Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
An anonymous and undated brief review of Christopher Simpson’s 1988 masterpiece BLOWBACK book about the subterranean CIA-led infection of racist imperialistic fascism, or ideological nazism, into and permeating the post-WW2 U.S. Government and culture under the guise of ‘anti-communism’ but really for achieving ultimately a conquest of the entire world by the U.S. Government, stated (which I 100% agree with):
“Blowback is the fullest, most authoritative account ever written of the USA’s collaboration with Nazis after WWII, & of the long-range effect this has had on the nation’s domestic & foreign policy. Drawing on extensive 1st-hand research & a wealth of documents previously classified or never before made public, Christopher Simpson has written a major & often startling work about the extensive connection between high-ranking US officials & ex-Nazis & collaborators, & about the effect this relationship has had on American society & the cold war.”
It’s still the case, 36 years after that astoundingly comprehensive book of history was published.
SO: I am here presenting representative samples from this book, which can be purchased at Amazon but is also available free of charge though much marked-up (good for at least considering whether or not to purchase the book) here:
I’ve selected the following excerpts from it [and additions to it from myself in brackets, so as to provide details on one of its key personages, Gustav Hilger] with two goals in mind: 1. To give a sense of the book’s basic narrative; and, 2. To display that narrative’s importance to understanding today’s U.S. Government and news-media:
p. 102:
The National Security Council had delivered President Truman’s official go-ahead for the special operations segment of Bloodstone and other U.S. covert warfare plans in a June 1948 decision known in national security parlance as NSC 10/2 (“NSC ten-slash-two”). The decision marked a crucial turning point in the history of U.S. intelligence, in the cold war, and, indeed, in the entire U.S.-Soviet relationship. It dealt with the types of clandestine operations the U.S. government was willing to undertake and how they were to be administered.
Through NSC 10/2, the National Security Council authorized a program of clandestine “propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures,” according to the top secret text. It went on to call for “subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” All this was to be carried out in such a way that “any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if [they are] uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” No longer would the CIA and other spy agencies be limited primarily to gathering and processing information about foreign rivals. The administrative hobbles that had limited U.S. covert activities since the end of World War II were about to come off.10
A new Office of Special Projects (soon to be renamed Office for Policy Coordination, or OPC) was created within the Central Intelligence Agency to “plan and conduct” these operations. Secretary of State [General George C.] Marshall gave [George] Kennan the job of selecting OPC’s chief, and the man Kennan chose was Frank Wisner, the intense, dynamic OSS veteran who had helped engineer the Bloodstone project.11 …
While NSC 10/2 authorized a significant expansion of U.S. covert warfare operations, it simultaneously attempted to do something else as well: to control U.S. subversion operations overseas by institutionalizing them and subjecting them to central civilian authority. This type of coordination, which tended to benefit the Department of State, had been an important aspect of the reorganization of the Pentagon, the creation of the NSC and the CIA in 1947, and most other “national security” reforms of the period.
Secretary of State Marshall gave George Kennan responsibility for policy guidance of the entire NSC 10/2 effort.
p. 114:
[About Gustav Hilger, Counselor and chief advisor to Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on USSR affairs. He strongly warned Ribbentrop (who, unlike his boss, was tried at Nuremberg and hanged) and then personally told Hitler himself, that unless Germany would first secretly gain the support of leading anti-communists in the USSR, to become the basis for a German stooge regime to rule there after the war, an invasion of the USSR by German forces would produce only a Nazi defeat. But Hitler rejected that advice, because he wanted all Slavs to be either slaves of Germans or else dead, no mere colony; so, Hitler invaded and lost WW2. Hilger also provided Hitler with crucial strategic advice regarding the roundup of Italy’s Jews (which advice Hitler adopted). When Hilger surrendered to Americans at the end of WW2, he became immediately protected by the Truman Administration; and, in a 28 February 1950 memo, the CIA’s Richard Helms wrote of him, “He is undoubtedly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet and his background fits him to make a substantial contribution to the work of the CIA.” Ribbentrop’s defense at the Nuremberg Tribunals had requested America to send Hilger from the U.S. to testify for him; the U.S. lied and said Hilger was too ill — Hilger actually wasn’t ill and was already under U.S. protection inside Germany at that time, assisting the CIA to get help from Hitler’s former chief of intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen, whom the U.S. regime then appointed as the chief of West German intelligence and a major CIA asset against the USSR. Matt Ellison, the Executive Director of the American Governance Foundation, headlined appropriately about Hilger, on 12 April 2019, “The German Behind America’s Postwar Strategy”. Ellison noted that “After Soviet intelligence learned Hilger was back in Germany, they requested his extradition as a war criminal and arrested members of his family in the Soviet Zone to force the issue. Hilger was later told Soviet intelligence considered him to be the ‘most dangerous German” who had served at the Moscow embassy before the war.’” The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says, in its article about Hilger, only that “Joseph Stalin said of Hilger: ‘German heads of state and German ambassadors to Moscow came and went – but Gustav Hilger remained’.