Sergei Mikhailovich Shpigelglas
Сергей Михайлович Шпигельглас
1897–1940
✕ Executed · Rehabilitated 1956
Architect of NKVD foreign operations during the Great Terror
Under the cover of a bourgeois fishmonger near the Boulevard Montmartre, Shpigelglas ran the Soviet illegal network in Paris — his shop was the base from which he penetrated White Russian émigré and Trotskyist circles.
Deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence (INO NKVD) from 1936 and its acting head from February to June 1938. A Cheka veteran fluent in four languages, he directed the NKVD's most consequential foreign operations of the Great Terror: the kidnapping of White Russian general Yevgeny Miller in Paris, the assassination of defector Ignace Reiss in Switzerland, and the liquidation of OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam. He also ran the Paris illegal residency under cover as a fishmonger and trained a generation of intelligence officers at the NKVD's Special Purpose School.
Career Timeline
- 1917Drafted; served as ensign in the 42nd Reserve Regiment
- 1918–1919Finance, Moscow military commissariat; Military Control; head of finance, Cheka Special Department
- 1921–1922Cheka of Belorussia
- 1922–1926INO OGPU, intelligence work from Mongolia against China and Japan
- 1926–1935Assistant to chief of INO OGPU; illegal residency chief in Paris
- 1935–1936Assistant to chief of INO GUGB NKVD
- 1936–1938Deputy chief, 7th Department (INO) GUGB NKVD
- 1938.2–6Acting chief, 7th Department (INO) GUGB NKVD
- 1938.3–9Deputy chief, 5th Dept., 1st Directorate NKVD
- 1940.1.29Executed
Related historical events
Spain and the Seeckt Testament: The Intelligence Officer Beyond the Liquidations
Shpigelglas's career is often reduced to the liternoye (special) operations: the liquidation of defectors and enemies abroad. But his intelligence work ranged far more broadly. During the Spanish Civil War in 1937–1938, he provided operational support to the NKVD residency in Republican Spain and directed the special operations of reconnaissance-diversionary "flying squads" (летучие отряды) operating behind Francoist lines. These units carried out sabotage, interdiction of bridges and supply routes, and intelligence-gathering against Franco's command. Spain also served as a testing ground for the model of coordinated legal and illegal residencies that Soviet intelligence would refine in wartime conditions.
In the same period, Shpigelglas personally directed the operation that obtained the so-called "Seeckt Testament": secret materials of the German General Staff that laid out Germany's military doctrine and strategic planning against the USSR. Named for General Hans von Seeckt, the architect of Germany's clandestine rearmament, these documents were regarded by Soviet intelligence as a crucial window into Nazi military posture in the East. Taken together with his years running the illegal Paris residency under fishmonger's cover, building agent networks against Japan and China from Mongolia, and training a generation of intelligence officers at the NKVD's School of Special Purpose (SHON), Shpigelglas emerges not as a mere executioner but as a comprehensive intelligence professional whose practice spanned collection, penetration, sabotage, and agent development.