By the time Stashinsky joined the MGB, there were close to 150 special agents divided into small units of up to ten men. The Lviv department of state security had three such groups, named “Thunderstorm,” “Typhoon,” and “Meteor.” The agents had at their disposal the products of the secret police special laboratories: concealed bombs that exploded upon delivery, for example, and toothpaste containers filled with poison gas and special sleeping powder called Neptune 47, which incapacitated within minutes anyone who drank water containing the substance.1
Stashinsky’s group excelled in conducting an operation that became standard for all similar units. An insurgent in police captivity who had proved resilient to torture would be turned over to the members of a group dressed in Soviet uniforms, allegedly to be transported to another location. The truck carrying the group would unexpectedly break down near a farm occupied by the rest of the MGB team, dressed as resistance fighters. The second group would attack the first one, apparently killing its members and “liberating” the captive. The fight was well staged: both sides would fire blanks at each other, and members of the secret-police detachment, apparently dead, would be seen lying in pools of blood—packages of chicken blood were prepared ahead of time.
Then the deception would take an even more unexpected twist. Those pretending to be insurgents would claim that they had found the newly liberated prisoner’s interrogation records, which showed that he had betrayed the secrets of the underground. They would threaten to execute the confused victim for treason if he did not establish his bona fides by telling them everything he knew about the resistance. Unless the terrified captive was alerted to the deception by sympathetic “actors”—themselves once members of the underground—he almost always gave up any information he had. No sooner was the interrogation over than a new secret-police group, dressed in Soviet uniforms, would appear and attack the “insurgents,” recapturing the now thoroughly confused prisoner. He was back in custody, his genuine confession recorded by the secret police, and Stashinsky and his group could go to Lviv for rest and entertainment.2
One of the commanders overseeing the activities of the MGB special groups, Ihor Kupriienko, later wrote that his agents “prepared and acted entire plays with staging. This was the work of true actors.” Kupriienko himself played a major role in an MGB episode that would change Stashinsky’s life. It began in June 1951, the same month that Stashinsky left the insurgent group in the forest and joined the secret police. That month, a special MGB unit consisting of former members of the underground established contact with a man dubbed by the secret police as “Maisky,” or “the one who came in May.” His real name was Myron Matviyeyko, he was the chief of Stepan Bandera’s security service, and a Brithish agent.
The British had high hopes for Myron Matviyeyko and his group. With the Soviets producing an atomic bomb of their own in the summer of 1949, and China going communist a few months later, both the British and the Americans were gearing up for a possible military confrontation in Europe. It was believed that only America’s nuclear monopoly prevented the USSR from using its numerically superior armed forces in Europe. If war was about to break out, the West needed as much intelligence about the Soviet Union as it could get. MI6, the British military intelligence service, wanted information on the Soviet Army and its technical capabilities and infrastructure. In exchange for technical support and supplies, they wanted the entire guerrilla network in Ukraine to be placed at their disposal. To this end, the British parachuted Matviyeyko into Ukraine on May 15, 1951, in the first of many such planned missions.3
Matviyeyko was thirty-seven years old and an experienced security operative when he began preparing for the airdrop. He was known in the Bandera organization under the code name “Smiley” (Usmikh), but now he received a new code name, “Moody,” from his British instructors. The original plan was to parachute Matviyeyko into Ukraine along with Bandera, who was supposed to lead the group, but the plan changed a few weeks before the start of the operation. The British refused to include Bandera, arguing that if the operation failed, they would be accused not simply of spying on the USSR but also of conspiring to overthrow the existing government by helping to bring in the leader of the largest anti-Soviet organization in the West. Nor did they want to take responsibility for Bandera’s safety: the risk was too great. Matviyeyko would have to go to Ukraine without his boss.
