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Other examples along these lines may be cited. In the Middle East top German espionage agent Fritz Grobba turned himself and
his entire spy net over to the Russians at least as early as 1945; in the Balkans Nazi finance expert Carl Clodius, who had built his reputation in part by applying slave labor to Germany's economic problems, went on to become the economics chief in the Cominform's Balkans division; in East Germany SS General Hans Rattenhuber, formerly commander of Hitler's personal SS guard, re-emerged after the war as a senior East German political police official in East Berlin; and so on.
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Clearly the Soviets, too, were willing to forgive past Nazi indiscretions when it was in their interest to do so.

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The brutality of nazism was masked at the interrogation center but was present nonetheless. One wartime escape ended in the roundup and summary execution of some fifty Allied prisoners of war, mainly British. Consistently uncooperative or escape-prone prisoners were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

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Examples of SS and Gestapo veterans who ended up in police work in East Germany include Abwehr Lieutenant General Rudolph Bamler, who collaborated with Soviet military intelligence following his capture by the Russians and eventually became a department head at state security headquarters in East Berlin; Johann Sanitzer, once in charge of the Gestapo's anti-Jewish work in Vienna and later an East German police major in Erfurt; and SS Captain Louis Hagemeister, who had once handled counterespionage for the SS and later became chief police interrogator in Schwerin. Ex-SS Sturmbannführer Heidenreich became the official liaison between the East German political police and the Central Committee of the country's Communist party after the war. Dimitry and Nina Erdely, a husband-and-wife team specializing in émigré affairs for the Gestapo, ended up with the Soviet United Nations delegation in New York. It is likely that they had been Soviet double agents during the war. Maintaining their wartime cover, however, required that they “help … send many Soviet citizens to concentration camps,” as a declassified U.S. State Department report on their activities puts it.

At least two former SS officers found their way onto the Central Committee of East Germany's Communist party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. They are Ernst Grossmann (a former Sachsenhausen concentration camp guard) and Waffen SS veteran Karlheinz Bartsch. Both were quickly purged when word of their wartime careers was published in the West.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I … Prefer to Remain Ignorant”

The emerging East-West conflict had entered a new and clearly more hostile phase early in 1947. The British government, exhausted by war and deeply in debt, had abruptly announced that January that it was withdrawing from its earlier guarantees to stabilize power in Greece, where a bitter civil war was raging between left-wing rebels and British-backed Greek monarchist forces. President Truman blamed the Soviets for the crisis and stepped in with a multimillion-dollar aid program for the “democratic” forces in Greece—though there is considerable dispute over just how democratic they actually were—and with a series of campaigns to restrict the activities of pro-Communist movements in both the Middle East and Europe.

Truman claimed that the Soviets were underwriting the Greek insurgency and asserted that this justified a major U.S. commitment in that country. In fact, however, the Greek left was primarily an indigenous force. What outside aid the Greek rebels did enjoy came primarily from Tito's Yugoslavia, which was already having serious problems of its own with Stalin.
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Be that as it may, it was clear to the Americans that communism was to be regarded as the main enemy in Greece. After liberation in 1944, political power in that country had teetered uneasily between a nationalist-Communist alliance dominated by the Greek Communist party (EAM), on the one hand, and the
weakened Greek monarchist forces. Both groups had fought the Nazi occupation during the war, though with varying degrees of dedication. When the British announced in early 1947 that they were withdrawing their sponsorship of the monarchists, almost every observer concluded that a leftist victory was at hand.

There was, however, another force in Greece, and it is to them that U.S. Intelligence turned. This was known as the Holy Bond of Greek Officers, or IDEA, by its Greek initials. This organization was made up in large part of Nazi collaborators. The Greek army and police were well known to have been controlled by rightists since the 1930s, and the bulk of those forces had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation. These sympathizers created “security battalions” during the war to hunt down anti-Nazi partisans and to execute Jews who had escaped from the ghetto at Salonika. These detachments were responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of Greeks during the occupation, according to all accounts, and directly assisted the Nazis in the liquidation of about 70,000 Greek Jews. After the Nazis had been driven out of the country, however, the security battalions and their officers were in deep disgrace. Colonel George Papadopoulos helped create IDEA shortly after the Nazis had been driven out of Greece, ostensibly to protect the Greek population from Communist attack. “In reality,” however, the
Times
of London later reported, “a principal activity of IDEA was to secure rehabilitation of those officers who had been initially purged by the post-liberation coalition government because of their activities in the collaborationist ‘security battalions' of the occupation years.”
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Secret Pentagon papers now in the U.S. National Archives show that the United States poured millions of dollars into IDEA during the U.S. intervention in Greece in order to create what it termed “Secret Army Reserve” made up of selected Greek military, police, and anti-Communist militia officers. Sufficient money, arms, and supplies to equip a fighting force of at least 15,000 men were shipped to Greece in connection with this program alone. This semiclandestine army soon emerged with American backing as the central “democratic” force in Greece, and a long line of latter-day Greek strongmen such as Colonel Papadopoulos
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(who eventually
took control of the CIA-supported Greek central intelligence agency, KYP) and military leaders General Alexander Natsinas and General Nicolaos Gogoussis have been drawn from IDEA's ranks.
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American arms and money had a powerful impact in Greece. Many Greek nationalist forces abandoned their former EAM allies—in part because of the brutality of the EAM in its execution of an attempted guerrilla war against the U.S.-backed forces—and within two years a strongly pro-American government had achieved control of the country.

