The Nazis Next Door (8 page)

Dulles and American intelligence officials took the bait. Even Höttl’s Nazi bosses had not trusted him—one SS man in 1941 had declared him “a liar, a toady, a schemer, and a pronounced operator”—but the Americans were willing to take a chance on the man. Freed from custody, Höttl was entrusted by military intelligence and CIA officials over the next few years to run secret spy rings in Austria and Hungary that relied on former Nazi officers like himself. Other American officials who knew of Höttl’s reputation were aghast to find out he was now working on their side. While there were “a few decent representatives of the former SD,” Höttl was surely not one of them, a military official warned in an internal memo. “Should it eventually become known that Höttl is being used by the Americans, this would be incomprehensible to all decent Germans
and Austrians.”

For those who knew of Höttl’s secret past, it was almost inevitable that the Americans’ partnership with the ex-Nazi would implode. The intelligence he sold the CIA and the U.S. Army, based on his highly touted Soviet contacts, was often pedestrian, sometimes dead wrong, and occasionally even bogus. Public reports from newspaper or radio reports were passed off to the Americans as top-secret intelligence. Höttl could churn out much of the prized intelligence he was selling America, one U.S. assessment concluded derisively, “without interrupting his regular pattern of coffee house conversations.”

His paltry output soon became the least of the Americans’ concerns. Höttl, despite his claims to Dulles of “altruistic” motives, was plainly a man out for himself. At the end of the war, Höttl was negotiating with fellow Nazis to claim a share of the gold and jewelry looted from Jews in Hungary and hidden away via the so-called Hungarian gold train. There were reports that he had stashed looted Nazi assets in Switzerland as well. Once he started working for Washington, Höttl seized on the Americans as his next big moneymaker. He began embezzling massive amounts of cash from the Army, funds that were supposed to go to his U.S.-financed spy operations, American officials discovered. He was selling his intelligence elsewhere, too. Red-faced Army officials ended up paying another source about $3,000 in Austrian shillings for a thick stack of intelligence on Soviet activities in the region, only to learn that their own spy Höttl was the one marketing the secret documents in the first place. The revelations only got worse, as the Americans stumbled onto a number of Höttl’s other secret customers. It turned out that Höttl—or Cheka, as he was secretly known in Moscow—was a Soviet double agent, and one of the Russians’ most highly paid, too, according to evidence that would emerge from a KGB defector. Linked to a pair of American citizens in Vienna accused of spying for the Russians, Höttl was thought to have given the Russians intelligence on America and even the names of Allied agents. True to his reputation, the ex-Nazi was playing all sides.

In 1952, after years of unheeded warnings about their “dangerous” spy, Dulles and the CIA finally cut ties with Höttl for good. All the predictions about the damage the ex-Nazi might do to America had come true.

While the CIA’s Dulles was the de facto ally of America’s many Nazi spies overseas in battling the Soviets, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI was his like-minded counterpart inside the United States—and every bit as powerful.

Hoover embraced the Cold War as his own. Like Dulles, he viewed the Nazis through a lens tinted a bright shade of Russian red. And like Dulles, Hoover would intervene time and again on behalf of Nazi intelligence agents and allies inside the United States when they were accused of war crimes. His FBI worked with dozens of ex-Nazis as informants and intelligence agents against the Soviets. Their wartime records were largely irrelevant. Hoover himself, then at the apex of his power, invariably saw whatever evidence of war crimes that emerged against European immigrants in the United States as a concoction of Soviet propagandists meant to smear their American opponents for political gain.

“Since the war, there have been a great number of complaints that people aided the Germans during the war in persecuting the Jews,” Hoover wrote in 1955, regarding a New Jersey immigrant suspected of executing Polish Jews. “Interviews in other cases have developed no substantiation of the allegations.”

Hoover’s tacit support for suspected Nazi war criminals reached the highest levels of the government. In 1962, the FBI learned from an apparent wiretap of columnist Drew Pearson that he might be planning to ask President John F. Kennedy about war crimes allegations against Andrija Artukovic, the Nazi collaborator in Croatia who became the FBI’s anti-Communist tipster. Hoover saw the case against Artukovic as largely Communist propaganda. So the FBI alerted Kennedy’s press secretary to help brace the president for possible questions at a news conference. Hoover didn’t want the president ambushed
by reporters demanding to know why a top Nazi collaborator from Croatia was living freely off the beaches of Southern California. Lucky for JFK, the question never came up.

