The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Aleksandrov told Stashinsky that they were still suspicious about the cause of Peter’s death, and a KGB crew would stay close to Stashinsky and Inge throughout the day to protect them against any threats. He wanted Stashinsky to go to the hospital where Peter had died and inquire about the cause of his death. They were given a car and driver for the day, and instructions to rendezvous with Aleksandrov at 4:00 p.m. at the Café Budapest in downtown East Berlin.

  Stashinsky and Inge asked the driver to first take them back to Dallgow. As the Volga drove up to the Pohl family home, Stashinsky noticed a car conspicuously parked with a clear view of the house and the whole street. Although the Stashinskys were observed from outside, they were fairly sure that there were no bugs in the house, so they decided to talk freely for the first time since they had left Berlin more than a year earlier. First and foremost, they needed to agree on a plan. It was Friday, August 11. Peter’s funeral was scheduled for Sunday, the 13th. They decided to flee to West Berlin immediately after the funeral. “My wife left the decision up to me,” said Stashinsky, recalling their conversation later. “She said that she would follow wherever I went.”

  The KGB car took Stashinsky and Inge from her parents’ house to the hospital, where Stashinsky was told that his son had died of pneumonia, which made sense, given the high fever Inge had told him about. That diagnosis, he hoped, would put the suspicions to rest about Inge or Western intelligence services playing a role in Peter’s death. The two then drove to the cemetery, where Stashinsky first saw his son’s now lifeless body in a chapel. By 4:00 p.m. they were at the Café Budapest. Aleksandrov already knew the cause of Peter’s death and had probably known it even before he sent Stashinsky to the hospital. They agreed that Stashinsky and Inge would spend the rest of the day in the city, and the car would pick them up in front of the same café at 11:00 that night to take them back to their Karlshorst safe house. They were virtual prisoners, but they had a few hours to talk freely. The couple walked the streets of Berlin, discussing all that had happened since their parting in January. They noticed that even though the KGB had now verified the completely innocuous cause of Peter’s death, they were still being followed by secret-police minders.3

  31

  DOWN TO THE WIRE

  It was only on the morning of August 12 that Lieutenant Colonel Yurii Aleksandrov implied that their KGB “protection” would be removed while they planned the funeral for their son. He drove them to Dallgow and left them there to make arrangements for the next day. They would be picked up at the Pohl family home at 10:00 p.m. and taken back to Karlshorst, said Aleksandrov. Stashinsky and Inge spent the morning of August 12 at her family’s home. In the afternoon they decided to go to her rented room just down the street to pick up some items. It was a difficult walk—Inge had spent the previous four months there with her newborn, and now the room brought back painful memories. Stashinsky experienced a different kind of pain. On the way to the apartment, he noticed that despite what Aleksandrov had said, the KGB “protection squad” was still there.

  On the street, Stashinsky noticed the same parked Volkswagen that he had earlier seen at the railway station. It was part of the KGB fleet that had followed Stashinsky and Inge the previous day. The KGB was doing a poor job of hiding their tracks: cars with foreign-looking men stood out in a neighborhood with little if any traffic. When Inge’s fifteen-year-old brother, Fritz, asked Stashinsky who the people in the cars were, he had sarcastically responded that they were there to protect him. But they were clearly still under surveillance, meaning that they would probably have no freedom of movement after the funeral on Sunday. Until 10:00 p.m. that night, however, they would be watched, but not fully controlled. If they wanted to go to the West, they had to act immediately, he realized. Tomorrow, after the funeral, it would be too late.

  Stashinsky shared his thoughts with Inge. “I was very much afraid she would not be able to bring herself to do this,” he remembered later. “But she realized that it was vital to do so and that we could be of no further use to our son even if we did attend the funeral.” Inge steeled herself to follow his advice. It was hard to keep their plans secret from Inge’s family: Fritz realized that something was wrong when Inge told him that he would have to take her and “Joschi’s” wreaths to the funeral. He did not object when she told him that the three of them were now going for a walk. If anything, he was excited.

