Blowback (3 page)

The Justice Department had printed up the 200-page Barbie study, along with about 400 pages of documentary exhibits, and distributed it on schedule at the event. Ryan made a short presentation
of the study's conclusions about fifteen minutes after the reporters had those books in their hands.

In a nutshell, the Justice Department's study acknowledged that a U.S. intelligence agency known as the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had recruited Schutzstaffel (SS) and Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie for espionage work in early 1947; that the CIC had hidden him from French war crimes investigators; and that it had then spirited him out of Europe through a clandestine “ratline”—escape route—run by a priest who was himself a fugitive from war crimes charges. That was point number one.

Point number two, on the other hand, was that the CIC agents who had recruited Barbie “had no reliable indication … that he was suspected of war crimes or crimes against humanity [until much later],” that Barbie was the
only
such war criminal that the United States had protected, and that he was the
only
such fugitive from justice that the United States had smuggled out of Europe. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in particular, was given a clean bill of health in the Barbie case and, by implication, in other incidents in which the agency is alleged to have had traffic with fugitive war criminals.

Point number one was true enough. Point number two was, and is, false.

At the time of the news conference Ryan stated point number two with what appeared to be genuine conviction. His extensive investigation had convinced him that “no other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the ratline, or where the ratline was used to evacuate a person wanted by either the United States government or any of its postwar allies,” he said carefully, as the television cameras recorded his words.

He noted, it is true, that his investigation had been limited to the Barbie affair, so he could not be certain that some other case might not have escaped his scrutiny. His mild qualification on that point was almost entirely ignored, however, by both the press and Ryan himself in the weeks that followed.

United Press International, for example, headlined
PROBER: BARBIE THE EXCEPTION, NOT RULE
, and quoted Ryan as indicating that the Justice Department's search had “uncovered no evidence [that] there was any other former Nazi that the U.S. shielded from justice.” ABC TV's
Nightline
program featured Ryan on its broadcast that evening. Ryan said that the United States had “innocently recruited Barbie, unaware of his role in France … [and that] the
Barbie case was not typical.” Under Ted Koppel's questioning, Ryan expanded on the theme: It was “very likely there were no other Nazi officials who were relied upon as Klaus Barbie was … [and] this closes the record.”
²

Since the Barbie case broke open, however, there has been a chain of new discoveries of Nazis and SS men protected by and, in some cases, brought to the United States by U.S. intelligence agencies. One, for example, was SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, who once instigated a bloody pogrom in Bucharest and served as a senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. According to von Bolschwing's own statement in a secret interview with U.S. Air Force investigators, in 1945 he volunteered his services to the Army CIC, which used him for interrogation and recruitment of other former Nazi intelligence officers. Later he was transferred to the CIA, which employed him as a contract agent inside the Gehlen Organization, a group of German intelligence officers that was being financed by the agency for covert operations and intelligence gathering inside Soviet-held territory. The CIA brought the SS man to the United States in 1954.
³

Following the revelation of the von Bolschwing affair, new evidence turned up concerning U.S. recruitment of still other former SS men, Nazis, and collaborators. According to army records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), SS Obersturmführer Robert Verbelen admitted that he had once been sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes, including the torture of two U.S. Air Force pilots. And, he said, he had long served in Vienna as a contract spy for the U.S. Army, which was aware of his background.

Other new information has been uncovered concerning Dr. Kurt Blome, who admitted in 1945 that he had been a leader of Nazi biological warfare research, a program known to have included experimentation on prisoners in concentration camps. Blome, however, was acquitted of crimes against humanity at a trial in 1947 and hired a few years later by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps to conduct a new round of biological weapons research. Then there is the business of Blome's colleague Dr. Arthur Rudolph, who was accused in sworn testimony at Nuremberg of committing atrocities at the Nazis' underground rocket works near Nordhausen but was later given U.S. citizenship and a major role in the U.S. missile program in spite of that record. Each of these instances
⁴
—and there were others as well—casts substantial doubt on the Justice Department's
assertion that what happened to Barbie was an “exception.”

And in the Barbie affair itself an independent review of the department's evidence raises considerable doubt whether one of its most important conclusions is justified—namely, that the American agents who recruited that particular Nazi had no reason to suspect that he had been responsible for crimes against humanity.

In fact, those agents did have evidence to indicate that Barbie had committed serious crimes against innocent people. The French government had submitted a statement to the United Nations War Crimes Commission as early as August 1944—almost three years before Barbie was recruited—charging him with “murder and massacres, systematic terrorism and execution of hostages.” These accusations led to repeated notices concerning Barbie in U.S. arrest lists of fugitive war criminals, beginning in 1945 and continuing through the late 1940s. Confirmation that the CIC knew that Barbie had been Gestapo police chief in Lyons may be found scattered throughout his CIC dossier.

The question of what the CIC knew of Barbie's wartime career is of considerable significance, for upon it hangs an unspoken premise of the Justice Department report—that is, that American recruitment of former Nazis or Gestapo officers was justified by the pressing “national security” needs of the day, as long as the U.S. agent who recruited him did not know of
particular
atrocities committed by that
individual
Nazi. Barbie's recruiters, the government asserts, made a “defensible” decision, and those who reject it are arguing from a “visceral” revulsion against the Nazis' Holocaust, rather than from a “pragmatic” point of view that “looks to the future.”
⁵

The practical effect of the Justice Department's premise, if accepted, is to provide a ready-made excuse—namely, “We just didn't know”—for any U.S. official who chose to protect Nazi criminals for their supposed intelligence value.

The fact is, U.S. intelligence agencies did know—or had good reason to suspect—that many contract agents that they hired during the cold war had committed crimes against humanity on behalf of the Nazis. The CIA, the State Department, and U.S. Army intelligence each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing selected former Nazis and collaborators to the United States. Other projects protected such people by placing them on U.S. payrolls overseas.

The government employed these men and women for their expertise
in propaganda and psychological warfare, for work in American laboratories, and even as special guerrilla troops for deployment inside the USSR in the midst of a nuclear war. CIA recruiting in Europe in particular often focused on Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and other Eastern European nationalists who had collaborated with the Nazis during Germany's wartime occupation of their homelands. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such recruits were SS veterans; some had been officers of the bloody Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi party's security service.

Most of the U.S. government has given every indication that it hopes that queries concerning U.S. intelligence agencies' use of these Nazis will fade away. But as each new bit of evidence accumulates, the questions about this practice become more insistent and more disturbing.

CHAPTER ONE

A Discreet Silence

The basic rationale U.S. policymakers used after 1945 to justify employment of former Nazis and collaborators was the possibility—no, the
imminence
—of the outbreak of a new war between the United States and the USSR.

The American anticipation of a cataclysm was reinforced by the East-West geopolitical confrontation in Europe and the Mideast in the first years after World War II; by the shortage of reliable information about actual conditions in the east; and not infrequently by religious doctrine that asserted that the Communists were Satan's army on earth.
¹
Such perceptions varied from individual to individual, of course, but were by no means a fringe phenomenon.

The actual balance of forces in Europe during the decade following 1945, however, meant that neither the United States nor the USSR was capable of unilaterally imposing its will on the other through military force alone. The Soviets' advantage in troop strength and geographical position gave it powerful leverage in Eastern Europe, America's atomic bomb and economic wealth notwithstanding.

Given that situation, President Harry Truman ordered a program of psychological warfare, covert operations, and intelligence gathering aimed at the USSR and its satellites that began as early as 1945 and significantly accelerated in the years that followed. Recently declassified records make clear that by 1948 Truman had approved
a multimillion-dollar program initiated by his National Security Council (NSC) secretly to finance and arm “underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberations [
sic
] groups … against hostile foreign states,” meaning the USSR and its Eastern European satellites.
²

Many of these “refugee liberations groups” were, in fact, extreme right-wing exile organizations that had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of their homelands. Some of their leaders were major war criminals who had directed massacres and deportations of Jews during the Holocaust. Despite this background, U.S. clandestine operations experts convinced the National Security Council and other senior policymakers that U.S. sponsorship of these organizations, and of their German agent handlers, would yield substantial benefits for the United States.

Exile organizations such as the Natsional'no-Trudovoi Soyuz (NTS, Russian Solidarists) and the various factions of the Ukrainska Povstancha Armia (UPA, or Ukrainian Insurgent Army) claimed to have large networks of sympathizers behind Soviet lines. German intelligence specialists like General Reinhard Gehlen, who had run these networks during the war, asserted that a modest infusion of American money and arms could produce secure organizations of espionage agents, saboteurs, and strong-arm specialists inside the East bloc countries and in the teeming refugee camps that then dotted western Germany. The idea, in a nutshell, was secretly to underwrite the work of these groups in much the same way that the Allies had backed resistance forces inside German-occupied territory during the war.

Contrary to the promises once made inside secret U.S. government councils that the use of such persons would be of practical benefit to this country, the truth is that these Nazi utilization programs have frequently been disasters, even when all ethical considerations are laid aside. Their behind-the-lines spy teams are now known to have been largely nonexistent, and those that did exist were laced with Soviet double agents. Instead of building a relatively airtight anti-Communist spy service, the same old boy circles used to recruit former Nazis ended up giving the USSR a relatively easy way to penetrate legitimate U.S. intelligence gathering on Soviet military capabilities and intentions. U.S.-sponsored secret warfare campaigns employing these recruits failed consistently, leading to the arrests, imprisonments, and sometimes executions of thousands of Eastern Europeans.

The government's use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has also left a mark on life in the United States itself. This impact is what is known in spy jargon as “blowback,” meaning unexpected—and negative—effects at home that result from covert operations overseas.

Often blowback from CIA clandestine work abroad has been no more (and no less) alarming than, say, a fraudulent news report planted in a European magazine that later shows up in U.S. publications as fact. Sometimes, however, the problem has become far more serious. In a case revealed here for the first time, an organization of former SS and German military intelligence experts provided false information that nearly led to World War III. In another instance Senator Joseph McCarthy employed a secret U.S. espionage squad made up in part of Nazi collaborators to gather slanderous information used to smear political opponents.

Despite these negative consequences, the existence of U.S. operations employing ex-Nazis has remained a carefully kept secret in the West. There has been a certain convergence of powerful interests, rather than the great conspiracy that some critics have alleged, that has kept this story buried. The American government, for example, has not been inclined to publicize the men and women involved in sensitive “national security” missions. Many U.S. documents concerning these programs have been systematically purged from the files and destroyed, and the majority of the records that remain are still classified above “secret.” Most of the men who put together the U.S. program—including the CIA's former chief of clandestine operations Frank Wisner and his boss, CIA Director Allen Dulles—are dead. Most of those who are still alive refuse to talk.

Until recently the U.S. media could usually be counted on to maintain a discreet silence about émigré leaders with Nazi backgrounds accused of working for the CIA. According to declassified records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, several mass media organizations in this country—at times working in direct concert with the CIA—became instrumental in promoting cold war myths that transformed certain exiled Nazi collaborators of World War II into “freedom fighters” and heroes of the renewed struggle against communism.
³
The general public, for the most part, has had little reason to suspect that anything was amiss.