Blowback (4 page)

But the facts concerning government protection of selected former Nazis and collaborators cannot remain buried forever. Smuggling
collaborators into the United States for clandestine work during the cold war was never as easy to keep hidden as it might seem. The entry of former senior Nazi Foreign Office official Gustav Hilger is a case in point. Senior U.S. State Department officials, including George F. Kennan, intervened personally on the German's behalf, leaving behind a trail of telegrams.
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Then secret visas had to be arranged and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had to be quietly informed, producing still more records. Transport for Hilger aboard a U.S. military aircraft was necessary to get him out of Germany. Later new identification and a top secret security clearance had to be obtained for Hilger before he could begin regular work in Washington, D.C.

Despite the fragmented nature of the evidence left by these activities, it is now possible to reassemble much of the story of Hilger and other collaborators. The careers—and the explanations—of the specific American leaders who protected such men and put them to work can be brought to light. Equally important, it is now possible to begin to trace the otherwise invisible imprint that the government's secret sponsorship of former Nazis and collaborators has left on the United States.

America's own initial plan to enlist the brains of Nazi Germany concentrated on scientists, declassified U.S. Army records show. Some American intelligence officials were clearly aware from the very beginning that they were recruiting former Nazis, including SS officers and others alleged to have personally participated in executions of concentration camp inmates. Even so, top Pentagon officers believed that these Germans could be put to work in the then continuing war with Japan and the emerging conflict with the USSR. A highly secret U.S. military intelligence coordinating center advised the U.S. Army to alter its dossiers on those scientists so as to bring them into this country with supposedly clean wartime records. The United States soon stopped “beating a dead Nazi horse,” as Bosquet Wev, executive officer of the Pentagon's intelligence coordinating office, put it, and began importing German chemical warfare experts, submarine specialists, and the scientists who had once built Germany's rockets using slave labor from Nazi concentration camps.
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At about the same time these experts were conscripted, the United States also began a small, extremely secret program to enlist German espionage and covert operations specialists at an American
camp for high-ranking Axis POWs near Wiesbaden. There the chief of U.S. Army intelligence in Europe, General Edwin Sibert, gave the go-ahead to a gaunt former Wehrmacht (German army) general named Reinhard Gehlen to construct a new espionage organization made up of German experts on the USSR. Sibert, in what was at the time a clear violation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders concerning denazification of Germany, assumed personal responsibility for the project. Before the 1940s were out, Sibert and Gehlen's small seed had grown into an organization upon which the Americans depended for much of what they knew about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
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With Gehlen's group at its core, former Nazis and collaborators went on to play an important, though largely unnoticed, role in the interlocked evolutions of the cold war and of American intelligence capabilities. Gehlen provided U.S. Army intelligence and later the CIA with many of the dire reports that were used to justify increased U.S. military budgets and intensified U.S./USSR hostilities. He exaggerated the Soviet military threat in Europe, says the CIA's former chief analyst on Soviet military capabilities Victor Marchetti,
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in order to ensure further protection and funding for his U.S.-financed operation. The German intelligence group, as it turns out, usually received at least part of any new budget appropriations that accompanied escalation of the conflict with the USSR.

At about the time the Gehlen organization was getting on its feet, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) gradually moved from investigating underground Nazis for war crimes prosecution to using some of these same Nazis and collaborators to track Communists. By 1948 the CIC found itself in a sub rosa bureaucratic battle with both the U.S. Air Force and the then newly founded CIA over funding in the spy war against the Russians. One of the most valuable prizes in this intra-American conflict was control of several thousand former Waffen SS soldiers and officers whom the army had hired and equipped for use in a guerrilla war against the USSR. The army ended up actually integrating these SS troops into U.S. nuclear strategy.
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Policy concerning clandestine use of former Nazi collaborators during the early cold war years was shaped by a series of National Security Council directives and intelligence projects sponsored by the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, then under the leadership of George F. Kennan, according to records discovered recently in U.S. State Department archives. Kennan was at the time assigned the task of internal policy oversight of all U.S. clandestine operations abroad. His initiatives—along with those of Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and a number of other latter-day CIA executives—helped convince Truman's NSC to approve a comprehensive program of covert operations that were explicitly modeled on the Vlasov Army, an anti-Communist émigré campaign created by the SS and the Nazi Foreign Office during World War II.
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Scholars and propagandists who had once collaborated in formulating the Nazis' political warfare program were brought into the United States to provide brains for the new operation.

Wisner, the dynamic director of the CIA's clandestine operations directorate, gradually gathered many of the threads of earlier Nazi utilization efforts into agency hands. Wisner believed in the tremendous espionage potential of the Eastern European émigré organizations, their value as propagandists and agents of influence, and the unique advantages of using soldiers who had no provable ties to the U.S. government for certain particularly sensitive missions, including assassinations. More than that, Wisner was convinced that Communist rule would be soon overthrown in Eastern Europe and possibly in the USSR itself. America was already at war,
as he saw it, and there was no time to quibble over the pasts of its new foot soldiers.

Wisner's clandestine campaigns were originally aimed at the USSR and its satellites. Before the decade was out, however, the American people also became an important target for CIA propaganda programs. It is at that point, over the winter of 1951–1952, that the blowback from the CIA's overseas operations reached a new and more dangerous stage. According to National Security Council records, Wisner began large-scale programs designed to bring thousands of anti-Communist exiles to the United States as a means of rewarding them for secret operations overseas and to train others for guerrilla warfare against East bloc countries. The CIA secretly subsidized the work of right-wing refugee relief organizations aiding such immigrants, including some groups with clear ties to extreme nationalist and Fascist organizations in Europe.
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The agency simultaneously funneled millions of dollars into advertising and staged media events inside the United States during the same period, with support for these overseas “refugee liberation” projects as a primary theme.

