Pavelic and Budak were as good as their word. Ustashe gangs rounded up Serbs and slaughtered them wholesale. They practiced ethnic cleansing by massacre. There exist films of whole Serb villages lined up on the hillside behind their priest. Their Croat tormentors demand that they convert to Catholicism on the spot. They refuse-and the Croat machine guns open up. Tens of thousands of Serbs besieged the Catholic churches of Croatia, demanding to be converted, to save their lives. At first the Church welcomed them, but then the hierarchy began to protest both the massacres and the forced conversions. Their protests were never very effective, however, and were ignored by Pavelic.
Individual priests were among the most extreme offenders, notably including Franciscans. One member of the Order of Saint Francis commanded the Jasenovac concentration camp for six months. It was a Croatian Auschwitz where tens of thousands of people were murdered, including most of the Jews of Yugoslavia. These half-century-old horrors have been used by the Serbs of modern Yugoslavia to justify the genocide they practiced in the 1990s against Moslems and Croats alike.
Draganovic was an avid supporter of the Pavelic regime. He became an official adviser to the government in 1941 and moved to Rome two years later as an unofficial ambassador. He was an effective diplomat. Pope Pius XII never explicitly condemned the Ustashe regime in Zagreb, and this may have been Draganovic's work. Certainly he was well connected in the Vatican. While there is no doubt of his loyalty to the Kingdom of Croatia during the war and the fact that he continued to help his former comrades after it, he also succeeded in making his peace with Tito at some point in the 1950s. That suggests, at the very least, that he had sold his soul to more than one devil.
He became the secretary of the Confraternity of San Girolamo in Rome, a Croatian seminary that prepared young men for the priesthood. It was also a convenient cover for refugees escaping from Tito's Yugoslavia. There is not much doubt that Draganovic first set up his rat line to get former Ustashe war criminals out of Europe. A secret American report prepared in 1947, the year Milano first hired him, stated that Draganovic had already smuggled 115 Croat war criminals to Argentina, and there were another 20 hiding behind the walls of San Girolamo. Pavelic himself may have been among them. At any event, he escaped to Argentina, where he lived out his days undisturbed. The Croatian minister of the interior and head of police, Andreyia Artukovic, Croatia's Himmler, got away to California, where for many years he was protected by American antiCommunists. Even as late as the 1980s, they defended Artukovic against Yugoslav demands that he be extradited for war crimes. Finally he was sent back to Zagreb, where he was tried and convicted of directing the murder of half a million people. He died in prison.
Draganovic's base was in Rome, but he also had an office in Trieste, which was then under British and American protection. The town was contested between Yugoslavia and Italy, and, until its fate was settled many years later, the Allies kept the peace. Up to 200,000 Croatian refugees had fled Yugoslavia at the end of the war, and the Allies were doing their best to send them back. The refugees were desperate to escape that fate and appealed to the Vatican for help. No doubt most of them were ordinary people who had been caught up in the whirlwind and deposited in Italy. Besides the Croats, there were people of scores of nationalities. Some had been conscripted into Hitler's armies in Ukraine, Slovakia, or the Baltics and had managed to avoid being deported back to the East by the Western Allies, at least for the moment. Others had escaped over the mountains from Yugoslavia or Central Europe, fleeing before the Red Army as it drove into Europe or slipping over the borders before they were locked tight.
The Americans never doubted that among the flotsam of war were many criminals, men who had served in the SS or in similar organizations, who were desperate to escape before their crimes caught up with them. When Draganovic was brought into the American intelligence system, Milano and his colleagues closed their eyes to the deplorable fact that he was helping war criminals to escape justice because he alone could supply a safe, efficient method of sending their Soviet defectors off to a new life. The American intelligence agencies in Austria were not in the business of catching Yugoslav war criminals. Their job was gathering current intelligence on the Soviet armies, not exacting retribution for past crimes. None of them was ever really comfortable with this rather specious justification for dealing with a man as guilty as Draganovic. Milano himself took care never to meet him, leaving that disagreeable necessity to Paul Lyon. The pain of the dilemma continued over the years, especially when they learned that Klaus Barbie, a much lesser figure than Pavelic or Eichmann but an undoubted war criminal, had been sent down the Rat Line from Germany with the connivance of their former colleagues.
