Blowback (41 page)

The campaign's program began by naming a board of directors headed by General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin airlift, who was falsely given credit for originating the Crusade for Freedom concept in order to enhance the program's patriotic appeal. Next came the casting of a ten-ton bronze “Freedom Bell” (to “let Freedom ring”), and a ticker-tape “Freedom” parade up Broadway in New York City, culminating in a huge rally on the steps of City Hall. The Freedom Bell became the centerpiece of a national promotion tour led by a phalanx of political notables, including many anti-Communist exile leaders. They loaded the bell onto a special “Freedom Train” and shuttled it to propaganda events from coast to coast. There were stops at Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and at least thirteen other major cities. Each event came complete with a continuous drumbeat of publicity in radio, newspapers, magazines, churches, and social clubs of every description. Posters, handbills, billboards, commercials, and even fund-raising telethons filled out the picture. (America's first simultaneous coast-to-coast television broadcast, in fact, was a Crusade for Freedom telethon.)
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The CFF consistently stressed the leading role of anti-Communist exiles in the liberation campaign. It was “essential to maintain as many [émigré] leaders as we can,” said NCFE President Dewitt
Poole, “[to prepare for] the day of their country's liberation.”
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Spokesmen for organizations founded and controlled in large part by such Nazi collaborators as the Free Albania Committee and the Committee for a Free Latvia, discussed above, appeared at many of these events side by side with leaders of more respectable associations, such as the Hungarian National Council, Bulgarian National Committee, and the various other groups gathered under NCFE's wing. They testified to their determination to free their homelands from Communist domination.

Similarly, the NCFE used its economic muscle to rent meeting halls and provide the public relations support that puffed up scores of otherwise minor émigré events into major “news” stories that enjoyed extensive play in the American media. Former Nazis did not control such programs, but they were sometimes able to make use of the prevailing anti-Communist hysteria to promote policies that they favored. The NCFE gave the annual Baltic Freedom Day Committee free use of Carnegie Hall once a year for at least three years, according to the organization's annual reports, then used its influence to line up noted speakers, including a half dozen U.S. senators, the president of the NCFE itself, and a leading board member of the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission to grace the event. Most important to the favored Baltic politicians was a flood of endorsements arranged by the NCFE that included a proclamation by the governor of New York and public messages of solidarity from the then president of the United States, Harry Truman, and the man who was soon to be Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. These were obviously not “Nazi” political gatherings. The major theme was support for democracy and for national independence of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from the USSR. Even so, the Vanagis among the Latvians and other extreme-right-wing forces within the Baltic immigrant community succeeded in placing speakers at the rostrum at Carnegie Hall to promote the myth that the Baltic Waffen SS legions were simply anti-Communist patriots and to press for changes in U.S. immigration regulations that would permit easy entry of such persons into this country under refugee relief programs.
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The crusade was only one part of a much broader CIA-sponsored effort to shape U.S. (and world) public opinion. Related programs included book publishing, scholarly studies of the USSR by carefully selected researchers, and bankrolling hundreds of rallies, commemorations, and other media events. The principal political point
of this program was to provide extensive publicity for all available evidence that the USSR was a dangerous imperial power. The agency went on to emphasize news of the “liberation” movements of the exiles as an important morale booster and an illustration of the resistance to Soviet expansion.

The CIA financed a literary campaign explicitly designed to promote former Nazi collaborators as appropriate leaders of liberation movements among their respective nationalities. The German author Heinz Bongartz (pen name Jiirgen Thorwald) recounts how he was approached in 1950 by a CIA officer named Pleasants with a proposal that he write a promotional account of the Vlasov Army for distribution in both the United States and Europe. Pleasants had read an earlier Bongartz tract that was strongly sympathetic to Vlasov and “he thought I would be the ‘right fellow'” to write further material on the subject, Bongartz remembers.

