The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  One of the alleged plotters, Osyp Zinkewych, was a publisher of dissident literature that was being smuggled out of Ukraine. He believed in the power of the written word, not of a fired bullet. Krawciw had served two tours of duty in Vietnam and had distinguished himself as an intelligence officer at his post in Israel in 1972, prior to the Yom Kippur War. Like many other members of the Ukrainian community in the United States listed by the Soviets, Krawciw knew nothing about a plot to kill Brezhnev. It became apparent that the Soviets were trying to unleash American law enforcement agencies on the Ukrainian organizations that were planning to protest Brezhnev’s visit to the United States. FBI sources reported that the leading Ukrainian newspaper in the country, the Ukrainian Weekly, was calling on its readers to take an active part in the protests. Brezhnev, wrote the newspaper, would be “smiling with a knife behind his back.”1

  The only guns that Leonid Brezhnev saw during his visit were two pistols presented to him by his favorite Hollywood actor, Chuck Connors, whose westerns the Soviet leader had come to admire. The protests took place in New York and other cities despite the best efforts of the KGB to stop them. The largest was held on Sunday, June 17, 1973, in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Close to a thousand Ukrainian protesters chanted, “Brezhnev go home, leave the U.S. alone.” One of the alleged participants in the plot, Askold Lozynskyj of the Bandera organization’s youth wing, addressed the crowd, calling attention to the irony that the government of the “land of free” was eager to do business with the government of the “land of the oppressed.” In the end, it was the Ukrainian nationalists’ demonstrations, not their bullets, that constituted the biggest threat to Soviet dignitaries traveling abroad.2

  Leonid Brezhnev knew that better than anyone else. In May 1975 he completed his rise to the pinnacle of Soviet power by removing his longtime rival, the former KGB chief Aleksandr Shelepin, from the Politburo. The official reason for the removal was Shelepin’s tarnished image abroad, as shown by mass demonstrations in London protesting his visit to Great Britain. Ever since the Stashinsky trial, Shelepin had become known in the West as the mastermind of political assassinations.

  In the United States, that role was highlighted in the report of Senator Thomas Dodd’s committee. “According to the testimony of Stashinsky,” wrote Dodd in his introduction, “at the top of the list of Soviet officials directing this [murder] apparatus was Alexander N. Shelepin, Chairman of the State Security of the USSR. Today this former commander-in-chief of the ‘Department of Blood-Wet Affairs’ is Deputy Premier of the Council of Ministers, Member of the Presidium, and Secretary of the Central Committee, Communist Party, USSR. His presence in these high posts under the ‘new’ administration strongly suggests that murder will continue as an instrument of Soviet policy, as it has since the days of Lenin himself.” Speaking to US politicians on the occasion of the Captive Nations Week’s observance in July 1965, Yaroslav Stetsko, no. 3 man on Stashinsky’s hit list, accused Shelepin of ordering the killing of President Kennedy.3

  For years Shelepin had been forced to avoid traveling to the West with official Soviet delegations because a West German judge had issued an order for his arrest in connection with the Stashinsky trial. It was only after the West German government canceled the order under strong Soviet pressure that Shelepin, then chairman of the Soviet Trade Union Association, felt he could travel to the West on official visits. In the spring of 1975, he accepted an invitation from the head of the British trade unions to visit that country. A political scandal exploded in London as soon as news of the visit reached the British parliament. The opposition Tories demanded that the government deny him an entry visa, and the governing Labourites said that it was a mistake to have invited him. One Labour parliamentarian stated that Shelepin was the most unwelcome guest since the prominent Nazi Rudolf Hess had flown to Britain in 1940.

