A few courageous congressmen – among them Rodino, Frank, and Solarz of the House Judiciary Committee – have kept the fight alive. In 1985, they co-sponsored House Resolution 1620, calling for a Congressional Committee to subpoena the rest of the classified Nazi files. [Eventually, it became legislation mandating the declassification of Nazi records.] There are a lot of ugly scandals that should be exposed. At the time I wrote this book, I could not tell anyone that my sources were the original secret papers of the same Nazi leaders who worked for the State Department. Nor could I tell anyone about my friends, John and Emily McIntyre, who had quit the intelligence business in disgust and had secretly helped me document the covert Nazi smuggling operations. I have written a book about the amazing McIntyre family, published in 1989. Most of the intelligence officers I have met are pretty decent people who just did not know what Dulles and Wisner had done. Most people don’t care. World War II was long ago and far away.
Even though the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act was finally passed, it will be still be several more decades before the last of the files become public. Many years from now, our children will finally see these documents in the National Archives and ask us why we did nothing when the Nazis were still alive. I fear that we shall have to give them Dante’s answer: that the seventh circle of hell is reserved for those who had the ability to prevent evil but did nothing. Our children deserve a better heritage than that; we are a better country than that. But the time for justice is running out, and I am left alone.
A lot of the old spies have kind of adopted me since I wrote this book, maybe because I am one of the few writers who once held super security clearances, They have sponsored me to join their retired spy clubs. I told the old secret warriors that I was very upset about what happened. I had learned something from all of this: the three great evils of this century are Stalinism, Fascism, and indifference. Indifference is the deadliest of the three. The old spies told me that I had blown it. I should forget about the communists and the Nazis and trace the money. Documents started to arrive anonymously in the mail. I had begun this research under Walter Rockler, my former boss at Justice, whose investigations of Nazi bankers at Nuremberg had been blocked.
Now I understood why the government had censored out of this book all references to the 1950s money laundering system that funded Stankievich and the other Nazi “freedom fighters.” A handful of mutinous bureaucrats was starting the system up again, even using some of the same old Nazis as bagmen. On February 16, 1985, I sent a lengthy classified report to several congressmen and senators. In sum, I charged that then-CIA chief William Casey had revived the old conduit system so that neither the CIA nor Congress would know that a secret interagency group was smuggling money to the contras. I named General John Singlaub, the World Anti-Communist League, and the countries of Israel, Taiwan, Iran and South Korea as being involved with the money laundering. I warned Congress that if they did nothing, a major media scandal about contra funding would explode in six months. They thought I was kidding.
You see, Ollie North didn’t invent this system; he just copied the “private” networks that Casey had worked on back in the McCarthy era. At that time, the General Singlaub role was played by General Clay, the Admiral Poindexter role was played by Vice President Nixon, the Ollie North role was played by Frank Wisner. Even Reagan had played a previous role as the innocent dupe. Back in the 1950s, Reagan was the public spokesman for the Crusade For Freedom, a charity that was supposed to raise private money to help anticommunist “freedom fighters.”
There is even a newsreel of Reagan’s fundraising in the National Archives. In the 1970s, Congress exposed the “private” Crusade for Freedom as having received 99% of its money from covert government sources. That’s how Stankievich got paid. One of his fellow Nazi collaborators from the Belarus network still works with the World Anti-Communist League. The WACL may be the second most anti-Semitic, anti-democratic organization in America today. The Arab Nazi network, the Muslim Brotherhood, takes the prize. The Russians must be laughing themselves silly. We keep making the same mistakes. Every time we use right-wing extremists it only drives more people over to the communists in disgust.
In the years since this book was first published, a lot of people have started to take it seriously. There are a lot of clues about other operations buried in the footnotes that have now become the basis for books by other historians. I convinced the government to declassify the Vatican’s Nazi files (embarassing to me as an Irish Catholic), but was stonewalled when I asked for the release of the British Nazi files. The Thatcher government desperately tried to keep a lid on a scandal that went back to members of the Royal Family and several Prime Ministers. The British make us look like Boy Scouts.
