America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (8 page)

[Pages 30-46: Letter from John Loftus to CIA, July 25, 1994.]

Shortly after I wrote that letter to the CIA, I became very ill.
[42]
A few details of the wiretapping were finally cleared for publication in my book
The Secret War Against the Jews
, but I had to remain silent about most of the Nazi connection. As long as Lebed was alive, I could go to jail for writing about him. DOJ’s deception of both CIA and Congress lasted for more than another decade. Finally in 2009, the CIA declassified its file holdings for Mykola Lebed under the new Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.

In a January 6, 1987 Memorandum for the Deputy Director of Operations, CIA staff noted that the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations had reopened an investigation of Mykola Lebed (Ryan and Sullivan were long gone from the Nazi hunting unit). Note that this CIA Lebed memo was written two years after Lebed’s file was presented by the GAO at the Congressional hearings and seven years before I informed the CIA about Lebed’s files at Justice and Army Intelligence. Thus, the 1987 files accurately reflect the state of ignorance in which DOJ had placed the CIA concerning Lebed’s true history.

The 1987 CIA file asserts that Lebed (whose codename was QRPLUMB/2) was an anti-Nazi Ukranian who was wanted by the Gestapo during WWII, and then came to work for CIA. The CIA was concerned that if the Justice Department asked the Soviets for help, the Russians would use it to blacken Lebed’s good name. In 1987, the CIA thought Lebed, after all, was an anti-Nazi and had never committed any war crimes.

The 1987 CIA memo also notes that a CIA officer who had previously worked at OSI was sent back to the Justice Department to ask OSI not to request information about Lebed from the Russians. I knew immediately that the file referred to Dick Sullivan, my old boss at the Justice Department, whom I had personally and extensively briefed on the Lebed files. Sullivan was the only lawyer who had left Justice OSI and gone over to the CIA. (Sullivan later confirmed this in a series of emails to me.)

Reading the CIA memo decades later, I realized what had happened. Sullivan, who had read the classified GAO report to Congress, knew that someone had withheld the real story about Lebed from the GAO. Sullivan was in the hearing room that day and said nothing as the false story was presented to Congress. The legal name for this is misprision of a felony. Two years later, Sullivan again withheld the truth about Lebed from the CIA when they asked him to intervene at Justice.

To top it all off, Sullivan falsely told his successors at OSI that Lebed was in the anti-Nazi resistance when Sullivan knew that Lebed was a major war criminal who had recruited Ukrainian Nazis for the SS, including some who were previously targets of OSI investigations. This is called
obstruction of justice
. It is a bit ironic that Sullivan could potentially be indicted by the Justice Department for continuing the Justice Department’s own cover-up of Lebed’s Nazi past. Certainly an independent prosecutor is in order.

What is absolutely clear from the 1987 CIA memo is that Sullivan had withheld his special knowledge of Lebed’s past from the GAO, from Congress, from the CIA, and even from his successors at OSI. To their credit, new OSI Director Neil Sher and his Deputy Mike Wolf increased their scrutiny of Lebed after Sullivan’s visit. Neither of them knew that the Justice Department and Army Intelligence had voluminous files on Lebed’s activities.

In the Top Secret Files of Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service is a letter from Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles’ Deputy in OPC. Like Sullivan several decades later, Wisner had written to ask the Justice Department’s INS to head off an investigation into Lebed’s Ukrainian Nazi unit, the SB. Unlike Sullivan, Wisner candidly admitted that the SB had worked for the Nazis and was now running an assassination program against Communists in the Ukraine.

I included quotes from the Wisner letter in my original manuscript of this book. It is absolutely clear from the letter quoted herein that Wisner had asked the Justice Department’s INS to cover up the illegal immigration of Nazi collaborators from the SB. It is obvious from subsequent events that Justice honored Wisner’s request. Lebed’s SB was in fact used by OPC in its cold war assassination program codenamed REDWOOD. All references to REDWOOD, and its companion programs REDSOX and REDCAP, were censored from the original manuscript of this book.

Sullivan insists to me that Ryan had nothing to do with any of this, but both Sullivan and Ryan read the uncensored version in 1981 when I first submitted this book for publication review.
[43]
Both men already knew by the end of 1981 what the CIA and Congress did not – that Mykola Lebed was the head of a Nazi intelligence unit called the SB that worked for OPC. Moreover, the Justice Department itself had been protecting Lebed and members of his SB unit from deportation as Nazi war criminals so that Frank Wisner and the OPC could keep them on the payroll as cold war assassins.

In the newly declassified CIA files, it is clear that Lebed warned the CIA that he could go public about the people who lost their lives in REDWOOD if his propaganda organization’s funding were ever discontinued. It does not appear that the attending CIA officer ever knew what REDWOOD was about or even understood that Lebed was trying to blackmail him by threatening to expose one of OPC’s black projects.

When Professor Jeffrey Burds discovered the CIA’s Lebed files in the Archives, he contacted me. I suggested that he immediately inform OSI. The current director, Eli Rosenbaum, went into a tirade, denying that Lebed had ever committed any war crimes. Professor Burds explained that after the fall of communism, he had visited the Ukrainian archives and conducted interviews confirming Lebed’s massacres, atrocities and war crimes beyond any reasonable doubt.
[44]

It is unclear whether Rosenbaum, like Sullivan and Ryan, had any previous knowledge of Lebed’s status as a Nazi sponsored by the Attorney General on behalf of OPC. It is absolutely clear that Rosenbaum had known all along – since the time when he was just a researcher for OSI – that Lebed was a wanted war criminal. While still a law student, Rosenbaum was the author of an OSI research memo listing the top Nazi war criminals wanted by the Russians. Lebed’s name was featured prominently on Rosenbaum’s list. I have no explanation for his lapse of memory.
[45]

Memory lapses seem to be epidemic among some of OSI’s leaders.
[46]
Whatever the truth about Ryan’s and Sullivan’s involvement in hiding Lebed’s background from Congress, the GAO and the CIA, it should be noted that the overwhelming majority of OSI’s leaders were people of integrity such as Rockler, Sher and Wolf. The men and women of OSI have done a superb job documenting the length and breadth of the Holocaust under western standards of evidentiary proof. Only a small minority of people within OSI perpetuated a lie. Unfortunately, they were enough.

