The question of U.S. use of former Nazi collaborators in assassinations is important, and not just because of the obvious damage that the Technical Service imbroglio did to U.S. relations with Germany’s influential Social Democrats. Few subjects are more deeply clothed in mystery than this one, and the evidence concerning how U.S. assassination operations worked during the cold war and who was responsible for them is inevitably scattered and fragmentary. All that can be said with certainty is that such murders did take place and that in some cases former Nazi collaborators were instrumental in carrying them out.
To put the case most bluntly, many American clandestine warfare specialists believed that the most “productive”—and least compromising—method of killing foreign officials was to underwrite the discontent of indigenous groups and let them take the risks.15 American intelligence agencies’ use of this technique appears to have originated in operations during World War II, when the OSS supplied thousands of cheap pistols to partisans in France and Yugoslavia specifically for assassination of collaborators and German officials. (According to Pentagon records,16 the OSS also air-dropped these weapons in areas where there were no significant rebel forces so that the Nazis, upon finding the guns, would tighten the screws on local populations and thereby produce new anti-Nazi partisans.)
The concepts of maintaining “plausible deniability” for the actual murder and of the expendability of the killers themselves are a key to understanding U.S. assassination techniques. In most cases, it appears to have been neither necessary nor practical for U.S. intelligence officers to give precise instructions for murder. Instead, the OPC gave directions to commit assassinations to guerrilla movements in the same simple, sweeping terms that had been used in wartime Yugoslavia. U.S. intelligence encouraged insurgents to “eliminat[e] the command and other dangerous personnel of the MVD and the MGB [the Soviet secret police],” as the psychological warfare appendix to a Pentagon war plan put it in 1948. Other assigned tasks under the Halfmoon war plan, as it was known, included “organiz[ing] for the destruction of industry, communications and other factors in Soviet war-making capacity”; “engag[ing] in sabotage wherever and whenever it disrupts enemy action”; and “creat[ing] panic and terror.”17
Several organizations of former Nazi collaborators were ready to undertake such slayings on a major scale. Covert operations chief Wisner estimated in 1951 that some 35,000 Soviet police troops and Communist party cadres had been eliminated by guerrillas connected with the Nazi collaborationist OUN/UPA in the Ukraine since the end of the war,18 and that does not include casualties from other insurgencies in Lithuania and the Muslim regions of the USSR that were also receiving aid from the United States and Britain.
These shotgun-style killings and guerrilla actions account for the large majority of murders carried out with U.S. assistance in Europe during the cold war. It is inappropriate, of course, to lay responsibility for all these deaths at the feet of the CIA. The rebellions against Soviet rule were not initiated by the agency; they exploded inside the country out of discontents that were bound to give rise to violent resistance. Still, it is clear that CIA aid sustained such rebellions longer and made them more deadly to all concerned than they might otherwise have been. Moreover, these widespread shotgun-style slayings served as cover for a smaller number of specific individual assassinations that appear to have been directly ordered by U.S. intelligence officers.
Former Nazi collaborators made excellent executioners in such instances, because of both their wartime training and the fact that the U.S. government could plausibly deny any knowledge of their activities. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. “In the international clandestine operations business, it was part of the code that the one and only remedy for the unfrocked double agent was to kill him” (emphasis added), the CIA’s director of operations planning during the Truman administration testified before Congress in 1976, “and all double agents knew that. That was part of the occupational hazard of the job.” The former director, whom the government declines to identify, also claimed, however, that he didn’t recall any executions of double agents actually occurring during his tenure there.19 It is understandable that he might fail to remember any executions; for admitting a role in such killings could well lead to arrest and prosecution for conspiracy to commit murder in Europe, if not in the United States itself.*
“We kept personnel at several air bases around the world for these types of missions,” says Colonel Prouty, who was responsible for U.S. Air Force air support of CIA missions overseas, including the delivery of agents to their targets and subsequent evacuation measures. “Some of these guys were the best commercial hit men you have ever heard of. [They were] mechanics, killers. They were Ukrainians, mainly, and Eastern Europeans, Greeks, and some Scotsmen. I don’t know how the Scotsmen got in there, but there they were. None of them were American citizens.” Prouty asserts that teams of such “mechanics” were used in cross-border infiltrations, in highly dangerous rescues of American agents inside the USSR and China, and in special murders. According to Prouty, there was no clear policy concerning the use of killing. “It was an ad hoc event, and it [the actual assassination] was done by third parties. If it had to be done in Yugoslavia, for example, it was set up with exile Yugoslavians or the [émigré] Polish groups. The [U.S.] Army had by far the best assets” for this type of thing, he states, but “on the operational level there was good cooperation with the air force, CIA, and army.” Many of the Eastern Europeans, he says, were Nazi collaborators during the war.20
Several such killings did take place during the late 1940s under Operations Hagberry and Lithia, both of which were approved at senior levels of the Pentagon. These two instances, furthermore, must be considered only the documented examples of a more widespread practice. Hagberry required, according to army records, the “liquidation of the Chikalov Ring, a possible Soviet intelligence net operating within the U.S. zone of Germany.” And Lithia, which began under army auspices in November 1947, authorized “liquidation in [the] United States Zone [of Germany] of the Kundermann Ring, a large scale Czechoslovakian intelligence net.”21 Army intelligence believed that the Chikalov Ring and the Kundermann organization had managed to plant double agents in certain émigré espionage networks that were being jointly managed by the United States and Britain under still another code-named project, Operation Rusty, and it is those agents who were marked for “liquidation.” Army spokesmen today claim with shrugs of their shoulders that all further files concerning Hagberry and Lithia have simply disappeared. No further information is available, they say, and there is no indication of who withdrew the Hagberry and Lithia files or when they vanished.
Other people were murdered gangland-style during Operation Ohio, according to published reports in the United States.22 Ohio employed a squad of Ukrainian ex-Nazis to carry out at least twenty murders in a displaced persons camp at Mittenwald, south of Munich. The Army CIC and later the CIA are reported to have financed this squad for strong-arm work against double agents, Soviet spies, and similar undesirables. The fragmentary evidence still available suggests that most of the squad’s victims were double agents whose deaths—when they became public at all—were attributed to factional violence among rival right-wing Ukrainian émigré groups.
“We were just out of World War Two, and we were using those [wartime] tactics,” says Franklin Lindsay, the former CIA/OPC paramilitary expert. “In my case, I had operated only in wartime conditions. Given the feeling that we were very near war at that time, one tended to operate in the same way as in wartime.”23 Lindsay, however, rejects the term assassination as a description of CIA/OPC practice during his tenure there.*
The records of Operation Bloodstone add an important new piece of information to one of the most explosive public issues of today: the role of the U.S. government—specifically the CIA—in assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign officials. According to a 1976 Senate investigation, a key offic
ial of Operation Bloodstone is the OPC officer who was specifically delegated responsibility for planning the agency’s assassinations, kidnappings, and similar “wet work.”24
Colonel Boris Pash, one of the most extraordinary and least known characters in American intelligence history, completes the circle of U.S. agents, Nazi collaborators, and “mechanics” involved in these highly sensitive affairs. Pash is not a Nazi, nor is there any evidence that he is sympathetic to Nazis. But his work for U.S. intelligence agencies places him in the critical office given the responsibility for planning postwar assassination operations.
Pash, now in his eighties, looks much like a bespectacled retired high school teacher. That’s not surprising. He taught gym at Hollywood High School for a decade prior to World War II. He is modest—even shy, some might say—with a gravelly voice and a cautious manner born of a lifetime of keeping secrets. Politically Pash remains loyal to the legacy of General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he served in occupied Japan. Colonel Pash is one of the few remaining originals of U.S. intelligence, and his experience in “fighting the Communists” goes back to the 1917 Russian Revolution. He was in Moscow and Eastern Europe in those days with his father, a missionary of Russian extraction, and the young Pash spent much of the Soviet civil war working on the side of the White armies, then with czarist refugees who had fled their country. In the 1920s Pash signed on as a reserve officer with the U.S. military intelligence service, and he maintained the affiliation throughout his years at Hollywood High. He was called to active duty in the first days of the Second World War, played a role in the internment of Japanese civilians in California, and was soon assigned as chief counterintelligence officer on the Manhattan Project, the supersecret U.S. effort to develop the atomic bomb. (More than a decade later it was Colonel Pash’s testimony that helped seal the fate of scientist Robert Oppenheimer in the well-known 1954 security case.) Before the war was out, it will be recalled, Colonel Pash led the series of celebrated special operations known as the Alsos Mission that were designed to capture the best atomic and chemical warfare experts that the Nazis had to offer.25
After the war Colonel Pash served as the army’s representative on Bloodstone in the spring of 1948, when the tasks of that project, including recruiting defectors, smuggling refugees out from behind the Iron Curtain, and assassinations, were established. Bloodstone’s “special operations,” as defined by the Pentagon, could “include clandestine warfare, subversion, sabotage and … assassination,” according to the 1948 Joint Chiefs of Staff records.26 In March 1949, Pash was assigned by the army to the OPC division of the CIA. There, according to State Department records, his responsibilities included many of the functions originally approved under the Bloodstone program.
At the CIA Boris Pash became an administrator and organizer, as distinct from a field operative. His five-man CIA unit, known as PB/7, was given a written charter that read in part that “PB/7 will be responsible for assassinations, kidnapping, and such other functions as from time to time may be given it … by higher authority.”27 Pash’s fluency in Russian, his skill in dealing with Bloodstone émigrés, and his solid connections in anti-Communist exile circles were valuable assets in that job. Indeed, those qualifications—along with his sterling record as a counterintelligence officer—may well have been what led to his selection as PB/7 chief.
