The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Stashinsky had no doubt who was supposed to be his next victim. When he was called in for the first meeting with the man from Moscow, Damon had mentioned that it would concern his old “acquaintance.” The name of that “acquaintance” was never mentioned explicitly during the meeting, but Stashinsky was sure it was Lev Rebet. With Bysaga gone, and no other person close to Rebet in sight, the KGB had decided to kill the troublesome journalist instead of kidnapping him. Despite assurances that the pistol had been successfully used before, the KGB officers were far from certain that the weapon would remain undetected. In fact, they were fairly sure that the assassination would be recognized immediately, and that the blame would fall on Rebet’s archenemies from the Bandera camp. Like Stalin, who had ordered the assassination of Konovalets, his successors counted on the murder of Rebet to deepen differences and provoke conflicts among the leaders of the Ukrainian emigration.

  Talk of “eliminating” leaders of the Ukrainian émigrés—who were allegedly preventing their followers from achieving reconciliation with the Soviet regime and returning to their homeland—was commonplace in Karlshorst’s émigré department, but Stashinsky had never thought—or, rather, did not wish to think—that it meant much in practice. Now he remembered Damon’s words, which he had initially dismissed as idle talk. When he had described to his handler how close he had stayed to Rebet while following him for the first time on the tram to Schwabing, Damon had said that striking Rebet with a pin would solve the whole issue. There was now no doubt that he was talking about a poison pin. It was also becoming clear why Damon had wanted Stashinsky to find out whether there were mailboxes in the foyer of Rebet’s building. The KGB had probably also discussed the possibility of using a parcel bomb to eliminate the Ukrainian journalist. There were no mailboxes in Rebet’s building, Stashinsky had reported to Damon, probably sealing his own fate as the one who would have to carry out Plan B.4

  Stashinsky was torn. He did not want to kill anyone. But neither could he imagine not following orders. The consequences of insubordination were clear to him. During his first months in Germany, after reading in the newspapers about the defection of a KGB assassin named Nikolai Khokhlov, Stashinsky had asked Damon who Khokhlov was and what position he had held in the KGB. Damon had responded that Khokhlov was an adventurist and a morally fallen man. Then he added something that etched itself in Stashinsky’s memory: “We’ll get him sooner or later.” They did. The man from Moscow who had brought the spray pistol had probably been involved in another scientific “experiment”—the failed assassination attempt on Khokhlov, who had been poisoned with radioactive thallium in Frankfurt that same month. The KGB kept its word and hunted down rogue assassins wherever they were. Khokhlov had refused to kill his target and escaped to the West, and now he was a hunted man.

  Stashinsky eventually found a solution to his moral conundrum, taking refuge in a political rationalization of what he was about to do: he would kill one person to help many others find their way back to their homeland. It was a rationale Sergei Damon had suggested, and Stashinsky latched on to the idea, burying his qualms down deep.5

  7

  GREETINGS FROM MOSCOW

  On the afternoon of October 9, 1957, Air France attendants at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin checked in a young man on his way to Munich carrying documents in the name of West German citizen Siegfried Dräger. In his pocket he had another document issued in the name of Josef Lehmann, a resident of East Germany born on November 4, 1930, in the Lublin province of Poland. Dräger/Lehmann was carrying more than a thousand West German marks, and there were two cans of Frankfurt sausages in his luggage. He seemed ready for any eventuality, including a sudden East German takeover of West Germany and the disappearance of food supplies from West German stores.

  The documents, money, and sausages had been given to Stashinsky at Karlshorst. They told him to use his Western passport for the flight to West Germany, and the East German one thereafter. If he was caught, he should declare himself an East German citizen, which would presumably improve his chances of returning to the Eastern bloc. The most incriminating piece of evidence in his luggage were the sausages. He had two tins of them, but only one actually contained sausages. The other had been opened and redesigned by KGB technicians at Karlshorst to conceal his weapon: the spray pistol. The weapon was wrapped in cotton wool and placed in a metal cylinder. The cylinder was then placed in the tin, which was filled with water. Both the weapon and the cylinder were made of aluminum, and the weight of the fake tin was the same as that of the real one, with a special mark on the fake tin to distinguish it. Other than that, they looked identical.

  The original plan had been to smuggle the weapon into West Germany through diplomatic channels. A member of one of the East European diplomatic corps was supposed to bring the weapon to Munich and pass it to Stashinsky there. Diplomats were not checked by customs officers, and the KGB planners thought that this would ensure safe passage of the secret weapon across the border. The plan was dropped, however, when someone pointed out that a diplomat might be followed by West German counterintelligence, leading its agents to Stashinsky, who would then be caught with the weapon in his possession. It was ultimately decided that Stashinsky would take the weapon with him on his flight to Munich. If he was caught with the fake tin in his luggage, he was supposed to tell investigators a story about meeting a man in East Germany who had paid him to bring both tins to Munich and pass them on to a woman at Maxim’s Bar. If he was caught with the weapon on him after using it, he was to say that he had just found it on the stairs.

  Stashinsky was not checked at the border. He reached Munich safely late in the afternoon of Wednesday, October 9. His instructions were to carry out the act in the office building at Karlsplatz 8. If that should prove difficult, he had a free hand to choose the office building on Dachauerstrasse or the residential one on Occamstrasse. He took the first antidote pill around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, October 10. He had ten pills and two ampoules—a supply that would last him the ten days allotted for his mission. Everything was now ready, the weapon in his pocket. He wrapped it in newspaper and made a hole in the wrapper so he could operate the safety catch and trigger. He discarded the tin that had contained the weapon in a garbage container in the English Garden.

  By 8:30 a.m. he was on the street, observing the entrance to building no.8 on Karlsplatz square. It contained numerous professional offices, including those of doctors. If he was caught in the act, he was supposed to say that he was an East German tourist who had suddenly gotten a toothache while admiring Munich’s architectural marvels, and was visiting a dentist in the building. If he was surprised by someone immediately after the act, he was to pretend that he had just found the victim lying on the floor and was trying to help him. That day he waited until 10:30 a.m., but Rebet did not appear. Nor was he in evidence that afternoon. He was also a no-show on Thursday, October 10, and Friday, the 11th. On each particular occasion it was a relief, but of the kind that increased his overall anxiety. Stashinsky felt it on awakening every morning. The psychological stress would reach its peak in the morning hours designated for the killing of his victim. As morning passed and afternoon approached, Stashinsky would feel some relief. He would walk the streets of the city to try and forget his deep, moral unease, but the next morning it would be back. The only way to get rid of the stress and put his life back on track seemed to be to carry out the order, but he felt that it was beyond his capacity. It was a vicious circle.1

  Lev Rebet did not usually go to his office on weekends, but did his customary reading and writing at home. On Saturday, October 12, he decided to make an exception. The previous night he had stayed up late reading Alexander Dovzhenko’s recently published autobiographical novel The Enchanted Desna. It was the last work produced by the famous filmmaker, who had died in Moscow the previous year. Dovzhenko had long been prohibited by Stalin from living and working in his native Ukraine, and his last novel was full of nostalgia for his childhood days in
the picturesque surroundings of the Ukrainian countryside. This was a subject with which Lev Rebet, a native of the Ukrainian village and a longtime émigré himself, could easily identify, despite all the ideological differences between him, a committed nationalist, and Dovzhenko, a Soviet filmmaker and communist convert.

