My nanny was a Stalin spy

Searching for the life of a spy is like chasing the trail of a ghost. África de las Heras, codename Patria, was a friend, a nanny, a caregiver, but also a stranger, a murderer, a spy, and a heroine. “She was everything at once,” confesses Argentine writer and columnist Laura Ramos, who has reconstructed the spy's life in the book Mi niñera de la KGB. De las Heras, hidden under the name María Luisa, was a supposed Spanish dressmaker who became the most decorated Soviet spy of the KGB, involved in the communist resistance against dictator Francisco Franco, the fight against German troops in Ukraine, the attempted assassination of Che Guevara, and the murder of Lenin's successor, Lev Trotsky. “Her job was precisely to leave no trace. But, paradoxically, the most important discoveries came through the back door, through the memories of the children she had looked after,” assures the writer, pointing to a search for the intangible, archival, and practically mythical memory of María Luisa.

When Laura Ramos began to investigate the woman who had been her nanny during her childhood in Montevideo, she only thought of writing a memoir. However, the plot captures a much larger web of lies. "I traveled to Ceuta, then to Cambridge, where the papers of a repentant KGB spy hidden in her shoes when she left the Lubyanka (nickname for the headquarters of the Soviet secret service) are kept. Among those names was that of my María Luisa,” she assures. Also in Mexico, Cuba, and Israel, she had traveled halfway around the world to verify the posthumous memory of an unknown friend. The result is an infinite investigation of legends, bibliography and rumorology, secrets and hiding places, skeletons in the closet, and a journey to find out who the family confidante really was.

Missions for the KGB

Those documents, from the archives compiled by former Soviet agent Vasili Mitrokhin, confirmed that while looking after children in Montevideo, África de las Heras continued to carry out international missions. In Mexico, she spent three months in Trotsky's secretariat. There she managed to infiltrate Frida Kahlo's house, where the Russian leader was staying, and remained there for another three months. “She drew the plans of one of the two houses where Trotsky lived and prepared a detailed report of the entire secretariat that surrounded him. That information was key to the assassination,” she explains. However, doubts remain. Such a straightforward involvement does not justify receiving the highest Soviet decorations.

“If she received so many medals, if she is the Spanish person – not just a woman, but any person, man or woman – who has received the most accolades from the Soviet Union, with the rank of colonel, if she received more awards than Trotsky's assassin himself, Ramon Mercader, what exactly was her role?”, she asks.

During the sixties, María Luisa was part of the inner circle of Ramos's parents. She would pick up the children from school and take them to her house, where she would offer them cakes from the best patisseries in Montevideo. "She was a dressmaker, a cordial but distant woman. She was nice, intelligent, without a Spanish accent. She addressed us formally, as was done then. She wasn't the tender grandmother from Little Red Riding Hood. She treated us as equals. But she won us over with the little cakes from La Mallorquina or El Oro del Rhin, the best patisseries in Montevideo,” she recalls.

Normalcy was a fine line between truth and lies. "I constantly move between them," she explains. "I include birth certificates, death certificates, letters, official documents, but also rumors, gossip, and oral testimonies. Many times these stories end up corroborating the documents," she continues. Like a classical myth, María Luisa became a legend, a constant knot of doubts and questions that died with her. "If I could have interviewed her, first I would ask her what exactly her role was in Trotsky's assassination. But then I would ask her a much more intimate question: did you truly love us?", reflects the author.

In one of the first interviews for the book, with the horse trainer Luis Ramírez, whose godmother María Luisa was, Ramos asks her:

—Before leaving Uruguay, María Luisa gave away all her belongings among her friends. What did she leave you?

After thinking about it for a while, he replies.

—She gave me life!

Upon discovering María Luisa's past, after her identity was revealed following the confession of the former head of the KGB, Pavel Sudoplatov, “scandal and stupor spread among María Luisa's circle of friends,” he confesses. “At first they felt deceived, they felt stupid. But, at the same time, when they learned that she had parachuted behind Nazi lines in Ukraine during World War II, they felt proud to have been friends with a heroine,” he continues.

"What impressed me the most was discovering that in the same room where she used to give us afternoon tea, she had poisoned her husband," explains Ramos. It was her third husband, the Italian spy known as Valentino Marchetti, but identified within the KGB by the codename Marco. According to a recording found during the investigation, a former collaborator stated that María Luisa had poisoned him.

The same tape revealed another crime, according to this witness: María Luisa would also have ordered the assassination of the Uruguayan historian Arbelio Ramírez, the husband of her assistant, when he wanted to leave the Soviet network.

The genius of the operation, argues Ramos, was to coincide the crime with Che Guevara's visit to Montevideo in 1961. "Everyone thought the bullet was intended for Che. The police too. But the widow always maintained that the real target was her husband, because he wanted to leave the KGB," he explains. Two murders spaced out in time that shared a link. The same doctor from the Communist Party who performed Arbelio Ramírez's autopsy is the one who years later signed the death certificate of María Luisa's Italian husband. "It's an extraordinary coincidence," states Ramos.

A secret of public domain

Luis Ramírez, as the son of the librarian and the historian that María Luisa had recruited as spies for the KGB, already knew who África de las Heras really was. “Before she died, her mother had left that recorded tape in which she explained everything,” he recounts. Among friends and neighbors in Montevideo, Ramos' parents and close relatives suspected it and, if they knew, they hid it. They looked away, after all, they were of a sympathetic ideology. “I also traveled to Ceuta, where I spoke with a great-niece of María Luisa, who told me that the family suspected that her aunt had murdered her first husband, a soldier from Ceuta".

In the same book, Ramos questions whether to continue investigating. At the moment of confirming the crimes, he wonders how many more bones this book would unearth. However, he discovered many more lives saved. “At first, for me she was Trotsky’s assassin. But, among so many discoveries, I found that she had saved dozens and hundreds of Spaniards who wanted to flee to France after the Civil War, opening paths for them through the Pyrenees. Or that she had disguised herself as a servant in Paris to infiltrate the Gestapo offices to locate lists of Spaniards that the Nazis intended to execute and, according to the files I found, she would have saved almost all of them,” assures the author. Perhaps María Luisa will remain a myth forever, but Laura Ramos, the girl who knew her “through the kitchen entrance,” has now managed to form an image of who she was. “María Luisa continues to be a murderer, but she is also a heroine of the 20th century,” she concludes.