Bohdan Stashynsky

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Bohdan Stashynsky (Bogdan Stashinsky) (November 4, 1931, Borshchovych)

Stashynsky is remembered as the KGB assassin of Ukrainian dissident professors Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera who were killed in the late 1950s.

1 Early biography
2 Assassin
3 Indoctrination
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Early biography

Born to a family of villagers not far from Lviv he completed his early education in 1948 and studied to become a teacher at the Lviv Pedagogical Institute. Statshynsky's family were supporters of the OUN. His three sisters were members of the organization. In 1950 he was arrested for travelling without a ticket on public transportation to Lviv from his village. Upon accepting a position of informer he was released. His family was spared deportation to Siberia. Through his siters he infiltrated the workings of the OUN and forwarded information to the KGB.

In 1953 he is sent to Kiev to continue studies in espionage. In 1954 he is sent to East Germany under the name Joseph Leman where he perfects his knowledge of German. From 1956 he often travelled to Munich where initially he tailed and later killed Lve Rebet.

[edit] Assassin

Stashynsky, received the instructions to carry out the assassination directly from the headquarters of the KGB in Moscow. At that time, Alexander Shelepin was Chairman of the State Security Committee at the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The assassination was known to and approved by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1957, the KGB trained the 25-year-old Stashynsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule. The gas was designed to induce cardiac arrest, making the victim's death look like a heart attack. Stashynsky used the weapon to kill Lev Rebet in 1957. On October 15, 1959 he used an improved version of the same gas gun to murder Stepan Bandera in Munich.

Stashynsky was honored by Moscow with the Order of the Red Banner by A. Shelepin for his work and given another assignment: to kill Yaroslav Stetsko a former prime minister of the Ukraine Republic then living in West Germany. Stetsko, a prominent personality of the Ukrainian liberation struggle and the President of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations was to be assassinated in 1960, but it could not be perpetrated for reasons which have as yet not been clarified.

[edit] Indoctrination

Explaining what motivated him to kill Rebet, Stashynsky told a court that he had been told that Rebet was “the leading theorist of the Ukrainians in exile,” since “in his newspapers "Suchasna Ukrayina" (Contemporary Ukraine), "Chas" (Time), and "Ukrayinska Trybuna" (Ukrainian Tribune) he not so much provided accounts of daily events as developed primarily ideological issues.”

Stashynsky however, had begun having second thoughts about his profession. Along with his new wife, who had been shocked to find herself married to an assassin, he defected to U.S. officials in Berlin in 1961.

After Stashynsky's defection the Moscow government tried to avert negative exposure by means of propaganda. On October 13, 1961, it arranged a press conference in East Berlin at which another agent of the Soviet secret service, named Stefan Lippolz, appeared in order to make certain "disclosures" regarding the murder of Stepan Bandera. He blamed the murder on the cashier of Bandera's own organization, Dmytro Myskiv, who has died in the meantime. This diversion manoeuvre was a failure since it was established that the fictitious "assassin" was not in Munich when Bandera was murdered, but was in Rome at the time, where he stayed for several days.

Stashynsky was given a short prison sentence for the assassinations, and was released in 1966.

Under an assumed identity, Stashynsky and his wife settled in South Africa.^[1]