  Still, Shelepin decided not to cancel the visit. He wanted to test his new immunity from prosecution. He was met not only by unhappy parliamentarians but also by outraged members of the Ukrainian community. There were 3,000 people protesting Shelepin’s visit on the streets of London. The former KGB chief was forced to cut his visit short and go back to Moscow, only to be removed from the Politburo shortly thereafter. His political career was over.4

  Shelepin lost his position at the top of the Soviet hierarchy not because his colleagues in the Politburo saw anything wrong with the KGB chief overseeing assassinations abroad, but because Leonid Brezhnev took advantage of the protests in the West to finish off his main political opponent. Brezhnev’s reference to Western public opinion as the reason for Shelepin’s dismissal made a strong impression on the Soviet political elite. The person most affected by it was Yurii Andropov, Brezhnev’s appointee to Shelepin’s former post at the helm of the KGB in 1967 (following Vladimir Semichastny). Like Shelepin, Andropov was a party apparatchik who harbored strong political ambitions. He learned an important lesson from the Shelepin/Stashinsky affair: if he was caught assassinating people abroad, his prospects of rising to the top in the USSR would vanish.

  Under Andropov, the KGB would stop assassinating political opponents of the Soviet regime. Andropov also did his best to avoid antagonizing the West through harsh persecution of leading dissidents. The two most important opposition figures of the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, received—by Soviet standards—very mild treatment at the hands of the KGB. The first was exiled to the West, the second to a provincial Soviet city. Both avoided prison sentences. By treading carefully, Andropov became head of the Soviet state after Brezhnev’s death in November 1982.5

  51

  ON THE RUN

  As the fallout from the public scandal created by Stashinsky’s defection to the West influenced the political struggles within the Soviet Politburo, the KGB was on the lookout for its former employee. In November 1962, the month after the Stashinsky trial ended, Vladimir Semichastny, Aleksandr Shelepin’s successor and Vladimir Andropov’s forerunner as chief of the KGB, approved a plan of “special actions” against “particularly dangerous traitors.” Those on the list included Bogdan Stashinsky.

  In his memoirs, Semichastny explained the logic behind this and other Soviet attempts to kill former KGB agents as follows:

  I myself, as chairman of the KGB, never had the right to make unilateral decisions on the physical liquidation of people. [Western] propaganda to the contrary was based above all on the principle of carrying out Soviet laws outside the motherland, which applied above all to defectors from our ranks whose names were known. If a Chekist [KGB man], a Soviet citizen, or a soldier who had sworn to serve the motherland and the existing order betrayed his country and fled to the West, then, according to current Soviet law, he could be taken to court and tried despite his absence. And if he was sentenced to death in those proceedings, after that the question could be raised of carrying out the sentence.1

  The document, signed by Semichastny in November 1962, specified that “as these traitors, who have given important state secrets to the opponent and caused great political damage to the USSR, have been sentenced to death in absentia, the sentence will be carried out abroad.” KGB counterintelligence units were supposed to conduct surveillance of the defector’s family members within the Soviet Union, check their correspondence, and search their homes in hopes that the defectors would try to establish contact. Counterintelligence units abroad were to track down traitors in their countries of residence so that specially trained killers from the Thirteenth Department, responsible for active measures, could carry out the sentence. In the case of Anatolii Golitsyn, a KGB officer who defected to the West in December 1961, the plan was to assassinate him if he were ever called to testify before a US Senate or congressional committee.2

  Stashinsky’s whereabouts after his release were known only to a small circle of West German officials. In 1971, General Reinhard Gehlen, who by then had retired as head of the West German Foreign Intelligence Service (BND), published h
is memoirs, in which he suggested that he knew what had happened to the former KGB assassin. Gehlen confirmed earlier statements by West German officials that Stashinsky had been released after serving only part of his sentence. “Today the KGB’s ‘torpedo’ is living as a free man somewhere in the world he chose on that day in the summer of 1961, a few days before the wall was erected across Berlin,” wrote Gehlen. The general never revealed this exact location.3

  If Stashinsky was not in the United States, then where had he gone? The answer was unexpectedly provided by another retired general, Mike Geldenhuys, in a series of interviews that he gave in early March 1984 to a South African newspaper reporter. Geldenhuys was the sixty-year-old former head of the secret branch of the South African security service, the Bureau for State Security (BOSS), which was known for its rough counterintelligence tactics and human rights violations in dealing with the liberation movement led by the African National Congress. In June 1983, eight months before granting the interviews, Geldenhuys had retired as police commissioner, the highest police office in the country.

