Shunpiking Online Vo. 02 No. 07 May 2005 Blowback America's recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy By CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON*

Collier / Macmillan, 1988

o A discreet silence
o Slaughter on the Eastern Front
o The man at box 1142
o The eyes and ears
o "I ... prefer to remain ignorant"
o Bloodstone
o Bare fists and brass knuckles
o Guerrillas for World War III
o Ratlines
o Pipelines to the United States
o The politics of "liberation"
o Brunner and Bolschwing
o The end of "liberation"
o Quotations

A Discreet Silence

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THE BASIC rationale US policymakers used after 1945 to justify employment of former Nazis and collaborators was the possibility -- no, the imminence -- of the outbreak of a new war between the United States and the USSR.

The American anticipation of a cataclysm was reinforced by the East-West geopolitical confrontation in Europe and the Mideast in the first years after World War II; by the shortage of reliable information about actual conditions in the east; and not infrequently by religious doctrine that asserted that the Communists were Satan's army on earth.' Such perceptions varied from individual to individual, of course, but were by no means a fringe phenomenon.

The actual balance of forces in Europe during the decade following 1945, however, meant that neither the United States nor the USSR was capable of unilaterally imposing its will on the other through military force alone. The Soviets' advantage in troop strength and geographical position gave it powerful leverage in Eastern Europe, America's atomic bomb and economic wealth notwithstanding.

Given that situation, President Harry Truman ordered a program of psychological warfare, covert operations, and intelligence gathering aimed at the USSR and its satellites that began as early as 1945 and significantly accelerated in the years that followed. Recently declassified records make clear that by 1948 Truman had approved claimed to have large networks of sympathizers behind Soviet lines. German intelligence specialists like General Reinhard Gehlen, who had run these networks during the war, asserted that a modest infusion of American money and arms could produce secure organizations of espionage agents, saboteurs, and strong-arm specialists inside the East bloc countries and in the teeming refugee camps that then dotted western Germany. The idea, in a nutshell, was secretly to underwrite the work of these groups in much the same way that the Allies had backed resistance forces inside German-occupied territory during the war.

Contrary to the promises once made inside secret US government councils that the use of such persons would be of practical benefit to this country, the truth is that these Nazi utilization programs have frequently been disasters, even when all ethical considerations are laid aside; Their behind-the-lines spy teams are now known to have been largely nonexistent, and those that did exist were laced with Soviet double agents. Instead of building a relatively airtight anti-Communist spy service, the same old boy circles used to recruit former Nazis ended up giving the USSR a relatively easy way to penetrate legitimate US intelligence gathering on Soviet military capabilities and intentions. US-sponsored secret warfare campaigns employing these recruits failed consistently, leading to the arrests, imprisonments, and sometimes executions of thousands of Eastern Europeans.

The government's use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has also left a mark on life in the United States itself. This impact is what is known in spy jargon as "blowback," meaning unexpected-and negative effects at home that result from covert operations overseas.

Often blowback from CIA clandestine work abroad has been no more (and no less) alarming than, say, a fraudulent news report planted in a European magazine that later shows up in US publications as fact. Sometimes, however, the problem has become far more serious. In a case revealed here for the first time, an organization of former SS and German military intelligence experts provided false information that nearly led to World War III. In another instance Senator Joseph McCarthy employed a secret US espionage squad made up in part of Nazi collaborators to gather slanderous information used to smear political opponents.

Despite these negative consequences, the existence of US operations employing ex-Nazis has remained a carefully kept secret in the West. There has been a certain convergence of powerful interests, rather than the great conspiracy that some critics have alleged, that has kept this story buried. The American government, for example, has not been inclined to publicize the men and women involved in sensitive "national security" missions. Many US documents concerning these programs have been systematically purged from the files and destroyed, and the majority of the records that remain are still classified above "secret." Most of the men who put together the US program-including the CIA's former chief of clandestine operations Frank Wisner and his boss, CIA Director Allen Dulles-are dead. Most of those who are still alive refuse to talk.

Until recently the US media could usually be counted on to maintain a discreet silence about emigre leaders with Nazi backgrounds accused of working for the CIA. According to declassified records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, several mass media organizations in this country -- at times working in direct concert with the CIA -- became instrumental in promoting cold war myths that transformed certain exiled Nazi collaborators of World War II into "freedom fighters" and heroes of the renewed struggle against communism. The general public, for the most part, has had little reason to suspect that anything was amiss...

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America's own initial plan to enlist the brains of Nazi Germany concentrated on scientists, declassified US Army records show. Some American intelligence officials were clearly aware from the very beginning that they were recruiting former Nazis, including SS officers and others alleged to have personally participated in executions of concentration camp inmates. Even so, top Pentagon officers believed that these Germans could be put to work in the then continuing war with Japan and the emerging conflict with the USSR. A highly secret US military intelligence coordinating center advised the US Army to alter its dossiers on those scientists so as to bring them into this country with supposedly clean wartime records. The United States soon stopped "beating a dead Nazi horse", as Bosquet Wev, executive officer of the Pentagon's intelligence coordinating office, put it, and began importing German chemical warfare experts, submarine specialists, and the scientists who had once built Germany's rockets using slave labor from Nazi concentration camps.

At about the same time these experts were conscripted, the United States also began a small, extremely secret program to enlist German espionage and covert operations specialists at an American camp for high-ranking Axis POWs near Wiesbaden. There the chief of US Army intelligence in Europe, General Edwin Sibert, gave the go-ahead to a gaunt former Wehrmacht (German army) general named Reinhard Gehlen to construct a new espionage organization made up of German experts on the USSR. Sibert, in what was at the time a clear violation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders concerning denazification of Germany, assumed personal responsibility for the project. Before the 1940s were out, Sibert and Gehlen's small seed had grown into an organization upon which the Americans depended for much of what they knew about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

With Gehlen's group at its core, former Nazis and collaborators went on to play an important, though largely unnoticed, role in the interlocked evolutions of the cold war and of American intelligence capabilities. Gehlen provided US Army intelligence and later the CIA with many of the dire reports that were used to justify increased US military budgets and intensified US/USSR hostilities. He exaggerated the Soviet military threat in Europe, says the CIA's former chief analyst on Soviet military capabilities Victor Marchetti, in order to ensure further protection and funding for his US-financed operation. The German intelligence group, as it turns out, usually received at least part of any new budget appropriations that accompanied escalation of the conflict with the USSR.

At about the time the Gehlen organization was getting on its feet, the US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) gradually moved from investigating underground Nazis for war crimes prosecution to using some of these same Nazis and collaborators to track Communists. By 1948 the CIC found itself in a sub rosa bureaucratic battle with both the US Air Force and the then newly founded CIA over funding in the spy war against the Russians. One of the most valuable prizes in this intra-American conflict was control of several thousand former Waffen SS soldiers and officers whom the army had hired and equipped for use in a guerrilla war against the USSR. The army ended up actually integrating these SS troops into US nuclear strategy.

Policy concerning clandestine use of former Nazi collaborators during the early cold war years was shaped by a series of National Security Council directives and intelligence projects sponsored by the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, then under the leadership of George F. Kennan, according to records discovered recently in US State Department archives. Kennan was at the time assigned the task of internal policy oversight of all US clandestine operations abroad. His initiatives -- along with those of Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and a number of other latter-day CIA executives -- helped convince Truman's NSC to approve a comprehensive program of covert operations that were explicitly modeled on the Vlasov Army, an anti-Communist emigre campaign created by the SS and the Nazi Foreign Office during World War II. Scholars and propagandists who had once collaborated in formulating the Nazis' political warfare program were brought into the United States to provide brains for the new operation.

Wisner, the dynamic director of the CIA's clandestine operations directorate, gradually gathered many of the threads of earlier Nazi utilization efforts into agency hands. Wisner believed in the tremendous espionage potential of the Eastern European emigre organizations, their value as propagandists and agents of influence, and the unique advantages of using soldiers who had no provable ties to the US government for certain particularly sensitive missions, including assassinations. More than that, Wisner was convinced that Communist rule would be soon overthrown in Eastern Europe and possibly in the USSR itself. America was already at war, as he saw it, and there was no time to quibble over the pasts of its new foot soldiers.

Wisner's clandestine campaigns were originally aimed at the USSR and its satellites. Before the decade was out, however, the American people also became an important target for CIA propaganda programs. It is at that point, over the winter of 1951-1952, that the blowback from the CIA's overseas operations reached a new and more dangerous stage. According to National Security Council records, Wisner began large-scale programs designed to bring thousands of anti-Communist exiles to the United States as a means of rewarding them for secret operations overseas and to train others for guerrilla warfare against East bloc countries. The CIA secretly subsidized the work of right-wing refugee relief organizations aiding such immigrants, including some groups with clear ties to extreme nationalist and Fascist organizations in Europe. The agency simultaneously funneled millions of dollars into advertising and staged media events inside the United States during the same period, with support for these overseas "refugee liberation" projects as a primary theme.

Tens of thousands of Eastern European refugees emigrated to the United States throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Clearly the overwhelming majority of these new immigrants have proved themselves to be valuable citizens, who have made great contributions to science, culture, medicine, sports, and the American work force as well as to the defense of values like democracy and national pride. But just as any large group of humans contains some criminals, so, too, did this emigration. The difference this time was that of the criminals who did come, many were experienced right-wing political activists who were highly organized and blessed with the patronage of the CIA.

Shortly before the presidential election of 1952 the agency sharply expanded its media operations with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign inside the United States designed to legitimize expanded US cold war operations in Europe.' This program was guided by a theory known as "liberationism," and an important part of that strategy held that certain exiled Fascist leaders left over from World War II should be regarded as democratic "freedom fighters" against the USSR. The CIA's propaganda campaign inside the United States was clearly illegal; but the agency concealed its ties to the effort, and the enterprise prospered.

Right-wing emigre organizations, which had once been little more than instruments of German (and later US) espionage agencies, began to take on a distinct life and authority of their own during the cold war, particularly inside America's large Eastern European immigrant communities. Through organizations such as the CIA-funded Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), certain Ukrainian fraternal groups, and the Latvian Daugavas Vanagi alliance (each of which included in positions of leadership persons whom US investigators have alleged to be Axis war criminals), these extreme-right-wing exiles gradually expanded their reach in American affairs.

Although never the mainstream voices for their particular nationality groups, these organizations and others like them succeeded in creating genuine power bases on the far right of the US political spectrum. Before the decade of the 1950s was out, the activities of extremist European emigre organizations combined with indigenous American anti-communism to produce seriously negative effects on US foreign policy and domestic affairs under both Republican and Democratic administrations. By 1959 these exile groups had articulate defenders inside the staff of the National Security Council and had won a measure of influence on Capitol Hill. Observing their impact on US policy toward the USSR and Eastern Europe had become, as columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, "a morbid experience."

In short, US clandestine operations employing Nazis never did produce the results that were desired when they were initiated, but they did contribute to the influence of some of the most reactionary trends in American political life. This lesson has increased in significance over the years. More recent US interventions abroad have facilitated the entry into America of extremist and even terrorist emigre organizations that have subsequently gained political footholds in ethnic communities in this country, often through the use of violence and intimidation. The influence of Bay of Pigs veterans in Cuban-American enclaves or of the former Saigon police among Southeast Asian refugees comes to mind in this regard. "Blowback" of this type has not been limited to cold war Nazi utilization operations; it is a much more widespread characteristic of the CIA's emigre operations than is generally recognized and one which deserves further study...

Slaughter on the Eastern Front

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CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, " states the Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of 1945, are "atrocities and offenses, including but not limited to murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, or other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds...."

