MOSCOW, March 5, 1938 (UP) - Christian Rakovsky, for years Russia's ace diplomat, asserted today at the mass trial of 21 Bolshevik leaders for treason that Great Britain accepted him as Russian ambassador only after learning that he was associated with Leon Trotsky.
Asserting that Trotsky was a British agent, Rakovsky said that he himself, after being shown a forged letter which constituted a threat to him, was taken to a dinner at a London restaurant to meet the chief of the Russian section of the British intelligence service in 1924, a year after his appointment as ambassador.
"I went to Moscow," he said, "and talked to Trotsky. Trotsky said that the forged letter was only an excuse. He agreed that we were to work with the British Intelligence."
Attorney General Andrew Vishinsky, chief prosecutor, said he suspected Rakovsky not only of having been a British agent after the World War but having been connected with the German secret service during the World War.
Rakovsky said his connection with the British intelligence service was interrupted for 10 years (he went to Paris as ambassador in 1925), but was renewed in 1934 when an English woman approached him and told him to renew his contact.
Under pressure from Prosecutor Vishinsky, Rakovsky named the woman as Lady Paget.
(A Lady Muriel Paget, wife of Sir Richard Paget, a British specialist in patent development, is living in Leningrad, the United Press Moscow correspondent said. She is 62).
The two "most hated men" in the Soviet Union waited to take their turn on the stand.
They are Nikolai Bukharin, one time "heir apparent to Lenin" and president of the Communist Internationale, and Henry Grigorievich Yagoda, for years the most dreaded man in the Soviet Union as head of the secret police.
