Blowback (35 page)

Special Agent Lyon went on to recommend expanded U.S. assistance to Intermarium leader Dragonovic. The priest's help was particularly desirable, Lyon writes, because if the smuggling was ever exposed, “we may be able to state, if forced, that turning over of a DP to a Welfare Organization [such as Dragonovic's] falls in line with our democratic way of thinking and that we are not engaged in illegal disposition of war criminals, defectees and the like.”
³⁷
Lyon was, in short, offering the “plausible denial” of the very fact that worried the CIC the most: The Austrian branch of the CIC
was
“engaged in the disposition of war criminals, defectees and the like,” at least when such persons were believed to be of intelligence value to the United States.

As far as any connections between the Barbie escape and the CIA are concerned, the former Office of Special Investigations director Allan Ryan states flatly in his report on the Barbie affair that “there is no evidence in CIA files that the CIA had any relationship with Barbie prior to 1951 or … thereafter.” Ryan also told the author shortly after the Barbie study was released: “Frank Wisner had nothing to do with this.”
³⁸
Ryan is probably right that the CIA had no operational control over Klaus Barbie. Whether the agency was involved in moving
other
Nazi fugitives with Dragonovic's assistance, however, is another question.

In fact, many of Dragonovic's phony exit papers were arranged through Robert Bishop, an American ex-OSS agent who was then
in charge of the eligibility office of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Rome, according to CIC records.
³⁹
Bishop was one of the CIA/OPC's most important assets in that city. He had worked with Wisner on a variety of clandestine projects in Istanbul, Bucharest, and Rome since at least 1944. The CIA/OPC's connection to the smuggling operation was through Dragonovic and Bishop, not Barbie.

Bishop and Wisner understood each other well when it came to clandestine operations. They had served together in Bucharest, Romania, in 1944 during what proved to be the first revealing collision between Soviet and American forces in Eastern Europe. Bishop had done truly pioneer work in Bucharest, from Wisner's point of view, by opening up clandestine contacts with the anti-Communist bureau of Axis Romania's wartime secret service in order to gather espionage information on the Soviets. “It was not our job to spy on the Russians [at that time],” Bishop concedes in a 1948 memoir of his Romanian experiences. “But we perceived very early that we were confronted with an even more sinister and potent totalitarian force than the one we were fighting. This realization caused us to spy on the Russians and their Romanian quislings, even though there was an order from the United States War Department that it should not be done.”
⁴⁰

Bishop went from there to the Italian IRO post. CIC Agent Lyon didn't like Bishop, even though he depended on him for phony identification cards and other refugee paperwork. Robert Bishop “fancied himself a top intelligence operative in Italy,” the CIC man sarcastically commented. Bishop drank too much and talked too much, Lyon thought. “After [a] breakdown due to alcoholism, Bishop imagined himself as the savior of Italy,” Lyon reported to CIC headquarters in his wrap-up of ratline activities.

During the 1948 Italian election campaign, according to Lyon, Bishop attempted to build the CIC's highly secret underground escape operation into a large-scale paramilitary force. He sought to provide “large numbers of underground troops, military supplies, sea evacuation, air evacuation and the like” for clandestine warfare against Communists, according to CIC records.
⁴¹
Bishop's Rome project, in short, was of a piece with Wisner's other insurgency operations in Greece, the Ukraine, and elsewhere. CIC Agent Lyon opposed this grandiose scheme because it would inevitably lead to public exposure of his secret ratline, which Lyon needed for his own purposes. Lyon and the CIC soon began avoiding Bishop when
they could, then cut him off altogether in 1950. Dragonovic managed to carry on without Bishop, however, by establishing new sources for false visas and identification through church relief channels.

Considerable evidence suggests that the CIA assumed control of Dragonovic—the “known and recorded … Fascist, war criminal, etc.,” in Agent Lyon's phrase—in mid-1951, then maintained that relationship for the remainder of the decade. The Justice Department strongly disputes this theory, however, in its report on Barbie. It argues that “the CIA stated … that it had no records of such an operation” involving Dragonovic and further notes that CIA officers familiar with the ratline told Justice that the agency “never had any connection with it.”

But another look at the evidence made available through the department's own investigation led many people to a different conclusion concerning the CIA's role in Dragonovic's ratline. First of all, Agent John M. Hobbins of the 430th CIC noted in early 1951 that the CIC's budget for running escaping agents through the ratline was scheduled to expire on June 31, 1951. Hobbins should have known, for he was the 430th's specialist in “Informant Disposal” during the early 1950s. The CIA “will assume responsibility for evacuations,” according to an order from the head of army intelligence in Austria, Hobbins reported, and the “end of the [CIC] budget and the assumption of control by CIA will roughly coincide.”
⁴²

CIC Agent George Neagoy, the army's principal officer in charge of the ratline after Agent Lyon's departure, transferred from the CIC to the CIA in 1951, at exactly the time the army's ratline “franchise” was to be transferred to the agency. At a minimum, Neagoy brought the CIA a solid working knowledge of the techniques and contacts of Dragonovic's ratline. It is certain that
some
U.S. intelligence group continued to use Dragonovic as a contract agent throughout the 1950s, though not necessarily for smuggling fugitives. The Croatian priest's CIC dossier, for example, leaves no doubt that he was of “operational interest to USI,” as the declassified record puts it,
⁴³
at least as late as October 1960. “USI” in this context signifies “U.S. intelligence.” The meaning of this phrase is unmistakable: Dragonovic was at the time a contract agent for an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency, most likely the CIA.

Officially Dragonovic remained active in Vatican refugee relief work for much of the 1950s, then gradually drifted into high-profile
political activism in the Croatian exile community abroad. He maintained his sympathy for the Ustachis and contributed to publications edited by Ante Bonifacic, an émigré nationalist politician who once served as “director of cultural relations” during the Ustachi regime. Dragonovic also maintained a profitable sideline business of currency smuggling in Italy and Yugoslavia, at least according to testimony in a 1960 trial in which three Yugoslavian Catholic priests confessed to having been used by him for that purpose. They went to prison, but Dragonovic remained free in Rome.

Dragonovic's death was of a piece with his life. The Croatian émigré press proclaimed with alarm in 1967 that the aging priest had been kidnapped by Tito's undercover agents and returned to Yugoslavia. There he was said to have been tortured, tried for war crimes, and executed. This version of events has found its way into a number of otherwise reliable studies of Eastern European affairs.

In reality, however, Dragonovic returned to Yugoslavia voluntarily in 1967, then lived out the remainder of his days in Zagreb, the capital of the Croatian state inside that country. There was no trial for war crimes, no execution, and not even any criticism or harassment in the Yugoslavian press. He died peacefully in July 1983,
⁴⁴
all of which raises a reasonable doubt about whether Monsignor Dragonovic—war criminal, Ustachi smuggler, and career contract agent for U.S. intelligence—might have been working for the Yugoslav secret service for quite some time prior to his return to his homeland.

Dragonovic's tangled life is an indication of the complexities and contradictions that are an inevitable part of the intelligence business. It is obvious that neither the United States nor any other power limits its operational intelligence contacts to only those persons who might be considered “respectable” at home. But Dragonovic's activities also make it clear that there can be a heavy price to pay for clandestine sponsorship of individuals and groups that have political agendas quite different from those of the United States. The Ustachi criminals saved by Dragonovic did not simply disappear once had they reached the New World. Instead, they established new Ustachi cells in Croatian communities abroad, in some cases headed by the same men who had once led murder squads inside wartime Croatia. The survival of this extremist sect remains one of the more violent examples of the blowback created by the postwar Nazi utilization programs. Ustachis are active to this day in the United States, Australia, and several other countries, and
according to reports of FBI investigations, some cells have been responsible for an airplane hijacking, bombings, extortion, numerous murders, and the assassination of several Yugoslavian diplomats over the course of the last two decades.
⁴⁵

No doubt the CIC did not anticipate that its support of Dragonovic's ratline would one day contribute, even indirectly, to the creation of terrorist groups inside the United States or other Western countries. But the secrecy that has up to now surrounded U.S. Nazi operations such as the Dragonovic ratline drastically restricted the American public's—and even the intelligence agencies' own—ability to learn from this mistake. Rather than draw back from using Nazis as agents in the wake of the Barbie debacle, the practice expanded and became more flagrant.

