In 1954, divided Berlin was ground zero in the Cold War and the only loophole in the Iron Curtain dividing Europe’s east and west. Officially, the city was still occupied by the four victorious powers—the Americans, Soviets, British, and French—but the significant division was the one between the Western and Soviet zones, which were not yet separated either by barbed wire or by the concrete of the Berlin Wall. From Berlin, which was in the middle of East Germany, but connected by a highway to West Germany, the Soviets sent hundreds of officers and agents on secret missions all over the West. They also used their Berlin base to provide support for Soviet espionage activity in the United States and other parts of the world. From East Berlin one could easily get to Tempelhof Airport in the western part of the city and, from there, proceed to anywhere in the world.
The Berlin loophole was not a one-way street. If you could get easily from East Berlin to the West, you could do the same in the opposite direction as well. There were dozens—even hundreds and thousands—of Western intelligence officers and their agents using the loophole to go east and spy on Soviet and East German military and industrial installations. “It was as easy to travel from East to West Berlin and back as from Hammersmith to Piccadilly,” wrote the British double agent and prized Soviet spy George Blake. “Although there were checkpoints on main streets, people could cross freely in both directions. On the Underground there was no check at all. All this made Berlin an ideal centre for intelligence activities, and the opportunities it offered in this respect were exploited to the full. . . . One had an impression that at least every second adult Berliner was working for some intelligence organization or other and many for several at the same time.”3
Bogdan Stashinsky lived in Karlshorst for about a month before being allowed to settle in the city. The German he had learned in Kyiv turned out to be insufficient for living independently: he could read the language but did not understand native speakers in conversation. He spent Christmas Day 1954 in an East Berlin hotel. It must have been a lonely holiday for a former village boy in a foreign country who spoke a foreign language. His family was far away. In fact, he had no family to speak of, and his adopted KGB family was on vacation.
Stashinsky spent the first months of 1955 studying the German language and way of life. By April, his handler, Sergei Damon, considered him ready to step into his new identity. Stashinsky was sent to Zwickau to work for a joint Soviet–East German venture. It was originally planned that he would do office work, but his German was not good enough for that, so they made him a laborer. Josef Lehmann had now become a real person with a first real job, first work record, and first genuine stamp in his papers. In the summer of 1955, the KGB awarded Stashinsky for his hard work with a vacation on the Black Sea coast. In the fall he was back in East Berlin. He rented a room in the city, introducing himself as Josef Lehmann, an employee of the East German Ministry of Foreign Trade. East Berlin became his base of operations, but his ultimate destination was West Germany, especially Munich, the headquarters of Stepan Bandera and other leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
In early 1956, Sergei Damon sent Stashinsky to Munich to meet a KGB agent known as “Nadiychyn,” a code name derived from the Ukrainian word for “hope.” Nadiychyn’s real name was Ivan Bysaga. Born in 1919 to a Ukrainian peasant family in Transcarpathia, which had just become a province of the newly minted Czechoslovak state, but would transfer in 1945 under the Soviet control, Bysaga had been trained as a spy in Kyiv after the war. In 1953 he showed up in Austria as a refugee. In 1954, the year Stashinsky began his training as Josef Lehmann in Poland, Bysaga moved to Munich. His early attempts to establish contact with the Bandera people failed, as they suspected him (like anyone else coming from Ukraine after 1945) of working for the KGB. Bysaga was more successful in gaining the trust of Bandera’s opponents, who organized themselves around a newspaper, the Ukrainian Independentist, edited by a forty-four-year-old lawyer turned political activist and journalist, Lev Rebet.4
Lev Rebet lived in Munich with his wife, Daria, who was also a political activist and journalist, and their children, Andrii and Oksana. Lev and Daria were leaders of the opposition within the ranks of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The Bandera people accused Rebet and his supporters of being CIA stooges. Sergei Damon, Stashinsky’s KGB handler, characterized Rebet as an intellectual leader of the Ukrainian nationalists whose writing tarnished the international image of the Soviet Union and dissuaded Ukrainian émigrés from ceasing their hostile activities and returning to Soviet Ukraine. Stashinsky began working as a courier between Karlshorst and Bysaga, a supporting player in the KGB’s plan to kidnap Rebet and take him to East Berlin for use in a propaganda campaign against the West, as had been done with some other “defectors.”
