Blowback (43 page)

Davies hung on in government for almost twenty months after Thayer fell. Finally, however, John Foster Dulles dismissed the Foreign Service officer for his supposed lapses of judgment and his “personal demeanor,” as Dulles called it,
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under hostile questioning.

Charles Bohlen—a close Kennan ally who, according to his own account, had been instrumental in the original recruitment of German political warfare expert Hans Heinrich Herwarth for U.S. intelligence—was next.
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Eisenhower had nominated Bohlen as U.S. ambassador to the USSR in February 1953, but the nomination had to be confirmed by the Senate before Bohlen could take his post. Ike liked and respected Chip Bohlen; they had been golf partners in France during the forties. Eisenhower had personally chosen Bohlen for the Moscow assignment, much to the discomfort of his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.

Arthur Bliss Lane, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of the liberationist stalwarts balked at the Bohlen nomination. Even Secretary of State Dulles was concerned about how Bohlen's earlier leading role in containment and in the 1945 Yalta accords with the USSR might look to voters who had just elected the Republicans on a liberation ticket.

Dulles gingerly testified on Bohlen's behalf anyway, and it seemed for a while as though the nomination might go smoothly. But Dulles had underestimated the strength and virulence of the McCarthyite movement, which up to that time he and most of the rest of the Republican party had openly supported. Dulles's top
internal affairs officer at the State Department, it turned out, was a McCarthy man who believed that anyone who had been as deeply involved in the Yalta negotiations as Bohlen had been was a security problem pretty much by definition. The internal affairs chief opposed the diplomat's nomination, and McCarthy used that dissent as a pretext for claiming that Bohlen was a “security risk.”

McCarthy marshaled Senators Everett Dirksen, Homer Cape-hart, and the rest of the far right caucus, then unleashed an emotional floor debate in the Senate in an attempt to block approval of Bohlen's nomination. The tide was against McCarthy; he was, after all, a Republican senator bucking a Republican president on what would ordinarily be a routine appointment. McCarthy's speech during the showdown lasted more than an hour. He rehashed the party's line on containment, lambasted Bohlen's brother-in-law Charles Thayer, then accused Bohlen himself of “cowardice” and of being “so blind that he cannot recognize the enemy.”
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McCarthy presented his trump card at the climax of his argument. It was an affidavit from Igor Bogolepov, who claimed that he knew that the Soviet secret police had regarded Bohlen as a “possible source of information” and a “friendly diplomat” during a Bohlen tour of duty in Moscow in the 1930s.
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Bogolepov was an NTS man who free-lanced as an anti-Communist expert in Washington. In the early 1950s he was on a number of payrolls, including Grombach's, and the State Department's Ylitalo says that it was Grombach who primed Bogolepov for his role in McCarthy's attack on Bohlen. Bogolepov had once been a Soviet Foreign Ministry official, but he defected to the Nazis and spent most of World War II making anti-Semitic propaganda broadcasts for the Goebbels ministry. Bogolepov says that U.S. intelligence brought him to this country in the late 1940s—apparently illegally, considering his work for Goebbels—and that he had worked on and off for the CIA for several years. In time, however, Bogolepov grew discontented with the agency, mainly because it did not pay him as much as he thought he deserved.
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The cooler heads on Capitol Hill considered Bogolepov a crackpot. The radical right did not, however, and readily used his statements as “proof” that among other things, Communist fellow travelers were engaged in a campaign to rewrite U.S. Army training manuals and that Charles Bohlen was “possibly” an undercover Stalinist agent.

Even Bogolepov's affidavit failed to bail out McCarthy this time.
The senator was outvoted, and Bohlen's nomination was approved. The
New York Times
carried the entire affair on its front page and prominently quoted the NTS man's affidavit.
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The Russian defector's stint in the Goebbels ministry, which had been made public in earlier congressional testimony, was not mentioned in the report.

