The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Bonn’s disclosure of Stashinsky’s testimony included the extremely sensitive information that the chief of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, had personally given him an award for services rendered. Earlier that week, Shelepin had officially left the helm of the KGB to take up his new position as secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Many believed that Khrushchev had tapped him as his successor. The promotion of Shelepin raised questions: Was the Soviet leader himself involved in the Stashinsky affair? German government officials were careful not to insinuate as much, but Ukrainian nationalists in Munich were quick to pin the death of their leader on the man at the top of the Soviet hierarchy.

  “There is no doubt that plans for the undercover assassination were known to and approved by the head of the USSR Council of Ministers, Nikita Khrushchev, to whom the chief of the KGB is subordinate,” read the statement released by the Bandera organization. The Shelepin-Khrushchev connection was picked up and further developed by a number of West European and British newspapers. The Illustrated London News suggested that Shelepin’s promotion to a crucial post in the Central Committee indicated Khrushchev’s knowledge and approval of the assassination. In the ongoing propaganda war, the Western media had scored a coup.3

  The release of this politically explosive information on the eve of Adenauer’s visit to Washington was hardly accidental. For months, the West German leaders in Bonn had been trying in vain to convince the young and inexperienced American president to accept their view of the future of East-West relations in Europe and get tougher on the Soviets. They failed. The Stashinsky revelations also fell on deaf ears in Washington. On November 17, as Adenauer was making his bellicose statements, American newspapers published the text of Kennedy’s address of the previous day. Referring to Soviet-American tensions over Berlin, Kennedy had said: “It is a test of our national maturity to accept the fact that negotiations are not a contest spelling victory or defeat.”4

  The CIA operatives in West Germany—the same ones who had dismissed Stashinsky’s testimony in August 1961—were eager to use Stashinsky’s revelations for propaganda purposes, but their hands were tied. In West Germany it was up to the Germans to decide what to do with their unexpected catch, and in the United States the CIA was prohibited from engaging in any activities meant to influence American public opinion. There was also a change of guard at Langley. Allen Dulles, the staunchly anti-Soviet director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was already on his way out. He would resign before the end of November, leading to KGB self-congratulation on the success of its anti-CIA campaign.5

  The first indication that the release of Stashinsky’s testimony had made a political impact outside of West Germany came not from the United States but from Canada. In early December 1961, less than three weeks after the publication of Stashinsky’s revelations, the forty-two-year-old Arthur Maloney, a member of the Canadian Parliament and one of the principal authors of the Canadian Bill of Rights, visited the General Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe—the center of West German jurisprudence and home of its Constitutional and High Criminal courts. A federal prosecutor who met Maloney in Karlsruhe confirmed media reports about Stashinsky’s testimony. The distortions and confusions in media coverage were minimal, he told his Canadian visitor. Stashinsky had indeed killed Bandera and Rebet on orders from the KGB in Moscow, using a specially designed spray pistol. The German authorities were gearing up for a trial that they hoped would take place in April 1962. They were still deciding whether to hold it in Munich or Karlsruhe.6

  Maloney’s visit to Karlsruhe, which the Canadian print media covered, was congruent with the tough anti-Soviet stance taken by Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker. In 1960, Diefenbaker—the leader of a country that was still working on its declaration of formal independence from the British Empire, five years away from the adoption of its own flag, and twenty-two years away from acquiring full control over its constitution—turned the tables on Nikita Khrushchev on the issue of decolonization, which the Soviets habitually used against the Western powers to win friends in former European colonies. Diefenbaker declared that the Soviet Union was in fact a colonial empire in its own right, denying freedom to tens of millions of non-Russians living within Soviet borders. The prime minister developed this theme at an ethnic forum organized on Maloney’s initiative in Toronto on November 22, 1961. In front of 8,000 people representing 29 different ethnic groups, Diefenbaker stated that since World War II, 37 countries with a total population of 850 million had acquired independence from noncommunist states, while the Soviets continued to hold captive 96 million non-Russians who were never given a chance to say whether they wanted to remain in the USSR.

  Diefenbaker’s championing of the “captive nations” in the USSR came naturally to the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, a center-right party that took pride in its anticommunist convictions. But there was also another reason for Diefenbaker and his government to be sensitive to the plight of non-Russians in the USSR. The Progressive Conservatives had been swept into power with strong support from Ukrainian Canadians, who were especially influential in Diefenbaker’s power base—the prairie provinces of western Canada. Arthur Maloney was one of many Progressive Conservatives who had been elected to parliament with the help of the Ukrainian vote. His Toronto district of Parkdale included two Ukrainian churches and the headquarters of several Ukrainian organizations. When it came to foreign policy, Ukrainians wanted the Canadian government to support freedom for their homeland. Though divided along political lines, they all regarded the assassination of Bandera as an attack on their cherished dream of Ukrainian independence.7

  News of the Stashinsky revelations reached North America while the United Nations General Assembly was in the throes of a three-week debate about colonialism. On November 26, 1961, the American ambassador, Adlai E. Stevenson, addressed the assembly and denounced the “Sino-Soviet” bloc as the largest colonial empire in history. The Soviets, he declared, were ruling the non-Russian nations by force. He included Ukraine among those “captive nations.” Earlier, in July 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower—who had made the theme of nations enslaved by communism an important part of his foreign-policy rhetoric—had declared the first Captive Nations Week for the third week of the month. With the Stashinsky revelations, and a new president in the Oval Office, the “captive nations” initiative was again squarely in the limelight.

