Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The CIC moved Lebed, aka “Roman Turan,” to Munich, where Frank Wisner snapped him up. With Lebed’s help Wisner created the sprawling Operation QR Plumb, which, among other projects, employed teams of assassins and saboteurs made up of UPA war criminals and former Waffen SS men, especially from the German-trained Nightingale and Roland brigades. The men were assigned to hit squads with code names like Operation Ohio, Operation Hagberry, and Operation Lithia. In Operation Ohio, for example, Lebed (code name P/2) recruited a squad of Ukrainian ex-Nazi collaborators who were credited with assassinating at least twenty suspected double agents and Soviet spies in an American DP camp near Munich.

Lebed also supervised espionage operations inside Ukraine as part of the larger Operation Redsox, a joint American and British venture. Under subproject Aerodynamic, Lebed organized parachute drops of men (Apostles) and supplies to the UPA hiding in the Carpathian Mountains. Supply bundles included grenades, guns and ammo, radio sets, maps and money, wristwatches, collapsible shovels for trenching, compasses, canteens, and flashlights. He also created a safe courier route between Germany and Ukraine through Czechoslovakia. With the help of British intelligence officer and Soviet mole Kim Philby, the KGB eventually captured and executed up to 75 percent of the agents air-dropped into Ukraine.

Within two short years under Lebed’s grassroots leadership and with eager help from the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR), a major Ukrainian liberation group that the CIA financed, Wisner had “established a secure underground movement” in Ukraine made up mostly of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals.

Like the CIC in Rome, the CIA in Munich soon got the jitters. With Soviet kidnappings and assassinations routine, and Lebed’s Ukrainian enemies still hunting for him, “Roman Turan” was no longer safe in Europe. Wisner and the CIA smuggled Lebed and his wife and daughter into the United States in 1949, the same year a former U.S. covert agent helped Romanian war criminal Nikolae Malaxa procure a visa to the United States.

New York City became Lebed’s new base of espionage operations. He wasn’t alone. In 1951, the CIA admitted to the INS: “There are at least twenty former or active members of the Security Branch (SB) of OUN-B in the United States at the present time.”

Unaware that Lebed was a top CIA operative, INS began investigating him for visa fraud, probably based on a tip from one of Lebed’s Ukrainian political enemies. As part of its background investigation, INS interviewed Ukrainian Americans and learned what the CIC had discovered four years earlier—that Lebed was “one of the most important Bandera terrorists… [responsible] for wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jewish [sic]…. In all these actions, Lebed was one of the most important leaders.”

Noting the CIA’s interest in Lebed, INS debriefed the agency on its findings with a warning that its star agent was a prime candidate for deportation. In response, CIA deputy director Allen Dulles made a strong case for a cover-up. The charges against Lebed were false, Dulles argued. Lebed had fought with equal zeal against the Nazis and Bolsheviks. Furthermore, Lebed and his contacts had been of “inestimable value” to the CIA and its operations, and he was “urgently needed.” Finally, Dulles argued that to deport Lebed would “severely damage national security” and “create serious repercussions among the anti-Soviet Ukrainian groups all over the world.”

Dulles wasn’t necessarily lying. The Wisner clique inside the CIA knew about Lebed’s war criminal background, but the agency as a whole probably did not. Confronted with Dulles’s cogent arguments to protect Lebed and his identity, the INS reluctantly caved in.

“We have always cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency within the permissible limits of the law,” INS commissioner Argyle Mackey told the CIA, “and have in this case suspended further investigation of what appears to be a clear-cut deportation case.” According to newly declassified documents, Mackey went on to ask the CIA to inform INS when Lebed was no longer useful.

In spite of the INS promise to drop its investigation of Lebed, the CIA was not about to take any chances. To secure his continued services, the agency played its trump card. Invoking the “one hundred rule” recently approved by Congress, it asked the attorney general to grant Lebed U.S. citizenship and to make it retroactive. Then the CIA offered to share Lebed with the FBI.

Director J. Edgar Hoover instructed a team of agents to interview Lebed as a possible FBI source and to conduct a background check on his wartime activity. The agents learned about Lebed’s alleged UPA war crimes from Ukrainian Americans. They also obtained captured German documents from the British intelligence agency MI5 that “expressed German appreciation of, and favor towards, bands of Ukrainian insurgents who apparently fought guerilla warfare against the Soviets. In one Lebed was described as the political leader of the Ukrainian Rebellion Army [sic], a valuable aid for the German High Command.”

The CIA put Lebed in charge of a massive psych warfare program in New York, code name QRDynamic, under a front organization called the Prolog Research and Publishing Association, with sister offices in Munich, Paris, and London. Dynamic’s objective was “to produce and infiltrate into the Soviet Union material aimed at keeping alive the Ukrainian national spirit while exploiting the vulnerabilities of the Soviet system.” Lebed—still known as P/2—and a handful of his most trusted men, including Dynamic’s vice president, Myroslav Prokop, and its operations officer, Anatol Kaminsky, hired Ukrainian authors, scholars, journalists, radio broadcasters, and poets to deluge Ukrainians on both sides of the Iron Curtain with propaganda calling for an independent Ukraine. Dynamic’s Ukrainian hires were not told they were working for the CIA.

Dynamic’s Munich office published a steady stream of books and articles through the Ukrainian Society for Studies Abroad; beamed thousands of Nova Ukraina radio broadcasts each year into Ukraine from Athens and Munich; dropped millions of leaflets on the Ukrainian countryside; and published its own newspaper, Suchasna Ukriana ( Ukraine Today ) to counter Soviet-backed Ukrainian papers like Michael Hanusiak’s News from Ukraine, which had featured the photos of John Demjanjuk’s alleged Trawniki card.

Working out of his New York publishing company office, Lebed traveled around the United States and Canada preaching the Gospel of Independent Ukraine, attempted to unite the Ukrainian émigré communities behind him, and undertook information gathering and dissemination missions to Europe. He retired from Prolog in 1975, the same year in which Hanusiak sent his Ukrainian list containing Iwan Demjanjuk’s name to Senator Jacob Javits and Elizabeth Holtzman was badgering Henry Kissinger to seek help from West Germany, Austria, Israel, Poland, and the Soviet Union for archival documents on former Nazis and Nazi collaborators.

Ten years later, in 1985, a bureaucrat at the State Department or the Justice Department goofed. He inadvertently handed over a top-secret Lebed file to GAO investigators. Without mentioning Lebed by name, the subsequent GAO report to Congress did summarize his Nazi collaboration, war crimes, and CIA connection.

Under pressure from Holtzman, Peter Rodino, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threatened to hold public hearings on the unnamed Nazis and Nazi collaborators listed in the GAO report. At the same time, the CIA heard rumors that OSI was investigating Lebed’s wartime activity.