The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  There were hundreds of plainclothes police officers hiding behind the trees of Waldfriedhof Cemetery—the “Paradise Garden” designed in the early twentieth century—on the gloomy, cold afternoon of October 20. Some of them, armed with cameras, were videotaping and documenting the event. They were not alone in doing so. There were also cameramen from the East, primarily from East Germany, as well as representatives of the Soviet Union. In attendance, apart from diplomats and journalists, were leaders of a Soviet Ukrainian folk ensemble that had just begun its schedule of performances in Munich. Many in Bandera’s organization regarded the “easterners” with utmost suspicion, thinking that Bandera’s killer could be a member of the ensemble.

  Close to 2,000 mourners gathered for Bandera’s interment. It had all the trappings of a state funeral, although the deceased was a leader of a stateless nation. At the head of the procession was a middle-aged man carrying a large cross. He was followed by numerous priests and a church choir. Then came standard-bearers with the blue and yellow national flags of Ukraine and the red and black flags of Bandera’s organization. Walking solemnly behind them were two men, each accompanied by two assistants. They carried two small urns on red pillows. One contained soil from Ukraine, the other water from the Black Sea. The symbolism was obvious to most of the mourners—Bandera had lived and died fighting not only for the independence of his country, but also for its integrity and territorial unity, from his native Carpathians to the faraway Black Sea. The salt water in the urn had been brought to Munich by one of Bandera’s associates from Turkey, the only country on the Black Sea not cut off from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain.1

  Bandera’s oak coffin was carried by six of his closest associates—all men of his age and background who had been with him since the early days of resistance in Ukraine. Behind the coffin walked Bandera’s widow, Yaroslava, and the couple’s three children. When the procession reached the burial site, the first to speak was the Ukrainian Catholic priest, himself a recent immigrant from Ukraine. “The life of Stepan Bandera of blessed memory followed a thorny course,” said the priest to the mourners. “He spent almost a quarter of his adulthood in prisons, jails, and concentration camps of foreign states that sought to enslave our fatherland.”

  It was not only Ukrainians who came to mourn Bandera. There were also “Caucasians, Georgians and Belarusians, Hungarians and Lithuanians,” wrote the correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “a cross-section of the whole Eastern emigration.” Some of them, especially those on the left, had set themselves against Bandera when he was alive. Nevertheless, they came now to show solidarity with their political opponent: an attack on him was an attack on all of them. They were all vulnerable. Many of those gathered at the cemetery wondered who would be next. “Assassination literally hung in the air,” wrote a reporter for the German newspaper Das Grüne Blatt.2

  The events of October 15 were not just a major emotional and political blow to Bandera’s followers but also a terrifying and unprecedented breach of security. Fingers were pointed at members of the Bandera security team who had failed to do their job. After Myron Matviyeyko had been parachuted into Ukraine in May 1951, his job as head of Bandera’s security service had gone to his second-in-command, Ivan Kashuba, and Kashuba’s intelligence chief, Stepan Mudryk, both experienced intelligence hands. The security people, in turn, blamed Bandera himself. “More than once, I warned my leader and his entourage about threats to their security,” Mudryk told the German police. “But my warnings were not always heeded, and I can only say that my leader behaved quite carelessly. If he had listened to me, I think it would not have come to that.”

  They weren’t wrong. After successfully turning the nationalist underground into a largely terrorist outfit in the early 1930s, Bandera had believed that he could manage security issues on his own. After years of living undercover, he had become inured to the sense of danger—so much so that when he lived outside of Munich, he would often pick up unknown passengers on his way to the city. Aside from ignoring the rules that his security service tried to impose on him, Bandera had also tended to treat his bodyguards very badly, leading many of them to leave both him and the organization. Finally, Bandera had decided that he would manage his own security. In the fall of 1959, the security staff consisted of a single person—his bodyguard, driver, and courier Vasyl Ninovsky, a former guerrilla fighter in Soviet-occupied Western Ukraine.3

  Two weeks before the assassination, disturbing news had reached Bandera’s security service that had forced him to consider paying more attention to his security and even changing his cover name. By that time, he had been using the name Stefan Popel for almost a decade. On October 2, 1959, Stepan Mudryk, Bandera’s chief of intelligence, called Bandera’s headquarters in Munich from Düsseldorf, where he was on a business trip, and demanded that an extraordinary meeting of the organization’s leadership be called for the next morning, when he was to return to Munich. Mudryk barely slept on the night train to the city because he was so troubled by the news that he was about to deliver.

