This was a complete fabrication. The CIC had an agent who photographed eleven volumes of Lebed’s secret internal files of OUN/ Bandera. These files clearly show how most of its members worked for the Gestapo or SS as policemen, executioners, partisan hunters, and municipal officials. The OUN contribution to the German war effort was significant, including the raising of volunteers for several SS divisions. It was precisely because of its work with the Nazis that Wisner wanted to hire the OUN for his Special Forces. The Ukrainian letter succeeded in fooling the immigration officials, however, and OUN/Bandera was subsequently taken off the inimical list.
By the time the DP Act expired in 1952, 400,000 immigrants had come to the United States. Among them were hundreds if not thousands of important Nazi collaborators from Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Balkans, including the nucleus of Wisner’s “Special Forces.” During the same four-year period, Wisner’s OPC enjoyed virtually unlimited freedom of action and had grown to the point that it was consuming more than half the CIA’s annual budget. Wisner’s private army had launched an undeclared war against the Soviet Union. He had defied the congressional ban on smuggling Nazis; he had misappropriated government funds to buy arms for ex-Nazi terrorists; and he had obstructed justice by sheltering fugitive war criminals who had been denounced by the Nuremberg Tribunal, the United Nations, and the Congress of the United States. He had, moreover, inflicted a crucial defeat on his arch rivals in the CIC and CIA. The State Department had won the first round.
[
1
] With several notorious exceptions, most of which appear to have been instigated by OPC.
[
2
] For reasons of national security, the author has been requested to delete certain details of the file-laundering process and to state only that, “various intelligence agencies had access to the central files at Stuttgart CIC
[
3
] At least one Byelorussian Nazi entered the United States illegally from Canada and came back and forth several times. Immigration and Naturalization Service files indicate he was never issued a visa or residence permit , and no visas are on record for several other émigrés. OPC simply sent letters to the American border guards at Niagara Falls to let the people across. That is how Nikolai Abramtchik, former Nazi Minster of Intelligence and Communist Double Agent, was able to enter America at will.
[
4
]Jasiuk spoke Byelorussian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, German, French, and English.
[
5
] Thus, U.S. intelligence had actually been in touch with the Ukrainian Nazis since 1946, despite denials of this to Washington and the UN.
[
6
] The letter also enclosed two visa applications – one admitting service in the OUN/SB, and the other concealing that fact. Apparently, the State Department knew all along that the agent had lied to get into America. It was not the last occasion on which State suddenly produced a second visa application to prevent deportation of an OPC agent who had misrepresented his SS connection on one form and concealed it on another.
8
On June 25-26, 1949, the remaining members of the Belarus network in Europe held their last conference in Germany at the Backnang DP camp near Stuttgart. A motion was made and approved to “transfer the entire organization to the United States, inasmuch as all the officers were there.” This was not an understatement: with the exception of Radoslaw Ostrowsky, who had gone to Argentina because his record was too well known for him to obtain a visa, virtually every cabinet-level Byelorussian Nazi had been smuggled into America. Franz Kushel, Jury Sobolewsky, Emanuel Jasiuk – the leadership of a movement branded “hostile to the United States” – had been issued visas in violation of federal law, and were now on the road to becoming American citizens.
One needed only to compare the Consolidated Orientation and Guidance Manual for Byelorussia prepared by the CIC in 1948 with the immigration rolls to realize how effective Wisner’s smuggling operations had been. More than 300 Byelorussian Nazis arrived in the United States, most of whom would become American citizens. (An even larger number of Ukrainian Nazis are suspected to have been smuggled in.)
Wisner’s own star had risen too. The announcement of the Soviet atom bomb in 1949 and the outbreak of war in Korea the following year led to sweeping changes in America’s intelligence community. Dissatisfied with Admiral Hillenkoetter’s performance, President Truman replaced him as Director of Central Intelligence with General Walter Bedell Smith.
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Brilliant and acerbic, Smith had been General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff during World War II and was credited with being the driving force behind the American victory in Europe. A postwar tour as envoy to Moscow had left him with a hatred of the Soviet Union. Smith was determined to increase the effectiveness of the CIA by bringing the OPC under his control.
Although the OPC was formally a part of the CIA, Wisner had acted independently, and there was considerable bureaucratic infighting between his shop and the CIA’S Office of Special Operations. They had squabbled over local jurisdictions, stealing each other’s agents and occasionally blowing each other’s operations. Such intra-agency raiding was not uncommon. A retired military intelligence agent revealed recently that OPC had offered him a high-paying job with the stipulation that he steal the list of agents working for the Army in that part of Germany and turn it over to his prospective employers. He refused, but others did not. OPC was envied, feared, and resented by the other agencies because of its power, influence, and limitless financial support.
Between 1950 and 1952, Smith took several steps to encourage cooperation between OPC and OSO. Allen Dulles, Wisner’s old friend and chief, was brought in as Deputy Director of Plans to supervise Wisner’s operations. Not long afterward, Dulles was named Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and when Eisenhower was elected President in 1952 he became DCI. Among Smith’s last acts was to merge OSO and OPC into the Directorate of Plans with Wisner in charge. All CIA covert actions were now controlled by the men who had planned the “Special Forces” program. The use of Eastern European émigrés to fight a clandestine guerrilla war against the Soviet Union had not received official sanction from the White House, but in 1953 its two most ardent advocates, Dulles and Wisner, were in a position to continue the secret war on their own.
126
[Although declassified files now show that Eisenhower gave more than a wink and a nod to the Dulles’s nefarious and inevitably futile efforts to roll back communism].
