MI6

(1934-6, p.223)   The thirties movement in central and eastern Europe of 'integral nationalism' did not, in the main, live by a cohesive ideology but rather propagated a set of irrational, even mystical beliefs which 'conceived of the solidarity of all individuals making up the nation'. It completely opposed the Marxian concept of class and class struggle. Totalitarian in concept, it deified the nation to the point of racism: nationalism was 'based on feelings, which are carried by the racial blood'. Historian John Armstrong observed that the nationalists 'in some respects went beyond the original Fascist doctrines'. Indeed, they had much in common with the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Croatian Ustashi and the Latvian Thunder Cross.
The young western Ukrainian nationalists of Galicia despised the way in which their elders in groups such as the Promethean League had compromised with the Poles. They put their faith in the illegal Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), modelled on the Bolshevik concept of party organisation and the successful guerrilla operations of Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The OUN was led by 'Colonel' Eugene Konolvets, who made contact with German Military Intelligence, the Abwehr, which was regularly supplied with intelligence by the nationalists in western Ukraine. The intense interest shown by the Nazis in the Ukrainian problem aroused the anxiety of the Polish government and provoked a series of trials, banishments and executions which created in the OUN a hatred of 'the Polish orientation'. This culminated in the murder of the Polish Interior Minister General Peiracki in June 1934. The Polish authorities arrested a number of OUN leaders who had conspired in attacks on Polish officials, including Stefan Bandera, Mykola Lebed and Yaroslav Stetsko. At the beginning of 1936, a Warsaw court handed down death sentences which were later commuted to life.

(1938, p.224)   In May 1938 Konovalets was assasinated in Rotterdam by means of a bomb disguised as a box of chocolates handed to him by an 'illegal' Soviet agent, Pavel Sudoplatov. Following Konovalets's death, the movement turned to Colonel Andrei Melnyk, a moderate of dignified military bearing. He faced, however, a strong, extremist opposition led by the younger generation of activists centered around the anti-Polish, anti-Russian Stefan Bandera, a 'folk-hero' to many Ukrainian exiles, who was chair of the executive of the OUN in western Ukraine.

From the mid-thirties, MI6, under its chief, Admiral Sir Hugh "Quex" Sinclair - previously head of Naval Intelligence in the 'Intervention' years against the Bolsheviks - patronised Bandera's extremist faction, which had been condemned by the League of Nations as a 'terrorist syndicate'. Open to a variety of offers, Bandera's followers were recruited by the MI6 head of station in Finland, Harry Carr, and used as a network of information inside the Soviet Union (since Bandera was in prison it is unlikely that Carr actually met the OUN leader as some accounts suggest). Carr, who was attracted to Bandera's brand of anti-communism, soon began to deliver funding and support for operations to infiltrate agent across the Finnish-Soviet border - although Galician Ukrainians, with their peculiar accents, would have been easily recognisable in the Soviet Union. Whether Carr knew about the German connection or indeed co-operated with the Abwehr on operations is still unsolved.
Andrei Melnyk, Richard Iarii and Colonel Roman Sushko, who was head of the OUN military organisation, continued to develop close ties with the Abwehr and opened an 'excellent' communications channel to Admiral Canaris. He 'cared little about the details of the OUN's programme', what mattered was that it was a 'nationalist fascist group'. At the end of 1938, the Abwehr used OUN activists to encourage Ukrainian nationalism in Ruthenia - a province in eastern Slovakia, renamed Carpatho-Ukraine - in a bid to undermine the Soviet Union and Poland. When the Ukrainians were ordered to submit to Hungarian rule in the area, they resolved to proclaim their own independence under an OUN supporter and priest, Monsignor Augustine Voloshyn. He created the Carpatian Sic Guard to persecute Jews, gypsies, Poles and Czechs, and to defend the Ukrainians against Magyar incursions. Declared a republic on 14 March 1939, Carpatho/Ukraine retained its independence for precisely twenty-four hours until the Hungarians moved against it. Voloshyn's ill-fated cause did, however, provide hope for the nationalist aspirations of the OUN. Subsequently, thousands of these Carpathian Ukrainians went into exile in Germany, expanding the ranks of the OUN and acting as a recruiting pool for Abwehr secret military formations.

Alfred Rosenberg, whose Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium - OMi), would be responsible for administering the conquered eastern territories, had already decided that although the OUN was 'entirely unfit to lead a political operation to seize hold of the population', the nationalist formations could be used in the expected attack on Poland to carry out intelligence duties and 'aim at the annihilation of the Jews and Poles behind enemy lines.'

(1939, p.225)   In the confusion that followed the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939, Bandera and Lebed were released from Warsaw's Swiety Kroyc prison and immediately began to challenge the authority of the leadership. Bandera first went to Cracow and then to Italy to meet Melnyk to discuss the differences of opinion that existed between the OUN leadership in Rome and the younger, pro-Bandera 'Home Executive Committee' in western Ukraine. Bandera's representative at a nationalist convention in Rome, Jaroslav Stetsko, called for a dynamic person to lead the nationalist cause. The reasons for the dispute are obscure but at its heart was the wish to launch a more aggressive policy in pursuit of Ukrainian independence. The conflict came to a head during the following January when Melnyk was dismissed for 'tolerating traitors among the party heads' - a forerunner of much fratricidal in-fighting. One reason for these intense and bitter disagreements was a Soviet deception operation which infiltrated NKVD agents into the Nazi Party training school with the intention of 'forcing these gangsters to annihilate each other in a struggle for power'. Another element revolved around the willingness or not of the differing OUN factions to intervene in the Russo-Finnish War which broke out in 1939. Attempts by Carr and MI6 to infiltrate Banderite OUN agents into Russia during the short war floundered and badly misfired. They did, though, set an example for a more militant policy.

(1941, p.225)   It would appear that MI6 gave considerable thought to using OUN assets to trigger a revolt in the Soviet eastern Ukraine, though given the logistical problems it is hard to believe that the plan was in any way a serious proposition. In March 1941 the Second OUN Congress led to a split in the nationalist ranks, breaking it into two camps - OUN-M[elnyk] and OUN-B[andera]. The latter proved to be the most effective, with its call for 'revolutionary action' for 'national liberation'. Prior to the invasion of the USSR, the Germans poured money into Bandera's group (claimed by its members to be about twenty thousand strong) with the result that OUN-B became even more closely tied to the Abwehr as key Melnyk supporters, such as Richard Iarii, who had a direct link to Canaris, changed sides. Bandera ensured his grip on the organisation by appointing the ultra-loyal Stetsko as his first lieutenant; while Mykola Lebed entered a Gestapo training academy at Cracow, establishing the 'Ukrainian Training Unit' and creating the Sluzhba Bezpeky, the OUN-B's 'ruthless' internal security service. According to one OUN eye-witness, Mykyta Kosakivsky, Lebed led his men in torture sessions which included beating naked Jews with iron bars and burning the open wounds into which salt had been poured.

In April 1941, the Abwehr gave the go-ahead to the OUN-B leadership to organise its sympathisers into two armed military formations, under Abwehr programmes code-named 'Nachtigall' and 'Roland'. The latter was formed in Austria under the unofficial command of Colonel Iraii, for reconnaissance and sabotage duties in Ukraine. Officially led by German officers, with the Abwehr's Professor Theodor Oberländer in charge of the political side, Nachtigall had an unofficial Ukrainian staff headed by Roman Shukhevych, leader of OUN-B's military section. Both units wore German uniforms with blue-and-yellow collar badges: there were never any Ukrainian uniforms. A Greek Catholic Uniate chaplain, Father John Hrynioch, who had worked for German intelligence, was appointed to Nachtigall. He helped facilitate contacts between the Italian secret service and Uniate groups in Galicia and Rome.

