[4] Born to a family of villagers in Barszowice near Lwów, Stashynsky completed his early education in 1948 and studied to become a teacher.

In 1957, the KGB trained the 25-year-old Stashynsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide capsule.

Stashynsky was honoured by Moscow with the Order of the Red Banner by Shelepin for his work and given his final assignment to kill Yaroslav Stetsko.

[4] The CIA was suspicious of Stashynsky, who was flown to Frankfurt for interrogation and doubtful of his claims that he had assassinated Rebet and Bandera.

They concluded that Stashynsky "would not be valuable operationally as a double agent, that he was not a bona fide defector and the individual he purported to be.

"[4] After three weeks, the CIA – believing Stashynsky to be useless – handed him over to West German authorities, who now began to investigate him for the two murders.

[5][6] Explaining what motivated him to kill Rebet, Stashynsky told a court that he had been told that Rebet was "the leading theorist of the Ukrainians in exile," since "in his newspapers Suchasna Ukrayina (Contemporary Ukraine), Chas (Time), and Ukrayinska Trybuna (Ukrainian Tribune) he not so much provided accounts of daily events as developed primarily ideological issues."

According to West German Intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, ...Bohdan Stashinskyi, who had been persuaded by his German-born wife Inge to confess to the crimes and take the load off his troubled conscience, stuck resolutely to his statements.

He reconstructed the crimes exactly as they had happened, revisiting the crumbling business premises at the Stachus, in the heart of Munich, where Lev Rebet had entered the office of a Ukrainian exile newspaper, his suitcase in his hand.

Passing sentence eleven days later, the court identified Stashinskyi's unscrupulous employer Shelyepin as the person primarily responsible for the hideous murders, and the defendant – who had given a highly credible account of the extreme pressure applied to him by the KGB to act as he did – received a comparatively mild sentence.

According to the historian of the Soviet state security organs Boris Volodarsky, after Stashynsky was released from prison, he underwent plastic surgery.

Bohdan Stashynsky and Inge Stashinsky were given new identities and provided asylum by South Africa in 1984, where they live under false names to this day, although this version is questioned by many.