The Vatican’s principal agencies for handling refugees were a group of relief agencies in Rome that divided the assistance work according to the nationality of the refugee. Lithuanians went to see Reverend Jatulevicius at No. 6 on the Via Lucullo, for example, while Padre Gallov at 33 Via dei Parione aided Hungarians and Monsignors Dragonovic and Magjerec at the Istituto di St. Jeronimus were in charge of Croatian relief, and so forth.5
According to a top secret U.S. State Department intelligence report of May 1947, “the Vatican … is the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants … [and] the justification … for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the Faith. It is the Vatican’s desire to assist any person, regardless of nationality or political beliefs, as long as that person can prove himself to be a Catholic.” The classified study confirmed that Nazis and their collaborators were not excluded from the effort: “[I]n those Latin American countries where the Church is a controlling or dominating factor, the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign missions of those countries taking an attitude almost favoring the entry into their country of former Nazis and former Fascists or other political groups, so long as they are anti-Communist. That, in fact, is the practice in effect in the Latin American Consulates and Missions in Rome at the present time.”6
Leaders of the Intermarium organization became coordinators of much of the Nazi escape effort, and many of the men who controlled the Vatican’s relief campaign simultaneously became the top leadership of Intermarium. Monsignor Krunoslov Dragonovic, who ran escape routes for Ustachi (Croatian Fascist) fugitives, for example, served as the chief Croatian representative on the self-appointed Intermarium ruling council. Archbishop Ivan Buchko of the Ukraine, who successfully intervened with Pope Pius XII himself to win freedom for a Ukrainian Waffen SS legion, * became the senior Ukrainian Intermarium representative, according to U.S. Army investigative records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The onetime Führer of the openly Nazi Latvian Perkonkrusts, Gustav Celmins, was tapped as secretary of the headquarters branch in Rome.7
Declassified U.S. State Department and army intelligence records trace the roots of Intermarium back to an alliance of militantly anti-Communist Catholic lay organizations from Eastern Europe established in the mid-1930s. The Abwehr (German military intelligence service) used Intermarium contacts as prewar “agents of influence” abroad as well as reasonably reliable sources of information on the large émigré communities of Europe. By the time the Nazis marched across the Continent, Intermarium had become, in the words of a U.S. Army intelligence report, “an instrument of the German intelligence.”8
The name of the group means “between the seas,” and the announced purpose of the coalition was to unite nations “from the Baltic to the Aegean” in a common front against the USSR. Intermarium was also to be the name of a new, unified Catholic federation of all the countries bordering Russia—a new Holy Roman Empire, in effect—that was to be created in order to hasten the overthrow of the USSR. Although never a Fascist or National Socialist group as such, Intermarium was far to the right of the political spectrum, and a number of its leaders actively collaborated with the Nazis. Their strategy was congruent in many important respects with that of Nazi “philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg, and Intermarium leaders established a close working relationship with the Rosenberg ministry at least as early as 1940. Centuries-old Catholic anti-Semitism was rife in the organization, and Jews were excluded from Intermarium’s federation plan.
After the war Intermarium became one of the first organizations to campaign openly for freedom for Waffen SS POWs and for permission to establish a volunteer anti-Communist army for use in a supposedly imminent war against the USSR. The group’s multilingual Bulletin, for example, argued as early as January 1947 that “it does not matter whether it is [now] between a second and a third world war, or else in the middle of a non-finished second world war … [but] events should not take us unprepared, like in 1939.” Organizing must begin immediately, the official publication asserted, for an “amalgamated common armed forces of the Intermarium,” built out of exiles who had fought on either side between 1939 and 1945.
The function of this exile army, in Intermarium’s vision, was to deal with the USSR as the Allies had with Germany: by “crushing her military strength and partitioning her,” as a key manifesto puts it, “into … free states in their ethnical borders”9—in other words, by dividing up the Soviet Union into smaller ethnic units in much the same way as had been proposed by the Rosenberg group inside the German high command. Not surprisingly, the USSR remained deeply hostile to Intermarium, and Soviet agents arrested the group’s leaders whenever they could lay hands on them.
U.S. intelligence became aware at least as early as 1947 that Intermarium had become deeply involved in arranging escapes for a wide variety of Nazis and collaborators from Eastern Europe. In June of that year, for example, U.S. CIC Special Agent William Gowen notified his headquarters in Rome of a curious incident in which a fugitive Hungarian Fascist who had been a part-time informer for him had “escaped” from Italian custody with Intermarium’s assistance. According to Agent Gowen, Intermarium enjoyed enough clout inside the Italian police administration that it was able to arrange for the release of his informant through official channels. Following Intermarium’s intervention on behalf of the former Fascist, Gowen said, the Italian Ministry of the Interior cabled the prison camp where the informant was interned and ordered it to turn him loose. The freed suspect was then listed as “escaped” in official files.10
Gowen and other CIC agents established a working relationship with a number of Intermarium officials that same year. Their immediate goal was to create trouble for the Soviet-aligned government in Hungary, which had deposed a pro-Western prime minister in mid-1947. Not long after the Intermarium escape incident Agent Gowen arranged with intelligence specialists at the U.S. Department of State to provide a U.S. diplomatic visa to a leading Intermarium spokesman, Ferenc Vajda, so that he might travel to America. Vajda’s mission for Intermarium (and for the CIC) was to convince the deposed prime minister, Ferenc Nagy, to join with former Axis quislings in a new U.S.-sponsored alliance against Communist power in Hungary.
Vajda, as it turns out, was himself a fugitive from war crimes and treason charges at the time he entered the United States. He had made a career out of extreme-right-wing politics in Hungary and had been a leading anti-Semitic propagandist for the clerical-Fascist Arrow Cross party. In the last months of the war Vajda had helped strip millions of dollars’ worth of Hungarian art treasures and industrial equipment from Budapest. This booty then became one of Intermarium’s primary sources of funding during the first years after the war.
Vajda had been arrested on war crimes charges in Italy in April 1947. But according to American counterintelligence records which have never before been made public, he soon escaped from Italian police custody in much the same way as Gowen’s earlier informant had and fled to Pope Pius’s summer estate at Castel Gandolfo, where he was given refuge. U.S. CIC Agent Gowen then helped Vajda secretly exit the country and even provided him with a reference letter that asserted that Vajda “had been of great assistance to Counterintelligence Corps in Rome [by] giving information on immigrants from Russian satellite states.”11 The Hungarian then traveled to Spain, where he succeeded in winning State Department and CIC support for his trip to the States.
Unfortunately for Vajda and Special Agent Gowen, columnist Drew Pearson was in Rome shortly after the Hungarian fled Italy. He was approached by unknown persons—”probably Communists or Communist inspired,” Gowen said—who leaked many of the details of Vajda’s history and plans to him. Pearson soon discovered that the fugitive war criminal—and Intermarium representative—Ferenc Vajda had actually entered the United States at taxpayer expense and with special State Department clearance. The columnist publicized the incident, and Vajda was soon arrest
ed and held at Ellis Island in New York Harbor. Former Hungarian Prime Minister Nagy, who had been the object of Vajda’s mission, denounced the Intermarium envoy as a “Nazi.”12 There followed a brief congressional investigation, the records of which have remained sealed for more than thirty-five years. Vajda was soon deported and found his way to refuge in Colombia. He eventually ended up as Bogota correspondent for Time magazine (though he was fired when his past became public) and as a teacher at an international university whose board, interestingly enough, included Adolf A. Berle, Jr., who is well known today to have served as a conduit for CIA funds throughout this period.13
The Vajda affair was a disappointment for the alliance between U.S. intelligence and Intermarium, but it certainly did not end the relationship. In case after case, a clear continuity of personnel can be established, beginning with the Vatican refugee-smuggling networks in 1945, continuing into Intermarium, and winding up in a variety of CIA-financed political warfare projects during the early 1950s. A number of Intermarium activists, including some who are war criminals by even the strictest definition of the term, followed this pipeline into the United States.
A handful of examples will have to suffice to illustrate this process. The Latvian component of Intermarium was among the most deeply compromised by its service to the Nazi war machine, yet a number of its most prominent members entered the United States. They went on to play leading roles in what are now known to have been CIA-funded émigré projects inside this country.
The Latvian Fascist Perkonkrust Führer Gustav Celmins, for example, had organized a Latvian SS unit in 1941 and served as a Nazi agent inside nationalist circles throughout the war. He went on to become an officer in the powerful Rome branch of Intermarium. Celmins entered the United States as a displaced person in 1950 and was quickly hired as a teacher in a Russian studies program at Syracuse, New York, with a history of ties to American intelligence agencies. Celmins eventually fled to Mexico following a newspaper series that exposed his efforts to organize anti-Semitic activities among Latvian exiles in the United States.14
Other Latvian émigrés in Intermarium include Alfreds Berzins and Boleslavs Maikovskis, both of whom were wanted on war crimes charges and both of whom ended up on the payroll of CIA-financed organizations during the 1950s. They served as leaders of the Committee for a Free Latvia and the International Peasant Union, respectively, which were bankrolled with agency funds laundered through RFE/RL and the related Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN).15
As will be seen in a later chapter, CIA money paid for the ACEN’s political congresses, provided substantial personal stipends to émigré leaders like Berzins, and in some cases published transcripts of their speeches in book form. Many Intermarium activists became guests on RFE/RL broadcasts, and the radio stations aggressively promoted the organizations they represented throughout the 1950s. CIA money laundered through Radio Free Europe, it is worth noting, also financed the publication of the book The Assembly of Captive European Nations, which presented the proceedings of the first ACEN congress in New York and included commentaries by Berzins and the Albanian Bloodstone émigré Hasan Dosti, among others.16 This text was distributed free of charge to virtually every library, newspaper, and radio station in the United States and Europe. The propaganda effort was so thorough that this tract continues to turn up regularly in used bookstores and garage sales to this day.
The United States became ensnarled in Intermarium’s large-scale underground railroads for Nazis when the CIC hired Croatian Intermarium leader Monsignor Krunoslav Dragonovic to run special ratlines out of Europe for U.S.-sponsored intelligence assets who were too “hot” to have any official connection with the U.S. government. Dragonovic, a high-ranking prelate within the Croatian Catholic Church, was running one of the largest and single most important Nazi escape services at the time the United States hired him. According to a later U.S. Justice Department report, Dragonovic himself was a war criminal who had been a “relocation” official involved in the deportation of Serbians and Jews by the Croatian Fascist Ustachi regime that had been set up inside Yugoslavia during the war. In 1944 he had fled to the Vatican, where he used the auspices of the church to create underground escape routes out of his home country for thousands of senior Ustachi leaders. According to Ivo Omrcanin, a former Ustachi government emissary and senior aide to Dragonovic now living in Washington, D.C., his mentor used church resources to arrange safe passage for “many thousands of our people,” as Omrcanin puts it. “He helped as much of the government as he could, not excepting the security officials.” These “refugees” included men such as Ustachi chieftain Ante Pavelic and his police minister, Andrija Artukovic, who between them had organized the murder of at least 400,000 Serbians and Jews.17
The later U.S. Justice Department investigation into the escape of Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie made public dozens of pages of official records concerning Dragonovic’s work for U.S. intelligence that would have otherwise probably never seen the light of day. The Justice Department directly admits that Dragonovic went to work for the Americans in smuggling U.S.-sponsored fugitives, and that—whether the United States liked it or not—this provided a source of financing and shield of protection, in effect, for the priest’s independent Nazi smuggling work.18
The deal with Dragonovic was a product of the perceived intelligence needs of the period. According to CIC Agent Paul Lyon, the senior officer of the 430th CIC in Vienna, Major James Milano, ordered him to “establish a means of disposition of visitors”—Lyon means exiles from Eastern Europe—in the summer of 1947. These “visitors” were men and women “who had been in the custody of the 430th CIC,” Lyon writes, “and whose continued residence in Austria constituted a security threat as well as a source of possible embarrassment to the Commanding General.” The CIC man traveled to Rome, where, with the assistance of an exiled Slovakian diplomat, he struck a deal for mutual assistance with Monsignor Dragonovic, who already had “several clandestine evacuation channels to the various South American countries for various types of European refugees” in operation.
Under the agreement the priest obtained false identifications, visas, secret safe houses, and transportation for émigrés whose flights were sponsored by the CIC. Lyon and CIC Special Agent Charles Crawford, in exchange, helped special refugees selected by Dragonovic to escape from the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany. These were almost certainly fugitive Ustachi (Croatian Fascist) war criminals, even according to the Justice Department’s version of events.19
Officially, of course, the United States was still committed to the capture and punishment of Ustachi criminals. But the CIC-Dragonovic agreement inevitably entailed providing de facto protection not only to the fugitives sponsored by the United States but to the Croatian criminals known to be in the monsignor’s care as well. The CIC knew that its arrangement with Dragonovic was facilitating the escape of Fascist fugitives. CIC Special Agent Robert Mudd, for example, reported at the time of the first CIC-Dragonovic contacts that “many of the more prominent Ustachi war criminals and Quislings are living in Rome illegally.… Their cells are still maintained, their papers still published, and their intelligence agencies still in operation. Chief among the intelligence operatives … appear to be Dragonovic and Monsignor Madjerec,” he wrote. “Ustachi Ministers are either living in [Dragonovic’s] monastery, or living in the Vatican and attending meetings several times a week at San Geronimo [i.e., the Istituto di St. Jeronimos, of which Dragonovic was in charge.]”20 Agent Mudd went on to name ten major Ustachi leaders then in Dragonovic’s keeping, several of whom had appeared on Allied lists of war crimes suspects. Despite Mudd’s report, however, the CIC did not arrest any of the Ustachis in Dragonovic’s care, nor did it report where they were hiding to the United Nations War Crimes Commission or the Yugoslav government.
The best known of the U.S.-sponsored passengers on Dragonovic’s ratline to come to light so far is Klaus Barbie, the wartime chief of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, wh
o later went to work for U.S. intelligence in Germany. During the war, Barbie had deported Jews to death camps, tortured and murdered the resistance fighters who fell into his hands, and served as the political police in Nazi-occupied Lyons. At war’s end Barbie fled back to Germany, where he first came to the attention of the U.S. Army CIC as a target in a hunt. He happened to fall into the sights of Operation Selection Board, a series of joint U.S.-British raids in February 1947, which were designed to round up about seventy Germans who had organized an underground pro-Nazi political party. Barbie was believed to be in charge of intelligence for the group—obtaining false papers and printing equipment, smuggling fugitives, and the like—and as such was high on the arrest list.
He escaped apprehension, however, by climbing out the bathroom window as CIC agents were kicking in the front door. Barbie fled to Memmingen, a small town west of Munich, and there his relationship with the CIC began in earnest. The CIC in Region IV (which included Memmingen) knew that the CIC in Stuttgart, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt (Regions I, II, and III) had arrest warrants out for Barbie in connection with his escape from Operation Selection Board. But Barbie went to his friend Kurt Merk—a former Abwehr officer who was running his own spy network for CIC Region IV—and volunteered for service in the CIC, the same organization that was attempting to capture him. Merk, himself a fugitive from French war crimes charges, convinced his American controller, Robert Taylor, that Barbie could be useful. CIC Region IV then hired Barbie and kept him hidden from the rest of the CIC.21
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