Mikhail Trilisser

Mikhail Abramovich Trilisser-Moskvin (Мейер Абрамович Трилиссер; Jewish born Meier Abramovich Trilisser; 1 April 1883, Astrakhan - 1940) was a Soviet OGPU chief of the Foreign Department of the Cheka and the OGPU. Later, he worked for the NKVD as a covert bureau chief and Comintern leader.

Career
From 1921, Trilisser worked in the foreign intelligence department of the Soviet secret police, from its inception as part of the Cheka. In 1922, Trilisser was named head of the foreign department of the new State Political Directorate (GPU), (later, the OGPU). In October 1929, he was ousted from the foreign department of the OGPU, and was replaced by Artur Artuzov.

In 1935, Trilisser was assigned to work as a covert NKVD bureau chief under the guise of a Comintern leader, using the name Mikhail Aleksandrovich Moskvin. Trilisser was assigned various tasks while overseeing the Comintern, including the recruitment of OGPU (later, NKVD) agents overseas and the kidnapping or assassination of various Soviet emigres, Comintern members, and other 'enemies of the people'. Another of Trilisser's tasks was to recruit Soviet covert couriers to supply funds, training, and political support to various overseas communist movements deemed sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In the United States, Trilisser provided Soviet visas for couriers sent to supply funds to a number of American left-wing trade unions, African-American worker organizations, and communist movements, including the CPUSA. In January 1938, at the specific request and recommendation of Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party of the United States, Trilisser gave Max Bedacht, an American Communist Party activist and former unsuccessful New York Senate candidate, a Soviet visa and employment as a courier supplying funds to the CPUSA and other communist front organizations. Bedacht soon began traveling between the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union as a courier, using his official cover as an international delegate for the American Communist Party. Arrested in 1938 during the Great Purge on fabricated charges, he was executed in 1940. He was posthumously rehabilitated during the period of Destalinization.