On orders from his Karlshorst bosses, Stashinsky suggested that Bysaga put a chemical substance in Rebet’s food that would incapacitate him temporarily and make the kidnapping easier. Bysaga never refused outright, but was reluctant to take this risky step. He told Stashinsky that he was not close enough to Rebet and that it would be all but impossible for him to do the job. Lev Rebet’s son, Andrii, remembered later that when he, then a thirteen-year-old boy, visited his father at the newspaper office with his four-year-old sister, Oksana, Bysaga showed special affection for little Oksana. That probably appealed to Rebet, but his strong-willed wife, Daria, was suspicious of Bysaga, and he never became a family friend.5
Stashinsky’s task was not only to supply Bysaga with money and transport his written reports back to Karlshorst, but also to provide moral support for the agent. As far as the KGB was concerned, Bysaga was having other problems apart from his inability to get close to Rebet. He was clearly cracking under pressure and believed that both Bandera’s security people and the West German and American counterintelligence services were after him. Eventually Stashinsky helped Bysaga return to East Berlin. As always in such cases, the KGB used the withdrawal of its agent from the West for propaganda purposes. The Soviet media published Bysaga’s “defection” letter, denouncing the leaders of the Ukrainian emigration and their subversive activities against the Soviet Union.6
Bysaga was gone, but Rebet was still there, and it soon became apparent to Stashinsky that he had inherited Bysaga’s object of surveillance. In the early spring of 1957, Sergei Damon showed Stashinsky a photo of a bald man in round glasses. It was Lev Rebet. Damon knew where Rebet worked in downtown Munich, but he wanted Stashinsky to verify Rebet’s home address. In April, Stashinsky went to Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin and boarded a flight to Munich.
At the Grünwald Hotel in Munich he filled out a registration card. It read: “Siegfried Dräger, resident of Essen-Haarzopf, born August 29, 1930, in Rehbrücke near Potsdam.” The document was forged, but the forgery, Damon assured Stashinsky, was of the highest quality. The real Siegfried Dräger indeed lived in Essen, so before going to Munich, Stashinsky had visited Essen to familiarize himself with the city and look at the house of the man whose identity he had just assumed. The trip was a precaution. If he was detained and police asked questions about the city or street he allegedly lived on, he would be able to provide credible answers.
To an outside observer, the newly minted Herr Dräger would have clearly seemed to be a fan of Munich architecture and an outdoor enthusiast. He spent hours in the downtown area, observing buildings and people. It also appeared that he loved Schwabing, Munich’s northern borough. According to KGB files, it was there that Rebet lived with his family. The address that Stashinsky had been given in Karlshorst was Franz-Joseph-Strasse 47. The entrance to the building was not locked, and Stashinsky visited every floor, looking at the nametags on the doors. Rebet’s surname was nowhere to be found. Stashinsky spent the next few days trying to figure out whether Rebet actually lived there. He would observe the building and the adjacent street from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m., then again during lunch hours and between 3:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. There was no trace of Rebet. Stashinsky went to th
e Sunday service at the Ukrainian Catholic Church—the church of the majority of the Ukrainian émigrés in Munich, hoping to spot Rebet there, but Rebet made no appearance.
Stashinsky moved his observation post to downtown Munich. He especially liked to frequent one of Munich’s most famous landmarks, Karlsplatz. His other favorite spot was the beginning of Munich’s longest street, Dachauerstrasse. According to KGB sources, Rebet had offices in both locations. Stashinsky had more luck with Karlsplatz than with Dachauerstrasse. One day he spotted the balding man from the photograph leaving building no. 8 on Karlsplatz square. Lev Rebet headed for a tram stop and boarded a tram. Stashinsky followed him onto the car. When it moved, he realized that it was heading for Schwabing, the area he knew so well. Stashinsky positioned himself immediately behind his target. He tried to calm his nerves, but it was a difficult task. He could not figure out which ticket to buy. The price depended on distance traveled, and he did not know how far Rebet was going—he had a tram pass and did not have to buy a ticket. What if he bought a ticket for 25 pfennigs and Rebet traveled to the next zone? After vacillating for a moment, he bought a ticket for 30 pfennigs. Then he noticed that he was the only person in the tram wearing sunglasses. Per his KGB training, he had put them on in order to blend into the background. It was a sunny day, and sunglasses were appropriate, but no one in the tram was wearing them. He removed his.
