America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (29 page)

Soviet eyewitnesses, Jewish survivors, and some of Jasiuk’s colleagues who later informed on him reported that his police did not repeat the mistakes of Borissow. They dug large trenches behind the Arinskaya Church in Kletsk, out of sight but within walking distance of the ghetto. The Byelorussian police lined the roads and escorted the Jews in columns of a hundred, men first, according to the familiar pattern, then women and children. A small detachment of Germans and specially selected Byelorussians accomplished the actual execution. Guards were left atop the graves until the ground stopped trembling and the muffled cries were still. There was no chance for anyone to crawl out. In one day Jasiuk murdered the entire Jewish population of the county, conservatively estimated at more than 5,000 people.

The Nazis took notice of Jasiuk’s efforts and promoted him to county chief of Stolpce, a much larger area. Contemporary newspapers related that Jasiuk proved adept at giving pro-Nazi speeches, but he apparently lacked the flair for anti-partisan operations that caused many of his contemporaries to advance under the SS to key positions in the national puppet government. Jasiuk was a valuable utility man, working tirelessly with religious collaborators from the local independent Byelorussian Orthodox church and others to increase the SS stranglehold on the civilian population. Ostrowsky selected him as one of the featured speakers at the collaborators’ convention in Minsk in 1944. Jasiuk was one of the first to be evacuated to Germany when Byelorussia fell to the Red Army in the summer of 1944. In Berlin he worked to organize other exiled collaborators into the Belarus Brigade. Just as the Reich was about to collapse, he was given forged identity papers listing him as a prisoner of war who had joined the Free Polish forces led by General Anders. Like many of the Belarus Brigade, Jasiuk fled to the French zone, where he lived for a time under the name of Max Jasinki, until the American attitude on repatriation became known.

Jasiuk crossed back into the American zone and became a courier for the Belarus network sponsored by OPC. Learning that Wagenaar was seeking intelligence information, Jasiuk brought him some maps of the Soviet airfields in the Urals that the Byelorussian collaborators had taken from the SS files and captured Soviet archives in Minsk. Much of the information furnished by Jasiuk was later discovered to be worthless. Nevertheless, he provided Wagenaar with an introduction to the Nazi underground that the agent exploited vigorously. Wagenaar hired Jasiuk as his translator,
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and together they traveled all over occupied Germany establishing liaison with the scattered battalions of the Belarus Brigade. As official State Department employees, the two were permitted unrestricted travel. Usually a vice consul from Stuttgart, more or less oblivious to Wagenaar’s true role, accompanied them on their rounds to provide cover.

When Wisner directed that an attempt be made to reconcile the various Byelorussian factions, Jasiuk accompanied an Ostrowsky delegation to France to try to reach an agreement with the Abramtchik group. During this journey, cover was provided by the Polish Central Commission at the request of General Anders. Wisner decided to bring Jasiuk to America, where he could continue his recruiting activities among the Byelorussians already here. The CIC was asked by the consulate to convene a special hearing to expedite Jasiuk’s visa. Wagenaar and two State Department officials appeared on Jasiuk’s behalf and testified that he had performed invaluable services “of a highly confidential nature” for an unnamed American intelligence agency. The State Department officials then corroborated Jasiuk’s fictitious biography, which put him in a monastery and then on a farm in Bavaria as a slave laborer during World War II.
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The CIC was not taken in, and subsequently launched a burglary of Wagenaar’s office in order to inspect the documents on Jasiuk.
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They recognized most of Jasiuk’s paperwork as recently produced forgeries and notified the State Department that they were preparing to arrest Jasiuk and Wagenaar. Wagenaar had friends in the French Surete who were called in to provide cover, and a high official in the French intelligence service protested that the CIC was meddling with one of its most valuable operations. After being reprimanded by the State Department, the CIC dropped its investigation of the allegation that Wagenaar was selling visas.
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Within a few months after Jasiuk had emigrated, the CIC received a tip from an informant linking Jasiuk to Dimitri Kasmowich, the former Smolensk police chief, who had applied for a visa. The CIC learned that Kasmowich had been previously rejected for emigration and had been taken into custody for falsifying a visa application. Under questioning, Kasmowich ran through a variety of cover stories and false identities before acknowledging that he was being recruited by the Americans for a secret intelligence mission. The OPC tried to persuade the CIC to drop the charges against him, but the CIC sensed there was something suspicious about the connection between Kasmowich and Jasiuk.

