America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (6 page)

Soon after the ironically named Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed, the British Intelligence Service prevailed upon the ever pliable Canadians to help spy on the Americans for them. The Canadian Embassy was quickly built on the choicest downtown lot closest to the Capitol. The “windowless” top floor of the Canadian Embassy has a direct line of sight to the west-facing offices of the Congressional leadership. From this position, our allies can use lasers to listen to the private discussions of our Congressional leaders. They can even tell what is being typed by the slightly different sound each key makes as it is being struck. No mention of the British wiretapping got past the CIA censors in 1981 or 1982.

As a compromise, I asked to include at least an innocuous mention that there was a sort of secret intelligence agreement where certain intelligence files were concealed from Congress on British orders. That was censored as well. To my horror, my publisher released the UK manuscript in 1983 with the innocuous mention still included. This was a miscommunication for which I took full responsibility. I immediately informed the CIA that I had inadvertently released censored material and offered to surrender all royalties from the British edition.

They told me not to worry about it. It would all probably come out at the Congressional hearings anyway. What I did not know was that one of the CIA’s own lawyers, Dick Sullivan, was lobbying his former employers at the Justice Department to shut down the Nazi hearings in Congress, or at least limit the scope to non-classified subjects.

These are serious charges, but as you shall see, I back them up. Obstruction of Congressional investigations is a crime. Mr. Sullivan was superbly effective at shutting down the Nazi hearings in the short run, but in the long run, his cover-up provided the evidentiary smoking gun to charge him with the crime of obstructing both CIA and Congressional investigations into Nazis working for OPC.

I really did not know why anyone would bother blocking an investigation into Nazis. WWII and the Holocaust were long ago and far away. There was no remaining national security interest. After all, Kim Philby and his Cambridge Ring of Communist spies were at the heart of the Anglo-British recruitment of Nazi agents. They betrayed to Moscow every secret we had on the subject. No wonder the CIA files show a 98% capture rate for American agents sent behind the Iron Curtain. In my naïve way, I thought the whole story of Nazis as cold war spies was old news.

But for some reason, people like Sullivan were working overtime to prevent my testifying before a secret session of Congress. They did not care about the Germans and their Eastern European Nazi collaborators. In hindsight, I think they were afraid I would tell Congress about the Arab Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Of course, I had seen all the Arab Nazi names in the classified files, but had no idea at the time I was testifying in 1985 that Vice President Bush had put the Arab Nazis back on our payroll, and that State and Justice were helping him hide the fact from Congress and the CIA. It never crossed my mind that anyone could be that stupid. Bush had briefly been CIA Director and knew enough to know that the rank and file at CIA would probably blow the whistle on any scheme to recruit ex-Nazi Arabs as Mujahideen.

Historians may debate whether, if Sullivan had not succeeded in his cover-up, Congress would have discovered that the Reagan administration had re-hired the Arab Nazi movement to fight their proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Neither Congress nor the CIA knew it at the time, but our tax dollars had given birth to Al Qaeda, the second generation of the Muslim Nazi movement. Only the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan knew who the players were. Vice President Bush’s compartmentalization kept everyone in American intelligence in the dark.

I was honestly surprised when the Congressional hearings were postponed year after year, until the
60 Minutes
furor died down. Behind my back Sullivan and the Justice Department had been busy. John Tipton, GAO’s senior investigator on Nazi immigration (now retired) asked to meet with me privately in 1985. He had received orders from the Congressional Subcommittee Chair to drop the names of all the Nazis I had identified in my Top Secret report to the Attorney General.

Instead, the Justice Department had suggested other semi-innocuous Nazis who were not the subject of previous Congressional investigations. Justice knew I had the goods on the Byelorussians who were on the previous GAO list. There was no way they could dispute the evidence I had collected, so they had to switch the targets of the investigation to a different group of Nazis. A congressional staffer warned me that Chairman Roman Mazzoli, Democrat of Kentucky, had gone along with the switch. When I asked the staffer why, he replied “Mazzoli was told that there are lots of Ukrainians and Germans in Louisville, but very few Jews.” As with the Nuremberg trials, the fix was in.