This statute, together with earlier joint declarations by Allied governments concerning war crimes, became the formal foundation upon which the Nazis and their collaborators were tried after World War II. The Control Council law as written is comprehensive. It also includes prohibition of war crimes-including murder or deportation of civilian populations by occupying armies, plunder, killing of POWs or hostages, wanton destruction of cities or towns, etc.-and crimes against peace, meaning the launching of an invasion or waging an aggressive war in violation of treaties. Punishment for those convicted under the law range from deprivation of civil rights to the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime.'

While this declaration prohibits specific acts by individuals, it also implicitly acknowledges that the genocide and slavery perpetrated by Nazi Germany required a high degree of coordination. Criminal culpability explicitly extends to the administrative apparatus of the SS, to the Nazi party, and to the chiefs of German industry that profited from concentration camp labor. It includes pro-Fascist newspaper publishers who promoted racial hatred in the pages of their publications and the senior officers of Axis ministries and local governments that carried through the day-to-day business of mass murder and persecution.

This text uses the term war crimes to refer to those activities banned by Allied Control Council Law No. 10, such as murder, torture, deportation, or persecution on the basis of race or religion. A "war criminal," logically, is one who has committed those crimes. But as is well known, many persons directly responsible for the Holocaust against the Jews, the mass murder by starvation of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, and other atrocities have escaped and never been tried for their deeds. Therefore, any serious discussion of who can properly be called a "war criminal" must of necessity consider all the historical evidence of what took place during the war and the Holocaust-not just the relatively small number of cases that were formally tried before the International Tribunal at Nuremberg or other courts. The term war criminal, as used here, is narrowly defined, but it goes beyond simply those persons who have been convicted in a court of law. It applies to the responsible officials of the political parties, police organizations, or wartime Axis governments whose records of terror, extermination, and anti-Semitism are beyond dispute; to the individuals who voluntarily participated in genocide or mass murders; and, in a small number of cases, to propagandists or publicists who actively promoted persecution on the basis of race or religion.

To understand how certain people ... escaped punishment for their crimes, it is necessary to look briefly at one of the most prominent features of the Nazi political philosophy: extreme anti-communism and particularly fanatic hatred of the USSR.

The slaughter that followed the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 is without equal in world history. Next to the Nazis' operation of the anti-Jewish extermination centers at Treblinka, Sobibor, Birkenau, and elsewhere, the most terrible crimes of the entire war took place in name of anti-communism in the German-occupied territories on the eastern front. Civilian casualties in these areas were so enormous, so continuous, and so extreme that even counting the dead has proved impossible. Scholars have attempted to deduce the numbers of fatalities from captured German records, reports of Einsatzgruppen (mobile execution squads), prisoner of war (POW) camp mortality reports, and Soviet census statistics. The evidence indicates that between 3 and 4 million captured Soviet soldiers were intentionally starved to death in German POW camps between 1941 and 1944. About 1.3 million Jews were exterminated inside Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, mainly through mass shootings but also through gassing, deportation to extermination camps, looting and destruction of villages, hangings, and torture. The generally accepted figure for all Soviet war dead is 20 million human beings-about 15 percent of the population of the country at the time-but the destruction was so vast that even this number can be only an educated guess.

The Nazis deliberately used famine as a political weapon in the East, and it soon became the largest single killer. As the German invasion of the USSR began, General (later Field Marshal) Erich von Manstein ordered that "the Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated.... In hostile cities, a large part of the population will have to starve." Nothing, Manstein continued, "may, out of a sense of mistaken humaneness, be distributed to prisoners or to the population-unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht."*

[* Other features of military regulations promulgated by Manstein on the eve of the war include orders for the immediate liquidation of all captured Soviet political officers or leaders, summary executions for civilians who 'participate or want to participate' in resistance to German troops, and "collective measures of force", which soon came to mean murder of entire populations of villages, including children-to punish hamlets in which 'malicious attacks [against the Wehrmacht] of any kind whatsoever' had taken place. German soldiers who had committed what would otherwise be crimes under Germany s own military code were not to be prosecuted if their acts had taken place "out of bitterness against . . . carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik [sic] system.

Manstein later claimed at his trial for war crimes that the starvation order had escaped my memory entirely. He was convicted by a British tribunal and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, but he obtained release in 1952 after serving fewer than three years of his term. The former field marshal eventually became an adviser to the West German Defense Ministry.]

This was a war not only of conquest but of extermination. Entire regions of the USSR were to be cleared of the existing Communist apparatus and of Slavic "subhumans" to make way for settlement by "Aryan pioneers." Above all, it was believed necessary to conduct an ideological war to wipe out the "Jewish-Bolshevist plague" and those who were its "carriers."

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Hitler's high command carefully planned the extermination campaign on the eastern front, drawing up directives for mass killings l and distributing them to Wehrmacht and SS commanders. They established special SS teams devoted exclusively to mass murder -- the Einsatzgruppen and their subgroups, the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos -- and set up liaison between the killing teams and the army commanders at the front to ensure that the killing teams received the necessary intelligence and logistical support. The SS carefully tabulated the results of the carnage as it took place, wrote it up, and sent word back to Berlin. Teams of inspectors and experts (among them men who were later employed as experts on Soviet affairs by US intelligence agencies) traveled the eastern front throughout the war to make sure the exterminations or confiscations of food from occupied territories were going properly and were being carried out, as one Einsatzgruppe leader was to testify at Nuremberg, in a manner which was "humane under the circumstances."

What has since come to be termed "political warfare"-that is, the use of propaganda, sabotage, and collaborators to undermine an enemy's will to fight-played an important role in German strategy from the beginning of the conflict. Specialized Nazi-trained propaganda and terror teams made up of native collaborators were among the first units that marched with the German armies across Europe.

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The collaborationist troops of the eastern front were ... integral part of German strategy in the East and deeply involved in Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews. The Western powers recognized this fact during the war. Collaborators captured by Western forces were treated as prisoners of war, and many were turned over to the USSR as traitors and suspected war criminals in the first months after Germany's surrender. The predominant opinion in the US command at war's end was that it was now up to the USSR to decide what to do with the Nazis' eastern troops and other traitors, just as it was up to the Americans to decide what to do with Tokyo Rose and similar captured defectors from this country.

But a parallel development that would soon have a powerful impact on how Axis POWs were treated in the West was taking `. place. There was at the time in American hands another group of the Axis prisoners, who, unlike the collaborators from the East, were regarded as quite valuable: scientists who had put their skills to work for the Nazi cause.

All the major powers considered German scientists part of the booty of war. The Americans, British, and Soviets each had established special teams that concentrated on the capture and preservation of German laboratories, industrial patents, and similar useful E hardware of the modern age. Scientists were generally regarded as another technical asset to be appropriated.

The United States and Great Britain jointly created a Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) to coordinate their efforts to seize particularly valuable targets. Actual raids were carried out by subordinate teams designated by a letter, like the "S Force" (also known as the "Sugar Force" in cable traffic) in Italy, the "T Force" in France, Holland, and Germany, and so on. These units had only minimal armed strength, but they traveled complete with accomplished linguists, Western scientists, and police specialists who permitted them to identify rapidly and capture useful experts and materials.

The stakes in the search for the scientific expertise of Germany were high. The single most important American strike force, for example, was the Alsos raiding team, which targeted Axis atomic research, uranium stockpiles, and nuclear scientists, as well as Nazi chemical and biological warfare research. The commander of this assignment was US Army Colonel Boris Pash, who had previously been security chief of the Manhattan Project-the United States' atomic bomb development program-and who later played an important role in highly secret US covert action programs. Pash succeeded brilliantly in his mission, seizing top German scientists and more than 70,000 tons of Axis uranium ore and radium products. The uranium taken during these raids was eventually shipped to the United States and incorporated in US atomic weapons.'

The US government's utilitarian approach to dealing with German science and scientists, however, proved to be the point of the wedge that eventually helped split American resolve to deal harshly with Nazi criminals, including the captured collaborators who had served on the eastern front. It is clear in hindsight that the Americans in charge of exploiting German specialists captured through Alsos and similar programs became pioneers of the methods later used to bring other Nazis and collaborators into this country. Equally important, the philosophical concepts and psychological rationalizations expressed by US officials in dealing with the German experts were gradually stretched to cover utilization of almost any anti-Communist, regardless of what he or she had done during the war.

The man at box 1142

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REINHARD GEHLEN, Hitler's most senior military intelligence officer on the eastern front, had begun planning his surrender to the United States at least as early as the fall of 1944...

General Gehlen ... was a scrawny man-at five feet eight and a half inches he weighed less than 130 pounds at the time of his surrender-with an arrogant demeanor and a violent temper that got worse as he grew older. But he also had extraordinary powers of concentration and a jeweler's attention to detail, both of which served him well in his remarkable thirty-seven-year career as a spy master.

In early March 1945 Gehlen and a small group of his most senior officers carefully microfilmed the vast holdings on the USSR in the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), the military intelligence section of the German army's general staff. They packed the film in watertight steel drums and secretly buried it in remote mountain meadows scattered through the Austrian Alps. Then, on May 22, 1945, Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to an American Counterintelligence Corps team.

Luck was with them. Captain John Bokor was assigned as their interrogator at Camp King, near Oberursel, in the American occupation zone. Bokor had been interned by the Germans early in the war, had been treated well, and had later served as an interrogator of captured German officers at Fort Hunt near Washington, DC. Though he was unquestionably anti-Nazi, Bokor's contact with the German officer corps had left him with a certain amount of respect for the enemy and a disdain for the narrow-minded anti-Germanism of many American officers of the time. He was, as Gehlen recalled later, "the first American officer I met with expert knowledge of Russia and with no illusions about the way political events were turning . . . we became close friends and have remained so."' During the weeks following Bokor's new assignment Gehlen gradually laid his cards on the table. Not only did the former Wehrmacht general know where the precious archives were buried, but he had also maintained the embryo of an underground espionage organization that could put the records to work against the USSR. Captain Bokor was interested.

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... it is clear that before a year was out, the Americans had freed Gehlen and most of his high command, then installed them in a former Waffen SS training facility near Pullach, Germany, which has remained the group's headquarters to this day.

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... Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the most terrible atrocities of the war: the torture, interrogation, and murder by starvation of some 4 million Soviet prisoners of war. Even Gehlen's defenders-and there are many of them, both in Germany and in the United States-acknowledge he was instrumental in organizing the interrogations of these POWs. The success of this interrogation program from the German military's point of view became, in fact, the cornerstone of Gehlen's career. It won him his reputation as an intelligence officer and his major general's rank.

But these same interrogations were actually a step in the liquidation of tens of thousands of POWs. Prisoners who refused to cooperate were often tortured or summarily shot. Many were executed even after they had given information, while others were simply left to starve to death. True, Gehlen's men did not personally administer the starvation camps, nor are they known to have served in the execution squads. Such tasks were left to the SS, whose efficiency in such matters is well known.

Instead, Gehlen's men were in a sense like scientists who skimmed off the information and documents that rose to the surface of these pestilent camps. Now and again they selected an interesting specimen: a captured Russian general ready to collaborate, perhaps, or a Ukrainian railroad expert who might supply the locations of vulnerable bridges when given some encouragement to talk. Gehlen's officers were scientists in somewhat the same way that concentration camp doctors were: Both groups extracted their data from the destruction of human beings.

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Nazis and collaborators became integral to the operation of Gehlen's postwar organization, and nowhere was this clearer than in control of emigre operations...

