by Peter Quinn
In some instances, as with Operation Dawson, the outcome is a matter of public record. The twelve OSS agents involved were captured in Slovakia while on a mission to rescue Allied fliers, shipped to the Mauthausen concentration camp, brutally interrogated by the SS commandant Franz Ziereis, and shot. It’s alleged that their bodies were given for dissection and “racial analysis” to an SS doctor.
The end of the Dawson team has drawn much attention. But the dramatic events that followed have gone unheralded. While honoring the commitment to anonymity and confidentiality, it’s worth recalling a few of those whose insistence on going above and beyond the call of duty is at the heart of the OSS.
In January 1945, in the wake of the Nazis’ success in crushing the revolt in Slovakia and capturing the Dawson operatives and the Allied fliers they were sent to rescue, the OSS considered how best to turn the tables. A new mission, Operation Maxwell, made up of three of the OSS’s most experienced veterans, was soon under way. Unbeknown to the trio of OSS agents, not only had the Dawson operatives already been dispatched to Mauthausen but the SS had intercepted a squad of partisans and extracted details of the rescue mission.
The agents were barely on the ground when the SS arrived on the site. A firefight ensued in which the youngest of the team, a lieutenant of Slovak ancestry, was killed. Over the next several days, the two surviving operatives moved so rapidly and skillfully the Germans thought they were dealing with a far larger contingent.
At one point, their only way out was to jump from a precipice. One of the agents broke his ankle. Undeterred, they succeeded in hijacking a high-performance car and blew up an ammo dump as they made their getaway. When the odds of being stopped on the road became too great, they borrowed a handcar and pumped their way west. On learning that a trainload of Panzer tanks was on its way from Slovakia to East Prussia, where a Russian breakthrough was imminent, they sacrificed the handcar and improvised a blockage that derailed the German train, thus stopping the tanks from reaching their destination.
Back on foot, they did their best to hide in plain sight amid the swelling hordes of refugees and displaced persons crowding the roads. Dressed in worn, ragged civilian clothes, they moved steadily west, north of Vienna and south of Prague, where they guessed the American army would eventually push through into Czechoslovakia.
Their luck seemed to run out when one of them came down with typhus, which was raging among the uprooted, lice-ridden population. Sick, feverish, in a half-stupor, the afflicted agent encouraged his companion to leave him and flee unencumbered toward the American lines. Instead, he made his way to the nearest village to seek out a physician. When a German sentry stopped him, he resisted, killing the German and drawing the attention of local partisans who took him and his companion under their care, hiding them in a brewery, where they were given rest and medical care.
Had the story ended there, it would still reverberate with the resourcefulness and endurance that distinguished the wartime operations of the OSS. But there’s a final chapter that adds a heightened degree of drama and derring-do.
In one of those devil-take-the-hindmost moments that has earned Wild Bill and his organization their reputation, the general summoned one of his most trusted operatives, a man who in civilian life had been a prominent player in the public relations industry and was among the first to put his talents at the disposal of the OSS.
Donovan charged him with a special mission—the kind only the OSS would be bold enough to undertake. Using a captured German staff car, he and two assistants were to take $30,000 in gold coins and drive hell-bent for Prague, where they’d make contact with the Czech resistance.
With their help, he was to head to Theresienstadt, the so-called model concentration camp, where the prominent Czechoslovak chemist and leading layman of the Jewish community in Brno (Brünn during the German occupation) Dr. Herschel Cernak was among the remnant of prisoners being held.
Seizing on the uncertainty of when the Soviets might arrive and the newborn, eleventh-hour desire of elements of the Nazi apparatus to distance themselves from the regime’s worst crimes, Donovan gambled that Dr. Cernak could be brought to safety.
Against all odds, the mission succeeded. The agent reached Prague, made contact with the resistance and proceeded to Theresienstadt. The rear guard of SS left in charge, devoid of its former swaggering omnipotence and amenable to bribery, turned a blind eye. Frail and thin, close to death, Dr. Cernak was brought to Prague and hidden.
Before he figured out the not-inconsequential matter of how to make the return trip, the agent made inquiries about the missing trio who had been dropped in hopes of rescuing the Dawson team. Headquarters presumed them dead, but he wanted to make sure. To his surprise and delight, he learned that the resistance was sheltering two surviving members. He arranged for them to be smuggled into Prague and stowed away safely.
On May 5 the resistance launched its uprising against the Germans. There was heavy fighting, but the Red Army entered the city on V-E Day and the game was up. After seven years of German occupation the first city to fall under the Nazi heel was free.
Happy as they were to witness the war’s end in liberated Prague, the OSS agents unanimously agreed to complete their journey under their own steam. They were determined not to rely on the Soviets, whose mixture of hospitality and suspicion made it hard to spend time out of their sight, and to bring Dr. Cernak to the West.
Once word reached Donovan of the agents’ situation, he sprang into action. Aware of the need for medical supplies in the Czech capital, he arranged a flight to deliver an emergency shipment. The plane landed on the very night that the city was set to celebrate the grand gala reopening of the Prague Opera House. The new government, the diplomatic corps, and the Soviet military command would all be in attendance.
Dr. Cernak and his American rescuer were also among the invited guests. Pretending to set out for the opera, they picked up the two OSS agents and made a beeline to the airport. They boarded the Lockheed Electra, which had just finished unloading its gift of medical supplies, and immediately took off for Paris.
The adventures of these OSS agents are small dots on the grand canvas of the war. Yet in their particularity—in the agents’ consistent dedication and determination—is a unique reminder of that band of men, those hidden heroes, who have made the Office of Strategic Services, well, oh so special.
The New York Standard, August 26, 1973
CARLTON BAXTER BARTLETT, FORMER PUBLIC RELATIONS EXECUTIVE
AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL DIES; ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER ENDED
BY INVOLVEMENT IN BAY OF PIGS FIASCO
Carlton Baxter Bartlett, a former senior government official who was assigned much of the responsibility for the Central Intelligence Agency’s failed attempt to topple the Castro government at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, in April 1961, died suddenly yesterday at his apartment on Beekman Place, in Manhattan. He was 75.
Mr. Bartlett had heart problems, said Kenneth Moss, president of Bartlett & Partners, the international public relations firm Bartlett founded in 1930, which is now a subsidiary of ISC.
While his role as a principal architect of what became a disaster for the newly installed Kennedy administration is widely remembered, Mr. Bartlett had already made great, though largely unsung, contributions during and after World War II.
As director of the Department of Information, Communication & Policy Analysis for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he served as a highly regarded aide to its legendary founder, General “Wild Bill” Donovan. “Where some agents of the OSS were content to fight the war from behind a desk,” commented Mr. Moss, “Carl Bartlett could usually be found in the field.”
As deputy director of planning for the CIA, he helped guide the clandestine operations that toppled the left-leaning government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi. He is also credited with playing a pivotal role in bringing about the 1954 coup d’état that ousted Presi
dent Jacobo árbenz Guzmán’s administration in Guatemala, which was seen by many as the spearhead of Communist subversion throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Recalling that Mr. Bartlett “helped design and implement efforts to counter Soviet spy efforts throughout the world, and especially in Western Europe,” Mr. Moss said that Bartlett would “be particularly remembered for his role in rebuilding the intelligence capabilities of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Mr. Bartlett submitted his resignation shortly after the Bay of Pigs operation. In 1971, on the tenth anniversary of that failed invasion, President Nixon awarded him the National Security Medal, calling his contributions to American intelligence operations “unique.”
Little in his previous life appeared to point him toward intelligence work, much less clandestine activity.
Carlton Baxter Bartlett was the son of Waldo Bartlett, an executive at the Equitable Life Insurance Company, and Marigold Alden Fiske, a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims. He attended Yale but did not graduate, choosing instead to join the firm of Ivy Lee & Associates, which managed press relations for some of the country’s most prestigious corporations.
Bartlett helped pioneer the firm’s involvement in the business of subtlety by aggressively protecting and burnishing the reputations of corporations and their executives. Today a multimillion-dollar industry and mainstay of corporate activity that has grown to include celebrities as well as politicians, “public relations” was still in its infancy when Bartlett began.
After his service in the OSS and his postwar involvement in creating what eventually became the CIA, Bartlett returned to the leadership of Bartlett & Partners. He was subsequently recalled by both Democratic and Republican administrations to serve in various high-ranking positions within the national intelligence community.
Though remembered by friends as “modest and shy,” Mr. Bartlett has been a mainstay of New York City’s social circuit and art scene. The acquisition of Bartlett & Partners by ISC in 1957 left him an extremely wealthy man. He enjoyed a reputation as an astute collector of modern art, and his perspicacity in buying some early works by leading Abstract Expressionist painters allowed him to amass a collection now valued at several million dollars.
All three of his marriages ended in divorce. He leaves no survivors.
“Carlton Baxter’s successes far outweigh his failures,” said Mr. Moss. “For now, many of those achievements remain classified information. We can only hope that the day is not far off when a full accounting of this man’s remarkable life can be entered into the public record.”
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE
THE CIA AND NAZI WAR CRIMINALS:
National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under War Crimes Disclosure Act
Washington, D.C., February 4, 2005. The National Security Archive today posted the CIA’s secret documentary history of the U.S. government’s relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German Army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen’s group, according to the CIA history Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, was a “double-edged sword” that “boosted the Warsaw pact’s propaganda efforts” and “suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB.”
The declassified two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German Intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of “the new and close ties” formed in postwar Germany and to mark the fiftieth year of CIA–West German cooperation. Declassified in 2002, it contains 97 key documents from various agencies.
This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the Interagency Working Group (IWG) that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Established in 1999, the IWG has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires in March of this year.)
Several members of the IWG went on record with their criticisms. Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman stated that “the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis.” According to Washington attorney Richard Ben-Veniste, “the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that’s not a position we can accept.”
Louis Pohl, a lawyer and activist with the Human Rights Foundation who has written extensively on alleged CIA abuses and whose uncle was a member of the Agency’s founding generation, stated: “The time is long past for the CIA to come clean about its extensive involvement with former members of Hitler’s terror apparatus.” Pohl wrote the foreword to Turlough Bassante’s 1981 book, Let the Murderers Be Judged, an exposé of the U.S.’s recruitment and use of Nazi intelligence agents, which was dismissed by many at the time as “sensationalist” and “unfounded.”
The documentation unearthed by the IWG leaves no doubt that the relationship between Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations—including the CIA—was far deeper and more intimate than formerly thought. For example, current records show that associates of Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA; a score of other Nazis, including former SS concentration camp personnel, were actively recruited; and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.
The IWG enlisted the help of distinguished scholars and historians to consult during the declassification process. Last May, they released their own interpretation of the declassified material, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, in which they concluded: “The notion that they [the CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corps, and the BND] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation … Hindsight allows us to see that American use of actual or alleged war criminals was a blunder in several respects … there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war.
“Lack of sufficient attention to history—and, on a personal level, to character and morality—established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them, these recruits represented a potential security problem.”
In answer to the question “Can we learn from history?” the IWG’s consulting historians quoted from the conclusion of Turlough Bassante’s Let the Murderers Be Judged: “The real question is not whether we can make use of our past to deal with the present and shape the future, but whether we have the courage, vision, and resolve to do so.”
Eat the Moon by Thornton Van Hull. (Forensic Manor Press) Before his death in 1958, OSS veteran Van Hull deposited his manuscript on a library shelf in the girls’ academy in which he taught. It lay there unread until the school closed and a local bookseller was invited to cart off what he wished. “The dusty binder that tumbled into his hands,” writes military historian John Murray in his introduction, “contained a firsthand account of a botched rescue mission in near war’s end. It’s a small, elegantly told tale filled with the larger truths of what war really involves.” Van Hull’s ground-level view is of ordinary men who do extraordinary things not in service to patriotic abstractions but out of loyalty to one another. Among the memoir’s many n
otable aspects is Van Hull’s frank description of his homosexuality, in particular his love affair with a fellow OSS agent (identified only as M.), who was captured and killed by the SS. The title is taken from Yeats’s poem, “Brown Penny”: “O love is the crooked thing / There is nobody wise enough / To find out all that is in it / For he would be thinking of love / Till the stars had run away / And the shadows eaten the moon.” Amid the unending torrent of WWII narratives, Van Hull’s is a reminder of the millions of untold stories and tragedies hidden forever beneath the shadows of the last “good war.” (www.bookblitz.com)
Cutchogue, New York, 12/30/13: With a dozen bestsellers behind her—several made into movies—writer Tess O’Keefe might seem ready to sit back and smell the roses. (Or, as part owner of a vineyard on the North Fork, sip chardonnay.) But at age 76, she’s just signed a contract for a series of detective novels featuring private eye Fintan Dunne. “I took the name from real life,” says O’Keefe. “Fintan Dunne was a mentor of mine. He had a wonderful edge about him, a blend of cynicism and humanism, sharpened by a decade on the NYPD and service in both world wars. But my Fintan won’t be a duplicate of the original. He’ll be cyber hip and post-modern, with a Peruvian partner/girlfriend who shares an apartment in Williamsburg.” Dunne makes his debut in November 2014. (www.newyorkpressgang.org)
PETER QUINN is the author of Hour of the Cat, The Man Who Never Returned, Looking for Jimmy, and The Banished Children of Eve, all available from Overlook. He has worked as a speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and as the Editorial Director for Time Warner. He is a third generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland.