The Nazis Next Door (20 page)

Together, Fier and DeVito formed a rogue two-man cabal intent on tracking down evidence against Soobzokov. With DeVito’s help, Fier redoubled his efforts, looking for more witnesses and more documents. They knew they would face resistance. They just didn’t realize it would come from the agency that had secretly hired Soobzokov two decades earlier: the CIA.

Even as the two investigators were trying to build their case, the CIA was growing more and more nervous about the notoriety surrounding their onetime spy. The agency’s dossier on Soobzokov was even thicker than the FBI’s, and the spy chiefs at Langley had even more to lose if Fier and DeVito were to expose their years of clandestine dealings with him. For months, the CIA kept a secret running account of the growing public tumult surrounding their old agent, Tom “Nostril” Soobzokov. “We’re hoping this will all blow over,”
one secret memo advised in 1974, after his name first surfaced publicly as the target of a Nazi investigation. The charges, one CIA official suggested, “stem from recent hysteria which appeared in U.S. press over congressional concern over number of former war criminals now living in U.S.” But instead of blowing over as the CIA had hoped, the “hysteria” only intensified, and another secret memo a few months later—titled “Latest Development in the NOSTRIL case:
An Approach by a Journalist”—warned that the accusations were “cutting closer to home” for the CIA.

A local reporter had come knocking on Soobzokov’s door in Paterson to ask him whether it was true that he had been a spy for the CIA in the Middle East two decades earlier. Soobzokov kept quiet, but the agency was alarmed to hear that the reporter was asking him—by name—about two agency operatives that he had contacted during his botched trip to Beirut in 1957. One of them was still working undercover seventeen years later. CIA officials feared the agent might be in danger, as they tried to shut down the leaks about Soobzokov. Then came another newspaper report in New Jersey suggesting that an unnamed Washington agency—it could only be read as the CIA—seemed to be protecting Soobzokov for reasons that were still a mystery. There were more questions arising publicly almost by the day.

With every turn in the case, the CIA was being drawn deeper into the muck, and its ex-agent was growing more nervous as well. Each new mention of his name in the press brought another frantic call from Soobzokov to the CIA. His old handler, John Grunz, reluctantly took the calls. He needed help, Soobzokov told Grunz in one call after another. He needed protection. The investigators, the reporters, even a member of Congress—they were all coming after him now.

For all his pleas, the CIA wanted nothing to do with him. Grunz let Soobzokov know that he was on his own. His continued contacts with the agency, he warned, would only end up hurting Soobzokov. Privately, Grunz and his CIA colleagues worried that Soobzokov was getting ready to “pinch” them for money
—a demand for a payoff in exchange for his silence about his covert work with the agency. But even if the CIA could keep Soobzokov quiet, officials there saw little hope of silencing his growing phalanx of accusers in New Jersey, immigrants who seemed to know all too much about his checkered history in Europe. “He has certainly made plenty of enemies
over the years,” one CIA memo observed, “and Circassians do tend to run toward the long nursing of secret grievances and grudges.”

Inside the CIA, the Soobzokov affair was now threatening to become a major political disaster for the agency at a time when it was already facing unparalleled scrutiny from Congress over its role in domestic spying and foreign assassinations. DeVito had helped persuade federal prosecutors to take a closer look at the case, and the Justice Department in Newark was now formally asking the CIA for any “derogatory” information it had on Soobzokov. If he really had been an agent for the CIA, as DeVito suspected, he wanted to find out what the spy agency knew of its agent’s Nazi past that might buttress the case against him.

With the Justice Department asking for help, the CIA did what it had done many times before when facing Nazi accusations against one of its own: it closed ranks.

The CIA had plenty of derogatory information on Soobzokov, of course. Its files were crammed with his own admissions years earlier about his role in rounding up Jews and Communists during the war, taking part in the execution of supposed resisters, and spying for the Nazis on his fellow countrymen. Soobzokov was implicated in “minor war crimes,” the CIA’s analysts had concluded, and the “incorrigible fabricator” had concocted so many lies about his wartime record that the agency finally cut ties with him altogether in 1960. Fifteen years later, CIA officials saw all this and more spelled out in their own files. But they could not afford to reveal any of that to DeVito and the federal prosecutors. So when it came time to respond to the Justice Department’s formal request for information in 1975, the CIA wrote flatly: “A thorough review of the Subject’s file does not reveal any evidence of a derogatory nature concerning him . . . We have no evidence that Subject was involved in war crimes
during his work for the German Army or at any other time.”

