Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Hoettl and his boys all came from U.S. Detention Camp Marcus W. Orr, near Salzburg. With twelve thousand Nazi detainees, it was the largest pen in Austria. While detained in Camp Orr, Hoettl and his friends became members of the Spinne (Spider), a political organization created in the camp to plan the resurrection of the Austrian Nazi party and the second Anschluss or annexation to Germany.

Project Mount Vernon ran nets in the Soviet-occupied zone of Austria. Project Montgomery ran a net of Hungarians and Hungarian refugees, especially Volksdeutsche. Its mission was to penetrate the Hungarian army and Soviet occupying forces and to supply CIC with information on their leaders, plans, and operations.

Project Los Angeles’s mission was to penetrate and collect information on the Italian Communist Party and to compile a list of high-level communists targeted for assassination. The chief source of the Los Angeles net was Karl Haas. Two other top sources, according to the secret report, were Monsignor Federico Fioretti, a Vatican official and director of the Vatican press bureau, and Bishop Alois Hudal, pastor of German Catholics living in Italy and a key player in the Vatican ratline that found safe havens for former Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the Middle East and South America.

In 1956, nine years after it had hired him, the CIC learned that Verbelen was a convicted war criminal. At this point, the CIC was winding down its espionage operations in Austria because the Allied occupation was over and Austria was once again a fully independent country. To the U.S. Army, Verbelen was no longer a useful enemy. Not only was he unreliable because he had lied about his wartime activity; he was also suspected of double dipping—working for the Americans and the British or French at the same time. More important, he was hopelessly compromised. The Soviets had uncovered him and tried to blackmail him into becoming a double agent.

The CIC decided not to tell Belgium where Verbelen was hiding. Since Belgium had not requested his extradition, the United States was under no legal obligation to deliver him. Like Klaus Barbie, Verbelen had become a dangerous liability as a man who knew too much. It was in the interests of the United States to protect him because his exposure would also reveal the scope of U.S. covert operations in Austria.

The United States had little choice but to cut Verbelen loose “without prejudice… suitable for intelligence re-employment.” The Austrian state police immediately hired him as a paid informant, probably at the recommendation of the CIC. Verbelen went on to become an Austrian citizen under his real name.

In 1962, fifteen years after Belgium had convicted him, the Austrian department of justice learned from former resistance fighters that Belgium had sentenced Robert Jan Verbelen in absentia to death for crimes committed as a captain in the Flemish SS. Austrian prosecutors tried him for the murder of seven named Belgian resistance fighters and asked for a life sentence. In turn, Belgium asked for his extradition. Both lost.

A Viennese court acquitted Verbelen of war crimes because, it said, he had just followed orders when he executed the seven civilians. The Austrian Supreme Court disagreed. Concurring with the Nuremberg Military Tribunal that obedience to a superior does not justify the commission of a crime and may only serve to mitigate punishment, it overturned the lower court decision, recommending a retrial.

In the end, the Austrian justice department declined to retry Verbelen. And without a conviction, his Austrian citizenship remained valid since he had not acquired it fraudulently. That left Belgium with empty hands because Austrian law prohibited the extradition of Austrian citizens.

Verbelen went on to write a string of espionage novels and to serve as a spokesman and publicist for neo-Nazi organizations. He died a free man in 1991, while John Demjanjuk was still sitting on death row. One hundred former SS men and neo-Nazis attended his funeral.

The Verbelen story is important for two reasons. It demonstrates that America’s use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators was extensive. And it shows clearly that their employment and subsequent protection was no bureaucratic accident. It was a U.S. Army open-door policy.

Mykola Lebed was one of America’s most sensitive Nazi secrets. The State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA not only protected him for decades; they guarded his deeply buried file like junkyard dogs. John Loftus stumbled across Lebed’s records in U.S. Army intelligence vault number six at the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland, in 1980 while working on the Belarus Project for OSI director Walter Rockler. Loftus’s discovery so unnerved the Justice Department and the CIA that both threatened him with criminal prosecution if he ever revealed Lebed’s name.

What was so special about Mykola Lebed that Washington went to such lengths to keep his story locked in a basement vault?

Lebed was a fiercely passionate and ruthless leader in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from 1931, when western Ukraine was part of Poland, to 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. OUN’s primary enemy was Poland.

To most Ukrainian dreamers of and plotters for an independent republic, Lebed was a national hero like his superior, Stepan Bandera, whom the CIA considered “dangerous” and whom the KGB assassinated in Munich in 1959. But to Moscow and his Ukrainian political enemies, Lebed was a Gestapo-trained terrorist, Nazi collaborator, and sadistic war criminal who had murdered thousands of Poles, communists, Jews, and Ukrainian rivals.

On the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, OUN was bitterly divided between two opposing political factions. OUN-M was led by Andriy Melnyk, an elderly moderate and conciliatory nationalist. The larger OUN-B was led by Stepan Bandera, a much younger, radical, and ambitious politician. According to recently declassified intelligence files, Mykola Lebed was Bandera’s number-two man and chief of the SB (Sluzhba Bezpeky), the underground terror arm of OUN-B. Both factions had planned and participated in the assassination of Polish officials before the war and conducted a “reign of terror” against Polish civilians. “The mere mention of the name ‘Bandera,’” the OSS reported a few months after the war, “invariably brings curses and imprecations among Polish refugees.”{The Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the leadership and officers of both OUN factions were inimical to the United States.}

Divided or not, OUN’s hatred of Stalin and the communists presented Germany with a unique opportunity. Why not recruit both factions and their combined army of thousands of freedom fighters to help Germany conquer the Soviet Union? Didn’t the Reich, Melnyk, Bandera, and Lebed have the same enemies—Poles, Soviets, and Jews?

To attract OUN and its resistance fighters, Germany offered a deal. It promised the organization an independent Ukraine in exchange for its help in defeating the Red Army and making Eastern Europe Judenrein. Germany failed to explain, however, how or when the independent state would be created and which OUN faction would lead it. Unaware that Berlin considered Slavs less than human ( untermenschen ) and that it planned to use them as slaves after Germany conquered Europe, both OUN factions swallowed the bait.

While the SS was recruiting and training the Belorussian exiles, who would soon form the core of the Nazi puppet government in their homeland, the Gestapo was training Lebed and his fellow Banderist terrorists as guerillas, saboteurs, and assassins at its center in Zakopane, near Krakow. According to one of the Gestapo trainees, Lebed personally supervised the torture and execution of Jews to “harden” his men.