Vandenberg viewed the CIG as a stepping-stone to a fourth star and the post of Chief of Staff of the Air Force as soon as it was created, but during his one year as DCI he built an intelligence empire. He was not hampered by the fact that he was the nephew of Arthur H. Vandenberg, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When aides presented the general with a proposal for a research department with a staff of eighty, he sent it back with an order to come up with a plan for eight hundred employees. Vandenberg’s most important acquisition was the OSS intelligence operation, which had been transferred to the War Department at the time of the dismantling of Donovan’s agency. It was renamed the Office of Special Operations (OSO) and brought with it a staff of a thousand people. The CIG also shared supervision, along with the Army’s G-2 Military Intelligence Service, of the Gehlen organization and the fruits of its efforts.
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Gehlen was delighted by the scope of Vandenberg’s vision, and foresaw a significant increase in his funding and mission. Omitting the Nazi backgrounds of his recruits, Gehlen informed his new employers that there was a network of Byelorussians operating in the DP camps which would like to assist the Allies. In return for recognition of their anticommunist nationalist movement, the Byelorussians would secretly target Communist spies working in the émigré community. The proposal attracted interest, because for some time Soviet espionage had been dramatically increasing among the exiles. Gehlen originated Operation Tobacco, a plan to use Byelorussian informants to help the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps to smoke out Soviet agents. He hoped not only to ingratiate himself with the CIG, but also to neutralize the increasing pressure from the Nazi hunters of the CIC.
Gehlen flooded the Americans with “authentic” documents provided by the Byelorussians. Because the information pertained to Soviet activity in areas where verification was impossible, the Americans had no choice but to view Gehlen’s information as genuine. In reality, most of the “secret” intelligence that Gehlen furnished was gossip from recently arrived émigrés who had just been released from a Russian POW camp, Soviet newspapers, and mail from Byelorussia and the Ukraine, which was permitted to continue with only varying degrees of censorship until 1948.
Much of Gehlen’s information concerned the DP camps themselves. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and survivors of Nazi brutality lived in these camps. The International Refugee Organization was making heroic attempts to feed and clothe them until a permanent solution could be found. With the German economy in ruins, cigarettes and chocolate were the main items of exchange, and there was a thriving black market.
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For a few years after the war, blackmarketing and espionage were among the chief means of livelihood. It was normal for Gehlen to pay his informants with goods from the American PX which they could then resell at a substantial mark up. Entire communities of refugees in post-war Germany scoured the DP camps for tiny shreds of gossip which Gehlen could resell to the ever gullible Americans.
But in the early post war years, all the Army had were suspicions. These suspicions were heightened when the CIC stumbled across some of Gehlen’s agents in its denazification sweeps. No one in their right mind would use a fugitive Nazi collaborator as a spy: he could too easily be turned or blackmailed. Time after time, CIC agents arrested Nazis hiding in the DP camps, only to have the suspect produce a special card with a phone number to Gehlen’s military liaison.
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Invariably, higher headquarters would order the CIC to release the Nazis. It did no good for the CIC to protest that Gehlen’s men were ex-Nazis who were suspected of selling the same information to the Soviets. By now Washington had become addicted to Gehlen’s reports, and he could claim his successes.
For example, Gehlen’s interrogations of German soldiers straggling home from Russian prison camps occasionally produced significant intelligence. Some had worked in Soviet factories and mines, others on rebuilding dams and highways. By piecing together bits of information obtained from these interrogations, Gehlen was able to deduce a significant portion of Soviet plans for reconstructing its military and economic machinery. One of the POWs brought back with him an ordinary-looking piece of ore that turned out to be fragments of pitchblende, from which uranium can be extracted and which was thought to be unknown in the Soviet Union. Another provided a soup bowl made out of a piece of special aircraft metal, which enabled Gehlen to come up with a precise estimate of the level of development of Soviet metallurgical processes. But such examples of useful intelligence were the exception, not the rule. By and large, the Belarus Brigade simply fabricated their estimates of Soviet troop strength and exaggerated Soviet willingness to attack western Europe. They were simply telling the gullible Americans what they wanted to hear.