One CIA official told a federal prosecutor bluntly not to expect any help from the spy agency. The Justice Department had waded in over its head in its investigation and should let it die, the CIA official told the prosecutor. “The greater good,” he said, “is you guys oughtta back off. You don’t understand these things.”

The CIA’s whitewashing of Soobzokov’s file set back prosecutors’ hopes for bringing a case against him. But the spy agency couldn’t kill the story altogether. Soobzokov was already a notorious figure in northern New Jersey, but in 1977, his notoriety went national. He was one of a handful of suspected Nazis profiled in a book called
Wanted!: The Search for Nazis in America
, written by a
Village Voice
writer named Howard Blum. Young and ambitious, Blum had no particular interest in the Holocaust; he was simply looking for a compelling story that might make him the next Norman Mailer. He found it in the Nazis. There had been dozens of stories written since the war about accused Nazis in America, most of them little noticed or long forgotten, but Blum’s book, written in a suspenseful style and an outraged tone—from its sensational title on through its dramatic narrative—captured an audience like none before it. It became a huge bestseller, and Tom Soobzokov’s infamy grew with it.

Nazis in America were suddenly a hot topic. Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, the newly formed news duo on PBS television, devoted a whole segment to it on February 1, 1977. Blum, the twenty-six-year-old author, appeared on the show, talking about all the accused war criminals—143, by the INS’s running count—who were still living freely in the United States. Tony DeVito was interviewed too, talking about the government’s “cover-up” of the shameful saga. And there onscreen in the middle of it all, angry and unapologetic, was the former CIA spy and current Passaic County chief purchasing officer, Tom Soobzokov. Other men might have shied from the spotlight, but that was not Soobzokov’s way. He would tell anyone who wanted to know—Robert MacNeil, Tony DeVito, Howard Blum, President Carter himself if he asked: he was innocent.

The charges in the book were “absolutely false,”
Soobzokov told MacNeil. “I can say it openly and irrevocably.”

MacNeil tried to pin down some of the basics of Soobzokov’s history. There was a document recovered in Berlin showing that Soobzokov was a second lieutenant in the Waffen SS. “Is that not true?” MacNeil asked.

“Let me put it this way,” Soobzokov began, his Slavic accent as thick as the day he came to America twenty-two years before. “I wore that uniform but I never was any official. I never was in any service by the so-called Waffen SS . . . I never executed any orders . . . I never participated in any form or shape with the SS.”

“But you did wear the uniform, you say?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why was that?”

“In order to save myself and about thirty-five or forty other people . . . refugees who were hiding from the Germans and the advancing Soviet troops.”

“Were you employed by the CIA after the war?” MacNeil asked the ex-agency spy.

“No, sir.”

“You were not.”

“No, sir.”

The lies were now leaving Soobzokov’s lips almost as fast as MacNeil could pose the questions. Some of his assertions came straight from the script of his life that he had written years earlier to keep track of all the different stories he had told his CIA interrogators. Some of the other claims he was airing for the first time, seemingly making them up on the fly.

So, MacNeil asked, was Soobzokov denying having served with the German forces in Europe or rounded up people for the Nazis, as Blum’s book suggested?

“I had to laugh when I saw that,” Soobzokov said. “I supposedly was rounding up the Communists and Jews. For the information of that young man who wrote that book, in our territory there was no Jews whatsoever.” The Jews, he said, lived a few hundred miles away in a separate colony in the Caucasus, and no one ever harmed them. “They were saved like as in heaven,” he said. “They never were our enemies.”

It was a striking claim, and easily exposed as false. In Krasnodar and the North Caucasus, the Nazis and their local collaborators had killed thousands of Jews and Communists. Jews were gassed in roaming death vans, shot, hanged, or set afire in some of the worst massacres in any Nazi-controlled region in Europe. Yet the region, by Soobzokov’s telling, was a safe haven for the Jews; a sanctuary where the Jews were “saved like as in heaven.”

The denials struck Blum as ludicrous. He had spoken with Soobzokov for his book, and the old man’s assertions seemed as thin now as they did then. But as he listened, Blum was struck by one surprising admission that Soobzokov had made. “I think tonight is the first time that I’ve ever heard Mr. Soobzokov say that he was in an SS uniform, that he even wore it,” Blum told MacNeil. “What I’ve read in the papers, and what he told me when I interviewed him, he confirmed the report that he was a semi-forced laborer, a transportation worker.”

