Yet we had never supplied the Russians with Stankievich’s address and, in keeping with Orthodox tradition, an obituary notice did not appear until sixty days after he died.
Late in 1980, the OSI asked John Tipton – the General Accounting Office supervisor who had helped prepare the report downgrading the possibility of a conspiracy to smuggle the Nazi war criminals into the United States – to examine the material we had gathered. We gave him the voluminous files that had been amassed on Jasiuk and Franz Kushel. Tipton was plainly embarrassed as he leafed through the dossiers, saying he had never seen the material before. And when he spotted the most recent entries, which admonished the clerks at the Immigration Service not to reveal the enclosed material to the GAO, he shook his head. “My God!” he exclaimed. “How could this have happened?”
The cover-up arose initially out of what were perceived to be the legitimate needs of national security. Imbued with the anticommunist spirit of the Cold War, intelligence officials decided to fight fire with fire, to enlist Eastern European Nazis with anti-Soviet backgrounds in a guerrilla and propaganda war against the Soviet Union. These Americans were not evil or vicious; they believed that moral ends justified immoral means. Allen Dulles put it best. Asked why he made use of someone like Reinhard Gehlen, the Director of Central Intelligence replied: “There are few archbishops in espionage. He’s on our side and that’s all that matters. Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.”
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Over the years, however, the emphasis of the cover-up switched from protecting ongoing operations and agents to protecting the men who had smuggled the Nazis into the United States. Wisner and his associates had violated several laws, including the Trading with the Enemy Act, and some statutes of limitations did not run out until 1961, but there were other reasons for the persistence of the cover-up. The major one was the change in the international climate. The Belarus conspiracy was a product of the Cold War and confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Rightly or wrongly, the American people and American policymakers were convinced that Stalin was determined to dominate the world and tailored their actions to meet the perceived threat. Anything that made trouble for the Russians was permissible, including the enlistment of Nazi collaborators. Critics were isolated as appeasers, enemies of the state, or, in the heyday of McCarthyism, “soft on communism.”
In the 1960s there came a change in the attitudes of the American public toward foreign policy and covert action. The war in Vietnam, which carried Cold War thinking to its logical end, was deemed too costly in blood and money. Covert action was discredited by the failure of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs expedition, the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the overthrow of the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. It was not the time to disclose the embarrassing details about the smuggled Nazi collaborators. Bureaucracies bury their embarrassments in the files.
So the cover-up continued long after there was any legitimate need for it. OPC veterans hoped that the records of the errors of the past would remain undisturbed in the vaults of the various intelligence agencies. As they retired they took with them the cryptonyms needed to unlock these secrets.
There were, of course, those for whom the cover-up never ended. During the 1960s Military Intelligence found it necessary to lie to the Immigration Service on several occasions when asked for information from its files, in order to conceal complicity in the smuggling operation. Within the CIA several old OPC hands still loyal to their Nazi protégés frustrated congressional and OSI requests for information in 1979. Exculpatory documents were again inserted in CIA records, and incriminating SS files were once more removed from the National Archives. The FBI refused to provide OSI with the complete dossiers on its Byelorussian informants, such as Anton Adamovitch of Radio Liberty. Only heavily censored summaries that did not reflect the full Nazi background of those under investigation were supplied. Perhaps the sanitizing process continued because of bureaucratic inertia. Without knowing why they were doing it – like Japanese soldiers holding out on Pacific islands long after the end of World War II – the SOD clerks continued to delete any information from the files pertaining to intelligence operatives connected with Wisner’s OPC.
Not all the blame for the cover-up belongs to the Cold War intelligence community. The congressmen who were in charge of overseeing intelligence programs at that time must share the responsibility because of their failure to perform the duties assigned them. As long ago as 1956, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, a member of one of the CIA oversight committees, stated:
It is not a reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have, unless I believed it to be my responsibility to have it because it might involve the lives of American citizens.
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I asked two former members of OPC and two retired CIA officials if it were true that no one ever told Congress about the Nazi connection or the details of Wisner’s secret war. They replied that they learned about the Nazis only from contacts in their individual overseas operations, and none of them had ever known of the Nazis in America. They doubted that Wisner or Dulles informed Congress, but most seemed fairly certain that Congress never asked, because members rarely asked about any “operational details.” If Nixon and Rockefeller were given briefings on the Nazis, it was done privately and not through regular channels. One very senior official interviewed recently did recall that C. D. Jackson of Eisenhower’s White House staff was squeezed off the Twenty Committee because he favored psychological warfare rather than the more popular paramilitary and political action programs, which his successors, Nixon and Rockefeller, authorized with enthusiasm.
We talked at length about the traditional methods of security compartmentalization, which keeps all but a handful of officials from knowing the complete picture of an intelligence operation. I asked if it were possible that this same system of compartmentalization had prevented Wisner’s rivals from discovering the full extent of his Nazi-recruiting program while he was with the State Department, and even after he left the post of DDP. Yes, they replied, it was possible. Wisner would have needed only a handful of operatives in the visa section of various consulates to bring anyone he wished to America. Once the underground railroad was established, it could continue running even after OPC was merged into the CIA, and neither Congress nor the President would know
The original purpose of this book was to amass incontrovertible evidence that the Justice Department had organized an obstruction of Congress with regard to the specific cases of Kushel, Jasiuk, Stankievich, and Lebed. In each of these cases, the Justice Department knew the truth, and lied about it. Many of the participants, such as Allan Ryan and Richard Sullivan are still alive, and should be compelled by an independent prosecutor to testify about their roles in harboring the perpetrators of the Holocaust from their victims. There is still time for survivors and their descendants to bring civil suits under the Filartega precedent against those who persecuted their families in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the Justice Department itself could be sued for its role in hiding the vast majority of the Arab and European Nazi collaborators in the United States.
