America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (2 page)

My, my, how times have changed. Newspapers used to have courage, and I used to be a favorite son of the press.

After I first submitted the core of this book for government censorship in 1981, enough of the truth remained that my publisher, Alfred Knopf, nominated it for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1982. A CBS
60 Minutes
segment about the book won Mike Wallace that year's Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism.

For a brief period of time, my name was on the front page of almost every newspaper in America. My book, originally
The Belarus Secret
, was the cover item for the
Washington Post Book Review
. It went through five printings, and was regarded as a seminal work on Holocaust history and on corruption within the American intelligence community.

That was then, this is now.

Now, US bureaucrats have apparently arranged that
America's Nazi Secret
will never be reviewed by a major newspaper. Previously, all they had needed to do to censor my writing was to keep me under wraps. Because of my many security clearances, after retirement I was subjected to a thirty-year restriction forbidding publishing without government review and editing. When the classification clock ran out, I received word from the CIA that I did not have to submit my books for censorship anymore. I decided to rush something into print quickly before they changed their minds.

This book,
America's Nazi Secret
, is like a sandwich. The center of the sandwich is the original thirty-year-old text of
The Belarus Secret
. On one side of that is a quite lengthy new introduction, explaining what was previously taken out of the book by US Government censors. The other piece is a lengthy epilogue, explaining why so much of the information that has been censored out of all seven of my books during the last three decades is still vitally important today. The new material I have added has more than a bit of relevance to current headlines.

And it still has the potential to put bureaucrats behind bars.

In 1982, Mark Richard was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division, at the Headquarters of the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC. It was he who directed the censorship of my book and threatened me with disbarment and imprisonment if I ever told the truth about him.

Mark Richard was a despicably evil little man, and one who perpetrated a fraud on Congress, the CIA, Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans. It was he, more than any other, who protected Nazi war criminals living in America and obstructed justice for the victims of the Third Reich.

It was a measure of Mark Richard's power and influence that Eric Holder, President Obama's Attorney General, recently gave the eulogy at his funeral in May 2009. I regret that Richard did not live just a few years more, so I could have had him indicted instead of eulogized. At least he knew that I was coming after him, and it panicked him into committing his lies to paper. According to his obituary article in the
Washington Post
, "not satisfied with his bar mitzvah ceremony at age 12," he had repeated it in April of that year. "'He performed like a champ,' his rabbi said."

Richard knew that he was dying of cancer, and he also knew that my thirty-year classification clock would expire in 2011, and I would be free to speak out without pre-publication review. He knew that I was a stubborn old Irishman, and that someday I would tell the world of his awful deeds, recorded in the secret files I had read. Every time I submitted a book for censorship, it only made things worse for him. The censorship only proved the truth of my charges. Sooner or later, all the deletions would come back to haunt him. Richard had arranged for the CIA to put its name on the censorship orders, but it was he who actually controlled the rules for inter-agency deletion.

Before his death in 2009, Mark Richard commissioned a 600-page classified report in which the Justice Department defended Richard's role in the failed “hunt” for Nazi war criminals in America. Of the 15,000 Nazi war criminals officially estimated to have lived in America, fewer than one hundred received any form of mild sanction from the Justice Department, and that at a staggering cost of more than a half-million dollars per case. Congress had delivered the money, but Justice never delivered the goods. Nazi hunting may have been the least effective program in Justice Department history.

Mark Richard edited the Justice Department document to exonerate himself and to shift the blame to a lower-ranking bureaucrat, Allan Ryan, whom Richard accused of perjury and dishonesty. He devoted an entire chapter of the report to me, claiming that I was an amateur historian who “exaggerated” things about Nazis working for American intelligence. And then Richard made a fatal mistake. He told the truth, just a bit, but enough to sink his reputation.

