Blowback (47 page)

The purge of certain Nazis in the wake of the Felfe matter and the CIA's ongoing efforts to conceal its relationships with Brunner and von Bolschwing point up another important fact: A substantial segment of the American public has long opposed the use of Nazis and war criminals in clandestine operations. When specific cases of this type have come to light in the past, as they did in the wake of the Felfe trial, public pressure has forced the CIA and even the Gehlen Organization to abandon at least some of the former Nazis on the intelligence payroll. Public condemnation of the CIA's use of Nazis in clandestine operations of questionable morality and
uncertain legality is not simply a product of America's present-day reexamination of intelligence practices, nor is it ex post facto moralizing to oppose these affairs today. The use of Nazis has, instead, often been the subject of general opprobrium—at least outside the elite national security circles of the government—and it is for that reason that the government attempts to conceal such practices to this day.

The revelations of the full implications of the Felfe affair were still well in the future back in 1954, however, when President Eisenhower and his National Security Council approved NSC 5412 and the related measures that were intended to guide U.S. covert operations for the remainder of his administration. That decision, it will be recalled, was the latter-day recapitulation of Truman's NSC 10/2 clandestine political warfare directive, and NSC 5412 again affirmed that “underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups”
⁴⁵
were the main forces in U.S. covert paramilitary programs of the day. These directives provided the broad strategic outline through which both the Nazi programs and the government's rhetorical commitment to liberating Eastern Europe were supposed to be executed.

The underground forces of NSC 5412 were to be the “bite” behind liberation's “bark,” so to speak; they were the armed squads that were to ignite a popular revolt inside the satellite states that would “roll back communism” in Eastern Europe. By mid-1956 the CIA's clandestine operations chief, Frank Wisner, had decided that the time was ripe to act.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The End of “Liberation”

Push came to shove for the “liberation” program that had provided the policy framework for the ex-Nazi recruitment programs in Hungary in November 1956. Under CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner's guidance, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation had hammered away at the liberation theme for Eastern European audiences through the first half of the 1950s. Listeners were told that America strongly supported freedom for the Soviet satellites, that the U.S. government was convinced that this freedom would come “soon,” and that the United States was willing to do its part to help bring this about. What exactly this all meant in terms of aid was never stated explicitly in the broadcasts, but the tone of the rhetoric left little doubt that the Americans would do
something
.

The discontent inside the satellite countries that the agency's broadcasts attempted to tap was very real; the subsequent revolts in Poland, Hungary, and eventually Czechoslovakia proved that. But the liberationists had seriously misjudged the balance of international power. To put it most bluntly, the Soviets were willing to undertake a nuclear war to preserve their hold over the satellite states. The Americans, though rhetorically committed to liberation, were not willing to fight World War III to achieve that object.

The tragic story of the Hungarian events has been often told. Tens of thousands of students and workers broke into the streets, burning local Communist party headquarters, seizing radio stations,
and erecting barricades. Thousands of Hungarian soldiers and officers joined the strikers. Crack Soviet troops equipped with tanks, machine guns, and even jet fighter aircraft invaded Budapest to suppress the rebellion. They were challenged—and even held off, for a time—by untrained civilian militias armed only with gasoline bombs and a handful of guns seized from local police warehouses.

One of the first things the Soviets did after their invasion was to sever all telephone contact into and out of Budapest, effectively sealing off the rebellion from the outside world. But by a curious oversight they forgot to shut down newspaper teletype lines, and it is through that medium that the epitaph of the liberation policy was written:

RUSSIAN GANGSTERS HAVE BETRAYED US; THEY ARE OPENING FIRE ON ALL OF BUDAPEST. PLEASE INFORM EUROPE AND THE AUSTRIAN GOVERNMENT
… clattered a message to the Associated Press from rebels who had occupied the offices of the Hungarian state news agency building.
WE ARE UNDER HEAVY MACHINE GUN FIRE.… HAVE YOU INFORMATION YOU CAN PASS ON … TELL ME, URGENT, URGENT
.

