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The creation of OPC as a specialized clandestine warfare and propaganda agency “was a very natural development,” John Paton Davies, one of Kennan's top aides in State at the time, commented in an interview years later. “During the war we had used these techniques against the Nazis. After the war, a number of [U.S.] military operators had come over to the civilian side [i.e., to the CIA and State Department], and we became interested in using these techniques to counter Soviet attacks. The job couldn't be done using formal warfare.… We had the problem of the Communist-led labor unions in France, for example. The AFL [American Federation of Labor] was working with their people, trying to combat this large subversive force in France. We couldn't just send in the Eighty-second Airborne, you know, [to help them], nor could we do it with diplomatic means. So we did what worked at the time.” According to Davies, “the backing for it [clandestine operations] existed in [Kennan's] Policy Planning Staff … [and] there was no opposition within the government that I can recall.”
¹²

Nor was there any known resistance outside the government either. This is for the simple reason that the NSC 10/2 decision was shrouded in such secrecy that only a tiny group of men and women at the most senior levels of the emerging national security complex even knew that this form of war had been declared. Indeed, had it not been for the congressional investigations into U.S. intelligence practices that followed the Watergate affair almost thirty years later, the very existence of this decision would still be secret.

While NSC 10/2 authorized a significant expansion of U.S. covert warfare operations, it simultaneously attempted to do something else as well: to control U.S. subversion operations overseas by institutionalizing them and subjecting them to central civilian authority.
This type of coordination, which tended to benefit the Department of State, had been an important aspect of the reorganization of the Pentagon, the creation of the NSC and the CIA in 1947, and most other “national security” reforms of the period.

Secretary of State Marshall gave George Kennan responsibility for policy guidance of the entire NSC 10/2 effort. According to a still-secret internal history of the CIA, fragments of which were published by the U.S. Congress in 1976,
¹³
Kennan insisted at the time the OPC was created that he had to have “specific knowledge of the objectives of every operation and also of the procedure and methods employed in all cases where those procedures and methods involved political decisions.” Kennan would, he said, “assume responsibility for stating whether or not individual projects are politically desirable.” This broad grant of authority was directly endorsed by CIA Director Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter and NSC Executive Director Sidney Souers.

During the months that followed NSC 10/2, subordinate operational responsibility for Bloodstone was divided up among State Department intelligence (then headed by W. Park Armstrong
*
), the military services, and Frank Wisner's new team. Wisner's OPC was given responsibility for “politico-psychological” operations as well as for preparing two policy statements on utilization of refugees from the Soviet bloc. The State Department, on the other hand, continued to lay claim to jurisdiction over recruitment of émigrés for use at the Voice of America and in intelligence analysis programs, as distinguished from the secret propaganda and covert warfare missions run by Wisner.
¹⁴

Once 10/2 had been approved, the Bloodstone team at the State Department moved quickly to enlist the support of a handful of powerful senators and representatives in what appears to have been a conscious evasion of immigration law. Undersecretary of State Lovett ordered Charles Bohlen, then chief counselor of the Department of State, to meet secretly with influential congressional leaders so that, as Lovett's aide Charles Saltzman noted, “when the inevitable undesirable alien brought in under these programs appears in the U.S., Congress will have been forewarned and undue
criticism of the Departments of State and Justice should be thereby minimized.”

According to Bohlen's notes, Leslie Biffle (the secretary of the Senate and executive director of the Democratic Party Policy Committee), Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn (later to be speaker of the House), New Jersey Representative Charles Eaton (chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), Senate Minority Leader Alben Barkley (later to be Truman's vice president), and Republican foreign affairs expert Senator H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey were approached with the proposal during July and August 1948. Arthur Vandenberg, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was apparently consulted later. “In each case,” Bohlen noted, the senator or congressman said he thought the project seemed “sensible.” Rayburn underlined the conspiratorial atmosphere of the encounter. “Congressman Rayburn was particularly insistent,” according to Bohlen, “that the members of Congress who had been inclined to make difficulties should this project become public were not those with whom it could be discussed in confidence with any assurance that it would be kept confidential.”
¹⁵

Kennan was later to testify before Congress that the entire NSC 10/2 effort, of which Bloodstone was but one part, was very limited in scope. “We had thought that this would be a facility which could be used when and if the occasion arose, when it might be needed,” he said in 1975 congressional hearings
¹⁶
on the origins of U.S. covert operations. “There might be years when we wouldn't have to do anything like this.”

But Kennan's comments in those latter-day hearings were something of an understatement. In fact, the Bloodstone record makes clear that the OPC and its associated émigré projects were actually major projects with multimillion-dollar budgets from the beginning. But no matter; Kennan was surely telling the truth as he perceived it. He had only wanted, he declared in his testimony, someone in the government who had the funds and the experience to do things “in a proper way … if an occasion arose.”

Kennan's anticommunism was far more sophisticated than that of many of his colleagues, and he wanted to use clandestine warfare techniques carefully. He viewed as unrealistic and dangerous demands for a quick “liberation” of Eastern Europe from Soviet influence, which were beginning to make themselves heard from the political right. Kennan had long been suspicious of popular participation in the formulation of foreign policy, and he considered the
U.S. Congress, for example, too mercurial, too ill informed, and too much subject to domestic pressures to serve the country well when it came to foreign affairs. These attitudes made him aware of the dangerous impact that yahoo-style reaction was beginning to have on American policy overseas. “I personally look with some dismay and concern at many of the things we are now experiencing in our public life,” Kennan had written in the spring of 1947.
¹⁷
“In particular I deplore the hysterical sort of anti-Communism which, it seems to me, is gaining currency in our country.”

Whatever the reason, Kennan made common cause in those years with other men who were soon to commandeer the work he had begun and take it places the diplomat apparently never expected. NSC 10/2 failed to bring covert operations under close civilian control. Instead, the clandestine service metastasized through the government at an extraordinary rate. Regardless of what Kennan may have intended, as NSC 10/2, NSC 20, and other programs he had helped design became institutionalized, they transformed themselves into an unrelentingly hostile effort to “roll back communism” in Eastern Europe, an effort that eventually consumed millions of dollars, thousands of lives, and considerable national prestige. As the political temperature between the superpowers inevitably got more frigid, the forces that Kennan had once ridden to power overwhelmed him and his program. By 1950 his erstwhile allies in secret work—men like Allen and John Foster Dulles, Paul Nitze, and Arthur Bliss Lane—were grasping for more power and depreciating Kennan's policies for being “soft on communism.”

In the end, Kennan testified many years later, “it did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.”
¹⁸

*
SANACC stands for “State, Army, Navy, Air Force Coordinating Committee.” As its name suggests, SANACC attempted to provide high-level coordination to U.S. security policies overseas, particularly in occupied Europe and Japan. SANACC was originally founded in 1944 as SWNCC (“State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee”), then changed its name with the reorganization of the War Department in 1947. The NSC coexisted with SANACC from 1947 through 1949, then eventually absorbed it.

*
Lindsay had served during the war as OSS liaison to Tito's guerrillas in Yugoslavia. He later became deputy chief of the Office for Policy Coordination in charge of behind-the-lines guerrilla actions in Eastern Europe between 1949 and 1951. He joined the Ford Foundation in 1953 and was named president of the Itek Corporation in 1962. In 1968 President-elect Nixon named Lindsay head of a secret task force on CIA reorganization.

*
W. Park Armstrong, one of the most powerful and least known figures in the U.S. intelligence community of the period, claimed in an interview with the author that he had “no recollection” and had “never heard” of Bloodstone or of any other effort to import Nazi collaborators into the United States for intelligence purposes. However, memos discussing the division of assignments under Bloodstone that were drafted and signed by Armstrong are now a matter of public record.

CHAPTER NINE

“See That He Is Sent to the U.S.…”

The men and women who created and administered Operation Bloodstone for the U.S. government had no sympathy for nazism as such, nor any desire to protect Nazis and collaborators in general from prosecution. They brought Bloodstone recruits into this country for three specific and sensitive purposes. First, there was the collection and analysis of intelligence on the USSR and its Eastern European satellites that the program's backers claimed were unavailable from any other source. Secondly, Bloodstone recruits trained U.S. intelligence, propaganda, and covert warfare specialists. And finally, some Bloodstone leaders were used for recruiting other émigrés for large-scale clandestine warfare, including sabotage and assassination missions.

By 1948, when the program began, the U.S. officials responsible for the approval and administration of Bloodstone were already senior, trusted officials with top security clearances. The names of more than three dozen of these officials are today found in a slender file of declassified Bloodstone records. They include Tom Clark, for example, the attorney general of the United States, who authorized the program on behalf of the Department of Justice; W. Park Armstrong, the director of the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research; and John S. Earman, Jr., the CIA observer on the Bloodstone team who later became inspector general of the agency.
Another notable Bloodstone veteran is Boris Pash, a career intelligence officer identified in the
Final Report
of the U.S. Senate's 1975–1976 investigation into U.S. intelligence activities as the retired director of the CIA unit responsible for planning assassinations.

Also found in the Bloodstone record are the names of more than twenty senior State Department officials concerned with Soviet or Eastern European affairs. This select crew went on to become the top officials in virtually every phase of U.S.-Soviet relations during the 1940s and 1950s and included, for example, three future U.S. ambassadors to Moscow; a director of the Voice of America; a director of Radio Free Europe; and two future directors of the State Department Intelligence section specializing in East bloc affairs.
¹
In a very real sense, the men and women who engineered Bloodstone were the same ones who designed U.S. cold war strategy for every administration from 1945 to 1963.

The officials who handled the day-to-day mechanics of the program are also of interest. John P. Boyd was the deputy commissioner, the number two man, at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1948. He was appointed to represent the Department of Justice on the Bloodstone team (then known as the SANACC 395 Committee) on April 15, 1948, and was named chairman of the entire effort two months later. He signed the Justice Department's formal approval for the project and asserted that the “Attorney General himself” had reviewed and approved the program. The Justice Department's approval was subject to only one proviso: that the recruits be “brought in under the Displaced Persons Act, if practicable.”
²

The phrase is significant, and it appears several times in Justice Department correspondence concerning Bloodstone. Under the Displaced Persons Act, there are two main categories of persons barred from entry into the United States. The first category is “war criminals, quislings and traitors … [including] persons who can be shown to have assisted the enemy in persecuting civil populations … [or who] have voluntarily assisted the enemy forces since the outbreak of the second world war,” and the second is “ordinary criminals who are extraditable by treaty.” True, the act did set limits (“quotas”) on the numbers of immigrants from each country, but it also permitted the federal government to move special immigrants to the head of the entry list, so that favored immigrants need not be excluded from entering under it for quota reasons. In short,
the only ones not “practicable” to be brought in under the Displaced Persons Act were Nazis and Nazi collaborators, on the one hand, and common criminals, on the other.
³

It is worth noting that Communists were
not
barred from entry into the United States under the Displaced Persons Act until amendments were passed by the Congress in June 1950, after the period that Boyd spent as head of the Bloodstone project. In any event, it is clear that few of the Bloodstone recruits had ever been Communists. Some of them, however, should have been excluded under the laws then on the books, as fugitives from charges of crimes against humanity.