Truman's decisive action in Greece had wider ramifications. It helped crystallize sentiment inside the U.S. government, which up to that point had often been divided over just how harshly to deal with the USSR, into a new and much more obdurate approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. This new strategy marked an important watershed in the development of U.S. efforts to make use of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, eventually creating the administrative structure and bureaucratic rationale for their utilization on an even wider scale than before.

The thinking behind this strategy was perhaps best articulated by George F. Kennan, the State Department expert on Soviet affairs who at the time had recently been appointed chief of the department's Policy Planning Staff. Kennan had served several tours of diplomatic duty in Moscow over the previous two decades, and his experience there had left him deeply bitter about both Stalin's dictatorship and the prospects for East-West cooperation. His antipathy toward Stalin had kept him isolated from the policy process during the Roosevelt administration, when relatively close U.S.-USSR ties were backed by the White House. He had come into his own, however, in the Truman years. His famous 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow (as it has since come to be known) became a rallying cry for those at State, the War Department, and the White House who were determined to get tough with the Russians. That message read, as Kennan himself later recalled, “exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.” Even so,
“its effect … was nothing less than sensational,” he writes. “It was one that changed my career and my life in very basic ways.… My reputation was made. My voice now carried.”
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By the time the United States intervened in Greece, Kennan enjoyed the direct sponsorship of Secretary of the Navy (soon to be Secretary of Defense) James Forrestal and of Secretary of State George Marshall. Acting on Forrestal's behalf, Kennan prepared a pivotal analysis of the USSR that has since come to be called the “containment doctrine” and is generally recognized as one of the basic programmatic statements of the cold war. In it, Kennan succeeded in reconciling many of the inchoate and conflicting perspectives on how to deal with the Soviets that had characterized Truman's administration up to that point. He argued that U.S.Soviet relations were a fundamentally hostile, protracted conflict that had been initiated by the USSR—not the United States—and that normal relations between the two states would be impossible as long as a Soviet type government was in power in the USSR. Their “ideology,” he wrote, “… has taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders.… [This] means that there can never be on Moscow's side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalist.”

The USSR was an imperial empire, Kennan continued, but the modern-day East-West clash could be managed through measures short of all-out war through what he termed “long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” and the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” As originally formulated, the containment doctrine envisioned bottling up internal pressures inside the USSR until they forced the Soviet Union to “cooperate or collapse,” as
Newsweek
summarized it, a process that was expected to take about ten to fifteen years. “Soviet power,” Kennan concluded, “… bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and … the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.”
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Kennan was later to assert that his intention at the time he prepared his analysis was to say that the “counterforce” and “containment” that gave the doctrine its name should employ political, not military, tactics. The phrases quoted above, he said, were misinterpreted by Secretary of Defense Forrestal and others when they used Kennan's formulations to promote NATO, a giant arms budget,
the permanent division of Germany, and a number of other policies that the diplomat opposed.
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Regardless of Kennan's reservations, it was precisely these more aggressive aspects of containment that attracted Forrestal and other hard-liners in the Truman administration. In their hands, containment became the theoretical framework for U.S.-Soviet relations under which a wide variety of clandestine warfare tactics, ranging from radio propaganda to sabotage and murder, was chosen to counteract—“contain”—left-wing initiatives virtually anywhere in the world.

Although it was rarely mentioned in the public discussions, it is clear that covert operations aimed at harassing (and, if possible, overthrowing) hostile governments were an integral part of the containment strategy from the beginning. A new breed of realpolitik advocates among the government's national security specialists embraced containment as a rationale for what has since come to be called “destabilization” of the USSR and its satellites. Put briefly, destabilization is a type of psychological or political warfare that is calculated to undermine a target government, to destroy its popular support or credibility, to create economic problems, or to draw it into crisis through some other means. U.S. security planners of the late 1940s became fascinated with the prospect of destabilizing the Soviet Union's satellite states while simultaneously harassing the USSR. They were anxious to capitalize on the spontaneous rebellions against Soviet rule then rumbling through the Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, some of which were approaching civil wars in intensity.

As is well known, Kennan's public work during this period concentrated on development of the Marshall Plan for the economic recovery of Europe and on U.S. policy in the Far East, both of which were tasks with far-reaching implications that have enjoyed lengthy treatment in cold war historiography ever since. Less understood, however, is the role he played in development of American covert operations abroad. Kennan was deeply involved in preparations for several large-scale clandestine propaganda and guerrilla warfare projects aimed at Eastern Europe at the same time he was preparing the containment paper for Forrestal.
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Use of former Nazi collaborators became interwoven with these clandestine destabilization efforts and with the containment doctrine in general from 1947 on. According to Pentagon records, at the same time that Kennan was publicly promulgating containment,
he and his close colleague Charles Thayer were lobbying with top Department of State and military officials for a revival of the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR. Kennan and Thayer pushed for the creation of a new school for anti-Communist guerrilla warfare training designed to bring together U.S. military specialists, Vlasov veterans, and other Eastern European exiles from Soviet satellite states. Several such schools were eventually established in Germany and in the United States and served not only as a training ground for insurgents but also as a source of highly skilled recruits for a variety of other American clandestine operations as well.
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