America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (24 page)

Although there was some resistance to a suggestion by Allen Dulles that Wisner be named to head OPC – William R. Corson states that military intelligence regarded him as “another Donovan who’ll run away with the ball” – he had strong backing.
⁹⁰
Forrestal supported him, and so did General Edwin L. Sibert – Gehlen’s original sponsor – who was a deputy director of Central Intelligence, as well as General Clay and the Dulles brothers. Each of these men was sympathetic to Wisner’s desire to create a “standby” force to carry out guerrilla warfare in case of a war with the Soviet Union. The underlying goal was to destabilize each of the Eastern European states in an undeclared war. In fact, the State Department had drawn up a plan to overthrow the governments of several Eastern European countries.
⁹¹

In the early days of OPC, Wisner projected an air of affability and optimism. A man of independent means – he could afford to leave his uncashed salary checks in his office desk for a year – he lived well and entertained lavishly. His critics say that the real source of his income was the million dollars that he and his Albanian fascist friends stole form the Embassy and buried on Wisner’s country farm in Maryland. He and his wife, Polly, knew everyone in Washington who counted, and at their parties one might meet James Reston and Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
; George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, the State Department’s Soviet experts; the journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop; Randolph Churchill; and British editor (and former intelligence agent) Malcolm Muggeridge.
⁹²
Although Wisner drank regularly and heavily, no one ever saw him drunk. And despite his active social life he was a hard worker, sparing neither himself nor his staff. Wisner was obsessed by an anticommunism that he had developed in the Balkans and postwar Germany, and it was the driving force behind the OPC. Of course, there was always the underlying motive or regaining American financial investments in Eastern Europe and Russia. Wisner threw off ideas for rolling back the Soviet empire – some good, others wildly impractical – like a human pinwheel.

Wisner established OPC in the temporary buildings near the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool and recruited a staff of what Stewart Alsop called “Bold Easterners” and less-admiring observers described as “Ivy League dilettantes.”
⁹³
They included Kermit Roosevelt, Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald, Richard Bissell, and Cord Meyer, Jr. The OPC, wrote William Colby, who later became Director of Central Intelligence, operated “in the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templar, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness – and from war.”
⁹⁴
[Overlooked at the time was that these particular Knights had once invested in both Hitler and Stalin. The true mission of OPC, once suspects, was to spare themselves and their financial allies from indictment of collaboration with the enemy. As we shall see, Wisner’s real masters were the Dulles brothers, lawyers for the Robber Barons]

By the summer of 1948, when Wisner flew to Germany, circumstances had combined to permit him to lay the groundwork for a unique intelligence operation. The presidential election was approaching, and Wisner, a dedicated Republican, was looking forward to a Dewey victory over Truman. This would mean that his program for funding underground guerrilla movements would soon be implemented. It also meant that he would no longer have to conceal his plans from the rest of the American intelligence community, which floundered about in various stages of disarray. As far as Wisner was concerned, the CIA under Hillenkoetter was “a bunch of old washerwomen exchanging gossip while they rinse through the dirty linen.”
⁹⁵

Wisner explained his plan to re-create the SS underground networks in Eastern Europe, Byelorussia and the Ukraine to General Clay in several lengthy meetings.
⁹⁶
Once these networks were revived, they could be used to cache supplies of arms and equipment for his “Special Forces.” Soon, Wisner believed, the Soviet Union would begin to disintegrate from internal rebellions, rebellions which he intended to assist and, if necessary, instigate. It was only a matter of time before the Western powers became involved in war, and then Wisner’s underground armies would play a major role in helping to overthrow the Soviet empire.

Of course, Wisner added, it would take several years for the plans to come to fruition – probably not until the 1950s – but it was necessary to begin preparation immediately. He knew that many of the people he wished to recruit were still being hunted because of their pro-Nazi activities and they had to be protected. The CIC, at the direction of Congress, was about to launch a major campaign to prevent Nazi war criminals from emigrating to the United States. It was important that the CIC not obstruct Wisner’s training program which, for reasons of secrecy would have to take place mostly in America.

With the leading Nazi collaborators in New York, safe from the prying eyes of other intelligence agencies (not to mention Soviet war crimes investigators), Wisner would be free not only to have his Nazi politicians recruit commando units to guide western forces in any future invasion of Russia, but he could also establish entire “governments-in-exile” to assist with the occupation. Although President Truman had never sanctioned this extension of OPC’s charter, Wisner and General Clay were confident that Dewey’s election would guarantee their freedom of operation. After all, the Dulles brothers were key figures in the Republican election campaign and they were the most ardent supporters of OPC‘s political action program.
[7]
But until the defeat of Truman, it was essential that the Byelorussian Nazis and the other collaborators hiding in Clay’s refugee camps remain protected.

New EEI’s (Expected Elements of Information) were drawn up by Clay’s intelligence staff and forwarded to the field. [EEI’s were the Headquarters’ blueprint for espionage priorities] The EEI’s for Byelorussia and the Ukraine were so sensitive that they were not published even in the Top Secret CIC Consolidated Orientation and Guidance Manual, but were issued directly to the commanders in a special memorandum. The effect was immediately apparent. A special team of CIC agents had been working in West Germany to confirm Hitler’s death by interviewing his bodyguards and chauffeurs, many of whom had gone underground in the Displaced Persons camps. When the CIC team went into the Byelorussian camps to round them up for questioning, however, they were quickly ordered to withdraw and were told that the persons they were seeking would not be found there. Instead, the CIC was ordered quietly to collect all intelligence on the political activities of the Byelorussian refugees and their links with other intelligence agencies. No mention was made of prosecuting the ex-Nazis, only of observing them. [A similar “do not arrest” order was issued for the Ukrainian Nazis, as we shall see.]