Within two years after Germany’s surrender the Byelorussian Nazis had, with Gehlen’s assistance, virtually seized control of the DP camps in which they lived.
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The ex-Nazi inmates were running the intelligence asylum. Most of the Belarus Brigade had been reassembled at Regensburg and Michelsdorf, where Franz Kushel acted as camp coordinator. Kushel organized military training units in the camps; to evade regulations forbidding such organizations, the units were disguised as Boy Scout troops and veterans’ social clubs.
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Stanislaw Stankievich ran the Osterhofen camp. Those who resisted his authority were cut off from food rations. Osterhofen contained a large number of refugees unconnected to the Belarus underground and when they protested to the American authorities about the brutality of Stankievich’s regime, their complaints were ignored. Some of the protesters were beaten by Stankievich’s thugs. Stankievich had never been elected camp leader, as required by the IRO rules, but those who demanded a free election were told by the U.S. military representative that there would be no changes. Eventually the dissidents were transferred to other camps.
A dual camp system was being established – one for legitimate refugees, who barely survived, and another for privileged refugees like the members of the Belarus Brigade. Under the guise of realigning the DP locations along ethnic lines to facilitate administration, the Byelorussian and Ukrainian collaborators were given their own private camps. The Backnang, Michelsdorf, Osterhofen, and Aschaffenburg camps all came under the control of one or another of the Byelorussian factions. Ex-Nazi collaborators who were now employed by the Gehlen organization were placed in charge of these camps, and they obtained jobs as schoolteachers, rations distributors, translators, and clerks. The sale of secrets was a cottage industry, and some of them worked not only for Gehlen but for other intelligence services as well.
One of the most embarrassing examples of multiple loyalties surfaced when the Americans conceived of the idea of “repatriating” their own agents into the Soviet zone to collect intelligence. Gehlen provided the Americans with the services of Jury Bartishevic, the man who ran the Byelorussian forgery operation. It was he who provided false documents to enable the Nazis to hide in the American zone. After his ruse was eventually discovered, the Americans asked Bartishevic to prepare sufficient documents to enable their Russian-speaking agents to move freely through the Soviet zone. The enterprising Bartishevic printed several duplicates of each forged document, which he promptly resold to a number of willing purchasers, including the Soviets. Thus, the Soviet border guards had a list of the false identities used by American spies, and picked them up as soon as they crossed the border into the Russian zone. When Bartishevic’s duplicity was uncovered he was dismissed, and a scathing comment was placed in his file at the CIC central registry to the effect that Bartishevic’s loyalty would follow whoever paid him.
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This was apparently a dig at the all-too-visible lack of coordination among the many organizations which sought to develop an intelligence presence among the refugee populations in Germany.
Fighting Russians with Russians was a concept that had long intrigued American Army intelligence. The Army hoped to build an underground force to disrupt the Soviet empire in advance of the inevitable conflict between East and West. In preparation for this mission, the European Command Intelligence School (EUCOM G-2) had been assembling Eastern European experts, particularly Ukrainians, as the nucleus for such a force. But the paramilitary units that could actually conduct this secret war were lacking. Even Gehlen was no help because his charter limited him to gathering and analyzing information rather than engaging in covert military activities. During the first years of his operation he had successfully concealed the fact – despite CIC probing – that most of the refugee sources he had recruited were members of the Nazi underground community and perpetrators of atrocities. But early in 1947 the Americans accidentally discovered the key to the Belarus network.
The disclosure came about when Dr. Friedrich Buchardt, who was wanted as a major war criminal, emerged from hiding with an offer designed to save himself from execution.
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Buchardt had been one of Dr. Franz Six’s assistants in Einsatzgruppe B, and had later commanded a detachment of the mobile killing units in the Minsk and Smolensk areas. Toward the end of the war, Buchardt became chief of “émigré affairs” of the SS. In this post he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the role of the various Eastern European and Russian collaborators. Most of the other Einsatzgruppen commanders had already been captured and were awaiting trial before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal on charges of having systematically liquidated millions of Jews and other Eastern Europeans.
