The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Padoch struggled to make sense of the unusually lenient treatment by the West German court. He suspected that the verdict was the result of a deal that Stashinsky had made not with the German prosecutor, as suggested by Kersten, but with the Americans. “He probably paid for it in a different currency,” wrote the disheartened Padoch to Lenkavsky on the day the verdict was published. “He probably spent considerable time with our American investigators.” This assumption was shared by others. A reporter for United Press International (UPI) finished his article on the verdict with the statement: “He is considered too valuable to Allied intelligence to exhaust himself crushing rock.”4

  The verdict in the Stashinsky trial caused a sensation in Germany. The West German media was divided in its assessment, as shown by the articles appearing in the next few days. “Verdict of the Year—the Killers Are Sitting in Moscow,” wrote a reporter for Hamburg’s Bild-Zeitung. “Mild Sentence—An Invitation to Killers,” opined a reporter for the Rheinische Post. A reporter for the Badische Zeitung wrote that no ordinary person could understand how an assassin could be judged a mere accessory to murder.

  The verdict touched on a number of highly sensitive elements of German postwar political history and identity, one of them being the Nazi legacy. Both the chief public prosecutor, Albin Kuhn, and the presiding judge, Heinrich Jagusch, made reference to the recent Nazi past—Kuhn in his legal judgment on the last day of the trial, and Jagusch in the text of the verdict. But the two references were of quite a different nature. Kuhn evoked the Nazi past to make the point that Germany’s own experience with totalitarianism should not make German courts more forgiving of crimes committed on behalf of such states. “We Germans have no reason merely to criticize others,” stated Kuhn. “For we have not yet done with our own past. Acts of violence are not, however, less serious because they have been committed by others.” Jagusch, on the other hand, argued that the Germans themselves knew how difficult it was to withstand concerted brainwashing on the part of the state. Stashinsky, he said, was not a willing or enthusiastic perpetrator, not an “Eichmann type who joyfully obeys the Führer and carries out the orders he receives with even greater emphasis.” He claimed that “the accused was at the time in question a poor devil who acted automatically under pressure of commands and was misled and confused ideologically.”5

  Many immediately sensed the danger of setting this precedent. A reporter for the Frankfurter Rundschau wrote: “It sounds like a mockery when President Jagusch of the Senate says in his explanation of the sentence that Germans supposedly have a special understanding for such people as Stashinsky—an assassin acting on orders? . . . Does he not see how close his sentence brings him to the principles of a government for which murder is not a crime?” A reader of the Hamburg Bild-Zeitung wrote to his newspaper: “Now all the verdicts in cases of murders carried out on Hitler’s orders will have to be reviewed.”6

  Since the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, the West German courts had universally rejected the argument that Nazi perpetrators had simply followed orders. Now the Federal Criminal Court and then the High Court, which approved its ruling, were dramatically reversing that policy. Both courts formally rejected the “acting under duress of orders” defense in the Stashinsky case, but the ruling opened new avenues for the defense of Nazi criminals, as they could now claim that they had only been accessories to murder, while the main perpetrators, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and other top officials of the Third Reich, were long gone.

  Few doubted that the verdict was influenced by a broader political agenda directly related to the Cold War. Some welcomed that; others found it deplorable. “The verdict is perfectly correct, for it must be hoped that thanks to this man’s confession the beclouded eyes of many people in the West have cleared up with regard to assessing Moscow’s policy,” wrote a reader of the Hamburg Bild-Zeitung. Another disagreed: “This is frightful. Are we a state under the rule of law or lackeys of a policy of assassins?”7

