Mykola Lebed

Who was Mykola Lebed?

Mykola Lebed, also known as Maksym Ruban, Marko or Yevhen Skyrba, was a Ukrainian political activist, Ukrainian nationalist and guerrilla fighter. He was among those tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the murder of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki, in 1936. The court sentenced him to death, but the state commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. As leader of OUN-B he is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

In 1949 he emigrated to the United States and lived in New York. Through Prolog Research Corporation, his Central Intelligence Agency funded organization, he gathered intelligence on the Soviet Union as late as into the late 1960s. In 1991, the CIA still considered him a valuable asset. Federal investigators would consider Lebed a possible war criminal but did not pursue prosecution. He died in 1998.