In one of the only contemporary reports on the Rat Line that has survived, a memorandum by Paul Lyon written in 1950, the difficulties of using Draganovic, and the need for keeping his involvement from the U.S. government are set out clearly.
Draganovich is known and recorded as a Fascist, war criminal, etc, and his contacts with South American diplomats of a similar class are not generally approved by US State Department officials, plus the fact that in the light of security, it is better that we may be able to state, if forced, that the turning over of a DP to a welfare Organization falls in line with our democratic way of thinking and that we are not engaged in illegal disposition of war criminals, defectees and the like....
Inasmuch as he, although reliable from a security standpoint, is unscrupulous in his dealings concerning money, as he does a considerable amount of charity work for which he received no compensation, it is not entirely impossible that he will delay one shipment for one organization to benefit another organization who pays higher prices.
The full text of the memo is given in the appendix.
In the late autumn of 1947, some weeks after the first staff meeting on the possibilities of setting up a rat line, Paul Lyon went to Trieste for his first official meeting with the Good Father. They met in San Gabriele, which was Draganovic's base in the city. He had a room set aside for him in the church rectory which he used as an office. Draganovic received Lyon with open arms. The purpose of the visit had been explained to him earlier by Hank Bono, and he was quite prepared to deal. The two men settled into armchairs in the Good Father's room in the rectory to discuss business over a bottle of Lacrimae Christi from Naples. The encounter was helped by a present of Scotch whisky that Lyon had thoughtfully provided. Draganovic confessed that he was particularly fond of Scotch, preferring Chivas Regal, Johnny Walker Black, or Pinch. The Rat Line Committee thereafter made sure that everytime one of its officers went to see him in Trieste or Rome, he would take a bottle or two along.
Draganovic told Lyon that he had six visas for Peru that he was willing to sell. The price was $9,000 for the packet. This was an exploratory visit, so Lyon had brought only $3,000 with him, enough for two visas. He said he would buy the remainder on a second trip if the first proved satisfactory. The only condition Draganovic set was Lyon's assurance that the two refugees were good, hardworking Catholics and loyal sons of the Church. Lyon put on his most sincere expression and assured Draganovic that the visas were intended for good, serious Catholics. Indeed, both of them had been altar boys in their youth and still attended Mass regularly. Later, Lyon admitted to Milano that he was glad that Draganovic had accepted his word for it. He did not, on that occasion, have to provide any certificate of good conduct. He felt slightly squeamish at lying to a priest, even one as corrupt as Draganovic, even if the priest knew perfectly well that the story was fiction. Putting the lie on paper would have been even more embarrassing for Lyon, although he had come with a pocket full of forged papers to justify it. A little hypocrisy goes a long way, and Draganovic expansively insisted that Captain Lyon's word was good enough for him.
Then he produced the visas, simple documents in Spanish and English, issued by the Peruvian Foreign Ministry, with the spaces for names blank. Lyon studied them carefully, pocketed them, and promised the pries
t that the names, together with the necessary biographical details, would be sent to him in due course, to be passed on to the Peruvian government. Then he laid a sealed envelope on the priest's desk. It contained $3,000 in greenbacks.
When he returned to Salzburg, the visas were examined and found to be authentic. Lyon therefore returned to Trieste for the other four, bearing $6,000 and a bottle of whisky for the Good Father. This was the first of many such transactions over the next four years. Del Greco always prepared phony baptismal certificates, just in case they were needed, to accompany the phony passports and other necessary travel documents. Draganovic never asked to see them, nor did he ever count the money in the Americans' presence. He always delivered the blank visas without any further questions. It was a satisfactory, businesslike arrangement.
