The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  In May, Soviet newspapers were preoccupied not only with the international crisis caused by the downing of the U-2 airplane but also with the East German trial of the West German federal minister Theodor Oberländer, whom Soviet and East European sources were linking to the Bandera assassination. On April 28, 1960, Oberländer was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for his alleged participation in the murders of Jewish citizens of Lviv in June 1941. The next month he resigned his post in the West German government. Despite earlier Soviet and East German assertions, the killing of Stepan Bandera was not mentioned among his alleged crimes.

  The KGB left it to their counterparts in the West to speculate on the forces behind the murder. In the media frenzy following the U-2 incident, the West German government claimed publicly that a KGB officer visiting West Germany had bragged that his organization was the one responsible for killing Bandera. The KGB misinformation department was silent. Moscow seemed to have lost all interest in the topic.6

  23

  GOING IN CIRCLES

  As Bogdan Stashinsky undertook his training in Moscow, the murder he had committed in Munich on October 15, 1959, was rapidly turning into a cold case. By the end of the year, Oberkommissar Adrian Fuchs of the Munich Kripo had interviewed close to a hundred individuals who might know something about the circumstances of Bandera’s death, but he was as far from cracking the case as he had been in mid-October.

  There was no shortage of theories, but evidence was lacking to prove any of them. In December 1959, Professor Wolfgang Laves of Munich University and his associates came up with the final autopsy results concerning the individual they were still calling Stefan Popel. The new results were as inconclusive as those produced in October. There were traces of cyanide in Bandera’s stomach, but no certainty about whether he had ingested an amount sufficient to kill him. One hypothesis was that Bandera could have been killed by one poison, while another (cyanide) might have been applied later to throw the investigation off track. In February 1960, CIA and BND experts were still arguing about the kind of poison involved.1

  On May 2, 1960, the chief of the CIA base in Munich dispatched a long-delayed report on the CIA investigation into Bandera’s death to headquarters in Langley. It was compiled by Father Michael (Mykhailo) Korzhan, the principal CIA agent dealing with Ukrainian émigré circles in Europe from 1947 to 1961. He had come to Munich at the invitation not only of the CIA but also of his former disciple in the art of espionage, Ivan Kashuba, now the Bandera organization’s security chief.

  In the hierarchy of Ukrainian nationalist security cadres, Father Korzhan, an ordained Orthodox priest from Galicia, was second to none. Myron Matviyeyko, Bandera’s security chief, had taken his first steps in counterintelligence training under Korzhan’s supervision back in 1940. He later characterized his former chief to KGB interrogators as “a highly experienced agent.” Korzhan was respected and trusted on both sides of the nationalist divide. A longtime member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, he was officially part of the Bandera faction but refused to take sides in the struggle between Bandera and Lebed. Many believed that, if anything, he was closer to the opposition than to Bandera’s people. At the same time, rumor had it that he was so close to Ivan Kashuba that he drafted Kashuba’s reports to the OUN leadership.2

  In Munich, Kashuba offered Father Korzhan all the intelligence support he and his people could provide. He knew that Korzhan had extensive connections in the intelligence world and was probably working for the BND. Kashuba was equally sure that whatever conclusions Korzhan drew from his investigation would be shared with his American handlers, who were suspicious of Kashuba’s motives and actions. Indeed, when Korzhan came to Munich, he arrived with a mandate from the CIA to draft a report on the investigation he was about to conduct.

  As the CIA’s man in charge of contacts with the Ukrainian community, Korzhan collected information about the community at large, gathered intelligence about the USSR, and worked to prevent Soviet penetration of émigré organizations and churches. He had his own budget and a number of “spotters” who identified possible contacts among Ukrainian émigrés traveling to the Soviet Union or living with relatives there. The number of code names that the CIA created and used to identify Father Korzhan was impressive, attesting to the role he played in a whole series of agency projects: Capelin 1, Aecapelin 1, Aebath 1, Aecassowary 29, and Petroclus were among those names. His Gehlen Organization numbers were V 9460.9 and V-13611.3

  Korzhan arrived in the Bavarian capital sometime in early November 1959—he wrote in his CIA report that he was on the spot less than a month after Bandera’s death—and he stayed there until January 1960 before returning to Paris. While in Munich, Korzhan interviewed many leaders and rank-and-file members of the Bandera group and had two meetings with Oberkommissar Fuchs, the primary investigator of Bandera’s death. The report was prepared in Ukrainian and then translated into English. The main report is dated December 23, 1959, but Korzhan supplied a number of additions and amendments to it in January 1960 before leaving for France.4

  In the report, entitled “Delving Behind the Scenes of the Death of Stepan Bandera,” Korzhan not only presented the facts he managed to uncover and the rumors he heard in Munich but also provided a thorough analysis. Of all the accounts of Bandera’s death that he heard in Munich, he found five “more or less logical.” He discussed all five in detail, listing pros and cons in his report. The first version blamed the death of Bandera on Bundesminister Theodor Oberländer and Reinhard Gehlen’s people; the second suggested that he had been killed by the KGB for his continuing involvement in the nationalist insurgency in Ukraine; the third pointed a finger at Bandera’s former chief of security, Myron Matviyeyko; the fourth blamed Mykola Lebed, the head of the anti-Bandera forces in the OUN; and the fifth suggested that Bandera had committed suicide by taking cyanide. “Each of these versions had some plausibility,” wrote Korzhan, “and at first there was so much basis for each one that it was possible to accept any of the versions as true.”5

