The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  The KGB certainly would not have appreciated such a comparison. Luckily, Stashinsky did everything in his power to keep his conversations with Inge private. Immediately after they moved into the KGB-provided apartment, he checked it for listening devices. He looked in every corner and checked the light fixture but found nothing. Still, he never felt truly secure in his own home. That very month the whole world was reminded of Soviet proficiency at placing bugs in the most unexpected places. In late May 1960, seeking to counter Soviet propaganda in the wake of the downing of the U-2, the US representative to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, proudly showed members of the Security Council a bug discovered in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States that had been presented to the American ambassador to the USSR back in 1946. The seal had hung in the ambassador’s private office at Spaso House—the ambassadorial residence in Moscow—for fourteen years before the bug was discovered by the embassy’s security officials. Lodge claimed that more than a hundred similar microphones had been found in official US residences in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.5

  Stashinsky needed no reminder about the KGB’s ability to eavesdrop on persons of interest, but he was not a specialist. As he later suggested, he and Inge only found hidden bugs by accident. In late July 1960, for example, soon after he and Inge moved into their second apartment provided by the KGB, Inge took a systematic approach to eradicating the rooms of fleas. After cleaning everything they had, she asked Stashinsky to lift a picture hanging on the wall of one of the rooms. It was a great idea: beneath it they found the fleas’ main nest. They also found two wires under the paper coming from different directions and leading through a hole in the wall to the neighboring apartment. Stashinsky immediately recognized that they were being bugged. Inge cried. Fleas were the least of their problems.

  “Of course, I was completely stunned by that discovery, but I couldn’t do anything about it,” remembered Stashinsky later. “My wife just looked at me with sympathy. I kept silent and said nothing at all.” Stashinsky and Inge were cautious enough not to betray their discovery by commenting on it immediately. Throughout their stay in Moscow, they tried to discuss politically sensitive matters outside their apartment. But not every conversation could be held outdoors (to do so anyways would arouse suspicion), so they freely exchanged their views on the shortages of food and goods, as well as on the generally dismal situation in the Soviet Union. “It would have been best to return to Berlin, but that was a thought not expressed in words,” said Stashinsky, recalling his thoughts of the moment.

  Even so, he hoped that what he had found was not what he thought it was. “I discovered a wire, I told myself,” remembered Stashinsky later. “But perhaps there was no microphone there; perhaps those were just apprehensions. I didn’t want it to be so!” When they were next visited by Stashinsky’s case officer, Sergei Sarkisov, Inge asked him the purpose of the wire in their apartment. Since Stashinsky was bound by the quasi-military discipline of the KGB, they had decided that Inge would be the one to ask the inconvenient questions. Sarkisov had no answer. Wide-eyed, he said that he did not know, but that it could be a telephone wire. He promised to make inquiries and report back to Stashinsky on his findings. He never did. When Inge confronted him with the same question the next time around, Sarkisov said that the person who might know the details was on vacation—they would have to wait.

  Stashinsky and Inge could not wait. They were extremely anxious to find out what the KGB knew about their private conversations and wanted the answer as soon as possible. Stashinsky showed the wire to electricians who were making repairs to the building, but they were of no help. So he decided to do his own detection. To find the location of the microphone, he connected one end of the wire to his tape recorder and spoke into it as he walked around the room. Playing back the recording, he could hear his own voice with varying degrees of clarity but was unable to locate the microphone. The KGB technicians were clearly more adept at this aspect of spycraft than he was. And their bosses clearly wanted to continue listening to what was going on in the apartment.