  Before they left the house, Stashinsky asked Fritz, who had just come in with the funeral wreaths, what he had seen on the street. Fritz replied that an East German Wartburg sedan, which he had seen previously in the neighborhood, had just passed in the direction of the railway bridge. Stashinsky concluded that the car had not yet returned. He, Inge, and Fritz left the house, turned right, and walked along the fence toward the building where Inge had rented her room. They did not look back. After a few minutes, Stashinsky sent Fritz ahead to check for cars. There were none: the fugitives crossed the street and entered the house where Inge’s rented room was located.

  Stashinsky and Inge knew that they would not be returning to Inge’s family home and had to prepare for a trip whose outcome was unknown. Stashinsky changed his shirt and packed his raincoat. Inge changed her dress. Stashinsky later remembered: “We could not take much, as we had to be inconspicuous and allow for being challenged in the course of our flight.” But when Inge asked whether she could take the quilt she had used to swaddle Peter, he let her do so. They left the house from a side entrance. “Our flight to West Berlin really was a flight,” recalled Inge later. “There was no other way out for us, though with all the strain and stress and emotional burden of the last few days we were not really fully aware of the consequences of our step.”1

  On a map of Berlin and its environs, the trip from Dallgow to the western part of the city seems easy. Dallgow, located west of Berlin, bordered a section of the city that had been occupied by the Western Allies in 1945. Until 1951, the Soviets and then the East Germans had maintained a checkpoint there to control automobile traffic heading for West Berlin. The easiest way to get from Dallgow to West Berlin was to take a train heading east. In two stops, they would reach the relative safety of the western sector. But they did not dare show up at Dallgow railway station, where the KGB would certainly have agents posted. Fritz also told Stashinsky and Inge the alarming news he had heard from a friend: the police were checking passengers’ documents at the station in Staaken, the last city before the border with West Berlin. By a quirk of fate, the eastern part of Staaken had become part of West Berlin, while its western part was assigned to East Germany. Now the East German police were turning back many East German passengers bound for West Berlin.

  The East German authorities were desperate to slow down, if not completely stop, the flood of refugees to the West. That day alone, close to 2,000 East Germans had applied for political asylum in West Berlin. More than twenty charter flights had left West Berlin, taking the asylum seekers to various destinations throughout West Germany. Refugee facilities in West Berlin were full to capacity, and the West Berlin authorities had been forced to ask the US Army to help with food rations. In one sense, the East German policemen turning people back at East German railway stations were helping their West Berlin counterparts keep the situation under control.2

  One way or another, the direct route to West Berlin through Staaken was closed to the Stashinskys. If they were detained, no cover story could possibly convince the KGB that Stashinsky was not defecting to the West. Another route had to be found. Ultimately, Stashinsky decided that they would head for the nearby village of Falkensee, about three miles north of Dallgow, and try their luck there. Stashinsky, Inge, and Fritz took the back entrance through the garden. Hidden by high shrubs, they walked to Falkensee. If they were stopped, they would say that they had decided to go to Falkensee to have some ice cream. Fritz would serve as proof that they were engaged in nothing more than a family outing. Luckily, they were never stopped. The walk took them about forty-five minutes.


  In Falkensee, Stashinsky decided to avoid the train and instead take a taxi. They found a taxi driver on a side street who agreed to take the three of them to East Berlin. He drove along the Berliner Ring Road, circling the city from the north. As they crossed the border between East Germany and East Berlin, which were both under Soviet occupation, they were asked for documents. Stashinsky told the guards that he was returning home to East Berlin and produced an identity card in the name of Josef Lehmann. Had the card been found on Stashinsky by his KGB “protectors,” it could have cost him his life. But now, the guards waved them through.3