[4],” and that footnote “[4]” links to this 11 October 1945 CIA document about him, during the Nuremberg Tribunals, and that document opened with that same undated alleged Stalin quotation. A prior 5 October 1945 U.S. Government advice to the American Nuremberg Prosecutor Robert Jackson headlined “German Nationals as Potential Witnesses” and opened with that same alleged and undated “quotation” of Stalin. The alleged ‘quotation’ was meaningless (perhaps cited by the CIA in order to suggest that Stalin disliked Hilger). Stalin would probably have had him hanged. On pages 259-273 of East Germany’s BROWN BOOK: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany, Hilger is listed, and briefly described, as one of 230 “Ribbentrop Diplomats in the Foreign Service.” That book likewise lists thousands of West German officials in other fields, who might have been tried and executed if they had been caught by the Soviets, but Hilger was possibly the brightest of them all.]
He had technically been a prisoner of war since his surrender in May 1945, but his wanted notice on the war crimes charge remained on the books as an open case. It is certain, however, that he was never actually arrested on the war crimes charges, nor was he forced to face a trial for his wartime activities. [That’s typical: Whereas the U.S. Government protected almost all of the Nazis and Nazi collaborators in West Germany, the Soviet Government imprisoned or executed any that hadn’t escaped to the West.]
For the next several years Hilger shuttled back and forth between the United States and Germany under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department, and he is known to have been in Berlin during the spring crisis of 1948. As the East-West tension that led to the famous Berlin airlift heated up during the summer and fall of that year, the State Department was faced with the tricky problem of evacuating a number of ex-Nazis and collaborators, including fugitives [such as Hilger], who were working under U.S. sponsorship in Germany at the time. …
George Kennan intervened with the U.S. political adviser in Germany, Robert Murphy, on Hilger’s behalf in late September 1948.
In a series of telegrams marked “Personal for Kennan” and carrying Kennan’s hand-scrawled initials, Murphy’s and Kennan’s deputies proceeded to argue over the best method to bring Hilger into the United States. Murphy noted that the army intelligence men in Germany wanted “visas for five persons [Hilger and his family] and travel arrangements . . . made under assumed names” — an apparent violation of U.S. law.* State Department headquarters favored bringing him in under his real name aboard a U.S. military aircraft, then providing him later with a false identity if necessary. That was the alternative backed by Kennan, and it was eventually implemented.13 It is worth noting that the arrangements for Hilger were handled directly by Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff, while the Visa Division, which is ordinarily responsible for issuing entry documents to the United States, was provided with only vague verbal reports. All of Hilger’s travel expenses were paid by the U.S. government.
Hilger soon became an unofficial ambassador to the United States from Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Party in West Germany. “Hilger was negotiating with the U.S. government and was instrumental in the creation of the Adenauer regime,” says Nikolai Poppe, a Bloodstone recruit with whom Hilger worked in Washington. “In the very beginning, when Adenauer wished to become head [of the new Federal Republic of Germany], some American officials did not regard him as suitable. . . . But Adenauer was eventually permitted to form a government in 1949. This was due in part to Hilger’s contacts with the U.S. State Department. Hilger had great influence there.”14 …
Hilger met frequently in Washington, D.C., with Kennan and Bohlen, who were then considered the United States’ preeminent experts on U.S.-Soviet relations. Kennan personally intervened on Hilger’s behalf to obtain him a high-level security clearance, and he listened closely to Hilger’s advice before making recommendations on East-West policy to President Truman. In 1950, for example, Bohlen remembers that he, Hilger, and Kennan formed an analysis team specializing in interpretation of Soviet geopolitical strategy following the outbreak of the Korean War. The group was given access to highly classified information and reported directly to the Office of National Estimates, the country’s most senior intelligence evaluation group, which in turn reported directly to the director of Central Intelligence and to President Truman. Hilger, the former Nazi Foreign Office executive who had once made his reports to Hitler, emerged in Washington as a highly influential expert on the USSR.15
George Kennan has declined several requests for an interview, thus making it impossible to obtain his comments on the memos bearing his name and initials that discuss bringing Hilger into the United States.
p. 120:
Among the now-declassified records of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps is the following memo, which is reproduced here in full:
TOP SECRET
22 May 1947
SUBJECT: Personnel of Possible Intelligence Interest
TO: Deputy Director of Intelligence, Headquarters, European Command, Frankfurt
APO 757 US Army .
