Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

OSI issued its internal Verbelen report in 1988 while John Demjanjuk was waiting for the Israeli Supreme Court to decide whether he should ascend the gallows, spend the rest of his days in prison, face another trial as Iwan of Sobibor, or go free. For national security reasons, the report “could not make public” every detail of the U.S.-Verbelen connection. In spite of that limitation, the document sketched a clear picture of America’s postwar espionage operations in Austria. And more important, it illustrated the total dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on the services of former Nazi SS and SD officers, Gestapo chiefs, Einsatzkommando leaders, German army intelligence officers (Abwehr), and a string of vicious Nazi collaborators stretching from Croatia to Latvia.

Robert Jan Verbelen was a decorated officer in the Flemish SS and a leader of DeVlag, a pro-Nazi organization of young Flemish fascists who considered Hitler their führer. As a lieutenant in the Flemish SS, Verbelen recruited fellow SS men and members of DeVlag into terror teams and death squads that worked closely with the Nazi SD security detail in Belgium to help keep the country safe for its German occupiers.

Like Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Lyon, Verbelen’s mission as security corps leader was to crush the Belgian resistance. And like Barbie, he failed. The best he could do during his two-year reign of terror was to arrest, imprison, torture, and murder hundreds of resistance fighters, some of whom ended up in Camp Dora excavating tunnels in the Harz Mountains. To punish the resistance and to deter others from joining it, Verbelen’s terror squads attacked and assassinated Belgian politicians and judges who refused to support the Nazis. They gunned down policemen sympathetic to the Belgian resistance. And they tossed grenades into taverns, pubs, and cafés frequented by Belgian anti-occupation nationalists.

As a reward for his dedication, the SS promoted Verbelen to captain and awarded him the German War Meritorious Cross. When the Allies liberated Belgium in September 1944, three months after the Normandy invasion, Verbelen fled to Germany with the retreating German army, leaving his wife and two children behind. Unable to punish Captain Verbelen personally for his crimes, Belgian resistance fighters murdered his family instead.

Not long after the war ended, a Belgian military war crimes court tried sixty-two members of DeVlag and convicted fifty-nine, among them SS Captain Verbelen, who was sentenced in absentia to death. Unlike France, which asked the United States to help locate and extradite Klaus Barbie, Belgium did not seek U.S. assistance in finding and extraditing Verbelen. If it had, the United States would not have had far to look. Like Barbie in Munich, which was the heart of U.S. espionage in Germany, Verbelen was working for the CIC in Vienna, the center of U.S. espionage in Austria.

When Verbelen arrived in Vienna in 1947 with false papers identifying him as Peter Mayer, a Czech displaced Volksdeutsche with no military history, the CIC was no longer in charge of searching for Nazis to prosecute at Nuremberg. Instead, untrained and inexperienced CIC agents were hiring them under a new mandate to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and communists living in the Allied zones. Although Congress created the CIA in 1947, it was not yet up and running and OSS had been disbanded. That left an intelligence-gathering vacuum. The U.S. military filled it.

As one would expect from a military detachment, CIC’s covert espionage program was highly organized. It divided the American zone in Austria into subdetachments centered in Salzburg, Linz, Gmunden, and Vienna. Each subdetachment set up a string of fifteen to twenty field offices. Each field office, in turn, ran nets (networks) of sources, sub-sources, informants, and stringers. Because CIC didn’t have any spies of its own under deep cover in the Soviet Union or its satellites, it was forced to rely completely on the services of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators eager to walk through the open door and work for the United States in order to avoid arrest, trial, and punishment.

Without digging very deeply, OSI investigators identified thirteen Nazi war criminals who had held key positions in CIC’s Austrian spy web. Although OSI declined to reveal their names in its 1988 report for national security reasons, they included: a Yugoslavian general who was on a British-American list of Nazi collaborators to be “handed over to Yugoslavian authorities immediately” after they were arrested… the chief of Security Services in a Nazi puppet state and a Balkan Gestapo agent, both wanted by their native countries for ordering the burning of villages and the massacre of their inhabitants… a Nazi collaborator wanted in his native country for torturing and murdering two Catholic priests and an unspecified number of Jews as chief of a Jewish ghetto that was eventually liquidated… a Romanian Iron Guardist who played a role in Viorel Trifa’s January 1941 uprising and massacre of Jews in Bucharest… and an SS lieutenant colonel responsible for the torture of resistance fighters and POWs, and the extermination of Jews in several countries.

CIC had both eyes open when it hired those war criminals and others like them to form the spine of American espionage operations in Austria. Corps guidelines cautioned its agents against hiring known or convicted Nazi war criminals, but did not preclude them from hiring unconvicted members of Nazi organizations that the Nuremberg Military Tribunal defined as criminal—SS, SD, Gestapo, and Secret Police, among others. As a result, the CIC’s hiring of war criminals was, to a great extent, an application of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. As OSI explained in its 1988 Verbelen report: “Nearly all the former CIC agents interviewed acknowledged that membership in the SS or participation in questionable wartime activities did not disqualify a person from use as a CIC informant. Indeed, Verbelen’s first CIC control agent maintained that it was advantageous to use such persons, not only because of their knowledge and experience, but also because their dependence upon the United States for protection ensured their reliability.”

In other words, war criminals were useful to the United States because they could be blackmailed.

Verbelen took the usual path to employment by the United States. A friend and former SS officer working for the 430th CIC in Vienna introduced “Peter Mayer” to Captain Frank Hastings, head of the Vienna espionage office. Hastings rightly assumed that Mayer was also a former SS officer, and didn’t bother to investigate his background. Why should he? Mayer came highly recommended by one of CIC’s top SS sources and, as far as Hastings knew, he wasn’t a known or convicted war criminal and, therefore, was eligible to work for the United States.

At the time he hired Verbelen, Hastings was running three nets of spies in Vienna, headed by agents code-named Bobi, Nick, and Hermann. Bobi and Nick were ethnic German Nazi collaborators from a Baltic country. Hermann was a former Austrian Nazi SS officer. The nets were filled with suspected war criminals. Hermann, for example, had “succeeded in developing a large net of informants who were, for the most part, former members of the Nazi party, SS, or SD.”

Hastings assigned Verbelen, aka Peter Mayer, code name Herbert, to Project Newton, which was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Austrian Communist Party. As the head of one of three nets embedded in Newton, Herbert quickly recruited a string of more than twenty Nazi subsources, and he would later brag that his net of spies, sources, and informants actually numbered 130.

The CIC wasn’t just running spy nets in the American zone of Austria. From its field office in Gmunden, it supervised three other espionage projects—Mount Vernon, Montgomery, and Los Angeles. According to recently declassified CIA files, SS Major Wilhelm “Willi” Hoettl, aka Goldberg, former deputy head of the SD in Budapest and later the head of the SD in Vienna, ran two of the nets for the CIC under the title of “control chief.” One of Austria’s seven hundred thousand Nazis, Hoettl in turn hired former detention camp mates to work for him. Among them were Erich Kernmayer, a Nazi propagandist and the Nazi press chief in Vienna; SS officer Karl Kowarik, the director of the Austrian Hitler Youth organization; former SD officer Werner Moser; and former SD Major Karl Haas, who, according to a top-secret CIA report, “utilizes the services of former Abwehr colleagues.”