When Operation Barbarossa was launched, on 22 June 1941, the OUN-B in Cracow formed a 'Ukrainian National Committee'. Nachtigall advanced with the Wehrmacht to Lvov, reaching the city in the morning of 30 June, while Roland was dispatched to southern Bessarabia. Three days later, Lebed arrived in Lvov with the tail-end of the Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatz-gruppe B. Prior to their withdrawal, Soviet NKVD personnel had slaughtered three thousand political prisoners, mostly Ukrainian nationalists and a few Jewish Zionists. Stacked from floor to ceiling with dead bodies, the police cells were said to have been flooded in blood. Inevitably, retaliation and revenge were swift. OUN-B militiamen attacked the Jews. General Korfes recalled seeing, on 3 July, 'Banderists . . . hurling grenades down the trenches' which 'contained some 60-80 persons . . . men, women and children'. In the weeks that followed, deserters from the Nachtigall unit and the Sonderkommando murdered over seven thousand Jews and Poles - the latter's addresses supplied by OUN-B to the Gestapo lists. Andre Pestrak was an enthusiastic recruit to the Ukrainian military police who was put in charge of a unit attached to Einsatzgruppen C (it replaced 'B' on 11 July), which massacred thousands of Jews in 'cleansing operations'. After the war, Pestrak moved as a DP to Britain, where he died in 1989. The Ukrainians were used for the dirty work in the pogrom 'Action Petlura', and in the ghetto-clearing operations in Warsaw and Lublin. Sonderkommando 4a confined itself 'to shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian helpers to shoot children'.

An estimated nine hundred thousand Jews disappeared from the Ukraine during the German occupation.

Informal agreement had been reached with the Germans, particularly Canaris's Abwehr, that the Banderites could engage in political activities in Ukraine in return for military and clandestine collaboration. This loose agreement was, however, liberally interpreted by the OUN-B, which assumed that it had been given a free hand. The OUN-B wanted an independent government, allied to Hitler's Reich, which would consolidate 'the new ethnic order in Eastern Europe' through the 'destruction of the seditious Jewish-Bolshevist influence'. On behalf of Bandera, who had remained in Cracow, the OUN-B's chief political officer, 'Wolodymyr', wrote to Adolf Hitler asking him to 'support our ethnic struggle'. Following hard on the heels of Nachtigall, Stetsko arrived in Lvov on 30 June ready to organise a hastily summoned 'National Assembly'. The Assembly proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in the name of Stefan Bandera, who had been recalled to Berlin by the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, and his lieutenant, Jaroslav Stetsko, who assumed the title 'Head of the National Assembly'. On the local radio the Uniate priest attached to Nachtigall, John Hrynioch, read out a pastoral letter that praised the Germans and recognised Stetsko as Prime Minister. The OUN-B also succeeded in obtaining a statement of support from the Uniate primate, Metropolitan Andreas Sheptytsky. These moves had the full support of the bulk of Galician youth, who defected from the Melnyk faction to the OUN-B, but disturbed the Wehrmacht officers who had helped organise Nachtigall.

The announcement of an independent Ukrainian state went against Nazi policy, but German officers were initially reluctant to take countermeasures. Hitler, however, who considered Ukraine a territory for exploitation and colonisation, and thought the Slavs to be 'subhuman', was not prepared to tolerate nationalist ambitions. Professor Oberländer's personal appeal to Hitler to the effect that a great opportunity was being lost was brushed aside with crude racist language. A German Foreign Office official told the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister in the National Assembly, Volodymyr Stakhiv, that the discussion regarding the liquidation of the Ukrainian government, which took place in Hitler’s headquarters in the presence of Ribbentrop, Keitel, Himmler and Hitler, 'only lasted a few minutes'.

The 'exhilarating days', as they were later described in OUN-B publications, were soon brought to a close. Accordingly, within a few days, the so-called nationalist government was disbanded and told to withdraw the proclamation. This the Banderites refused to do and, on 6 July, a number of its leaders were arrested by the SS and kept under house arrest in Berlin. They were, however, allowed to carry on with political activities, and Stetsko was able to consult with the ambitious security chief and Home Affairs minister in the Lvov 'government', Mikolai Lebed, who, under the nom de guerre 'Maxim Ruban', had escaped arrest and was delegated to take command of all OUN-B activities.

(1942, p.228)   Meanwhile, 'marching groups' of OUN-B (and OUN-M) personnel moved eastwards behind the German Army further into the Ukraine in an attempt to set up nationalist administrations. With the arrest of Bandera and concerned that they might rebel, the Germans withdrew the Nachtigall and Roland units from the front lines to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, where they were later united into a single formation, Schutzmannschaftbataillon (Guard Battalion) No. 201, which in 1942 was sent to Belorussia to fight Red partisans.

Many of the officers refused to accept the posting and were imprisoned in Lvov. In contrast, Melnyk's more moderate and accommodating OUN-M had zealously retained its own contacts with the Wehrmacht and, once the OUN-B administration was set aside, took over the reins. This resulted in bloody civil strife between the two factions. Lebed played a leading role in the terror that followed with his élite Sluzhba Bezpeky (SB) - which was modelled on the Gestapo - assassinating those Ukrainians who refused to join OUN-B's enforced united front. 'It was highly effective and fractious and completely without scruple.' Two OUN-M leaders were shot in the back on 30 August by an assassin who was immediately, and conveniently, killed by Ukrainian police. Eventually, the in-fighting was put down by the SS: 'The separatists, only recently privileged, promptly became pursued pariahs.'

On 15 September 1941, the Gestapo arrested two thousand Ukrainian nationalists. Melnyk was put under house arrest, while Bandera, Stetsko and a number of other leading OUN-B members were transferred from Berlin and confined as ‘privileged’ internees within the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Other Ukrainian nationalists were less lucky and were executed or later died in Auschwitz, including Bandera's two brothers, who had cement poured over their water-soaked bodies. Although, on 4 October, a 'Wanted' notice was put out for Lebed, he was never arrested. Lebed had friends in high places, while his deputy, Father John Hrynioch, had retained the favour of German Intelligence. Bandera and Stetsko were still permitted to continue political activities and continued to pursue the goal of an independent state. At least once during 1943 Stetsko was allowed to travel to Poland to confer with Lebed. An outstanding organiser, Lebed was soon 'secretly pulling the strings' within OUN-B, and as his own political ambitions grew, he gradually developed an intense factional rivalry with Bandera, who remained trapped in Germany. As one émigré writer noted, it is these 'facts' which gave 'full meaning to the political and personal dividing lines within the post-war Ukrainian emigration'.

Any British plans for a revolt in eastern Ukraine collapsed following the German invasion, which forced the Soviet Union to align itself with Britain and its allies. In these changed circumstances, foreign policy dictated that it was in Britain's interest to preserve the integrity of the Soviet Union, whose economic wellbeing would be severely undermined by the loss of Ukraine. Any MI6 actions that might indicate British support for the Ukrainian nationalists were, therefore, curtailed. Indeed, surveillance against pro-German Ukrainian organisations was stepped up and MI6 exchanged information with its counterparts in the United States and Canada, where émigré support and funding for the nationalists were particularly strong. MI6 was of the opinion that all the nationalist groups in North America were 'directly or indirectly influenced by Berlin'. At the same time, MI6 made efforts to monitor developments inside Ukraine, though intelligence-gathering was to prove difficult.

(1943, p.229)   Inside Ukraine, during the spring of 1943, OUN-B guerrillas - made up of German-trained police and military formations who had killed their German officers and abandoned their posts - assumed the title of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Its commander, under the nom de guerre of Taras Chuprynka, was senior Nachtigall officer Roman Shukhevych, To the end of the year, Galicia was subject to intense Soviet partisan activity, and OUN-B forces led by Bohdan Kruk - sometimes referred to as the Director of the UPA Red Cross - were recruited to pacify the countryside. More often than not these various formations were engaged in a civil war, sometimes fighting different nationalist factions, occasionally the Germans, often the Soviets, but mainly the Poles. Despite the execution by the Germans of a number of leading members of his organisation, Andrei Melnyk continued to support the Nazis; a stance that was to 'prevent his faction from playing a major political role' in postwar nationalist affairs.

During 1943, a number of PoWs and deserters from the Red Army and from non-German SS units, including Belorussians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Turkestanians, Cossacks, Armenians, Uzbeks, Tartars and even Russians, went over to the UPA 'to form a national formation of enslaved peoples'. In émigré myth-making accounts of this period, Ukrainians portrayed the UPA as 'the third military and political force in Eastern Europe' which soon became 'the champion of all revolutionary forces representing not only the resistance movement of Ukraine, but all the subjugated peoples of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia'. Rosenberg's OMi and German Intelligence saw this as an opportunity to co-ordinate resistance activity against the Soviet Army and sponsored a committee of subjugated nations. On 21 and 22 November OUN-B nationalists in Zhitomir set up an 'Anti-Bolshevik Front' to co-ordinate the activities of the 'enslaved' Soviet ethnic minorities. Tolerated by German Intelligence, the conference was attended by thirty-nine delegates representing twelve peoples of eastern Europe and Asia with the common slogan 'Freedom of the Individual - Freedom of the Nations'. The front was a direct precursor of the postwar Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), though the nationalists continued to deny its Nazi origins.

