Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  They were not, however, told anything about the clients who were to be sent down the line. They were merely informed that one Klaus Altmann, his wife, and his two children were "of very great interest" to the 66th CIC. The family was issued with travel documents and identity cards, either forged by the 430th CIC or (which is more probable) obtained under false pretenses by the 66th itself in Germany. "Altmann's" papers gave his place of birth as Kronstadt, Germany, which was rather odd: there is no such place. The only Kronstadt is a famous Russian naval base near Saint Petersburg. The Altmanns were driven by their American friends to Salzburg, where they were put onto a train for Genoa. All their documents were in order, and they arrived safely.

  Draganovic himself met them in Genoa, according to Barbie's own account of his travels, and took him to the various consulates to obtain the necessary Argentine and Bolivian documents. The family was lodged in a safe house, which, according to Thomas Bower's book on the subject, was already full of escaping Nazis, including Eichmann himself. Barbie was presumably the source of this sensational piece of information. It is entirely possible that Draganovic helped Eichmann, but it would seem improbable that Eichmann took the same boat to Buenos Aires as Barbie. The Barbies were escorted to Genoa by George Neagoy, who had succeeded Paul Lyon with the Austrian CIC in Linz as chief operator of the Rat Line and had later joined the CIA. If, indeed, Eichmann was in Genoa, Neagoy missed the chance of a lifetime. American officials might have condoned the use of a minor Gestapo official like Barbie, but Eichmann was the most senior war criminal alive, Heinrich Himmler's top lieutenant, the man who had organized the "Final Solution," and, if he had been identified, he would have been arrested immediately.

  Eichmann had passed through several American interrogation centers undetected after the end of the war and had lived for four years in the British zone of Germany, raising chickens. According to the Israelis who interrogated him after his capture and tried to reconstruct his movements after the war, Eichmann had been smuggled through Austria to Italy by one of the SS rat lines, perhaps the one known as "Odessa." In July 1950, he was in Genoa where he was hiding in a monastery. A Franciscan monk provided him with a refugee passport in the name of Ricardo Klement, and on July 14 he obtained an Argentine visa. He reached Buenos Aires in October. It is possible that Draganovic's operation was involved in Eichmann's escape, but there were other rat lines and other Fascist priests in Europe at the time, and the case has not been proven. As for the possibility that Eichmann's and Barbie's paths crossed, it would mean that the dates given by one of them were wrong. Barbie reported that he left Genoa on March 22, 1951, and surviving American documents corroborate the date. That was nine months after Eichmann, by his own account, left Genoa. In 1960, Eichmann was discovered in Buenos Aires by the Israeli Secret Service, which sent a commando unit to kidnap him. He was taken to Israel, where he was tried for war crimes, convicted, and hanged. Most of the Nazis who escaped were more fortunate and lived out the rest of their lives, anonymously and undetected, in South America.

  That was the future Barbie planned for himself. He and his family were put safely aboard a ship for Argentina. When they arrived in Buenos Aires, they took the train to La Paz, Bolivia, where Barbie made contact with other German exiles and eventually established himself successfully as a businessman and an adviser to a series of Bolivian presidents.

  Barbie's name was known only to specialists in the occupation, even though he was the man who had killed Jean Moulin. He became famous in the 1970s, when two French anti-Nazi specialists, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, discovered that he was living in Bolivia and devoted themselves to bringing him to justice. They stirred up the press and, through them, the French government. Finally, in 1983, they succeeded. A new, democratically elected president took office in Bolivia and was persuaded by the French government to deport Barbie to France. He was taken back to Lyons and tried and convicted for war crimes in 1987. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in 1991.

  By the time of his arrest, the climate of opinion had changed. In Europe and America a new generation had grown up that had never known the tensions and the absolutes of the early cold war years. They could not understand how a branch of the American govern ment had knowingly employed a war criminal, had concealed him from the French, and had then smuggled him to South America-all the while denying knowledge of his presence. Numerous protests were mounted, and the Justice Department in Washington set up an investigation into the case.

  A detailed report was presented to Attorney General William French Smith by Allan A. Ryan in August 1983. It concerned Jim Milano and his former colleagues in the CIC in Austria because their Rat Line had been used to smuggle Barbie out of Europe, and the Ryan investigation had thrown some light upon that operation. It is also striking how differently the two intelligence organizations, the one in Germany and the one in Austria, conducted their business. According to the documents and the recollections of the surviving case officers, the CIC in Germany never hesitated to use former Gestapo officials or SS men and never concerned themselves with their agents' past records. Milano and his colleagues, by contrast, were constantly worried about using former Nazis, even those who had spent the war behind desks in Vienna analyzing reports from the eastern front. As we have seen, former SS men and Gestapo officers were sometimes used, but always with discretion and for short periods. Barbie, by contrast, had been treated as a friend and colleague by the 66th CIC and had been one of its major assets for three years. That organization was deeply concerned with the dangers of communism in West Germany. The 430th CIC in Austria took a much more relaxed attitude to the Red Menace. It noted that the United States had several fully equipped divisions in Germany and the Communist Party was an inconsiderable risk.

