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Operation Maki Mirage or Maki-Mirage (Russian: Маки-Мираж, romanized: Maki-Mirazh)[1][2][3] was a Soviet intelligence operation that involved 1200 plus Soviet intelligence agent-officers, that is, spies of East Asian descent being sent to China, Korea, Manchukuo (existing and under Japanese rule to 1945) and Mongolia (through Kiakhta) to perform intelligence gathering, "special tasks," and disinformation.[4][5] The operation occurred primarily during the Interwar period, starting in the 1920s and continued into World War II. According to Soviet literature, the NKVD placed moles inside Japanese anti-Soviet operations (agentura). The Soviet moles supposedly uncovered an active network of 200 Japanese agents in the Soviet Far East during the 1930s.[6][7] This network was never verified by reliable sources including Japanese (i.e. the 200 on Soviet territory were never proven to exist). A notable aspect of the operation was the employ of East Asian agents from an estimated 1200 plus Soviet Koreans and Soviet Chinese who were sent to spy on the Japanese Empire primarily in Manchuria/Manchukuo, China proper, Korea (then part of the Japanese empire) and Mongolia (the latter was where the Transbaikal INO agents were sometimes deployed). This number has been adjusted from Chang's initial estimate of "over 600" to 1200 plus with the finding that Soviet intelligence (GRU and INO, NKVD) recruited from not only the Chinese Lenin School (initially the only school known, abbreviated as CLS), but also the KUTV and the KUTK universities in Moscow. This recruitment from three universities is confirmed (by Ancha, Tepliakov, the Wilson Center document and the two articles in Russian about the life of Lenintsev), but without the exact numbers.[8] Leopold Trepper, a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) agent, confirmed that the KUTV and the KUTK were utilized to recruit East Asians into Soviet intelligence in his biography, The Great Game: The Story of the Red Orchestra.[9] Operation Maki Mirage can be placed in the context of the Soviet Union utilizing their diaspora nationalities (i.e. non-Eastern Slav peoples or narody such as Greeks, Finns, Germans, Poles, Chinese, Turks, Koreans, Iranians and many others), otherwise treated as "last among socialist equals" and subject to forced deportations.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] However, in Russian historiography and documentary portrayals, the participation of over one thousand East Asian agents (who were Soviet citizens and foreigners, the latter were Chinese students studying in the USSR) was almost completely omitted and even when confirmed, this evidence was disregarded (see the picture of the eight NKVD officers, three of whom were Chinese).[4][18]