Reexamination of Joseph Hansen’s writings following the assassination of Leon Trotsky shows that he deliberately creates some doubt as to whether or not Trotsky’s own carelessness was responsible for what happened on August 20, 1940, at Coyoacan. It emerges most strikingly in his major article on the assassination, which he self-effacingly called “With Trotsky to the End.” He says that Trotsky disliked the elaborate security arrangements at Coyoacan; opposed the screening of visitors; demanded to be left alone with callers; and “hated” suspicions among members of the organization. This is a conscious and deliberate falsification of Trotsky’s attitude to revolutionary security.

The article contains a section under the subheading, “Could We Have Prevented It?” Hansen answers the question by creating the impression that what happened was Trotsky’s fault. He writes:

Since September 1937 Trotsky’s secretaries tried to institute a system in the household whereby everyone who entered would be searched for concealed weapons. They also attempted to make it an iron rule that Trotsky was never to talk with anyone alone in his study. Trotsky could not endure either of these rules.

The reader is presented with a picture created by Hansen that Coyoacan was an open house. He says as much a few sentences later:

Trotsky had dozens upon dozens of friends in Mexico, whom the guards—so far as their vigilance was concerned—placed in the same general category as Jacson (Mercader) before the assault.

According to this description by Hansen, any one of “dozens of dozens” of visitors could have been a GPU agent, could have walked into Trotsky’s study with an ice pick, could have met him alone and murdered him.

Is this a serious or accurate picture of Trotsky’s final residence in exile? This is how three other observers described it:

General Leandro A. Sanchez Salazar, chief of the Mexican secret police:

We approached the gate of the fortress-house. It was a summer residence, built at the end of the last century, simply constructed. It was “T” shaped. The iron railings which had surrounded it had been replaced by a high wall of concrete, surmounted by battlemented towers, which now made it a veritable fortress. This gate, the high stern walls and the machine-gun towers, gave it the air of a prison rather than a dwelling-house. What precautions the old revolutionary had had to take to protect his life! The precautions adopted by Trotsky and his guards had, I repeat, transformed their house into an impregnable fortress. The interior system of defense could not have been more complete. It was obvious that the old revolutionary, feeling his life threatened and knowing better than anyone the strength and cunning of his enemies, had spared no effort. (Murder in Mexico, by General Sanchez Salazar, Secker and Warburg, 1950.)

Historian Isaac Deutscher:

The house was old and roughly built, but fairly solid and spacious; and it stood in its own grounds, separated by thick walls from the road and the surroundings. Later on a watch tower was to be erected at the entrance gate; immediately doors were heavily barred, sandbags were put up against the walls, and alarm signals were installed. Day and night five policemen were on duty in a street outside; and eight to 10 Trotskyists guarded the house inside. (The Prophet Outcast, by Isaac Deutscher, Oxford University Press, 1963.)

Writer Isaac Don Levine:

Nevertheless, measures were being taken to protect Trotsky against the expected attack. His followers and sympathizers raised several thousand dollars in the United States to transform the Coyoacan villa into a virtual fortress. A military engineer was called in to plan the reconstruction. Twenty-foot walls were built. A redoubt was constructed with bomb-proof ceilings and floors. Double steel doors, controlled by electric switches, replaced the old wooden entrance. Three bullet-proof towers were erected to dominate not only the patio but the surrounding neighborhood. Barbed-wire entanglements and bomb-proof nets were being installed. The Mexican government tripled the number of outside police guards on duty around the place. (The Mind of an Assassin, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1959.)

These are descriptions of a physical environment which Trotsky himself called “our own prison.” Hansen says that Trotsky “did not feel happy about living in such a place”—an insinuation that he was opposed to the fortifications too. But this is not borne out by the memory of other guards. They recall how Trotsky took a detailed interest in the construction of the security measures, even down to a discussion over where and how big the gun apertures should be.

Continuing his question, “Could We Have Prevented It?”, Hansen gives his version of Trotsky’s attitude to security:

Mutual suspicion in his eyes was a disintegrating force much worse than the inclusion of a spy in the organization, since such suspicions are useless anyway in uncovering a highly skilled provocateur. Trotsky hated personal suspicion towards the members and sympathizers of the Fourth International. He considered it worse than the evil it was supposed to cure. Whenever this subject came up, he was fond of telling the story of Malinovsky, who became a member of the Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party, its representative in the Duma and a trusted confidant of Lenin. Malinovsky was at the same time an agent of the Czar’s secret police, the dreaded Okhrana. He sent hundreds of Bolsheviks into exile and to death. Nevertheless, in order to maintain his position of confidence, it was necessary for him to spread the ideas of Bolshevism. These ideas eventually caused his downfall. The proletarian revolution is more powerful than the most cunning police spy.

