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The Ukrainian SS division surrendered to British troops in early 1945 and was interned at the Rimini POW camp north of Rome. Most of them were facing forced repatriation to the USSR under a clause of the Yalta agreements governing return of POWs who had been captured in enemy uniform. If they returned, they would almost certainly be executed for treason or serve long prison sentences in gulag labor camps.

But that spring General Pavlo Shandruk, the leader of a Ukrainian liberation committee that had been founded under Nazi auspices, contacted Archbishop Ivan Buchko, a high-ranking prelate in Rome specializing in Ukrainian matters for the Holy See. Shandruk pleaded with Buchko by letter to intervene on behalf of the Ukrainian soldiers who had served in SS units, particularly what Shandruk termed the “1st Ukrainian Division,” which was in fact the 14th Waffen SS division “Galicia.” Shandruk hoped that Archbishop Buchko might reach the pope himself with the general's plea for mercy on behalf of his men.

“Archbishop Ivan [Buchko] answered my letter very soon informing me that he had already visited the Division,” Shandruk recalled later. “In a special audience (at night) the Archbishop had pleaded with His Holiness Pope Pius XII to intercede for the soldiers of the Division, who are the flower of the Ukrainian nation.… I learned from the Archbishop … that as a result of the intercession by His Holiness, the soldiers of the Division were reclassified merely as confinees [rather than as prisoners of war], and Bolshevik agents were prohibited to visit their camps [
sic
].” Although the troops were still confined to the POW camp at Rimini, they were, according to Shandruk, “out of reach of Communist hands” and no longer subject to repatriation to the USSR. By the spring of 1946 Shandruk, backed by Archbishop Buchko and the Ukrainian Relief Committee of Great Britain, had arranged with the British government to extend “free settler” emigration status to the Ukrainian Waffen SS veterans at Rimini and to assist them in resettling in Canada, Australia, and other Commonwealth countries.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pipelines to the United States

American policy on the use of defectors from the East, including those who had been Nazi collaborators, was institutionalized in three National Security Council decisions during late 1949 and 1950. The government still contends that revealing the full text of these orders would “damage national security” if they were published today, more than thirty-five years later. These high-level orders, which were reviewed and approved by both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, are known as NSC 86, NSCID (pronounced “N-skid” and standing for NSC intelligence directive) 13, and NSCID 14. They are based on recommendations prepared by Frank Wisner's OPC division of the CIA during the Bloodstone program.

These decisions gave the CIA control of several highly secret government interagency committees responsible for handling émigrés and defectors both overseas (NSCID 13) and inside the United States itself (NSCID 14). Like the earlier Bloodstone effort from which these directives sprang, NSCIDs 13 and 14 were not designed to rescue Nazis as such. They were instead aimed at making good use of all sorts of defectors from the East—with few questions asked. The bureaucratic turf remaining after the CIA had taken its share was divided among the FBI, military intelligence, the State Department, and, to a small degree, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
¹

Most important in the present context, these orders authorized clandestine CIA funding of a variety of ostensibly private refugee relief organizations so as to ensure the cooperation of those agencies in the government's efforts to locate and exploit presumably valuable defectors.
*
²
Under the aegis of these secret orders, the CIA assumed the power to bring “temporarily” anyone it wished to the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), regardless of any other laws on the books in the United States or any other country.

NSCID 14, moreover, dramatically expanded the agency's authority to conduct clandestine operations
inside
the United States—in an apparent violation of the CIA's charter—as long as those affairs were conducted through émigré political organizations that supposedly still had some connection with the old country. The CIA has used that loophole to authorize hidden agency funding for the Committee for a Free Latvia, the Committee for a Free Albania, and other supposedly private exile organizations active in this country. A substantial amount of the agency's money ended up being spent on lobbying the U.S. Congress and on other propaganda efforts inside this country—a clear violation of the law.

When Congress created the CIA, it specifically legislated that the agency be barred from “police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions” in the United States. This was to be a
foreign
intelligence agency, not a still more powerful version of the FBI. Most Americans, including the members of the congressional watchdog committees responsible for oversight of CIA operations, have long contended that this provision banned the agency from involvement in political activities inside this country. Even Senator Leverett Saltonstall, long the ranking Republican on the Senate's intelligence oversight committee, remarked to then CIA Director John McCone (in 1962): “Is it not true, Mr. McCone … that any work on ethnic groups in this country would not be within the province of the CIA? … Am I correct in that?” (McCone
replied, “I cannot answer that, Senator,” and the matter was dropped.)
³

But unbeknownst to most of the Congress and the American people, however, the agency has repeatedly chosen to interpret the NSC 86, NSCID 13, and NSCID 14 orders as authorization for substantial political involvement in immigrant communities in America. As early as 1949—only two years after Congress had thoroughly debated keeping the CIA out of American politics—the agency began underwriting several major programs designed to bring favored European exiles into this country. Then, in 1950, this immigration work was coupled with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign in the United States tailored to win popular approval for cold war measures sponsored by the CIA, including increased funding for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the émigré political groups in the governments-in-exile program.

These efforts have left a lasting mark on American political life, especially among the United States' large first-generation Slavic and Eastern European immigrant population. Hundreds of thousands of decent people of Central and Eastern European heritage entered this country legally during the 1950s, often at the price of great personal sacrifice. But the measures undertaken by the CIA in connection with NSC 86, NSCID 13, and NSCID 14 led to the infiltration of thousands of Waffen SS veterans and other Nazi collaborators into their communities in the United States at the same time. This in turn laid the foundation for a revival of extremist right-wing political movements inside immigrant communities in this country that continue to be active.
⁴

The CIA, and Frank Wisner's clandestine action shop (the OPC) in particular, were never content with the immigration to the United States of a handful of especially valuable assets. The 100 Persons Act was simply too restrictive, Wisner believed. The agency was running international programs involving thousands of foreign agents, with tens of thousands of subagents. Many of these men and women were risking their lives for the modest paychecks they got from the Americans, as he saw it. The promise of free immigration to the United States was crucial in recruiting new overseas help for the CIA and in retaining the loyalty of many persons already on the U.S. payroll.

