News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Trotsky Held As POW During WW I

Date: July 15, 2001

"Documents Reveal Spy Campaign

LONDON (AP) - As World War I engulfed Europe and revolution stirred in Russia, British spies urgently tried to supply the Russian government with information that could stop the Bolsheviks' rise to power.

Declassified documents from Britain's MI5 spy agency, released Thursday by the Public Record Office, show an agency worried that the Russian government had grown too weak to stop the revolutionary movement led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

Britain feared - correctly - that Russia would pull out of the war against Germany if the Bolsheviks took power.

``Until such men as Trotsky are finally convicted, anti-war agitation will be carried on in the factories of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Moscow and other large centers and Leninite doctrines will continue to be promulgated among the simple-minded peasantry,'' warned a document written shortly before the 1917 October Revolution.

Among the declassified documents compiled by British spies were papers tracking the movements of Trotsky during his years in exile in Western Europe, extracts from his and intercepted letters.

``It is impossible to overestimate the necessity of supplying the pro-war parties in Russia with every available detail of information regarding these men's doings in England, France and America both during and before the war,'' the document said. ``This question is no less important for England than it is for Russia since it directly concerns the war.''

MI5 already had intercepted Trotsky's mail - including a 1916 letter in which he complained of being spied on in France.

But Britain's spy chiefs ultimately allowed Trotsky to slip through their net. In April 1917, a ship carrying the Russian revolutionary to Russia from the United States docked in the Canadian port of Halifax. Trotsky was interned in a British prisoner-of-war camp - and then ordered released on the orders of Lt. Col. Claude Dansey, a British secret-service officer.

Trotsky returned to Russia and helped lead the Bolsheviks to victory."