Blowback (31 page)

It was only at that point—after Lebed had been, in effect, “caught”—that the CIA chose to “legalize” his immigration status under the 100 Persons Act. First, the agency convinced the INS to suppress the results of its own investigation. Then the necessary correspondence was exchanged among Director Walter Bedell Smith, Attorney General James P. McGranery, and INS Commissioner Argyle Mackey. Lebed—the former police minister in Nazi-occupied Ukraine—was formally declared to be a legal permanent resident of the United States “for national security reasons.”
²⁹
This was about two years
after
the CIA had smuggled him into the country in the first place.

Since that time, Lebed has made himself a fixture at Ukrainian conferences and gatherings, where his political faction continues to advertise him as the foreign minister of the supposed Ukrainian government-in-exile. He lives today in Yonkers, New York, and it is unlikely he will ever be forced to leave the United States against his wishes.

The CIA's decision to legalize Lebed's status only
after
he had been detected is one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire affair. The obvious question is just how many other Mykola Lebeds did the agency secretly sponsor who were not accidentally caught by INS field investigators?

One other such “illegal” is clearly General Pavlo Shandruk, the chief of the Ukrainian quisling “government-in-exile” created by the Nazi Rosenberg ministry in 1944. Shandruk had actively collaborated with the Nazis since at least 1941, and his role in pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic activities clearly barred him from legal entry into the United States.

But Shandruk had apparently won the CIA's favor by working for both British and U.S. intelligence after the war. He is known to have been paid at least 50,000 deutsche marks by the United States in 1947 (the equivalent of about $150,000 in today's currency) “to organize an intelligence net,”
³⁰
according to his Army CIC file.

Shandruk traveled to America only days before Lebed, also arriving in October 1949. It is likely that Shandruk entered the United States under a false name, as Lebed had. The INS, at least, claims that it has no record of anyone named Pavlo Shandruk (or the various other transliterations of that name) ever entering the United States. But Shandruk did in fact arrive, and he lived openly in New York under his own name during the 1950s. He even eventually published his war memoirs in this country through Robert Speller & Sons, a well-known outlet for right-wing literature. It is clear from the CIC's dossier on Shandruk that that agency, at least, knew of his activities, address, and ambiguous immigration status. Yet no one moved to deport Shandruk, and he remained influential in Ukrainian émigré circles in the United States until his death.
³¹

By the time Mykola Lebed arrived in the United States in 1949, the CIA and OPC appear to have discarded any lingering reservations about employment of Nazi collaborators for behind-the-lines missions into the USSR. Who was better suited, after all, to lead an insurgency in the Ukraine than the men who had shared their weal and woe during the war? The OUN/UPA's Nazi collaborators, in short, were not accidentally involved in U.S. efforts in the region through an oversight. In reality, the United States systematically sought out Ukrainian SS and militia veterans because they were
thought to be well suited for rejoining their former comrades still holed up in the Carpathian Mountains. The Americans kept careful registers, in fact, of the names, addresses, and careers of thousands of such Ukrainian SS veterans well into the 1950s so that they might be quickly mobilized in the event of a nuclear conflict with the USSR.
³²

Meanwhile, inside the Ukraine many OUN/UPA insurgents continued to employ the same terror and anti-Semitism during the postwar guerrilla conflict that they had during the Nazi occupation. At Lutsk in the western Ukraine, for instance, OUN/UPA guerrillas concentrated on halting Soviet efforts to establish collective farms. Their practice, according to a U.S. intelligence report dispatched from Moscow, was to identify peasant farmers who agreed to join the state-sponsored farms. “That same night,” the U.S. military attache cabled to Washington, OUN guerrillas “appeared in the homes of these individuals and chopped off the arms which the peasants had raised at the [collective farm] meeting to signify assent.” Similarly, according to a second American report,
³³
“prosperous Jews” were “singled out” for attack along with Communists during the insurgency in much the same way they had been during the Nazi occupation.

The fact that some of the OUN/UPA insurgents had been responsible for atrocities—the looting, the rape, and the destruction of villages that refused to provide them with supplies, for example—does not appear to have entered U.S. policymakers' deliberations of the day to any significant degree. That was a serious blunder for strictly practical reasons, even if one disregards the ethical considerations involved in employing these agents.

The OUN's collaboration with the Nazis during the war, as well as the organization's own bloody history, had fatally severed the insurgents from the large majority of the Ukrainian people they claimed to represent. This was apparently true even among villagers who were opposed to the new Soviet regime. By the time the Americans decided to extend clandestine aid to the guerrillas in 1949, the insurgency was already in serious decline. War weariness, popular disgust with the naked terrorism of OUN/UPA guerrillas, and the Soviets' use of large-scale forced relocations of the indigenous population combined to isolate the guerrillas and cut them off from grass-roots support.

The CIA itself was divided over how to handle the OUN. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and other clandestine warfare enthusiasts
advocated extending substantial military aid to the guerrillas. This would rekindle the rebellion, they reasoned, and the insurgents' example might spred to the rest of Eastern Europe. Among Wisner's first maneuvers on behalf of the Ukrainian rebels was a November 1949 agreement with the army for clandestine procurement of “demolition blocks, M4 [plastique explosive] and blasting accessories” for use in sabotage programs, according to Pentagon summaries of CIA correspondence. Less than two months after that Wisner struck a second deal with the military for the off-the-books acquisition of a stockpile of arms and explosives that eventually totaled hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of guns, helicopters, Jeeps, grenades, uniforms, and everything else necessary to equip several small armies.
³⁴

Even so, a substantial faction of the agency did not favor a full-scale guerrilla conflict in the Ukraine, at least not at that time. The military and political reality of the situation, these men and women argued, was that the United States could harass the USSR in the region but not seriously challenge Soviet rule. CIA executives like Franklin Lindsay and Harry Rositzke, both of whom worked closely with the Ukrainian guerrillas, agreed that underground warfare in the Carpathian Mountains was premature and likely to lead to the complete obliteration of the rebels. As Rositzke tells the story today, some CIA analysts concluded as early as 1950 that the OUN/UPA guerrillas “could play no serious paramilitary role”
³⁵
in the event of a Soviet military move against the West. Rositzke's group instead favored using the guerrillas as a temporary base inside the USSR for espionage and for gathering “early warning” types of intelligence concerning possible Soviet military mobilization.

But significant pressures from the State Department and the Pentagon pushed for a vastly expanded paramilitary effort, and this arm twisting grew stronger after the outbreak of the Korean War. One Pentagon plan confidently predicted that a 370,000-man guerrilla army could be assembled in a matter of months by parachuting in some 1,200 U.S.-trained insurgency specialists, plus supplies.
³⁶
This extensive underground force was supposed to wait patiently for an American order to move once World War III had broken out. “A view was held in both the State Department and the Pentagon,” says Lindsay, “that said, ‘Go build an organization, and then put it on standby in case we need it.' I remember saying that it just doesn't work that way” when it comes to guerrilla warfare, Lindsay recalls.
³⁷

In practice, these contradictory forces within the U.S. national security community produced a situation in which some CIA and OPC agents promised nearly unlimited military support to the insurgency but actually delivered relatively little. In the end, U.S. aid was given to the rebels only insofar as it served short-term American intelligence-gathering objectives, no more.

What this meant in strategic terms was that the guerrillas received neither the military support they needed to survive as an insurgent movement nor the patient camouflaging that might have permitted them to exist as spies. Instead, they were used as martyrs—some of whom died bravely; some pathetically—and grist for the propaganda mills of both East and West.

