The Man with the Poison Gun Page 33
Despite the obvious differences in choice of targets and methods employed to “eliminate” their opponents, both Soviet and American intelligence services in the 1950s and 1960s resorted to assassination in order to deal with the same phenomenon—insurgency aroused by the weakening or disintegration of empires. In ordering the killings of Bandera and Rebet, the Soviets were seeking to protect their empire from the threat of disintegration, which, despite their best efforts, came to pass in 1991. The Americans did not have a formal empire of their own to protect; but, for all its anticolonial rhetoric, the US government had a stake in keeping other empires afloat in areas that Washington considered vulnerable to communist subversion. Leaders of independent countries, like Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Achmad Sukarno of Indonesia, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, could be targeted because of their pro-Soviet leanings, independent political actions, or, as in the case of Trujillo, because of policies they maintained that were regarded as conducive to a communist-type revolution.5
Over time, international scandals caused by the exposure of KGB and CIA assassinations forced both parties to put a hold on their assassination programs. The Russian authorities claimed that their Soviet predecessors did so immediately after Stashinsky’s testimony became public. They could not, however, refuse to help their comrades in arms, so they played a role in the Bulgarian security service’s assassination of dissident Georgi Markov in September 1978. Markov was shot by an umbrella-shaped pistol, courtesy of the KGB. In the United States, the investigation into CIA activities conducted by a US Senate committee led by Frank Church influenced President Jimmy Carter’s decision to officially end the assassination program in 1978.
The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of international relations. It brought liberalism to Eastern Europe, ended apartheid in South Africa, and helped achieve a short-lived Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation in the Middle East. But it also produced a wounded and humiliated Russia, created numerous newly independent nations that had to sort out relations with their former masters and neighbors, and revived a number of formerly frozen interethnic and international conflicts. As the new millennium began, former KGB officers reached once again for their Cold War–era assassination manuals in hopes of reshaping the world according to their wishes. The Russians sought to preserve what was left of their empire and surround themselves with friendly (i.e., subservient) states and leaders.
In February 2004, authorities in Qatar arrested three Russian citizens on charges of killing the acting president of the rebellious republic of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. One of those arrested had diplomatic immunity, but the other two were put on trial and given life sentences for their role in the assassination, which took place in Qatar’s capital of Doha. The following year they were extradited to Russia in order to improve Russo-Qatari relations. The Russian authorities refused to admit that their agents had been sent to Qatar to carry out the assassination. A spokesman for the Russian intelligence service reiterated that Moscow had stopped conducting assassinations abroad after the Stashinsky scandal. Despite their protestations, most considered Yandarbiyev the second Chechen president to be killed by the Russian government. Eight years earlier, his predecessor, Dzhokhar Dudaev, had been killed in Chechnya by a guided missile launched from a Russian military aircraft.6
In the fall of 2004, world news agencies reported on the mysterious poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko was a pro-Western candidate in the Ukrainian presidential election. Traces of dioxin found in his body raised the suspicion that Russia was the source of the poison and might have masterminded the attempt—few countries had poison laboratories attached to their security services, and even fewer had reason to use them against Yushchenko. Yushchenko did not die, and many theories circulated about what might have happened.
In November 2006, another opponent of the Kremlin, the former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, died in London after being poisoned by radioactive polonium. This was the second time that Moscow was alleged to have used a radioactive substance in an attempt to kill an opponent. The first target, in 1957, was Nikolai Khokhlov, who survived the attempt. In the case of Khokhlov, radioactive poison was allegedly added to his coffee; in Litvinenko’s case, to his tea. The British authorities asked the Russian government to extradite a former KGB officer whom they believed was involved in the murder of Litvinenko. Moscow refused the request.7
A report released in January 2016 on the poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko concluded that he had been killed by two agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). “The FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr [Nikolai] Patrushev and also by President Putin,” read the report, naming the head of the FSB and the sitting Russian president as the people ultimately responsible for the assassination. The hard evidence implicating the Russian leadership was not there, but once again, as in Stashinsky’s case, the trail of evidence had pointed to the very top of the Moscow power pyramid.8
The Russian intelligence services are not the only ones reviving the Cold War–era practice of political assassination. By all accounts, the CIA is far ahead of its competitors, relying more on its mastery of technology than on its human assets. As in the Cold War, the Russians are going after those whom they consider their own, while the Americans prefer to kill “others.” The new opportunities offered by Predators—unmanned aerial vehicles or drones that can attack targets from the sky—give the CIA a clear advantage over its rivals and puts its officers on the cutting edge of the rapidly changing art of assassination.
