Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

At the same time, Bandera was helping the Germans assemble and train two Ukrainian brigades of mostly OUN members, code names Nightingale and Roland, to fight the Soviet army and help Einsatzkommandos round up and execute Jews, according to recently declassified CIA documents. Roland and Nightingale did their jobs well. A high German source later reported that OUN had “rendered valuable services… in the war against the U.S.S.R.”

On June 30, 1941, nine days after Germany invaded the Soviet Union and without German approval, the Banderists hastily convened a National Assembly in L’vov, the capital of western Ukraine, proclaimed an independent country, and created a new government made up exclusively of OUN-B members. The assembly appointed Lebed security minister and national police chief.

“By the will of the Ukrainian people,” the Banderists announced over a radio station they had seized, “the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the direction of Stepan Bandera proclaim the renewal of the Ukrainian state….

“Long live the Sovereign Ukrainian State!

“Long live the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists!

“Long live… Stepan Bandera.”

What followed next was a drunken orgy of violence. Banderists began assassinating angry OUN-M rivals who had been outfoxed by Bandera in his political power grab. (The total number of rivalry murders is unknown.) And Lebed organized mass roundups, torture, public hangings, and executions under the popular slogan “Death to Jews and Communists.” According to historian Yehuda Bauer, the Banderists “killed all the Jews they could find… many thousands.”

Taken by surprise, Germany was not pleased with Bandera’s swift and unapproved proclamation of an independent state, and it blamed him for driving the final wedge between OUN-M and OUN-B, the two factions Germany was courting. In response, the Gestapo rounded up Bandera and most of his leaders and placed them under house arrest in Germany. The Reich then dissolved the six-week-old Independent Ukraine.

Bandera’s arrest left Lebed, who had escaped the Gestapo dragnet, in charge of OUN-B. Angry and vindictive, he established two secret training camps in western Ukraine, regrouped the Banderist arm of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), declared a guerilla war against the Germans occupying his homeland, and issued a blunt manifesto to the Gestapo who had trained him:

“Long live greater Independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles, and Germans. Poles behind the San [River]! Germans to Berlin! Jews to the gallows!”

Lebed was an ambitious killer. He proposed to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population” as an act of revenge against Polish partisans who had been crossing the San and preying on Ukrainian civilians, burning down their villages and executing their residents. Eyewitness Moshe Maltz, a Jew hiding in the woods, reported in 1943: “Bandera men… are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down entire villages. Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles, literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day… you can see the bodies of the Poles… floating down the Bug [River].” On one day alone in July 1943, Lebed’s Banderists raided as many as eighty villages, killing up to ten thousand Poles.

Scholars estimate that Ukrainian militia slaughtered 90,000 Polish men, women, and children, and that Polish militia butchered 20,000 Ukrainian civilians, including women and children.

Lebed’s UPA became more than a gadfly to the German and Soviet armies. It was a well-trained, highly disciplined, and elusive guerilla army. It blew up troop and supply trains, destroyed arms depots, attacked military installations, and disrupted military campaigns. It posed such a threat to the German occupation of the Soviet Union that the Gestapo declared Lebed public enemy number one and distributed posters announcing he was sought dead or alive.

When it became clear that the tide of war had changed and that the German army was beginning to lose, the SS released Bandera and his men and promised, once again, an independent Ukraine after it defeated the Soviets—if UPA stopped killing Germans. The Banderists played along. They would help the Germans get rid of the communists. Then they would get rid of the Germans.

Lebed and most of his UPA guerillas began collaborating with the Nazis, until the summer of 1944, when the Red Army recaptured Ukraine and drove the Germans into Poland, signaling the beginning of the end of the war. Lebed and many of his fellow terrorists followed the German army west in Operation Sunflower (Sonnenblume).

Thousands of resistance fighters, however, did not follow Lebed. Some returned to their villages ready and willing to take up arms again if needed. Others holed up in the Carpathian Mountains and reassembled. From their craggy retreats, the Banderist guerillas preyed on western Ukrainian civilians. They looted and raped and destroyed villages that refused to feed and supply them. And they robbed and killed Jews who had managed to survive Einsatzgruppen raids.

After the war, Bandera made his way to Germany, where the CIC seriously considered hiring him to help unite the various Ukrainian political factions. In the end, however, the CIC decided not to use Bandera because he was “extremely dangerous” and deeply hated by a substantial number of the Ukrainian refugees. British intelligence hired him instead.

Because his face was well-known in Eastern Europe after the war, Lebed made his way to Rome and offered his services to the CIC. Like Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun with his thousands of pages of ballistic missile designs for trade, Lebed brought his own chip to the American bargaining table. He had a treasure trove of names and lists—nationalists still inside Ukraine whom the United States could recruit; communist agents in Ukraine whom the United States could assassinate; experienced and skilled killers whom the United States could hire; and thousands of OUN members with compromising war histories living in DP camps whom the United States could recruit with promises of steady employment and protection.{The Lebed list can no longer be accessed at the National Archives. Either it was destroyed, lost, or is still classified. John Loftus uncovered more than eleven volumes of handwritten names and descriptions of Banderists and UPA members in Lebed’s CIC files at Archives. The U.S. Army had translated the documents from Cyrillic to Roman script and computerized the names. Loftus showed the list to his superiors at the Department of Justice. Some of the men on the Lebed list were also OSI targets.}

The CIC knew that Lebed’s hands were bloody. From interviews with Ukrainian DPs, it concluded that Lebed was “ruthless… cunning… [with] Gestapo training… a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans” who had been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Polish interior minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934.

For its role in that murder, the League of Nations had condemned OUN as a terrorist group, and Poland had sentenced Lebed to life in prison. He was either freed from jail by the Germans when they invaded Poland in 1939 or escaped during the confusion after a bombing raid.

War criminal or not, CIC deemed Lebed vital to U.S. interests and hired him in 1947, the same year it hired Klaus Barbie and Robert Jan Verbelen. The main concern of CIC immediately after the war was Soviet infiltration into the Allied sectors of partitioned Germany and Austria, especially the American zone. With help from Ukrainian contacts in DP camps, Lebed supplied CIC with accurate and vital information about Soviet espionage in Western Europe.

Within months of hiring Lebed, however, CIC developed a severe case of the jitters. Soviet bloodhounds and Ukrainian assassins, bent on revenge for Lebed’s execution of their compatriots, were hot on his heels. With agents, spies, and informants in all Allied sectors of Western Europe, it would be only a matter of time before the Soviets or Lebed’s Ukrainian enemies learned that he was in Rome working for America.