The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  The film made an unexpected impression on Bogdan Stashinsky, who watched it in one of East Berlin’s cinemas. He was especially affected by the images of Bandera lying in his coffin surrounded by family members, including his three children. As the narrator announced that the Ukrainian nationalist leader had been murdered in cold blood by paid assassins working for the United States, the word “murder” reverberated in Stashinsky’s head. He rushed out of the cinema. “Bandera has a wife and children,” he later told Sergei Damon. “I have done it. I’m a murderer.” But Damon did not seem to share his concerns. With a smile on his face, he told his agent: “You don’t need to worry yourself about that. Bandera’s children will later be grateful to you for having done it, when they are able to see things in perspective.” Stashinsky was anything but persuaded. The KGB’s “active measure” had produced the opposite effect.10

  PART III

  MOSCOW NIGHTS

  16

  HIGH HOPES

  In early November 1959, Sergei Damon picked up Bogdan Stashinsky in the city and brought him by car to the KGB compound in Karlshorst. He told his prized agent that he was about to meet his ultimate boss, the general in charge of the KGB apparatus at Karlshorst. Although Stashinsky was never given the general’s name, there was only one general and one boss of the KGB operations in Karlshorst. His name was Aleksandr Korotkov.1

  The general played the welcoming host, launching into small talk. According to the memoirs of General Pavel Sudoplatov, Korotkov had no qualms about what was called “wet work” in criminal parlance. He had been twenty-nine when he had planned and helped execute his first murder. In the late 1930s, he had traveled to France at the head of a group of assassins who had hunted down and killed two political enemies of the regime. One of them was an associate of Stalin’s archenemy Leon Trotsky, the other a former member of the Soviet intelligence network in Istanbul. The latter’s defection had led to the arrest of hundreds of Soviet agents in the Middle East. Korotkov had not only planned but also taken part in both killings. The bodies of both victims, one of them decapitated, had been stuffed into suitcases and dumped into the water. One of those suitcases had later been found in the Seine by the Paris police, and Korotkov and his assassins had fled France.2

  One of the first “wet” jobs that Korotkov must have overseen after his return to Berlin in the spring of 1957 was the failed assassination attempt of a former agent who had gone rogue. His name was Nikolai Khokhlov. An experienced Soviet intelligence officer whose heroic wartime exploits had served as an inspiration for the 1947 Soviet blockbuster A Scout’s Exploit, Khokhlov had decided to jump ship while on assignment in Germany. One day in March 1954, instead of killing Georgii Okolovich, a leader of the émigré National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, he had gone to Okolovich’s apartment in Frankfurt and confessed. Khokhlov later claimed that he had read literature produced by Okolovich that appealed to his sense of Russian patriotism. Once in CIA custody, he was persuaded to give a press conference exposing the Soviet plot to assassinate leading figures of the Russian emigration in the West. The next day, the KGB arrested his wife in Moscow, who was sentenced to five years of internal exile. Khokhlov became a hunted man.

  By that time General Korotkov was already in complete command of his Karlshorst apparatus. The assassination attempt in 1957 took place during Khokhlov’s first public appearance on returning to Europe after extensive debriefing in the United States. He was a speaker at a Russian émigré conference in Frankfurt, the city where he had refused to be an assassin. After delivering his remarks, Khokhlov went to the porch to breathe some fresh air and enjoy the view—the conference hall was situated in the Palmengarten, the largest garden in Germany. Someone offered him a cup of coffee. Khokhlov drank, as he later remembered, half a cup. Instead of being refreshed and reenergized by the drink, he began to feel exhausted and tired.

