Blowback (44 page)

Finally, Tenzerov, who had been chief of security for the Vlassov Army, was betrayed by other NTS leaders in the last days of the war and left the organization in a fury. Army CIC records indicate that SS veteran Emil Augsburg (of the Gehlen Organization and the Barbie network) later recruited him as an agent.

*
In his published memoirs Petrov contradicts the statement that he was unaware of Nazi extermination efforts in Krasnodar. There he says that he
did
know Jews were being systematically murdered in Krasnodar even before he became a city official. In
Escape from the Future
Petrov also writes that he appointed the city's chief of police during the Nazi occupation. Petrov claims that he helped warn Krasnodar's Jews of their danger and even encouraged them to escape.

Whichever version is true, Petrov says today: “I did not make decisions on the basis of massacres. Where I had been [in prison camp] in Siberia,” he continues grimly, “there were also massacres, if not of the German style. There were many people done to death against their wishes and without honor. So there were massacres here, massacres on that side, all around.… Over here [in the United States] there is a distinction about who is killed,” he says, with a trace of irony. “If one is a chosen person, then that means something. But if one is a Russian peasant, then that counts for nothing.”

*
In 1985 the State Department published a number of key Solarium records in its highly regarded series,
Foreign Relations of the United States
. Unfortunately it chose to delete almost the entire text of the program put forward by Frank Wisner and Admiral Richard L. Connolly's “Team C” concerning clandestine operations.

The deletions in these documents are not easily apparent to the casual reader of the
Foreign Relations
volumes, and that has led to considerable misinterpretation of the Solarium record. The
Washington Post
reported after the new Solarium papers were published, for example, that Eisenhower had flatly rejected Wisner's covert operations plan. In fact, however, the conferences concluded that the United States should selectively integrate stepped-up clandestine action into the broader U.S. security policy.

The State Department's decision to publish only an expurgated version of the Solarium record contributes to the continuing confusion over what U.S. foreign policy actually was during the 1950s. This is particularly unfortunate considering the role the Solarium sessions played in setting the stage for America's clandestine entrance into the Vietnam conflict, the decision to undertake a coup in Guatemala, and other covert operations of the day that have since proved to have had far-reaching implications for U.S. relations abroad.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Brunner and von Bolschwing

The tough-guy ethos of most professional intelligence officers has always militated against letting conventional ethical considerations stand in the way of collecting information or carrying out special operations. “We're not in the Boy Scouts,” as latter-day CIA Director Richard Helms often said. “If we'd wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have
joined
the Boy Scouts.”
¹

By the time Allen Dulles became CIA director in 1953, almost all resistance within the CIA to using Nazi criminals to accomplish the agency's mission seems to have evaporated. In the Lebed affair top CIA officials as well as the U.S. attorney general intervened to “legalize” the ex-OUN man's status in the United States after Lebed had been accidentally caught by an overeager INS agent. In a second case, that of former SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, the agency smoothed the former Nazi's entry into the country through consultations with interagency intelligence coordinating committees, then contacted “outsiders” at the INS—in writing—on the ex-Nazi's behalf. In the arcana of espionage etiquette, these acts are unmistakable indicators of high-level consent for von Bolschwing's immigration.
²

But the key phrase remained “to accomplish the agency's mission.” Nazis were never employed or protected for their own sake, but only as a means to achieve some other goal that was presumably in the interests of U.S. national security. Conversely, the fact that
a man might have been a mass murderer did not by itself disqualify him from working for the agency if he was believed to be useful. And once such a person
had
worked for U.S. intelligence, there was inevitably pressure to protect him, if only to keep out of the public eye the operations he had been involved in.

There was, it is true, concern inside the CIA about the possible public relations problems involved in employing persons who had been compromised by their earlier service to the Nazis. In the case of Belorussian Nazi leader Stanislaw Stankievich, for example, his CIA case officers fretted during the 1950s and 1960s that Stankievich “has been and perhaps remains ardently Fascist” and that “continued use [of him] might be a source of embarrassment to the Project and/or the Agency.”
³
Stankievich, who had once served as the SS-appointed mayor of Borisov during a 1941 pogrom that took the lives of thousands of Jews, was at the time of the CIA officer's comments a leading member of the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich, a CIA-financed émigré think tank affiliated with Radio Liberation. The Munich institute is the “Project” to which the quoted CIA records refer.

According to the CIA's own documentation, the agency oversaw Stankievich's recruitment to the institute, then reviewed and passed on his various promotions as he rose through the ranks there. The agency also directly intervened to bring him to the United States, according to a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, by falsely certifying that it had no derogatory information on Stankievich that would bar him from coming into the country when in fact, it had a record of his role in the Borisov massacre and of his ongoing association with extremist émigré organizations.
⁴

The only known internal opposition to this Nazi's repeated professional promotions and eventual U.S. citizenship came from a CIA officer who was clearly disturbed by Stankievich's continuing dedication to Fascist causes. Yet the agency's informal code of conduct impelled the officer to make the only complaint that might have any effect—that is, using the “Butcher of Borisov” (as Stankievich had come to be called) was a mistake not because Stankievich played a role in a pogrom but because he “might be a source of embarrassment.”
⁵
In the end, however, this protest, too, was overridden.

There were occasional internal purges of former Fascists for public relations reasons from time to time during the 1950s. A series of Soviet propaganda broadsides exposing Nazis at RFE and RL in
1954 led to the dismissals or reassignments of thirteen employees. And Eberhardt Taubert, a former Goebbels ministry propagandist with anti-Semitic credentials stretching back to the 1920s, was forced to resign from the directorship of the CIA- and German government-financed Peoples League for Peace and Freedom in 1955 under public pressure, even though Taubert himself claimed to have abandoned Nazi thinking.
⁶
A handful of other examples along these same lines cropped up in the course of the decade.

But the fundamental decision to exploit anyone who might have something to offer to the struggle against Moscow remained untouched. This is precisely because such “pragmatism” is at the very heart of contemporary clandestine practice. Using Nazis (or the Mafia or, conversely, a church-sponsored organization of college students) was never an aberration in the minds of most intelligence operatives. This is simply the way clandestine wars are fought, they say, whether the general public likes it or not.

Still, public opinion does remain a factor, at least in the West. Gehlen's organization benefited greatly from that fact because the CIA often turned to Gehlen when it wished to bury certain very sensitive operations even more deeply than usual. At those times his contacts among former SS and Gestapo men could be uniquely valuable. One such occasion took place in Egypt in late 1953, shortly after Solarium's renewed approval of large-scale CIA countermeasures aimed at offsetting Soviet influence in the Mideast. There the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled the activities of SS Sturmbannführer Alois Brunner, a man considered by many to be the most depraved Nazi killer still at large.

Brunner had once been Eichmann's top deportations expert for the entire Reich. He was a skilled administrator who specialized in driving Jews into ghettos, then systematically deporting them to the extermination camps. This was a difficult job, requiring a keen sense of the exact types of terror and psychological manipulation necessary to disarm his victims.

Brunner did not simply administer the deportations. He was a troubleshooter who rushed from Berlin to Gestapo offices throughout occupied Europe to train local Nazi satraps in how to carry out the destruction of Jews quickly and thoroughly. He did not neglect the murder of children because (as he told Berlin lawyer Kurt Schendel, who was pleading on behalf of a group of French orphans) they were “future terrorists.” Brunner studied hard for his
assignment and is said to have eventually become an expert on the railway systems of Europe so that he could locate enough boxcars to carry out his mission for the fatherland. “He's one of my best men,” Eichmann said.
⁷

The Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that Brunner is personally responsible for the murder of 128,500 people. The French government eventually convicted him in absentia of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death. Instead of facing trial, however, Brunner was in Damascus, Syria, where he had become Gehlen's “resident”—a post similar in authority to the CIA chief of station—shortly after the contract for the Org had been picked up by the Americans in 1946, keeping him safe from the French. His alias was “Georg Fischer.”
⁸
Brunner/Fischer eventually became an important part of a CIA-financed program to train Egyptian security forces.

The Egyptian episode began as an attempt to protect U.S. interests in Egypt as the monarchy of King Farouk crumbled. Frank Wisner had dispatched his top troubleshooter in the Mideast, Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt, to Cairo as early as 1951 to open secret negotiations with Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his insurgent Society of Free Officers. They found, Roosevelt telegraphed back to Washington, “a large area of agreement.”
⁹
Nasser asked Roosevelt for aid in building up Egypt's military intelligence and internal security squads. Both men agreed that a better-trained security force was in the mutual interest of both Egypt and the United States. But domestic politics in both countries required that the American involvement in this effort be kept very low-profile.

So CIA Director Allen Dulles turned to Gehlen in 1953 for help in the Egyptian situation. Gehlen's men and the contract agents he kept on tap had many of the qualities that Dulles was looking for: They were experienced in police security work, were willing to work cheaply, and were not inclined to call attention to themselves. The committed anti-Semitism of some of Gehlen's men was also a plus, at least in the eyes of some members of the Egyptian secret service. At the same time West Germany's deeply conflicted relationship with Israel during the postwar period ensured that almost any group of German experts who went to Egypt could be easily penetrated and internally monitored by both Gehlen and the CIA as the project went forward.

Gehlen enlisted the help of Otto Skorzeny, a hulking former SS
Sturmbannführer
who had once been dubbed by the wartime German
press “Hitler's favorite commando.” At six feet four inches and 220 pounds, with appropriately arrogant “Aryan” features and a five-inch dueling scar down his left cheek, Skorzeny had transformed himself during the war from an unknown SS truck driver into a walking symbol of Nazi strength and cunning. He had specialized in training behind-the-lines sabotage and assassination teams for SS RSHA Amt VI during the war as well as in daring commando raids to rescue Mussolini and to kidnap recalcitrant Hungarian politicians and in similar exploits. Hitler loved him and seemed to believe that Skorzeny and his gang of cutthroats would become the secret weapon that could single-handedly reverse Germany's disastrous military losses.
¹⁰

Skorzeny did nothing to reduce his legend after the war. At one point he escaped from American custody under mysterious circumstances while awaiting a denazification trial in 1948, leaving behind a note claiming that he had “only done my duty to my Fatherland” both during the war and after it. Skorzeny pictured himself as something like a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel fighting for the “honor” of Hitler's Germany and the SS against overwhelming odds.
¹¹
He spent many of the early postwar years deeply involved in running escape operations through Spain and Syria for fugitive Fascists. Both the Odessa and
die Spinne
(the Spider) SS escape organizations revolved in large part around the personality—and the myth—of Otto Skorzeny.

As intelligence veteran Miles Copeland tells the story, Gehlen wanted to subcontract the CIA's Egyptian training mission to Skorzeny in 1953. The former
Sturmbannführer
demurred, however. The Egyptians simply did not pay enough, he argued. Gehlen promised that Skorzeny's salary from Nasser would be subsidized with CIA money laundered through the Org and that the expenses of the operation would also be covered by American funds. Skorzeny's position in Egypt, furthermore, would give him a valuable entrée into the lucrative Middle Eastern arms trade. Cope-land, who was personally involved in the affair, reports that “a certain well-known Major General of the American Army” (whom he declines to identify) was enlisted to convince the former Nazi commando that his services were greatly needed in Egypt.
¹²