Tens of thousands of Eastern European refugees emigrated to the United States throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Clearly the overwhelming majority of these new immigrants have proved themselves to be valuable citizens, who have made great contributions to science, culture, medicine, sports, and the American work force as well as to the defense of values like democracy and national pride. But just as any large group of humans contains some criminals, so, too, did this emigration. The difference this time was that of the criminals who did come, many were experienced right-wing political activists who were highly organized and blessed with the patronage of the CIA.

Shortly before the presidential election of 1952 the agency sharply expanded its media operations with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign inside the United States designed to legitimize expanded U.S. cold war operations in Europe.
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This program was guided by a theory known as “liberationism,” and an important part of that strategy held that certain exiled Fascist leaders left over from World War II should be regarded as democratic “freedom fighters” against the USSR. The CIA's propaganda campaign inside the United States was clearly illegal; but the agency concealed its ties to the effort, and the enterprise prospered.

Right-wing émigré organizations, which had once been little
more than instruments of German (and later U.S.) espionage agencies, began to take on a distinct life and authority of their own during the cold war, particularly inside America's large Eastern European immigrant communities. Through organizations such as the CIA-funded Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), certain Ukrainian fraternal groups, and the Latvian Daugavas Vanagi alliance (each of which included in positions of leadership persons whom U.S. investigators have alleged to be Axis war criminals
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), these extreme-right-wing exiles gradually expanded their reach in American affairs.

Although never the mainstream voices for their particular nationality groups, these organizations and others like them succeeded in creating genuine power bases on the far right of the U.S. political spectrum. Before the decade of the 1950s was out, the activities of extremist European émigré organizations combined with indigenous American anticommunism to produce seriously negative effects on U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs under both Republican and Democratic administrations. By 1959 these exile groups had articulate defenders inside the staff of the National Security Council and had won a measure of influence on Capitol Hill. Observing their impact on U.S. policy toward the USSR and Eastern Europe had become, as columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “a morbid experience.”
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In short, U.S. clandestine operations employing Nazis never did produce the results that were desired when they were initiated, but they did contribute to the influence of some of the most reactionary trends in American political life. This lesson has increased in significance over the years. More recent U.S. interventions abroad have facilitated the entry into America of extremist and even terrorist émigré organizations that have subsequently gained political footholds in ethnic communities in this country, often through the use of violence and intimidation. The influence of Bay of Pigs veterans in Cuban-American enclaves or of the former Saigon police among Southeast Asian refugees comes to mind in this regard. “Blowback” of this type has not been limited to cold war Nazi utilization operations; it is a much more widespread characteristic of the CIA's émigré operations than is generally recognized and one which deserves further study.

The pages that follow focus in detail on one example of blowback: the Nazi utilization operations during the cold war and their influence on America. Why did the U.S. government decide to employ
war criminals? Why did it admit such persons to this country? To understand the answers, it is first of all necessary to look at what is meant by the term
war crimes
and to trace back to their roots the careers of some of the men and women who committed those iniquities.

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Since the end of the war a protracted debate has taken place in West Germany concerning the character of the Waffen SS or “Armed SS” and its relationship to the rest of Himmler's police apparatus. Former members of the Waffen SS sometimes glorify the role of the group as a select type of Marine Corps that was not, they contend, involved in war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The Waffen SS originated in 1940 as specially trained and indoctrinated German troops under SS leader Himmler's command who were assigned special tasks ranging from duty as Hitler's personal bodyguards to serving as custodians and executioners at concentration camps. As the war proceeded, many were placed under the operational command of the Wehrmacht (the German army), and were often employed in brutal antipartisan strike force operations. By 1944 the increasingly desperate Nazis had begun conscripting men, including many foreign-born collaborators, into these previously all-volunteer divisions. These draftees have since argued, in some cases truthfully, that they did not participate in the mass murders for which the SS has become infamous. Therefore, they say, they should not bear the same burden of guilt as other members of that group.

The International Tribunal at Nuremberg concluded that the entire SS (including the Waffen SS) was a criminal organization. “[T]he shooting of unarmed prisoners of war was the general practice in some
Waffen SS
divisions,” the Nuremberg judgment reads. “[They] were responsible for many massacres and atrocities in occupied territories, such as the massacres at Oradour and Lidice.… [They] supplied personnel for the
Einsatzgruppen
[murder commandos], had command over the concentration camp guards,” and operated under the direct authority of SS headquarters in anti-Jewish operations. The tribunal made an explicit exception, however, for those individuals who “were drafted into [SS] membership … in such a way as to give them no choice in the matter, and who had committed no [war] crimes.”

CHAPTER TWO

Slaughter on the Eastern Front

“Crimes against humanity,”
states the Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of 1945, are “atrocities and offenses, including but not limited to murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, or other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds.…”

This statute, together with earlier joint declarations by Allied governments concerning war crimes, became the formal foundation upon which the Nazis and their collaborators were tried after World War II. The Control Council law as written is comprehensive. It also includes prohibition of
war crimes
—including murder or deportation of civilian populations by occupying armies, plunder, killing of POWs or hostages, wanton destruction of cities or towns, etc.—and
crimes against peace
, meaning the launching of an invasion or waging an aggressive war in violation of treaties. Punishment for those convicted under the law range from deprivation of civil rights to the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime.
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