The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  The meeting began soon after 2:00 p.m. The senator greeted the former KGB assassin and told him that he had “rendered an important service by telling the truth.” Dodd then launched into his questions. The senator wanted to know what Stashinsky could tell him about other assassinations, including ones that appeared to be suicides—a subject that Dodd’s committee had been investigating for some time. One such case was that of the Soviet secret agent Walter Krivitsky, who defected to the West in 1937 and wrote the book I Was Stalin’s Agent, exposing Soviet methods of espionage and assassination abroad. In February 1941, Krivitsky had been found in a Washington hotel, lying in a pool of blood, allegedly a suicide.

  Another case was that of Paul Bang-Jensen, a young Danish diplomat who refused to turn over to the United Nations a list of participants in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as he believed that it would be leaked to the Soviets. He was found dead in Queens, New York, in November 1959. As had been the case with Krivitsky, Bang-Jensen’s body was found with a suicide note explaining his reason for taking his own life.5

  Stashinsky tried to be as helpful as he could. Dodd remembered later that Stashinsky described to him “in detail how he murdered Bandera . . . and how he followed him day by day, learned his habits, met him on the stairway of the apartment house.” Stashinsky had no firsthand knowledge of other assassinations committed by the KGB, but he knew well the culture of the institutions he worked for and could make informed guesses. Commenting on the matter, he said that “in the Soviet Union it was taken for granted that this is the way one deals with certain types of political enemies in other countries.”

  Stashinsky also told Dodd that “it was his definite impression that he functioned as part of a worldwide apparatus.” He knew that he had been acting on orders coming from the very top of the Soviet hierarchy. He also knew that assassinations would continue after the public outrage over the assassination of Bandera had ebbed. “He said,” reads Dodd’s travel diary, “that it was his firm impression that he was to be assigned to the same kind of work in one of the major English speaking countries.” Senator Dodd was particularly impressed by the replica of the spray pistol that Stashinsky had used to assassinate Bandera. After the meeting, which lasted close to two hours, Dodd went to see Yaroslav Stetsko, the no. 3 man on Stashinsky’s hit list.6

  Dodd left West Germany, as he later recalled, with a much better understanding of how the KGB apparatus worked. In March 1965, the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee finally conducted its hearings, focusing particularly on the Stashinsky case. The subcommittee’s report appeared in print under the title Murder International, Inc.: Murder and Kidnapping as an Instrument of Soviet Policy. The main title echoed the name that the American press had given Mafia hit men of the 1930s and 1940s—“Murder, Inc.” The introduction, written by Senator Dodd, stated that although the Stashinsky trial had “attracted only episodic attention in the press of the Western world,” it deserved to be “ranked with the great trials of history.” Dodd explained its importance as follows: “The evidence presented at the trial established for the first time in a court of law that the Soviets employ murder as an instrument of international policy and that, despite the so called ‘liberalization’ which is supposed to have taken place since Stalin’s death, the international murder apparatus of the Soviet Government continues to operate full blast.”7

  48

  JUDEX

  When Dodd left Karlsruhe on April 10, 1964, Stashinsky was taken back to his prison cell. Rumor had it that he was serving his sentence in Landsberg Prison, some forty miles from Munich. At this point, he had more than five years of imprisonment still ahead of him. His lawyer, Helmut Seidel, had filed a request for clemency, but there was no telling whether it would be granted.

  There was also more bad news from outside the prison walls. On June 23, 1964, Inge, apparently traumatized by the ordeal, filed for divorce. We do not know how Stashinsky reacted to the news. But it is easy to imagine Inge’s motivations. She was afraid for her life and, according to Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann, had begun psychiatric treatment. Heidemann interviewed Inge in early November 1962, soon after the Stashinsky trial. The interview was arranged by Erwin Fischer of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, who assured Inge that she could trust Heidemann and tell him everything. Unfortunately, she was unaware that since 1953 Heidemann had been working for the Stasi—the East German secret police—under the code name “Gerhardt.” He went to prison in 1985 for selling forged diaries purported to be Hitler’s, while still on the list of active Stasi agents. Heidemann would later claim that he was a double agent—a claim that would have given Inge little solace.1

  Bogdan Stashinsky was relatively safe in prison, but what would happen after his release? Where could he find safe haven from his former KGB colleagues? During his meeting with Senator Dodd, Heinrich Jagusch told the American visitor that “Stashinsky’s testimony had been most helpful, but when he was released, Germany would be very unsafe for him.” Jagusch hoped that “arrangements could be made for him in a safer country.” Jagusch was an important ally, but he would soon be forced out of office, leaving Stashinsky largely unprotected.2