  The Soviets protested vehemently against the initiative, and some of Kennedy’s advisers suggested that he distance himself from the controversial stance. It de facto endorsed the overthrow of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, complicating relations with Moscow. However, despite the advice of the father of US Soviet policy, George Kennan, President Kennedy continued the tradition Eisenhower had established, reaffirming Captive Nations Week for July. Refugees from Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe—Ukrainians, in particular—stood guard over Eisenhower’s legacy.

  In January 1962, Dr. Lev Dobriansky, professor of economics at Georgetown, who was the primary author of the congressional resolution on captive nations, chair of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and founding chairman of the National Captive Nations Committee, issued an appeal to US senators and congressmen urging them to support the liberation struggles of all enslaved nations, notably the largest of them—Ukraine. He mentioned the displeasure Adlai Stevenson’s UN statement had provoked in the communist camp and then switched to the news from Germany. “The recent testimony of the Moscow agent Bogdan Stashinsky,” wrote Dobriansky, “that on Moscow’s orders he murdered the patriotic Ukrainian leaders in exile—Dr. Lev Rebet in 1957 and Stepan Bandera in 1959—provide further proof of the Khrushchev regime’s terrorism and its fear of Ukrainian nationalism.” Stashinsky’s testimony was rapidly becoming part of the “captive nations” discourse in the United States.8

  Appeals to political leaders were only part of the Ukrainian émigré campaign to alert the Western world to the danger of political terrorism co
nducted by Moscow. The leaders of the Bandera organization began to mobilize their supporters in Ukrainian communities in Germany and North America on November 17, 1961, as soon as the West German government made Stashinsky’s statements public. In the next few weeks, they organized more than a hundred demonstrations, close to eighty in Western Europe and Britain and about fifty in the United States and Canada. The media paid special attention to those in front of the Soviet embassy in London on November 25, 1961, and before the Soviet mission at the United Nations in New York on December 2. One hundred New York policemen protected the Soviet mission from approximately four hundred angry protesters, who began by displaying caricatures of Nikita Khrushchev and ended by breaking the police cordon and burning the Soviet flag. A few days later, the Soviets protested to the US ambassador in Moscow against “hooligans” and “fascists” whose actions threatened the future of cultural cooperation between the two countries. The official protest made no mention of Bandera or Stashinsky.9

  37

  CONGRESSMAN

  As politicians from Germany to Canada and to the United States struggled with the impact of Stashinsky’s revelations, the culprit himself was undergoing psychiatric evaluation. Professor Joachim Rauch of Heidelberg University observed him from February 12 to March 5, 1962, at the university clinic before concluding that he was fit to stand trial. The investigators and prosecutors got busy working on the indictment. After Chancellor Adenauer made public the main points of Stashinsky’s testimony, court officials did their best to stop further disclosures. Nonetheless, the indictment was leaked to the press almost immediately after it was ready. In late April its essentials appeared in Christ und Welt, the largest-circulation weekly newspaper in the country, triggering rumors that the trial would begin in late May. But the Senate of the Supreme Court sent the case back to the investigators, pushing the trial date into summer and then autumn. The trial was rescheduled for October 8, 1962.1

  Bandera’s followers used the postponement of the trial as an opportunity to secure the best representation possible for Bandera’s widow, Yaroslava. The organization had already begun collecting funds and obtained the services of a Munich attorney, Dr. Hans Neuwirth, but they wanted him to be backed up by additional attorneys with expertise in Ukrainian affairs and international law. The Bandera people turned for help to two American attorneys. The first, Jaroslav Padoch, a childhood friend of Bandera’s who had emigrated to the United States after World War II, would be their expert on Ukrainian affairs. The second, Charles J. Kersten, an attorney from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was supposed to wield political influence because of his role in the US government. Many in the Bandera organization considered it a major political coup that Kersten had agreed to help represent Bandera’s widow at the trial.

  Charles J. Kersten had been a powerful figure on the Washington political scene in the 1950s, serving three terms as a congressman. During his days in Washington, he had led the House Select Committee to Investigate Communist Aggression. He had also served as an adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower on psychological warfare. Kersten was not only a Cold War veteran but a founding father of American anticommunism. Wisconsin voters had first sent him to Congress in 1947, the same year Joseph McCarthy was elected to represent that state in the US Senate, and the same year President Harry Truman asked Congress for funds to stop communism in Greece and Turkey. The Truman Doctrine was born; the war on communism at home and abroad had begun.2

  In Washington, the forty-five-year-old Kersten had also ended up serving on the House Committee on Education and Labor. It was there that he first met two other freshman congressmen, the thirty-four-year-old Richard Nixon of California and the not yet thirty-year-old John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kersten and Kennedy were practicing Catholics and easily made common cause as opponents of communism. In 1948, Kersten was appointed to chair the congressional subcommittee investigating communist penetration of American trade unions. Kennedy was one of its members.3

