.”^17 In a letter sent years later to
Kopinič, he was even more explicit: “In 1940, Kardelj wanted my head!” He
suspected Kardelj/Bevc of conspiring against him because he was returning
home endowed with full powers by the Comintern.^18 This reveals his habitual
suspicious attitude, even toward his closest collaborators.
Broz only returned to Yugoslavia on 13 March 1940 with the document he
had been given in Moscow.^19 So as not to raise doubts, he bought a first class
ticket for the transatlantic ship Rex, which was leaving Genoa for New York
in mid-March. At the Greek-Yugoslav border his passport, officially issued by
the British consulate in Moscow, raised suspicions, but without serious conse-
quences.^20 When in Zagreb, he got off the train to stretch his legs but did not,
of course, continue the journey. His feeling of imminent danger was anything
but unfounded, as confirmed some days later, when in the Corso coffeehouse
he read in a newspaper that the British authorities in Gibraltar had blocked
and checked an Italian ship in search of a suspect—almost certainly him. The
ship was delayed for six hours, much to the annoyance of the passengers. “And
in the meantime, I was sitting in Zagreb.”^21
He was furious when he returned to the Croat capital, suspecting that his
comrades wanted to get rid of him, possibly even in favor of Petko Miletić.
“I had the impression,” Djilas writes in his memoirs, “that Tito, returning from
Moscow, even suspected me of having helped Petko.” There was a turbulent
session of the CC, during which Broz vented his rage at having to wait so long
for a decent passport in Istanbul. He already seemed to have resolved the prob-
lem with Kardelj, so now it was Djilas’s turn to be accused. His explanation that
the party’s expert forger had been arrested, and therefore could not do his job,
was of no interest to Tito. The accusations directed at Djilas made him so
indignant that he did not even try to defend himself, and when at last he started