Blowback

by Christopher Simpson

  The only known internal opposition to this Nazi’s repeated professional promotions and eventual U.S. citizenship came from a CIA officer who was clearly disturbed by Stankievich’s continuing dedication to Fascist causes. Yet the agency’s informal code of conduct impelled the officer to make the only complaint that might have any effect—that is, using the “Butcher of Borisov” (as Stankievich had come to be called) was a mistake not because Stankievich played a role in a pogrom but because he “might be a source of embarrassment.”5 In the end, however, this protest, too, was overridden.

  There were occasional internal purges of former Fascists for public relations reasons from time to time during the 1950s. A series of Soviet propaganda broadsides exposing Nazis at RFE and RL in 1954 led to the dismissals or reassignments of thirteen employees. And Eberhardt Taubert, a former Goebbels ministry propagandist with anti-Semitic credentials stretching back to the 1920s, was forced to resign from the directorship of the CIA- and German government-financed Peoples League for Peace and Freedom in 1955 under public pressure, even though Taubert himself claimed to have abandoned Nazi thinking.6 A handful of other examples along these same lines cropped up in the course of the decade.

  But the fundamental decision to exploit anyone who might have something to offer to the struggle against Moscow remained untouched. This is precisely because such “pragmatism” is at the very heart of contemporary clandestine practice. Using Nazis (or the Mafia or, conversely, a church-sponsored organization of college students) was never an aberration in the minds of most intelligence operatives. This is simply the way clandestine wars are fought, they say, whether the general public likes it or not.

  Still, public opinion does remain a factor, at least in the West. Gehlen’s organization benefited greatly from that fact because the CIA often turned to Gehlen when it wished to bury certain very sensitive operations even more deeply than usual. At those times his contacts among former SS and Gestapo men could be uniquely valuable. One such occasion took place in Egypt in late 1953, shortly after Solarium’s renewed approval of large-scale CIA countermeasures aimed at offsetting Soviet influence in the Mideast. There the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled the activities of SS Sturmbannführer Alois Brunner, a man considered by many to be the most depraved Nazi killer still at large.

  Brunner had once been Eichmann’s top deportations expert for the entire Reich. He was a skilled administrator who specialized in driving Jews into ghettos, then systematically deporting them to the extermination camps. This was a difficult job, requiring a keen sense of the exact types of terror and psychological manipulation necessary to disarm his victims.

  Brunner did not simply administer the deportations. He was a troubleshooter who rushed from Berlin to Gestapo offices throughout occupied Europe to train local Nazi satraps in how to carry out the destruction of Jews quickly and thoroughly. He did not neglect the murder of children because (as he told Berlin lawyer Kurt Schendel, who was pleading on behalf of a group of French orphans) they were “future terrorists.” Brunner studied hard for his assignment and is said to have eventually become an expert on the railway systems of Europe so that he could locate enough boxcars to carry out his mission for the fatherland. “He’s one of my best men,” Eichmann said.7

  The Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that Brunner is personally responsible for the murder of 128,500 people. The French government eventually convicted him in absentia of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death. Instead of facing trial, however, Brunner was in Damascus, Syria, where he had become Gehlen’s “resident”—a post similar in authority to the CIA chief of station—shortly after the contract for the Org had been picked up by the Americans in 1946, keeping him safe from the French. His alias was “Georg Fischer.”8 Brunner/Fischer eventually became an important part of a CIA-financed program to train Egyptian security forces.

  The Egyptian episode began as an attempt to protect U.S. interests in Egypt as the monarchy of King Farouk crumbled. Frank Wisner had dispatched his top troubleshooter in the Mideast, Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt, to Cairo as early as 1951 to open secret negotiations with Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his insurgent Society of Free Officers. They found, Roosevelt telegraphed back to Washington, “a large area of agreement.”9 Nasser asked Roosevelt for aid in building up Egypt’s military intelligence and internal security squads. Both men agreed that a better-trained security force was in the mutual interest of both Egypt and the United States. But domestic politics in both countries required that the American involvement in this effort be kept very low-profile.