  After the Barbie incident the Rat Line was closed down again, and the CIA has always denied that it ever made any use of it. However, as various writers have pointed out, the CIC agent who shipped Barbie to Bolivia, George Neagoy, joined the Agency in 1951. Obviously, he took with him all the knowledge required for using the Rat Line. Furthermore, the agency made use of Draganovic, in some capacity, at least until 1960. All that time, he continued to work for Croatian refugees and to take part in political activity among Croatian exiles. Some of the Ustashe war criminals whom he may have helped took part in the terrorist campaign waged against Yugoslavia, notably against Yugoslav embassies abroad. In those years, the Yugoslav embassies in Washington and New York, for instance, had armed guards at the door, protected from Ustashe attack by concrete shields. Draganovic may also have been involved in currency smuggling. Then his career took a surprising twist: in 1967 he returned to Yugoslavia and ended his days peacefully in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Evidently he had made a deal with the Yugoslav authorities, and it is entirely possible that he had for many years been a double or triple agent, working simultaneously for Ustashe plotters, American intelligence, and Tito. He died of old age in 1983.

  Two contemporary accounts of the Rat Line and the Good Father have survived, and they are given in full in the Appendix. They were both written by Paul Lyon. The first, dated 1948, refers to "a tentative agreement" with Father Draganovic, which he described as "simple mutual assistance, i.e. [we] assist persons of interest to Father Draganovic to leave Germany and, in turn, Father Draganovic will assist [us] in obtaining the necessary visas to Argentina, South America, for persons of interest to this command.

  "It may be stated that some of the persons of interest to Father Draganovic may be of interest to the Denazification policy of the Allies; however, the persons assisted by Father Draganovic are also of interest to our Russian ally."

  This implied that G-2 operations was ready to assist Draganovic in smuggling war criminals out of Germany. The Justice Department investigation in 1983 found no evidence that anything of the sort ever happened, and Milano and his friends are quite clear that the rule was always that no members of the SS, SD, or Gestapo or other potential war criminals would ever be
allowed down the Rat Line. That prohibition explicitly extended to Croatian refugees: the services provided by Milano's Rat Line had never been made available to Draganovic for his own friends and clients. They were reserved entirely for deserters from the Soviet army or former DPs who had provided useful information on Soviet dispositions. In Milano's view, the people qualified for the Rat Line were those who had risked their lives to bring useful information to U.S. Army Intelligence, people, in Lyon's ironic phrase, who were "of interest to our Russian ally."

  Paul Lyon is long dead, and it is quite impossible to discover just what he meant by "mutual assistance." His colleagues understood that the deal was strictly financial: they paid Draganovic $1,500 for each visa. One possible explanation, which was certainly discussed at the time, was that Draganovic used the funds the Americans gave him to subsidize his own rat line, with which he smuggled Ustashes out of Europe. Milano certainly knew that this was a possibility and consciously turned a blind eye.

  The Ryan report's conclusion, as far as it concerned Milano's Rat Line, is as follows:

  the evidence establishes that the 430th CIC in Austria had been using Father Dragonovic's rat line for several years as a means of providing defectors and informants with a safe and secret passage out of Europe. This investigation yielded no evidence that the 430th CIC had used the rat line as a means of escape for suspected Nazi war criminals.

  As the discussion of the rat line's operation makes clear, the 430th CIC and its parent command, G-2 United States Forces Austria (USFA), were operating on the edge of the law, if not over it: false documentation was obtained surreptitiously, information was withheld from United States agencies controlling travel, funds were transferred in unorthodox and perhaps illegal ways, and knowledge of the entire procedure was intentionally restricted to the persons actually involved in it.

  The use of the rat line for informants and defectors raises troubling questions of ethical and legal conduct. The United States Army certainly had an obligation to protect from harm those informants who had assisted the Army at substantial risk, as well as defectors whose discovery in the American zone would have jeopardized their lives and safety. Furthermore, there was nothing inherently wrong in evacuating such persons from Europe to places of sanctuary in South America. But to carry out this obligation by relying on the intercession of a foreign national whose own background and interests were suspect, by concealing information from United States agencies, and by possibly violating lawful regulations on travel, currency and documentation, the Army did not act responsibly.

  The proper course, when faced with the necessity of bringing such people to safety, would have been to arrange, with due authority, an approved and lawful mechanism for their safe passage. This mechanism could have been arranged to operate covertly; there is no inherent contradiction between lawful action and covert action. But there is an important distinction between lawfully establishing a covert escape route and covertly taking advantage of a secretive and unauthorized scheme.

  In addition, the rat line procedure took unnecessary and ill-advised security risks by placing sensitive informants and defectors in the unsupervised control of a foreign agent. One cannot exclude the possibility that United States intelligence methods or information were compromised when defectors and informants were turned over to Dragonovic. It is abundantly clear that Dragonovic was not loyal to the United States; he simply accommodated United States requests to the extent they were consistent with, or could advance, his own objectives in assisting his compatriots.