There is no doubt that the social revolution is definitely more powerful than the secret police. But Hansen is saying something quite different. He is using Trotsky’s anecdote about Malinovsky to suggest that such agents provocateurs inevitably find their way into revolutionary parties; they are obliged to play a progressive as well as a reactionary role; and no matter, in due course they will be flushed out when the revolution occurs. With this kind of conception, why bother about security at all? Hansen suggests that having a spy in the organization is better than an atmosphere of “mutual suspicion.” He counterposes one to the other. We are for neither.

The only method is continual political vigilance by all party members. No party member imbued with the determination to build revolutionary leadership in the working class to take state power will object to a security commission conducting an examination into his or her work. This was the revolutionary method employed by the Workers League in handling the case of Tim Wohlforth and his deliberate concealment of the CIA family connections of his accomplice, Nancy Fields. With Hansen’s method you end up with the worst of both worlds—police spies and “mutual suspicion.” This may appeal to Hansen (it certainly appeals to the GPU and the imperialist police agencies!) but it has nothing to do with the revolutionary traditions of Bolshevism.

The kind of organization that Hansen, Wohlforth, and Fields agree upon is one in which security questions can never be raised at all. In which they as individuals are altogether above investigation. But this is precisely the kind of organization in which the Malinovskys and Zborowskis flourish and “personal suspicions” get out of hand since there is no revolutionary procedure for investigating them. This is completely contrary to Trotsky’s practice, established at its highest point in the Dewey Commission when he submitted himself to the fullest investigation of the frame-up charges brought by world Stalinism and the capitalist press. If Trotsky set the precedent for submitting himself to a thorough investigation, why don’t the same conditions apply to others? The only people who object are the individualist petty-bourgeois like Wohlforth and the guilty.

All serious-minded revolutionists will applaud those leaders and members who selflessly carry out the revolutionary requirements of the party on security and every other question. Without such training no revolutionary party can be built. Trotsky established the precedent of a security commission with the arrival of the unsigned letter of General Alexander Orlov dated December 27, 1938. Orlov pinpointed Mark Zborowski as a Stalinist agent inside the Paris headquarters of the Trotskyist movement. In spite of assurances by Mrs. David Dallin, Lola Estrine, that Zborowski was a devoted and loyal party member and that Orlov’s letter was a GPU “hoax,” Trotsky set up a commission to investigate. Was Hansen on this commission? What were its findings? Will the report now be published?

From insinuating security carelessness on Trotsky’s part, Hansen goes on to create doubt about his “will to live.” Referring to the days immediately following the murder of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, Hansen writes in the foreword to Trotsky’s autobiographical work, My Life:

I became very worried over them. The thought came to me of the impact the suicide of Paul and Laura Lafargue (Marx’s daughter) had had on the revolutionary socialist movement in 1911 when the couple, at the age of seventy, decided that their usefulness had ended ... That suicide pact deeply stirred the socialist movement at the time and echoes of it were still to be heard when I joined the movement. I pushed back the thought, telling myself that it most likely arose from some obscure reaction of my own: or that the idea reflected the convictions I had heard others express. Then Rae, who was very close to Natalia, and who was making sure that meals were brought to them, and that anything they might want was attended to, confessed the same fear to me. Especially worrisome was the small automatic pistol which LD generally left lying on his desk like a paperweight. We decided to remove it. After all, it probably needed cleaning and oiling.

It may have done, but it also left Trotsky without a weapon to defend himself in the event of one of the “dozens upon dozens” of visitors being a GPU assassin! On the face of it, this seems to have been a dangerous thing for the chief of Trotsky’s security to do. The total picture created by Hansen in these articles is one in which nothing could be done to defend Trotsky since he was opposed to elementary security and, in any case, he was on the brink of suicide. This is little more than an extension of the Stalinist slander that the May 24 raid on Coyoacan was organized by Trotsky himself—the “self assault” theory—which Trotsky vociferously attacked in his article “Stalin Seeks My Death.”

What a different picture Natalia presents in her article entitled “Father and Son,” which appeared in the Fourth International in August 1941. She wrote:

At the same time, Lev Davidovich was taking part in the conduct of the investigation of the case of May 24. Its slothful pace worried LD exceedingly. He followed the developments patiently and tirelessly, explaining the circumstances of the case to the court and to the press, making superhuman efforts to force himself to refute the self-evident and hopeless lies or malicious equivocations, doing all this with the intense perspicacity peculiar to him, and not allowing a single detail to escape his notice. He attached the proper significance to every single thing, and wove them all into a single whole.