  The next morning, everyone was waiting for Mudryk in Bandera’s office. The leader was at his desk; his assistants were around the table. Disheveled and tired after a rough night on the train, Mudryk sat in front of his bosses and told them of an encounter he had had in Düsseldorf. On October 2, he had had a routine meeting with a double agent, someone who worked for the KGB while keeping Mudryk informed of his activities. The agent had just returned from East Berlin, where he had met with his KGB handlers, and told Mudryk that in Moscow the decision had been made at the highest level to liquidate Bandera and his close associates. “All the arrangements have been made with regard to Bandera,” declared the double agent. “The hit may take place any day. Remember that a decision has been made to do away with you; there are technical resources involved of which the world is as yet unaware. You will not be able to withstand them.” The double agent wanted money in exchange for further information. Mudryk did not have money to give him, but believed that the information was solid. He wanted Bandera to leave Munich, possibly for Spain, where General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship made it hard for the KGB to operate with impunity.

  Bandera refused to follow his intelligence chief’s advice. He said that they were in a state of war, danger was a given, and they simply had to carry on. But a few days later he took a brief vacation in the Alps, while Mudryk was ordered to go to Bonn to produce new documents for Bandera and his family. Stepan Bandera was about to turn into someone else, throwing off possible KGB assassins. Mudryk once again boarded a night train and, early in the morning of October 15, began his secret mission in the West German capital. During the lunch break he called Munich to report on his progress, but he had missed Bandera by a few minutes. Shortly before noon on October 15, 1959, Bandera had left the office for lunch at home. In the register for security personnel he had noted that he did not need any lunch-hour protection that week, as he intended to have lunch at work. The next morning, Mudryk called home and learned from his wife that his mission in Bonn was obsolete: Bandera was dead.4

  Mudryk and his colleagues now faced the outrage of members of their own organization who demanded an explanation for the security breach. For years Mudryk would be at pains to defend his role as chief of intelligence in his memoirs, private correspondence, and interviews. He argued that he had done all he could to prevent the assassination, and many years after the event he still wondered whether Bandera had remembered his warning in the last moments of his life. Vasyl Ninovsky, Bandera’s part-time bodyguard, whose services Bandera had rejected on the day he was murdered, was psychologically destroyed by what had happened on his watch. Decades after the assassination, his wife was still telling Ninovsky’s relatives stories that cleared her husband of responsibility. According to her, on October 15, Vasyl Ninovsky was in the hospital, having saved his leader from a previous attack in which an unidentified automobile had crashed into Bandera’s car. If Ninovsky had been on
duty that day, Bandera would still be alive, went the family legend.5

  Ivan Kashuba, the chief of Bandera’s counterintelligence service and the man directly responsible for his security, would tell anyone willing to listen that Bandera had killed himself over his unrequited love for the maid who looked after his neighbor’s children. “Stepan Bandera was in love with that German woman and spent more than one night sleepless over her,” Kashuba told one of his acquaintances. “He would take every opportunity to meet with her, either in front of the building or at her door, to speak with her. It is also possible that he met with her in the evenings in secret from his wife and from that maid’s employers.” Kashuba argued that Bandera had deliberately chosen to commit suicide in front of the apartment where his beloved was working that day—she was the last person to hold his hand before he stopped breathing. Kashuba maintained that Bandera’s love for the German maid was known to other leaders of the organization. It was anyone’s guess whether Kashuba truly believed the theory of lovelorn suicide; perhaps he advanced it only to ward off allegations of his own security failure.6

  As early autumn darkness fell on Waldfriedhof Cemetery, and people started to become almost indistinguishable from the rows of crosses and surrounding trees, the last mourners left. Also gone were the cameramen from East Germany. The newsreel about Bandera’s funeral would be ready for distribution before the end of the month. The Munich police could congratulate themselves on a job well done. The funeral had gone on without a hitch, with no shootings or unexpected collapses. The police detachment hidden in the courtyard of the cemetery chapel dispersed soon after the mourners. As far as they were concerned, they were done with the death of Stepan Bandera.

