The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  The CIA and its informers in the Ukrainian emigration did not exclude the possibility that Eugenia may have acted on behalf of her husband, Myron Matviyeyko. It was widely assumed that Matviyeyko, who had “miraculously” avoided capture by the Soviets for more than eight years, was in fact acting under Soviet control. A few days before Matviyeyko had parachuted into Ukraine, a similar group recruited from Lebed’s people had been dropped as part of a CIA-run operation. After the airdrop, Matviyeyko and his associates had easily established radio contact with the British and Bandera. The CIA group, for its part, had been ambushed, and its leader had been captured by the Soviets. Matviyeyko had been looked at with suspicion ever since. If Matviyeyko was in fact working for the KGB, then one had to consider a connection between Eugenia, her husband, Bandera’s death, and the KGB.4

  While under Soviet control, Matviyeyko, we now know, tried to stay loyal to his cause, if not to his former boss, Stepan Bandera. On the night of June 16, 1952, slightly more than a year after his capture, Matviyeyko suddenly disappeared from the heavily guarded Lviv villa where he had conducted his radio game with the West. The loss of a major asset in the radio game, which had begun so successfully and promised so much, shook the Soviet security establishment. The USSR minister of state security ordered the arrest of Colonel Ivan Shorubalka, who was in charge of the radio game and had been given an award only two years earlier for his role in eliminating the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The investigation into Matviyeyko’s escape was conducted by Roman Rudenko, the chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

  In the morning after his escape, as the entire KGB machine mobilized to search for him, Matviyeyko frantically checked his old contacts and safe houses. He was in for a major disappointment. The people he had known during the war were all gone, either killed or arrested by the Soviets. Matviyeyko was forced to come to terms with a new reality. For once, Soviet propaganda was not lying: the resistance really was limited to small, isolated groups deep in the mountain forests. It was doomed, and so, thought Matviyeyko, was he—he would be captured sooner or later. He had nowhere to turn. In desperation, Matviyeyko prepared handwritten leaflets explaining who he was, what had happened to him, and under whose control he was working. He began dropping them on random city streets in the hopes that one of them would make its way to the underground, and then, eventually, abroad. As for his own fate, Matviyeyko came to the conclusion that his only chance of survival was to return to captivity.

  On the evening of June 17, after less than twenty-four hours of freedom, Matviyeyko headed for the main Lviv railway station. There he approached a passing sergeant and asked whether he worked for the secret police. When the sergeant said that he did, Matviyeyko declared that he was armed and wanted to surrender to the security services. He then admitted who he was. Matviyeyko was flown to Moscow, where the conditions of his imprisonment were nothing like those in Lviv.

  It was only after Stalin’s death in March 1953 that Matviyeyko was returned to the custody of his old handlers in Munich. His brief freedom and the subsequent time he had spent in Moscow remained unknown to British intelligence and the Bandera people in Ukraine. For eight long years, Matviyeyko and his radio messages remained the voice of the OUN “leadership” in Ukraine. Matviyeyko managed to make his way back into the trust of his captors. In June 1958, seven years after his capture and six years after his bizarre escape, Bandera’s security chief was pardoned for his nationalist activities by a secret decree of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow. By that time he was officially married to a female KGB agent who was spying on him for her bosses.5

  Only a few months before his death, Bandera had begun to doubt the bona fides of his emissary in Ukraine. In the early summer of 1959, the Munich Ukrainians received what they knew to be completely false information from Matviyeyko. Bandera and his people became worried. Had the inevitable happened, and had Matviyeyko finally fallen into the hands of the enemy and begun working under the enemy’s control? Through the usual channels, Bandera sent Matviyeyko a new message, giving him the opportunity to secretly and safely indicate whether he was working under KGB control. If he was, then he was to use the word borshch (Ukrainian beet soup) in his reply. Matviyeyko responded in late September, making no reference to the dish.

  Bandera was relieved. He was planning a major conference of nationalist organizations for November 1959, and he needed Matviyeyko’s help and support. Apart from assessing the state of the resistance movement in Ukraine and agreeing on its future tasks, the conference was supposed to resolve once and for all who truly represented “fighting Ukraine,” Bandera or Lebed. Matviyeyko was supposed to lead key participants from Ukraine to Germany, giving Bandera high hopes that he would emerge victorious from the long and exhausting émigré dispute. But Matviyeyko informed his boss that he would not be able to arrange the arrival of the delegation from Ukraine that fall. He was, however, fairly sure that he could come himself and bring the other delegates a year later. When Bandera and Eugenia Mak went shopping at the Munich Grossmarkthalle less than an hour before Bandera’s death, Bandera was happy to tell her that her husband would be back in the country the next year. Bandera died not knowing that his Ukrainian emissary had betrayed him long before that.6

  Stepan Bandera and Eugenia Mak seemed to be the last believers in the miracle that Myron Matviyeyko could have avoided KGB arrest for eight long years. The CIA agents looking into the circumstances of Bandera’s death were much less optimistic. They assumed that Matviyeyko was working under Soviet control, and they were confused about why Moscow would decide to eliminate Bandera when they could have continued to manipulate him through Matviyeyko. The only explanation the CIA could come up with was that perhaps the Soviets wanted to get rid of Bandera before the planned conference took place, fearing that Bandera might still suspect Matviyeyko of working for the KGB and, on confronting him in Munich, might force a confession out of him. In that scenario, the Soviets would have preferred to send Matviyeyko to Germany for a conference only after a weaker leader replaced Bandera.7

  Neither the Munich Kripo nor the counterintelligence office truly suspected that Eugenia had poisoned Stepan Bandera. “Eugenia Matviyeyko-Mak is capable of anything,” wrote the author of the CIA report on the investigation into Bandera’s death. “But I do not believe that she personally fed cyanide to Bandera. The German police are of the same opinion.” As of November 12, 1959, the leading theory, according the CIA cable sent that day to Langley, was that “the poison was administered by force after Bandera entered his apartment house.” According to that theory, Eugenia could have “tipped off the killers when Bandera would be coming home.” They would have been “hiding in the elevator that was stopped at one of the upper floors.”8

  The investigators believed that Bandera had tried to resist. “When he was found,” read the CIA cable, “Bandera was lying on his face in the hallway of the building with his left arm doubled under him and his left hand clutching at his right shoulder. Questioning of Bandera’s associates revealed that Bandera was left-handed and carried a pistol in a shoulder holster on his right side.” The investigators believed that in the last moments of his life, Bandera was about to shoot someone. Their major regret was that the bloodstains on the ground floor, where Bandera had died, had been removed by an unidentified “janitress” before they could be examined by police.9

  15

  ACTIVE MEASURES

  Sergei Damon was the first KGB officer to congratulate Stashinsky on a job well done upon his return to Berlin on October 16, 1959, after killing Bandera. In a celebratory mood, Damon called his agent a hero. Stashinsky had filed two reports, just as he had after killing Rebet. The first listed the localities in West Germany that he had visited on his secret trip. The second stated that he had met a person known to his superiors and passed on their greetings.1

  The news was reported to the very top of the Karlshorst KGB pyramid and from there to the KGB headquarters in Moscow. Major Gen
eral Aleksandr Korotkov, a forty-nine-year-old spymaster in charge of the KGB apparatus in Karlshorst, had reason to celebrate. Korotkov held one of the most important positions in KGB intelligence operations abroad. He had first come to Berlin under diplomatic cover on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. At that time, registered officially as third secretary of the Soviet embassy, he was running the illegal Soviet spy network in Germany. He had left Berlin after the invasion but returned in April 1945. Korotkov had attended the German surrender ceremony, which happened to take place at Karlshorst, and then stayed in the compound to become the first Soviet intelligence chief in postwar Germany. He had been called back to Moscow in January 1946, but had returned to Karlshorst ten years later with the rank of major general and the cover of councilor of the Soviet embassy in East Berlin. His real job was to liaise with the East German security services and manage the KGB apparatus in Karlshorst.2

  Korotkov’s subordinates were responsible for operations not only in Germany, but also in the rest of Western Europe, and they provided support for clandestine activities in North America as well. Korotkov’s apparatus consisted of officers working for various KGB departments. By far the largest KGB department at Karlshorst was the one dealing with support for illegal operatives in West Germany and the West in general. Somewhat less numerous in personnel was the department dealing with operations against the Soviet émigrés abroad, a category that also included Western Ukrainians and Balts who were never Soviet citizens but came from lands occupied by the USSR during the war.3

  In January 1959, KGB headquarters in Moscow created a new department within the foreign intelligence directorate. Its responsibility was “active measures,” a euphemism for disinformation campaigns abroad. The chief of the department, conveniently labeled “D” for “disinformation,” was Ivan Agaiants, the same officer who had welcomed Pavel Sudoplatov to Paris in May 1938 after his assassination of Colonel Konovalets. Now Agaiants’s main target was West Germany. His task was to portray the country as a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Agaiants first tried his hand on Russian soil: KGB officers were sent to a Jewish cemetery in the Russian countryside at night to desecrate tombstones. They soon learned that while most of the villagers were reacting negatively to this act of vandalism and anti-Semitism, a small group of youths had become inspired by the “active measure” and were carrying out similar assaults on their own. East German agents were then sent to West Germany to vandalize Jewish cemeteries there. The operation was a success, causing a spike in anti-Semitic acts all over the country.4

  Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to know what was going on behind the high fences of the Soviet security compound. They tried to recruit East Germans working in the Karlshorst, used double agents to identify the KGB officers and their locations in the compound, and used listening devices to pick up on their conversations. In June 1958, the US secretary of state, Christian Herter, surprised the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, with a CIA-prepared exposé of subversive Soviet activities in Berlin that included a surprisingly detailed description of the Karlshorst compound.