For thirty years, Richard and Ryan had falsely claimed that there was
no evidence whatsoever
of any connection between the US Government and the immigration of Nazi war criminals. But in his long-winded deathbed screed, Richard grudgingly admitted that perhaps some Nazis may have had a little US government help, and perhaps a “few” lies had been told to the federal courts.

It is an old lawyer's trick to cop a plea to a misdemeanor to avoid a felony charge, but Richard should have stayed with the total stonewall instead of going for the limited hang out. Richard and Ryan had been peddling the “we never helped the Nazis” line to the press for thirty years, and reporters were quick to pick up on the change.

America's Nazi Secrets
was released, without any advance notice to the government, in November 2010 on Veteran's Day. (Although advance copies were sent to the
New York Times
, which may have provided an early warning to the Justice Department.) That same week, someone took a copy of Richard's classified report out of the Justice Department safe and leaked it to the
Times
, which broke the story three days later. Now, instead of praising Mark Richard, the
Times
reported primarily that the Justice Department acknowledged that the US government helped Nazis immigrate and then lied about it. That was the headline that ran all over the country.

The
Times
actually published Richard's entire 600-page report on its website, but it seems that only I and a handful of others ever read the whole thing. The bias was self-evident. There is a whole section about an unnamed former Justice Department prosecutor who helped the Australian Government uncover Nazis there. Richard took the credit for the Australian success, but he never mentioned that I was the one who had actually done the praiseworthy work. That would have conflicted with his previous chapter denouncing me as an amateur exaggerator. There is an old saying that those who would lie about history deserve to be forgotten by it.

Still, it was good for a few laughs to imagine that Richard was so terrified of what I might say about him that he wasted thousands of man-hours put in by Justice Department employees. They produced his posthumous defense packet, only to have the press focus on the precise matter I had warned Congress about decades before: Nazis didn't sneak into America; they were smuggled in by our spy agencies. It was nice to be right, even if my name wasn't mentioned in the stories.

No one in the Justice Department or the
New York Times
ever called to interview me about Richard's report. So much for fairness, accuracy and objectivity, but as readers of my weekly column in
Ami
magazine will recall, I have long known that the Times had incestuous ties to both the Justice Department and the intelligence community.

I have read the secret files about the
New York Times
itself, including how Abwehr Leutnant Paul Hoffman, adjutant to the top Nazi war criminal in Italy, later became the
Times
' Rome Bureau Chief at the request of US intelligence. The last I heard, Leutnant Hoffman is retired in Switzerland, but still writes an occasional article for the
Times
' Travel section.

Many of the
Times
' “journalists” over the years have actually been shady covert operatives running assassinations and South American coups. Nowadays, the
Times
doesn't hire Nazis or spies, but it continues to turn a blind eye to such activities. In return for scoops, the
Times
washes the dirty laundry of the intelligence community. They all know how to scrub a story.

The best way to cover up a scandal is merely to minimize it. That way, the rest of the press won't pay much attention: “It's no big deal. The
Times
already covered it. Nothing much there.”

For example in the 1980s, the
Times
ran several skeptical articles about a New Yorker named Mykola Lebed being a “suspected” Nazi. Despite my urging, the
Times
would dig no further. A pity, because there was a lot they could have dug up. Lebed had been the head of the Ukrainian version of the Gestapo, whose thugs murdered Simon Wiesenthal's mother, along with tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and other Ukrainian citizens.

I have a good candidate for who waved the
Times
off the Lebed story. Back in the 1980s, one of Mark Richard's subordinates, Dick Sullivan, had convinced Congress and the CIA that Lebed had been the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Ukraine. To understand the scope of this lie, I should explain that I once had poor Mr. Sullivan read Lebed's entire three-volume intelligence dossier, which throughout documented Lebed's various crimes and atrocities in detail.

