America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (23 page)

On October 31, 1947, the delegate to the United Nations from the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic unleashed an attack that revealed just how closely the MVD had monitored the activities of the Belarus in the DP camps.
⁸²
Almost every one of the men denounced by the Soviets as war criminals was associated with one or another Western intelligence agency. Few of the UN delegates realized, however, that the denunciation was a skirmish in the rapidly heating Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West.

The Government of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic has available a substantial list of German fascist criminals and their accomplices who committed crimes on the temporarily occupied territory of Byelorussia [the Byelorussian delegate declared]. Some of the criminals are still hiding in camps for displaced persons, while others are living on in the western zones of Germany and Austria, where they are forming all kinds of organizations hostile to Soviet Byelorussia and engaging in subversive activity against the United Nations.

Thus, according to our information, there [exists] in Munich, in the United States zone of occupation, a so-called “Byelorussian National Committee” which is composed of war criminals and is a centre of subversive activity directed against Soviet Byelorussia….

A “Byelorussian Committee” … also operates at Regensburg (in the United States zone of occupation). This “Committee” has a considerable number of members who committed crimes against the Byelorussian people [among them] … Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Kushel, who lives in Amberg (United States zone of occupation), and who, during the German occupation of Byelorussia, was a member of the so-called “Byelorussian Central Council” set up by the fascists. Kushel was one of the most active workers of the “Byelorussian Territorial Defence Organization,” which took part in the fighting against the Soviet Army and the Byelorussian partisans. With Franz Kushel lives his wife Arsenieva, one of the chief contributors to the fascist newspaper Ranitsa, which was published in Berlin by the German authorities and called for bloody reprisals against the unyielding Byelorussian people….

The following members of the “Byelorussian Central Council” which existed during the German occupation of Byelorussia are also at Amberg: Evgeni Kolubovich (or Geny Golubovich), who worked as head of the Department of Culture and Propaganda of the “Byelorussian Central Council”; Stanislaw Stankievich, who was chief of the Borissow district at the time of the German occupation, directed the massacre of the innocent inhabitants of this district, and afterwards became editor of the fascist newspaper Ranitsa; Yosif Dashkevich, who served as an SS captain and conducted punitive operations against the population of the Slonim district of the region of Baranovichi; and many others whose hands are stained with the blood of the Byelorussian people.

In the town of Hoexter in the United Kingdom zone of occupation of Germany lives the butcher of the Byelorussian people, the President of the so-called “Byelorussian Central Council” set up by the Germans when they were temporarily in occupation of Byelorussia. He is Radoslaw Ostrowsky, whose misdeeds the Byelorussian people will never forgive, wherever he may hide and whoever may hide him….

When Washington made inquiries, in an attempt to meet Soviet demands for repatriation of the collaborators, the charges were brushed off, and so were similar accusations against Stankievich and the Ukrainian Stephan Bandera.
⁸³

Bandera was advised by military intelligence to go underground while the CIC searched for him. Stankievich constituted a more difficult problem. The CIC picked him up in 1948 for “aggressive interrogation,” and upon being shown a copy of Ranitsa with his name on the masthead, he broke down and sobbed out a partial confession.
⁸⁴
While Stankievich acknowledged having held numerous posts in the occupation regime, he did not mention the atrocities committed while he held those positions. The staff of General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of the American Zone in Germany, persuaded the CIC not to prosecute, pointing out that Stankievich was now working for British intelligence. The CIC agreed, and Clay’s intelligence staff notified Washington that Stankievich was merely an anticommunist politician whom the Soviets wished to discredit. “All other indicated files … disclosed no derogatory information,” the letter said.
[4]

Meanwhile, the American intelligence establishment was undergoing another shake-up. In September 1947 the Central Intelligence Group became the Central Intelligence Agency, with a greatly enlarged field of operations.
⁸⁵
Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Vandenberg’s successor at the CIG, was named its head. Unlike his predecessors, the admiral had considerable intelligence experience, which he had garnered in the Pacific during the war, and he was fluent in German.

Army intelligence, which lost its share of the supervision of the Gehlen organization to the CIG, was determined to prevent further erosion of its privileged position in the intelligence community. Military intelligence was particularly alarmed about the influence of old OSS hands in the civilian-oriented CIA, for the Army had always regarded the OSS as too liberal in its political coloration. Many of the G-2 staff were convinced that the OSS had been effectively penetrated by the Communists during the war, and the FBI claimed that Allen Dulles had hired “a bunch of Bolsheviks” to work with him.
⁸⁶
In point of fact, while the OSS made use of Communists in its work in occupied Europe, its prevailing political ideology was for the most part a vague sort of Eastern Establishment liberalism. By comparison, the Army intelligence staff was largely conservative in its political and social outlook.

The CIA and G-2 also clashed over the proper function of an American intelligence agency. Military intelligence favored infiltration of “liberation groups” such as the Byelorussians into the Soviet Union, while Hillenkoetter disdained “unconventional warfare.” He did not believe the high risk of exposure justified actively engaging in sabotage and subversive activities or recruiting paramilitary cadres even on a standby basis. He regarded the CIA as a consumer of intelligence rather than a producer, and was content to receive Gehlen’s reports and pass on analyses to the President.

Many of the OSS veterans in the CIA argued that 90 percent of all American intelligence needs could be met by a careful examination of open source material, such as newspapers, or by questioning returning visitors to foreign countries, while the remainder could be supplied by a few well-placed agents. The OSS faction convinced Hillenkoetter that espionage was an industry for craftsmen, requiring a great deal of skill, enormous concentration, and large amounts of money and patience. To support their arguments the OSS veterans maintained that every American intelligence failure in the postwar era could have been prevented by making better use of information already in the files. More emphasis should be placed on gathering information about foreign industry, mineral resources, and political patterns to supplement the heavy doses of purely military intelligence. Hillenkoetter was determined that analysis and collection would be the foundations of the CIA’s success, and that the agency should not become involved in schemes to prepare liberation groups for a war that might never come.

The military had important allies, however. Many ranking Republicans regarded the Truman administration’s efforts to contain the Soviet Union as ineffectual. Containment of communism was not enough; America should roll back the frontiers of the Soviet empire and liberate the captive nations of Eastern Europe. The “liberationists” included Thomas E. Dewey, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948; John Foster Dulles, Dewey’s top foreign policy adviser; Allen Dulles, his brother and an old OSS hand; and Nelson A. Rockefeller, who had headed the U.S. propaganda-espionage effort in Latin America during the war.
[5]
Within the government, their allies were James V. Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, who possessed a fanatical hatred of communism; George F. Kennan, chief of the State Department’s Policy and Planning Staff; and Robert P. Joyce, Kennan’s assistant for Eastern Europe.

Alarmed at the prospect of a Communist victory in the Italian parliamentary elections scheduled for April 1948, Forrestal pressed Truman to use the CIA as an active weapon.
⁸⁷
Following considerable debate, the National Security Council ordered Hillenkoetter to instigate covert operations to make certain that the pro-Western Christian Democrats remained in power. Although Hillenkoetter was concerned that such activities were beyond the statutory jurisdiction of the CIA, he ordered the agency’s Office of Special Operations to take a hand in the Italian elections. Backed by $10 million in secret funds, the OSO launched a well-coordinated propaganda campaign that created fear of a Communist takeover. Politicians were bought and sold with impunity. Tens of thousands of Americans of Italian ancestry were persuaded to appeal directly to friends and relatives at home to cast their votes for parties that would cooperate with the United States. Although the Communists gained many votes, the Christian Democratic majority was sufficient to keep them out of the government – and the reluctant OSO was credited with the victory.

The success of the Italian operation brought demands for similar actions elsewhere. Just before the Italian election a state of near-hysteria was generated in official Washington by a cable from General Clay, which warned of the danger of imminent war with the Soviets.
⁸⁸
In May 1948, George Kennan produced a plan for a permanent State Department agency to do worldwide what the OSO had done in Italy. While the CIA would continue with the routine collection and interpretation of information, this new agency, the Office of Policy Coordination, would engage in a back-alley struggle against the Soviet Union.

National Security Council Directive 10/2, the OPC‘s charter, gave it the widest possible latitude, which would include the use of clandestine military organizations to overthrow governments regarded as unfriendly to the United States. The OPC was also a bureaucratic anomaly. Its agents overseas wore American military uniforms, but were paid by the CIA. Although its director was to be chosen by the Secretary of State, policy guidance would theoretically be provided by the Secretaries of State and Defense.

In practice, however, OPC’s program emanated almost entirely from the State Department’s Policy and Planning Staff, headed by George Kennan. In 1948, this unit functioned as the operational arm of the National Security Council, which had been constituted the previous year. Policy and Planning was the nucleus of America’s Cold War effort, with liaisons to each component of the intelligence community. One high-ranking official of the Truman administration confided that the State Department had been engaged in intelligence operations even before OPC was created. This is not surprising, in view of the backgrounds of the Policy and Planning Staff. Robert Joyce, who became OPC‘s liaison officer, was formerly an OSS agent assigned to guerrilla warfare in Yugoslavia. Kennan had worked in the Moscow embassy from 1939 to 1941, where, according to one of his contemporaries, he had become close friends with Gustav Hilger, who had helped negotiate the Hitler-Stalin Pact. When Hilger was first brought to the United States in 1945 for secret interrogation, he met with a warm reception from his friends in the State Department, who were later to become his sponsors.

Retired CIA officials agree that the State Department alone had initiated OPC‘s “political action” programs, and that the other intelligence services merely provided cover and logistical support. The Director of Central Intelligence was completely bypassed, even though the OPC eventually became a CIA component, after State became uneasy about the risk of exposure. Yet, when the head of the CIA objected to the recklessness of these covert operations, he was ordered to cooperate. The net result of State’s maneuvering was that no one had ultimate authority for riding herd on OPC, and a strong director could do almost anything he wanted.
⁸⁹

Frank Wisner had returned to government service from his Wall Street legal practice only a short time before he was named to head the Office of Policy Coordination. In 1947, Under Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson suggested that Wisner be named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Countries. It was an intelligence, rather than a diplomatic, assignment, where Wisner had ample opportunity to map out his plans. Everything that he observed convinced him that the United States faced the prospect of a long struggle with the Soviet Union, with the strong possibility of a sudden eruption into open warfare. Wisner set to work reviewing the accumulated files of the OSS, now held by the State Department, including the list of Romanian collaborators and fascists that he had compiled while in Bucharest searching for potential sources for destabilization movements behind Soviet lines. His staff came up with a copy of Stanislaw Hrynkievich’s statement to Third Army intelligence in 1945, with its detailed description of the Nazi puppet government of Byelorussia.

The Byelorussians appeared ideal for Wisner’s purposes. They had run a complex system of secret informants, most of whom had remained behind Soviet lines and were now vulnerable to blackmail by threats to expose their wartime collaboration with the Nazis. They had also proven their willingness in Operation Tobacco to collaborate with the Americans by informing on Communist penetration of the DP camps. The counterintelligence angle would also provide good cover for Wisner’s guerrilla warfare operations, which he wanted to keep hidden from the rest of the American intelligence community. Wisner was going to make General Patton’s dream a reality – continuing the fight against communism by recruiting guerrilla bands of former SS men.
[6]