One of the first major acts of violence against the radios was the yet unsolved and controversial murder of the Radio Liberation Azerbaijan Service Director in 1954, presumably a KGB-directed murder.
On Monday, November 22, 1954, an eighty-year-old Munich landlady was cleaning a small kitchen she rented in her apartment. She moved a couch and noticed something large lying underneath. Something she had not noticed before. She called a neighbor to help move the couch. As they moved the couch out from the wall, they saw a horrifying sight: a man's body lying face down with his hands tied behind his back. They immediately ran out of the apartment building and asked a neighbor to return with them. He picked up a flashlight, and they all returned to look at the body. Then, they called the Munich police.
The landlady identified the body to the police as Soviet émigré Michael Ismailow to whom she rented the kitchen. Only Ismailow had the key, and he used the kitchen infrequently, she told the police. She could not see the face of the man because his coat was pulled up over his head as the police removed the body. She assumed it was Ismailov, and the police accepted her assumption as fact without further investigating the identification of the body.
The next day, the Munich newspapers reported the murder of Michael Ismailow. The initial medical report was that he had died of strangulation after being struck on the head with a hammer. The murderer remained unknown. Two days later, he was buried in a Munich cemetery.
Meanwhile, Radio Liberation (as Radio Liberty was then called) Chief Editor Abdulrachmann (Abo) Fatalibey failed to show up for work and did not call to say he was sick. This was highly unusual; his colleagues knew him to be punctual and conscientious. Colleagues went to his apartment, but it was empty, with no sign of what had happened to him. They declared him missing to the Munich police and RL Management. The Munich press speculated that Fatalibey was the prime suspect in the murder and had disappeared and committed the act.
Somehow, a rumor started at Radio Liberation that the person buried as Michael Ismailow was actually Fatalibey. The police were notified and exhumed the body. After a full examination, the coroner said that the body was the missing RL employee Fatalibey, not Ismailow.
Police later reconstructed his last night:
November 20, 1954, Fatalibey worked at the station "Radio Liberation" until 4PM, then went to the US Military Post Exchange at Prinzregentenstrasse and from there to "Cafe Freilinger" at Leopoldstr. There he drank until 7:45 PM. He then took streetcar No. 22 to Nordbad, where he probably changed into No. 7 (direction Ostfriedhof-Alpenplatz). From around 8 PM to 9 PM, Fatalibey was with Ismailov at the latter's place at No. 6, Alpenplatz, together with Mrs. Ruhland, a tenant on the 2nd floor in the same building. Mrs. Ruhland left at 9 PM. Around 1 AM, Ismailov was seen alone, and for the last time, in the restaurant "Alpenhof."
Ismailow became the suspected murderer of Fatalibey.
This is probably the first "political murder affecting RFE/RL. I write probably because Belorussian Service employee Leonid Karas failed to show up for work at Radio Liberation two months earlier and was reported missing. A week later, his body was found floating in the Isar River. How the body got there was never discovered, but lacking any evidence of wrongdoing, his death was officially ruled a suicide or an accident.
Radio Liberation became a subject of Munich newspaper attention for the first time since the first broadcast in March 1953. This caused as much stir within the RL American management as did the murder of Fatalibey. The life and death of Abo Fatalibey could be taken as the metaphor for all émigrés who worked at RFE and RL. It is necessary to review the details of his life to fully understand the reasons why he was murdered.
The following is extracted from his "autobiography" for employment with Radio Liberation. Abdulrachmann (Abo) Fatalibey was born in 1908 of a Turkic Father and Azerbaijan mother. His grandfather had been a colonel in the Tsar's army. He attended various public and military schools in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. With the help of local military officer sponsorship, he moved to Leningrad in 1926 to attend the Military Engineering School for the next three years. He joined the Communist Party then as a peasant origin member.
He returned to Azerbaijan as a Soviet military officer. He completed some more military schools and returned to the headquarters of the Leningrad Military District. He continued to be active in the Communist Party and Soviet army in both Moscow and Leningrad before being assigned to Kalinin in 1936. Three years later, he was finally interviewed in-depth about his "social origins." He was then expelled from the Communist Party for concealment of his "social origins."