I also briefed Sullivan and his buddy Allan Ryan on the Justice Department's embarrassing connections to the Lebed case. In addition to finding Lebed's intelligence visa personally signed by the Attorney General (behind Truman's back), I had found a 1950s intelligence letter to the Eisenhower Justice Department asking to admit Lebed's entire Nazi team for immigration so they could be employed as assassins behind the Iron Curtain. I asked Ryan and Sullivan if I could open the sealed Justice Department “Sunrise” files to look for Ukrainian Nazis admitted in the 1950s.

Permission was denied.

To this day, as far as I can tell, no one in the Justice Department has ever opened the Parole Waiver Act (“Sunrise”) files to look for visas granted to Nazis hired by US intelligence during the Eisenhower administration under that statute. The New York Times continues to praise the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, even hiring Sullivan's buddy Ryan as a book reviewer.

Now you can begin to understand why my books are invisible, and why I think both the
Times
and the Justice Department are charades.

Nearly two decades after I tried to get Justice to move against Mykola Lebed and his network of Nazis, Professor Jeffrey Burds of Northeastern University confirmed the extent of Lebed's atrocities by interviewing eyewitnesses and reviewing recently opened Ukrainian archives. The professor had no doubt that Lebed had been a major war criminal, perhaps the highest ranking Nazi murderer ever to arrive in America.

In 2006, he met with Eli Rosenbaum, the last head of the Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit, who continued to insist that Lebed was nothing of the sort, and that I had exaggerated Lebed's entire Nazi collaboration. I then told Professor Burds about a memo that same bureaucrat had written back when he worked for me as a law clerk. Rosenbaum had reviewed newspaper articles referencing Nazis wanted by the USSR, compiling a list of the two dozen most notorious. Lebed was featured prominently in Rosenbaum's catalog of major war criminals.

Perhaps Mr. Rosenbaum forgot. The
Times
seems to have forgotten a lot as well, apparently never questioning how someone like Lebed could stay in America without the Justice Department ever checking up on him.

Unlike the remarkably uncurious
Times
, the CIA followed up and asked me to write a detailed history of Lebed's Nazi activities, information someone seemed to have purged from its classified files. I have a pretty good guess as to who might have done the purging. There was at least one CIA employee who had the motive, means and opportunity to shred any number of old Nazi files.

In this book, I have now included a copy of my previously classified memo to the CIA about Lebed, along with some of the very recently declassified CIA memos identifying their man responsible for handling any Lebed issues. The CIA trusted Dick Sullivan's expertise on Lebed, since Sullivan had previously worked in the Nazi-hunting unit at Justice. Despite the fact that Sullivan had already seen all of the files at Justice naming Lebed as a war criminal, he nonetheless convinced the CIA that Lebed was an anti-Nazi resistance leader wanted by the Gestapo. There was even a phony “wanted” poster. Mark Richard must have been so proud of Sullivan.

I suspect that pretty much everything the
Times
has ever published about how successfully the Justice Department pursued Nazis in America is a bit of a fraud. Fraud is a bit harsh, you may think. Maybe the editors were just absent minded about events that happened a long time ago. But if so, how can the
Times
reconcile that with its own coverage in November 2010?

Prior to the official release on Veterans Day, my publisher sent the
New York Times
advance copies of
America's Nazi Secret
along with press releases. The book clearly asserts that the Justice Department itself sponsored the immigration of war criminals, including Mykola Lebed and his entire Nazi network. Even if the
Times
ignored all the press releases and had mislaid all their advance copies on Veteran's Day, someone still should have called me shortly after Mark Richard's 600-page classified report landed on their desks, coincidentally arriving just three days after my book was published. Yeah, that's what it was. Just a coincidence.

Following standard practice and checking the indexes for previous
Times
stories about Nazis or Lebed or Justice Department cover-ups, a staffer would have seen my name as the whistle-blowing Justice Department lawyer who had read all the classified Nazi files at CIA, including Lebed's. Forget the archives index, my name was featured prominently in Richard's report itself. It is more than a bit odd that I never got a phone call.