  But questionable as these actions may have been from a legal or security standpoint, they do not appear to have risen to the level of an obstruction of justice other than in the Barbie case. This investigation examined all materials known to exist on the operation of the rat line and interviewed all persons now alive known to have been involved with it. No other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the rat line, or where the rat line was used to evacuate a per son wanted by either the United States Government or any of its postwar

  The Ryan investigation and report were just the sort of thing that Milano and his colleagues feared when they built their Rat Line in such secrecy. They specifically did not seek legal approval for their actions because they were fairly sure that they would not have got it and had no faith at all in the State Department's ability to keep a secret. The report expressed Ryan's regret that there are no files giving the names of the people sent down the Rat Line, either their original names or the ones they had been given to start their new lives with. Ryan wanted to interview them to make sure that they were not Nazis or security risks. Milano had anticipated just such an official inquiry when he made sure that no traces of his "visitors" should be left behind, and the passage of thirty-five years had not given him any reason to think he had been mistaken.

  Late in 1949, Jim Milano was told that his time in Austria was coming to an end. A successor chief of operations would be sent out from Washington the following summer, and at the same time the CIA would take over some of the Army's intelligence operations in Austria. Army Intelligence had carried the burden since 1945, when the Americans had first occupied the country, because there had been no regular spy agency: the wartime OSS had been disbanded. The CIA had been established by act of Congress in 1947 and had steadily expanded its activities since then. This was an opportune moment for it to take over responsibility for peering across the Iron Curtain into Central Europe. The Berlin Airlift had ended, with a signal Allied victory, in May 1949. The Communist offensives in France, Italy, and Greece had been turned back, and the split between Tito and Stalin had exploded into open animosity, which relieved some of the pressure on the West. NATO had been formed, and the Federal Republic of Germany had been set up. The heroic period of the early cold war, 1945 to 1949, was over. It was succeeded by the long years of cautious confrontation punctuated by occasional crises like the Korean War, the Berlin crisis of 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis. The new phase of hard animosity lasted until 1989. One reason that the Army had been left to conduct most intelligence operations in Austria for the four years after the war had been that everyone expected an agreement between the World War II Allies on the fate of Austria, to be followed by the departure of all the armies of occupation. By 1949, it was apparent that there would be no quick treaty. Prolonged diplomatic maneuvering had at last achieved an Italian peace and treaties with the other European Axis powers, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. But the negotiations over the key issue, Germany, had failed utterly, and Stalin had also refused to give up the Soviet zone of Austria. The American and Allied armies remained in Vienna and in their zones of Austria far longer than they had ever anticipated: the Austrian State Treaty was not concluded until 1955. It was evident by 1949 that the provisional arrangements in force since the end of the war might continue indefinitely, and it was necessary to put them on a regular basis. As far as intelligence gathering was concerned, that meant calling in the CIA.

  It was time for the pioneers, Milano and his friends, to move on. They had achieved outstanding success in observing the activities of the Red Army, measuring its capabilities and judging its intentions, and had also protected the West by their assiduous attention to counterintelligence. The Army accepted the transfer of its intelligence functions to the CIA with good grace. The Agency had already expanded the operations of its precursor agency, the SSU, and it had brought several case officers and headquarters personnel into Vienna. Army Intelligence networks and operations large and small, essential and marginal, would all be reviewed by the Agency, and the ones it deemed useful would be taken over. Those it did not want would either be wound up or kept by the Army until that distant day of its withdrawal from Austria. The two organizations would, of course, cooperate: the Army would still want to analyze the fruits of CIA operations, and the Pentagon would still ply the Agency with the questions it had regularly sent to Milano. The CIC would continue counterintelligence work, guarding the security of army ins
tallations and personnel. The MIS continued to direct civil censorship and the interrogation of returning Austrian POWs.

  Milano had no personal concern in the matter. He was leaving anyway. He had only one question: What would happen to the Rat Line? It was the most secret of his operations, and he had a proprietorial interest in its fate. He was particularly concerned with its security: he wanted to be sure that the visitors he had sent off to their new lives in South America would be left undisturbed.

  The question was tied up with a decision he had to make himself: the CIA had offered him a job, and he had to decide whether to accept or to remain in the Army. It was not an easy decision, and Milano was influenced by news coming out of Washington. In the course of 1949 and into 1950, the great anti-Communist witch-hunt was spreading like a plague across the face of American government and a great part of intellectual life. It affected the State Department and the military, and American agencies in Austria received everincreasing numbers of peremptory demands for detailed background information on their personnel. President Truman, in a concession to the forces his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, called "the primitives," had agreed to institute "loyalty procedures" in the State Department and elsewhere in the government. The purge began immediately, and before very long scores of government officials were sacked because they had at some time shown sympathy for leftwing causes. The Army was particularly vindictive and obsessive in its hunt for soldiers whom it considered disloyal, frequently basing its judgment on such matters as a relative's leftist sympathies.