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This article appears in the May 16, 2014 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Heirs of the OUN, Grandchildren of MI6

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One wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN(b)) was headquartered in Munich after World War II and ran British MI6-backed operations into Ukraine well beyond the end of the western Ukraine civil war between Soviet authorities and the remnants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1954. The 1991 return to Ukraine of that faction's leader, Slava Stetsko, and her co-founding of what became the Tryzub component of Right Sector, is related in the body of this article.

The OUN(b)'s wartime security police chief, Mykola Lebed, parted ways with Stepan Bandera after the war. EIR reported in previous issues (see Notes 4 and 5) on CIA chief Allen Dulles's keeping Lebed from being turned away from the United States as "a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans," in the words of an Army Counterintelligence report. The CIA funded the Prolog Research Corporation, led by Lebed, for intelligence-gathering and the distribution of nationalist and other literature inside the USSR.

Taras Kuzio's "U.S. support for Ukraine's liberation during the Cold War: A study of Prolog Research and Publishing Corporation"[1] drew on recently declassified CIA documents and his own experience, for a review of Prolog's publications and network-building operations. He shed light on the ingrained influence of the OUN within the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

One of Lebed's Prolog deputies, Anatole Kaminsky, moved to Radio Liberty in Munich in 1978. As the termination of Prolog's funding approached in 1990, its then-President Roman Kupchinsky followed suit. These two, plus Prolog freelancer Bohdan Nahaylo, headed Radio Liberty's Ukrainian service, Radio Svoboda, until 2003—12 years after the break-up of the USSR.

After the Church Committee's findings led to restrictions on CIA activities in the mid-1970s, Prolog shifted its publishing activities to London. By 1985, the Society for Soviet Nationality Studies (U.K.) and the opening of Ukrainian Press Agency, for collecting information through "unofficial offices" in Warsaw, Moscow, and Kiev, enabled Prolog to resume publishing. The Society for Soviet Nationality Studies (SSNS), located in London, was already being funded by Prolog. It was directed by two young Britons of Ukrainian extraction, one of them Kuzio himself.

In 1984, the SSNS launched Soviet Nationality Survey, edited by two young Ukrainian emigrés having "close contacts with Prolog"—Alexander Motyl and Nadia Diuk, "who was completing her doctorate at Oxford University." A Ukrainian-American in the orbit of Prolog was Adrian Karatnycky, then working in the international department of the AFL-CIO. He helped get literature for Ukraine printed for Prolog, through trade union contacts in Poland.

Nadia Diuk, quoted in this dossier, is the U.S. NED's Vice President for Programs—Africa, Central Europe, Eurasia. She has been at the NED since 1990 and is a frequent co-author with her husband, Karatnycky, who headed Freedom House for 12 years and is now at the Atlantic Council. Kuzio cites Diuk's eulogy of Kupchinsky at his funeral in 2010, including her recollections of Lebed and Kupchinsky at work in the New York offices of Prolog in the 1980s. Taras Kuzio has written scores, if not hundreds, of RFE/RL intelligence reports on Ukraine. He also is a Ukraine expert for NATO, which opened a NATO Information and Documentation Center in Kiev in 1997. These three graduates of the Prolog kindergarten are among the most influential Ukraine experts in the United States.


[1] Communist and Post-Communist Studies (2012), doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2012.02.007.

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