  So CIA Director Allen Dulles turned to Gehlen in 1953 for help in the Egyptian situation. Gehlen’s men and the contract agents he kept on tap had many of the qualities that Dulles was looking for: They were experienced in police security work, were willing to work cheaply, and were not inclined to call attention to themselves. The committed anti-Semitism of some of Gehlen’s men was also a plus, at least in the eyes of some members of the Egyptian secret service. At the same time West Germany’s deeply conflicted relationship with Israel during the postwar period ensured that almost any group of German experts who went to Egypt could be easily penetrated and internally monitored by both Gehlen and the CIA as the project went forward.

  Gehlen enlisted the help of Otto Skorzeny, a hulking former SS Sturmbannführer who had once been dubbed by the wartime German press “Hitler’s favorite commando.” At six feet four inches and 220 pounds, with appropriately arrogant “Aryan” features and a five-inch dueling scar down his left cheek, Skorzeny had transformed himself during the war from an unknown SS truck driver into a walking symbol of Nazi strength and cunning. He had specialized in training behind-the-lines sabotage and assassination teams for SS RSHA Amt VI during the war as well as in daring commando raids to rescue Mussolini and to kidnap recalcitrant Hungarian politicians and in similar exploits. Hitler loved him and seemed to believe that Skorzeny and his gang of cutthroats would become the secret weapon that could single-handedly reverse Germany’s disastrous military losses.10

  Skorzeny did nothing to reduce his legend after the war. At one point he escaped from American custody under mysterious circumstances while awaiting a denazification trial in 1948, leaving behind a note claiming that he had “only done my duty to my Fatherland” both during the war and after it. Skorzeny pictured himself as something like a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel fighting for the “honor” of Hitler’s Germany and the SS against overwhelming odds.11 He spent many of the early postwar years deeply involved in running escape operations through Spain and Syria for fugitive Fascists. Both the Odessa and die Spinne (the Spider) SS escape organizations revolved in large part around the personality—and the myth—of Otto Skorzeny.

  As intelligence veteran Miles Copeland tells the story, Gehlen wanted to subcontract the CIA’s Egyptian training mission to Skorzeny in 1953. The former Sturmbannführer demurred, however. The Egyptians simply did not pay enough, he argued. Gehlen promised that Skorzeny’s salary from Nasser would be subsidized with CIA money laundered through the Org and that the expenses of the operation would also be covered by American funds. Skorzeny’s position in Egypt, furthermore, would give him a valuable entrée into the lucrative Middle Eastern arms trade. Cope-land, who was personally involved in the affair, reports that “a certain well-known Major General of the American Army” (whom he declines to identify) was enlisted to convince the former Nazi commando that his services were greatly needed in Egypt.12

  When Skorzeny continued to balk, Gehlen brought pressure to bear on Skorzeny’s father-in-law and chief financial sponsor, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht, who had been Hitler’s financial genius of clandestine rearmament, had only recently avoided an eight-year prison sentence when his conviction under denazification laws had been quashed by John McCloy, the U.S. high commissioner in Germany. When Schacht, too, stressed the usefulness of helping the Americans, Skorzeny came around at last. He agreed to take the Egyptian training mission, on the condition tha
t his stay in Cairo be limited.

  Over the next eighteen months Skorzeny used CIA money to recruit for the Egyptian security services about 100 German advisers, many of whom he reached through neo-Nazi organizations and SS escape networks. Among his wards were Hermann Lauterbacher, an SS man and former deputy leader of the Hitler Youth, and Franz Buensch, a Goebbels propagandist best known for his pornographic work The Sexual Habits of Jews. Buensch, Gehlen’s resident chief in Cairo, was a veteran of Eichmann’s SS “Jewish Affairs” office.13

  This “talented” group was later joined by Alois Brunner. As “Georg Fischer,” Brunner moved to Cairo in the midst of the Skorzeny project in Egypt and quickly integrated himself into that effort. He remained in Cairo until 1962, when an exploding Israeli letter bomb tore off several of his fingers. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad has claimed—unofficially, of course—that after Brunner’s stint with Skorzeny he enjoyed a second Egyptian contract under which he helped recruit a corps of German rocket experts on behalf of the Egyptian government.14 Israeli secret agents are said to have undertaken the letter bomb campaign that very nearly killed Brunner.

