The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  The chief investigating officer at the scene was Inspector Vanhauer of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt). He became the first German official to interrogate Stashinsky once the latter was in West German custody. Had the CIA discerned any operational value in Stashinsky or his information, he would have been handed over not to the criminal police but to one of the CIA’s West German partners—the BND (foreign intelligence) or the BfV, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (counterintelligence). Interrogations began on the day of his transfer, September 1, and continued the following day. Like the CIA interrogators, Vanhauer found it difficult to believe Stashinsky’s testimony. “At first I treated the matter skeptically, as this was the first we had heard of both murders,” remembered Vanhauer later. “After the interrogation, we discussed the case late into the night, weighing the ‘pros and cons.’ Later we inclined ever more to the conviction that Stashinsky’s account was genuine.”

  The investigators would leave no stone unturned in checking his story. On September 11, Oberkommissar Fuchs was asked to go back to Munich and check the automatic lock of the entrance door at Kreittmayrstrasse 7. Stashinsky had claimed that he had twice broken his keys trying to open the door. Sure enough, Fuchs found metal parts of the broken keys in the lock. Stashinsky’s testimony on the dates of his travel and hotel stays matched the records unearthed by Fuchs and his assistants. On September 11, the authorities interviewed Inge Pohl, who confirmed and further corroborated her husband’s testimony. The Americans, they concluded, were wrong: Stashinsky was not lying.

  The final turning point in the interrogation came on September 12, 1961. Present in the interrogation chamber along with Vanhauer were the chief police commissioner and a number of security officers. A report filed by those present stated that “Stashinsky’s quiet, sure and precise statements with regard to events preceding the assassination, the lapse of time, and the description of the localities and the execution of the deeds led to the general conclusion that Stashinsky could, in fact, be the murderer of Rebet and Bandera.” The information he then provided upon visiting both crime scenes on September 22 added further credibility to his story.3

  In late September and early October 1961, Stashinsky was questioned once again by agents of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA), who concluded once and for all that he was telling the truth. To make certain, they brought along an interpreter who could interrogate Stashinsky in his mother tongue. Whatever doubts the German investigators had about Stashinsky’s story were now gone. The suspect seemed as genuine and as distressed as a person could be under such circumstances. “His behavior made it apparent,” recalled Inspector Vanhauer, “that he wanted to tell all that was weighing on him and have it recorded in the minutes with all the details.”

  Stashinsky must have been relieved that this time the investigators believed him. At Vanhauer’s request, he prepared a map of his native village and made drawings of his apartment building and apartment in Moscow, as well as of the weapons he had used to kill both his victims. But it did not come easily to him. He probably suffered from insomnia, as he had in the past. Vanhauer also noticed signs of depression. “On some days he was very downcast, and it was apparent that he was seriously remorseful about having carried out the assassinations.”4

  By late September the CIA came to the realization that Stashinsky, to whom the CIA officers referred using the code name “Aeskewer 1,” was actually a gold mine of information. The Americans were putting pressure on the West German authorities to go public with Stashinsky’s testimony. But the West Germans were hesitant.

  The federal elections that took place on September 17, 1961, left West Germany without a strong government. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer struggled to create a coalition in the new parliament and stay in power. No one in the interim government wanted to take responsibility for releasing explosive information that could cause another crisis in relations with the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office was not prepared to say anything publicly about the investigation before its indictment was ready. The Germans offered to publish the story in the United States rather than at home, but the CIA turned them down, as the case lay outside American territory.5

  Stashinsky continued to be questioned into November. “My present attitude to both deeds is fundamentally different,” said Stashinsky to his interrogators:

  This is explained by the change which I have undergone since November 1959. The reason for my flight to the West is to be found in this change. I wanted to unburden my conscience and wanted to give world-wide publicity to the way in which “peaceful coexistence” really works in practice. I did not want to go on being used on murder assignments. I wanted to warn all those who live in danger of being liquidated, as were Rebet and Bandera, to take precautions. I hope that my flight to the West will be seen as lessening my guilt, for I have brought a great deal upon myself through my flight. The fate of my parents and relatives will come to pass, or may already have come to pass, as I have described it. My flight has already resulted in my father-in-law, who still lives in the Soviet Zone, being kept in custody for seven weeks by the Soviet authorities. It is by no means certain that he will not be subject to more serious measures when my case becomes known in its entirety. My wife and I will always live in the fear that we shall one day be overtaken by retribution from the East. Quite apart from that, we are certainly without means here in the West. Nevertheless I have decided in favor of the West, because I believe that this step was absolutely necessary for the world at large.6

  Bogdan Stashinsky was fighting for his life. His strategy was not to hide what he had done but to explain why he had done it and why he now regretted his actions. He was also prepared to go public with his revelations. Publicity was never part of Stashinsky’s original plan, and it is hard to say whether this idea came to him independently or was suggested by the interrogators, but he was ready to play along. He had accepted the prospect that both his family and Inge’s would probably become victims of any such publicity. For his interrogators, this was a chance to unmask Soviet actions on the international scene. Stashinsky’s statements were beginning to have international repercussions, whether he wanted them to or not.

  35

  PRESS CONFERENCE

  While the West Germans debated whether to publicize Stashinsky’s statements, the Soviets decided to beat them to the punch and tell their version first. On Friday, October 13, 1961, Kurt Blecha, the head of the East German government press service, called a press conference in East Berlin to announce their cover story. “Today we will become acquainted with the criminal intrigues of the Bonn Federal Intelligence Service, which is subordinate to [Director of the Federal Chancellery Hans] Globke . . . and which is headed by [Reinhard] Gehlen, the former general of the Nazi Secret Service,” Blecha told the journalists. He referred to Globke as “the murderer of Jews.”

  Globke had been involved in the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship, while Gehlen had worked in the Wehrmacht intelligence. Blecha was now suggesting that Globke and Gehlen—now in prominent roles in the West German government—had continued their criminal activities long after the end of the war, and he had evidence to prove it. “Herr Lippolz,” continued Blecha, referring to a man he was about to introduce to the reporters, “by using concrete examples will acquaint us with the methods of these political murderers. And in this way, we will help the German public and the whole world take notice of the criminal intrigues of the Bonn ‘ultras’ and their political methods, which include the murder of individual people as well as mass murder.”1

  Stefan Lippolz, a balding, bespectacled man in his early fifties, began with an apology for his limited command of German. Lippolz had been born in 1907 to a family of German colonists in the Volhynia region of Ukraine, which then belonged to the Russian Empire. As the Soviet Union took over Volhynia in 1939 after the si
gning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lippolz claimed the status of Volksdeutcher and was resettled in the Third Reich. He was soon drafted into the army and sent to intelligence school; after graduating, he served as an interpreter for various military intelligence units, including one under Gehlen’s general command. He was briefly imprisoned by the Soviets in 1945. Until 1951 he lived in East Germany, after which he moved to the West using the Berlin loophole. Settling in Munich, he opened a restaurant and befriended fellow Ukrainians, many of whom belonged to the Bandera organization. According to CIA records, he had been in Soviet employ since 1929 and was sent to Munich with a supply of poison and the order to kill Bandera. Instead he turned himself in and confessed to the officers of the US Counter Intelligence Corps, who in 1954 passed him to the CIA as a double agent. The KGB recalled him to the East soon after Stashinsky’s defection.2

  Now Lippolz claimed that while in Munich, he was approached by a certain Dr. Weber, a representative of Gehlen’s BND, who asked him to collect intelligence about Stepan Bandera. Soon thereafter he was ordered to kill the émigré leader by mixing a poisonous powder into his food. The Gehlen people wanted Bandera out of the picture because he had decided to cooperate with British intelligence rather than the West Germans. Lippolz failed to carry out the assignment. He told Dr. Weber that he did not have adequate access to Bandera and advised him to recruit someone who was better placed.

  Lippolz claimed that Dr. Weber had found such a man in his friend Dmytro Myskiw, a confidant of Bandera’s. Believing that Gehlen’s operatives were about to kill him, Lippolz fled West Germany, only returning to visit Myskiw in late December 1959. He found his friend terribly distraught: Myskiw told Lippolz that he had assassinated Bandera by putting poison into his food at lunch on the day of his death. Myskiw also said that Bandera’s security people were looking for him. Lippolz left West Germany again, this time hiding in Norway. It was there that he learned about Myskiw’s unexpected death in March 1960. “You can well imagine the impression all this created on me,” Lippolz told the reporters. “I was just as uneasy, depressed and intimidated as Dmytro Myskiw was a few months ago. . . . Realizing that there was no other way to escape the secret murderers of the Gehlen Intelligence, I crossed the border to the GDR and surrendered myself to the authorities.”

  The statement was followed by a question-and-answer period in which Lippolz did his best to link his testimony to the allegations against Theodor Oberländer that had been advanced earlier by the East German and Soviet press. Bandera, suggested Lippolz, was killed because he stood in the way of Bundesminister Oberländer, who was afraid that the Ukrainian leader would testify against him at the trial concerning Oberländer’s participation in the Lviv pogroms in June and July 1941. According to Lippolz, Myskiw had confessed to him that the Gehlen operative who had ordered him to kill Bandera had said the following: “Bandera should finally shut his mouth, as certain respectable people in the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] also have an interest in that,” clearly referencing Oberländer. The press conference included a statement by a representative of the East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi), who attacked former Nazis holding senior positions in Gehlen’s BND and stressed the links between Bandera’s people and Oberländer. He promised a full investigation into the circumstances of Bandera’s death.3

  With the wealth of Nazi archives at their disposal, the East German Security Ministry and the KGB were uniquely positioned to track down and expose former Nazis in the West German security services. They also were known to blackmail former SS men into working for Soviet intelligence in exchange for keeping their past hidden. The CIA believed that it was from one such ex-Nazi that the Soviets had learned that Stashinsky was talking to the West Germans. The name of the former SS officer and now Soviet spy in the ranks of Gehlen’s service was Heinz Felfe. A former SS Obersturmführer, Felfe had joined the Gehlen Organization in 1951 and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming head of the counterintelligence department. Catching Soviet spies was his daytime job, providing the perfect cover for his own covert activities. He supplied the KGB with huge quantities of information on BND and CIA agents in the East.

