America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (26 page)

Wisner wanted to train his Nazi protégés in the United States out of sight of both Soviet spies and other Allied intelligence agencies. Plans were made to bring recruits to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for parachute instruction, and a secret base was established near Williamsburg, Virginia where they could be trained in guerrilla warfare without even knowing they were in the United States. In order for this to happen, however, Wisner had to evade a ban imposed by President Truman on admitting ex-Nazis to this country without alerting the Immigration Service.

Precedent existed for such sleight of hand. Following the end of the war, the Pentagon had become alarmed at the extent of the Soviet roundup of German rocket and atomic scientists. To make such recruitment easier, the Russians had classified virtually every significant German physicist as a “war criminal” subject to immediate arrest. [Some scientists, such as Arthur Rudolph, were in fact war criminals who used Jewish slave laborers as if they were disposable chemicals at his underground Dora facility for V-2 rockets. Years later, Rudolph admitted his crimes to OSI, and accepted voluntary deportation back to Germany.]

The Pentagon asked Truman for permission to “deny” these scientists to the Russians by smuggling them into the United States. The White House was concerned that the United States might be accused of breaching international agreements against sheltering war criminals, and issued an order forbidding admission into the country of any scientist who had voluntarily aided the Nazis. The scientists brought over in Operation Paperclip, therefore, were to be classified as prisoners of war so as not to violate immigration laws. Top Secret White House documents recently discovered among State Department archives conclusively establish that Truman was under the impression that no American agency had ever brought any Nazi “quislings, traitors, or war criminals” into the country.
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Assistance in earmarking which German scientists to recruit was offered by Donald Maclean, the First Secretary of the British embassy in Washington and liaison for atomic secrets.
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Maclean was also a Soviet mole. Among the Top Secret documents in the Operation Paperclip files is a letter from him advising the Pentagon that certain German scientists were not important enough for recruitment. Later it was determined that several of these men were physicists of international reputation. And the Pentagon soon began to notice that with unsettling regularity many of the scientists whom it wanted to bring to the United States were disappearing, apparently kidnapped by the Russians.

The Pentagon had other worries. The CIC, which had been assigned to scrutinize the candidates for entry into the United States to ferret out Nazis, was coming dangerously close to discovering that several Paperclip candidates were war criminals who had participated in experiments on human beings or had employed slave labor under inhuman conditions. [Indeed, I discovered in the Top Secret vaults written orders from President Truman banning the immigration of any German Scientist who was either a) an early member of the Nazi party b) an SS volunteer or c) wanted by the Allied for war crimes. The State Department, convinced that President Dewey would soon take office, simply lied to the President, sanitized the scientists’ files, and brought them to America anyway.]

The Pentagon had apparently decided, without informing the President, that the interests of national security in using these scientists far out-weighed any notion of prosecuting them for war crimes. The names of several scientists were deleted from the Army’s war crimes suspects list, and the CIC was directed to accelerate background clearances for them. The war crimes investigations were closed, and a “no derogatory information” report was issued. The scientists were simply listed as cargo on an aircraft weigh bill and flown to the United States. Several years later they would be paraded across the Mexican border and back again so as to create a “legal” entry for immigration.
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It was almost an article of faith that any deception was permissible to protect valuable scientists such as Wernher von Braun from Soviet apprehension.
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There were, however, several incidents that graphically illustrated the haphazard nature of postwar security checks for German scientists. According to one CIA agent, Klaus Fuchs was given clearance to work on the atomic bomb project despite the fact that the agency possessed a classified SS report identifying him as a Communist spy. The document was discovered only after Fuchs had sent much important information off to Moscow. (I have since found this document in the National Archives.) The net result of OPC’s recruitment of Nazi scientists was that the Russians obtained all the secrets of the US Atom Bomb research.

With the “successful” Paperclip example before him, Frank Wisner designed a program to smuggle his “freedom fighters” into the United States, where he could prepare them for the coming war of liberation. He instructed OPC to concentrate on refugees who had been high-level political collaborators. They were to be brought to the United States to set up “national committees for liberation” for each country behind the Iron Curtain, with money funneled through the OPC‘s secret accounts. Clay’s contacts ensured that the CIC would not conduct war crimes investigations involving them, while Wisner used his influence within the State Department to make certain that the Nazis’ visa applications were expedited.
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Incriminating information was removed from the files and false identities were created as necessary. And so, while other government agencies were actively engaged in pursuing Nazi war criminals, the State Department was importing their Nazi leaders to the safety of the United States.

It was not a large operation at first. A few dozen obscure politicians from countries under Soviet occupation were brought to New York and put to work in “private” organizations dedicated to opposing communism.* Outside of a handful of State Department officials, few even knew of their Nazi collaboration, fewer still realized their connection to Nazi intelligence operations. Between 1948 and 1950, while the CIA was still being organized, the State Department systematically imported and recruited the leaders of nearly all the puppet regimes established by the Third Reich from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Hilger’s dream was coming true.

*George Kennan, who designed the administrative structure of OPC for the State Department, was also instrumental in forming the National Committee for a Free Europe. However, there is no conclusive evidence that he knew that Joyce and Wisner were staffing these committees with former Nazi collaborators.[ Such ignorance does seem implausible, given Kennan’s rank and position.]

