Blowback
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*That is, male, age eighteen to thirty-four, unmarried, and physically fit.
*The past careers of the other recruits in the March 1954 enlistment are also worthy of note. Three were veterans of British-sponsored Polish exile armies in Italy, which were well known to have been thoroughly penetrated by both German and Soviet intelligence. One was a defector from the Czech secret police, and another had defected from the Soviet NKVD. Two were recent defectors from the Czech army and two more were Polish army veterans from an unknown period. Sixteen of them—including the self-acknowledged ex-Gestapo man, Libor Pokorny—volunteered for training as airborne guerrilla warfare experts.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Politics of “Liberation”
The Central Intelligence Agency did not sever its ties with the extremist exile organizations once they had arrived in this country. Instead, it continued to use them in clandestine operations both abroad and in the United States itself. Before the middle of the 1950s the agency found itself entangled with dozens—and probably hundreds—of former Nazis and SS men who had fought their way into the leadership of a variety of Eastern European émigré political associations inside this country.
Instead of withdrawing its support for the extremist groups and for the men and women who led them, the CIA went to considerable lengths to portray these leaders as legitimate representatives of the countries they had fled. At about the same time that the agency initiated the immigration programs discussed in the last chapter, it dramatically expanded its publicity and propaganda efforts inside the United States itself. A major theme of this effort was to establish the credibility and legitimacy of exiled Eastern European politicians—former Nazi collaborators and noncollaborators alike—in the eyes of the American public. Through the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) and a new CIA-financed group, the Crusade for Freedom (CFF), the covert operations division of the agency became instrumental in introducing into the American political mainstream many of the right-wing extremist émigré politicians’ plans to “liberate” Eastern Europe and to “roll back communism.”1
The agency’s entry into the American political scene was part of a broad escalation of the U.S. conflict with the Soviets that coincided with the outbreak of the Korean War. Coming on the heels of the Communist victory in China, the Soviet atomic bomb tests, and the Alger Hiss spy scandal in Washington, the North Korean attack on the U.S.-backed government in the South seemed to many in the West to prove all of the most alarming predictions about Communist—specifically Soviet—ambitions for world conquest. “Containment,” they argued, had only fueled Russia’s designs for power in somewhat the same way that “appeasement” at Munich had encouraged Hitler. There was little that the Truman administration could say in reply; it had spent much of the previous four years aggressively promoting the conception that communism was a monolithic criminal conspiracy at work everywhere in the world and that America’s job was to “contain” and preferably to stop it altogether.
Truman’s failure to achieve that goal became proof in the minds of many that the tactics of containment had not been sufficiently aggressive. It would be decades later—after the Sino-Soviet split, the U.S. debacles in Cuba and Vietnam, and the rise of third world nationalism as a major political force—before the fallacies of containment’s basic premises, not just its tactics, would begin to find a hearing in American political discourse. At the time, however, it seemed to many that the only possible response to the crisis precipitated by Korea and the Soviet atomic tests was a major escalation of U.S. weapons programs, coupled with intensified clandestine campaigns to undermine Soviet rule everywhere it had been established.
The price tag for the U.S. arms buildup, according to Paul Nitze, who drafted most of the main policy statements on the issue, was some $50 billion—almost three times the then existing U.S. military budget. The real question for U.S. policymakers of the day, write Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in their study of American foreign policy formulation The Wise Men, “was whether Congress and the Administration would pay for it. The public had to be persuaded. The way to do that, Nitze knew from experience, was to scare them; to tell them that the Soviets were intent on world domination, that they were poised to attack, and that the U.S. had to meet them everywhere.”2
It was in this context that the CIA launched a major propaganda effort in the United States. Despite a legal prohibition against domestic activities by the agency, it initiated a multimillion-dollar publicity project in this country called the Crusade for Freedom. This new group served as a fund-raising arm for Radio Free Europe, the various Free Europe exile committees, and eventually Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, all of which worked primarily overseas, where the agency had stronger statutory authority to operate. These overseas propaganda programs were posing as private corporations made up solely of individual citizens who wanted to do something about the problem of communism in Europe, it will be recalled, and the CFF’s fund-raising efforts in the United States provided a convenient explanation for where all the money that RFE was spending was coming from, the CIA’s longtime legislative counsel Walter Pforzheimer has said.3 Its work permitted the broadcasting operations to claim that they were financed by millions of small contributions from concerned Americans—not by the government.
