Conclusion 195not able to establish such contacts thereafter. In general, the Japa nese got no
valuable information from spies or Soviet nationals other than deserters.^37This U.S. military report plants a seed of heavy doubt as to the effectiveness
of deporting nearly two hundred thousand Soviet Korean laborers, farmers,
and proletariat, as the primary culprit appears to have been Soviet cadres in
state institutions of all nationalities, but especially Eastern Slavs, due to the
purges of national minorities within state security organs (a secondary effect
of the Terror). Beginning in 1934, many of the NKVD’s highest- ranking
minorities, especially those who were German, Polish, Latvian, and Jewish,
were released from their duties.^38 Khan Chan Gol, the lone Korean who
was a high- ranking NKVD officer, was executed. Nikolai Nigai, after con-
ducting the Korean deportation, was let go by the NKVD despite ten years
of ser vice. He received a stipend to study accounting (somewhere around six
to nine months) and then was transitioned into a white- collar job as a bank
accountant.^39 After 1944, Ti Khai Ir was demobilized from the Rus sian
General Staff. He, too, studied some accounting and finance, and immedi-
ately took a position as an assistant to the director of a bank.^40 It was not
until the mid- to- late-1960s that Koreans, Germans, and other diaspora
peoples began to be recruited again by the Soviet intelligence ser vices (pri-
marily in Central Asia) until the end of the Soviet Union.^41 The KGB was
one of the most vaunted and feared Soviet institutions. This recruitment
was perhaps the last step in the rebirth and rehabilitation of the Koreans as
a power ful Soviet people who could rise to all levels of society. The Terror,
the deportation of 1937–1938, and the restrictions of administrative exile
did not serve as the Korean’s denouement, but rather a postponement of
their eventual recognition and success in the Soviet Union.