There was a pause.

ANY NEWS ABOUT HELP? QUICKLY, QUICKLY. WE HAVE NO TIME TO LOSE. NO TIME TO LOSE.

The connection broke. Soon, however, the teletype line between the Vienna AP office and a second Hungarian newspaper came to life.

SOS SOS SOS
, was banged out.
THE FIGHTING IS VERY CLOSE NOW AND WE HAVEN'T ENOUGH TOMMY GUNS IN THE BUILDING
, Budapest cabled.
I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG WE CAN RESIST.… HEAVY SHELLS ARE EXPLODING NEARBY
.…

WHAT IS THE UNITED NATIONS DOING
?
GIVE US A LITTLE ENCOURAGEMENT.

THEY'VE JUST BROUGHT A RUMOR THAT AMERICAN TROOPS WILL BE HERE WITHIN ONE OR TWO HOURS
.…

Like most rumors in war, the story was wrong. There would be no American soldiers in Hungary.

Moments later this came over the UPI wire:
GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOD SAVE OUR SOULS. THE RUSSIANS ARE TOO NEAR
.
¹

The line went dead.

At least 15,000 people, including about 3,000 Soviet soldiers,
were killed in the fighting, according to contemporary reports.
²

The United States huffed and puffed over Radio Free Europe. Wisner and a large crew of CIA agents personally manned the Austrian-Hungarian border, carrying out refugee relief, agent recruitment, and clandestine radio broadcasting. There were the usual protests in the United Nations. But the Western allies were embroiled in the dispute over the Suez Canal at the time of the rebellion, and no one was willing to go nose to nose with the Russians over Hungary. The Republican administration's liberation rhetoric was put to the test—and failed.

The Nazi collaborationist exile organizations on the agency's payroll again played a thoroughly counterproductive role in the Hungarian events. In the wake of the failed rebellion there was considerable controversy over whether or not the United States had misled street fighters in Budapest into believing that U.S. military aid would be delivered to the rebels. Many anti-Communist Hungarian refugees bitterly charged that such promises—supposedly broadcast over Radio Free Europe—had resulted in considerable unnecessary bloodshed when rebels held out to the last man in the false hope that international help was on the way.
³

An internal inquiry, as well as a German government study, largely cleared RFE of those charges. The CIA then used these clearances to reassure congressional oversight committees—such as they were in those days—that the United States had not unduly interfered in the Hungarian events.
⁴

In fact, however, misleading claims that American military aid was on the way
had
been broadcast by radio, though not by Radio Free Europe. According to a special investigation by the parliamentary Council of Europe, the Russian nationalist NTS organization was responsible for beaming the ill-considered pledges into Hungary at the height of the rebellion. The NTS, as it turns out, sporadically operated a clandestine radio station named Radio Free Moscow, aimed at Soviet troops in East Germany, and they decided to send its signal into Hungary at the height of the fighting. As with other NTS projects of the period, Radio Free Moscow was staffed primarily by former Nazi collaborators—for it is they who made up most of the NTS leadership during the 1950s—and was almost entirely financed by the CIA. Whether or not the agency directly authorized broadcasts of the false promises concerning American help during the crisis is unknown.
⁵

The practical result of the agency's sponsorship of the NTS extremists
in this incident is similar in some important respects to the earlier pattern of events in the Ukraine. In both cases, clandestine U.S. sponsorship of groups dedicated to war on the Soviets enabled them to serve as provocateurs, in effect, triggering further bloodshed and increased repression, the primary victims of which were the ordinary people of those lands whom the United States professed to support. The United States, of course, made full use of the propaganda material provided by the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary, just as it had earlier in the Ukraine. But neither crisis advanced the longer-term—and more fundamental—U.S. interest in the creation of stable, independent states in Eastern Europe.

The high U.S. policy decisions on clandestine operations that have since leaked into the public domain did not specifically mention the NTS or von Bolschwing, Lebed, Ostrowsky, and the other fugitives from war crimes charges who were entering the United States during the cold war. The thrust of the government's covert operations authorization was, as always, support for pro-Western forces inside Communist countries, not for former Fascists.

But the fact remains that quisling “governments-in-exile” frequently became the primary beneficiaries of the clandestine political warfare strategy. This practice gradually became so open that almost any scholar, journalist, or politician with a reasonably sophisticated knowledge of the events of World War II could have deduced that
somebody
was underwriting the political activities of former Fascists and extreme nationalist exile leaders who had found their way to the United States. The political tenor of the day, however, seems to have ensured that such questions rarely found their way into mainstream political discourse or the media.

A good example of how this self-censorship worked—and the political blowback it produced—may be found in the case of the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN). The ACEN became the showcase of the CIA's numerous exile projects inside the United States beginning in 1954. Although the CIA's direct funding and orchestration of the ACEN remained veiled during the 1950s,
*
the U.S. government's strong political support for the project was quite open. The ACEN was a miniature United Nations made up
of the best representatives of Eastern European life, the official story went. There “the efforts of the legitimate representatives of these nations, representing all democratic political trends and groups,” as the organization's founding documents put it, “could be united on a continuous and enduring basis.”
⁶

Above all, the ACEN was supposed to be respectable. Its job was to provide a dramatic counterpoint to statements made by Communist UN deputies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other satellite countries. It met in parallel with the official United Nations at the elegant Carnegie Endowment International Center on UN Plaza itself, considered many of the same subjects, and sought to discredit Soviet claims of democracy and freedom in the satellite states. The
New York Herald Tribune
welcomed its formation as a “rallying point for the submerged hopes and desires of subjugated populations … a voice to command the attention of the outside world.” Similar glowing editorial endorsements appeared in the
New York Times, Christian Science Monitor
, and many other newspapers and magazines.
⁷

Even in this carefully groomed project, however, former Nazi quislings held dominant positions in several delegations. The Albanian collaborationist Balli Kombetar organization controlled the pivotal ACEN Political Committee for most of the 1950s. Onetime Nazi collaborators also enjoyed substantial influence in the Lithuanian delegation and in the observer group known as the Liberal Democratic Union of Central Eastern Europe, which was still another émigré political association financed primarily by the CIA. Latvia's Alfreds Berzins (the former pro-Nazi propaganda minister) was placed in charge of the ACEN's “Deportations” Committee, though the subject of its interest was Soviet deportations of Latvian nationalists to Siberia, not the Nazis' wartime deportations of Jews. The International Peasant Union, as noted previously, was represented at many ACEN functions by a mass murderer who had once been a Latvian police chief.
⁸

It would be a mistake, however, to view the ACEN as a whole as a “Nazi” organization. The influential Czech delegation was controlled by anti-Nazi (and anti-Communist) moderate socialists. The Polish delegation consisted in large part of the old wartime Polish government-in-exile in London combined with a handful of surviving Polish underground fighters, many of whom had risked their lives in the struggle against Germany. Most of the Hungarian emissaries
were undisputably conservative but apparently free of culpability for war crimes, and so on.
⁹

The relatively mainstream character of those ACEN groups, including the anti-Communist and anti-Nazi credentials of some top ACEN leaders, gave this Captive Nations movement a thoroughly acceptable image in the eyes of the media and the public at large. Furthermore, the ACEN had money and contacts among powerful people. Its support group, American Friends of the Captive Nations, for example, was headed by Christopher Emmet (the onetime sponsor of Constantine Boldyreff) and included such notables as former Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, IRC Chairman Leo Cherne, and noted attorney Adolf A. Berle, Jr.
¹⁰

But other ACEN member groups, as has been seen, were deeply compromised by their leaders' wartime collaboration with the Nazis. And those organizations, together with some of the more extreme nationalists in the Radio Liberation camp, drew the ACEN into a variety of Captive Nations coalitions with yet another Eastern European émigré coalition, the neo-Nazi Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN).