The Murder of Abo Fatalibey

On Monday, November 22, 1954, an eighty-year-old landlady was cleaning a small kitchen she rented in her apartment. She moved a couch in the corner and noticed something large underneath. Something she had not noticed in the past. She called a tenant in the building to help move the couch. As they moved the couch out from the wall, they saw a man's body lying face down with his hands tied behind his back. Horrified, they ran out of the apartment building and asked a neighbor to return with them. He picked up a flashlight, and they all went back to look at body. Then, they called the police.

The landlady told the police that the dead man was émigré Michael Ismailov who rented the kitchen but used it infrequently. Only Ismailov had the key, she told the police, and he occasionally used the kitchen to entertain guests. 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, on which, reportedly, there was a note attached that read “Traitors to the Motherland.”

The next day the Munich newspapers reported the mysterious murder of Michael Ismailov, a émigré from the USSR. The initial medical report was that he had died of strangulation, after being struck on the head with a hammer by an unknown assassin. Two days later, the deceased was buried in a Munich cemetery as Michael Ismailov.

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, which was considered unusual for him. Colleagues went to his apartment, but he was not there. They declared him missing to the Munich police and RL Management. The Munich media speculated that Fatalibey was the prime suspect in the murder and had disappeared after committing the act.

        

A rumor started at Radio Liberation a week later that the person buried as Michael Ismailov was actually Fatalibey.  Police exhumed the body.  After a full examination, the coroner said that the body was, in fact, the missing RL employee Abo Fatalibey and not Ismailov, who had disappeared—presumably he returned to the USSR. Ismailov then became the prime suspect in Fatalibey’s murder.

Who Was Abo Fatalibey?

Abdulrachmann (Abo) Fatalibey-Dudanginski was born in 1908 of a Turkish Father and Azeri mother. There are variations of the spelling of the name, here are some: Abdürrahman Fatalibeyli-Düdanginski (Абдулрахман Фаталибейли-Дудангинский / Əbdürrəhman Fətəlibəyli-Düdənginski, Або Алиевич Дудангинский / Əbo Əliyeviç Düdənginski. 

His grandfather had been a cavalry colonel in the Tsar's army. Fatalibey 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 and completed more military studies, before returning to Headquarters of the Leningrad Military District.  He was 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 where he was 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 in 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 promoted to the rank of major. 

He returned to Berlin, where in 1943 he was elected to a high office and then addressed the Azerbaijan Congress under the name Dudanginski. He is possibly seen here in this extract from a World War 2 German propaganda film:

Reportedly, he was tried by the Soviets in absentia in 1944 in Leningrad and sentenced to death.

The Lion Battalion, part of the Osttürkischen Waffen-Verbände der SS, was then sent to northern Italy aid the German war effort and stationed in Merate (north of Milan), in March 1945. Fatalibey was in the group captured by American forces marching through Italy and put in a prisoner of war camp in Rimini. He wrote political letters and pamphlets to American and British political leaders and sent them out of the camp. He avoided repatriation to the USSR. The American military released him, but he had to move to various refugee camps in Italy before settling in Rome in 1948 and then moving to the Middle East.

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 in 1948, according to unconfirmed information. He later wrote that he made the necessary battle plans, but they were never put into action. Fatalibey moved into Jordan with some Palestinian leaders. Later he crossed the border into Turkey and settled in Istanbul.

He later claimed that when he was in Cairo, he maintained close contact with American and British officials and continued writing anti-Soviet political pamphlets that were sent to Washington and London. He was invited to Munich for a successful interview with American officials and returned to Turkey to await a job offer. He eventually returned to Munich to be part of the American psychological war effort against the USSR. Fatalibey was known as "The Major" in Munich's active emigre community. 

Who was Michael Ismailov?

Michael Ismailov’s background is not fully known. He, too, was born in Azerbaijan. And he, too, fought in the Lion Battalion in Italy. He deserted the Azerbaijan force and reportedly joined the Italian partisan movement against the Germany. Ismailov spent a few years in various refuges camps in Italy before being released. He remained in Italy, married an Italian woman, and they had two children. He then registered for repatriation to the Soviet Union in 1951. He left his family and returned to the USSR via ship from Naples.  Reportedly, he was arrested as an army deserter upon arrival and faced twenty-five years in prison. One can speculate that Ismailov was offered the choice of prison or return to the West to work for the Soviet intelligence services and was allowed to leave the USSR. When he arrived in Dresden, East Germany, his Italian wife and children were waiting for him.

He was able to leave the Soviet occupied zone of Germany and arrived in American zone in 1953. After a few weeks in a displaced persons camp near Nuremberg, he was given permission to move to Munich. Ismailov remained apart from any political activity and was not involved with Radio Liberation.  Ismailov was the subject of a U.S. Army 1953 Counter Intelligence Corps espionage investigation, but the charges of espionage were not proven.

For the first time after its first broadcast in March 1953, Radio Liberation became a subject of Munich newspaper attention. This caused as much stir within the RL American management as did the murder of Fatalibey.

After the police proved that the body was Fatalibey, RL succeed in getting two of Munich’s newspapers to strike any references to Radio Liberation. The Munich newspaper Abendzeitung, however, refused to go along with the request and wrote that Fatalibey worked for Radio Liberation. This is the first newspaper reference in Munich to Radio Liberation. The dam of protection had been broken.  On December 9, 1954, RL’s Radio Division Director wrote a long report to New York, in which he wrote:

In view of our established negative policy in regard to publicity, and also in view of police desire to go along in playing the case down, Mr. Moeller, who is responsible for AmComLib press relations in Germany, tried hard to keep the story of our connection with the murder from appearing at all, and has since attempted to minimize the political implications of the murder.

AmComLib referred to American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism.

The New York Programming Center sent a draft program to Munich on December 2, 1954, about the Fatalibey murder. In a short cover memo to the program, the NYPC wrote:

        

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.

MVD referred to the Soviet Secret Police.

At Fatalibey’s burial in Neu-Ulm on December 5, 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 was aired on 7 December 1954. The broadcast concluded 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.

In July 2008, Fatalibey and nine others were honored in Washington, D.C., on a memorial plaque dedicated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors for “journalists slain in the line of duty.”

Recommended Reading:

Chapter 2 of my book Cold War Radio: the Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950 – 1989 (McFarland & Co, 2009). Also see my article: 'The Intelligence Underpinnings of American Covert Radio Broadcasting in Germany during the Cold War', The Journal of Intelligence History (Winter 2001).

Critchlow, James.  Radio Hole-in-the-Head:  Radio Liberty: An Insider’s Story of Cold War Broadcasting (The American University Press, 1995). Critchlow worked at Radio Liberty in Munich from 1953 until the 1980s.

Johnson, Ian.  A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Houghton Miffin Hartcort, 2010)