  The Times of London reports that Brunner returned to Syria after the bomb attack. He lives today in the prosperous Abu Rumaneh district of Damascus.15

  What the CIA knew, if anything, of the background of “Georg Fischer” will remain a mystery until its files on the Skorzeny operation are opened. Considering, however, that American tax money was underwriting both Gehlen and the Skorzeny project, and considering Skorzeny’s frequent efforts to promote himself as an international neo-Nazi leader and benefactor of SS fugitives, it is reasonable to ask just what steps, if any, the CIA took to determine who it was it had hired to train Nasser’s secret service.

  A good place to begin such an inquiry is with the former CIA agent Miles Copeland, who worked closely with the German advisers assembled by Gehlen and Skorzeny in Egypt. Copeland’s writings do not discuss Brunner, but he confirms that it was Skorzeny who did the contracting for the Egyptian project and that he brought in about 100 German advisers. The hirelings “were not—or in some cases not quite—war criminals,” Copeland writes.

  Copeland insists that the men he worked with were not “unrepentant Nazis.” Their rejection of neo-Nazi ideology might actually be considered unfortunate in a certain sense, in Copeland’s opinion, “because as mere survivalists rather than men of principle, even wrong principle,” he writes, “they find no difficulty in adjusting to Leftish influences in Nasser’s government.”16

  Copeland’s frank comment is a revealing illustration of a much broader trend of thinking in U.S. government security circles during the 1950s. Because the Soviets were also recruiting selected former Nazis after the war, Copeland argues, “we simply could not bring ourselves to let valuable non-Anglo-American assets (who, as Nazis, were under perfect ‘cover’) go to waste.” He continues: “It was to our advantage to have [Nazi intelligence specialists] absorbed, with a minimum of fuss and embarrassment, by various countries of the world where they could live inconspicuously and earn a living.” This policy was the necessary “amorality of power politics,” he argues. “Believe it or not”—Copeland approvingly quotes an unidentified U.S. Army intelligence colonel—”some of us are still able to put future American interests ahead of the delights of revenge.”17

  The story of U.S. intelligence relations with criminals such as Brunner is of necessity fragmentary, for both the CIA and Brunner himself have taken extensive measures to keep such affairs hidden. It is clear, however, that Brunner was not an exception to the rule who managed to ingratiate himself with the Americans through guile or through an oversight. There is, in fact, at least one other known case of U.S. recruitment of another SS veteran of Adolf Eichmann’s “Jewish Affairs” office, the elite committee that served as the central administrative apparatus of the Nazis’ campaign to exterminate the Jews.

  That recruit’s name is Baron Otto von Bolschwing. Supremely opportunist, von Bolschwing succeeded in traversing the whole evolution of U.S. policy toward Nazi criminals. He had profited during the war from the Nazi confiscation of Jewish property, then later from the defeat of Nazi Germany itself. Von Bolschwing enlisted as a CIC informer for the Americans in the spring of 1945, and before two years were out, CIA agents in Vienna, Austria, had recognized his skills and recruited him for special work on some of the most sensitive missions the agency has ever undertaken. These included running secret agents behind the Iron Curtain and even spying on Gehlen himself on behalf of the Americans.

  Von Bolschwing was deeply involved in intelligence work—and in the persecution of innocent people—for most of his adult life. He had joined the Nazi party at the age of twenty-three, in 1932, and had become an SD (party security service) informer almost immediately.18 In the years leading up to 1939, von Bolschwing became a leading Nazi intelligence agent in the Middle East, where he worked under cover as an importer in Jerusalem. One of his first brushes with Nazi espionage work, according to captured SS records, was a role in creating a covert agreement between the Nazis and Fieval Polkes, a commander of the militant Zionist organization Haganah, whom von Bolschwing had met through business associates in the Mideast. Under the arrangement the Haganah was permitted to run recruiting and training camps for Jewish youth inside Germany. These young people, as well as certain other Jews driven out of Germany by the Nazis, were encouraged to emigrate to Palestine. Polkes and the Haganah, in return, agreed to provide the SS with intelligence about British affairs in Palestine. Captured German records claim that Polkes believed the increasingly brutal Nazi persecution of the Jews could be turned to Zionist advantage—at least temporarily—by compelling Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that the Haganah commander’s sole source of income, moreover, was secret funds from the SS.19

