McCarthy marshaled Senators Everett Dirksen, Homer Cape-hart, and the rest of the far right caucus, then unleashed an emotional floor debate in the Senate in an attempt to block approval of Bohlen’s nomination. The tide was against McCarthy; he was, after all, a Republican senator bucking a Republican president on what would ordinarily be a routine appointment. McCarthy’s speech during the showdown lasted more than an hour. He rehashed the party’s line on containment, lambasted Bohlen’s brother-in-law Charles Thayer, then accused Bohlen himself of “cowardice” and of being “so blind that he cannot recognize the enemy.”55
McCarthy presented his trump card at the climax of his argument. It was an affidavit from Igor Bogolepov, who claimed that he knew that the Soviet secret police had regarded Bohlen as a “possible source of information” and a “friendly diplomat” during a Bohlen tour of duty in Moscow in the 1930s.56
Bogolepov was an NTS man who free-lanced as an anti-Communist expert in Washington. In the early 1950s he was on a number of payrolls, including Grombach’s, and the State Department’s Ylitalo says that it was Grombach who primed Bogolepov for his role in McCarthy’s attack on Bohlen. Bogolepov had once been a Soviet Foreign Ministry official, but he defected to the Nazis and spent most of World War II making anti-Semitic propaganda broadcasts for the Goebbels ministry. Bogolepov says that U.S. intelligence brought him to this country in the late 1940s—apparently illegally, considering his work for Goebbels—and that he had worked on and off for the CIA for several years. In time, however, Bogolepov grew discontented with the agency, mainly because it did not pay him as much as he thought he deserved.57
The cooler heads on Capitol Hill considered Bogolepov a crackpot. The radical right did not, however, and readily used his statements as “proof” that among other things, Communist fellow travelers were engaged in a campaign to rewrite U.S. Army training manuals and that Charles Bohlen was “possibly” an undercover Stalinist agent.
Even Bogolepov’s affidavit failed to bail out McCarthy this time. The senator was outvoted, and Bohlen’s nomination was approved. The New York Times carried the entire affair on its front page and prominently quoted the NTS man’s affidavit.58 The Russian defector’s stint in the Goebbels ministry, which had been made public in earlier congressional testimony, was not mentioned in the report.
McCarthy succeeded in drawing some blood despite losing the vote on Bohlen. According to columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Republican Majority Leader Robert Taft visited Eisenhower shortly after the vote. Taft insisted that “no more Bohlens” be sent to the Senate as nominees. Eisenhower agreed, the Alsops reported, and Taft “hastened to spread the happy word on Capitol Hill that Senator McCarthy and his ilk would thereafter enjoy a virtual veto on all presidential appointments.”59 The Alsops were overstating the case, perhaps, but it was clear enough that McCarthy had demonstrated his power as a spoiler in the Senate. Eisenhower’s diplomatic nominations were screened for their acceptability to the extreme right for much of the rest of his administration.
Bohlen left for Moscow about a week after his confirmation. Shortly before he departed, however, John Foster Dulles implored Bohlen to stay in Washington for just a few more weeks so that the diplomat could travel to Russia together with his wife and family. Traveling alone, Dulles suggested, would only raise an issue of Bohlen’s possible “immoral behavior.” The diplomat was dumbfounded. He later confided to a friend, historian David Oshinsky recounts,60 “that it took every ounce of his patience to keep from smashing Dulles in the face.”
The role of Grombach’s former Nazis and collaborators in gathering political ammunition for Joseph McCarthy is, in many respects, only a short footnote to the history of high politics in Washington. Grombach rapidly lost influence in the State Department and the CIA in the wake of his showdown in the hotel room with Kirkpatrick, and McCarthy, too, discredited himself in the end. Bogolepov returned to Europe, where he is reported to have committed suicide several years later. Bohlen went on to do a workmanlike job as U.S. ambassador to Moscow and eventually ended up as a central player in U.S.-Soviet relations over the next two decades.
But incidents such as the purging of Thayer and Davies and the crisis over Bohlen’s nomination can sometimes point to larger historical patterns. The popular support for liberation that was so carefully nurtured during the early 1950s provided fertile ground for entrepreneurs like Grombach to put down roots. Regardless of its “American” and patriotic trappings, liberation’s paranoid anticommunism made it easier for some U.S. politicians to make common cause with a former Goebbels propagandist such as Bogolepov or with public spokesmen for prewar anti-Semitic terrorist groups such as NTS leader Boldyreff.
As was seen in the case of the Bogolepov affidavit, private intelligence apparats like John Grombach’s organization formed one of the important linkages between the careful politicians in Washington and the former Nazis and collaborators who were occasionally thought to be useful to them. Such unofficial clandestine action groups have long played a sporadic but sometimes important role in American political life; witness G. Gordon Liddy’s Watergate burglary team or the more recent scandal surrounding Colonel Oliver North’s activities inside the National Security Council. The extralegal status of Grombach’s group permitted him to hire and exploit former Nazis and Axis officials for intelligence-gathering purposes, then secretly to put the products of his work to use in partisan political battles in the United States. Perhaps in some other decade John Grombach would have hired persons from other failed regimes as agents; the continuing intrigues among anti-Castro Cubans and the former South Vietnamese police suggest that a new generation of espionage entrepreneurs in the Grombach mold is still at work. But in the early 1950s it was former Nazis and collaborators who were in the most abundant supply for such affairs. It is they who formed much of the heart of Grombach’s overseas network and they who gave him much of the ammunition he needed to participate in McCarthy’s purges.
At the same time that McCarthy and his allies were battling in the Senate for the dismissals of Thayer, Davies, and Bohlen, the Republicans’ election year pledge to liberate Eastern Europe also fueled a rapid expansion of clandestine destabilization operations. A special series of foreign policy conferences code-named Solarium reaffirmed that the new administration would engage in “selected aggressive actions of limited scope, involving moderately increased risks of general war,” as Eisenhower’s top national security adviser, Robert Cutler, put it, in order “to eliminate Soviet-dominated areas within the free world and to reduce Soviet power in the Satellite periphery.” U.S. policy aimed at “a maximum contribution to the increase in internal stresses and conflicts within the Soviet system.”61
But despite the Republicans’ public attacks on Truman’s containment policy, Eisenhower’s election had been a victory for the Republican establishment, not for the radical right. The Republicans did not have a substantially new strategy for dealing with the Soviets, beyond a tendency to use harsher rhetoric than the Democrats. George Kennan’s containment theories may have seemed like part of the problem to most liberation advocates, but his thinking on clandestine political warfare against the Soviets was most welcome to Eisenhower and dominated the scene at the Solarium strategy conferences. Eisenhower himself personally endorsed Kennan’s stratagems, his analysis of East-West affairs, and the former diplomat himself.62
The president and his advisers decisively renewed the ongoing program of harassment and destabilization inside Eastern Europe that had given birth to the Nazi utilization efforts in the first place. Further efforts to “reduce indigenous Communist power” through clandestine CIA action were approved in both Western Europe and the third world. Guatemala and the Middle East were also singled out for CIA attention, while agency Director Allen Dulles promoted a renewed attempt to overthrow the government in Albania.*
The clandestine action provisions of Solarium were later codified in NSC 5412, a slightly revised version of Truman’s NSC 10/2 c
overt warfare decision. NSC 5412 again affirmed that the United States was fully committed to a broad campaign of political war against the USSR.63 It again affirmed that “underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups”—obviously including the various surviving collaborationist organizations from Eastern Europe—were still at the center of U.S. covert paramilitary programs.
In the meantime, however, the existing threads of clandestine operations, liberation politics, and the abandonment of war crimes investigations and prosecutions were woven together into a new and more disturbing tapestry. By 1953 the CIA was willing to finance and protect not simply former Nazis and Gestapo men but even senior officers of Adolf Eichmann’s SS section Amt IV B 4, the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust.
*Boldyreff was by no means the only senior NTS leader who enjoyed the sponsorship of Western intelligence agencies in the wake of the war. As early as 1946 Boldyreff created an elaborate plan under U.S., British, and French sponsorship in which NTS-led bands of exiles established construction companies in Morocco. In reality, however, “these were military groups, companies of the Vlasov Army, most of them soldiers together with their officers,” Boldyreff remembered during an interview. We “kept them together in order to provide special fighting units in a war with the Soviets.” The point of the Boldyreff plan, he says, was to subsidize these Vlasovite colonies, while at the same time preserving their military potential. Boldyreff specifically excluded refugee Jews from this program, although several other Eastern European groups—Latvians, Lithuanians, etc.—were included. Boldyreff blamed this bit of postwar anti-Semitism on the Moroccan authorities.
A brief look at the men mentioned in the declassified State Department study on the NTS referred to in the text is useful as an illustration of how other NTS collaborators found their way into secret employment in the West. The State Department report indicates that Roman Redlich and Vladimir Porensky, for example, led Nazi recruitment and training of Russian defectors at a special school at Wustrau, that Yevgeniy R. Romanov served in Berlin as a leading Vlasov propagandist, and that an NTS man known simply as Tenzerov served as chief of security for the Vlasov Army. Vladimir Porensky (sometimes spelled Poremsky), in particular, enjoyed a reputation as a “200% Nazi,” the study asserts.
Of just these men, a RAND Corporation study identifies Redlich as an officer in the notorious Kaminsky SS legion, and Soviet publications have repeatedly charged him with personally committing atrocities during the Nazi occupation of their country. U.S. intelligence nevertheless hired Redlich after the war to train behind-the-lines agents at its school at Regensburg, the Department of State admits. Redlich is also known to have been active at Bad Homburg, where agent training was carried out under cover of a “journalism” program at the CIA-financed Institute for the Study of the USSR. By the late 1950s Redlich had become chief of teams of Russian émigrés responsible for attempting to recruit Soviet tourists, businessmen, and sailors traveling abroad, an intelligence service that eventually became the bread and butter of the NTS’s contract with the CIA as the cold war wound down.
Meanwhile, the Berlin propagandist Romanov became chairman of the NTS Executive Bureau and served for years as the broker for NTS agents interested in employment with Western espionage groups. Romanov’s close friend Porensky, the “200% Nazi,” was imprisoned as a war criminal in 1945, then released in 1946, with the cooperation of the British secret service. Porensky then went on to run the NTS’s Possev publishing house in Munich, where tens of millions of agitative leaflets used among Soviet émigrés outside the USSR were printed at British and American expense. Porensky’s Possev eventually became a major funding conduit through which U.S. payments to the NTS were passed, and the CIA’s later financial backing permitted the NTS to print millions of newspapers, pamphlets, books, and other literature, a good part of which was used to influence public opinion in Western Europe and the United States. Porensky has also served as NTS chairman.
Finally, Tenzerov, who had been chief of security for the Vlassov Army, was betrayed by other NTS leaders in the last days of the war and left the organization in a fury. Army CIC records indicate that SS veteran Emil Augsburg (of the Gehlen Organization and the Barbie network) later recruited him as an agent.
*In his published memoirs Petrov contradicts the statement that he was unaware of Nazi extermination efforts in Krasnodar. There he says that he did know Jews were being systematically murdered in Krasnodar even before he became a city official. In Escape from the Future Petrov also writes that he appointed the city’s chief of police during the Nazi occupation. Petrov claims that he helped warn Krasnodar’s Jews of their danger and even encouraged them to escape.
Whichever version is true, Petrov says today: “I did not make decisions on the basis of massacres. Where I had been [in prison camp] in Siberia,” he continues grimly, “there were also massacres, if not of the German style. There were many people done to death against their wishes and without honor. So there were massacres here, massacres on that side, all around.… Over here [in the United States] there is a distinction about who is killed,” he says, with a trace of irony. “If one is a chosen person, then that means something. But if one is a Russian peasant, then that counts for nothing.”
*In 1985 the State Department published a number of key Solarium records in its highly regarded series, Foreign Relations of the United States. Unfortunately it chose to delete almost the entire text of the program put forward by Frank Wisner and Admiral Richard L. Connolly’s “Team C” concerning clandestine operations.
The deletions in these documents are not easily apparent to the casual reader of the Foreign Relations volumes, and that has led to considerable misinterpretation of the Solarium record. The Washington Post reported after the new Solarium papers were published, for example, that Eisenhower had flatly rejected Wisner’s covert operations plan. In fact, however, the conferences concluded that the United States should selectively integrate stepped-up clandestine action into the broader U.S. security policy.
The State Department’s decision to publish only an expurgated version of the Solarium record contributes to the continuing confusion over what U.S. foreign policy actually was during the 1950s. This is particularly unfortunate considering the role the Solarium sessions played in setting the stage for America’s clandestine entrance into the Vietnam conflict, the decision to undertake a coup in Guatemala, and other covert operations of the day that have since proved to have had far-reaching implications for U.S. relations abroad.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Brunner and von Bolschwing
The tough-guy ethos of most professional intelligence officers has always militated against letting conventional ethical considerations stand in the way of collecting information or carrying out special operations. “We’re not in the Boy Scouts,” as latter-day CIA Director Richard Helms often said. “If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have joined the Boy Scouts.”1
By the time Allen Dulles became CIA director in 1953, almost all resistance within the CIA to using Nazi criminals to accomplish the agency’s mission seems to have evaporated. In the Lebed affair top CIA officials as well as the U.S. attorney general intervened to “legalize” the ex-OUN man’s status in the United States after Lebed had been accidentally caught by an overeager INS agent. In a second case, that of former SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, the agency smoothed the former Nazi’s entry into the country through consultations with interagency intelligence coordinating committees, then contacted “outsiders” at the INS—in writing—on the ex-Nazi’s behalf. In the arcana of espionage etiquette, these acts are unmistakable indicators of high-level consent for von Bolschwing’s immigration.2
But the key phrase remained “to accomplish the agency’s mission.” Nazis were never employed or protected for their own sake, but only as a means to achieve some other goal that was presumably in the interests of U.S. national security. Conversely, the fact that a man might hav
e been a mass murderer did not by itself disqualify him from working for the agency if he was believed to be useful. And once such a person had worked for U.S. intelligence, there was inevitably pressure to protect him, if only to keep out of the public eye the operations he had been involved in.
There was, it is true, concern inside the CIA about the possible public relations problems involved in employing persons who had been compromised by their earlier service to the Nazis. In the case of Belorussian Nazi leader Stanislaw Stankievich, for example, his CIA case officers fretted during the 1950s and 1960s that Stankievich “has been and perhaps remains ardently Fascist” and that “continued use [of him] might be a source of embarrassment to the Project and/or the Agency.”3 Stankievich, who had once served as the SS-appointed mayor of Borisov during a 1941 pogrom that took the lives of thousands of Jews, was at the time of the CIA officer’s comments a leading member of the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich, a CIA-financed émigré think tank affiliated with Radio Liberation. The Munich institute is the “Project” to which the quoted CIA records refer.
According to the CIA’s own documentation, the agency oversaw Stankievich’s recruitment to the institute, then reviewed and passed on his various promotions as he rose through the ranks there. The agency also directly intervened to bring him to the United States, according to a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, by falsely certifying that it had no derogatory information on Stankievich that would bar him from coming into the country when in fact, it had a record of his role in the Borisov massacre and of his ongoing association with extremist émigré organizations.4
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