1. At the present time there is residing in the British Zone a Soviet citizen by the name of Nicolai Nicolovitch [s/c] Poppe. He is living under an assumed name. Mr. Poppe is an authority on and a professor of Far Eastern languages.
2. His presence in the British Zone is a source of embarrassment to British Military Government, as the Soviet authorities are continually asking for his return as a war criminal. The British feel that Mr. Poppe is valuable as an intelligence source and have asked me if it is possible for U.S. intelligence authorities to take him o ff their h a n d s a n d see that he is sent to the U.S. w here h e can be “lost. ” [Emphasis added.]
3. For my information will you advise me as to what you may be able to do in this matter or in similar cases which may arise in the future.
[signed]
PETER P. RODES
Colonel GSC
Director of Intelligence24
Poppe was indeed “lost” by the Americans. Despite U.S. knowledge of Poppe’s work for Nazi intelligence and Soviet efforts to capture him — indeed, probably precisely because of that knowledge — he was given a false name (Joseph Alexandris) while in Germany and was brought to the United States in 1949. Sanitized State Department telegraphic correspondence between Berlin and Washington, D.C., released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Poppe’s immigration to the United States was directly overseen by George Kennan and John Paton Davies, at the time senior executives in the political warfare unit at the State Department.25 …
p. 125:
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (usually abbreviated RFE/RL) began in 1948 as a corporation named the National Committee for a Free Europe, a supposedly private charitable organization dedicated to aiding exiles from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.
The roots of the RFE/RL effort, in an administrative sense, are the same political warfare programs that gave birth to Bloodstone and NSC 10/2.
George Kennan, Allen Dulles, and a handful of other foreign affairs specialists came up with the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) as a unique solution to a knotty problem. The U.S. government found it advantageous to maintain conventional, albeit frosty, diplomatic relations with the Communist-dominated governments of the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and the other satellite states. However, the Department of State and the intelligence community also wished to underwrite the anti-Communist work of the numerous emigre organizations that claimed to represent “governments-in-exile” of the same countries. It was impossible to have diplomatic relations with both the official governments of Eastern Europe and the “governments-in-exile” at the same time, for obvious reasons. The NCFE was therefore launched to serve as a thinly veiled “private-sector” cover through which clandestine U.S. funds for the exile committees could be passed.
The seed money for the National Committee for a Free Europe was drawn from the same pool of captured German assets that had earlier financed clandestine operations during the Italian election. At least $2 million left over from that affair found its way first into the hands of Frank Wisner’s OPC and then into the accounts of the NCFE, according to former RFE/RL president Sig Mickelson, who helped administer Radio Free Europe money for many years. Printing presses, radio transmitters, and other equipment salvaged from the Italian campaign were also transferred to the OPC and from there on to the NCFE.
Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner combined their talents to line up an all-star board of directors for the NCFE that served as a cover, in effect, to explain where all the money was coming from. Early corporate notables who served on the board or as members of the NCFE include (to name only a few) J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace & Company and the National City Bank; H. J. Heinz of the Mellon Bank and Heinz tomato ketchup fame; Texas oilman George C. McGhee; auto magnate Henry Ford II; film directors Darryl Zanuck and Cecil B. De Mille; and so many Wall Street lawyers that NCFE board meetings could have resembled a gathering of the New York State Bar Association. The intelligence community’s contingent featured former OSS chief William J. Donovan, Russian emigre Bernard Yarrow, and Allen Dulles himself, among others. Labor was represented in the person of James B. Carey, a self-described CIO “labor executive” who played a leading role in the trade union movement’s purge of Communists during the late 1940s. Carey was outspoken in his attitude concerning communism. “In the last war we joined with the Communists to fight the Fascists,” he told the New York Herald Tribune. “In another war we will join the Fascists to defeat the Communists.”
From the beginning the National Committee for a Free Europe depended upon the voluntary silence of powerful media personalities in the United States to cloak its true operations in secrecy. “Representatives of some of the nation’s most influential media giants were involved early on as members of the corporation [NCFE],” Mickelson notes in a relatively frank history of its activities. This board included “magazine publishers Henry Luce [of Time-Life] and DeWitt Wallace [of Reader’s Digest],” he writes, “but not a word of the government involvement appeared in print or on the air.” Luce and Wallace were not the only ones: C. D. Jackson, editor in chief of Fortune magazine, came on board in 1951 as president of the entire Radio Free Europe effort, while Reader’s Digest senior editor Eugene Lyons headed the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia Inc., a corporate parent of Radio Liberation. Still, “sources of financing,” Mickelson writes, were “never mentioned” in the press.
The practical effect of this arrangement was the creation of a powerful lobby inside American media that tended to suppress critical news concerning the CIA’s propaganda projects. This was not simply a matter of declining to mention the fact that the agency was behind these programs, as Mickelson implies. Actually the media falsified their reports to the public concerning the government’s role in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation for years, actively promoting the myth — which most sophisticated editors knew perfectly well was false — that these projects were financed through nickel-and-dime contributions from concerned citizens. Writers soon learned that exposes concerning the NCFE and RFE/ RL were simply not welcome at mainstream publications. No corporate officers needed to issue any memorandums to enforce this silence: with C. D. Jackson as RFE/RL’s president and Luce himself on the group’s board of directors, for example, Time’s and Life’s authors were no more likely to delve into the darker side of RFE/RL than they were to attack the American flag.
CIA-funded psychological warfare projects employing Eastern European émigrés became major operations during the 1950s, consuming tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. Noted conservative author (and OPC psychological warfare consultant) James Burnham estimated in 1953 that the United States was spending “well over a billion dollars yearly” on a wide variety of psychological warfare projects, and that was in pre-inflation dollars. This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberte movement, paying the bills of the German League for Struggle Against Inhumanity, and financing a half dozen free jurists associations, a variety of European federalist groups, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines, news services, book publishers, and much more.
These were very broad programs designed to influence world public opinion at virtually every level, from illiterate peasants in the fields to the most sophisticated scholars in prestigious universities. They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders, to name a few. The political analysis they promoted varied from case to case, but taken as a whole, this was prodemocracy, pro-West, and anti-Communist thinking, with a frequent “tilt” toward liberal or European-style Social Democratic ideals. They were not “Nazi” propaganda efforts, nor were many of the men and women engaged in them former Nazi collaborators or sympathizers. In Europe, at least, the Central Intelligence Agency has historically I been the clandestine promoter of the parties of the political center, not the extreme right. …
p. 138:
As U.S. atomic planning grew more sophisticated, the role of émigrés in America’s nuclear war-fighting strategy expanded quickly. By late 1948 paramilitary expert General Robert McClure had won the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to approval of a full-scale program of guerrilla warfare that was to follow any U.S. nuclear strike on the USSR. From then until at least 1956, when this strategy was at the height of its popularity in U.S. command circles, preparations for post-World War III guerrilla insurgencies employed thousands of émigrés from the USSR. Pentagon documents show that Vlasov veterans and Waffen SS men played a major role in these underground armies. Considering the wartime record of these forces, there is reason to suspect that a number of these enlistees may have been war criminals.
These émigrés did not, of course, create U.S. nuclear strategy. The advent of atomic weapons and their impact on international affairs would have taken place with or without the use of former Nazis and collaborators in U.S. war planning. The exile soldiers simply rode the coattails of the movement toward reliance on nuclear weapons during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In many cases they themselves were not aware of what the Pentagon had in mind for them. The integration of these groups into even the most humble levels of U.S. nuclear planning, however, gave the military and intelligence agencies a powerful reason to conceal the Nazi pasts of their unusual troops.
The process of integrating ex-Nazi emigre groups into U.S. nuclear operations may be traced at least to early 1947, when General Hoyt Vandenberg became the first chief of staff of the newly independent U.S. Air Force. Vandenberg had commanded the Ninth Air Force in Europe during World War II, then been tapped to head the Central Intelligence Group, the immediate predecessor to the CIA, in 1946. Among the general’s responsibilities at the air force was the development of written plans describing strategies and tactics for the use of America’s new nuclear weapons in the event of war.
“Vandenberg had a clear idea about just how he thought a nuclear war was going to be fought,” argues retired Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who was a senior aide to the air force chief of staff in the 1940s and later the top liaison man between the Pentagon and the CIA. “[He] knew that if there was a nuclear exchange in those days — and we are talking about atomic bombs, now, not H-bombs — you would destroy the communications and lifeblood of a country but the country would still exist. It would just be rubble. People would be wandering around wanting to know who was boss and where the food was coming from and so forth, but the country would still be there.” Therefore, the U.S. thinking went, “we must begin to create independent communications centers inside the Soviet Union [after the nuclear blast] and begin to pull it together for our ends.”
The army, air force, and CIA all began competing programs to prepare for the post-nuclear battlefield. This included creation of what eventually came to be called the Special Forces — better known today as the Green Berets — in the army and the air resupply and communications wings in the air force. The job of these units, Prouty explains, was to set up anti-Communist political leaders backed up by guerrilla armies inside the USSR and Eastern Europe in the wake of an atomic war, capture political power in strategic sections of the country, choke off any remaining Communist resistance, and ensure that the Red Army could not regroup for a counterattack. “Somebody had to bring order back into the country, and before the Communists could do it we were going to come flying in there and do it,” Prouty says.
“The Eastern European and Russian emigre groups we had picked up from the Germans were the center of this; they were the personnel,” according to the retired colonel. “The CIA was to prepare these forces in peacetime; stockpile weapons, radios, and Jeeps for them to use; and keep them ready in the event of war. A lot of this equipment came from military surplus. The CIA was also supposed to have some contacts inside [the USSR] worked out ahead of time for use when we got there, and that was also the job of the emigre groups on the agency payroll. In the meantime, they [the emigre troops] were useful for espionage or covert action.” Both the army and the CIA laid claim to the authority to control the guerrilla foot soldiers after war had actually been declared.2
A recently declassified top secret document from the JCS to President Truman confirms Prouty’s assertion that the emigre armies enjoyed an important role in the eyes of nuclear planners of the time. The 1949 study begins with a summary of what was then the current atomic strategy. Seventy atomic bombs, along with an unspecified amount of conventional explosives, were slated to be dropped from long-range planes on selected Soviet targets over a thirty-day period. The impact of the attack had been carefully calculated, according to the JCS memo: About 40 percent of the Soviets’ industrial capacity would be destroyed, including most of the militarily crucial petroleum industry.
But this, the chiefs contended, would not guarantee victory. The thirty-day atomic assault, the Pentagon concluded with considerable understatement, “might stimulate resentment against the United States” among the people of the USSR, thus increasing their will to fight. A major program of political warfare following the attack was therefore essential, the JCS determined. In fact, the effectiveness of the atomic attack itself was “dependent upon the adequacy and promptness of [the] associated military and psychological operations. Failing prompt and effective exploitation, the opportunity would be lost and subsequent Soviet psychological reactions would adversely affect the accomplishment of Allied objectives.”3
The commitment of five wings of B-29 bombers to the emigre guerrilla army project is a practical measure of the importance that the Pentagon attached to it. The B-29 was the largest, most sophisticated, and most expensive heavy bomber in the U.S. inventory at the time. According to Prouty, General Vandenberg originally conceived of the air force’s role in psychological and guerrilla warfare as a third branch of his service, equal, at least in administrative status, to the Strategic Air Command and the Tactical Air Command. Special Forces visionaries in the army such as General McClure had similar plans for that service as well. The Vlasov Army guerrilla training proposals earlier initiated by Kennan, Thayer, and Lindsay fitted neatly into the military’s nuclear strike force plans. By the beginning of 1949 the two projects were gradually merging into a single strategy combining preconflagration psychological warfare and clandestine action under the control of the CIA and State Department with postnuclear guerrilla armies under military command.
Extreme secrecy cloaked every aspect of U.S. atomic policy, and the fact that the United States was training an emigre army for use following an atomic attack on the USSR was among the most closely held details. Even the foot soldiers who were destined to be dropped into the radioactive ruins of the USSR were not to be informed of the details of their mission until the final moments before their departure. The secrecy was designed to conceal the military strategy, not the fact that a number of recruits had Nazi backgrounds. But the sensitivity of the mission guaranteed that newspaper reporters and academics could usually be tactfully deterred from probing too deeply into the origins of the Special Forces. Anyone who refused to take the hint was met with a stone wall of government silence.*
It was up to the U.S. Army to devise a program for the day-to-day maintenance of several thousand of the CIA’s emigre guerrillas until “the balloon goes up,” as a nuclear crisis has come to be called in national security circles. The stockpiling of military equipment was fairly simple in those days, when warehouses full of World War II surplus material were available. But how does even the U.S. Army go about hiding an armed force of several thousand enthusiastic anti-Communists in the European heartland? The answer was simple, in a way: The emigre soldiers were hidden inside another army. Those covers were known as Labor Service companies, and these U.S.-financed paramilitary units are a story in themselves.
These organizations began shortly after the war as U.S. Army sponsored Labor Service units or Industrial Police corps inside occupied Germany. They were U.S. Army-financed semimilitary corps of about 40,000 displaced persons and refugees set up to guard POW camps, clear rubble from bombed-out cities, locate graves of casualties, and carry out similar tasks. The U.S. government’s rationale for the program was that the labor companies provided a cheap and relatively reliable source of workers for the army, navy, and occupation government at a time when the military was struggling against budget cutting and a demobilization mood in the Congress. The units offered employment, housing, and respectability to their recruits at a time when much of Europe was a shattered wasteland, so thousands of displaced persons flocked to enlist.* Former Nazis or members of armies that had taken up arms against the United States were strictly barred from participating in the Labor Service units, at least officially, and U.S. occupation authorities announced that they would undertake a reasonably thorough screening process for new recruits.4
Despite the official ban on hiring ex-Nazis, however, the Labor Service divisions began recruiting Waffen SS volunteers at least as early as 1946. Before long many members of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian labor units found themselves serving under the same officers in Labor Service companies as they had earlier in the SS. An examination of several of the Latvian companies provides a clearcut example of the penetration of ex-Nazis into the Labor Service units, and the same pattern held true for Albanian, Lithuanian, and some Estonian units.
The first Latvian labor company, for example, was created on June 27, 1946, under the command of Voldemars Skaistlauks, a former Latvian SS general. All six of his top lieutenants in the U.S.-sponsored unit were Latvian SS veterans. The next Latvian labor unit was the 8850th Engineer Construction Company headquartered at Frankfurt, which officially consisted mainly of truck drivers and heavy equipment operators. The senior Latvian officer there was Talivaldis Karklins, who had been a top officer of the Madonna concentration camp during the war. Karklins was accused in sworn testimony by former inmates of Madonna of leading torture and murder at that camp. He emigrated to the United States in 1956.* His chief lieutenant in the 8850th, according to the unit’s roster, was Eduards Kalinovskis, also a veteran of a Latvian police death squad. The senior Latvian officer of the 8361st Company of Engineers was Janis L. Zegners, who had once been the top aide to the inspector general (i.e., commanding officer) of the Latvian SS Legion and deputy warden of the notorious Riga security police during the war. At least half a dozen similar cases have come to light.5
The American recruiters for the Labor Service units knew that these highly motivated groups of Eastern European volunteers had earlier served in the Nazi Waffen SS, and they knew, at least in general terms, what the SS had done in Latvia. At the same time, however, the Americans apparently rejected or ignored indications that their enlistees had personally committed atrocities, even though evidence was readily available. “The Russians had their own spies inside the groups who stole the unit rosters and anything else they could get their hands on,” states a retired American colonel who once headed a Ukrainian-Polish Labor Service unit. “So the Russians made plenty of denunciations of my guys. But in those days to get denounced by the Communists, well, it probably meant they were doing something right for our side.”6
Before long the pretense of careful anti-Nazi screening of recruits had been dropped, even in official correspondence. Following a routine revision of Labor Service company orders in 1950, Colonel C. M. Busbee, the chief of the operation, noticed that the wording of a subparagraph in the new orders that barred recruitment of ex-Nazis had been tightened. Busbee wrote to Lieutenant General Daniel Noce, chief of staff of the European command, pointing out that under the new order, “all former SS officers [would be] prohibited from joining labor service units. This policy, if continued, would deprive labor services of a considerable number of these personnel,” Busbee argued, “who were previously employed in the Industrial Police and labor service units, and who have proved their dependability through efficient service. . . . [I] request authority to hire former Waffen-SS officer personnel provided they have been properly screened.” The reply, interestingly, came back through civilian rather than military channels. Chauncey G. Parker, a senior assistant to U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John McCloy, approved Busbee’s request a few weeks later.7 …
The next cover story was known to the Labor Service recruits themselves but was kept secret from the general public. This was that the companies were trained and armed for counterinsurgency work inside Germany in the event of a rebellion or an attack by the USSR. “They were,” according to a secret Pentagon study obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, “carefully instructed in the suppression of civil disturbances … [and] specifically … trained to secure military installations, such as ammunition dumps, warehouses, and food depots, or were schooled in interior guard duty, marksmanship, and riot control.” Some 30,000 Labor Service recruits, including those supposedly limited to driving trucks, had been fully trained and armed with light infantry weapons and chemical warfare gear by 1950.8
Finally, there was the highly cIassified postnuclear strike mission, which was generally kept secret from the recruits themselves. Approximately 5,000 selected volunteers were trained for the postnuclear guerrilla force. As natives of the USSR and Soviet-occupied countries, these cold war minutemen spoke the language, knew the customs, had military training, and, in some cases, maintained underground contacts that made them seem perfect for guerrilla warfare. Before the decade of the 1940s was out, the recruitment of Labor Service men, including Waffen SS veterans, for behind-the-lines missions into Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe had become commonplace.
In the meantime, the Labor Service militias became a convenient holding tank for a variety of emigre agents attached to the Gehlen Organization, the CIA, or U.S. military intelligence. They were a military reserve, in short, for the ongoing political warfare programs under the OPC. The 4000th Labor Service Company, for example, served as an incubator for 250 Albanian guerrillas engaged in Frank Wisner’s Bay of Pigs-style raids on their homeland during 1949 and the early 1950s.9 These operations were portrayed at the time as spontaneous rebellions led on a political level by Hasan Dosti and the other Albanian Bloodstone recruits in the Committee for a Free Albania. …
In 1950 CIC and CIA agents used the Labor Services cover to begin guerrilla training of at least 100 members of the far-rightwing League of Young Germans (Bund Deutscher Jungen, or BDJ).
These “Young Germans” were no Boy Scouts; most were Waffen SS and Wehrmacht veterans, according to a later West German government investigation, and a considerable part of the leadership of the group had been enthusiastic “Jew baiters” in the Goebbels ministry during the Nazis’ rule.
The budget for the clandestine group was 50,000 deutsche marks per month, according to records seized by German police in 1952, plus an ample supply of free arms, ammunition, and explosives cached in the Odenwald Hills south of Frankfurt. American and
German advisers provided BDJ agents with extensive military instruction, including, as a report in the West German parliament later revealed, “use of Russian, United States and German weapons, including machine guns, grenades, and knives… [as well as] light
infantry weapons and explosives.” The underground group called itself a U.S. “Technical Service” unit.10
But the training program was only the beginning. BDJ Technical Service leaders decided that the best thing they could do for Germany following a Soviet attack was to liquidate certain German leaders they regarded as insufficiently anti-Communist. German Communists were, of course, at the top of the Technical Service assassination list. Next in line for elimination were leaders of West Germany’s Social Democratic party, the country’s loyal opposition during the Adenauer administration. The Technical Service group planned to murder more than forty top Social Democratic officials, including the party’s national chief, Erich Ollenhauer; the interior minister of the state of Hesse, Heinrich Zinnkann; and the mayors of Hamburg and Bremen. BDJ’s U.S.-trained underground infiltrated the Social Democrats to shadow individual party leaders so as to kill them more efficiently when the day to act arrived. …
p. 148:
The question of U.S. use of former Nazi collaborators in assassinations is important, and not just because of the obvious damage that the Technical Service imbroglio did to U.S. relations with Germany’s influential Social Democrats. Few subjects are more deeply clothed in mystery than this one, and the evidence concerning how U.S. assassination operations worked during the cold war and who was responsible for them is inevitably scattered and fragmentary. All that can be said with certainty is that such murders did take place and that in some cases former Nazi collaborators were instrumental in carrying them out.
To put the case most bluntly, many American clandestine warfare specialists believed that the most “productive” — and least compromising — method of killing foreign officials was to underwrite the discontent of indigenous groups and let them take the risks. American intelligence agencies’ use of this technique appears to have originated in operations during World War II, when the OSS supplied thousands of cheap pistols to partisans in France and Yugoslavia specifically for assassination of collaborators and German officials. (According to Pentagon records,’ the OSS also air-dropped these weapons in areas where there were no significant rebel forces so that the Nazis, upon finding the guns, would tighten the screws on local populations and thereby produce new anti-Nazi partisans.)
The concepts of maintaining “plausible deniability” for the actual murder and of the expendability of the killers themselves are a key to understanding U.S. assassination techniques. In most cases, it appears to have been neither necessary nor practical for U.S. intelligence officers to give precise instructions for murder. Instead, the OPC gave directions to commit assassinations to guerrilla movements in the same simple, sweeping terms that had been used in wartime Yugoslavia. U.S. intelligence encouraged insurgents to “eliminate the command and other dangerous personnel of the MVD and the MGB [the Soviet secret police],” as the psychological warfare appendix to a Pentagon war plan put it in 1948. Other assigned tasks under the Halfmoon war plan, as it was known included “organiz[ing] for the destruction of industry, communications and other factors in Soviet war-making capacity”; “engag[ing] in sabotage wherever and whenever it disrupts enemy action”; and “creat[ing] panic and terror.”
Several organizations of former Nazi collaborators were ready to undertake such slayings on a major scale. Covert operations chief Wisner estimated in 1951 that some 35,000 Soviet police troops and Communist party cadres had been eliminated by guerrillas connected with the Nazi collaborationist OUN/UPA in the Ukraine since the end of the war, and that does not include casualties from other insurgencies in Lithuania and the Muslim regions of the USSR that were also receiving aid from the United States and Britain.
p. 199:
American policy on the use of defectors from the East, including those who had been Nazi collaborators, was institutionalized in three National Security Council decisions during late 1949 and 1950. The government still contends that revealing the full text of these orders would “damage national security” if they were published today, more than thirty-five years later. These high-level orders, which were reviewed and approved by both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, are known as NSC 86, NSCID (pronounced “N-skid” and standing for NSC intelligence directive) 13, and NSCID 14. They are based on recommendations prepared by Frank Wisner’s OPC division of the CIA during the Bloodstone program.
These decisions gave the CIA control of several highly secret government interagency committees responsible for handling émigrés and defectors both overseas (NSCID 13) and inside the United States itself (NSCID 14). Like the earlier Bloodstone effort from which these directives sprang, NSCIDs 13 and 14 were not designed to rescue Nazis as such. They were instead aimed at making good use of all sorts of defectors from the East — with few questions asked. The bureaucratic turf remaining after the CIA had taken its share was divided among the FBI, military intelligence, the State Department, and, to a small degree, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
Most important in the present context, these orders authorized clandestine CIA funding of a variety of ostensibly private refugee relief organizations so as to ensure the cooperation of those agencies in the government’s efforts to locate and exploit presumably valuable defectors. Under the aegis of these secret orders, the CIA assumed the power to bring “temporarily” anyone it wished to the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), regardless of any other laws on the books in the United States or any other country.
NSCID 14, moreover, dramatically expanded the agency’s authority to conduct clandestine operations inside the United States — in an apparent violation of the CIA’s charter — as long as those affairs were conducted through emigre political organizations that supposedly still had some connection with the old country. The CIA has used that loophole to authorize hidden agency funding for the Committee for a Free Latvia, the Committee for a Free Albania, and other supposedly private exile organizations active in this country. A substantial amount of the agency’s money ended up being spent on lobbying the U.S. Congress and on other propaganda efforts inside this country — a clear violation of the law.
p. 215:
One of the most important characteristics of the war criminals who did come to the United States is that they did not arrive here as isolated individuals. As has been seen in the cases of the Croatian Ustachis, the Ukrainian OUN, and the Latvian Vanagis, to name only three, many of these immigrants were, in fact, part of experienced, highly organized groups with distinct political agendas that differed little from the Fascist programs they had promoted in their homelands. The anti-Communist paranoia of the McCarthy period gave these groups fertile soil in which to put down roots and to grow. In time they began to play a small but real role in the political life of this country.
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In the years since 1988, that “small but real role in the political life of this country” has metastasized into a tumor that has now become what today’s America predominantly is. Truman, and his successors, have been constantly seeping their nazi spirit into American culture, in order to ‘fight communism’ even after communism ended in Russia and became heavily mixed with capitalism in China. But the racist-fascist imperialistic spirit has nonetheless continued to take over America’s culture and government, long after communism itself has virtually gone. It’s like a virus that just won’t go away.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.