As with so many other aspects of the history of U.S. intelligence, the evidence here must be carefully sifted. Pash himself denies involvement in the Bloodstone program, asserting that he has “no recollection” of Bloodstone or of “anything like that.”28 However, documents establishing his participation in Bloodstone and PB/7 are now a matter of public record.29
Pash did testify before Congress in 1976 that his responsibilities at the CIA included planning for defections from Communist countries, facilitating the escape of prominent political refugees, and disseminating anti-Communist propaganda behind the Iron Curtain—all of which were clearly Bloodstone activities. Pash’s supervisor at the CIA (who is not identified in the hearing record) offered further details concerning some of the less savory aspects of émigré operations during the 1940s that coincide with what is known of Bloodstone. Pash’s PB/7, the supervisor said, was responsible for “kidnapping personages from behind the Iron Curtain … [including] kidnapping people whose interests were inimicable to ours.”30
Much of the documentary evidence concerning what PB/7 did during the first years of the CIA has disappeared, leaving both Congress and the general public with many unanswered questions concerning U.S. operations among émigrés during the cold war. The CIA claimed in 1976 that it had “no record of documents which deal with this aspect [i.e., assassinations] of Pash’s unit” and that even the office’s charter was missing. Colonel Pash himself insisted in congressional testimony that he did not “believe” that he had any involvement in or responsibility for planning or conducting assassinations. He also testified that he had no recollection of the language of the charter of PB/7, the CIA office of which he had been in charge.31
Despite the mysterious disappearance of the PB/7 records while in the hands of the CIA, the chain of circumstantial evidence concerning some Bloodstone émigrés’ roles in paramilitary, kidnapping, and assassination operations abroad is too strong to be easily dismissed. First, there is the incriminating Pentagon document, quoted above, which indicates that paramilitary operations, assassinations, and kidnappings were an explicit mission of the Bloodstone program from its beginning.
Secondly, at least one key Bloodstone official, Boris Pash, was active in Bloodstone’s early phases in mid-1948, then became chief of the OPC office responsible for planning paramilitary operations, assassinations, and kidnappings at about the time that control of “politico-psychological” and paramilitary operations was passed from the Bloodstone committee to the OPC.
Thirdly, at least some Bloodstone émigrés with backgrounds as Nazi collaborators—former Albanian Minister of Justice Hasan Dosti, for example—went on to become deeply involved in clandestine operations that did indeed involve paramilitary operations, murders, and unconsummated plans for assassinations, such as the 1949 and 1950 secret raids on Albania designed to overthrow the government. (Dosti did not participate in the actual field operations. But the organization he led, the Committee for a Free Albania, served as a “private” cover for the Albanian guerrillas, who were, in fact, organized and financed by the OPC.)
Fourthly—and perhaps coincidentally—certain Soviet spies, double agents, and “people whose interests were inimicable” to those of the CIA were marked for death by the agency. Pash’s immediate superiors in the OPC acknowledge that the “one and only remedy” for Communist double agents was to murder them. According to published reports in the United States,32 persons accused of being Soviet or East bloc agents were in fact killed during this period by former Nazi collaborators at Mittenwald and in other displaced persons camps, though under mysterious circumstances that have never been clearly traced back to the OPC.
In the opinion of the author, the early Bloodstone operations played a significant role in laying the groundwork for what one Senate investigator later called “a procedure [within the CIA] which, although not spelled out in so many words, was generally understood and served as the basis to plan or otherwise contemplate political assassination.”33 The killings of minor double agents in German DP camps were murders and deserve to be investigated as such. More significant, however, is what these otherwise obscure crimes appear to have foreshadowed: Before the decade of the 1950s was out, the CIA is known to have established mechanisms for using “deniable” assets and émigrés for the execution of heads of state and other international leaders. These later killings, which are arguably the most serious blunders ever made by the CIA, have created blowback problems on an international scale and have had a significant and generally negative effect on the lives of millions of people.
*Once, in 1952, a reporter strayed too close to the truth, and the followin
g single sentence appeared in Newsweek: “The Army will soon open a secret guerrilla warfare and sabotage school for military personnel and CIA agents at Ft. Bragg, N.C.” Army psychological warfare chief General Robert McClure was enraged by the security lapse and demanded a full field investigation into the reporter’s activities in order to trace the leak to its source. Army intelligence had its hands full with the Korean War at the time, however, and is said to have declined to follow up on McClure’s request. Even so, the incident reveals how closely the Special Forces secret was being held.
*The United States’ postwar labor service units were known at various times as Labor Service Guard Companies, Labor Service Companies (Guard), Technical Labor Service Units, Labor Service Technical Units, Industrial Police, Civilian Guard Companies, Military Labor Service, and a half dozen other similar names. All, however, were under the nominal command of the U.S. Army European Command’s Labor Service Division. The names Labor Service companies and Labor Service units are used throughout this discussion for simplicity’s sake.
The use of such Labor Service companies for arms training and as cover for clandestine paramilitary brigades is a well-established practice in Europe. The Nazis, for example, created similar brigades of Ukrainians and foreign-born Germans for use during the invasions of Poland and the Baltic states. These Nazi Labor Service squads often did double duty as triggermen and goons during the Holocaust.
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