Blowback
Page 27
Bishop went from there to the Italian IRO post. CIC Agent Lyon didn’t like Bishop, even though he depended on him for phony identification cards and other refugee paperwork. Robert Bishop “fancied himself a top intelligence operative in Italy,” the CIC man sarcastically commented. Bishop drank too much and talked too much, Lyon thought. “After [a] breakdown due to alcoholism, Bishop imagined himself as the savior of Italy,” Lyon reported to CIC headquarters in his wrap-up of ratline activities.
During the 1948 Italian election campaign, according to Lyon, Bishop attempted to build the CIC’s highly secret underground escape operation into a large-scale paramilitary force. He sought to provide “large numbers of underground troops, military supplies, sea evacuation, air evacuation and the like” for clandestine warfare against Communists, according to CIC records.41 Bishop’s Rome project, in short, was of a piece with Wisner’s other insurgency operations in Greece, the Ukraine, and elsewhere. CIC Agent Lyon opposed this grandiose scheme because it would inevitably lead to public exposure of his secret ratline, which Lyon needed for his own purposes. Lyon and the CIC soon began avoiding Bishop when they could, then cut him off altogether in 1950. Dragonovic managed to carry on without Bishop, however, by establishing new sources for false visas and identification through church relief channels.
Considerable evidence suggests that the CIA assumed control of Dragonovic—the “known and recorded … Fascist, war criminal, etc.,” in Agent Lyon’s phrase—in mid-1951, then maintained that relationship for the remainder of the decade. The Justice Department strongly disputes this theory, however, in its report on Barbie. It argues that “the CIA stated … that it had no records of such an operation” involving Dragonovic and further notes that CIA officers familiar with the ratline told Justice that the agency “never had any connection with it.”
But another look at the evidence made available through the department’s own investigation led many people to a different conclusion concerning the CIA’s role in Dragonovic’s ratline. First of all, Agent John M. Hobbins of the 430th CIC noted in early 1951 that the CIC’s budget for running escaping agents through the ratline was scheduled to expire on June 31, 1951. Hobbins should have known, for he was the 430th’s specialist in “Informant Disposal” during the early 1950s. The CIA “will assume responsibility for evacuations,” according to an order from the head of army intelligence in Austria, Hobbins reported, and the “end of the [CIC] budget and the assumption of control by CIA will roughly coincide.”42
CIC Agent George Neagoy, the army’s principal officer in charge of the ratline after Agent Lyon’s departure, transferred from the CIC to the CIA in 1951, at exactly the time the army’s ratline “franchise” was to be transferred to the agency. At a minimum, Neagoy brought the CIA a solid working knowledge of the techniques and contacts of Dragonovic’s ratline. It is certain that some U.S. intelligence group continued to use Dragonovic as a contract agent throughout the 1950s, though not necessarily for smuggling fugitives. The Croatian priest’s CIC dossier, for example, leaves no doubt that he was of “operational interest to USI,” as the declassified record puts it,43 at least as late as October 1960. “USI” in this context signifies “U.S. intelligence.” The meaning of this phrase is unmistakable: Dragonovic was at the time a contract agent for an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency, most likely the CIA.
Officially Dragonovic remained active in Vatican refugee relief work for much of the 1950s, then gradually drifted into high-profile political activism in the Croatian exile community abroad. He maintained his sympathy for the Ustachis and contributed to publications edited by Ante Bonifacic, an émigré nationalist politician who once served as “director of cultural relations” during the Ustachi regime. Dragonovic also maintained a profitable sideline business of currency smuggling in Italy and Yugoslavia, at least according to testimony in a 1960 trial in which three Yugoslavian Catholic priests confessed to having been used by him for that purpose. They went to prison, but Dragonovic remained free in Rome.
Dragonovic’s death was of a piece with his life. The Croatian émigré press proclaimed with alarm in 1967 that the aging priest had been kidnapped by Tito’s undercover agents and returned to Yugoslavia. There he was said to have been tortured, tried for war crimes, and executed. This version of events has found its way into a number of otherwise reliable studies of Eastern European affairs.
In reality, however, Dragonovic returned to Yugoslavia voluntarily in 1967, then lived out the remainder of his days in Zagreb, the capital of the Croatian state inside that country. There was no trial for war crimes, no execution, and not even any criticism or harassment in the Yugoslavian press. He died peacefully in July 1983,44 all of which raises a reasonable doubt about whether Monsignor Dragonovic—war criminal, Ustachi smuggler, and career contract agent for U.S. intelligence—might have been working for the Yugoslav secret service for quite some time prior to his return to his homeland.
Dragonovic’s tangled life is an indication of the complexities and contradictions that are an inevitable part of the intelligence business. It is obvious that neither the United States nor any other power limits its operational intelligence contacts to only those persons who might be considered “respectable” at home. But Dragonovic’s activities also make it clear that there can be a heavy price to pay for clandestine sponsorship of individuals and groups that have political agendas quite different from those of the United States. The Ustachi criminals saved by Dragonovic did not simply disappear once had they reached the New World. Instead, they established new Ustachi cells in Croatian communities abroad, in some cases headed by the same men who had once led murder squads inside wartime Croatia. The survival of this extremist sect remains one of the more violent examples of the blowback created by the postwar Nazi utilization programs. Ustachis are active to this day in the United States, Australia, and several other countries, and according to reports of FBI investigations, some cells have been responsible for an airplane hijacking, bombings, extortion, numerous murders, and the assassination of several Yugoslavian diplomats over the course of the last two decades.45
No doubt the CIC did not anticipate that its support of Dragonovic’s ratline would one day contribute, even indirectly, to the creation of terrorist groups inside the United States or other Western countries. But the secrecy that has up to now surrounded U.S. Nazi operations such as the Dragonovic ratline drastically restricted the American public’s—and even the intelligence agencies’ own—ability to learn from this mistake. Rather than draw back from using Nazis as agents in the wake of the Barbie debacle, the practice expanded and became more flagrant.
*According to a 1941 diplomatic report by Vichy France’s representative to the Vatican (which has never been disavowed by the Holy See), the proper Christian attitude toward Jews at that time was summarized as follows:
We know by history that the Church has often protected Jews against the violence and injustice of their persecutors, and that at the same time it has relegated them to the ghettos. One of the greatest of churchmen, St. Thomas Aquinas, has left teachings that cast light on this attitude.… The Jews must be tolerated in the exercise of their religion; they must be protected from religious coercion; their children must not be baptized by force.… On the other hand, while proscribing any policy of repression of the Jews, St. Thomas nevertheless recommends that suitable measures be taken to limit their activities and restrict their influence. It would be unreasonable in a Christian state to allow the Jews to participate in the government.… It is legitimate to forbid them access to public office, and it is also legitimate to admit them to the universities and the liberal professions only on the basis of a fixed proportion. As a matter of fact, this practice was strictly adhered to in the Middle Ages, and to [the enforcement of] that end a Lateran Council prescribed that Jews should distinguish themselves from Christians by a peculiarity of dress.… The precepts of justice and charity [should] be taken into account in … the liquidation of businesses in which
Jews own interests [emphases in the original].
This policy, in practice, led to Catholic political parties’ carrying out many of the preparatory steps for the Holocaust, such as registering Jews and expelling them from public life, legislating seizure of Jewish property, and compelling Jews to display yellow Stars of David. But several of the same Catholic parties responsible for this persecution—Horthy’s Hungary being the best-known case—hung back from the actual mass murder of Jews, much to the annoyance of Hitler Germany.
Regardless of the intentions of the Catholic collaborators in Eastern Europe, the fact remains that in the end the executions of Jews went ahead anyhow. Monsignor Tiso’s Slovakia, for example, had murdered about 75,000 Jews, including children, by the end of the war. In Hungary Germany installed a more cooperative prime minister in 1944 and succeeded in deporting about 70 percent of the country’s Jewish population—more than 400,000 people—to death camps in a matter of weeks. In the Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania, the subtleties of St. Thomas’s distinction between restricting Jews and killing them seems to have gotten lost in the chaos of war. There leaders of Catholic political parties, in some cases accompanied by priests, actively instigated pogroms in which thousands of people lost their lives.
The Vatican did not condone these killings. Indeed, Pope Pius XII and some of his senior lieutenants moved discreetly—too discreetly, some say—to try to bring them to an end. Official letters were secretly dispatched, Jews were given shelter in church buildings, and the pope himself is said to have spent the bulk of his personal fortune on relief work. In Italy and France, in particular, many thousands of Jews owed their survival to the church’s efforts on their behalf. There were also individual prelates who acted with great heroism to save innocent people. These include Father Maximilian Kolbe, who gave up his life at Auschwitz so that another man might live. Despite such efforts, however, the results of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” are well known.
*Perhaps the most dramatic single escape through church channels was the 1946 deliverance of an entire Ukrainian Waffen SS division—some 11,000 men, plus many of their families—with the personal assistance of Pope Pius XII. Most of the rescued men, it is true, were no more than simple soldiers caught in a compromising position by events beyond their control. Many of the men in the division, however, were veterans of Ukrainian collaborationist police and militia units that had enthusiastically participated in anti-Semitic and anti-Communist pogroms in their homeland. Some of them—a smaller number—had served as guards in the Nazis’ death camps at Treblinka, Belsen, and Sobibor. Many of these men were destined eventually to serve in political warfare projects underwritten by the CIA. Hundreds of them are known to live in the United States and Canada today.
The Ukrainian SS division surrendered to British troops in early 1945 and was interned at the Rimini POW camp north of Rome. Most of them were facing forced repatriation to the USSR under a clause of the Yalta agreements governing return of POWs who had been captured in enemy uniform. If they returned, they would almost certainly be executed for treason or serve long prison sentences in gulag labor camps.
But that spring General Pavlo Shandruk, the leader of a Ukrainian liberation committee that had been founded under Nazi auspices, contacted Archbishop Ivan Buchko, a high-ranking prelate in Rome specializing in Ukrainian matters for the Holy See. Shandruk pleaded with Buchko by letter to intervene on behalf of the Ukrainian soldiers who had served in SS units, particularly what Shandruk termed the “1st Ukrainian Division,” which was in fact the 14th Waffen SS division “Galicia.” Shandruk hoped that Archbishop Buchko might reach the pope himself with the general’s plea for mercy on behalf of his men.
“Archbishop Ivan [Buchko] answered my letter very soon informing me that he had already visited the Division,” Shandruk recalled later. “In a special audience (at night) the Archbishop had pleaded with His Holiness Pope Pius XII to intercede for the soldiers of the Division, who are the flower of the Ukrainian nation.… I learned from the Archbishop … that as a result of the intercession by His Holiness, the soldiers of the Division were reclassified merely as confinees [rather than as prisoners of war], and Bolshevik agents were prohibited to visit their camps [sic].” Although the troops were still confined to the POW camp at Rimini, they were, according to Shandruk, “out of reach of Communist hands” and no longer subject to repatriation to the USSR. By the spring of 1946 Shandruk, backed by Archbishop Buchko and the Ukrainian Relief Committee of Great Britain, had arranged with the British government to extend “free settler” emigration status to the Ukrainian Waffen SS veterans at Rimini and to assist them in resettling in Canada, Australia, and other Commonwealth countries.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pipelines to the United States
American policy on the use of defectors from the East, including those who had been Nazi collaborators, was institutionalized in three National Security Council decisions during late 1949 and 1950. The government still contends that revealing the full text of these orders would “damage national security” if they were published today, more than thirty-five years later. These high-level orders, which were reviewed and approved by both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, are known as NSC 86, NSCID (pronounced “N-skid” and standing for NSC intelligence directive) 13, and NSCID 14. They are based on recommendations prepared by Frank Wisner’s OPC division of the CIA during the Bloodstone program.
These decisions gave the CIA control of several highly secret government interagency committees responsible for handling émigrés and defectors both overseas (NSCID 13) and inside the United States itself (NSCID 14). Like the earlier Bloodstone effort from which these directives sprang, NSCIDs 13 and 14 were not designed to rescue Nazis as such. They were instead aimed at making good use of all sorts of defectors from the East—with few questions asked. The bureaucratic turf remaining after the CIA had taken its share was divided among the FBI, military intelligence, the State Department, and, to a small degree, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).1
Most important in the present context, these orders authorized clandestine CIA funding of a variety of ostensibly private refugee relief organizations so as to ensure the cooperation of those agencies in the government’s efforts to locate and exploit presumably valuable defectors.*2 Under the aegis of these secret orders, the CIA assumed the power to bring “temporarily” anyone it wished to the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), regardless of any other laws on the books in the United States or any other country.
NSCID 14, moreover, dramatically expanded the agency’s authority to conduct clandestine operations inside the United States—in an apparent violation of the CIA’s charter—as long as those affairs were conducted through émigré political organizations that supposedly still had some connection with the old country. The CIA has used that loophole to authorize hidden agency funding for the Committee for a Free Latvia, the Committee for a Free Albania, and other supposedly private exile organizations active in this country. A substantial amount of the agency’s money ended up being spent on lobbying the U.S. Congress and on other propaganda efforts inside this country—a clear violation of the law.
When Congress created the CIA, it specifically legislated that the agency be barred from “police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions” in the United States. This was to be a foreign intelligence agency, not a still more powerful version of the FBI. Most Americans, including the members of the congressional watchdog committees responsible for oversight of CIA operations, have long contended that this provision banned the agency from involvement in political activities inside this country. Even Senator Leverett Saltonstall, long the ranking Republican on the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee, remarked to then CIA Director John McCone (in 1962): “Is it not true, Mr. McCone … that any work on ethnic groups in this country would not be within the province of the CIA? … Am I correct in that?” (McCone replied, “I cannot answer
that, Senator,” and the matter was dropped.)3
But unbeknownst to most of the Congress and the American people, however, the agency has repeatedly chosen to interpret the NSC 86, NSCID 13, and NSCID 14 orders as authorization for substantial political involvement in immigrant communities in America. As early as 1949—only two years after Congress had thoroughly debated keeping the CIA out of American politics—the agency began underwriting several major programs designed to bring favored European exiles into this country. Then, in 1950, this immigration work was coupled with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign in the United States tailored to win popular approval for cold war measures sponsored by the CIA, including increased funding for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the émigré political groups in the governments-in-exile program.
These efforts have left a lasting mark on American political life, especially among the United States’ large first-generation Slavic and Eastern European immigrant population. Hundreds of thousands of decent people of Central and Eastern European heritage entered this country legally during the 1950s, often at the price of great personal sacrifice. But the measures undertaken by the CIA in connection with NSC 86, NSCID 13, and NSCID 14 led to the infiltration of thousands of Waffen SS veterans and other Nazi collaborators into their communities in the United States at the same time. This in turn laid the foundation for a revival of extremist right-wing political movements inside immigrant communities in this country that continue to be active.4