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Wisner's OPC division of the CIA appears to have lost control of many of its émigré assets as their factional conflicts expanded. Exile leaders fought bitterly among themselves, split coalitions they had been instructed to support, and undertook murders and other paramilitary operations that they concealed from their American sponsors. Several leaders of the Russian nationalists are now known to have been simultaneously on several other payrolls, including that of the USSR, and were providing false information to each of their patrons. Double, triple, and quadruple agents were the rule, not an exception. Political murders and kidnappings became commonplace.

One U.S.-financed exile group, known as TsOPE by its Russian initials, even went so far as to blow up its own headquarters, then blame the deed on the Soviet security police. The idea was to prove that its organization must be the most effective anti-Communist force, and thus worthy of increased funding, because the Soviets had singled it out for sabotage. TsOPE's inspired plan unraveled, however, when its office staff was brought in for questioning by American investigators.
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The well-known radio broadcasting operations of RFE/RL were secondary to the National Committee for a Free Europe's funding
of exile political action committees during the late 1940s. The radios were only added as something of an afterthought as the weaknesses in Thayer's work at the Voice of America became apparent. Thayer's radio propaganda efforts at the VOA—which were, it will be recalled, one of the impetuses for Bloodstone—had been shown to be counterproductive relatively quickly. His vitriolic attacks on Eastern European regimes, the State Department soon discovered, were taken by their targets as official policy statements of the U.S. government because they were broadcast on the official radio voice of the United States. The Policy Planning Staff concluded that use of an official mouthpiece for the more virulent anti-Communist propaganda actually ended up restricting the U.S. government's ability to deal effectively with the complex political rivalries in the region. Instead, it argued, the government should secretly expand the supposedly “private” NCFE to handle radio broadcasting aimed at the USSR and its satellites. This would permit some measure of “deniability” for the broadcasts and personalities associated with RFE/RL.

Unlike the relative moderation of the present-day RFE/RL broadcasts, the cold war operations of these stations were hard-hitting. It was “bare fists and brass knuckles,” as Sig Mickelson puts it. Their work was, as National Committee for a Free Europe President Dewitt Poole noted in one 1950 directive, “to take up the individual Bolshevik rulers and their quislings and tear them apart, exposing their motivations, laying bare their private lives, pointing at their meannesses, pillorying their evil deeds, holding them up to ridicule and contumely.”
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Further, the radio broadcasting operations were themselves used as covers for a much broader range of political warfare activities, including printing and distributing black propaganda,
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intelligence gathering, and the maintenance of agent networks behind the Iron Curtain.

This tough agitation drew its ideological vigor from a variety of sources. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were often quoted and praised in RFE/RL broadcasts, as were Eastern European national heroes like the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth and the Pole Thaddeus Kosciuszko. At the same time, however, RFE/RL sometimes
produced a dull undertone of Nazi-like propaganda in its early years. At times material that had been directly created by the Nazi security service SD found its way into RFE/RL broadcasts and publications. The NCFE often distributed the highly publicized—but fraudulent—”Document on Terror,” for example, as a means of crystallizing public anger in the West against communism during Radio Free Europe fund-raising campaigns. The “Document” purported to be a translation of a captured Soviet secret police directive encouraging the use of terror against civilian populations. It included sections on “general terror” (murders, hangings, etc.), “creating the psychosis of white fear,” “enlightened terror” (use of agents provocateurs), “disintegrating operations,” and others. The CIA aggressively promoted the text of the “Document” both directly through RFE/RL and indirectly through coverage planted in a wide variety of sympathetic newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts to audiences around the world.

