A drugstore on the Santa Fe Plaza figured in the assassination of Leon Trotsky, says a new book by an intelligence professional.

E.B. Held's A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, published this month by The University of New Mexico Press, tells how Zook's Drugstore served as a safe house for a Soviet secret agent 70 years ago.

The author says a Lithuanian-born, Argentina-raised, French-educated KGB agent named Josef Grigulevich used the store at 56 E. San Francisco St., now the site of the Haagen-Dazs shop, as his base for the assassination of the Russian revolutionary in Mexico City nearly 1,200 miles away.

Grigulevich did it, Held says, by initiating a relationship, possibly a romantic one, with Katherine "Katie" Zook, the daughter of Zook's owner.

"Katie became a well-known figure in Santa Fe society, famous for her erect carriage, long braids coiled on her head, and her love for fancy hats," he wrote. "She was often seen around town on her daily walks with her beloved dog, Tillie, or driving her bright-red convertible. She traveled the world extensively. She never married."

Like most women of her time, the only daughter of pharmacist John Zook kept a low public profile. A computerized search of The New Mexican through the 20th century found only a half-dozen mentions of Katie or Katherine Zook — the first on June 6, 1963, when a society column noted that Sherry Flanagan, a junior at Arizona State, was in town visiting her aunt, "Miss" Zook. Other articles in the 1970s were about her winning bridge tournaments. She died in 1998 at El Castillo Retirement Residences. Held was unable to find a photograph of her.

Master of deceit

Grigulevich was a textbook example of a spy known as an "illegal" (the Russian term) or a NOC (for non-official cover, the American term). He was not even a Soviet citizen. As a child, he had emigrated from Lithuania to Argentina, where he and his father founded a chain of pharmacies. He was recruited to the KGB by studying at the university level in Paris and built a reputation as an assassin by killing Trotskyites during the Spanish civil war, 1936-39. His orders to kill Trotsky himself came directly from Soviet strongman Josef Stalin, who was obsessed with eliminating his revolutionary rival living in exile in Mexico City.

"Like all successful assassins, Grigulevich's first concern was to insure his own escape from the assassination scene," Held wrote. "Grigulevich searched his contacts for others of Lithuanian ancestry in the drugstore business located somewhere in the southwestern United States. He found Zook's Drugstore in the small town of Santa Fe."

Zook's fit Grigulevich's needs — centrally located, on a corner of the Plaza, with a hidden back entrance on Water Street, behind what is now Cafe Pasqual's, so that someone watching the front door on San Francisco Street could not see who was entering or leaving from the rear. "Buildings with double entries like this just warm the cockles of a spy's heart!" Held wrote.

In 1940, when Grigulevich arrived in Santa Fe, John Zook, a pharmacist in town since 1904, was 65 and ready to retire. Katie, who was running the drugstore, was 33. Grigulevich, code named "Padre," was 27, "cosmopolitan, and a ladies' man akin to James Bond," Held wrote. "There are no available public records to provide insight into any personal relationship between Katie and Grigulevich. She most likely didn't even know his true name."

Connecting dots

Held's book covers the Manhattan Project espionage cases involving Ted Hall, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, Harry Gold and others in Los Alamos, Albuquerque and Santa Fe in the 1940s; Ed Howard's defection to Russia after giving the slip to FBI agents in Santa Fe in the 1980s, and even the machinations leading up to accusations against Los Alamos engineer Wen Ho Lee in 2000. But Held's interpretations of previously published snippets of information, some of it wrong, about the pharmacy/safe house have special significance to Santa Fe.

KGB assassin czar Pavel Anatolievich Sudoplatov in his 1994 book, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness — A Soviet Spymaster, first mentioned that a Santa Fe pharmacy played a role in the Trotsky assassination, but didn't name it. Ronald Radosh, in his review of Sudoplatov's book in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, identified it as "Zuck's Pharmacy." At least two other books, both cited by Held, add to the story of the Soviet safe house, but Held said he believes his is the first to pull together what he calls the "little dots."

