Word: bandera
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...against Russians living in exile and working for the overthrow of the Moscow regime. The last known case was the 1959 murder, with a special cyanide pellet fired from a pistol, of Ukrainian Exile Leader Stefan Bandera in Munich...
Assassination also became part of the game. Russian exile groups in West Germany, particularly the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), worked actively to overthrow the Soviet government. To stop them, a Russian KGB spy named Bogdan Stashinsky was sent to murder Ukrainian Exile Leader Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet, the editor of an anti-Soviet newspaper. Using a cyanide pistol, Stashinsky was successful in both cases. Hired killers are not among the world's most attractive people. Yet Stashinsky emerges as a tragic figure. A brilliant young scholar, he was blackmailed into murder by the KGB. Later, driven...
...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...
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...
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...