With unlimited funds and support available, Wisner stepped up his activities among the Byelorussians in the United States. Soon after his arrival in this country, Franz Kushel, now the leader of the old Abramtchik faction, was able to establish the White Ruthenian Institute of Arts and Sciences at 8 Alabama Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. Abramtchik himself remained in Paris. The institute churned out intelligence reports supposedly generated by Kushel’s network of spies in Eastern Europe. In reality, most of these agents had long since been captured by the Soviets. Kushel fabricated his reports from newspapers, old books, radio broadcasts, and gossip among the émigrés. Nevertheless, Wisner was so pleased by the results that he expanded the number of émigré institutes, and established a headquarters in Munich where access to the “informants” would be greater. The secretary and later chairman of the board of the Institute of Russian Research in Munich was Stanislaw Stankievich.
127
Funding for these “research institutes,” which were little more than front groups for ex-Nazi intelligence officers, came from the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, now known as Radio Liberty.
[1]
The committee was actually a front for OPC. AMCOMLIB was originally a subsidiary organization of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), which was set up by George Kennan in the State Department long before the CIA became involved.
128
Money for the NCFE and AMCOMLIB was raised through the “private” fund-raising efforts of the “Crusade for Freedom.” General Clay, who had retired from his post as military governor of the American Zone of Germany in 1949, was chairman of the Crusade. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were among those who solicited public contributions. (The newsreel collection of the National Archives has a film clip of Reagan urging the American public to send their contributions to General Clay’s “Crusade for Freedom.”) Over 90% percent of its income came from the non-vouchered accounts of the CIA rather than public donations, however. The State Department laundered the money through private charities, such as the Rockefeller Fund, the Carnegie Fund, and the Ford Foundation’s Russian Research Committee, which in turn claimed credit in public for their generous donations. Some of the funds went through corporate conduits, such as the Radio Corporation of America, which in turn “donated” equipment to Wisner’s front groups.
129
In return, the Dulles brothers awarded General Sarnoff of RCA a no-bid contract to help build the wiretapping system of the NSA.
Only a few of the more favored Byelorussian Nazis found employment with AMCOMLIB. While the intelligentsia with advanced degrees obtained jobs at local hospitals, academic institutions, and architectural firms, the rest took positions as laborers and factory workers. Almost without exception, the Byelorussians filed applications to become American citizens. Now that they were safely in the United States they needed only to wait out the five-year residency requirement. While the Abramtchik faction was centered at Kushel’s base in Brooklyn, Ostrowsky’s followers, led by Jury Sobolewsky, were expanding their foothold in South River, New Jersey, the headquarters of a growing Belarus network.
Between 1948 and 1950 over 200 Byelorussian Nazis, together with their families, arrived in South River. It was a quiet little town on the fringe of New Jersey’s industrial belt where large numbers of Ukrainian and Byelorussian refugees had settled after World War I. The new arrivals kept to themselves and, unlike other émigrés, did not encourage publication of their social activities in the local newspapers. They built their own parish church, established a meeting hall and business offices, and began organizing charities and religious groups to sponsor still more émigrés. Relatives brought in relatives and arranged jobs for them in the factories of Passaic and Newark. In time, a local lawyer was hired to assist with the immigration process.
Later on, as the number of immigrants increased, new parishes were established near the old Byelorussian communities in Chicago, Cleveland, and Toronto.
130
Toronto was the Nazi headquarters for the North American continent because of the large number of émigré presses established by the British Secret Service there. It is quite easy to find Nazi front groups in Canada: they were all members of the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations. ABN was Kim Philby’s umbrella group for the Nazi networks he peddled to the Dulles brothers. I told all of this in great detail to Alti Rodal, historian of the Canadian Deschene Commission. Almost every word on how the British dumped the Nazis in Canada was blacked out of the Deschene Report to Parliament. The British SIS station at Windsor kept shuttling the Nazis across the border to America.
Belarus activity in America was directed by Sobolewsky, vice president of the Byelorussian Central Council. As time went on, it became necessary to expand into the New York area. Formal charters were obtained for various front organizations, but most of the leaders of the local groups had one thing in common: They had all been Nazi intelligence officers who had helped the Einsatzgruppen direct the subjugation of Byelorussia.
131
With Ostrowsky still in hiding in Argentina, where he had gone with the assistance of the British, Sobolewsky decided to try to gain public recognition for his organization.
132
He sent Emanuel Jasiuk, now head of the South River chapter, to speak at a Ukrainian convention in Washington, D.C.
133
Vice president Alben Barkley unwittingly shared the same platform with men who had fought against America and helped obliterate the Jewish population of their countries. To establish his credentials, Jasiuk carried a commission that read:
Mr. Emanuel Jasiuk is appointed by the Byelorussian Central Council as Chairman of the delegation to represent the Byelorussian people and the government of the Byelorussian Democratic Republic in the United States of America.
The commission was signed by Radoslaw Ostrowsky as President of the Byelorussian Central Council and bore the seal of his wartime administration. Ostrowsky was once again trying to rehabilitate his government by dropping the cover name of the “Byelorussian Central Representation,” which he had used since 1945.
In February 1951 the first Belarus convention in America was held at South River. It was decided to link up with similar exile organizations from the Ukrainian, Latvian, and Estonian communities. The Belarus network hoped to persuade American public officials that the “White Ruthenian” émigrés in America were willing to do anything to defeat the Communists. Letters were sent to both President Truman and General Eisenhower, promising to supply armed troops for the struggle against communism. American politicians were sought out to endorse Byelorussian nationalism, press releases were issued, and a series of local newspapers were established to link the scattered collaborators.
134
Everything was in readiness for the day when Americans would realize that it was Ostrowsky’s Nazis, not Abramtchik’s, who offered the best chance of penetrating the Soviet Union. They did not have long to wait.