  It was in the course of these negotiations that the young Baron von Bolschwing gained the trust of Adolf Eichmann, who was at the time an obscure SS functionary specializing in intelligence on Freemasonry and Jewish affairs for the Nazi party. The acquaintance was more than a casual one, for von Bolschwing went on to play a central role in arranging conferences between Eichmann and Polkes in Vienna and Cairo, contacts that established Eichmann as the SS’s “Jewish affairs expert” and laid the foundation for his later career as the architect of the extermination of European Jewry.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Eichmann—ever the plodding, careful clerk—would have learned about Jewry and Zionism from someone. But as fate would have it, it was Otto von Bolschwing who became Eichmann’s teacher. “The first time I was occupied with Jewish matters,” Eichmann testified under interrogation prior to his 1962 trial for crimes against humanity, “was when [Nazi agent Theodor von] Mildenstein visited me at my workplace together with von Bolschwing—never before that.”

  Thereafter “Herr von Bolschwing would often drop in at our office and talk to us about Palestine,” Eichmann recalled. “He spoke so knowledgeably of the aims and situation of Zionism in Palestine and elsewhere that I gradually became an authority on Zionism.… I kept in touch with Herr von Bolschwing … because no one else could give me firsthand information about the country I was most interested in for my work.”20

  Von Bolschwing teamed up with Eichmann in 1936 and 1937 to draw up the SS’s first comprehensive program for the systematic robbery of Europe’s Jews. “The Jews in the entire world represent a nation which is not bound by a country or by a people but [rather] by money,” von Bolschwing argues in a pivotal SS policy study. “Therefore they are and must always be an eternal enemy of National Socialism … [and they] are among the most dangerous enemies.” The whole point of his plan, he notes, was to “purge Germany of its Jews.”21

  Of course, von Bolschwing was not the only Nazi to come up with schemes for persecution of Europe’s Jews, nor was he the first. His techniques, however, were uniquely practical and well suited for implementation by Germany’s modern bureaucratic state machine. Within months after von Bol
schwing’s proposals had circulated through the SS “Jewish affairs” apparatus, the SS implemented a series of aryanization measures in Austria that institutionalized many of the measures that von Bolschwing had outlined. These tactics then became a model for anti-Semitic persecution throughout Nazi-dominated Europe.22

  The SS soon appointed von Bolschwing to a prestigious post as SS and SD clandestine operations chief in Bucharest, Romania. There, according to captured German war records, he personally helped organize a coup attempt and pogrom led by the Romanian Iron Guard, a Fascist organization that maintained fraternal ties with the German Nazi party.

  Iron Guardists stormed into the Jewish sector of Bucharest on January 20, 1941, burning synagogues, looting stores, and destroying residences. Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up for execution. Some victims were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as “kosher meat” with red-hot irons. Their throats were cut in an intentional desecration of kosher laws. Some were beheaded. “Sixty Jewish corpses [were discovered] on the hooks used for carcasses,” U.S. Ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther wired back to Washington after the pogrom. “They were all skinned … [and] the quantity of blood about [was evidence] that they had been skinned alive.” Among the victims, according to eyewitnesses, was a girl no more than five years old who was left hanging by her feet like a slaughtered calf, her body bathed in blood.23

  Von Bolschwing helped arm and instigate the rebels by giving them the secret blessing of the SS, according to German records.24 Later he smuggled a dozen of their top leaders out of Bucharest when the rebellion was put down by a rival faction of Romanian rightists. About 630 people were killed during the violence, according to contemporary reports, with another 400 reported missing. “In the Bucharest morgue, one can see hundreds of corpses,” a Nazi military attache cabled back to headquarters in Berlin. “But they are mostly Jews.”25