I did a documentary for Canadian Broadcasting that exposed Nazis living in Canada. The Canadian Parliament set up the Duschene Commission, which confirmed the charges and asked for new legislation to re-open war crimes cases. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government classified most of the secret appendix, where I explained how the Nazis got into Canada in the first place. I had more luck in Australia. After I did five hours of documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Parliament quickly confirmed that there were indeed large numbers of Nazis living there as well. The Aussies are changing their laws to be able to prosecute Nazis in criminal court, unlike the American system, where all we can do is strip war criminals of their citizenship and ask them to leave the country. Two U.S. agencies have forbidden me in writing from telling the Australians who brought the Nazis in.
Now and then I get permission to tell a little more. I wrote an exposé for a West German magazine describing how Klaus Barbie was a hand-me-down Nazi who worked for French, British, and West German intelligence before he was dumped on the Americans. Barbie had a Gestapo informant who became a prominent post-war French politician. In order to cover up his past, Barbie’s informant gave Allen Dulles a lot of Red Cross passports, a sort of international travel document, to smuggle Barbie and other Nazis out of Europe lest they expose the French politician as a Nazi. The French war crimes prosecutors were hot on Barbie’s trail. They were convinced someone in US intelligence was hiding him, and they were partly right. The French have their own hidden scandals. One of Barbie’s French collaborators became France’s highest Nazi hunter in Occupied Germany; the other became a Judge on the Supreme Court.
I spent part of my time researching Kurt Waldheim, former Secretary General of the United Nations. It appears likely that Allen Dulles’ son-in-law gave Waldheim a phony clearance in 1945 so that Allied intelligence could plant him inside the Austrian Foreign Ministry. Declassified documents confirm that shortly afterward, the Austrian government was secretly supporting the Nazi smuggling programs, as well as serving as a base for ex-Nazi guerilla warfare. Former Nazis were armed with US weapons and sent to fight the communists in Yugoslavia. In fact, the Austria-Vatican smuggling route, or “Ratline,” was run by the same Yugoslavian Nazis who had decorated Waldheim for his service during the war. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
Sometimes, the coincidences can be frightening. I once received a stack of declassified top secret documents on Nazi experiments using a super deadly nerve gas called “Sarin.” After the war, the Russians, British, and Americans secretly manufactured tons of the stuff, despite the fact that using nerve gas is condemned and prohibited under international law. The authoritative Jane’s Defense Weekly esitimates that there are now two factories manufacturing Sarin in the Middle East. It is an irony that one of Israel’s Arab neighbors is reported to be manufacturing Nazi nerve gas. Sarin is cheaper than atomic bombs and almost as deadly. Wonder where the Arabs got the Nazi nerve gas formula? A British document mentions a post-war interview with a man named “Mengele” as a Nazi adjutant in charge of research on poison gas weapons. It is almost certain that Dr. Joseph Mengele experimented with Sarin on Auschwitz inmates and then traded the test records to British intelligence in return for his freedom. The actual inventor of Nazi nerve gas emigrated to the United States and died recently in Florida.
Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I received some information suggesting that the US tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s. I explored the old spies’ hypothesis that the poison ticks were the source of the Lyme disease spirochete, and that migrating waterfowl were the vectors that carried the ticks from Plum Island all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret US document confirming that “clandestine attacks on crops and animals” took place at this time. The Lyme disease outbreak in America was monitored secretly under the cover of a New England health study.
Sooner or later the whole truth will come out, but probably not in my lifetime. Years from now historians will have to put the secret files into the context of events, a job akin to pasting dead leaves back on a tree in the right order. I hope that this book will help future researchers understand the connections between the visible branches of government and the secret roots of war. So why do I bother if I am not going to live to see the results of my efforts? After all, this isn’t my fight. I am not a Jew; none of my family perished in the Holocaust. My family has suffered a great deal because I keep on fighting.