The NCFE announced that it had obtained the “Document” from “a former Baltic cabinet minister, favorably known to us,” who in turn had gotten it from a Ukrainian refugee, who in turn had “found it on the body of a dead NKVD officer” in Poland in 1948. The committee acknowledged in small type that it had “no means of conclusively establishing the authenticity” of the “Document,” but it insisted that it was a “genuine product of Communist theory” whose recommendations “did … take place.” This low-key caveat concerning the questionable authenticity of the “Document” was soon forgotten in the media storm that followed publication of the item.
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The “Document” became a staple of anti-Communist propaganda and continues to show up occasionally in extreme-right-wing publications to this day. Recycled extensively through congressional hearings,
Reader's Digest
articles, and newspaper accounts, this “captured report” emerged as one of the frequently cited sources of “documentary evidence” of Communist terror during the cold war. It was not until 1956, with the publication of Khrushchev's extraordinary report detailing Stalin's crimes, that the “Document” began to fade from view.

In fact, however, the “Document” was a forgery, whose origins can be traced to the wartime Nazi intelligence service. The true source of the “Document” was, according to American psychological warfare expert Paul Blackstock, “one of the Nazi secret police or related terrorist organizations such as the
Sicherheitsdienst
or
one of the notorious
SD
or
SS
‘action groups'”—that is, the
Einsatzgruppen
(mobile murder squads). Blackstock uses an etymological investigation to track the origins of phrases used in the “Document” back to their sources.
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He concludes that the section concerning “disintegrating operations,” for example, originated in a Nazi manual used for indoctrinating Eastern European collaborationist troops, including the Ukrainian Waffen SS.

RFE/RL broadcasts sometimes featured well-known Nazi collaborators and even outright war criminals. Officially, of course, the political slant of those stations was nondenominational support for “freedom” and “democracy.” The large majority of RFE/RL employees were not Nazi collaborators, and the two stations often quoted anti-Nazi European politicians with approval. RFE/RL's broadcasts of European Social Democrats, in fact, occasionally led to complaints from hard-core anti-Communist congressmen in the United States, who found such ideas dangerously close to communism.

Even so, certain war criminals found a comfortable roost at RFE/ RL. Radio Free Europe repeatedly featured Romanian Fascist leader (and Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America) Valerian Trifa, for example, in Romanian-language broadcasts, particularly during the 1950s. Vilis Hazners, who was accused in a CBS-TV
60 Minutes
broadcast of spearheading a Nazi gang that “force[d] a number of Jews into a synagogue [which was] then set on fire,” emerged as a prominent Latvian personality in Radio Liberation transmissions. Hazners, at last report, was still broadcasting for RL in the 1980s. Belorussian quisling and mass murderer Stanislaw Stankievich also frequently free-lanced programs for the radios.
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The Pentagon was gradually coming to grips with using former Nazi collaborators at about the same time that the State Department and CIA were. General Lucius Clay's war scare of early 1948, together with the deepening cold war, convinced many Americans in and out of government that there was at least an even chance of an all-out U.S.-USSR war over Europe before the decade was out.

As the final arbiter of U.S. security the Pentagon considers it part of its job to assume the worst about Soviet intentions in order to be adequately prepared for any eventuality. By 1948 that the United States would increasingly rely on atomic weapons to deter any Soviet military moves against the West had already become a foregone
conclusion among most U.S. military strategists. The American perception that the Soviets enjoyed overwhelming superiority in troops and conventional arms in Europe seemed to leave few other choices.

The Pentagon was evolving a strategy of exactly how to go about using atomic weapons in a war with the USSR at about the same time that Kennan, Dulles, and Wisner were hammering together the National Committee for a Free Europe and the NSC 10/2 clandestine warfare authorization. By the time the decade was out, the military's preparations for waging nuclear war—if that proved necesssary—had merged with many of the ongoing CIA and State Department political warfare operations that have been discussed thus far. As those two streams came together, Nazi collaborators became entwined with some of America's most sensitive military affairs.

