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Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping
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KGB Terrorism, 1964
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| designed to demonstrate that the Soviet regime can strike its enemies anywhere in the world. The Soviets hope thereby to create fear, unrest, confusion, and dissension within emigre organizations, and at the same time deter other emigres from joining their ranks. The planned assassination in February 1954 of Georgiy S. Okolovich, leader of the NTS emigre organization, was to have been a particularly significant step toward achieving this goal, but the act was not carried out because of the defection of state security Captain Nikolay Khokhlov. |
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| On the other hand, assassinations of some emigr6 leaders have been carried out so skillfully as to leave the impression that the victims died from natural causes. Details of some of the techniques used to achieve this were brought to light in 1961 when professional KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinskiy defected to the West and revealed that he had successfully performed two such missions. In 1957 he killed Ukrainian emigre writer Lev Rebet in Munich with a poison vapor gun which left the victim dead of an apparent heart attack. In 1959, the same type of weapon was used on Ukrainian emigre leader Stepan Bandera, although Bandera's death was never fully accepted as having been from natural causes. These cases are discussed in more detail later in this paper. |
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| Executive action is also triggered by any signs of possible disloyalty on the part of Soviet officials abroad. The Soviets have gone to great lengths in the past to silence their intelligence officers who have defected, as evidenced by the assassination of former state security officer Ignace Reiss in 1937 and the unexplained "suicide" of former Soviet military intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky in 1941. In the post-war era, determination to prevent such defections was vividly demonstrated by the unsuccessful attempt to force the wife of Vladimir Petrov to return to the Soviet Union from Australia after his defection in April 1954. The practice of physical restraint applies with equal force to other Soviet officials who attempt to defect or are suspected of being on the verge of doing so. Examples were witnessed in Calcutta, India in January 1958 and Rangoon, Burma in May 1959. The respective victims, Aleksandr F. Zelenovskiy and Mikhail 1. Strygin, were both portrayed by the Soviets as mental cases, were taken into custody by means of strong-arm tactics, and were forcibly removed to the USSR in a matter of days. |
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| Foreign nationals are sometimes victims of Soviet executive action. The targets who fall into this category may be indigenous agents who have become suspect, or former citizens of satellite countries who have turned against the Soviet regime. In the latter case, actions against such individuals are usually carried out through the corresponding satellite intelligence service, aided and abetted by Soviet state security. The abductions of Dr. Walter Linse and Bohumil Lausman exemplify this type of operation. Linse had fled East Germany in 1947 and later became a leader of the "Society of Free jurists," an anti-Communist organization that the Soviets considered particularly dangerous. He was kidnaped from West Berlin in July 1952 by agents of the East German security service, with the full knowledge and approval of Soviet state security; he was later turned over to Soviet authorities in Karlshorst, East Berlin, and eventually sentenced to imprisonment in the USSR.* Lausman, prominent Czech antiCommunist who fled to the West in 1949, disappeared from Vienna in 1953. It was later learned that he had been kidnaped by agents of Czech intelligence, with the |
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| * Linse died in a Soviet prison camp 15 December 1953, according to a statement issued by the Soviet Red Cross on N June 1960, a virtual admission of Soviet responsibility for the kidnaping. The cited date of his death is at variance, however, with information from fellow prisoners of Linse who reported having seen him in 1954 and 1955. |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
