Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including, recently, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine and The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. The above story is an excerpt from his most recent book, The Man With the Poison Gun.

Shortly before 5 a.m. on August 10, 1961, Bogdan Stashinsky was waiting near his apartment building in Moscow to be picked up by his case officer, Yurii Aleksandrov. Before leaving, he put his household effects in order and destroyed the list of code phrases that he and his wife, Inge, had used in their correspondence over the past six months, he in Moscow, where the KGB kept an eye on him, and she in East Berlin, where she had gone to have their newborn son. The only incriminating evidence remaining was what he carried on him—identification papers and documents, issued in the names of his numerous aliases, that he was taking to Berlin against the orders of his case officer. If they were discovered, the KGB would have no doubt about his real intentions.

He was risking his life to escape the suffocating embrace of the KGB, the ultra-secretive Soviet spy agency that had ensnared him when he was 19 years old and made him one of the highest-profile assassins in the world.


The story of Stashinsky’s defection from the KGB—which has never before been told in such detail—started when he fell in love with Inge Pohl, an East German woman, in the spring of 1957. A son of Ukrainian patriots, he had been forced to spy on the anti-Soviet underground under the threat that his entire family would be arrested for helping the nationalist underground, and he was now in his seventh year of working for the Russian security agency. In the fall of 1957, he had ambushed the editor of a Ukrainian émigré newspaper on the stairs of a Munich office building and killed him with a top-secret spray gun that fired cyanide. Two years later, in October 1959, he scored an even bigger success, assassinating the top leader of the Ukrainian resistance hiding in Munich, Stepan Bandera, in the same way. He had told Inge nothing about his work for the KGB.

Stashinsky probably knew that his work for the KGB would make his marriage to Inge difficult. He argued with his bosses over his desire to propose to a non-KGB-employed, non-Soviet woman. They tried to dissuade him, citing her lower social status and her German nationality; they gave him a new assignment in Moscow, offered to pay Inge a cash settlement—but Stashinsky was still not dissuaded.

Eventually, Stashinsky settled on an agreement with his KGB superiors: He could marry Inge, but she would have to acquire Soviet citizenship. She would also have to agree to help him in his KGB work. The KGB’s logic was simple. If Stashinsky would not marry a Soviet woman in service to the KGB, then his German wife would have to become a Soviet citizen and join the KGB.

Stashinsky was taken aback by the proposal—these conditions would make the marriage a trap for him and his fiancée, not a psychological escape from the embrace of the KGB. Nevertheless, it was the best he could get under the circumstances, and he was not going to let it slip through his fingers. But the KGB grew ever more suspicious as it eavesdropped on the newly married couple and heard them expressing criticism of the Soviet system. The KGB would not allow them to travel abroad together, and it prohibited Stashinsky from visiting Inge in East Berlin, where she had traveled to give birth to their son. But suddenly things changed. A family tragedy was about to crush the young couple, while presenting them with the opportunity they long dreamed about—to escape the embrace of the KGB and start a new life for themselves in the West.

***

On the evening of Tuesday, August 8, 1961, Stashinsky took a call from Inge and learned that their son, Peter—the healthy boy born four months earlier—was dead. He had fallen ill, developed a high fever and died suddenly. Inge was disconsolate and wanted Stashinsky to come to Berlin. All Stashinsky could tell her was that he would talk to his bosses. He couldn’t contact his case officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yurii Aleksandrov, until the next morning.

During the sleepless night following Inge’s call, Stashinsky had devised a strategy that might bring him to Berlin, capitalizing on Inge’s precarious condition after the loss of her child. The couple had agreed some months earlier that defection from the KGB and life in the West was their only chance at a normal life. Now, under the most tragic of circumstances, their plan had finally become possible. In the morning, he told Aleksandrov that “in her present state of mind she might do something in despair that would be harmful to the KGB,” such as turning to the German authorities and demanding his arrival in Berlin. That could blow his cover.

A few hours later, the case officer had good news for him—his request for travel to Berlin had finally been granted. Stashinsky could not wait to pass on the good news to Inge, whom he spoke to by phone later that day. They would see each other either tomorrow or the day after, he told his anxious wife.

That evening, Aleksandrov told Stashinsky that everything was ready for his departure. He would go to Germany on a military plane the next morning and would need to be ready by 5 a.m. Aleksandrov would collect him near his apartment building. He asked Stashinsky to turn in all his KGB-issued documents and passes before leaving for Germany, keeping his travel document only. It was issued, as always, in the name of Aleksandr Krylov.

But in direct violation of Aleksandrov’s instructions, Stashinsky took the Joseph Lehmann identity card—his original identity—with him, which was good until April 1970, and a driver’s license in the same name. He also pocketed his Soviet passport and a Foreign Languages Institute student identity card, both issued in his real name. To these, he added the letter of reference that the KGB had provided for his enrollment at the institute. The letter mentioned the Order of the Red Banner—proof of the importance of the tasks he had carried out for the KGB. Stashinsky was ready not just to go to the West and request asylum, but to turn himself in and disclose the work he had done for the KGB.

On August 10, before dawn, Alexandrov picked up Stashinsky, armed with the documents and identification papers that would surely give him away and get him killed if he were discovered. When Stashinsky learned that Aleksandrov would accompany him on the trip to Berlin, his heart sank. He turned over to Aleksandrov the envelope with his identification papers and passes. Aleksandrov did not ask about the missing Lehmann and Stashinsky documents.

They drove to the military airport on the outskirts of Moscow and spent a few hours waiting for their flight. “He told me,” recalled Stashinsky later, “that … it was necessary that I be protected at all times, and that he had ordered a car with KGB personnel for that purpose.” Either scenario conveniently gave the KGB sufficient excuse to keep Stashinsky under constant watch during his stay in Berlin. His chances of escape were diminishing by the hour.

***

Once in Berlin, Stashinsky convinced Inge to attempt escape to the West before their son’s funeral, as the KGB would make it all but impossible afterward. Inge reluctantly agreed. They would try to make their way to West Berlin from Inge’s parents’ home in Berlin’s suburb of Dallgow, part of East Germany. Before Inge and Stashinsky, along with Inge's brother Fritz, embarked on their journey, Stashinsky changed his shirt and packed his raincoat. Inge changed her dress. Stashinsky later remembered: “We could not take much, as we had to be inconspicuous and allow for being challenged in the course of our flight.” But when Inge asked whether she could take the quilt she had used to swaddle Peter, Stashinsky agreed. They left the house from a side entrance. “Our flight to West Berlin really was a flight,” recalled Inge later. “There was no other way out for us, though with all the strain and stress and emotional burden of the last few days we were not really fully aware of the consequences of our step.”

On a map of Berlin and its environs, the trip from Dallgow to the western part of the city seems easy. Dallgow, located west of Berlin, bordered a section of the city that had been occupied by the Western Allies since 1945. The easiest way to get from Dallgow to West Berlin was to take a train heading east. In two stops, they would reach the relative safety of the western sector. But they did not dare show up at Dallgow railway station, where the KGB would certainly have agents posted. Fritz also told Stashinsky and Inge the alarming news he had heard from a friend: The police, desperate to stem the tide of refugees escaping to the West, were checking passengers’ documents at the station in Staaken, the last city before the border with West Berlin, turning back many East German passengers bound for the western part of the city.

Another route had to be found. Ultimately, Stashinsky decided that they would head for the nearby village of Falkensee, about three miles north of Dallgow, and try their luck there. Stashinsky, Inge and Fritz took the back entrance through the garden. Hidden by high shrubs, they walked to Falkensee.

Luckily, they were never stopped. The walk took them about 45 minutes. In Falkensee, Stashinsky decided to avoid the train and instead take a taxi. They found a taxi driver on a side street who agreed to take the three of them to East Berlin. He drove along the Berliner Ring Road, circling the city from the north. As they crossed the border between East Germany and East Berlin, which were both under Soviet occupation, they were asked for documents. Stashinsky told the guards that he was returning home to East Berlin and produced an identity card in the name of Josef Lehmann. Had the card been found on Stashinsky by his KGB “protectors,” it could have cost him his life. But now, the guards waved them through.

Stashinsky and Inge decided that the time had come to say goodbye to Fritz as well. Inge gave him 300 East German marks to cover the funeral expenses and told him that they probably would not see each other for a while. If he was asked at home where the two had gone, he was to say that they were visiting relatives in Berlin. Fritz made his way to the S-Bahn rail transit station and bought a ticket to Staaken through West Berlin.

With Fritz gone, Stashinsky and Inge went to Schonhauser Allee, where they boarded the S-Bahn. Their luck held; the police did not get to their car. They got off the S-Bahn at Gesundbrunnen, the first station in West Berlin.

There was no time to savor the moment. Stashinsky and Inge grabbed a taxi and asked the driver to take them to the apartment of Inge’s aunt, who lived in West Berlin.

Stashinsky and Inge spent no more than half an hour at her aunt’s apartment and then went to the police station near Tempelhof, the airport from which Stashinsky had flown to Munich so many times. Back then, he had wanted to avoid the police at all costs; now he believed that they were his only hope of salvation.

But the policemen were in no hurry. A Soviet intelligence officer wanting to turn himself in to the Americans? Was that for real? Heinz Villwok, Inge's uncle who negotiated the surrender, had to wait 20 minutes to talk to an officer. Then he waited again. After that, he spoke with police officials together with Inge. Finally they persuaded the police to call the Americans. It was already past 9 p.m., less than an hour before Aleksandrov would be certain to discover the Stashinskys’ disappearance, and three hours before the East German Army and police started unrolling their barbed wire—the start of the Berlin Wall.

Meanwhile, at Peter’s funeral three hours before in Dallgow, KGB officers were beginning to realize something was amiss. Stashinsky and Inge hadn’t come. Georgii Sannikov, a 32-year-old KGB officer then working in Berlin under diplomatic cover, later described the shock felt by his KGB colleagues and superiors once they realized that Bogdan Stashinsky had defected. “The KGB operatives present at the child’s funeral were puzzled by the parents’ absence,” wrote Sannikov. “By the end of the day on 13 August 1961 it was clear that the Stashinskys had gone to the West.” KGB officers immediately started recalling agents whom Stashinsky knew or might have known from the West. Every measure was taken to find the defector and silence him before he could talk to the Americans.

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 Soviet leader Nikita 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,” one of the KGB officers recalled later. “Anyone at all who had had anything to do with the matter was removed from his post, fired and put on trial.”

***

On August 13, the Soviet defector was the last thing on the mind of the chief of the CIA base, William Graver, who had just learned that the East Germans put up a barbed wire wall to separate the city in the middle of the night. 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 Carre—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.

Once the initial panic at the CIA Berlin base was over, and they realized there’d be no invasion, Bogdan Stashinsky was flown from besieged West Berlin to Frankfurt, where he would spend the rest of the month in CIA custody. As attested by CIA veteran William Hood, “when possible” (as Hood wrote about his experience in Vienna), the CIA tried to transfer defectors promptly from places where the Soviets could get at them.

Stashinsky was flown to Frankfurt on August 13, 1961, while Inge stayed behind and was interrogated separately by the West German authorities. Stashinsky would be housed in a block of buildings used by the CIA and U.S. 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.

On August 24, as Stashinsky was being interrogated in Frankfurt, the chief of the Soviet Russia section at CIA headquarters received a memorandum summarizing an old report on the Bandera murder. To the CIA agents, this seemed like the most reliable information they had at the time of Stashinsky’s defection and sounded nothing like Stashinsky’s account. His stories about spray pistols and stalking Bandera around the streets of Munich not only sounded suspicious but also made no sense at all.

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.” Since Stashinsky was not considered a genuine defector, his interrogation was over in less than three weeks. The CIA decided to dump him on its West German hosts, where he would stand trial for the crimes he claimed to have committed.

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 the Americans, 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? 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.” Furthermore, if he were 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.

The chief investigating officer at the scene was Inspector Vanhauer of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt). He became the first German official to interrogate Stashinsky once the latter was in West German custody. Interrogations began on the day of his transfer, September 1, and continued the following day. Like the CIA interrogators, Vanhauer found it difficult to believe Stashinsky’s testimony. “At first I treated the matter skeptically, as this was the first we had heard of both murders,” remembered Vanhauer later. “After the interrogation, we discussed the case late into the night, weighing the ‘pros and cons.’ Later we were inclined ever more to the conviction that Stashinsky’s account was genuine.”

The investigators would leave no stone unturned in checking his story. On September 11, Oberkommissar Fuchs was asked to go back to Munich and check the automatic lock of the entrance door at Kreittmayrstrasse 7, where Stashinsky had assassinated Stepan Bandera.

Stashinsky had claimed that he had twice broken his keys trying to open the door. Sure enough, Fuchs found metal parts of the broken keys in the lock. Stashinsky’s testimony on the dates of his travel and hotel stays matched the records unearthed by Fuchs and his assistants. On September 11, the authorities interviewed Inge Pohl, who confirmed and further corroborated her husband’s testimony. The Americans, they concluded, were wrong: Stashinsky was not lying.

The final turning point in the interrogation came on September 12. Present in the interrogation chamber along with Vanhauer were the chief police commissioner and a number of security officers. A report filed by those present stated that “Stashinsky’s quiet, sure and precise statements with regard to events preceding the assassination, the lapse of time, and the description of the localities and the execution of the deeds led to the general conclusion that Stashinsky could, in fact, be the murderer of Rebet and Bandera.”

On September 22, the West German police brought Stashinsky to both crime scenes in Munich, at Karlsplatz 8, where Stashinsky had killed Lev Rebet, and the apartment building at Kreittmayrstrasse 7, where he had assassinated Stepan Bandera. The visit solidified his story. 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. 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.

New Window This article was adapted from The Man With the Poison Gun, published by Basic Books in December.

In late September and early October 1961, Stashinsky was questioned once again by agents of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA), who concluded once and for all that he was telling the truth.

News had reached the Soviets that Stashinsky had defected; they followed by circulating a fabricated story. Kurt Blecha, the head of the East German government press service, held a news conference about the “criminal intrigues of the Bonn Federal Intelligence Service.” As flaws came up in the original story, it evolved, but the basic storyline was that Bandera had been killed by ex-Nazis in the employ of the West, and it became the official story in the Soviet Union for decades.

What happened to Stashinsky afterward remains a mystery. The West Germans put him on trial in October 1962 for the crimes he insisted he had committed. Sentenced to eight years of imprisonment as an accessory to the murder committed by the Soviet state, Stashinsky was released on parole New Year ’s Eve 1966 and disappeared from the public eye forever. Rumor had it that he was brought to the United States by the CIA. In fact, the CIA files are silent in that regard. He actually ended up in South Africa—a country that had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and where he could feel relatively safe confronted with the possibility of being hunted down by his former spy colleagues. He is probably still living there, always looking over his shoulder, aware that the old habits of KGB die hard, if at all.