Apparently the CIC‘s analysts were disgruntled by the hands-off treatment given the Byelorussians. In their Top Secret Consolidated Orientation and Guidance Manual for 1948, they devoted a special chapter to the Byelorussian Nazi underground that was encyclopedic in its thoroughness. More than a hundred Byelorussian leaders were identified by their wartime services to the Nazis, present status in the DP camps, and relationship to the various Byelorussian factions. Virtually the entire Nazi puppet government was identified, and the CIC made it clear that every one of the factions had collaborated with the Nazis. Their claims to be leaders of a legitimate nationalist political movement were plainly without foundation, for, as the Manual pointed out:

To ease occupational problems and to take advantage of native nationalist feeling, the Germans created the puppet state of White Russia during their invasion…. When the Red Army threatened to reoccupy the country in 1944, the puppet government moved to Berlin and continued its activity as a government in exile. The Germans, in the meantime, put their agents into the Central Rada [Council].

With an extra twist of the knife, the CIC listed the Byelorussian collaborators by atrocity as well as by the other classifications. Massacre after massacre was linked to the residents of the Byelorussian DP camps who, despite their war crimes, now seemed to lead a charmed existence.
⁹⁷

Nevertheless, Wisner’s plans for a “standby” guerrilla movement were proceeding smoothly. General Clay, the most powerful American in Europe, was on his side, and he had neutralized the troublesome CIC by making it a part of the program. Now Wisner began recruitment of his OPC paramilitary force. The old SSU had already established intelligence operations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine, and had even made brief contact with the Byelorussians. Wisner’s program was more comprehensive, and less susceptible to exposure by the CIA, which was at that time actively assisting with the prosecution of war criminals at Nuremberg. Wisner’s staff contacted each of the German intelligence chiefs who had worked with the émigrés during the war. It was not hard to find them: Hilger had given his State Department friends a great deal of information, and most of the key Nazis were already working for the Americans at Gehlen’s secret base in Pullach, where Wisner now went to visit him. This elaborate new headquarters, built in 1938 as a large housing development for SS officers and their families, had been converted into a sort of fortress at a cost to the United States of $3 million. The Gehlen Organization left Oberursel near Frankfurt and moved into Pullach in the second week of December 1947, prepared to continue its espionage activities against the Soviet Union, now backed by substantial American financial aid.
[8]

[
1
] According to a recent interview with a senior CIA official, the Gehlen organization was not completely relinquished by the Pentagon until 1949.

[
2
] Although the American military government tried to crack down on the black market, military intelligence also subsidized it by paying its informants in cigarettes and other hard-to-get goods. Gehlen augmented his cash subsidies from the Americans by taking payment for his own network of informants in cigarettes and cocoa, which he sold on the black market. There was a rumor that the Americans had given him the Lucky Strike cigarette concession as a permanent subsidy for his organization, but it does not appear true.

Communists were also infiltrating these large, disorganized communities of refugees and establishing intelligence collection networks. Operation Tobacco was only the first of many sweeps in which the CIC investigators picked up Soviet agents who had been identified by Gehlen’s organization.

The CIC was unhappy with Gehlen’s prowess, however. Not only did he make their own efforts seem ineffective, but to their credit, CIC officers deduced that much of Gehlen’s information could have been planted by the MVD, the latest version of the Soviet state security apparatus. The CIC had secretly photocopied the entire secret archives of the communist membership of East Germany, and knew that many of Gehlen’s informants were selling information to both sides. Many years later, Gehlen’s right hand man, Heinz Felfe, who was in charge of anti-Soviet intelligence, turned out to be a Soviet spy. All of Gehlen’s amazing information about Soviet strengths, weaknesses and war plans turned out to be a fiction made up in Moscow.

[
3
] Batishevic emigrated to the United States shortly thereafter.

[
4
] This letter was recently discovered in Stankievich’s “blue” (sensitive) file at Fort Meade, along with his confession and other incriminating documents. It is listed under “Stanislav Stankievic, date of birth, 23 February 07, File No. AE5296:75.”

[
5
] During the war, Rockefeller foreshadowed the anticommunist policies of the Cold War by cozying up to dictatorial regimes in Latin America. Niccolo Tucci, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Latin American Research, resigned because of this, asking Secretary of State Cordell Hull to abolish his bureau. “My bureau was supposed to undo the Nazi and fascist propaganda in South America and Rockefeller was inviting the worst fascists and Nazis to Washington.” Tucci took his objections to Rockefeller and was told: “ ‘Everybody is useful and we’re going to convert these people to friendliness to the United States.’ And then, Rockefeller’s lawyer Larry Levy said to me, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll buy those people’ ” (Peter Collier and David Horowitz,
The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty
. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976, p. 236).

[
6
] Recently, Marc Truitt, a graduate student working on his doctoral dissertation in Albanian history, came across references to State’s Top Secret plans for the overthrow of the Communist regime in that country. The documents that he discovered at the National Archives plainly establish the role of the Policy and Planning Staff in recruiting a network of Albanian anti-communists, principally from among those who had previously been denied visas as Nazi collaborators and war criminals. In 1948, Robert Joyce arranged for one such person to be brought to the United States “outside of the regular visa division” channels. In arranging this patently illegal transaction, Joyce laconically explained that “our friends” had determined that the person was of interest to the national security. From subsequent documents, the identity of the Nazi’s friends became clear. He and his fellow collaborators were later placed in charge of an OPC front group in New York, and began recruiting agents for OPC‘s abortive invasion of Albania.

[
7
] One retired CIA official said that the Dulles brothers were “fanatical” adherents of covert liberation programs. Another, who visited with John Foster Dulles during the Dewey campaign, described the OPC Cold War mentality as almost “surrealistic,” and inexplicable outside of the context of the times.