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The army, air force, and CIA all began competing programs to prepare for the post-nuclear battlefield. This included creation of what eventually came to be called the Special Forces—better known today as the Green Berets—in the army and the air resupply and communications wings in the air force. The job of these units, Prouty explains, was to set up anti-Communist political leaders
backed up by guerrilla armies inside the USSR and Eastern Europe in the wake of an atomic war, capture political power in strategic sections of the country, choke off any remaining Communist resistance, and ensure that the Red Army could not regroup for a counterattack. “Somebody had to bring order back into the country, and before the Communists could do it we were going to come flying in there and do it,” Prouty says.

“The Eastern European and Russian émigré groups we had picked up from the Germans were the center of this; they were the personnel,” according to the retired colonel. “The CIA was to prepare these forces in peacetime; stockpile weapons, radios, and Jeeps for them to use; and keep them ready in the event of war. A lot of this equipment came from military surplus. The CIA was also supposed to have some contacts inside [the USSR] worked out ahead of time for use when we got there, and that was also the job of the émigré groups on the agency payroll. In the meantime, they [the émigré troops] were useful for espionage or covert action.” Both the army and the CIA laid claim to the authority to control the guerrilla foot soldiers after war had actually been declared.
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A recently declassified top secret document from the JCS to President Truman confirms Prouty's assertion that the émigré armies enjoyed an important role in the eyes of nuclear planners of the time. The 1949 study begins with a summary of what was then the current atomic strategy. Seventy atomic bombs, along with an unspecified amount of conventional explosives, were slated to be dropped from long-range planes on selected Soviet targets over a thirty-day period. The impact of the attack had been carefully calculated, according to the JCS memo: About 40 percent of the Soviets' industrial capacity would be destroyed, including most of the militarily crucial petroleum industry.

But this, the chiefs contended, would not guarantee victory. The thirty-day atomic assault, the Pentagon concluded with considerable understatement, “might stimulate resentment against the United States” among the people of the USSR, thus increasing their will to fight. A major program of political warfare following the attack was therefore essential, the JCS determined. In fact, the effectiveness of the atomic attack itself was “dependent upon the adequacy and promptness of [the] associated military and psychological operations.… Failing prompt and effective exploitation, the opportunity would be lost and subsequent Soviet psychological
reactions would adversely affect the accomplishment of Allied objectives.”
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The commitment of five wings of B-29 bombers to the émigré guerrilla army project is a practical measure of the importance that the Pentagon attached to it. The B-29 was the largest, most sophisticated, and most expensive heavy bomber in the U.S. inventory at the time. According to Prouty, General Vandenberg originally conceived of the air force's role in psychological and guerrilla warfare as a third branch of his service, equal, at least in administrative status, to the Strategic Air Command and the Tactical Air Command. Special Forces visionaries in the army such as General McClure had similar plans for that service as well.

The Vlasov Army guerrilla training proposals earlier initiated by Kennan, Thayer, and Lindsay fitted neatly into the military's nuclear strike force plans. By the beginning of 1949 the two projects were gradually merging into a single strategy combining preconflagration psychological warfare and clandestine action under the control of the CIA and State Department with postnuclear guerrilla armies under military command.

Extreme secrecy cloaked every aspect of U.S. atomic policy, and the fact that the United States was training an émigré army for use following an atomic attack on the USSR was among the most closely held details. Even the foot soldiers who were destined to be dropped into the radioactive ruins of the USSR were not to be informed of the details of their mission until the final moments before their departure. The secrecy was designed to conceal the military strategy, not the fact that a number of recruits had Nazi backgrounds. But the sensitivity of the mission guaranteed that newspaper reporters and academics could usually be tactfully deterred from probing too deeply into the origins of the Special Forces. Anyone who refused to take the hint was met with a stone wall of government silence.
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It was up to the U.S. Army to devise a program for the day-to-day
maintenance of several thousand of the CIA's émigré guerrillas until “the balloon goes up,” as a nuclear crisis has come to be called in national security circles. The stockpiling of military equipment was fairly simple in those days, when warehouses full of World War II surplus material were available. But how does even the U.S. Army go about hiding an armed force of several thousand enthusiastic anti-Communists in the European heartland? The answer was simple, in a way: The émigré soldiers were hidden inside another army. Those covers were known as Labor Service companies, and these U.S.-financed paramilitary units are a story in themselves.

