Blowback
Authors: Christopher Simpson
Blowback
America's Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Destructive
Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy
Christopher Simpson
With a New Introduction by the Author on CIA Declassification of Nazi-Related Records
For my mother and father
Contents
2. Slaughter on the Eastern Front
7. “I ⦠Prefer to Remain Ignorant”
9. “See That He Is Sent to the U.S. ⦔
10. Bare Fists and Brass Knuckles
11. Guerrillas for World War III
12. “Any Bastard as Long as He's Anti-Communist”
14. Pipelines to the United States
15. The Politics of “Liberation”
16. Brunner and von Bolschwing
Series Introduction
I
We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display themâa bookshelf that would stretch from Boston's Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.
Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won't allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran,
no
book may be forbidden by the US government
at any level
(although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books
are
banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations-church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.
Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it's easy to locate those hot works that once
were
banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment groundsâ
Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch
. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from
Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies
to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.
II
And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America's vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like
The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451
. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can't know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.
How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does
not
ban books, other meansâless evident, and so less controversialâhave been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiasticallyâthen “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, orâmost oftenâlaughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it).
Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masseâor never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.
III
The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to lifeâfirst life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.
These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens.
These
books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protectâtruths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.
Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new lightâfor most of us, it's
still
new lightâon the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America's broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan's Mafia connections, Richard Nixon's close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob's grip on the NFL; America's terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America's most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City's poor and middle class.
The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of Americaâa history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long lastâto shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.
Mark Crispin Miller
Introduction
From 1999 through 2007 I served on a historians' advisory panel for the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The group met once or twice a year at an inexpensive hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, to discuss recommendations for declassifying tens of millions of pages of still-secret, fifty- and sixty-year-old US government records that might include information about the Holocaust and the role of Nazi and Axis war criminals in US Cold War covert operations.
The advisory panel was a low-status group. Unlike the historians hired to explore the records themselves, the committee did not have (or declined to undergo) security clearances required by NARA and other agencies in order to view old records. With the exception of the panel's chair, Dr. Gerhard Weinberg, the panel was sometimes treated with open contempt by the representatives from federal agencies that we were supposedly advising. Nevertheless, we were authorized to ask questions about the competence and effectiveness of the declassification review project. In that way, the little committee did succeed in helping to rattle the cages of several powerful federal bureaucracies, including the CIA.
There was also a consolation prize offered to these advisors in addition to the hotel coffee and Danish pastries. Chief US archivist Allen Weinstein frequently repeated his promise that NARA would publish written critiques from the advisors as part of the official report to Congress about the mechanics of the declassification effort, which was our area of expertise.
I wrote the critique (which now forms the contents of this book) of how federal agencies had handled their responsibilities under the relevant laws. I delivered it by the deadline. NARA first responded with a fog of delays, and then with silence.
The report was issued a year later without the critique, and without the courtesy of a note acknowledging how and why the piece had been spiked. I eventually learned from three different sources involved in the process that Allen Weinstein had made the decision to bar its publication. That was disappointing, of course, but not especially surprising. It is worthy of note only because it is another example of how political administrations in Washington, DC, routinely suppress reports they find disagreeable. Indeed, performing that type of ideological border patrol is an unspoken but tacitly understood part of the job description for government and private-sector managers.
In this particular instance, Dr. Weinstein was a Bush-era appointee at the archives, a noted historian, and a widely praised leader of a long string of Cold War publicity projects that pitted a bright, shiny United States against those viewed as the enemies of the moment. As archivist of the United States, he was also a principal promoter of a White House effort to appoint John Choon Yoo to the panel overseeing declassification of the CIA's records on its work with Nazi criminals. Yes,
that
John Yoo, the disgraced author of the Bush administration's legal approval for systematic beatings and other torture of Middle Eastern suspects by CIA specialists. Fortunately, cooler heads soon blocked Yoo's appointment, as I report in this previously unpublished critique. Interestingly, this aspect of John Yoo's abortive government service has fallen down NARA's own memory hole. The written record of that debacle has today disappeared from NARA itselfâthe agency whose primary mission is to preserve a complete and accurate record of the activities of the US government.
The once-censored critique that follows provides an appropriate new introduction to the digital publication of
Blowback
in Open Road Media's Forbidden Bookshelf series.
A few notes on context: The “IWG” mentioned in the critique stands for the Interagency Working Group, which was created in 1999 and made up of representatives from federal agencies implementing the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (NWCDA) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (JIGDA). As the critique mentions, the IWG included a bipartisan panel of prominent “public members,” some of whom clashed repeatedly with federal agencies that resisted appropriate declassification of records.
The censored critique comes from the galleys that NARA created for use in the report. For the first time, readers today are able to read this bit of history that the archivist of the United States went out of his way to ensure would not see the light of day.
Christopher Simpson
Washington, DC
April 2014
Christopher Simpson
Member, IWG Historical Advisory Panel
“The CIA's ongoing campaign against accountability for its activities requires that every responsible historian and journalist treat the CIA claims with great skepticism.”
You'll recall that the fundamental reason for the passage of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (NWCDA) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (JIGDA) was to open classified records concerning U.S. intelligence agencies' and corporate collusion with Nazi and Japanese war criminals. Significant progress has been made on that score, not least of which is that no educated person can ignore the reality of this collaboration and the substantial role it played in Cold War intelligence operations.