Free Republic

Kremlin reportedly dispatches contract killer to US to pursue 'traitor' colonel, claims reputable Moscow newspaperA contract killer has been dispatched to assassinate the Russian double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman and nine other spies in the United States this spring, according to reports in Moscow. "We know who he is and where he is," a high-ranking Kremlin source told the reputable Kommersant newspaper. "You can have no doubt – a Mercader has already been sent after him." Ramón Mercader was the KGB-hired Spanish communist who was sent to kill Leon Trotsky with an icepick in Mexico in 1940.

The man, named as Colonel Scherbakov, worked for Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service, a successor agency to the KGB, where he oversaw a top- secret programme to dispatch long-term sleeper agents or "illegals" to the United States. Russian intelligence sources told the Kommersant newspaper that he was the traitor who had given the FBI the names of the ten sleeper agents who made up the ring, including glamorous spy Anna Chapman. In at least one case, he is even said to have taken part in an interrogation. In an echo of the Cold War, a Kremlin source was quoted as...

Ramón Mercader from Barcelona killed Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City. On 20th August 1940, the exiled Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded at his home in a suburb of Mexico City when an ice axe was driven into his skull. He cried out to his guards as they burst into his study, ‘Don’t kill him! He must talk.’ Despite struggling fiercely, and even managing to bite the hand of his assassin, Trotsky died the next day, and the man who wielded the murder weapon was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He insisted throughout his trial and his...