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The plot unraveled in late 1952, however, when a chance arrest by local police led to discovery of the hit list of Social Democratic officials. The CIC's behavior following this accidental exposure was so compromising that it raised serious questions in the German parliament whether the U.S. government was aware of the Technical Service unit's assassination plans all along. Then again, perhaps
the CIC response to the arrests was just stupid, not a conspiratorial cover-up. Either way, American CIC officers took custody of the arrested BDJ members and proceeded to hide them from the German civil police, who intended to charge the “Young Germans” with numerous weapons violations and conspiracy to commit murder. The German chief of the Technical Service unit, an ex-Luftwaffe man named Gerhard Peters, was placed under wraps for almost two weeks in a U.S.-requisitioned building that was off-limits to German civil authorities. U.S. CIC agents also seized all the remaining Technical Service records that they could lay their hands on, then refused to turn the dossiers over to the German equivalent of the FBI.
¹¹

But the cat was out of the bag. Soon Social Democratic deputies were demanding investigations and pounding the lecterns in state and federal parliaments all over West Germany. Unfortunately for the Americans and for the Technical Service, their blunder had been discovered in the midst of a closely fought election, and the Social Democrats made the most of it. In the end, U.S. authorities were forced to confirm, as the
New York Times
reported,
¹²
that they had “sponsored and helped finance the secret training of young Germans, many of them former soldiers, to become guerrilla fighters in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.” The unnamed American officials told the
Times
that they had been unaware of the group's “political activities,” including the plan to assassinate selected German leaders. All funding or other support of the BDJ group was said to have been abandoned following the arrests.

In fact, however, the CIC handlers were well aware of at least some BDJ “political activities,” like the infiltration of Social Democratic party conventions, and had been all along. According to the later German parliament report on the affair, the American agencies were actually paying the plotters an additional 12,000 deutsche marks per month for these espionage services.
¹³

But the assertions of U.S. ignorance concerning the hit list of Social Democratic leaders are probably true. American clandestine policy toward Social Democratic parties in Europe at the time appears to have consisted of the collection of espionage information on their activities, plus a carrot-and-stick type of patronage along the lines of the Italian election model—not the wholesale assassination of their leaders.
¹⁴
Indeed, the very amateurishness of compiling a written list of forty prominent targets suggests that Technical
Service chief Peters may very well have kept that activity secret from the Americans.

In a certain sense, that is just the problem. U.S. intelligence was financing, training, and arming a squadron of former Waffen SS and Wehrmacht soldiers with about $500,000 per year—and that's in 1951 dollars—and they
still
could credibly claim that they did not know what their own contract agents were up to. This, moreover, was inside West Germany, where U.S. officials enjoyed enormous influence within the government, where telephones could be tapped with impunity, and where U.S. agents moved without restraint. This “command breakdown” is a clear indication of just how little real control U.S. intelligence had over many of its far-flung paramilitary operations and how carelessly it was willing to spend money.

The question of U.S. use of former Nazi collaborators in assassinations is important, and not just because of the obvious damage that the Technical Service imbroglio did to U.S. relations with Germany's influential Social Democrats. Few subjects are more deeply clothed in mystery than this one, and the evidence concerning how U.S. assassination operations worked during the cold war and who was responsible for them is inevitably scattered and fragmentary. All that can be said with certainty is that such murders did take place and that in some cases former Nazi collaborators were instrumental in carrying them out.

To put the case most bluntly, many American clandestine warfare specialists believed that the most “productive”—and least compromising—method of killing foreign officials was to underwrite the discontent of indigenous groups and let
them
take the risks.
¹⁵
American intelligence agencies' use of this technique appears to have originated in operations during World War II, when the OSS supplied thousands of cheap pistols to partisans in France and Yugoslavia specifically for assassination of collaborators and German officials. (According to Pentagon records,
¹⁶
the OSS also air-dropped these weapons in areas where there were no significant rebel forces so that the Nazis, upon finding the guns, would tighten the screws on local populations and thereby produce new anti-Nazi partisans.)

