Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon (Russian: Наум Исаакович Эйтингон, romanized: Naum Isaakovich Eytingon), also known as Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon (Russian: Леонид Александрович Эйтингон)[1] (6 December 1899 – 3 May 1981), was a Soviet intelligence officer, who gained prominence through his involvement in several NKVD operations, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the orchestration of partisan movements during World War II, and atomic espionage.

Along with other Chekists, he took part in numerous operations during the Russian Civil War, including the "liquidation" of a number of the more prosperous citizens of the Belarusian town of Gomel.

[5] 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.

[9] 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.

[6] 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.

[11] Sudoplatov also notes the 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.

For example, Eitingon took with him to Spain, Aleksandra Kochergina as his mistress who played the role of his third "wife" while he ran NKVD guerrilla operations during the Spanish Civil War.

It is not clear how he was able to afford this lifestyle (dating, courting, cafes, cabarets, wine, renting an apartment or house rather than living in the NKVD barracks).

While in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Eitingon was able to recruit a young Spaniard communist ideologue, Ramón Mercader, as executioner.

On 20 August 1940, Mercader attacked and fatally wounded Trotsky with an ice axe while the exiled Russian was in the study of his house in Coyoacán (then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City).

Eitingon was further said to have been instrumental in the NKVD "Max" network, the Jewish-led Abwehr spy ring whose allegiances continue to befuddle historians to the present day.

After the victory of the USSR in World War II, Eitingon was made deputy head of the C Department of the NKVD (later KGB), where he continued atomic espionage.

During this time, he played roles in the arrests and executions of suspected nationalist collaborators or sympathizers, including Bishop Theodore Romzha and Alexander Shumsky.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, the head of Soviet intelligence and security services Lavrentiy Beria issued an order to close the cases against the "Zionist plotters" and all were released, including Sofia.