The OPC insiders were hardly ignorant of the fact that these men were responsible for war crimes involving thousands of innocent civilians. Joyce himself had fought the Nazi collaborators in Yugoslavia. Wisner had been stationed with the OSS in Istanbul during the war when refugees escaping from Eastern Europe described the role of these political leaders in the Holocaust. Kennan, the State Department’s Russian expert, must have had access to the reports of atrocities in Byelorussia and the Ukraine from the OSS, the Polish Secret Service, and the U.S. Military Attache in Moscow. The Department even maintained a Political Biographical Section that cross-filed all the reports on the emigre leaders. In the Library of Congress is a 1948 publication by the government of Albania, identifying its major collaborators and war criminals. Across the top is the signature of the State Department official who donated the copy. A few months later, many of the war criminals listed were placed in charge of the “National Committee for a Free Albania” by the State Department. A review of State cable traffic in the National Archives, Diplomatic Branch, Decimal Files Section, shows that they possessed similar information on the backgrounds of the collaborators in each country prior to OPC’s recruiting drive in 1948-50.

Kennan’s friend in the German Foreign Office, Gustav Hilger, can hardly deny that he knew of the atrocities. Foreign Office records in the National Archives show that weekly reports from the Einsatzgruppen were forwarded to Hilger’s Russian desk. Hilger’s records were cited in a CIA report (now declassified) listing “S.S. officers wanted for atrocities and mass murders.” Ironically, the report lists Friedrich Buchardt, Hilger’s counterpart in the SS, for his war crimes in Byelorussia. Several of the persons named in the CIA report, including various Ukrainian collaborators [such as Mykola Lebed], were recruited by OPC. In a secret report, an Army intelligence officer noted with amusement that one wing of the CIA (apparently OSO) was hunting Ukrainian Nazis, while another wing (OPC) was recruiting them. All of the intelligence officers with whom I spoke placed full responsibility for the initial recruitment of collaborators on the State Department.

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]As early as 1949 the OPC had 302 agents in five stations and a budget of $4.7 million. By 1952, the number of employees had jumped to about 4,000 in forty-seven stations and the budget had reached 582 million. This did not include funds spent by other American intelligence agencies on behalf of OPC, nor did it represent the expenses of OPC proprietary operations such as Radio Liberty.

[
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] Tragically, those refugees who opposed both the Nazis and the Communists were ignored.

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] During a series of interviews, former CIA officials conceded that nearly every American intelligence organization, including OPC, had utilized ex-Nazi émigrés for intelligence purposes in Europe during the Cold War. To do otherwise, they insisted, would have been negligent, since there were so few sources of information available with any expertise on Eastern Europe. All of them disavowed any knowledge that the Nazi émigrés were later assisted in entering the United States. Several conceded that in view of the bitter rivalry between CIA and OPC in the late forties, it would have been most unlikely that Wisner would have apprised them of his plans. [One Army officer when shown evidence that his former Nazi agents had been relocated to America said “this is treason.”]

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] The FBI terminated several internal security investigations when the suspect identified himself as working for an OPC front group.

[
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] Clark Clifford, special counsel to President Truman, recently confirmed that the White House had not been informed of any illegal smuggling program.

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] *Not all the scientists, of course, were von Brauns. Some were Soviet spies. Not until many years later, when one of the Paperclip scientists turned down a job requiring a Top Secret clearance, did the Army first begin to suspect that it may have been too hasty in expediting the earlier background checks. The “scientist” confessed that he had simply made up a host of academic credentials in the hope that the Americans would grant him sanctuary. Upon arrival in the United States he had sought out managerial positions where his fictitious degrees would not be challenged. The “scientist” feared that if he accepted the better-paying job offer and underwent a Top Secret clearance investigation his fraud might be discovered. To the consternation of the Army investigator conducting the interview, the man also confessed that before his departure to the United States he had been solicited to become an informant for Soviet intelligence. For years the “scientist” had lived in dread that one day the Soviet agents would blackmail him. After an investigation the Army decided that he was telling the truth and had not been in contact with the Soviets since coming to America. Apparently the Soviets had much higher level Nazi scientists on their payroll.

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Paradoxically, at the same time that Wisner was trying to smuggle Byelorussian and Ukrainian Nazis into the United States, these very same people were being denounced in Congress as examples of those who should not be allowed entry. In the summer of 1948, Congress approved the Displaced Persons Act, which permitted some 400,000 refugees to come to America, but only after extensive debate because of widespread concern that war criminals might slip through the screening process. The strict standards established by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to bar war criminals, Nazi officials, and collaborators from emigrating were tightened by Congress. Even mere membership in any “movement hostile” to the United States was made sufficient cause for denial of an immigration visa.

On August 7, 1948, during the debate on the DP bill, Congressman Arthur G. Klein of New York cited Stanislaw Stankievich as an example of the war criminals hiding in the refugee camps who should never be permitted to enter the United States. Klein inserted into the Congressional Record Appendix an article prepared by an OSS officer who was then assisting the Nuremberg prosecution, giving a detailed account of the Borissow massacre and other atrocities in Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The documentation included Sergeant Soennecken’s report on the events of October 19-20,1941, which had been entered as evidence at Nuremberg.
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For the first time Congress learned of the holocaust in Byelorussia, as Klein read Soennecken’s account of the slaughter of the 7,000 Jews of Borissow. He also noted the OSS agent’s belief that among the refugees in the European camps were many Eastern European Nazis, including Stankievich, who were trying to emigrate to America:

No doubt every one of them now bears a new name, passes [himself off as a martyr of Soviet oppression, and answers to all the specifications of a “political refugee.

The story of Borissow was enacted in every one of the hundreds of towns of [Byelorussia and] the Ukraine, and when the Jews were no more, the same present-day martyrs were used to hound partisans, recruit forced laborers, confiscate property, supervise labor gangs, operate the crematoria.