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Nižňanský is reported to have participated in the special SS Kommando “Edelweiss” and to have won the German Iron Cross, second class, for his efforts. A Czechoslovakian court tried him in absentia and condemned him to death for war crimes, including four massacres of civilians by troops under his personal command which took place in late 1944 and early 1945 in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Many of the victims were women and children. In addition, evidence was offered at his trial that he had participated in the December 12, 1944, murder of Anglo-American military mission officers that took place near Polomka. Nižňanský went to work for the CIC at least as early as 1948, when he was an interpreter and interrogator at Braunau. He was hired by RFE at least as early as 1955, and he served for many years as a specialist in work among Czechoslovakians who were visiting or who had emigrated to the West.

Csonka is alleged to have been a member of the Fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross party during the war and to have served as both a youth leader in that organization and, for a time, secretary to Ferenc Szalasi, the organization's leader, who was executed for war crimes in 1946. Following the war Csonka worked for French intelligence. He joined RFE at least as early as 1954 as a political editor specializing in Hungarian questions. He has often used the pseudonym Gergely Vasvari.

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“Black” propaganda is a standard covert operations technique in which the CIA—or any other intelligence agency—employs agents with no provable ties to the U.S. government to disseminate false information that is designed to discredit hostile foreign states. This includes spreading rumors of impending food shortages in order to precipitate hoarding and economic crises, for example, or leaking forged documents that might undermine the targeted government.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Guerrillas for World War III

The Vlasov Army and Waffen SS veterans from Eastern Europe worked hard to integrate themselves into the evolving U.S. nuclear weapons strategy during the cold war years. Colonel Philp and General Gehlen, it will be recalled, began as early as the winter of 1945–1946 to use German officers and refugees from the East to gather information about military construction behind Soviet lines. Each time the location of a new Soviet military site was confirmed, word of its location was passed to a special U.S. Air Force office at the Pentagon whose job was the selection of targets slated for atomic annihilation.

As U.S. atomic planning grew more sophisticated, the role of émigrés in America's nuclear war-fighting strategy expanded quickly. By late 1948 paramilitary expert General Robert McClure had won the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to approval of a full-scale program of guerrilla warfare that was to follow any U.S. nuclear strike on the USSR. From then until at least 1956, when this strategy was at the height of its popularity in U.S. command circles, preparations for post-World War III guerrilla insurgencies employed thousands of émigrés from the USSR. Pentagon documents show that Vlasov veterans and Waffen SS men played a major role in these underground armies. Considering the wartime record of these forces, there is reason to suspect that a number of these enlistees may have been war criminals.

These émigrés did not, of course, create U.S. nuclear strategy. The advent of atomic weapons and their impact on international affairs would have taken place with or without the use of former Nazis and collaborators in U.S. war planning. The exile soldiers simply rode the coattails of the movement toward reliance on nuclear weapons during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In many cases they themselves were not aware of what the Pentagon had in mind for them. The integration of these groups into even the most humble levels of U.S. nuclear planning, however, gave the military and intelligence agencies a powerful reason to conceal the Nazi pasts of their unusual troops.

The process of integrating ex-Nazi émigré groups into U.S. nuclear operations may be traced at least to early 1947, when General Hoyt Vandenberg became the first chief of staff of the newly independent U.S. Air Force. Vandenberg had commanded the Ninth Air Force in Europe during World War II, then been tapped to head the Central Intelligence Group, the immediate predecessor to the CIA, in 1946. Among the general's responsibilities at the air force was the development of written plans describing strategies and tactics for the use of America's new nuclear weapons in the event of war.

“Vandenberg had a clear idea about just how he thought a nuclear war was going to be fought,” argues retired Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who was a senior aide to the air force chief of staff in the 1940s and later the top liaison man between the Pentagon and the CIA. “[He] knew that if there was a nuclear exchange in those days—and we are talking about atomic bombs, now, not H-bombs—you would destroy the communications and lifeblood of a country, but the country would still exist. It would just be rubble. People would be wandering around wanting to know who was boss and where the food was coming from and so forth, but the country would still
be there
.” Therefore, the U.S. thinking went, “we must begin to create independent communications centers inside the Soviet Union [after the nuclear blast] and begin to pull it together for our ends.”
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