Yet the timing of the proclamation was significant, and it constituted a major victory for hard-line Captive Nations organizers. Vice President Richard Nixon—hardly a liberal on the question of communism—was then in Moscow on a major Republican effort to improve East-West communication and stabilize the nuclear arms race. Soviet Premier Khrushchev took exception to the unanimously passed congressional statement calling for the disintegration of his country and used the incident to raise questions about American sincerity in the negotiations. Nixon was forced to explain and, in effect, apologize for the U.S. Congress, pointing out that even President Eisenhower did not control the timing of congressional acts. “Neither the President nor I would have deliberately chosen to have a resolution of this type passed,” Nixon said soothingly, “just before we were to visit the USSR.”18 The damage, however, had already been done.
According to Senator Mathias, the Captive Nations movement also succeeded in placing obstructions in the path of Kennedy’s and Johnson’s policy of “building bridges” to Eastern Europe, which those presidents hoped to use as a means of gradually winning some measure of influence in the region. Captive Nations organizers spearheaded appeals to broad cold war constituencies in the United States to force the cancellation of major trade contracts with Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland that had been approved by Washington. George Kennan, who had returned to government in 1961 as U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia under President Kennedy, remembers how this same ethnic coalition succeeded in pressuring Congress to stop the extension of most favored nation trading status to Yugoslavia and then in halting the shipment of obsolete jet fighter parts—for which the Yugoslavs had already paid—to that country altogether. The CIA-funded ACEN’s role in banning the export of the fighter parts is ironic because the agency had itself helped arrange the sale of the previous-generation jets to the independent-minded Yugoslavs in the first place as a means of splitting that country away from Moscow.19 After the Americans’ promises for spare parts had collapsed, Marshal Josip Tito of Yugoslavia went back to the USSR for his first reconciliation with the Soviets in almost fifteen years. He was met at Moscow’s airport with roses and marching bands.
The Assembly of Captive European Nations, in short, began as what must have appeared to be a clever propaganda project, an appropriate counterpart to the Crusade for Freedom. In the end, however, it became a political force to be reckoned with on the American far right. And the radical right, in turn, remains a very real force in Washington, D.C.
These exiled leaders have by no means disappeared, and some such groups have won the open support of the Reagan administration. The Captive Nations activists have been particularly strong in the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council, led by conservative activist Frank D. Stella.20 This national GOP organization embraces several score of conservative ethnic organizations and state coalitions that tend to identify with the far right wing of the party. While the large majority of the organizations in the Republican Nationalities Council are thoroughly respectable, it is nonetheless true that the council has become fertile ground for political organizing by certain former Nazi collaborators still active in immigrant communities in this country.
Perhaps part of the reason for this is that the director of the council during the early 1970s was Laszlo Pasztor, a naturalized American of Hungarian descent who served during the war as a junior envoy in Berlin for the genocidal Hungarian Arrow Cross regime of Ferenc Szalasi. Pasztor, in an interview with reporter Les Whitten, insisted that he did not participate in anti-Semitic activities during the war.21 Furthermore, he says, he has attempted to weed out extreme-right-wing groups from among the GOP’s ethnics.
But the record of Pasztor’s “housecleaning” leaves much to be desired. The GOP nationalities council has provided an entry into the White House for several self-styled immigrant leaders with records as pro-Nazi extremists. Bulgarian-American Republican party notable Ivan Docheff, for example, who has served as an officer of the Republican party’s ethnic council for years, has acknowledged that he was once a leader in the National Legion of Bulgaria, a group that the more moderate Bulgarian National Committee in the United States has described as “Fascist.” He also spent twelve years as chair of the influential New York City Captive Nations Committee as well as president of the Bulgarian National Front, an extreme rightist émigré organization long active in the openly pro-Axis Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Docheff, who describes himself as “100 percent anti-Communist, not a Nazi,” was once invited to the White House to share a Captive Nations22 prayer breakfast with President Richard Nixon.
A half dozen other somewhat similar cases among Republican ethnics may be readily identified. The official Latvian-American organization in the GOP’s nationalities council is the Latvian-American Republican National Federation, which was led for years by Davmants Hazners (president) and Ivars Berzins (secretary). During the 1970s the group shared the same office and telephone number in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with the Committee for a Free Latvia. The latter group, it will be recalled, was led for most of the last decade by the by-now familiar Vilis Hazners (president) and Alfreds Berzins (treasurer and secretary) despite accusations aired by 60 Minutes and other media that both had been responsible for serious crimes during the war. Their associate Ivars Berzins is most recently noted as a leading proponent of the campaign to halt prosecutions of fugitive Nazi war criminals in the United States.23 There is no indication, it should be stressed, that Ivars Berzins or the other leaders of the Latvian-American Republican party group engaged in any sort of disreputable activity. Even so, the intimate ties between these two organizations and their leaderships raise legitimate questions concerning what the political agenda of the Republican organization may actually be.
