America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (38 page)

[
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] Deputy Director of Plans, the head of covert operations for the CIA. Previously, the unit was known as the Directorate of Operations.

[
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] Originally, the Green Berets were made up of foreigners who were trained at the same bases in Germany as Wisner’s recruits, and even used the same Special Forces name.

[
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] The CIA continued to finance Radio Free Europe and Radio Europe at a cost of about $35 million a year until 1971, when a policy of open funding by congressional appropriation was approved (Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence [Alfred A. Knopf, 19741, pp. 167-70).

[
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] Recently, a staff member stated that the Church Committee had actually decided to stop its investigation before the Welch incident, and that most Senators remained eager to investigate abuses in the future.

[
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] “Emanuel Jastuk” instead of “Emanuel Jasiuk.”

[
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] In order to avoid inadvertent disclosure of intelligence informants working for Agency A, Agency B may not disclose a given informant’s name to Agency C without A’s approval. One of the side effects of the third agency rule is that it frequently hinders, and occasionally blocks, outside investigations.

[
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] There was not a shred of credible evidence to indicate that the GAO had been negligent in pursuing its investigation of Jasiuk. It would be a different matter if GAO had received Crossland‘s memo after reviewing the file, but I later determined that this was not the case. In any event, that still would not explain why the other agencies failed to respond to GAO’s requests for their files.

[
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] I asked to see the official who had relayed the message that the files did not exist and was told that he was unavailable. He had been sent away for training and was later transferred to a different job. Most of the people I tried to interview about the withholding of files had just retired or had been transferred out of the country by their respective agencies. Curiously, each of the retirees seemed once to have worked on intelligence operations in Germany around the time Kushel and Jasiuk had emigrated.

Epilogue

March 25 is the traditional National Day of the Byelorussians of South River.

On the Sunday closest to that date – which marks the anniversary of the proclamation of the Byelorussian National Republic in 1918 – they gather at the Byelorussian-American Club on Whitehead Avenue to celebrate. Some of the girls and women wear brightly colored national costumes, and there is dancing, drinking, and feasting.

On most days, the club is almost empty except for a few old men drinking in the bar, but there are some interesting customers. One of them had thrown small children into a well and dropped hand grenades on them. A frequent visitor to the club had been an executioner at the death camp at Koldichevo. Another club patron teased a visitor known to be squeamish about the Holocaust by picking up a cleaver and hacking at some lunch meats. “I wish these were Jews,” he declared.

The old men of South River have achieved a certain respectability. In 1978, the New Jersey American Revolution Bicentennial Celebration Commission published an Ethnic Directory of New Jersey. Heading the five pages of Byelorussian organizations was the American Friends of Byelorussian Central Council. Its president was listed as Emanuel Jasiuk.

Radoslaw Ostrowsky had finally emigrated to America too. There was no controversy concerning his entry, but his file shows that at the time he applied for citizenship in 1972, the INS was notified of Ostrowsky’s complete Nazi background.
²⁰⁰
After considerable consultation among the various intelligence services, the INS noted in his file that he “appears to have been involved in some sort of espionage activity.” A reporter for a New Jersey newspaper who learned that Ostrowsky was living in the United States asked the Immigration Service if the rumors were true. The INS noted on the letter that it had no record of any such individual, but filed it in Ostrowsky’s folder. When the reporter came back in 1975 with several variants on the spelling of Ostrowsky’s name, the INS put that in the folder too, along with the note that the reporter had been advised by telephone that the INS had conducted a full investigation which cleared Ostrowsky completely.
²⁰¹
And so one of the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals to enter this country lived on undisturbed until his death in 1979.

The old men of South River might have been more circumspect if they had realized that despite the clean bill of health reluctantly given them by the General Accounting Office, another investigation was closing in on them.

The Eilberg hearings had left the strong suspicion that the INS had not been as thorough as it might have been in investigating the smuggling of Nazis into the United States, and Congress requested the Justice Department to make an inquiry. An Office of Special Investigations was created within the Criminal Division early in 1979, and Walter Rockler, Jr., who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, was named to head it. I joined OSI a few weeks later and was assigned the cases from Byelorussia.

For two months I read the translations of the books and documents published by the Byelorussians. I learned enough of the Cyrillic alphabet to recognize the names of the leading Byelorussian war criminals and secured access to the stacks of the National Archives, where I discovered more books and documents that had not been translated. Ostrowsky’s history of the Minsk convention was among them, and in its index I found numerous entries for and references to Stankievich, Jasiuk, and other leading collaborators. I compared this information with captured SS documents stored at the Archives and they corroborated each other. All the evidence clearly suggested that Nazi war criminals had been allowed to emigrate to the United States, and later to become American citizens. There were unanswered questions, however.

Who had helped them, and why? And who had been responsible for covering up their records all these years and for stonewalling the Eilberg hearings? In October 1980, as soon as he received my findings, Allan Ryan, my immediate superior, sent a Top Secret report to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti stating that this was the single most important matter in which his office was engaged. That report said, “It should be apparent that the matters discussed in this report are extremely sensitive, both because of the number of Byelorussian Nazis who entered this country, and the extent to which U.S. Government agencies apparently assisted that entry, possibly in violation of the law.”

OSI was authorized to expand the scope of its investigation. More researchers and translators were hired, and security clearances were raised – my own was three access levels above Top Secret – to permit inspection of the secret records of the various intelligence services. For the first time in thirty years an effort was made to search out and coordinate all the information concerning the Byelorussian Nazis in this country.