(1944, p.230)   Just before the Red Army reconquered eastern Galicia in the summer of 1944, 'the supreme and only guiding organ of the Ukrainian people for the period of its revolutionary struggle', the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR), was created at a meeting in the Carpathian mountains, on 12 July, by the OUN-B to unite all the factions. It was intended to garner popular support, provide a broader organisational base for the resistance and serve as an underground political guiding body for the UPA 'until the formation of the government of an independent Ukrainian state'. Shukhevych was elected secretary general, Mykola Lebed general secretary of the Foreign Representation (ZP UHVR), with Ivan Hrynioch, and Bohdan Kruk on its council. Its formation went too far for the Germans, and a number of its leaders were temporarily imprisoned. The deteriorating military situation, however, forced the desperate Nazis to seek allies where they could and, in August, Himmler sanctioned a secret SS programme, Operation SUNFLOWER, designed to co-ordinate German and OUN efforts during the German retreat from the Soviet Union. The UPA insisted that the negotiations be kept secret in order to keep alive the myth that it did not co-operate with the Nazis. In October, as Ukraine finally came under Soviet control, Melnyk, Borovets, Bandera and Stetsko were released from detention to organise a final defence. According to the UHVR constitution, its centre would always be in Ukraine and only one delegation was permitted to leave Ukraine to go abroad - the ZP UHVR. Late in the year, SS favourite Lebed left Galicia for Rome, where he made contact with high-level Vatican networks.

The centre of nationalism reverted to its traditional strongholds in Galicia, where the number of fighters was never to exceed fifty thousand - though nationalists optimistically claimed over eighty thousand. The final drama was played out in an atmosphere of confusion and in-fighting as the Germans tried to entice the OUN to join with the anti-communist Vlasov movement but were rebuffed as there was 'fratricidal hatred' between the pro-Russian leaders of the Vlasov army and the anti-Russian Ukrainians. During 1943 the idea had been common that Germany and the Soviet Union would exhaust themselves in battle and that, with the help of the Allies, the nationalists would be able to assume control of western Ukraine. The destruction of so many German divisions during 1944 put paid to such fantasies, though some Ukrainians did not lose hope that it would not be long before rivalry between the Allies erupted into armed hostility and, in anticipation of that event, OUN-B began to send emissaries to potential allies in the West.

Despite the intense hatreds aroused, there were attempts to establish contact through the London-based Polish government-in-exile with British and American intelligence agencies. OUN leaders did not manage contact with the London Poles but low-level negotiations did take place in Lvov in November 1943 with members of the Polish underground 'Armia Krajow' (AK), and it seems that the AK radio link with London was used to pass on messages to British Intelligence about the UPA/OUN. The OUN-B next turned to Italian Army officers who were returning home, and persuaded them to take with them their emissaries disguised in Italian uniforms and help them contact British and American troops. Early in 1945, a senior OUN figure and former head of the 'Ukrainian Police' in Lvov, Yevhen Wreciona, made a covert journey from Slovakia to Switzerland, where he met with British intelligence officers at the embassy in Berne.

(1945, p.198)   In late January 1945, Pavlo Shandruk met with the head of the recently created Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), Andrei Vlasov. Although the Ukrainians formally opposed subordination of their national committee to the KONR, Shandruk agreed to a modus vivendi which gave the Ukrainians a degree of indepenence. Eventually, Shandruk, who had actively collaborated with the Nazis in anti-Semetic campaigns, received the consent of Rosenberg to head the committee and the support of Stefan Bandera, leader of the pro-western Galician-centered Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) - though his rival, Andrei Melnyk (OUN-M), was not enthusiastic (see Chapter 14). On 17 March 1945, the Germans officially recognised the committee.
Their world falling apart around them, the émigrés were living in a nightmarish existence of fantasy in which, right up to the end, they continued to fight over the munutiae of deals and alliances, believing that some miracle was at hand which might deliver their independence.

(1945, p.231)   In anticipation of the coming struggle with Soviet forces, Shukhevych broke up the UPA armed formations into underground cells and attempted to preserve a 'bridgehead' that would hold until hostilities erupted. UPA units around Volhynia and in Galicia were able to develop and equip a large and efficient underground force utilising thousands of tons of arms, munition and other war material left behind by the retreating German Army. This was initially a highly successful strategy, with up to two hundred thousand Red Army troops tied down and more than seven thousand officers killed. By the beginning of 1945, in south-west Ukraine and eastern Poland, UPA units - some still led by German SS officers - continued to attack the Red Army and Polish militia. The UPA - primarily a guerrilla fighting force - soon found itself isolated, which the OUN-B regarded as proof of the weakness of the military strategy. In May the nationalists were facing a Soviet Army that was at the height of its power. A conspiratorial and terrorist faction, the OUN-B believed that 'a totalitarian state could be damaged only by a totalitarian organisation striking from below'. Its conviction was that the UPA soldiers 'had chosen the fastest route to death, though one decorated with laurels'. Despite the superior Soviet forces, over the next two years a near civil war ensued with 'counter-revolutionary bandits' in effective control of many villages and rural districts.

At the war's end, many leading members of the OUN fled west to avoid capture by the occupying Red Army. As they did so they forged links with the remnants of the fascist Slovak Hlinka Guard which had also continued its guerrilla war against the communists and supplied the Ukrainians with many of their weapons. After holding out with a few thousand of these troops in the wild Slovakian mountains, Bandera eventually surfaced in the British Zone of Germany, where he re-established contact with MI6, claiming with some justification that his group was organising a rebellion in Ukraine. MI6 was desperate to gather intelligence on what was happening behind the Soviet lines in the newly occupied territories and was willing to recruit agents without judgements on their past activities. Harry Carr believed that 'his single-minded purpose was to continue the interrupted struggle against communism'. It was inconceivable that Carr and his colleagues did not know about the atrocities committed in Galicia, but it mattered little. To his subordinates Carr would not have been 'in the least sympathetic to any inquiries about Bandera's past. His overriding concern was the current campaign against Stalin.'

A War Office report on the 'Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and Resistance in Ukraine' - which was valid to March 1945 - is a model of its kind. Seemingly accurate and fair in its assessment, it could only have been based on OUN sources, probably backed up with Soviet intelligence, possibly German intercepts of Red Army signals and MI6 intelligence-gathering. It concluded that with 'the inevitable Sovietisation and Russification of the Western Ukraine under Soviet rule it will be seen that Ukrainian nationalism has little prospect of being anything more than a nuisance to the Soviet Union in future years of peace'. It was not what MI6 or the OUN-B wanted to hear.

Bandera's second-in-command, Yaroslav Stetsko, escaped to Austria, where he managed to avoid the attentions of Allied units. Major Stephen Dattner had been sent to Klagenfurt in command of the 310th Field Security Service (denazification) unit to arrest and interrogate suspected Nazi war criminals. Using 'black lists' compiled by MI6's Section V, Dattner's task was to unearth and detain important Nazi officials, SS members and collaborators known to be in the area. Dattner was 'deeply concerned and astonished', however, to discover that Stetsko was openly engaged in organising OUN-B political activities, even though he was on the 'black list' and subject to automatic arrest for his crimes. Downplaying his murderous past, Lebed had established himself in Rome as 'foreign minister' of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (ZP UHVR) and was active in talks with Vatican Uniate Bishop Ivan Buchko. Lebed also arrived with a treasure trove of intelligence material on the Ukrainian resistance movement. Following close behind was Father John Hrynioch, who had been awarded the German Iron Cross for his work with the Nachtigall battalion. By the spring of 1945, Lebed had established contact with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Berne. In Switzerland, the former Abwehr agent and chief of the German-Ukrainian police in Lvov, Vretsonia, offered his services to American Intelligence, as did, in Munich, Volodymyr Stakhiv, minister of foreign affairs in the Stetsko 'government'.

