Genrikh Lyushkov

Genrikh Samoilovich Lyushkov was an officer in the Soviet secret police and its highest-ranking defector. A high-ranking officer of the NKVD, he played a role in perpetrating Stalin's Great Purge. When, in 1938, he suspected he would soon fall victim to the purge, he fled to the Japanese. Thereafter, he acted as a major source of intelligence for Imperial Japan about the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II, he was killed by the Japanese in order to prevent him from falling back into Soviet hands.