The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Shelepin was eager to talk to his prized agent and hear a firsthand account of Stashinsky’s secret mission. The KGB head was interested in every detail, starting with Stashinsky’s first travels abroad to track down Bandera. He showed particular interest in the details of the assassination itself. He wanted to know where Stashinsky had stood and where Bandera was at the time of the shooting. He even asked about the color of the tomatoes that Bandera was carrying: red or green? The media had reported that Bandera was carrying a bag of green tomatoes, but Stashinsky claimed that they were red. If asked about what had happened to Bandera by his own boss, Nikita Khrushchev, Shelepin had to be able to fill him in on the details, the smallest particulars of the act.3

  Then, having listened to his lengthy description of the Bandera assassination, Shelepin told the young agent what he already knew from Korotkov and Krokhin: for the time being he would stay in Moscow to get additional training. But once the stir created by the assassination had subsided, he would be sent back to continue his same work in the West. “Using a good deal of political and propaganda padding,” remembered Stashinsky later, “he said that what was expected of me was difficult but honorable.” Stashinsky agreed, and then seized the opportunity to raise the matter that was at the top of his personal agenda. He told the KGB chairman that he wanted to marry Inge Pohl.

  Shelepin, who was Stashinsky’s last hope for permission to marry his fiancée, had already been briefed on his agent’s love affair. Like his subordinates, he was against the marriage. “Isn’t it a bit early?” he asked. He then used the same argument that Stashinsky had already heard. “You know that it’s not done for a KGB operative to marry a foreigner,” said Shelepin. Stashinsky responded that in the three years he had known Inge, he had become convinced that she was the right woman for him. “I described her as a decent, hard-working girl with whom I got on well and who was by no means wholly unreceptive to Soviet ideas,” said Stashinsky later. He was lying through his teeth. He knew that Inge was anything but sympathetic toward Russia and communism, but had decided to risk everything. “I lied to Shelepin to attain my goal,” he recalled later.

  General Krokhin gave him a few days to consider the matter further, and Stashinsky did just that. His bosses’ reservations aside, he had doubts of his own. Going through with the marriage meant dragging the woman he loved into the nightmare of his past and present relations with the KGB. But the alternative—leaving her and marrying a KGB employee—was one that he refused to entertain. “Renouncing her would mean, to say no more, leaving her alone and abandoning her,” he remembered later. “That was something I did not want to do and could not do.” The man who had made treason his profession and betrayed his family was not prepared to betray Inge Pohl.

  It was more, however, than love and fear of betrayal that informed his decision. “I had no high opinion of myself,” said Stashinsky, recalling his state of mind after the assassinations. He needed someone who could understand and forgive him. “My soul was at stake,” he remarked on another occasion. “I already abominated what I had done. Had I not married Inge Pohl, I should probably have become again a faithful party-line communist and KGB man.” That was the fate that awaited him if he married a KGB woman, as his bosses suggested. And that was what Stashinsky wanted to avoid at all costs. He was trying to save his soul. Inge was his means of salvation, the rock on which he could lean to lift himself out of the quagmire.

  But Shelepin pressed on. “You now have great accomplishments behind you,” he told Stashinsky, trying to use the career card. Nor was he above playing the matchmaker. “We also have pretty women. Look at this one, for instance,” continued the KGB chief, pointing to a photo of an attractive young woman in his file. “Beauty is not the point,” replied Stashinsky. “When you’ve known someone for a long time and know that it will be good to go on living with her, that’s exactly what you need.” It was then that Shelepin gave up his attempts to persuade Stashinsky to marry a Soviet citizen. If Stashinsky insisted and was confident of his fiancée’s positive attitude toward the Soviet Union, they would try to make an exception in his case. There was a catch, however. They could not make such an exception while Inge was a citizen of an East European country: she would have to acquire Soviet citizenship. Inge would also have to agree to help him in his KGB work.

