But the rest of the story, much of which is revealed in CIA records released in 2007, reveals irony in Yushchenko’s award. After the war Bandera lived in Munich. British intelligence used him to help run agents into Ukraine to gather intelligence and to help the Ukrainian underground against the Soviets. The CIA used some of Bandera’s former cronies for similar reasons, but never used Bandera himself, owing to Bandera’s infatuation with his own legend. “Bandera,” said one CIA report from 1948, “is by nature a political intransigent of great personal ambition [who] has…opposed all political organizations in the emigration which favor a representative form of government in the Ukraine, as opposed to a mono-party, OUN/Bandera regime.”
Owing to his self-promotion in print and on West German radio, Bandera remained popular with thousands of Ukrainian émigrés in West Germany. His superficial effectiveness prompted West German intelligence (the BND) to establish contact in 1956. By 1959 the BND was helping Bandera to run a new generation of Ukrainian agents from West Germany into the USSR. General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the BND, had lead German Army intelligence in the USSR during the war. He and his subordinates were surely familiar with Bandera’s wartime record. They were less familiar with the fact that the BND was by now thoroughly penetrated with Soviet agents. On October 14, 1959, Bandera had lunch with senior BND officials to discuss the expansion of operations in Ukraine. The next day the KGB assassinated Bandera in his apartment building
No of course not, just my attempt at highlighting the general media narrative of 'good vs. bad' that these things generally boil down to.
