America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (34 page)

The simple truth appears to be that bureaucratic incompetence and institutional inefficiency, unable to discern or penetrate the deliberate and elaborate fraud being perpetrated, enabled hundreds of ineligible applicants to obtain citizenship. For instance, the Army, in a request to the CIA for information on Kushel, noted that “he surrendered to the Germans,” suggesting that Kushel was an anti-Nazi.
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If the inquiry was sincere, it illustrates the Pentagon’s inability to extract information it already possessed from the intelligence archives of the various military services, which had thick dossiers on SS General Kushel. Perhaps the Army was testing to see how much the CIA knew about the Byelorussians. It is fair to say that, after a comparison of the Top Secret archives of multiple agencies, the CIA was the most unwitting intelligence unit in America, at least when it came to Byelorussia.

It is possible that not even OPC or Justice knew the extent to which the members of the Belarus network conspired to help each other obtain citizenship. Jasiuk once told immigration officials that while he was mayor of Stolpce, he had secretly resisted the Germans and helped save the life of a Jewish doctor named Greenberg. The story sounded so convincing that it was used by another Byelorussian, who did not even bother to change the name of the town or the name of the doctor. The two stories were solemnly sworn to by many of the same South River “character witnesses,” yet the Immigration Service apparently never caught on.

Assured of their security, the enclaves of Byelorussian collaborators settled down in their new country. But they refused to give up the dream of returning to Byelorussia in triumph to revenge themselves upon the Soviets. In cellars and suitcases all across America the Belarus network had hidden the records of their wartime regime. They had smuggled their entire archives into the United States: everything from unit rosters of the Belarus Brigade to the minutes of the meetings of the Nazi puppet government. They had even brought some of the captured files that they had located for the SS as the Einsatzgruppen swept through Minsk. It may have been reckless to keep so many incriminating documents, but the Byelorussians would not part with these talismans.
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They were all that was left of their years of power under the Third Reich.

Many years later, I sent an enterprising young French Jew, posing as a French Catholic, to interview the surviving “heroes” of the Belarus. They proudly dragged out file folders and photo catalogs of themselves, even in Nazi regalia. Apparently, they had no fear of being checked or searched at Ellis Island.

[
1
] The State Department organized “national committees for liberation” for each Eastern European ethnic group, recruiting officials from the exile governments that Gustav Hilger had worked with in Berlin and bringing them to the United States (e.g., Top Secret State Department Decimal File for Albania, Declassified Diplomatic Branch of the National Archives). Money for these committees came from the “Governments-in-Exile” sections of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.

[
2
] The Americans had begun to suspect Philby before the British, when it was noticed that projects with which he was associated had a tendency to blow up. Believing that the CIA was on Donald Maclean’s trail rather than his own, Philby tipped him off, and Maclean and Guy Burgess, another mole, fled to the Soviet Union. After questioning, Philby was dismissed from the SIS, but conclusive evidence that he was a Soviet spy did not turn up until 1963. Philby got wind of it and defected to the Soviet Union. Another version of the story is that wiretaps on the British embassy strongly implicated Philby, but before conclusive evidence had been gathered, the CIA demanded in 1951 that the SIS recall him. Philby bluffed his British superiors with the admission that of course he had been giving information to the Soviets, he had been posing as a double agent for several years, with the full knowledge of the SIS. The British were convinced that their bumbling American cousins had made a mistake, and continued to employ Philby as an SIS agent in Turkey until, to their chagrin, he showed up at a 1963 press conference in Moscow. Philby probably did more damage to British-American intelligence relations after he came under suspicion than he ever achieved while his cover was still secure. Interview with Military Intelligence official, 1980.

[
3
] An ex-Army sergeant named Henry A. Kissinger was one of the ORO consultants. Kissinger had served with the 970th CIC unit in Germany, where his specialty was identifying Gestapo and SS officers hiding out among the civilian population. Another ORO consultant was Erich Waldmann, formerly Gehlen’s liaison to the Army.

[
4
]Adamovitch was not an ordinary journalist who merely kept his job on a newspaper when the Nazis overran his homeland. Eventually he rose to become a member of the Presidium, the ruling body of the Byelorussian government-in-exile in Berlin in 1944-45. This is the group that authorized the organization of the Belarus SS Brigade (Ivan Kosiak, For the National Independence of Byelorussia (Byelorussian language publication), Ukrainian Press, London, copy in the National Archives).

[
5
] The Belarus usually vacationed together at a hotel owned by a fellow Byelorussian, the Bel-Air Minsk in Glen Spey, New York.

[
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]Ostrowsky followed a similar line in a letter to the editor of the New York Times from San Martin, Argentina that was published on October 13, 1951. He discussed the long history of Byelorussia’s fight for independence from Russia and pointed out that such a declaration had been made by the Second National Byelorussian Congress in 1944. “The Byelorussian home guard was fighting against the invasion of the Soviet armies at this time,” he added. Ostrowsky signed the letter as “President, Byelorussian Central Council.” The Times made no mention of the Nazi background of Ostrowsky or his government. It should be noted that the New York Times used its overseas bureaus as a cover for OPC. In fact, the Rome Bureau Chief for the Times had been a German Army Officer and translator for the top Nazi war criminal in Italy.

[
7
] Vakar drew heavily on material collected by Harvard University’s Institute for Russian Research.