McCarthy succeeded in drawing some blood despite losing the vote on Bohlen. According to columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Republican Majority Leader Robert Taft visited Eisenhower shortly after the vote. Taft insisted that “no more Bohlens” be sent to the Senate as nominees. Eisenhower agreed, the Alsops reported, and Taft “hastened to spread the happy word on Capitol Hill that Senator McCarthy and his ilk would thereafter enjoy a virtual veto on all presidential appointments.”
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The Alsops were overstating the case, perhaps, but it was clear enough that McCarthy had demonstrated his power as a spoiler in the Senate. Eisenhower's diplomatic nominations were screened for their acceptability to the extreme right for much of the rest of his administration.

Bohlen left for Moscow about a week after his confirmation. Shortly before he departed, however, John Foster Dulles implored Bohlen to stay in Washington for just a few more weeks so that the diplomat could travel to Russia together with his wife and family. Traveling alone, Dulles suggested, would only raise an issue of Bohlen's possible “immoral behavior.” The diplomat was dumbfounded. He later confided to a friend, historian David Oshinsky recounts,
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“that it took every ounce of his patience to keep from smashing Dulles in the face.”

The role of Grombach's former Nazis and collaborators in gathering political ammunition for Joseph McCarthy is, in many respects, only a short footnote to the history of high politics in Washington. Grombach rapidly lost influence in the State Department and the CIA in the wake of his showdown in the hotel room with Kirkpatrick, and McCarthy, too, discredited himself in the end. Bogolepov returned to Europe, where he is reported to have committed suicide several years later. Bohlen went on to do a workmanlike job as U.S. ambassador to Moscow and eventually ended up as a central player in U.S.-Soviet relations over the next two decades.

But incidents such as the purging of Thayer and Davies and the crisis over Bohlen's nomination can sometimes point to larger historical patterns. The popular support for liberation that was so carefully nurtured during the early 1950s provided fertile ground for entrepreneurs like Grombach to put down roots. Regardless of
its “American” and patriotic trappings, liberation's paranoid anticommunism made it easier for some U.S. politicians to make common cause with a former Goebbels propagandist such as Bogolepov or with public spokesmen for prewar anti-Semitic terrorist groups such as NTS leader Boldyreff.

As was seen in the case of the Bogolepov affidavit, private intelligence apparats like John Grombach's organization formed one of the important linkages between the careful politicians in Washington and the former Nazis and collaborators who were occasionally thought to be useful to them. Such unofficial clandestine action groups have long played a sporadic but sometimes important role in American political life; witness G. Gordon Liddy's Watergate burglary team or the more recent scandal surrounding Colonel Oliver North's activities inside the National Security Council. The extralegal status of Grombach's group permitted him to hire and exploit former Nazis and Axis officials for intelligence-gathering purposes, then secretly to put the products of his work to use in partisan political battles in the United States. Perhaps in some other decade John Grombach would have hired persons from other failed regimes as agents; the continuing intrigues among anti-Castro Cubans and the former South Vietnamese police suggest that a new generation of espionage entrepreneurs in the Grombach mold is still at work. But in the early 1950s it was former Nazis and collaborators who were in the most abundant supply for such affairs. It is they who formed much of the heart of Grombach's overseas network and they who gave him much of the ammunition he needed to participate in McCarthy's purges.

At the same time that McCarthy and his allies were battling in the Senate for the dismissals of Thayer, Davies, and Bohlen, the Republicans' election year pledge to liberate Eastern Europe also fueled a rapid expansion of clandestine destabilization operations. A special series of foreign policy conferences code-named Solarium reaffirmed that the new administration would engage in “selected aggressive actions of limited scope, involving moderately increased risks of general war,” as Eisenhower's top national security adviser, Robert Cutler, put it, in order “to eliminate Soviet-dominated areas within the free world and to reduce Soviet power in the Satellite periphery.” U.S. policy aimed at “a maximum contribution to the increase in internal stresses and conflicts within the Soviet system.”
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But despite the Republicans' public attacks on Truman's containment policy, Eisenhower's election had been a victory for the Republican establishment, not for the radical right. The Republicans did not have a substantially new strategy for dealing with the Soviets, beyond a tendency to use harsher rhetoric than the Democrats. George Kennan's containment theories may have seemed like part of the problem to most liberation advocates, but his thinking on clandestine political warfare against the Soviets was most welcome to Eisenhower and dominated the scene at the Solarium strategy conferences. Eisenhower himself personally endorsed Kennan's stratagems, his analysis of East-West affairs, and the former diplomat himself.
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The president and his advisers decisively renewed the ongoing program of harassment and destabilization inside Eastern Europe that had given birth to the Nazi utilization efforts in the first place. Further efforts to “reduce indigenous Communist power” through clandestine CIA action were approved in both Western Europe and the third world. Guatemala and the Middle East were also singled out for CIA attention, while agency Director Allen Dulles promoted a renewed attempt to overthrow the government in Albania.
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The clandestine action provisions of Solarium were later codified in NSC 5412, a slightly revised version of Truman's NSC 10/2 covert warfare decision. NSC 5412 again affirmed that the United States was fully committed to a broad campaign of political war against the USSR.
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It again affirmed that “underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups”—obviously including the various surviving collaborationist organizations from
Eastern Europe—were still at the center of U.S. covert paramilitary programs.

