Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

During the two years of hostilities, thousands of Russian soldiers and sailors were taken as prisoners. Schiff paid for the printing of one-and-a-half tons of Marxist propaganda and had it delivered to the prison camps. He also sent scores of Russian-speaking revolutionaries, trained in New York, to distribute the 264

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pamphlets among the prisoners and to indoctrinate them into rebellion against their own government. When the war was ended, 50,000 officers and enlisted men returned home to become virtual seeds of treason against the Tsar. They were to play a major role a few years later in creating mutiny among the military during the Communist takeover of Russia.

TROTSKY WAS SCHIFF'S AGENT

One of the best known Russian revolutionaries at that time was Leon Trotsky. In January of 1916, Trotsky was expelled from France and came to the United States at the invitation of Schiff. His travel expenses aboard the Monserrat were paid by his host. He remained for several months while writing for a Russian socialist paper the Novy Mir (New World), and giving revolutionary speeches at mass meetings in New York City. According to Trotsky himself, on many-occasions a chauffeured limousine was placed at the service of his family by a wealthy friend identified as Dr. M. In his book, My Life, Trotsky wrote: '

The doctor's wife took my wife and the boys out driving and was very kind to them. But she was a mere mortal, whereas the chauffeur was a magician, a titan, a superman! With the wave of his hand he made the machine obey his slightest command. To sit beside him was the supreme delight. When they went into a tea-room, the boys would anxiously demand of their mother, 'Why doesn't the chauffeur come in?

It must have been a curious sight to see the family of the great socialist radical, defender of the working class, enemy of capitalism, enjoying the pleasures of tea rooms and chauffeurs, the very symbols of capitalist luxury. In any event, it is now known that almost all of his expenses in New York, including the mass rallies, were paid for by Jacob Schiff.

On March 23,1917, a mass meeting was held at Carnegie Hall to celebrate the abdication of Nicholas H, which meant the overthrow of Tsarist rule in Russia. Thousands of socialists, Marxists, nihilists and anarchists attended to cheer the event. The following day there was published on page two of the New York Times, a telegram from Jacob Schiff which had been read to this audience. He expressed regrets that he could not attend and then described the successful 1- Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Scribner's, 1930), p. 277.

MASQUERADE IN MOSCOW

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Russian revolution as '...what we had hoped and striven for these long years.'

In the February 3,1949, issue of the New York Journal American, Schiff's grandson, John, was quoted by columnist Cholly Knicker-bocker as saying that his grandfather had given about $20 million for the triumph of Communism in Russia.

When Trotsky returned to Petrograd in May of 1917 to organize the Bolshevik phase of the Russian Revolution, he carried $10,000

for travel expenses, a generously ample fund considering the value of the dollar at that time. The amount is known with certainty because Trotsky was arrested by Canadian and British naval personnel when the ship on which he was travelling, the S.S.

Kristianiafjord, put in at Halifax. The money in his possession is now a matter of official record. Because Trotsky was a known enemy of the Tsar and because Germany was then at war with Russia, it was assumed that the $10,000 was German money given to him in New York. The evidence, however, is that this, too, came from Kuhn, Loeb and Company.

Trotsky was not arrested on a whim. He was recognized as a threat to the best interests of England, Canada's mother country in the British Commonwealth. Russia was an ally of England in the First World War which then was raging in Europe. Anything that would weaken Russia—and that certainly included internal revolution—would be, in effect, to strengthen Germany and weaken England. In New York, on the night before his departure, Trotsky had given a speech in which he said: 'I am going back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government and stop the war with Germany.'3 Trotsky, therefore, represented a real threat to England's war effort. He was arrested as a German agent and taken as a prisoner of war.

With this in mind, we can appreciate the great strength of those mysterious forces, both in England and the United States, that intervened on Trotsky's behalf. Immediately, telegrams began to come into Halifax from such divergent sources as an obscure 1- 'Mayor Calls Pacifists Traitors,' The New York Times, March 24,1917, p. 2.

2. See Anthony C. Sutton, Ph.D., Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1974), pp. 21-24.

3. A full report on this meeting had been submitted to the U.S. Military Intelligence. See Senate Document No. 62, 66th Congress, Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 1919, Vol. 11, p. 2680.

attorney in New York City, from the Canadian Deputy Postmaster-General, and even from a high- ranking British military officer all inquiring into Trotsky's situation and urging his immediate release

The head o the British Secret Service in America at the time was Sir

William Wiseman who, as fate would have it, occupied the apartment directly above the apartment of Edward Mandell House jmd who had become fast friends with him. House advised Wiseman that President Wilson wished to have Trotsky released Wiseman advised his government, and the British Admiralty issued orders on April 21st that Trotsky was to be sent on his wa J

It was a fateful decision that would affect, not only the outcome of war, but the future of the entire world.