The GRU illegal rezident in The Hague, where he ran an art gallery on the fashionable Celebestraat posing as a wealthy antiquarian bookseller, Krivitsky feared for his life when he was recalled to Moscow at the end of September 1937. He promptly fled to Paris, where he was granted political asylum, and the French Surété extracted enough information from him to fill 80 volumes. He then moved to the United States, where he gave interviews to the Saturday Evening Post and testified before the Dies Committee, and then to Canada. It was not until September 1939 that the British ambassador in Washington, D.C., Lord Lothian, was told by journalist Isaac Don Levine that Krivitsky could implicate a spy in the British Foreign Office. As a result, Capt. John King was arrested, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. In February 1940 MI5 brought Krivitsky across the Atlantic to be interviewed at length by Jane Sissmore, and then returned him to Canada, where he was the subject of two assassination attempts. His book, In Stalin’s Secret Service, was published in 1940.
He was found shot dead in his locked Washington, D.C., hotel room in February 1941, apparently the victim of suicide.