*
According to a 1941 diplomatic report by Vichy France's representative to the Vatican (which has never been disavowed by the Holy See), the proper Christian attitude toward Jews at that time was summarized as follows:

We know by history that the Church has often protected Jews against the violence and injustice of their persecutors, and that at the same time it has relegated them to the ghettos. One of the greatest of churchmen, St. Thomas Aquinas, has left teachings that cast light on this attitude.… The Jews must be tolerated in the exercise of their religion; they must be protected from religious coercion; their children must not be baptized by force.… On the other hand, while proscribing any policy of repression of the Jews, St. Thomas nevertheless recommends that suitable measures be taken to limit their activities and restrict their influence. It would be unreasonable in a Christian state to allow the Jews to participate in the government.…
It is legitimate to forbid them access to public office, and it is also legitimate to admit them to the universities and the liberal professions only on the basis of a fixed proportion
. As a matter of fact, this practice was strictly adhered to in the Middle Ages, and to [the enforcement of] that end a Lateran Council prescribed that Jews should distinguish themselves from Christians by
a peculiarity of dress.…
The precepts of justice and charity [should] be taken into account in … the liquidation of businesses in which Jews own interests [emphases in the original].

This policy, in practice, led to Catholic political parties' carrying out many of the preparatory steps for the Holocaust, such as registering Jews and expelling them from public life, legislating seizure of Jewish property, and compelling Jews to display yellow Stars of David. But several of the same Catholic parties responsible for this persecution—Horthy's Hungary being the best-known case—hung back from the actual mass murder of Jews, much to the annoyance of Hitler Germany.

Regardless of the intentions of the Catholic collaborators in Eastern Europe, the fact remains that in the end the executions of Jews went ahead anyhow. Monsignor Tiso's Slovakia, for example, had murdered about 75,000 Jews, including children, by the end of the war. In Hungary Germany installed a more cooperative prime minister in 1944 and succeeded in deporting about 70 percent of the country's Jewish population—more than 400,000 people—to death camps in a matter of weeks. In the Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania, the subtleties of St. Thomas's distinction between restricting Jews and killing them seems to have gotten lost in the chaos of war. There leaders of Catholic political parties, in some cases accompanied by priests, actively instigated pogroms in which thousands of people lost their lives.

The Vatican did not condone these killings. Indeed, Pope Pius XII and some of his senior lieutenants moved discreetly—too discreetly, some say—to try to bring them to an end. Official letters were secretly dispatched, Jews were given shelter in church buildings, and the pope himself is said to have spent the bulk of his personal fortune on relief work. In Italy and France, in particular, many thousands of Jews owed their survival to the church's efforts on their behalf. There were also individual prelates who acted with great heroism to save innocent people. These include Father Maximilian Kolbe, who gave up his life at Auschwitz so that another man might live. Despite such efforts, however, the results of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” are well known.

*
Perhaps the most dramatic single escape through church channels was the 1946 deliverance of an entire Ukrainian Waffen SS division—some 11,000 men, plus many of their families—with the personal assistance of Pope Pius XII. Most of the rescued men, it is true, were no more than simple soldiers caught in a compromising position by events beyond their control. Many of the men in the division, however, were veterans of Ukrainian collaborationist police and militia units that had enthusiastically participated in anti-Semitic and anti-Communist pogroms in their homeland. Some of them—a smaller number—had served as guards in the Nazis' death camps at Treblinka, Belsen, and Sobibor. Many of these men were destined eventually to serve in political warfare projects underwritten by the CIA. Hundreds of them are known to live in the United States and Canada today.