Rockefeller left the administration at the end of 1955 as a result of political infighting, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon replaced him as the President’s Cold War strategist. Nixon had a small boy’s delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft – the hidden microphones, the “black” propaganda, the techniques of interrogation – and Dulles and Wisner were pleased to gratify his curiosity. Like Rockefeller, Nixon received a deep briefing on OPC operations, and Wisner personally escorted him to the training center in Virginia where the Special Forces were being trained.
162
On June 28, 1956, riots broke out in Poznan, Poland, and were brutally put down by the Russians. Across America there were demands that the United States “do something” to help the embattled Poles in their fight for freedom. Considerable pressure was brought to bear upon Wisner to order his forces into action, but he convinced the Twenty Committee that his plan was not yet ready. Over the next few months he worked at a furious pace to have the operation ready by the middle of 1958.
But revolt erupted in Hungary in late October 1956. With only small arms and homemade bombs, youthful rebels drove out the officials of the Communist government and proclaimed Hungary a free nation, neutral between East and West. There is no evidence that OPC provoked the uprising, but Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty created the hope of American support. [As discussed in our later books, a Russian ex-Nazi double agent broadcast the OPC uprising codes on his own radio transmitter which had a similar frequency. ] The situation was complicated by an Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt to seize control of the Suez Canal, which had been expropriated by the Egyptians. The Eisenhower administration opposed the Suez adventure, and on November 4, Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev took advantage of the disarray among the Western allies to send 200,000 troops into Hungary to put down the rebellion.
Fighting for their capital block by block, the Hungarian “freedom fighters” frantically called out to the West for help:
“We appeal to the conscience of the world,” Radio Free Rakoczi broadcast on November 6. “Why cannot you hear the call for help of our murdered women and children? Peoples of the world! Hear the call for help of a small nation! … This is Radio Rakoczi, Hungary … Radio Free Europe, Munich! Radio Free Europe, Munich! Answer! Have you received our transmission?”
This was followed a few hours later by another broadcast:
“…Attention, attention, Munich! Munich! Take immediate action…. We urgently need medicine, bandages, arms, food, and ammunition. Drop them to us by parachute.”
163
Wisner, who had been on a tour of OPC stations in Europe, was in Vienna as these appeals for help poured in. At the first reports of the uprising he had been in a state of euphoria, expecting the revolt to spread to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. He pleaded with Washington for an airlift of arms and reinforcements for the Hungarians – only to be ignored. Rage boiling over, he cursed the British, French, and Israelis, claiming their attack on Egypt had provided the Russians with a cover for intervention in Hungary.
[1]
There was to be no help for the Hungarians. The shock of the Soviet counterattack had stunned the Eisenhower administration. The Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed out that not even an incursion of the Special Forces would be enough to save Budapest. Only an airlift of weapons could stave off defeat, and that would mean the use of military aircraft and open American intervention. This might lead to war with the Soviet Union – a war, the military pointed out, for which the United States was unprepared.
164
So no relief was sent to the Hungarians. Before the fighting ended in Budapest, as many as 30,000 people may have been killed, and another 200,000 fled the country. “Poor fellows, poor fellows,” lamented Eisenhower. “I think about them all the time. I wish there was some way of helping them.”
165
“Liberation” and dreams of “rolling back” the Iron Curtain were exposed for the hollow and misleading generalities they had always been. Short of an all-out war, the United States simply lacked the means to direct or influence events in the Soviet sphere.
General Lucian K. Truscott was assigned by President Eisenhower to investigate Wisner’s operation.
166
He went first to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, the site of a hastily established reception center for Hungarian refugees, and was disturbed by what he learned. Wisner’s agents had led the Hungarians to believe that direct American military intervention would take place once the revolt had started. Truscott also discovered that despite the disaster in Hungary, Wisner was pressing ahead with his plan for Czechoslovakia with the same hope of inciting or assisting a mass uprising. The general succeeded in persuading the President that the outcome would be equally disastrous, and orders were given to close down Wisner’s operation and disperse the agents involved.
