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Much of this beautifully written family memoir concerns Leonid Eitingon (1899-1981), a terrifying figure who joined the Cheka in 1920 and later went about enthusiastically \"liquidating\" Stalin's enemies, even helping to organise Trotsky's murder. More palatable, perhaps, are Max (1881-1943) and Motty (1885-1956).

Which leaves [Mary-Kay Wilmers] in a postmodern bind: not just disinformation, but the outline of what could be a many-volumed novel. But the game of separating fiction from fact takes on another layer, because Wilmers fills the gaps in her knowledge with questions. One section of the book ends: \"I was having supper with [Leonid Eitingon]'s granddaughter in a cafe in Camden Town when she told me that the Rosenbergs' names were in his address book. Did Leonid know them? Did he in fact recruit them? Do secret agents have address books that they leave lying around?\" She also asks if [Motty] knew Leonid, and helped facilitate Leonid's arrival in Moscow; and if [Max] was liaising with Leonid on those holidays with his Russian wife. She is confident these kind men weren't funding their killer cousin, but can't rule it out.

Spies who never got caught make tough subjects for a biographer and though [Mary-Kay Wilmers] spent 20 years gathering the material for this book, she can come to no definite conclusions: \"Every anecdote from the trivial to the mega-political exists in more than one version, and you can never be sure of the story you're trying to tell.\" The author seems bemused by the number of questions that remain. \"[Motty], I assume, knew Rachmaninov: did he also know Plevitskaya?\" and her narrative is punctuated by \"I wonder\", \"I suppose\", and even the brave \"I have no idea\".

[Stephen Frears] admits he couldn't cope with any of that. \"I'm afraid to say I didn't do it. I couldn't face it. I'm a baby. I'm a coward,\" he says in the film. \"He did do my back once,\" Sam says. \"Hmph. That's good of him,\" [Mary-Kay Wilmers] replies. In between episodes of extreme illness, where he would be fighting for survival in hospital, Sam led a fairly normal life - climbing trees, falling out of them, playing football, making sure he got more attention than his younger brother, Will. Look, he says, parts of his life are rubbish, but in many ways he has been lucky. He is privileged - his parents are wealthy, well-educated (Mary-Kay went to Oxford, his father to Cambridge), successful and loving. Both introduced him to their creative worlds. Sam has been an extra in a few of his father's films and knocks around with many contributors to the London Review of Books. Does he read their work? \"No!\" he says, as if it's a ridiculous question. What, he's never read an [Alan Bennett] book? \"No. I've seen his plays. I loved The History Boys. I saw The Habit of Art, which I don't think much of.\" (Bennett is more generous: \"An encounter with Sam invariably cheers you up,\" he says in the film.) As for the writer Andrew O'Hagan, Sam's chief pleasure seems to be baiting him. They went to the same barbers, Ossie's, and had a competition to see who could get their photograph on the wall first alongside other famous customers such as Suggs and Trevor McDonald. Sam won. \"Andy just can't bear it that he's not up there and I am,\" he says gleefully. \"Why are you ashamed?\" Mary-Kay asks. Sam swallows loudly. \"Because one of them had a boyfriend at the time.\" Girls are a recurring theme, in the film and the book. His friends say he has a knack of setting his heart on the unobtainable - young, beautiful, blonde and about to be married. Why blonde? \"Because I can see them more clearly!\" Sam admits he is a terrible flirt, and uses the same chat-up line when a girl he likes tells him her name, he tells her it's his favourite. \"I got it from Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses. I get all my lines from Del Boy.\"

To me, at least, far the most interesting character in this affair is [Leonid Eitingon]. Who was he? Mr. [Stephen Schwartz] maintains that he was a close relative of Dr. [Max Eitingon]; Mr. [Theodore Draper] finds no evidence of any relationship. In any case, Leonid was a long-term officer of the Foreign Department of the secret police, and eventually its deputy head. In the 1930's he was one of its most prominent operatives in Western Europe, and eventually the organizer, on the spot, of the murder of Trotsky. He is spoken of as ''Leonid'' in reports both at that time and in the 1950's. In the meantime, in 1945, senior N.K.V.D. officers were given army rank. Among those listed (as major general) was Naum Isaakovich Eitingon: was this the same man? Leonid was certainly at this level: his superior in the Foreign Department, P. A. Sudoplatov, was named lieutenant general; his inferior, Gaik Ovakimian, major general (the latter, as Soviet consular representative in New York in 1940, also played a role in the Trotsky case). The natural conclusion (and moreover Eitingon is an extremely rare name) is that this is indeed the same man. All that needs to be assumed is that Leonid, a name he had come to be known by, was used on all but the most official occasions: there are many similar cases (my own younger sister for one). Mr. Draper has [Leonid-Naum], son of Isaac, on the genealogical table of his New York Review article of April 14; he suggests that there was another Naum. If so, was he also the son of another Isaac? It is not impossible: but the genealogical table itself is by no means guaranteed or complete. If there is only one Naum Isaakovich he is Max's first cousin. Otherwise he is surely a relative, however distant (unless we assume, as Mr. Draper suggests, that the takers-over of the Eitingon enterprise in Russia took the Eitingon name: that would involve, first, evidence that anything similar ever took place; second, that it took place in the Eitingon case).