  On March 5, 1984, the Cape Times, the oldest South African daily newspaper, ran the interviews. The piece began with Geldenhuys’s biography and a description of Stashinsky’s killing of Lev Rebet. The killing of Bandera would be included in the next issue of the newspaper. In the interview, the retired general claimed that Stashinsky had come to South Africa from Germany, and that he, Geldenhuys, then a colonel and second-in-command at BOSS, had been the first South African official to interrogate the new settler. Geldenhuys described some aspects of Stashinsky’s life in South Africa but refused to disclose others. “Stashinsky’s dossier is one of the world’s best kept secrets,” he told the reporter, “and in fact is still partly so, since Stashinsky’s new identity and whereabouts would never be disclosed.” If a KGB assassination team was still hunting for Stashinsky, this was an important clue as to where Stashinsky had started his new life. The problem was that the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with South Africa, and carrying out any operation in that country would be a logistical nightmare. Besides, Geldenhuys told the newspaper, no one would now be able to recognize Stashinsky.

  Geldenhuys told the reporter that although Stashinsky had escaped the death sentence in West Germany, his life was in danger, and his release from prison had been arranged in the utmost secrecy well before the end of his sentence. “In the meantime we were approached by the West German Security Service and asked to give this man asylum in South Africa because they were convinced it was the only country where he would be comparatively safe from KGB agents,” continued the general. “We agreed.” There were only three people in the entire country who knew about the secret resettlement: Geldenhuys; his boss, the chief of the South African security service, Hendrik van den Bergh; and the prime minister of South Africa, B. J. Vorster.

  According to Geldenhuys, Stashinsky had come to South Africa in 1968, at least one year after his release from prison. The South Africans did not regret accommodating the request of their West German colleagues. According to Geldenhuys, Stashinsky “was able to supply our intelligence service with a vast amount of invaluable information on the structure and operations of the Russian secret service.” In South Africa, Stashinsky allegedly not only acquired a new identity but also underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance. He also got a new job and remarried.

  “We got him a job in which he did very well for himself,” Geldenhuys told the reporter, “and sometime after that he met a girl from Durban and they fell in love. When they got married at the registry office somewhere in the Republic, he asked me to be his best man. We had formed a bond of friendship that still exists today and I was delighted to accept.” Geldenhuys said in the interview that in his bank vault he kept a picture of himself posing with Stashinsky and his wife after the wedding. Geldenhuys never mentioned Inge Pohl or anyone else accompanying Stashinsky to South Africa.4

  The Associated Press and other wire agencies picked up the story on the whereabouts and post-prison life of the former KGB assassin and sent it around the world. Many, including members of the Bandera and Rebet families, questioned whether the report could be true. There are reasons to believe it was. Of the two people besides Geldenhuys who supposedly knew Stashinsky’s identity in South Africa, one was still alive. The former prime minister and then president, J. B. Vorster, had died in September 1983, but Hendrik van den Bergh was in excellent health, working on his chicken farm and writing his memoirs after being pushed out of government in 1980. According to General Geldenhuys’s biographer, Hanlie van Straaten, as of the summer of 2013 the general had in his archive a photo of President Vorster, van den Bergh, and himself. The photo was the only item in the file labeled “Stashinsky.”5

  Geldenhuys’s story was also corroborated by earlier media reports that on June 23, 1964, less than two years after the trial, Inge had divorced Stashinsky, formally ending the relationship that had shaken the KGB world to its foundations. She had then completely disappeared from sight. Was her divorce a ploy to throw off the KGB? Or did she disappear in order to rejoin Stashinsky upon his release? After news of Stashinsky’s early release was leaked to the press, a federal prosecutor told Stern that Inge was being provided for and was living happily. No one could say whether it was Stashinsky who was providing for her and whether she was living with him. We do know that she almost certainly never returned to East Germany. In 1986 the tombstone was removed from the grave of Stashinsky and Inge’s son, Peter. According to German law, a cemetery plot can be cleared for reuse twenty-five years after the burial if no one is looking after the grave.6

