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Lattimore was hounded by McCarthy and his allies for the rest of his professional career. He was repeatedly called before congressional investigating committees, publicly denounced (in part as the result of Poppe's testimony) as a “conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy … since the 1930s,” and indicted for perjury. The charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but that was a Pyrrhic victory for Lattimore. He left the country at age sixty-three to take a teaching assignment at Leeds University in England.

Today Poppe openly discusses many aspects of his work for the Nazis and insists that he shares no responsibility for war crimes. In 1948, Poppe says, “the Americans who wanted me to come to the U.S. interrogated me. I told them everything about Wannsee and about [SS RSHA] Amt VI. They said that this was not regarded as a war crimes organization. They said, ‘All right, you have not to fear anything.'
*
“[SS Standartenführer] Augsburg and [Wannsee Director]
Akhmeteli,” according to Poppe, “also did not have to fear anything. We were just doing research, and any nation does that in wartime.” Poppe is philosophical about his defection to the Nazis. “Things do not always go by a straight line,” he says, referring to his journey from the USSR to the United States. “There are also breaks, and zigs and zags.”
³⁰

While Poppe was an intelligence expert and Hilger a high-ranking diplomat, a large number of Bloodstone recruits appear to have been leaders of pro-Axis émigré organizations. One example of this type of Bloodstone profile will have to suffice. In this case, which actually involves not just one but at least six high-ranking Albanian émigrés, we again see that certain Bloodstone recruits had backgrounds as leading Nazi collaborators.

Midhat Frasheri had been head of the Albanian Nazi collaborationist organization Balli Kombetar during the war. Frasheri first approached the U.S. ambassador in Rome in 1947 with a plan to import fifty Albanian refugee leaders into the United States to counteract what he called Communist “intrigues” among Albanians living in this country, according to Stanford University doctoral candidate Marc Truitt, who first uncovered the incident.
³¹

Among the men proposed by Frasheri were Xhafer Deva, the former minister of interior of the Italian Fascist occupation regime in Albania, who had been responsible for deportation of “Jews, Communists, partisans and suspicious persons” (as a captured SS report put it) to extermination camps in Poland as well as for punitive raids by the Nazi-organized Albanian SS Skanderbeg Division; Hasan Dosti, the former minister of justice in the pro-Fascist government; Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, the Albanian premier from 1941 to 1943; and, of course, Frasheri himself. Frasheri's crew had been responsible for the administration of Albania under Fascist sponsorship. The small mountain territory had relatively few Jews, so relatively few were captured and killed, but not for lack of trying by the Balli Kombetar organization, and the Albanian SS. Surviving reports implicate the Albanian SS division in a series of anti-Semitic purges that rounded up about 800 people, the majority of whom were deported and murdered.

The U.S. State Department initially rejected Frasheri's plan because of what it termed the “somewhat checkered” background of his wards. But his plan later came to the attention of Robert Joyce, the State Department's liaison officer with the CIA and OPC, who was active in Bloodstone and other political warfare programs. On
May 12, 1949, Joyce took steps to obtain a U.S. visa for Frasheri. The Albanian collaborator's entry into the United States “is considered in the national interest” by “our friends,” Joyce wrote in an apparent reference to Wisner's OPC division at the CIA. The visa was issued, and Frasheri entered the United States later that year, followed shortly by his team of Albanian leaders.
³²

Once inside the country, Frasheri, Deva, Dosti, and several others established the National Committee for a Free Albania, which was substantially financed by the CIA with funds laundered through foundations and through Radio Free Europe. The committee subsequently played an important role in recruiting Albanian refugees for a series of abortive invasions of their homeland sponsored by the OPC under NSC 10/2. It is now known, however, that those invasion attempts were betrayed by British double agent Kim Philby and by Soviet spies among the émigrés in Europe. The unfortunate Albanian rebels attempting to overthrow the Albanian Communist Enver Hoxha's regime in their homeland were quickly rounded up and shot.

Frasheri's senior lieutenants were safely in the United States and able to avoid that fate, however. Most of them went on to long careers in right-wing politics in the United States and were active in the Assembly of Captive European Nations, which was also financed by the CIA, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service. Deva lived comfortably in Palo Alto, California, until he died in 1978; Merlika-Kruja, the former quisling premier, died in New York in 1958; and Hasan Dosti, the former minister of justice, is at this writing in his eighties and living in Los Angeles. All of them served as senior officers in the National Committee for a Free Albania and on a long list of Albanian fraternal groups in the United States.
³³
Dosti dismisses charges that Albanian war criminals entered the United States as nothing more than “Communist propaganda.”

*
Alexander's highly publicized activities during 1948 are another indication that Bloodstone was geared to bring in Nazi collaborators, not Communists. In July of that year Alexander defied Secretary of State Marshall by testifying in Congress that “Communist agents” were entering the United States under cover of United Nations agencies. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration “was the greatest offender,” he said, adding that some of the Communists had been trained as spies and terrorists. Alexander's testimony, in short, stressed the need to keep Communists, former Communists, and anyone who might be sympathetic to them out of the country at all costs.

Secretary Marshall was concerned that conservatives in Congress would use the “UN spy” testimony, as it came to be known, to derail a $65 million U.S. loan to the United Nations that was being strongly backed by the administration. The secretary rejected Alexander's charges, and a variety of follow-up studies concluded that Alexander's “irresponsible statements produced serious repercussions on the foreign policy of the United States.”

Alexander was eventually appointed deputy administrator for all U.S. refugee programs under the Refugee Relief Act. He publicly recommended that the “free nations of the world … undertake a concerted effort to solve the refugee problem” by organizing military retaliation against governments—particularly Communist ones—that were producing too many refugees. In the meantime, he cautioned, accepting more exiles from socialist countries “even for humanitarian reasons” only “drain[ed] off the properly discordant and recalcitrant elements” of their populations, thus propping up Soviet rule.

ϯ Kirkpatrick is today an irrepressibly cheerful man with a comfortable girth and a goatee that makes him resemble, of all people, an aging Leon Trotsky. He is also husband to Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration. Mr. and Mrs. Kirkpatrick share ownership in Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (also known as OPR, Inc.), which has benefited over the years from government contracts for studies in psychological warfare, defense policy, and political behavior. Critics have alleged that the company served as a funding conduit between U.S. intelligence agencies and promising scholars.

*
A special Bloodstone subcommittee had, in fact, been created to supply false identities, government cover jobs, and secret police protection to selected Bloodstone immigrants because “the activities in which some of the aliens concerned are to be engaged may result in jeopardizing their safety from foreign agents [inside] the United States.”

ϯ
The PPS was simultaneously engaged in a second project employing Nazi collaborators through a U.S.-financed “think tank” named the Eurasian Institute. According to declassified State Department records bearing George Kennan's handwritten initials, the Eurasian Institute enlisted such men as Saldh Ulus, who was described in U.S. cables as an “important member of [the] German espionage network in Central Asia from 1931 to 1945,” and Mehmet Sunsh, who was said to have been “employed by the German Propaganda Bureau [in] Istanbul 1942.”

Eurasian Institute work was handled in large part by Bloodstone specialists John Paton Davies and Carmel Offie, according to declassified State Department records. Many of its recruits were eventually integrated into the Munich-based (and CIA-financed) Institute for the Study of the USSR during the early 1950s.

*
In 1985 the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that U.S. intelligence agencies considered Poppe to have been a “traitor” during the war, as the GAO put it, but not a “war criminal” at the time they sponsored his immigration into the United States in 1948.

More recently the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which is responsible for prosecuting Nazis and collaborators alleged to have entered this country illegally, closed out an investigation of Poppe's immigration to the United States without bringing any charges against him. This action was taken in part because the OSI determined that Poppe had disclosed his relationship with the SS to U.S. intelligence prior to his immigration, thus making it highly unlikely that the OSI could successfully prosecute Poppe for illegal entry into the United States.

CHAPTER TEN

Bare Fists and Brass Knuckles

Many of the Bloodstone recruits—both Nazi collaborators and anti-Nazis—were passed along to two heavily funded CIA psychological warfare projects that are still in operation. These two enterprises were authorized under the “subversion against hostile states” and “propaganda” sections of NSC 10/2 and are probably the largest and most expensive political warfare efforts ever undertaken by the United States. They are certainly the longest-running and best-publicized “secret” operations ever. Their names are Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, the latter of which is better known as Radio Liberation or Radio Liberty.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (usually abbreviated RFE/RL) began in 1948 as a corporation named the National Committee for a Free Europe, a supposedly private charitable organization dedicated to aiding exiles from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. The roots of the RFE/RL effort, in an administrative sense, are the same political warfare programs that gave birth to Bloodstone and NSC 10/2.

George Kennan, Allen Dulles, and a handful of other foreign affairs specialists came up with the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) as a unique solution to a knotty problem. The U.S. government found it advantageous to maintain conventional, albeit frosty, diplomatic relations with the Communist-dominated governments of the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and the other satellite
states. However, the Department of State and the intelligence community also wished to underwrite the anti-Communist work of the numerous émigré organizations that claimed to represent “governments-in-exile” of the same countries. It was impossible to have diplomatic relations with both the official governments of Eastern Europe and the “governments-in-exile” at the same time, for obvious reasons. The NCFE was therefore launched to serve as a thinly veiled “private-sector” cover through which clandestine U.S. funds for the exile committees could be passed.
¹

The seed money for the National Committee for a Free Europe was drawn from the same pool of captured German assets that had earlier financed clandestine operations during the Italian election. At least $2 million left over from that affair found its way first into the hands of Frank Wisner's OPC and then into the accounts of the NCFE, according to former RFE/RL president Sig Mickelson, who helped administer Radio Free Europe money for many years. Printing presses, radio transmitters, and other equipment salvaged from the Italian campaign were also transferred to the OPC and from there on to the NCFE.
²

Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner combined their talents to line up an all-star board of directors for the NCFE that served as a cover, in effect, to explain where all the money was coming from. Early corporate notables who served on the board or as members of the NCFE include (to name only a few) J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace & Company and the National City Bank; H. J. Heinz of the Mellon Bank and Heinz tomato ketchup fame; Texas oilman George C. McGhee; auto magnate Henry Ford II; film directors Darryl Zanuck and Cecil B. De Mille; and so many Wall Street lawyers that NCFE board meetings could have resembled a gathering of the New York State Bar Association. The intelligence community's contingent featured former OSS chief William J. Donovan, Russian émigré Bernard Yarrow, and Allen Dulles himself, among others. Labor was represented in the person of James B. Carey, a self-described CIO “labor executive” who played a leading role in the trade union movement's purge of Communists during the late 1940s. Carey was outspoken in his attitude concerning communism. “In the last war we joined with the Communists to fight the Fascists,” he told the
New York Herald Tribune
. “In another war we will join the Fascists to defeat the Communists.”
³

From the beginning the National Committee for a Free Europe depended upon the voluntary silence of powerful media personalities
in the United States to cloak its true operations in secrecy. “Representatives of some of the nation's most influential media giants were involved early on as members of the corporation [NCFE],” Mickelson notes in a relatively frank history of its activities. This board included “magazine publishers Henry Luce [of Time-Life] and DeWitt Wallace [of
Reader's Digest
],” he writes, “but not a word of the government involvement appeared in print or on the air.” Luce and Wallace were not the only ones: C. D. Jackson, editor in chief of
Fortune
magazine, came on board in 1951 as president of the entire Radio Free Europe effort, while
Reader's Digest
senior editor Eugene Lyons headed the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia Inc., a corporate parent of Radio Liberation. Still, “sources of financing,” Mickelson writes, were “never mentioned” in the press.
⁴