  The question of the violation of West German sovereignty by the country’s powerful Soviet neighbor was another highly sensitive issue for the public and the political elite. Immediately after the publication of the verdict, Karl-Günther von Hase, the chief spokesman for the West German government, made a statement in which he declared: “It is a monstrous fact that a foreign power has deemed it necessary, with complete disregard of all human laws, to pass summary judgments in this country.” The media asked whether the government would take real action against the Soviets in response. “And what will Bonn do?” asked a reporter for the Karlsruhe-based Badische Neueste Nachrichten. “The unconscionable violation of the sovereignty of our federal state is a proven fact. Rebet and Bandera were murdered in Munich on Soviet orders. Criminal and international law were flouted. No one can consider himself safe from Moscow—no state, no individual.” But the government was not eager to act. The author of the Badische Neueste Nachrichten article was right. No European state, especially West Germany, could feel safe in the face of a rising communist superpower willing to change the rules of the game in order to gain equal status with the Americans.8

  German parliamentarians began to request an official government response. The first request was made on December 7, 1962. The government dodged it by pointing out that the High Court in Karlsruhe had not yet filed its official judgment. After repeated requests, the government sent an official note to the Soviet embassy in Bonn in April 1964. It read: “As the Federal Court has established, both . . . crimes were committed on orders of Soviet agencies. This leads the Federal Government to bring to the attention of the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that such actions are acutely contrary to generally recognized principles of law, especially international law.” The note ended with standard assurances of mutual respect: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs takes this opportunity to assure the embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of its great respect.” The Soviet authorities ignored the note, and German officials did not press them for a response.9

  PART VII

  DEPARTED

  46

  UNANSWERED LETTER

  On November 7, 1963, a year after the trial, Charles Kersten sat down to write a letter to President John F. Kennedy. The president, with whom Kersten shared not only his Catholic faith but also a record of anticommunist crusading, was his last hope to bring Bogdan Stashinsky, who was now in prison in West Germany, to the United States to testify before a Senate committee investigating the Soviet assassinations abroad.

  Kersten considered Stashinsky’s testimony to be a matter of state importance. He presented the highlights of Stashinsky’s story and noted that “before his defection Stashinsky was being trained for high level killing in England and the United States. There are undoubtedly others in such training.” He wanted the president to force the State Department to lift its objections to admitting Stashinsky to the United States. “I think you agree with me,” he wrote, “that full exposure of deadly subversive operations is the best way to prevent them.” At the end of the letter, Kersten reminded Kennedy of their days as anticommunist crusaders in the US Congress in the late 1940s. He also recalled the time when “the exposure of Communist operations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1947 helped break the hold of the conspiracy on industry in the area.” Kersten attached a photograph of the two of them during their trip to Milwaukee to organize hearings on the communist penetration of trade unions.1

  Kersten had tried to gain as much publicity as possible for the Stashinsky case. Immediately after the trial, he had issued a statement that read: “The verdict of the German Supreme Court is just and is a great victory for truth. It reveals the Russian Communist government as the real killer.” Kersten stated that on behalf of Yaroslava Bandera he was going to bring the case against Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet government before the International Tribunal in the Hague and the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. While in West Germany, Kersten had even spoke
n with Professor Hermann Mosler, a renowned authority on international law at Heidelberg University, to discuss the possibility of bringing the case before the United Nations. Upon his return to the United States, Kersten strategized with his Ukrainian friends and visited some foreign representatives to the United Nations, but the project had never gotten off the ground.2

  Fresh from his visit to Karlsruhe and disappointed with his unsuccessful attempts to bring the case before the United Nations, Charles Kersten joined a campaign to hold hearings on the Stashinsky case on Capitol Hill. It was spearheaded by Professor Lev Dobriansky, the chairman of the National Captive Nations Committee. On February 19, 1963, Kersten wrote to his old ally, Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, the vice chairman of the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, urging him to take part. “I know that you are fully aware that it is not only the launchings of missiles that we fear from Cuba,” wrote Kersten, referring to the Cuban crisis of less than six months earlier. “It is also the diabolical subversive tactics that the Communists employ all over the world, and in this case the potential of swift, silent and unattributed murder of even the highest officials in the United States who oppose the Soviets.” Kersten wrote a similar letter to the ranking member of the subcommittee, Senator Kenneth Keating of New York. Both responded in March 1963, with Keating referring the matter to Dodd, and Dodd indicating his interest in the idea.

