Nahum Eitingon

Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon , also known as Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon (; 6 December 1899 – 3 May 1981), was a Soviet intelligence officer. Eitingon rose through the ranks of the early Soviet Union's intelligence services through his involvement in a number of special operations, most famously the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Later in his career, he organized anti-Nazi Partisan networks and used his extensive network in the United States to engage in atomic espionage.

Eitingon fell victim to the secret police apparatus he helped build after being accused of "Zionist plotting" in 1951, effectively ending his intelligence career. He lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity.

Early life Eitingon was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Shklov, Russian Empire (now Belarus). His father, Isaak Faivelovich Eitingon, was a paper mill clerk, and his grandfather was a lawyer. He may have been a distant cousin of Max Eitingon. Shortly before the Russian Revolution his family moved to Mogilev, where Nahum studied at Mogilev Commercial School. Eitingon first became involved in labor during the German occupation of Mogilev, when he joined a cement worker's union and joined the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. In his memoirs, KGB General and friend and colleague of Eitingon Pavel Sudoplatov claimed that Eitingon had fought in the Red Army since 1918, however, this claim is not substantiated by official records of the time. Following the Russian Revolution, he became a clerk at the commodities exchange. Following several promotions within the local labor bureaucracy, he joined the CPSU in 1919.

Intelligence career Eitingon joined the Cheka on May 10, 1920, having been recruited to a shortage of Chekists in the area. 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. He also gained prominence at the time for his work against banditry in Belarus. Eitingon was temporarily ejected from the Cheka and investigated during a 1921 purge due to his bourgeois origins, however, he was quickly let back in. In 1924, he graduated from Frunze Military Academy, after which served at several diplomatic postings in China and Turkey under the auspices of the OGPU. From 1927 to 1929 he served as Vice-Consul General at the Consulate of the USSR at Harbin. He also served at the special operations directorate of the OGPU from 1930 to 1932 and served under Alexander Orlov during the Spanish Civil War, using his linguistic skills to adopt several aliases. During this time, he was involved in several operations, including the assassination of Zhang Zoulin and the transportation of the Spanish gold reserves to the USSR. 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. 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. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, Eitingon was sent to the U.S. as an "illegal" in the beginning of the 1930s, prior to the establishment of Soviet Union–United States 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). 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. Eitingon was also tasked to assess the intelligence potential of Americans involved in Communist activities.

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.