America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (31 page)

By the spring of 1951 the Abramtchik faction had begun to collapse. The few parachutists that had been sent to Byelorussia had been captured or killed. Several turned up at press conferences in Moscow to exhibit the American and British equipment with which they had been supplied and to proclaim themselves as having been Soviet agents all along. The “Special Forces” training school in Germany was later discovered to be riddled with Soviet moles, one of whom had even earned a place on the faculty. Kim Philby, who was kept informed of Wisner’s secret operations, is usually blamed for the defeat of the first waves of Special Forces. An attempt to parachute in Ukrainians with the hope of linking up with partisans who had been left behind failed, prompting a macabre epitaph from Philby: “I do not know what happened to the parties concerned. But I can make an informed guess.”
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In another, highly publicized incident in 1950, Wisner had recruited a force of some 500 Albanians, armed and trained them in Greece, and sent them over the Albanian frontier to depose the Communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. They were met by waiting Communist forces and slaughtered.

After Philby’s connection with the Soviets was discovered, he was charged with betraying to Moscow the plans for the invasion. But it appears that much of the damaging information came to the Soviets not by means of high-level agents such as Philby but through the low-ranking Communist informants who had permeated the émigré community at every level. Since Wisner’s plans centered on the émigrés, it was not surprising that Soviet moles were among his very first volunteers.
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Wisner’s right hand man in charge of émigré affairs for OPC, Carmel Offie, was later discovered to have been a lifelong communist agent. With a Soviet spy in charge of American guerilla warfare against the Soviet Union, it is not surprising which side had the greater number of casualties. Walter Bedell Smith told a class at the Army War College that the “covert agents” that the intelligence agencies were trying to slip into the Soviet Union had an enormous fatality rate. [The exact figure, 98% fatalities was censored out of the original manuscript on the grounds that it might discourage recruitment in the future.]

Philby’s exposure in 1951 as a Communist agent led both the FBI and Wisner to drop the British-sponsored Abramtchik faction and take a new look at Ostrowsky’s group.
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The anticommunist chorus from South River began to sound better and better. The large numbers of Ostrowsky’s people with Nazi backgrounds had once been a source of embarrassment for American intelligence, but they could not expose them without risk of disclosing that Abramtchik’s group was working for Wisner. Now the Ostrowsky faction appeared to be an alternative source of recruitment.

Meanwhile, the FBI decided to do some recruiting of its own. Two agents went to South River to question Emanuel Jasiuk. The agents knew about Jasiuk‘s Nazi background from the CIC complaint to J. Edgar Hoover; what they wanted was information on the Byelorussians in America. Jasiuk agreed to provide it. He described how the Germans had allowed the Byelorussians to form an independent state during the war, but he characterized the government as democratically elected, with a president and a congress. No mention was made of atrocities, and most of the postwar history was concealed. Jasiuk was not sure how much the FBI knew about the Special Forces network behind the Iron Curtain, so he simply denied that his organization had any contacts with Communist countries.

The FBI agents departed, but after reviewing the CIC allegations that Jasiuk had worked for the SS and had submitted lists of anti-Nazi Poles to be executed by the Germans, they returned three days later for a more thorough interrogation. This time, Jasiuk confessed that he had obtained his immigration visa through fraud. He admitted lying to the CIC screening officers when he concealed his background as mayor of Kletsk under the Nazis, because it would have caused him to be deported to the Soviet Union, where he would have been executed as a war criminal. Jasiuk defended his collaboration and that of others with the Nazis on the ground that resistance would have been useless. It should be noticed that the German forces did not coerce people like Jasiuk into service: there were more than enough willing collaborators to be found.

The FBI now had all it needed to arrest Jasiuk for fraud and illegal entry, not to mention deporting him as a quisling and a member of a “movement hostile.” Instead, he was left alone. In return, Jasiuk provided a great deal of information to the bureau about the Byelorussians in America.

In the fall of 1951 the FBI had enough information to confront Jury Sobolewsky, the head of the Ostrowsky network in America.