  The KGB’s logic was simple. If Stashinsky would not marry a Soviet woman in service to the KGB, then his German wife would have to become a Soviet citizen and join the KGB. Her willingness to do so was a prerequisite to their marriage. William Hood, the head of the CIA station in Munich on whose “watch” Stashinsky had killed Bandera, later wrote that the Soviets’ extremely cautious attitudes toward their agents’ romantic liaisons probably stemmed from the 1931 defection of Georgii Agabekov. Agabekov, the USSR’s chief of intelligence in Turkey, had fallen in love with the young Englishwoman whom he had hired to be his language teacher. It was believed that their romance had contributed to his decision to abandon his post and turn over key intelligence about the Soviet spy networks in the Middle East. The memory of Agabekov’s defection was very fresh for the KGB brass. It was, after all, Stashinsky’s boss at Karlshorst, General Aleksandr Korotkov, who had “liquidated” the traitor and helped stuff his body into a suitcase to be thrown into the Seine.4

  Stashinsky was taken aback by Shelepin’s proposal—these conditions would make the marriage a trap for him and his fiancée, not a psychological escape from the embrace of the KGB. Nevertheless, it was the best he could get under the circumstances, and he was not going to let it slip through his fingers. Stashinsky suggested that he go back to East Berlin at the end of the month and propose. But General Krokhin had other ideas. He wanted Stashinsky to start training as soon as possible and wait until spring or early summer to go to Berlin for the wedding. Until then, Stashinsky and Inge could correspond only. “I did not agree to that,” remembered Stashinsky later. “It was clear to me that he wanted to use the time to interfere with my plans.”

  Stashinsky quickly came up with a new line of argument. He told Shelepin and Krokhin that it would be difficult for him to live in a state of uncertainty for so long. He would prefer to settle his family matters before starting his training and taking on new assignments. That seemed reasonable to Shelepin. He told Stashinsky that they would do a check on Inge in Berlin. “We have good relations with our friends in the German Democratic Republic. If that is what she’s like [i.e., as you describe her], then we have nothing against it.” Shelepin suggested that before Stashinsky disclosed his KGB employment to Inge and proposed to her, he bring her to Moscow for a few weeks to familiarize her with life in the USSR. There, of course, the KGB could size up Stashinsky’s fiancée for itself. They agreed that Stashinsky would travel to East Berlin for Christmas and then bring Inge back to Moscow.5

  20

  PROPOSAL

  On the evening after his audience with Shelepin, Bogdan Stashinsky celebrated his award with Major Arkadii Fabrichnikov and a certain Nikolai Nikolaevich, another KGB officer assigned to take care of him in Moscow. Judging by the declassified biographies of the KGB officers, his full name was Nikolai Nikolaevich Kravchenko. He was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB and served as the assistant to the head of the KGB émigré department, Colonel Ishchenko.

  Fabrichnikov, an ethnic Russian, had fought the Germans as a Red Army soldier and joined the NKVD after the war. One of his first assignments had been to help root out the Polish underground in Ukraine. He then switched to working against Ukrainian émigré groups, first in Czechoslovakia and then in Germany. There his targets had included the Munich-based and US-funded stations Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, which broadcast across the Iron Curtain. Fabrichnikov had first gone to Berlin in February 1954, and by 1957 had been identified by the CIA Berlin station as a KGB officer.

  Fabrichnikov left for Moscow in October 1959, the same month in which Stashinsky assassinated Bandera. A rumor making its way through the Karlshorst KGB offices said that Maj
or Fabrichnikov, who was considered one of the leading experts on the emigration, had opposed the assassination of Bandera on the grounds that it would only turn him into a martyr. Whatever Fabrichnikov’s thoughts on the subject, he said nothing about it to Stashinsky. The successful assassination meant awards and promotions not only for Stashinsky but also for the KGB officers involved in the operation. Nikolai Kravchenko, the man with whom Fabrichnikov and Stashinsky celebrated the occasion, was awarded the highest KGB decoration, “Distinguished Member of the KGB,” on the same day that Stashinsky got his own order. The chances are good that he was a key figure coordinating the assassination of Bandera from Moscow.1