  Sarkisov eventually came up with an improbable excuse for the wire in their apartment: the flat had allegedly previously belonged to a shady character, and the bug had been installed in order to keep him under surveillance. Inge later recalled that, according to Sarkisov, that individual had since been arrested. This story, fake or not, was not comforting. Was that the fate in store for her and Stashinsky as well? Stashinsky soon obtained clear evidence that he and Inge were being listened to. One day his handlers told him that instead of Stashinsky reeducating Inge, she was reeducating him. “Now I realized perfectly well with whom I was collaborating,” he recalled later. The day Inge had been dreaming of, when Stashinsky would wake up and be cured of his illusions, had finally arrived. But it had come too late and in the wrong city, as far as both of them were concerned.6

  25

  FAMILY

  The KGB messenger was in a good mood and asked Inge to dance. It was an old Russian custom that the postman could ask the recipient of a letter for a dance as payment for delivery. The messenger had brought Inge letters from her family, who thought that she and her husband were living in Poland. Her relatives addressed the letters they wrote to her to a Warsaw address controlled by the KGB. Inge was supposed to be pleased and do a couple of pirouettes, but she refused. She was not familiar with the custom and was in no mood to dance. Stashinsky asked the surprised messenger to hand over the letters without the usual dance. The messenger produced the letters—the envelopes had already been opened—and told the Stashinskys that he had had no time to read and translate them. He instead asked the couple to tell him what the letters were about. Now it was Stashinsky’s turn to experience culture shock. The KGB was reading their correspondence and not even trying to hide the fact from them.

  “My wife and I were angry,” recalled Stashinsky later. “I could not contain myself and asked him sharply what this was supposed to mean. Those were our letters, after all. He said that he had not opened the letters; they had come from Poland in that condition. I said that if this kept up, I would have to take measures of some kind. The war had been over for fifteen years, and I could not allow anyone to open my letters.” Stashinsky threatened to complain to his superiors. The KGB messenger was quite taken aback. What he had done by asking them to tell him the content of the letters, instead of reading them himself, was a breach of KGB protocol and a clear sign that he trusted them. They obviously did not take it that way. First there were the wires in their apartment, and now their letters were being opened. They were outraged and complained to Stashinsky’s contacts in the KGB.

  Stashinsky’s case officer, Sergei Sarkisov, tried to calm the couple down once he was briefed on the incident. But his explanations and assurances were contradictory, at best. On the one hand, he said that the KGB completely trusted Stashinsky; on the other, he admitted that the letters had been opened in Poland on KGB orders. He told Stashinsky and Inge that anyone corresponding with foreigners was subject to censorship, and he himself would not be treated any differently if he were to correspond with someone in Europe. He was certainly right on that point. The KGB trusted no one and, like any other intelligence service, tried to keep its agents under complete control. After that, the Stashinskys received their letters in sealed envelopes. But the people reading them were definitely sloppy, or simply did not know German well enough. Stashinsky and Inge could not help noticing that sometimes the letters arrived in the wrong envelopes. Sarkisov blamed those incidents on the German and Polish authorities, over whom the KGB allegedly had no control.1

  With their apartment bugged and their letters opened by their KGB handlers, Stashinsky and Inge were happy to take a break and leave Moscow for a vacation in the countryside, away from the KGB and its eavesdropping equipment. In late August, they decided to travel to Stashinsky’s home village of Borshchovychi, not far from Lviv in Western Ukraine. Stashinsky wanted to introduce his young wife t
o his family: his father, mother, and two sisters, who still lived in the village. It was easier said than done. Stashinsky’s Moscow handlers did not want Inge to meet Stashinsky’s family or learn his real name. Stashinsky ignored the KGB’s advice and insisted on the trip.

  They spent almost a month in Borshchovychi, returning to Moscow in late September. Stashinsky told his parents and neighbors that he had met Inge in Moscow, where she was allegedly a university student studying abroad. They had fallen in love and married. Inge made a strong impression on the local women, who envied the well-dressed foreigner from the capital for having won the heart of their handsome neighbor. “The German woman was tall and slender, with her hair cut short,” remembered one of the local girls years later. “I see her as if it were yesterday, wearing her polka-dot dress with a broad belt and metal buckle. She was interested in everything but understood nothing; Bogdan translated everything.”2

  Stashinsky’s family had never fully forgiven him for his betrayal back in 1950. It had been a shock to the family and their neighbors when Stashinsky had started openly working for the secret police. As the authorities began arresting people in the village linked to the nationalist underground, suspicion naturally fell on Stashinsky. He was accused of killing his sister’s fiancé, Ivan Laba, the local underground commander. He had denied the accusations, but it did not help. The relatives of those who were arrested had blamed not only Stashinsky but his entire family for their tragedy. Once popular in the village, the Stashinskys became outcasts. The relatives of those arrested grew increasingly hostile, until the family did not dare to go out after dark and boarded up their windows to prevent break-ins. Stashinsky, whose secret police career had taken him first to Lviv and then to Kyiv, Berlin, and Moscow, could do little to help his family.

