Blowback (49 page)

“This particular ethnic group was responsible for aiding [the] Soviet NKVD,” he continued. “A million of our people [were] destroyed as a result of them aiding the NKVD.… You hear a lot about the Jewish Holocaust,” he exclaimed, his yellowed mustache quivering, “but what about the 140 million Christians, Moslems and Buddhists killed by Communism? That is the real Holocaust, and you never hear about it!”
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The Captive Nations Committee's crowd responded with excited applause in the most enthusiastic welcome for any speaker of that evening.

There is also substantial overlap between the Captive Nations Committee, the Republicans' ethnic council, and a broad variety of other well-known right-wing organizations, some of which enjoy multimillion-dollar financing and play substantial roles in U.S. elections. About 15 percent of the organizational members of the American Security Council's Coalition for Peace Through Strength—the high-powered lobbying group that led the successful campaign to stop SALT II—are these same Captive Nations groups. The coalition dispenses hundreds of thousands of dollars it has received from major defense contractors to candidates it favors in U.S. congressional campaigns and is generally regarded as one of the most effective proarmament lobby groups in Washington. At least four coalition member organizations still openly support the enemy Axis governments of World War II; one is led by Nazarenko, who has stated publicly that the Coalition for Peace Through Strength has provided him with a mailing list of senior U.S. military officers for use in Captive Nations propaganda work.
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More important than any organizational connections, however, is the manner in which “liberation” thinking has again taken hold in Washington, D.C. The Reagan wing of the Republican party has historically maintained extremely close ties with the Captive Nations
movement. Many top Reagan activists have spent much of their lives promoting the liberationist cause, even when the theory fell out of fashion after the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

President Reagan himself bestowed a Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, on liberation theorist (and former OPC/CIA émigré program consultant) James Burnham in 1983. Burnham's liberation analysis “profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world,” Reagan intoned at the awards ceremony. “And I owe him a personal debt,” the president continued, “because throughout the years of travelling on the mashed-potato circuit I have quoted [him] widely.”
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Today the Reagan administration has updated liberationism to apply to 1980s crisis points like Angola and Nicaragua. The CIA, with the president's backing, is now spending in excess of $600 million per year to equip some 80,000 to 100,000 anti-Communist “freedom fighters” with arms, supplies, and even state-of-the-art Stinger antiaircraft missiles. This renewed cold war strategy, sometimes known as the Reagan Doctrine, has also become a litmus test of conservative Republican orthodoxy, writes
Washington Post
political analyst Sidney Blumenthal.
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Right-wing true believers have taken to using votes on funding for “freedom fighters” like Angolan rebel strongman Jonas Savimbi as a means of extracting concessions from Republican moderates and driving their party farther to the right. The new liberationists' goal, Blumenthal writes, “is to ensure that no Republican will be nominated for president who has not pledged fealty to their ideology.”

The liberation ideal—”permanent counterrevolution,” in Blumenthal's words, meaning protracted conflict with the USSR, leading to a final showdown in which communism is wiped from the face of the earth—is not simply a “Nazi idea,” nor is it appropriate to label people who support it Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. The
Post's
Blumenthal, for example, attributes many of Burnham's liberationist theories to Burnham's flirtation with Trotskyism in the 1930s.

But the fact remains that ideas and theories have histories, just as nations do. They are the products of particular circumstances and junctures in civilization. Burnham's theories were based on his work with exiles during the early years of the American Committee for Liberation, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, and similar projects that enlisted numerous Nazi collaborators among that generation of “freedom fighters.” Burnham speaks highly of Germany's
political warfare in Belorussia and the Ukraine; it was only Hitler's later blunders that made its eastern front policy a mistake, he writes in
Containment or Revolution
.
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The true origins of liberationism as a coherent philosophy lie in Nazi Germany and in the Nazis' political warfare campaign on the eastern front, nowhere else.