(1946, p.232)   When the Soviet authorities realised that Bandera and Melnyk, who had found refuge in Switzerland, were once more organising campaigns in Ukraine, they demanded their and other anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists' extradition. According to his daughter, Natalia, Bandera and his family were 'constantly obliged to flee from one place to another to avoid discovery. Berlin, Innsbruck, Seefeld ...' The Soviet Ukraine Republic delegate at the United Nations charged that Bandera and Melnyk were running special schools to train cadres in sabotage and intelligence work against the Soviet Union, and listed numerous atrocities committed by them. Although dismissed as smears and propaganda, the charges were essentially true. The western intelligence agencies responded by helping OUN leaders to go into hiding to escape the Soviet investigators. On the instructions of his British handlers, Bandera fled to Munich, in the American Zone, where he reformed his OUN-B organisation. During 1946 Soviet military officials repeatedly demanded Bandera's extradition, but US officials informed them that they had no knowledge of Bandera's whereabouts. Natalia recalled that they moved from Munich to 'Hildesheim, and finally a lonely house in the forests of Starnberg were the places in Germany and Austria where we lived'. Even though they had accurate information on his past, US CIC officers forewarned Bandera of the Soviet moves and, in an operation code-named ANYFACE, he was kept under surveillance to protect him from Soviet assassination and kidnap attempts.

New attempts were made to unite the different factions (In the immediate postwar period, OUN-B became known as OUN-r (revolutionary) and continued to attract young nationalists who had military experience in the Waffen-SS Galician Division or the UPA. Melnyk's OUN-M, in turn, changed into the OUN-s (solidarist) and continued to enjoy centres of support, especially in Paris. To avoid confusion, I will continue to use the older terms.)
and a conference of Ukrainian delegates, held in March 1946 with the aim of creating a common platform and front for the liberation of Ukraine, produced a policy that rebuked all 'totalitarian mono-party' trends and condemned all acts of terrorism. It was clearly directed at the Banderites, and it was no surprise, therefore, when the OUN-B refused to take part in a so-called Ukrainian Co-ordinating Committee. In April, with the backing of MI6, the OUN-B created an over-arching organisation for all the former pro-fascist nationalist exile movements, reconstituting the Nazi-sponsored 1943 Anti-Bolshevist Front, as the Anti-Bolshevik Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Well-produced leaflets and posters appeared in the occupation zones of Germany, the source of whose funding was, according to CIC reports, unknown. The true source, besides their own funding efforts from the DP camps, was a secret subvention from MI6.

In June 1946 OUN-B's annual conference produced a hard-headed appraisal of the international situation with regard to the Soviet Union, correctly concluding that British power was on the decline. Even though the OUN-B was sponsored by MI6, Bandera had repeatedly warned his supporters that they would have to rely on 'our strength'. The OUN-B had wanted to send agents back into the Ukraine as quickly as possible, but these ideas 'were not immediately re-embraced by MI6 despite their repeated advances'. This resulted not in an abandonment of the links with British Intelligence but in an increase in the use of conspiratorial methods. OUN-B would take material support from where it could, while retaining an intense distrust of the Americans. Since January there had been contacts between the OUN-B and the US embassy in Warsaw. The head of OUN-B intelligence had met with the American station chief for the purpose of sending propaganda material abroad. This was received in the autumn by the assistant naval attaché, but 'there is little evidence that anything was done with it'. In fact, OUN-B was 'more of a headache to American intelligence than a boon'. In Germany, American intelligence agencies found 'the price set by Stefan Bandera for complete co-operation involved types of political recognition and commitments to his group which no American in Germany was in a position to make'. The divide was widened following the insertion into OUN-B headquarters of a CIC agent who managed to photograph 'eleven volumes of their secret internal files' which contained proof that the majority of its members 'had worked for the Gestapo and the SS as policemen, executioners, partisan hunters and municipal officials'. The Americans simply could not understand the intense bitter and deadly rivalry between the different nationalist factions.

The OUN-B gained dominance over its rivals by control of the DP camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, where the traditional enemy, the Russians, were not admitted to the MI6-backed International Committee for the DP and Political Emigrés, which had been formed just after the war in Hanau, Germany. Within the camps eastern Ukrainians lived in fear of being repatriated to the Soviet Union, and the prospect of internment in a labour camp, or death. Western Ukrainians, who were mostly followers of Bandera, were exempt because of their Polish origin. The easterners, therefore, tried to prove citizenship of the western region, but they would only be 'helped to escape the repatriation if they would accept the Bandera-Stetsko leadership'.

During the summer of 1946, following the establishment of liaison with the US CIC by Roman Petrenko - a senior member of OUN-B's secret police, the Sluzhba Bezpeky (SB) - the OUN-B embarked on a reign of terror in the camps. Father Hrynioch had acted as the go-between when the CIC office in Rome made an approach to Lebed, after which Petrenko offered the SB's services in eliminating communist agents. On 22 July, the SB handed the CIC a list of alleged communist refugees, mostly, but not exclusively, in the Frankfurt am Main area. In response, the Americans arrested several hundred people who were questioned and in many instances tortured by OUN-B members dressed in US military uniforms. The torturers included Lebed. Yet out of all those arrested, only 1 per cent of the cases turned out to warrant further investigation; all were set free within a few months 'for lack of evidence'. This made the Americans more cautious and, as time went by, the OUN-B's secret police largely took over what was known as Operation OHIO.

(1947, p.235)   The atmosphere of denunciation was heightened by Stetsko's accusation that Melnyk's OUN-M followers were both Gestapo and NKVD collaborators. In turn, Melnyk accused one of Bandera's closest assistants, Richard Iarii, of being a Soviet agent (Polish communist publications said he had been a Gestapo agent). Headed by Mykola Matwiyeko and Ivan Kashuba, the SB launched a killing spree in which more than one hundred Ukrainians were murdered. A few were undoubtedly Soviet agents but most appear to have been DPs who, for various reasons, opposed the OUN-B, objected to black market activities, or were members of more moderate, but still anti-communist, Ukrainian groups. Another reason why some were eliminated was that they knew too much about the Ukrainians' pro-Nazi past and participation by OUN supporters in the mass murder of Jews, Poles and 'Red' Russians. Personally directing Ohio were Lebed, Stetsko, Stefan Lenkovsky, Father Hrynioch and Stefan Bandera. In Kornberg, Mittenwald, Munich and other camps in Germany and Austria, many DPs were questioned, tortured and killed. Mittenwald had an underground torture chamber which was used by the SB until the summer of 1948. A private flat in a camp near Kornberg served for interrogations during 1946 and 1947, while, in 1949, another interrogation chamber was set up at Regensberg. In the two years to 1951, a bunker in the basement of the DPs' hostel at Furnchstafe, in Munich, was the scene of SB torture. According to a former CIA employee, 'in the Mittenwald camp American intelligence used techniques borrowed from the Nazis by burning murdered bodies in large bread ovens. To compound the horror these were the very same ovens used to bake the bread for the hungry residents of the camp.' The CIC-sponsored organisation that cremated at least twenty victims in the ovens was the OUN-B.

According to Fletcher Prouty, who was responsible for US Air Force air support for CIA missions overseas, a series of assassinations was undertaken by 'the best commercial hit men you have ever heard of. Known as 'mechanics', they were 'Ukrainians, mainly, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, and some Scotsmen. I don't know how the Scotsmen got in there, but there they were.' Prouty asserts that teams of 'mechanics' were used in cross-border infiltration operations to rescue agents and in the murders of alleged Soviet agents. During 1947, a joint British/US émigré espionage network infiltrated with agents organised by Soviet and Czech Intelligence was 'liquidated' as part of Operation RUSTY. To mask the deaths, the killings were attributed to factional violence among rival Ukrainian groups.

The war inside Ukraine - which killed an estimated thirty-five thousand members of the Polish and Russian secret police and troops in the two years following the end of the war - was kept going by a campaign of terror during which OUN guerrillas cut off the arms of those peasants who assented to collectivisation. The majority of Red Army units stationed in Poland were involved in trying to rebuild the country, and it took time for the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) to create the Department to Combat Bandits, which successfully began to organise a network of informers in the countryside. In a brutal campaign against the 30-40,000-strong UPA, whole forests were burned and extensive use was made of counter-gangs. Polish Brigadier-General Ignacy Blum later admitted that the UPA had succeeded in setting up ambushes, destroying militia outposts, laying waste to deserted villages and blowing up bridges. The terrain was an advantage for the insurgents, as were their treacherous fighting methods and excellent intelligence-gathering methods derived from access to captured MVD organisation and operation manuals. The man responsible for leading the anti-bandit campaign, Col. Jan Gerhard, acknowledged that "the Banderites . . . with their conspiratorial style ... were the best organised'. The OUN-B 'ruthlessly' controlled the Supreme Council, the UHVR, while the SB security groups attached to UPA units made them hard to penetrate."