  On the morning of October 12, Rebet, who generally was reluctant to display his softer side to his children, showed interest for the first time in many months in the piano exercise performed by his teenage son, Andrii. He even patted him on the head. When his wife, Daria, shouted to him from the kitchen not to stay at work too long and not to be late for lunch, he told her not to worry. He joked that he wasn’t sure if he would even make it to his office. The family members later believed that Lev Rebet had had a premonition of what would happen to him that day.2

  That Saturday, Stashinsky was at his observation post at Karlsplatz soon after 9:00 a.m. It was a pleasant, sunny day. He had left his coat in the hotel and was walking around in his suit. As always, he was nervous. He took a sedative as well as his antidote pill. The sedative did not work. His anxiety only continued to grow as he waited on tenterhooks for his target to materialize. The pressure peaked sometime after 9:00 a.m. and then began to subside. It was already close to 10:00, and Rebet was nowhere in sight—Stashinsky began to relax. Suddenly he spotted the figure that by now he could distinguish from thousands of others. Rebet had gotten off the tram and was walking directly toward his hunter. Stashinsky turned around and walked toward the entrance to Karlsplatz 8. It all unfolded as in a dream. “Before and at the time I felt as though I were only half awake,” he remembered later. “My surroundings, people, traffic in the street did not seem to penetrate my conscious mind. It was all in shadow, as if only reaching my subconscious mind.” Whether it was the effect of the pill he had been given at Karlshorst (the chemical experts would later claim that instead of an antidote he was given an anti-anxiety drug) or the desire to rid himself of the burden that had been oppressing him for so many days, Stashinsky was determined to carry out his orders. Before entering the building he took out the cylinder rolled up in newspaper and disappeared into the doorway, the weapon in his right hand.

  He went upstairs to the second-floor landing and stopped there. He released the safety catch, fingering it through the hole in the newspaper, and got ready to face his victim. When he heard the door opening downstairs, he began his descent, keeping to the left so Rebet would be forced to pass by his right side. He soon saw a man coming up the other side—it was Rebet. As they were about to pass each other, Stashinsky raised his hand with the rolled-up newspaper and pressed the trigger. He tried not to look in his victim’s direction. Still, he could not help noticing out of the corner of his eye that the man he had targeted slumped forward. Stashinsky did not see what happened to his victim after that. He put the cylinder back in his pocket, took out the antidote ampoule as instructed at Karlshorst, crushed it in a piece of gauze, and inhaled the fumes. He felt like he was about to faint.

  Stashinsky exited the building and turned left, then left once again. It took about ten to fifteen minutes after exiting the building for his mind to return to normal. “My surroundings made an impression upon me again and penetrated my conscious mind,” he remembered later. Eventually he made his way to one of Munich’s busiest streets, Ludwigstrasse, crossed it, and found himself in the Hofgarten, a public (formerly royal) garden established in the early seventeenth century by Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria. Heading for the edge of the garden, he stood on a bridge across the Kögelmühlbach, a stream that flowed through the garden, and dumped the spray pistol in the water. So far he had followed to the letter the instructions received at Karlshorst, down to the stream where he disposed of his weapon.

  After leaving the Hofgarten, Stashinsky began to return to his hotel before realizing that perhaps a dog might be used to trace his scent. Instead he took a tram and rode it aimlessly for a few stops before heading back. Years later he would remember every detail of the route he had taken from the Hofgarten. He could not help but follow a subconscious urge to revisit the scene of his crime. The building no. 8 on Karlsplatz was surrounded by a crowd of people and police. Stashinsky turned his eyes away and hurried to his hotel. He packed up his belongings, which no longer included Frankfurt sausages, placed the West German ID in the name of Siegfried Dräger in his pocket, paid the hotel bill, and headed for the Hauptbahnhof. His instructions were to leave the city immediately upon fulfilling his mission. He followed them exactly.3

  Lev Rebet was found on the stairs of his office building sometime between 10:20 and 10:45 a.m. He died after managing to reach the second-floor platform. The cleaning lady who heard his screams (despite the assurances of the weapon expert from Moscow, the poison pistol failed to make a victim unconscious right away) found him lying on the floor and alerted others in the building. They called an ambulance and then the police. Patrol officers received a call soon after 11:00 a.m.: “Some man has fallen on the staircase,” was the message. One minute later they were informed that he had died. Dr. Waldemar Fischer, who was called to the scene, estimated that death had taken place at approximately ten minutes to eleven. The cause of death was cardiac arrest. There was no way to call Lev Rebet’s wife and children, as the Rebets did not have a home telephone. But one of their Ukrainian neighbors did, and people in Rebet’s office knew that number. They called the neighbor, who happened to be at home, and he broke the news to Mrs. Rebet. The neighbor also volunteered to drive her to Karlsplatz.