In 1985, three years after I appeared on
60 Minutes
to expose Nazis working for US intelligence, the Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration finally decided it was safe to hold Congressional hearings, but without notice to the press or public. One of the staff members tipped me off only a few days before the hearings so I could quickly prepare a written summary of my testimony. To my astonishment, there would be no executive or secret session. That meant I could not tell Congress any classified information.

The Justice Department had directly threatened me with disbarment if I disclosed what I knew about any living Nazi working for US or British intelligence.
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If I told Congress anything about the still-classified Nazi files in open session, I would go directly to jail. It was not a threat, it was a promise. Allan Ryan, America’s top Nazi hunter, was already leaking stories to the press that I was under criminal investigation for copying classified files.
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Of course I had copied the classified Nazi files, but not illegally. I had given them to the House Judiciary Committee. The Justice Department had been ignoring Congressional Subpoenas for more than a decade. Two General Accounting Office investigations had already been sent on a wild goose chase. I had found little notes marked “Do not disclose to GAO unless authorized by SOD.” The SOD, of course, had been the Special Operations wing of the OPC.

The “do not disclose” memos were stapled to the Nazi files that the GAO had previously requested on Congress’ behalf. When I confronted the SOD official in 1981 and asked who gave him such orders, he replied, “the Justice Department … I thought you knew all about it.” I went back to Ryan and Sullivan, my bosses at OSI, and demanded an investigation to find out who at Justice had ordered a cover up of the GAO’s first Nazi investigation.

My superiors did nothing even though the “do not disclose” notes meant that someone inside the Justice Department had decided to deliberately obstruct Congressional investigations – not once, as it turned out, but twice. The first GAO inquiry into Nazi immigration had taken place before I joined OSI. After my 1981 revelations on
60 Minutes,
Congress ordered a second GAO inquiry, whose report was to accompany my testimony in 1985. It is this second cover-up that clearly and directly implicates my own superiors at the Justice Department, especially Mr. Sullivan, who sat smiling in the audience as the 1985 Congressional Hearings got underway.

The Congressional hearings were a joke, as Chairman Mazzoli limited them to one open session with no opportunity to present classified files. In order to avoid naming living Nazis, my testimony introduced three documents revealing how the Byelorussian Nazis had emigrated to America.

The first document was an Army Counter-Intelligence Corps memo listing each of the Byelorussian Nazis living in the refugee camps of West Germany, even mentioning the specific atrocities and war crimes they had committed. The second document was a handwritten letter from the Nazi President of Byelorussia to OPC, offering to work for the Americans if they stopped prosecuting his men as war criminals. The third document was an FBI file listing the Nazis mentioned in the first two documents by their new American front groups and residences.

Technically, I had established a very strong case that US intelligence had knowingly relocated known Nazi war criminals to America, and I had done it without naming a single living Nazi suspect. Mazzoli was visibly furious. The Chair could not block my testimony from being included in the record, as I had submitted it in writing in advance. Instead, they deleted all three documents from the Congressional hearing transcript “for reasons of space.”

As for the list of topics I had submitted to be discussed in executive session, those had to be included in the record, but were flatly ignored. For the next several decades, I all but abandoned my legal career to collect and declassify the hidden files that should have been made public before the 1985 Congressional Hearings. Like Rockler, I wanted to protect as much as I could from the Justice Department shredder.

Nearly thirty years later, almost two thirds of the Nazi files have been legally declassified by the US Government. The remaining one third, of course, awaits British permission before the CIA can release them to Congress. Many Americans, particularly veterans and victims of the Holocaust, will be astounded to learn that the Justice Department itself was directly behind the Nazi cover-up, betraying the sacrifice and suffering of both.

