First Published: Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 27, 6 July 1940, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Einde O’Callaghan.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2020. Creative Commons (Attribute & Share-alike).
The body of Bob Sheldon Harte in a tragic manner proves the falsity of all the calumnies and denunciations levelled against him. The police authorities, who were obligated not to refuse to take this suspicion seriously, have revealed exceptional energy in this matter also. The GPU is not a simple band of gangsters – it is an international selection of trained agents with a long background of crimes, armed with unlimited technical and economic resources. According to the lowest calculations, the technical preparation alone for the assault in Mexico, leaving aside bribes and the costs in other countries, amounted to not less than $10,000.
The solving of the crimes of the GPU, because of this, presents tremendous difficulties. In no other country of the world, not in France, not in Switzerland, not in Spain, have any of the crimes of the GPU been brought to light with such thoroughness as is being done before us with this one, the assault of May 24 in Mexico. The body of Bob Sheldon in all certainty will shed a supplementary light on all the devices of this complicated conspiracy.
In two of its announcements, the Central Committee of the “Communist” Party has repeated that the participation of Sheldon casts a “suspicious” light on the assault. In reality the penetration of an agent of Stalin into my household could have indicated solely that the GPU had succeeded in deceiving my friends in New York, who recommended Bob Sheldon to me. Every informed person knows that the GPU floods its agents into all the workers’ organizations and state institutions throughout the world. For this it spends annually tens of millions of dollars. But the version that Sheldon was an agent of the GPU is completely crushed. His body is a convincing argument. Bob perished because he placed himself in the road of the assassins. He died for the ideas in which he believed. His memory is spotless.
Qui Prodest? asks the old and wise maxim of Roman law. Who is interested in slandering Bob Harte and leading the investigation astray? The answer is clear: the GPU and its agents. The discovery of the source of the false declarations in reference to Bob will certainly reveal one of the staffs in the plot.
Bob is not the first of those close to me who has fallen at the hands of the mercenary assassins of Stalin. I leave aside the members of my family, two daughters and two sons brought to their death by the GPU. I do not speak of the thousands of my partisans exposed to physical extermination in the USSR and other countries. I limit myself solely to my secretaries in various countries who have been led to suicide by persecution, who have been shot or assassinated by the agents of the GPU – seven persons: M. Glasman, G. Butov, Y. Blumkin, N. Sermuks, I. Poznasky, R. Klement, E. Wolf. In this list Robert (Bob) Sheldon Harte occupies the eighth, but I fear not the last place.
After this, the political agents of the GPU can speak of my “persecution mania.”
Coyoacan, D.F.
June 25, 1940
Last updated on: 23 May 2019