Most fighting took place in western Ukraine: there was only limited resistance in the east and very little took place in what would have been assumed to be the promising territory of Carpatho-Ukraine, where there was continuing conflict between the OUN-M and OUN-B. In many areas the hard winter of 1945/6 extinguished the UPA insurrection. The offensive by the Soviet anti-guerrilla units inflicted 'huge losses' on the Ukrainian insurgents and after 1946 morale 'declined sharply' with only small pockets of resistance. Courier links with the UPA broke down in May 1946, and to keep the illusion going fabricated reports were handed to their intelligence sponsors. Photos purporting to show military action in Ukraine were stage-managed in the Bavarian forests, while radio broadcasts from a transmitter inside Ukraine reporting on UPA successes were discovered to emanate from no further than a room next door to OUN-B headquarters.

The final blow came in March 1947, when Poland's deputy defence minister, General Karol Swierczewski, was killed in a UPA ambush. This led in the following month to a pact between the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland to co-ordinate their anti-guerrilla operations. Later that month, the Polish government launched VISTULA, a large-scale operation to wipe out the UPA and to resettle the peasants from the south-eastern sector into the former German lands of the north-western provinces. It was a brutal campaign: 'extermination battalions' and 'pseudo gangs', made up of defectors from the underground and locals pressed into the front line, fought alongside MVD units. The communist authorities ordered mass deportations and the forced recruitment of villagers to spy on the nationalists. These were quickly identified and eliminated by the SB, the OUN's security service, but there was never any certainty about whether they were genuine or not. The SB tactics eventually alienated the OUN's support among the peasants.

During the spring, further attempts at contact between the UPA and the Americans were made when the US vice-consul in Warsaw and an Associated Press correspondent travelled to the UPA headquarters in Presovo, Slovakia, to 'familiarise themselves with the actual situation of the Ukrainian Nationalist Underground'. The visit did not lead to any reconciliation with the Bandera faction; instead, the Americans decided to collaborate with the known 'sadist and collaborator of the Germans', Mykola Lebed, who was beginning to distance himself from Bandera. Following a number of approaches, the Americans finally accepted Lebed as an intelligence asset and arranged to smuggle him from Rome to Munich, where his handlers helped set up a 'Liberation Council', with substantial funding from US Army Intelligence.

Moves were made by a Ukrainian Co-ordinating Committee to create a governing body to co-ordinate military activity in Ukraine, but once again the Banderites refused to join. Even though they remained a destabilising factor in Ukraine émigré politics, MI6 continued to back them to the hilt. Support also came from the Vatican, which lobbied the British and Americans to render material assistance to the Ukrainian nationalists, and the Uniate Church, which 'maintained intensive contacts with guerrilla leaders and secret representatives of the Vatican'. During the summer of 1947, MI6 moved to enlarge the ABN into a body to co-ordinate and organise the activities of all the émigré groups it covertly supported. In July, MI6 joined the federalist Danubian grouping, Intermarium, with the ABN, and then, in September, added the Polish-orientated Promethean League. Not all the émigre groups joined the ABN because of the dominance of the Ukrainians and the OUN-B.

By July, Vistula had reduced the UPA to a small underground force. The organisational structure had been destroyed and the Soviet government announced that 'all counter-revolutionary fascist bands under German command had been annihilated'. The guerrillas were reduced to living during the winter months in appalling conditions in underground bunkers. Isolated from the world, such conditions 'generated severe psychological effects' among the guerrillas. While there was still some fighting, UPA commander Roman Shukhevych knew that the military struggle was over, and in the autumn ordered the remaining battalions under the command of Major Bayda to escape to the West. From an assembly point near Przemysl, they managed to fight their way over the mountains, through Czechoslovakia, to the American occupation zones in Austria and Germany. During what became known as the 'Great Raid', a considerable number of guerrillas died along the 1,500-mile route.

(1948, p.238)   In September, a delegation of OUN-B crossed into the American Zone where, after initial thought was given to sending them back, they were interned for interrogation in order for US Intelligence to decide 'what disposition is to be made of them'. In April 1948, General Clay's representative, Carmel Offie, met with three of the leaders, who told him that their nationalist groups were 'ready to revolt'. They wanted an aggressive propaganda campaign to publicise the actions of the UPA, the 'striking arm' of the UHVR, which they claimed was 'engaged in an armed conflict with the Soviet troops in Ukraine'. In reality, the conflict was all but over. From 1948 onwards, UPA actions increasingly took the form of terrorist acts such as the assassination of prominent communist officials. Unaware of the reality, Offie tried to interest the State Department in the Banderites but was brushed off. The thinking was that 'we have to be very careful not to give too much encouragement to Ukrainian Nationalists because of the effect this might have on racial Russians'.

In Germany there was no let-up in the increasingly irrelevant political manoeuvring which was becoming ever more obscure in its reasoning. The Banderites finally agreed to join the Ukrainian Co-ordinating Committee though they insisted that it recognise the UHVR as the only revolutionary body having the exclusive right to direct the UPA and formulate foreign policy. In June the Ukrainian National Council was set up in West Germany as an official provisional government. The Promethean Andrew Livitsky was made president, with the elderly social democrat Mazepa as Prime Minister and Stetsko vice-premier. The British Foreign Office thought that there was a chance that the council might prove to be 'most important' and finally resolve the factional problems. It was not to be. Because of its strength on the ground inside Galicia and other parts of western Ukraine, the OUN-B demanded majority representation on the executive committee. When this was refused, it declined to take seats on the executive and insisted that the council should be treated as only the foreign representation of the UHVR. The refusal to co-operate cloaked another spate of in-fighting and a bitter battle by the so-called 'moderate' wing of the OUN-B led by Lebed and his Vatican allies for control of the UHVR.

Although an 'avid' supporter of the OUN-B, by the spring of 1948 the Vatican's Ukrainian contact for Intermarium, Bishop Buchko, had become impatient with Bandera's intransigence and Führer style of leadership. Buchko thought Bandera, who saw himself as the leader of the 'Foreign Branch' of the UVHR, had become 'an overrated extremist' whose army was 'largely dispersed and lacking all types of necessary equipment'. Lebed and Father John Hrynioch, who claimed to be in contact with the military leader of the UPA, Shukhevych, regarded themselves as the 'foreign representatives' (ZP UHVR). It was an obscure differentiation which centred on whether the government-to-be should be based in Ukraine or abroad. In August, Lebed and Hrynioch had a secret showdown with Bandera in Munich. After they had explained their plan to develop the UHVR's 'foreign representation' as a second supra-party body, Bandera furiously attacked them as 'opportunists' intent on weakening the OUN-B. Lebed retorted that the UHVR 'hoped, some day, to set up a free democratic government which is divorced from all dictatorial pressure'. Denouncing the OUN-B's 'trend toward Fascism', Lebed's group quit the session. Bandera retaliated by ordering his organisation to avoid all contact with the new American-backed Ukrainian centre in Augsburg. Increasingly, the splits within the nationalist movement mirrored differences between the British and Americans on how to pursue the struggle in Ukraine.

In late 1948 a new, enlarged ABN - including the most extreme of the nationalist groups in its ranks - was formally launched with Yaroslav Stetsko assuming the presidency as the OUN-B seized supreme power. Besides funding a number of its constituent members, MI6 provided a huge amount of finance to the ABN. The source of the money was hidden by having the funding directed through Vatican intermediaries. In November, the International Press Bureau released the 'Chuprynka Plan', accredited to the head of the UPA, which envisaged the division of the USSR and eastern Europe into four distinct regions: Serbia, the Caucasus, Turkestan and the 'Scandinavian-Black Sea Unit'. As the British Foreign Office recognised, it was a restatement of the aims professed by the Federal Clubs of Central Europe and their parent body, Intermarium, which was now part of the ABN. A Foreign Office official concluded that it betrayed little real interest in federalism and, instead, 'admits the superiority of one nation [Ukraine], the most powerful, over the rest, as in the present Soviet system'.