The program began in 2004 and, over the course of nine years, has resulted in the assassination or targeted killing of more than 3,300 individuals, supposedly Al Qaeda operatives who found themselves on the longest-ever CIA hit list. The program reached its apogee in 2011. According to experts at the Washington-based New America Foundation, that year alone there were more than 120 drone strikes in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, the main target area of the drone program. Close to 850 individuals were killed. Of those, about 50 were either innocent or never had their identities and affiliations established. This is by far the lowest available estimate of the number of innocent victims. According to one report, only 35 out of 200 individuals killed by drones in northeastern Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013 were the intended targets.9
The world has changed significantly since the Cold War. What remains largely the same, however, is the logic used to justify assassination as a legitimate tool of government policy. “I would say that since the war, our methods—ours and those of the opposition—have become much the same,” declares Control in Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. “I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s ‘policy’ is benevolent, can you now?” The benevolent policies of government continue to figure as the main moral argument in favor of continuing programs of targeted killing. The Cold War is maybe over, but the recent rise in East-West tensions and the emergence of new challenges to the established international order make the return to Cold War–era methods of struggle almost irresistible to the former Cold War rivals. In that sense, the Stashinsky story is more than a piece of history. It is also an insight into the present and forewarning for the future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I became interested in Bogdan Stashinsky’s story after reading excerpts from his trial testimony that were first published in Ukraine in 1993, more than thirty years after the trial. The testimony, taken from the earlier and much more comprehensive edition of trial materials published in Munich and unavailable in Ukraine, struck me as a surprisingly candid account of crimes committed by a man who seemed to have every reason not to tell the truth. They offered a unique insight into the modus operandi of the Soviet secret services and an individual’s relation to the state that turned him into a traitor.
My reading of Stashinsky’s testimony left a number of questions unanswered. His sta
tements often sounded self-serving and sometimes improbable. After all, could a lone KGB agent have carried out not one assassination but two? And what happened to Stashinsky after the trial? Why was he given only eight years for committing two murders and released two years early? Where did he go after his imprisonment? Also, if the testimony he gave was part of a deal he made with the court, how much of it was true?
The idea of checking Stashinsky’s story against the existing body of evidence came to me during a visit to Munich. Following the example of Alex Motyl, who prepared for writing a novel that featured Stashinsky as a character by tracing the Soviet agent’s movements before and after the two murders he committed there, I, too, retraced Stashinsky’s steps. On the basis of Stashinsky’s court testimony, I drew a map and walked the routes myself. Stashinsky’s assertions were borne out by my experiment. In that regard, at least, he had told the truth.
More comparative data became available when I learned about the existence of declassified CIA files dealing with the political activities and assassination of Stepan Bandera, as well as activities of his followers and rivals from the ranks of the Ukrainian emigration. The information in the CIA files helped me verify and supplement the evidence given by Stashinsky during his trial. So did sources and testimony that emerged from the Soviet side. Once again, it turned out that Stashinsky had told the truth—but not the whole truth. It was up to me to fill in the gaps in his narrative.
Any subject involving the history of intelligence services is difficult, not only because much remains secret but also because there are numerous cover stories and deliberate efforts to mislead that linger for decades, as the Stashinsky case seemed to exemplify. To collect the kind of sources I wanted to see and find my way through the labyrinth of Cold War espionage history, I needed a lot of support, and I am happy to thank those who helped me the most.
My special thanks go to my friends and colleagues Frank Sysyn and Zenon Kohut. Frank invited me to two of the conferences he organized in Munich, and Zenon accompanied me on Stashinsky’s trails in Munich from Karlsplatz, where Lev Rebet was killed, to Zeppelinstrasse, where Bandera had worked, and Kreittmayrstrasse, where he died. They also introduced me to Andrii Rebet, the son of Lev Rebet and probably the only surviving participant in the Stashinsky trial of October 1962. I am grateful to Andrii Rebet for the interview he granted me during one of my visits to Munich and for the help that his wife, Ivanna Rebet, offered me with the library collections at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. The university’s chancellor, Dr. Nicolas Szafowal, advised me on the Stasi archives pertaining to the Stashinsky case and shared information on the life trajectories of Bandera’s associates after his assassination.
Dr. Roman Procyk of the Ukrainian Studies Fund in the United States agreed to refer my questions about post–World War II Munich to his mother, who well remembered how the Ukrainian community had lived in that city in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also helped me arrange an interview with Dr. Anatol Kaminski, who was close to Lev and Daria Rebet at the time of the assassination of Lev Rebet.
My special thanks also go to Andriy Portnov, who introduced me to one of his best students at the Free University of Berlin, Maria Przyborowska. I could not have asked for a better assistant than Maria, who traveled repeatedly to Dallgow, the Berlin suburb where Inge Pohl was born and from which Bogdan and Inge made their way to the West in August 1961. Maria did her best to locate Inge’s neighbors and relatives. Unfortunately, there were none. But in the parish archive, Maria managed to discover the record of the burial of Peter Pohl and biographical information about his mother.
A colleague of mine at Harvard, Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, helped me acquire copies of rare newspapers from the Republic of South Africa, to which Bogdan Stashinsky emigrated after his release from prison in West Germany. I am grateful to General Mike Geldenhuys, the former police commissioner of South Africa, for granting me a telephone interview, and to his wife, Annatje Geldenhuys, for arranging it. The general’s biographer, Hanlie van Straaten, was exceptionally kind in agreeing to pass on to the general the materials I wanted him to read and the questions I had with regard to those materials.