[
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] When Richard Nixon was a naval officer, he was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to review captured German financial documents, some of which, according to legend,involved the Dulles brothers and their clients. The Dulles brothers promptly financed Nixon’s first run for Congress and then prevailed upon Eisenhower to take him on as Vice President. Australian intelligence records confirmed that President Nixon used the eastern European Nazi vote as his ethnic counterweight to the Jewish vote for the Democrats in five key states. This story is developed in some detail in J. Loftus and M. Aarons,
The Secret War Against the Jews
.

9

Under the Eisenhower administration, the CIA/OPC’s covert activities expanded rapidly. After the end of the Korean War in 1953, the perception of the Soviet threat shifted from the military to the political, and there was a consequent increase in covert operations. Allen Dulles played a major part in defining this role. Dulles’s wartime experience in the OSS had been on the operational side of intelligence, and his fascination with undercover work persisted. Rolling back communism became the central theme of CIA operations, and Wisner’s shop scored successes against nationalist governments, as well: the overthrow of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the coup against President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala a year later. Neither of them were communists, but their replacement was deemed necessary by Dulles corporate clients.

These achievements gave the CIA and the administration a sense of confidence and set the stage for future developments. Ever since the “Anti-Communist Manifesto” of the Doolittle report, the intelligence community had been waiting for a signal to begin making serious trouble for the Soviet Union, especially in the occupied countries of Eastern Europe. Finally, on March 12, 1955, the National Security Council issued a directive to the CIA, entitled NSC 5412/1, which at last authorized Wisner to declare guerrilla war against the Communists:

In accordance with established policies, and to the extent practicable in areas dominated or threatened by international communism, develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations….

Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, political action, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups; support of indigenous and anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world; deception plans and operations and all compatible activities necessary to accomplish the foregoing.
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Of course the Constitution says only Congress has the power to declare war, but the little trifle did not stop OPC. Armed with this mandate, Wisner determined to take “preventive direct action” against a number of Communist-bloc nations that he believed were ripe for revolt. He authorized an operation designed to incite simultaneous revolts against Soviet authority in each of the major cities of Eastern Europe, which were to be followed by a civil war among the ethnic and religious minorities within the Soviet Union. Once the revolt had erupted, underground cells were to seize the government buildings and radio, and call for the people to rise up. Within hours, Wisner’s “liberation armies” would be dropped in to attack the scattered Soviet garrisons.
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Roads, bridges, and rail lines would be blown up or blocked to prevent the movement of Russian reinforcements. After the Soviets had been sufficiently weakened, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops would be dispatched as a peacekeeping force, with the declaration that they would remain only long enough to restore order and conduct the democratic elections that Stalin had promised at Yalta in 1945.

Wisner began pouring millions of dollars into training dissident Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Byelorussians, Latvians, and Romanians to be the spearhead of the operation. Underground resistance networks were to be reestablished, training areas and bases for guerrilla bands opened on the periphery of the Iron Curtain, and arms caches built up. A few years before, as relations with the Russians soured, President Truman had ordered a study prepared for an invasion of the Soviet Union. A review of the study shows that invasion routes had been planned and a timetable set for the early 1950s. Wisner’s plan to use proxy underground armies of ex-Nazis was in a sense more sophisticated than Truman’s, which relied heavily on the use of American combat forces to capture strategic targets long enough for the anticipated revolts to gain momentum. Nevertheless, Wisner’s plan was romantic and absurdly impractical. In order for it to have any chance for success two elements were indispensable: complete secrecy in preparation and complete coordination of attack. Not only would Wisner have to train, arm, and equip resistance forces in secret, but he would need to orchestrate each of the internal rebellions so they would culminate at the same time. And secrecy had already been lost, for Gehlen’s organization – which would supply the core of the groups being recruited – had been penetrated by Communist agents who reported to Moscow every facet of the plan.

For example, Gehlen’s liaison to NATO headquarters, Heinz Felfe, turned out to be a Soviet mole. A ranking Pentagon official who personally briefed Felfe acknowledged in a recent interview that there was not a secret in the entire NATO archives to which Felfe did not have access, including the plans for Wisner’s operation.
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Felfe had been brought to the United States for consultation, but because of his Nazi past he could not be issued a regular visa. This was no obstacle for Wisner. According to Felfe’s “blue file” at Fort Meade, a false background was created for him and he was issued false documentation. Felfe’s KGB controllers must have been amused at the efforts made by Wisner to circumvent the laws of his own country to smuggle a Soviet mole into the United States.

The blame for the tragic dénouement of the plan should not rest with Wisner alone. During the Eisenhower administration, “no direct action covert operations were initiated without prior White House approval,” according to a high-ranking CIA officer.
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The President himself had difficulty in presenting cover stories to the press and generally preferred not to know about Wisner’s cover operations.
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Instead, a special group, the Operations Coordination Board – which came to be known as the “Twenty Committee” – was created to oversee these operations and to serve as a “circuit breaker” so that the President could disavow direct knowledge of such activities. In 1954 Nelson Rockefeller succeeded C. D. Jackson, a former Time, Inc. executive, as “super-coordinator” for clandestine intelligence operations, with the title of Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Strategy. Rockefeller must have known of Wisner’s plan, for he received a “family jewels” briefing from Dulles and Wisner apprising him of all covert operations run by the OPC. Moreover, as a confirmed Cold Warrior, he had previously allowed the Rockefeller Fund to serve as a conduit for OPC money. And of course, Rockefeller had all those troubling Nazi investments lurking in his past. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war was treason, and the Rockefellers were arguably the most guilty of all the American families who financed Hitler.