America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (36 page)

The Immigration Service should have realized that the CIA’s allegations about Kushel’s SS background dovetailed rather neatly with the recent war crimes charges, and it should have gone back to CIC with a demand that the earlier, unsanitized files be produced and the leads followed up. But through incompetence or conspiracy, these leads were never pursued. The Kushel investigation was terminated almost immediately after the CIA reported that it had “no derogatory information” on him.
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Recently a CIA official was asked to define “no derogatory information.” He responded that it meant there was no evidence of pro-communist activity. Nazism was regarded as anticommunist, therefore information that a person was a Nazi was not derogatory. This was not simply doublespeak; the intelligence community has a precise language all its own, reflecting carefully constructed compartmentalization to conceal organizational connections. For example, if the CIA were asked whether it ever employed Nazis as agents, the agency would respond in the negative. Upon further inquiry, if a researcher knew enough to ask, he would discover that “employee” does not include someone employed by a CIA front organization; and “agents” do not include persons who worked for Wisner’s guerrilla forces, because they were not on the United States government payroll. To a layman it may seem like a distinction without a difference, since they were all paid by the CIA to do work for the CIA.

The FBI employs similar distinctions. If the Bureau were asked whether it ever used Nazis as informants, the answer would be “no.” The FBI distinguishes between confidential sources, casual sources, volunteers who provide information, and people who provide information under investigation. Since the FBI refuses to release the names of its confidential informants even to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division, it has normally been impossible to determine whether the Bureau has had a conflict of interest in conducting war crimes investigations.

Even though the temporary “Sunrise” visas for intelligence agents are granted by the Attorney General, the FBI keeps control of the records. Mssrs. Ryan and Sullivan, my superiors at OSI, told me that I could not see our own files. To this day, no one in the OSI has ever reviewed the most likely records for Nazi emigration to America. That speaks volumes about the Justice Department’s knowledge of what those records contain.

Apart from bureaucratic unwillingness to reopen the old Nazi files, intelligence agencies change their record-keeping procedures with astonishing frequency. Only the file clerks who suffer through each of these reorganizations can track down the locations of the cold files. The Pentagon could not even find the name of the office within Military Intelligence that coordinated its old Sensitive Document files. As the World War II-era clerks retired from government service during the late 1960s and 1970s, they took with them the institutional memory of Top Secret operations that had been conducted only twenty years previously. With some chagrin, a CIA official has confided that the institutional memory in one section of the agency went back only eighteen months due to the wave of recent retirements. In fact, each American intelligence agency carefully maintains acres and acres of cavernous vaults under heavy guard without the remotest idea of their contents.

The CIA had misplaced the entire Gehlen collection and did not know where to find it. It was not able even to begin its search until another agency furnished the exact cryptonym that had originally been used by the CIA twenty years earlier.

In the wake of Watergate and other abuses – including CIA involvement in an “anticommunist” coup in Chile that recalled Frank Wisner in his heyday – there were demands for a congressional investigation. President Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon, issued an executive order establishing a presidential commission to investigate the CIA. Nelson Rockefeller, then Vice President, was named to head it, and knowledgeable observers compared the appointment to sending in the fox to guard the henhouse because of Rockefeller’s links to the intelligence community and his knowledge of its covert activities. A subsequent Senate investigation concluded that the Rockefeller Commission was only a whitewash effort to divert further investigation from abuses by the intelligence community.

The Rockefeller Commission included Ronald Reagan, who, perhaps unwittingly, had helped years before to raise funds for the Crusade for Freedom, which served as an OPC front, and had publicly urged that the refugee freedom fighters be given a home in America.

The existence of the Rockefeller Commission did not noticeably assuage Congress’s urge to investigate, however. On January 27, 1975, the Senate established a Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, under the chairmanship of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee’s mandate included:

The extent to which the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and any other federal law-enforcement or intelligence agencies coordinate their respective activities, and agreements which govern that coordination, and the extent to which a lack of coordination has contributed to activities which are illegal, improper, inefficient, unethical, or contrary to the intent of Congress…. The extent and necessity of overt and covert intelligence activities in the United States.
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The committee soon discovered the existence of OPC, the original clandestine service, and was just starting to penetrate the labyrinth of OPC cryptonyms when Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was assassinated. The Church Committee was falsely blamed for inadvertently disclosing Welch’s identity and thus causing his death. The resulting furor over what was perceived as a reckless investigation contributed to the disbandment of the committee just as it was about to start probing into the Belarus secret and the other Nazi networks that had been smuggled into America at Wisner’s direction. In hindsight, it appears that the Church Committee was the victim of false propaganda: subsequent investigations have shown that neither Welch nor his predecessor in Athens had ever concealed their position as CIA station chief. But whether by accident or by design, the investigation was terminated.
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Wisner’s OPC project files remain buried in the vaults. The Church Committee did (like the Rockefeller Commission) recommend the establishment of a joint congressional oversight committee.
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Paradoxically, right across the street from the Senate lay enough information to expose not only the Belarus secret but virtually the entire range of OPC’s illegal activities. The Library of Congress had obtained copies of several books published by the Byelorussian Soviet Republic in the late 1960s that described in detail the wartime collaboration of the Belarus, the atrocities its members had committed, and their subsequent involvement with the CIA and the British secret service. One book, Collaborators in Crime, displayed photographs of captured Byelorussian paratroopers with their U.S. government-issue equipment.
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The book also reproduced many of the Nazi documents incriminating the Belarus political leaders, and named their supervisors in Radio Liberty, and identified the Eisenhower administration officials who had hired them and smuggled them to America. Other books recently published in Byelorussia display photos of the various collaborators, including Franz Kushel, in full Nazi uniform.
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These volumes had never been translated into English, and none of the accusatory information on the library’s open shelves had been discovered by any of the intelligence agencies until I came across them while working for OSI.