Stashinsky then got the feeling that he was being followed. Was he right? He moved farther away from Rebet to be safe. When the tram reached the Münchner Freiheit station, not far from one of the entrances to the English Garden, Rebet stepped off. Stashinsky did not dare follow him and stayed on the tram. The next day he left Munich for Berlin. His orders were not to stay in the city longer than ten days, and he had already reached that point. But his time in Munich had not been wasted. The old residential address that the KGB had in its files could now be discarded, and the new area of Rebet’s residence established. The KGB officers now knew which tram he took to work and back home.
In June 1957, Stashinsky went back to Munich to learn more about his target. Once again he checked into the Grünwald Hotel, but this time he asked for a room looking onto Dachauerstrasse, the location of one of Rebet’s offices. Now Rebet would pass under Stashinsky’s window as he walked to work in the morning. It was easy to follow him from one workplace to another, and eventually to his home. One day Stashinsky followed him on a tram to the Münchner Freiheit stop, and then to nearby Occamstrasse. On this trip he traveled on a different tram car, and he did not wear sunglasses. Still, his nerves were on edge; he believed that he had been uncovered. Upon reaching Occamstrasse, Rebet turned into an archway on the right side of the street leading to a cinema. Stashinsky followed him into the archway and, to his surprise, found Rebet standing there, apparently looking at the movie posters. Rebet left the archway the moment Stashinsky appeared.
Back on the main street, he saw Rebet entering one of the corner buildings. He followed him and, passing the building, saw Rebet’s nametag on the entrance. The next day he returned to the area, waited until Rebet left for work, and then went to his building and took pictures of the residents’ nametags. The KGB officers in Karlshorst were more than pleased with the results: the young agent who was going by the name of Siegfried Dräger had managed to locate Rebet’s residence and fully establish his route to work and back. In July, Stashinsky was sent back to Munich to confirm his earlier findings and to see if the entrance hall in Lev Rebet’s building had any mailboxes.
Stashinsky did not know what the KGB’s plans were for Rebet, and, knowing the KGB rules, he never asked. He knew that his old contact in Munich, Ivan Bysaga, had been asked to help with the kidnapping of Rebet, but Bysaga was now back in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Stashinsky was given a new mission—to follow the publisher of the same Ukrainian Independentist newspaper that Rebet worked for. It seemed that, at least for him, the Rebet saga was over.7
6
WONDER WEAPON
Bogdan Stashinsky led a relatively comfortable, if not stress-free, life as a spy. He followed Ukrainian émigrés on his numerous trips to Munich; stuffed dead drops (hiding items such as money or instructions for recipients to later come and pick up, thereby avoiding the need for personal contact); and spied on American and West German military installations. He had a routine. That routine, however, came to an end in September 1957, when Sergei Damon invited him to a meeting at the KGB safe house in Karlshorst. They were about to meet an important guest from Moscow, Damon told him. The time had come, he added significantly. Stashinsky remained unsure of what was going on until the moment their unnamed guest took something from his pocket: it was a metal cylinder, eight inches long and less than an inch in diameter, with a safety catch and a trigger attached to it.
The guest from Moscow told Stashinsky that it was a weapon and went on to explain how it worked. The cylinder contained an ampoule with liquid, said the Moscow guest. When the trigger was pressed, a striker set off by a gunpowder charge hit the ampoule with poison, spraying the contents from the cylinder. The cylinder would have to be aimed at the other person’s face or chest for him to breathe in the gas and the liquid poison. The poison caused unconsciousness and then death; the contents would evaporate almost immediately after the discharge, leaving no trace. Damon explained that the first effect was the same as suffocation. Death by cardiac arrest, continued the guest from Moscow, would follow within two to three minutes. He went on: “Once the liquid evaporates, it leaves no trace; a minute after death the veins return to their previous state, making it impossible to establish violent death.” Damon added that the weapon was 100 percent foolproof.1
This turn of events took Stashinsky by surprise. They clearly wanted him to become an assassin, or they would never have shown him the secret weapon, let alone explained its workings. Stashinsky also understood that he would not be the first to use the spray cylinder. He couldn’t have known, but the weapon was in all probability a Soviet improvement on the German World War II–era liquid poison gun.
