America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (37 page)

Congressman Eilberg did not give up, and wrote a formal letter of request to the Comptroller General asking that the General Accounting Office begin a full-scale inquiry. So that there would be no doubt as to what Congress was looking for, Eilberg carefully spelled it out:

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, with the cooperation of the Department of State, is presently compiling evidence on alleged Nazi war criminals who entered the United States fraudulently…. For the past two years I have been following closely the action being taken by the Service in these cases. Certain allegations have emerged which lead me and some of my colleagues to believe that the existence and backgrounds of these individuals were known to the Service for a long time without any action having been taken.

These people entered the United States and acquired benefits under the Immigration and Nationality Act in contravention of United States law. No adequate explanation has been forthcoming from the Service as to why they did not proceed against these individuals until Congress brought the matter to their attention.

I would like to enlist the cooperation of the General Accounting Office in conducting a thorough investigation of this situation, especially to determine if Immigration personnel deliberately obstructed active prosecution of these cases or engaged in a conspiracy to withhold or quash any information in its possession.

I intend to explore all avenues to get the true facts behind these cases and the apparent negligent attitude adopted by the Immigration Service. I consider this matter to be of extreme urgency and would consider this investigation on that basis.
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As the audit-and-inspection branch of the government, the GAO was accustomed to dealing with bureaucratic feints. It examined a number of Immigration and Naturalization Service files for allegations of war crimes, winnowed the list down to 111 names, including both Kushel and Jasiuk, and prepared to resubmit it to the Defense Department.
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In order to avoid any confusion over misspellings or insufficient identifying data, the GAO asked INS to list every alternate spelling found in its files, along with the date and place of each person’s birth. Each of the GAO’s spellings of names for Kushel and Jasiuk was an exact match of a dossier name listed in the CIC and Air Force repositories.
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In fact, on October 7, 1977 David Crossland, General Counsel of INS, notified GAO that Immigration had found a CIC dossier for Jasiuk, but that GAO would have to wait until the Department of Defense gave permission to see it under the “third agency rule.”
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Someone on Crossland’s staff then removed all of the CIC material from Jasiuk‘s immigration file and put an internal routing slip on the documents:

RE: Emanuel JASIUK, A7 165 388

Defense material NOT cleared for review by GAO.
DO NOT disclose to GAO until notified to do so.

General Counsel, Washington, D.C.

Crossland’s staff at INS then notified DOD that it had come up with a Jasiuk dossier. Apparently, DOD realized that it had previously told Congressman Eilberg that no such file existed. Subsequently, Defense’s response was relayed to INS, for the note bears a distinct alteration. Someone had drawn a pencil line through that part about “until notified” so that the final note now read: “Defense material NOT cleared for review by GAO.” No future disclosure was contemplated.

At the same time, the FBI sanitized its reports in Jasiuk’s immigration file by blacking out any mention that Jasiuk had ever worked for State Department or Military Intelligence. The usual procedure is to coordinate with the third agency before attempting such deletions. So again, in 1977 DOD was apparently notified that there was CIC information in Jasiuk’s immigration file. Nevertheless, when DOD officials met with the GAO investigators in April 1978, they stated that it would be unnecessary to recheck Jasiuk’s file since they had already done that for Eilberg, and no such file could be found.

When the GAO finally saw Jasiuk’s immigration file, all the incriminating information linking him with intelligence operations had been removed. The GAO read the FBI’s sanitized discussion of a previous CIC investigation, and concluded that this must have been the report that Crossland had mentioned earlier. There was no indication in the file that any documents had been removed, and, as if to reassure the investigators, they immediately received a note from DOD:

We trust our response to your April 7, 1978 letter request for records in support of your report was satisfactory. All available pertinent DOD records were provided your representative for review by April 28.