  On their way downtown, they passed through the East Berlin suburb of Pankow, home to many of the East German political elite. It was past 6:00 p.m., and some of the most prominent inhabitants of Pankow were not at home. That evening, the East German supreme leader, Walter Ulbricht, was throwing a garden party about twenty-five miles north of Berlin. In the middle of the party, Ulbricht invited his already tipsy guests to congregate for an announcement that sobered up many of them in a split second. In three hours, Ulbricht told his ministers, the “still open border between socialist and capitalist Europe” would be closed. Everything was ready for the final move to seal East Berlin from the western part of the city and stop the flow of refugees that was bleeding the East German economy dry. Ulbricht then told his guests that for security reasons no one would be allowed to leave the premises until the operation was over. Only now did some of them realize why they had seen more than the usual number of troops in the woods surrounding the villa. No one was foolish enough to raise any objections, even if they had them. They went back to eating and drinking. The party went on late into the night.4

  Like Ulbricht’s guests, Stashinsky and Inge were surprised to see more than the usual number of soldiers as their taxi made its way downtown. Inge even thought she saw military maneuvers going on. They got out of the taxi on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Reinhardstrasse. In case the police interrogated the taxi driver, he had no way of knowing where the group was heading from there—east or west. Stashinsky and Inge decided that the time had come to say goodbye to Fritz as well. Fritz wanted to go with them, but they refused. Inge gave Fritz 300 East German marks to cover the funeral expenses and told him that they probably would not see each other for a while. If he was asked at home where the two had gone, he was to say that they were visiting relatives in Berlin. Fritz made his way to the S-Bahn station and bought a ticket to Staaken through West Berlin.

  With Fritz gone, Stashinsky and Inge went to Schönhauser Allee, where they boarded the S-Bahn. Their route was designed in such a way that if the police or KGB stopped them, Stashinsky could say that he was heading for his old rented room, where he had left his shoes. But their cover story was valid only up to a point: the old rented room was, after all, in East, not West Berlin. Then they noticed that the East German police were checking documents in the neighboring train car. If they reached Stashinsky and Inge’s car, there was no telling what would happen. With their East German documents, they had no business going to West Berlin and could easily be turned back or even detained. But their luck held—the police did not get to their car. They got off the S-Bahn at Gesundbrunnen, the first station in West Berlin.

  There was no time to savor the moment. Stashinsky and Inge grabbed a taxi and asked the driver to take them to the apartment of Inge’s aunt, who lived in West Berlin. But Inge’s relatives were not at home. Stashinsky returned and asked the taxi driver to take them farther north, to Berlin-Lübars, where Inge’s other aunt lived. It was getting dark. At the East German army headquarters thirty kilometers east of Berlin, General Heinz Hoffmann, the East German minister of defense, was gathering his senior officers and handing them sealed envelopes with their marching orders. Precisely at midnight they were instructed to start moving troops and equipment into place to seal off East Berlin completely. At this point, Stashinsky and Inge would have been happy to see the border securely closed. They could no longer be stopped by East German police, but the border remained open to KGB agents who might already be on their trail.

  Luckily, Inge’s second aunt was at home—in fact, both aunts and their families were spending the evening together. Stashinsky and Inge were now off the street and in relative safety—and completely out of cash. “Uncle Heinz,” said Stashinsky to the husband of one of Inge’s aunts, “pay for the taxi. We have to go to the police, the American secret police, as soon as possible.” Heinz Villwok, a fifty-one-year-old municipal employee, could see that Stashinsky, whom he knew as Joschi (as did all members of Inge’s family), was under great stress. “He was highly agitated,” remembered Villwok, “just like my niece; they looked very poorly and were exhausted.” Stashinsky and Inge spent no more than half an hour at her aunt’s apartment and then went to the police station near Tempelhof, the airport from which Stashinsky had flown to Munich so many times. Back then, he had wanted to avoid the police at all costs; now he believed that they were his only hope of salvation.

