Georges Agabekov Georges Agabekov ( original family name Arutyunov ; , transliteration Grigoriĭ Sergeevich Agabekov ) ( 1896 – 1937 ) was a Soviet Red Army soldier , Chekist , OGPU agent , and Chief of OGPU Eastern Section ( 1928 – 1929 ) . He was the first senior OGPU officer to defect to the West ( 1930 ) , motivated presumably by his amorous infatuation with an English language teacher in Constantinople ; his revelatory books led to massive arrests of Soviet intelligence assets across the Near East and Central Asia . Biography . Agabekov was born in Askhabad , the Russian Empire , in 1895 to an Armenian family . Red Army . He fought in the Russian army from 1914 to 1916 during World War I . At the end of 1916 he was sent to the Tashkent Praporshchik s school . Following the 1917 October revolution , he joined the Red Guard in March 1918 . Cheka . He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1920 ; soon after , he joined the Cheka . He partook in the Red Terror at Ekaterinburg and in the suppressing a peasant revolt in Tyumen . OGPU . As Agabekov could speak Persian and Turkish , he was brought to Moscow in October 1921 to join the Oriental Section of the Cheka . In 1922 , he was dispatched to Tashkent to work for Yakov Peters . While in Turkestan , according to his own account , he played a key role in locating the camp of Enver Pasha , then Basmachi leader , near Denau ( now in Surxondaryo Province of Uzbekistan ) , thus laying the groundwork for the routing of Enver ' s troops and his assassination in early August 1922 . In April 1924 , he was posted to the Soviet mission in Kabul , where he spied under diplomatic cover . At the end of 1926 , Agabekov was posted in Tehran as " rezident " of the OGPU Foreign Branch in Persia , where he was successful in obtaining foreign powers ' secret codes , recruiting agents and fomenting animosity against Britain amongst the local tribal leaders ; however , he failed in the task of dispatching back to the USSR the defector Boris Bazhanov , Joseph Stalin ' s former assistant . In April 1928 , back in Moscow , Agabekov was promoted to the position of chief of the OGPU Near Eastern Section . Defection . At the end of October 1929 , Agabekov arrived from Odessa in Constantinople as " illegal " " rezident " in Turkey , where he replaced the Trotskyite Yakov Blumkin ( alias " Zhivoi " ) executed in Moscow shortly afterward . Like Blumkin before him , Agabekov travelled to Turkey on a Persian passport ; he posed as a wealthy ethnic Armenian merchant under the name of Nerses Ovsepyan . Apart from Turkey , Blumkin had started to set up " illegal " spy networks in such countries as Syria , Palestine , Hejaz and Egypt . According to Agabekov , prior to 1930 , Turkey was viewed by OGPU as a friendly power pursuant to the Russo - Turkish Treaty of Moscow , yet cooperation offers on the part of Turkey ' s police and intelligence were declined . Mikhail Trilisser , chief of the OGPU Foreign Branch ( 1922 – 1930 ) , whose patronage Agabekov enjoyed , envisioned Constantinople as a base of Soviet espionage activity for the entire Near East . British intelligence officer and journalist Gordon Brook - Shepherd in his book " The Storm Petrels : The First Soviet Defectors , 1928 - 1938 " ( 1977 ) maintained that Agabekov ' s defection to France in June 1930 was caused solely by the fact that he had fallen in love with an under - age English girl Isabel Streater who taught him English ; but Agabekov ' s own account implies political and ideological motives as well as the fact that at the end of April 1930 he discovered he and his contacts ( mostly ethnic Armenian merchants in Constantinople ) were under close scrutiny by the Turkish police . Shortly after his arrival in Paris , in August 1930 , the French authorities expelled Agabekov to Brussels , Belgium , where he lived under his original name of Arutyunov . There , he finally succeeded in establishing cooperation with the British and in marrying Isabel . Publication of " OGPU " . The publication of Agabekov ' s English - language book " OGPU : The Russian Secret Terror " in 1931 , led to sweeping arrests of hundreds of Soviet agents and sympathisers in Persia as well as other Near Eastern countries ; a sharp deterioration of Moscow ' s relations with Rezā Shāh ensued . He also published 2 Russian - language books in Berlin , which have an autobiographical element . Amongst other things , Agabekov said that starting from 1929 , the OGPU Foreign Branch actively used Armenian clergy both from the USSR and abroad for the purposes of espionage . Assassination . He was believed to have been killed by Soviet agents in the Pyrenees in 1937 , after a series of unsuccessful attempts on his life ; but according to the 1997 memoir attributed to Pavel Sudoplatov , his assassination was perpetrated by a retired Turkish officer in Paris and organised by Alexandr Korotkov who subsequently became deputy chief of the Foreign Intelligence .