America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (25 page)

[
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] According to an interview with a senior intelligence official, only Gehlen and five of his top associates were transferred from Army control in 1947, while the final integration of the Gehlen Organization into the CIA did not take place until 1949.

Nazi General Reinhard Gehelen.

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Gehlen must have envied Wisner. The Office of Policy Coordination had access to unlimited funds, and the entire world was its area of operations.
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Sensing that OPC was the wave of the future, he became Wisner’s firm ally. Wisner offered financial support, which Gehlen repaid with information – particularly about the Byelorussian DPs, who so much interested the American. They conferred together on several occasions during the Cold War. The two men presented a striking contrast: Wisner, bulky and given to orotund utterance; Gehlen, short, slight, and precise as he provided a briefing that filled the gaps in Wisner’s knowledge about the intended recruits for his secret army.

For example, the CIC, despite its extensive digging into the background of the Byelorussians, realized only that Franz Kushel, who had taken over control of the Michelsdorf DP camp, was a Nazi police commander who had served with the Waffen-SS. They did not know that Kushel’s camp was the home of the Belarus Brigade, which had fought against the Americans on the western front. Gehlen was aware of the facts because his organization employed many of the SS and SD men who had supervised the Byelorussians during the war. The leaders of the SS intelligence network in Byelorussia were now “research analysts” in Pullach, and over the next four years Gehlen recruited most of the original intelligence staff of the Byelorussian Einsatzgruppen.

Gehlen believed that the émigrés who had most recently collaborated with the Germans were the ones in closest touch with the thinking of the populations behind the Iron Curtain.
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For this reason he had immediately recruited Ostrowsky and his followers after they had been dropped by the British in favor of Abramtchik‘s group. He urged Wisner to put his political backing and financial support behind Ostrowsky, and suggested that they try to bring about a merger of various factions. Ostrowsky had taken such a step early in May 1948 by convening a mass meeting of Byelorussian refugees at the Ellwangen DP camp. Abramtchik did his best to disrupt planning for the session, and his people were ordered to boycott it.

When he learned that Ostrowsky had petitioned General Clay to be accredited as head of a legitimate government-in-exile,
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Abramtchik launched a fresh campaign to discredit the Ostrowsky group as war criminals – even though Stankievich and Kushel were leading figures in his own organization. The charges and countercharges of Communist infiltration and Nazi collaboration were so strident that they reached the Byelorussian-language press. Fortunately for both factions, few outsiders were able to read the camp newspapers. The infighting gradually subsided, but not before Abramtchik’s divisive tactics caused lingering resentment in both groups.
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To eliminate the endless feuding, Wisner and Gehlen planned to establish an umbrella group – known as the KTsAB for its Russian acronym – to lead the various nationalities in the struggle to liberate the homelands. The Byelorussians were to be used as a link to the other British groups, especially the more numerous Ukrainians. The Americans planned eventually to supplant the British and take control of all émigré anticommunist activities.

Kennan’s Policy and Planning Staff had already convinced the State Department to fund a series of innocuous-sounding cover organizations in New York,[ such as the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism or AMCOMLIB. A red cardboard flag with AMCOMLIB’s address was all any of the Nazis needed to obtain an illegal visit to America. AMCOMLIB, later known as Radio Liberty, was funded by the innocent sounding Crusade for Freedom, for whom young Ronald Reagan was the pitchman in fundraising commercials. Reagan well knew that 99% of AMCOMLIB’s funding came not from his fundraising commercials but from CIA’s unvouchered funds. This information was censored from the original manuscript of this book.]

With the help of the old OSS political intelligence files, Joyce arranged to have these organizations staffed with the “émigré leaders” that Wisner would select. In turn, they could fund each of the KTsAB’s émigré committees headquartered in Paris, Munich, London, and Rome.
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Under the guise of carrying on anticommunist propaganda, the émigré committees would also identify potential recruits for the paramilitary section of OPC.

Wisner’s immediate strategy was to locate enough Nazi intelligence officers to train the nucleus of the private armies that were to fight in the expected guerrilla war behind the Iron Curtain. Gehlen was to identify those to be recruited, and General Clay would provide cover for the training activities at the European Command Intelligence School near Oberammergau in Bavaria, or at OPC’s “Air Force” units near Wiesbaden. Money for the project would be drawn from untraceable government accounts, such as those of the CIA, and laundered through American corporations whose leaders had expressed willingness to work with Wisner and OPC.

Gehlen suggested that Wisner hire Dr. Franz Six to head the recruitment and training of the Special Forces. Dr. Six knew most of the leading Byelorussians, he explained, having recruited them for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. Six, however, was at that moment on trial at Nuremberg for his war crimes. Wisner asked General Clay to intercede with the Nuremberg prosecutor and judges. Whether Clay took such action is unknown, but Six received only a twenty-year prison term, while the rest of the Einsatzgruppen commanders were sentenced to death. In 1950, Clay’s successor, High Commissioner John J. McCloy, commuted the sentence to time served, and Six went to work for Gehlen on the Special Forces project.

Wisner and Gehlen found the DP camps fertile ground for recruits. Hundreds of thousands of young refugees – Byelorussians, Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, and anti-Stalinist Russians – lacked work or prospects of emigration. The only jobs they could find were as ill-paid farm workers or as laborers clearing bomb rubble. The “secret army” provided good pay and living conditions, and within a few months recruits were assembled at various camps. American and former Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS instructors provided training in hand-to-hand combat, wireless operation, parachuting, small arms, demolition, signals, and all the other “trade craft” of the spy.