Although the CIA does not realize it (they never do), their own newly declassified records released to the National Archives in 2009 make a very convincing case that it is the Justice Department which has been lying through its teeth to Congress. Included in these newly declassified files is the CIA’s account of how my superiors at the Justice Department, lobbied Congress to cancel the 1985 hearings, or at least curtail the executive session. More damaging, the CIA’s recent files prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that former Justice Department lawyer Dick Sullivan personally lied about one of the six new Nazi subjects who had been substituted for the GAO’s original group.

Again, the swap of the GAO’s target list of Nazis took place because I had too much evidence about the original group. Two of the people discussed in the original manuscript of this book are Franz Kushel and Emanuel Jasiuk from the Byelorussian Nazi collaborators. Both were on the original GAO target list. Instead, the GAO was told to investigate a Ukranian collaborator named Mykola Lebed. As it turned out, that was an enormous mistake, and one that eventually doomed the cover-up to failure.

It seems Congress did not know it, but the Attorney General of the United States had personally approved the immigration of Mykola Lebed. Arguably the highest-ranking Nazi war criminal ever to enter the United States, Lebed was one of the top twenty war criminals wanted by the Soviet Union. Justice had given a false biography to the CIA. CIA thought Lebed was an anti-Nazi resistance leader who could not immigrate legally to the US because he had been involved in plotting the death of a pre-war Polish politician.
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Anti-Nazi resistance leader, indeed. The CIA and Congress were thoroughly suckered. Lebed had been the head of the SB, the Ukrainian version of the Gestapo. His men murdered tens of thousands of Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian citizens. I know this is true because I found the original files of Mykola Lebed in the Army Intelligence vaults at Suitland, Maryland, and showed them to my two superiors at the Justice Department: Ryan and Sullivan. It will be impossible for them to deny that they were briefed in detail before allowing this killer to enter the United States.

Lebed had thousands of files on his Nazi collaborators, so many that the Army actually computerized the list. When I circulated Lebed’s list to the other attorneys at OSI, we discovered that many of our Ukrainian war-crimes suspects were among Lebed’s recruits. Any attorney who worked in OSI at that time will probably recall that they were asked by Ryan or Sullivan to check my computerized list of suspected war criminals. There were several matches from the Lebed files, including a Ukranian Nazi propagandist named Oktan, whose case was being actively processed by OSI for denaturalization. As Deputy Director, Sullivan had personally supervised all cases involving the Ukraine, Russia and Byelorussia.

I had briefed both Ryan and Sullivan personally and extensively on the Mykola Lebed case because of its extreme sensitivity. Lebed’s immigration had been personally approved by the Attorney General of the United States under a special statute for intelligence agents. Although Lebed was the highest ranking war criminal in the United States, he could never be deported because the Attorney General had sponsored his immigration on behalf of OPC.

Since we could not deport Lebed, I urged Ryan and Sullivan to at least use him as a witness against the many other Ukrainian Nazis who lacked his special legal immunity. Ryan and Sullivan said no, the Lebed case had to remain secret. Think what would happen to OSI, Sullivan said, if it got out that the Justice Department had protected the man whose troops had murdered Simon Wiesenthal’s mother.

I did not find out until nearly a decade after the Congressional Hearings that even the CIA, which employed Lebed as a Ukrainian propagandist, had no idea of his true background as a mass murderer for the Nazis. Only Ryan, Sullivan and I knew the whole story at the time Lebed’s case was presented to Congress in 1985.

The CIA’s ignorance proved to be a costly embarrassment. In 1994, former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman reported in the
New York Times
that the CIA Director had just told her that CIA could find no files whatsoever for Mykola Lebed. Apparently, all the CIA’s files on Lebed had been “mislaid” since the 1985 Congressional hearing. I alerted the CIA that I would have to contradict them, and told the
New York Times
the next day that Lebed had been a major player for the CIA in paramilitary operations behind the Iron Curtain.

On 1 July 1994, the Director of Information Technologies at the CIA wrote to me, asking for my help in finding their Nazi files. The following is my response. It contains code words and details of classified operations that have never been revealed before. It explains why the CIA could not find its own files. Someone had hidden them.