Lyon returned to Salzburg, the visas in his pocket, to discover that preparations were well advanced for the first shipment of "visitors." Captain James Alongi, the unit's administrative and supply officer, had made the most useful contribution to the operation. A few weeks earlier, driving along the autobahn toward Munich, he had passed a huge depot of army vehicles parked in a field. These were the jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks of the Third Army, Patton's army, which had liberated western Czechoslovakia and western Austria. The army had recently been sent home, and had left its vehicles, heavy weapons, and much other equipment behind. It was a typical enough scene: all over Western Europe there were huge dumps of American materiel, and it would be years before they were all disposed of.
Alongi had struck up a conversation with a private first class at the gate and learned that no one had any clear idea how many vehicles were in the motor park. He had also discovered that the soldier was lonely, bored, and open to suggestion. Alongi explained to the sentry that the Army in its wisdom kept his unit short of everything, particularly jeeps. They were as scarce as hens' teeth in Austria-yet here were thousands of them rusting in a field in Bavaria just across the border.
"What would I need for you to go for a walk while some of my men came in and drove a few of these jeeps back up the road to Austria? I can guarantee they'd be used on official business, and it doesn't look to me like you'd miss a few of them."
Later, recounting the story to his friends, Alongi expressed his astonishment at the speed with which his offer was accepted.
"I can't go for long," the soldier told him, "but one bottle of good American whiskey a minute would do. You can't take more than five jeeps, or my sergeant would notice."
Alongi replied by offering six bottles of whiskey for six jeeps and throwing in six cartons of cigarettes as a bonus. The soldier, without blinking an eye, said he would settle for ten cartons: his German girlfriend and her mother were always nagging him for cigarettes.
A week or so later, Alongi returned to the depot in a three-ton truck with six of his colleagues, including Jim Milano. The friendly soldier had arranged to swap guard duty with another man who had the night shift, so Milano's party arrived after dark. They brought the six quarts of whiskey and the ten cartons of cigarettes for the guard, and jerry cans of gasoline and oil for the jeeps. They knew their job. They quickly selected half a dozen jeeps in mint condition, put gas into their tanks and within half an hour were speeding down the autobahn toward Salzburg. As far as they ever learned, the soldier never suffered any ill effects as a result of the theft.
The next day Del Greco's mechanics filed off the serial numbers on each jeep and punched in new ones specially made up for the occasion. Then Del Greco was set to work to concoct documentation for these new vehicles. He discovered that a certain ordnance officer had recently been demobbed and had returned to the States. He found an example of that unsuspecting officer's signature, manufactured the appropriate forms and forged the signature, and had three of the jeeps with their new numbers allocated to a signal unit that had recently left Austria for good. The new documentation was then inserted into the appropriate files in the ordnance depot office by a sympathetic secretary. Del Greco had many qualities: among them was his ability to charm, bribe, or seduce secretaries. Subsequently, if any supplies officer should ever come nosing around the intelligence unit's parking lot, which was shared with other military establishments, and started inquiring about the mysterious surplus jeeps, they would deny all knowledge of them or claim that they had been inherited from the departed signal unit.
Jeeps were useful. They were the workhorses of the American army of occupation as they had been of the Army in wartime. They were needed this time, first of all, to carry the visitors down to their ports of embarkation in Italy. They were off-the-books, untraceable vehicles, and if anything went wrong the unit could deny it had any connection with them or their passengers. Furthermore, Milano might need them for trade purposes. Booze, cigarettes, and nylons were useful, but the senior echelons of the Italian military, police, and intelligence forces cost more than that. A jeep was the most desirable bribe of all, and now Milano had six of them. Two were already allocated: one to the head of the Italian Border Police in Genoa, Major Mario Anselmo; the other to Major Alfredo Capatelli, an inspector in the same unit in Naples. These were two of the key figures whose help, or at least acquiescence, was essential to operat ing the Rat Line. The head of the Italian Border Police and Customs Service, General Giovanni Barsanti, was too senior to be bought off with a jeep. Instead, the Americans used their most precious advantage, the fact that their zone in Austria included Salzburg. They found the general tickets for the Salzburg Festival.
