*Alexander’s highly publicized activities during 1948 are another indication that Bloodstone was geared to bring in Nazi collaborators, not Communists. In July of that year Alexander defied Secretary of State Marshall by testifying in Congress that “Communist agents” were entering the United States under cover of United Nations agencies. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration “was the greatest offender,” he said, adding that some of the Communists had been trained as spies and terrorists. Alexander’s testimony, in short, stressed the need to keep Communists, former Communists, and anyone who might be sympathetic to them out of the country at all costs.
Secretary Marshall was concerned that conservatives in Congress would use the “UN spy” testimony, as it came to be known, to derail a $65 million U.S. loan to the United Nations that was being strongly backed by the administration. The secretary rejected Alexander’s charges, and a variety of follow-up studies concluded that Alexander’s “irresponsible statements produced serious repercussions on the foreign policy of the United States.”
Alexander was eventually appointed deputy administrator for all U.S. refugee programs under the Refugee Relief Act. He publicly recommended that the “free nations of the world … undertake a concerted effort to solve the refugee problem” by organizing military retaliation against governments—particularly Communist ones—that were producing too many refugees. In the meantime, he cautioned, accepting more exiles from socialist countries “even for humanitarian reasons” only “drain[ed] off the properly discordant and recalcitrant elements” of their populations, thus propping up Soviet rule.
ϯ Kirkpatrick is today an irrepressibly cheerful man with a comfortable girth and a goatee that makes him resemble, of all people, an aging Leon Trotsky. He is also husband to Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration. Mr. and Mrs. Kirkpatrick share ownership in Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (also known as OPR, Inc.), which has benefited over the years from government contracts for studies in psychological warfare, defense policy, and political behavior. Critics have alleged that the company served as a funding conduit between U.S. intelligence agencies and promising scholars.
*A special Bloodstone subcommittee had, in fact, been created to supply false identities, government cover jobs, and secret police protection to selected Bloodstone immigrants because “the activities in which some of the aliens concerned are to be engaged may result in jeopardizing their safety from foreign agents [inside] the United States.”
ϯ The PPS was simultaneously engaged in a second project employing Nazi collaborators through a U.S.-financed “think tank” named the Eurasian Institute. According to declassified State Department records bearing George Kennan’s handwritten initials, the Eurasian Institute enlisted such men as Saldh Ulus, who was described in U.S. cables as an “important member of [the] German espionage network in Central Asia from 1931 to 1945,” and Mehmet Sunsh, who was said to have been “employed by the German Propaganda Bureau [in] Istanbul 1942.”
Eurasian Institute work was handled in large part by Bloodstone specialists John Paton Davies and Carmel Offie, according to declassified State Department records. Many of its recruits were eventually integrated into the Munich-based (and CIA-financed) Institute for the Study of the USSR during the early 1950s.
*In 1985 the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that U.S. intelligence agencies considered Poppe to have been a “traitor” during the war, as the GAO put it, but not a “war criminal” at the time they sponsored his immigration into the United States in 1948.
More recently the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which is responsible for prosecuting Nazis and collaborators alleged to have entered this country illegally, closed out an investigation of Poppe’s immigration to the United States without bringing any charges against him. This action was taken in part because the OSI determined that Poppe had disclosed his relationship with the SS to U.S. intelligence prior to his immigration, thus making it highly unlikely that the OSI could successfully prosecute Poppe for illegal entry into the United States.
CHAPTER TEN
Bare Fists and Brass Knuckles
Many of the Bloodstone recruits—both Nazi collaborators and anti-Nazis—were passed along to two heavily funded CIA psychological warfare projects that are still in operation. These two enterprises were authorized under the “subversion against hostile states” and “propaganda” sections of NSC 10/2 and are probably the largest and most expensive political warfare efforts ever undertaken by the United States. They are certainly the longest-running and best-publicized “secret” operations ever. Their names are Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, the latter of which is better known as Radio Liberation or Radio Liberty.
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 émigré 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.1
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.2
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 émigré 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.”3
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 me
dia 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.4
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 preinflation dollars.5 This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberté 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 been the clandestine promoter of the parties of the political center, not the extreme right.
Contrary to Soviet propaganda, “anti-Communist” and “pro-Nazi” are not the same thing among the exiled politicians and émigré organizations from Eastern Europe, including those that were sponsored by the CIA in the 1950s. The large majority of these exile politicians and scholars who accepted covert U.S. aid during the cold war had not been Nazi collaborators. Many of them, especially the anti-Communist Czechs and Poles, themselves had suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis.
But the American policy expressed in NSC 20 and similar high-level decisions set the stage for U.S. enlistment of some exiles who had been Nazi collaborators. By refusing to make distinctions among the various anti-Communist exile groups, the CIA soon found itself with a substantial number of former Nazis and collaborators on its payroll. These recruitments were not “accidental” if the word implies that the CIA did not know what those groups had done during the war, nor were they as rare as most people assume. The how and why of some of those cases are the focus of the story in the pages that follow.
Beginning as early as 1948 and picking up speed in the decade that followed, the National Committee for a Free Europe and its sister project, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, became the single most important pipeline through which the CIA passed money for émigré leaders. Although both were supposedly private, voluntary organizations, the political control of these projects and virtually all their funding was actually provided by Wisner’s OPC division at the CIA.
Contrary to popular impression, the well-known radio transmissions of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation were added only as something of an afterthought several years after the CIA’s funding of émigré projects had begun. Radio transmissions into Central and Eastern Europe began in 1950 under Radio Free Europe’s auspices, then expanded to include programs beamed into the USSR itself through RFE’s sister project, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, in early 1953. Radio Liberation from Bolshevism was renamed Radio Liberty during a thaw in the cold war in 1963. The CIA’s direct sponsorship of these programs continued until 1973, when a new (and somewhat more public) Board for International Broadcasting was established to fund and administer the radio propaganda effort. The corporate names and details of organizational structure of these projects went through a number of changes in those years, which are summarized in the source notes.6 For simplicity’s sake, the text that follows uses RFE/RL to refer to these projects.
By the early 1970s the U.S. government had poured at least $100 million into support of political activities of the Eastern European exile groups through the RFE/RL conduit alone, according to an unclassified study by the government’s General Accounting Office.7 That money, however, was only the beginning. An unknown sum clearly totaling many tens of millions of dollars more found its way into CIA-sponsored émigré programs by way of European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan) funds, displaced persons assistance, foreign aid to West Germany, and donations of U.S. military surplus goods.
Nazi collaborators’ links to the U.S. political warfare effort became particularly pronounced in the governments-in-exile divisions of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation, which were the main administrative channels for CIA money flowing to a number of Eastern European émigré groups. The RFE division funded the “governments-in-exile” or “national committees” (as they were often called) for most of the countries occupied by the USSR at the end of the war, while a similar structure inside Radio Liberation performed much the same job for exiles from a dozen different nationalities within the Soviet Union itself.8
During World War II both the Axis and the Allies had financed such national committees as a means of mobilizing resistance, keeping an eye on refugees from occupied territories, and creating behind-the-lines spy networks. The intelligence services or foreign ministries of the belligerents passed money to favored exile leaders, who in turn distributed patronage and favors to followers they considered loyal.
RFE/RL recruiters wanted to re-create these governments-in-exile for propaganda use against the USSR and its satellite countries. They were faced with a difficult problem in the early years, however, because many of their more promising volunteers turned out to have been willing Nazi collaborators. Often the national committees that had been sponsored by Berlin remained well organized and relatively powerful even after the German defeat, and these groups sometimes controlled the displaced persons camps where refugees of their nationality had been dumped by the Allies. The quisling national committees included men whom the Nazis had sponsored as mayors, government officials, newspaper editors, and police chiefs during the German occupation. They were experienced in working together, and their organizations were often backed up by gangs of thugs made up of Waffen SS and Vlasov Army veterans who made sure that things ran smoothly inside the camps.
&nb
sp; These formerly pro-Nazi national committees had, almost without exception, jettisoned their Fascist rhetoric and Iron Cross awards following the collapse of Berlin. They took to presenting themselves as democrats, freedom fighters, and even anti-Nazis. These false stories should have been transparent, considering that the United States had captured enough of the German intelligence archives to document the activities of thousands of the more prominent collaborators, had it been a priority to dig their names out of Nazi correspondence. But no one in the Western intelligence agencies, it seems, was willing to look critically at the wartime careers of the émigrés who were eager to help the United States in the cold war. Instead, the intense secrecy that surrounded Wisner’s OPC and similar psychological warfare projects protected many ex-Nazis and collaborators by putting a top secret stamp on their activities.
RFE recruiters generally attempted to shun Nazi collaborators when it was possible to do so, and they often favored democrats and moderate socialists for their ability to present an alternative to the USSR, on the one hand, and to the old monarchist or Nazi power structures, on the other. This liberal, anti-Communist approach was successful in recruiting agents from some of the wartime exile governments that had been founded under British auspices in London or from among certain Czech and Hungarian political groups which had established some measure of democratic power between World Wars I and II. The left-leaning Council for a Free Czechoslovakia under Peter Zenkl, to name one example, was usually favored over the more reactionary Slovak Liberation Committee under Ferdinand Durcansky, which openly pledged its allegiance to the genocidal wartime regime of Monsignor Jozef Tiso.9 RFE’s sympathy for the Zenkl committee over its rivals led to endless, bitter attacks on both Radio Free Europe and Zenkl, many of which appeared in rightist émigré journals that were themselves receiving U.S. government subsidies.
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