Blowback
Page 28
The CIA, and Frank Wisner’s clandestine action shop (the OPC) in particular, were never content with the immigration to the United States of a handful of especially valuable assets. The 100 Persons Act was simply too restrictive, Wisner believed. The agency was running international programs involving thousands of foreign agents, with tens of thousands of subagents. Many of these men and women were risking their lives for the modest paychecks they got from the Americans, as he saw it. The promise of free immigration to the United States was crucial in recruiting new overseas help for the CIA and in retaining the loyalty of many persons already on the U.S. payroll.
According to State Department records, Wisner wanted to grant U.S. citizenship as a reward to not just “100 Persons” per year, but to thousands, even tens of thousands of informants, covert operators, guerrillas and agents of influence. Whatever else might be said of Wisner, he was never one to let sticky legal technicalities stand in the way of what he believed to be the best interests of the country. He set out to create a wide variety of both legal and illegal dodges to bring men and women favored by his organization into the country.
This immigration campaign became an integral part of CIA clandestine strategy of the period. The agency manipulated U.S. immigration laws and procedures on behalf of thousands of favored émigrés, selecting some for entry to this country and rejecting others. While only a fraction of this influx appears to have been Nazis or Nazi collaborators (the true number is impossible to know until the agency opens its files), it is clear that a number of identifiable war criminals were brought to the United States with CIA assistance during this period.5 Equally important, the security agencies of the government gave tacit support to private refugee relief committees the stated goals of which included assisting thousands of Waffen SS veterans in immigrating to the United States.
Bloodstone had begun this process on a relatively modest scale, with about 250 sponsored immigrants per year. By 1950, however, CIA representatives approached Congress with a plan to authorize special importation of some 15,000 CIA-sponsored refugees per year, in addition to those entering under the Displaced Persons Act and other more conventional immigration channels. They were to be émigrés “whose presence in the U.S. would be deemed in the national interest,” according to Department of State documentation,6 “as a result of the prominent or active part they played in the struggle against Communism.” Congress whittled that authorization down to 500 “carefully selected” refugees over a three-year period. Even so, the CIA’s professed need for 15,000 annual entrance visas is some measure of its ambitions in this field. éMigrés sponsored under this law came to be known as “2(d)” cases, after the section of the immigration code that provided the legal authorization.
The law established a new category of immigrant, the “Displaced Persons National Interest Case.” Officially the departments of State and Defense were supposed to sponsor these immigrants, but in reality this was a CIA program. Agency-funded organizations, “working closely with the National Committee for a Free Europe,” like the Committee for a Free Latvia, International Peasant Union, and so on, were singled out for patronage under the new law, according to State Department records. The CIA also sponsored immigrants who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence in espionage or covert operations. Finally, the agency brought survivors of the failed raids on Albania into the United States under the 2(d) program.7
Congress’s refusal to support fully the agency’s 15,000-visa-per-year immigration effort was not the final word on the matter. Indeed, the CIA expanded upon the authority it had been granted by the National Security Council under NSC 86 and NSCIDs 13 and 14. If the agency was barred from directly importing 15,000 exiles annually, it reasoned, it could still employ the NSC’s top secret authorization to sponsor indirectly many of the same émigrés through ostensibly private relief organizations. Some U.S.-based refugee assistance groups specializing in aid to Latvian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian émigrés made no secret of their desire to import precisely the same anti-Communist activists, some of them Waffen SS veterans, in whom the CIA was most interested. Wisner found the solution to his legal problems by secretly underwriting the activities of such organizations, then letting them do the legwork involved in bringing their countrymen to the United States. In this way, the Mykola Lebeds, Gustav Hilgers, and other exiles who entered the country with direct agency assistance soon became only the tip of a much larger iceberg.
