From Wiki,
At this time the
Great Purge was near its peak and NKVD boss
Nikolai Yezhov was gradually losing power. Lyushkov received a summons to return to
Moscow, but strongly suspected that this would mean his own arrest and execution. His own two predecessors in his post, Deribas and Balitsky, had both been purged. On
June 13,
1938 Lyushkov defected by crossing the border into
Manchukuo with valuable secret documents about Soviet military strength in the region, which was much higher than the Japanese had realized. As a "third-rank commissar of state security" (комиссар госбезопасности 3-го ранга), Lyushkov was the highest ranking secret-police official to successfully defect, and he had the most inside knowledge about the purges within the Soviet
Red Army due to his own participation in carrying them out.
Before defecting, Lyushkov had previously arranged for his wife Inna and 11 year old daughter to leave the Soviet Union in order for his daughter to receive medical treatment abroad. After receiving a pre-arranged code-phrase telegram from his wife, he defected a few days later believing that his family was safe, but in fact they had vanished without a trace. It was later reported that his wife had been tortured and shot at
Lubyanka prison, and his parents and all his relatives were sent to
Siberia. His mother and brother died, however, his sister survived the
Siberian camp. The daughter's fate remains unknown.
A month after his defection, he gave a press conference at a
Tokyo hotel. He published a number of articles and interviews about the Soviet purges, and served as an intelligence advisor to the Japanese. He proposed and planned a detailed assassination plot to be carried out against Stalin in
Sochi in January 1939, and the Japanese attempted to smuggle six Russian emigrant agents across the Soviet-Turkish border to carry out this suicide mission. However the group had been infiltrated by a Soviet agent and the attempt to cross the border failed. Lyushkov also served as a
military advisor and warned the Japanese not to underestimate Soviet military strength, estimating that at least 4000 tanks would be needed for an attack on the Soviet Union. This was an impossible figure for the
Imperial Japanese Army to achieve.
Lyushkov worked for the Japanese
Kwantung Army in Manchukuo until he disappeared in August 1945, at the beginning of
Operation August Storm near the very end of
World War II. His fate is uncertain, but according to one version he was shot at the Japanese military mission in
Dairen, by the head of the mission, a Japanese
counterintelligence officer named Takeoka, to prevent him falling into the hands of the Soviets and his body secretly cremated.
Genrikh Lyushkov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia