The Poison Pistol

CLOAK & DAGGER

The 1959 death of Ukrainian Nationalist Leader Stefan Bandera in Munich was officially listed as a suicide. Bandera, apparently, had a sudden seizure, fell and broke his neck. An autopsy revealed traces of cyanide, which Munich police surmised had been self-administered, causing the fall. But last week the case was reopened by the confession of the man responsible for Bandera's "suicide"--a former Russian secret-police agent named Bogdan Nikolaevich Stachinsky.

Fanatically devoted to the cause of Ukrainian independence from Russia, Bandera had fought alongside the Nazis against the Russians during World War II. After the war, his partisans continued to harass the Soviets until they were crushed in 1950 in an all-out Soviet effort. Bandera escaped to Munich, evaded at least four attempts on his life. Then the Soviet secret police assigned Agent Stachinsky to the job.

Trained in a Moscow spy school for five years, Stachinsky showed up in Munich with a West German passport and an ingeniously designed murder weapon. Though his primary target was Bandera, the Soviets ordered him to perform a trial run on another Ukrainian Nationalist, Writer Lev Rebel. The weapon worked perfectly; the verdict was that Rebel's death was caused by a heart attack. Thus the stage was set for Bandera. As the Ukrainian leader hurried up the stairs of his apartment building one afternoon, Stachinsky stepped out of the shadows to meet him. The agent was wearing a gas mask, and in his hand he carried a double-barreled air pistol. Aiming carefully, he fired two pellets into Bandera's face. The capsules exploded on impact, releasing a cloud of cyanide gas. Bandera gasped the fumes and fell unconscious. He died, without gaining consciousness, on the way to a hospital.

After the murder. Agent Stachinsky was reassigned to East Berlin. There, he says, he incurred the wrath of his superiors by making a local girl pregnant and secretly marrying her. Last August, shortly before the Wall was built, Stachinsky and his wife escaped to the West. Now a confessed double murderer, he faces life imprisonment in a West German jail.

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