Beginning in late 1949, the agency parachuted U.S.-trained émigré agents into the Ukraine, infiltrating perhaps as many as seventy-five guerrilla leaders into the region over a four-year period. A related American program dropped agents near Soviet airfields and rail junctions farther north, near Orsha and Smolensk, where Gehlen's spy networks left behind during the Nazi occupation maintained a fragile existence. Britain also parachuted exile agents into the Ukraine, dropping in at least three teams of six men each in the spring of 1951 alone, all within about fifty miles of the nationalist stronghold at Lvov.
³⁸

Despite the heavy secrecy still surrounding Western paramilitary activities in the Ukraine, it is clear that former Nazi collaborators were integral to this effort. In one documented example, the Soviets captured four U.S.-trained exiles within days of one of the first parachute drops of agents into the region. According to a formal complaint later filed by the USSR at the United Nations,
³⁹
the four had been trained for their mission in an American intelligence school at Bad Wiessee, near Munich, then parachuted into the country by an American aircraft stripped of all identification markings. Three of the four captured men—Aleksandr Lakhno, Aleksandr Makov, and Sergei Gorbunov—had worked closely with the Nazis during the occupation of the USSR, the Soviets charged. Lahkno was reported to have betrayed five Red partisans to the Gestapo, while Makov had been a member of the Nazis' “Black Sea” punitive battalion. All four of the captured men were interrogated by Soviet police until they yielded everything they knew of U.S. espionage and covert warfare missions. Then they were shot.

The handful of exiles who survived the harrowing parachute missions were given new identities and safe passage to the United
States. Not too many men lived long enough to take advantage of that program, however. Unfortunately for the U.S. agents, a Soviet spy named Kim Philby had wormed his way into the highest echelons of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Philby used his post aggressively to stir up factional conflicts among the various Ukrainian exile groups and then to betray every American and British agent he could identify to the Soviets. The large majority of the U.S.-trained agents who parachuted into the Ukraine were captured and executed.

In hindsight, it is clear that the Ukrainian guerrilla option became the prototype for hundreds of CIA operations worldwide that have attempted to exploit indigenous discontent in order to make political gains for the United States. Basically similar CIA programs have since been attempted among the Meo and Hmong peoples of Southeast Asia, anti-Castro Cubans, and, most recently, the Nicaraguan contras, to name only a few. Part of the U.S. rationale for these operations has always been that the American money and arms for the rebel groups will somehow provide a spark that will ignite popular support for democracy, civil liberties, and resistance to totalitarian—read Communist—rule. There is every indication, however, that such affairs have often produced serious blowback problems because their actual results have almost always been the exact opposite of what was originally intended, even in instances where the U.S.-backed faction has succeeded in taking power.

In the case of the Ukrainian civil war the detail that it was now the “good” Americans, rather than the Nazis, who were backing the OUN failed to change the brutal, anti-Semitic tactics that this group had historically employed. Instead of rallying to the new “democratic” movement, there is every indication that many of the ordinary people of the Ukraine gave increased credence to the Soviet government's message that the United States, too, was really Nazi at heart and capable of using any sort of deceit and violence to achieve its ends. The fact that this misperception of U.S. intent has taken root and sometimes flourished among native Ukrainians is a bitter pill for most Americans to swallow. But, indeed, how could it be otherwise? If former Nazis and terrorists were the vehicle through which America chose to spread the doctrine of freedom among people who had no other direct contact with the Western world, it is entirely understandable that these types of ideas about the United States seem reasonable to them. The Soviet government, not surprisingly, has long made every effort to reinforce such
conceptions of the United States among its population, and with some success. Today, more than forty years after the end of the war, Soviet propaganda still tags virtually any type of nonconformist in the Ukraine with the label of “nationalist” or “OUN,” producing a popular fear and hatred of dissenters that are not entirely unlike the effect created by labeling a protester a “Communist” in American political discourse.

The Ukrainian exile leader Lebed's entry into the United States and his high-profile political agitation once he had arrived provide an example of a second type of blowback as well, one which was to become much more widespread in the years to come. To put it most bluntly, former Nazis and collaborators on the U.S. payroll who were also fugitives from war crimes charges began to demand U.S. help in escaping abroad in return for their cooperation with—and continuing silence about—American clandestine operations. Some such fugitives pressed for entry into the United States itself, while others were content to find safe havens in South America, Australia, or Canada. Before the decade of the 1940s was out, some American intelligence agents found themselves deeply embroiled in underground Nazi escape networks responsible for smuggling thousands of Nazi criminals to safety in the New World.