When immigration investigators were trying to build a deportation case against another Nazi collaborator, an FBI informant in New Jersey named Laszlo Agh, Hoover came to his aid as well. With dozens of eyewitnesses testifying against him, Agh was accused of forcing Jews at a Hungarian work camp to throw themselves onto buried bayonets and eat their own feces, and he had made a damning admission to an FBI agent about his involvement with Hungary’s Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross Party. But Hoover, in 1959, blocked his agent from testifying about Agh’s admissions, effectively killing the deportation case against him. Agh was allowed to stay in Newark. At the same time, Hoover shut down a field investigation into the right-wing Hungarian American political group that Agh led. Agh and his group were seen as allies by Hoover, feeding anti-Soviet intelligence to the FBI for years, with some of it landing in Hoover’s mailbox. The group’s leaders “are known to have been connected with the Hungarian Nazi Party,” Hoover admitted, but the organization “exhorts its leaders to be good American citizens and to report all Communist and subversive activities to the FBI.” That, in Hoover’s view, took priority.

Even when the FBI’s own files held damning evidence of an immigrant’s wartime atrocities, Hoover would defend him unabashedly. A Romanian bishop in Michigan named Viorel Trifa became so politically well-connected during the Eisenhower administration that he was given the honor of delivering the opening prayer at the U.S. Senate, and met personally with a sympathetic Vice President Nixon to urge support for his anti-Communist “brothers” back in Romania living under Soviet control. But he had a darker past. In Romania during the war, he was a well-known Nazi collaborator and leader of the fascist Iron Guard who gave a notorious speech in 1941 denouncing the “kikes.” His fiery oratory helped set off gruesome pogroms in Bucharest
that killed thousands, and he was sentenced to death in absentia after the war.

The FBI knew of the less inspirational elements of Bishop Trifa’s history, because in its files was a copy of the so-called Trifa Manifesto, published in Romania during the war under the headline: “Death to the Masons and the Jews.” But his past was irrelevant to Hoover. To him, Trifa was simply a loyal anti-Communist, and that made him an important ally. The Romanian Church under Trifa would send Hoover its literature attacking grand Communist plots, and when war crimes allegations surfaced against Trifa in 1955, Hoover defended him. He managed to scuttle a meeting that one of Trifa’s main accusers was supposed to have with Vice President Nixon to press the war crimes allegations against him. In a note to Nixon, Hoover told the vice president that the accusations against Trifa were simply the result of “a factional schism within the Rumanian Orthodox Church of America.” The bishop’s accusers were Communists who lacked credibility, the FBI director assured Nixon. Besides, Hoover added dismissively, Trifa himself had denied any wartime involvement with the Iron Guard or the Nazis. That appeared to settle the matter.

The charges of Nazi collaboration against Trifa went nowhere, and the FBI soon closed its case against him. Eight years later, Trifa was able to return the favor to Hoover, when rumors surfaced that President Lyndon B. Johnson might sack the FBI director. Bishop Trifa, his staunch anti-Communist ally, was alarmed. “The American people,” the onetime Nazi collaborator wrote in a letter to LBJ, “need men like J. Edgar Hoover.”

3

“Minor War Crimes”

February 22, 1956

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The Russians were everywhere. Or so it seemed on a frigid Wednesday morning in Washington, as the capital was blanketed by talk of the Red menace, an atomic arms race with Moscow, and the escalation of the Cold War. It was George Washington’s birthday, but save for a lone senator who read the first president’s Farewell Address to a mostly empty Senate chamber, few lawmakers seemed to remember. History yielded to more modern-day threats, real and imagined.

At a raucous rally that night, Senator Joe McCarthy would rail against Communist “traitors” in Washington and “murderers” in Moscow. Congressional leaders would be meeting to find money for new ballistic missiles to keep up with the Russians, while the Pentagon pored over the results of a massive atomic assault it simulated the week before on the sands of Iwo Jima. And with Nikita Khrushchev delivering increasingly bold pronouncements almost by the day about Russia’s global ambitions, President Eisenhower’s aides would issue yet another dire warning about America’s security.