Sobolewsky admitted that the Byelorussian Central Administration was the same as the Byelorussian Central Council, which had collaborated with the Germans during World War II. He told the FBI that the SS had permitted the government to be formed and said he had served as vice president under Ostrowsky. He admitted that the government had raised sixty-five battalions for a national militia, but he neglected to mention that the battalions were later formed into the Belarus SS Brigade and had fought against the Americans. He described the worldwide network under 0strowsky, with branches in England, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, and Germany, and emphasized that his organization was dedicated to fighting communism.

Again, no attempt was made to arrest Sobolewsky for his Nazi background and war crimes. Instead one of the FBI agents suggested that he register with the Department of Justice to avoid any entanglements with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Sobolewsky took the hint and ordered one of his lieutenants to write to the Attorney General, displaying his anticommunist sentiments and downgrading the wartime collaboration with the Nazis.
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On April 13, 1952, one of Sobolewsky’s aides appeared at FBI headquarters in New York. Confident that he had nothing to fear, the aide provided a complete rundown of the postwar emigration from the DP camps, and even admitted that the BCC had changed its name to the BCR “so that the members could avoid being called war criminals during the time of crisis in Germany.” The FBI not only overlooked this remark but also helped him prepare the information that he would need for the Attorney General so that the Justice Department could protect them under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It was the beginning of a most cooperative relationship: the Byelorussians in South River assisted the FBI in untangling the charges of Soviet penetration permeating the émigré community, while the bureau (and its superiors in the Justice Department) protected the Byelorussians from being prosecuted as war criminals.

Hoover’s decision not to bring the collaborators to court provided him with agents who delivered information on what his rivals in American intelligence were doing. In 1952 the OPC finally dumped the Abramtchik group and began shifting AMCOMLIB’s funding and programs to the Ostrowsky faction. Ostrowsky had moved to London with the approval of the British secret service, where he was working with OPC and the British in a new attempt to penetrate the Iron Curtain. Hoover’s informants started to provide information on AMCOMLIB’s change of strategy. They even discovered that Zarechny (Jasiuk’s old friend Dimitri Kasmowich, the Smolensk police chief) was heading up the military operations in London.

Sobolewsky’s aide petitioned the Justice Department for clearance under the Foreign Agent section of the Internal Security Act of 1950. [In those days, the Justice Department had an entire National Security Division which later became the Internal Security Section of the Criminal Division. As a member of the Criminal Division, I used this long-forgotten unit as my back door to obtain the FBI’s Nazi files without them knowing it, such as the request for the Justice Department to help Soboloewsky’s Nazi front group.] Joseph M. McInerney, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, forwarded Sobolewsky’s request to the FBI to help determine whether the Byelorussians should register as agents of a foreign power. The FBI responded with a sanitized summary of some of its early interviews, showing that the Byelorussians were a truly anticommunist organization with no international connections. Sobolewsky was advised that a problem had arisen, and he subsequently mailed the Justice Department a lengthy report on the Byelorussian struggle for “liberation.” As a result of these letters, McInerney and Charles B. Murray of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department concluded that the Byelorussian group was not in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act because it did not communicate with foreign principals and all major officers were resident in the United States.
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In a sense it was true: those Byelorussian Nazis who mattered, with the exception of Ostrowsky, were now living in America.

Like Frank Wisner, Ostrowsky was never at a loss for ideas. With his organization revived by the transfusion of American funds, he assigned Kasmowich to the task of recruiting volunteers in the United States, Germany, and Britain for a Byelorussian Liberation Movement to cause trouble for the Soviets. Ostrowsky also had a more subtle plan in mind. As a result of their membership in the Gramada in post-World War I Poland, both he and Sobolewsky were acquainted with some of the Communist officials who now ruled the country. In fact, the Byelorussians had hidden a few of their Polish Communist friends during the Nazi occupation. Ostrowsky informed Wisner that some of these men were now high officials in Polish security. Although they were Communists, they were also opposed to Russian imperialism and were willing to cooperate with the West.