In the early 1950s, several of these agents were parachuted into various regions of the Soviet Union from planes supplied by Wisner. They had excellently forged documents and carried miniature radio transmitters, as well as a few thousand rubles and small bags of gold coins with which to buy favors from peasants whom they might have to ask for food and shelter. Some of these agents were to attempt to make contact with the agents Gehlen had left behind in Russia after the German retreat; others were to take jobs in Soviet industry and report back on what they found. A few were successful and provided information for a brief time, but most were quickly captured and executed. Some were “turned” by the Soviets and transmitted false information to Gehlen until the Russians decided to make a show of them at well-publicized press conferences.
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Many of the recruits from the Byelorussian SS were put on the government payroll as members of “Polish” labor service battalions and detailed as armed guards at American PXs and commissaries.
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The Byelorussian units kept the same command structure used under the Nazis and simply changed uniforms as they went on the American payroll. Some had “Polish army” papers signed by Joseph Danikevich, who had been an officer in one of the Byelorussian police units absorbed into the Belarus Brigade. One of the benefits of joining a labor service unit was the fact that character references were provided. For example, a document in Stankievich’s file from the commanding officer of the U.S. Army’s 59th Supervision Company stated that, “in the opinion of the undersigned, Stankievich, Stanislaw, is a good prospect for providing the United States with a loyal, useful citizen of excellent integrity.”

The other intelligence agencies were not oblivious to the preparations taking place in Germany, although Wisner did his best to keep the CIC and the CIA away from his operation.
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His cover was that he was planning to train psychological-warfare operators and secret agents who would help downed American fliers escape from behind the Iron Curtain in case of war. Most of the American agencies were content to believe that this was all Wisner intended with his rather small operations in West Germany. The MVD was not fooled, however.

Soviet intelligence had penetrated every corner of the Byelorussian network and had even entered into active competition with Gehlen and Wisner for recruits in the DP camps. Anticipating that the western Allies would sooner or later try to establish an anti-Soviet underground movement, the Russians engaged in a preemptive strike. The right wing exile groups – Byelorussian BCC, Ukrainian OUN, and Russian NTS – were all riddled with Soviet agents. From almost the beginning, as we have seen, Ostrowsky had repeatedly charged that many of Abramtchik’s associates were former Communists and his group had been honeycombed with Soviet informers. Wisner went to the best source for comment on these charges – Kim Philby, who had been head of anti-Soviet operations for the British secret service at the time the British recruited Abramtchik and his followers. Philby, then in Washington as liaison between the British and the CIA and FBI, assured Wisner that Ostrowsky’s warnings were merely the sour grapes of a disaffected politician.

In later years, however, Ostrowsky’s warning of Communist penetration of the Abramtchik faction received independent corroboration. CIC records show that several Soviet moles were unearthed who furnished derogatory information about the group. Other intelligence agencies learned that one of Abramtchik’s deputies had been trained as an intelligence officer by the Soviets. (He later emigrated to the United States.) Military intelligence identified several Byelorussians as part of a network that passed sensitive information to east-bloc intelligence services. (Another of these alleged Communist agents subsequently worked in America.) [Soviet Intelligence had found a shortcut for smuggling their agents to America … their spies just “confessed” that they were former Nazis willing to fight communism.]

Stanislaw Stankievich was pressured by Soviet intelligence to work for them, but he reported the recruiter to the CIC. She was Nina Litwinczyk, the typist at Gestapo headquarters in Minsk during the German occupation who had supplied the Soviets with the names of Nazi collaborators. Since 1945 she had been blackmailing these fugitives in an effort to turn them into Russian agents.
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Years later, the FBI received three separate reports concerning a Communist agent living in the United States. The three reports emanated from a group of collaborationists who had been captured by Russian partisans during the war. One of the prisoners confessed to the pro-Russian partisans that he was a secret communist agent who had infiltrated the Nazi networks. The other two bona fide Nazi collaborators managed to escape from the partisans and, following the war, eventually made their way to the United States, only to find that the self-confessed communist spy had preceded them.
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The FBI filed the reports without action because the Communist/Nazi agent had been checked by OPC. OPC, of course, assumed that British Intelligence had done the background checks.
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Time after time, American intelligence officials ignored their own informants or were persuaded by Kim Philby that the charges about Communist agents among the Byelorussians were merely mudslinging by the out-of-favor Ostrowsky faction. Philby’s biggest coup was to unload the Communist-infiltrated Abramtchik organization on the all-too-eager Wisner.
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Pleading a lack of funding from Britain’s impecunious postwar government, he allowed Wisner to take over the group, emphasizing the extensive espionage network that Abramtchik was supposedly developing in Poland. Philby also threw in the entire NTS network to serve as the foundation for a Pan-Slavic anticommunist bloc in exchange for access to the intelligence produced. Delighted by Philby’s willingness to cooperate with the OPC, Wisner accepted the offer.

As chief of the Soviet section of British intelligence, Philby could claim his successes – in which he was assisted by his Soviet masters – and was considered a preeminent authority on anti-Soviet espionage. Wisner apparently believed that Philby’s endorsement provided the “Special Forces” concept with a cachet that might have taken him years to acquire on his own. The sardonic Philby must have smiled to himself as he turned over the hollow shells of his Eastern European intelligence operations to Wisner. In his memoirs, published after he escaped to the Soviet Union, Philby dismissed Wisner as “a young man for so responsible a job, balding and running self-importantly to fat.”
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