  Stashinsky, by all accounts, remained in South Africa. There were rumors that in the 1970s he served as an adviser to South African–backed units fighting in Congo. Was that the job that General Geldenhuys said BOSS had found for him? It’s certainly possible: in 1967, the year Stashinsky was released from prison, the South African police became involved in counterinsurgency operations in Rhodesia. The first special forces personnel for the mission were trained at a secret police base in Durban, the city Stashinsky’s new wife had reportedly come from. Gerhi Strauss, the newspaperman who interviewed Geldenhuys and broke the story about Stashinsky’s transfer to South Africa, also lived and died in Durban. All this could be coincidence, of course, but it also could be evidence of Stashinsky’s life after prison.7

  The new clandestine police force needed to be trained in fighting insurgents. Stashinsky, who had experience in fighting the liberation movement in Ukraine, could provide helpful advice. If that was indeed the case, Stashinsky’s story had an ironic and sad ending. Rescued by Inge, he returned to his old habits with her gone. He would not be the first assassin to leave one totalitarian regime to earn his living from another. In the 1950s, Nikolai Khokhlov, another KGB assassin turned defector, was advising the South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem on how to organize an effective struggle against the partisan movement in his country. To different degrees, both Khokhlov and Stashinsky were experts on counterinsurgency, and while in the West they shared strong anti-Soviet convictions. It would make sense for them to join what was heralded by many as a worldwide struggle against communism.8

  Of the two conjectures about Stashinsky’s country of residence after his release—the United States and the Union of South Africa—the latter seems more plausible. But if the Geldenhuys story is accurate, then it casts many elements of Stashinsky’s life and career in a new light. The ironworks training that Stashinsky received in West Germany, it would appear, proved useless to him. It is not clear where or how he spent the year 1967, but by 1968 he was working for the South African secret police, which used tactics similar to those of the KGB in putting down the liberation struggle of another oppressed people. He also lost the woman who had inspired him to shake off the embrace of the KGB and the Soviet system.

  In a telephone conversation with the author on April 1, 2013, General Geldenhuys confirmed that Bogdan Stashinsky had indeed been in
South Africa in the late 1960s and 1970s. He also confirmed to his biographer, Hanlie van Straaten, the authenticity of the interviews he gave in 1984. But he claimed to remember nothing else. While the general’s selective memory may be a result of time and the aging process, it may also indicate that he is not at liberty to speak about a man who is still alive and relies on the protection of his former boss.9

  52

  HOMECOMING

  “The slightly stooped man with bald spots and gray hair, who looks considerably less than his age, does not at all resemble the Bogdan Stashinsky I have seen in photographs,” wrote the Ukrainian freelance journalist Natalia Prykhodko, beginning her description of the man who introduced himself as Bogdan Stashinsky. She claimed to have met with the former KGB assassin in the summer of 2011 through a friend in the Ukrainian security service. According to the friend, Stashinsky, then approaching his eightieth birthday, wanted to set the record straight. He was ready to give an interview.

  In the old man’s apartment in downtown Kyiv, the journalist found a bust of Joseph Stalin and a portrait of Winston Churchill on the wall. The old man was friendly but asked her not to use a tape recorder. The interview was conducted in Ukrainian, and the journalist, who primarily spoke Russian, asked readers to take into account that not all the peculiarities of Stashinsky’s speech were adequately reflected in her notes. The interview appeared in one of Kyiv’s leading newspapers in August 2011, a few weeks before Ukraine celebrated its twentieth anniversary of independence. It had an intriguing title: “Bogdan Stashinsky: I Fulfilled My Duty to Ukraine.”