  In any case, they did not want his help. They did not want to see him. From 1951 to 1954 Stashinsky had no contact with his family. Eventually he managed to restore relations to some extent through his older sister, Iryna. She told him that he could come home. But he would not dare to do so without getting his father’s approval first. Stashinsky’s father agreed to meet him and gave him permission to return—and only then did he risk showing up in his native village. “Relations changed after all,” remembered Stashinsky later. “It was not entirely pleasant.” News of the assassination of Stepan Bandera had reached the village of Borshchovychi through Western broadcasts and rumors, but no one in the family could imagine that the person responsible for the death of the symbol of their resistance to the Soviets was their own Bogdan.3

  Stashinsky’s neighbors in Borshchovychi remembered that during their visit to the village, Stashinsky and Inge spent a lot of time walking in the garden. They also traveled to neighboring Lviv for sightseeing. Inge must have felt more at home in Lviv than she did in Moscow, as the city’s architecture resembled that of her native Germany. Founded by a Rus’ prince in the early thirteenth century, the city fell under Polish control in the fifteenth century and became part of the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth. Lviv was governed for centuries according to the German town rules, and it was centered on a city hall and a market square around it, like any German town. Its buildings were a mixture of major European architectural styles, from Renaissance to Baroque and Classical. Dominated again by the Poles after the fall of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Lviv, known then as Lwów, was claimed by Stalin at the Yalta Conference for the Soviet Union. By the late 1950s, with the Jews of Lviv exterminated in the Holocaust and the Poles resettled to formerly German areas, Ukrainians became the city’s main ethnic group.

  Tour guides on the streets of downtown Lviv and in its numerous museums emphasized the Rus’ roots of the city, its Ukrainian past, and its allegedly strong links with Russia. They noted brief visits to the city by Tsar Peter I of Russia in the early eighteenth century, when he negotiated with Polish notables in an attempt to build an alliance against Charles XII of Sweden. While Ukrainians indeed had deep roots in the city, most of those whom Inge saw on its streets in August and September 1960 were relatively recent arrivals who had come from nearby villages after the war. Stashinsky was one of the tens of thousands of those who had migrated to Lviv in search of education and better job prospects. It was the city of his youth—he had begun his studies there in a teachers’ college back in the late 1940s. Two of his victims had also spent much of their youth there: Stepan Bandera studied agriculture, while Lev Rebet and his wife, Daria, studied law. Stashinsky had no way of knowing that, and, if he had known, he would not have told Inge, who still had no idea what services he had performed for the KGB.4

  Among the many subjects that Stashinsky and Inge must have discussed while walking the streets of the ancient city and the gardens of Borshchovychi, away from KGB listening devices, was their future as a family. Inge was pregnant—a fact that the couple was hiding from the KGB. But once Stashinsky and Inge returned to Moscow in late September, they learned that the KGB wires were clearly doing their job and had betrayed at least that secret to their superiors.

  On the day after the Stashinskys returned from Ukraine, Sarkisov raised the subject. He began indirectly, saying that people in their situation should have no secrets from their superiors, even if they concerned personal matters. Stashinsky got the message: the KGB knew about the pregnancy. He quickly “volunteered” that information to Sarkisov. The KGB officer did not look surprised. When Inge asked Sarkisov how he knew that she was pregnant, he told her: “There are no secrets from the KGB.” He told the couple that giving birth to a child would delay or derail altogether the plans that the KGB had made for them. He asked whether the Stashinskys wanted to keep the baby or have an abortion. It was an easy and routine thing to do in the Soviet Union, he explained to Inge.