When the war with Finland broke out, he was sent to the front and awarded the military order "The Red Star" as a Red Army soldier. Fatalibey was accepted back into the Communist Party. When the war with Germany broke out in July 1941, Fatalibey was Deputy Chief of Staff for the Soviet 27th Army. He was captured by the German army in September 1941 and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
Fatalibey was approached by the German military to work on their behalf. He accepted and eventually was sent to Berlin. The Germans formed battalions of nationality groups to fight against the Soviet Army. Fatalibey volunteered for the Azerbaijan Legion, rumored to number about 20,000, and in August 1942, he was sent to the front with the First Battalion, later renamed the Lion Battalion. He was decorated for his action against the Soviet Army and returned to Berlin, where in 1943, he was elected to a high office in the Azerbaijan Congress.
The Lion Battalion was then sent to aid the German war effort in Italy. In 1945, Fatalibey was captured by American forces marching through Italy and put in a prisoner-of-war camp. He wrote political letters and pamphlets to American and British political leaders and sent them out of the camp. The American military released him, but he had to move to various refugee camps before settling in Rome in 1948.
Fatalibey continued to write anti-Soviet and pro-Moslem pamphlets and drew the attention of the Palestinian Religious Leaders. He was invited to Egypt, where he became a military advisor for the Palestinian cause--he might even have fought against Israel, according to unconfirmed information. He wrote that he made the necessary battle plans, but they were never implemented. He moved to Jordan with some Palestinian leaders. Later, he crossed the border into Turkey and settled in Istanbul.
While in Cairo, Egypt, he claimed he maintained close contact with American and British officials and continued writing anti-Soviet political pamphlets sent to Washington and London. He was invited to Munich for a successful interview with Radio Liberation officials and returned to Turkey to await a job offer.
In 1950, he returned to Munich to become part of the American Committee for the Liberation of Bolshevism. He was called "The Major" in Munich's émigré community.
Almost a year before the date of Fatalibey's death, on November 30, 1953, at approximately 5 PM, two officials of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), Munich, went to the Munich police and declared that émigré Michael Ismailov was strongly suspected of espionage. He intended that night to remove important information directly or indirectly from Germany.
Three Munich policemen followed Ismailov that night. At 8.40 PM, a person who was unknown and accompanied by another person, also unknown at that time, gave Ismailov a briefcase, which he took and continued on his way. At the next intersection, Ismailov was arrested. The papers in the briefcase that Ismailov received were submitted to CIC and the Bavarian Land Office for the protection of the Constitution since they were written in a foreign language (probably Russian language RL scripts). Both agencies returned the document with the notation "no interest".
Thus, Ismailov's agent activities could not be proved. He was, therefore, only sentenced to two months imprisonment for violation of passport regulations.
After the murder of Fatalibey, two employees of Radio Liberation declared to the police that they had known all along that Ismailov was an agent for the East and had instructions to do away with Fatalibey and to obtain material concerning "Radio Liberation. In agreement with CIC, and presumably Fatalibey, they had tried to establish Ismailov's guilt. They were the ones who handed the documents to Ismailov in November 1953.
After being criticized for a poor investigation, the Munich police responded with, “Had CIC at that time properly informed the German police, it might have been possible to convict him not only for violation of passport regulations to two months imprisonment, but also for espionage activities or traitorous connections in violation of other German or Allied High Commission laws add thus prevent him from doing any further harm.
The Radio Liberation New York Programming Center sent a draft program on December 2, 1954, about the Fatalibey murder to Munich. “We have reservations re any mention. Treating it as act Soviet agents would certainly tend increase feeling Soviet omnipotence and hopelessness resistance. Would discourage potential defectors to know how MVD can reach abroad. Also see possibility some aspects case vulnerable to Soviet counterattacks. Leave it to you to decide whether possible positive gains outweigh these negative considerations.”
At Fatalibey’s burial in Neu-Ulm on 5 December 1954, a Radio Liberation statement was read to inspire other émigrés to keep up the struggle: "It is of paramount importance that the Bolshevik leaders know that the anti-communist liberating struggle of the peoples of the Soviet Union--of which Radio Liberation is the voice--are not to be intimidated nor checked by the assassination of its front-line fighters. Let us see to it that Fatalibey has not died in vain."
The RL program on the death of Fatalibey was addressed to "Comrade Soldiers, Sailors, and Officers" of the Soviet Union and broadcast on December 7, 1954. The program ended with this thought: “His murder shows that his recent activities, like the activities of Radio Liberation as a whole, had begun to hurt the dictatorship in a vital spot.“