In 1985, Justice allowed a false and fraudulent background story for Lebed to be given to the GAO for submission to the House Judiciary Committee. It is time, I submit, for these Justice Department officials, including but not limited to Ryan and Sullivan, to be called before a grand jury by a Special Independent Prosecutor.

Some time ago, I received a letter from CIA confirming that I no longer needed to submit any of my manuscripts for prepublication review. Thus, the description of the uncensored British edition is included here for the first time. At long last, I am free to tell the American people and Congress not all of the story, but at least most of it.

Those readers from the UK will have to wait a bit longer for the full record of their own government’s perfidious involvement with fugitive Nazi war criminals. The remaining one-third of the American Nazi records are mostly of British origin. The British Secret Intelligence Service requires that at least seventy five years pass from time of original classification. It will be 2015-2025 before the last, sad secrets of World War II are revealed to the British public. I am sixty years old now, and hope I live long enough to tell the rest of the story.

Here are just a few of the things I would like to discuss with Congress, most of which I would have told them in 1985, had they not barred me from testifying in executive session.

It was the Justice Department itself which helped draft the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918 to carve loopholes in Teddy Roosevelt’s “trust busting” legislation. This enabled the Robber Barons to establish trusts, cartels and monopolies overseas, draining America of investment capital, and helped to bring about the crash of 1929.

During the 1920s the Robber Barons protected their overseas investments by funding extremist groups to keep the trade unions under control. In Germany, they funded the infant Nazi party, in Russia, they funded the infant Bolshevik party, and in the Middle East, they funded the Wahhabbi terrorists (the Ikhwan al Muslimeen or Muslim Brothers) who used American guns to place the House of Saud on the throne. The Justice Department to this day protects this Muslim Brotherhood group from being included on our terrorist lists, as almost every European and Arab state has done.

The Robber Barons were both Republican and Democrats. In truth they only believed in profit. They were comprised of some of America’s wealthiest families, including the Harrimans, Bushes, Rockefellers, DuPonts and of course, the Dulleses. It is not an exaggeration to say that they funded both Hitler and Stalin.

The new documentary film,
American Secrets
, in which I am proud to have played a part, reveals how the American Robber Barons initially planned for Auschwitz to be a profit center, and how many of them secretly controlled Nazi front companies before, during and after WWII.

The Justice Department played a critical role in protecting the Robber Barons from prosecution for Nazi collaboration. Walter Rockler, who recruited me for OSI, was himself a Nazi prosecutor at the Bankers’ Trial at Nuremberg. He knew that there was some kind of fix to protect American bankers. Rockler gave me the secret assignment of tracing the Nazi money to its American sources. I disclosed some of this in my declassified book,
Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks
. All mentions of the Vatican connection were censored from the original manuscript of
The Belarus Secret
.
[47]

The British Secret Service, under the leadership of double agent Kim Philby, played a critical role in recruiting fugitives from both the Eastern European and Arab Nazi movements. Philby dumped these groups on the Dulles brothers who, with the cooperation of their allies inside the State and Justice Departments, hid them from prosecution in America. It is entirely probable that Philby’s protégé, Mykola Lebed, was the longest surviving Soviet agent inside the CIA.

As the State Department later explained to the Australian intelligence community, the Eastern European Nazis were the GOP’s antidote to the Jewish vote for the Democrats in five key states during the Nixon era. Similarly, the Muslim Nazi movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, was used to offset the Jewish vote and narrowly swing the state of Florida for President Bush.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a Nazi movement, was used by the Dulles brothers during the cold war as a counterweight to the Arab-Communist movements. In time, the Brotherhood splintered into a dozen or more Sunni based terrorist groups. From their secret bases in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood became the latest iteration of the extremist groups funded by the Robber Barons.

The rise of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Enron’s manic diversion of funds to Pakistan, both had their roots in the second generation Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood, protected by the US Justice Department. To this day, the United States is the only major power not to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. In an ironic touch, OSI is now in charge of their terrorist investigations.

The bottom line is that for nearly a century, segments of the US Justice Department and the State Department have been running a foreign policy directly at odds with orders of the Presidents and contrary to the knowledge and consent of Congress and the American people. This ongoing bureaucratic mutiny has nothing to do with ideology – they funded the Nazis and the Bolsheviks alike. There was no conspiracy, just a large number of separate Wall Street sharks swimming in parallel lines towards their bleeding victims. It was all about the money.

Many years ago, when I first submitted the manuscript of this book for censorship, one of my CIA reviewers grumbled that I had more of an institutional memory than they did. It is really not surprising, since I had studied the classified archives of the twenty-two other US intelligence agencies who had spied on the early CIA.

Then again, I had help. My editor at Knopf Publishers, the legendary and recently retired Ashbell Green, had himself been one the old OPC hands. If memory serves, his Master’s thesis was on the Hungarian Nazi movement. He was not one of the Nazi recruiters, but had heard enough to know that the story about the Nazi connection had to be told.