The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  The KGB general who had ignored Sviatogorov’s warnings was by all accounts Aleksei Krokhin, the former deputy chief of the KGB Foreign Intelligence Directorate. Krokhin had been present in Aleksandr Shelepin’s office when the KGB chief had awarded Stashinsky the Order of the Red Banner of Valor. He had been sent to Berlin after Korotkov’s unexpected death in June 1961. Shelepin, who was slowly purging the agency of supporters of his predecessor, Ivan Serov, did not mourn Korotkov’s death. His passing had come as a shock to everyone who knew the young, healthy-looking general, but the KGB brass was unmoved. On learning the news, the head of East German intelligence, Markus Wolf, and his colleagues flew to Moscow to attend the funeral, only to be surprised that Shelepin was ignoring the event.6

  With Korotkov out of the picture and Krokhin now in place at Karlshorst, it would be his responsibility to deal with the consequences of Stashinsky’s escape. To save his own career, he had to pass blame along to his subordinates. The first to go was Lieutenant Colonel Yurii Aleksandrov, Stashinsky’s case officer, who had trusted his agent too much. On the evening Stashinsky and Inge escaped to West Berlin, Aleksandrov was partying with old friends at Karlshorst. Once the special commission to investigate the incident arrived in Berlin, Aleksandrov was sent back to Moscow, where he was soon arrested.

  What had happened in Berlin was a major blow not only to Soviet intelligence operations but also to the international prestige of the Soviet Union and Khrushchev himself. The Western media were about to have a field day turning Khrushchev, a self-styled man of peace, into the assassin in chief. It was not just that a Soviet spy had been caught: this was an assassin who had taken orders and received awards from the top echelon of the KGB. “Khrushchev was very angry: they say he tore papers and threw things,” Sviatogorov recalled later. “Anyone at all who had had anything to do with the matter was removed from his post, fired, and put on trial.”7

  According to later reports, a total of seventeen KGB officers were sent packing or reprimanded, some of them dismissed from the service altogether. Aleksandr Sviatogorov, who never got a chance to kill either Stashinsky or himself, was arrested, put behind bars in the infamous Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, and tried by the Military Branch of the Supreme Court. He was cleared of criminal responsibility but demoted in rank and dismissed from the KGB without a pension. He expected Krokhin, whom he had apparently asked to increase surveillance of Stashinsky, to vouch for him, but the general did nothing: Krokhin had to look after himself. Among those recalled to Moscow was Vadim Goncharov, who was responsible for eavesdropping on Stashinsky and Inge. He later claimed that he had caught them discussing their escape and reported the news to the top, but his warning had been ignored. It seemed that every KGB officer recalled from Berlin had warned his superiors about the threat presented by Stashinsky.8

  One person who received no punishment at all was Stashinsky’s old case officer, Sergei Damon. When Stashinsky and Inge had returned from Moscow to Berlin to get married in April 1961, they had learned that Damon had been transferred to Kyiv. It was about that time that a man called Aleksei Daimon appeared at KGB headquarters in Kyiv and was put in charge of the émigré department of the local intelligence directorate. Born in 1912, he was the same age as Sergei Damon. According to his personal file, preserved in the Kyiv archives, Daimon came from the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and was recruited to the secret police in 1939, while working as an engineer at one of the mines in that region. His responsibility was economic sabotage. During the German-Soviet war, he was in Stalingrad, where he was in charge of training individual spies and commando groups and sending them behind the German lines. From a counterintelligence officer he became an intelligence specialist and remained a member of the intelligence department of the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet secret services after the war. From Kyiv, his new base of operations, they would dispatch him to Poland and Czechoslovakia. An ethnic Ukrainian, he was fluent in Ukrainian and Russian but struggled with German. He was married but had no children. His mother was killed by the Germans in the spring of 1942.