The German author accepted Pleasants's offer. The CIA—with the cooperation of Heinz Danko Herre, a senior officer in the Gehlen Organization—provided him with stenographers, translators, travel expenses, a substantial grant, access to secret U.S. records, and assistance in locating SS and Vlasov Army veterans scattered all over Europe. Bongartz's glowing report of Vlasov was published in German and English two years later, and it remains an often-cited work in the field.
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The book presents a thoroughly whitewashed picture of the Vlasov movement, but Bongartz deserves credit, at least, for openly discussing the sponsors of his book, more than can be said for a number of other scholars of the period.

This broad-based, multifaceted effort legitimized for many Americans what the extreme-right-wing émigré movement had been saying since the end of World War II. The United States could easily liberate Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union and even dismember the USSR, the theory went, by bankrolling stepped-up subversion programs in the East.

“It became an article of faith that the USSR was going to fall apart at any time,” notes scholar Vladimir Petrov. “The idea was that communism was a small conspiracy of men sending out the revolution, that it was hated by the people, [and so] naturally they wanted to overthrow it right away. Communists killed people to maintain their power, so the first chance [the people] had there would be a rebellion.”
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John Foster Dulles articulated this myth neatly in congressional testimony that went entirely unchallenged at the time. “Some
dozen people in the Kremlin,” he proclaimed, “are seeking to consolidate their imperial rule over some 800,000,000 people, representing what were nearly a score of independent nations.”
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With those kinds of odds—800 million against 12—the overthrow of communism from within would seem like a fairly simple task.

“That was the theory at the time,” Petrov says. “There was a lot of enthusiasm. Many people thought that communism could be very simply gotten rid of.” But in reality, Petrov reflects with a sigh, “this just wasn't true.”

The liberation message struck an extraordinarily responsive chord in the United States, one which reverberated far beyond the relatively narrow community of Eastern European exiles. Its potent blend of anti-Communist paranoia, American patriotism, and the self-perceived generosity of doing something practical to aid people seen as suffering from persecution abroad appealed to millions of Americans.

It is probably impossible today to determine the impact that the CIA's émigré programs and domestic propaganda efforts had on the election of 1952 or other mainstream political events of the period with any degree of scientific certainty. The information detailing the full extent of the agency's efforts to shape domestic public opinion remains buried in classified files, if it has not been purged from the record altogether. The carefully controlled surveys of public opinion that might enable scholars to disentangle the specific effects of the CIA's immigration and propaganda programs from the broader political impact of the media's day-to-day coverage of international events were not taken at the time, and it would be pointless to try to take them today, thirty-five years later. It is not surprising that sociologists and political scientists of the period failed to make use of surveys and other statistical tools to examine the impact of CIA clandestine action campaigns in the United States; after all, the fact that a systematic propaganda effort even existed was a state secret at the time.

But the anecdotal evidence concerning the significance of these programs is strong. The role of former Nazi collaborators and U.S. intelligence agencies in promoting the penetration of liberationist political thinking into the American body politic may be traced through several clear steps. First, the rhetoric and the detailed strategies for the “liberation” of the USSR and Eastern Europe were originally generated before World War II by pro-Fascist
émigré organizations enjoying direct sponsorship from Nazi Germany's intelligence agencies, which were intent on using these groups as pawns in their plans to exterminate European Jewry and to achieve a military victory in the East. The Nazis significantly developed both the liberation strategies and their exile constituencies during the war, despite the Germans' own internal factional fighting over how to make best use of collaborators.
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Secondly, after the war U.S. intelligence agencies brought leaders of a number of these pro-Fascist groups—the Ukrainian OUN, the Russian nationalist NTS, the Albanian Balli Kombetar, certain of the Baltic Nazi collaborators, etc.—into the United States through programs the specific purpose of which was, in part, the generation of effective anti-Communist propaganda.
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Next, these same exile leaders aggressively promoted essentially the same liberation propaganda in the United States that they had advocated under Nazi sponsorship, though now with a new appeal to American values, such as democracy and freedom, rather than the earlier open advocacy of racial politics and fascism. The CIA gave these domestic publicity campaigns multimillion-dollar clandestine backing during the 1950s by providing operating cash, salaries, and logistic and publishing support and—not least—by facilitating endorsements from respected mainstream politicians.

Neither the Eastern European exile community in America nor, still less, the minority of former Nazi collaborators among them had the political muscle to force adoption of a liberation agenda on the American public by themselves. But they could, and did, often serve as catalysts that helped trigger the much bigger political “chemical reaction,” so to speak, that was then under way, the primary ingredients of which were East-West disputes over economic and military spheres of influence. The first and in some ways most credible spokesmen in the United States for liberationist thinking were exiled activists who were, like NTS executive Constantine Boldyreff discussed above, “well known to American intelligence [and] vouched for by high American officials.”
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Their message and slogans caught on with millions of Americans during the first half of the 1950s, especially among conservatives and others alarmed by the spread of communism abroad. In 1952 the public support in the United States for threats to liberate Eastern Europe and the USSR from their Communist governments was sufficiently broad that the Republican party adopted an explicit call for liberation as the main foreign policy plank in its party platform and as a
central theme in its presidential and congressional election campaigns.

The Republicans' campaign platform demanded “the end of the negative, futile and immoral policy of ‘Containment,'” as the
New York Times
reported, “which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism.” The GOP pledged to “revive the contagious, liberating influences that are inherent in freedom” and to mark the “beginning of the end” for Communist party rule in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
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America, the Republicans' primary foreign policy spokesman, John Foster Dulles, wrote in
Life
magazine, “wants and expects liberation to occur.” This anti-Communist revolution, he claimed disingenuously, would come about “peacefully.”
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The Republicans used this liberation rhetoric as a means of distinguishing their promises of a new, tougher foreign policy from the program of the Democrats. What exactly Eisenhower intended to do to promote the liberation of Eastern Europe once the election campaign was over, however, was usually left vague.

Arthur Bliss Lane, who had been U.S. ambassador to Poland during the Truman years, became the point man in the Republican party's effort to swing the enthusiasm created by the Crusade for Freedom into the GOP's column during the 1952 election. Lane's inspiration was to attract the large Slavic and Eastern European voting blocs in the United States, which had traditionally voted for Democratic candidates, to the Republican party through demagogic promises to “liberate” their former homelands with American assistance.
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Along with his party assignment, Lane, as noted earlier, simultaneously served on the boards of both the NCFE and the CFF, and he was an indefatigable speaker and promoter on behalf of each of his causes. Soon Republican election tactics in ethnic communities paralleled the CIA's Crusade for Freedom campaign so closely that considerable political sophistication was required to distinguish one from the other. The party sponsored Committees of Crusades to Lift the Iron Curtain, Liberation Centers, Liberation Week festivities, and Liberation Rallies, designed to draw ethnic voters into the Republican camp. These campaigns imitated and sometimes overlapped the CFF's Freedom Weeks, Baltic Freedom Days, and Freedom Rallies. Speakers and local activists of the two crusades were frequently the same people.
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Several of Lane's top ethnic advisers personified the gradual evolution
from World War II collaboration into cold war liberation advocacy that has been seen in the CIA's propaganda programs. Lane's specialist in Republican party appeals to Americans of Russian and Ukrainian ethnic descent, for example, was the scholar and publicist Vladimir Petrov. Petrov, a survivor of Stalin's prison camps in the 1930s, had defected to the Germans early in the war and spent much of the conflict assigned to a Nazi-sponsored propaganda group in Vienna, according to his own account, and as a publicist promoting Vlasov's “Russian Army of Liberation.” Petrov also served as a quisling city administrator in Krasnodar, in the USSR, during the Nazi occupation. He insisted in a recent interview that he had no knowledge when he was serving in Krasnodar of the Nazis' gas truck extermination program, which was introduced in Krasnodar during Petrov's tenure as transportation and finance chief. The Germans killed at least 7,000 people in this manner during Petrov's brief time in office, then used collaborationist militia troops to shoot others in tank ditches on the outskirts of town.
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During the 1952 election campaign Petrov served both as an adviser to Lane and as a leading Russian-language journalist in the ethnic press in this country.
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