I have a personal reason, and I’d like to tell you about it. After this book was first published, I found out that the government was wrong again. I received a telephone call. It was Sol. He was still alive. We had become fast friends, like family. My wife and I kept his identity a secret. He was an old man, entitled to his privacy, and was still living near the Belarus SS enclave in New Jersey.
The first time I met Sol was at a “Holocaust Education Day” for public school kids in New Jersey. I had been invited to speak, and Sol was sitting in the audience. No one knew who he was. I told the teenagers about the Holocaust in Belarus. They wouldn’t believe it.
A lot of them were of Eastern European descent, and their parents had told them that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Oh, maybe the Germans killed a few Jews, but the kids believed that there were no Poles, or Ukrainians, or White Russians involved. I tried to tell the kids that the SS kept meticulous records. The armies of the executioners weren‘t all German. It was mostly Eastern Europeans who were the guards at Auschwitz and Treblinka. It was the local police and native collaborators who ran the Nazi-occupied territories, in addition to the German military. Some of the kids still wouldn’t believe me. Their relatives had been in Eastern Europe during the war, and I hadn’t. They wanted a witness. Suddenly, Sol stood up in the audience and said quietly, “Tell them, tell them who I am.” He was willing to sacrifice his anonymity, his privacy, to risk his life again, to bear witness to the truth. It was an act of great courage. Sol was like that. There is a photograph of Sol and the other Jewish partisans in the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel. The Israeli government tracked Sol down and flew him over for the dedication. Golda Meir met him at the airport. He was one of the last living Jewish resistance heroes on the face of the earth.
I took my young daughter Meg to visit Sol repeatedly. I want her to remember him. He is a gentle, funny man and Meg loves him. But I knew that Sol was very ill, and would not live long enough to tell my daughter about the Holocaust. I would have to do that for him. When he passed away, I gave her a copy of The Belarus Secret, and told her about Sol’s struggle for freedom. I told her that there are still heroes in the world, because her father met one. When you read the dedication to The Belarus Secret that I wrote back in 1982, I think you will understand why I keep on fighting.
It seems sometimes that the battles never end. After 9/11 I was asked to help expose an Arab terrorist leader posing as a peaceable Florida Professor. But the FBI had attempted to recruit Dr. Sami Al Arian as an informant, so one section of the Justice Department had placed him off limits. I donated money to Al Arian’s charity and then sued him to find out whether my money was being used to aid the poor or terrorists. My civil complaint, which had been cleared in advance by the CIA, revealed all the classified files on Professor Al Arian. An embarrassed Justice Department was forced to indict him, but allowed novice attorneys to botch the prosecution. Al Arian was allowed to make a deal. Nothing surprises me anymore.
A group of retired spies helped me form an educational organization called the Intelligence Summit. We sponsored conferences where, inter alia, State Department’s protection of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood was exposed. Worse, we revealed Saddam Hussein’s abandoned intelligence archives proving that he had every intention of reviving his weapons of mass production, and temporarily hidden his WMD equipment across the border in Deir as Zour, Syria. Both the press and Bush administration had the WMD story wrong. The Israelis got it right. They bombed Saddam’s Syrian stockpile along with the nearby nuclear facility.
State Department retaliated by organizing an illegal boycott of the Intelligence Summit, on the ludicrous grounds that one of our charitable donors had ties to the Russian Mafia, a foul allegation that has been flatly refuted in the courts. Still, it does not take much to drive a charity under in these financially difficult times, and they did. The Intelligence Summit still exists on paper, but our exposés have been temporarily stopped. Still, the truth is like an acid, it always has a way of burning its way out. The story of the Belarus Secret which I wrote several decades ago is a beginning of truth.
It has stood the test of time.