  Daimon was promoted and awarded for his work against the Bandera faction and its rivals among the Ukrainian nationalists. His superiors considered him an energetic, effective, and imaginative operative, well-acquainted with the inner workings of the Ukrainian nationalist organizations. In September 1954, Daimon was transferred to Berlin to head the Ukrainian division of the KGB émigré department at Karlshorst. Stashinsky became his first agent, whom he would groom, train, and handle on his own. The murders of Rebet and Bandera became their joint “achievements.” Daimon was awarded the order of Distinguished Member of the KGB on November 3, 1959, the same day as Voroshilov signed his decree awarding Stashinsky for the killing of Bandera. On the very next day, Daimon was promoted to full colonel ahead of schedule in recognition of “successes achieved in work with the anti-Soviet emigration.” His awards and rank remained intact.9

  Meanwhile, the KGB tried to figure out where they had gone wrong with Stashinsky. The KGB commission sent from Moscow reached different conclusions. The KGB brass believed that Stashinsky had originally been a reliable, ideologically motivated agent dedicated to the Soviet cause. It was his strong-willed anti-Soviet wife who had led him astray after becoming convinced that the KGB was going to kill them both. The KGB was not prepared to admit its own mistake in either selecting or handling an agent. As for Nikita Khrushchev, who was behind the entire operation, he was infuriated by the assassin’s escape, but apparently had no second thoughts about the killings themselves. In May 1963, he would advise the young communist leader Fidel Castro to work harder in order to penetrate Cuban émigré circles and, if necessary, kill his opponents. “There are times when the security services should physically eliminate the leaders of the counterrevolution in exile,” Khrushchev told his Cuban guest.10

  33

  DEFECTOR

  As Aleksandr Sviatogorov and Georgii Sannikov watched the entrance to CIA headquarters in Berlin, CIA Berlin base officers were recovering from the shock of learning about the newly constructed Berlin Wall. A few days earlier, John Dimmer, the deputy chief of the base, had spoken at a meeting of the Berlin Watch Committee, an interagency intelligence group in West Berlin, where he dismissed intelligence reports about Soviet plans to seal off East Berlin and said that putting up a wall would be tantamount to Walter Ulbricht’s political suicide. On the morning of August 13, 1961, it became clear that if anyone had committed political suicide, it was Dimmer, not Ulbricht.

  On August 13, the Soviet defector was the last thing on the mind of the chief of the CIA base, William Graver. He was trying to figure out what could be done if the Soviets crossed the border and took over West Berlin. He asked for evacuation plans, but was told that no evacuation was possible: the Soviet armed forces had Berlin completely surrounded, and the Western Allies had few forces at their disposal to prevent an invasion. David Cornwell, who was then serving as a British intelligence officer in the West German capital of Bonn—and later became known under his pen-name, John le Carré—remembered later that the British embassy personnel had discussed evacuation in secret conclave but failed to develop a plausible plan: “Where do you evacuate to when the world is about to end?” The CIA officers in West Berlin began to activate emergency links with their agents on the other side of the rapidly rising wall. They also monitored the situation on the ground in West Berlin, where the locals were growing angry at the lack of Western response to Soviet actions. But once the initial panic at the CIA Berlin base was over, Bogdan Stashinsky was transferred from besieged West Berlin to Frankfurt, where he would spend the rest of the month in CIA custody.1

  As attested by CIA veteran William Hood, the CIA tried to transfer defectors promptly from places where the Soviets could get at them. “When possible,” wrote Hood about his experience in Vienna—which, like West Berlin, was deep inside Soviet-controlled territory until 1955—“defectors were hustled out of Vienna as soon as plans could be made for their r
eception in West Germany. No matter how long a defector may have brooded over his plan, the actual break always unleashes emotional demons, among which acute anxiety and depression are the most common.” Hood wrote that “the most that could be done in Austria was to make sure the person was who he claimed to be, to assess the strategic intelligence he might be able to impart, and try to siphon off any perishable information he might have on the security of the American forces in Austria.”2

