The convergence of Ukrainian fascists and the CIA

According to an internal OUN‐B document from 2007 by Myron Swidersky (1925–2022), the vice president of the UAFF [the so‐called Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation] in the early‐to‐mid 2000s, Mykola Bojczuk was a young entrepreneur in 1940s western Ukraine, who worked in the economic sector of OUN‐B and training camps for its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. After the war, in American‐occupied Germany, Bojczuk was reportedly “further involved in the work of the economic sector, organizing an organizational enterprise.” This might have been the “luggage factory whose profits enabled him to bring a substantial nest egg to the United States in 1949.”

In 1941, before the [Axis] invaded the Soviet Union, Bojczuk is said to have gone into hiding from Soviet authorities that took over western Ukraine in 1939. They deported his wife and young son, Stefan, to Kazakhstan. As told by one article, “When the Germans invaded later that year, Bojczuk stayed behind and continued making money.” He fled westward in 1944, “one step behind the retreating Germans and ahead of the Red Army.” Bojczuk was only reunited with his son in 1994, over fifty years after they last saw each other. In the meantime, Mykola built a hotel, purchased a valuable tract of land, and married an American woman who owned a stone yard—all in New Jersey. By the 21st century, he was thought to be worth 30 million dollars. And maybe 40 million, according to Swidersky.

During the Cold War, Bojczuk was reportedly a financial supporter of the Banderites. For example, he paid for at least one of their trips to Taiwan for a conference of the “Anti‐Communist League.” It’s unclear if this was the Asian People’s Anti‐Communist League (APACL), which was partnered with the Banderites’ Anti‐Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), or the World Anti‐Communist League (WACL), in which the ABN represented the “captive nations” of the Soviet Union. According to the Swidersky report, Bojczuk’s Days Inn hotel also hosted Banderite meetings, including the 1982 World Congress of the “Ukrainian Liberation Front,” the international coordinating body of OUN‐B front groups.

[…]

During the Cold War, Mykola Lebed (1909–98) led a small OUN faction of ex‐Banderites that the CIA put in charge of a front company based in New York City called the Prolog Research Corporation. Smorodsky was the same age as Roman Kupchinsky (1944–2010), a Ukrainian American Vietnam veteran¹ who became a “full‐fledged CIA officer” and president of Prolog after Lebed took a step back from the operation. As the youngest member of Prolog, the CIA reported that Kupchinsky “maintains close connections with student groups in the New York area.” That included the “Committee for the Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners” (CDSPP) that Myron Smorodsky joined. Some of its other early members, Adrian Karatnycky and Alexander Motyl, became part‐time student employees of Lebed’s CIA front.

In 2020, a friend from the Toronto‐based “Committee for the Defense of Valentyn Moroz” (CDVM) recalled that Smorodsky had “worked closely with Roman Kupchinsky and Prolog.” The CDVM was spearheaded by top Banderites in Canada, such as Stepan Bandera’s son Andriy, and Oleh Romanyshyn, a nephew of OUN‐B leaders Yaroslav and Slava Stetsko. According to a declassified CIA document, the Banderite‐led CDVM “played a very active role in 1973–74 in mobilizing Canadian public opinion around the question of persecution in the USSR. In the USA similar type committees were also active, but with less measure of success.” The CDSPP, established in 1972, “has taken a less ideological role while agitating among left and liberal intelligentsia on matters concerning dissent in Ukraine and in the USSR.” Apparently the two organizations learned to work together. Andy Semotiuk, a Ukrainian Canadian lawyer from the CDVM, helped to facilitate this when he moved to New York, joined the CDSPP, and befriended Smorodsky. “In the years that followed,” according to Semotiuk, who now writes for Forbes,

Myron and I worked on estates involving decedents who died in the U.S. but left Ukrainian beneficiaries. We worked together while I was practicing in California for ten years, and later when I was in New York and finally after I returned to Canada again. Myron was very knowledgeable about wills and estates and litigated Ukrainian estate cases successfully in the U.S. He helped to defend Ukrainians that were wrongfully accused of collaboration with the Nazis, a task that was not always easy.