  “I agree with you that the case might give us a wedge with which to go into the entire matter of stimulated and induced suicide as practiced by the Soviet terror apparatus,” wrote Dodd to Kersten. He promised to discuss the matter further with his colleagues on the committee. Kersten wrote back to his old friend, further encouraging him to go ahead with the hearings. Kersten cited one of the earlier reports of Dodd’s committee, which stated that after considering a number of suspected political killings, the committee could not find “ironclad proof that the Kremlin . . . in any of these cases committed murder and dressed it up as a suicide.” The Stashinsky trial, wrote Kersten, provided that ironclad proof.3

  Lev Dobriansky, the main advocate for the hearings, believed that Stashinsky should be brought to the United States to be a star witness. “My feeling was,” recalled Dobriansky later, “that we should dramatize all this. In having Stashinsky and numerous others here we would show the interrelationships of the subject of the political murders ordered by Moscow. Especially after the Supreme Court in West Germany indicted and charged not so much Stashinsky as the Russian government in Moscow, this was deemed necessary.” But the State Department refused to give its approval. Officials cited logistical difficulties and security concerns, but Dobriansky believed their lack of support was driven by the “whole détente that was supposed to be built up between the United States and the USSR.”4

  By the summer of 1963, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had changed dramatically, and for the better. The Berlin Wall crisis of the summer and fall of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 were in the past. In July 1963, American, British, and Soviet negotiators agreed on conditions for a treaty on a partial nuclear test ban—the first major step toward limiting nuclear arsenals. The next month, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev set up a hotline between the White House and the Kremlin to help resolve possible future crises. Kennedy authorized a quarter-billion-dollar deal for the sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union—a measure intended to relieve the severity of Soviet food shortages. On October 7, in the presence of his advisers and congressional leaders, Kennedy signed the agreement on the limitation of nuclear tests. It was a major turn in his relations with Khrushchev and marked the height of the short-lived Soviet-American rapprochement. No one wanted to hear about Stashinsky or political murders carried out on the orders of the same man in the Kremlin who seemed to have finally come to his senses, was eager to buy American wheat, and promised not to test his nuclear weapons.5

  The letter that Kersten sent President Kennedy, urging him to support the idea of Senate hearings on Soviet assassination tactics, was never answered. On November 22, 1963, two weeks after Kersten sent his letter, the president was assassinated in Dallas. A copy of Kersten’s letter was forwarded to the FBI. The FBI suspected that Kersten’s prediction that the Soviets might send trained killers from Havana to assassinate anticommunist leaders in the United States was coming true. Lee Harvey Oswald uncannily fitted the image of the Moscow-trained and Havana-directed killer that Kersten had warned against. Were Khrushchev and Aleksandr Shelepin—who now held enormous power as chairman of the Party and State Control Commission, and would soon be named to the Communist Party Presidium—back at work, now ordering the killing of an American president? This supposition terrified many Americans. If that was the case, what should be the response? And could it be anything less than all-out nuclear war?6

  These were questions over which many American politicians, including people at the very top of the government, lost sleep. Despite Oswald’s prolonged stay in the Soviet Union, his Soviet wife, and his ties with Cuban émigrés, government investigators worked hard to promote the lone gunman theory of the assassination. For William Hood, who served as the CIA chief in Munich during the assassination of Bandera, it was another high-profile killing on his watch, but one of much larger significance and greater potential repercussions. Transferred from Germany to Langley at the beginning of the decade, Hood was one of a handful of CIA officers who signed a cable that failed to disclose Oswald’s recent arrest for a quarrel with anti-Castro émigrés. He had helped to remove Oswald’s name from the FBI watch list a few weeks before the Kennedy assassination. Despite this, Hood would keep his job and would not retire from the CIA until the 1970s. Whether the Soviets were involved or not—and, in 1963, no one could say for sure—few people in power were prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union, even over the assassination of the president.7