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Gehlen's man in emigre enterprises, SS Brigadefuhrer Franz Six, is a major war criminal and is still alive at last report. He was once described by Adolf Eichmann as a Streber (a "real eager beaver") on the so-called Jewish Question and as a favored prot�g� of SS chief Himmler's. Eichmann should have known: His own first efforts in the Holocaust were carried out under Six's personal command in the "Ideological Combat" section of the security service. In 1941 Six led the Vorkommando Moskau, an advance squad of the Nazi invasion, whose job it was to seize Communist party and NKVD archives in order to compile lists of hunted Soviet officials and to liquidate those who were caught. Six's Vorkommando never made it to Moscow, but his own reports indicate that his unit murdered approximately 200 people in cold blood in Smolensk, where they had stopped on the march to the Russian capital. The Smolensk victims, Six wrote headquarters, included "46 persons, among them 38 intellectual Jews who had tried to create unrest and discontent in the newly established Ghetto of Smolensk."

As late as 1944 Six spoke at a conference of "consultants" on the "Jewish Question" at Krummhubel. The stenographic notes of the meeting indicate that "Six spoke . . . about the political structure of world Jewry. The physical elimination of Eastern Jewry would deprive Jewry of its biological reserves," he announced. "The Jewish Question must be solved not only in Germany but also internationally". Himmler was so pleased with Six's work that he lifted him out of projects in Amt VI and gave him a newly created department, Amt VII, of his own.

But Six was not simply a killer. He was a college professor with a doctorate in law and political science and a dean of the faculty of the University of Berlin and was regarded by some of his peers as one of the most distinguished professors of his generation. Six -- Dr. Six, as he preferred -- had joined the Nazi party in 1930, then the SS and SD a few years later. He was, along with Walter Schellenberg and Otto Ohlendorf, one of the nazified professors and lawyers who supplied a thin cover of intellectual respectability to the Hitler dictatorship. A number of such men enlisted in the security service and became the brains of the party, the intelligence specialists who presented dispassionate analyses to the Nazi high command concerning ideological warfare, racial questions in the East, and tactics for the Final Solution.

The eyes and ears

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OF ALL the networks of former Nazis and collaborators employed by the United States after World War II, it is Gehlen's organization that has left the most substantial imprint on the United States. Gehlen's analysis of the forces that guide Soviet behavior, which were forged in part by his personal defeat at the hands of the Russians during World War II, became widely accepted in US intelligence circles and remain so to this day.

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Gehlen's impact on the course of the cold war was subtle, but l real. Self-avowed pragmatists in the US intelligence services have consistently argued that the otherwise questionable employment of Gehlen and even of unrepentant Nazis through the Org was justified by their significant contributions to fighting a powerful and ruthless rival: the Soviet Union. "He's on our side," CIA Director Allen Dulles later said of Gehlen, "and that's all that matters."

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During the first years of the CIA under Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter's administration, according to a retired executive of the CIA's Office of National Estimates, Gehlen's reports and analyses were sometimes simply retyped onto CIA stationery and presented to President Truman without further comment in the agency's morning intelligence summaries. Gehlen's organization "shaped what we knew about the Soviets in Eastern Europe and particularly about East Germany," he continued. Heinz Hohne, an internationally recognized historian and senior editor at Der Spiegel magazine, asserts that "seventy percent of all the US government's information on Soviet forces and armaments came from the Gehlen organization" during the early cold war. While any such precise number is bound to be arbitrary, the thrust of Hohne's comment is certainly accurate.

Contrary to the accepted wisdom, however, US dependence on Gehlen's organization for intelligence on the Soviet military was quite likely a blunder from a strictly practical point of view. For one thing, enlisting Gehlen was in itself a substantial escalation of the cold war that undermined what little hope was possible for EastWest cooperation during the pivotal years of 1945 to 1948. Once on board, Gehlen's Nazi-tainted operatives often gave the Soviets an easy target for denunciations of war criminals being sheltered by the West. This has since become a highly successful Soviet propaganda theme-in part because there is some truth to it-that is replayed regularly to this day as a means of undermining US and West German relations with Eastern Europe. Financing Gehlen's organization also appears to have made infiltration of Western intelligence by Soviet spies easier, not more difficult, as will be seen. Most important, Gehlen's operatives and analysts strongly reinforced US intelligence's existing predilection toward paranoia about communism and the USSR, contributing significantly to the creation of a body of widely believed misinformation about Soviet behavior.

"Gehlen had to make his money by creating a threat that we were afraid of," says Victor Marchetti, formerly the CIA's chief analyst of Soviet strategic war plans and capabilities, "so we would give him more money to tell us about it." He continues: "In my opinion, the Gehlen Organization provided nothing worthwhile for understanding or estimating Soviet military or political capabilities in Eastern Europe or anywhere else." Employing Gehlen was "a waste of time, money, and effort, except that maybe he had some CI [counterintelligence] value, because practically everybody in his organization was sucking off both tits." In other words, Gehlen did not produce the reliable information for which he was employed, but careful monitoring of the Org might have produced some clues to Soviet espionage activity because the group had been deeply penetrated by double agents, thus giving the United States a vastly expensive and not very efficient means of keeping up with Soviet spies.

"The Gehlen Organization was the one group that did have networks inside Eastern Europe, and that is why we hired them," international affairs expert Arthur Macy Cox says. "[But] hiring Gehlen was the biggest mistake the US ever made. Our allies said, 'You are putting Nazis at the senior levels of your intelligence,' and they were right. It discredited the United States." According to Cox, the Gehlen Organization was the primary source of intelligence that claimed that "the Soviets were about to attack [West] Germany.... [That was] the biggest bunch of baloney then, and it is still a bunch of baloney today."

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Had Gehlen's role been limited to the preparation of top secret studies for the use of America's own most expert intelligence analysts, it is unlikely that his project would have done much harm during the postwar period, and it might actually have done some good. But that is not how intelligence agencies actually work. In reality, contending factions in the government leak their versions of events to favored members of Congress or reporters and from them to the public at large. "Secret reports" revealed in this way -- especially those that frighten or titillate us -- take on a mystique of accuracy that is undeserved. These "secrets" become potent symbols that rally constituencies whose concern is not with the accuracy of a given bit of intelligence but rather with the use to which the leak can be put in the domestic political arena. As time goes on, a self-reinforcing process sets in, each new leak lending credibility to the next, which in turn "confirms" those stories that have already been revealed.

"The agency [CIA] loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear," Marchetti concludes. "We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it
to everybody else: the Pentagon; the White House; the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian boogeyman junk, and it did
a lot of damage to this country."

"I ... prefer to remain ignorant"

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THE EMERGING East-West conflict had entered a new and clearly more hostile phase early in 1947. The British government, exhausted by war and deeply in debt, had abruptly announced that January that it was withdrawing from its earlier guarantees to stabilize power in Greece, where a bitter civil war was raging between left-wing rebels and British-backed Greek monarchist forces. President Truman blamed the Soviets for the crisis and stepped in with a multi-million-dollar aid program for the "democratic" forces in Greece-though there is considerable dispute over just how democratic they actually were ...

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... US Intelligence turned ... [to] the Holy Bond of Greek Officers, or IDEA, by its Greek initials. This organization was made up in large part of Nazi collaborators. The Greek army and police were well known to have been controlled by rightists since the 1930s, and the bulk of those forces had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation. These sympathizers created "security battalions" during the war to hunt down anti-Nazi partisans and to execute Jews who had escaped from the ghetto at Salonika. These detachments were responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of Greeks during the occupation, according to all accounts, and directly assisted the Nazis in the liquidation of about 70,000 Greek Jews. After the Nazis had been driven out of the country, however, the security battalions and their officers were in deep disgrace. Colonel George Papadopoulos helped create IDEA shortly after the Nazis had been driven out of Greece, ostensibly to protect the Greek population from Communist attack. "In reality," however, the Times of London later reported, "a principal activity of IDEA was to secure rehabilitation of those officers who had been initially purged by the post-liberation coalition government because of their activities in the collaborationist 'security battalions of the occupation years."

Secret Pentagon papers now in the US National Archives show that the United States poured millions of dollars into IDEA during the US intervention in Greece in order to create what it termed "Secret Army Reserve" made up of selected Greek military, police, and anti-Communist military officers...

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American arms and money had a powerful impact on Greece. Many Greek nationalist forces abandoned their former EAM lies-in part because of the brutality of the EAM in its execution of an attempted guerrilla war against the US-backed forces-and within two years a strongly pro-American government achieved control of the country.

Truman's decisive action in Greece had wider ramifications. It helped crystallize sentiment inside the US government, which up to that point had often been divided over just how harshly to deal with the USSR, into a new and much more obdurate approach to U S.-Soviet relations. This new strategy marked an important watershed in the development of US efforts to make use of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, eventually creating the administrative structure and bureaucratic rationale for their utilization on an even wider scale than before.

The thinking behind this strategy was perhaps best articulated by George F. Kennan, the State Department expert on Soviet affairs who at the time had recently been appointed chief of the department's Policy Planning Staff. Kennan had served several tours of diplomatic duty in Moscow over the previous two decades, and his experience there had left him deeply bitter about both Stalin s dictatorship and the prospects for East-West cooperation. His antipathy toward Stalin had kept him isolated from the policy process during the Roosevelt administration, when relatively close US-USSR ties were backed by the White House. He had come into his own, however, in the Truman years. His famous 1946 "Long Telegram" from Moscow (as it has since come to be known) became a rallying cry for those at State, the War Department, and the White House who were determined to get tough with the Russians. That message read, as Kennan himself later recalled, "exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy. Even so, "its effect . . . was nothing less than sensational," he writes. "It was one that changed my career and my life in very basic ways.... My reputation was made. My voice now carried."

By the time the United States intervened in Greece, Kennan enjoyed the direct sponsorship of Secretary of the Navy (soon to be Secretary of Defense) James Forrestal and of Secretary of State George Marshall. Acting on Forrestal's behalf, Kennan prepared a -- pivotal analysis of the USSR that has since come to be called the containment doctrine" and is generally recognized as one of the basic programmatic statements of the cold war. In it, Kennan succeeded in reconciling many of the inchoate and conflicting perspectives on how to deal with the Soviets that had characterized Truman s administration up to that point. He argued that US-Soviet relations were a fundamentally hostile, protracted conflict that had been initiated by the USSR-not the United States-and that normal relations between the two states would be impossible as long as a Soviet type government was in power in the USSR Their ideology," he wrote, ". . . has taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders.... [This] means that there can never be on Moscow's side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalist."

The USSR was an imperial empire, Kennan continued, but the modern-day East-West clash could be managed through measures sort of all-out war through what he termed "long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies" and the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a se of constantly shifting geographical and political points." As originally formulated, the containment doctrine envisioned bottling internal pressures inside the USSR until they forced the Soviet Union to "cooperate or collapse," as Newsweek summarized it process that was expected to take about ten to fifteen years. "Soviet power, Kennan concluded, ". . . bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and . . . the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced."

p84
Regardless of Kennan's reservations, it was precisely these more aggressive aspects of containment that attracted Forrestal and other hard-liners in the Truman administration. In their hands, containment became the theoretical framework for US-Soviet relations under which a wide variety of clandestine warfare tactics, ranging from radio propaganda to sabotage and murder, was chosen to counteract-"contain"-left-wing initiatives virtually anywhere in the world.