In May 1951, Stepan Bandera traveled to London to bid farewell to Matviyeyko and give him his parting instructions. For Bandera, gaining the trust of the resistance leaders was Matviyeyko’s top priority. He wanted Matviyeyko to convince Vasyl Kuk, the new commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, to support Bandera in his struggle for control of the Ukrainian emigration. Matviyeyko was also to launch an investigation into the circumstances of the death at Soviet hands of the previous insurgent commander, Roman Shukhevych. There were rumors that Kuk had been responsible for a breach in Shukhevych’s security. Should Kuk refuse to take Bandera’s side, Matviyeyko had orders to take over the leadership of the guerrilla forces himself and, if necessary, liquidate the “traitor.”4
On May 7, 1951, Matviyeyko and five members of his team were supplied with British military uniforms, handed documents issued in the name of Polish nationals, and flown on a British military airplane to Malta. Their subsequent flight to Ukraine was delayed because of bad weather, and they spent a long, anxious week on Malta waiting to be cleared for the airdrop. Finally, on the evening of May 14, Matviyeyko and his people took off from a British airbase on a flight of some six hours that took them across Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania. At a quarter past midnight on May 15, the plane flew low over the Dniester valley, whose high forested banks hid it from Soviet radar, and dropped the parachutists onto Western Ukrainian soil. The plane then turned west and dropped another group of Ukrainian parachutists over Poland.
The Soviets knew about Matviyeyko’s group long before it left Malta. One of their sources was Kim Philby, the MI6 liaison officer with the CIA and a double agent recruited by Soviet military intelligence in the 1930s. Matviyeyko’s was one of many groups betrayed by Philby, for whom it was a routine operation. “I do not know what happened to the parties concerned,” wrote Philby in his memoirs. “But I can make an informed guess.” Most of people he betrayed were captured, interrogated, and shot. The lucky ones received long sentences in the Gulag.
Soviet radar detected the British airplane violating Soviet air space but did nothing to stop it. The MGB commanders were lying in wait, with 14 aircraft and almost 1,100 officers and soldiers mobilized to locate the landing area and arrest the parachutists. But Myron Matviyeyko appeared to be extremely lucky on that score. Not only was the plane not intercepted by the Soviets, but the airdrop went exactly as planned, and the group did not lose any of its members. They all managed to find one another and avoid capture by the Soviet search teams. Besides Spanish Llama pistols, British Sten sub-machine guns, and large amounts of Soviet and foreign cash, the parachutists had substantial supplies of canned food and could survive in the woods for a long time without making contact with the locals. During the last week of May, they managed to establish contact with the only individual they really cared about, the leader of the Ukrainian resistance, Vasyl Kuk.
The commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army sent his people to bring Matviyeyko to the headquarters of one of his local commanders. Matviyeyko was eager to come. After years in exile, he wanted to meet those waging war behind enemy lines. They, in turn, were glad to see an emissary from the West. They shared food and drink and were about to smoke a cigarette or two when the alleged Kuk people, upon hearing the words, “Let’s have a smoke,” suddenly attacked and incapacitated Matviyeyko. He felt too weak to resist—the water he had just drunk was laced with the sleeping powder Neptune 47. The “insurgents” were in fact agents of the Soviet police, members of a group similar to the one Stashinsky would join only a few months late
r.
For Matviyeyko, the game seemed to be over, but his captors thought otherwise. They told him that the real game was only about to begin. Matviyeyko, the head of a fearsome security service responsible for the interrogation, torture, and execution of those who fell out with Bandera and his organization, had no doubt that the MGB had means to make him talk at its disposal. He said as much to General Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin’s master killer, who personally interrogated Matviyeyko when he was brought to Moscow. Sudoplatov recalled that Matviyeyko decided to cooperate after he realized how much the Soviets already knew about his organization; they seemed to be lacking only the names of the second-tier operators. There were probably other reasons for Matviyeyko’s cooperation as well. Given his leadership of a group that the Soviets considered “British spies,” and his position at the head of Bandera’s security service, he doubtless made what Kim Philby would have called an “informed guess” that unless he cooperated, he would not just be sent to the Gulag, but shot.
