Blowback (51 page)

The records the defense lawyers are attempting to suppress through the “forgery” claims include captured SS identification cards, for example, and Axis police reports that establish that certain Nazi collaborators had been leaders of genocidal organizations, or that they participated in massacres and other crimes against humanity. Considering the passage of time since the Holocaust took place, these records are often essential to building solid cases against Nazi criminals.

In case after case the defense claim that the Soviets have falsified evidence on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department has itself proved to be false. “When the Red Army advanced westward across Poland
in 1944 it captured massive quantities of German personnel files,” U.S. Justice Department attorney Eli Rosenbaum pointed out in the case against Liudas Kairys, a Waffen SS veteran who is facing deportation from this country in connection with his role in atrocities at Lublin, Poland, and at the Treblinka labor camp. “The Soviet government has routinely made such files available for war crimes trials in West Germany for many years. None have ever been shown to be—or even seriously suspected of being—forgeries.” Such records have been introduced by U.S. prosecutors in many deportation proceedings against Nazi collaborators, he continued, and “in all cases these documents have been admitted in evidence.”
⁴⁹
None of the claims of forged evidence has ever stood up in a U.S. court despite the fact that all questioned evidence is routinely made available to defense attorneys and trained document examiners in order to test its authenticity.

The failure of these claims in the courts notwithstanding, the proponents of KGB/U.S. Justice Department conspiracy theories have undertaken a major publicity campaign playing on the “forged evidence” theme, and having as its object the abolition of the U.S. government's Office of Special Investigations, which investigates and prosecutes Nazi criminals in America. As documented in a recent study by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith,
⁵⁰
this anti-OSI campaign frequently has a distinctly anti-Semitic tone. Dr. Edward Rubel, a board member of the same New York-based Captive Nations Committee discussed previously, is a leading spokesman for the effort. Stalin's Russia was “exclusively ruled by Marxist Zionist Jews as a ruling class,” Rubel argued in a recent letter to U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. Now, he continued, a “Jewish Zionist pressure group in Washington speaks through the OSI for the U.S. Government.” Rubel went on to demand that “the ‘Holocaust' propaganda” be “clear[ed] up once and for all” and that the OSI be abolished for its supposed collusion with the KGB.
⁵¹

Rubel's views are extreme, but he is by no means alone. Revealingly, many of the same leaders of the old “liberationist” political coalition have resurfaced in the present campaign to end prosecution of Nazis in America. Prominent among them is former White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan, who has publicly characterized the U.S. Justice Department's prosecution of Treblinka death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk as “an official lynching, choreographed by the KGB.”
⁵²

In the final analysis, the cold war became the means for tens of thousands of Nazi criminals to avoid responsibility for the murders they had committed. The breakdown of East-West cooperation in the prosecution of war criminals—motivated, again, in part by the short-term interests of the intelligence agencies of both sides in protecting their clandestine operations assets—provided both the means for criminals to escape to the West and the alibis for them to use once they arrived here. “Nazi criminals,” as Simon Wiesenthal has commented, “were the principal beneficiaries of the Cold War.”
⁵³

Most of the American officials originally involved in the articulation of “liberation” during the 1950s or who played roles in Operation Bloodstone and other programs employing Nazi collaborators have long since died or retired. OPC consultant James Burnham suffered a stroke several years ago and is now hospitalized in Baltimore. Others, like W. Park Armstrong, Edward M. O'Connor, Robert Joyce, and Robert Lovett, died while this book was in preparation. Evron Kirkpatrick, who once ran the State Department's external research program, is today ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute. John Grombach died in 1983; his archrival in CIA internal factional fighting, Lyman Kirkpatrick, is in Middleburg, Virginia, writing a history of the American presidency.
⁵⁴

Frank Wisner, the chief of U.S. covert operations throughout the cold war and the driving force behind most of the Nazi utilization operations, began to come unglued at about the time that “liberation” met its Waterloo in Hungary. Wisner worked and drank like a trooper throughout his career, and by late 1956 he was overweight, addicted to alcohol, and given to episodes of severe paranoia and depression. The November 1956 revolt proved to be his breaking point. “That's when he first went nuts,” says agency veteran Tom Braden. “Frank may have gone nuts partly because here was this Hungarian thing and we weren't doing anything about it.… [T]his was the first time he broke down, and it came about because we didn't do anything.”
⁵⁵

Wisner's emotional distress was compounded by a serious physical illness. Shortly after the abortive rebellion he picked up a case of hepatitis and suffered profound collapse and a temperature of up to 106 degrees for days at a time. He began to have hysterical
episodes in which he screamed at his CIA colleagues that they were “a bunch of Commies.”
⁵⁶

Wisner partially recovered in early 1957 and returned to work as CIA deputy director in charge of clandestine action. His doctors gave him the usual warnings about getting plenty of rest and giving up alcohol; but the pace of CIA covert operations actually accelerated during this period, and Wisner remained a nightly fixture on Washington's fashionable social circuits. In August 1958 Frank Wisner broke down completely and was dragged screaming from CIA headquarters. His colleagues watched in horrified fascination as he shouted and struggled with the muscular hospital attendants in white coats. He underwent six months of electroshock treatment and emerged from the experience a deeply shaken, shattered man.