In reality, one of the most important reasons for the CFF was to bring to America the analysis of foreign affairs that had been developed by the National Committee for a Free Europe—and by the CIA. The CFF became a “gigantic, nationwide drive,” as former RFE/RL director Sig Mickelson has put it, “to obtain support for the activities of the Free Europe Committee.”4
The basic message of that analysis was a more aggressive, hardhitting version of the containment doctrine that would soon come to be known as “Liberation.” Liberation, in a nutshell, began at about the point that containment left off, politically speaking. It held, as many containment advocates had argued earlier, that the socialist governments of Eastern Europe were unremittingly despotic regimes, installed by the Red Army and ruled exclusively by Stalin-style terror. Liberation proponents discarded the earlier circumspection about public calls for the overthrow of those states, however, and openly agitated for the “rollback of communism” in Eastern Europe through U.S. instigation of, and support for, counterrevolutionary movements in those countries. “Some day, sooner or later, the Iron Curtain is bound to disintegrate,” NCFE Board Chairman Joseph Grew exclaimed at the launching of the Crusade for Freedom. “So let’s prepare for that day in advance.”5 The name eventually chosen for the radio broadcasting into the Soviet Union—Radio Liberation from Bolshevism—neatly summed up the political point the group was trying to make every time it identified itself on the air.
Although it was little known in the United States at the time, the genesis of the liberation philosophy can be clearly traced to émigré propagandists who had worked for the Nazis on the Eastern Front during World War II. After the war the various conservative and liberal anti-Communist organizations in the United States that adopted liberation as a rallying cry added new and specifically American elements to the program that altered the earlier German strategy in basic ways. Liberation, in its American version, included an insistence that the anti-Communist revolution be democratic rather than Fascist in character, and it abandoned the racial theories and anti-Semitism of the earlier Nazi propaganda. Liberation, in the United States’ hands, was billed as the fulfillment of America’s own revolutionary heritage of resistance to tyranny.
It is useful to look at the gradual evolution of how these changes took place. The political rhetoric of the extremist exile groups that had once worked for the Nazis also evolved in a complex interaction with the gradual introduction of liberationist thinking into America. By the late 1940s exiled extremist leaders had learned the rhetoric of this new, more “American” form of liberation. Their adoption of lip service to democracy began to provide former Fascists with a platform to promote their agenda to millions of A
mericans, and it created a shelter, in effect, that protected them from the exposure of their Nazi pasts. They were no longer seen as the triggermen of Nazi genocide in the public mind but, rather, as fervent anti-Communist patriots. The government’s intelligence agencies played a substantial role in this shift.