  But the policemen were in no hurry. A Soviet intelligence officer wanting to turn himself in to the Americans? Was that for real? Heinz Villwok, who negotiated the surrender, had to wait twenty minutes to talk to an officer. Then he waited again. After that, he spoke with police officials together with Inge. Finally they persuaded the police to call the Americans. It was already past 9:00 p.m., less than an hour before Aleksandrov would be certain to discover the Stashinskys’ disappearance, and three hours before the East German Army and police started unrolling their barbed wire.5

  PART V

  PUBLICITY BOMB

  32

  SHOCK WAVE

  It was a strange funeral. More KGB agents and officers of the East German Ministry of Security came to say farewell to the four-month-old Peter than the Rohrbeck Evangelical Cemetery in Dallgow had ever seen. Despite the absence of Peter’s parents, the funeral went as planned. A record in the parish registry indicates that Peter Lehmann—the last name was a product of the KGB officers’ imagination—was buried there on August 13, 1961.1

  Also absent from the funeral was Fritz Pohl, Inge’s brother. He had not brought the promised funeral wreath, and the 300 East German marks that Fritz had been asked to bring home to cover the cost of the funeral had disappeared as well. Fritz had resolved to follow Inge and her husband to the West. He had indeed boarded a train to Dallgow, but then he had changed his mind, turned back, and made his way to the house of his aunt, Grete Villwok, in West Berlin. On the day of his nephew’s funeral, he applied for asylum in West Berlin.2

  Georgii Sannikov, a thirty-two-year-old KGB officer then working in Berlin under diplomatic cover, later described the shock felt by his KGB colleagues and superiors once they realized that Bogdan Stashinsky had defected. “The KGB operatives present at the child’s funeral were puzzled by the parents’ absence,” wrote Sannikov. “By the end of the day on 13 August 1961 it was clear that the Stashinskys had gone to the West. Everyone who knew what tasks the agent had carried out in Munich in 1957 and 1959 and what could happen if Stashinsky were to talk was in shock.” The KGB officers immediately started recalling agents whom Stashinsky knew or might have known from the West. Every measure was taken to find the defector and silence him before he could talk to the Americans.

  A few days after the funeral, Sannikov was summoned to Karlshorst and ordered to accompany another KGB officer, Colonel Aleksandr Sviatogorov, on a special mission. The two took up positions a hundred meters away from the entrance to the Central Intelligence Agency building on Clayallee in West Berlin. “We kept watch for two days,” remembered Sannikov. “Sviatogorov hoped for a miracle. On the first day, taking his chosen position, he told me, ‘Georgii, I have a pistol with me. If we see Bogdan, go away; I’ll shoot. I have nothing to lose. I’ll kill Bogdan and myself.’”3

  Sviatogorov, the KGB officer who was prepared to sacrifice his life in order to kill Stashinsky, was a seasoned forty-four-year-old intelligence veteran. He had carried out a num
ber of daring commando-style operations behind the German lines during World War II, then received additional training in Kyiv in order to work diplomatic cover, first in Czechoslovakia and then as an illegal in West Germany. An ethnic Ukrainian, he was an expert on Ukrainian émigré circles and the art of “special operations.” Since 1956 he had been stationed at Karlshorst, where he worked under the cover of a Soviet army colonel. His area of responsibility was clandestine operations, and he ran dozens of agents through a number of “residents.” Sviatogorov had doubted Stashinsky’s loyalty when he had become engaged to Inge and then married her, but Stashinsky was soon out of Berlin. He had become someone else’s responsibility.4

  With Stashinsky back in Berlin for his son’s funeral, Sviatogorov’s suspicions had returned. He had warned his commanding general that Stashinsky could not be trusted and asked for increased surveillance of the couple. Sviatogorov’s warnings were ignored. Stashinsky’s handler, Yurii Aleksandrov, had complete trust in his agent. “How could you?” he asked Sviatogorov. “Distrust such a heroic man who has done so much for our county?” Now, with Stashinsky gone, Sviatogorov felt that his career was on the line. Sannikov, who had been chosen for the operation because he had diplomatic immunity and could recognize Stashinsky, whom he had once seen during his KGB training in Kyiv, did not believe that they had any chance of locating the defector. He assumed that the Americans had already whisked Stashinsky out of Berlin. But Sviatogorov insisted on continuing the surveillance, still hoping to get Stashinsky, and ready to give his life in the process. “I would not have allowed the German police to take me alive,” Sviatogorov remembered later. “As far as I was concerned, I decided that if something were to happen, I would shoot myself in the head.”5