and a hopeless confusion of friend and foe. Lev Shvartsman, the star interrogator who had coauthored Babel’s confession, now produced his own, in which he claimed that he had belonged to a Jewish terrorist organization and had had sex with his son, his daughter, the former state security minister V. S. Abakumov, and the British ambassador. N. I. Eitingon, who had organized the murder of Trotsky (among many others), was accused of planning to murder the Soviet leaders; L. F. Raikhman, who had run the secret surveillance of the Jewish Anti- Fascist Committee, was arrested as a Jewish nationalist; Lieutenant Colonel Kopeliansky, who had interrogated the savior of the Budapest Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, was fired as a Jew; and M. I. Belkin, who had staged the Rajk trial in Hungary, confessed to having spied for the Zionists and recruited, among others, the head of the Hungarian secret police and his fellow Jew Gábor Péter. The Soviet espionage network in the United States had to be completely revamped because most of the agents (including the highly successful atomic spy Semyon Semenov, who had “controlled” both the Cohens and the Rosenbergs) were Jews. Even G. M. Mairanovsky, the head of the most secret of all secret police institutions, the Toxicology Laboratory of the Ministry of State Security (“Lab-X”), was unmasked as a Zionist spy. Lab-X specialized in producing poisons, testing them on Gulag inmates, and using them in secret assassinations (including the one of Raoul Wallenberg, according to Pavel Sudoplatov). Mairanovsky had directed Lab-X since 1937 and had personally administered some of his poisons to “enemies” singled out by Soviet leaders for quiet removal (sometimes in the form of an injection during a medical checkup). Now, after repeated beatings, he confessed to having belonged to a Jewish conspiracy within the Ministry of State Security and to having planned the murder of those same leaders on the orders of American Zionists. 142 Mairanovsky was Stalin’s tool, creature, and worst nightmare. Stalinist purges had always assumed that all departures from perfection were caused by deliberate acts; that deliberate acts were perpetrated by enemies selflessly committed to evil; that commitment to evil was endemic and institutionalized outside the Soviet Union; and that the Soviet Union contained “alien elements” who were predisposed to devil worship because of their social or national origins. In the 1930s, national origins had begun to overshadow social ones, and during World War II, Jewishness had emerged as a perfect combination of suspect tribe and suspect class. Much of the Soviet professional elite was Jewish, and a large number of Jews belonged to the Soviet professional elite. As far as Stalin and his investigators were concerned, the two groups might very well be identical—especially because no elite profession was more esoteric or more