C4 | www.flagshipnews.com | The Flagship | 9.28.2017
Arts&Entertainment basetheaters
bookreview
Wet work
$3 Movies
“Poison Gun” is well researched look at brutal life journey of KGB-recruited assassin By Timothy J. Lockhart Virginian-Pilot Correspondent
Courtesy of Paramount
“The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature: “ Following the events of the first film, Surly and his friends must stop Oakton City’s mayor from destroying their home to make way for a dysfunctional amusement park.
JEB Little Creek, Gator Theater – 757-462-7534
NAS Oceana, Aerotheater – 757-433-2495
Friday, Sept. 29
Friday, Sept. 29
6 p.m. Leap! (PG) 9 p.m. The Hitman’s Bodyguard (R)
6 p.m. Wind River (R) 9 p.m. The Hitman’s Bodyguard (R)
Saturday, Sept. 30
Saturday, Sept. 30
1 p.m. Leap! (PG) 4 p.m. Logan Lucky (PG-13) 7 p.m. Wind River (R)
Noon The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (PG) 3 p.m. Logan Lucky (PG-13) 7 p.m. The Hitman’s Bodyguard (R)
Sunday, Oct. 1
1 p.m. Leap! (PG) 4 p.m. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (PG) 7 p.m. Logan Lucky (PG-13)
Sunday, Oct. 1
Noon Leap! (PG) 3 p.m. The Glass Castle (PG-13) 6 p.m. Wind River (R)
Schedule is subject to change. For your weekly movie showtimes and more, check out the Navy MWR website at www.navymwr.org/movies/theater/.
The Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall came down, but echoes of its dark and often deadly battles ring in Russia’s current behavior. That should not be surprising – Vladimir Putin learned to be a ruthless leader as a lieutenant colonel in the fearsome KGB, and as recently as 2010, the U.S. expelled 10 “illegals” – Russian spies living and working here under false identities. Other illegals have been – and presumably still are – based in Western Europe. One such illegal was Bogdan Stashinsky, a Ukrainian national recruited by the KGB in the 1950s to work first as a spy and then as an assassin. Stashinsky received a specially made weapon, a tube about 8 inches long that used a gunpowder charge to ram a striker into an ampoule of liquid poison. Breathed by the victim, the poison mist produced cardiac arrest within two to three minutes and was virtually undetectable in the corpse. After Stashinsky defected to the West, his 1962 trial for murder was, as Serhii Plokhy relates in “The Man With the Poison Gun,” what is likely to be the definitive account of Stashinsky’s career as an illegal, one of the first public airings of the brutal methods the KGB used against enemies of the Soviet Union. Stashinsky’s family mem-
bers were Ukrainian nationalists who wanted freedom for their country, but he believed that resistance to the Soviet Union was futile. After being arrested on a minor charge in 1950 and agreeing to work as an informer, he used his sisters to infiltrate the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and report to the KGB on its activities. Stashinsky moved quickly up the KGB ladder, learning German, developing a false East German identity, and traveling to Munich to become familiar with the city. In 1957 he used the poison gun there to kill Ukrainian nationalist and newspaper editor Lev Rebet, an assassination approved by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He struck again in Munich in 1959, killing a more prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Stepan Bandera. KGB head Aleksandr Shelepin awarded Stashinsky the Order of the Red Banner for those two labors of “wet work” (named for the blood assassins spill). The KGB had another Ukrainian nationalist in mind as Stashinsky’s third target. But Stashinsky, who in 1957 had married an East German woman over the strong objections of the KGB, had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union, a process accelerated by the KGB’s refusal to allow him to travel to East Germany for the birth of his son. When the baby died four months later, the KGB
PRESENTS
let Stashinsky attend the funeral, and he and his wife fled to West Berlin. The CIA interviewed the Soviet assassin but did not believe his story and turned him over to West German authorities. After Stashinsky demonstrated how he had carried out his two murders, the West German police were convinced he was telling the truth. Meanwhile the Soviets tried to deflect blame by alleging that another Ukrainian nationalist, Dmytro Myskiw, had killed Bandera. But evidence showed that Myskiw was in Rome at the time. A West German court tried Stashinsky in 1962 and sentenced him to eight years in prison. The court explained the light sentence by noting that he had acted as an “accessory” to murders ordered by the Soviet state. Coming only a few years after national and international courts had rejected similar arguments from Nazi war criminals, the sentence received considerable criticism. Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard who directs its Ukrainian Research Institute and who has written 10 books, does an excellent job of describing the trial in the context of the Cold War, which was then near its height. He also notes that “the recent rise in East-West tensions” makes the “Stashinsky story … more than a piece of history” – it “is also an insight
into the present and forewarning for the future.” Plokhy’s prose is sturdy but not sparkling (understandable for a writer whose first language is not English), and the book would benefit greatly from the inclusion of photographs of its principal figures. But he has done his research well, interviewing the few witnesses still alive and accessible, and drawing on documents from Eastern as well as Western archives. And he doesn’t sensationalize a story so fantastic that it inspired an early scene in Ian Fleming’s posthumous 1965 novel “The Man With the Golden Gun.” Stashinsky served only about four years in prison, being released on parole in 1966 and disappearing from public view. Evidence indicates that he moved to South Africa (apparently without his wife), where he received asylum, assumed a new identity and may have advised the South African secret police about their own wet work. Residents of his native village in Ukraine believe he returned there at least once – unrecognizable, “a ghost in his own homeland and a tragic figure who is regarded as a traitor by every side he had ever been on.” Timothy J. Lockhart is a Norfolk lawyer, retired Navy Reserve captain, and author of the novel “Smith,” an international thriller about political assassination.
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PSYCHOLOGY 9:30 AM 10:35 AM
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Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness
Catherine Sanderson / Amherst College Princeton Review’s Best 300 Professors
How the 1960s Changed America: Four Political Lessons from the Pivotal Decade Leonard Steinhorn / American University Graduate Mentoring Award
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The Three Greatest Films in American Cinema
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