  Korotkov was well aware of Western efforts to penetrate his lines of defense. His technical counterintelligence officers had even discovered a microphone concealed in his own office. When they reported their find to Korotkov, he wanted to keep the microphone in place for a while so that he could tell the Americans in no uncertain terms, using the full power of the Russian language, what he thought of them. He was dissuaded: there was too great a risk that the microphones would pick up not only the words he intended to be heard but also those he did not. Much of what was discussed in Korotkov’s office went far beyond the “legitimate” activities of any intelligence service. The Karlshorst staff was busy not only supplying Moscow with intelligence information but also “removing” those whom the Kremlin considered undesirable.5

  Bandera’s assassination presented the Karlshorst disinformation specialists with a new challenge and a new opportunity. Unlike the death of Lev Rebet, that of Bandera was almost immediately identified as a murder. The KGB officials could either maintain that it had been cardiac arrest or suicide, or blame it on someone else, as they had planned to do after the killing of Rebet. They chose the second option. This time, the plan was to blame not a rival faction of Ukrainian émigrés, however, but the political establishment of West Germany itself—a much more desirable target. The campaign began immediately after KGB operatives in Karlshorst learned that the mission had been a success.

  On October 16, the day after Bandera’s death, the East German Information Agency (Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst) broadcast a news piece associating Theodor Oberländer, West German federal minister for refugees and displaced persons, with Bandera and suggesting that the minister was involved in the death of the Ukrainian leader. “Bandera, who was the leader of a Ukrainian group of fascist terrorists, bears part of the responsibility for vicious crimes against the Ukrainian and Polish population,” said the agency, referring to events of World War II and, as usual, branding any anticommunist group as fascist. “Some of those crimes were committed by units for which Oberländer was directly responsible. After being appointed minister, Oberländer did everything in his power to rid himself of his compromising ties with Bandera. It is said that one of the consequences of those efforts was that Bandera received only inadequate funding for his work from the Bonn government. Hence some people assumed that Bandera had publicly reminded the Bonn minister of their common past.”6

  Neues Deutschland, the newspaper of the Central Committee of East Germany, added more detail to the information agency’s version of events in its issue of October 19: “During the Nazi period Bandera was a murderer in league with the current minister, Oberländer, at the time of the Nachtigall battalion’s bloody butchery in Lviv. He was now to appear as the chief witness in the course of the investigation of an accusation against Oberländer. The main witness has been eliminated.” The article was accompanied by a cartoon that depicted Oberländer commenting on Bandera’s death: “I’m sorry for him. He was such a good Nazi, but he just knew too much about me.” More details were soon provided by Berliner Zeitung, another East German newspaper. Its correspondents suggested that Bandera had been killed on Oberländer’s orders by the operatives of Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). The Soviet media took the same line as their East German counterparts, and one of the leading Soviet newspapers, Komsomol’skaia pravda (Truth of the Communist Youth League) even reprinted the Oberländer cartoon.7

  Oberländer, who had served in June and July 1941 as a liaison officer between the German command and the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion—recruited from among Bandera’s followers—was a thorn in Moscow’s side as a minister directly opposing the recognition of postwar borders. In August 1959, the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime filed charges against Oberländer in a West German court because of his connection to Nachtigall. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office ordered an investigation into the matter and turned to the Bundesminister for explanations. Oberländer denied the charges. Nachtigall, he claimed, had taken no part in either executions of Polish intellectuals or in the pogrom of Jews in Lviv. On the contrary, said Oberländer, the battalion, which entered Lviv ahead of regular units of the German Army early in the morning of June 30, 1941, had discovered hundreds of bodies of inmates of Soviet prisons who had been massacred by the Soviet secret police before they left the city. They were uncovering the war crimes of the other side, not committing crimes of their own. And indeed, later research would demonstrate that as a military unit, the battalion had no role in the Jewish pogrom, which was conducted by nationalistic mobs with the support of the German authorities.8

  The West German media seemed to be on Oberländer’s side, especially given the fact that the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime was widely perceived as a communist front working on orders from the East. It was despised by the Christian Democrats and shun
ned by the Social Democrats and leaders of Jewish organizations alike. But then came Bandera’s mysterious death, and the whole story took a new turn. Had Oberländer committed a new crime in his efforts to cover up the crimes of his past? His East German critics claimed that he had. On October 22, three days after Bandera’s funeral, Professor Albert Norden, the head of the East German Committee for German Unity, called a press conference in East Berlin in which he directly linked the murder of Bandera to Oberländer. Professor Norden was more than a leader of the Committee for German Unity. He was also secretary of the Central Committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, a member of its Politburo, and the man responsible for its information gathering, propaganda, and relations with the West.

  Albert Norden’s press conference and the statements that he and other participants made regarding Oberländer’s involvement in the Lviv massacres put the story on a different political level. It was no longer individual journalists who were making damaging accusations against a powerful West German minister, but the chief propagandist of the East German state. Later that month, the East German documentary film company DEFA issued a newsreel in which a thirty-two-minute report on Norden’s press conference was followed by a twenty-five-minute item on Bandera’s funeral. It presented Bandera as Oberländer’s underling in the Nachtigall battalion, responsible for the Lviv massacres.9