  12

  CIA TELEGRAM

  The chief of the CIA base in Munich reported the news of Bandera’s death to Washington on the day it happened. The priority telegram was addressed to the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. It was marked as “Redwood,” indicating an action alert for the agency’s Soviet Russia division, and “Lcimprove,” meaning that the information it contained dealt with the activities of Soviet intelligence worldwide. The telegram was sent close to midnight Munich time, and its contents were cryptic indeed: “15 Oct[ober] subj[ect] reported Stefan Bandera dead. Details when available. End of message.”1

  Although addressing the telegram to the director of the CIA did not mean that he would actually read it, the odds were that that one would reach its addressee. William Hood, the thirty-nine-year-old chief of the Munich base, knew Allen Dulles personally. At the end of the war, he had served under Dulles’s supervision in the Office of Strategic Services—the predecessor of the CIA—in Bern, Switzerland. Back then, Dulles and his staff had been busy establishing links with the SS commander in Italy, General Karl Wolff, in hopes of securing the surrender of German troops on the Apennine Peninsula. News of Dulles’s dealings with the Nazis had reached Joseph Stalin and caused an international scandal, the precursor of Cold War espionage rivalry. William Hood had joined the CIA in 1949, the same year the agency was established. His foreign assignments had included a stint as deputy chief of the CIA station in Vienna, where he had been involved in recruiting and handling the CIA double agent Major Petr Popov of Soviet military intelligence. In Munich, Hood then took over the local CIA base. The CIA station responsible for covert operations throughout Germany was in Frankfurt, but Munich was a very important hub of CIA activity in Germany, second only to West Berlin where Hood was transferred in December 1959.2

  At the end of the war, Munich had fallen into American hands. The city center was almost entirely destroyed by Allied bombing. The roof of Munich’s main tourist attraction, the Gothic Frauenkirche, a Catholic cathedral, had collapsed, and one of its onion-dome towers had been severely damaged. On April 30, 1945, the soldiers of the US 42nd Infantry Division, who had liberated the Dachau concentration camp in the vicinity on the previous day, made their way to the center of Munich through the rubble of bombed-out and ruined buildings. There was no resistance. The surviving citizens, whose beer halls had given birth to the Nazi movement back in the 1920s, were eager to surrender to the Americans. At Marienplatz, the city’s main square, German police officers turned in their weapons in exchange for a receipt provided by an American GI. The alternative—retreat to the east to be captured by the Soviets—was much worse.3

  Under American military administration, Munich became a safe haven and a destination of choice for displaced persons—refugees from the East who wanted to stay in the West. The Soviets demanded their return, calling them traitors to the motherland. They generally denied the charges by claiming that the places they had left did not belong to the Soviet motherland, but had been unjustly conquered in the course of the war: the Baltics; Western Ukraine and Belarus, which had belonged to Poland before the war; Bukovyna and Bessarabia, which were parts of interwar Romania; and Transcarpathia, which was part of Czechoslovakia. After initially repatriating some of them by force, the Americans let the rest stay. As time passed, most of them would move to the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. Some claimed to be stateless and remained in Germany. In the late 1950s, there were close to 80,000 refugees from the East still living in Munich. By far the largest contingent was the one made up of Ukrainian refugees from interwar Poland.4

  Stepan Bandera was hardly unknown to the CIA officers in Munich. Immediately after the end of the war, the US Army Counterintelligence Corps, or CIC, which was responsible for security in the American zone of occupation, and in many ways a forerunner of the CIA, cooperated with Bandera’s group to root out suspected Soviet spies in the displaced persons’ camps in the American zone. But the Americans soon developed serious reservations about Bandera and his people. Bandera, it was believed, used heavy-handed tactics, intimidation, and violence to secure both his own position in the organization and his organization’s dominant role among the Ukrainian refugees. Bandera and his followers were staunchly anti-Russian and anticommunist, but those characteristics carried much less weight immediately after the end of World War II than they would a few years later, with the start of the Cold War.

