Genrikh Lyushkov - Defection

Defection

In preparation for his defection, Lyushkov arranged for his Jewish wife, Inna, to leave the country with his eleven-year-old daughter in order for the daughter to receive medical treatment in Poland. Their plan was for Inna to embed a secret code-word into a telegram, which would signal Lyushkov that it was safe for him to leave the Soviet Union. Under unknown circumstances, however, Inna and her daughter were captured. Though the daughter's fate remains unknown, Inna was kept at the Lubyanka prison and tortured for information throughout late 1938 before eventually being executed. Other members of Lyushkov's family were arrested and imprisoned in Siberian gulags. While his mother and brother were both killed, his sister survived her imprisonment.

On 13 June 1938, Lyushkov defected from the Soviet Union by crossing the border into Manchukuo with valuable secret documents about the Soviet military strength in the region, which was much higher than the Japanese had realized. He was the highest-ranking secret-police official to successfully defect; as well, he had the greatest inside knowledge about the purges within the Soviet Red Army due to his own participation in carrying them out. His defection was initially kept a state secret by Japan, but the revelation of his defection was judged to have a high propaganda value, so the decision was made to release the news to the world. A press conference was arranged at a Tokyo hotel on 13 July, a month after Lyushkov had defected. He "categorically denied Moscow's allegation that he was an impostor," though some news agencies, such as the New York Times, doubted his story.

During subsequent interviews and interactions with Japanese military personnel, Lyushkov adopted an anti-Stalinist position. However, his professed political views remained socialistic in nature, according to the recollections of some Japanese intelligence officers, with Lyushkov calling himself a Trotskyite, though some Japanese officers believed that he had later become a liberal communist. Though Lyushkov was anti-Stalinist, he was resistant to the idea of creating a new regime led by Russian émigrés. He was, however, willing to include them in a proposed plan for the assassination of Joseph Stalin. A resistance group of Russian emigrants would travel across the Turkish-Soviet border when Stalin would travel south to a resort in Sochi, which he had visited previously to swim in the Matsesta river. Lyushkov's intimate knowledge of NKVD procedures and the way Stalin's guard detail would be organized encouraged the Japanese to support the plan. However, a Soviet agent had infiltrated the group of Russian exiles and foiled the plan, which was considered the only serious attempt to assassinate Stalin.

Lyushkov was able to detail the strength of the Red Army in the Far East, Siberia, and the Ukraine, simultaneously providing Soviet military radio codes. While his ability to provide current military information was limited, he was considered highly intelligent and dedicated, producing great volumes of written material, though there were doubts about his ability to provide useful information specific to military operations; as he spent more time in Japan, his hard work impressed the Japanese intelligence officers he had been assigned to work with. The staff of the Imperial Japanese Army had concerns, however, about his psychological state, especially pertaining to the status of his wife and daughter, whom he had heard no news about since his defection. After a failed search by Japanese intelligence agents for his family, a plan to both pacify and "domesticate" Lyushkov was decided upon: he would be paired with a woman both to distract him from the question of his family's status and to keep him rooted in Japan. An eventual match was found after Lyushkov refused several White émigré women. At some point, he began to make plans to travel to the United States and contacted an American publisher about a possible autobiography he would write. He had concerns that he might be prevented from leaving Japan and went as far as to negotiate a written safe-conduct guarantee.

After Germany's capitulation, Lyushkov was sent on 20 July 1945 to work for the Japanese Kwantung Army's Special Intelligence authorities in the puppet state of Manchukuo. On 7 August 1945, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria commenced and Lyushkov vanished in the confusion of the assault, where he was reportedly last seen in a crowd at a Dairen train station. Other theories hold that he was captured by the Red Army or that he was killed on the orders of a Japanese Special Intelligence officer to prevent him from giving away Japanese military secrets to the Soviet Union. To this day, Lyushkov's ultimate fate remains unknown.