  Both Stashinsky and Inge told their handler that they were keeping the baby. He did not argue with them, but that was not the end of the matter. Sarkisov soon came back and insisted on the abortion. “Although it was not formulated as an order, he said quite clearly that it would be better if my wife consented to an abortion.” Stashinsky and Inge would not budge, but this time Stashinsky took the lead in saying no to the KGB. As he had before, he came up with an explanation for why a KGB suggestion was good in principle but impossible in practice. Inge had had difficulties with childbearing before, he said, and a doctor had told her that she would require an operation to be able to give birth in the future. Her current pregnancy was nothing short of miraculous, and they were very glad that it had happened without an operation. They could not risk an abortion under those circumstances.

  Sarkisov gave up on the idea of abortion but soon came back with a new proposal—that Inge put the newborn child into a foster home. She protested vehemently, but he told her that it was an honor to give a child to the country and the community. Inge collapsed, and Stashinsky exploded. Sarkisov realized that he had crossed the line. The KGB eventually relented, and the Stashinskys were allowed to have their baby. Furthermore, to make amends, the KGB unexpectedly gave Stashinsky a 20,000-ruble bonus—a major sum by the standards of the time—to buy furniture. Sarkisov escorted Stashinsky to a bank to withdraw the money and then to a furniture store, where he used his KGB connections to secure the purchases.5

  26

  CHANGE OF PLANS

  Everything changed for Stashinsky after he and Inge decided to keep the baby. His language lessons came to a halt—Elvira Mikhailovna, the KGB star teacher of German who had also been lecturing Stashinsky on German history, geography, and etiquette, suddenly disappeared. Sarkisov explained that she had been sent on assignment to the West. Stashinsky was left with little to do but work on the few translations commissioned to him by the KGB. It was suggested that he would soon start training as a barber. But the conversations that he had constantly been having with Sarkisov about their future life in the West, the name they were going to use there, and their cover story came to an end as well.

  Stashinsky learned that his status within the KGB had changed on December 3, 1960, sli
ghtly less than a year after his all-important meeting with the KGB chief, Aleksandr Shelepin. On that date, Stashinsky’s case officer brought him to meet with another important official, who was introduced to him as Vladimir Yakovlevich, a department head at KGB headquarters on Lubianka Square. According to declassified biographies of senior KGB officers, the stocky and somewhat below-average-height man who greeted Stashinsky on that day was Vladimir Yakovlevich Baryshnikov, the deputy head of Directorate C of the KGB foreign intelligence branch. Created in 1957, the directorate was in charge of illegals and their support abroad. Its first head was Stashinsky’s acquaintance at Karlshorst, General Aleksandr Korotkov.

  Baryshnikov had turned sixty in July. A graduate of a German commercial school in St. Petersburg before the revolution, he joined the secret police in the late 1920s and made a name for himself during the war as the architect of radio games with the German military intelligence—a deception tactic made possible by advances in radio technology. Before assuming his current position at Directorate C, he had served under Korotkov at Karlshorst, where he was second-in-command. Stashinsky’s assassination of Lev Rebet had taken place on his watch. In KGB circles, Baryshnikov was a well-respected senior officer known as a scholarly type. His subordinates remembered him constantly bending over his paper-strewn desk—he was nearsighted and refused to wear glasses.1

  After greeting Stashinsky, Baryshnikov began the conversation in his usual soft-spoken manner. He inquired about Inge, asking how she was coping with her new living conditions and occasional shortages of products. Stashinsky, who knew where those questions were coming from, put on a brave face and denied that any such problem had ever existed in his family. He assured Baryshnikov that both he and Inge loved living in Moscow and had learned to replace goods to which they were accustomed in Germany with those locally available. Baryshnikov dropped the subject. He took a different approach, telling Stashinsky that, given the impending changes in his family, certain things would have to be rearranged when it came to his work with the KGB.