Blowback (32 page)

*
Lebed's version of these events is considerably different. In a series of interviews with the author Lebed contended that he arrived in Lvov on July 3, several days after the German invasion. He was not police minister, he says, but instead was “responsible to help transfer members of our organization further east, in march groups.” He acknowledges that he was “number three” in the Ukrainian government but denies that he had any official title. He attributes any slayings of Jews that took place during that period to the Soviet NKVD and says that the hangings of Polish intellectuals was the work of the German SD, not Ukrainian nationalists. He also flatly denies that he was ever a leader of the SB, the OUN's secret intelligence organization. “Even the KGB, who often accuse me of all kinds of ‘crimes,'” Lebed says, “state that the leader of the SB was Mykola Arsenych, who committed suicide when he was finally surrounded by KGB forces so that he would not fall into their hands alive.”

Lebed's assertions on this last point contradict those in contemporary U.S. Army intelligence records, which state that Lebed “became chief of the SB, which is the intelligence organization” and that, according to a second U.S. study, he “organized a strong, underground executive corps of SB security service, which by terrorist methods kept under control the Bandera party [the OUN], as well as later [its army, the] UPA.”

*
Buried in the text of the CIA-sponsored law, and mentioned almost in passing, was legal authorization for the CIA to ignore public accountability for its budget, its personnel policy, or its procurement practices. That one-sentence-long subsection exempted the agency from complying with any
other
law that might disclose “intelligence sources and methods.”

A second phrase directs the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties … as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” Agency lawyers have long interpreted that passage to mean that secret orders from the NSC or the president carry greater weight than any “ordinary” law passed by Congress. These two brief sections of the law have proved to be the legal foundation upon which most of the modern CIA has been built.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ratlines

Ratlines, in espionage jargon, are networks of agents who smuggle fugitives or undercover operatives in and out of hostile foreign territories. These escape and evasion routes, as they are sometimes called, are a standard part of the clandestine operations of every major power, and there were hundreds of such ratlines snaking out of the Soviet-occupied territories in Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II.

The story of one of these ratlines is of special interest here because it reveals the manner in which the United States became entangled in the escape of large numbers of Nazi and Axis criminals, many of whom remained ardent Fascists as contemptuous of American democracy as of Soviet-style communism. In hindsight it is clear that many of the ratlines used by the United States during the cold war began as independent, unsanctioned Nazi escape organizations that later turned to selling their specialized services to U.S. intelligence agencies as a means of making money and protecting their own ongoing Nazi smuggling efforts. Some of the exiles involved in this dangerous work did it for money; some, for ideological reasons; some, for both.

The most important Western ratlines that have come to light thus far, including those that smuggled Nazis, operated in and through the Vatican in Rome.
¹
Unraveling the reasons why and how the Catholic Church became involved in Nazi smuggling is an important
step in understanding the broader evolution of the postwar alliances between former Nazis and U.S. intelligence agencies. One organization is worthy of close scrutiny. It is the prominent Catholic lay group known as Intermarium. During its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s leading members of this organization were deeply involved in smuggling Nazi fugitives out of Eastern Europe to safety in the West. Later Intermarium also became one of the single most important sources of recruits for the CIA's exile committees. This can be said with some certainty because about a score of Intermarium leaders ended up as activists or officials in Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), each of which the U.S. government has since admitted as having been a CIA-financed and -controlled organization.
²

For much of the Catholic Church's leadership, it will be recalled, World War II had been an interlude in a deeper and more important struggle against “atheistic communism” that had been raging for decades. This more fundamental struggle had closely aligned the Vatican hierarchy with a half dozen conservative Christian Democratic and clerical-Fascist political parties that were willing Nazi pawns during the war, even when the Church of Rome was itself under ideological attack from the German Nazi party. The majority of the Nazis' Axis partners in Eastern Europe, as well as Vichy France, had been led by Catholic political parties during the war. The puppet government in Slovakia, for example, was run by a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Croatia, a terrorist breakaway state from Yugoslavia, described itself as a “pure Catholic state” whose leader, Ante Pavelic, had been personally received by the pope, while clerics in Admiral Nicholas Horthy's Hungary enjoyed a more profound influence in that country's wartime government than did its own parliament. It is well established, of course, that some Catholic Church leaders bravely resisted Nazi crimes, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Even so, it is also true that the church-based political parties mentioned above played a central role in Axis military aggression. These organizations used the mantle and the moral authority of the church to help carry out the preparations for, and in some cases the actual execution of, the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
*
³

As Nazi Germany collapsed during late 1944 and early 1945, many senior church officials helped organize a massive campaign of refugee relief for millions of Catholics fleeing from Eastern Europe. Once this was under way, few distinctions were made between the Catholics responsible for the crimes against humanity committed in the Axis states and those being persecuted simply for opposition to the Soviets. The vast majority of the refugees who swept through Rome in the wake of the war had left their homelands for reasons
that had nothing to do with war crimes, obviously; they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the German or Soviet armies had stormed through their villages.

At the same time, however, these refugee routes became the most important pipelines out of Europe for Nazis and collaborators fleeing war crimes charges. Factions within the church that had long been sympathetic to the Nazis' extreme anti-Communist stand organized large-scale programs to facilitate the escapes of tens of thousands of Nazis and collaborators from Germany, Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and a number of other Eastern European states. The pivotal role of the church in the escape of the Nazis has been emphasized by Luftwaffe Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, the highly decorated German air ace who became an international spokesman for the neo-Nazi movement after the war. “One may otherwise view Catholicism as one wishes. But what the Church, especially certain towering personalities within the Church, undertook in those years [immediately after the war] to save the best of our nation, often from certain death, must never be forgotten!” Colonel Rudel exclaimed in a speech at Kufstein in 1970. “In Rome itself, the transit point of the escape routes, a vast amount was done. With its own immense resources, the Church helped many of us to go overseas. In this manner, in quiet and secrecy, the demented victors' mad craving for revenge and retribution could be effectively counteracted.”
⁴

The Vatican's principal agencies for handling refugees were a group of relief agencies in Rome that divided the assistance work according to the nationality of the refugee. Lithuanians went to see Reverend Jatulevicius at No. 6 on the Via Lucullo, for example, while Padre Gallov at 33 Via dei Parione aided Hungarians and Monsignors Dragonovic and Magjerec at the Istituto di St. Jeronimus were in charge of Croatian relief, and so forth.
⁵

According to a top secret U.S. State Department intelligence report of May 1947, “the Vatican … is the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants … [and] the justification … for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the Faith. It is the Vatican's desire to assist any person, regardless of nationality or political beliefs, as long as that person can prove himself to be a Catholic.” The classified study confirmed that Nazis and their collaborators were not excluded from the effort: “[I]n those Latin American countries where the Church is a controlling or dominating factor, the Vatican has
brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign missions of those countries taking an attitude almost favoring the entry into their country of former Nazis and former Fascists or other political groups, so long as they are anti-Communist. That, in fact, is the practice in effect in the Latin American Consulates and Missions in Rome at the present time.”
⁶

Leaders of the Intermarium organization became coordinators of much of the Nazi escape effort, and many of the men who controlled the Vatican's relief campaign simultaneously became the top leadership of Intermarium. Monsignor Krunoslov Dragonovic, who ran escape routes for Ustachi (Croatian Fascist) fugitives, for example, served as the chief Croatian representative on the self-appointed Intermarium ruling council. Archbishop Ivan Buchko of the Ukraine, who successfully intervened with Pope Pius XII himself to win freedom for a Ukrainian Waffen SS legion,
*
became the
senior Ukrainian Intermarium representative, according to U.S. Army investigative records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The onetime Führer of the openly Nazi Latvian Perkonkrusts, Gustav Celmins, was tapped as secretary of the headquarters branch in Rome.
⁷

Declassified U.S. State Department and army intelligence records trace the roots of Intermarium back to an alliance of militantly anti-Communist Catholic lay organizations from Eastern Europe established in the mid-1930s. The Abwehr (German military intelligence service) used Intermarium contacts as prewar “agents of influence” abroad as well as reasonably reliable sources of information on the large émigré communities of Europe. By the time the Nazis marched across the Continent, Intermarium had become, in the words of a U.S. Army intelligence report, “an instrument of the German intelligence.”
⁸

The name of the group means “between the seas,” and the announced purpose of the coalition was to unite nations “from the Baltic to the Aegean” in a common front against the USSR. Intermarium was also to be the name of a new, unified Catholic federation of all the countries bordering Russia—a new Holy Roman Empire, in effect—that was to be created in order to hasten the overthrow of the USSR. Although never a Fascist or National Socialist group as such, Intermarium was far to the right of the political spectrum, and a number of its leaders actively collaborated with the Nazis. Their strategy was congruent in many important respects with that of Nazi “philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg, and Intermarium leaders established a close working relationship with the Rosenberg ministry at least as early as 1940. Centuries-old Catholic anti-Semitism was rife in the organization, and Jews were excluded from Intermarium's federation plan.

After the war Intermarium became one of the first organizations to campaign openly for freedom for Waffen SS POWs and for permission to establish a volunteer anti-Communist army for use in a supposedly imminent war against the USSR. The group's multilingual
Bulletin
, for example, argued as early as January 1947 that “it does not matter whether it is [now] between a second and a third world war, or else in the middle of a non-finished second world war … [but] events should not take us unprepared, like in 1939.”
Organizing must begin immediately, the official publication asserted, for an “amalgamated common armed forces of the Intermarium,” built out of exiles who had fought on either side between 1939 and 1945.

The function of this exile army, in Intermarium's vision, was to deal with the USSR as the Allies had with Germany: by “crushing her military strength and partitioning her,” as a key manifesto puts it, “into … free states in their ethnical borders”
⁹
—in other words, by dividing up the Soviet Union into smaller ethnic units in much the same way as had been proposed by the Rosenberg group inside the German high command. Not surprisingly, the USSR remained deeply hostile to Intermarium, and Soviet agents arrested the group's leaders whenever they could lay hands on them.

U.S. intelligence became aware at least as early as 1947 that Intermarium had become deeply involved in arranging escapes for a wide variety of Nazis and collaborators from Eastern Europe. In June of that year, for example, U.S. CIC Special Agent William Gowen notified his headquarters in Rome of a curious incident in which a fugitive Hungarian Fascist who had been a part-time informer for him had “escaped” from Italian custody with Intermarium's assistance. According to Agent Gowen, Intermarium enjoyed enough clout inside the Italian police administration that it was able to arrange for the release of his informant through official channels. Following Intermarium's intervention on behalf of the former Fascist, Gowen said, the Italian Ministry of the Interior cabled the prison camp where the informant was interned and ordered it to turn him loose. The freed suspect was then listed as “escaped” in official files.
¹⁰

Gowen and other CIC agents established a working relationship with a number of Intermarium officials that same year. Their immediate goal was to create trouble for the Soviet-aligned government in Hungary, which had deposed a pro-Western prime minister in mid-1947. Not long after the Intermarium escape incident Agent Gowen arranged with intelligence specialists at the U.S. Department of State to provide a U.S. diplomatic visa to a leading Intermarium spokesman, Ferenc Vajda, so that he might travel to America. Vajda's mission for Intermarium (and for the CIC) was to convince the deposed prime minister, Ferenc Nagy, to join with former Axis quislings in a new U.S.-sponsored alliance against Communist power in Hungary.