Nahum Eitingon

Born in to a Belarusian Jewish family, Eitingon joined the Cheka in 1920, shortly before his 21st birthday. Along with other Chekists, he took part in numerous operations during the Russian civil war, including the "liquidation" of a number of the more prosperous citizens of the Belarusian town of Gomel. At the end of the 1920s, Eitingon, a polyglot, organized and led an operation producing fake documents which persuaded the Japanese that 20 Russian agents who were working for them had secretly applied to have their Soviet citizenship restored. This ruse resulted in the Japanese executing their anti-Soviet allies.[3]

In 1930, Eitingon was appointed deputy director of the Administration for Special Tasks under Yakov Serebryansky, but due to his poor personal relations with Serebryansky, in April 1933 he was shifted to chief of section charged with coordinating the operation of "illegals" in the INO (Foreign Department of the OGPU) under Artur Artuzov and later (from May 1935) Abram Slutsky.[4][5] According to Gen Pavel Sudoplatov, Eitingon was sent to the U.S. as an "illegal" in the beginning of the 1930s, prior to the establishment of U.S.–USSR diplomatic relations in November 1933, to recruit Japanese and Chinese emigrants with a view to possible using them in military and sabotage operations against Japan (the U.S. itself was not deemed a high priority for intelligence operations by the Centre then).[6] One of the agents recruited by Eitingon in the U.S. was Japanese painter Yotoku Miyagi, who in 1933 returned to Japan and became a member of Richard Sorge's spy ring in that country.[7] Eitingon was also tasked to assess the intelligence potential of Americans involved in Communist activities.[6]

He was active in Spain in the late 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War. Eitingon was reputedly responsible for a number of kidnappings and assassinations at the behest of the OGPU/NKVD in Western countries.[3] However, Gen Pavel Sudoplatov, who was Leonid Eitingon′s close friend and colleague in the Soviet intelligence directorate, writes that Western accounts of Eitingon′s role in the abduction of White Russian Gen Yevgeny Miller in Paris in September 1937, organised by NKVD, are false.[8] Sudoplatov also notes unabashed sexual promiscuity of Eitingon, who in this period of his career had concurrent relationships with several women (including his wives) and used his female colleagues and subordinates as mistresses.[9]

The illegal espionage network, which included Jews with ancestry in the Russian Empire, established by Eitingon in the United States in the early 1930s helped Pavel Sudoplatov in the 1940s run a wide network of Soviet moles in the scientific community in the U.S. and beyond, to conduct atomic espionage.[10]

Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary, had been banished from the USSR by Joseph Stalin and had found refuge in Mexico. Stalin assigned the organisation and execution of a plan to assassinate Trotsky to Eitingon. Eitingon, while in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, was able to recruit a young Spaniard communist ideologue, Ramón Mercader, as executioner. Trotsky was living in Mexico at the time and, soon after Mercader worked his way into Trotsky's group of friends, Eitingon had also arrived in Mexico.

On 20 August 1940, Mercader attacked and fatally wounded Trotsky with an ice axe while the exiled Russian was in the study of his house in Coyoacán (then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City). Eitingon and another collaborator (Caridad Mercader, Ramon Mercader's mother) in the assassination plot were waiting outside Trotsky's residence, in separate cars, to provide a getaway for Mercader. When Mercader failed to return (having been detained by Trotsky's bodyguards), they both left and fled the country.

In October 1951, Major-General of State Security Eitingon, along with three other high-ranking members of the government (all Russian Jewish), were accused of "a Zionist plot to seize power" (the Doctors' Plot). Eitingon's sister Sofia was also arrested. As a doctor, she was considered to be the "link" to the plotting doctors who were allegedly planning to poison high-ranking Soviet leaders. The officers were all imprisoned in cold, dark cells and tortured. The tortures led many of them to falsely confess but Eitingon was steadfast in his denial. Sofia was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, the head of Soviet intelligence and security services Lavrentiy Beria issued an order to close the cases against the "Zionist plotters" and all were released, including Sofia.

Beria was arrested in June 1953 and executed. Eitingon, considered a supporter of Beria, was arrested again and held in jail without trial at the Butyrka prison in Moscow for four years. In November 1957 he was put on trial, in which he was accused (again) of conspiracy against the regime (but this time without any Zionist connotations). The court sentenced him to 12 years in prison, and his rank and all his medals were taken from him. After Nikita Khrushchev's ouster from power in 1964, Eitingon was released from prison. After his release he worked as an interpreter.

Nahum Eitingon died in 1981. In 1992 the Russian Supreme Court annulled the conviction and cleared his name. Eitingon had persistently sought his official rehabilitation, but this was granted only posthumously.[11]

• Pavel Sudoplatov

• Wilmers, Mary-Kay: The Eitingons, London, UK, Faber; 2009; ISBN 978-0-571-23472-1