  Stashinsky had good reason to celebrate. The road to marriage with Inge Pohl was all but open. In the following days, Stashinsky had a detailed discussion with Kravchenko about how to deal with Inge and her family in Berlin. Before inviting Inge to Moscow, he was supposed to tell her that he was in fact working not for the East German Ministry of Trade, as he had led her to believe, but for the Stasi—the East German Ministry of State Security. His bosses were happy with his work and wanted to give him additional training for work in West Germany. He wanted her to join him in training for that important assignment; then they would go to the West together to work for world peace. The plan was to recruit Inge not only on personal grounds, exploiting her feelings for Stashinsky and her desire to marry him, but also on ideological ones—that is where the idea of struggling for peace came in handy. If Inge agreed to join him in working for the Stasi, he would invite her to Moscow, where he would tell her the truth—or, rather, part of the truth—about their joint future service to the KGB. Stashinsky signed on to the plan.2

  Inge was happy to see her Joschi back. He had not planned to return before summer, but he had unexpectedly managed to get a few days off for Christmas break, he told her. It was a pleasant surprise. So far she had received just one letter from him, which had been mailed, as far as she could tell, from Warsaw—the city where he had told her he was going when he actually went to Moscow. (He had sent two, but the first letter, which he had turned over to his handlers in Moscow to be mailed from Warsaw, mysteriously disappeared and never reached Berlin.) Stashinsky picked up Inge after work at the hairdresser’s salon, and they spent Christmas Eve in the company of her family in her native village of Dallgow on the border with West Berlin. Everyone at the table was interested in hearing about Joschi’s experiences in Warsaw, but he preferred to discuss other topics.

  After the holiday dinner, Stashinsky and Inge walked to the house where she was renting a room. On the way he asked her whether anyone had approached her in the past few days and asked her to hold onto a package for safekeeping. Stashinsky was relieved when she said no. He suspected that the KGB would try to trick her into taking a recording machine so that Stashinsky’s handlers could spy on the conversation. Sergei Damon had even asked him to tape the conversation he was about to have with Inge. “He explained the reason why he wanted to do that,” remembered Stashinsky later, and had said it was “not because they did not trust me.” Damon told Stashinsky that if there was a recording, they could help him understand what Inge really thought: “Given my close relations with my fiancée, I might not always understand her responses correctly, while he would understand them well.” But clearly, the KGB did not entirely trust its star agent.3

  William Hood, the Munich CIA station chief at the time of the Bandera assassination, later wrote that the task of handlers everywhere was to maneuver their agent “into a position where there is nothing that he can hold back—not the slightest scrap of information, nor the most intimate detail of his personal life.” “Whatever his motives may be,” he wrote, “the role of a spy is to betray trust. A man who has volunteered, or been tapped, to commit treason cannot logically ever be trusted again. . . . Whatever reservations an agent may have when he signs on, the fact is that when an intelligence service buys a spy, it buys him in toto. No espionage service can tolerate the merest whiff of independence or reserve on the part of an agent. For the spy, espionage is a one-way street.”4

  Stashinsky’s KGB bosses were clearly following the international espionage handbook, but their star agent would not go along. In the course of his years with the KGB, Stashinsky had learned how to deal with his handlers. The best way to say no, in his experience, was to agree enthusiastically with the proposal in principle but then raise objective factors that made it difficult or impossible to carry out a particular assignment. With Damon, Stashinsky enthusiastically embraced the idea of taping his conversation with Inge, but then pointed out that unfortunately the signal from the listening device could be picked up at a distance no greater than two hundred meters. To make the plan work, a van with listening equipment would have to be parked near the Pohl family home, which was at a significant distance from other buildings. That would be sure to arouse suspicion. Damon had to agree with Stashinsky’s reasoning. His conversation with Inge would not be taped.

