Yakov Serebryansky

Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky (Russian: Яков Исаакович Серебрянский) (born 11 December 1891 – died 30 March 1956) was an agent of the Soviet security services who created the first Soviet spy network in Palestine, and conducted special operations including the kidnapping and murder in Paris of a former Russian General Alexander Kutepov.

Early career Yakov Serebryansky was born in Minsk, in present-day Belarus, the son of a Jewish apprentice watchmaker. His date of birth is various given as 8 December (26 November old style 1891, 11 December (29 November old style) or 1892 He joined a student revolutionary group as a schoolboy in 1907, and in 1908 joined the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. In 1909, he was arrested as a suspected accomplice in the assassination of the head of the Minsk prison. He was held in prison in 1909–1910, then exiled to Vitebsk. Drafted into the Russian Imperial Army in 1912, Serebryansky was seriously wounded at the start of the war with Germany, in August 1914, and was demobilised after long treatment in hospital. In 1925–28, he was an 'illegal' OGPU resident, based in Brussels and Paris. In 1929, he was appointed head of a section whose mission was to prepared sabotage and terrorism abroad, in the event of war. In 1929, he was appointed head of the 'special group' answering directly to the Chairman of the OGPU, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. |

A different version is that Kutepov was stabbed to death during the struggle, by the police agent working with Serebryansky's. but he withdrew his confession almost immediately. In 1941, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out, and he was released after the German invasion of the USSR in July 1941, and chosen by Pavel Sudoplatov to run a section recruiting agents among German prisoners of war.

In 1946, when Abakumov was appointed head of the security services, now called the MGB, Serebryansky retired on a pension, unable to work for the man who had tortured him. When Beria was arrested in 1953, Serebryansky and his wife were suspected of being his accomplices. He was arrested on 8 October 1953, died in prison under interrogation. He was fully rehabilitated in 1971.