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. However, Pavel Sudoplatov writes that Western accounts of Eitingon′s role in the abduction of White Russian Gen Yevgeny Miller in Paris in September 1937, organised by NKVD, are false. Sudoplatov also notes unabashed sexual promiscuity of Eitingon, who in this period of his career had concurrent relationships with several women (including his wives) and used his female colleagues and subordinates as mistresses. The illegal espionage network, which included Jews with ancestry in the Russian Empire, established by Eitingon in the United States in the early 1930s helped Pavel Sudoplatov in the 1940s run a wide network of Soviet moles in the scientific community in the U.S. and beyond, to conduct scientific espionage. Assassination of Trotsky Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary, had been banished from the USSR by