In the meantime, however, the existing threads of clandestine operations, liberation politics, and the abandonment of war crimes investigations and prosecutions were woven together into a new and more disturbing tapestry. By 1953 the CIA was willing to finance and protect not simply former Nazis and Gestapo men but even senior officers of Adolf Eichmann's SS section Amt IV B 4, the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust.

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Boldyreff was by no means the only senior NTS leader who enjoyed the sponsorship of Western intelligence agencies in the wake of the war. As early as 1946 Boldyreff created an elaborate plan under U.S., British, and French sponsorship in which NTS-led bands of exiles established construction companies in Morocco. In reality, however, “these were military groups, companies of the Vlasov Army, most of them soldiers together with their officers,” Boldyreff remembered during an interview. We “kept them together in order to provide special fighting units in a war with the Soviets.” The point of the Boldyreff plan, he says, was to subsidize these Vlasovite colonies, while at the same time preserving their military potential. Boldyreff specifically excluded refugee Jews from this program, although several other Eastern European groups—Latvians, Lithuanians, etc.—were included. Boldyreff blamed this bit of postwar anti-Semitism on the Moroccan authorities.

A brief look at the men mentioned in the declassified State Department study on the NTS referred to in the text is useful as an illustration of how other NTS collaborators found their way into secret employment in the West. The State Department report indicates that Roman Redlich and Vladimir Porensky, for example, led Nazi recruitment and training of Russian defectors at a special school at Wustrau, that Yevgeniy R. Romanov served in Berlin as a leading Vlasov propagandist, and that an NTS man known simply as Tenzerov served as chief of security for the Vlasov Army. Vladimir Porensky (sometimes spelled Poremsky), in particular, enjoyed a reputation as a “200% Nazi,” the study asserts.

Of just these men, a RAND Corporation study identifies Redlich as an officer in the notorious Kaminsky SS legion, and Soviet publications have repeatedly charged him with personally committing atrocities during the Nazi occupation of their country. U.S. intelligence nevertheless hired Redlich after the war to train behind-the-lines agents at its school at Regensburg, the Department of State admits. Redlich is also known to have been active at Bad Homburg, where agent training was carried out under cover of a “journalism” program at the CIA-financed Institute for the Study of the USSR. By the late 1950s Redlich had become chief of teams of Russian émigrés responsible for attempting to recruit Soviet tourists, businessmen, and sailors traveling abroad, an intelligence service that eventually became the bread and butter of the NTS's contract with the CIA as the cold war wound down.

Meanwhile, the Berlin propagandist Romanov became chairman of the NTS Executive Bureau and served for years as the broker for NTS agents interested in employment with Western espionage groups. Romanov's close friend Porensky, the “200% Nazi,” was imprisoned as a war criminal in 1945, then released in 1946, with the cooperation of the British secret service. Porensky then went on to run the NTS's Possev publishing house in Munich, where tens of millions of agitative leaflets used among Soviet émigrés outside the USSR were printed at British and American expense. Porensky's Possev eventually became a major funding conduit through which U.S. payments to the NTS were passed, and the CIA's later financial backing permitted the NTS to print millions of newspapers, pamphlets, books, and other literature, a good part of which was used to influence public opinion in Western Europe and the United States. Porensky has also served as NTS chairman.