I'm John Batchew with Josh Ireland, the death of Trotsky, the true story of the plot to kill Stalin's

greatest enemy. The fatalist Trotsky and his wife in Talia living in Mexico at the suburb of Mexico

city in a house that's owned by two famous painters, Cocoa and Rivera. However, at the same time, there is the NKVD order to kill Trotsky.

How are you going to get into the compound guarded by the Mexican police

and by private guards, all of whom are well-armed and are aware that the NKVD is trying to penetrate our defenses. The Mercardre family is the recruiting agent,

but not the only recruiting agent. And while Karadad can operate as a grown woman, no suspect there,

although she's a very accomplished killer as well as a spy, having left her Cuban

roots behind.

Her son, Ramon, has another approach.

He's going to find a way into the compound as merely a well-attended Trotskyist, an admirer

of Trotsky, and the way he does that is to go to America.

Well, he comes across, it's serendipity.

He comes across a way to connect to Mexico City via a young woman.

How does he recruit a fiancé?

Who is she?

And how does that get him into Mexico City, Josh? So, yeah, so

the, so, so Ramon doesn't begin, he's not, he's not recruited to assassinate Trotsky. To begin

with, he understands his mission is just to help penetrate the Trotskyists and entourage. And he does that

by seducing a naive young American Trotskyist called Sylvia Agaloff, who is who the NKBD know is

travelling to Paris in the summer of 1938. They arrange for him, her to accidentally bump into what she thinks is a,

some dissolute Belgian playboy in the bar of the Ritz.

And against her, you know, against all her best instincts,

...