  Dr. Jagusch’s political troubles began soon after he read the verdict in the Stashinsky trial. A propaganda campaign launched in the East accused him of being a committed Nazi. Then the same Stern reporter, Gerd Heidemann, published photographs revealing the face of one of the investigators in the case considered by Jagusch, revealing the fact that the judge was sharing confidential materials with the journalist. Things got much worse a few months after Dodd’s visit to Karlsruhe. In September 1964, Jagusch broke the corporate ethics code by publishing in Der Spiegel, West Germany’s leading political weekly, an article that exposed the release of a suspected East German spy from a federal prison, allegedly in exchange for the release of a number of political prisoners in East Germany. The article, which questioned government policy and the position taken on the issue by Jagusch’s superiors, was unsigned. Another of Jagusch’s articles appeared in the same magazine in early November 1964. It questioned the actions of the General Prosecutor’s Office, which had sanctioned the arrest of a Der Spiegel journalist on charges of espionage. This article was signed with the pseudonym “Judex”—taken from a popular French movie about a mysterious avenger. Both pieces were controversial and attracted a great deal of publicity. The hunt for the author began, and soon one of the Munich newspapers pointed a finger at Jagusch.3

  When approached by Bruno Heusinger, the head of the Federal Criminal Court, Jagusch denied the charge. But he soon changed his mind and admitted to being “Judex.” His career at the High Court was all but over. He had offended almost everyone—proponents of improved relations with the East by arguing against the release of a communist spy, and hardliners by questioning the unlawful arrest of a journalist on espionage charges. Most importantly, he had lied to his superiors and to his own colleagues. Since the Stashinsky trial, there had been accusations floated against Jagusch, probably with support and encouragement from the East, that he had taken part in the Nazification of German trade unions under Hitler. Jagusch had denied the charge, and his superiors and colleagues at the High Court had supported him. He lost their support after the publication of his Spiegel articles.4

  In January 1965, Jagusch was suspended on charges of lying about his membership in the Nazi Party. A month later he was allowed to retire for health reasons. Off the bench, he reinvented himself as an authority on German traffic law, but his political legacy remained the verdict that he had handed down in the Stashinsky case. The ruling had a direct impact on dozens of trials of former Nazi officials, including the Auschwitz trial, which ended in the fall of 1965. In a mirror of the Stashinsky trial, the accused were convicted not as primary perpetrators but as accessories to murder. Robert Mulka, the adjutant to the camp commander, received a fourteen-year sentence, a far cry from the death sentence imposed by a Warsaw court in 1947 on the camp commander and Mulka’s superior
, Rudolf Höss. It would take the German parliament seven years to change the criminal code and remove the loophole that the Stashinsky ruling had created. Because the new code did not come into force until the mid-1970s, quite a few accused Nazi criminals were able to use the “Stashinsky defense” in the German courts. In 1973, Ludwig Hahn, a former commander of the German secret police (SD) in Warsaw who had supervised the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and taken part in the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, received a twelve-year sentence. The West German press directly linked its leniency to the Stashinsky precedent.5

  With Jagusch gone, there was one less person at the top of the German judiciary who was concerned about Stashinsky’s safety after he served his sentence. It is not known whether Senator Dodd ever acted on Jagusch’s prompting to find a safe haven for Stashinsky. But Dodd’s days as a powerful senator with influence over world events—and Stashinsky’s future—were numbered.6

  In June 1966, the US Senate Select Committee on Standards and Conduct held hearings on Dodd’s trip. His political opponents were alleging that his real purpose had been to help his friend Julius Klein, a retired brigadier general in the US Army who handled public relations for West German companies in the United States. Klein had been criticized for promoting companies that had previously profited from the Nazi regime and its crimes. In response, other West German companies had ceased to employ him as their public relations representative. It was now argued by Dodd’s accusers that he had gone to Germany not primarily to see Stashinsky, but to lobby on behalf of General Klein and help him regain some of his lost business. The charges were never proved, but Dodd was censured by the Senate in 1967 on a separate charge of using reelection campaign funds for his own purposes. The investigation came in the wake of Dodd’s partially successful attempts to regulate the firearms industry and resulted from the efforts of industry lobbyists.

  The man who thanked Stashinsky for telling the truth stayed in office until 1971, but he lost all his power and prestige before that. The Soviet media celebrated the senator’s downfall. Many in the Soviet government considered him to be one of the worst enemies the Soviet Union had ever had.7

  49

  VANISHED

  Stern magazine in Hamburg was the first to break the news. “He was met by agents of the US Intelligence Service, the CIA,” wrote the magazine reporter, “and immediately taken to the United States in a military plane.” The reference was to Bogdan Stashinsky’s release from prison. The Stern reporter also touched upon Inge’s fate. She had divorced Bogdan in June 1964, but, according to the federal prosecutor Erwin Fischer, who had been helping her through the years, she was well provided for and happy again. Was she married, and if so, to whom? It was anyone’s guess.