(1949, p.239)   During 1949 more changes took place within the various Ukrainian associations, the result of which was their gradual takeover by the Banderites. Initially, differences between the factions were patched over with in-fighting absent from the Second Congress of the Ukrainian National Council in June. This did not, however, last long, as Bandera insisted that his group be allowed complete control over the UHVR and of all paramilitary activity in Ukraine. He, therefore, demanded that the Banderites on the executive committee be 'used as the channel through which all action should be carried out'. This was unacceptable to other political centres, such as that led by Lebed, and the short-lived coalition once again fell apart. At the end of the year, the Banderites reissued their ultimatum, but the council refused to consider such an uncompromising stance.

Lebed soon fell foul of the rival Bandera faction, and the CIA - which with other US agencies had recently broken off relations with Bandera - helped smuggle him to the United States under a false name. Reaching New York in October 1949, Lebed continued to work for the Ukrainian underground on behalf of his American sponsors. Another arrival was the new MI6 liaison officer with the CIA and Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC), Kim Philby, who tried to interest the Americans in taking over the entire British-funded Ukrainian network. During meetings with State Department officials, Philby also requested that they take over other émigre groups because of his service's lack of funds. The Americans initially balked at the suggestion because of the known fascist past of the extremists such as the Banderites. Philby did, however, persuade Frank Wisner to run joint operations with MI6 and, in time, US aversion to the extremists of the OUN-B diminished, thereby facilitating the emigration of a large number of DPs in western Europe to North America, where they constituted a substantial recruiting pool for operations.

The British government had sent, on 13 July 1948, a secret telegram via the Commonwealth Relations Office to all Commonwealth governments with a proposal to end Nazi war crime trials in the British Zone of Germany. It explained that for reasons of political expediency - 'future political developments in Germany' - the time had come to 'dispose of the past as soon as possible'. No fresh trials would start after 31 August that 'would particularly affect cases of alleged war criminals, not now in custody, who might subsequently come into our hands'. The British government believed that 'punishment of war criminals is more a matter of discouraging future genera- tions than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual'. As a result of this new policy, MI6 took the opportunity to transfer large numbers of its former Nazi-sponsored émigré assets to Canada and Australia, and to the United States, where Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act in the same year.

(1949, p.106)   Karl Marcus had been the co-ordinator of agents in Byelorussia, known as V-men, who controlled the SS networks of White Russian collaborators, and he knew the identities of SS agents throughout eastern Europe. His role was was to recruit former colleagues for Kim Philby's Section IX Europe and work in co-operation with Lord Vansittart, whose unofficial propaganda activities were co-ordinated with the Service's anti-communist operations. Those recruited included SS and SD officers with knowledge of Stefan Bandera's Ukrainian nationalist resistance movement, OUN-B. They had retrained their contacts with Bandera's men, who were now scattered in DP camps throughout Germany. In order to increase his effectiveness, Marcus was appointed mayor of a small town in the British Zone of Germany, from where word spread that MI6 was recruiting intelligence specialists.

(1950, p.240)   In his role as the senior British Intelligence officer in North America, Kim Philby persuaded the Canadian authorities to make an exception to the blanket exclusion of former members of the Waffen-SS. His efforts were indirectly aided by a well-known Ukrainian-Canadian leader, Gordon Bohdan Panchuk, director of Canadian postwar relief work, who informed his government that Division members had passed British security checks and that they had only joined the Wehrmacht to defend their homeland against the Russians. Backed by heavy lobbying from ultra-right-wing Catholics, on 31 May 1950 the Canadian Cabinet passed an order-in-council to admit several thousand men who had served in the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, including several alleged war criminals using false identities. Screening of these men was rudimentary and often undertaken by inexperienced officials with little knowledge of the Nazi regime. They were over-worked, with up to thirty-five interviews a day, and made no attempt at a physical search for SS tattoos. Using a simple 'negative clearance' criterion for the screening process, the system could only have worked if the screeners had had effective sources; these were absent since they 'depended almost exclusively on British Intelligence', which was primarily interested in looking for security risks - communists - not war criminals. Canadian security had had access since 1947 to the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) lists of war criminals but failed to circulate them: 'They were simply filed away and forgotten.' Even if the screening had been efficient, it is unlikely that it would have worked: 'MI6 duped the Canadian authorities, where there was no offensive intelligence agency, into admitting immigrants by supplying them with false documents.'

The British Foreign Office played along with the deception. On behalf of the Foreign Secretary, L. Scopes wrote to Canada House on 4 September 1950 with respect to a Canadian inquiry on the status of the Ukrainians:

While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and that neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies [some units fought against the Americans in France following D-Day] or engaged in crimes against humanity. Their behaviour since they came to this country has been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology. When they surrendered to the Allied forces at the end of the war, they were members of the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Wehrmacht which was formed in September 1944, and which was only in action once (against the Red Army in Austria during April 1945) being employed in training and guard duties in Austria and Yugoslavia during the rest of its existence. Some of its members, however, appear to be survivors of an earlier formation known as the 14th Galician Grenadier Division. This was also a Wehrmacht unit, as an attempt by the Germans to make it into an SS Division having apparently been resisted by the Ukrainians themselves. This unit seems to have been formed about July 1943, and to have been destroyed at the Battle of Brody in June 1944. Although Communist propaganda has constantly attempted to depict these, like so many refugees, as 'quislings' and 'war criminals' it is interesting to note that no specific charges of war crimes have been made by the Soviet or any other Government against any member of this group.'

Rarely have there been so many untruths in such a short statement.

(1952, p.222)   With the collapse of the Promethean League, its Belorussian leaders, Ostrowsky and Stankievich, became leading lights in another MI6-backed umbrella organisation, the more extreme and militant Ukrainian-dominated Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Smal-Stocky recognised it as 'a revolutionary underground movement which called for a common continuous revolution of all subjugated nations against Soviet Moscow', which upheld and promoted the League's ideas. A close reading of the League's own propaganda suggests that the ABN, which was controlled by Stefan Bandera's faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN-B, acted, in effect, as the military wing of the League. Ostrowsky would eventually become vice-president of the ABN.

(1952, p.241)   In December 1952, at the request of MI6, the Canadian government set up a committee on defectors which permitted the entry into the country of 'defectors' who did not meet normal security requirements. The term 'defector' became a convenient euphemism for allowing in former Nazis posing as anti-communists. Secrecy was paramount, and a three-country agreement between Britain, the United States and Canada ensured that information about these 'defectors' could only ever be released with the joint consent of all three governments. When the Canadian authorities did eventually investigate the role of MI6 in transferring its émigré assets to their country, the inquiry was hampered by the 'disappearance in the early seventies of files relating to the subject of Nazi war criminals'. They had been replaced at some stage with a 'false docket'. Similarly, immigration records had been destroyed as a matter of course, and when a huge batch of files was found to have escaped destruction, investigators were informed that the files had been destroyed weeks before. The protection of Nazi assets went as high as the then Prime Minister's office where 'Louis St Laurent and his aides were personally involved in communicating with the alleged war criminals, their protectors, and those that would have had them expelled from the country'.

During 1949 there was a debate within the Foreign Office's Northern Department regarding 'Ukraine, Ukrainian Insurgency, and Emigré Organisations', and the feasibility of an alternative to Soviet rule. Officials regarded the resultant paper considered in March as 'scarcely relevant', as there was no question of an alternative government. The idea of using the various exile groups to foment rebellion within Ukraine had already come too late. The UPA had been reduced to pockets of token resistance and, in September, the UPA commander belatedly recognised the reality of the situation and ordered the deactivation of the army and its transformation into a purely underground resistance network. Starved of accurate intelligence, MI6 knew little about the reality on the ground and went ahead with schemes to parachute agents into the region, in the expectation that they would be welcomed into the arms of a well-organised guerrilla force. The Foreign Office thought that, at best, the OUN-B and other émigré organisations could only be used for 'information and intelligence purposes' and with 'financial or other encouragement of their internecine quarrels being carefully avoided'.

