The biography of the intelligence officer Eitingon

Trilisser was at a reception with Comrade Dzerzhinsky. And all my life I followed this parting words and always did what I considered useful and necessary for the Soviet regime and party. It is easy to imagine how ridiculous, wild and incomprehensible my arrest came for me. Neither during the preliminary investigation, which lasted four years, neither during the court, just like at present, I did not find myself guilty of the Soviet Motherland and I do not recognize you, I ask you to help me as soon as possible to deal with my case about rehabilitation and restoration in the party.

”The author of this letter was Naum Isaakovich Eitingon. The provinces of Shklova, where his father worked as a local paper factory, was a well -being, although the relatives of the future Chekist on the paternal line were attributed to the merchant class. Swamps where many of them died. The French hung a courageous patriot. The Eitingon family remembered the hand -made ancestor and often talked about it.

In the year, when Naum was not yet 13 years old, his father died. From Shklov, the family moved to Mogilev. In addition to Naum himself, three more children remain in the care of the widow - two daughters and the youngest son, whom she alone could not feed. For some time the family was held by grandfather Naum - a private attorney. But he soon died. The future scout had to earn a living by private lessons, tutoring and correspondence of all kinds of papers.

However, at the family council it was decided to send the boy to the Mogilev Commercial School. Here he began to engage in a literary circle, where he first met illegal revolutionary publications. The overthrow of the autocracy caught summer Naum in Mogilev. He leaves the 7th grade of a commercial school and begins to work as an instructor in the statistics department.

In May, he enters the Socialist -Revolutionary Party, which was at that time widely popular among young people. However, already in August of the same year, he breaks with her, disappointed in the practical activities of the leaders of socialist revolutionaries. Naum Eitingon enthusiastically met the October Revolution. Since November, he, an employee of the Mogilev City Council, has been engaged in the implementation of the surplus, he travels a lot in the province, participates in the suppression of kulak rebellions.

In April, Eitingon goes to Moscow for courses at the All -Russian Council of Work Cooperation. And already in September of the same year, he returns to his native lands. True, this time in Gomel, where he takes an active part in the suppression of the anti -Soviet rebellion, which was headed by the former tsarist officer of Dragonfly. Eitingon’s stay in Gomel and his participation in the fight against rebels coincided in time with the approach of the city of the White Guards and the Polish General Galler.

In October, the Naum enters the Bolshevik party and becomes a fighter of the communist detachment. At the end of the year, when the onset of Polish interventionists was reflected, Eitingon again works as an instructor in cooperation. At the same time, he is an instructor in trade union work in the province and is engaged in the creation of trade union organizations. In May, Naum Eitingon, on the ticket of the party of the party, became authorized by the Special Department of the Gomel fortified area.

Thus, with military counterintelligence, the Eitingon service began in state security agencies, which lasted more than three decades. I had to work in front -line conditions, it was necessary to fight banditry, as well as Polish espionage. In May, the Gomel Chekists, having introduced their agent, revealed the headquarters of the so -called "Western Regional Committee", which structurally part of the "People's Union of the Protection of the Homeland and Freedom".

He was led by a former prominent Socialist -Revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov. Being an employee of the Gomel provincial Cheka, Eitingon took a direct part in the KROT operation, as a result of which it was possible to arrest about a hundred members of the Western Regional Committee. In May, Eitingon participated in the identification and arrest of the Commissioner of the People’s Union of the Protection of the Homeland and Freedom in Minsk, Eduard Opperput-Staunitsa.

In the same year, the young Chekist more than once had to travel with operational groups to eliminate the armed gangs of Savinkovites. During one of these operations in October, Eitingon was seriously wounded. Etingon left the hospital only in March and was immediately appointed a member of the Bashkir Department of the State Political Administration of the GPU, so by that time the Cheka began to be called.

But since the education of Naum was clearly not enough, the leadership decided to send him to study at the eastern faculty of the Military Academy of the Red Army. Here, future scouts studied military and general disciplines, and also mastered foreign languages.After two -year classes at the Aitingon Academy, he was transferred to the Foreign Department of the OGPU and soon received an appointment to the post of deputy head of the Ino resident in Shanghai, led by an experienced intelligence officer Yakov Minker.

Naum came to Shanghai at the end of the year as a Soviet vice-consul. It was not easy to work in the tributary of the Middle Kingdom torn off at that time, to put it mildly. In March, the Communist Party China made an unsuccessful attempt to shift Chan Kaisha from the post of commander in chief of the Chinese army. The leadership of the CCP began to form in Shanghai the Red Guard detachments in order to organize an armed uprising and the proclamation of the revolutionary government.