The agency pressed ahead with the case against Kasmowich until State Department officials requested that he be released. In return, State promised to make certain that he would never receive a visa to come to the United States. Instead, Kasmowich was smuggled to England, where he lived under the name of Zarechny.
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The incident was not yet closed, however. Suspicions aroused, the CIC located several informants who identified Jasiuk and Kasmowich as Nazi collaborators. In fact, Kasmowich was a cousin of Michael Vitushka, who had led the Black Cat guerrilla band behind Soviet lines at the end of the war. Kasmowich himself had undergone parachute and commando training at the SS school at Dahlwitz, but had fled to Switzerland at the end of the war.

The CIC had obtained a copy of a letter from Jasiuk to his old friend “Captain Wagner” (the copy is in Wagenaar’s CIC file). The letter introduced Kasmowich as a former police chief in Byelorussia under the Nazis who Jasiuk said “would be perfect for the purposes of your organization.” Wagenaar told the CIC that a “Mr. J.” had obtained valuable intelligence information from Kasmowich. The CIC, however, was not fooled.

CIC investigators now realized that Jasiuk was the central figure in a Nazi underground railroad that assisted war criminals to come to the United States, and they blamed the Air Force, which they believed was Jasiuk‘s controller, for allowing it to operate. The Air Force was mystified; Jasiuk had been only a routine source who had turned over some minor documents on airfield runways and had assisted in putting together an information handbook on Byelorussia. In fact, Jasiuk had been working for an OPC mission wearing Air Force uniforms. Still oblivious to the OPC connection, CIC officials were even more angered at the realization that Jasiuk had orchestrated the escape of at least eight major war criminals by means of the visas he had secured from Wagenaar when he was only a minor informant for the Air Force. To prevent the cancellation of any more of its prosecutions, the CIC submitted a formal complaint up the chain of command on the handling of Jasiuk.

The protest finally reached General John Weckerling, chief of Military Intelligence at the Pentagon, who agreed that the Nazi smuggling operation was deplorable.
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The FBI had jurisdiction over fugitives wanted for trial on war crimes charges who had entered the United States, so Weckerling personally apprised J. Edgar Hoover of the affair. He told Hoover on January 2, 1951 that the Air Force had apparently used a Nazi war criminal as an informant and that the State Department had permitted him to enter the United States. Hoover expressed an interest in the case, for it seemed likely to fit in with his plans to expand the FBI’s domestic intelligence capabilities. When FBI agents went to visit Jasiuk, it was not to arrest him but to recruit him. Like SS General Kushel, Jasiuk could keep Hoover apprised of gossip about what OPC was up to. Hoover spent as much time spying on American intelligence agencies as he did on the enemy. Jasiuk and the other Byelorussian Nazis had found their ultimate protector, the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the US Department of Justice.

Following his difficulties with the Byelorussians, Wisner attempted to circumvent similar immigration problems with Ukrainian Nazis. But the repeated Soviet denunciations of the alleged links between Stephan Bandera and other Ukrainian war criminals and American and British intelligence agencies kept the spotlight focused on them. The Ukrainian delegate to the United Nations charged that Bandera and other Ukrainian Nazis, such as Andrei Melnik, were running special schools to train cadres in sabotage and intelligence work against the Soviet Union. He listed numerous atrocities committed by them.