After giving up my career and risking my family’s safety to testify before Congress, I am no longer hopeful that anything will be done. Still, Congress and the American people must know this much: The unlocking of the Belarus secret is not the end of the conspiracy. It is only the beginning. The situation has not improved over the last quarter-century.
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There is a continuous lack of scrutiny, a heritage of congressional negligence that allows the intelligence community to act on its own authority. When Bill Casey asked Oliver North to set up an “all purpose” private spy organization to trade arms to Iran for money to help the Contras, North was directed to the NSC 5412 authorization of OPC without Congressional approval. North cited 5412 in his notes as justification for his wholesale defiance of the Congressional ban on funding the Contras. Wisner and Dulles’ legacy haunts us still.
Without the assent or knowledge of the present members of Congress, intelligence agencies have smuggled a modern band of “war criminals” into the United States. The leader of this Iranian intelligence group, Chief of SAVAK Moghaddam, was installed in power by the OPC three decades ago and is alleged to have persecuted 200,000 innocent Iranian civilians. Despite full knowledge of his alleged atrocities, Moghaddam was approved for sanctuary in the United States by President Carter’s Justice Department. Although Moghaddam was reported executed in Iran before he could escape to America, it now appears that his SAVAK followers are entering this country in significant numbers.
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To be fair, some allegations against SAVAK appear to have been falsified or exaggerated. A similar case happened to the MEK, an insurgent group whom the Iranians demanded be put on the terrorist list. The EU, and now the USA, are removing the MEK group from the banned list. The point is that US intelligence is incapable of determining friend from foe, and the Justice Department seems either incompetent or indifferent to Congress’s prohibitions on immigration.
The most current example is the Justice Department’s blind spot towards the mass immigration of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Members of this Arab Nazi organization are clearly ineligible for citizenship, as they openly advocate replacement of the US Government and Constitution with the racist and extremist cult of Al-Salafiyyah al-Jihadiyah. Every civilized western nation, and all of the Arab countries, bans the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. The US Justice Department and State Department continue to protect the Muslim Brotherhood, the last surviving remnant of the original Arab Nazi intelligence networks.
This cover-up of the Arab Nazi brotherhood has reached the point that the Executive Branch falsified information to the Congressional 9/11 Commission in order to protect their own informants who had aided the attacks on the twin trade towers.
For example, Professor Sami Al Arian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and co-founder of the Palestinian Jihad Terrorist Group, grew up in Kuwait where his family was close with one of the senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was the uncle of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the chief planners of the 9/11 attacks. It was Al Arian’s brother in law, Masson al Najjar, who taught Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the tiny engineering department at North Carolina Agriculture and Technology College. Among the courses that Khalid Sheik Mohammed studied at NCA&T and elsewhere were building structures and aviation power plants, exactly what he needed to plan the attack on the Twin Towers.
Others of Al Arian’s business associates were members of a Palestinian clan that provides most of the logistical and financial support for terrorist groups operating in the United States. When Al Arian obtained a teaching job at the University of South Florida, his brother in law followed with a friend from the clan. Najjar and his clan friend had nearly consecutive social security numbers from the same office in North Carolina and arrived in Florida shortly after each other. Al Arian himself and another Clan member incorporated a Florida “bank” with the exact same name as the bank in the UAE that funded the 9/11 terrorists going through flight school in Florida and other states. Apparently Al Arian and the clan opened their “Al Baraka” bank only to enable the 9/11 terrorists to cash their checks in Florida. It is no coincidence that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Florida Bank closed a few weeks after 9/11.
With Al Arian’s support, and financial help from the Saudis, Al Arian’s clan purchased a series of auto dealerships in western Florida. One of them was on land owned by Al Arian. Stolen luxury cars across the USA were funneled through the clan’s network to Dhubai where they were re-sold for two or three times their price by a car network run by one of Al Qaeda’s “golden chain” financiers. Older vehicles were turned into car bombs to kill American soldiers in Iraq. Two of the car bombs have been traced through the Clan’s network through their vehicle identification (VIN) numbers.
A brilliant private investigator named Bill Warner of Sarasota, Florida came up with an extremely innovative method of tracking the members of the Clan’s terrorist network. He approached me for a list of all Al Arian’s friends and clan contacts. Warner then sent out an advertisement to each of them enclosing a pre-paid cell phone card. The pitch was to try our new phone company’s international call service free for ninety days, and then decide whether to become a permanent subscriber.
One of the idiots in the clan actually used our calling card. In one stroke, we had become the Muslim Brotherhood’s telephone service. As a telephone company, we lawfully purchased the phone bills of everyone our customer contacted, allegedly to recruit new customers. We used the phone bills to identify the clan’s overseas contacts, and then I cross-matched the phone records against the terrorist attacks of Hamas, PIJ, and Al Qaeda, all of which are subsidiaries of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The results were astonishing. We had the calling records of the Al Qaeda cell in Ceuta as they planned their abortive attack on shipping off Gibraltar. We could tell that every time a clan member in California called a cell phone in a refugee camp in Jordan, a terrorist attack on Israel would take place that same day. Mr. Warner and I assembled a nationwide map of terrorist logistical cells in America complete with their overseas telephone contacts. We did not trust the Justice Department’s FBI, so we presented our cell phone map to NORTHCOM military intelligence.
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