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 1934. 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 genocide of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. In 2009, the United States Congress directed the National Archives and Records Administration to review declassified intelligence records pertaining to the activities of the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Government that were not processed in time for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group's final report in 2007. The follow-up report from the IWG's Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda included a discussion of Lebed's relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War. In 1949 he emigrated to the United States and lived in New York. Through Prolog Research Corporation, his CIA funded organization, he gathered intelligence on the Soviet Union as late as into the late 1960s. The CIA project name for the operation was AERODYNAMIC. The report stated that as late as 1991 the CIA, for fear of compromising the operation and triggering outrage within the Ukrainian émigré community, shielded Lebed from prosecution for war crimes by preventing the United States Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations from learning about his wartime connections to the Nazis. He died in 1998.
In 1940, during the internal conflict that erupted within the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists he supported Stepan Bandera, and, in 1941, became his assistant. In June 1941, he was one of the functionaries in the short-lived Ukrainian government. Lebed assumed control of Bandera's faction of the OUN in western Ukraine, which would come to dominate the Ukrainian Insurgent Army until 1943. In 1942, he was a participant in the 3rd Special Conference of the OUN, and headed the head council and the delegate for external contacts of the Direction of the OUN. In 1944 he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council and the general Secretary of International Policies of the UHVR. At the recommendation of the UHVR he traveled to the West where he contacted various Western governments. In 1948, he became a member of the OUN.
In a government reports publication, published by the National Archives, Lebed is being suspected of having collaborated with Nazi Germany. Lebed was described as a "Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator", and later labeled as a "well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans" by United States Army counterintelligence. On the other hand, it was also stated, that Lebed himself was persecuted by the Gestapo: "it fought German rule, and the Gestapo put a price on Lebed's head."
Post-war activities
From 1949, Lebed lived in the United States. During 1952-1974, he headed the research center "Prologue" in New York; in 1982-85, he was Deputy Chairman and since 1974 he was a Member of the Board of Directors of the institution. In 1956-91 he was a member of the board of the Ukrainian Society of Foreign Studies in Munich and Toronto, publishing committee "Chronicle of the UPA. Author memories "UPA".