The GAO did not learn about this note or the missing DOD documents until October 1980, when I showed them the unexpurgated file. Nor was the Department of Defense the only agency to withhold information. The FBI, the Central Office of the INS, the State Department, and the CIA all had their own dossiers on Jasiuk – containing everything from the CIC’s letter to J. Edgar Hoover denouncing Jasiuk as a war criminal working for the Air Force, to the High Commissioner’s letter to the State Department reminding State how it had smuggled Jasiuk in. The CIC had copies of letters from Jasiuk recruiting other war criminals for the State Department, including his cousin Dimitri Kasmowich, whom Jasiuk identified as a former Nazi police chief in Byelorussia. There were CIC reports criticizing State Department officials who intervened to help Kasmowich avoid CIC prosecution.

In all, there were about a dozen copies of various Jasiuk dossiers in the possession of the intelligence community in 1978. Despite the fact that GAO asked for them from each agency, using the correct spelling of Jasiuk’s name, none of the dossiers was disclosed. The only information the GAO saw was an FBI report claiming that there was no information showing Jasiuk to be a Nazi war criminal, and that, in any event, he was determined to be “trustworthy” and a good anticommunist by the FBI after a thorough investigation – hardly grounds for suspicion by the GAO.
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Far more incriminating is the response of DOD to the GAO request for dossiers on Kushel. This time there is no doubt that DOD forwarded Kushel’s name to CIC.
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There were no misspellings that could be used to evade a charge of obstruction of Congress.
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On April 29, 1979 the CIC sent the following letter to the Pentagon to report the results of their search for a Kushel dossier:

In accordance with above reference, an intensive search of the records maintained at the Investigative Records Repository (IRR) USAIN-SCOM, was conducted. Checks were accomplished with the Defense Central Index (DIS); Name Only Index, IRR, Special Records Division, IRR, and the Microfilm Branch, IRR…. The results of this search represent an exhaustive check of the IRR conducted on the basis of the information provided.
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The Department of Defense told the GAO it had located a file for Kushel, but that it contained no derogatory information.
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In fact, the only file mentioned was the sanitized version supplied to the CIA back in 1956, which included just a two-page character reference letter, designed to show that the military had no contact with Kushel until the mid-1950s.
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Yet the CIC had several files on Kushel, under the exact spellings furnished by GAO and exactly where the CIC claimed to have conducted its “exhaustive search.”
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In fact, Kushel was such a prominent Nazi that he was twice indexed as far back as the 1948 Consolidated Orientation and Guidance Manual which listed him as the president of the “ZBW,” an underground organization of “White Russian War Veterans in Exile.” The CIC described Kushel’s ZBW as a unit of the “right-wing Kriwiczy party” whose members had collaborated in the “puppet government of White Russia,” in which “Oberstleutnant Franz Kushel” was the Minister of Defense. In 1948 the Army files also listed Kushel’s military history:

Franz (Francizek) Kushel, president (of the ZBW), Michelsdorf, Kriwiczy Chairman, born about 1896 in Novogorod, former Captain in Polish Army, former Lieutenant Colonel in a White Russian battalion created by Germans, last military unit was Russische No. 2, 29th SS Grenadier Division.

Even assuming that no one in the Pentagon or the CIC had consulted this Top Secret reference book in 1978 (which was possible), the CIC had several complete personal background dossiers each filed under alternative spellings of Kushel’s name, so there was no possibility of missing any of the files the GAO requested. The individual dossiers in the Investigative Records Repository at Fort Meade included everything from Kushel’s affiliation with the SD (the SS intelligence service)
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to his participation in the Nazi government.
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Moreover, the cross-references in either of Kushel’s personal background dossiers would have led the GAO straight to the thousands of documents which the CIC had compiled on the Belarus network.
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In fact, the cross-references indicated that there had once been a third personal background dossier on Kushel (not counting the sanitized file) in the Top Secret vault, a dossier that no one now could find.
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Apparently, Kushel’s principal file was destroyed at about the same time that other agencies were destroying theirs according to a “routine purge” in 1962 which coincidentally was the last time Kushel was under investigation for war crimes.