The guest from Moscow wanted to demonstrate his 100 percent foolproof weapon, and loaded the pistol with an ampoule of water. He then released the firing pin and pressed the trigger. Stashinsky heard a sound like that of hands clapping. The pistol shot water onto a towel pinned to the wall approximately one meter away. The water left a stain on the towel about 20 centimeters in diameter. The guest explained that the ampoule of poison would shoot half a meter farther, and the area of impact would be larger from farther away, as the poison was lighter than water. He took a wrench out of his case, unscrewed the bolts of the cylinder, cleaned the weapon, and reloaded it. He would shoot it a few more times. He then used a broom to collect small pieces of glass from the broken ampoules, which had fallen to the floor. They were no more than a millimeter in diameter.
Before he left, the guest from Moscow explained to Stashinsky that the person shooting the pistol was also in danger of breathing in the poisonous fumes, but two ways had been found to make the procedure safe. The first was to take a pill between sixty and ninety minutes before the shooting. It would prevent the constriction of blood vessels and was effective for four to five hours. The other option was to use an antidote contained in a special ampoule immediately after the shooting. Stashinsky would have to crush the ampoule in a piece of fabric and breathe in the gases evaporating from it. The antidote was so strong, continued the expert, that if it was administered to the object of the attack within one minute, that person could be revived. The safest way was to use the pill before the shooting and the antidote after it. The man from Moscow also suggested that it would be useful for Stashinsky to see the spray pistol at work loaded with poison, not water. Damon agreed. They decided to try the weapon on a dog, and said they would let Stashinsky know when everything was ready for the experiment. With that, the meeting was over.2
Damon volunteered to drive Stashinsky out of Karlshorst into the city. He was excited, and congratulated Stashinsky on the
honor that was being bestowed on him with such a high-clearance assignment. When Stashinsky showed little emotion and remained mostly silent, Damon asked whether he fully understood how much trust the authorities were placing in him. Stashinsky remembered later that Damon behaved as if the two of them were saviors of the nation. Stashinsky was confused. He was not a novice in the game of betrayal, and he had experienced brutal life-and-death skirmishes with the insurgents in the woods and mountains of the Carpathians. But he simply could not imagine himself killing an unarmed person. He had been raised a Christian, and some of the values his parents had taught him had stayed with him. At the same time, he was equally convinced that he could not turn down the assignment. Once again he felt trapped—increasingly so as time passed. He spent days and nights trying to find a solution to his moral dilemma. He failed to find one.
The trial of a fully loaded spray pistol on a dog a few days later did nothing to assuage his mental torment: if anything, it increased his anxiety. Damon and the mysterious guest from Moscow bought a small mongrel at the local market and then picked up Stashinsky in the city. They drove to a wooded area near Müggelsee Lake outside of East Berlin. There the poison expert from Moscow gave Stashinsky a pill. They tied the dog to a tree and waited the requisite sixty minutes for the pill to start working. Stashinsky had no way of telling whether it had taken effect. The man from Moscow handed him a loaded cylinder. Stashinsky could not bear to look at the dog. He felt sorry for the small creature. When he approached with the pistol, the dog tried to lick his hand. Stashinsky turned his head away and pressed the trigger. The spray hit the dog’s muzzle. The dog fell, its legs moving jerkily. A few minutes later it was dead. “My first victim,” Stashinsky thought to himself. He knew there would be others to follow. Someone crushed an ampoule containing the antidote, and the three men all breathed in the evaporating gases. They got into the car and drove back to East Berlin. The experiment was declared a success.3
The Man with the Poison Gun Page 5