A few blocks from the White House, a former Nazi SS officer
with a cigarette in hand was doing his part to rein in the Communists as well. Tom Soobzokov was holed up inside the Statler Hotel, a fashionable spot frequented by presidents and celebrities. The CIA had given him a room at the grand hotel, along with seventy-five dollars in walking-around money, for the most important job interview of his life: he was vying for a spot as a spy on a top-secret team ominously called the “Hot War cadre.” It was aimed at using anti-Communist refugees like himself to gather intelligence on their old country, stir discontent, and help overthrow the Reds.

It was a grandiose plan, more Keystone Kops than James Bond. But as Soobzokov figured it, this was a role he was born to play. If he got the job, it would put him in a position to not only help topple the detested Soviets, but advance his own outsize ambitions as well.

He was nothing if not ambitious. If the Soviets were thrown out of his native land in the North Caucasus, he saw himself in a leadership post in a new regional government along the Black Sea. He was brainier and more politically savvy than any of the other expatriates from his homeland, he volunteered to the CIA with smug pride. In his bold political vision, he imagined himself as a favorite son returning triumphantly to the Caucasus to lead an oppressed people back from the political wilderness.

It was heady stuff for anyone, much less a new immigrant to America still struggling to survive in the gritty, blue-collar streets of Paterson, New Jersey. Just days earlier, he had been selling cars there—a promotion from night watchman at the Plymouth auto lot. Now here he was sitting across from a CIA officer at a renowned Washington hotel, in line to become an American spy working on the most important issue of the day.

The CIA already knew a lot about him. Leaving Italy after the war amid a wave of refugees, Soobzokov had resettled in the Middle East with hundreds of fellow White Russians, and the agency quickly zeroed in on him in 1952 as a man with connections who could do some low-level spy work for the United States. They wanted him to be a “spotter”—someone who could secretly recruit other Russian refugees in the region who might then turn against the Soviets. The CIA had a keen interest in the Middle East at the time; working with Britain, the agency secretly overthrew the Iranian government a year later in a coup designed to ensure access to Iran’s rich oil fields and to blunt Soviet influence.

The CIA saw great potential in Soobzokov as a spy. He spoke five languages. He was of Muslim heritage—but not religious enough to cause concern, the CIA reported favorably in one write-up. He was working for a well-connected energy company in Amman at the time. He had deep contacts among other disaffected Russian exiles from the Caucasus who had fled to the Middle East. He knew the Russians well, even studying at a Soviet military academy as a young man, according to his resumé. And, most important, he hated his old Soviet countrymen.

His marked antagonism “clearly indicated that he is prepared to join forces with any group working actively against the Soviet regime,” the CIA noted in his file. Soobzokov was almost maniacal in his hostility toward the Russians, CIA psychologists would conclude. In the eyes of the agency, his “fanatic” hatred of the Soviets was an asset: in the Cold War era, there was no such thing as hating Communism too much.

His passion was what drew the CIA to him. His file described Soobzokov in wildly effusive terms: “sparkling and vivacious”;
“a keen, alert mind”; “well poised”; “shrewd and practical”; a survivor with “animal cunning.” Granted, his passion and lack of self-control could be a problem at times, the CIA acknowledged. (It was probably best, for instance, not to put him in the same room with a Communist, to avoid an anti-Russian outburst, one analyst warned.) But officials knew it was that brashness that made Soobzokov a leader.

CIA officials suspected something else about their new recruit, too. From their earliest dealings with Soobzokov, they suspected that he had fought with the Nazis during the war. Despite his claims to have been a prisoner of war for much of the fighting, the CIA knew better. This raised no alarms within the agency, however. It was deemed irrelevant. In fact, as they prepared to give Soobzokov his first lie-detector test in Lebanon in 1952, CIA officials wanted to make sure that Soobzokov—aka Nostril, his new code name—knew that nothing in his past would harm his prospects, and that he need not worry. His handler for the interrogations “may assure NOSTRIL,” the CIA’s top Middle East spy wrote, “that we are not at all interested in any criminal, moral or other similar lapses in his past and that such things will not be covered in the tests and interviews.”