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After the war Colonel Pash served as the army's representative on Bloodstone in the spring of 1948, when the tasks of that project, including recruiting defectors, smuggling refugees out from behind the Iron Curtain, and assassinations, were established. Bloodstone's “special operations,” as defined by the Pentagon, could “include clandestine warfare, subversion, sabotage and … assassination,” according to the 1948 Joint Chiefs of Staff records.
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In March 1949, Pash was assigned by the army to the OPC division of the CIA. There, according to State Department records, his responsibilities included many of the functions originally approved under the Bloodstone program.

At the CIA Boris Pash became an administrator and organizer, as distinct from a field operative. His five-man CIA unit, known as PB/7, was given a written charter that read in part that “PB/7 will be responsible for assassinations, kidnapping, and such other functions as from time to time may be given it … by higher authority.”
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Pash's fluency in Russian, his skill in dealing with Bloodstone émigrés, and his solid connections in anti-Communist exile circles were valuable assets in that job. Indeed, those qualifications—along with his sterling record as a counterintelligence officer—may well have been what led to his selection as PB/7 chief.

As with so many other aspects of the history of U.S. intelligence, the evidence here must be carefully sifted. Pash himself denies involvement in the Bloodstone program, asserting that he has “no recollection” of Bloodstone or of “anything like that.”
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However, documents establishing his participation in Bloodstone and PB/7 are now a matter of public record.
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Pash did testify before Congress in 1976 that his responsibilities at the CIA included planning for defections from Communist countries, facilitating the escape of prominent political refugees, and disseminating anti-Communist propaganda behind the Iron Curtain—all
of which were clearly Bloodstone activities. Pash's supervisor at the CIA (who is not identified in the hearing record) offered further details concerning some of the less savory aspects of émigré operations during the 1940s that coincide with what is known of Bloodstone. Pash's PB/7, the supervisor said, was responsible for “kidnapping personages from behind the Iron Curtain … [including] kidnapping people whose interests were inimicable to ours.”
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Much of the documentary evidence concerning what PB/7 did during the first years of the CIA has disappeared, leaving both Congress and the general public with many unanswered questions concerning U.S. operations among émigrés during the cold war. The CIA claimed in 1976 that it had “no record of documents which deal with this aspect [i.e., assassinations] of Pash's unit” and that even the office's charter was missing. Colonel Pash himself insisted in congressional testimony that he did not “believe” that he had any involvement in or responsibility for planning or conducting assassinations. He also testified that he had no recollection of the language of the charter of PB/7, the CIA office of which he had been in charge.
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Despite the mysterious disappearance of the PB/7 records while in the hands of the CIA, the chain of circumstantial evidence concerning some Bloodstone émigrés' roles in paramilitary, kidnapping, and assassination operations abroad is too strong to be easily dismissed. First, there is the incriminating Pentagon document, quoted above, which indicates that paramilitary operations, assassinations, and kidnappings were an explicit mission of the Bloodstone program from its beginning.

Secondly, at least one key Bloodstone official, Boris Pash, was active in Bloodstone's early phases in mid-1948, then became chief of the OPC office responsible for planning paramilitary operations, assassinations, and kidnappings at about the time that control of “politico-psychological” and paramilitary operations was passed from the Bloodstone committee to the OPC.

Thirdly, at least some Bloodstone émigrés with backgrounds as Nazi collaborators—former Albanian Minister of Justice Hasan Dosti, for example—went on to become deeply involved in clandestine operations that did indeed involve paramilitary operations, murders, and unconsummated plans for assassinations, such as the 1949 and 1950 secret raids on Albania designed to overthrow the government. (Dosti did not participate in the actual field operations. But the organization he led, the Committee for a Free Albania,
served as a “private” cover for the Albanian guerrillas, who were, in fact, organized and financed by the OPC.)

Fourthly—and perhaps coincidentally—certain Soviet spies, double agents, and “people whose interests were inimicable” to those of the CIA were marked for death by the agency. Pash's immediate superiors in the OPC acknowledge that the “one and only remedy” for Communist double agents was to murder them. According to published reports in the United States,
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persons accused of being Soviet or East bloc agents were in fact killed during this period by former Nazi collaborators at Mittenwald and in other displaced persons camps, though under mysterious circumstances that have never been clearly traced back to the OPC.

In the opinion of the author, the early Bloodstone operations played a significant role in laying the groundwork for what one Senate investigator later called “a procedure [within the CIA] which, although not spelled out in so many words, was generally understood and served as the basis to plan or otherwise contemplate political assassination.”
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The killings of minor double agents in German DP camps were murders and deserve to be investigated as such. More significant, however, is what these otherwise obscure crimes appear to have foreshadowed: Before the decade of the 1950s was out, the CIA is known to have established mechanisms for using “deniable” assets and émigrés for the execution of heads of state and other international leaders. These later killings, which are arguably the most serious blunders ever made by the CIA, have created blowback problems on an international scale and have had a significant and generally negative effect on the lives of millions of people.

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Once, in 1952, a reporter strayed too close to the truth, and the following single sentence appeared in
Newsweek:
“The Army will soon open a secret guerrilla warfare and sabotage school for military personnel and CIA agents at Ft. Bragg, N.C.” Army psychological warfare chief General Robert McClure was enraged by the security lapse and demanded a full field investigation into the reporter's activities in order to trace the leak to its source. Army intelligence had its hands full with the Korean War at the time, however, and is said to have declined to follow up on McClure's request. Even so, the incident reveals how closely the Special Forces secret was being held.