  Korzhan believed that the version being touted in East Germany’s newspapers, implicating Oberländer, was nonsense. The Soviet-backed campaign in East Germany accusing Oberländer of complicity in the Lviv massacres and then in Bandera’s murder was likely retaliation for the minister’s resistance to Soviet requests that West Germany grant diplomatic recognition to the communist governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Also, Oberländer simply had no real motive. “The Soviet version is primitive,” wrote Korzhan, “and does not stand up against criticism because: If Bandera was a participant in the Lviv murders, or more specifically the Nachtigall, which was organized at his request, then it is clear that he could only have defended Prof. Oberländer in order to protect himself.”6

  Among those investigating the case, there were two versions of the theory that Bandera had been assassinated by KGB agents. According to the first, poison had been administered to Bandera by force in the hall of his apartment building; the second posited that it had been slipped to Bandera by someone close to him. The first scenario was favored by Bandera loyalists, who claimed that two strangers had been seen in his apartment building prior to his death. The strangers had allegedly followed Bandera in the days leading up to his death, shadowing him even on his trip to the mountains to pick mushrooms, and on October 15 they had hidden in the elevator, awaiting their victim there. The Kripo investigation, wrote Korzhan, found that the original reports of two people in the building before Bandera’s death were unsubstantiated and could not be confirmed by neighbors, who heard no sound in the hallway from anyone other than Bandera himself. The rumors about the two strangers had been disseminated by the Banderites themselves, as they helped to glorify the story of their leader’s heroic death.

  The Kripo investigators paid much more attention to the theory that the poison had been administered by someone close to Bandera who was secretly a Soviet agent—a version staunchly rejected by the Banderites, who tried to prevent
Fuchs from talking to members of their organization, and encouraged him to focus his investigation on finding an outside murderer. Korzhan, who had much better access to members of the organization than Fuchs, was able to reconstruct the last day of Bandera’s life minute by minute. Eugenia Mak (Matviyeyko) was at the top of both Fuchs’s and Korzhan’s list of “insider” suspects, but neither of them believed that she had administered the poison. With the original reports about the sighting of two men in Bandera’s apartment building dismissed, it was hard to imagine who could have been using her to finger the victim.

  Korzhan did not exclude the possibility that the Soviets might have been putting pressure on Eugenia through her husband, Myron Matviyeyko, but he found no evidence that Matviyeyko had visited Munich before Bandera’s death. The theory of Soviet involvement in Bandera’s death in any of its versions made no sense to him. Neither did that of Lebed’s involvement. Korzhan, who knew the Lebed people in Munich very well, argued that there was simply no one in place to successfully undertake such a mission.

  With four hypotheses about Bandera’s death dismissed, Korzhan focused on the fifth—that Bandera had committed suicide. That theory was advocated by Korzhan’s Munich host, Ivan Kashuba, and Korzhan agreed that it was the most logical of the lot. But Korzhan had his own theories about Bandera’s motive for suicide. While Kashuba believed, or at least argued, that Bandera had been driven to suicide by unrequited love, Korzhan suggested that the cause was the unbearable psychological situation at home.

  “As a result of some very difficult experience in her life, and for fear of constant surveillance, Bandera’s wife had practically lost all her senses,” wrote Korzhan:

  If it weren’t for the fact that she was the wife of the leader . . . she would have been in an insane asylum a year ago. All of Bandera’s friends knew about her situation. . . . Bandera’s wife purposefully compromised his every move. She made him appear without any character, a despot, a sadist, a liar amoral and dishonorable. . . . Bandera, who considered himself a hero, and perhaps was one, and an individual who enjoyed the respect of the members of his organization and to whom he was a “god,” had to bear the slander and accusations made by his wife, who saw him only as a human being, her husband and the father of her children. This was more than he could stand. The people who were acquainted with this situation felt that these tortures (for which he often was personally to blame) were so horrible that any normal individual would have committed suicide long ago.

  Korzhan suggested that Bandera had committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide, purposefully choosing a time that might enhance his image as a folk hero. By committing suicide when a Soviet choir was performing in Munich, and his own security service was concerned about Moscow’s plans to eliminate him, Bandera made it almost inevitable that his death would be blamed on the Soviets. The information in support of this “most logical” version of Bandera’s death, as Korzhan termed it, came from Ivan Kashuba, who knew Bandera’s family situation firsthand.