In response, Chan Kayshi took an attack on Shanghai, who fell under the blows of his troops on April 12. But in April, at the direction of Chan Kayshi, the Chinese police raided the Soviet General Consulate there and defeated it. In Manchuria, the capital of which was Harbin, at that time more than thousand permanently lived. Numerous White Guard formations, including the detachments of the chieftain of Semenov, found refuge here.

At the same time, the Harbin residency actively acted not only in the White Guard emigration. Her work against Japanese special services, who prepared the occupation of Manchuria, was very effective. Arriving in Harbin, Eitingon adopted a number of valuable sources, one of which was a former officer of the Amur Flotilla Vyacheslav Pentkovsky, who worked together with his wife for Soviet intelligence.

Freely speak Chinese, Pentkovsky received Contemporary Citizenship and entered the service of the Harbin court, where he had access to important information. In touch, Eitingon also had a source of Osipov, recruited by him in the year and was an employee of the political department of local gendarmerie. In the year, the residency through Osipova brought documents to the Japanese, from which it followed that 20 of their active agents from among the Russian military emigrants allegedly asked them to provide them with Soviet citizenship.

As a result of this misinformation action, they were all eliminated by their owners. All the "legal" residences of the OGPU in this country temporarily stopped their work. Intelligence from the territory of China began to be conducted from illegal positions. Naum Eitingon returned to Moscow. In this largest Turkish city, Eitingon was under the guise of the attaches of the Soviet Consulate General.

During the reign of Kemal Ataturk, Soviet intelligence did not work against Turkish organizations and institutions. Moreover, cooperation was even established between the special services of both countries. She managed to access the secrets of these missions. The residency also collected information about the activities of various groups of anti -Soviet emigration in Turkey - Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, North Caucasus.

Since the conditions for conducting intelligence work from the standpoint in Istanbul were extremely favorable, in the middle of the year the center decided to organize illegal residency here in the Middle East, led by the famous Chekist Yakov Blumkin. However, already in October, he was recalled to Moscow for contact with Trotsky, arrested, and then shot. It was urgent to reorganize the work of illegal residency, which was previously headed by Blumkin.

He came to Istanbul under the guise of an Armenian merchant and, under the leadership of Eitingon, began to restructure the agent network. Through the "legal" residency, he maintained a connection with the center. However, in June, Agabekov fled west. Soon in Berlin, he published a book called "GPU. Notes of a Chekist", in which he called Eitingon a resident of Soviet foreign intelligence.

This circumstance forced the center to withdraw Naum to Moscow in order to avoid various kinds of provocations. It was created on his initiative in the year with the aim of deeply introducing agents on objects of military-strategic significance and the preparation of sabotage operations in the enemy rear in the military period. As an employee of a special group, Eitingon traveled to the United States to recruit Chinese and Japanese emigrants who could be useful to Soviet intelligence in the event of the beginning of hostilities against Japan.

He introduced in one of the American institutions two agents brought out of Poland to prolonged settlement in the United States. Among the recruited by Eitingon was the artist Iotok Miyaga, who later entered the famous Ramzai group Richard Sorge. However, despite the significant positive results, Eitingon at the end of the year raised the question of his transfer back to Ino before the OGPU leadership.

He was appointed head of the 8th department of scientific and technical intelligence, but worked here for only a few months. At the beginning of the year, Eitingon was sent to France, and then to Belgium, from where he returned in the year. Since April, Naum Eitingon is the head of the 1st branch of Ino, the head of the illegal intelligence of the Soviet state security authorities.

By this time, serious changes had occurred in foreign intelligence. It was a strong and competent operative, a brilliant organizer.He decided to strengthen foreign intelligence personnel and expand its staff. Anticipating Hitler’s inevitability of power in Germany and, therefore, the inevitability of a new world war, Artuzov back in November gave an order to strengthen illegal work and on the preparation of “legal” residencies for the transition to illegal forms of work in a “special period”.

It was at the suggestion of Arthur Artuzov Naum Eitingon, who turned only 33 years old, was appointed the head of illegal intelligence. At the same time, Eitingon’s acquaintance with Pavel Sudoplatov took place, who later became his immediate boss and comrade. In his memoirs, "Intelligence and the Kremlin" Pavel Anatolyevich described his colleague as follows: "The beautiful face of Eitingon and his living brown eyes glowed with his mind.

The piercing look, his hair is thick and black, like a chin, the majority of people who remained after a car accident took him as a trace of a combat wound, all this gave him the appearance of an experienced person. He literally fascinated by by heart, quoting Pushkin’s poems, but his main weapon was the irony and humor, I immediately drew attention to the fact that this person does not look at the same time as a high -ranking spent bureaucrat.

Eitingon was a truly gifted personality and, he would not become a scout, would surely succeed in the public service or made a scientific career. ”However, Etingon did not lead the illegal intelligence of state security agencies.