The concepts of maintaining “plausible deniability” for the actual murder and of the expendability of the killers themselves are a key
to understanding U.S. assassination techniques. In most cases, it appears to have been neither necessary nor practical for U.S. intelligence officers to give precise instructions for murder. Instead, the OPC gave directions to commit assassinations to guerrilla movements in the same simple, sweeping terms that had been used in wartime Yugoslavia. U.S. intelligence encouraged insurgents to “eliminat[e] the command and other dangerous personnel of the MVD and the MGB [the Soviet secret police],” as the psychological warfare appendix to a Pentagon war plan put it in 1948. Other assigned tasks under the Halfmoon war plan, as it was known, included “organiz[ing] for the destruction of industry, communications and other factors in Soviet war-making capacity”; “engag[ing] in sabotage wherever and whenever it disrupts enemy action”; and “creat[ing] panic and terror.”
¹⁷

Several organizations of former Nazi collaborators were ready to undertake such slayings on a major scale. Covert operations chief Wisner estimated in 1951 that some 35,000 Soviet police troops and Communist party cadres had been eliminated by guerrillas connected with the Nazi collaborationist OUN/UPA in the Ukraine since the end of the war,
¹⁸
and that does not include casualties from other insurgencies in Lithuania and the Muslim regions of the USSR that were also receiving aid from the United States and Britain.

These shotgun-style killings and guerrilla actions account for the large majority of murders carried out with U.S. assistance in Europe during the cold war. It is inappropriate, of course, to lay responsibility for all these deaths at the feet of the CIA. The rebellions against Soviet rule were not initiated by the agency; they exploded inside the country out of discontents that were bound to give rise to violent resistance. Still, it is clear that CIA aid sustained such rebellions longer and made them more deadly to all concerned than they might otherwise have been. Moreover, these widespread shotgun-style slayings served as cover for a smaller number of specific individual assassinations that appear to have been directly ordered by U.S. intelligence officers.

Former Nazi collaborators made excellent executioners in such instances, because of both their wartime training and the fact that the U.S. government could plausibly deny any knowledge of their activities. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. “In the international clandestine operations business, it was part of the code that
the one and only remedy for the unfrocked
double agent was to kill him
” (emphasis added), the CIA's director of operations planning during the Truman administration testified before Congress in 1976, “and all double agents knew that. That was part of the occupational hazard of the job.” The former director, whom the government declines to identify, also claimed, however, that he didn't recall any executions of double agents actually occurring during his tenure there.
¹⁹
It is understandable that he might fail to remember any executions; for admitting a role in such killings could well lead to arrest and prosecution for conspiracy to commit murder in Europe, if not in the United States itself.
*

“We kept personnel at several air bases around the world for these types of missions,” says Colonel Prouty, who was responsible for U.S. Air Force air support of CIA missions overseas, including the delivery of agents to their targets and subsequent evacuation measures. “Some of these guys were the best commercial hit men you have ever heard of. [They were] mechanics, killers. They were Ukrainians, mainly, and Eastern Europeans, Greeks, and some Scotsmen. I don't know how the Scotsmen got in there, but there they were. None of them were American citizens.” Prouty asserts that teams of such “mechanics” were used in cross-border infiltrations, in highly dangerous rescues of American agents inside the USSR and China, and in special murders. According to Prouty, there was no clear policy concerning the use of killing. “It was an ad hoc event, and it [the actual assassination] was done by third parties. If it had to be done in Yugoslavia, for example, it was set up with exile Yugoslavians or the [émigré] Polish groups. The [U.S.]
Army had by far the best assets” for this type of thing, he states, but “on the operational level there was good cooperation with the air force, CIA, and army.” Many of the Eastern Europeans, he says, were Nazi collaborators during the war.
²⁰

Several such killings did take place during the late 1940s under Operations Hagberry and Lithia, both of which were approved at senior levels of the Pentagon. These two instances, furthermore, must be considered only the documented examples of a more widespread practice. Hagberry required, according to army records, the “liquidation of the Chikalov Ring, a possible Soviet intelligence net operating within the U.S. zone of Germany.” And Lithia, which began under army auspices in November 1947, authorized “liquidation in [the] United States Zone [of Germany] of the Kundermann Ring, a large scale Czechoslovakian intelligence net.”
²¹
Army intelligence believed that the Chikalov Ring and the Kundermann organization had managed to plant double agents in certain émigré espionage networks that were being jointly managed by the United States and Britain under still another code-named project, Operation Rusty, and it is those agents who were marked for “liquidation.” Army spokesmen today claim with shrugs of their shoulders that all further files concerning Hagberry and Lithia have simply disappeared. No further information is available, they say, and there is no indication of who withdrew the Hagberry and Lithia files or when they vanished.

Other people were murdered gangland-style during Operation Ohio, according to published reports in the United States.
²²
Ohio employed a squad of Ukrainian ex-Nazis to carry out at least twenty murders in a displaced persons camp at Mittenwald, south of Munich. The Army CIC and later the CIA are reported to have financed this squad for strong-arm work against double agents, Soviet spies, and similar undesirables. The fragmentary evidence still available suggests that most of the squad's victims were double agents whose deaths—when they became public at all—were attributed to factional violence among rival right-wing Ukrainian émigré groups.

“We were just out of World War Two, and we were using those [wartime] tactics,” says Franklin Lindsay, the former CIA/OPC paramilitary expert. “In my case, I had operated only in wartime conditions. Given the feeling that we were very near war at that time, one tended to operate in the same way as in wartime.”
²³
Lindsay, however, rejects the term
assassination
as a description of CIA/OPC practice during his tenure there.
*

The records of Operation Bloodstone add an important new piece of information to one of the most explosive public issues of today: the role of the U.S. government—specifically the CIA—in assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign officials. According to a 1976 Senate investigation, a key official of Operation Bloodstone is the OPC officer who was specifically delegated responsibility for planning the agency's assassinations, kidnappings, and similar “wet work.”
²⁴

Colonel Boris Pash, one of the most extraordinary and least known characters in American intelligence history, completes the circle of U.S. agents, Nazi collaborators, and “mechanics” involved in these highly sensitive affairs. Pash is not a Nazi, nor is there any evidence that he is sympathetic to Nazis. But his work for U.S. intelligence agencies places him in the critical office given the responsibility for planning postwar assassination operations.

Pash, now in his eighties, looks much like a bespectacled retired high school teacher. That's not surprising. He taught gym at Hollywood High School for a decade prior to World War II. He is modest—even shy, some might say—with a gravelly voice and a cautious manner born of a lifetime of keeping secrets. Politically Pash remains loyal to the legacy of General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he served in occupied Japan. Colonel Pash is one of the few remaining originals of U.S. intelligence, and his experience in “fighting the Communists” goes back to the 1917 Russian Revolution. He was in Moscow and Eastern Europe in those days with his father, a missionary of Russian extraction, and the young Pash spent much of the Soviet civil war working on the side of the White armies, then with czarist refugees who had fled their country. In the 1920s Pash signed on as a reserve officer with the U.S. military intelligence service, and he maintained the affiliation throughout his years at Hollywood High. He was called to active duty in the first
days of the Second World War, played a role in the internment of Japanese civilians in California, and was soon assigned as chief counterintelligence officer on the Manhattan Project, the supersecret U.S. effort to develop the atomic bomb. (More than a decade later it was Colonel Pash's testimony that helped seal the fate of scientist Robert Oppenheimer in the well-known 1954 security case.) Before the war was out, it will be recalled, Colonel Pash led the series of celebrated special operations known as the Alsos Mission that were designed to capture the best atomic and chemical warfare experts that the Nazis had to offer.
²⁵