These organizations began shortly after the war as U.S. Army-sponsored Labor Service units or Industrial Police corps inside occupied Germany. They were U.S. Army-financed semimilitary corps of about 40,000 displaced persons and refugees set up to guard POW camps, clear rubble from bombed-out cities, locate graves of casualties, and carry out similar tasks. The U.S. government's rationale for the program was that the labor companies provided a cheap and relatively reliable source of workers for the army, navy, and occupation government at a time when the military was struggling against budget cutting and a demobilization mood in the Congress. The units offered employment, housing, and respectability to their recruits at a time when much of Europe was a shattered wasteland, so thousands of displaced persons flocked to enlist.
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Former Nazis or members of armies that had taken up arms
against the United States were strictly barred from participating in the Labor Service units, at least officially, and U.S. occupation authorities announced that they would undertake a reasonably thorough screening process for new recruits.
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Despite the official ban on hiring ex-Nazis, however, the Labor Service divisions began recruiting Waffen SS volunteers at least as early as 1946. Before long many members of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian labor units found themselves serving under the same officers in Labor Service companies as they had earlier in the SS. An examination of several of the Latvian companies provides a clear-cut example of the penetration of ex-Nazis into the Labor Service units, and the same pattern held true for Albanian, Lithuanian, and some Estonian units.

The first Latvian labor company, for example, was created on June 27, 1946, under the command of Voldemars Skaistlauks, a former Latvian SS general. All six of his top lieutenants in the U.S.-sponsored unit were Latvian SS veterans. The next Latvian labor unit was the 8850th Engineer Construction Company headquartered at Frankfurt, which officially consisted mainly of truck drivers and heavy equipment operators. The senior Latvian officer there was Talivaldis Karklins, who had been a top officer of the Madonna concentration camp during the war. Karklins was accused in sworn testimony by former inmates of Madonna of leading torture and murder at that camp. He emigrated to the United States in 1956.
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His chief lieutenant in the 8850th, according to the unit's roster, was Eduards Kalinovskis, also a veteran of a Latvian police death squad. The senior Latvian officer of the 8361st Company of Engineers was Janis L. Zegners, who had once been the top
aide to the inspector general (i.e., commanding officer) of the Latvian SS Legion and deputy warden of the notorious Riga security police during the war. At least half a dozen similar cases have come to light.
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The American recruiters for the Labor Service units knew that these highly motivated groups of Eastern European volunteers had earlier served in the Nazi Waffen SS, and they knew, at least in general terms, what the SS had done in Latvia. At the same time, however, the Americans apparently rejected or ignored indications that their enlistees had personally committed atrocities, even though evidence was readily available. “The Russians had their own spies inside the groups who stole the unit rosters and anything else they could get their hands on,” states a retired American colonel who once headed a Ukrainian-Polish Labor Service unit. “So the Russians made plenty of denunciations of my guys. But in those days to get denounced by the Communists, well, it probably meant they were doing something right for our side.”
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Before long the pretense of careful anti-Nazi screening of recruits had been dropped, even in official correspondence. Following a routine revision of Labor Service company orders in 1950, Colonel C. M. Busbee, the chief of the operation, noticed that the wording of a subparagraph in the new orders that barred recruitment of ex-Nazis had been tightened. Busbee wrote to Lieutenant General Daniel Noce, chief of staff of the European command, pointing out that under the new order, “all former SS officers [would be] prohibited from joining labor service units. This policy, if continued, would deprive labor services of a considerable number of these personnel,” Busbee argued, “who were previously employed in the Industrial Police and labor service units, and who have proved their dependability through efficient service.… [I] request authority to hire former Waffen-SS officer personnel provided they have been properly screened.” The reply, interestingly, came back through civilian rather than military channels. Chauncey G. Parker, a senior assistant to U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John McCloy, approved Busbee's request a few weeks later.
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There were at least three layers of secrecy surrounding the Labor Service companies and their nuclear mission. The army was reluctant to talk about these units at all, but when questioned about the camps full of Latvian-speaking troops marching in close order drill,
it had to provide some sort of explanation. Officially the recruits were nothing more than laborers, truck drivers, and warehouse guards hired to offset the declining number of U.S. troops in Europe.

