Josh Ireland

And,

The Russian, the NKVD do what the KGB would later do after the war and also the FSB, you know, the future iterations of the Russian secret services would do is they recruit people who they think are useful.

They don't know what they're going to, they want them to do, but they just think, well, this person speaks Spanish, that could be useful.

Yeah, and he's, you know, he can, apparently he can strip a rifle in the dark.

He's got a photographic memory.

He's a great, he can speak several languages.

He's very strong.

He's very athletic.

So just keep him on the books.

He's a good liar.

I mean, why not?

You know, you don't know what he could be useful for.

Interesting.

The thing that they decide to use him for is to seduce a young American Trotskyist called Sylvia Agaloff, who's travelling from

um new york to paris to observe um a sort of trotskyist meeting called the fourth international actually the nkvd have got it wrong they think she's a much more significant figure than she is they think i think they've got her confused with the one of her sister ruth who was actually trotskyist trotsky's secretary oh my goodness okay

And so the family is, you know, is sort of adjacent to Trotsky, but she's not really part of it.

But their plan is that Ramon will seduce her, become her girlfriend or her husband, and then see what happens then.

I mean, it's a real punt.

They don't know what's going to happen.

And it's unclear quite what, how much they told him and what he's supposed to do and what his brief is.