Fortunately, however, no one remembered to eliminate the rest of the files for Kushel outside the vault, in the microfilm section, and there they remained, exactly where DOD said it had conducted its exhaustive search.

One of the interesting things about intelligence files is that they are so extensively cross-referenced that it is almost impossible to destroy them completely. Copies always exist in another agency, or even in another file within the same agency. For example, Jasiuk’s CIC file contained copies of the letter to Hoover, and so did the Air Force file, either of which showed that he was a wanted war criminal.
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Ironically, I discovered the Hoover letter by tracing the CIC documents in Jasiuk’s immigration file, which (unknown to the GAO) indicated that CIC had still another Jasiuk dossier containing derogatory information.
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In 1979, I requested Kushel’s dossiers from the same agencies that told GAO in 1978 that they had furnished all pertinent information. One agency, the CIA, reported to OSI (Office of Special Investigations) in 1979 that it had no dossiers for Kushel or any of the other Byelorussian Nazis on my list, but when I went back in 1980 with proof from other agencies that the CIA dossiers existed, I came across an interesting surprise: On top of several of the old CIA dossiers was a new CIA memo, summarizing the Nazi background of my suspect. The new CIA memo was dated in 1979 and explicitly referenced my 1979 request. Like the GAO, I had hit a roadblock.
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Someone had found the Nazi files I had requested, but never turned them over to the Justice Department.

With the firm support of OSI in 1980 (while the Democrats were still in power), the roadblocks inside the CIA began to vanish, and the files on Kushel began to appear. One document listed Kushel as a source for Wisner’s OPC, another that he had been working for American intelligence since 1948 – a year before he emigrated. Another contained an interview with Kushel that flatly contradicted the information on his citizenship application. And another showed that Kushel was the leader of a group being funded by AMCOMLIB, the OPC front group that later became Radio Liberty. In all, there were nearly a dozen incriminating documents on Kushel’s Nazi background in five different intelligence agencies. However, the only materials shown to GAO were sanitized file summaries asserting that there was no derogatory information available on Franz Kushel. The GAO only saw files to the effect that Kushel was some sort of Polish freedom-fighter who had once worked in the military wing of the SS against the Communists, which in itself would not even have barred him from citizenship.

There are only two possibilities: either five separate branches of the intelligence community were stricken with simultaneous amnesia in 1978 so that they all inadvertently overlooked nearly two dozen incriminating dossiers indexed exactly as GAO requested, or a small group of individuals who knew how to protect their key informants (and themselves) sanitized, concealed, and manipulated their records so that the Belarus secret would never be made public.

On May 15, 1978 the GAO released its report to Congress entitled “Widespread Conspiracy to Obstruct Probes of Alleged Nazi War Criminals Not Supported by Available Evidence.” The report concluded that the GAO had conducted an extensive search of all the intelligence agencies’ files, and of the twenty-nine background dossiers that were discovered – including one innocuous file for Kushel – but that none of the documents had indicated any derogatory information. Stymied for lack of evidence, the subcommittee terminated its inquiry.

Kushel had died before the inquiry began. But a year or so after the GAO investigation, the Immigration Service was asked to determine whether Emanuel Jasiuk was still alive. The local investigator contacted his most reliable informant in South River. Mrs. Jasiuk informed him that her husband had died.

[
1
] According to one intelligence official, Wisner was never the same after the abortive uprising. In his opinion, the Hungarian episode did not itself shatter Wisner, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Years of effort in fighting the Communists had taken their toll. Wisner became a manic depressive – up when OPC was moving against the Communists, down when his networks were eliminated. James Forrestal, one of Wisner’s original patrons, is said to have experienced a similar end. According to Charles Higham, who researched this period, nurses found Forrestal lying on the floor of his hospital room, babbling that the Communists and the Jews were trying to kill him. Shortly afterward, he committed suicide with a cryptic note concerning the Nazi code word “Nightingale”, which referred to the use of Byelorussian and Ukrainian intelligence guides in the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.