The next cover story was known to the Labor Service recruits themselves but was kept secret from the general public. This was that the companies were trained and armed for counterinsurgency work inside Germany in the event of a rebellion or an attack by the USSR. “They were,” according to a secret Pentagon study obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, “carefully instructed in the suppression of civil disturbances … [and] specifically … trained to secure military installations, such as ammunition dumps, warehouses, and food depots, or were schooled in interior guard duty, marksmanship, and riot control.” Some 30,000 Labor Service recruits, including those supposedly limited to driving trucks, had been fully trained and armed with light infantry weapons and chemical warfare gear by 1950.
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Finally, there was the highly classified postnuclear strike mission, which was generally kept secret from the recruits themselves. Approximately 5,000 selected volunteers were trained for the postnuclear guerrilla force. As natives of the USSR and Soviet-occupied countries, these cold war minutemen spoke the language, knew the customs, had military training, and, in some cases, maintained underground contacts that made them seem perfect for guerrilla warfare. Before the decade of the 1940s was out, the recruitment of Labor Service men, including Waffen SS veterans, for behind-the-lines missions into Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe had become commonplace.

In the meantime, the Labor Service militias became a convenient holding tank for a variety of émigré agents attached to the Gehlen Organization, the CIA, or U.S. military intelligence. They were a military reserve, in short, for the ongoing political warfare programs under the OPC. The 4000th Labor Service Company, for example, served as an incubator for 250 Albanian guerrillas engaged in Frank Wisner's Bay of Pigs-style raids on their homeland during 1949 and the early 1950s.
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These operations were portrayed at the time as spontaneous rebellions led on a political level by Hasan Dosti and the other Albanian Bloodstone recruits in the Committee for a Free Albania. Unfortunately for these émigré soldiers, however, both the 4000th Labor Service Company (Guards)
and British intelligence were thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet and Albanian Communist agents. The raids were failures.

In 1950 CIC and CIA agents used the Labor Services cover to begin guerrilla training of at least 100 members of the far-right-wing League of Young Germans (Bund Deutscher Jungen, or BDJ). These “Young Germans” were no Boy Scouts; most were Waffen SS and Wehrmacht veterans, according to a later West German government investigation, and a considerable part of the leadership of the group had been enthusiastic “Jew baiters” in the Goebbels ministry during the Nazis' rule.

The budget for the clandestine group was 50,000 deutsche marks per month, according to records seized by German police in 1952, plus an ample supply of free arms, ammunition, and explosives cached in the Odenwald Hills south of Frankfurt. American and German advisers provided BDJ agents with extensive military instruction, including, as a report in the West German parliament later revealed, “use of Russian, United States and German weapons, including machine guns, grenades, and knives … [as well as] light infantry weapons and explosives.” The underground group called itself a U.S. “Technical Service” unit.
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But the training program was only the beginning. BDJ Technical Service leaders decided that the best thing they could do for Germany following a Soviet attack was to liquidate certain German leaders they regarded as insufficiently anti-Communist. German Communists were, of course, at the top of the Technical Service assassination list. Next in line for elimination were leaders of West Germany's Social Democratic party, the country's loyal opposition during the Adenauer administration. The Technical Service group planned to murder more than forty top Social Democratic officials, including the party's national chief, Erich Ollenhauer; the interior minister of the state of Hesse, Heinrich Zinnkann; and the mayors of Hamburg and Bremen. BDJ's U.S.-trained underground infiltrated the Social Democrats to shadow individual party leaders so as to kill them more efficiently when the day to act arrived.