Today liberation activists often have a reasonably sophisticated political agenda and enough clout to arrange annual Captive Nations commemorations hosted directly by the president or vice president of the United States.
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Their political stands are not entirely unreasonable: Most Captive Nations activists are strong supporters of improved human rights inside the Soviet bloc, for example, although their record on civil rights inside the United States is somewhat less exemplary. The one position they cling to above all, however, is an implacable paranoia toward the USSR that would permit no arms control treaties, no trade and indeed no East-West cooperation of any type, only relentless preparation for war.

The scars that secret émigré anti-Communist programs have left on life in the United States run considerably deeper than the contribution they may have made to the early 1950s purge of former Voice of America Director Charles Thayer or to the escape of certain Nazis from justice. The cold war itself—and, indirectly, much that has flowed from it—should be reconsidered today in the light of what is beginning to be known of clandestine activities during that period.

Many, though obviously not all, U.S. covert operations of the period involved use of Nazi collaborators, and it is that aspect of American secret warfare that has been the focus of attention here. The basic rationale for using Nazis in covert operations has consistently been that doing so was of practical value to the United States in international relations, that it was putting “future American interests” ahead of the “delights of revenge.” In reality, however, these affairs have worked to the long-term—and frequently the short-term—detriment of the United States. The negative blowback from U.S. operations employing Nazis and collaborators may be generally grouped into six categories. The first of these, chronologically speaking, stems from the intense West-East competition over recruitment of German scientists and secret agents. The fight over these intelligence assets played a surprisingly large role in the rapid erosion of trust between the superpowers, especially in the first months after the defeat of Hitler Germany.

The mistrust engendered during this race proved to be an important factor in undermining the possibility of superpower peace as early as the Potsdam Conference of July 1945.
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Both sides at Potsdam read the clandestine campaigns of the other as the “true” policy behind the veils of diplomacy. Yet both also insisted that their own diplomatic initiatives be taken at face value. One practical result of this semiotic clash was an acceleration of the upward spiral of suspicion, hostility, and fear.

The second major type of damaging blowback has been the destructive effect that Western covert operations and political warfare—particularly programs employing Nazi collaborators—has had on provoking the cold war and later crises in East-West relations. These affairs were not only products of the cold war but also catalysts that escalated the conflict. They offer graphic proof that the United States' struggle against the USSR began considerably earlier and was carried out with far more violence than the Western public was led to believe at the time.

The U.S. “national security state,” as it has since come to be termed, established itself very quickly in the wake of the showdown at Potsdam. Before three years had passed, the emerging intelligence community had begun undertaking small- and medium-scale campaigns using former Nazis and Axis collaborators as operatives in the attempted coup d'etat in Romania, the subversion of elections in Greece and Italy, and attempts to manipulate favored political parties throughout the Soviet-occupied zone of Eastern Europe. One can well imagine what the USSR's interpretation of these U.S. initiatives was at the time, considering the Marxist-Leninist dictum that the United States is inherently imperialist in character.

The liberal anti-Communist consensus of the day in the West saw covert operations as a viable “national security” option that was short of open warfare. Such tactics were supposed to be a relatively enlightened and effective means of advancing American interests at the expense of their Soviet rival. George Kennan, Charles Thayer, Brigadier General John Magruder, and other theoreticians of clandestine political warfare contended that the relatively successful experience that the United States had enjoyed in sponsoring an anti-Nazi underground during wartime could be selectively applied to the harassment, “containment,” and perhaps the overthrow of the postwar pro-Soviet states in the East.
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There was a fundamental difference between the United States'
wartime experience, however, and the postwar practice of attempting to bankroll alliances between Eastern European center parties and the remnants of the Axis power structure that still held on in the Soviet-occupied zone. In many cases, the U.S.-backed factions lacked either the moral authority or the simple competence to rule, particularly in the face of Soviet hostility. But instead of urging its proxies to cooperate as junior partners in the early postwar coalition governments dominated by Communists—and thereby to stabilize the situation in Eastern Europe with some measure of democracy, however imperfect—the United States encouraged its sympathizers to attempt to seize total power (as in the Romanian coup of 1947) or, that failing, to use clandestine action to disrupt the ability of any other group to govern (as in Poland from 1946 to 1951).
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Captivated by a vision of the world in which any enemy of the Communists was a friend of ours, the United States'
public
role in Eastern Europe during the cold war consisted in large part of the creation of polarized crises in which East-West cooperation became impossible, while the
clandestine
counterpart to this same policy often created secret alliances with war criminals, Nazis, and extremists. It is clear from the secrecy that surrounded these alliances that many U.S. national security experts recognized at the time such tactics as reprehensible. However necessary such tactics may have seemed in the 1940s and 1950s, in retrospect this policy has proved to have been an ineffective way to deal with Eastern Europe, one which some subsequent U.S. administrations have spent considerable effort trying to correct.

The results of the clandestine policy have set back, not advanced, American efforts to win friends in Eastern Europe, lessen repression, and improve civil liberties in the region. The American sponsorship of Gehlen and other collaborators may have remained largely secret in the United States, but it became a long-running theme in pro-Soviet Eastern European publicity, precisely because such practices tended to discredit America. The hypocrisy of U.S. actions and the CIA's not-so-secret encouragement of disgraced Axis collaborators tended to undermine Eastern European public understanding of Western-style norms and civil liberties, which had never been a strong tradition in the region in the first place. Furthermore, exposure of U.S.-backed campaigns of this type tended to provide satellite states with convenient and surprisingly credible outside scapegoats for the failures of their own governments, especially during the years of extreme economic problems in the immediate
aftermath of the war. In many cases—Romania, Poland, and the Ukraine—clandestine campaigns by U.S. intelligence may have ended up actually strengthening the pro-Soviet regimes they were intended to subvert.

Even some of the “success stories” of the postwar Nazi campaigns have rebounded in unpleasant ways for the United States. In Greece the United States backed the reintegration of wartime Nazi collaborators into that country's police agencies as a means of fighting an insurgency, and the strategy did indeed succeed in placing political parties favorable to the United States in power there. At the same time, however, leaders of the CIA-trained and-supported police agency KYP—many with records of Nazi criminality—became the center of a long string of extremist plots, coup attempts, and brutality that eventually culminated in the imposition of neo-Fascist rule in that country under Colonel George Papadopoulos from 1967 to 1974.
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The role of American multinational corporations and the CIA in the Papadopoulos coup of 1967 continues to undermine U.S.-Greek relations to this day.

Despite the demonstrable lack of success of these clandestine tactics in Europe, especially those involving rehabilitated Nazi collaborators, the United States has expanded and intensified similar émigré subversion programs all over the world during the past three decades. Instead of being discarded, the early émigré operations employing Waffen SS veterans have become a model for thousands of other U.S. clandestine operations. The CIA's present techniques for virtually every type of covert operation from black propaganda to murder were first formulated during the agency's work with the Eastern European collaborationist troops it inherited from the Nazis. True, some types of psychological strategies are as old as warfare itself, and other modern clandestine techniques may be traced to British, German, or Soviet programs initiated during the 1920s and 1930s. The first systematic use of assassinations, coups d'etat, ratlines, and subversion began for Americans, though, while working with Axis assets in the wake of World War II. The National Security Council's pivotal NSC 10/2 and later NSC 5412 decisions—the rationales for both of which were intimately tied up with the enlistment of Waffen SS veterans and anti-Communist irregulars left over from the war—have proved to be the foundation upon which more than three decades of multibillion-dollar clandestine activities have been built. The present-day U.S. sponsorship of the Nicaraguan contras, including the well-publicized CIA training of
contras in the assassination of medical workers, schoolteachers, and civilian officials,
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are in many respects a replay of tactics that were tested—and failed—in the Ukraine more than thirty years ago.