Blowback

by Christopher Simpson

  The Soviet position on such matters, stated briefly, was that if the West was holding a war crimes suspect, it should simply turn him or her over to the NKVD, which would conduct an investigation. No outside examiners were needed or wanted. Although the USSR did make a vital contribution to the prosecutions at Nuremberg, the fact remains that the unmistakable priority of Soviet investigators during the first years after the war was to lay hands upon any refugee or POW who might conceivably pose a political threat to regions under Russian control and only secondarily to collect evidence of crimes against humanity.

  Why did the Soviets refuse to cooperate more fully with the admittedly imperfect and limited efforts that the United States did make to bring war criminals to justice? The people of the Soviet Union, after all, had suffered far more terribly at the hands of the Nazis than those of the United States. And the USSR did undertake a massive (but usually completely independent) effort to locate and punish Nazis and collaborators inside the Soviet-occupied territories.

  The reasons for the Soviets’ intransigence on this point are open to speculation. The U.S. use of CROWCASS to locate promising Nazi intelligence recruits was no doubt part of the reason. But that cannot be taken as a complete explanation; recruiting defectors from the enemy is, after all, a standard intelligence practice in wartime, one which the Soviets themselves regularly employed.

  A more persuasive argument is that especially during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the NKVD had committed a number of atrocities of its own that would have been impossible to conceal if Western investigators were permitted access to the Soviet zone. Public proof of these crimes would likely have been a major setback for the USSR at the time, threatening the Soviets’ still-fragile hold over Eastern Europe and undermining the USSR’s attempts at expanded political and trade relations with the West.

  One notable example of the politically explosive nature of the NKVD’s crimes was the Katyn Forest massacre, which remains a bitter problem in Soviet-Polish relations to this day. The preponderance of available evidence in this still-controversial episode points to the conclusion that Soviet security troops executed approximately 8,000 nationalist Polish army officers taken prisoner during 1939, then stacked the bodies like cordwood in mass graves at an isolated outpost. Similar NKVD mass killings of unarmed Ukrainian prisoners took place at Lvov, Dubno, and Vinnitsa, near the present Soviet-Polish border.

  Other examples include the NKVD’s forced deportation of some 35,000 to 50,000 “suspect” Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians to Siberian exile in 1940 and 1941, which has remained a rigidly enforced secret inside the USSR ever since.11 Soviet security troops also seized approximately 1 million politically suspect Poles during the course of the war and shipped them in railroad cars to gulag prisons and labor camps in Central Asia and Siberia. There tens of thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of thousands were worked to death.

  Nor did these practices end with the termination of the Hitler-Stalin pact. By the end of the war Stalin had developed a deeply rooted hatred of several minority groups in the USSR that he regarded as disloyal. As the Red Army reclaimed Soviet territory from the Nazis during 1943 and 1944, special police troops moved in behind the front to secure the ethnic minority regions of the USSR. In some parts of the country all the men, women, and children of entire Soviet nationality groups—the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, and Volga Germans, among others—were rounded up at gunpoint and exiled to remote settlements deep inside the country for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. Indeed, as Nikita Khrushchev himself later commented, the entire Ukrainian ethnic group “avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise,” Khrushchev continued, Stalin “would have deported them also.”12

  The political price involved in admitting such disgraces was clearly higher than Stalin was willing to pay, and none of this could have been concealed for long had the USSR fully cooperated with war crimes investigations. Instead, the Soviets chose to solicit whatever CROWCASS information they could obtain through the various joint Allied control commissions and committees, at the same time undertaking on their own a vast criminal investigation that was kept carefully sealed off from Western eyes. Only in this way was it possible to maintain the “security” of the USSR—and the NKVD—throughout the purges of Nazi criminals.

  It is also clear that the Soviets, like the Western Allies, were engaged in their own recruiting of selected Nazi agents whom they believed to be useful for intelligence or political purposes. The history of that recruitment has been suppressed in the East and is unlikely to be made public anytime soon. A number of documented cases have come to light, however, largely as a result of splits among Eastern Europe’s Communist parties during the last thirty years.

  Some measure of the scope of the Soviet’s Nazi recruitment efforts may be found in Romania. There the country’s Communist party, which was thoroughly dominated by a Muscovite clique in the first years after the war, swelled from about 1,000 old-timers in 1945 to some 714,000 members by the end of 1947. Several years later, however, a much more nationalistic faction of Romania’s Communist party took control and purged many Muscovite leaders, including the party chairman Ana Pauker and secret police chief Teohari Georgescu. That, in turn, led to public revelations of the extent to which Georgescu had relied on recruitment of Fascist Iron Guard veterans for his police apparatus during the first years after the war. According to Nicolae Ceau§escu, the Romanian party’s present chairman, the new ruling group purged more than 300,000 “alien careerist elements, including Iron Guardists and hostile persons” who had entered the party’s ranks during the height of Stalin’s influence in that country.13 Somewhat similar situations have been reported in both East Germany and Hungary, where Soviet occupation authorities permitted so-called little Nazis to remain in the police apparatus as a means of stabilizing power.

  Yugoslavia’s split with the USSR in 1948 also brought forth reliable information concerning the extent to which Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenti Beria relied on Nazi collaborators for clandestine operations. According to an official Yugoslav government statement to the United Nations, Beria’s police “created a vast network of spies … [trained] in the USSR and composed mainly of fascists who had enlisted in the one and only regiment which the Croatian [Ustachi] traitor Pavelić had been able to place at Hitler’s disposal.” The purpose of the Soviet maneuver, the Yugoslavs charged, was seizure of the government of their country.

  Other examples along these lines may be cited. In the Middle East top German espionage agent Fritz Grobba turned himself and his entire spy net over to the Russians at least as early as 1945; in the Balkans Nazi finance expert Carl Clodius, who had built his reputation in part by applying slave labor to Germany’s economic problems, went on to become the economics chief in the Cominform’s Balkans division; in East Germany SS General Hans Rattenhuber, formerly commander of Hitler’s personal SS guard, re-emerged after the war as a senior East German political police official in East Berlin; and so on.*14 Clearly the Soviets, too, were willing to forgive past Nazi indiscretions when it was in their interest to do so.

  *The brutality of nazism was masked at the interrogation center but was present nonetheless. One wartime escape ended in the roundup and summary execution of some fifty Allied prisoners of war, mainly British. Consistently uncooperative or escape-prone prisoners were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

  * Examples of SS and Gestapo veterans who ended up in police work in East Germany include Abwehr Lieutenant General Rudolph Bamler, who collaborated with Soviet military intelligence following his capture by the Russians and eventually became a department head at state security headquarters in East Berlin; Johann Sanitzer, once in charge of the Gestapo’s anti-Jewish work in Vienna and later an East German police major in Erfurt; and SS Captain Louis Hagemeister, who had once handled counterespionage for the SS and later became chief police interrogator in Schwerin.
Ex-SS Sturmbannführer Heidenreich became the official liaison between the East German political police and the Central Committee of the country’s Communist party after the war. Dimitry and Nina Erdely, a husband-and-wife team specializing in émigré affairs for the Gestapo, ended up with the Soviet United Nations delegation in New York. It is likely that they had been Soviet double agents during the war. Maintaining their wartime cover, however, required that they “help … send many Soviet citizens to concentration camps,” as a declassified U.S. State Department report on their activities puts it.

  At least two former SS officers found their way onto the Central Committee of East Germany’s Communist party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. They are Ernst Grossmann (a former Sachsenhausen concentration camp guard) and Waffen SS veteran Karlheinz Bartsch. Both were quickly purged when word of their wartime careers was published in the West.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I … Prefer to Remain Ignorant”

  The emerging East-West conflict had entered a new and clearly more hostile phase early in 1947. The British government, exhausted by war and deeply in debt, had abruptly announced that January that it was withdrawing from its earlier guarantees to stabilize power in Greece, where a bitter civil war was raging between left-wing rebels and British-backed Greek monarchist forces. President Truman blamed the Soviets for the crisis and stepped in with a multimillion-dollar aid program for the “democratic” forces in Greece—though there is considerable dispute over just how democratic they actually were—and with a series of campaigns to restrict the activities of pro-Communist movements in both the Middle East and Europe.

  Truman claimed that the Soviets were underwriting the Greek insurgency and asserted that this justified a major U.S. commitment in that country. In fact, however, the Greek left was primarily an indigenous force. What outside aid the Greek rebels did enjoy came primarily from Tito’s Yugoslavia, which was already having serious problems of its own with Stalin.1

  Be that as it may, it was clear to the Americans that communism was to be regarded as the main enemy in Greece. After liberation in 1944, political power in that country had teetered uneasily between a nationalist-Communist alliance dominated by the Greek Communist party (EAM), on the one hand, and the weakened Greek monarchist forces. Both groups had fought the Nazi occupation during the war, though with varying degrees of dedication. When the British announced in early 1947 that they were withdrawing their sponsorship of the monarchists, almost every observer concluded that a leftist victory was at hand.

  There was, however, another force in Greece, and it is to them that U.S. Intelligence turned. This was known as the Holy Bond of Greek Officers, or IDEA, by its Greek initials. This organization was made up in large part of Nazi collaborators. The Greek army and police were well known to have been controlled by rightists since the 1930s, and the bulk of those forces had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation. These sympathizers created “security battalions” during the war to hunt down anti-Nazi partisans and to execute Jews who had escaped from the ghetto at Salonika. These detachments were responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of Greeks during the occupation, according to all accounts, and directly assisted the Nazis in the liquidation of about 70,000 Greek Jews. After the Nazis had been driven out of the country, however, the security battalions and their officers were in deep disgrace. Colonel George Papadopoulos helped create IDEA shortly after the Nazis had been driven out of Greece, ostensibly to protect the Greek population from Communist attack. “In reality,” however, the Times of London later reported, “a principal activity of IDEA was to secure rehabilitation of those officers who had been initially purged by the post-liberation coalition government because of their activities in the collaborationist ‘security battalions’ of the occupation years.”2

  Secret Pentagon papers now in the U.S. National Archives show that the United States poured millions of dollars into IDEA during the U.S. intervention in Greece in order to create what it termed “Secret Army Reserve” made up of selected Greek military, police, and anti-Communist militia officers. Sufficient money, arms, and supplies to equip a fighting force of at least 15,000 men were shipped to Greece in connection with this program alone. This semiclandestine army soon emerged with American backing as the central “democratic” force in Greece, and a long line of latter-day Greek strongmen such as Colonel Papadopoulos* (who eventually took control of the CIA-supported Greek central intelligence agency, KYP) and military leaders General Alexander Natsinas and General Nicolaos Gogoussis have been drawn from IDEA’s ranks.3

  American arms and money had a powerful impact in Greece. Many Greek nationalist forces abandoned their former EAM allies—in part because of the brutality of the EAM in its execution of an attempted guerrilla war against the U.S.-backed forces—and within two years a strongly pro-American government had achieved control of the country.

  Truman’s decisive action in Greece had wider ramifications. It helped crystallize sentiment inside the U.S. government, which up to that point had often been divided over just how harshly to deal with the USSR, into a new and much more obdurate approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. This new strategy marked an important watershed in the development of U.S. efforts to make use of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, eventually creating the administrative structure and bureaucratic rationale for their utilization on an even wider scale than before.

  The thinking behind this strategy was perhaps best articulated by George F. Kennan, the State Department expert on Soviet affairs who at the time had recently been appointed chief of the department’s Policy Planning Staff. Kennan had served several tours of diplomatic duty in Moscow over the previous two decades, and his experience there had left him deeply bitter about both Stalin’s dictatorship and the prospects for East-West cooperation. His antipathy toward Stalin had kept him isolated from the policy process during the Roosevelt administration, when relatively close U.S.-USSR ties were backed by the White House. He had come into his own, however, in the Truman years. His famous 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow (as it has since come to be known) became a rallying cry for those at State, the War Department, and the White House who were determined to get tough with the Russians. That message read, as Kennan himself later recalled, “exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.” Even so, “its effect … was nothing less than sensational,” he writes. “It was one that changed my career and my life in very basic ways.… My reputation was made. My voice now carried.”4

  By the time the United States intervened in Greece, Kennan enjoyed the direct sponsorship of Secretary of the Navy (soon to be Secretary of Defense) James Forrestal and of Secretary of State George Marshall. Acting on Forrestal’s behalf, Kennan prepared a pivotal analysis of the USSR that has since come to be called the “containment doctrine” and is generally recognized as one of the basic programmatic statements of the cold war. In it, Kennan succeeded in reconciling many of the inchoate and conflicting perspectives on how to deal with the Soviets that had characterized Truman’s administration up to that point. He argued that U.S.Soviet relations were a fundamentally hostile, protracted conflict that had been initiated by the USSR—not the United States—and that normal relations between the two states would be impossible as long as a Soviet type government was in power in the USSR. Their “ideology,” he wrote, “… has taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders.… [This] means that there can never be on Moscow’s side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalist.”

  The USSR was an imperial empire, Kennan continued, but the modern-day East-West clash could be managed through measures short of all-out war through what he termed “long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russia
n expansive tendencies” and the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” As originally formulated, the containment doctrine envisioned bottling up internal pressures inside the USSR until they forced the Soviet Union to “cooperate or collapse,” as Newsweek summarized it, a process that was expected to take about ten to fifteen years. “Soviet power,” Kennan concluded, “… bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and … the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.”5

  Kennan was later to assert that his intention at the time he prepared his analysis was to say that the “counterforce” and “containment” that gave the doctrine its name should employ political, not military, tactics. The phrases quoted above, he said, were misinterpreted by Secretary of Defense Forrestal and others when they used Kennan’s formulations to promote NATO, a giant arms budget, the permanent division of Germany, and a number of other policies that the diplomat opposed.6

  Regardless of Kennan’s reservations, it was precisely these more aggressive aspects of containment that attracted Forrestal and other hard-liners in the Truman administration. In their hands, containment became the theoretical framework for U.S.-Soviet relations under which a wide variety of clandestine warfare tactics, ranging from radio propaganda to sabotage and murder, was chosen to counteract—“contain”—left-wing initiatives virtually anywhere in the world.

  Although it was rarely mentioned in the public discussions, it is clear that covert operations aimed at harassing (and, if possible, overthrowing) hostile governments were an integral part of the containment strategy from the beginning. A new breed of realpolitik advocates among the government’s national security specialists embraced containment as a rationale for what has since come to be called “destabilization” of the USSR and its satellites. Put briefly, destabilization is a type of psychological or political warfare that is calculated to undermine a target government, to destroy its popular support or credibility, to create economic problems, or to draw it into crisis through some other means. U.S. security planners of the late 1940s became fascinated with the prospect of destabilizing the Soviet Union’s satellite states while simultaneously harassing the USSR. They were anxious to capitalize on the spontaneous rebellions against Soviet rule then rumbling through the Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, some of which were approaching civil wars in intensity.