The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  41

  BIG DAY

  On the morning of October 10, 1962, the courtroom was more crowded than ever. On that day the former KGB agent was scheduled to testify about the murder of Stepan Bandera. There were more journalists present than before, and some celebrities showed up at the trial for the first time. Among them was the now retired Bundesminister Theodor Oberländer. He came to witness the confession of the man who had committed the crime for which he himself had been falsely accused. That accusation had helped finish Oberländer’s political career. Perhaps the trial would prove to the world that he was innocent.

  Oberländer was a popular figure in the courtroom, which was full of East European refugees whose interests he had represented in the government. Borys Vitoshynsky, who, as always, came to the courtroom long before the opening of the proceedings, even had the opportunity to meet the former minister. “There are more people than on previous days; the noise is louder,” wrote Vitoshynsky in his reportage for that day. “Almost everyone listening to the trial leafs quickly through the morning papers to scan the reports on the previous day.” As always, Vitoshynsky paid close attention to the behavior of the accused, who consulted with his attorney before the proceedings, as he did every day. “And the fact that Stashinsky listens to him very carefully and always nods his head as a sign of agreement shows that the KGB agent does not feel very confident in the environment of the ‘corrupt’ West,” wrote Vitoshynsky, referring to a Soviet propaganda cliché. “But he tries to adjust to that environment at least outwardly—from time to time he smooths the hair on his head, adjusts his tie or his suit, and ogles the young girls sitting in the chamber.”

  Apart from the young girls, Stashinsky also paid special attention to the ranked members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Among them was the man who Stashinsky believed might have been his next target, the former prime minister of the short-lived independent Ukrainian government of 1941, Yaroslav Stetsko, whom the Germans had incarcerated in Sachsenhausen. Now fifty years old, Stetsko was the head of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. The previous day, Stashinsky had told the court that his KGB handlers had ordered him to locate Stetsko’s apartment in Munich, which was exactly how they had first put him on the trail of both Rebet and Bandera. For Stetsko, this was the first day of the trial he could attend. He had just returned from Tokyo, where he had attended a conference organized by the Asian People’s Anticommunist League. In his address to the conference, Stetsko had referred to the Stashinsky trial as the latest proof of Moscow’s desire to control the world.1

  Soon after 9:00 a.m., Heinrich Jagusch entered the room along with the rest of the judges. He opened the proceedings with a benign-sounding request: “Tell us what happened in the summer of 1958.” With Jagusch’s help, Stashinsky told the court the story of his travels to Rotterdam and Munich in search of Bandera. When he described the excitement of his control officer, Sergei Damon, over finding Bandera’s address in the telephone book, Jagusch did not hide his disbelief. “That does not sound very probable,” he told Stashinsky. “They could have known all that—telephone number, address, license plate number.” Stashinsky had no answer. Despite its allegedly deep penetration of the Ukrainian nationalist organizations, the KGB was at least a few years behind its targets. In 1957 Stashinsky’s KGB contacts had given him Rebet’s old home address, and the same thing had happened with Bandera.

  “For some time I did not receive any assignments,” Stashinsky continued. Then, in late April 1959, he was ordered to go to Moscow. It was there, in a Moscow hotel, that he met a KGB “aristocrat” called Georgii Avksentievich, who told him that the decision had been made to “liquidate” his target in the same manner as Rebet. “Did he express himself as you said, or did he say which agency had adopted that resolution?” asked Jagusch. “He did not speak clearly about that,” responded Stashinsky. “It emerged from what he said that the resolution had been adopted by the ‘supreme authority.’” Jagusch probed further. Did the expression mean that the order came from the government? Stashinsky said that it did: he became convinced of it when he visited the head of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, later that year to receive his award for a job well done.

  This was the first time that the name of Shelepin, by now a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU), had been mentioned by Stashinsky in his testimony, and the first direct reference to top Soviet government officials. A number of journalists immediately rose from their seats and headed for the exit, and then to the telephones. They were rushing to report on the most politically explosive information so far revealed by the accused: Stashinsky had confirmed earlier press reports that the new secretary of the CC CPSU had been personally involved in the plot to assassinate Bandera.