Upon his return to Washington, Wisner began to act erratically. He told long, pointless stories at conferences and drank more heavily than usual. A worried Polly Wisner told friends that she had seen her husband take out his pistol and talk to it. Not long afterward, Wisner was hospitalized with nervous exhaustion and hepatitis, apparently picked up in Athens from a plate of tainted clams. Over the next few years, Wisner suffered several nervous breakdowns; in 1965 he killed himself with a 20-gauge shotgun on his Maryland farm.
167
Kim Philby said he was told by a mutual friend that Wisner had committed suicide because of his disappointment over the outcome of the Hungarian uprising.
168
Friends and associates described Wisner as a man who had given his life in the service of his country. “At the very outset of this country’s unforeseen and unprepared role as a major power of the world, he was called upon to break new ground of the most dangerous, and for a major power, the most essential ground,” they said in a statement issued at the time of his death. “In fact, he had to meet the long prepared challenge of the vast Stalinist intelligence and subversion net. Thereafter, for about a decade, he devoted himself totally to one of the most onerous and difficult tasks any American public servant has ever had to undertake…. What never can be broken is the image of Frank Wisner left with those who worked with him. He was brave yet wise, prudent yet strongly determined, and deeply American above all….”
169
Critics denounced him as a reckless adventurer who had brought the world perilously close to war. During the 1980’s Frank Wisner’s daughter visited me at my home and asked me to tell her the truth about her father. I told her that he was a very bad man, but I couched it as gently as I could.
Many years later, one of the men who had succeeded Wisner as DDP
[2]
assessed the net results of OPC’s programs. Apart from East Germany, he said, OPC did not have even the basic elements of an intelligence system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. There was no network of safe houses, not even a reliable system of couriers. Before he left his post as head of CIA covert operations, Wisner must have realized how thoroughly he had been betrayed by his Nazi protégés. Whether out of embarrassment or anger, he did not brief his successors in DDP on the State Department-Nazi connection.
The CIA, however, continued to use Wisner’s old contacts, in utter ignorance of their Nazi backgrounds. In one case, the agency even considered granting a Byelorussian Nazi permanent sanctuary under the Hundred Persons Act, in the belief that he had worked with the Resistance in France, and had been imprisoned by the Gestapo. He was still considered to have been a reliable agent until the CIA was shown a copy of his Gestapo file in the National Archives. All along he had worked for the SS as an intelligence agent until it discovered his extensive communist background and demoted him. Wisner was not even efficient at smuggling Nazis.
With the disbanding of the few remaining cadres of Wisner’s secret army, the Special Forces were taken over by the Army and became the nucleus of the Green Berets.
[3]
The Byelorussian collaborators he had helped come to America faced difficult times. The CIA finally realized it had never possessed an organized underground behind the Iron Curtain. Most of the agency’s so-called intelligence sources were merely “paper mills,” producing scraps of information that had been doctored up to be traded to the gullible Americans in exchange for survival.
170
And by concealing the extent of Soviet penetration within their own ranks, the émigrés had helped delude Wisner into believing they could carry on covert operations in secrecy. Now their CIA subsidies were cut off, and there was even talk of scrapping Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, which had provided jobs for many of them.
[4]
In the years following the collapse of Wisner’s operations, the Soviets continued to monitor the activities of the Belarus network in America. Soviet officials from the official Byelorussian UN delegation even met with Belarus leaders in New York City.
171
Some collaborators contacted the Soviet embassy, asking for transcripts of their school records in Byelorussia. Three or four wrote to Byelorussia and brought over mail-order brides, all of whom professed to unhappiness in America and quickly returned home. The Nazis in America knew what the CIA did not, that the Russian intelligence service already knew all about their activities and places of residence. [Because OPC shattered the CIA’s file system, it was impossible to conduct reliable background checks. General George Shakisvilli became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff without anyone in the US Government realizing that his father was a Nazi war criminal from the Soviet Republic of Georgia. The Russians possessed the knowledge to blackmail the Nazis in America at will. The Americans did not even know where Wisner had hidden the Nazis.]
