Blowback (50 page)

The third major type of blowback is insidious and subtle. Former Axis intelligence analysts enlisted by the U.S. Army and the CIA consistently reinforced the existing self-deception among U.S. national security experts concerning the USSR, particularly during the first formative years of the cold war and the emerging U.S. national security apparatus. Examples may be readily identified today in spite of the extreme security measures that still surround the internal intelligence evaluation processes of those years. These include very basic errors that range from misappraisal of the size and war readiness of the USSR's military establishment to fundamental misjudgments about Soviet political intentions in both Western and Eastern Europe.

The information-gathering and analysis divisions of intelligence agencies are intensely political organizations. Instead of the ideal of dispassionate, accurate evaluation of facts, what one actually encounters inside such groups is a sharply competitive business in which final reports are often shaped as much by the policies of the administration in power as they are by the underlying reality of any given situation. Bureaucratic infighting and even domestic partisan debates play a very substantial role in the creation of intelligence analyses.
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During the cold war years the CIA and army intelligence often selectively enlisted those persons abroad who confirmed those agencies' vision of what U.S. strategy in Europe should be. At the same time they purged other analysts, including highly trained Americans of impeccable reputations, who challenged those assumptions. These personnel decisions seem to have been motivated primarily by a desire for institutional orthodoxy, not by the actuality of Soviet behavior of the day.

Information and analysis that reinforced the dominant preconceptions of the day almost always received a far more sympathetic reception in Washington than news that ran counter to those beliefs. Thus General Clay's (and Gehlen's) alarms about the Red Army in early 1948 counted for more in U.S. national security circles than the reality that the USSR had significantly reduced its troop strength in Europe, in large part because Clay's war scare confirmed the American leaders' worst suspicions concerning the USSR.

Entrepreneurs such as General Gehlen, John Valentine Grombach,
and their various rivals have historically been able to manipulate this situation to their own advantage, sometimes for years at a time. Gehlen, above all, proved to be the master at playing to the audience of American national security experts. By shaping the data that shaped global decisions, he played an indirect yet substantial role in world events. His support for a relentlessly hostile cold war against the USSR, together with the success he enjoyed in undermining his critics, has left a durable mark on European history.
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The fourth important type of blowback is the long-term corrupting influence that financing the work of men like Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Stanislaw Stankievich, and others has had on the American intelligence agencies themselves. The corrosive effect of recruiting criminals, mercenaries, and torturers as CIA contract operatives extends well beyond the impact of any single incident or operation in which such persons may become involved. The internal logic of clandestine agencies demands that the organization protect its former agents long after their usefulness has passed—or at least to “dispose” of such agents properly, as it is termed in intelligence jargon—in order to retain their loyalty to the institution as long as possible. This can produce compromising personnel problems that last for years, even for decades.

The CIA has historically dealt with its disposal problem by quietly resettling its former contract agents in South America, Canada, or Australia. It has also brought a smaller number of operators to the United States, official reports have finally admitted. (Traitors and suspected double agents present a special sort of disposal problem, of course. Congressional testimony and fragmentary CIA records now in the public domain suggest that some such persons have been murdered.)
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Ongoing agent disposal programs create a strong incentive for the government to continue protecting retired Nazis or other criminals for years after their supposed usefulness to this country has expired. The CIA's present determination to protect its agent disposal system remains one of the single greatest obstacles to expulsion of known Nazi criminals hiding in the United States.

As late as 1976 the agency's practices in this regard were still so blatant that the CIA actually wrote an unclassified letter to a former CIA contract agent, Edgars Laipenieks, who was then facing deportation from the United States in connection with allegations that he had committed multiple murders, torture, and other crimes against
humanity at the Central Prison in Riga, Latvia, during the war. “We have been corresponding with the Immigration and Naturalization Service about your status,” agency spokesman Charles Savage wrote to Laipenieks on official CIA letterhead. “It is our understanding that INS has advised their San Diego office to cease any action against you. If this does not prove [to be] the case, please let us know immediately. Thank you once again for … your past assistance to the Agency. Sincerely,” etc.
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Laipenieks, as it turned out, made the CIA's letter public during his legal defense, and caused something of an uproar, for obvious reasons. Since that time the agency has been more cautious about what it sends out to disposed agents with questionable backgrounds. The practice of tacitly protecting them continues, however, and remains a factor in several cases of Nazi criminals still living in the United States.

The reverse side of this particular type of blowback is the intrinsic weakness, from a strictly practical point of view, of the networks of contract agents who had been compromised by their service to Hitler during the war. As was seen in the case of Heinz Felfe inside the Gehlen Organization, the tight, often cultlike relationships among Nazi veterans actually provided a relatively easy means for Soviet agents to penetrate U.S.-sponsored espionage operations.

Intelligence agencies of both East and West have effectively obstructed prosecution of Nazi criminals on a far broader scale than simply the handful of cases cited above. To put it simply, espionage organizations have long found it more profitable to use the evidence of criminality that has come into their hands as a means of blackmailing or suborning former Nazis (or any other compromised persons) into cooperating with intelligence operations rather than bring such persons to trial in an open forum. In case after case, America's—and the world's—long-term interest in advancing social justice has been subordinated to short-term espionage gains. The full extent of this practice will probably never be known. The successful execution of this sort of blackmail, it is important to remember, requires continuing the cover-up of an individual's criminal past, if only to ensure that the espionage agency can come back for another “bite.” But the recent revelations of alleged blackmail of United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim using charges of wartime crimes against humanity is one more indication that this type of extortion of ex-Nazis for intelligence purposes has reached far more deeply into European life than is generally known.
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The fifth and perhaps the most damaging type of blowback from the émigré and Waffen SS utilization programs stems from the CIA's large-scale intervention in domestic American politics during the 1950s. These operations became important elements in the complex process through which U.S. intelligence agencies systematically nurtured persons viewed as useful, while attempting to suppress those deemed dangerous.

The CIA was presumably motivated by a desire to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives when it promoted the careers of Eastern European liberation activists inside the United States. Foreign affairs, after all, are the CIA's assigned sphere of operations. But the agency's liberation campaigns were never confined to overseas operations or even to immigrant communities in this country. Instead, they became a component of the agency's larger domestic political agenda. The CIA combined the émigrés' liberation efforts with other agency programs of even larger scope, such as the manipulation of mainstream U.S. media, direct propaganda broadcasting in this country through the Crusade for Freedom and other CIA-financed radio shows, surveillance and harassment of opponents, careful sculpting of academic and scholarly research programs, aggressive lobbying on Capitol Hill, and penetration of the senior leadership of trade unions, corporations, religious groups, and even student organizations.
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Many details of the CIA's domestic campaigns have gradually leaked into the public domain over the last decade. The synergistic effect that this enormous effort produced on life in this country is still not adequately understood, however, and may not be for many years. The fact is that the CIA's domestic operations had a substantial and lasting impact on political debate in this country during the cold war years, most important of all on foreign policy issues. The agency played a powerful role in setting the general parameters of the foreign policy debate in the United States throughout those years and in drawing the lines that separated “respectable” opinions from those considered beyond the pale.

America's large Eastern European immigrant population was particularly vulnerable to this process. The renewed liberation politics hammered out by compromised exile politicians in the wake of World War II became the only acceptable point of view in many immigrant communities in the 1950s; those with different perspectives learned that it was safer to hold their tongues.
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Ironically, even the anti-Communist exiles most favored for their
usefulness by the CIA also suffered, though to a lesser degree. Regardless of the rhetoric of the day, the secret councils of the U.S. government never actually determined to liberate any Eastern European territory, at least not if doing so required substantial risks or sacrifices on the part of the United States. The exiled nationalist foot soldiers became mere pawns in the superpower contention over Europe, inexpensive agents whose lives were expended as though they were dollar bills that could be bet and lost without any great consequence to the men who formulated the grand strategies.

The final major type of blowback is the role that these clandestine operations played in the obstruction of justice. U.S. courts assert that they have no jurisdiction to try persons accused of committing Nazi war crimes or crimes against humanity, in large part because the offenses took place in foreign countries and generally did not directly involve U.S. citizens. Therefore, the present U.S. government Nazi hunters who work for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) are limited to bringing charges against war criminals in this country for violations of U.S. immigration law—not for murder, looting, or other persecution. If the prosecution is successful, the Nazi criminal is expelled from this country.
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Although the OSI is loath to admit it, the fact is that its attorneys often have difficulty with war crimes suspects who plead the “CIA defense” in response to OSI charges. Former Nazis and collaborators who once worked for U.S. intelligence agencies are arguing in court that they disclosed their wartime activities, SS membership, or other compromising evidence to their CIA or army controllers back during the cold war. In so doing, defense lawyers claim, their clients satisfied any legal requirement to acknowledge their pasts to the U.S. government during immigration. Therefore, the lawyers say, they cannot be deported today.
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In other instances, persons whom some have accused of crimes against humanity like Mykola Lebed are unlikely to be brought to trial in the first place because their immigration to the United States was legally sponsored under the 100 Persons section of the 1949 CIA charter. Similarly, some ex-SS men insist that they entered the country under the Displaced Persons Act waiver for Baltic SS veterans engineered by Displaced Persons Commissioner O'Connor back in 1951. Their U.S. citizenships are perfectly legal despite their SS backgrounds, they say.
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Court rulings on such arguments have been mixed. Tscherim
Soobzokov, a onetime Waffen SS and police battalion activist suspected of multiple murders, succeeded in forcing the OSI to drop its deportation case against him when he proved at the eleventh hour that he had in fact disclosed his work for the SS to the CIA prior to his immigration to this country.
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The agency also intervened in the case of Otto von Bolschwing, the career SS and SD veteran who had once helped organize the Bucharest pogrom, and helped engineer a settlement under which the gravely ill von Bolschwing was forced to give up his U.S. citizenship yet permitted to remain in the country until his death.
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Edgars Laipenieks, the one who received the written endorsement from the CIA's spokesman, having successfully resisted earlier deportation attempts, remains comfortably in the United States as this book goes to press, more than ten years after the agency's letter. Court decisions are pending concerning CIA defense claims by several other former Nazis.
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At the same time a second maneuver, known among war crimes attorneys as the “KGB defense,” has become the single most popular plea on behalf of the Nazi criminals facing deportation from the United States today. In a replay of the same cold war arguments that brought many Nazi collaborators to the United States in the first place, lawyers for accused collaborators are arguing that the Soviet KGB, now supposedly working with the tacit cooperation of the U.S. Justice Department, is manufacturing documentary evidence against their clients for political reasons. The Soviets, they say, are really the ones who are behind the evidence that Nazi criminals are hiding in America, and the U.S. Justice Department has somehow been taken in by their scheme. Many Americans feel a deep antipathy toward the USSR and believe the KGB forgery stories just might be true.