Other supplies were acquired with equal panache. At the time, the liquor allowance was one quart of whiskey per month for officers and six bottles of beer a month for each enlisted man. This was not nearly enough to satisfy the thirsts of Milano and his staff, let alone provide the needs of their widening circle of agents and contactsand the people they needed to bribe. The Operations Branch resolved the problem, with the help of "Lefty" Spinosa, a retired bootlegger from Brooklyn.
Spinosa was a native of Benevento, in the mountains above Naples, who had emigrated to New York just before World War I. At the conclusion of that conflict, in which Italy had been an ally of the British and Americans, Spinosa had been working as a laborer in Brooklyn when the U.S. Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Many Americans had found Prohibition an intolerable infraction of their liberties, and, in the best tradition of the free enterprise system, a large industry had grown up to circumvent it. Lefty Spinosa had joined Angelo Palmeria, head of one of the New York families engaged in the business. He ran a chain of speakeasies and liquor stores in Brooklyn, and Lefty was soon in charge of importing supplies from Canada. It was a highly profitable operation, and Spinosa was able to send his take back to Benevento-until he was caught. The Coast Guard intercepted him as he steered a small tug loaded with booze into a secluded dock in Sheepshead Bay.
The Palmerias' lawyer visited him in jail and set out his options succinctly. He could deny everything and stand his chance at a trial. It was not likely that he would escape, and he would face twenty years in Attica. Or he could talk to the FBI, which was most anxious to find out who that large quantity of bootleg liquor had been destined for. Spinosa could reveal all the details of the Palmerias' operations to the feds, who would undoubtedly agree to release him from prison soon afterward. Unfortunately, he would be dead by then: the family had excellent contacts inside the prison system. Lastly, he could take the rap, but offer up a few, minor sacrifices to the government. Angelo Palmeria was ready to give up two of his less profitable speakeasies and a brothel, Widow Llewelyn's club, in order to protect his other investments. If Lefty would confess that these operations were his and his alone, he would get a light sentence and then be deported back to Italy. The Palmerias would guarantee that he would return home a rich man.
Six months later Lefty Spinosa was back in Benevento with ample resources to set himself up in business. He was by then an expert in the liquor trade and t
herefore bought himself a distillery near his hometown and a palazzo to live in. He immediately joined the Fascist Party, proclaiming his eternal admiration for 11 Duce, Mussolini, and settled down to the life of a prosperous, respected businessman. When the U.S. Army liberated the town in 1943, Spinosa welcomed them with open arms. The unfortunate circumstances that had led to his forced departure from New York were forgiven: Prohibition had been repealed, and besides, the GIs in wartime were in even greater need of booze than their fathers had been twenty years before.
Among his visitors was a nephew who had grown up in Philadelphia and was now in Army Intelligence-and who introduced Lefty to Dominic Del Greco. The Benevento distillery produced a good quality of gin and had limitless supplies of the best Italian wines. Furthermore, Spinosa had some excellent connections elsewhere in the peninsula, including another distillery, near Trieste, that produced a passable brandy. In no time at all, Del Greco had established a regular supply run between Salzburg and Benevento and Trieste. Every few months he would make a "spiritual trip" to stock up on supplies, taking a truck with him to carry them.
Cigarettes came from the Army PX in Italy. They were rationed, one carton a week, but Milano had discovered a mode of exchange that enabled him to buy as many cartons as he wanted. He paid cash for everything but also offered Nazi memorabilia. SS daggers, Nazi battle flags, medals, helmets, and other souvenirs of the German war machine were relatively easily obtained in Austria but were in short supply in Italy. The PX at Livorno was run by the supply staff, men who had made essential but unadventurous contributions to the war and occupation and were only too glad to be offered the opportunity to stock up on interesting items to take home with them as substitutes for more glorious memories. There was soon a regular exchange of souvenirs for cigarettes, and everyone was happy.
Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line Page 8