Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon, or Naum Isaakovič Ejtingon , also known as Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon (6 December 1899, Shkloŭ

Shklou

Škłoŭ is a town in Mahilyow Voblast, Belarus, located 35 km north of Mogilev on the Dnieper river. It has a railway station on the line between Orsha and Mogilev. The population is 13,282...

 - 3 May 1981), was a Soviet intelligence officer, who was sometimes described as a major organizer of Stalin's state terrorism

State terrorism

State terrorism may refer to acts of terrorism conducted by a state against a foreign state or people. It can also refer to acts of violence by a state against its own people.-Definition:...

 system.

Career

Eitingon, a Russian Jew, joined the Cheka

Cheka

Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...

 in 1920, shortly before his 21st birthday. Along with other Chekists, he took part in numerous operations during the Russian civil war

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

, including the "liquidation" of a number of the more prosperous citizens of the Belorussian

Belarus

Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

 town of Gomel. At the end of the 1920s, Eitingon, a polyglot

Polyglot

Polyglot may refer to:*Polyglot , someone who uses many languages*Polyglot , a book that contains the same text in more than one language*Polyglot , a computer program that is valid in more than one programming language...

, 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.

He was active in Spain in the late 1930s, during the Spanish civil war

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

 and in Belorussia during the Second World War. As a high-ranking NKVD

NKVD

The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....

 officer, Eitingon was responsible for numerous kidnappings and assassinations, even in peacetime.

During the 1930s, Eitingon, established an illegal espionage network in the United States among Jewish people who had left Russia shortly before the Russian Revolution broke out. This penetration of Soviet intelligence into the United States helped the Soviets to gain, later on, a foothold in the scientific community. During the early 1940s, Eitingon had as many as 40 Soviet agents among the scientists and personnel who were working on the Manhattan Project

Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...

 at or near Los Alamos

Los Alamos, New Mexico

Los Alamos is a townsite and census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, built upon four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau and the adjoining White Rock Canyon. The population of the CDP was 12,019 at the 2010 Census. The townsite or "the hill" is one part of town while...

, New Mexico

New Mexico

New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...

, and Berkeley

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

, CA.

The Assassination of Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

, the Soviet revolutionary, had been banished from the USSR by 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 the services of a young Spaniard communist ideologue, Ramón Mercader

Ramón Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández was a Spanish communist who became famous as the murderer of Russian Communist ideologist Leon Trotsky in 1940, in Mexico...

, to act as executioner. Trotsky was living in Mexico at the time and, soon after Mercader worked his way into Trotsky's group of friends, Eitingon, too, arrived in Mexico.

On August 20, 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 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.

Doctors' Plot

In October 1951, Major-General of State Security Eitingon, along with 3 other high-ranking members of the government (all Russian Jewish), were accused of "a Zionist plot to seize power." 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

Lavrentiy Beria

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....

 issued an order to close the cases against the "Zionist plotters" and all were released, including Sofia.

Nahum Eitingon persistently sought his official rehabilitation, but this was granted only posthumously.

Further reading

• Wilmers, Mary-Kay: The Eitingons, London, UK, Faber; 2009; ISBN 9780571234721