Beginning at least as early as 1950, the CIA earmarked money for favored émigrés and passed it through a variety of cutouts—including both private foundations and “overt” governmental programs—to selected refugee relief groups serving Eastern European immigrants. Control of this effort was centralized in the NSC’s executive committee responsible for oversight of the NSC 10/2 program and other CIA covert operations.8 A full accounting of these funds has yet to be made, but the public reports of the National Committee for a Free Europe, the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, and the fragmentary declassified records of the NSC indicate that major recipients included the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the United Lithuanian Relief Fund of America, and a number of similar ethnic and religious-based charities. At least $100 million was spent on such efforts during the decade of the 1950s according to presently available reports,9 and the true total may well be considerably higher.
The private refugee aid groups were closely monitored by the CIA. As a later NSC decision on refugee and defector programs puts it, these programs “contribute to the achievement of U.S. national security objectives both toward Communist-dominated areas and the Free World.… These contracts, under which the [private] agencies are reimbursed only for services actually performed on behalf of escapees, are carefully supervised to assure that they give maximum support to the objectives of the program.”10
Yet in several cases Nazi collaborators and sympathizers took control of key aspects of refugee relief agencies serving their nationalities in the United States. Among Latvians a secretive organization known as the Daugavas Vanagi (“Hawks of the Daugava River”) gradually built up an influential political machine in Latvian displaced persons camps in Europe and, later, in Latvian communities in this country as well. The Vanagis began as a self-help and welfare society for Latvian SS veterans in Germany in 1945; many of its leaders had been involved in Fascist activity in Latvia since the 1930s. Like the OUN Ukrainian nationalists, some of the Vanagis’ leaders had served as the Nazis’ most enthusiastic executioners inside their homeland, only to be spurned by the chauvinistic Germans. The Latvian extremists held on tenaciously during the Nazi occupation, however, and many were rewarded with posts as mayors, concentration camp administrators, and—most frequently—officers of the Latvian Waffen SS division sponsored by the Nazis during the last years of the conflict. Most of the Vanagis’ leadership fled to Germany with the retreating Nazis at war’s end.11
In the first five years after the war the Vanagis gradually came to control Latvian displaced persons camps in Germany. The semi-secret society also served as an organizing and coordinating force among the Latvian Waffen SS veterans who enlisted in the U.S. Labor Service units. Many Vanagi members found their way to Britain, Canada, and the United States in the guise of displaced persons during this period.
Highly disciplined and organized, the Vanagis maintained their linkages during their diaspora and used their international connections to expand their influence inside Latvian communities abroad. In the United States several Vanagis who had once been high-level Nazi collaborators created interlocking directorships dominated by party members among the American Latvian Association, the Latvian-American Republican National Federation, and the CIA-funded Committee for a Free Latvia.12 These organizations, which came to be controlled or strongly influenced by the Vanagis, exercised considerable unofficial authority over which potential Latvian immigrants would obtain visas to the United States—and which would not. Not surprisingly, their ex
ercise of this power has consistently tended to reinforce Vanagi authority inside Latvian-American communities.
It is clear today that several of these groups and a number of individual Vanagi Nazi collaborators enjoyed clandestine U.S. government subsidies from the CIA. This money was laundered through the CIA’s Radio Free Europe and Assembly of Captive European Nations channels or through private organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, among others.13 Whether or not the CIA approved of the Vanagis’ sometimes openly racist and pro-Fascist political behavior, the fact remains that it helped underwrite the careers of at least three—and probably more—senior Vanagi leaders that the U.S. government itself has accused of Nazi war crimes. The three beneficiaries were Vilis Hazners, Boleslavs Maikovskis, and Alfreds Berzins.
Vilis Hazners is an SS veteran and a winner of the German Iron Cross. The U.S. government has accused him of serving as a senior security police officer in Riga, Latvia, for much of the war. The government records include reports that the men under Hazners’s command committed serious atrocities, including herding dozens of Jews into a synagogue and setting it aflame. Hazners successfully defended himself from these charges, however, during a deportation proceeding in the late 1970s.14
Hazners entered the United States in the early 1950s. Whether or not the CIA assisted him in this is unknown, but it is clear that it sponsored him and helped pay his salary once he was here. Hazners assumed the chairmanship of the Committee for a Free Latvia and a post as delegate to the ACEN in New York. Both organizations—including the wages of their officials—are now known to have been financed in part by the CIA. (The sponsorship of these groups was secret during the 1950s but was eventually admitted by the government during the series of scandals that rocked the agency during the 1970s.)15 “Liberation” committee chairmen like Hazners typically received a salary of $12,000 per year in the early 1950s, a pay rate that was better than that of most mid-level State Department employees of the day.
Hazners did not hide his Fascist background. He practically flaunted it. At the same time he was active in ACEN, he served as chairman of the Latvian Officers Association, a thinly disguised self-help group made up in large part of Waffen SS veterans. He also served as an officer of the American branch of the Vanagis and as editor of the group’s magazine for many years.16 He was meanwhile active in a number of more respectable groups like the American Latvian Association, which he served as an officer, specializing in immigration and “refugee relief” work on behalf of favored Latvian émigrés in Europe.
Then there is Boleslavs Maikovskis. Also a Latvian police chief decorated with the Iron Cross, Maikovskis has been charged by the U.S. government with having been instrumental in pogroms at Audrini and Rezekne, Latvia, in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. He is a longtime Vanagi activist, former vice-chairman of the American Latvian Association, and a former delegate to the ACEN. The U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi hunting unit has been trying to deport Maikovskis from the United States for more than eight years as this book goes to press, but the cumbersome judicial process involved in expulsion of Nazi criminals has permitted him to continue to live in New York State until his appeals are exhausted.17
Alfreds Berzins, now deceased, was propaganda minister in the prewar Latvian dictatorship of Karlis Ulmanis. During World War II Berzins “help[ed] put people in concentration camps,” according to his CROWCASS wanted report, and was “partially responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Latvians and thousands of Jews.” The United States asserted that Berzins was “responsible for murder, ill treatment and deportation of 2000 persons.” He was, the United States said, “a fanatic Nazi.”18
After the war Berzins went to great lengths to establish himself as democratically minded. He put his propaganda skills back to work on the ACEN’s public relations committee. He simultaneously served as editor of the journal Baltic Review and as a leading member of the Committee for a Free Latvia. His books on Latvia are found in most major U.S. libraries (one has an introduction by Senator Thomas Dodd), and he served for years as deputy chairman of the American Latvian Association and the World Latvian Association.19
These Vanagis did not hesitate to use their political clout and government contacts to sponsor former SS men and Nazi collaborators for U.S. citizenship. In fact, they waged a successful campaign to reverse U.S. immigration regulations to permit Baltic SS men, who had long been the primary beneficiaries of Vanagi assistance anyway, to enter the United States legally.
The Latvian-language Daugavas Vanagi Biletens, for example, helpfully provided its readers with English-language texts to send to U.S. officials protesting exclusion of Baltic SS men from U.S. visas and citizenship. Their argument, in brief, was that the Baltic SS men had not “really” been Nazis, only patriotic Latvians and Lithuanians concerned about protecting their countries from a Soviet invasion. “My [brother] who is already a U.S. soldier,” the Vanagis urged their supporters to write to Washington, “is going to defend the Free World against Communist aggression [in Korea]. Whay [sic] are those Latvians who did the same in 1944—defend our country Latvia, against Communist aggression—not now admitted to the U.S.?20 These are not more fascists [sic] than those American boys who now die from Soviet manufactured and Chinese Communist fired bullets,” the appeal continued.
Their effort bore fruit in late 1950, when Displaced Persons Commissioner Edward M. O’Connor forced through an administrative change that redefined the Baltic SS as not being a “movement hostile to the United States.” The decision cleared Baltic SS veterans for entry into this country. O’Connor’s maneuver was opposed by DP Commissioner Harry N. Rosenfield, but without success.21 Charitable organizations such as Latvian Relief Incorporated and the United Lithuanian Relief Fund of America made sure that the favored SS veterans were not only permitted entry but often given free passage, board, food, emergency funds, and assistance in finding jobs as well.
Similar events and the use of similar interlocking directorships brought extreme rightists to power in a number of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, and Belorussian (White Russian) émigré organizations in this country, just as they had in the Latvian groups mentioned above. Their common wartime experience as Nazi collaborators and, often, as Waffen SS men was the glue that held these groups together. Their members adapted reasonably well to the American political scene, putting themselves forward as militant nationalists and anti-Communists, as was true enough, while declaring their personal innocence of war crimes.
At the same time many Americans preferred to concentrate on the role of those former Nazi collaborators as anti-Communists who had worked with the Germans out of “patriotic” motives—as the Daugavas Vanagi Biletens letter cited above illustrates—while denying evidence of their role in atrocities and crimes against humanity on the ground that such accusations were Communist propaganda. Not all Eastern European anti-Communists were former Nazi collaborators obviously. But it is true that the intense anticommunism of the cold war gave those who were Nazi collaborators a means of rationalizing what they had done during the war and, in effect, a place to hide. Respectable conservatives in this country who had never been Nazi collaborators often turned a blind eye to this process and were sometimes the most articulate advocates for SS veterans and other collaborators.22
For example, the United Lithuanian Relief Fund of America (known as BALF, for its Lithuanian initials) was created in 1944 for the specific purpose of excluding leftists from any role in Lithuanian relief assistance programs. BALF was, and remains, closely tied to the pre-World War II Lithuanian Activist Front, an extreme nationalist group whose leaders were similar in many respects to those of the Vanagi.
BALF became instrumental, by its own account, in virtually every aspect of postwar Lithuanian immigration to the United States and enjoyed heavy funding from both U.S. government and Catholic Church agencies. It claimed responsibility for selection of, and assistance to, some 30,000 Lithuanian immigrants to America in the wake
of World War II.23 The organization helped many Lithuanians of many different political persuasions, including some who had been persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazis. Even so, aid to Lithuanian Waffen SS veterans was central to BALF’s relief work during the 1950s. The largest single group of alleged war criminals now facing deportation from the United States by the Department of Justice, in fact, are Lithuanian veterans of the SS who entered the country with BALF assistance during the cold war.24
BALF’s longtime business manager, the Reverend Lionginas Jankus, was a measure of the political point of view that the organization embraced in its refugee relief work. Testimony taken during a 1964 Lithuanian war crimes trial accused Jankus of leading a series of pogroms in the Jazdai forest region that took the lives of some 1,200 people during the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Jankus himself, who was in the United States at the time of the trial and out of reach of the Lithuanian prosecutors, denied he had been involved in the pogrom, if indeed, it had taken place at all. He said that the whole case was politically motivated propaganda from the USSR designed to discredit Lithuanians.25
The preponderance of evidence, however, is that the priest was lying. Prosecutors at the trial introduced physical evidence, including photographs and documents, that they claimed proved Jankus’s role in these murders. Dozens of sworn statements from both Lithuanian Jewish survivors and Nazis involved in the pogrom itself were also submitted to the court. An international outcry against Jankus ensued, but BALF kept him on staff as business manager. Jankus died in the late 1960s, and the dispute over his veracity has never been conclusively resolved.
It is evident that the CIA knew that substantial numbers of SS men and former Nazi collaborators were streaming into this country through organizations that were themselves on the CIA’s payroll.* Highly competent U.S. intelligence officers followed each twist and turn of these émigré organizations and knew exactly who was linked to which political faction in the old countries. The affairs of Eastern European exiles were, after all, a major focus of the CIA’s work at the time. Their relief groups and political organizations were thoroughly infiltrated with agency informers. Indeed, if the CIA did not know what was taking place in the immigration process, that in itself raises serious questions concerning its ability to collect and analyze information from refugee sources.