Perhaps most disturbing, the GOP ethnic council has passed resolutions on racial and religious questions sponsored by an openly pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic activist in that organization on at least three occasions in recent years. The author of those resolutions is worthy of note, if only as an indication of the degree of racial extremism that the Republican organization has been willing to tolerate in its ranks. His name is Nicholas Nazarenko, and he is the self-styled leader of the World Federation of Cossack National Liberation Movement of Cossackia and the Cossack American Republican National Federation, which is a full organizational member of the Republicans’ ethnic council. The Republican party’s Cossack organization describes itself as a “division” of the world federation and shares the same leadership, letterhead, and post office box address in Blauwelt, New York, as the world federation group. Nazarenko has admitted in an interview with the author that he spent much of World War II as an interrogator of POWs for the SS in Romania.24
Nazarenko’s speech at the 1984 Captive Nations ceremonial dinner in New York left little to the imagination about his own point of view or that of his audience. He spoke of what was, in his mind, the heroism of the Eastern European collaborators in the German legions during the war, and he spoke of why, in his mind, the Nazis lost the war. “There is a certain ethnic group that today makes its home in Israel,” Nazarenko told the gathering. “This ethnic group works with the Communists all the time. They were the Fifth Column in Germany and in all the Captive Nations.… They would spy, sabotage and do any act in the interest of Moscow,” he claimed. “Of course there had to be the creation of a natural self defense against this Fifth Column,” he said, referring to the Nazi concentration camps. “They had to be isolated. Security was needing [sic]. [So] the Fifth Column was arrested and imprisoned.
“This particular ethnic group was responsible for aiding [the] Soviet NKVD,” he continued. “A million of our people [were] destroyed as a result of them aiding the NKVD.… You hear a lot about the Jewish Holocaust,” he exclaimed, his yellowed mustache quivering, “but what about the 140 million Christians, Moslems and Buddhists killed by Communism? That is the real Holocaust, and you never hear about it!”25 The Captive Nations Committee’s c
rowd responded with excited applause in the most enthusiastic welcome for any speaker of that evening.
There is also substantial overlap between the Captive Nations Committee, the Republicans’ ethnic council, and a broad variety of other well-known right-wing organizations, some of which enjoy multimillion-dollar financing and play substantial roles in U.S. elections. About 15 percent of the organizational members of the American Security Council’s Coalition for Peace Through Strength—the high-powered lobbying group that led the successful campaign to stop SALT II—are these same Captive Nations groups. The coalition dispenses hundreds of thousands of dollars it has received from major defense contractors to candidates it favors in U.S. congressional campaigns and is generally regarded as one of the most effective proarmament lobby groups in Washington. At least four coalition member organizations still openly support the enemy Axis governments of World War II; one is led by Nazarenko, who has stated publicly that the Coalition for Peace Through Strength has provided him with a mailing list of senior U.S. military officers for use in Captive Nations propaganda work.26
More important than any organizational connections, however, is the manner in which “liberation” thinking has again taken hold in Washington, D.C. The Reagan wing of the Republican party has historically maintained extremely close ties with the Captive Nations movement. Many top Reagan activists have spent much of their lives promoting the liberationist cause, even when the theory fell out of fashion after the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
President Reagan himself bestowed a Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, on liberation theorist (and former OPC/CIA émigré program consultant) James Burnham in 1983. Burnham’s liberation analysis “profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world,” Reagan intoned at the awards ceremony. “And I owe him a personal debt,” the president continued, “because throughout the years of travelling on the mashed-potato circuit I have quoted [him] widely.”27
Today the Reagan administration has updated liberationism to apply to 1980s crisis points like Angola and Nicaragua. The CIA, with the president’s backing, is now spending in excess of $600 million per year to equip some 80,000 to 100,000 anti-Communist “freedom fighters” with arms, supplies, and even state-of-the-art Stinger antiaircraft missiles. This renewed cold war strategy, sometimes known as the Reagan Doctrine, has also become a litmus test of conservative Republican orthodoxy, writes Washington Post political analyst Sidney Blumenthal.28 Right-wing true believers have taken to using votes on funding for “freedom fighters” like Angolan rebel strongman Jonas Savimbi as a means of extracting concessions from Republican moderates and driving their party farther to the right. The new liberationists’ goal, Blumenthal writes, “is to ensure that no Republican will be nominated for president who has not pledged fealty to their ideology.”
The liberation ideal—”permanent counterrevolution,” in Blumenthal’s words, meaning protracted conflict with the USSR, leading to a final showdown in which communism is wiped from the face of the earth—is not simply a “Nazi idea,” nor is it appropriate to label people who support it Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. The Post’s Blumenthal, for example, attributes many of Burnham’s liberationist theories to Burnham’s flirtation with Trotskyism in the 1930s.
But the fact remains that ideas and theories have histories, just as nations do. They are the products of particular circumstances and junctures in civilization. Burnham’s theories were based on his work with exiles during the early years of the American Committee for Liberation, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, and similar projects that enlisted numerous Nazi collaborators among that generation of “freedom fighters.” Burnham speaks highly of Germany’s political warfare in Belorussia and the Ukraine; it was only Hitler’s later blunders that made its eastern front policy a mistake, he writes in Containment or Revolution.29 The true origins of liberationism as a coherent philosophy lie in Nazi Germany and in the Nazis’ political warfare campaign on the eastern front, nowhere else.