The Soviet Union embassy staff collected books and magazines written by members of the Belarus network, and criticized them as collaborators in internal Soviet publications. But the Soviets did not repeat the denunciations made in front of the United Nations General Assembly in 1947 that large numbers of infamous war criminals were being sheltered by Americans.
The silence ended in 1961, when Franz Kushel and Emanuel Jasiuk were singled out for special attention. The accusations against them surfaced in a Yiddish-language newspaper, the
Morning Freiheit
, published in New York.
172
Basically, the paper reprinted several accounts of the trials in the Soviet Union of those who had participated in the atrocities at the Koldichevo death camp in Byelorussia. Jasiuk and Kushel were named as key officials in the Nazi administration that had sent thousands of people to their deaths in the camp. Earlier on, when similar accusations had been made, the FBI had consulted Simon Wiesenthal, the noted Nazi hunter, who had warned that the charges might be a Communist Cold War tactic to intimidate the émigré community with false charges of war crimes.
173
Since this was precisely what the FBI wanted to hear, the earlier probes were dropped. But this time the charges had come to the attention of survivors of the Holocaust, who refused to ignore them. There was also a great deal of pressure from Congress, and in 1962 the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched an investigation. Once again, the INS turned to the FBI for assistance. It was a case of one wing of the Justice Department hunting Nazis, while the other wing protected them.
The FBI had known the entire history of the Byelorussian Nazi government since the early 1950s and realized that Kushel and Jasiuk were two of the most important war criminals in the United States. The Bureau also was aware that both men had ties to OPC through the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, which funded their activities. So, citing Wiesenthal’s unfortunate comment, the FBI reported to the Immigration Service that the Soviet charges were part of a plot to discredit important anticommunist political figures in the United States.
Occasionally, an enterprising newspaper reporter would try to dig into the story. One even managed to interview Kushel, who denied having served with the Einsatzgruppen before slamming the door in the reporter’s face. Similarly, when one Byelorussian in South River began receiving anonymous letters denouncing him as a war criminal, he wrote to the FBI asking for assistance in identifying his accuser. To understand the confidence behind such a gesture and the presumption that such assistance would be forthcoming, it should be noted that the charges were accurate.
174
The Immigration Service did not rest on the assurances of the FBI, as it had before, however. INS officials called the U.S. Army’s Investigative Records Repository at Fort Meade, Maryland, and asked if the CIC had any information on Kushel. The CIC, it will be recalled, possessed several classified dossiers dating back to the late 1940s that positively identified him as an SS officer, a member of the Nazi government of Byelorussia, and an informant for SS intelligence. But something had changed at CIC. After a telephone call from CIC in 1963 the Immigration Service noted in its records:
Mr. Woolwine advised that the CIC records … show that Franzishek Kushel was the leader of the Michelsdorf Displaced Persons Camp. No additional information relating to Franzishek Kushel is contained in the CIC Records. In view of this information, Mr. Woolwine was advised that formal report would not be required.
And so, the sanitizing continued. The Pentagon had reason to be grateful that it did not have to submit a formal report on Kushel to the Immigration Service. The agency had previous experience with putting Kushel’s false background in writing. In 1956 it had furnished CIA/OSO with a sanitized version of Kushel’s history. Undeceived, the CIA had responded with a summary of the hodgepodge of erroneous information concerning Kushel’s anticommunist activities, but did note that he had been in fact some sort of SS division commander, as the CIC’s own records showed. It will be recalled that the FBI had alerted the Immigration Service to Kushel’s CIA file when he applied for citizenship in 1955, but through “oversight,” the records were never checked.
175
In 1963 the CIA informed the INS that it had “no derogatory information” on Kushel, but included a copy of its 1956 report mentioning the ambiguous reference to the SS division, as well as the fact that the CIC possessed “voluminous information” on Kushel.
176