The CIA pulled the plug on the Prolog Research Corporation when the Cold War ended. Cooperation between the CDVM and CDSPP however paved the way for a greater convergence of Banderites and ex‐Prolog staffers in the years to come. After CIA funding for Lebed’s OUN faction dried up, several Prologers went on to help the U.S. government “promote democracy” in the former Soviet Union. Adrian Karatnycky, from the CDSPP, became the president of Freedom House (1993–2004), and his wife Nadia Diuk (1954–2019) rose through the ranks of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a founder of which infamously said in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Prolog was “a fascinating place” to work, Diuk once remembered, “but after a while it became very clear to me that Kupchinsky was the gravitational force that brought together a number of intersecting universes.”

From 1990 to 2002, Roman Kupchinsky directed Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian language service of the US‐funded Radio Liberty, which was established by the CIA. Kupchinsky led Radio Svoboda in the years that it got set up in Ukraine, but Andriy Haidamakha, a former editor of the OUN‐B’s newspaper in Munich, almost the same age as Kupchinsky, was put in charge of the Kyiv bureau that they founded together. Haidamakha kept that job until 2000, when he was crowned the next international leader of OUN‐B—a first for his generation of Ukrainian nationalists, and a first for someone from the postwar Ukrainian diaspora. I suspect this represented a turning point for the Banderites’ relationship with Washington.

Andriy Haidamakha’s 1987 Radio Liberty press pass

:::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (October 9). 1907: Horst Wessel, SA officer and musician, was unfortunately born.
1908: Werner von Haeften, Axis lieutenant who failed to oust the Third Reich’s Chancellor, was delivered to the world.
1934: An ustaša murdered King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Louis Barthou, Foreign Minister of France, in Marseille.
1937: Somebody massacred nine Catholic priests in Zhengding, China who were protecting the local population from the advancing Imperialists.
1940: The Axis’s occupation government in the Netherlands banned Jews as well as legally ‘Jewish’ people from public employment, and the Wehrmacht began to secure oil fields in the Kingdom of Romania, which was vital for the Axis war effort. Additionally, Axis fighter‐bombers dropped bombs in London, Maidstone, Hastings, Falmouth, and other British towns. The Axis lost three fighters and one Ju 88 bomber. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Liverpool, and Manchester; St. Paul’s Cathedral in London took a hit, destroying choir stalls and the High Altar (but the building itself was structurally undamaged).

Lastly, Axis submarine U‐103 attacked Allied convoy SC‐6, sinking Greek ships Zannes Gounaris (killing somebody) as well as Delphin (killing nobody) and damaging British ship Graigwen (massacring seven but leaving twenty‐seven alive). U‐103 became subject to a depth charge attack, yet escaped unharmed.
1941: The Kingdom of Romania deported Jews to Transnistria. (Hence this day is known as the National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust in Romania.) Likewise, the Axis exterminated 1,169 Jewish men, 1,840 Jewish women, along with 717 Jewish youths in Svenciany, Lithuania (for a total of 3,726 people), and Berlin announced that the war against the Soviet Union was nearly over. Berlin also signed a trade agreement with Istanbul under which the Third Reich would get no deliveries of chrome until 1943. Lastly, Georg von Bismarck became the commanding officer of the 20th Panzer Division.
1942: Alois Brunner declared Vienna Judenfrei (free of Jews), and Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary that Axis intelligence had learned that the Allies were planning on invading North Africa, which concerned him as a successful Allied campaign there would put Fascist Italy in danger.
1943: Axis flightcraft attacked the Dobodura Airfield in Australian Papua, setting oil dumps on fire, and Oberfeldwebel Johann Boos as well as Oberleutnant Robert Seib of the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.
1944: The garrison at Aachen rejected the Allies’ surrender ultimatum, and Léon Degrelle received the German Cross in Gold.
1945: Gottlieb Hering, SS commander involved in Action T4, finally died.
1947: Yukio Sakurauchi, Imperial Minister of Commerce and Industry, expired.
1959: Shirō Ishii, the Axis director of Unit 731 and later contributor to the U.S. biological warfare program, did a nice thing for once and dropped dead.
1974: Oskar Schindler, a moderate fascist who famously saved (but occasionally abused) hundreds of Jewish workers, perished in Hildesheim.
1976: Walter Warlimont, Axis staff officer, died.
1988: Felix Wankel, Axis engineer and SS member, departed from the world. :::