Today liberation activists often have a reasonably sophisticated political agenda and enough clout to arrange annual Captive Nations commemorations hosted directly by the president or vice president of the United States.30 Their political stands are not entirely unreasonable: Most Captive Nations activists are strong supporters of improved human rights inside the Soviet bloc, for example, although their record on civil rights inside the United States is somewhat less exemplary. The one position they cling to above all, however, is an implacable paranoia toward the USSR that would permit no arms control treaties, no trade and indeed no East-West cooperation of any type, only relentless preparation for war.
The scars that secret émigré anti-Communist programs have left on life in the United States run considerably deeper than the contribution they may have made to the early 1950s purge of former Voice of America Director Charles Thayer or to the escape of certain Nazis from justice. The cold war itself—and, indirectly, much that has flowed from it—should be reconsidered today in the light of what is beginning to be known of clandestine activities during that period.
Many, though obviously not all, U.S. covert operations of the period involved use of Nazi collaborators, and it is that aspect of American secret warfare that has been the focus of attention here. The basic rationale for using Nazis in covert operations has consistently been that doing so was of practical value to the United States in international relations, that it was putting “future American interests” ahead of the “delights of revenge.” In reality, however, these affairs have worked to the long-term—and frequently the short-term—detriment of the United States. The negative blowback from U.S. operations employing Nazis and collaborators may be generally grouped into six categories. The first of these, chronologically speaking, stems from the intense West-East competition over recruitment of German scientists and secret agents. The fight over these intelligence assets played a surprisingly large role in the rapid erosion of trust between the superpowers, especially in the first months after the defeat of Hitler Germany.
The mistrust engendered during this race proved to be an important factor in undermining the possibility of superpower peace as early as the Potsdam Conference of July 1945.31 Both sides at Potsdam read the clandestine campaigns of the other as the “true” policy behind the veils of diplomacy. Yet both also insisted that their own diplomatic initiatives be taken at face value. One practical result of this semiotic clash was an acceleration of the upward spiral of suspicion, hostility, and fear.
The second major type of damaging blowback has been the destructive effect that Western covert operations and political warfare—particularly programs employing Nazi collaborators—has had on provoking the cold war and later crises in East-West relations. These affairs were not only products of the cold war but also catalysts that escalated the conflict. They offer graphic proof that the United States’ struggle against the USSR began considerably earlier and was carried out with far more violence than the Western public was led to believe at the time.
The U.S. “national security state,” as it has since come to be termed, established itself very quickly in the wake of the showdown at Potsdam. Before three years had passed, the emerging intelligence community had begun undertaking small- and medium-scale campaigns using former Nazis and Axis collaborators as operatives in the attempted coup d’etat in Romania, the subversion of elections in Greece and Italy, and attempts to manipulate favored political parties throughout the Soviet-occupied zone of Eastern Europe. One can well imagine what the USSR’s interpretation of these U.S. initiatives was at the time, considering the Marxist-Leninist dictum that the United States is inherently imperialist in character.
The liberal anti-Communist consensus of the day in the West saw covert operations as a viable “national security” option that was short of open warfare. Such tactics were supposed to be a relatively enlightened and effective means of advancing American interests at the expense of their Soviet rival. George Kennan, Charles Thayer, Br
igadier General John Magruder, and other theoreticians of clandestine political warfare contended that the relatively successful experience that the United States had enjoyed in sponsoring an anti-Nazi underground during wartime could be selectively applied to the harassment, “containment,” and perhaps the overthrow of the postwar pro-Soviet states in the East.32
There was a fundamental difference between the United States’ wartime experience, however, and the postwar practice of attempting to bankroll alliances between Eastern European center parties and the remnants of the Axis power structure that still held on in the Soviet-occupied zone. In many cases, the U.S.-backed factions lacked either the moral authority or the simple competence to rule, particularly in the face of Soviet hostility. But instead of urging its proxies to cooperate as junior partners in the early postwar coalition governments dominated by Communists—and thereby to stabilize the situation in Eastern Europe with some measure of democracy, however imperfect—the United States encouraged its sympathizers to attempt to seize total power (as in the Romanian coup of 1947) or, that failing, to use clandestine action to disrupt the ability of any other group to govern (as in Poland from 1946 to 1951).33 Captivated by a vision of the world in which any enemy of the Communists was a friend of ours, the United States’ public role in Eastern Europe during the cold war consisted in large part of the creation of polarized crises in which East-West cooperation became impossible, while the clandestine counterpart to this same policy often created secret alliances with war criminals, Nazis, and extremists. It is clear from the secrecy that surrounded these alliances that many U.S. national security experts recognized at the time such tactics as reprehensible. However necessary such tactics may have seemed in the 1940s and 1950s, in retrospect this policy has proved to have been an ineffective way to deal with Eastern Europe, one which some subsequent U.S. administrations have spent considerable effort trying to correct.
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