Moreover, the Library of Congress also contained sufficient information to sustain many of the Soviet charges against the Byelorussian collaborators. Books published by the Belarus network in the Byelorussian language contain photographs of the leaders, including Kushel, Jasiuk, Sobolewsky, and many others. Even the sanitized Nazi documents reprinted by the Belarus network itself confirmed the Soviet accounts in nearly every respect, including admissions that they were being funded by AMCOMLIB, whose name was later changed to Radio Liberty.

The Slavic Reading Room at the Library of Congress has copies of various other Byelorussian publications, including those in which the various factions accused each other of war crimes and secret collaboration with the Communists. The library’s microfilm section contains copies of the
Minsker Zeitung
,
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the Nazi newspaper published in Minsk during the occupation, which names and discusses the roles of the various collaborators. In the stack sections under “White Russian History” are various eyewitness accounts by the Jewish victims of the Byelorussian holocaust, describing in detail the atrocities committed by the Byelorussian collaborators and the police battalions during the war.

A few blocks away from the Senate, in the Modern Military Section of the National Archives, repose microfilms of the Third Reich’s wartime records for Byelorussia. The weekly SS reports named their key collaborators and reported the total number of Jews killed. The Wehrmacht reports discussed the role of the political collaborators in forming the police battalions to suppress the partisans. There is even an old OPC card index to the Nazi documents (from which the names of its agents had been removed) that could facilitate a search for a particular individual. A general index to each country had already been prepared by one of OPC‘s research fronts. The index contains such topics for Nazi documents as “Collaborators Civilian,” “Atrocities,” “Jews,” and “Anti-Partisan Operations.” There was only one problem: There had never been funds to translate the materials, and so they lay there while various congressional investigating committees searched for proof of illegal activity in the intelligence community. Once again, these incriminating documents remain untranslated until I hired a team of German speaking college students as part of OSI’s Belarus Project.

It was not necessary to search the Library of Congress or the National Archives if one had access to a security agency. In 1977, for example, when the new head of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe took over, he was puzzled by the frequent charges in the Soviet press that many of his staff members were war criminals. When he started receiving reports that these same staff members were having difficulties with Jewish employees, he became alarmed. He went to pull their personnel records, only to be informed that the CIA had removed them when custody of Radio Liberty was returned to the State Department.

A list of suspected Nazis among the employees of Radio Liberty – including Stanislaw Stankievich – was submitted to State Department security, with the request to conduct a thorough background check. Security officers contacted virtually every intelligence agency in NATO and reported the initial raw results. Most of the names were connected to various uncorroborated accusations, but in Stankievich’s case, agency after agency had listed him as a former Nazi who had committed dreadful atrocities in Borissow. Stankievich had recently retired, however, and instead of continuing the investigation, Radio Liberty quietly let the matter drop.

But others in Washington were not so content. In 1977, Representative Joshua Eilberg, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, and Representative Elizabeth Holtzman were convinced that there was something to the persistent rumors about Nazi war criminals residing in the United States.
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Together they collected a list of some forty-four names which were submitted to various federal agencies. For the first time, the Department of Defense was faced with a specific request by a member of Congress for information on war criminals.

Among the names was that of Emanuel Jasiuk. Although one letter of his name was mistyped,
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that should not have hindered the Pentagon’s computerized files entry program, which searched out names spelled 75 percent the same. A phone call to the Defense Investigative Service was all that was needed to disclose that the Army CIC possessed a dossier on Jasiuk. In fact, the CIC dossier on Jasiuk in its Top Secret “blue files,” or “Special Documents Division,” contained a number of documents from different agencies discussing everything from Jasiuk‘s war crimes to his postwar service as an intelligence informant. As mentioned earlier, it included a discussion of the decision by the consular officials in Stuttgart to condone the fraudulent statements in his visa application. All of this information was on file prior to Jasiuk’s obtaining citizenship. There was also another Jasiuk dossier in the Pentagon – an Air Force file that was equally explosive. In it was a copy of the 1950 CIC correspondence with J. Edgar Hoover exposing Jasiuk as a war criminal who had fraudulently entered the United States after working for Air Force intelligence. It would have led Congress straight to the FBI’s involvement in the cover-up.

Yet, the Department of Defense informed Congress in 1977 that the files of all the service intelligence agencies had been checked and no record for Jasiuk could be found.
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Both the Air Force and the CIC use the same computerized record index as the Pentagon. If either the Army, the Air Force, or the Defense Department had checked the computer on a 75 percent search for “Emanuel Jastuk” it would have printed out the following entry:

JASIUK, EMANUEL DB=060819 ss=PB=PL
DOSSIER LOC=AIRR YR=00 NO=x8423082 CTX=SUBJECT

This entry indicates that the Army Investigative Records Repository (AIRR) at Fort Meade had a dossier discussing a subject of investigation named Emanuel Jasiuk who was born on August 19, 1906, in Poland. Since both the Army and the Air Force dossiers cross-referenced each other, if either one had run a name trace on its own manual index, or on the Pentagon’s computer index, every Jasiuk dossier would have been instantly located. In order not to find any Jasiuk dossiers, two intelligence clerks in two separate military agencies would have had to make the same series of errors simultaneously.