  Stashinsky started with a personal confession. He told Inge that he had been deceiving her about his identity. He was not Josef Lehmann, he said. In fact, he was not even German. He was a Russian. She was shocked and perplexed. He would later say that she reacted as if she had “fallen out of the sky.” He recalled: “I tried to soften the blow by saying that I was not actually Russian but Ukrainian.” It was a calculated move. Many Germans saw the Russians as traditional enemies and now occupiers, but they saw the Ukrainians as one of the East European peoples held captive by the Soviets. By now he was in clear violation of all the instructions he had received from the KGB both in Moscow and at Karlshorst. He had blown the Lehmann cover and revealed his true identity. Instead of giving her the Stasi story, Stashinsky told Inge that he was working for the KGB and had come to Berlin not from Warsaw but from Moscow. There he had seen the head of the KGB himself, who had given his approval for their marriage. She was the first non-Soviet woman to be allowed to marry a KGB agent. The catch was that she would have to join the KGB.5

  Inge burst into tears. Her wartime experiences had made her anything but friendly to the Russians, or to Soviets in general, for that matter. Her father, Fritz Pohl, had been drafted into the German Army, and in early 1945, fearing the coming Soviet attack on Berlin, Inge and her mother had moved to the town of Feldberg in Mecklenburg, northeast of the capital. Feldberg ended up in the Soviet sphere of occupation. The new Soviet-appointed mayor of the city was the renowned antifascist German writer Hans Fallada, who praised the Soviet occupation and the new regime in his novels. The Soviets loved to quote one of his complimentary remarks: “I was astounded by the Russian people. . . . Where and when has a conquering army ever been known to be so kind and generous to a conquered people?”

  The actual situation was very different from its portrayal in Fallada’s novels. Inge remembered the mass rape of women in Feldberg by soldiers of the victorious Red Army. “The worst were the Mongols,” she recalled later, “who wore Cossack hats and had little whips in their hands.” She was probably referring to Soviet soldiers recruited from the Central Asian steppes and southern Siberia—the “Asiatics,” who were portrayed as subhuman in Nazi propaganda. Now it seemed that they were doing their best to prove Joseph Goebbels right. Inge’s mother had been raped three times. “No woman was spared,” remembered Inge. Many women took their own lives. But Inge and her mother had survived the ordeal. On Christmas Eve 1945, Fritz Pohl came home. He had been released from a British POW camp. But he was in for a surprise: earlier that year, Inge’s mother had given birth to a son, also named Fritz. The elder Fritz’s war experiences had done little to turn him into a supporter of the new regime. “The Pohl family were by no means Russophiles but rather viewed the Russian occupation as hostile,” recalled Stashinsky later. Inge’s father made no secret of his feelings, especially when he got drunk. His views became public when he was mentioned by name in one of the local newspapers. He did not seem to care very much. “He always carried the newspaper cutting about with
him and showed it with great pride when conversation was on that subject,” remembered Stashinsky.6

  After listening to Stashinsky, Inge was not only shocked—she was horrified. She did not care that these were the “words and conditions” of his superiors, and not what he himself wanted. She told Stashinsky immediately that he must be out of his mind to propose such things, being perfectly well aware of her attitude toward the communist system. “That’s fine,” answered Stashinsky. “But if we are going to live together, come what may, you have to do this. You have to act as if you accept their proposals and agree to cooperate.” Inge was not prepared to give up on him or the prospect of their marriage, but neither was she about to join the KGB.

  She had a better plan for both of them: they should flee immediately to the West. With Dallgow a few miles away from West Berlin, that seemed a reasonable thing to suggest. But Stashinsky refused to go along. “I told her,” he remembered later, “that I could not do it now, but that possibility remained open to us in the future. We should play for time.” Stashinsky believed that the training he was about to get in Moscow would greatly help him when it came time to establish their life in the West. “I knew that after the new training I would again be sent to West Germany or to another West European country,” he said, recalling his thoughts at the time. He told Inge that his future assignment in the West had already been decided.

  It was a long talk. Inge eventually calmed down. Stashinsky told her that she would not become a true KGB employee and that he would do everything in his power to shield her from taking on any KGB assignments. All that was required was that she play a role. He told her a good deal about himself, but nothing about the nature of his work for the KGB or the assassinations he had carried out. He was not concerned that she would inadvertently betray him, but he thought it best for her own safety that she know nothing about the assassinations. Eventually Inge agreed to play the role he had assigned her for their forthcoming trip to Moscow—that of a Soviet sympathizer willing to help her future husband in his difficult but honorable work on behalf of world peace.