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The practical effect of this arrangement was the creation of a powerful lobby inside American media that tended to suppress critical news concerning the CIA's propaganda projects. This was not simply a matter of declining to mention the fact that the agency was behind these programs, as Mickelson implies. Actually the media falsified their reports to the public concerning the government's role in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation for years, actively promoting the myth—which most sophisticated editors knew perfectly well was false—that these projects were financed through nickel-and-dime contributions from concerned citizens. Writers soon learned that exposes concerning the NCFE and RFE/ RL were simply not welcome at mainstream publications. No corporate officers needed to issue any memorandums to enforce this silence: with C. D. Jackson as RFE/RL's president and Luce himself on the group's board of directors, for example,
Time
's and
Life
's authors were no more likely to delve into the darker side of RFE/ RL than they were to attack the American flag.

CIA-funded psychological warfare projects employing Eastern European émigrés became major operations during the 1950s, consuming tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. Noted conservative author (and OPC psychological warfare consultant) James Burnham estimated in 1953 that the United States was spending “well over a billion dollars yearly” on a wide variety of psychological warfare projects, and that was in preinflation dollars.
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This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberté movement, paying the bills of the German League for Struggle Against Inhumanity, and financing a half dozen free jurists associations, a
variety of European federalist groups, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines, news services, book publishers, and much more.

These were very broad programs designed to influence world public opinion at virtually every level, from illiterate peasants in the fields to the most sophisticated scholars in prestigious universities. They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders, to name a few. The political analysis they promoted varied from case to case, but taken as a whole, this was prodemocracy, pro-West, and anti-Communist thinking, with a frequent “tilt” toward liberal or European-style Social Democratic ideals. They were not “Nazi” propaganda efforts, nor were many of the men and women engaged in them former Nazi collaborators or sympathizers. In Europe, at least, the Central Intelligence Agency has historically been the clandestine promoter of the parties of the political center, not the extreme right.

Contrary to Soviet propaganda, “anti-Communist” and “pro-Nazi” are not the same thing among the exiled politicians and émigré organizations from Eastern Europe, including those that were sponsored by the CIA in the 1950s. The large majority of these exile politicians and scholars who accepted covert U.S. aid during the cold war had not been Nazi collaborators. Many of them, especially the anti-Communist Czechs and Poles, themselves had suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis.

But the American policy expressed in NSC 20 and similar high-level decisions set the stage for U.S. enlistment of some exiles who had been Nazi collaborators. By refusing to make distinctions among the various anti-Communist exile groups, the CIA soon found itself with a substantial number of former Nazis and collaborators on its payroll. These recruitments were not “accidental” if the word implies that the CIA did not know what those groups had done during the war, nor were they as rare as most people assume. The how and why of some of those cases are the focus of the story in the pages that follow.

Beginning as early as 1948 and picking up speed in the decade that followed, the National Committee for a Free Europe and its sister project, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, became the single most important pipeline through which the CIA passed money for émigré leaders. Although both were supposedly private, voluntary organizations, the political control of
these projects and virtually all their funding was actually provided by Wisner's OPC division at the CIA.

Contrary to popular impression, the well-known radio transmissions of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation were added only as something of an afterthought several years after the CIA's funding of émigré projects had begun. Radio transmissions into Central and Eastern Europe began in 1950 under Radio Free Europe's auspices, then expanded to include programs beamed into the USSR itself through RFE's sister project, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, in early 1953. Radio Liberation from Bolshevism was renamed Radio Liberty during a thaw in the cold war in 1963. The CIA's direct sponsorship of these programs continued until 1973, when a new (and somewhat more public) Board for International Broadcasting was established to fund and administer the radio propaganda effort. The corporate names and details of organizational structure of these projects went through a number of changes in those years, which are summarized in the source notes.
⁶
For simplicity's sake, the text that follows uses RFE/RL to refer to these projects.

By the early 1970s the U.S. government had poured at least $100 million into support of political activities of the Eastern European exile groups through the RFE/RL conduit alone, according to an unclassified study by the government's General Accounting Office.
⁷
That money, however, was only the beginning. An unknown sum clearly totaling many tens of millions of dollars more found its way into CIA-sponsored émigré programs by way of European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan) funds, displaced persons assistance, foreign aid to West Germany, and donations of U.S. military surplus goods.

Nazi collaborators' links to the U.S. political warfare effort became particularly pronounced in the governments-in-exile divisions of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation, which were the main administrative channels for CIA money flowing to a number of Eastern European émigré groups. The RFE division funded the “governments-in-exile” or “national committees” (as they were often called) for most of the countries occupied by the USSR at the end of the war, while a similar structure inside Radio Liberation performed much the same job for exiles from a dozen different nationalities within the Soviet Union itself.
⁸

During World War II both the Axis and the Allies had financed such national committees as a means of mobilizing resistance, keeping an eye on refugees from occupied territories, and creating behind-the-lines
spy networks. The intelligence services or foreign ministries of the belligerents passed money to favored exile leaders, who in turn distributed patronage and favors to followers they considered loyal.

RFE/RL recruiters wanted to re-create these governments-in-exile for propaganda use against the USSR and its satellite countries. They were faced with a difficult problem in the early years, however, because many of their more promising volunteers turned out to have been willing Nazi collaborators. Often the national committees that had been sponsored by Berlin remained well organized and relatively powerful even after the German defeat, and these groups sometimes controlled the displaced persons camps where refugees of their nationality had been dumped by the Allies. The quisling national committees included men whom the Nazis had sponsored as mayors, government officials, newspaper editors, and police chiefs during the German occupation. They were experienced in working together, and their organizations were often backed up by gangs of thugs made up of Waffen SS and Vlasov Army veterans who made sure that things ran smoothly inside the camps.

These formerly pro-Nazi national committees had, almost without exception, jettisoned their Fascist rhetoric and Iron Cross awards following the collapse of Berlin. They took to presenting themselves as democrats, freedom fighters, and even anti-Nazis. These false stories should have been transparent, considering that the United States had captured enough of the German intelligence archives to document the activities of thousands of the more prominent collaborators, had it been a priority to dig their names out of Nazi correspondence. But no one in the Western intelligence agencies, it seems, was willing to look critically at the wartime careers of the émigrés who were eager to help the United States in the cold war. Instead, the intense secrecy that surrounded Wisner's OPC and similar psychological warfare projects protected many ex-Nazis and collaborators by putting a top secret stamp on their activities.

RFE recruiters generally attempted to shun Nazi collaborators when it was possible to do so, and they often favored democrats and moderate socialists for their ability to present an alternative to the USSR, on the one hand, and to the old monarchist or Nazi power structures, on the other. This liberal, anti-Communist approach was successful in recruiting agents from some of the wartime exile governments that had been founded under British auspices in London or from among certain Czech and Hungarian political groups which
had established some measure of democratic power between World Wars I and II. The left-leaning Council for a Free Czechoslovakia under Peter Zenkl, to name one example, was usually favored over the more reactionary Slovak Liberation Committee under Ferdinand Durcansky, which openly pledged its allegiance to the genocidal wartime regime of Monsignor Jozef Tiso.
⁹
RFE's sympathy for the Zenkl committee over its rivals led to endless, bitter attacks on both Radio Free Europe and Zenkl, many of which appeared in rightist émigré journals that were themselves receiving U.S. government subsidies.

Even among exiles from the more democratic countries, however, the Nazi collaborationist influence remained substantial. The Americans sometimes ended up hiring former quislings and collaborators because it seemed there were few other choices available. Men such as Ladislav Nižňanský and Emil Csonka (to name only two examples among many), both of whom had played well-publicized roles in the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, found themselves jobs and influence under RFE sponsorship.
*

The problem of finding anti-Communist liberals was far more difficult among refugees from the USSR. “There were no significant ‘democratic elements' in Russia,” Kennan was to admit later. “Thirty years of Communist terror had seen to that.”
¹⁰
That was an overstatement, perhaps, but not by much. No “democratic” committees had been established among these groups by the British during the war. Stalin's government, after all, had been a crucial ally. Indeed, the only organizations of any strength among the exiles from Belorussia (White Russia), the Ukraine, Turkestan, Azerbaijan,
and several other Soviet nationalities were precisely those that had enthusiastically collaborated during the Nazi occupation. Whether out of cynicism or the pressures of the cold war, or both, these organizations and the men who ran them were recruited, financed, and protected by Radio Liberation.

In a number of cases RL recruiters did not even bother to change the names, much less the leadership, of the nationality committees that had served the Nazis. The North Caucasian National Committee, the Georgian Government in Exile, and the Belorussian Central Rada, for example, all of which had been founded or administered under Berlin's watchful eye, retained their names, memberships, and most of their central committees intact under U.S. sponsorship. In a revealing act of indiscretion, even the U.S. cover organization for the Radio Liberation operation, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, took its name directly from Vlasov's Komitet Osvobozhdeniia Narodov Rossii (KONR), which had been created under joint SS and Nazi Foreign Office sponsorship in Prague in 1944.
¹¹

Frank Wisner's Office for Policy Coordination, backed up strongly on this issue by Kennan, established the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (usually abbreviated as AMCOMLIB). AMCOMLIB was both an implementation and a development of NSC 20. Now, as Wisner envisioned it, the OPC would use its considerable financial resources to induce all the various Soviet émigré organizations, including those that had been most active on behalf of the Nazis, to unite into a single anti-Communist federation. This movement was to include not only people of Russian nationality but those of the Ukrainian, Belorussian, Cossack, Turkic, and other minority groups as well. This was to be a united anti-Stalin movement in which all non-Communist exiles from the USSR could participate.

But the same problems that had once plagued the Germans reappeared almost immediately. Each of the minority groups demanded equality within the envisioned federation. Ukrainian leaders insisted on the right to secede from any government created after the planned overthrow of Stalin. The ethnic Russian nationalists, on the other hand, refused to accept the Ukrainians' conditions because they regarded the Ukraine as a component part of the Russian empire. The battle among the émigré groups escalated from there.

The first concession demanded by the Ukrainians was a change
in the name of the federation; a committee for the liberation of the peoples of
Russia
implied that they considered themselves part of Russia, as they emphatically did not. So the name was changed to American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, a term which had been favored by Nazi propagandists in the Ukraine. In the end, however, this attempt at unity also failed, and the émigré groups continued bitter factional fighting.

Even the federation's name eventually turned into an embarrassment. The American organizers of the committee, former RFE/RL President Sig Mickelson notes, “seem to have been unaware that ‘Bolshevism' had been Hitler's favorite term of disparagement for the Soviet Union.” The Soviet government lost no time in pointing out the rhetorical similarity between Radio Liberation's broadcasts and those of the Nazis as well as the fact that a number of easily identified Nazi collaborators were working for the station. According to Mickelson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation were eventually forced to ban the use of the term
Bolshevism
in their news broadcasts because of its unmistakable association with Nazi propaganda in the minds of European listeners.
¹²