  Stashinsky continued his testimony, speaking to an audience riveted by the sheer drama of what he was describing. “I saw Bandera disappear into the garage,” testified Stashinsky, recalling his first direct encounter with Bandera and his first, failed attempt to assassinate him. “Then I went out [of the archway of another building where he had been hiding], taking the weapon out of my pocket on the way.” He spoke slowly, heightening the tension in the room. “I held the weapon in my right hand, with an ampoule in the left, began walking, and was convinced that I should attempt the assassination now,” continued Stashinsky. “When I was directly in front of the archway, I thought for a moment that here he was, standing and doing something around the car, not knowing that I was already on my way, that by the same token his death was very near, that in an instant he would no longer be alive.”

  These words were met with complete silence. Pale as always, Stashinsky fixed his gaze on Jagusch, while everyone else looked at him. Even the stenographers had stopped typing. “I went into the entrance archway,” continued Stashinsky. “The garage was open, the car was in the garage; he was standing on the left side, doing something near the driver’s seat. He had just got out of the car. . . . I had already taken two steps in his direction, but then a thought flashed through my mind, and I told myself that I would not do it. I turned and went away.” One could almost hear a sigh of relief from the audience. Only Jagusch seemed unaffected by the emotional roller coaster of the story. “Was it a stone or a wooden bridge?” he asked after Stashinsky told the court that in order to make it impossible to change his mind, he fired the spray pistol into the ground, and then dropped it from a bridge into the very stream in the Hofgarten into which he had dumped the pistol he had used to assassinate Lev Rebet a year and a half earlier. Stashinsky responded that this time it was a stone bridge—same stream, different bridge.

  When Stashinsky reached the day of the actual killing of Bandera, he recounted how, after seeing the car leaving Zeppelinstrasse, he had hopped on the tram to go to Bandera’s apartment building. Jagusch wasted no time in highlighting the inconsistency: “What were you thinking of? You could have said to yourself: now he’s driven off; enough for today. Instead of that, you asked yourself where he was going.” Stashinsky had no good answer, except that he was just following orders. “I had to take steps of some kind that would make it clear that I was trying to carry out the assignment,” he told the judge. When Stashinsky moved on to the description of the actual killing, Jagusch asked another of his characteristically brief questions: “What did you do?” “I understood that I could not refuse to carry out the assassination,” responded Stashinsky. “I had to do it!” The tension in the courtroom peaked again. “Some listeners leaned forward, bracing themselves for the impending shock,” wrote Vitoshynsky. “No one stirs; there is no whispering to be heard, nor coughing. Five judges in crimson robes, with broad white fronts and bow ties, sit motionless, like sculptures against the background of the front wall, and do not take their eyes off Stashinsky. And he keeps his head down, speaking irregularly, almost in a whisper, and continues his terrible story.”

  He did not dare to go into the courtyard this time, Stashinsky told the judges. Instead, he
walked to the entrance of the building and opened the door with the keys he had received in Karlshorst. He then locked the door from the inside and took the stairs to the ground floor, where he would wait until Bandera entered the hallway. A few minutes later, after avoiding detection by a woman who was leaving the building, Stashinsky saw Stepan Bandera standing in front of him at the main door, struggling with his key, which he was trying to remove from the keyhole. He was carrying some bags under his arm. One of them was open, and Stashinsky said that he could see it contained green tomatoes. “That was not the right situation for carrying out the killing,” Stashinsky told the court, which was hanging on his every word. “He would have had to close the door behind him.”