  Bogdan Stashinsky was flown to Frankfurt on August 13, 1961, while Inge was interrogated separately by the West German authorities. Stashinsky would be housed in a block of buildings used by the CIA and US Army personnel, and there he would be interrogated repeatedly by CIA officers. The first of the many problems that CIA interrogators faced in dealing with Stashinsky’s testimony, both in Berlin and then at the CIA interrogation center in Frankfurt, was that they could not establish his identity. The many documents he produced had three different names on them: Bogdan Stashinsky, Joseph Lehmann, and Aleksandr Krylov. The CIA officers did not know which of them, if any, was authentic. The CIA also had no way to verify Stashinsky’s career with the KGB, or his surprisingly candid claims that he had killed Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet. Besides, no one thought that Rebet had been assassinated, and what Stashinsky was telling the interrogators about Bandera ran counter to all the evidence they had collected so far and all the theories developed on the basis of it. The documents assembled in the CIA’s Bandera file suggested that he had been poisoned by someone close to him, not by a lone killer wandering the streets of Munich with a strange tube in his pocket.3

  The most likely scenario—a theory the CIA kept strictly classified—came from the report of a CIA source inside Polish intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Michał Goleniewski. Goleniewski had first reported to the CIA on what he claimed to know about the KGB’s role in Bandera’s death in the fall of 1959. Two years later, on January 4, 1961, Goleniewski and his East German mistress had taken a taxi to the American consulate on Clayallee in West Berlin and asked for asylum. During questioning, Goleniewski did not provide any additional information on Bandera’s demise, but his accurate information on Soviet spies in the West had forced the CIA to reconsider his original report and take it seriously.4

  On August 24, 1961, as Stashinsky was being interrogated in Frankfurt, the chief of the Soviet Russia section at CIA headquarters received a memorandum summarizing Goleniewski’s old report on the Bandera murder. According to the report, an unsuspected KGB agent in Bandera’s circle had convinced him to meet with an alleged Soviet defector who was in fact another KGB agent. During the meeting, that agent had dropped delayed-action poison into Bandera’s coffee. The death of Bandera had allegedly cleared the way for another KGB agent to climb to the top of the Bandera organization. To the CIA agents, this seemed like the most reliable information they had at the time of Stashinsky’s defection. His stories about spray pistols and stalking Bandera around the streets of Munich not only sounded suspicious but made no sense at all.5

  The CIA officers in Frankfurt decided to let Stashinsky be someone else’s problem. As far as they were concerned, he posed too many risks and offered too little benefit. “After initial Agency interrogation of Stashinsky in Frankfurt on Main in August 1961,” reads a later CIA report, “the conclusion was drawn that he would not be valuable operationally as a double agent, that he was not a bona fide defector and the individual he purported to be.” Interrogations of bona fide defectors in Frankfurt lasted months; such individuals were typically debriefed on the political situation in the Soviet Union, popular attitudes toward the Soviet regime, the effect of Western radio broadcasts on the popular mood, and the spread of Ukrainian nationalism, among other topics. But since Stashinsky was not considered a genuine defector, his interrogation was over in less than three weeks. The CIA decided to dump him on their West German hosts.6

  Stashinsky’s hopes for security and freedom in the United States, nourished during long and lonely months in Moscow, were dashed. The information he was offering them, and for which the Soviets were ready to kill him, was deemed fake—the Americans would not be saving him. Had he and Inge made a mistake in risking their lives and fleeing to the West? Stashinsky’s shock and despair must have turned to horror when the CIA told him that they were going to turn him over to the West German authorities to stand trial for the crimes he claimed to have committed. But he had no choice but to accept the new reality. “Stashinsky told the Agency officials,” reads a CIA report, “that at the time he came to the West, he did not feel his past actions were criminal. They were patriotic acts committed in the name of the state. He said he now realized that the German law took a different view. He said that although he did not want to go to jail, he would have to suffer the consequences.”7

  Stashinsky did not trust the West Germans, and he had not wanted to deal with them in the first place. To make matters worse, the Americans were transferring him not in order to make a deal like the one he had been planning with the CIA—exchanging information for security and protection—but to prosecute him for crimes to which he had voluntarily confessed. Stashinsky must have felt trapped. He could not rescind his confession. If he was dumped by the Americans and acquitted by the Germans, he would have nowhere to go but back into the hands of the Soviets, and he could only imagine what awaited him there. In many ways, a German prison seemed like the safest place available under the circumstances.