Arguably the highest ranking Ukrainian Nazi to ever enter the United States was Mykola Lebed. Lebed was Bandera’s chief of the national security service, the SB. When Army intelligence picked up Lebed, he turned over thousands of pages of dossiers on his Nazi recruits. The Attorney General promptly protected Lebed from arrest and deportation by granting him permanent citizenship under the 1949 “Hundred Persons A Year Act.” Because of the Congressional prohibition against using the Act to protect “Nazis, murderers, and persons of that sort,” the Attorney General concocted a fictitious biography of Lebed and sent it to the CIA and the Immigration and Naturalization service.” Lebed’s name was censored from the original manuscript of this book.

The Immigration Service, the IRO as well as the U.S. DP Commission had long regarded the Ukrainian Nazis as ineligible for visas and had placed their organizations on the “inimical list”; but that did not deter Wisner.

In the spring of 1951, he learned that another of Lebed’s SB intelligence agents had been detained at Ellis Island. He was charged with possession of false documents as well as being a member of the torture squad (SB) of the Nazi-sponsored Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN/Bandera. Rather than risk another false entry under the 100 persons Act, Wisner decided to evade Congressional prohibitions entirely , and had the following letter sent to the headquarters of the Immigration and Naturalization Service:

1. …It was definitely established that [the agent] is a member of OUN/Bandera, although he at first denied any connection with the organization and even went so far as to perjure himself in writing … with the explanation that he was under an oath of secrecy which he could not break.

2. There are at least twenty former or active members of the SB of OUN/Bandera in the United States at the present time. Although the SB is known to have used extra-legal methods while investigating or interrogating suspected Soviet agents, there have been few cases to date where it was possible to pin a specific criminal activity on any individual belonging to the SB and take court action. Since the SB kept elaborate files and conducted investigations on Ukrainians and suspected Soviet agents of other nationalities, no serious attempt has ever been made by American officials in Germany to disband the SB. In the past five years the SB has been chronically unable to cooperate wholeheartedly with American intelligence representatives in Germany, primarily because the price set by Stephan Bandera for complete cooperation involved types of political recognition and commitments to his group which no American in Germany was in a position to make.
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Operating independently, the SB has upon occasion been more of a headache to American intelligence than a boon. Nevertheless in wartime a highly nationalistic Ukrainian political group with its own security service could conceivably be a great asset. …Alienating such a group could, on the other hand, have no particular advantage to the United States either now or in war time.

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At the end of the last war many members of the OUN came to Western Europe to avoid capture by the advancing Soviets. The OUN re-formed in Western Europe with its headquarters in Munich. It first came to the attention of American authorities when the Russians demanded extradition of Bandera and many other anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists as war criminals. Luckily the attempt to locate these anti-Soviet Ukrainians was sabotaged by a few far-sighted Americans who warned the persons concerned to go into hiding. [Emphasis added.] From 1945 to 1948 members of OUN and of UPA arrived from the Soviet Ukraine to Western Germany on foot. The messages they and returning German prisoners of war brought conclusively confirmed that the OUN and the UPA were continuing the fight against the Soviets, with the weapons and ammunition which the retreating German armies had left behind. Over 35,000 members of the Russian secret police (MVD-MKGB) have been killed by OUN-UPA since the end of the last war. In other words, the main activities of the OUN in the Ukraine cannot be considered detrimental to the United States.
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Wisner’s letter must have caused a commotion at the INS. It was as close as he dared come to disclosing that OPC was using CIA money and CIA cover to provide “left-behind” arms and ammunition to underground assassination teams inside Eastern Europe. But that was not all. The letter conclusively established that Wisner lied to the INS.
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He fraudulently claimed that the OUN was not a Nazi-sponsored organization and that its members had never collaborated with the Germans. At the end of several paragraphs of fictional history, Wisner stated:

In simple terms, the Germans wanted from the Ukrainians only food and supplies for their armies and forced labor for their factories. The Germans used all means necessary to force the cooperation which the Ukrainians were unwilling to give. Thus, by summer 1941 a battle raged on Ukrainian soil between two ruthless exploiters and persecutors of the Ukrainian people, the Third Reich and Soviet Russia. The OUN and the partisan army it created in late 1942, UPA, fought bitterly against both the Germans and the Soviet Russians.