Joseph Stalin and had found refuge in Mexico. Stalin assigned the organisation and execution of a plan to assassinate Trotsky to Eitingon. While in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Eitingon 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. Second World War Eitingon continued his service in the NKVD during World War II. In 1941, he and Sudoplatov successfully negotiated the release of purged NKVD officers with Lavrentiy Beria, as they were needed at the outset of the war. After this, he was involved in the assurance of Turkish neutrality from 1941–42. In late 1942, he was appointed as deputy head of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD, which was focused on sabotage and infiltration operations behind enemy lines. In this capacity as the deputy of Sudoplatov, he organized several successful operations, including Operation Scherhorn. He also assisted in the organization of several partisan movements in Eastern Europe. Through this work, Eitingon was introduced to Rudolf Abel, who would become famous as a spy in the US. Eitingon also used his extensive preexisting network in the US to conduct Atomic Espionage. After the war After the victory of the USSR in World War II, Eitingon was made deputy head of the C Department of the NKVD (later KGB), where he continued atomic espionage. In this role, Eitingon was also tasked with operations against the anti-communist Forest Brothers in the Baltic states and other anti-Soviet movements in Eastern Europe. He was also tasked with the liquidation of the OUN and other Ukrainian nationalist movements. During this time, he played roles in the arrests and executions of suspected nationalist collaborators or sympathizers, including Bishop Theodore Romzha and Alexander Shumsky. Doctor's Plot and later life In October 1951, Major-General of