Matviyeyko was prepared to listen to what his captors had to say. They wanted Bandera’s emissary to become a key figure in a radio game that they were eager to play with the British and Bandera’s nationalists. Matviyeyko would work under MGB control, sending radio telegrams composed by his handlers to London and Munich. His messages would contain some genuine information for the British and Bandera and a lot of disinformation for both. Matviyeyko would report on the alleged successes and real difficulties of the Ukrainian insurgency, which was already on its last legs as an organized movement, having been thoroughly penetrated by MGB agents and crushed by Soviet interior forces. The British and Bandera would inform Matviyeyko about each and every airdrop they were planning to execute—information that would go straight to the MGB. Matviyeyko accepted the conditions offered him.
The radio game began in earnest in late June 1951, a little more than a month after Matviyeyko’s airdrop and about three weeks after his capture. Ihor Kupriienko was one of its supervisors. Under his and his colleagues’ supervision, the MGB created a sham guerrilla group in the woods. Its members established a base in the countryside and began to spread rumors that they had Bandera’s personal emissary with them. From their base, Matviyeyko would send his radio messages abroad. In the course of a year, the MGB sent thirty-two radio telegrams to the British center in Cologne and received twenty-nine telegrams with instructions from London.
The British and the Bandera people could not have been happier. In their minds, their previous sporadic contacts with the resistance, conducted through couriers, had finally become regular. They were getting intelligence that perhaps was not first-rate but, to all appearances, genuine. The Soviets, however, were triumphant. The MGB handlers got a unique opportunity to learn about their enemies’ plans, feed them false information, and frustrate their activities in their very center. The MGB never managed to persuade Bandera to visit Matviyeyko in Ukraine, but it succeeded brilliantly in deepening existing divisions among nationalist factions by providing disinformation that pitted one leader against another.5
The arrival of Matviyeyko in Ukraine, his confession, and the information gathered from the radio game highlighted the increasing importance of Stepan Bandera’s headquarters in the resistance struggle being conducted by the remnants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Ukraine. While interrogating Matviyeyko, Pavel Sudoplatov paid special attention to information about Bandera’s whereabouts and his living conditions, habits, and contacts in the Ukrainian emigration. The MGB officers abroad were charged with the task of locating and killing Bandera and other leaders of the Ukrainian emigration. Bogdan Stashinsky, a novice member of the MGB special tasks unit, would play an important role in the realization of those plans.
In the summer of 1952, after serving with his unit for close to a year, Stashinsky was summoned to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and offered two years of training for clandestine work abroad. Stashinsky must have been a good agent. His level of education was also significantly higher than that of his comrades. Many of the former resistance fighters were young boys who knew nothing but their mountains and had never seen a city or traveled by train. Few of them were high school graduates. Even among the officers and agents of the secret police, only 13 percent had a university education, and less than half had finished high school. Stashinsky, with several years of university courses behind him, was clearly an exception. The proposal must have come as a relief, as he would no longer have to betray his own family or face the danger of being killed in a shootout with actual insurgents. He agreed, and then he began the training that would put his life and Bandera’s on a collision course.6
5
STREETS OF MUNICH
As the Cold War heated up, Joseph Stalin set out to reform and restructure his intelligence services. In November 1952, he issued recommendations on how the new service should be organized. “Our main enemy is America,” declared the elderly leader. “But the main pressure should not be directed against America itself. Illegal residencies should be established first and foremost in neighboring states. The first base where we need to have our people is West Germany.” He wanted agents who would be prepared to carry out any order coming from Moscow. “Communists who look askance at espionage, at the work of the Cheka [the earlier name for the communist secret police], who are afraid to get their hands dirty should be thrown headfirst into the well,” continued the dictator.1
Bogdan Stashinsky, who had joined the foreign intelligence school in the summer of 1952, was indeed trained to perform any task the Soviet leaders could think of. His future country of deployment was West Germany—the centerpiece of Stalin’s intelligence plan. During his two years in Kyiv, Stashinsky studied espionage craft, from photography to driving and shooting. He also took German classes with a private tutor. In the summer of 1954, Stashinsky was finally ready to start his journey westward. By now he was an employee of the KGB—the name the Soviet secret police had assumed that March. The name change came with the cleansing of the old cadres from the Soviet security services. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Nikita Khrushchev, the former boss of Ukraine and now the head of the Communist Party apparatus, staged a coup against Stalin’s most powerful aide, the former head of the security services, Lavrentiy Beria. Khrushchev and his allies arrested Beria in June 1953 and shot him in December of that year. They also arrested Beria’s leading aides, including General Pavel Sudoplatov, who would spend years in Soviet prisons. The master killer was now gone, but with Khrushchev gaining more strength in Moscow than ever before, the task of hunting down Bandera was passed on to the new generation of intelligence officers. Stashinsky became the most recent addition to the ongoing KGB operation against the Ukrainian émigrés in Central Europe.