Although it was rarely mentioned in the public discussions, it is clear that covert operations aimed at harassing (and, if possible, overthrowing) hostile governments were an integral part of the containment strategy from the beginning. A new breed of realpolitik advocates among the government's national security specialists embraced containment as a rationale for what has since come to be called "destabilization" of the USSR and its satellites. Put briefly, destabilization is a type of psychological or political warfare that is calculated to undermine a target government, to destroy its popular support or credibility, to create economic problems, or to draw it into crisis through some other means. US security planners of the late 1940s became fascinated with the prospect of destabilizing the Soviet Union's satellite states while simultaneously harassing the USSR. They were anxious to capitalize on the spontaneous rebellions against Soviet rule then rumbling through the Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, some of which were approaching civil wars in intensity...

Use of former Nazi collaborators became interwoven with these clandestine destabilization efforts and with the containment doctrine in general from 1947 on. According to Pentagon records, at the same time that Kennan was publicly promulgating containment, he and his close colleague Charles Thayer were lobbying with top Department of State and military officials for a revival of the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR. Kennan and Thayer pushed for the creation of a new school for anti-Communist guerrilla warfare training designed to bring together US military specialists, Vlasov veterans and other Eastern European exiles from Soviet satellite states. Several such schools were eventually established in Germany and in the United States and served not only as a training ground for insurgents but also as a source of highly skilled recruits for a variety of other American clandestine operations as well.

p89
Not all the clandestine containment programs were aimed at the USSR and its satellites. Some of the most important early applications of these tactics began in Western Europe. The Italian elections of early 1948 marked another important milestone in the development of US covert operations and in high-level US support for use of former Nazi collaborators. Two developments of far-reaching importance for these programs took place during this election campaign. First, US security agencies successfully tested a series of propaganda and political manipulation techniques that were later to come into widespread use around the world, including inside the United States itself. Secondly, the CIA established much deeper and broader ties with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome than had previously been the case. This not only had a powerful impact on the Italian political scene but also ... laid the foundation for the agency's relationship with Intermarium, an influential Catholic lay organization made up primarily of Eastern European exiles that operated under the protection of the Vatican. At least a half dozen senior leaders of Intermarium and its member groups can be readily identified as Nazi collaborators. Some were fugitive war criminals. However, Intermarium was later to emerge as one of the mainstays of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (later renamed Radio Liberty), and scores of other CIA-sponsored clandestine operations during the next two decades.

The Italian Communist party was favored to score heavily in the 1948 elections, and many analysts said that the party might democratically win control of the country's government. This prospect created such alarm in Washington that George Kennan-by then the foremost long-range strategist for the US government-went so far as to advocate direct US military occupation of the Foggia oil fields if the voting results went wrong from the point of view of the United States.

Washington's apprehension was shared-indeed, was enthusiastically fueled-by the Holy See. The church's hierarchy, which was already under severe economic and political pressure in Eastern Europe, feared a Communist takeover of the very heart of its institution, or at least of its worldly resources. The prospect of a Communist electoral victory in Italy coming close on the heels of Communist gains in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland was viewed by many of the hierarchy as the most profound material crisis the church had seen in centuries. Prochurch Italian officials were "positively desperate and almost immobilized by the fear which hangs over them," Bishop James Griffiths, an American emissary to the Vatican, wrote at the time. They were afraid, the bishop said, of a "disastrous failure at the polls which will put Italy behind the Iron Curtain.''

The election campaign became a major test of containment and of its accompanying clandestine political warfare strategy. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, William Colby, and a team of other top-ranked US intelligence officials put together a crash program of propaganda, sabotage, and secret funding of Christian Democratic candidates designed to frustrate the Italian Communist party's ambitions. The CIA was a young organization in those days and was primarily limited (until June 1948) to simple information gathering and analysis. Therefore, much of this campaign was handled on an ad hoc basis out of the offices of Allen and John Foster Dulles at the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm in New York. Kennan watched events unfold from his vantage point at State Department headquarters in Washington, while Thayer kept up a steady cannonade of pro-West and anti-Communist broadcasts over the Voice of America.

Working in close coordination with the Vatican and with prominent Americans of Italian or Catholic heritage, the CIA found that its effort in Italy succeeded well beyond its expectations. On a public level the United States dumped $350 million in announced civil and military aid into the country during this campaign alone. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, and a score of other prominent Americans were enlisted to make radio broadcasts to Italy warning against the Communist electoral menace. A CIA-financed media blitz showered Italian newspapers with articles and photographs expressing American munificence and Communist atrocities, both real and manufactured...

p94
The CIA's strategy in Italy, including Monsignor Biccherau's strong-arm squad, was a great success. The Italian Communists lost by a comfortable margin, and the American intelligence services emerged with the Catholic Church as a powerful new ally. Perhaps most important of all, the strategy of using covert operations to achieve political goals in peacetime was firmly implanted in the minds of Washington's foreign policy elite as a powerful weapon in an increasingly dangerous cold war.

The utility of the new covert operations apparatus seemed clear at the time: It permitted the White House to circumvent the cumbersome bureaucracy of Congress and the Department of State in the field of foreign affairs; it extended the reach of the United States with what appeared to be relatively little risk; and it permitted the president secretly to carry out actions that would discredit the United States if they were undertaken openly. Covert action was also relatively cheap, at least compared with the costs involved in maintaining a permanent military presence throughout the world.

George Kennan, in particular, "was deeply impressed by the results achieved in Italy," according to Sig Mickelson, the longtime chief of Radio Free Europe. "And [Kennan] foresaw similar crises arising in the future." Kennan was "directly concerned with the refugee problem and worried about the weakness of the nation's intelligence apparatus," Mickelson writes. "[He] advocated the creation of a covert action capability designed to complement covert psychological operations somewhere in the governmental structure.... His intention was to create a mechanism for direct intervention in the electoral processes of foreign governments," the former Radio Free Europe president continues. "It would be under the control of the Department of State, specifically [Kennan's own] policy planning staff, but it would not be formally associated with the department. State was still skittish about dealing openly with foreign governments on the one hand [while] carrying out covert destabilizing efforts on the other."

Greece in 1947 and Italy in 1948 also taught the CIA that it could employ former Nazi collaborators on a large scale in clandestine operations and get away with it US national security planners appear to have concluded that extreme-right-wing groups that had once collaborated with the Nazis should be included in US-sponsored anti-Communist coalitions, for the participation of such groups became a regular feature of US covert operations in Europe in the wake of the Greek and Italian events.

A case may be made for the idea that doing so was simply real politik. Former collaborators were, after all, a substantial organized force, so why not make use of them? At the time the benefits of using former Nazi collaborators appeared to outweigh any drawbacks. The American media-and the American people, for the most part-warmly welcomed the victories of European center parties over their Communist rivals There were few public questions concerning exactly how these successes had been brought about...

Bloodstone

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THE GREEK and Italian campaigns revealed something else as well: Covert action was largely out of the control of the established foreign policy
apparatus in Washington. Although the Italian operation had been endorsed by all the appropriate government committees, not one of them had
really known what was under way...

p97
Secretary of State George Marshall counted on George Kennan to make sure that obvious blunders like the Romanian affair did not occur again. By the summer of 1948 Truman and Marshall had delegated personal responsibility for political-oversight of all peacetime clandestine operations to George Kennan, according to a later Senate investigation of US foreign intelligence activities. (Control of espionage and counterintelligence, however, remained outside the diplomat's purview.) Key members of Kennan's Policy Planning Staff-officially a somewhat egg-headed institution dedicated to planning US strategy for ten or twenty years in the future-were detailed to help him with this task.

Two forces, then, converged to thrust the covert operations weapon into Kennan's hands. First, there was President Truman's desire-strongly backed up by Secretary of Defense Forrestal-to make use of this powerful tool in what appeared to be a deteriorating situation in Europe. Secondly, there was the determination, especially by Secretary of State Marshall as well as by Kennan himself, to make sure that no one else in the US government seized political control of this prize before the State Department did.

A new stage in the American effort to use ex-Nazis began. The early "tactical" or short-term utilization of former Fascists and collaborators-techniques somewhat akin to the exploitation of prisoners of war by intelligence agents-gradually came to an end. American agencies and policymakers replaced the tactical approach with a deeper "strategic" appreciation of the usefulness that emigre groups might have in large-scale clandestine operations against the USSR. The US government increasingly accepted the exiles' organizations as legitimate and began to pour substantial amounts of money into them-at least $5 million in 1948 alone, and probably considerably more.

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The strategic thinking behind the United States tactics during this period is best summarized in a top secret National Security Council directive and a group of supporting policy papers which are known collectively as NSC 20. These documents, which were drawn up primarily by Kennan and his Policy Planning Staff (PPS), were formally adopted by Truman's NSC in August 1948.2 They deserve quotation at some length because they provided the basic policy framework for US clandestine operations against the Soviets, including the use of former Nazi collaborators, for the remainder of Truman's term.

Kennan sought, as the preamble of his policy statement states, "to define our present peacetime objectives and our hypothetical wartime objectives with relation to Russia, and to reduce as far as possible the gap between them." The objectives, he writes, were really only two:

a. To reduce the power and influence of Moscow....

b. To bring about a basic change in the theory and practice of international relations observed by the government in power in Russia.

Adoption of these concepts in Moscow [however] would be equivalent to saying that it was our objective to overthrow Soviet power. Proceeding from that point, it could be argued that this is in turn an objective unrealizable by means short of war, and that we are therefore admitting that our objective with respect to the Soviet Union is eventual war and the violent overthrow of Soviet power.

But actual warfare is not what he had in mind. The idea, rather, was to encourage every split and crisis inside the USSR and the Soviet camp that could lead to the collapse of the USSR from within, while at the same time maintaining an official stance of nonintervention in Soviet internal affairs. "It is not our peacetime aim to overthrow the Soviet Government," NSC 20 continued. "Admittedly, we are aiming at the creation of circumstances and situations which would be difficult for the present Soviet leaders to stomach, and which they would not like. It is possible that they might not be able, in the face of these circumstances and situations, to retain their power in Russia. But it must be reiterated: that is their business, not ours...."

Anti-Communist exile organizations are cited as one of the primary vehicles for the creation of the desired domestic crisis. "At the present time," Kennan continues, "there are a number of interesting and powerful Russian political groupings among the Russian exiles . . . any of which would probably be preferable to the Soviet Government, from our standpoint, as rulers of Russia." At the same time it is decided that both the Soviet internal problems and the official "hands-off" posture that the United States desires could be more effectively achieved by promoting all the exile organizations more or less equally rather than by sponsoring only one favored group. "We must make a determined effort to avoid taking responsibility for deciding who would rule Russia in the wake of a disintegration of the Soviet regime. Our best course would be to permit all of the exiled elements to return to Russia as rapidly as possible and to see to it, in so far as this depends on us, that they are all given roughly equal opportunity to establish their bids for power....

The policy framework for clandestine operations involving exiles from the USSR, in short, was to encourage each of them to attempt to seize power in his or her homeland but to attempt to decline responsibility for having done so. Most interesting in the present context, no distinctions were to be made in the extension of aid to the various exile groups. The practical implication of this decision in the world of 1948 is clear: The United States would indeed support the veterans of the Vlasov Army, the eastern SS collaborators, and other groups that had permitted themselves to become pawns of Berlin during the war.

The State Department began the first known major clandestine effort recruiting Soviet �migr�s at the same time its drafts of NSC 20 were working their way through the policy process. This project was known as Operation Bloodstone, and it became one of the department's most important covert projects from 1948 until approximately 1950, when it was superseded by similar programs under direct CIA sponsorship.