It was indeed a puzzling moment. On national television, Soobzokov was admitting that he had worn the Nazi uniform as his accusers in Paterson had long charged. This was not the only surprise from Soobzokov on the show. That very night, his Long Island lawyer announced on the air, Soobzokov was filing a $10 million libel suit in federal court against Howard Blum, Tony DeVito, and the publishers of
Wanted!
for falsely accusing him of being a Nazi. Soobzokov was determined to put the American justice system to full use, and he vowed that the truth would come out.

For one inveterate reporter, the burst of publicity surrounding Blum’s book was a moment of vindication. For years, Chuck Allen had been warning that there were “Nazi war criminals in our midst,” and now, belatedly, the country seemed to be catching on. But
Wanted!
was also a source of some understandable resentment for Allen, a reporter who loved scooping the competition, even if no one noticed. He had spent years in obscurity chasing Hitler’s men, and now a young kid from the
Village Voice
was reaping the fruits of his labor with a splashy bestseller. Allen felt he deserved more credit than he was getting for his groundbreaking work years before. In his view,
Wanted!
was a shoddy product,
without the kind of documentation he favored in his own work. Miffed by all the publicity the book was generating, Allen wanted the chance to get back in the Nazi hunt with another big story. He found it in Tom Soobzokov.

On a sweltering September day in New York City, Allen walked into a gothic mansion
in Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a much-anticipated meeting. At the grand offices of the Soviet Consulate in New York, he sat down with Valentin Kamenev, a top official there, to talk about Tom Soobzokov. Months before, with publicity swelling over the accusations against Soobzokov, Allen had put a series of written questions to the Russians about what was known of Soobzokov’s wartime record during the Nazi occupation. He was hoping to find records that might bolster the accounts of the Circassian witnesses in New Jersey. It would be another two years before the U.S. government reached a deal with the Russians to get access to their wartime records on the Nazis, but Allen already realized that behind the Iron Curtain lay a trove of documents and eyewitness accounts on Nazi atrocities in the Baltics. Many of the worst war crimes had occurred in the region. The Russians had long accused the United States of going easy on Nazi collaborators, and so they were eager to help Allen in his research.

At their half-hour meeting, Kamenev gave Allen a thick stack of Soviet documents detailing Nazi atrocities and wide-scale killings in the North Caucasus, including the notorious massacres at Krasnodar in 1942. The documents certainly looked authentic. Among the cache: eighteen sworn affidavits given after the war by Russian eyewitnesses, many of them placing Nazi officer Tscherim Soobzokov at the scene of the killings. One of the affidavits was from Soobzokov’s own father-in-law in Russia. Another was from his nephew, Yahkia Mosovitch Soobzokov, who testified that he last saw his uncle retreating with the Nazi troops in early 1943. “He still wore his German uniform
at the time,” the nephew testified.

Allen left the Russian Consulate with the documents in his hand and a bounce in his step. He’d found what he’d set out to find. As he walked out onto Ninety-First Street, he noticed a large blue van that appeared to be parked with a strategic view of the consulate’s entrance. Allen had been through this cat-and-mouse routine with the FBI enough times the last few years to be suspicious. He jotted down the license plate—New York tag number 474-FZJ, which he later traced to an “unlisted federal agency.” Peering in the front window, he saw a young man slumped in the driver’s seat, apparently asleep. Allen tapped on the window. “You can wake up now,”
he said amusedly.

That night, Allen began contacting the major newspapers in New Jersey to tip them off to the documents he had obtained. “Soviets Provide Data
on Suspected Ex-Nazi,” the front-page headline in the
Star-Ledger
declared. Local reporters who had followed the case for four years speculated: Would this be enough to get the Justice Department to bring a case against Soobzokov? Two grand juries had already heard many days of testimony in the case, with investigations opened and closed. Yet for all the evidence gathered by Fier, DeVito, and others on the case, some prosecutors remained skittish. The Justice Department had never brought a denaturalization case like this against an accused Nazi. Was it really going to start now by taking on a prominent civic leader based on testimony that might be the result of bitter ethnic feuding? DeVito figured that all the witnesses might be dead before that happened.