America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (32 page)

One of the most cogent explanations of why the Dulles brothers continued to fund such disastrous spy operations came from a woman who had participated in covert operations in Germany during this period. In her opinion, it mattered little whether the émigré groups were penetrated or not. If they produced good propaganda or intelligence, so much the better; if not, the group would be dropped after it was blown, and another recruited in its place. OPC simply wrote blank checks and waited to see if any of its investments paid off. It is easy to see how Wisner could have believed that, sooner or later, his apparently inexhaustible supply of money was bound to produce something more than a paper army of anti-communists. There is a more cynical explanation: the Dulles brothers expected nothing more from the Nazi spy networks than a convenient way to hide their client’s Nazi investments under a shroud of national security. In the end, tens of thousands of people behind the Iron Curtain died for nothing. It was all about the money.

Sensing a congressional investigation of the Wisner debacle in the offing, President Eisenhower appointed a special committee to conduct its own inquiry, headed by General James Doolittle, who had led the first bomber raid on Tokyo during the war. Wisner had nothing to fear, however, because Doolittle was an old friend, and another committee member, Morris Hadley, knew Allen Dulles well. Even the policy guidelines for the committee were drafted by the OPC clique within the CIA. To no one’s surprise the Doolittle committee, far from condemning Wisner, issued a report in September 1954 suggesting that his operations be expanded:

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.
¹⁴⁰

For the first time since he became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Countries in 1947, Frank Wisner had received a form of official endorsement for his covert action program. The Belarus network was a direct beneficiary of Doolittle’s “Anti-Communist Manifesto.” Funding for the Byelorussian community in America was increased, and large numbers of them were hired as researchers for various government projects. Many of OPC‘s research requests were farmed out to public and private groups in order to provide cover, and more jobs for informants.

The Operations Research Office of the Pentagon was one such agency. ORO was doing historical research into the use of local collaborators by the Nazis in the hope of obtaining information of value in the event of an American invasion of Russia. Operation Pow-wow was the code name given the project. The voluminous material produced by ORO included a series of classified manuals analyzing the Nazi documents concerning Byelorussia. One entire manual was devoted to the Nazi use of local police in the area around Borissow. Only cursory mention was made of the atrocities that had been committed there.

Still another paper discussed the political organizations established by the Nazis to control the population. Ostrowsky’s government was mentioned in detail, as was Sobolewsky’s earlier work under General Kube. Some of the reports on operations in Baltic countries indicated that they were written by persons who had been high-ranking Nazi collaborators themselves. Obviously, the “researchers” employed by ORO were either Nazis or individuals with a great deal of familiarity with their history.
[3]

Harvard University was also linked to Wisner’s research programs. The Harvard Institute for Russian Research was funded by OPC, using the Air Force Human Resources Research Institute as a conduit.
¹⁴¹
Wisner commissioned a team of historians to interview Eastern European émigrés in the DP camps. The first series of interviews was legitimate; the refugees provided historical, medical, sociological, and ethnological data on the Soviet Union. But any émigrés who displayed knowledge of Nazi collaborators or intelligence networks were subsequently referred to a second set of interrogators.

The B-6 series of interviews, for example, covered such nonacademic topics as the best method for dropping paratroopers, the utility of Nazi anti-partisan operations, the popularity of Nazi-sponsored political organizations, the successful uses of anticommunist propaganda, and the kind of reception certain Nazi leaders such as Ostrowsky had received from the local population. Several of those interviewed candidly acknowledged that they had held positions in Nazi police or intelligence organizations. One even admitted that he was hiding out because he was wanted as a major war criminal. Apparently they were more than willing to confess participation in criminal activities because they suspected that the person conducting the interview was more than just another Harvard researcher. One even demanded that he be provided with a visa to the United States through special channels so that he would not have to go through the usual screening.

But Wisner’s OPC did more than finance research. Large numbers of Byelorussians and other Eastern European Nazis were hired to work in propaganda agencies. The two most important were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were funded by the Crusade for Freedom. After 1953 these agencies turned sharply conservative in their staffing and in their funding of émigré groups in the United States. Instead of a representative mix of moderate nationalists and right-wingers, the various “national committees of liberation” became dominated by those who had been outright Nazi collaborators – at least no one would ever accuse them of being soft on communism.

Radio Liberty was a haven for the Byelorussian Nazis. The operation had a White Ruthenian Desk, and it employed several members of the Belarus network who had served as Nazi propagandists, among them Anton Adamovitch, who acknowledged in a television interview that he had been a Nazi collaborator and worked for U.S. Army intelligence. He said he had told the FBI about his background at the time he was admitted to the United States and no objections were raised.
[4]

Stankievich became chairman of the Learned Council of the Institute of Russian Research in Munich, which had been placed under Radio Liberty. After Stankievich was overheard bragging about the mass execution at Borissow, one of the other émigrés asked an OPC liaison man whether it was wise to place a notorious war criminal in such a prominent position. The discussion was cut short. Stankievich was credited with being an important source of information. After all, he had exposed the Soviet agent who attempted to recruit him. Moreover, he was a major politician in the Abramtchik faction, having risen to become its vice president. Many of his followers were employed at Radio Liberty and its research staffs. Their academic credentials served them in good stead. When the famous Berlin wiretap tunnel was dug in 1953, the Byelorussians were hired to translate the voluminous Soviet conversations. Many took jobs with government research institutes or served as translators for the State Department and other government agencies. A few, including Kushel, were hired as consultants by military and academic organizations such as the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

For the most part, the Byelorussian émigrés in the United States possessed modest jobs. They lived in old but well-maintained neighborhoods and kept to themselves. In South River, for instance, they concentrated in a triangle between Whitehead Avenue, Main Street, and Hillside Avenue, although several of the more prominent collaborators were located on the southwestern side of town, near Route 527. They kept their lawns trimmed, their houses painted, and they never got in trouble with the police, which was not surprising as one of their offspring became the Chief of Police.

Most of their neighbors knew little about them. No one who was not part of the Belarus network, or a relative of a collaborator, was allowed to join their social groups.
[5]
No one who was not a member of the parish could be buried in St. Euphrosynia’s cemetery. The Belarus even had its own youth group, the Byelorussian-American Youth Organization, or BAYO. Now a social organization, BAYO was an outgrowth of the paramilitary “Boy Scout” units organized by Kushel in the DP camps.

The BAYO monthly magazine was a valuable tool for learning the names of the Belarus members living in America, as nearly every issue contained a picture of some of the parents. The magazine also published a grossly distorted history of World War II, apparently in recognition that the children had learned some of the truth. The BAYO article admitted, for instance, that an SS brigade known as the Belarus Legion had been formed, but it denied that the unit had gone into battle. The Ostrowsky government was portrayed as the culmination of centuries of Byelorussian striving for nationhood and independence.

The BAYO article went to great lengths to place the blame for the killing of Jews in Byelorussia on Lithuanian mercenaries (some of whom did serve in Byelorussia). No mention was made of the Byelorussian mercenaries in the northern Ukraine, or of the police battalions who participated in the Einsatzgruppen “actions” against the Jews. The responsibility for the deaths of the civilian population was assigned to Soviet partisans. Selections from Nazi documents, complaining about the lack of support from the natives, were displayed as proof of Byelorussian innocence. No mention was made of the SS and Wehrmacht documents listing the collaborators and their roles in the extermination of the Jews. The BAYO article was a good example of the revisionist party line served up not only to the children of South River but to the equally naive intelligence community as well as the press.
[6]

By 1954, it was an open secret among American intelligence agencies that elements of some kind of former Byelorussian regime existed in America that had some kind of ties to the Nazis. In the middle of that year, Wisner funded an international convention of collaborators in South River that was called the Fourteenth Plenum of the Byelorussian Central Council. A brochure published for the occasion made clear the origins of the organization, for it listed the thirteen previous meetings going back through the exile government in Berlin to the SS-sponsored Minsk congress of 1944. Additional evidence of the collaborationist nature of the wartime Ostrowsky regime was provided by the publication in 1956 of Nicholas Vakar’s book
Belorussia: The Making of a Nation
.
[7]
It caused something of a sensation in the émigré community because it described, quite accurately, the role of the Byelorussian collaborators during the Nazi occupation and mentioned some by name.

The Byelorussians denounced Vakar’s book, which, among its other offenses, accurately quoted some of the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi speeches made at the Minsk collaborators’ convention of 1944. Ostrowsky’s son, Wiktor, published a pamphlet in London on anti-Semitism in Byelorussia that sought to lay a large measure of the blame on Jewish Communists and Russian repression, while mentioning very little about the actual existence of anti-Semitism among the Byelorussians themselves. The younger Ostrowsky concluded that “the local population took no part in these actions against the Jews.”

Ironically, most of the Belarus settlements in America are located near large concentrations of Jews. Occasionally, allegations connecting the Byelorussians to war crimes were forwarded from the Jewish community to the FBI during the 1950s, but all the inquiries were dropped after only a cursory check.
¹⁴²

Despite the rumblings, Wisner succeeded in making it easier for the collaborators to become American citizens. Legislation was secured that relaxed the five-year residency requirement for persons sent overseas to work for American institutes of research.

The Attorney General designated the institutions that qualified, most of which were subsequently identified as CIA front organizations. An applicant for citizenship was now able to leave the country without breaking his five-year waiting period. Individuals accorded special preference for immigration visas, reentry permits, and citizenship applications had small red cardboard flags stapled to their immigration paperwork. The red flag read simply “American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism” and gave a New York City address.

Persons whose files were red-flagged received special treatment. Minor discrepancies in their applications were overlooked; background investigations were cut short; paperwork was expedited. Most of the Byelorussian employees at Radio Liberty had red flags in their immigration files.
¹⁴³
The immigration officials knew that they were performing some kind of anticommunist propaganda or intelligence work and simply assumed that the CIA had already made a thorough background check. That is how Stanislaw Stankievich entered the United States and eventually became an American citizen, in spite of the fact that five previous visa applications had been rejected. He was naturalized on March 8, 1969, by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
¹⁴⁴

Stankievich gained his citizenship although he spent very little time in the United States. He was admitted in 1959 on a visa obtained by AMCOMLIB. On the day of his arrival, Wisner’s staff sent a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service requesting that he be issued a reentry permit so he could leave the country for Germany. Over the next ten years Stankievich traveled back and forth between the United States and Germany. He finally took up residence in New York City before being naturalized. Each of his reentry permits bears a red tab with the name and address of AMCOMLIB.