  It was then that Bandera, hearing the sound of his approaching footsteps, raised his head and saw Stashinsky. “In that moment he saw me; I looked at him,” said Stashinsky. To gain time, Stashinsky pretended to be fixing his shoelace. But when he arose, Bandera was still busy with the door. “Then I went on,” continued Stashinsky. “I did not know whether to carry out the assassination or not. I was coming down the stairs and already thinking that in a moment I would pass him, and probably nothing would come of all that. On the other hand, I knew that I had to do it. . . . This was already the second attempt, and I should not let it pass, I thought.” Stashinsky told the court that he had heard his own voice as if from a distance. He asked Bandera whether anything was wrong with the lock. He knew that this was foolish: his accent could betray him. Bandera responded that everything was in order. Stashinsky held the door with his left hand. Bandera finally got his key out of the lock. Stashinsky paused for a second, not knowing what to do. “I stood there and wanted to close the door behind me,” Stashinsky told the court, “. . . [S]uddenly I raised my hand and pressed both triggers, turned instantly, closed the door behind me, and went away.”

  Borys Vitoshynsky took a look at his watch. It was 11:30 a.m. on October 10, 1962. The truth about the death of his friend and leader was finally out. Theodor Oberländer, the retired federal minister, finally had proof of his own innocence. Yaroslav Stetsko, the no. 3 man on the KGB hit list, had no problem imagining what his own assassination might someday look like.

  A few minutes later, Hans Neuwirth, the attorney representing the Bandera family, had his first opportunity to ask a question: “What did you think when you were killing Mr. Stepan Bandera?” It took some time for Stashinsky to come up with an answer. He was clearly nervous when he finally spoke: “I had no personal reason to kill him. I was only carrying out an order.” Jagusch adjourned the court for lunch. The members of the audience headed for the exit.2

  42

  DOUBT

  Bogdan Stashinsky’s confession of double murder in a courtroom full of West German and foreign journalists was as stunning as it was difficult to believe. Why would someone who had committed two murders admit to them so candidly? Was he being manipulated?

  The Soviet and East German media vehemently argued that Stashinsky must be a devoted follower of Bandera who had agreed to sacrifice himself in order to implicate Moscow for crimes it had not committed. In early October 1962, before the trial began, the Soviets published an interview with one Mykhailo Davydiak, a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists who had been sent by Bandera and the West German foreign intelligence on an espionage mission to Ukraine. Davydiak claimed that before he left in the spring of 1959, Bandera had personally met with him and asked him to locate and gather intelligence on the Stashinsky family in Ukraine. Bandera, suggested Davydiak, wanted to send Bogdan Stashinsky, who was an OUN member currently in the West, on a clandestine mission to Ukraine.1

  Questions about Stashinsky were raised not only in the East but also in the West. There was still widespread doubt about the veracity of Stashinsky’s confession on the morning of October 10. Reporters for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt (Hamburg), Deutsche Zeitung (Cologne), and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) all questioned his guilt. Part of the media’s skepticism was due to the way the presiding judge, Heinrich Jagusch, had conducted the questioning. Concerned by media leaks before the trial, Jagusch had gone out of his way to stress the impartiality of the court in his opening statement. He had lived up to that statement throughout the first few days of the trial. Jagusch was actively seeking evidence to disprove Stashinsky’s testimony about his travels to Munich, his meetings with other agents, and details of the assassinations of Rebet and Bandera. His skepticism became contagious.2

  At the end of the second day of the trial, Jagusch summarized for Stashinsky what he had said so far about his reasons for committing the murder. He asked the accused to correct him if he was wrong. “Your upbringing from 1950 to 1957 and your views were such that once you were given an order, you were to carry it out in the interests of the Soviet Union and take no account of any feelings of fear for yourself as an individual, but to overcome them,” suggested the judge. Stashinsky agreed with his statement. Jagusch asked what consequences Stashinsky had thought he might face if he refused to follow the order. Stashinsky told the court that “refusing to carry out the assassination out of humane considerations and because of my own conscientious objection would mean the most severe punishment for me. Since I knew that the assassination was being planned, I would have been isolated from everyone, which would have been equivalent to a death sentence.”

  Jagusch’s summary of Stashinsky’s argument was based not only on his testimony before the court but also on the records of his interrogation by the West German investigators. In his testimony before and during the trial, Stashinsky had spoken of Russia and the Soviet Union as equivalents. He appeared to be loyal to that Russia-led union, not to his native Ukraine. He had tried hard to leave his Ukrainian past and identity behind. Had he not done so, he would have found it difficult to consider himself a patriot.

  “I gradually became convinced of the rightness of the Soviet regime and became ever more accustomed to the view that I was doing all this for the good of the Soviet people,” said Jagusch, quoting from Stashinsky’s testimony to the police investigators. “I was a committed communist; I did everything out of political conviction. . . . I regarded [anyone’s] refusal to return to the homeland [from the West] as treason. That followed from my communist convictions. On the other hand, I had sympathy for the families of the victims, but when it came to enemies of the Russian people, my communist upbringing commanded me to be firm.” To one judge’s question of whether he believed in God, Stashinsky responded with a long silence. He told the court that until he killed Lev Rebet, he believed that he had not harmed anyone else, or at least was not directly responsible for anyone else’s death. He had grown up in a religious family, but it was not easy for him to say whether he still believed in God after all that had happened to him and all that he had done.

  As the discussion of Stashinsky’s motives went on, it was Adolf Miehr, the attorney for the Rebet family, who asked most of the questions, while Stashinsky’s attorney, Helmut Seidel, stayed silent. Seidel did not add much to the proceedings—he did not have to. It seemed as if Heinrich Jagusch, who had gone after Stashinsky so doggedly the previous day, was doing his job for him, asking questions and suggesting answers that conformed well to Seidel’s line of defense: Stashinsky had committed horrible murders, but he had done so after being brainwashed by Soviet propaganda and on orders from above that he could not disobey without putting his own life in danger. Had Stashinsky’s testimony managed to convince the judge that he was not hiding anything from the court and that he had genuinely repented? Or was this evidence of the bargain that Charles Kersten had heard about in Washington: In exchange for implicating the Soviet authorities, was Stashinsky getting lenient treatment from the court? There was more than one way to interpret the proceedings.3

  With regard to Stashinsky’s direct culpability for the killings, Jagusch had little solid evidence apart from the word of the defendant. None of the witnesses could place him on the scene at the time of the killings
. Crescenzia Huber, the woman who had passed him in the hallway before he killed Bandera, could not positively identify him in court. She actually said that the man she saw near the elevator door had darker hair than the accused. The rest of the witnesses, who testified during the fifth day of the trial and included Inspector Vanhauer of the Federal Criminal Police and Oberkommissar Adrian Fuchs of the Munich Criminal Police, could confirm that Stashinsky, or at least a person using his numerous aliases, had indeed traveled to and from Munich on the days specified by the accused and stayed in the hotels in which he claimed to have stayed. But that was it.

  The three spray pistols that Stashinsky had allegedly dumped into the stream in the Munich Hofgarten were never found, even though the stream was drained in a search for them. Adrian Fuchs explained that the city cleaned the stream every year, and the pistols had probably already been removed by the cleaners. With no murder weapon and no witnesses, Stashinsky’s ability to answer questions in a manner that generated trust in him and his story was crucial to securing his conviction.4

  The whole case would simply have fallen apart if he had ever changed his story. He did not. His narrative captured the imagination of the audience in the packed courtroom and found many sympathetic ears outside it. The reporter for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote on October 18, 1962: “This individual has qualities not often found in such measure and in such a combination. Stashinsky is extraordinarily intelligent, reacts quickly, is almost incredibly self-confident, sharp, and seems capable of dedicating himself completely to a cause he considers just.” The likability of the confessed killer presented Bandera’s followers with a major problem. They were working hard to turn the criminal trial into a political one and depict the Soviet regime as one that would stop at nothing to eliminate its enemies. Now it seemed as if one of the criminals—the only face of communism directly visible to the Western public—was winning the congeniality contest.5