  He soon lost consciousness. Khokhlov’s associates, including Georgii Okolovich, whose life he had saved three and a half years earlier, drove him to the hospital. His face was covered with red and blue spots, and he could not see, as his eyes were producing some kind of sticky liquid. His hair was starting to fall out. The German doctors treated him for food poisoning, but things were only getting worse, and they did not know what to do. They transferred him to the US Army hospital, where the American doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with thallium. Khokhlov overheard one of the doctors saying that there was also some other foreign element in his system—but they wouldn’t know more until after the autopsy. It never came to that. Khokhlov survived to learn the results of the medical analysis of the poison used against him. It was radioactive thallium prepared in a special laboratory, which many believed could only have been sponsored by the KGB.3

  If Khokhlov had finished drinking his coffee, General Korotkov and his subordinates at Karlshorst would probably have achieved their purpose. His luck, and the work of the US military doctors, saved his life. The whole operation turned out to be yet another embarrassment for the KGB.4

  But in October 1957, a month after the unsuccessful attempt on Khokhlov’s life, Bogdan Stashinsky assassinated Lev Rebet. Now he had succeeded in killing the most important Ukrainian figure of all, Stepan Bandera. During his years at Karlshorst, Korotkov had developed a habit of meeting with his agents personally. He had learned from them not only about émigré leaders and their contacts with Western intelligence services, but also about political life and developments in West Germany. It was almost a nostalgic experience for the former operative, who could no longer “work” in the field. Korotkov had not met his star assassin after his first success, but he was delighted to see him now. There was good news from Moscow, from the very top of the Soviet pyramid, that he wanted to share with Karlshorst’s new top agent.5

  Korotkov began by asking Stashinsky about his impressions of Munich. The conversation went on for about fifteen minutes until the general ushered his guests into an adjacent room, where dinner was served. They were going to celebrate their success and discuss plans for the future. Korotkov offered cognac to his guests before breaking the big news. It gave him great pleasure, he told Stashinsky, to inform him that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had awarded him the Order of the Red Banner of Valor. It was the oldest Soviet military decoration—indeed, the only one that existed in the first years of Soviet rule to recognize heroism in combat and acts of military valor. It was second only to the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union, which was introduced much later. Korotkov explained to Stashinsky that it was extremely rare to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Valor in peacetime. It was a clear indication of how important the young agent’s assignment had been to the Soviet government.6

  Bogdan Stashinsky had not expected such an award. Moral struggles aside, he was clearly pleased. For completing his previous assignment, the killing of Lev Rebet, he had been given a Contax camera. Now it was a prestigious state award. Its importance was underscored by the fact that he would go personally to Moscow to receive it, Korotkov told him. The general also spoke of the future. For now, Stashinsky would have to disappear from Berlin—the assassination of Bandera, unlike that of Lev Rebet, had raised an uproar in the West, and he could not return until the dust had settled. Instead of wasting time in East Berlin, he would be better off going to Moscow for a year of additional training. Judging by the general’s words, the award marked a turning point in Stashinsky’s career. He was moving up in life. His case officer, Sergei Damon, suggested that after training in Moscow he would be sent either to West Germany or to another Western European country. One day, Damon told Stashinsky only half-jokingly, he would replace his case officer in Karlshorst.7

  On November 20, 1959, Stashinsky boarded a train to Moscow. As was always the case on his trips to the Soviet Union, he used a Soviet passport in the name of Aleksandr Antonovich Krylov. Compared to his previous trip to Moscow in April, he had significantly heavier luggage—his bosses expected him to stay at least until sum
mer. The border guards and customs officers usually did thorough searches of passengers, looking for coffee and other smuggled goods that were in short supply or of poor quality in the Soviet Union, but they did not bother Comrade Krylov. His travel documents had a seal with the number of a Soviet Army military unit that border officials knew better than to investigate. The post office box number 42601 stood for the KGB.8

  For Stashinsky, the trip to Moscow opened new horizons. Even before the meeting with Korotkov, he had heard from Damon about the possibility of working for the KGB in Western Europe, but now it became much more real. Moving up the KGB ladder meant learning to carry out tasks other than assassinations, which Stashinsky was determined not to repeat. Training in Moscow would allow him to leave that stage of his life behind without jeopardizing his career in the secret service. He also knew that he could not leave of his own free will: like the Mafia, the KGB did not allow agents to resign. There was also little else in life that he knew how to do. Given all this, he had high hopes for the meetings he was about to attend in Moscow. There was also an important question of a personal nature that only Moscow could decide.