  The information that Felfe provided on Stashinsky’s testimony was one of the last messages he sent to his KGB handlers. Felfe was placed under surveillance after the CIA triple agent Michał Goleniewski helped to identify him as a KGB spy after escaping to East Berlin in January 1961. On October 20, 1961, the authorities intercepted a radio message from the East addressed to Felfe: “Inform promptly whether it is advisable to ask Busch about reaction to Lippolz’s press conference of 13.10. [1961].” Another message on that subject followed a week later: “Inform promptly whether it is advisable to continue the explanatory campaign. Your opinion of the question put to Busch on 20.10. [1961].” Friedrich Busch was a BND officer responsible for efforts to counter the KGB deception campaign against the BND. The KGB was eager to know whether its disinformation campaign was working. New requests with regard to the impact of the Lippolz press conference were sent to Felfe on October 28, and again on November 4. It was that last request, mailed to Felfe by one of his accomplices, that provided legal grounds for Felfe’s arrest on November 6, 1961.4

  Lippolz’s press conference was sponsored by the Stasi. But the public spectacle, which was supposed to control the damage, failed to accomplish its purpose. It was soon revealed that Dmytro Myskiw, who had allegedly confessed to the murder of Bandera, could not possibly have been the assassin: on the day of Bandera’s death he had attended a major Ukrainian church gathering in Rome. The Bandera organization was quick to offer proof of this alibi, thus discrediting KGB allegations that Bandera had been killed by one of his own before the theory could gain any traction in the Western media.5

  Despite its promise at the press conference, the East German Security Ministry never reported on the outcome of its investigation into Lippolz’s accusations. On November 10, 1961, the ministry held another press conference accusing Gehlen and the BND of political murder, but provided no new information about the killing of Bandera. On April 2, 1962, they held yet another press conference in East Berlin, this time featuring another of their operatives, whom they recalled from Munich: a former agent of the Abwehr (Nazi military intelligence), Osyp Verhun. Verhun claimed that Stashinsky was not an agent of the KGB but in fact a loyal member of the Ukrainian underground who had killed Bandera on orders from the rival nationalist faction. Immediately after the press conference, the KGB sent a request to its counterpart organizations in the Eastern bloc countries, asking them to use their clandestine channels to publish the conference materials in the West. The goal was not only to exonerate the KGB of the murder of Bandera but also to drive a wedge between Western intelligence services: Verhun also claimed that General Gehlen’s BND was recruiting agents among Ukrainian nationalists to spy on the United States.6

  In Kyiv, the KGB was getting ready to deal with a possible backlash from the remnants of the nationalist underground as a reaction to Stashinsky’s revelations. They reckoned with the possibility of terrorism in retaliation for the assassination of Bandera. In November 1961, the head of the Ukrainian KGB, Vitalii Nikitchenko, sent a memo to regional KGB offices warning them that “a provocational fabrication is being disseminated in the foreign press and radio to the effect that the death of one of the heads of the foreign Ukrainian nationalist centers, Bandera, supposedly resulted from measures taken by state security agencies of the Soviet Union.” He advised his underlings to deny everything: “If reports concerning that matter are received from agents, the operative should tell the agent that this is one more provocation.”

  In February 1962, the heads of regional KGB branches in Ukraine received a new memo from their chief in Kyiv. Nikitchenko called on them to be vigilant with regard to published materials associating the KGB with Bandera’s death that were being sent to Ukraine from the West by regular mail. Ironically, the memo warning KGB officers about “provocational reports on the involvement
of Soviet intelligence in the death of Stepan Bandera” was prepared for Nikitchenko’s signature by none other than Colonel Daimon, Stashinsky’s control officer, now safely in Kyiv. As always, he was particularly careful. The words “death of Stepan Bandera” were inserted in the document by hand—the typist was not supposed to know the key element of the memo that she typed.7

  36

  HIGH POLITICS

  The West German response to the Soviet disinformation campaign came on Friday, November 17, 1961. On that day, with the personal approval of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office stated that it had taken custody of a Soviet citizen, Bogdan Stashinsky, who had been arrested on charges of “maintaining contacts intended to carry out treason to the state.” The authorities announced that Stashinsky had been convinced to defect by his young East German wife. He believed that he would be assassinated as an unwanted witness if he remained in Russia and, despite the murders he had committed, believed defection was his only chance to remain alive.1

  By the time the statement was released, Heinz Felfe, the BND officer and KGB agent who had informed Moscow about the results of Stashinsky’s interrogations, was already in a West German prison. The West German governing coalition had finally solidified after the indecisive September elections, and Chancellor Adenauer felt confident in releasing the information that Stashinsky had revealed about Bandera’s death. He dropped this public relations bombshell right before leaving for Washington to meet with President Kennedy to discuss the state of East-West relations in the shadow of the rising Berlin Wall.2