Stashinsky’s road to Germany went through Poland. The car carrying the secret agent crossed the Soviet-Polish border just west of Lviv. Alerted by their commanders, the border guards left the border open for almost an hour. They lifted the crossing barrier and stopped checking traffic on both sides of the border until the car with Stashinsky and his control officer inside had passed the checkpoint. They drove across Poland toward the former German city of Stettin, now Polish Szczecin in the former East Prussia, which had been divided between Poland and the Soviet Union after the Potsdam Conference of 1945. They finally stopped in the city of Stargard, a medieval town whose center had been all but destroyed by the Allied bombing in the last years of World War II. Its German residents had been driven out and replaced by Poles, as well as by Ukrainians deported from the areas along the new Soviet-Polish border, so as to deprive the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of popular support.
In Stargard, Stashinsky was given a new identity. In Kyiv he had lived under the name of Moroz; now he became Bronisław Kaczor. He was put up with a member of the Polish secret police and for five months studied the invented biography of the person whose identity he was to assume once in Germany. His new name was Josef Lehmann, born to a German-Polish family in eastern Poland on November 4, 1930. H
is birthday remained the same, November 4—he just became one year older. Lehmann supposedly had a checkered past, and he had lived in Ukraine and Poland before making his way to East Germany. That was supposed to explain his accented German. In Poland, Stashinsky even visited the places where Lehmann had allegedly lived. Once he had mastered Lehmann’s biography, Stashinsky’s KGB handler brought him to the new Polish-German border on the Oder. They crossed the river by night, walking across the bridge. Stashinsky turned in his documents in the name of Bronisław Kaczor and became Josef Lehmann.
Stashinsky first met his new handler there at the border, First Lieutenant Sergei Aleksandrovich Damon. Or so he was introduced to Stashinsky. Damon was in his mid-forties, with brown, slightly curly hair that he combed back, a youngish face with a pointed nose, and a pleasant, disarming smile. Behind it was the toughness of a battle-hardened counterinsurgency operative. He came from Ukraine, had fought with the nationalist insurgency there, and spoke the language. From now on, they would be a team.2
From the border, Damon brought Stashinsky to East Berlin. It was the first time that Stashinsky had visited Karlshorst (Karl’s Nest), the heavily guarded compound in an East Berlin suburb that served as the center of the Soviet military administration in Germany and of its intelligence services—the KGB and the GRU (military intelligence). An area of about one square mile was surrounded by a three-meter-high fence and guarded by a special KGB detachment. The top Soviet military commanders, civilian administrators, and spies not only worked in Karlshorst but also lived there. So did some top East German officials, who found the guarded territory of Karlshorst a much safer place to live and raise their families than the unprotected areas around it.
The Man with the Poison Gun Page 4