Bloodstone proved to be an open door through which scores of leaders of Nazi collaborationist organizations thought to be useful for political warfare in Eastern Europe entered the United States. The project's usual cover, even in top secret correspondence, was an innocuous effort to utilize "socialist, labor union, intellectual, moderate right-wing groups and others" for distribution of anti-Communist "handbills, publications, magazines or use of . . . radio" that was secretly financed by the US government. This all was true enough.

But there was much more to Bloodstone than its cover story. In reality, many of Bloodstone's recruits had once been Nazi collaborators who were now being brought to the United States for use as intelligence and covert operations experts. Some of them eventually became US agent spotters for sabotage and assassination missions. The men and women enlisted under Bloodstone were not low-level thugs, concentration camp guards, or brutal hoodlums, at least not in the usual sense of those words. Quite the contrary, they were the cream of the Nazis and collaborators, the leaders, the intelligence specialists, and the scholars who had put their skills to work for the Nazi cause.

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Kennan's anti-communism was far more sophisticated than that of many of his colleagues, and he wanted to use clandestine warfare techniques carefully. He viewed as unrealistic and dangerous demands for a quick "liberation" of Eastern Europe from Soviet influence, which were beginning to make themselves heard from the political right. Kennan had long been suspicious of popular participation in the formulation of foreign policy, and he considered the

US Congress, for example, too mercurial, too ill informed, and too much subject to domestic pressures to serve the country well when it came to foreign affairs. These attitudes made him aware of the dangerous impact that yahoo-style reaction was beginning to have on American policy overseas. "I personally look with some dismay and concern at many of the things we are now experiencing in our public life," Kennan had written in the spring of 1947.'7 "In particular I deplore the hysterical sort of anti-Communism which, it seems to me, is gaining currency in our country."

Whatever the reason, Kennan made common cause in those years with other men who were soon to commandeer the work he had begun and take it places the diplomat apparently never expected. NSC 10/2 failed to bring covert operations under close civilian control. Instead, the clandestine service metastasized through the government at an extraordinary rate. Regardless of what Kennan may have intended, as NSC 10/2, NSC 20, and other programs he had helped design became institutionalized, they transformed themselves into an unrelentingly hostile effort to "roll back communism" in Eastern Europe, an effort that eventually consumed millions of dollars, thousands of lives, and considerable national prestige. As the political temperature between the superpowers inevitably got more frigid, the forces that Kennan had once ridden to power overwhelmed him and his program. By 1950 his erstwhile allies in secret work-men like Allen and John Foster Dulles, Paul Nitze, and Arthur Bliss Lane-were grasping for more power and depreciating Kennan's policies for being "soft on communism."

In the end, Kennan testified many years later, "it did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.''

Bare fists and brass knuckles

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MANY OF THE BLOODSTONE recruits -- both Nazi collaborators and anti-Nazis-were passed along to two heavily funded CIA psychological warfare projects that are still in operation. These two enterprises were authorized under the "subversion against hostile states" and "propaganda" sections of NSC 10/2 and are probably the largest and most expensive political warfare efforts ever undertaken by the United States. They are certainly the longest-running and best-publicized "secret" operations ever. Their names are Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, the latter of which is better known as Radio Liberation or Radio Liberty.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (usually abbreviated RFE/ RL) began in 1948 as a corporation named the National Committee for a Free Europe, a supposedly private charitable organization dedicated to aiding exiles from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. The roots of the RFE/RL effort, in an administrative sense, are the same political warfare programs that gave birth to Bloodstone and NSC 10/2.

George Kennan, Allen Dulles, and a handful of other foreign affairs specialists came up with the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) as a unique solution to a knotty problem. The US government found it advantageous to maintain conventional, albeit frosty, diplomatic relations with the Communist-dominated governments of the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and the other satellite states. However, the Department of State and the intelligence community also wished to underwrite the anti-Communist work of the numerous emigre organizations that claimed to represent "governments-in-exile" of the same countries. It was impossible to have diplomatic relations with both the official governments of Eastern Europe and the "governments-in-exile" at the same time, for obvious reasons. The NCFE was therefore launched to serve as a thinly veiled "private-sector" cover through which clandestine US funds for the exile committees could be passed.

The seed money for the National Committee for a Free Europe was drawn from the same pool of captured German assets that had earlier financed clandestine operations during the Italian election. At least $2 million left over from that affair found its way first into the hands of Frank Wisner's OPC and then into the accounts of the NCFE, according to former RFE/RL president Sig Mickelson, who helped administer Radio Free Europe money for many years. Printing presses, radio transmitters, and other equipment salvaged from the Italian campaign were also transferred to the OPC and from there on to the NCFE.

Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner combined their talents to line up an all-star board of directors for the NCFE that served as a cover, in effect, to explain where all the money was coming from. Early corporate notables who served on the board or as members of the NCFE include (to name only a few) J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace & Company and the National City Bank; H. J. Heinz of the Mellon Bank and Heinz tomato ketchup fame; Texas oilman George C. McGhee; auto magnate Henry Ford II; film directors Darryl Zanuck and Cecil B. De Mille; and so many Wall Street lawyers that NCFE board meetings could have resembled a gathering of the New York State Bar Association. The intelligence community's contingent featured former OSS chief William J. Donovan, Russian emigre Bernard Yarrow, and Allen Dulles himself, among others. Labor was represented in the person of James B. Carey, a self-described CIO "labor executive" who played a leading role in the trade union movement's purge of Communists during the late 1940s. Carey was outspoken in his attitude concerning communism. "In the last war we joined with the Communists to fight the Fascists," he told the New York Herald Tribune. "In another war we will join the Fascists to defeat the Communists."

From the beginning the National Committee for a Free Europe depended upon the voluntary silence of powerful media personalities in the United States to cloak its true operations in secrecy. "Representatives of some of the nation's most influential media giants were involved early on as members of the corporation [NCFE]," Mickelson notes in a relatively frank history of its activities. This board included "magazine publishers Henry Luce [of Time-Life] and DeWitt Wallace [of Reader's Digest]," he writes, "but not a word of the government involvement appeared in print or on the air." Luce and Wallace were not the only ones: C. D. Jackson, editor in chief of Fortune magazine, came on board in 1951 as president of the entire Radio Free Europe effort, while Reader's Digest senior editor Eugene Lyons headed the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia Inc., a corporate parent of Radio Liberation. Still, "sources of financing," Mickelson writes, were "never mentioned" in the press.

The practical effect of this arrangement was the creation of a powerful lobby inside American media that tended to suppress critical news concerning the CIA's propaganda projects. This was not simply a matter of declining to mention the fact that the agency was behind these programs, as Mickelson implies. Actually the media falsified their reports to the public concerning the government's role in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation for years, actively promoting the myth-which most sophisticated editors knew perfectly well was false-that these projects were financed through nickel-and-dime contributions from concerned citizens. Writers soon learned that exposes concerning the NCFE and RFE/ RL were simply not welcome at mainstream publications. No corporate officers needed to issue any memorandums to enforce this silence: with C. D. Jackson as RFE / RL's president and Luce himself on the group's board of directors, for example, Time's and Life's authors were no more likely to delve into the darker side of RFE/ RL than they were to attack the American flag.

CIA-funded psychological warfare projects employing Eastern European �migr�s became major operations during the 1950s, consuming tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. Noted conservative author (and OPC psychological warfare consultant) James Burnham estimated in 1953 that the United States was spending "well over a billion dollars yearly" on a wide variety of psychological warfare projects, and that was in pre-inflation dollars. This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberte movement, paying the bills of the German League for Struggle Against Inhumanity, and financing a half dozen free jurists associations, a variety of European federalist groups, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines, news services, book publishers, and much more.

These were very broad programs designed to influence world public opinion at virtually every level, from illiterate peasants in the fields to the most sophisticated scholars in prestigious universities. They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders, to name a few. The political analysis they promoted varied from case to case, but taken as a whole, this was prodemocracy, pro-West, and anti-Communist thinking, with a frequent "tilt" toward liberal or European-style Social Democratic ideals. They were not "Nazi" propaganda efforts, nor were many of the men and women engaged in them former Nazi collaborators or sympathizers. In Europe, at least, the Central Intelligence Agency has historically I been the clandestine promoter of the parties of the political center, not the extreme right.

p134 Unlike the relative moderation of the present-day RFE/RL broadcasts, the cold war operations of these stations were hardhitting. It was "bare fists and brass knuckles," as Sig Mickelson puts it. Their work was, as National Committee for a Free Europe President Dewitt Poole noted in one 1950 directive, "to take up the individual Bolshevik rulers and their quislings and tear them apart, exposing their motivations, laying bare their private lives, pointing at their meannesses, pillorying their evil deeds, holding them up to ridicule and contumely." Further, the radio broadcasting operations were themselves used as covers for a much broader range of political warfare activities, including printing and distributing black propaganda, intelligence gathering, and the maintenance of agent networks behind the Iron Curtain.

The fraudulent "Document on Terror"

THIS TOUGH agitation drew its ideological vigor from a variety of sources. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were often quoted and praised in RFE/ RL broadcasts, as were Eastern European national heroes like the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth and the Pole Thaddeus Kosciuszko. At the same time, however, RFE/RL sometimes produced a dull undertone of Nazi-like propaganda in its early years. At times material that had been directly created by the Nazi security service SD found its way into RFE/RL broadcasts and publications. The NCFE often distributed the highly publicized -- but fraudulent -- "Document on Terror," for example, as a means of crystallizing public anger in the West against communism during Radio Free Europe fund-raising campaigns. The "Document" purported to be a translation of a captured Soviet secret police directive encouraging the use of terror against civilian populations. It included sections on "general terror" (murders, hangings, etc.), "creating the psychosis of white fear," "enlightened terror" (use of agents provocateurs), "disintegrating operations," and others. The CIA aggressively promoted the text of the "Document" both directly through RFE/RL and indirectly through coverage planted in a wide variety of sympathetic newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts to audiences around the world.

The NCFE announced that it had obtained the "Document" from "a former Baltic cabinet minister, favorably known to us," who in turn had gotten it from a Ukrainian refugee, who in turn had "found it on the body of a dead NKVD officer" in Poland in 1948. The committee acknowledged in small type that it had "no means of conclusively establishing the authenticity" of the "Document," but it insisted that it was a "genuine product of Communist theory" whose recommendations "did . . . take place." This low-key caveat concerning the questionable authenticity of the "Document" was soon forgotten in the media storm that followed publication of the item.

The "Document" became a staple of anti-Communist propaganda and continues to show up occasionally in extreme-right-wing publications to this day. Recycled extensively through congressional hearings, Reader's Digest articles, and newspaper accounts, this "captured report" emerged as one of the frequently cited sources of "documentary evidence" of Communist terror during the cold war. It was not until 1956, with the publication of Khrushchev's extraordinary report detailing Stalin's crimes, that the "Document" began to fade from view.

In fact, however, the "Document" was a forgery, whose origins can be traced to the wartime Nazi intelligence service. The true source of the "Document" was, according to American psychological warfare expert Paul Blackstock, "one of the Nazi secret police or related terrorist organizations such as the Sicherheitsdienst or one of the notorious SD or SS 'action groups' "-that is, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile murder squads). Blackstock uses an etymological investigation to track the origins of phrases used in the "Document" back to their sources. He concludes that the section concerning "disintegrating operations," for example, originated in a Nazi manual used for indoctrinating Eastern European collaborationist troops, including the Ukrainian Waffen SS.

