 Richard Oehrling and his family left the country the same year, relocating to the Netherlands where he worked for "Exportchleb", the Soviet trade organisation in the Netherlands, and at the same time undertaking work for the Soviet security services.While in the Netherlands he was in close contact with Ignace Reiss, a Soviet spy who fell foul of Moscow's shifting power structures and was shot by an NKVD assassin in Lausanne a few weeks after sending a letter to Party general secretary Stalin in which he announced his "defection", and support for Trotsky (who by this time had become a high-profile opponent of the Soviet dictator).While in the Netherlands Oehring recruited , the foreign correspondent of the "Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC)" (newspaper), to work for Soviet intelligence.