Run by Harry Carr, MI6's Northern Division controlled INTEGRAL - the operation to send agents into Ukraine. Ukrainians, primarily belonging to OUN-B, were trained at the Special School in Holland Park and run by officers operating from bases in Turkey and under cover of the Control Commission in Germany. The officer in charge of the operation was Colonel Harold 'Gibby' Gibson. Working with him was Hubert O'Bryan Tear ('always known as OBT'), a former SOE officer in the French RF Section and German Control Officer, who was later posted to the small station in Moscow. The first group of three was dropped from an RAF aircraft, without wing markings, in the Kiev region in July 1949, and other Banderite groups followed during the next ten months. MI6 appears to have infiltrated most of its spies into the western regions of Ukraine. Czech wartime pilots had perfected a workable but highly dangerous method of evading Soviet radar screens by flying at only two hundred feet across the Russian border and climbing at the last moment to five hundred feet, the minimum height for a safe parachute drop. Soviet ground crew monitored every flight and shot at some but the planes 'survived every flight'. While the drops were successful, nothing more was heard from the agents and they were assumed to have been captured. According to his Soviet handler, Yuri Modin, 'during his tour of duty in Istanbul, Philby had already helped us wreck several attempts to send in agents. He did the same thing from Washington'.

Since August 1948, the Policy and Planning Staff of the US State Department, the controlling body for OPC operations, had been considering the issue of 'Ukrainian National Liberation'. A senior figure from the OUN-B had contacted Secretary of Defence James Forrestal directly with an offer of the services of an estimated hundred thousand Ukrainians, mostly from the 'Bandera party', in the western zones in Germany. As to making use of these 'dissident elements in combating Communism', it had been decided in Washington to give the responsibility to the CIA, but it was to be handled 'in some special manner under Frank Wisner', who was already recruiting 'shock troops' for 'roll-back' operations. The US National Security Council advocated establishing relations with the resistance groups as a means of acquiring intelligence on Soviet 'mobilization in the area'. The OPC as well as the Soviet Division of the CIA's Office of Special Operations (OSO) began parachuting émigré agents into Ukraine, infiltrating 'as many as seventy-five guerrillas into the region over a four-year period'. On 5 September 1949, two agents were landed near Lvov, in the CIA's first deep penetration of the Soviet Union, and later, four parachutists were dropped in the Carpathian area. OSO operational head Harry Rositzke realised that 'they would not survive' and blamed unrealistic operational demands by the Pentagon. According to a formal complaint placed before the United Nations by the USSR, the security police captured four US-backed exiles and former Nazi collaborators within days of the first parachute drops. The agents were interrogated and then shot.'

A Soviet amnesty for UPA members launched in the first week of 1950 proved to be particularly effective as eight thousand guerrillas handed in their weapons. Many had originally fled into the forests to escape conscription to the coalfields. In March, the supreme commander of the UPA, Roman Shukhevych, acknowledged by the Soviets as 'a bold man, competent in clandestine work', was killed by the MVD in a village near Lvov, after being trapped in an underground bunker. While this did not end UPA activities, and it was true that small-scale resistance went on for a number of years, the UPA was no longer able to inflict major losses on the Soviet forces or pose a serious threat to the communist administration. MI6 knew little of this and continued to parachute agents into eastern Poland, between Lvov and Bridy, near Ternopol, and between Kolomiya and Kamenets, where Ukrainian, Polish and White Ruthenian insurgents were still thought to be fighting the Soviet Army. Looking for a safer route to Ukraine, British parachute drops were switched to aircraft taking off from Cyprus or Malta, while the Americans favoured bases in Greece and West Germany.'

(1950, p.244)   It was against this background that Harry Carr made his first trip to Washington in early 1950 to consult with his American counterparts on the Polish and Ukrainian operations. Welcomed by Philby, Carr met with the avowed anglophile Harry Rositzke, who, along with the CIA analysts, appears to have had a much more realistic view of the Ukrainian operations, having already concluded that the OUN/UPA guerrillas 'could play no serious paramilitary role' in the event of a Soviet move against the West. Instead, Rositzke's group favoured using the guerrillas as a temporary base inside the USSR for espionage. Their agenda was dominated by the failure of the initial missions and the effect on future plans. OSO planned six drops in 1950, while MI6 hoped to send in at least two more teams. 'The requirement for co-ordination concerned not only which groups were receiving Western support but also the intended dates of the missions and predominantly technical information. Their object was to avoid clashes.' All this was discussed in front of Philby, who took the notes for future reference. Unfortunately for the Americans, Carr was only willing to discuss the broad outline of his operations, which they felt was unsatisfactory. Philby recalled that the Washington talks were largely taken up with 'skirmishes' about Stefan Bandera, who was regarded by the Americans as highly disruptive. The British, however, 'put up a stubborn rearguard action'.

In May 1950, the Banderites continued their spoiling tactics and finally withdrew from the National Ukrainian Council in Augsburg. The Banderites regarded the sudden emergence of various nationalist groups in Munich - such as 'the supposedly democratically inclined' Ukrainian government-in-exile, led by Mykola Liwycky, Director of Press and Information of the Ukrainian Information Bureau, and the Committee for the Liberation of the Ukraine from Bolshevism, which ran 'Radio Liberation' - as manoeuvres by the Americans and their Russian émigré advisers to create divisions between the Ukrainian nationalist groups. At some point in 1950 Bandera secretly visited Washington in an unsuccessful attempt to establish better relations with the Americans. Increasingly, the Banderites focused their energies on the ABN, which took on a more neo-fascist character. This did not worry MI6, though it was concerned about its own lack of funds for such groups as the Treasury coffers were increasingly empty for special operations. The ABN was still able, though, to collect considerable funds from its supporters in Canada, and its mood remained buoyant.

Several teams of agents, their numbers ranging from four to six, parachuted into the Soviet Union during 1950. Two of these missions disappeared without a trace. The operations were, however, compromised from top to bottom. Pavel Sudoplatov of Special Tasks and Ilarion Kamazuk, an MGB operator, had planted an agent in the surviving Bandera group which had made its way to West Germany, where MI6 'picked them up and carried them to England for training'. Bandera, who was increasingly concerned about the lack of radio communications with the UPA, had decided to send his head of the security service (SB), Mynon Matwijejko, to Ukraine to restore the movement. Meanwhile the planted Soviet agent kept in contact with his handlers by mailing a coded postcard, informing them 'of the Matwijejko group's route back to Ukraine'. He revealed details of their planned landing and instructions were given to the Soviet air defence command not to attack the British plane that was flying from Malta carrying Matwijejko. 'We not only wanted to protect our own man, who was with them,' Sudoplatov recalled. 'We wanted to take them alive.'

(1951, p.245)   In March 1951 Philby gave his friend and Foreign Office traitor Guy Burgess, who was leaving the Washington embassy for London, 'the names and arrival points of three groups of six men who were to be parachuted into Ukraine'. This information eventually reached MGB/KGB officer Yuri Modin, through another member of the 'Ring', former MI5 officer Anthony Blunt. Modin acknowledges that he 'made good use of it'. In the late spring, the British dropped the three parties in an area within fifty miles of the nationalist stronghold of Lvov, and others on the territories of Ternopol and Stanislaw. Again, none of the teams reported back.'

In April 1950 , a high-level conference was held in London between MI6 officials and a CIA team. The occasion was a European tour by Allen Dulles, recently appointed Deputy Director for Plans in the CIA, with responsibilities for Wisner's OPC and the OSO. Once again, a row broke out over the Ukraine operations and the appalling record of Bandera, which the OSO officials claimed was hindering recruitment and proving to be positively counterproductive. The Americans claimed that there was no evidence that OUN-B commanded any substantial support in Ukraine. Despite the failed operations and the continuing urging by Dulles to abandon Bandera, Carr steadfastly refused to break the relationship. The operations continued, partly because of the belief that thirty-five thousand Soviet police troops and Communist Party cadres had been eliminated by OUN-B/UPA guerrillas in Ukraine since the end of the war. If true, it was all in the past; forced collectivisation implemented during the year cut vital supplies to the underground. The resistance was simply no longer effective.'

