Meanwhile, inside the Ukraine many OUN/UPA insurgents continued to employ the same terror and anti-Semitism during the postwar guerrilla conflict that they had during the Nazi occupation. At Lutsk in the western Ukraine, for instance, OUN/UPA guerrillas concentrated on halting Soviet efforts to establish collective farms. Their practice, according to a U.S. intelligence report dispatched from Moscow, was to identify peasant farmers who agreed to join the state-sponsored farms. “That same night,” the U.S. military attache cabled to Washington, OUN guerrillas “appeared in the homes of these individuals and chopped off the arms which the peasants had raised at the [collective farm] meeting to signify assent.” Similarly, according to a second American report,33 “prosperous Jews” were “singled out” for attack along with Communists during the insurgency in much the same way they had been during the Nazi occupation.
The fact that some of the OUN/UPA insurgents had been responsible for atrocities—the looting, the rape, and the destruction of villages that refused to provide them with supplies, for example—does not appear to have entered U.S. policymakers’ deliberations of the day to any significant degree. That was a serious blunder for strictly practical reasons, even if one disregards the ethical considerations involved in employing these agents.
The OUN’s collaboration with the Nazis during the war, as well as the organization’s own bloody history, had fatally severed the insurgents from the large majority of the Ukrainian people they claimed to represent. This was apparently true even among villagers who were opposed to the new Soviet regime. By the time the Americans decided to extend clandestine aid to the guerrillas in 1949, the insurgency was already in serious decline. War weariness, popular disgust with the naked terrorism of OUN/UPA guerrillas, and the Soviets’ use of large-scale forced relocations of the indigenous population combined to isolate the guerrillas and cut them off from grass-roots support.
The CIA itself was divided over how to handle the OUN. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and other clandestine warfare enthusiasts advocated extending substantial military aid to the guerrillas. This would rekindle the rebellion, they reasoned, and the insurgents’ example might spred to the rest of Eastern Europe. Among Wisner’s first maneuvers on behalf of the Ukrainian rebels was a November 1949 agreement with the army for clandestine procurement of “demolition blocks, M4 [plastique explosive] and blasting accessories” for use in sabotage programs, according to Pentagon summaries of CIA correspondence. Less than two months after that Wisner struck a second deal with the military for the off-the-books acquisition of a stockpile of arms and explosives that eventually totaled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of guns, helicopters, Jeeps, grenades, uniforms, and everything else necessary to equip several small armies.34
Even so, a substantial faction of the agency did not favor a full-scale guerrilla conflict in the Ukraine, at least not at that time. The military and political reality of the situation, these men and women argued, was that the United States could harass the USSR in the region but not seriously challenge Soviet rule. CIA executives like Franklin Lindsay and Harry Rositzke, both of whom worked closely with the Ukrainian guerrillas, agreed that underground warfare in the Carpathian Mountains was premature and likely to lead to the complete obliteration of the rebels. As Rositzke tells the story today, some CIA analysts concluded as early as 1950 that the OUN/UPA guerrillas “could play no serious paramilitary role”35 in the event of a Soviet military move against the West. Rositzke’s group instead favored using the guerrillas as a temporary base inside the USSR for espionage and for gathering “early warning” types of intelligence concerning possible Soviet military mobilization.
But significant pressures from the State Department and the Pentagon pushed for a vastly expanded paramilitary effort, and this arm twisting grew stronger after the outbreak of the Korean War. One Pentagon plan confidently predicted that a 370,000-man guerrilla army could be assembled in a matter of months by parachuting in some 1,200 U.S.-trained insurgency specialists, plus supplies.36 This extensive underground force was supposed to wait patiently for an American order to move once World War III had broken out. “A view was held in both the State Department and the Pentagon,” says Lindsay, “that said, ‘Go build an organization, and then put it on standby in case we need it.’ I remember saying that it just doesn’t work that way” when it comes to guerrilla warfare, Lindsay recalls.37
In practice, these contradictory forces within the U.S. national security community produced a situation in which some CIA and OPC agents promised nearly unlimited military support to the insurgency but actually delivered relatively little. In the end, U.S. aid was given to the rebels only insofar as it served short-term American intelligence-gathering objectives, no more.
What this meant in strategic terms was that the guerrillas received neither the military support they needed to survive as an insurgent movement nor the patient camouflaging that might have permitted them to exist as spies. Instead, they were used as martyrs—some of whom died bravely; some pathetically—and grist for the propaganda mills of both East and West.
Beginning in late 1949, the agency parachuted U.S.-trained émigré agents into the Ukraine, infiltrating perhaps as many as seventy-five guerrilla leaders into the region over a four-year period. A related American program dropped agents near Soviet airfields and rail junctions farther north, near Orsha and Smolensk, where Gehlen’s spy networks left behind during the Nazi occupation maintained a fragile existence. Britain also parachuted exile agents into the Ukraine, dropping in at least three teams of six men each in the spring of 1951 alone, all within about fifty miles of the nationalist stronghold at Lvov.38
Despite the heavy secrecy still surrounding Western paramilitary activities in the Ukraine, it is clear that former Nazi collaborators were integral to this effort. In one documented example, the Soviets captured four U.S.-trained exiles within days of one of the first parachute drops of agents into the region. According to a formal complaint later filed by the USSR at the United Nations,39 the four had been trained for their mission in an American intelligence school at Bad Wiessee, near Munich, then parachuted into the country by an American aircraft stripped of all identification markings. Three of the four captured men—Aleksandr Lakhno, Aleksandr Makov, and Sergei Gorbunov—had worked closely with the Nazis during the occupation of the USSR, the Soviets charged. Lahkno was reported to have betrayed five Red partisans to the Gestapo, while Makov had been a member of the Nazis’ “Black Sea” punitive battalion. All four of the captured men were interrogated by Soviet police until they yielded everything they knew of U.S. espionage and covert warfare missions. Then they were shot.
The handful of exiles who survived the harrowing parachute missions were given new identities and safe passage to the United States. Not too many men lived long enough to take advantage of that program, however. Unfortunately for the U.S. agents, a Soviet spy named Kim Philby had wormed his way into the highest echelons of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Philby used his post aggressively to stir up factional conflicts among the various Ukrainian exile groups and then to betray every American and British agent he could identify to the Soviets. The large majority of the U.S.-trained agents who parachuted into the Ukraine were captured and executed.
In hindsight, it is clear that the Ukrainian guerrilla option became the prototype for hundreds of CIA operations worldwide that have attempted to exploit indigenous discontent in order to make political gains for the United States. Basically similar CIA programs have since been attempted among the Meo and Hmong peoples of Southeast Asia, anti-Castro Cubans, and, most recently, the Nicaraguan contras, to name only a few. Part of the U.S. rationale for these operations has always been that the American money and arms for the rebel groups will somehow provide a spark that will ignite popular support for democracy, civil liberties, and resistance to totalitarian—read Communist—rule. There is every indication, however, that such affairs have often produced serious blowback problems because their actual
results have almost always been the exact opposite of what was originally intended, even in instances where the U.S.-backed faction has succeeded in taking power.
In the case of the Ukrainian civil war the detail that it was now the “good” Americans, rather than the Nazis, who were backing the OUN failed to change the brutal, anti-Semitic tactics that this group had historically employed. Instead of rallying to the new “democratic” movement, there is every indication that many of the ordinary people of the Ukraine gave increased credence to the Soviet government’s message that the United States, too, was really Nazi at heart and capable of using any sort of deceit and violence to achieve its ends. The fact that this misperception of U.S. intent has taken root and sometimes flourished among native Ukrainians is a bitter pill for most Americans to swallow. But, indeed, how could it be otherwise? If former Nazis and terrorists were the vehicle through which America chose to spread the doctrine of freedom among people who had no other direct contact with the Western world, it is entirely understandable that these types of ideas about the United States seem reasonable to them. The Soviet government, not surprisingly, has long made every effort to reinforce such conceptions of the United States among its population, and with some success. Today, more than forty years after the end of the war, Soviet propaganda still tags virtually any type of nonconformist in the Ukraine with the label of “nationalist” or “OUN,” producing a popular fear and hatred of dissenters that are not entirely unlike the effect created by labeling a protester a “Communist” in American political discourse.
The Ukrainian exile leader Lebed’s entry into the United States and his high-profile political agitation once he had arrived provide an example of a second type of blowback as well, one which was to become much more widespread in the years to come. To put it most bluntly, former Nazis and collaborators on the U.S. payroll who were also fugitives from war crimes charges began to demand U.S. help in escaping abroad in return for their cooperation with—and continuing silence about—American clandestine operations. Some such fugitives pressed for entry into the United States itself, while others were content to find safe havens in South America, Australia, or Canada. Before the decade of the 1940s was out, some American intelligence agents found themselves deeply embroiled in underground Nazi escape networks responsible for smuggling thousands of Nazi criminals to safety in the New World.
*Lebed’s version of these events is considerably different. In a series of interviews with the author Lebed contended that he arrived in Lvov on July 3, several days after the German invasion. He was not police minister, he says, but instead was “responsible to help transfer members of our organization further east, in march groups.” He acknowledges that he was “number three” in the Ukrainian government but denies that he had any official title. He attributes any slayings of Jews that took place during that period to the Soviet NKVD and says that the hangings of Polish intellectuals was the work of the German SD, not Ukrainian nationalists. He also flatly denies that he was ever a leader of the SB, the OUN’s secret intelligence organization. “Even the KGB, who often accuse me of all kinds of ‘crimes,’” Lebed says, “state that the leader of the SB was Mykola Arsenych, who committed suicide when he was finally surrounded by KGB forces so that he would not fall into their hands alive.”
Lebed’s assertions on this last point contradict those in contemporary U.S. Army intelligence records, which state that Lebed “became chief of the SB, which is the intelligence organization” and that, according to a second U.S. study, he “organized a strong, underground executive corps of SB security service, which by terrorist methods kept under control the Bandera party [the OUN], as well as later [its army, the] UPA.”
*Buried in the text of the CIA-sponsored law, and mentioned almost in passing, was legal authorization for the CIA to ignore public accountability for its budget, its personnel policy, or its procurement practices. That one-sentence-long subsection exempted the agency from complying with any other law that might disclose “intelligence sources and methods.”
A second phrase directs the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties … as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” Agency lawyers have long interpreted that passage to mean that secret orders from the NSC or the president carry greater weight than any “ordinary” law passed by Congress. These two brief sections of the law have proved to be the legal foundation upon which most of the modern CIA has been built.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ratlines
Ratlines, in espionage jargon, are networks of agents who smuggle fugitives or undercover operatives in and out of hostile foreign territories. These escape and evasion routes, as they are sometimes called, are a standard part of the clandestine operations of every major power, and there were hundreds of such ratlines snaking out of the Soviet-occupied territories in Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II.
The story of one of these ratlines is of special interest here because it reveals the manner in which the United States became entangled in the escape of large numbers of Nazi and Axis criminals, many of whom remained ardent Fascists as contemptuous of American democracy as of Soviet-style communism. In hindsight it is clear that many of the ratlines used by the United States during the cold war began as independent, unsanctioned Nazi escape organizations that later turned to selling their specialized services to U.S. intelligence agencies as a means of making money and protecting their own ongoing Nazi smuggling efforts. Some of the exiles involved in this dangerous work did it for money; some, for ideological reasons; some, for both.
The most important Western ratlines that have come to light thus far, including those that smuggled Nazis, operated in and through the Vatican in Rome.1 Unraveling the reasons why and how the Catholic Church became involved in Nazi smuggling is an important step in understanding the broader evolution of the postwar alliances between former Nazis and U.S. intelligence agencies. One organization is worthy of close scrutiny. It is the prominent Catholic lay group known as Intermarium. During its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s leading members of this organization were deeply involved in smuggling Nazi fugitives out of Eastern Europe to safety in the West. Later Intermarium also became one of the single most important sources of recruits for the CIA’s exile committees. This can be said with some certainty because about a score of Intermarium leaders ended up as activists or officials in Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), each of which the U.S. government has since admitted as having been a CIA-financed and -controlled organization.2
For much of the Catholic Church’s leadership, it will be recalled, World War II had been an interlude in a deeper and more important struggle against “atheistic communism” that had been raging for decades. This more fundamental struggle had closely aligned the Vatican hierarchy with a half dozen conservative Christian Democratic and clerical-Fascist political parties that were willing Nazi pawns during the war, even when the Church of Rome was itself under ideological attack from the German Nazi party. The majority of the Nazis’ Axis partners in Eastern Europe, as well as Vichy France, had been led by Catholic political parties during the war. The puppet government in Slovakia, for example, was run by a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Croatia, a terrorist breakaway state from Yugoslavia, described itself as a “pure Catholic state” whose leader, Ante Pavelic, had been personally received by the pope, while clerics in Admiral Nicholas Horthy’s Hungary enjoyed a more profound influence in that country’s wartime government than did its own parliament. It is well established, of course, that some Catholic Church leaders bravely resisted Nazi crimes, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Even so, it is also true that the church-based political parties mentioned above played a central role in Axis military aggression. These organizations used the mantle and the moral authority of the church to help carry out the preparations for, and in some cases the actual execution of, the Nazi genocide of the Jews.*3
As Nazi Germany coll
apsed during late 1944 and early 1945, many senior church officials helped organize a massive campaign of refugee relief for millions of Catholics fleeing from Eastern Europe. Once this was under way, few distinctions were made between the Catholics responsible for the crimes against humanity committed in the Axis states and those being persecuted simply for opposition to the Soviets. The vast majority of the refugees who swept through Rome in the wake of the war had left their homelands for reasons that had nothing to do with war crimes, obviously; they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the German or Soviet armies had stormed through their villages.
At the same time, however, these refugee routes became the most important pipelines out of Europe for Nazis and collaborators fleeing war crimes charges. Factions within the church that had long been sympathetic to the Nazis’ extreme anti-Communist stand organized large-scale programs to facilitate the escapes of tens of thousands of Nazis and collaborators from Germany, Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and a number of other Eastern European states. The pivotal role of the church in the escape of the Nazis has been emphasized by Luftwaffe Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, the highly decorated German air ace who became an international spokesman for the neo-Nazi movement after the war. “One may otherwise view Catholicism as one wishes. But what the Church, especially certain towering personalities within the Church, undertook in those years [immediately after the war] to save the best of our nation, often from certain death, must never be forgotten!” Colonel Rudel exclaimed in a speech at Kufstein in 1970. “In Rome itself, the transit point of the escape routes, a vast amount was done. With its own immense resources, the Church helped many of us to go overseas. In this manner, in quiet and secrecy, the demented victors’ mad craving for revenge and retribution could be effectively counteracted.”4
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