Such “black” operations appealed to Wisner. Not long before, he had masterminded a scheme in which scores of Communist Party officials had been discredited in Poland and the Soviet Union itself. Stalin was apparently convinced that a mass defection was taking place within the Communist Party and ordered a sweeping purge. If the reports are correct, Wisner’s disinformation campaign resulted in the liquidation of several thousand Party members who were falsely denounced for collaborating with Western intelligence.

Wisner saw in Ostrowsky’s proposal a chance to penetrate deep into Communist territory by organizing a string of double agents who would feed false information to the Communists while alerting the OPC to Stalin’s moves. Millions of dollars in gold, bank notes, arms, and equipment were smuggled into Poland. Wisner believed it was important to establish the bona fides of his double agents by giving them valuable secret information. Once these agents were accepted by the Communists the pipeline could be reversed. Within a few months dozens and then hundreds of Polish agents were reporting back to Wisner.

The Polish “double agent” operation was in fact a scheme concocted by the KGB, the latest incarnation of the Soviet security apparatus. Wisner’s double agents were actually Communist triple agents. They had been using Ostrowsky’s men to identify the real traitors among them.
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The lists of anti-communists were sent to Moscow almost as soon as they were transmitted to Washington and London. Several of the leading agents were “turned around,” and more and more money and supplies were demanded for spy networks that were only a fiction created by the KGB. Wisner fell for it. Millions of dollars and an untold number of agents were dispatched before the Communists decided to roll up the operation. Ostrowsky’s friends in Polish security helped direct the roundup of American- and British-funded agents in Poland. When the arrests were completed in 1952, nearly every important anticommunist contact with the West had been seized. For the first time, Wisner realized that his émigré agents had been thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets.

Angry at the loss of AMCOMLIB funding, the Abramtchik faction chose this moment to strike back. In 1953 an article was published in a Byelorussian-language newspaper in Germany attacking Kasmowich, Ostrowsky’s military coordinator. Kasmowich was described as a former Communist official, a major Nazi collaborator, and now an employee of the British secret service. His cover blown, Kasmowich fell into a depression and began drinking heavily. One night he returned drunk to the apartment he and Ostrowsky shared, and was ordered not only from the premises but out of the Byelorussian Liberation Movement as well. Kasmowich refused to be dropped, and started proselytizing for public support. The few surviving operations in Poland and Byelorussia were threatened by the continuing factional rivalry.

Wisner’s rivals in CIA/OSO and military intelligence were quick to criticize his failure. By 1954 he had spent, conservatively, tens of millions of dollars in an utterly fruitless effort to destroy the Communists from within. In fact, his reckless activities may have destroyed any hope of ever building an effective anticommunist intelligence network in Eastern Europe. One after another his “underground armies” had been eliminated, along with the innocent citizens who had helped them.

Wisner’s deputy for certain Eastern European operations candidly admitted that OPC, like the other intelligence services, had recruited a number of ex-Nazi intelligence agents, and had engaged in a series of “political action” programs against regimes behind the Iron Curtain. Faced with a series of defeats, Wisner’s deputy had in 1952 presented Allen Dulles with a lengthy memorandum criticizing these programs as reckless. He visited Dulles at his home in Georgetown and explained that, as each program grew in size, the risk of Communist penetration had increased proportionately, leading inevitably to the disasters which had occurred, and which would occur in the future unless the programs were scaled down. Dulles and he debated throughout the day, with the result that Dulles persuaded him to water down his appraisal. Soon afterwards, he resigned from OPC.

Other CIA and OPC officials confirmed that both Wisner and Dulles had been repeatedly warned that these grandiose programs were doomed to failure, but the advice was ignored. One official, who knew Wisner well, suggested that Wisner, Dulles, and the other OSS veterans were captives of a “guerrilla war” mentality – it was difficult for them to see that what had worked so well in France during World War II might not be applicable in Eastern Europe. Another official suggested that one effect of the McCarthy purges was to pressure the intelligence community to “do something, anything” about the Communist takeovers while at the same time making it politically unsafe to use any but the most right-wing groups to fight the Communists. The example was given of a senior OPC official in Germany who was hounded out of the government for alleged left-wing sympathies.