From the annals of Russian intelligence poisonings: Ignace Reiss (real name: Ludwig Poretsky), an early Fourth Department/GRU defector, was originally supposed to be murdered with strychnine-laced chocolates given to him by one of his agents, Gertrude Schildbach.
Schildbach got cold feet when she realized Reiss’s wife and child would also die from ingesting them. So instead Reiss was machine-gunned at point blank range after an attempted abduction near Lausanne went sideways.
(One of the OGPU/KGB agents responsible, Renata Steiner, had also surveilled Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov in Paris. Sedov later died under suspicious circumstances during recovery for acute appendicitis. He was almost certainly poisoned in hospital by the OGPU....
His longtime secretary, Mark Zborowski/“Etienne”, who arranged his hospital visit, was a Stalinist agent who duped everyone in his retinue, not least of all Trotsky himself after Sedov’s probable murder.)
To add to the wilderness-of-mirrors that was the anti-Stalinist opposition of that era, Walter Krivitsky, Reiss’s childhood friend and fellow defector, was convinced the real mole in the Trotskyist camp was... Victor Serge, the finest anti-Stalinist novelist of that generation.
Serge kept promiscuous company in European exile and Krivitsky always thought him dirty because he was released from Soviet prison in spite of his avowed political heresies, which normally meant one would have been shot.