  Korzhan was so certain of his hypothesis that he put his reputation, and, indeed, his intelligence career, on the line when he wrote in his report: “If anyone proves to me that the situation was other than that which I have summarized above, I shall never again take any interest in either political or intelligence work. However, I am certain that no one will prove me wrong. I think that the German Commission which is composed of professional individuals will come to the same conclusion, even though all the information that was available to me will not be available to them.”7

  Despite Korzhan’s best efforts to convince his CIA bosses that Bandera had committed suicide, the CIA believed that Bandera had been killed by the Soviets. Both the Gehlen Organization people and their CIA counterparts now considered not only Korzhan’s theories, but also Korzhan himself, highly suspicious. The former felt that his “reporting on Bandera’s death amounted to deliberate whitewash.” The latter had “various reservations about his bona fides” and dropped Korzhan as their agent in 1961. The firing of Korzhan had little effect on the case. The investigation into Bandera’s death remained stalled. It looked as if Bogdan Stashinsky had added one more name to the Soviet Union’s list of clandestine achievements that would successfully remain secret. And in his line of work, keeping a secret was no less important than getting the job done.8

  PART IV

  ESCAPE FROM PARADISE

  24

  MOSCOW BUGS

  Bogdan Stashinsky’s stay in Moscow led to a personal awakening, but not the kind that the KGB had been hoping for. Among the books given to him for translation as part of his language lessons, one left a strong impression on him. “It was a book intended for Germans resettling elsewhere—I don’t recall its title now—that summarized information about living conditions in North and South America, Africa, and Europe as well,” he recalled later. “I translated it, and that became my first rather detailed acquaintance with living conditions in other countries: on the other hand, I knew living conditions in Moscow, made comparisons, and always calculated how much workers made there and here. First and foremost, I paid attention not to money but to political and economic structure. I saw the socialist and capitalist systems before me but could hear nothing of people’s poverty and suffering, which I knew from experience in Moscow.” Now he was able to compare them firsthand, and communism was coming up short.1

  Moscow enjoyed special status and was much better supplied with consumer goods than other parts of the country. But even there, waiting in long lines for essential food supplies and goods was part of everyday life. The year 1960 was relatively good for Soviet industry, but also the second straight year of poor harvests. In 1958 the government had received close to 42 million tons of wheat from the collective farms, but in 1959 the figure was close to 34 million tons and, in 1960, less than 31 million tons. Food shortages became endemic in the USSR around 1960. Robert W. Gibson of the Los Angeles Times, who lived in Moscow in the late 1950s, remembered that when he left the Soviet capital in January 1960, “cabbage, frostbitten potatoes, garlic and bread represented winter’s staples. An orange or a chunk of meat created an occasion. Life offered few treats.”

  Many of Gibson’s Soviet acquaintances had privileged status, given the fact that they were allowed to deal with foreigners, but they still spent hours in food lines. “And they yearned deeply for material comfort,” wrote Gibson later. “Like most Russians, they had suffered much from war, Josef Stalin’s terror, and everlasting priorities during peacetime for steel, machine tools and still more weapons. Cynicism saturated their outlook. At times, vodka did, too.” The cynicism grew partly out of the enormous gap between the promises given to ordinary Soviet citizens by party propaganda and the hardships of everyday life. “While I was a correspondent [in Moscow],” recalled Gibson, “Khrushchev frequently boasted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in industrial production by 1970, surpass it overall by 1980 and leave it in the dust ever after. The Soviet lead in space established by Sputnik and the Lunik moon probes offered credibility.”2

  In 1961 the Soviet Union began buying grain abroad, especially from Canada, to alleviate the food shortage at home. In the following year, food shortages and rising prices for meat and milk caused mass strikes all over the country. In the city of Novocherkassk in southern Russia, workers’ strikes turned into riots. Khrushchev dispatched a high-powered delegation that included Aleksandr Shelepin, who had left the KGB the previous year to become a secretary of the party’s Central Committee, but the party and state officials failed to alleviate tensions. After the Novocherkassk workers chased the Moscow delegation out of local party headquarters, the army opened fire, killing more than twenty protesters. Khrushchev was anything but lenient toward those who survived. Hundreds were arrested and imprisoned, and seven sentenced to death and executed. The disturbance was keep quiet; the rest of the country and the world would not learn what had happened in Novocherkassk until the last days of the Soviet Union.3


  As time passed, Inge began to behave more independently and erratically. She refused to attend lessons in spycraft and became increasingly bold in expressing her dissatisfaction with Soviet conditions. She complained to her husband about the lack of basic foods, including potatoes. Her anti-Soviet sentiments aside, she had to prepare the couple’s meals, and there were constant shortages. The empty shelves in Moscow stores and long lines for bare necessities spoke for themselves. She would remember for years how she was unable to reliably obtain the kind of meat she wanted—and was prepared to pay for—in a Soviet grocery store. Moscow lagged embarrassingly behind not only West Berlin, where Inge had worked, but also East Germany, where she had lived.

  Inge told Stashinsky that she was puzzled about how a clever person such as he could fall so easily for Soviet propaganda tricks. “One day you will wake up,” she said, “and find yourself cured.” The cure was a process rather than a onetime event and would come in stages. Reading a German-language book on the life of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of Hitler’s military intelligence, given to him by his KGB handlers, Stashinsky was forced to conclude that the communist secret police were no better than the Nazi secret police they despised. As he later recalled, “In conversations with my wife, we reached the conclusion that, generally speaking, there was no difference between the Gestapo and what was going on here.”4