  That same year, Nixon began his rise to power as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kersten was an important contributor to that rise. “He taught me most of what I know about communism,” recalled Nixon, speaking of his first encounters with Kersten. Kersten introduced Nixon to his own advisers on communist affairs, the Catholic clergymen Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen and Father John Cronin. It was also Kersten who advised the vacillating Nixon to bring his accusations against the suspected Soviet spy Alger Hiss to John Foster Dulles, the future secretary of state and rising star in the Republican establishment, who had been keeping Hiss under his protection. John Foster Dulles and his younger brother Allen, the future head of the CIA, were persuaded by Nixon’s evidence and withdrew their support from Hiss.4

  Kersten agreed to attend the Stashinsky trial after being approached by his old acquaintances in the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). In the 1950s, the chairman of the UCCA, Professor Lev Dobriansky, had served as a consultant to the Kersten Committee on Communist Aggression. He had helped Kersten find witnesses who were prepared to testify about Soviet nationality policies, and had himself testified before the committee. The now retired congressman did not let his Ukrainian friend down. He not only agreed to come to Germany to participate in the trial, but also volunteered to rally as many of his former Washington colleagues and acquaintances as possible and impress upon them the importance of the trial that was about to start in faraway Germany.5

  On Monday, October 1, 1962, Kersten made a stopover in Washington on his way from Wisconsin to Germany. Before coming to the nation’s capital, Kersten requested a meeting with Robert Kennedy, the US attorney general and younger brother of the sitting president. Unfortunately, the attorney general was too busy. When John F. Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960 against Richard Nixon, Kersten had thrown his full support behind Nixon. As a consequence, he was now having difficulty in getting a meeting even with Kennedy’s younger brother, to say nothing of the president himself. Kersten had to settle for a meeting with Bobby Kennedy’s assistants. A copy of his letter of May 18, 1962, to Kennedy, in which he advised the attorney general that he was going to participate in the Stashinsky trial in order to prove the connection between Stashinsky and senior Soviet officials, was forwarded to the FBI.6

  One door that was always open for Kersten was that of his former junior colleague Thomas J. Dodd, who was now a senator from Connecticut. In 1962, Dodd was serving as the vice chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Although they belonged to different parties (Kersten was a Republican, Dodd a Democrat), the two politicians had much in common. Both were Catholics, and they subscribed to the same brand of American patriotism, which included a determination to fight communism at home and abroad. Dodd had made a name for himself as the American executive counsel at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. He had cross-examined such prominent Nazis as Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Rosenberg, and when Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson left Nuremberg in October 1946, returning to Washington, DC, he named Dodd to take his place as acting chief of counsel until the completion of the trials a few months later. Dodd was elected to Congress in 1952, where he served under Kersten on the House Select Committee to Investigate Communist Aggression.7

  Kersten and Dodd met as old friends. Later that day, in a memo drafted for the senator, Kersten summarized his reasons for going to Germany as follows: “It will be my purpose to bring out as many facts as possible through Stashinsky and possibly others to show that Stashinsky was acting under direct orders of the Kremlin and that murders such as the one perpetrated by Stashinsky are an integral part of Russian Communism.” He also stated his main reason for wanting to see Dodd: “I feel there might be some efforts thorough the CIA or other of our Government agencies from people who are unsympathetic to raising the mask of Communist activities, to sabotage publicity from this trial and Stashinsky’s operations,” wrote Kersten. “Anything you might do through CIA, Tom, to aid in the publicizing of this trial will be m
uch appreciated.”8

  His concern was informed by an experience he had had in 1956, when he had been serving as an attorney for a Romanian exile on trial in Switzerland. Kersten’s defendant was one of four anticommunist Romanians who had occupied the Romanian embassy in Berne on February 14, 1955, demanding the release of a number of political prisoners being held in Romania. The “Berne incident,” as the armed takeover of the embassy became known in the media, had resulted not only in the disruption of the embassy’s activities, but also in the death of one of its employees. The trial, which received extensive coverage in the European media, had helped to attract European attention to human-rights abuses in communist Romania. Not so in the United States. Kersten later remembered, “I recall Radio Free Europe played it down, and I had understood that Life magazine had a story on the Romanian trial, but I had heard that it had been killed and I had hoped that this would not happen in the Stashinsky case.”9

  This time the situation was quite different. On September 7, 1962, long before the date of the trial became known to the public, Life magazine published a long exposé by the head of its Washington office, John L. Steele, entitled “Assassin Disarmed by Love: The Case of a Soviet Spy Who Defected to the West.” The article was most likely based on records that the US government had acquired from its West German partners. It was the fullest account of the Stashinsky story then available. Later, the CIA press office would refer journalists writing on the KGB assassination program to Steele’s article. Steele, who had extensive contacts in Washington, was able to recount the tiniest details of the murders Stashinsky had committed. He presented Stashinsky’s political “conversion” as a result of his love for Inge.