  The operational benefits that the Bandera group could provide the CIC and then the CIA seemed limited as well. The Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a highly centralized and disciplined group run by a narrow circle of professional conspirators seasoned in partisan warfare against the Germans and the Soviets, was difficult for US counterintelligence officers to use, let alone control, as they had little experience in dealing with East European guerrilla fighters. The Bandera people made contacts with the CIC, but they hardly ever conveyed any kind of reliable information, unless it had to do with possible Soviet penetration of Ukrainian refugee camps. They kept their secrets close, while engaging in all sorts of illegal activities. They eliminated those whom they suspected of treason, or who did not follow the party line. To fund their operations, they used counterfeit American dollars.

  The Soviets had demanded the extradition of Stepan Bandera, who was the recognized symbol of anti-Soviet struggle in Ukraine. They had sent officers and agents into the American zone to kidnap Bandera, but he had gone into hiding, changing his name and the places where he stayed. The Americans were prepared to cooperate with their wartime ally. The officers of the Strategic Services Unit, in fact, saw the Soviet request as an opportunity to get rid of an inconvenient and, indeed, dangerous leader. But no matter how they tried, they could not deliver Bandera. The US intelligence network was infiltrated by Bandera supporters, who gave false or misleading information about their leader’s whereabouts. He was also just incredibly lucky. Once, while riding in his car, he had been stopped by an American officer, but the officer had allowed him to continue because Bandera had a press ID. Bandera, who was indeed directly involved in publishing his organization’s newspaper, would continue to use the journalist’s cover up to the end of his life. The search was eventually called off. Soon afterward, Soviet-American relations deterior
ated to the point where any cooperation between them became impossible. Bandera would stay in Bavaria.5

  In 1949, the newly created Central Intelligence Agency took over primary responsibility for the refugees and their networks in Germany from the Army Counterintelligence Corps, and although they never tried to capture or extradite Bandera, they also stayed clear of him and any intelligence opportunities that his organization could offer. Bandera, whose main base of operations remained the US occupation zone, instead began cooperating with MI6—section 6 of British Military Intelligence, responsible for foreign operations. The British had more expertise in dealing with European nationalities than the Americans and were less scrupulous when it came to the ideological inclinations and operational tactics of their clients. A contemporary British report described Bandera as “a professional underground worker with a terrorist background and ruthless notions about the rules of the game.” The British also believed that of all the organizations of Russian and East European provenance, Bandera’s people had the largest and best-established network, and that it could be used for intelligence gathering in the Soviet Union.6

  The Americans had their doubts in that regard, believing that Bandera’s networks were thoroughly penetrated by the Soviet secret police. Instead of Bandera, the CIA made an alliance with his rivals in the Ukrainian nationalist camp. By 1947, the Bandera branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had split. The rival group was led by Mykola Lebed, the former head of the OUN Security Service and the man who took over the leadership of the organization after Bandera’s arrest by the Germans in July 1941. He was responsible for its survival and its heroic struggle against the Nazis. But it was also on his watch that the OUN units began their massacres of Poles in Volhynia, which resulted in tens of thousands of victims. In 1944, with the Soviets advancing into Ukraine, Lebed was sent to the West to represent the Ukrainian nationalist cause among the Allied powers. He clashed with Bandera over control of organization and his links to Western intelligence services. Bandera allegedly ordered a hit on Lebed, but the former security chief escaped to the United States with the help of the CIA. From there he ran his own organization, called the Foreign Representation of the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council. Lev Rebet, assassinated by Stashinsky in October 1957, was one of the émigré Ukrainian intellectual leaders in Lebed’s milieu.