  47

  GUEST FROM WASHINGTON

  Friday, April 10, 1964, was an usual day in Bogdan Stashinsky’s otherwise monotonous and uneventful life behind bars. That morning he was transferred to the High Criminal Court in Karlsruhe, where he had stood trial a year and a half earlier. They wanted him to meet a VIP from overseas. His name was Senator Thomas J. Dodd. Stashinsky was on his list of people to see, along with the new chancellor of West Germany, Ludwig Erhard; his predecessor, Konrad Adenauer; the chief federal prosecutor, Ludwig Martin; and the presiding judge in the Stashinsky trial, Heinrich Jagusch.

  The senator later claimed that whomever else he saw on the visit, his main purpose was first and foremost to meet Mr. Stashinsky. The meeting took place in the presence of one of the prosecutors at the Stashinsky trial, Dr. Oberle, and a number of US officials—some of them had come with the senator all the way from Washington; others were from the American embassy in Bonn. Senator Dodd’s trip to Karlsruhe to see Bogdan Stashinsky had been long in the making.1

  The murder of John Kennedy had revived interest in the idea of holding hearings on Capitol Hill to discuss the Soviet use of political assassinations. In February 1964, the CIA had prepared a report on the “Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping” for the commission investigating Kennedy’s murder, and it included a section on the Stashinsky case. But the problem of bringing him to the United States remained unsolved. In late January, Lev Dobriansky had learned that in order to move the whole thing along, Senator Dodd had decided to go to West Germany himself to interview Stashinsky and the West German officials involved in his case.2

  Dodd’s German agenda was filled with meetings with top West German politicians, both active and retired. His meeting with Konrad Adenauer took place on the morning of April 8, the first full day of Dodd’s visit. The chancellor did not hide his criticism of the late President Kennedy and his foreign policy. He considered Kennedy to be too soft on the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis. In October 1962, soon after the end of the Stashinsky trial, he asked the US ambassador to West Germany to make the transcripts of the trial available for
Kennedy to demonstrate what the Soviets were up to and what they were capable of. Now he raised concerns about the growing American trade with the Soviet Union, especially Kennedy’s American grain deal with Khrushchev. The irony, Dodd told him, was that if Kennedy were still alive, the Senate would probably have defeated the deal; the president’s death had made that a political impossibility.3

  The next day, Dodd went to Karlsruhe to meet with Dr. Hubert Schrubbers, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (West German counterintelligence), who briefed him on the Stashinsky case and Soviet espionage in West Germany. The statistics that Schrubbers presented to Dodd were impressive: there had been 222 cases of kidnapping in West Germany in the past few years, most of them in Berlin. In 52 of those cases, force had been used, and in 7 cases the victims had been drugged. The rest were lured to the East by deception. The threat posed by Soviet espionage and the activities of its agents was nowhere as serious as in West Germany.

  April 10 was the Stashinsky day on Dodd’s schedule. In the morning, the senator discussed the case with Dr. Bruno Heusinger, the president of the Federal Criminal Court. They also talked about the ongoing trial of the former SS men involved in running Auschwitz—Dodd had visited the proceedings the previous day in Cologne. Heusinger told him that the two cases, those of the Auschwitz criminals and Stashinsky, were legally intertwined. Both trials, he said, demonstrated “how an all-powerful state apparatus could deform and enslave the human character.” Judging by Dodd’s notes, they did not formally discuss whether the accused in the Auschwitz trial would be treated in the same way as Stashinsky—as accessories to murder rather than perpetrators—but Heusinger’s comments suggested that it was a possibility. The verdict in the Stashinsky trial had created a precedent that was now influencing the trials of Nazi criminals in West German courts. After his meeting with Heusinger, Dodd went to see the primary author of the Stashinsky verdict, Heinrich Jagusch. They talked about Stashinsky, his crimes, and his future. Dodd now felt prepared to meet the man he had heard so much about.4