My first assignment was to get rid of the
exiled Ukrainian intellectual, Lev Rebet. This man, once a key player in the Organization
of Ukrainian Nationalists and later the deputy prime minister of the Ukrainian government,
became a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union. He had to go. I watched in the background as Rebet walked
through the Stachus, a grand square in central Munich where he wrote his anticommunist articles
in a small office. As he entered that office building, I followed
him almost to the door of his newspaper. I remember it vividly. How he walked without a care in the world,
briefcase in hand, just ambling along without any protection in sight. That was his major downfall; his brazenness. Surely he must have known that he was on the
kill list of the KGB. He began to walk up a staircase, and suddenly
I was right in his face. I quickly pulled out my state of the art single
barrel poison gun that contained a hydrogen cyanide capsule and I blasted a cloud of mist
in his face. He dropped right away, as if he’d been struck
down by the devil himself. I walked away casually, putting the gun under
the newspaper where it had been previously hidden, leaving the man strung over the staircase. There was nothing that could be done for him;
I had done my job well and would later be commended for it. Better still, because of the nature of the
poison used, the authorities thought the cause of death was a massive cardiac arrest…and
that’s why the KGB loved their cyanide. The problem was never the fact that cyanide
poisoning wasn’t certain death, it was how to get a man in public; how to create a weapon
that could blast the mist with accuracy. Well, we had guys in our secret laboratory,
The Cell, to sort that problem out. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That scene, which happened on 10 October 1957, starred a KGB assassin named Bohdan Stashynsky. While there were plenty of assassinations
undertaken by the KGB, Stashynsky is a man whose name is perhaps the best known. His assassination of Rebet has gone down in
history, but it was by no means his most infamous act while taking orders from the KGB. He would kill again, and he would use new
and improved weapons. But first, we should ask the question; how
does a man become an assassin for the KGB? That’s not a job that would appear in the
local newspaper; it’s not even a vocation that one would tell his own family about. Stashynsky was born in a village outside the
Ukrainian city of Lviv. Back then, in 1931, this city was part of
Poland but it later became part of the Soviet Union after Germany and the Soviets invaded
Poland. Stashynsky certainly grew up in a tumultuous
time. His three sisters became part of what was
called the anti-Soviet “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, but it seems young Bohdan was not
on board with them. When he was just 19 years old he was arrested
for travelling on a train and not having a ticket. We can’t tell how it happened or what kind
of duress Stashynsky faced, but during that arrest he agreed that he would spy for the
Soviet secret police. And with his sisters as part of the anti-Soviet
insurgent army, STashynksy was well placed to leak vital intelligence to the Soviets. At home he pretended everything was normal,
and then he’d go and report what he heard to the secret police, which was then part
of something called the MGB, or Ministry of State Security. Stashynsky became such a valuable asset, and
so good at his job, that while still in his early twenties he was sent to work as an undercover
agent in Kiev and later East Germany. It was there that he studied German until
he was fluent, and after that he started using the name Josef Lehmann. Now the Soviets had a spy working in Germany
that could pass off as German and move between East and West Germany. If anyone asked him, he was born to Polish-German
parents. He kept the same birthday so he’d never
forget if asked, but for some reason he made himself one year older. He was fluent in German, but the problem was
his accent wasn’t exactly perfect. Because of this, Stashynsky made up a back
story that he had lived in Poland and Ukraine before. In fact, he even visited all the places he
had supposedly grown up in and lived in and could recount tales of what he had done in
those places. Such was the work of a spy…those guys had
to be great actors and be able to talk about a past that didn’t exist- not exactly easy
when staring down the barrel of a gun. Stashynsky eventually set up shop in East
Berlin and was met by a handler for the secret police. Our soon-to-be assassin honed his spycraft
amongst other Soviet and East German spies, while making contact with military and political
leadership. Soon, Stashynksy’s talents for killing would
be discovered, and put to the test. In 1954, Berlin had not yet been divided by
fences and barbed wire, and so often spies from the compound would take off and go do
their business in the West. At the same time, Western Intelligence, mainly
the secret services of the Americans, British and the French, were doing the job of espionage
in the East. There were checkpoints here and there, but
those could easily be bypassed. Berlin was literally full of spies, with one
former British spy who became a double agent for the Soviets, a man named George Blake,
saying it was so crazy he felt that every other adult male he saw was likely in some
way spying for one of the sides. Like a giant game of very dangerous cat and
mouse, spies circled each other on Berlin’s streets, with their life only ever being one
trigger pull away from being over… The Soviets originally planned for Stashynsky
to move into a management position in some corporate office, but because of his not-quite-perfect
German accent, it was decided he would draw too much attention. The Soviets lost faith in Stashynsky being
able to remain undetected, after all in a city full of spies the guy with the funny
accent was going to draw a lot of suspicion. Then they decided he would work as a laborer,
just like in any other place in the world, nobody pays attention to the laborer with
a funny accent. One of the men that Soviets spies had their
eye on for elimination was named Stepan Bandera. He was a far right-wing Ukrainian ultranationalist
who held some rather hardline views. He wanted to unite Ukraine, but in the style
of “Ukraine for Ukrainians” only. Ukraine would be made great again by kicking
everybody who wasn’t Ukranian out- and that of course included the Soviets. Yet Bandera was not an easy man to get to. Paranoid and with a suspicion that the Soviet
Union might be out for his blood given his anti-Soviet views, Bandera exiled himself
in West Germany and had plenty of security around him. His time would come, but first the Soviets
decided to go for an easier target, a man who happened to be enemies with Bandera, and
the victim we introduced you to at the start of this show, Lev Rebet. Rebet wanted to unite Ukraine, but not in
the same fashion as Bandera. Both these men you will see became related
in a kind of way, despite their differences. Rebet was an intellectual, a journalist, a
book writer and a newspaper editor. Bandera called him stooge for the CIA, but
where both men were similar is that they were both anti-communist. Now back to our assassin, Mr. Stashynsky. He was told by his bosses in the KGB that
both these men were dangerous, but Bandera was hard to get close to. On the other hand, Rebet didn’t walk around
with bodyguards since he probably thought that writing intelligent articles that espoused
Ukrainian unity wasn’t something he would be killed for. As you know, he was wrong and it cost him
his life. Before he could get through the office door,
Stashynsky blasted cyanide mist in his face. The KGB hadn’t at first decided to kill
Rebet, and in fact the plan had been to spike his food, knock him out, take him to East
Germany and coerce him to say that he had defected. After that he would be forced to write propagandistic
articles about how bad the west was. That plan changed, and Stashynsky was told
his mission was to kill Rebet. He wasn’t happy about this at all, since
he wasn’t keen on murdering someone, but he knew if he turned down an order it would
likely lead to his own death. On October 9th, 1957, a man arrived at Tempelhof
Airport in West Berlin carrying 100 marks and a suitcase containing two large cans of
sausages. It was Stashynsky, moving under a different
name. He had flown in from France on a West German
passport, but inside West Germany he was told to use his East German passport that had in
it the name Josef Lehmann. Only one of those cans actually contained
sausages. The other contained a poison gun. On October 10, Stashynsky swallowed an antidote
pill. He was told to take one before the assassination
and one after the job was done, and that way he wouldn’t fall ill or die if the mist
got into his own system. He had ten pills in all, just in case his
plan failed. In the morning he was observing some offices
in a plush part of town, which could obviously arouse suspicion given the hectic times. If the police asked him what he was doing
he was told to tell them that he was merely a tourist and he was just looking at the marvelous
architecture. As you know, that morning he would get his
man. Forensic scientists would rule the death as
a heart attack, which Rebet’s wife didn’t believe since her husband had never had any
heart problems. The killing didn’t stop there. In January 1959, Stashynsky was given another
task. This time his mission was to find out where
Stepan Bandera lived. Again he flew to Munich under a West German
passport but this time as a man named Hans. The KGB thought they knew where Bandera lived,
but when Stashynsky went to check the address out he discovered that Bandera wasn’t living
there. The KGB told him he might be living under
the name Stefen Popel, so Stashynsky looked in the phone directory for such a person and
he found one. He went to that address and hid for a while,
and lo and behold, he saw Bandera arrive there. The KGB then had one more message for Stashynsky. Your order is to “liquidate” the target
in the same way you did Rebet. First he returned to Moscow to pick up the
weapon. This time it was a vastly improved double
barrel poison gun. He was told that Bandera would likely have
a bodyguard with him, so now he could take them both out. They gave him his antidote pills and said
off you go, don’t fail, the Soviet Union needs you. Oh, and one other thing they gave him was
a set of keys for Bandera’s apartment building. Don’t ask us how they got those. The plan was to secretly enter the building
and then get Bandera as soon as he walked in. Stashynsky did his due diligence and watched
the apartment for a few days. Most times Bandera was with his bodyguard,
but then one night he saw him walking alone. He had his chance. It was now or never. But for some reason, Stashynsky couldn’t
go through with it. Instead, he turned his back, shot the gun
at the floor, and dumped it in a stream. He also broke the key to the apartment, which
was all a ruse so he could tell his superiors that he’d tried to go through with the assassination
but it failed. The KGB were less than impressed when Stashynsky
told them in Moscow what had happened and they sent him right back to Munich. On October 15, 1959, he swallowed his antidote
pill and went to Bandera’s apartment building. He was pretty sure his handlers were watching
him this time so knew he had to go through with it. He used a new set of keys to get into the
building and laid in wait. At the moment that he knew Bandera was trying
to open the door he stood waiting with his poison gun hidden under a newspaper. It took some time, because Bandera was holding
a bag of vegetables and couldn’t quite get the door open. Stashynsky just waited on the other side,
thinking c’mon, come in. He finally did and out of sheer nervousness
he gave him both barrels of the gun into his face. Bandera dropped to the floor and off Stashynsky
went into the busy streets. The next day at the airport he read the story
about how Bandera, known to his neighbors as Popel, had mysteriously died...He’d just
fallen to the ground inside his apartment complex. The death looked like natural causes, said
the newspaper. The autopsy actually revealed that the cause
of death was cyanide poisoning, but the police kept this hidden from the public for as long
as they could. The cops believed that they could have a suicide
on their hands, but it seemed unlikely, given that Bandera was so strong-willed. You have to remember that cyanide guns were
pretty high tech killing devices so it confounded the cops how cyanide could have gotten into
Bandera’s system. Back in Moscow, Stashynsky was given the “Order
of the Red Banner” for his actions and was cheered by his colleagues. But that didn’t mean he could hang his gloves
up. He was told he had one last assignment and
that was to assassinate the anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist leader, Yaroslav Stetsko. By this time Stashynsky had fallen in love
with an East German woman and was falling out of love with the KGB. He wanted out, but how to get out…they wouldn’t
even let him be there for the birth of his own son. When that son was four months old he suddenly
died, and the KGB told Stashynsky that he could go back to East Berlin for the funeral,
but not as Joseph Lehmann. Stashynsky had had it with the KGB. He took that fake ID, got his wife, passed
through into West Berlin and then got a flight to the USA. He had defected, and that’s what he told
the U.S. authorities. Ok, so that sounds truthful to you guys watching
this show, but what was the U.S. supposed to think. Maybe Stashynsky hadn’t actually defected
and was in fact still a spy, a kind of Trojan Horse. The CIA flew him back to Germany and interrogated
him there. They didn’t want the man on U.S. soil. The thing was, though, Stashynsky could describe
in detail what had happened to Rebet and Bandera…He could recount details that only the cops knew. Not only that, the police and secret services
at this point had no idea that Rebet had been assassinated. The CIA still thought that death by poison
spray gun was over the top; they’d never heard of such a thing. In documents that would later be revealed,
the CIA wrote that Stashynsky, “would not be valuable operationally as a double agent,
that he was not a bona fide defector and the individual he purported to be.” Nonetheless, he was imprisoned in 1962 for
two murders, but got out in ’66. What happened to him and his wife after that
we don’t exactly know…We found one newspaper clipping from 1984 on the CIA’s website
that said he was sent to South Africa and he didn’t only get a new name, but also
underwent extensive cosmetic surgery. Now you need to watch this video, “KGB SECRETS
(And Why It Fell Apart)” or this video, “CIA vs KGB - Which Was Better During the
Cold War?”