Mr. [Stephen Schwartz]'s article was given a particularly lurid title: ''Intellectuals and Assassins - Annals of Stalin's Killerati.'' The chief villain of the piece was Dr. [Max Eitingon], one of Sigmund Freud's most devoted colleagues. Eitingon was accused of having taken part in three major Stalinist operations, all in 1937 - of being ''instrumental in preparing the 1937 secret trial'' of the Soviet generals in Moscow; of being ''involved in the murder of Ignace Reiss'' in Switzerland; and of being a ''key agent'' in the disappearance of the White Russian General Yevgeni Miller in Paris. As for the third charge, Mr. Schwartz rested much of his original case against Max Eitingon on a book, ''High Treason,'' by Vitaly Rapoport and Yuri Alexeev. I showed that Mr. Schwartz had played fast and loose with his own source. The Rapoport-Alexeev book contained the following sentence: ''It is more likely that he [ Max Eitingon ] acted as messenger and finance agent for his brother [Leonid-Naum Eitingon].'' This Naum is also supposed to have been known as Leonid, though no good explanation has been given for the confusion of names. In any case, the sentence had come out in Mr. Schwartz's article as follows: ''The dissident Soviet historians Vitaly Rapoport and Yuri Alexeev declare flatly in their book, 'High Treason' (Duke University Press), that Dr. Eitingon, serving his brother Leonid, was the control agent for Skoblin and Plevitskaya [ implicated in the disappearance of General Miller ] .'' Mr. [Robert Conquest] never seriously undertakes to deal with the ''true issue'' and ''main question.'' No sooner does he pay lip service to them than he goes on and on about something else. The reason seems to be that Max Eitingon, for whatever reason, doesn't really interest him. ''To me, at least,'' Mr. Conquest confesses, in what is supposed to be another view of Max Eitingon, ''far the most interesting character in this affair is Leonid Eitingon.'' As a result, whether Leonid was also called Naum comes in for much speculation, whereas Mr. Conquest does not contribute one iota of new information about Max Eitingon's alleged crimes.

In the absence of space for a point-by-point reply to Mr. [Peter Gay], let me cite in addition Pierre Broue's article ''La Main dOeuvre Blanche de Staline'' in Cahiers Leon Trotsky (December 1985); the French police files in the Boris Nikolayevsky collection at the Hoover Institution; ''Les Pourvoyeurs du Goulag'' by P. F. de Villemarest (Geneva, 1978); and ''The Miller Abduction,'' an unpublished paper by [Natalie Grant]. (4) ''About Leonid Eitingon we know relatively little.'' Mr. [Stephen Schwartz] has apparently overlooked a special appendix in our book dedicated to Naum (Leonid) Eitingon. Late in 1940 Eitingon was appointed deputy director of G.R.U. - Intelligence Department of the General Staff - under General Sudoplatov. He was imprisoned before - not after - Stalin's death, tried in 1954 and sentenced to 12 years in labor camp for ''violation of the socialist legality.'' Released, Eitingon came back to Moscow and was employed by Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga (International Book), a book trade company that is basically a K.G.B. front. He is probably dead by now. VITALY RAPOPORT New York Stephen Schwartz replies:

[Leon Trotsky], who with Vladimir Lenin forged the success of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, was assassinated in 1940 in an operation ordered from Moscow and run by an NKVD secret police agent, historian N. Vasetsky said in an article in the widely read Literary Gazette weekly. Vasetsky, apparently basing his account on some Soviet archive material, also identified the NKVD officer charged with organizing the killing - in which Trotsky was slashed in the head with an alpenstock at his Mexico City home - as Col. Leonid Eitingon. He said Caridad Mercader and Eitingon, who had become lovers, were waiting with a get-away car near Trotsky's villa in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan as the murder was under way but [Ramon Mercader] was caught by Trotsky aides.

[Leon Trotsky], who with Vladimir Lenin forged the successful 1917 Bolshevik revolution, was assassinated in 1940 in an operation ordered from Moscow and run by an NKVD secret police agent, historian N. Vasetsky said in an article in the widely read Literary Gazette weekly. Some Western works on the killing say Mercader, who during the summer of 1940 visited Trotsky frequently pretending to be a follower, was trained in Moscow for the operation, but Vasetsky made no reference to this. He said Caridad Mercader and [Leonid Eitingon], who had become lovers, were waiting with a get-away car near Trotsky's villa in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan as the murder was under way, but [Ramon Mercader] was caught by Trotsky aides.