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The United States' postwar labor service units were known at various times as Labor Service Guard Companies, Labor Service Companies (Guard), Technical Labor Service Units, Labor Service Technical Units, Industrial Police, Civilian Guard Companies, Military Labor Service, and a half dozen other similar names. All, however, were under the nominal command of the U.S. Army European Command's Labor Service Division. The names Labor Service companies and Labor Service units are used throughout this discussion for simplicity's sake.

The use of such Labor Service companies for arms training and as cover for clandestine paramilitary brigades is a well-established practice in Europe. The Nazis, for example, created similar brigades of Ukrainians and foreign-born Germans for use during the invasions of Poland and the Baltic states. These Nazi Labor Service squads often did double duty as triggermen and goons during the Holocaust.

After the war the USSR also organized its own labor companies out of the German POWs it had captured. “Former German military personnel, both officers and other ranks, held in the USSR as prisoners of war have been organized into labor battalions,” the CIA reported in 1947. “[They] have been given Soviet training for administration posts, and police work, and in some instances been organized into small combat units for use against Baltic partisans.” These men, the CIA continued, were “available for service with whatever regime the Kremlin elect[s] to establish in Germany.” The Soviets also created labor units from among captured Poles, Yugoslavs, and Romanians who had fought on the German side during the war, according to the agency.

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Karklins concealed his wartime career at the time he entered the United States. Detailed charges concerning Karklins's role at the Madonna camp were published in English by a Latvian state publishing house as early as 1963 and had been available in the Latvian language for several years before that. Unfortunately, however, no action was taken against Karklins by American authorities for more than fifteen years.

Finally, in 1981, the Office of Special Investigations (which had been forced to fight a tough bureaucratic battle simply to establish itself within the Department of Justice) succeeded in bringing charges against Karklins. In its complaint the OSI alleged that Karklins had “assisted in the persecution and murder of unarmed Jewish civilians and committed crimes including murder.… During [Karklins's] tenure as Commandant of this camp, unarmed inmates were starved, beaten, tortured, murdered and otherwise brutalized by the defendant and/or by persons acting under his direction.…”

Complex litigation ensued, depositions were gathered in Latvia, and thousands of hours of court and attorney time were consumed. Karklins, however, died peacefully on February 9, 1983, in Monterey, California, before a decision concerning his deportation from the United States could be reached.

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Unfrocked double agents were also tortured—there is no other word for it—in so-called terminal medical experiments sponsored by the army, navy, and CIA. These tests fed massive quantities of convulsant and psychedelic drugs to foreign prisoners in an attempt to make them talk, according to CIA records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by author John Marks. The CIA also explored use of psychosurgery and repeated electric shocks directly into the brain.

Then CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all records of these “experiments” in the midst of Watergate and congressional investigations that threatened to bring to light the agency's practices in this field. A cache of papers that he accidentally missed was found some years later, however, and the agency has since been forced to make public sanitized versions of some of those records. It is now known that similar agency tests with LSD led to the suicide of an army employee, Frank Olson, and are alleged to have permanently damaged a group of unsuspecting psychiatric patients at a Canadian clinic whose director was working under CIA contract. The agency unit that administered this program was the same Directorate of Scientific Research that developed the exotic poisons used in attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba.

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The USSR, too, made substantial use of assassination as a political tool during the cold war. To name only one example, KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky murdered émigré OUN leaders Lev Rebet (in October 1957) and Stepan Bandera (in October 1959) with poisonous chemical gas guns. Soviet president Kliment Y. Voroshilov awarded Stashinsky the Red Banner Combat Order for his efforts.

Stashinsky defected to the West after the Bandera murder, bringing with him the Voroshilov award and the chemical pistol as proof of the deed. The assassin, interestingly enough, claimed he had been recruited by the Soviet security police on the basis of threats against family members who had once collaborated with the Nazis.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Any Bastard as Long as He's Anti-Communist”

The more deeply American agencies became involved in relations with the exile groups, the more rapidly myths grew up around those organizations concerning what they had actually done during the war. The common theme of those stories is the tragic heroism of the defectors from the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Eastern Europe who chose to fight Stalin by joining the Nazis. That proposition was (and is) often accompanied by the assertion that damaging statements about these émigrés are nothing more than Soviet propaganda.

The standard version of that saga and the political use to which it was put during the cold war is perhaps best illustrated by a 1949
Life
magazine article by noted journalist and psychological warfare expert Wallace Carroll, who argued that during the war “the Germans had millions of eager accomplices in Russia … [who] welcomed them as liberators and offered their cooperation.” Unfortunately the Nazis let “this chance slip through their hands” because of Hitler's racial policy and the German government's refusal to implement fully a political warfare program when the time was ripe. Hans Heinrich Herwarth and Ernst Kostring's political warfare tactics, when attempted, were “a phenomenal success,” according to Carroll. “There was no Partisan movement in their area … [and] no sabotage, and the peasants fulfilled the German requisitions
of farm products on schedule.” The attribution of atrocities to these troops, as well as the numerous pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic periodicals published by the Vlasov organization during the war, were “forgeries [which] Soviet propagandists shrewdly attributed to Vlasov's forces.” These “facts,” Carroll writes, had been “known for a long time to the Russian experts of the State Department and to a small number of American officers” and were now a “lesson which we must learn without delay.”
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Carroll's 1949 conclusion was, in part, that America needed to embrace the former Nazi collaborators as a central tactic in a comprehensive strategy of political warfare against the Soviets.

The fact that Carroll was a psychological warfare consultant to the U.S. Army at the time he penned this narrative was acknowledged by
Life
's editors. Indeed, they even included a special introduction that billed Carroll's work for the army as a “perceptive and fresh standpoint from which to re-examine U.S. strategic planning.”
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