RFE/RL broadcasts sometimes featured well-known Nazi collaborators and even outright war criminals. Officially, of course, the political slant of those stations was nondenominational support for "freedom" and "democracy." The large majority of RFE/RL employees were not Nazi collaborators, and the two stations often quoted anti-Nazi European politicians with approval. RFE/RL's broadcasts of European Social Democrats, in fact, occasionally led to complaints from hard-core anti-Communist congressmen in the United States, who found such ideas dangerously close to communism.

Even so, certain war criminals found a comfortable roost at RFE / RL. Radio Free Europe repeatedly featured Romanian Fascist leader (and Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America) Valerian Trifa, for example, in Romanian-language broadcasts, particularly during the 1950s. Vilis Hazners, who was accused in a CBS-TV 60 Minutes broadcast of spearheading a Nazi gang that "force[d] a number of Jews into a synagogue [which was] then set on fire," emerged as a prominent Latvian personality in Radio Liberation transmissions. Hazners, at last report, was still broadcasting for RL in the 1980s. Belorussian quisling and mass murderer Stanislaw Stankievich also frequently free-lanced programs for the radios.'

The Pentagon was gradually coming to grips with using former Nazi collaborators at about the same time that the State Department and CIA were. General Lucius Clay's war scare of early 1948, together with the deepening cold war, convinced many Americans in and out of government that there was at least an even chance of an all-out US-USSR war over Europe before the decade was out.

As the final arbiter of US security the Pentagon considers it part of its job to assume the worst about Soviet intentions in order to be adequately prepared for any eventuality. By 1948 that the United States would increasingly rely on atomic weapons to deter any Soviet military moves against the West had already become a foregone conclusion among most US military strategists. The American perception that the Soviets enjoyed overwhelming superiority in troops and conventional arms in Europe seemed to leave few other choices.

The Pentagon was evolving a strategy of exactly how to go about using atomic weapons in a war with the USSR at about the same time that Kennan, Dulles, and Wisner were hammering together the National Committee for a Free Europe and the NSC 10/2 clandestine warfare authorization. By the time the decade was out the military's preparations for waging nuclear war-if that proved necessary-had merged with many of the ongoing CIA and State Department political warfare operations that have been discussed thus far. As those two streams came together, Nazi collaborators became entwined with some of America's most sensitive military affairs.

Guerrillas for World War III

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THE VLASOV ARMY and Waffen SS veterans from Eastern Europe worked hard to integrate themselves into the evolving US nuclear weapons strategy during the cold war years. Colonel Philp and General Gehlen, it will be recalled, began as early as the winter of 1945-1946 to use German officers and refugees from the East to gather information about military construction behind Soviet lines. Each time the location of a new Soviet military site was confirmed, word of its location was passed to a special US Air Force office at the Pentagon whose job was the selection of targets slated for atomic annihilation.

As US atomic planning grew more sophisticated, the role of �migr�s in America's nuclear war-fighting strategy expanded quickly. By late 1948 paramilitary expert General Robert McClure had won the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to approval of a full-scale program of guerrilla warfare that was to follow any US nuclear strike on the USSR. From then until at least 1956, when this strategy was at the height of its popularity in US command circles, preparations for post-World War III guerrilla insurgencies employed thousands of �migr�s from the USSR. Pentagon documents show that Vlasov veterans and Waffen SS men played a major role in these underground armies. Considering the wartime record of these forces, there is reason to suspect that a number of these enlistees may have been war criminals.

These �migr�s did not, of course, create US nuclear strategy. The advent of atomic weapons and their impact on international affairs would have taken place with or without the use of former Nazis and collaborators in US war planning. The exile soldiers simply rode the coattails of the movement toward reliance on nuclear weapons during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In many cases they themselves were not aware of what the Pentagon had in mind for them. The integration of these groups into even the most humble levels of US nuclear planning, however, gave the military and intelligence agencies a powerful reason to conceal the Nazi pasts of their unusual troops.

The process of integrating ex-Nazi emigre groups into US nuclear operations may be traced at least to early 1947, when General Hoyt Vandenberg became the first chief of staff of the newly independent US Air Force. Vandenberg had commanded the Ninth Air Force in Europe during World War II, then been tapped to head the Central Intelligence Group, the immediate predecessor to the CIA, in 1946. Among the general's responsibilities at the air force was the development of written plans describing strategies and tactics for the use of America's new nuclear weapons in the event of war.

"Vandenberg had a clear idea about just how he thought a nuclear war was going to be fought," argues retired Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who was a senior aide to the air force chief of staff in the 1940s and later the top liaison man between the Pentagon and the CIA. "[He] knew that if there was a nuclear exchange in those days-and we are talking about atomic bombs, now, not H-bombs -- you would destroy the communications and lifeblood of a country but the country would still exist. It would just be rubble. People would be wandering around wanting to know who was boss and where the food was coming from and so forth, but the country would still be there." Therefore, the US thinking went, "we must begin to create independent communications centers inside the Soviet Union [after the nuclear blast] and begin to pull it together for our ends."

The army, air force, and CIA all began competing programs to prepare for the post-nuclear battlefield. This included creation of what eventually came to be called the Special Forces-better known today as the Green Berets-in the army and the air resupply and communications wings in the air force. The job of these units, Prouty explains, was to set up anti-Communist political leaders backed up by guerrilla armies inside the USSR and Eastern Europe in the wake of an atomic war, capture political power in strategic I sections of the country, choke off any remaining Communist resistance, and ensure that the Red Army could not regroup for a counterattack.

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In 1950 CIC and CIA agents used the Labor Services cover to begin guerrilla training of at least 100 members of the far-rightwing League of Young Germans (Bund Deutscher Jungen, or BDJ). These "Young Germans" were no Boy Scouts; most were Waffen SS and Wehrmacht veterans, according to a later West German government investigation, and a considerable part of the leadership of the group had been enthusiastic "Jew baiters" in the Goebbels ministry during the Nazis' rule.

The budget for the clandestine group was 50,000 deutsche marks per month, according to records seized by German police in 1952, plus an ample supply of free arms, ammunition, and explosives cached in the Odenwald Hills south of Frankfurt. American and German advisers provided BDJ agents with extensive military instruction, including, as a report in the West German parliament later revealed, "use of Russian, United States and German weapons, including machine guns, grenades, and knives . . . [as well as] light infantry weapons and explosives." The underground group called itself a US "Technical Service" unit.'

But the training program was only the beginning. BDJ Technical Service leaders decided that the best thing they could do for Germany following a Soviet attack was to liquidate certain German leaders they regarded as insufficiently anti-Communist. German Communists were, of course, at the top of the Technical Service assassination list. Next in line for elimination were leaders of West Germany's Social Democratic party, the country's loyal opposition during the Adenauer administration. The Technical Service group planned to murder more than forty top Social Democratic officials, including the party's national chief, Erich Ollenhauer; the interior minister of the state of Hesse, Heinrich Zinnkann; and the mayors of Hamburg and Bremen. BDJ's US-trained underground infiltrated the Social Democrats to shadow individual party leaders so as to kill them more efficiently when the day to act arrived.

The plot unraveled in late 1952, however, when a chance arrest by local police led to discovery of the hit list of Social Democratic officials. The CIC's behavior following this accidental exposure was so compromising that it raised serious questions in the German parliament whether the US government was aware of the Technical Service unit's assassination plans all along. Then again, perhaps the CIC response to the arrests was just stupid, not a conspiratorial cover-up. Either way, American CIC officers took custody of the arrested BDJ members and proceeded to hide them from the German civil police, who intended to charge the "Young Germans" with numerous weapons violations and conspiracy to commit murder. The German chief of the Technical Service unit, an ex-Luftwaffe man named Gerhard Peters, was placed under wraps for almost two weeks in a US-requisitioned building that was off-limits to German civil authorities. US CIC agents also seized all the remaining Technical Service records that they could lay their hands on, then refused to turn the dossiers over to the German equivalent of the FBI.

But the cat was out of the bag. Soon Social Democratic deputies were demanding investigations and pounding the lecterns in state and federal parliaments all over West Germany. Unfortunately for the Americans and for the Technical Service, their blunder had been discovered in the midst of a closely fought election, and the Social Democrats made the most of it. In the end, US authorities were forced to confirm, as the New York Times reported, that they had "sponsored and helped finance the secret training of young Germans, many of them former soldiers, to become guerrilla fighters in the event of a war with the Soviet Union."

US use of former Nazi collaborators in assassinations

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THE QUESTION of US use of former Nazi collaborators in assassinations is important, and not just because of the obvious damage that the Technical Service imbroglio did to US relations with Germany's influential Social Democrats. Few subjects are more deeply clothed in mystery than this one, and the evidence concerning how US assassination operations worked during the cold war and who was responsible for them is inevitably scattered and fragmentary. All that can be said with certainty is that such murders did take place and that in some cases former Nazi collaborators were instrumental in carrying them out.

To put the case most bluntly, many American clandestine warfare specialists believed that the most "productive" -- and least compromising-method -- of killing foreign officials was to underwrite the discontent of indigenous groups and let them take the risks. American intelligence agencies' use of this technique appears to have originated in operations during World War II, when the OSS supplied thousands of cheap pistols to partisans in France and Yugoslavia specifically for assassination of collaborators and German officials. (According to Pentagon records,' the OSS also air-dropped these weapons in areas where there were no significant rebel forces so that the Nazis, upon finding the guns, would tighten the screws on local populations and thereby produce new anti-Nazi partisans.)

The concepts of maintaining "plausible deniability" for the actual murder and of the expendability of the killers themselves are a key to understanding US assassination techniques. In most cases, it appears to have been neither necessary nor practical for US intelligence officers to give precise instructions for murder. Instead, the OPC gave directions to commit assassinations to guerrilla movements in the same simple, sweeping terms that had been used in wartime Yugoslavia. US intelligence encouraged insurgents to "eliminate the command and other dangerous personnel of the MVD and the MGB [the Soviet secret police]," as the psychological warfare appendix to a Pentagon war plan put it in 1948. Other assigned tasks under the Halfmoon war plan, as it was known included "organiz[ing] for the destruction of industry, communications and other factors in Soviet war-making capacity"; "engag[ing] in sabotage wherever and whenever it disrupts enemy action"; and "creat[ing] panic and terror."

Several organizations of former Nazi collaborators were ready to undertake such slayings on a major scale. Covert operations chief Wisner estimated in 1951 that some 35,000 Soviet police troops and Communist party cadres had been eliminated by guerrillas connected with the Nazi collaborationist OUN/UPA in the Ukraine since the end of the war, and that does not include casualties from other insurgencies in Lithuania and the Muslim regions of the USSR that were also receiving aid from the United States and Britain.

These shotgun-style killings and guerrilla actions account for the large majority of murders carried out with US assistance in Europe during the cold war. It is inappropriate, of course, to lay responsibility for all these deaths at the feet of the CIA. The rebellions against Soviet rule were not initiated by the agency; they exploded inside the country out of discontents that were bound to give rise to violent resistance. Still, it is clear that CIA aid sustained such rebellions longer and made them more deadly to all concerned than they might otherwise have been. Moreover, these widespread shotgun-style slayings served as cover for a smaller number of specific individual assassinations that appear to have been directly ordered by US intelligence officers.

Former Nazi collaborators made excellent executioners in such instances, because of both their wartime training and the fact that the US government could plausibly deny any knowledge of their activities. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. "In the international clandestine operations business, it was part of the code that the one and only remedy for the unfrocked double agent was to kill him" (emphasis added), the CIA's director of operations planning during the Truman administration testified before Congress in 1976, "and all double agents knew that. That was part of the occupational hazard of the job." The former director, whom the government declines to identify, also claimed, however, that he didn't recall any executions of double agents actually occurring during his tenure there. It is understandable that he might fail to remember any executions; for admitting a role in such killings could well lead to arrest and prosecution for conspiracy to commit murder in Europe, if not in the United States itself.

