Espionage: A Poor Devil

The day before the Berlin Wall was built, a Russian named Bogdan Nikolaevich Stashinsky went over to the West, confessed that he was a Soviet secret agent and that years earlier he had hunted down and killed two Ukrainian anti-Red emigrés in Munich. The reason why the deaths had not attracted special attention—one was put down as a heart attack, the other as suicide—proved bizarre. His weapon, said Stashinsky, had been a single-barreled aluminum air gun that fired a pellet of liquid potassium cyanide through a fine mesh screen, releasing a poison spray. The poison caused death within 90 seconds after it was inhaled, leaving no mark on the victims.

Last week, in the Federal High Court in Karlsruhe, the airgun killer was on trial, and for three days he quietly explained the circumstances behind his cold-blooded crime. Oddly enough, the friends and relatives of Stashinsky’s victims who crowded the courtroom felt less hate than pity for the man in the dock. His was a tale of blackmail, grief, fear and love that moved the lawyer representing the widow of one victim to define the crime as manslaughter, not murder. Added an attorney for the other widow: Stashinsky was only “a poor devil.”

No Choice. Stashinsky’s bedevilment began innocently enough. In the summer of 1950, he was riding home on the train from Lvov, where he was studying to be a mathematics teacher, when he was picked up by Soviet transport police for traveling without a ticket. Stashinsky, the son of a poor peasant in a nearby village, was relieved when police let him go after merely asking some questions.

But the cops obviously concluded that they could use Stashinsky; a few days later, he was summoned back to police headquarters and blackmailed into becoming an informer. The area around Lvov was a hotbed of guerrilla activity by anti-Communist Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had fought with the Nazis against the Russians during the war. Stashinsky’s family, especially a younger sister, supported the guerrillas. Unless he cooperated, police told Stashinsky, his family would be sent to Siberia. Testified Stashinsky last week: “I had no choice. I wanted to see an end to the fighting. I wanted to protect my family. And I wanted to go on studying.”

The new MVD recruit easily passed his first test: he asked his sister to put him in contact with a local underground group, then turned in its leaders. Soon afterward, Stashinsky was enrolled in a spy school at Kiev. Assigned to East Berlin, Stashinsky was bored with his tasks; he passed information to and from other Soviet couriers, and once he was ordered to copy down the license plate numbers of Allied military vehicles. One of Stashinsky’s few excitements was a girl he met in an East Berlin dance hall, Inge Pohl, with whom he fell in love. Inge did not know her lover’s real employer, thought Stashinsky was a translator.

Stricken Conscience. In 1957 Stashinsky received orders to go to Munich, track down a Ukrainian nationalist writer named Lev Rebet and kill him; an agent sent from Moscow gave him instructions in using the poison-spray gun. The prospect mildly disturbed Stashinsky, but his belief that the Ukrainian extremists were ‘people of the lowest sort” stiffened his spirit. Still, when he tested the gun on a dog that was tied to a tree, Stashinsky recalled, “I felt sick. I kept telling myself this was all necessary to help other people. At moments like this you grab on to your political dogma to pull you through even when you feel it’s hollow.”

Stashinsky pulled through. While passing Rebet on the staircase of an office building, he pointed the six-inch aluminum barrel at Rebet’s face and pulled the trigger. Rebet toppled without a sound, and Stashinsky did not look back as he walked to a canal and dropped the weapon into the water. Two years later, he killed another exiled Ukrainian leader, Stefan Bandera, almost as smoothly. But while watching a newsreel of Bandera’s funeral in a movie theater, Stashinsky felt his conscience catching up with him. “It hit me like a hammer,” he said. “From then on, I knew that I must never allow myself to be used like this again.”

To his Soviet superiors, Stashinsky was a hero: he was flown back to Moscow, received the Order of the Red Banner signed personally by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. At a lavish stag party, Secret Police Boss Aleksander Shelepin himself gave him the high award.

Tragic Opportunity. That night Stashinsky announced that he intended to marry Inge Pohl. Reluctantly, Shelepin & Co. agreed, though they would have preferred a Russian girl for their boy. Stashinsky was ordered to stay in Moscow and Inge, who by now knew her husband’s real job, joined him there. Soon she persuaded Stashinsky to flee to the West, but it seemed impossible. Their Moscow apartment was bugged, and often they would communicate only by notes.

Tragedy finally gave them their chance to escape. When Inge became pregnant, she was allowed to go back to East Berlin to have her baby. The baby died, and the secret police, though suspicious that Inge had poisoned the child, permitted Stashinsky to return for the funeral. Before the burial, the couple shook off Soviet agents who were trailing them and took the elevated train into Berlin.

Said Stashinsky at last week’s trial: “My confession is a sign of my remorse.” His sentence: eight years in prison, a surprisingly light punishment, reflecting the court’s opinion that Stashinsky was “an abused tool of highly placed wire-pullers” and the really guilty party was the Soviet government.