A key operative was Marc Masurovsky, a young French-born Jew, who worked under cover within the Byelorussian community for two years. Posing as a historical researcher with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Masurovsky was accepted into the homes of the Belarus leaders in South River and other communities. He tracked down and authenticated a large number of documents vital to the inquiry, including the records of the puppet government of Byelorussia and the original roster of the militia units that formed the nucleus of the Belarus Brigade.

In the vaults at Suitland, Maryland, I discovered a portion of the many dossiers that had been built up on Stankievich. Included among them was the confession that he had made to Military Intelligence in 1948. Another intelligence agency had dossiers on Stankievich in which he admitted in 1954 that he had ordered the massacre of the Jews of Borissow. Upon learning that the Army officer who had taken the 1948 confession was still on active duty, OSI asked to talk with him. The Pentagon’s response was that he was working under deep cover on a secret project in Europe. Eventually, however, he was brought back for an interview by OSI.

On his return, the officer was shown a series of reports that he had written more than thirty years before, but at first he failed to remember them. “We had many Nazis working for the Army in those days,” he said. Gradually, however, the names and operations came back as his memory was refreshed by the dossiers, and he began to recall some of the details of the cases. When told that the Nazi collaborators mentioned in his reports were now living in the United States as American citizens, he was shocked. “This is mutiny,” he murmured as he dropped the pages on the desk. I asked him how such a thing could have happened.

Someone must have sanitized the records, he replied.

Did he have any idea who had done it?

He recalled that years earlier there had been a special Army intelligence unit in Germany that screened sensitive material on informants before it was turned over to other agencies.

Was it possible that such a unit was still in existence? Was someone still hiding Nazi records decades after the end of WWII?

He telephoned friends at the U.S. Army Investigative Records Repository at Fort Meade, where the records had been stored after being shipped from Germany many years earlier. He found out that the SOD, Special Operations Detachment, a secret unit with a liaison officer at Fort Meade, had responsibility for screening the files before they were given to other agencies. The following day the two of us went to the post, which is only a short drive from Washington. At SOD headquarters, we confronted a civilian employee who readily admitted that the unit had been routinely ordered by the Department of Defense to look over all dossiers of intelligence informants and had deleted sensitive items. He seemed surprised at our questions, saying he was certain that the OSI had been informed of the arrangement.
[1]
He was certain the Justice Department itself had approved sanitizing the Nazi files. I was shocked to the core. If what he was saying was true, my own agency had been orchestrating the Nazi cover-up, which meant that all our work at OSI was a farce.

I asked to see material that had been deleted from ten files that I selected at random. The first dossier contained not only Army material that had never been sent to OSI but also documents belonging to other agencies as well. I looked at the name on it: Emanuel Jasiuk. In it was a letter to the State Department from the office of John J. McCloy, the new civilian High Commissioner in Germany. Written at the time that Jasiuk had applied for citizenship, the letter reminded the State Department that three of its officials had knowingly allowed Jasiuk to present a fraudulent personal history to the visa-screening officer in the Stuttgart consulate. The file also contained correspondence between the CIC and J. Edgar Hoover in which the FBI director was explicitly informed that Jasiuk was a war criminal who had worked for Air Force Intelligence.
²⁰²

None of this material had been supplied to the Eilberg inquiry or to OSI, despite repeated requests. Had it been turned over to the congressional investigators, the cross-references would have uncovered the entire Byelorussian Nazi underground and the subsequent cover-up. Of the ten files I reviewed, three contained clear evidence that U.S. agencies had assisted Nazi collaborators to emigrate to this country. A fourth file included the case history of a Soviet spy, Soloviej-Sokolowsky, who had posed as a Nazi during the war but had later defected to American intelligence and provided eyewitness descriptions of war crimes committed by Byelorussian Nazis, including Jasiuk. After confirming the defector’s allegations through its own network of informants, the Army gave him a new identity and helped him to emigrate to Australia. This information confirmed the reports that some of the Byelorussian emigres in this country not only were war criminals but that their ranks had been penetrated by Soviet spies.

I asked Msrs. Sullivan and Ryan, my superiors at OSI, for permission to investigate who it was at the Justice Department who had been telling SOD to hide Nazi files from our own investigators and from Congress. Permission was denied. I suspected then that my own superiors knew more than they were telling. The only explanation was that the Justice Department itself was behind SOD’s obstruction of Congress.

There is always a back door, By backtracking through the labyrinth of the various intelligence agency archives, with the aid of the cross-references provided by these files, the staff of Belarus Project at OSI built up a strong case for instituting denaturalization procedures against living Byelorussian collaborators. Unfortunately, the United States has no law to imprison the members of the Belarus network for murders committed in their native Byelorussia. Without criminal jurisdiction the only action the Justice Department can take against these ex-Nazi collaborators is to bring civil suit to revoke their citizenship and try to have them deported, a difficult and lengthy process. These men perpetrated their crimes nearly forty years ago in a foreign country, and most of the surviving witnesses were living in Eastern Europe. To compound the difficulties, the Soviet government has failed to cooperate – it withheld evidence against the Byelorussians while providing documentation about other national groups, such as the Ukrainians and Baltic peoples. An educated guess is that this Soviet policy is designed to protect their former, and possibly present, agents who infiltrated the Belarus network.

Stanislaw Stankievich was to have been the first to face proceedings to strip him of his citizenship. As previously explained, there was conclusive proof that he had lied on his visa application, had procured his citizenship by fraud, was an admitted perjurer, a strident anti-Semite, a high-ranking Nazi collaborator, a suspected Soviet agent, and a confessed murderer. But the “Butcher of Borissow” died on November 3, 1980, before hearings could begin in the federal district court in New York City. Oddly enough, the first report we received of Stankievich’s death came from the Procurator General of the Soviet Union.