The changes in the rhetoric of the extreme Russian nationalist organization Natsional’no-Trudovoi Soyuz (NTS), which is still active in today’s Russian emigration, are a case in point. This once openly Fascist group was founded in the early 1930s by a congress of younger Russian exiles who had fled their homeland in the wake of the 1917 revolution. During the first decade of its existence the NTS proclaimed the Nazis as models. NTS members were contemptuous of any sort of democratic norms and of the United States, which they viewed as degenerate. Their party program called for an anti-Communist revolution in the USSR, assassination of Soviet leaders, disfranchisement of Jews, and confiscation of Jewish property. When war broke out, the NTS unhesitatingly rallied to the cause of Nazi Germany.6
NTS strategy during the conflict centered on an attempt to convince the Germans to sponsor its members as the new rulers of a puppet state inside the Nazi-occupied zone of the USSR. They gradually became a central part of the Germans’ Vlasov Army political warfare project, serving as political officers and informers among the Eastern European troops who had defected to the Nazis. As a declassified U.S. State Department study on the group puts it, the NTS “served in the good graces of the Germans … [and] it placed its men into the Kriegsgefangenkommissionen [part of the Nazi prisoner of war camp administration frequently used for interrogation and recruitment of defectors]; into the special training camps [for] politically reliable prisoners … and, above all, [into] the propagandists’ schools at Wustrau and Dabendorf; as well as into Goebbels’ Anti-Komintern,” a Nazi-sponsored alliance of Fascist parties from around the world. “Graduates of the [NTS] training program,” the study continues, “were assigned to positions in German-occupied Russia, such as chiefs of police, deputy mayors [and] propagandists with army units.”
Many of the NTS leaders of the 1950s, particularly those who served as police and city administrators in the Nazi occupation zone, are major war criminals who personally helped organize the identification, roundup, and execution of millions of Jewish and Slavic civilians. Insofar as NTS men won control of local administrations in the Nazi-occupied regions of the USSR, the organization became an integral part of the Nazis’ propaganda, espionage, and extermination apparatus in the East.7
The main theme of NTS propaganda throughout the conflict was a campaign to “liberate” the USSR from Stalin, communism, and the Jews through a mutiny by the Red Army. This became the centerpiece of Vlasov Army recruiting efforts at least as early as 1942 and was elaborated in considerable detail with tactics for counterinsurgency operations in the Nazi occupation zone, behind-the-lines infiltration of NTS agents on espionage and sabotage missions, propaganda themes tailored to appeal to Russian sensibilities and similar specifics. When the Germans were finally driven out of Russia, selected NTS agents were left on “stay-behind” missions in an attempt to organize subversion in Soviet rear areas once the Red Army front had passed. The NTS also served as the dominant force (after the Nazis themselves) in the Russkaja Osvoboditel ’naia Armiia (Russian Army of Liberation, or Vlasov Army) and the Komitet Ozvobozhdeniia Narodov Rossii (German-sponsored Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia), the Nazis’ primary front group for eastern front political warfare operations in the desperate closing months of the war.8
It was through the NTS, and through the rival national liberation programs sponsored among Soviet minority groups by the Nazis’ Rosenberg ministry, that the strategy and tactics of the “liberation” of the USSR were first hammered out. These were the laboratories, so to speak, used by Hans Heinrich Herwarth, Gustav Hilger, and the other German political warfare officers discussed earlier to develop the propaganda themes and behind-the-lines subversion tactics believed most suitable for reaching people inside the USSR.
Constantine Boldyreff was a founder of NTS and a senior leader of the group throughout the war. His wartime career is shrouded in secrecy today; but it is clear that the CIC believed that in late 1944 he helped administer gangs of Russian laborers for the SS.9 He is a case in point of the manner in which the intervention of U.S. intelligence agencies shepherded the migration of liberation propaganda out of the fallen wartime ministries of Berlin and into the living rooms of America.
According to U.S. Army intelligence records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the mainstream U.S. anti-Communist organization Common Cause—no relation to the present-day liberal organization of the same name—sponsored the NTS spokesman’s travel to the United States in 1948, then gave him a media campaign that enabled him to reach into millions of American homes during the late 1940s and early 1950s.10 Common Cause was a prototype of, and a sister organization to, the CIA-sponsored National Committee for a Free Europe. Its directors included many of the men—Adolf Berle, Arthur Bliss Lane, and Eugene Lyons, among others—who simultaneously led CIA-financed groups such as the NCFE and, later, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism.11
Boldyreff’s speaking and writing tour in this country became one of the first rallying cries in the United States for a liberationist political agenda. The campaign aimed at winning financial and popular support for the NTS as a weapon in clandestine warfare against the USSR. The NTS, claimed Common Cause chairman Christopher Emmet, controlled a gigantic underground apparatus that had penetrated every major Soviet city. The USSR was on the edge of an anti-Communist revolution, Boldyreff announced, and the NTS could bring Stalin to his knees.12
In reality, most of the NTS’s supposed “underground network” inside the USSR did not exist. True, the Nazis’ SS RSHA Amt VI had helped the NTS create such clandestine cells during the German retreat from the USSR, although the Nazis’ connection to this program, needless to say, was not publicized in the United States during Boldyreff’s tour. Subsequent events were to show, however, that most of those underground cells had already been mopped up by the NKVD by the time the émigré leader arrived in America.
But that did not deter the publicity campaign. Common Cause arranged well-attended press conferences for the NTS spokesman in New York, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore. A dozen newspapers published prominent interviews or articles about supposed NTS clandestine activities inside the Soviet Union. This revolutionary work was said to include anti-Communist radio broadcasting, use of rockets to distribute airborne leaflets over Red Army ground troops, and a variety of other dramatic psychological warfare techniques. In fact, however, most of these claimed actions either never took place at all or were vastly exaggerated by NTS propagandists. Nevertheless, every article, with the exception of a Newsweek piece penned by Ralph de Toledano (who favored a different faction of Soviet émigrés), offered virtually uncritical praise for the NTS and acceptance of Boldyreff’s claims. Boldyreff pledged that the NTS would soon mobilize enough dissident Russians to overthrow the Stalin dictatorship, thereby supposedly saving the world from war. The price tag for NTS help in getting rid of communism, he said, was $100 million.13
It is impossible to determine today what Common Cause knew, if anything, of the NTS’s wartime record at the time it sponsored his speaking tour. It is clear, however, from Boldyreff’s own U.S. Army intelligence file that the CIC was well aware that the NTS was a totalitarian and pro-Fascist organization. Instead of making this fact clear, however, U.S. intelligence promoted Boldyreff’s propaganda work in this country. “A Common Cause spokesman said that Boldyreff is ‘well known to American intelligence,’” the Boston Herald reported in its coverage of one of the NTS man’s early news conferences. “‘[He] is vouched for by high American officials,’ and cooperated with the American military government in Germany.”14
Over the next four years Boldyreff went on to ghostwritten feature stories appearing under his
by-line in Look, Reader’s Digest, and World Affairs. “Will Russia’s democratic revolution take place in time to keep the Communist plotters from using their atomic bombs against humanity?” he asked readers of the American Federation of Labor’s mass circulation Federationist.15 “The answer to this all important question depends on how hard the free world fights to pierce the Iron Curtain and join forces with Russian anti-Communists.”
It is clear that Boldyreff was soon enjoying the direct sponsorship of the CIA. British intelligence historian E. H. Cookridge reports that the U.S. agency put Boldyreff on retainer for assistance in recruiting Vlasov Army veterans for espionage missions inside the USSR—a claim that the nationalist leader does not deny. Moreover, several of Boldyreff’s ghostwriters—including James Critchlow, who coauthored the article quoted above—have since become known as career executives of the CIA’s political warfare projects such as Radio Liberation, a fact that strongly suggests that the agency also had a hand in Boldyreff’s publicity tours in the United States.*16
According to Boldyreff’s CIC dossier, U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force intelligence arranged a job for him at the prestigious Foreign Service Institute at Georgetown University in Washington. There, he taught psychological warfare techniques to pilots engaged in clandestine air missions into the USSR. As Boldyreff himself put it in an interview, the air force assignment involved training “about 120” U.S. pilots responsible for cross-border flights into the USSR. “This was the cold war,” he says. “Air force officers were more frequently captured, [because] their planes would be shot down, and they needed to know what to do, how to survive. That sort of thing was much more open then than it is today.”17