  Daria Rebet was shocked, not least because her husband had never complained of any heart condition. But the autopsy conducted two days later by Dr. Wolfgang Spann of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Munich University confirmed Dr. Fischer’s diagnosis. One of Lev Rebet’s arteries was significantly narrowed, and the University of Munich experts found no reason to believe that death had occurred as a result of anything other than natural causes. Rebet’s family and friends had no choice but to accept the diagnosis. Deep down they hoped that it was not what they thought it might be: the start of a KGB operation to eliminate them all.4

  On the afternoon of October 12, 1957, as the police, doctors, and family tried to figure out what had happened to Lev Rebet, a receptionist at the Continental Hotel in Frankfurt registered a new visitor: Siegfried Dräger. The next day, Stashinsky, as Dräger, took a flight to Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, crossed the border into East Berlin, and went home to Marienstrasse in the city center, where he was renting a furnished room from an elderly woman named Frau Stranek. She knew her tenant as Josef Lehmann, a Volksdeutscher (ethnic German) from the East—one could tell that from his accented German. Josef Lehmann paid his rent on time and did not cause any trouble. He was quiet and polite—an ideal tenant for any landlady. Lehmann told Frau Stranek that he worked as an interpreter for the East German Ministry of Trade and had to go on business trips from time to time. It appeared as if he had just returned from another trip that Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning he left for work as usual.

  Stashinsky’s first order of business that Monday was to call Karlshorst. He told his case officer, Sergei Damon, that he was back. Damon asked whether everything was all right and whether the trip had been successful. Stashinsky answered in the affirmative. They agreed to meet in the city, whereupon, apart from an oral report, Stashinsky filed two written ones. The first gave the dates of his trip, the places he had visited, the hotels he had stayed in, and the airlines he had taken. The second was of a different nature. “On Saturday,” went the report, “I met the person in question in a town that I know well. I greeted him, and I am sure that the greeting was satisfactory.”

  Damon explained to Stashinsky that this report would never be typed—there would exist one copy, and one copy only. Unbeknown to Stashinsky, on November 15, 1957, the chief of the KGB intelligence directorate, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, sent the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, a secret report “on measures taken in Germany.” The report was written by hand and
produced in a single copy, for Khrushchev’s eyes only.

  Stashinsky truly hoped that he would never again have to “pass greetings” to anyone on behalf of the KGB. As the shock associated with the assassination wore off, he felt a new burden on his soul—he had killed a man against his own convictions. “Now, after what had happened,” he remembered later, “it seemed to me that I was lost in every respect. Later, once a good deal of time had passed, I tried to tell myself that it had happened once, it would not happen again; perhaps there had been other reasons for this assignment that were unknown to me.” Once again he started looking for justification of what he had done. Sergei Damon and other KGB officers he met at Karlshorst were eager to help. They often told him that if émigré leaders did not understand the demands of the time, they should be “eliminated.” He also found solace in the fact that the killing was not violent. “The weapon I was given,” he recalled later, “was constructed in such a way that it required no exertion, nor the use of force to bring about someone’s death.” There was no need to take aim or look at the target. “I did not see the act of killing, only the act of pressing the trigger.”5

  PART II

  PERFECT MURDER

  8

  RED SQUARE

  Bogdan Stashinsky was moving up in the world. In April 1959, Sergei Damon told him that he was being summoned to Moscow, possibly to meet the head of the KGB himself. Why such an honor was being bestowed on him Stashinsky did not know, but later that month he received a ticket and travel documents and boarded the train to Moscow.