In May, Bandera's representative, Mynon Matwijejko, and his team, which had been under constant surveillance since landing in Ukraine, surrendered voluntarily to the Soviet authorities. After a month of interrogations by Pavel Sudoplatov, Matwijejko 'realised that except for the names of secondary agents, there was nothing we didn't know about the Ukrainian emigrant organisations and the Bandera movement. He was taken aback by my recital to him of the biographies of all their leaders, bitter conflicts between them, and details of their lives.' Somehow, Matwijejko managed to escape his captors, but gave himself up after only three days when he discovered that the OUN-B network in Lvov was not functioning. He learned that much the same experience had faced the original two teams parachuted into Ukraine in 1949. What existed of the local movement had been inflating its intelligence reports to London and Munich. Matwijejko decided to co-operate with the debriefers and, at a press conference staged by the Ukrainian authorities, denounced the Bandera movement, using 'his authority to appeal for national reconciliation'. Further denunciations came from 'W. Kruk', whose earlier recruitment by the NKVD had been a major intelligence coup. A senior UPA commander, his arrest and 'turning' had enabled the Soviets successfully to thwart a number of operations. Pardoned by the Supreme Soviet Presidium, Kruk later became an archivist of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

Carr's refusal to break with the OUN-B was partly based on his knowledge that the Americans were increasingly relying on Reinhard Gehlen and his Organisation, for whom MI6 had little time or respect. While Gehlen claimed that Bandera was 'one of our men', his American intelligence advisers had helped block Bandera's access to the Org. Gehlen was able, however, to warn the CIA that Bandera's group inside Ukraine was, in all probability, penetrated. He did have access to information on Bandera from the Ukrainian 'specialist' Theodor Oberländer, political adviser with the Nachtigall battalion which swept into Lvov in 1941 and who later became a minister in the Bonn government. After surrendering to American troops at the end of the war, Oberländer had been sent to London to an Anglo/American Intelligence Service camp for debriefing. Thereafter, he was 'handed from office to office' before returning to West Germany, where he was 'allowed' to go underground.

Frank Wisner was also using Gehlen for the OPC/CIA's own Ukrainian operations. The first of three OPC/CIA missions involving five of Wisner's Gehlen-backed agents was dispatched into Moldavia, between south-east Ukraine and Romania, in mid-August 1951. A former Red Army PoW and a Soviet deserter, who had served in the Vlasov army, were instructed to make their way separately to Ukraine and the Caucasus before making their escape via Turkey. The ambitious project was terminated when, soon after they arrived, their radios went quiet. A month later, another agent was dropped into Belorussia, but only lasted a few weeks before being picked up by the Soviet secret police. Two further agents similarly disappeared. Moscow Radio later announced that the insurgents had engaged in gathering intelligence for 'imperialist intelligence' and 'ideological diversions'.

Given the continuing lack of success of the Bandera agents, the MI6 hierarchy could no longer stand idly by, and so a discreet secret review of operations was undertaken. Carr was able to retain control of the Baltic operations, and the establishment of a 'Joint Centre' with the CIA in the I. G. Farben building in Frankfurt for anti-Soviet operations was agreed. The MI6 liaison officer between headquarters in Germany and the centre was Michael Lykowski, alias Mike Peters, who joined the CIA's George Belic to manage the project. Lykowski and Belic paid 'tens of thousands of dollars to Ukrainian agents who often reappeared wearing new clothes, boasting the ownership of new cars and hosting champagne parties in the nightclubs. Occasionally, they disappeared from Frankfurt for ever.' These 'special training' schools in Germany were found to beriddled with Soviet agents, and as with other unsuccessful émigré operations it was often less a case of Philby betraying the networks than of low-level Soviet agents infiltrating the émigré community at every turn.

(1952, p.247)   Although the infiltrations carried on throughout 1951/2 produced little intelligence feedback, the American-backed Gehlen programme was stepped up in the summer of 1952 with regular parachute drops. In August and November American planes dropped more agents in south-west Ukraine. Sixteen agents were lost on at least five missions mounted during 1952/3. British losses in this period are unknown, as are those of the separate OSO operations. Despite the failures, 'as the flow of "intelligence" radioed to West Germany increased, MI6 confidently assured customers in Whitehall that it was running a reliable network'. It was only later that it was discovered that those few agents who did manage to radio back were acting under Soviet instructions. As in Poland, the agents had been turned and the Soviet radio deception soon bore fruit. Unlike other deception operations this one did not run for long, and the cases were publicised in the Soviet press at great length.' In May 1953, the Soviet newspaper Pravda reported the execution of four Ukrainians alleged to have spied for the United States. A year later, Soviet radio announced the execution of V. O. Okhrymovych, who had parachuted into Ukraine from an American plane. A leading figure during the war in both the OUN and the UHVR, Okhrymovych had left for the West after 1945 on a 'special mission'. The official Soviet communiqué stated that he had revealed the identities of 'his accomplices in espionage activities in Ukraine'. Taking into account the general communist-style propaganda language in which they were couched, the communiqués issued following the executions were, in fact, remarkably accurate. One reason for subsequently publicising the cases at the United Nations was that the Soviets took the insurgent threat seriously and could not allow the risk of its revival while the deception operation was played out.

It was apparent, indeed blindingly obvious, to both MI6 and the OUN-B that the Ukrainian networks were totally compromised. Bandera, who had always been ambivalent about foreign support, took the initiative and began to draw away from his British and American sponsors. In the mid-fifties he 'tried to create an even smaller, more secret network', which made him 'a target for Soviet assassination efforts'.

Ukrainian guerrillas fought in numbers until at least 1948 in the western provinces of Ukraine. According to two CIA-trained radio operators, who remained to the bitter end, the last major UPA unit was crushed by Soviet security troops in regimental strength in November 1953, though small pockets of resistance continued for another three years. In truth, it took the Soviets only four years to suppress OUN/UPA. During the Second World War, the OUN/UPA believed that the Germans and Russians would exhaust fhemselves and that as a result they would emerge as a 'third force'' which would win Ukrainian independence. Similarly, when the Cold War began, the nationalists expected a confrontation leading to war between the West and the USSR. They were wrong on both counts. The problem for the Ukrainians, who were torn by ethnic, ideological and political divisions, was that they suffered from what Alexander Buchsbajew has called 'suicidal romanticism'. There never was a chance that they would succeed.

There were a number of additional reasons for the nationalist failure, Even though the OUN was extremely security-conscious, as early as 1940 the NKVD had infiltrated the organisation at a high level. Although there were contacts with counterpart organisations in the West and with British Intelligence, no material supplies were delivered to the guerrillas in Ukraine. Gradually, the war of attrition reduced the quantity of weapons and ammunition available for a sustained campaign. Christopher Simpson argues that 'what this meant in strategic terms was that the guerrillas received neither the military support they needed to survive as an insurgent movement nor the patient camouflaging that might have permitted them to exist as spies. Instead, they were used as martyrs - some of whom died bravely; some pathetically - and grist for the propaganda mills of both East and West.' This is a view shared by one senior American diplomat who described the role of the OUN in these campaigns as 'little more than puppets in the hands of back-stage agents'.

The real problem - about which MI6 may have reached the correct conclusion but which it refused to impart to its émigré agents - was the same as that reported by Maj. Gatehouse and Capt. Tamplin when they interviewed Russian PoWs in Finland. 'Contrary to the widely held belief', Alexander Buchsbajew concludes in his study of guerrilla warfare, 'even the popularly backed, well-armed or highly motivated insurgents cannot succeed against a modern totalitarian state.' Harry Rositzke came to the conclusion that the Ukrainian operations were 'not worth the effort'. In retrospect, he realised that after the Czech coup in 1948 there were 'no resistance groups in Eastern Europe ... or none that could be trusted'.

The nationalists had wished to unite the whole of Ukraine into a new independent state, and in pursuit of this goal told the West's intelligence agencies that Ukrainian resistance after 1945 was spread throughout the region. In truth, resistance was mainly limited to the former Polish territories: Soviet west Ukraine and certain districts west of the Curzon Line which were left to the Poles after 1944/5. There was a deep and unbridgeable divide between the western and eastern regions of Ukraine. It is a tragic irony for the nationalists that, despite their often heroic efforts, the same division exists today. The 1994 general election split the country down the middle, with nearly 90 per cent of western Ukraine voting against the eventual victor, who came from the eastern region. The most vocal opponents of the result, who threatened the stability of the country, were the still-active Banderites. The preceding year, seven hundred former members of the Waffen-SS Galician Division, the majority now living in Canada and the United States, with a contingent of eighty from Britain, held a reunion in the nationalist stronghold of Lvov. Most remained unapologetic about the past.