According to State Department records, Wisner wanted to grant U.S. citizenship as a reward to not just “100 Persons” per year, but to thousands, even tens of thousands of informants, covert operators,
guerrillas and agents of influence. Whatever else might be said of Wisner, he was never one to let sticky legal technicalities stand in the way of what he believed to be the best interests of the country. He set out to create a wide variety of both legal and illegal dodges to bring men and women favored by his organization into the country.

This immigration campaign became an integral part of CIA clandestine strategy of the period. The agency manipulated U.S. immigration laws and procedures on behalf of thousands of favored émigrés, selecting some for entry to this country and rejecting others. While only a fraction of this influx appears to have been Nazis or Nazi collaborators (the true number is impossible to know until the agency opens its files), it is clear that a number of identifiable war criminals were brought to the United States with CIA assistance during this period.
⁵
Equally important, the security agencies of the government gave tacit support to private refugee relief committees the stated goals of which included assisting thousands of Waffen SS veterans in immigrating to the United States.

Bloodstone had begun this process on a relatively modest scale, with about 250 sponsored immigrants per year. By 1950, however, CIA representatives approached Congress with a plan to authorize special importation of some
15,000
CIA-sponsored refugees per year, in addition to those entering under the Displaced Persons Act and other more conventional immigration channels. They were to be émigrés “whose presence in the U.S. would be deemed in the national interest,” according to Department of State documentation,
⁶
“as a result of the prominent or active part they played in the struggle against Communism.” Congress whittled that authorization down to 500 “carefully selected” refugees over a three-year period. Even so, the CIA's professed need for 15,000 annual entrance visas is some measure of its ambitions in this field. éMigrés sponsored under this law came to be known as “2(d)” cases, after the section of the immigration code that provided the legal authorization.

The law established a new category of immigrant, the “Displaced Persons National Interest Case.” Officially the departments of State and Defense were supposed to sponsor these immigrants, but in reality this was a CIA program. Agency-funded organizations, “working closely with the National Committee for a Free Europe,” like the Committee for a Free Latvia, International Peasant Union, and so on, were singled out for patronage under the new law,
according to State Department records. The CIA also sponsored immigrants who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence in espionage or covert operations. Finally, the agency brought survivors of the failed raids on Albania into the United States under the 2(d) program.
⁷

Congress's refusal to support fully the agency's 15,000-visa-per-year immigration effort was not the final word on the matter. Indeed, the CIA expanded upon the authority it had been granted by the National Security Council under NSC 86 and NSCIDs 13 and 14. If the agency was barred from directly importing 15,000 exiles annually, it reasoned, it could still employ the NSC's top secret authorization to sponsor indirectly many of the same émigrés through ostensibly private relief organizations. Some U.S.-based refugee assistance groups specializing in aid to Latvian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian émigrés made no secret of their desire to import precisely the same anti-Communist activists, some of them Waffen SS veterans, in whom the CIA was most interested. Wisner found the solution to his legal problems by secretly underwriting the activities of such organizations, then letting them do the legwork involved in bringing their countrymen to the United States. In this way, the Mykola Lebeds, Gustav Hilgers, and other exiles who entered the country with direct agency assistance soon became only the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Beginning at least as early as 1950, the CIA earmarked money for favored émigrés and passed it through a variety of cutouts—including both private foundations and “overt” governmental programs—to selected refugee relief groups serving Eastern European immigrants. Control of this effort was centralized in the NSC's executive committee responsible for oversight of the NSC 10/2 program and other CIA covert operations.
⁸
A full accounting of these funds has yet to be made, but the public reports of the National Committee for a Free Europe, the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, and the fragmentary declassified records of the NSC indicate that major recipients included the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the United Lithuanian Relief Fund of America, and a number of similar ethnic and religious-based charities. At least $100 million was spent on such efforts during the decade of the 1950s according to presently available reports,
⁹
and the true total may well be considerably higher.

The private refugee aid groups were closely monitored by the
CIA. As a later NSC decision on refugee and defector programs puts it, these programs “contribute to the achievement of U.S. national security objectives both toward Communist-dominated areas and the Free World.… These contracts, under which the [private] agencies are reimbursed only for services actually performed on behalf of escapees, are carefully supervised to assure that they give maximum support to the objectives of the program.”
¹⁰

Yet in several cases Nazi collaborators and sympathizers took control of key aspects of refugee relief agencies serving their nationalities in the United States. Among Latvians a secretive organization known as the Daugavas Vanagi (“Hawks of the Daugava River”) gradually built up an influential political machine in Latvian displaced persons camps in Europe and, later, in Latvian communities in this country as well. The Vanagis began as a self-help and welfare society for Latvian SS veterans in Germany in 1945; many of its leaders had been involved in Fascist activity in Latvia since the 1930s. Like the OUN Ukrainian nationalists, some of the Vanagis' leaders had served as the Nazis' most enthusiastic executioners inside their homeland, only to be spurned by the chauvinistic Germans. The Latvian extremists held on tenaciously during the Nazi occupation, however, and many were rewarded with posts as mayors, concentration camp administrators, and—most frequently—officers of the Latvian Waffen SS division sponsored by the Nazis during the last years of the conflict. Most of the Vanagis' leadership fled to Germany with the retreating Nazis at war's end.
¹¹