How I stumbled onto the story of a secret agent waiting in Santa Fe to kill Trotsky in Mexico

Josif Grigulevich was a Soviet assassin, saboteur and master manipulator of the media and politics in Latin America, Spain, the United States and Italy, 1933 to 1953. During his stint in New Mexico, mid 1938 to early 1940, he laid low, hung out at two pharmacies near the Santa Fe Plaza and might have had a fling with the daughter of one of the owners.

He would later boast to his supervisor in Moscow that he had opened a drug store in Santa Fe, developed his own cadre of agents and turned over the pharmacy to one of them before leaving for Mexico for his next job, to kill Leon Trotsky.

As a Soviet “illegal” — the Americans use the acronym NOC for non-official cover — Grigulevich always used fake identities. He was paid well in cash by couriers who would pick up his reports. He had no diplomatic immunity and if arrested, he would have to serve his time without revealing anything. That wasn’t a problem for Grigulevich who was never even identified during his covert career. Even.in retirement, when he wrote dozens of best-selling books, he only used pseudonyms.  

His real name was first revealed six years after his death in a memoir by his spymaster. I was working at the Santa Fe bureau of the Albuquerque Journal in 1994 when an editor sent me a review of Special Tasks and asked if I could find out more about the Santa Fe drug store used as a Soviet spy “safe house”?

In researching previous pieces about espionage in the Manhattan Project, I had heard rumors of such a place. When I would walk up Alameda or Palace Avenue in the late afternoon, I would wonder if one of these walled compounds might be the rumored safe house. But the spymaster said it wasn’t a house at all, but a drug store, and that the agent had opened it five years before the atomic bomb project set up shop in nearby Los Alamos. He never got the name of the pharmacy but knew it was near the plaza.

Old city directories in the library indicated Santa Fe had six pharmacies in the 1930s until a seventh opened in 1940. Kay Bird at the Santa Fe Reporter scooped me by finding in state pharmacy board records a 10-year gap in the employment history of the owner and pharmacist at the newest pharmacy, Coronado Prescription Shop. Her story was headlined, “Was Local Drugstore a Soviet Spy Nest?” Years later, I reached the owner’s son who said his dad spent the decade before opening the shop raising fur-bearing animals in Red River.

Finding nothing suspicious or even significant about any of the pharmacies in my admittedly brief research in 1994, I focused on the memoir’s charge that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a source for some of atomic secrets forwarded through the drug store. A few days later, I got a call from Hans Bethe. At first, I thought it was a joke, but the then-87-year-old physicist, German refugee, Los Alamos veteran, Nobel Prize laureate and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., convinced me otherwise. A graduate student had found my article with a new thing called the Internet. He began by introducing himself as if I didn’t know who he was. “I just want you to know,” he said. “Oppenheimer was no traitor.” Do you have any friends so loyal they would track down a reporter who wrote something about you in a small newspaper nearly 2,000 miles away and 27 years after your death, to defend you? Oppenheimer did.

What will follow here, one installment each day, is a 10-part biography of Grigulevich — the first in English and the only one since Nik Nikandrov’s Russian language The Agent with Luck in 2005. Other books in English and Spanish have covered portions of his life since the 1994 memoir, as have dozens of online articles. His time in Santa Fe was less than 10 percent of his 20-year career. There is no connection to Truth or Consequences (then Hot Springs) that I know of, though he probably passed through here. In the movie that keeps playing in my head, I see him sitting on the floor of the bathhouse at Marshall Miracle Pools (now La Paloma Hot Springs & Spa), soaking his feet in little pools of hot water that would make one feel cooler in the days before air conditioning. 

Pass this along to your friends interested in the subject, especially if they have information or sources I should consider or contact. Grigulevich was a disinformation specialist and some false information may end up in this piece. If I find out more, I will put it in a subsequent article or book. My working title is Lucky Yuz — a reference to one of his many code names and the fact that even his failures morphed into successes. 

Instead of footnoting, I have attached references to the main sources of each installment:

Sources:
Special Tasks: the memoirs of an unwanted witness — a Soviet spymaster by Pavel Sudoplatov, Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Little, Brown & Co. 1994 The spymaster Pavel died in 1996, Anatoli is his son, The Schecters are a married pair of journalists who have lived and worked in Moscow.