On October 12, 1957, a car stopped in front of the building opposite the Stagos Hotel in Munich, Germany, and out of the car came a fat man wearing a beret, at 10 o'clock in the morning, the bright sun sprinkled on Casa Palaz Avenue, and the pedestrians who came and went began their day in the slightly cool autumn breeze.
The man got out of the car and stopped to look around, then he lowered the brim of his hat and went straight into the building. When he walked to the middle of the stairs on the first and second floors, he encountered a tall young man who was going downstairs, because the stairs were relatively narrow, the man slightly sideways to let the young man pass, suddenly, he felt a tightness in his heart, his eyes were black, his feet did not listen to the call, he wanted to reach out and grasp the handrail of the stairs, but before he could touch the handrail, he fell on the steps and rolled down the stairs, and soon, he did not breathe.
The next day, the local Munich newspaper published a news article:
"At 10:40 a.m. on the morning of the 12th, Ukrainian nationalist leader Lev Libit was found dead by the stairs at 8 KasaParaz Street, and the cause of death was a heart attack."
In order to achieve Ukrainian independence, Libit has been directing the Ukrainian Resistance Organization in Munich to engage in activities to split the Soviet Union, causing a lot of trouble for the Soviet Union, and his sudden death is a great loss to the Ukrainian nationalist movement and the intelligence work of the United States in the Federal Republic of Germany, and it was the tall young man who rubbed shoulders with Libit who rubbed shoulders with Libett, Baucardan Stasinsky.
Stasinski was born in a small village in western Ukraine to honest farmers. In 1950, Stasinski, who was studying at the Lviv Normal College in Ukraine, was sent to the Lviv Traffic Police Department for escaping tickets by train, but because of his Ukrainian background, he was not punished and recruited into the KGB as a spy. He then went to Kiev for two years of secret training, learning German and espionage, and in 1955 he was sent to East Berlin, East Germany.
One day in the early summer of 1957, Stasinski was taken to the office of a senior KGB official, where he was given a multi-knotted, tubular metal object about 7 inches long and as thick as a human finger.
This is a poison dispenser. The launcher has a firing plug and gunpowder, and the force generated after firing will spew out the venom in the tube, forming a colorless and odorless poisonous gas, which can make a person who inhales this poisonous gas within a foot and a half immediately fall to the ground and die. At the same time as he got the launcher, Stasinski also got the poison pill, which was mainly to prevent the poison gas from hurting himself during the operation, and the target of his operation was Lev Libitt.
On 9 October 1957, Stasinski arrived in Munich on an Air France plane, this time under the name Siegfried Deregje. The Stagos Hotel, where he stayed, was across the street from the newspaper building where The Libit office was located. The next morning, he swallowed an antidote pill, put the transmitter in his pocket, and went downstairs to monitor the movement across the street, but for a whole day, The Libit did not appear, and the next day he remained the same, and the Libit still did not appear.
On the third day, October 12, just when he thought that the target would still not appear, Libit stepped out of a car with his iconic beret, and Stasinski, who found his prey, was suddenly very excited, he got up and wrapped the transmitter in the newspaper, rushed to the second floor of the opposite building with a pace that was difficult for ordinary people to detect, turned around and went down the stairs again, and in the moment of passing by Libit, he opened the newspaper and pulled the trigger...
Stasinski then calmly left the scene, walked along the pre-planned route to a bridge, threw the transmitters and antidote bottles into the water under the bridge, returned to the hotel and retired to Frankfurt, where he bought a plane ticket under another name and returned to East Berlin.
The success of operation Munich made Stasinski highly valued by the KGB, and soon he was sent to Munich on a mission targeting Sveter Bundra, the leader of the "Ukrainian Nationalist Organization", but the operation went wrong.
One day in October 1959, Statsinski went to Bundra's apartment, 7 Kretmayr Street, as planned, where he waited for Bundra, who had returned from shopping, where He was carrying a shopping bag full of food and was preparing to enter his apartment, And Stasinski stepped forward to greet Bundra warmly, and just as Bundra was wondering about the stranger's unusual enthusiasm, the next second he had collapsed because he could not breathe, and the stranger quickly disappeared without a trace.
But whether it was the lack of efficacy of the poison or other reasons, Bundra died on the way to the hospital, doctors determined that he died of potassium cyanide based on symptoms, not a heart attack, and West German police also determined that Bundra's death was a murder case.
It should be known that in September of that year, Khrushchev had just completed his visit to the United States, held talks with US President Eisenhower, and also had lunch with Hollywood movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe, and if a diplomatic dispute was triggered by the death of Bundra at this time, it would adversely affect the Soviet Union's diplomatic strategy of Soviet-American cooperation. While trying to quell the incident, the KGB demanded that Stasinski return to Moscow for investigation. The investigation made Stasinski nervous, and at the same time he was tired of this dark spy life, because he had a beloved woman, he wanted to get married and start a family, and live like a normal person.
While in East Berlin, Stasinski met Inge Bona, a German girl who worked in a barbershop, and although the KGB strictly forbade spies to maintain long-term relationships with any woman, Stasinski fell in love with Baona. In order to stay with his beloved, he persuaded his superiors to allow him to marry Baona, who offered to tell her true identity and get assurances from Baona that she would assist him in his work, and that Baona must move to Moscow. On December 25, 1959, Stasinski was allowed to return briefly to East Berlin, where he had dinner with Bona and revealed his identity and experiences, the German girl was disgusted with the Soviet Union and asked Stasinski to take him to the West, while her fiancé, tired of the spy life, offered to flee with her.
A few days later, because the stay approved by his superiors was about to expire, Stasinski had to return to Moscow with Baona first, and lied to Baona's parents that they were going to Warsaw on a business trip. They were soon allowed to marry in Moscow, and the comfortable married life made Stacinsky even more tired of his espionage work, more hostile to the KGB surveillance activities, and Bao Na kept complaining to him, but their escape plan was far away, and worse, in September 1960, Bao Na became pregnant.
For the sake of the child, Stasinski got into an argument with his superiors, because for a spy, a child meant the end of his job, so the superiors asked them to beat the child up or send it to a nursing home. In order to escape, Stasinski pretended to compromise, agreed to send the child to a nursing home after birth, and received permission to send the pregnant Baona back to East Berlin to visit her parents, while she continued to stay in Moscow on a mission. On March 31, 1961, his son was born in East Berlin, and Stasinski immediately asked his superiors to visit his wife and children, but was refused, on the grounds that Bao na's vacation had expired and she should return to Moscow with her children.
In August, Stasinski received grief-stricken news that his son had died. The desperate father again asked his superiors to travel to East Berlin for his son's funeral, and this time his request was granted. On 10 August, Stacinsky arrived in East Berlin accompanied by another KGB agent, and on 12 August he, Bao Na, and her family arrived at the Graveyard of Dahlg, near them were a dozen trained KGB agents whose mission was to monitor the couple and bring them back to Moscow safely. But soon they would find that these two big living people had disappeared right under their noses.
It turned out that Stasinski and Baona had sneaked behind a nearby house under the cover of a wreath in the cemetery, where they carefully followed the ground through a bush, and at the end of the road, Baona's brother had brought them light luggage as agreed. After escaping from the cemetery, they took a train to West Germany and entered the West Berlin police headquarters just after nightfall, demanding that the police arrest them.
On August 13, 1961, the day after Stasinski and Bona defected, Khrushchev ordered the blockade of East Berlin and the construction of the 155-kilometer-long Berlin Wall.
After his arrest, Stasinski was interrogated by West Germany and the United States, and although his defection was what the United States wanted to see, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison for murder because of the importance of Libbett and Bundra in the hearts of Ukrainian nationalists, and he was released early in 1966 for his good performance in prison.
The Stasinski defection incident was a big blow to the KGB, this peasant boy who grew up in the Ukrainian countryside, who would have changed his fate through learning like countless young Soviet teenagers, became a good KGB agent by chance, and made a contribution to the national security of the Soviet Union, but after that, he failed to withstand the temptation of red wine and greenery, was blinded by love and eventually betrayed his country. His defection may have been doomed from the moment he joined the KGB, he originally wanted to live only the life of an ordinary person, and when he became more and more tired of the high-intensity, high-pressure role of a spy, loyalty was bound to waver.