I am also grateful to Tomas Sniegon of the University of Lund for sharing with me the notes of his interviews with the former head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, and to Serhy Yekelchyk of the University of Victoria in Canada for pointing me to the latest literature on Stepan Bandera. In Kyiv, Andriy Kohut and Mariia Panova helped me to find my way in the rich collections of the Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine. In Warsaw, Dr. Marcin Majewski of the Polish Institute of National Memory provided me with files relating to Stashinsky. In the United States, Olha Aleksic assisted me with access to the Mykola Lebed Papers at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and Lev Chaban and Lubow Wolynets were very helpful in arranging my work on the Yaroslav Padoch Papers at the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford, Connecticut. Professor Leigh McWhite provided access to the James O. Eastland collection at the University of Mississippi. In Canada, I am grateful to Oleh Romanyshyn of the newspaper Ukrainian Echo and to Roman Senkus of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies for helping me access a collection of newspaper clippings on the assassination of Stepan Bandera.
My friend and longtime editor Myroslav Yurkevich once again helped me with my English prose. Hiroaki Kuromiya and Jim Klingle read the manuscript and gave it their enthusiastic approval. Mary Sarotte posed some important questions about my treatment of Stashinsky as the main character of the book, which helped me rethink his personal story. My wonderful literary agent, Jill Kneerim, became fascinated with the Stashinsky story and gave me numerous excellent suggestions on how to make it even more appealing. And I was very lucky that Lara Heimert of Basic Books agreed to add it to the impressive list of spy stories issued by this distinguished publishing house. It gave me an opportunity to work again with Lara and the outstanding team that produced my two previous books, The Last Empire and The Gates of Europe. I am especially grateful to Leah Stecher, Collin Tracy, Kathy Streckfus, Jennifer Thompson, and Betsy DeJesu.
Once again, it was my wife, Olena, who was the inspiration and driving force behind this new book project. My daughter, Olesia, helped me edit the manuscript and offered suggestions for improving it. I followed her advice to the letter.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
1. Richard Deacon and Nigel West, Spy! Six Stories of Modern Espionage (London, 1980), 127; Karl Anders, Murder to Order (New York, 1967), 51–54; Moskovs’ki vbyvtsi Bandery pered sudom, ed. Danylo Chaikovs’kyi (Munich, 1965), 194–198.
CHAPTER 1: STALIN’S CALL
1. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, with an introduction, commentary, and notes by Edward Crankshaw, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, 1970), 262; Dmitrii Vedeneev and Sergei Shevchenko, “Priznalsia, zabiraite,” 2000, February 14, 2002; Tarik Cyril Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis and Nationalists (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 242–248; Iuliia Kysla, “‘Post imeni Iaroslava Halana.’ Osinnii atentat u L’vovi,” Ukraïna moderna, January 6, 2014, http://uamoderna.com/blogy/yuliya-kisla/kysla-galan.
2. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2004), 179–207.
3. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 146–147; “Bandera, Stepan,” in Encyclopedia of Nationalism (San Diego, 2001), 2: 40–41; Mykola Posivnych, Stepan Bandera (Kharkiv, 2015); Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult (Stuttgart, 2014).
4. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 228; Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka, 1942–1960 (Warsaw, 2006); Volodymyr Viatrovych, Druha pol’s’koukraïns’ka viina (Kyiv, 2012).
5. Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (Toronto, 2010), 696–700; Jeffrey Burds, “Agentura: Soviet Informants’ Networks & the Ukrainian Underground in Galicia, 1944–48,” East European Politics and Societies 11 (1997):
89–130; Yuri M. Zhukov, “Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-Insurgency: The Soviet Campaign Against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 3 (2007): 439–466.
6. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939–1950) (Edmonton, 1996); Vedeneev and Shevchenko, “Priznalsia, zabiraite”; Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, 240–242; Kysla, “‘Post imeni Iaroslava Halana.”
7. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (New York, 1995), 253 (hereafter Sudoplatov, Special Tasks).
8. Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, 243; Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 254.
9. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 262–263.
CHAPTER 2: MASTER KILLER
1. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 24–38.
2. Myroslav Yurkevich, “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (Toronto, 1993); Roman Wysocki, Organizacja ukraińskich nacjonalistów w Polsce w latach, 1929–1939: Geneza, struktura, program, ideologia (Lublin, 2003).
3. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 249–253, 378; Nikita Petrov, “Shtatnyi gosudarstvennyi ubiitsa (reabilitirovannyi): Dva dnia iz zhizni Pavla Sudoplatova,” Novaia gazeta, August 7, 2013; Nikita Petrov, “Master individual’nogo terrora: Portret Ėitongona, kollegi Sudoplatova,” Novaia gazeta, February 26, 2014.