Blowback

by Christopher Simpson

  Late in the war the Germans became sufficiently desperate that they reestablished a more or less formal “alliance” with a quisling Ukrainian national committee headed by Pavlo Shandruk, an aging Ukrainian-Polish general who had been a war hero during World War I.12 This propaganda gesture was accompanied by accelerated German recruitment of Ukrainians from the police groups into the Waffen SS, and by increased cooperation with the underground OUN/UPA leadership in a secret program that the SS-designated Operation Sonnenblume (Sunflower). According to U.S. interrogations of SS RSHA Amt VI clandestine operations chief Otto Skorzeny and his adjutant Karl Radl, Amt VI organized Sonnenblume in 1944 to coordinate German and OUN efforts during the Nazis’ retreat from Russia.13

  Thousands of tons of arms, ammunition, and other war materiel abandoned by the Nazis were consigned to underground OUN-led troops, Skorzeny told the Americans. The deal proved to be an astute investment for the Germans. The OUN/UPA succeeded in tying down some 200,000 Red Army troops and killing more than 7,000 Soviet officers14 during the Wehrmacht’s disordered flight across Europe during 1944 and 1945.

  The case of the OUN illustrates the complexity of the real-world relationships between Berlin and its collaborators on the eastern front. The OUN was not a puppet of the Germans in the same sense that the Vlasov Army was, but it did knowingly ally itself with the Nazis whenever it could. Whatever its conflicts with the Nazis may have been, the OUN’s own role in anti-Semitic pogroms—such as the mass murders in Lvov in 1941—and in the Lidice-style exterminations of entire villages accused of cooperating with Soviet partisans has been well established. Many OUN members committed serious crimes during the war, and the primary victims of their excesses were their own countrymen.

  As the Germans were driven out of the Ukraine in 1944, many OUN members who had served the Nazis in local militias, police departments, and execution squads fled with them. At least 40,000 other OUN-led partisans, however, retreated to the craggy Carpathian Mountains, where they hid out, waiting for the Red Army front to pass. It was this group that served as the backbone of the Ukrainian rebellion that fascinated the American security experts during the late 1940s.

  The convicted assassin Mykola Lebed emerged after the war as one of the United States’ most important agents inside the OUN/UPA. His case is of interest here, because it illustrates the manner in which the CIA recruited Nazi collaborators after the war and how it smuggled a number of the top leaders of the OUN/UPA into the United States.

  As noted above, Lebed entered the Gestapo’s training school in Krakow in 1939. The Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem contain a detailed description of Lebed’s activities at that center that was provided by Mykyta Kosakivs’kyy, a former OUN functionary who worked under Lebed’s command at Krakow but who broke with him after the war. As Kosakivs’kyy tells it, Lebed personally led the torture and murder of captured Jews at Krakow as a means of “hardening” his men against bloodshed.15 (Lebed himself acknowledges that he was active in the Gestapo center but denies he took part in torture or murder.)

  According to U.S. Army intelligence records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the OUN appointed Lebed “Home Secretary and Police Minister” in the Nazi quisling government in Lvov, the temporary capital of the Ukraine during the German invasion in 1941.16 There OUN police and militia made a horrifying discovery in the first days of the invasion. The retreating Soviet secret police, they learned, had massacred more than 2,000 unarmed Ukrainian nationalist prisoners in cold blood in Lvov jails, then sealed up the rotting corpses in underground chambers while the NKVD agents made their escape.

  The Soviets, for their part, have long claimed that the murders of the nationalists in Lvov were actually committed by the Nazis. Eyewitness testimony, however, refutes that contention. Either way, the atrocity provided a convenient pretext for an OUN-led pogrom against local Jews, who were accused of aiding the Soviets during the arrests of Ukrainians prior to the Nazi invasion. Ukrainian nationalist propaganda whipped the population into a fury against Jews and anyone suspected of Communist sympathies. Police and militia forces presumably under the command of the Police Minister, Mykola Lebed, remained busy day and night with mass roundups of unarmed men and women, public hangings, beatings, and other abuse. Lvov’s Jews were arrested, tortured, and shot in large numbers by both OUN troops and Nazi Einsatzkommando murder squads. “Long Live Adolf Hitler and [OUN leader] Stepan Bandera!” was among the most popular slogans, according to eyewitnesses. “Death to the Jews and the Communists!”17

  The killings of these people during these first weeks after the German invasion must have seemed almost carnivallike to some; they were a drunken orgy of violence and a celebration of newly seized power. Resistance was crushed through open terror. OUN police and militiamen raped Polish and Jewish women with impunity; Polish professors were rounded up, beaten, then executed; and Ukrainian nationalist extremists assisted in mass executions of Jews near the gasworks on the outskirts of town. At least 7,000 unarmed Jewish men and women were rounded up and executed in the weeks that followed, according to Nazi Einsatzgruppen reports, and this number does not include those who were shot or beaten to death during civilian pogroms.*18

  But these “exhilarating days,” as they were later described in OUN publications, were soon over. The nationalist government was double-crossed and disbanded by the Germans as soon as its propaganda value for illustrating the supposed “warm welcome” enjoyed by Wehrmacht troops in their invasion of the USSR had passed. Several OUN leaders, including Stetsko and Bandera, were placed under house arrest. One kingpin the Nazis missed, however, was the OUN’s ambitious secret police chief, Mykola Lebed.

  U.S. Army intelligence reports19 that Lebed organized the police and militia from the underground, where he forged them into the Slushba Bespiekie (SB), the elite terror arm of the Ukrainian nationalist forces. The specialty of Lebed’s SB teams was the hunting down of Red partisan leaders, torture, and interrogation, as well as gathering military intelligence for barter with the Germans. A number of right-wing Ukrainian groups have also accused the SB of murdering competing nationalist leaders who declined to join “united fronts” organized by Lebed and his colleagues—a perception that led to considerable bitterness about Lebed among rival Ukrainian nationalist factions after the war. By 1944 the OUN’s SB had proved its effectiveness as an intelligence agency equal to those of both the Nazis and the Soviets. Its experience with the use of assassination as a political tool, in particular, was second to none.

  Lebed fled from the Ukraine shortly after the Nazis had left. In early 1945 he escaped to Rome, where he established himself as “foreign minister” of the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council, an anti-Communist united front organization dominated by OUN chieftains. He brought with him a treasure of great value: records of the Liberation Council and the SB, including lists of nationalist and Communist agents still in the Ukraine, names of strong-arm specialists, and enough compromising information on personalities of the Ukrainian movement to give whoever enlisted his help a handle on thousands of prominent exiles.

  Lebed immediately began public and private appeals on behalf of the Ukrainian guerrillas still behind Soviet lines. At first the Americans spurned him. Army CIC reports on Lebed dating from 1945 and 1946 state claims that the nationalist leader was “a well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans,”20 accuse him of several murders, and assert that he looted money from nationalist organizations.

  Sometime during the spring or summer of 1947, however, Lebed made an offer to U.S. Army intelligence that it failed to resist: exchange of his experience and his file collection for the patronage and protection of the U.S. government. The United States “wanted to know what Russia, what the Soviet Union was,” Lebed acknowledged in an interview with the author. “They wanted to know what was the [Soviet secret police] MVD, who was who and how things fit together. That was why they wanted me.”21

  A certain Captain Hale of the Rome U.S. Army Counterintel
ligence Corps office notified CIC headquarters in Munich and recommended that the U.S. Army smuggle the Ukrainian out of Rome and into Germany, where he could be put to better use by American agencies. Munich CIC HQ was pleased with the plan, and the operation was carried out smoothly later that year. Captain Hale—and everyone else involved in the recruitment and transfer of Mykola Lebed—were given letters of commendation. Lebed’s new handlers in Munich, it is worth noting, were the same group of American CIC agents who were at that time running Klaus Barbie and Emil Augsburg’s network of fugitive SS men.

  Lebed’s relationship with the CIC in Munich worked well. By mid-1948 his “Liberation Council” was receiving a substantial income from American sources, probably through army intelligence. His handlers liked him; his “political standpoint is positive,” reported the CIC in a study of personalities recommended for a Ukrainian government in exile—”i.e., reliable from the point of view of the Western Powers.”22

  But Lebed’s life in Germany was fraught with danger. His pseudonym, “Mykola Ruban,” was becoming well known in exile circles. Soviet and Polish secret police agents had a blood debt to settle with him, and their attempts to capture him and ship him back to the USSR on war crimes charges were only the edge of a much larger tempest that was headed toward Lebed. Perhaps worst of all, the OUN had undergone another factional split during the summer of 1948, and some of his erstwhile comrades, men who knew his habits, hideouts, and contacts, were now after him as well. His new enemies—a rival OUN faction under Stepan Bandera that included a number of SB men—had a well-deserved reputation for murdering their opponents.

  The CIA saved Lebed. Fortunately for him, the agency’s OPC division had committed itself to building governments-in-exile for Eastern Europe, and the agency’s authority within the American national security complex was on the rise. An innocuous piece of agency-sponsored legislation was winding its way through the U.S. Congress just as Lebed’s personal crisis took hold. Most provisions of the proposed new law were routine housekeeping; they authorized the CIA director to commission an official seal for the CIA, for example, and permitted the agency to pay “association and library dues” on behalf of overseas agents.

  The 1949 law also contained a provision that eventually rescued Mykola Lebed. It reads: “Whenever the Director [of the CIA], the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Immigration shall determine that the entry of a particular alien into the United States … is in the interests of national security or essential to the furtherance of the national intelligence mission, such alien and his immediate family shall be given entry to the United States … without regard to their inadmissibility under their immigration or any other laws and regulations.… [emphasis added].”23 Up to 100 persons per year, plus their families, could be brought into the United States under this statute with no questions asked.*

  Since 1949 nearly everything about this so-called 100 Persons Act has been kept strictly secret by the government. Both the Office of the Attorney General and the commissioner of immigration have claimed—in reply to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the author—that they have no records whatsoever concerning their activities under the act for any time during the last thirty-five years.24 The CIA, for its part, defied a congressional committee’s request for an accounting—even a secret accounting—of the agency’s activity under this law. A few things are known, however, as a result of leaks over the years. One is that Gustav Hilger, the former Nazi Foreign Office expert who had entered the country under Operation Bloodstone, became one of the first beneficiaries of the act. Hilger was rewarded for his services with a permanent resident alien status in the United States.

  Despite all the secrecy, it is clear that the intent of Congress was in part to limit the CIA’s importation of questionable aliens, at the same time giving the agency a legal means of handling the tricky sorts of immigration cases that an espionage agency inevitably faces. Congress put a cap—100 persons per year, plus families—on the number of people the CIA could legally import who would otherwise be excluded from entering the United States. The law also established that senior government officials—namely, the director of the CIA, the attorney general, and the commissioner of the INS—would have to take personal responsibility for stating that the favored immigrant was vital to national security.

  The CIA, in short, had a legal avenue to bring Mykola Lebed, or, indeed, anyone else it chose, into the United States if that person was truly needed for national security reasons. In Lebed’s case, however, the agency chose intentionally to break the law which the agency itself had sponsored.

  In an apparent violation of immigration law and of its own charter, the CIA smuggled Lebed into the country under a false name in October 1949. Officially Lebed was just another immigrant entering the United States under the Displaced Persons Act. An internal U.S. government investigation later found, however, that in reality CIA agents had helped him obtain false identification, a false police clearance form, and false references.25 The fraudulent identity was necessary, at least in part, because members of the OUN and the “Ukrainian Intelligence Service” were recognized as Nazi collaborators who had persecuted and murdered innocent people during the war and were therefore specifically barred from entry into the United States.26 The agency was well aware of Lebed’s wartime record when they brought him into the country; interrogations dated 1946 and 1947 concerning these activities are found today in Lebed’s CIC file, copies of which were undoubtedly provided to the CIA prior to his entry.

  The agency followed Bloodstone procedures and notified the INS of some aspects of Lebed’s career including the fact that he had once been sentenced to death for his role in an assassination. The CIA concealed Lebed’s true name, however, as well as the evidence that he had served as police minister during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Lebed was briefly employed at the Pentagon following his entrance to the United States, and much of the file collection of the “Liberation Council” may still be found among army intelligence records.27

  Once in this country, Mykola Lebed used his government connections to expand his influence in Ukrainian communities. He embarked on a major speaking tour aimed at boosting U.S. support for guerrilla warfare in the Ukraine. His propaganda efforts caught the media’s interest; his dramatically highlighted photograph plugging him as an “underground” leader appeared in Newsweek, and his speech at the Yale University Political Union enjoyed front-page treatment in Vital Speeches of the Day.28

  Word of Lebed’s true name—and of his notoriety—inevitably reached INS field agents in New York. Not realizing that he had been sponsored by the CIA, the INS men opened an investigation into what appeared at first to be a clear-cut violation of American immigration law. By the time INS headquarters in Washington learned of the inquest, there was already enough evidence on hand in New York to compel Lebed’s immediate expulsion from the United States.

  It was only at that point—after Lebed had been, in effect, “caught”—that the CIA chose to “legalize” his immigration status under the 100 Persons Act. First, the agency convinced the INS to suppress the results of its own investigation. Then the necessary correspondence was exchanged among Director Walter Bedell Smith, Attorney General James P. McGranery, and INS Commissioner Argyle Mackey. Lebed—the former police minister in Nazi-occupied Ukraine—was formally declared to be a legal permanent resident of the United States “for national security reasons.”29 This was about two years after the CIA had smuggled him into the country in the first place.

  Since that time, Lebed has made himself a fixture at Ukrainian conferences and gatherings, where his political faction continues to advertise him as the foreign minister of the supposed Ukrainian government-in-exile. He lives today in Yonkers, New York, and it is unlikely he will ever be forced to leave the United States against his wishes.

  The CIA’s decision to legalize Lebed’s status only after he had been detected is one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire affair. The obvi
ous question is just how many other Mykola Lebeds did the agency secretly sponsor who were not accidentally caught by INS field investigators?

  One other such “illegal” is clearly General Pavlo Shandruk, the chief of the Ukrainian quisling “government-in-exile” created by the Nazi Rosenberg ministry in 1944. Shandruk had actively collaborated with the Nazis since at least 1941, and his role in pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic activities clearly barred him from legal entry into the United States.

  But Shandruk had apparently won the CIA’s favor by working for both British and U.S. intelligence after the war. He is known to have been paid at least 50,000 deutsche marks by the United States in 1947 (the equivalent of about $150,000 in today’s currency) “to organize an intelligence net,”30 according to his Army CIC file.

  Shandruk traveled to America only days before Lebed, also arriving in October 1949. It is likely that Shandruk entered the United States under a false name, as Lebed had. The INS, at least, claims that it has no record of anyone named Pavlo Shandruk (or the various other transliterations of that name) ever entering the United States. But Shandruk did in fact arrive, and he lived openly in New York under his own name during the 1950s. He even eventually published his war memoirs in this country through Robert Speller & Sons, a well-known outlet for right-wing literature. It is clear from the CIC’s dossier on Shandruk that that agency, at least, knew of his activities, address, and ambiguous immigration status. Yet no one moved to deport Shandruk, and he remained influential in Ukrainian émigré circles in the United States until his death.31

  By the time Mykola Lebed arrived in the United States in 1949, the CIA and OPC appear to have discarded any lingering reservations about employment of Nazi collaborators for behind-the-lines missions into the USSR. Who was better suited, after all, to lead an insurgency in the Ukraine than the men who had shared their weal and woe during the war? The OUN/UPA’s Nazi collaborators, in short, were not accidentally involved in U.S. efforts in the region through an oversight. In reality, the United States systematically sought out Ukrainian SS and militia veterans because they were thought to be well suited for rejoining their former comrades still holed up in the Carpathian Mountains. The Americans kept careful registers, in fact, of the names, addresses, and careers of thousands of such Ukrainian SS veterans well into the 1950s so that they might be quickly mobilized in the event of a nuclear conflict with the USSR.32