Held, 58, first began to look into New Mexico's spy stories in 2002 after retiring as a clandestine operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency to take a job as chief of counterintelligence at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.

"CIA operations officers just have to be students of local history because we have to know the environment that we're operating in," he said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where he is now director of intelligence and counterintelligence for the U.S. Department of Energy. "The first thing I was looking for is where Gold met Fuchs ... but I had no idea that the Trotsky thing had been related to Santa Fe."

A few years ago, Held offered to take Sandia colleagues on a walking tour of Santa Fe to demonstrate what he had learned about local examples of espionage. He said he expected no more than 15 people to sign up, but more than 600 did. His wife, Lani, then encouraged him to start working on a book.

Unknown factors

One of the unknowns in the Zook's story is how Grigulevich managed to insinuate himself in Santa Fe. Held said it would make sense that he used his common ties to the Zook family. John Zook was born in Pennsylvania, but his parents were from Lithuania. Both were from families of pharmacists.

Held said he thinks Grigulevich also claimed to be working on a project about Latin American history. That would explain his trips to Mexico. After he left the KGB, he published 58 books on Latin American history.

A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque recounts how once Grigulevich established his Santa Fe safe house, he developed two separate plans to assassinate Trotsky — code-named Operation Duck. One involved the well-known Mexican painter David Siqueiros, a Stalin supporter and a founder of the Mexican Communist Party. The other relied on Ramon Mercader, a Spanish aristocrat.

In the predawn hours of May 23, 1940, Siqueiros and two dozen armed men stormed Trotsky's home in the elegant Coyoacan section of the Mexican capital. Grigulevich had tricked Sheldon Harte, an idealistic young American serving as Trotsky's volunteer secretary and bodyguard, into leaving the gate open to the heavily fortified compound. Siqueiros and his men machine-gunned the bedroom where Trotsky and his wife were sleeping, but they escaped injury.

Siqueiros was later arrested and accused of the attempted assassination, but escaped to Chile with the assistance of the poet Pablo Neruda, who was then Chilean consul general to Mexico, Held wrote. Harte, who could have identified Grigulevich, was kidnapped and executed, and his body was dumped beside a road.

"Grigulevich disappeared, presumably slipping across the American border and hiding out in Santa Fe with Katie Zook," Held wrote.

Assassination complete

The second, successful attempt against Trotsky occurred three months later, on Aug. 30, 1940. Mercader, posing as a Canadian businessman named Frank Jackson, had insinuated himself into Trotsky's circle by seducing Trotsky's secretary, Sylvia Ageloff. During a meeting with Trotsky arranged by Ageloff, Mercader pulled a pickax and plunged it into Trotsky's head. Trotsky died the next day.

"Frank Jackson" spent 20 years in prison for the crime. His true identity was not discovered until 1946, but even then, he stuck to his prearranged story that he killed Trotsky because he wouldn't let Frank marry Sylvia. Upon his release in 1960, Mercader fled to the Soviet Union, where he was decorated as a hero.

Held's book says Grigulevich "laid low in Santa Fe until 1941, then parted company with Katie Zook."

Sudoplatov, in his 1994 memoir, suggests that the Santa Fe pharmacy continued to play a role in the Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project. But the secret wartime project to build an atomic bomb didn't even start until 1943. Held thinks Sudoplatov's boast may have been his attempt at disinformation — that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian director of the project, was a Soviet asset.

"Absolute nonsense," Held said. "We know that with 100 percent certainty. Did Katie continue to be a support asset of some sort? Maybe, but I really doubt it because they would not have sent Harry Gold all the way from New York to meet Klaus Fuchs if they had had Katie Zook sitting right there. That, I think, is pure disinformation. The Soviets have always loved to stoke that Oppenheimer story because it pisses off so many Americans."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.