  The Stern story appeared in mid-February 1969 and was immediately picked up by the Associated Press and wired to newspapers all over the world. The KGB took special note of the Stern publication. In late March, the KGB chief in Ukraine reported on the story to his Communist Party boss. Inside the CIA, officials also noted the Stern account, and a copy of it ended up in the agency’s files dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy. The only official agency to comment on the news publicly was the West German Ministry of Justice. On February 18, 1969, a spokesman for the ministry declared that Stashinsky, then thirty-eight years of age, had been released and allowed to leave the country for his own protection. The spokesman would not say exactly where Stashinsky had gone. But he did say that the departure had taken place a full two years earlier. The former KGB assassin had been released after serving only two-thirds of his sentence.1

  This was the first public announcement about Stashinsky since March 1965, when the media had reported that President Heinrich Lübke of West Germany had turned down an appeal for clemency filed by Stashinsky’s attorney. Now the Stern reporter wrote that upon his release on New Year’s Eve 1966, Stashinsky was picked up by the CIA agents. According to the report, the Americans considered him a very valuable agent. The Stern article served as a starting point for numerous speculations about the fate of the spy who had disappeared into thin air after his early release from prison. Some suggested that he had probably been transferred to the United States for good. But anyone who wanted to pick up Stashinsky’s trail was at least two years behind him.2

  While the world wondered if the CIA was harboring Stashinsky, CIA experts were in fact still debating whether they could trust the former Soviet agent. Perhaps, after all that had taken place, he was still part of a clever KGB plot to undermine Western security. James Jesus Angleton, who served as head of CIA counterintelligence for many years (1954–1975), was paranoid about the possible KGB penetration of the CIA—he considered every KGB defector a plant. It was only after Angleton’s resignation on Christmas Eve 1975 that the agency took another look at the Stashinsky case.

  The report, which was ready on April 22, 1976, began with a telling statement: “This memorandum has been written in an attempt to determine whether there is sufficient information to support KGB agent Bogdan Nikolaevich Stashinsky’s claim that he assassinated Ukrainian émigré leader Stepan Bandera in Munich in October 1959.” The sixteen-page report, which went through every bit of information the CIA had gathered on the Stashinsky case, came to the carefully formulated conclusion that Stashinsky most likely did what he claimed to have done. The only unexplained evidence was the trace of cyanide in Bandera’s stomach, an element that Stashinsky’s spray pistol was not supposed to leave. Otherwise, claimed the author of the report, it was “difficult to see what the KGB would gain by Stashinsky’s confession.”

  The report gives no indication that Stashinsky was ever in fact brought to the United States, let alone allowed to live there after undergoing plastic surgery, as the rumors suggested in journalistic circles. If the Stern magazine reporters who broke the story of Stashinsky’s release were correct in their assertion that the Americans had picked up Stashinsky, then they must have taken him somewhere other than the United States. Had he been brought to the United States and placed under the authority of Angleton and his people at the CIA, Stashinsky most likely would have experienced the same kind of treatment that KGB defector Yurii Nosenko had been subjected to. Nosenko had spent three years in solitary confinement and was given drugs to make him tell the “truth”; he was released from CIA captivity only in 1967 and declared a bona fide defector only in 1969.

  The author of the 1976 CIA report stated that Stashinsky had been released in 1967 after serving two-thirds of his sentence. “He was given iron works training by German authorities and resettled under another name in another country.” The report did not specify the country. Wherever Stashinsky went after being released from the West German prison, he was clearly in hiding.3

  The only hint that Stashinsky had let slip appeared in advice he gave to the no. 3 man on his Munich death list, Bandera’s second-in-command, Yaroslav Stetsko. “I do not think there is any real protection against a murder ordered by the KGB,” wrote Stashinsky from his prison cell. “But the carrying out of such crimes could be made far more difficult.” Stashinsky advised Stetsko and other possible KGB targets to change their first and last names and their places of residence at least once every three years, and their country of residence as often as possible. In each country they should choose common aliases, avoiding Slavic names. Their names and addresses should not appear in telephone books and directories. A second alias should be chosen for use in their residence, and they should be trained to recognize shadowing. “Complete secrecy must be the first commandment,” wrote Stashinsky.4

  50

  KREMLIN GHOST

  Bogdan Stashinsky disappeared from the pages of the press after the 1969 surprise announcement about his early release from prison. But his crimes, and even more, his confession, continued to influence Cold War politics as well as the lives of people directly involved in his case for years to come. For a number of such individuals, that influence was anything but benevolent.

 
In the summer of 1973, his name came up in connection with a US government investigation into an alleged plot to assassinate Leonid Brezhnev on a visit to the United States. In early June, the Soviet embassy in Washington informed the US Secret Service that, according to their sources, a group of Ukrainian nationalists, headed by Bandera’s former associate Yaroslav Stetsko, was conspiring to assassinate the Soviet leader. The killers were allegedly fanatical young Ukrainians who had fought in the Vietnam War and were now undergoing special training in the United States. They were planning to dress in police or US Army uniforms and attack Brezhnev, who had succeeded Khrushchev in 1964. One of the alleged plotters was a US Army lieutenant colonel named Nicholas Krawciw.

  The Secret Service checked the Soviet inquiry with the CIA, who identified Stetsko from the Stashinsky file. Stetsko, the CIA told its Secret Service contacts, was on the KGB hit list. The FBI immediately got on the case, and soon realized that the plot was a figment of the Soviet imagination. Stetsko, who by that time had become the leader of the Bandera organization, had been planning to visit the United States, but he did not do so. His alleged associates in the plot either stayed out of politics altogether or belonged to a rival faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that would not cooperate with him on any project, much less the assassination of Leonid Brezhnev.