"We kept personnel at several air bases around the world for these types of missions," says Colonel Prouty, who was responsible for US Air Force air support of CIA missions overseas, including the delivery of agents to their targets and subsequent evacuation measures. "Some of these guys were the best commercial hit men you have ever heard of. [They were] mechanics, killers. They were Ukrainians, mainly, and Eastern Europeans, Greeks, and some Scotsmen. I don't know how the Scotsmen got in there, but there they were. None of them were American citizens." Prouty asserts that teams of such "mechanics" were used in cross-border infiltrations, in highly dangerous rescues of American agents inside the USSR and China, and in special murders. According to Prouty, there was no clear policy concerning the use of killing. "It was an ad hoc event, and it [the actual assassination] was done by third parties. If it had to be done in Yugoslavia, for example, it was set up with exile Yugoslavians or the [emigre] Polish groups. The [US] Army had by far the best assets" for this type of thing, he states, but "on the operational level there was good cooperation with the air force, CIA, and army." Many of the Eastern Europeans, he says, were Nazi collaborators during the war.

Several such killings did take place during the late 1940s under Operations Hagberry and Lithia, both of which were approved at senior levels of the Pentagon. These two instances, furthermore, must be considered only the documented examples of a more widespread practice. Hagberry required, according to army records, the "liquidation of the Chikalov Ring, a possible Soviet intelligence net operating within the US zone of Germany." And Lithia, which began under army auspices in November 1947, authorized "liquidation in [the] United States Zone [of Germany] of the Kundermann Ring, a large scale Czechoslovakian intelligence net." Army intelligence believed that the Chikalov Ring and the Kundermann organization had managed to plant double agents in certain emigre espionage networks that were being jointly managed by the United States and Britain under still another code-named project, Operation Rusty, and it is those agents who were marked for "liquidation." Army spokesmen today claim with shrugs of their shoulders that all further files concerning Hagberry and Lithia have simply disappeared. No further information is available, they say, and there is no indication of who withdrew the Hagberry and Lithia files or when they vanished.

Other people were murdered gangland-style during Operation Ohio, according to published reports in the United States. Ohio employed a squad of Ukrainian ex-Nazis to carry out at least twenty murders m a displaced persons camp at Mittenwald, south of Munich. The Army CIC and later the CIA are reported to have financed this squad for strong-arm work against double agents, Soviet spies, and similar undesirables. The fragmentary evidence still available suggests that most of the squad's victims were double agents whose deaths-when they became public at all-were attributed to factional violence among rival right-wing Ukrainian emigre groups.

"We were just out of World War Two, and we were using those [wartime] tactics," says Franklin Lindsay, the former CIA/OPC paramilitary expert. "In my case, I had operated only in wartime conditions. Given the feeling that we were very near war at that time, one tended to operate in the same way as in wartime." Lindsay, however, rejects the term assassination as a description of CIA/OPC practice during his tenure there.

The records of Operation Bloodstone add an important new piece of information to one of the most explosive public issues of today: the role of the US government -- specifically the CIA -- in assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign officials. According to a 1976 Senate investigation, a key official of Operation Bloodstone is the OPC officer who was specifically delegated responsibility for planning the agency's assassinations, kidnappings, and similar "wet work."

Colonel Boris Pash, one of the most extraordinary and least known characters in American intelligence history, completes the circle of US agents, Nazi collaborators, and "mechanics" involved in these highly sensitive affairs. Pash is not a Nazi, nor is there any evidence that he is sympathetic to Nazis. But his work for US intelligence agencies places him in the critical office given the responsibility for planning postwar assassination operations.

Pash, now in his eighties, looks much like a bespectacled retired high school teacher. That's not surprising. He taught gym at Hollywood High School for a decade prior to World War II. He is modest-even shy, some might say -- with a gravelly voice and a cautious manner born of a lifetime of keeping secrets. Politically Pash remains loyal to the legacy of General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he served in occupied Japan. Colonel Pash is one of the few remaining originals of US intelligence, and his experience in "fighting the Communists" goes back to the 1917 Russian Revolution. He was in Moscow and Eastern Europe in those days with his father, a missionary of Russian extraction, and the young Pash spent much of the Soviet civil war working on the side of the White armies, then with czarist refugees who had fled their country. In the 1920s Pash signed on as a reserve officer with the US military intelligence service, and he maintained the affiliation throughout his years at Hollywood High. He was called to active duty in the first days of the Second World War, played a role in the internment of Japanese civilians in California, and was soon assigned as chief counterintelligence officer on the Manhattan Project, the supersecret US effort to develop the atomic bomb. (More than a decade later it was Colonel Pash's testimony that helped seal the fate of scientist Robert Oppenheimer in the well-known 1954 security case.) Before the war was out, it will be recalled, Colonel Pash led the series of celebrated special operations known as the Alsos Mission that were designed to capture the best atomic and chemical warfare experts that the Nazis had to offer.

After the war Colonel Pash served as the army's representative on Bloodstone in the spring of 1948, when the tasks of that project, including recruiting defectors, smuggling refugees out from behind the Iron Curtain, and assassinations, were established. Bloodstone's "special operations," as defined by the Pentagon, could "include clandestine warfare, subversion, sabotage and . . . assassination," according to the 1948 Joint Chiefs of Staff records. In March 1949, Pash was assigned by the army to the OPC division of the CIA. There, according to State Department records, his responsibilities included many of the functions originally approved under the Bloodstone program.

At the CIA Boris Pash became an administrator and organizer, as distinct from a field operative. His five-man CIA unit, known as PB/7, was given a written charter that read in part that "PB/7 will be responsible for assassinations, kidnapping, and such other functions as from time to time may be given it . . . by higher authority." Pash's fluency in Russian, his skill in dealing with Bloodstone �migr�s, and his solid connections in anti-Communist exile circles were valuable assets in that job. Indeed, those qualifications-along with his sterling record as a counterintelligence officer-may well have been what led to his selection as PB/7 chief.

As with so many other aspects of the history of US intelligence the evidence here must be carefully sifted. Pash himself denies involvement in the Bloodstone program, asserting that he has "no recollection" of Bloodstone or of "anything like that." However, documents establishing his participation in Bloodstone and PB/7 are now a matter of public record.

Pash did testify before Congress in 1976 that his responsibilities at the CIA included planning for defections from Communist countries, facilitating the escape of prominent political refugees, and disseminating anti-Communist propaganda behind the Iron Curtain-all of which were clearly Bloodstone activities. Pash's supervisor at the CIA (who is not identified in the hearing record) offered further details concerning some of the less savory aspects of emigre operations during the 1940s that coincide with what is known of Bloodstone. Pash's PB/7, the supervisor said, was responsible for "kidnapping personages from behind the Iron Curtain . . . [including] kidnapping people whose interests were inimicable to ours."

Much of the documentary evidence concerning what PB/7 did during the first years of the CIA has disappeared, leaving both Congress and the general public with many unanswered questions concerning US operations among �migr�s during the cold war. The CIA claimed in 1976 that it had "no record of documents which deal with this aspect [i.e., assassinations] of Pash's unit" and that even the office's charter was missing. Colonel Pash himself insisted in congressional testimony that he did not "believe" that he had any involvement in or responsibility for planning or conducting assassinations. He also testified that he had no recollection of the language of the charter of PB/7, the CIA office of which he had been in charge.

Despite the mysterious disappearance of the PB/7 records while in the hands of the CIA, the chain of circumstantial evidence concerning some Bloodstone �migr�s' roles in paramilitary, kidnapping, and assassination operations abroad is too strong to be easily dismissed. First, there is the incriminating Pentagon document, quoted above, which indicates that paramilitary operations, assassinations, and kidnappings were an explicit mission of the Bloodstone program from its beginning.

Secondly, at least one key Bloodstone official, Boris Pash, was active in Bloodstone's early phases in mid-1948, then became chief of the OPC office responsible for planning paramilitary operations, assassinations, and kidnappings at about the time that control of "politico-psychological" and paramilitary operations was passed from the Bloodstone committee to the OPC.

Thirdly, at least some Bloodstone �migr�s with backgrounds as Nazi collaborators-former Albanian Minister of Justice Hasan Dosti, for example-went on to become deeply involved in clandestine operations that did indeed involve paramilitary operations, murders, and unconsummated plans for assassinations, such as the 1949 and 1950 secret raids on Albania designed to overthrow the government. (Dosti did not participate in the actual field operations. But the organization he led, the Committee for a Free Albania, served as a "private" cover for the Albanian guerrillas, who were, in fact, organized and financed by the OPC.)

Fourthly-and perhaps coincidentally-certain Soviet spies, double agents, and "people whose interests were inimicable" to those of the CIA were marked for death by the agency. Pash's immediate superiors in the OPC acknowledge that the "one and only remedy" for Communist double agents was to murder them. According to published reports in the United States, persons accused of being Soviet or East bloc agents were in fact killed during this period by former Nazi collaborators at Mittenwald and in other displaced persons camps, though under mysterious circumstances that have never been clearly traced back to the OPC.

In the opinion of the author, the early Bloodstone operations played a significant role in laying the groundwork for what one Senate investigator later called

"a procedure [within the CIA] which, although not spelled out in so many words, was generally understood and served as the basis to plan or otherwise contemplate political assassination."

The killings of minor double agents in German DP camps were murders and deserve to be investigated as such. More significant, however, is what these otherwise obscure crimes appear to have foreshadowed: Before the decade of the 1950s was out, the CIA is known to have established mechanisms for using "deniable" assets and �migr�s for the execution of heads of state and other international leaders. These later killings, which are arguably the most serious blunders ever made by the CIA, have created blowback problems on an international scale and have had a significant and generally negative effect on the lives of millions of people.

Ratlines

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RATLINES, in espionage jargon, are networks of agents who smuggle fugitives or undercover operatives in and out of hostile foreign territories. These escape and evasion routes, as they are sometimes called, are a standard part of the clandestine operations of every major power, and there were hundreds of such ratlines snaking out of the Soviet-occupied territories in Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II.

The story of one of these ratlines is of special interest here because it reveals the manner in which the United States became entangled in the escape of large numbers of Nazi and Axis criminals, many of whom remained ardent Fascists as contemptuous of American democracy as of Soviet-style communism. In hindsight it is clear that many of the ratlines used by the United States during the cold war began as independent, unsanctioned Nazi escape organizations that later turned to selling their specialized services to US intelligence agencies as a means of making money and protecting their own ongoing Nazi smuggling efforts. Some of the exiles involved in this dangerous work did it for money; some, for ideological reasons, some, for both.

The most important Western ratlines that have come to light thus far, including those that smuggled Nazis, operated in and through the Vatican in Rome. Unraveling the reasons why and how the Catholic Church became involved in Nazi smuggling is an important step in understanding the broader evolution of the postwar alliances between former Nazis and US intelligence agencies. One organization is worthy of close scrutiny. It is the prominent Catholic lay group known as Intermarium. During its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s leading members of this organization were deeply involved in smuggling Nazi fugitives out of Eastern Europe to safety in the West. Later Intermarium also became one of the single most important sources of recruits for the CIA's exile committees. This can be said with some certainty because about a score of Intermarium leaders ended up as activists or officials in Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), each of which the US government has since admitted as having been a CIA-financed and -controlled organization.

