Ambassador's End

Russia's sleek, smiling Ambassador to Mexico climbed into the Mexican Army plane. Behind him came his wife and three members of his staff. In his pocket he carried his new credentials to the Government of Costa Rica, one of several Latin American Republics from which he had won recognition of the Soviet Union. Heavily, in the grey dawn, the plane lifted itself off the ground to 400 feet, then dived back to earth. There was a flash of blue and red flames. Then, in the blazing plane, death came to 42-year-old Ambassador Oumansky, his wife, and three Embassy officials. Nor for years had Mexico seethed with such tales of death and revenge. Madame Oumansky, it was said, had heard in the snapping of her suitcase the sound of a coffin closing.

The ambitious son of a humble father, Constantine ("Kostya") Oumansky was 15 years old when the Bolsheviks seized power. Soon his facility for learning foreign languages (he could learn a new one in a month) won him a post in the Tass news agency. His journalistic career was said to have included secret-police duties. Journalism led to diplomacy. When Oumansky came to Washington as Russia's Ambassador to the U.S. (1939), a reporter asked him if he had ever been a GPU (secret police) agent. Said Ambassador Oumansky: "It is beneath my dignity to answer such a question."

At the age of 37, Oumansky was Washington's youngest Ambassador--suave, saponaceous, brilliant and astute. His English was spattered with current U.S. slang. His diplomatic parties were lavishly spattered with champagne and caviar. But Washington never really unbent to him. The GPU story would not down. In 1941, he was called back to Moscow.

Two years later, when Mexico resumed diplomatic relations with Russia, the Kremlin sent Constantine Oumansky as Ambassador to Mexico. Soon he was the most popular diplomat there. His sumptuous Embassy in Mexico City, with its big autographed picture of Stalin, was the most crowded social center in the Mexican capital. In no time, he had won friends for Russia all over Latin America. Now & again a suspicious voice would ask why Russia had sent such a top-drawer diplomat to Mexico City. There were rumors of Russian undercover activity. But Ambassador Oumansky's conduct was always scrupulously correct.

Two days after the crash the body of Oumansky was cremated in the same oven that had been used to cremate Leon Trotsky, murdered (by a GPU agent) in Mexico City four and a half years ago.

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