CIA Director Dulles gave Wisner a largely titular post as chief of station in London, but even a figurehead's job proved to be beyond him. Wisner returned to Washington after a few months at the London office, then retired altogether. His physical condition stabilized briefly, then began slipping again with the onset of hernia problems, liver ailments, and the gradual toll of age.

His depression returned with a vengeance. In October 1965 Frank Wisner blew off the top of his head with a twenty-gauge shotgun.
⁵⁷

The former Voice of America Director Charles Thayer died on the operating table in the midst of heart surgery in 1969. He was only fifty-nine. Thayer had, as he hoped, become a writer after he was hounded out of government, authoring a biography of his mother, a polemic in support of guerrilla warfare, and several books on U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-German relations.
⁵⁸

And George Kennan keeps on. Now well over eighty, he maintains a remarkably rigorous schedule of public speaking and writing, a neatly cultivated mustache, and a reputation as a senior statesman. He lectures at length on a multitude of subjects without notes, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling rather than at his audience.

He considers himself “a strange mixture of a reactionary and a liberal,” as he put it recently, and favors decidedly hierarchical governments run by an enlightened few regardless of the shifting currents of mass public opinion. Democracy, he once quipped, should be compared to “one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin.” He views the political left with undisguised contempt and presents the long
dictatorship of Portuguese strongman Antonio Salazar as a model of governmental efficiency.
⁵⁹

Yet Kennan is today one of the few men of his station who have had the courage to take public issue with the Reagan administration's efforts to renew the cold war in the 1980s. The present American military establishment, he wrote recently, operates on the “assumption not just of the possibility of a Soviet-American war but of its overwhelming
probability
and even imminence.” He blames the present administration, together with the media, for creating an “image of the Soviet opponent in his most terrible, desperate and inhuman aspect: an implacable monster, incapable of impulses other than the lust for sheer destruction, and to be dealt with only in a final military struggle.” What much of the U.S. government and journalistic establishment says today about the USSR is “so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action.” He fears, he says, “the cards today are lined up for a war.”
⁶⁰

That situation may be traced in part to Kennan's own role in the CIA-sponsored anti-Communist exile programs of the 1940s and 1950s, including those that employed Nazi collaborators. True, the problems of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation are far deeper than any clandestine program. But there are moments in history when small events clarify much bigger patterns, and such is the case with the CIA's enlistment of Nazis during the 1940s and 1950s.

Here one sees the extent of the corruption of American ideals that has taken place in the name of fighting communism. No one, it seems, not even Adolf Eichmann's personal staff, was too tainted to be rejected by the CIA's recruiters, at least as long as his relationship with the U.S. government could be kept secret.

The American people deserve better from their government. There is nothing to be gained by permitting U.S. intelligence agencies to continue to conceal the true scope of their association with Nazi criminals in the wake of World War II. The files must be opened; the record must be set right.

*
A 1972 Congressional Research Study finally admitted that this effort had been bankrolled by the CIA. That fact had become obvious to many observers much earlier, however, because nonclassified annual reports published by the Committee for a Free Europe had also openly discussed that RFE's funds were underwriting the assembly's activities.

*
Later Dr. O'Connor reemerged as a leading public spokesman on behalf of Ukrainian émigrés in the United States accused of war crimes. O'Connor was announced as a featured speaker at a 1985 rally organized on behalf of Ivan Demjanjuk, for example, who was found by a U.S. federal court to have been a former Treblinka death camp guard responsible for loading prisoners into the gas chambers. O'Connor contended that the KGB had falsified the evidence against Demjanjuk. O'Connor's son Mark, as it turns out, was Demjanjuk's defense attorney.

Edward O'Connor died at age seventy-seven on November 24, 1985.

Acknowledgments

My special gratitude goes to the Freedom of Information Act officers, archivists, and librarians without whose generous professional assistance this project would not have been possible.

The following institutions and their staffs deserve special mention: National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.; Berlin Document Center, Berlin, Germany; Staatsanwaltschaft bei dem Landgericht Wiesbaden, Federal Republic of Germany; National Archives and Records Service, Suitland, Maryland; New York Public Library; John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts; Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri; Center for Military History, Washington, D.C.; McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland; Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City; Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Chicago Public Library; Special Forces Museum, Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles, California, and Vienna, Austria; RFE/RL Library, New York;
Washington Post;
Group Research Reports, Washington, D.C.; Association of Former Intelligence Officers, McLean, Virginia; and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort Meade, Maryland.

My personal thanks to the following people, who helped out in one way or another when the chips were down: Richard Barnet, Peter Carey, William Corson, Konrad Ege, Benjamin Ferencz, John Friedman, Ron Goldfarb, John Herman, Elizabeth Holtzman, Lisa Klug, Jonathan Marshall, Marcel Ophuls, David Oshinsky, Constance Paige, John Prados, Fletcher Prouty, Marcus Raskin, Eli
Rosenbaum, Allan Ryan, Jr., Gail Ross, Thomas Simpson, Robert Stein, and several others who must remain nameless.

Thanks, most of all, to my wife, Susan, whose help was essential in the completion of this manuscript.

Christopher Simpson

Washington, D.C., 1988

Source Notes

Author's note: All source material listed here is now declassified and in the public domain. The security classifications appearing after certain citations (e.g., “secret,” “top secret,” etc.) are references to the original security status of the document prior to its declassification. The abbreviations RG and NA used in the source notes that follow refer to Record Group and National Archives.

Prologue