For much of the Catholic Church's leadership, it will be recalled World War II had been an interlude in a deeper and more important struggle against "atheistic communism" that had been raging for decades. This more fundamental struggle had closely aligned the Vatican hierarchy with a half dozen conservative Christian Democratic and clerical-Fascist political parties that were willing Nazi pawns during the war, even when the Church of Rome was itself under ideological attack from the German Nazi party. The majority of the Nazis' Axis partners in Eastern Europe, as well as Vichy France, had been led by Catholic political parties during the war. The puppet government in Slovakia, for example, was run by a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Croatia, a terrorist breakaway state from Yugoslavia, described itself as a "pure Catholic state" whose leader, Ante Pavelic, had been personally received by the pope, while clerics in Admiral Nicholas Horthy's Hungary enjoyed a more profound influence in that country's wartime government than did its own parliament. It is well established, of course, that some Catholic Church leaders bravely resisted Nazi crimes sometimes at the cost of their lives. Even so, it is also true that the church-based political parties mentioned above played a central role in Axis military aggression. These organizations used the mantle and the moral authority of the church to help carry out the preparations for, and in some cases the actual execution of, the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

As Nazi Germany collapsed during late 1944 and early 1945, many senior church officials helped organize a massive campaign of refugee relief for millions of Catholics fleeing from Eastern Europe. Once this was under way, few distinctions were made between the Catholics responsible for the crimes against humanity committed in the Axis states and those being persecuted simply for opposition to the Soviets. The vast majority of the refugees who swept through Rome in the wake of the war had left their homelands for reasons that had nothing to do with war crimes, obviously; they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the German or Soviet armies had stormed through their villages.

At the same time, however, these refugee routes became the most important pipelines out of Europe for Nazis and collaborators fleeing war crimes charges. Factions within the church that had long been sympathetic to the Nazis' extreme anti-Communist stand organized large-scale programs to facilitate the escapes of tens of thousands of Nazis and collaborators from Germany, Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and a number of other Eastern I European states. The pivotal role of the church in the escape of the l Nazis has been emphasized by Luftwaffe Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, the highly decorated German air ace who became an international spokesman for the neo-Nazi movement after the war. "One may otherwise view Catholicism as one wishes. But what the Church, especially certain towering personalities within the Church, undertook in those years [immediately after the war] to save the best of our nation, often from certain death, must never be forgotten!" Colonel Rudel exclaimed in a speech at Kufstein in 1970. "In Rome itself, the transit point of the escape routes, a vast amount was done. With its own immense resources, the Church helped many of us to go overseas. In this manner, in quiet and secrecy, the demented victors' mad craving for revenge and retribution could be effectively counteracted."

The Vatican's principal agencies for handling refugees were a group of relief agencies in Rome that divided the assistance work according to the nationality of the refugee. Lithuanians went to see Reverend Jatulevicius at No. 6 on the Via Lucullo, for example, while Padre Gallov at 33 Via del Parione aided Hungarians and Monsignors Dragonovic and Magjerec at the Istituto di St. Jeronimus were in charge of Croatian relief, and so forth.

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According to a top secret US State Department intelligence report of May 1947,

"the Vatican ... is the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants . . . [and] the justification . . . for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the Faith. It is the Vatican's desire to assist any person, regardless of nationality or political beliefs, as long as that person can prove himself to be a Catholic."

The classified study confirmed that Nazis and their collaborators were not excluded from the effort:

"[I]n those Latin American countries where the [Catholic] Church is a controlling or dominating factor, the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign missions of those countries taking an attitude almost favoring the entry into their country of former Nazis and former Fascists or other political groups, so long as they are anti-Communist. That, in fact, is the practice in effect in the Latin American Consulates and Missions in Rome at the present time."

Pipelines to the United States

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American policy on the use of defectors from the East, including those who had been Nazi collaborators, was institutionalized in three National Security Council decisions during late 1949 and 1950. The government still contends that revealing the full text of these orders would "damage national security" if they were published today, more than thirty-five years later. These high-level orders, which were reviewed and approved by both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, are known as NSC 86, NSCID (pronounced "N-skid" and standing for NSC intelligence directive) 13, and NSCID 14. They are based on recommendations prepared by Frank Wisner's OPC division of the CIA during the Bloodstone program.

These decisions gave the CIA control of several highly secret government interagency committees responsible for handling �migr�s and defectors both overseas (NSCID 13) and inside the United States itself (NSCID 14). Like the earlier Bloodstone effort from which these directives sprang, NSCIDs 13 and 14 were not designed to rescue Nazis as such. They were instead aimed at making good use of all sorts of defectors from the East-with few questions asked. The bureaucratic turf remaining after the CIA had taken its share was divided among the FBI, military intelligence, the State Department, and, to a small degree, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Most important in the present context, these orders authorized clandestine CIA funding of a variety of ostensibly private refugee relief organizations so as to ensure the cooperation of those agencies in the government's efforts to locate and exploit presumably valuable defectors. Under the aegis of these secret orders, the CIA assumed the power to bring "temporarily" anyone it wished to the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), regardless of any other laws on the books in the United States or any other country.

NSCID 14, moreover, dramatically expanded the agency's authority to conduct clandestine operations inside the United States-in an apparent violation of the CIA's charter-as long as those affairs were conducted through emigre political organizations that supposedly still had some connection with the old country. The CIA has used that loophole to authorize hidden agency funding for the Committee for a Free Latvia, the Committee for a Free Albania, and other supposedly private exile organizations active in this country. A substantial amount of the agency's money ended up being spent on lobbying the US Congress and on other propaganda efforts inside this country-a clear violation of the law.

When Congress created the CIA, it specifically legislated that the agency be barred from "police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions" in the United States. This was to be a foreign intelligence agency, not a still more powerful version of the FBI. Most Americans, including the members of the congressional watchdog committees responsible for oversight of CIA operations, have long contended that this provision banned the agency from involvement in political activities inside this country. Even Senator Leverett Saltonstall, long the ranking Republican on the Senate's intelligence oversight committee, remarked to then CIA Director John McCone (in 1962):

"Is it not true, Mr. McCone . . . that any work on ethnic groups in this country would not be within the province of the CIA? . . . Am I correct in that?" (McCone replied, "I cannot answer that, Senator," and the matter was dropped.)

But unbeknownst to most of the Congress and the American people, however, the agency has repeatedly chosen to interpret the NSC 86, NSCID 13, and NSCID 14 orders as authorization for substantial political involvement in immigrant communities in America. As early as 1949 -- only two years after Congress had thoroughly debated keeping the CIA out of American politics -- the agency began underwriting several major programs designed to bring favored European exiles into this country. Then, in 1950, this immigration work was coupled with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign in the United States tailored to win popular approval for cold war measures sponsored by the CIA, including increased funding for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the emigre political groups in the governments-in-exile program.

These efforts have left a lasting mark on American political life, especially among the United States' large first-generation Slavic and Eastern European immigrant population. Hundreds of thousands of decent people of Central and Eastern European heritage entered this country legally during the 1950s, often at the price of great personal sacrifice. But the measures undertaken by the CIA in connection with NSC 86, NSCID 13, and NSCID 14 led to the infiltration of thousands of Waffen SS veterans and other Nazi collaborators into their communities in the United States at the same time. This in turn laid the foundation for a revival of extremist right-wing political movements inside immigrant communities in this country that continue to be active.

The CIA, and Frank Wisner's clandestine action shop (the OPC) in particular, were never content with the immigration to the United States of a handful of especially valuable assets. The 100 Persons Act was simply too restrictive, Wisner believed. The agency was running international programs involving thousands of foreign agents, with tens of thousands of subagents. Many of these men and women were risking their lives for the modest paychecks they got from the Americans, as he saw it. The promise of free immigration to the United States was crucial in recruiting new overseas help for the CIA and in retaining the loyalty of many persons already on the US payroll.

According to State Department records, Wisner wanted to grant US citizenship as a reward to not just "100 Persons" per year, but to thousands, even tens of thousands of informants, covert operators, guerrillas and agents of influence. Whatever else might be said of Wisner, he was never one to let sticky legal technicalities stand in the way of what he believed to be the best interests of the country. He set out to create a wide variety of both legal and illegal dodges to bring men and women favored by his organization into the country.

This immigration campaign became an integral part of CIA clandestine strategy of the period. The agency manipulated US immigration laws and procedures on behalf of thousands of favored �migr�s, selecting some for entry to this country and rejecting others. While only a fraction of this influx appears to have been Nazis or Nazi collaborators (the true number is impossible to know until the agency opens its files), it is clear that a number of identifiable war criminals were brought to the United States with CIA assistance during this period. Equally important, the security agencies of the government gave tacit support to private refugee relief committees the stated goals of which included assisting thousands of Waffen SS veterans in immigrating to the United States.

Bloodstone had begun this process on a relatively modest scale, with about 250 sponsored immigrants per year. By 1950, however, CIA representatives approached Congress with a plan to authorize special importation of some 15,000 CIA-sponsored refugees per year, in addition to those entering under the Displaced Persons Act and other more conventional immigration channels. They were to be �migr�s "whose presence in the US would be deemed in the national interest," according to Department of State documentation," as a result of the prominent or active part they played in the struggle against Communism." Congress whittled that authorization down to 500 "carefully selected" refugees over a three-year period. Even so, the CIA's professed need for 15,000 annual entrance visas is some measure of its ambitions in this field. �migr�s sponsored under this law came to be known as "2(d)" cases, after the section of the immigration code that provided the legal authorization.

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Congress's refusal to support fully the agency's 15,000-visa-per-year immigration effort was not the final word on the matter. Indeed, the CIA expanded upon the authority it had been granted by the National Security Council under NSC 86 and NSCIDs 13 and 14. If the agency was barred from directly importing 15,000 exiles annually, it reasoned, it could still employ the NSC's top secret authorization to sponsor indirectly many of the same �migr�s through ostensibly private relief organizations...

The private refugee aid groups were closely monitored by the CIA. As a later NSC decision on refugee and defector programs puts it, these programs "contribute to the achievement of US national security objectives both toward Communist-dominated areas and the Free World.... These contracts, under which the [private] agencies are reimbursed only for services actually performed on behalf of escapees, are carefully supervised to assure that they give maximum support to the objectives of the program.''

Yet in several cases Nazi collaborators and sympathizers took control of key aspects of refugee relief agencies serving their nationalities in the United States.

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It is clear today that several of these group and a number individual Vanagi Nazi collaborators enjoyed clandestine US government subsidies from the CIA. This money was laundered through the CIA's Radio Free Europe and Assembly of Captive European Nations channels or through private organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, among others.

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It is evident that the CIA knew that substantial numbers of men and former Nazi collaborators were streaming into this country through organizations that were themselves on the CIA's payroll. Highly competent US intelligence officers followed each twist and turn of these emigre organizations and knew exactly who was linked to which political faction in the old countries. The affairs of Eastern European exiles were, after all, a major focus of the CIA's work at the time. Their relief groups and political organizations were thoroughly infiltrated with agency informers. Indeed, if the CIA did not know what was taking place in the immigration process, that in itself raises serious questions concerning its ability to collect and analyze information from refugee sources.

But nothing was done by the CIA, so far as can be determined, to stop the influx of ex-Nazis and collaborators during the 1950s. If anything, the government subsidies to their organizations actually increased. Some men and women who had once enlisted as agents for the Nazi occupiers of their homelands put their skills back to work as inside sources for the CIA and FBI once they had arrived here. Federal agencies are, of course, unwilling to release the names of their confidential informants, but a 1978 study by the General Accounting Office clearly establishes that working relations between US police agencies and these former Fascists did exist.

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The[US] army command eventually decided that much tighter control would be necessary to ensure