Blowback (40 page)

It was through the NTS, and through the rival national liberation programs sponsored among Soviet minority groups by the Nazis' Rosenberg ministry, that the strategy and tactics of the “liberation” of the USSR were first hammered out. These were the laboratories, so to speak, used by Hans Heinrich Herwarth, Gustav Hilger, and the other German political warfare officers discussed earlier to develop the propaganda themes and behind-the-lines subversion tactics believed most suitable for reaching people inside the USSR.

Constantine Boldyreff was a founder of NTS and a senior leader of the group throughout the war. His wartime career is shrouded in secrecy today; but it is clear that the CIC believed that in late 1944 he helped administer gangs of Russian laborers for the SS.
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He is a case in point of the manner in which the intervention of U.S. intelligence agencies shepherded the migration of liberation propaganda out of the fallen wartime ministries of Berlin and into the living rooms of America.

According to U.S. Army intelligence records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the mainstream U.S. anti-Communist organization Common Cause—no relation to the present-day liberal organization of the same name—sponsored the NTS spokesman's travel to the United States in 1948, then gave him a media campaign that enabled him to reach into millions of American homes during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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Common Cause was a prototype of, and a sister organization to, the CIA-sponsored National Committee for a Free Europe. Its directors included many of the men—Adolf Berle, Arthur Bliss Lane, and Eugene Lyons, among others—who simultaneously led CIA-financed groups such as the NCFE and, later, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism.
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Boldyreff's speaking and writing tour in this country became one of the first rallying cries in the United States for a liberationist political agenda. The campaign aimed at winning financial and popular support for the NTS as a weapon in clandestine warfare against the USSR. The NTS, claimed Common Cause chairman Christopher Emmet, controlled a gigantic underground apparatus that had penetrated every major Soviet city. The USSR was on the edge of an anti-Communist revolution, Boldyreff announced, and the NTS could bring Stalin to his knees.
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In reality, most of the NTS's supposed “underground network”
inside the USSR did not exist. True, the Nazis' SS RSHA Amt VI had helped the NTS create such clandestine cells during the German retreat from the USSR, although the Nazis' connection to this program, needless to say, was not publicized in the United States during Boldyreff's tour. Subsequent events were to show, however, that most of those underground cells had already been mopped up by the NKVD by the time the émigré leader arrived in America.

But that did not deter the publicity campaign. Common Cause arranged well-attended press conferences for the NTS spokesman in New York, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore. A dozen newspapers published prominent interviews or articles about supposed NTS clandestine activities inside the Soviet Union. This revolutionary work was said to include anti-Communist radio broadcasting, use of rockets to distribute airborne leaflets over Red Army ground troops, and a variety of other dramatic psychological warfare techniques. In fact, however, most of these claimed actions either never took place at all or were vastly exaggerated by NTS propagandists. Nevertheless, every article, with the exception of a
Newsweek
piece penned by Ralph de Toledano (who favored a different faction of Soviet émigrés), offered virtually uncritical praise for the NTS and acceptance of Boldyreff's claims. Boldyreff pledged that the NTS would soon mobilize enough dissident Russians to overthrow the Stalin dictatorship, thereby supposedly saving the world from war. The price tag for NTS help in getting rid of communism, he said, was $100 million.
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It is impossible to determine today what Common Cause knew, if anything, of the NTS's wartime record at the time it sponsored his speaking tour. It is clear, however, from Boldyreff's own U.S. Army intelligence file that the CIC was well aware that the NTS was a totalitarian and pro-Fascist organization. Instead of making this fact clear, however, U.S. intelligence promoted Boldyreff's propaganda work in this country. “A Common Cause spokesman said that Boldyreff is ‘well known to American intelligence,'” the
Boston Herald
reported in its coverage of one of the NTS man's early news conferences. “‘[He] is vouched for by high American officials,' and cooperated with the American military government in Germany.”
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Over the next four years Boldyreff went on to ghostwritten feature stories appearing under his by-line in
Look, Reader's Digest
, and
World Affairs
. “Will Russia's democratic revolution take place in time to keep the Communist plotters from using their atomic
bombs against humanity?” he asked readers of the American Federation of Labor's mass circulation
Federationist
.
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“The answer to this all important question depends on how hard the free world fights to pierce the Iron Curtain and join forces with Russian anti-Communists.”

It is clear that Boldyreff was soon enjoying the direct sponsorship of the CIA. British intelligence historian E. H. Cookridge reports that the U.S. agency put Boldyreff on retainer for assistance in recruiting Vlasov Army veterans for espionage missions inside the USSR—a claim that the nationalist leader does not deny. Moreover, several of Boldyreff's ghostwriters—including James Critchlow, who coauthored the article quoted above—have since become known as career executives of the CIA's political warfare projects such as Radio Liberation, a fact that strongly suggests that the agency also had a hand in Boldyreff's publicity tours in the United States.
*
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According to Boldyreff's CIC dossier, U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force intelligence arranged a job for him at the prestigious Foreign Service Institute at Georgetown University in Washington. There, he taught psychological warfare techniques to pilots engaged in clandestine air missions into the USSR. As Boldyreff himself put it in an interview, the air force assignment involved training “about 120” U.S. pilots responsible for cross-border flights into the USSR. “This was the cold war,” he says. “Air force officers were more frequently captured, [because] their planes would be shot down, and they needed to know what to do, how to survive. That sort of thing was much more open then than it is today.”
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But that was only the beginning. Next came radio interviews, then lucrative speaking engagements at Daughters of the American Revolution and American Legion conventions. The powerful Henry Holt publishing company issued a book made up largely of Boldyreff's commentaries exposing both real and imagined Stalinist assassination plots. Last but not least, Boldyreff made the circuit in Washington of congressional investigating committees, which sought out his advice on fighting communism, psychological warfare, and spotting supposed Red agents inside U.S. government agencies.
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Whatever one may think of Boldyreff's politics, none of his personal actions in this country are known to have been illegal. At the same time, however, the actions of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in promoting his entry into American politics were, on their face, an apparent violation of U.S. law and of the CIA's charter. Legal questions aside, it is clear that Boldyreff was only one of a long train of more or less similar ex-Fascist leaders whose publicity work on behalf of “liberation” during the late 1940s and early 1950s was underwritten at least in part by the U.S. government.

Ironically, George Kennan and Charles Thayer—who once had helped sponsor the U.S. political warfare programs that had rehabilitated the NTS and similar groups—were among the first men targeted by the radical right once the liberation message started to catch on. What was needed, the far right argued, was a much more aggressive American policy overseas. The United States should underwrite the “revolutionary” activities of anti-Communist émigrés such as the NTS on a much larger scale, they said. The “rollback of communism” in the East should become the touchstone of U.S. efforts on the Continent. America should make a public declaration of its intent to “liberate” Eastern Europe, exiles like Boldyreff and their supporters argued, in order to encourage discontent with Soviet rule. The CIA should then deliver clandestine U.S. arms and money to the rebels to back up that promise. Some even argued that the United States should send in American troops.

Supporters of liberation had no patience for Kennan's ten- to fifteen-year strategy for the containment and eventual collapse of the USSR, even if it actually worked. “The expression in those days was ‘We're sitting on our suitcases,'” says Vladimir Petrov, a leading Russian scholar in the United States and a onetime Vlasov Army adviser. “They were ready to go back at any time.”
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Many believed that the sooner a U.S.-USSR war over Europe broke out, the better.

George Kennan became a target within the Truman administration for the radical right. Regardless of what the diplomat may have backed as far as clandestine U.S. policy was concerned, he favored U.S. government recognition of the reality of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, and many extremist émigrés saw that as a sellout of their aspirations to return to power in their former homelands. As the political fortunes of the radical right in the United States rose, Kennan grew increasingly disillusioned with the results of the American foreign policy he had once been instrumental in formulating. He clashed sharply with Truman's new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, over such key issues as the establishment of NATO, the permanent division of Germany, and large-scale U.S. intervention in Asia, all of which Kennan opposed. Soon Acheson's disdain and Kennan's stomach ulcers got the better of Kennan. He was hospitalized briefly, and when he returned to work, he discovered that he had been frozen out of Acheson's inner circle of advisers, then stripped of his oversight authority in clandestine operations as well.
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The émigré anti-Communist movement continued to accelerate. Soon there emerged in the United States “one vocal and not uninfluential element that not only wanted war with Russia, but had a very clear idea of the purposes for which, in its own view, such a war should be fought,” as Kennan noted later in a discussion of his views on the possibility of war with the USSR during the early 1950s. “I have in mind the escapees and immigrants, mostly recent ones, from the non-Russian portions of the postwar Soviet Union, as well as from some of the Eastern European satellite states.

“Their idea,” he writes, “to which they were passionately and sometimes ruthlessly attached, was simply that the United States should, for their benefit, fight a war against the Russian people to achieve the final breakup of the traditional Russian state and the establishment of themselves as the regimes of the various ‘liberated' territories.” Kennan is referring here to the spokesmen of the so-called “Captive Nations” movement, particularly Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists.

“These recent refugees were by no means without political influence in Washington,” Kennan adds. “Connected as they were with the compact voting blocs situated in the big cities, they were able to bring direct influence to bear on individual Congressional figures. They appealed successfully at times to religious feelings, and even more importantly [
sic
] to the prevailing anti-Communist hysteria.” Among the countries the Captive Nations movement represented were several that the diplomat admits had been “invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry during the recent war.”
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Agitation by these émigrés became a part of dozens of CIA-sponsored exile operations in the United States during the early 1950s. Almost all these affairs were sponsored by the CIA covert operations directorate's International Organizations Division, which was then administering the NCFE, the CFF, and similar overlapping projects. This division organized and bankrolled the CFF with an initial grant of $180,000, according to former RFE/RL chief Mickelson. The agency, working through the NCFE, then went on to pour at least $5 million into CFF propaganda work inside the United States over the next five years.
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That $5 million figure is only a pale reflection of the true scope of the CFF's effort, however. The campaign arranged with the nonprofit Advertising Council of America for thousands of hours of free radio and television time as well as for countless free magazine and newspaper promotions. The crusade paid only for the actual
production of the proliberation political advertising, which was then broadcast or published without charge by media outlets enjoying substantial tax deductions for airing these “public service” announcements. This unique program “made it possible for the American people to read, hear and see The Crusade Story in all media of communications,” the National Committee for a Free Europe boasted in an annual report, including “newspapers, magazines, outdoor advertising, radio, television and newsreels.”
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But the CIA's $5 million direct contribution to anti-Communist education through the CFF can serve, at least, as a yardstick for comparing the scope of the crusade promotion to other political propaganda efforts undertaken in this country at about the same time. That $5 million contribution exceeds, for example, the
combined
total of all the money spent on the Truman/Dewey presidential election campaign of 1948. It establishes the CIA (through the CFF) as the largest single political advertiser on the American scene during the early 1950s,
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rivaled only by such commercial giants as General Motors and Procter & Gamble in its domination of the airwaves.