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In the first five years after the war the Vanagis gradually came to control Latvian displaced persons camps in Germany. The semi-secret society also served as an organizing and coordinating force among the Latvian Waffen SS veterans who enlisted in the U.S. Labor Service units. Many Vanagi members found their way to Britain, Canada, and the United States in the guise of displaced persons during this period.

Highly disciplined and organized, the Vanagis maintained their linkages during their diaspora and used their international connections to expand their influence inside Latvian communities abroad. In the United States several Vanagis who had once been high-level Nazi collaborators created interlocking directorships dominated by party members among the American Latvian Association, the Latvian-American Republican National Federation, and the CIA-funded Committee for a Free Latvia.
¹²
These organizations, which came to be controlled or strongly influenced by the Vanagis, exercised
considerable unofficial authority over which potential Latvian immigrants would obtain visas to the United States—and which would not. Not surprisingly, their exercise of this power has consistently tended to reinforce Vanagi authority inside Latvian-American communities.

It is clear today that several of these groups and a number of individual Vanagi Nazi collaborators enjoyed clandestine U.S. government subsidies from the CIA. This money was laundered through the CIA's Radio Free Europe and Assembly of Captive European Nations channels or through private organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, among others.
¹³
Whether or not the CIA approved of the Vanagis' sometimes openly racist and pro-Fascist political behavior, the fact remains that it helped underwrite the careers of at least three—and probably more—senior Vanagi leaders that the U.S. government itself has accused of Nazi war crimes. The three beneficiaries were Vilis Hazners, Boleslavs Maikovskis, and Alfreds Berzins.

Vilis Hazners is an SS veteran and a winner of the German Iron Cross. The U.S. government has accused him of serving as a senior security police officer in Riga, Latvia, for much of the war. The government records include reports that the men under Hazners's command committed serious atrocities, including herding dozens of Jews into a synagogue and setting it aflame. Hazners successfully defended himself from these charges, however, during a deportation proceeding in the late 1970s.
¹⁴

Hazners entered the United States in the early 1950s. Whether or not the CIA assisted him in this is unknown, but it is clear that it sponsored him and helped pay his salary once he was here. Hazners assumed the chairmanship of the Committee for a Free Latvia and a post as delegate to the ACEN in New York. Both organizations—including the wages of their officials—are now known to have been financed in part by the CIA. (The sponsorship of these groups was secret during the 1950s but was eventually admitted by the government during the series of scandals that rocked the agency during the 1970s.)
¹⁵
“Liberation” committee chairmen like Hazners typically received a salary of $12,000 per year in the early 1950s, a pay rate that was better than that of most mid-level State Department employees of the day.

Hazners did not hide his Fascist background. He practically flaunted it. At the same time he was active in ACEN, he served as chairman of the Latvian Officers Association, a thinly disguised
self-help group made up in large part of Waffen SS veterans. He also served as an officer of the American branch of the Vanagis and as editor of the group's magazine for many years.
¹⁶
He was meanwhile active in a number of more respectable groups like the American Latvian Association, which he served as an officer, specializing in immigration and “refugee relief” work on behalf of favored Latvian émigrés in Europe.

Then there is Boleslavs Maikovskis. Also a Latvian police chief decorated with the Iron Cross, Maikovskis has been charged by the U.S. government with having been instrumental in pogroms at Audrini and Rezekne, Latvia, in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. He is a longtime Vanagi activist, former vice-chairman of the American Latvian Association, and a former delegate to the ACEN. The U.S. Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit has been trying to deport Maikovskis from the United States for more than eight years as this book goes to press, but the cumbersome judicial process involved in expulsion of Nazi criminals has permitted him to continue to live in New York State until his appeals are exhausted.
¹⁷

Alfreds Berzins, now deceased, was propaganda minister in the prewar Latvian dictatorship of Karlis Ulmanis. During World War II Berzins “help[ed] put people in concentration camps,” according to his CROWCASS wanted report, and was “partially responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Latvians and thousands of Jews.” The United States asserted that Berzins was “responsible for murder, ill treatment and deportation of 2000 persons.” He was, the United States said, “a fanatic Nazi.”
¹⁸

After the war Berzins went to great lengths to establish himself as democratically minded. He put his propaganda skills back to work on the ACEN's public relations committee. He simultaneously served as editor of the journal
Baltic Review
and as a leading member of the Committee for a Free Latvia. His books on Latvia are found in most major U.S. libraries (one has an introduction by Senator Thomas Dodd), and he served for years as deputy chairman of the American Latvian Association and the World Latvian Association.
¹⁹

These Vanagis did not hesitate to use their political clout and government contacts to sponsor former SS men and Nazi collaborators for U.S. citizenship. In fact, they waged a successful campaign to reverse U.S. immigration regulations to permit Baltic SS men,
who had long been the primary beneficiaries of Vanagi assistance anyway, to enter the United States legally.

The Latvian-language
Daugavas Vanagi Biletens
, for example, helpfully provided its readers with English-language texts to send to U.S. officials protesting exclusion of Baltic SS men from U.S. visas and citizenship. Their argument, in brief, was that the Baltic SS men had not “really” been Nazis, only patriotic Latvians and Lithuanians concerned about protecting their countries from a Soviet invasion. “My [brother] who is already a U.S. soldier,” the Vanagis urged their supporters to write to Washington, “is going to defend the Free World against Communist aggression [in Korea]. Whay [
sic
] are those Latvians who did the same in 1944—defend our country Latvia, against Communist aggression—not now admitted to the U.S.?
²⁰
These are not more fascists [
sic
] than those American boys who now die from Soviet manufactured and Chinese Communist fired bullets,” the appeal continued.

Their effort bore fruit in late 1950, when Displaced Persons Commissioner Edward M. O'Connor forced through an administrative change that redefined the Baltic SS as
not
being a “movement hostile to the United States.” The decision cleared Baltic SS veterans for entry into this country. O'Connor's maneuver was opposed by DP Commissioner Harry N. Rosenfield, but without success.
²¹
Charitable organizations such as Latvian Relief Incorporated and the United Lithuanian Relief Fund of America made sure that the favored SS veterans were not only permitted entry but often given free passage, board, food, emergency funds, and assistance in finding jobs as well.

Similar events and the use of similar interlocking directorships brought extreme rightists to power in a number of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, and Belorussian (White Russian) émigré organizations in this country, just as they had in the Latvian groups mentioned above. Their common wartime experience as Nazi collaborators and, often, as Waffen SS men was the glue that held these groups together. Their members adapted reasonably well to the American political scene, putting themselves forward as militant nationalists and anti-Communists, as was true enough, while declaring their personal innocence of war crimes.

At the same time many Americans preferred to concentrate on the role of those former Nazi collaborators as anti-Communists who had worked with the Germans out of “patriotic” motives—as the
Daugavas Vanagi Biletens
letter cited above illustrates—while denying evidence of their role in atrocities and crimes against humanity on the ground that such accusations were Communist propaganda. Not all Eastern European anti-Communists were former Nazi collaborators obviously. But it is true that the intense anticommunism of the cold war gave those who
were
Nazi collaborators a means of rationalizing what they had done during the war and, in effect, a place to hide. Respectable conservatives in this country who had never been Nazi collaborators often turned a blind eye to this process and were sometimes the most articulate advocates for SS veterans and other collaborators.
²²

For example, the United Lithuanian Relief Fund of America (known as BALF, for its Lithuanian initials) was created in 1944 for the specific purpose of excluding leftists from any role in Lithuanian relief assistance programs. BALF was, and remains, closely tied to the pre-World War II Lithuanian Activist Front, an extreme nationalist group whose leaders were similar in many respects to those of the Vanagi.

BALF became instrumental, by its own account, in virtually every aspect of postwar Lithuanian immigration to the United States and enjoyed heavy funding from both U.S. government and Catholic Church agencies. It claimed responsibility for selection of, and assistance to, some 30,000 Lithuanian immigrants to America in the wake of World War II.
²³
The organization helped many Lithuanians of many different political persuasions, including some who had been persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazis. Even so, aid to Lithuanian Waffen SS veterans was central to BALF's relief work during the 1950s. The largest single group of alleged war criminals now facing deportation from the United States by the Department of Justice, in fact, are Lithuanian veterans of the SS who entered the country with BALF assistance during the cold war.
²⁴

BALF's longtime business manager, the Reverend Lionginas Jankus, was a measure of the political point of view that the organization embraced in its refugee relief work. Testimony taken during a 1964 Lithuanian war crimes trial accused Jankus of leading a series of pogroms in the Jazdai forest region that took the lives of some 1,200 people during the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Jankus himself, who was in the United States at the time of the trial and out of reach of the Lithuanian prosecutors, denied he had been involved in the pogrom, if indeed, it had taken place at all. He said
that the whole case was politically motivated propaganda from the USSR designed to discredit Lithuanians.
²⁵

The preponderance of evidence, however, is that the priest was lying. Prosecutors at the trial introduced physical evidence, including photographs and documents, that they claimed proved Jankus's role in these murders. Dozens of sworn statements from both Lithuanian Jewish survivors and Nazis involved in the pogrom itself were also submitted to the court. An international outcry against Jankus ensued, but BALF kept him on staff as business manager. Jankus died in the late 1960s, and the dispute over his veracity has never been conclusively resolved.

It is evident that the CIA knew that substantial numbers of SS men and former Nazi collaborators were streaming into this country through organizations that were themselves on the CIA's payroll.
*
Highly competent U.S. intelligence officers followed each
twist and turn of these émigré organizations and knew exactly who was linked to which political faction in the old countries. The affairs of Eastern European exiles were, after all, a major focus of the CIA's work at the time. Their relief groups and political organizations were thoroughly infiltrated with agency informers. Indeed, if the CIA did
not
know what was taking place in the immigration process, that in itself raises serious questions concerning its ability to collect and analyze information from refugee sources.

But nothing was done by the CIA, so far as can be determined, to stop the influx of ex-Nazis and collaborators during the 1950s. If anything, the government subsidies to their organizations actually increased. Some men and women who had once enlisted as agents for the Nazi occupiers of their homelands put their skills back to work as inside sources for the CIA and FBI once they had arrived here. Federal agencies are, of course, unwilling to release the names of their confidential informants, but a 1978 study by the General Accounting Office
²⁶
clearly establishes that working relations between U.S. police agencies and these former Fascists did exist. The GAO found that of a sample of 111 persons reported to have been war criminals—not simply ex-collaborators—discovered in the United States, some “seventeen were contacted by the CIA in the United States” for use as informants, many of whom had previously been CIA contract agents overseas. Five more cooperated with the agency in a variety of other capacities. Others worked for the FBI. In all, about 20 percent of the GAO's sample of alleged war criminals had worked as informants for U.S. security organizations inside this country.

Meanwhile, a parallel and sometimes overlapping series of events was taking place inside the army's guerrilla warfare training program. The embarrassing incident in Germany with the
“Young Germans” assassination squads slowly convinced U.S. intelligence that the Labor Service units in Europe were unsuitable for the major guerrilla warfare and espionage projects that the army and CIA were attempting to hide in them. The army command eventually decided that much tighter control would be necessary to ensure the security and effectiveness of postnuclear guerrilla operations. The best of the émigré foot soldiers should be brought to the United States, the army concluded, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and provided with intensive training far beyond what was possible in the Labor Service units. The army reasoned that this more formal recruitment of émigrés would also permit the granting of security clearances to translators with backgrounds in Russian, Ukrainian, and other Eastern European languages. The new enlistees were to remain under U.S. Army control, even though the military was eager to cooperate with the CIA on specific missions.
²⁷