America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (51 page)

¹⁵⁹
Confidential source, Pentagon interview, 1981.

¹⁶⁰
Harry Rositzke,
The CIA’s Secret Operations
(Reader’s Digest Press, 1977), p. 190.

¹⁶¹
Peter Collier and David Horowitz,
The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty
(Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), p. 273 n.

¹⁶²
Corson, op. cit., pp. 36-37.

¹⁶³
Quoted in Wise and Ross, op. cit., p. 327.

¹⁶⁴
Mosley, op. cit., pp. 419-21; Powers, op. cit., p. 75.

¹⁶⁵
Quoted in Charles C. Alexander,
Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952-1961
(Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 180.

¹⁶⁶
Truscott’s role in terminating OPC‘s covert action programs is detailed in ibid., pp. 368-72.

¹⁶⁷
Mosley, op. cit., p. 421; Powers, op. cit., pp. 75-77;
Washington Post
, October 30, 1965.

¹⁶⁸
Mosley, op. cit., pp. 491-92.

¹⁶⁹
Washington Post
, October 30, 1965.

¹⁷⁰
Lyman Kirkpatrick,
The Real CIA
(Macmillan, 1968), p. 153, states:

By this time (1952) we knew that there was not only a false network involved, although there were some sources that occasionally did produce some information of value, but we knew further that a large number of their so-called intelligence sources were nothing but “paper mills.” These “paper mills” were organizations of refugees or émigrés producing alleged intelligence reports from interrogating other refugees and emigres or from the “cocktail circuit.” These reports were worthless and unreliable and most frequently dedicated to selling a point of view.

¹⁷¹
Various meetings in America between Communist officials from the BSSR delegation to the UN and the leaders of the Belarus organizations are described in FBI File No. NY 105-35905. During one of these meetings, one of the Soviet delegates requested and received copies of some of the books published by the Belarus.

¹⁷²
Allegations of war criminals residing in the United States appear several times in the
Morning Freiheit
. For example, April 13, 1962; June 10, 1962; July 6, 1962; March 22, 1964.

¹⁷³
FBI files: Notes of an Interview with Simon Wiesenthal.

¹⁷⁴
FBI file citation has been deleted because the subject is a potential target of investigation.

¹⁷⁵
Dossier AC645873, USAIRR, Ft. Meade, Maryland. It should be noted that the Central Registry of the CIA was not privy to the more comprehensive data on Kushel available to the OPC. Consequently, their background information on Kushel was sketchy, to say the least.

¹⁷⁶
Over the years, some of the intelligence agencies noted that the 29th was not an SS division. Upon further research it was discovered that the source of this interesting bit of disinformation was General Kushel himself.

¹⁷⁷
INS reopened the Kushel investigation in 1973 in response to allegations of war crimes received from Dorothy Rabinowitz, a reporter, and from the World Jewish Congress. Again the investigations were terminated.

¹⁷⁸
Senate Resolution 21 adopted by the Senate on January 27,1975, established the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) to determine whether “illegal, improper, or unethical activities were engaged in by any agency of the Federal Government” (emphasis added).

¹⁷⁹
The final conclusions of the Church Committee are in Select Committee Report, op. cit., pp. 424-26.

¹⁸⁰
Romanouski,
Vasily Pilipavich, Saudzel’niki u Zlachynstvakh
(Collaborators in Crime) (Minsk: “Belarus” Publishing House, 1964). This is possibly the best unclassified Soviet account of Byelorussian war criminals and their subsequent escape to the U.S.

¹⁸¹
A photograph of Kushel in Nazi uniform is contained on p. 81 of Collaborators in Crime, White Ruthenian History Section, Library of Congress.

¹⁸²
See
Minsker Zeitung
, February 23, 1944, for an article in German, “With Deutschland for a Free White Ruthenia.”

¹⁸³
An article in the
Morning Freiheit
, “More Names of Jew Murderers Who Live Undisturbed in the Free World,” provides the following account of Jasiuk’s activities:

When the Germans entered Baronovichy, they appointed Jasiuk as head of the town administration of Kletzk. I was working for him for some time. The Germans and Jasiuk ordered me to prepare a deep ditch outside the town, and to bring over 300 arrestees to do the work. Soon thereafter the Jews in Kletzk were rounded up and summarily shot. Jasiuk personally directed the operation (action) and gave all orders to the police squads. Later on he regularly dispatched consignments of victims to the Koldychev Concentration Camp.

The article also briefly denounced Kushel and gave his address as Alabama Avenue, East New York, Brooklyn.

¹⁸⁴
Interview with GAO investigator John Tipton, November 1980.

¹⁸⁵
Letter of January 13,1977 from Joshua Eilberg, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and International Law (Committee on the Judiciary), to Elmer B. Staats, Comptroller of the General Accounting Office.

¹⁸⁶
Letter of April 7, 1978, from the GAO to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, with enclosed lists of names. Kushel was number 45 on the list.

¹⁸⁷
Jasiuk‘s “blue file” “XE8423082” was readily located in April 1980 at the USAIRR in Ft. Meade, Maryland. The entire dossier (blue file) is still stored in the vault at Ft. Meade.

¹⁸⁸
Letter of April 17, 1978, from Department of the Army, Military Intelligence-Counter-Intelligence Section (DAMIKIS) to USAIRR, Fort Meade, Maryland, requested the Army to check their files for persons listed on the GAO request. Both agencies had access to the Defense Investigative Service’s computerized index.

¹⁸⁹
Title 18, Section 1505 of the United States Code makes it a crime to obstruct a congressional inquiry:

Whoever corruptly … influences, obstructs or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which such proceeding is being had before such department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which such inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any joint Committee of the Congress….

… shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than five years or both.

Similarly, Title 18, Section 371 makes it a felony to conspire to defraud the United States, and Title 18, Section 4 (misprision of felony) punishes those who knowingly keep silent on crimes that have been committed against the federal government.

¹⁹⁰
Copies of the pertinent correspondence are located both in the GAO investigation records and in the files of the Army Special Actions Officer, USAIRR, Ft. Meade, Maryland.

¹⁹¹
The sanitized Kushel file is listed as File No. AC645873, USAIRR, Ft. Meade, Maryland.

¹⁹²
One comment in the sanitized report for Kushel is that “President Abramtchik of the Belo-Russian Rada, who is also president of the Paris Bloc, is now staying with General Kushel.” One of the interesting but unanswered questions raised by this document is how Abramtchik managed to get a visa to visit the United States in the first place. Abramtchik has an immigration file, but there is no visa in it. There is, however, a letter from an intelligence officer to the Canadian border guards.

¹⁹³
File No. XE198433-1181045, classified FOUO (For Official Use Only) for “Kusiel, Franciszek,” was readily retrieved by the staff at Ft. Meade, even though that particular spelling of the name was not requested during a subsequent OSI investigation.

¹⁹⁴
The CIC file for “Kusiel, Franciszek,” File XE198433-1181045, contains index cards showing that Kushel controlled the White Ruthenians veterans league and was a leading figure in the German SD. Another index card indicates that he was an SS officer in “Siegling’s Division” (subsequently identified as the 30th Waffen-SS Division).

¹⁹⁵
The file for Kushel, Francisek, No. 152 628 (USAIRR, Ft. Meade, Maryland), contains a photocopy of Kushel’s 1947 CIC index card indicating that he was a member of the Byelorussian Central Council and that further references can be found on secret list 700-4. The index card naming Kushel as the leader of the Michelsdorf DP camp is in this file, along with various Top Secret document replacement sheets indicating that even more sensitive documents had once belonged to the file but now could no longer be located. The Army has no idea what happened to the missing documents.

¹⁹⁶
Among the general subject matter files relating to the Byelorussians at Ft. Meade are the following: “White Russian National Center,” “White Ruthenian BNC,” “Association of White Russian Veterans,” “White Ruthenian Student Organization,” “Sakavir Monthly Papers” (March), “Bakauscyna Newspaper” (Fatherland), “White Ruthenian DP Group,” “White Ruthenian Propaganda,” “BNR White Ruthenian National Public,” “White Ruthenian Committee,” “White Ruthenian National Committee.”

¹⁹⁷
An interesting thing about the sanitized Kushel file was that it was kept in the Top Secret vault at Ft. Meade, although all Top Secret information in it had been removed from it, and all his other dossiers. There were no sign-out sheets indicating who had taken the Top Secret information. Moreover, there was no record of the dossier ever being signed out of the vault. Even the punch-card index for Kushel’s file was missing. Apparently, whoever went to the trouble to create the sanitized file for Kushel went to extreme steps to insure that it could not be readily located.

¹⁹⁸
Jasiuk’s CIC dossier No. X847230A2 also contains copies of the CIC report of Jasiuk‘s connection with Air Force Counterintelligence. These documents were among those forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover by General Weckerling, along with allegations that CIC informants had conclusively established that Jasiuk was a war criminal who was:

…well known for his cruelty and persecution of the Polish populace in the area and was responsible for sending many persons to forced labor in Germany. In 1942, during the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, subject submitted a list of certain residents of Nieswicz and other cities to the Sicherheits Dienst (German secret service) in Baranowicz, and as a result a number of these persons were shot.

¹⁹⁹
According to a note on the reverse of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s background investigation form, in 1975 the CIC reported that it had at least two dossiers for Jasiuk, one of which was missing, but the available dossier represented “possible derogatory information learned about subject after he had departed to the US.” The information was not shown to the GAO.

Epilogue

²⁰⁰
Ostrowsky’s immigration file number is A12866178, C9098434. He received his American citizenship in Michigan in 1972.

²⁰¹
The FBI was aware of illegal immigration in some cases even before it occurred. See, for example, FBI File NY97-1251. “The president of this organization, informant said, is R. Ostrowsky who lives in Argentina and expects to come to the United States in the near future.” This file, and others, are replete with information that Ostrowsky was the president of the Nazi government in Byelorussia during the German occupation.

²⁰²
Top Secret files, Emanuel Jasiuk, USAIRR, Ft. Meade, Md.

²⁰³
Mosley, op. cit., p. 275.