Buchardt offered to trade a secret history of SS operations in Russia, with particular emphasis on the work of the native collaborators, in exchange for help from Army intelligence in avoiding punishment for his crimes. Omitting no details, Buchardt described how his colleague Dr. Six had recruited the Byelorussian collaborators in Warsaw and had imported about thirty of them along with the first wave of the invasion. He named several – including Ostrowsky, Kushel, and Stankievich – and described in detail the functioning of Ostrowsky’s government. The manuscript was also a manual on the art of psychological warfare and the winning over of an occupied population through the effective use of collaborators. All the mistakes made by the Nazis during the occupation of Russia were enumerated, and methods were discussed to avoid repeating them during a future occupation.
Buchardt arranged for a copy of his manuscript to be passed on to Alexander Dallin of Army intelligence, and it was rapidly handed up the chain of command until it reached the office of the Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence in the Pentagon where it was immediately classified Top Secret and placed in a special safe for sensitive documents. Buchardt was taken under the wing of Army intelligence and the U.S. government thus recruited a major war criminal. With few exceptions, the other Einsatzgruppen commanders were sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Army intelligence protected Buchardt so effectively that no further trace of him has been found. [Years later I found Buchardt’s manuscript in the Top Secret vaults in Suitland, and traced his recruitment to then Professor Alexander Dallin, Chair of the History Department at Stanford. Dallin frantically confessed that Buchardt had been taken by the CIA, presumably OPC, but no further trace of him was found. Although Buchardt’s name as an Einsatzgruppen commander originally appeared in one of the most noted histories of the Holocaust, it was mysteriously deleted in later editions. But at the time Dallin received Buchardt’s manuscript, it was considered the key to unlocking the secrets of the Soviet Union.]
The Army soon linked the names in Buchardt’s manuscript to the Byelorussians living in the DP camps. Within a month after the manuscript was received in the Pentagon a courier from the Polish Military Mission in France was caught passing sensitive information to the Polish Communists. The courier claimed to be a double agent for Free Polish Intelligence, jointly supported by the French and the British, and was trying to penetrate the Communist intelligence service. He said he had been requested by the Polish Communists to establish the whereabouts of the former leaders of the Byelorussian Central Council, and to ascertain whether or not they were working with any Western intelligence agency.
The courier had contacted Kushel, Stankievich, and other leading members of the western Byelorussian faction, and had obtained a list showing the residence of several cabinet-level collaborators. This list matched the names in Buchardt’s manuscript. Kushel and the others had willingly furnished it to the courier to establish his bona fides as a spy. The Byelorussians realized Soviet agents were monitoring their activities and would have secured the information anyway.
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Up until this time, the Americans had no knowledge of the importance of the Byelorussians to Soviet intelligence. The Russians had made no request for their arrest, and their names had never been published on any list of wanted war criminals. The Soviets seemed content to track their every move but not to disclose an interest. This was surprising, as the Soviets had previously relished publishing the names of eastern European Nazis given sanctuary in the American zone. Curiously, the Soviets kept their silence about the Belarus Brigade only until their courier was captured.
Primed by the information in Buchardt’s manuscript, Army intelligence launched a crash program to learn everything it could about the Byelorussians, who seemed made to order for a guerrilla campaign against the Soviet Union. But the Americans faced serious problems in enlisting the Byelorussians for a secret war. One problem was that the various factions showed no inclination to cease their internecine feuding. More importantly, however, the United States was officially committed to the policy of repatriation for all Russian war criminals, including Byelorussians. With the trials of the Einsatzgruppen commanders soon to begin at Nuremberg, this was hardly the time for the Pentagon to reveal that it had recruited any of their colleagues. And the Soviets chose this moment to break their silence regarding the Byelorussian Nazis.