by J. W Lateer
Dodd continued to state that the reason he was being investigated was because he was so strong in his opposition to Communists and the Soviet Union. Dodd referred to “the Soviet terror apparatus” implying that there was some relationship between the Soviets and his own censure investigation.
In a summary of the findings against Dodd, the Washington Post recounted “that thirteen members of the Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee’s staff were diverted to work for Dodd on matters unrelated to the subcommittee’s business, that some members of the Internal Security Subcommittee staff were used as fund-raisers by Dodd, and that some Senate employees were exploited as personal servants.”
The result before the Senate Ethics Committee was, among other matters, that the committee recommended “censure” of Dodd for a course of conduct between 1961 and 1965 that “is contrary to accepted morals, derogates from the public trust expected of a Senator and tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. The committee found that Dodd’s relationship with General Julius Klein was “indiscreet and beyond the responsibilities of a Senator to any citizen.”…Dodd was recommended for censure, a condemnation visited on only five Senators in the nation’s history.
Ninety-two members of the Senate voted for censure. The only Senators voting in support of Dodd were Earl Long, Abraham Ribicoff, Strom Thurmond and John Tower of Texas, as well as Dodd himself, who voted no. Dodd was the only Senator in history to be censured for financial misconduct.
Beyond the Senate Ethics Committee’s formal disciplinary action, other sources (such as investigative journalist Drew Pearson’s and Jack Anderson’s “Congress in Crisis”) suggest Dodd’s corruption was far broader in scope, and there were accusations of alcoholism. In response to these accusations, Dodd filed a lawsuit against Pearson claiming that Pearson had illegally interfered with his private property. (This was because Pearson had received stolen records which had been taken by Dodd’s staff). Although the district court granted a partial judgment to Dodd, the appellate court ruled in favor of Pearson on the grounds that Dodd’s property had not been physically abused. In 1970, the Democrats endorsed for his seat Joseph Duffey.
Dodd was criticized for beginning investigations and then halting them after getting contributions from defendants in the investigations. In particular, a major target of his investigations was the firearms industry. We have seen that Lee Harvey Oswald just happened to order his two firearms from the two mail-order gun outlets being investigated by Dodd’s committee. Dodd was to investigate the gun salesmen (and to receive contributions from them) in 1961, 1963, 1964 and 1965.
In addition to his work with the firearms industry, Senator Dodd opened what became nearly three years of scheduled hearings on the effects of violence on TV. The results of the three committee staff monitoring reports of television content in 1954, 1961 and 1964 showed incidents of violence. Senator Dodd and Estes Kefauver are the two men responsible for informing the public of the effects of violence on juveniles.
Dodd played an instrumental role in the prohibition of LSD in the United States, presiding over subcommittee hearings investigating the drug’s effects on youth. Notably, LSD proponent and Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary was called to Washington to testify. Leary urged lawmakers to enact a framework of strict regulation whereby LSD could remain legal and used for medical and research purposes. However, Dodd and his colleagues drafted a ban which was later adopted. This event was one of the precursors to the all-out “War n Drugs” in the 1970’s.
In 1970, the Democrats endorsed for his seat Joseph Duffey, who won the nomination in the primary. Dodd then entered the race as an independent, taking just under a quarter of the vote, in a three-way race which he and Duffey lost to Lowell Weicker. Months after his defeat, Dodd died from a heart attack at his home. His son Christopher Dodd was elected to the Senate as a Connecticut Democrat in 1980.
Notes:
For basic biographical facts about Dodd, see: [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Dodd]. Information in this chapter not otherwise noted can be found at this Wikipedia address.
Most information in this chapter can be found in the following: Above The Law: The Rise And Fall Of Senator Thomas J. Dodd (1968) by James P. Boyd, abbreviated as ATL.
Another excellent source about Senator Dodd is: The Case Against Congress: A Compelling Indictment Of Corruption On Capitol Hill (1986) by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, abbreviated as CAC.
Of course the Dodd censure hearings, a valuable source, is cited here as: Investigation of Senator Thomas J. Dodd. : Hearings, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session ... pursuant to S. Res. 338, 88th Congress. PT. 1-2 by United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Standards and Conduct. Published 1966.
Chapter 33
The Stashynsky Affair
Introducing the
Stashynsky Case
The Stashynsky affair and the JFK assassination have a direct relationship, but it is a relationship which is largely overlooked. (See notes for the citation for the above headlines, articles and picture reproduced for the reader above). However, Dick Russell, author of the most comprehensive assassination book, The Man Who Knew Too Much (usually called TMWKTM), mentions the Stashynsky affair as it relates to General Willoughby and H.L. Hunt, the Dallas Oilman. (TMWKTM, p. 594-597).
Author Russell came into possession of some documents from the Douglas MacArthur Archives in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1967, General Charles Willoughby wrote to oilman Hunt, “There is no difference between Stashynsky and Oswald … in an obvious parallel of training and planning and direction.” In another memo, Willoughby wrote “The similarity with the Oswald case is irresistible … the case should be widely publicized to remove the leftist smear on Dallas … I recommend patriotic residents of Dallas to handle this project under your leadership.”
The fact is, Agent Bogdan Stashynsky (a/k/a Stashinsky and other similar spellings) was a Russian defector who was most likely part of the plan for the JFK assassination. His activities preceded 11-22-1963 by several years. But they were apparently an integral part of the JFK plot.
Russell next describes the general outline of the story of Stashynsky. But the story begins with a man by the name of Stepan Bandera. Bandera was a famous figure in Ukrainian history, not just back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but even today. Holding on the Bandera legend could be due to a backward-looking perspective of Ukrainians and other people of Eastern Europe. They are constantly looking to specific periods in history to bolster their argument that a border should be drawn in this place or that place. So, to the Ukrainians, the story of Bandera is important because to them Bandera was a patriot who fought for the nation of Ukraine. Also important is that Bandera was a collaborator with Hitler in the WWII struggle against the Soviets. This fact is used to inspire many Neo-Nazis still active in Ukrainian politics today.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera was found dead in his apartment in Munich, Germany. According to author Russell, Bandera had worked with two of the closest right-wing allies of Charles Willoughby, namely Jaroslaw Stetzko and Theodore Oberlander. Many of the followers of both Bandera and Stetzko were recruited to work for U.S. Military Intelligence and the CIA in the late 1940’s to help combat the Soviets.
According to Russell there was a suspect in the death of Bandera, but that suspect was Bandera’s friend Theodore Oberlander. This theory was based on the fact that Oberlander had a shady past as a Nazi. Oberlander’s past was about to be exposed. Stepan Bandera had information about Oberlander that he might be compelled to reveal in some pending Nazi trials.
Perhaps the most important trial was about Oberlander being held in Communist East Germany, beyond the control of West German officials. Bandera could have wound up as a witness there and devastated the reputation of Oberlander who was, by 1959, a high West German official.
In August, 1961, Bogdan Stashynsky, a Russian citizen, defected to American officials in West Germany and immediately confessed to having killed Stepan Bandera. On top o
f that, he also confessed to having murdered another Ukrainian in 1957 whose name was Lev Rebet. Stashynsky claimed to have used a previously unknown type of weapon—a “gun” which squirted either cyanide or prussic acid (these are two names for the same chemical). This gun had allegedly been able to fool the coroner in the death of Rebet. Officials believed that Rebet had died of a heart attack. However, the death of Bandera was blamed on cyanide poisoning. The police had not determined who killed Bandera.
After Stashynsky defected to U.S. authorities, U.S. officials quickly turned him over to the German criminal investigators. Both of the alleged murders had occurred on West German soil. Author Russell makes an important connection. He reminds the reader that when Lee Harvey Oswald returned from the U.S.S.R., he was greeted by a man named Spas T. Raikin, a member of Bandera’s Ukrainian underground.
Author Dick Russell also reports an important fact that happened over two years later. On November 26, 1964, Washington-based columnists Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News:
“Fifteen days before he was shot down, President Kennedy was warned that assassins were being trained to commit murders in the U.S. and England. The burden of [Congressman Charles] Kersten’s letter was an effort to obtain Administration help in focusing public attention on the assassination of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian underground leader, by Communist agents” (TMWKTM, p. 596)
Also reported in this column was a claim by Congressman Kersten that a hearing on the Stashynsky-Soviet murder situation had been delayed by the Kennedy State Department. Russell then cites the article in the Ukrainian Bulletin which is reproduced above.
It would have been better if author Russell had realized that artificially placing Oswald and Stashynsky together as students of murder in the Soviet SMERSH group was a basic ploy by the JFK assassination plotters.
But Dick Russell took a wrong turn in his analysis of the information he had about Stashynsky. Russell focuses on a memo which shows that General Charles Willoughby and oilman H. L. Hunt were very interested in the cyanide “gas gun” described by Stashynsky. Also disclosed sometime in the mid-1960’s was the involvement of Senator Thomas J. Dodd in the Stashynsky Affair. Dodd attempted to use Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) to frame the Russians for the murder of JFK. In this, Dodd was apparently working with the JFK plotters and former Congressman Charles Kersten in a trans-Atlantic plan which resulted in the murder of JFK. Dodd’s partners in crime were West German intelligence (BND) and certain ex-Nazi’s still involved in the government of West Germany.
The Kidnapping of Dr. Linse
The best author on the subject of Stashynsky and alleged Soviet assassins is Ronald Seth, who wrote the definitive book on the subject called The Executioners.
To understand the subject of Stashynsky, the reader must begin with the alleged kidnapping of Dr. Walte Linse in 1952. (Seth, p. 113).
Dr. Walter Linse was a prominent German lawyer and was acting President of the Association of Free German Jurists, which was in turn affiliated with the World Federation of Free Jurists. This group was anti-Communist in nature. Among the officials of this association, only the acting President, Dr. Walter Linse, was available for the Soviets to kidnap because he happened to live in the American sector of Berlin.
Four kidnappers were selected to do the kidnapping. On July 8, 1952, they grabbed Dr. Linse, forced him into a vehicle and then sped into the Soviet sector. Linse was kept imprisoned for an unknown period. In 1960, the Russian Red Cross informed the German Red Cross that Dr. Walter Linse had died in a Russian prison camp on December 14, 1953.
At the time of the kidnapping, John J. McCloy was U.S. High Commissioner for Germany in the American Sector. He protested to his Soviet counterpart about the kidnapping but the Soviet Commissioner said he didn’t know anything about it.
There was a noted Soviet defector in the early 1950’s named Pyotr Deriabin. He testified often to Congress, making use of his inside knowledge of Kremlin activities and methods. He testified to the SISS about the case of Dr. Linse. He stated that all of the high officials in the Soviet Union had been aware of the kidnapping of Dr. Linse.
For the next eight years, demands for information and denials went back and forth between the West and the Soviets. In New York, the Linse case was taken up by The Committee to Combat Soviet Kidnappings. The members of the Committee were Judge Robert Morris, later chief counsel for SISS; the Rev. Charles Lowry, later head of the foundation for Religious Action; Archbishop Paul Yu-Pin, at that time the head of Sino-American Amity; Metropolitan Anastasy, the United States head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile; Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, founder and President of the Tolstoy Foundation; Admiral Paulus Powell and General Charles Willoughby. Willoughby was one of the three major Barons involved in the JFK assassination. At the time the this committee was formed, he was the former head of intelligence for General Douglas MacArthur in the Far East and Japan.
The people listed above represented some of the key vertebrae in the backbone of the JFK assassination plot. They were part of a small inside group who perpetrated the JFK assassination.
Shortly after the formation of the Committee in 1954, there was another kidnapping, that of an anti-Communist Russian émigré leader, Valery Tremmel, who was kidnapped by SMERSH (the Russian assassination and kidnapping agency). The Committee presented evidence of this kidnaping to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. They also investigated, arranged lectures and set up an international information service. This information service was related to The International Research on Communist Techniques, Inc.
This committee activity was typical of the tangled web of government and private covert operators involved in Eastern Europe in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The President of The International Research on Communist Techniques, Inc. was Vladimir N. Rudin, a writer and analyst. It’s Vice-President was Eugene Lyons, a senior editor for Reader’s Digest who had written several books on Russia. It’s V.P. and Treasurer was A.G. Elmendorf, who had worked for the World Council of Churches in Greece and had also been director of the Tolstoy Foundation. Other officers were Emily Kingsberg, and Natalie Kushnir.
Four cases of Soviet acts were submitted by the Committee to Combat Soviet Kidnappings to the U. N. Commission on Human Rights. No action resulted. They did have one success: they led a campaign against Article 16 of the proposed Austrian Treaty which would have forcibly repatriated people back to the Soviet Union. The Article was eliminated.
What actually happened to Dr. Walter Linse once he was in the Soviet Union was known and it can be described as follows: Dr. Linse was first taken to the East German Police Headquarters and then to SMERSH headquarters in Karlhorst, Germany. He was interrogated by as Soviet Major General named Kaverznev, who was head of SMERSH at that location. Under interrogation, Dr. Linse revealed the names of somewhere between 21 and 27 of the secret contacts within East Germany of the Association of Free Jurists.
Soviet law allowed the torture of traitors to gain information. According to defector Pyotr Deriabin, a person under interrogation may be subjected to torture if it has been established that he has already done harm to the Soviet Union. All of the contacts that Dr. Linse revealed were arrested, imprisoned or sent to forced labor camps. Dr. Walter Linse was tried before a secret tribunal and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment.
The rendition of the story of Dr. Linse has a surreal quality. He is described as a jurist but he was apparently a spy. There is no information presented by author Ronald Seth as to who the betrayed contacts in East Germany were or if this was really a spy ring that the Soviets disrupted. The American reader could perhaps feel some sympathy for a spy who got kidnapped back to Russia, but only if we knew more about for whom he was spying.
It seems like a dangerous avocation for a Judge to be spying on East Germany and the Soviet Union, unless he was not a mere volunteer. Was Linse working for the Gehlen organization or for the CIA? How many honest judges just happen to kn
ow between 21 and 27 spies in East Germany?
There was a fundamental problem in the attitude of the U.S. Government about the type of spying which involved Dr. Linse and this Committee. This attitude assumed that the “White Russians” were the cure for Soviet Communism. In fact the “White Russians” were not the cure for Soviet Communism. They were the disease that caused Soviet Communism to come to power.
If the U.S. had sponsored pro-democracy operatives against Soviet Communism in place of the White Russians (and Nazis and other fascists), then Communism might have been established.
As in all of our chapters which deal with people like General Willoughby, the de Mohrenschildt brothers and Dr. Walter Linse, things might have been different if they were fighters for democracy. If the members of the The Committee to Combat Soviet Kidnappings were small “d” democrats, they would evoke more sympathy. For instance, with regard to Princess Alexandra Tolstoy, we know that a Princess, (should she be successful in helping overthrow the Soviets), would likely want her title back. And we know that a Princess does not run for election for her legally recognized position in societies like that of the Czar. We know that Sergius von Mohrenschildt (father of Oswald babysitter George de Mohrenschildt ) was appointed Governor of the Minsk region by the Czar. He wasn’t elected to that post, either.