Ignace Reiss (1899 – 4 September 1937) – also known as "Ignace Poretsky,"[1] "Ignatz Reiss,"[2] "Ludwig,"[3] "Ludwik",[1] "Hans Eberhardt,"[4] "Steff Brandt,"[5] Nathan Poreckij,[6] and "Walter Scott (an officer of the U.S. military intelligence)"[7] – was one of the "Great Illegals" or Soviet spies who worked in third party countries where they were not nationals in the late 1920s and 1930s.

An NKVD team assassinated him on 4 September 1937 near Lausanne, Switzerland, a few weeks after he declared his defection in a letter addressed to Joseph Stalin.

[9][10] He was a lifelong friend of Walter Krivitsky; his assassination influenced the timing and method of Whittaker Chambers's defection a few months later.

Reiss was born Nathan Markovich Poreckij[6] in 1899 in Podwołoczyska (today Pidvolochysk),[11][12] then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine).

Reiss also visited Leipzig, Germany, to meet, fatefully, German Socialist Gertrude Schildbach, who would later conspire in his assassination.

[1] By the summer of 1919, he had received a summons to Vienna, Austria, where he moved quickly from work with agencies of the newly formed Comintern to "Fourth Department of the General Staff"—which became the Soviet GRU.

There he met Joseph Krasny-Rotstadt, a friend of both Rosa Luxemburg (already dead) and (more importantly) of fellow Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky.

In Berlin, their house guests included Karl Radek and Larissa Reisner, ex-wife of Fedor Raskolnikov (a Naval officer who chronicled the Kronstadt rebellion).

From 1929 to 1932, Reiss served in Moscow, where he worked in a nominal post of the Polish section of the Comintern—already sidelined as "foreign" (non-Russian).

"Ika"), Sorge's superior, Alexander Borovich, Felix Gorski, Otto Braun, Max Maximov-Friedman, Franz Fischer, Pavlo Ladan, and Theodore Maly.

There, Reiss and his wife met Egon Erwin Kisch, Alexander Rado, Noel Field, Vasily Zarubin, Yakov Blumkin, Boris Bazarov, and Yan Karlovich Berzin.

Reiss himself received a summons back to Moscow but allowed his wife to travel there in his stead in late 1936, staying into early 1937.

[1] Upon Krivitsky's return, Reiss composed a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, addressed to Stalin and dated 17 July 1937.

He returned the Order of the Red Banner with his letter, stating that to wear the medal "simultaneously with the hangmen of the best representatives of the Russian worker" was beneath his dignity.

[17] Reiss then fled with his wife and child to the remote village of Finhaut, Valais canton, Switzerland, to hide.

She refused a request by Abbiate to give Reiss a box of chocolates filled with strychnine but agreed to set up a meeting with him.

[citation needed] Reiss, then using the alias "Eberhardt", was lured by Schildbach onto a side road near Lausanne, where Roland Abbiate was waiting for him with a Soviet PPD-34 submachine gun.

[1][20] Police investigations revealed that a long strand of grey hair was found clutched in the hand of the dead man.

One of the men was Roland Abbiate, who had registered on 4 September at the Hotel de la Paix in Lausanne with Schildbach, the two had fled without their baggage and without paying their bill.

[19] The other man was Etienne-Charles Martignat, born in 1900 at Culhat in the Puy-de-Dôme, living since 1931 at No 18 Avenue de Anatole France, Clichy, Paris.

[8] However, as France's left-wing Popular Front Government of the period did not wish to upset diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Stalin, no arrests or announcement of the results of the police investigation were made at the time.

Instead, a brave and a lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action.

It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a G.P.U limousine would swing open and Reiss's body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out—as happened shortly after he deserted.