  On September 1, 1961, Stashinsky was officially turned over to the West German authorities. Interrogations began immediately, and once again, his main task and challenge would be to prove that he was guilty, not innocent. There is no indication that throughout those weeks he was allowed to get in touch with Inge. They were now both in the West, but Inge would live there in freedom, while Stashinsky would be confined to a prison cell.8

  34

  INVESTIGATION

  Friday, September 22, 1961, was a warm and sunny day in Munich. The West German newspapers were reporting on an unexpected visit by General Lucius Clay of the United States to Steinstücken, an isolated enclave of West Berlin that had found itself cut off from the American zone of the city after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Steinstücken was in many ways a miniature model of West Berlin. West Berlin was linked to West Germany by a single road controlled by the Soviets and their East German clients; Steinstücken was linked to West Berlin by a road passing through the Soviet sector of the city. Once the Berlin Wall was built, President Kennedy ordered a column of US troops to march along the only highway linking West Germany to West Berlin to demonstrate American resolve to stay in the city. General Clay’s visit to Steinstücken showed his determination to defend the tiniest piece of Western territory if the East Germans and Soviets decided to annex it.

  As German newspapers discussed Clay’s symbolic visit to the enclave, which had a population of only forty-two families, Clay ordered a small detachment of US Military Police to take up permanent residence there. A month later he would send American tanks to Checkpoint Charlie in the center of Berlin to reaffirm the American right to travel in the eastern part of the city. The world was careening toward one of the most dangerous conflicts in modern history, but for the moment, everyone in Germany seemed excited about General Clay’s cowboy tactics. The message was clear. The Americans would not retreat: they were there to stay and fight if need be. That same day, the US Congress passed a bill creating the US Peace Corps, allocating $40 million to send American college graduates to Third World countries to make friends, mark the territory, and stop the spread of communism.1

  The fine weather that day reminded Bogdan Stashinsky of another warm autumn day he had spent in Munich: October 12, 1957, the day he killed Lev Rebet. Stashinsky mentioned that to one of the eight agents who accompanied him on a tour of his crime scenes. It was the first time he had seen the streets of Munich since his assassination of Stepan Bandera two years earlier. Among the agents and officials supervising Stashinsky on his return to Munich w
as Oberkommissar Adrian Fuchs of the Munich Kripo, who, after months of going around in circles in search of Bandera’s killer, was thrilled to finally have his man. Fuchs, a stocky forty-year-old Bavarian police officer, held a microphone in his hand and kept reminding Stashinsky that he was not supposed to mention any names while describing details of the killings he had committed.

  They traveled to both crime scenes, at Karlsplatz 8, where Stashinsky had killed Rebet, and Kreittmayrstrasse 7, where he had assassinated Bandera. Stashinsky not only described how he had done so but also reenacted both crimes, walking the same routes and climbing the same stairs for the benefit of a police camera. The photos taken that day show a lean, erect young man with black hair cut short, wearing a black shirt without a tie, a jacket slightly lighter in color, and even lighter pressed pants. At Karlsplatz, Stashinsky was asked to go to the second floor and then walk down toward an agent who was going up. He was told to aim at the agent with a rolled-up newspaper once they reached the same level and, after the virtual pistol shot, to hide the newspaper in the inside pocket of his jacket. In the hallway of Bandera’s apartment building on Kreittmayrstrasse, Stashinsky was asked, among other things, to bend down and pretend to fix his shoelaces. The photograph captured his black slip-on shoes and white socks. Stashinsky’s face showed no expression on either photo: he looked calm and detached and resigned to his fate. The crowd of accompanying agents was needed to protect rather than guard him. He had nowhere to run.2