  17

  MAN AT THE TOP

  In Moscow, news of the assassination of Stepan Bandera was met with great jubilation. Notices of his death were buried discreetly in the middle pages of major newspapers, but those holding the Kremlin’s top offices were clearly pleased.

  On November 3, 1959, less than three weeks after the assassination, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, approved the draft of a secret decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR awarding Bogdan Stashinsky the Order of the Red Banner of Valor. The decision was made on the basis of a KGB report that credited Stashinsky with carrying out “several responsible assignments involving risk to his life.” The Presidium, knowing who had been assassinated and why the award was being proposed, voted to recognize the man who had risked his life abroad. Three days later, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee and head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR—the formal head of the Soviet state—signed the decree. The decision to award Stashinsky with a military order had been made at the highest levels and in record time.1

  There could be only one explanation for that breathtaking speed—the deep satisfaction that the news had brought the man at the very top of the Soviet power pyramid, Nikita Khrushchev. The Ukrainian resistance movement had been a thorn in Khrushchev’s flesh during his years as Stalin’s prefect in Ukraine. Khrushchev’s major regret was that in September 1939, when the Red Army had crossed the Polish border under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and taken over Western Ukraine and Belarus, Bandera had been able to escape his Polish prison. After years of fighting the “Banderites” in Ukraine, Khrushchev wanted Bandera dead.

  General Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the secret police directorate responsible for sabotage and the assassination of Colonel Yevhen Konovalets—Bandera’s predecessor at the helm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—recalled that after Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev had demanded that the security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, immediately intensify efforts to kill Bandera. At Khrushchev’s request, Beria summoned to Moscow two of Bandera’s sisters, who were serving sentences in the Gulag because they were members of his family. The goal was to convince them to establish contact with their brother and persuade him to meet with an NKVD agent in Germany. The plan failed. Khrushchev did not give up on the idea of having Bandera assassinated after he removed Beria from power in July 1953. Meeting with Sudoplatov in the presence of other party officials soon after Beria’s arrest, Khrushchev allegedly told the top NKVD assassin: “You will shortly be asked to prepare a plan for liquidating the Bandera leadership of the Ukrainian fascist movement in western Ukraine, which is arrogantly insulting the leadership of the Soviet Union.”2

  Sudoplatov was soon arrested and spent years in Soviet prisons. He believed that this was the result of a fatal mistake he had made while meeting with Khrushchev and other party officials after Beria’s arrest. When they had asked him to list the assassinations undertaken by his department on Beria’s orders, he had provided a list that began with his assassination of Colonel Konovalets and included “wet work” approved not only by Stalin and Beria—one safely dead, the other in prison—but also by people present in the room, including Viacheslav Molotov, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev. Sudoplatov had merely been trying to shield himself from accusations of having conspired with Beria, but he incurred the wrath of party bosses who wanted no witnesses of their complicity in Stalin’s crimes.3

  Khrushchev’s enthusiasm for solving his political problems at home and abroad by means of secret-police assassinations was not shared by many people in the secret services, including, apparently, Beria himself. Sometime in the spring of 1953, General Sudoplatov overheard his boss talking with Khrushchev by telephone. “Look,” Beria allegedly told Khrushchev, “you asked me to find a way to liquidate Bandera, and at the same time your petty crooks in Kyiv and Lviv are preventing real work against real opponents.” Beria’s comments reflected the growing feeling among secret-police officials that Bandera was becoming less and less relevant to what was going on in Ukraine, and that assassinating nationalist leaders would not resolve the military struggle that had been going on in Western Ukraine for more than eight years. The KGB wanted to focus on convincing the nationalist leaders to cooperate with the regime and put an end to the guerrilla struggle. But Khrushchev was not amenable to that strategy, even if people he trusted were suggesting it.

  General Tymofii Strokach, the Ukrainian minister of the interior, once tried to convince Khrushchev to spare the life of the last leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Vasyl Kuk (nom de guerre “Lemish”), whom the NKVD had caught in 1954, when Khrushchev was busily consolidating power in Moscow after Stalin’s death. It was a difficult task. One of Strokach’s subordinates recalled his words:

  “I told Nikita Sergeevich that I had promised those people not only freedom but also the normal life of a Soviet citizen. I had promised them high official awards. And he said to me: We make a lot of promises for the sake of our enterprise and our goals. It should be clear to you that Lemish and everyone associated with him are sworn enemies of Soviet Ukraine; the noose is begging for his neck, but you ask that they be pardoned. I said to him: Nikita Sergeevich, there are thousands of Lemish’s political sympathizers standing behind him, and we need to work on them.”

  Kuk’s life was saved, according to Strokach, only because of the intervention of Ukrainian party officials. When Khrushchev was approached by his close political ally Oleksii Kyrychenko, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, he eventually backed down and changed his mind.4

  Bandera was a different matter. There Khrushchev and Kyrychenko seemed to be in complete agreement. In the summer of 1953, immediately after taking over as party boss of Ukraine, Kyrychenko insisted at a conference of secret-police officers that Bandera be eliminated. According to one account, he told the gathering: “That enemy of Soviet rule, Bandera, is still alive and active in the West. Believe me, once Bandera is gone, that will be the end of the OUN movement.” Kyrychenko brought those same sympathies with him when he was transferred to Moscow by his boss and patron, Nikita Khrushchev, in December 1957. He became the second-most powerful man in the Soviet Union after Khrushchev himself. Kyrychenko oversaw the activities of the KGB on behalf of the Central Committee.

  In May 1959, Kyrychenko addressed a major conference of KGB officers. The purpose of the conference was to discuss how to coordinate KGB activities with the new party line. “I would consider it one of the main tasks to activize work on the liquidation of foreign centers,” Kyrychenko told the KGB brass, referring to émigré groups. He then listed the leaders of the Ukrainian and Russian émigré organizations: “Bandera, Melnyk, Poremsky, Okolovich, and many others must be actively unmasked.” He we
nt on: “Who is Bandera? He was an agent of Hitlerite espionage, then of English, Italian, and a number of other services; he leads a corrupt way of life and is greedy for money. You Chekists are aware of all that and know how that same Bandera can be compromised.”5

  Although Kyrychenko spoke euphemistically, some of the KGB officers in the audience were well aware that the Central Committee wanted them not to “compromise” but to kill Bandera. KGB officers who were working on the problem of Ukrainian insurgents argued against assassinating Bandera. Like their Western counterparts, they believed that killing Bandera, who by then had little influence on developments in Ukraine, would turn him into a martyr. But their voices were not heard by those at the top of the KGB, which was run in 1959 by Khrushchev’s handpicked man, Aleksandr Shelepin. He was remembered by those who worked under him in the KGB as a leader who was very demanding of his underlings, but extremely accommodating when it came to his superiors, especially Khrushchev.6

  Shelepin was only forty years old when, in December 1958, Khrushchev appointed him to the most sensitive position in the country, that of KGB chairman. His main task was to get rid of Stalin-era people and traditions. Shelepin originally refused to take the position. His political experience until that point had been limited to the Central Committee of the Young Communist League—the youth branch of the party—which he had led since 1952, when he was appointed to that position by Stalin. Before the fateful conversation with Khrushchev, he had spent only a few months as a department head in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Khrushchev told Shelepin that he had his full confidence and promised to help. Shelepin agreed. The leader of state then asked the new head of the KGB to do everything in his power to prevent the wiretapping of Khrushchev himself—a clear indication that he did not fully trust his own security officials.