Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The CIA panicked. If the GAO report, which already had been made public, was not officially “corrected,” if Rodino held hearings, and if OSI aggressively pursued its investigation of the former Banderist leader, Lebed’s name was bound to be made public and Operation QRPlumb and its subgroup QRDynamic would be compromised. The CIA couldn’t risk it. As the agency put it in a secret synopsis of Plumb operations: “QRPLUMB is one of the oldest, and most effective CA [covert action] operations targeted on the Soviet Union and is the only project conducting CA operations inside the Soviet Ukraine.”

The CIA went to the plate and struck out. The GAO refused to amend its report. Then the CIA hit two home runs. It was told by OSI director Neal Sher that “his office does not have a file on Mr. Lebed and, at the moment, has no basis for initiating an investigation of him. If such investigation is warranted in the future, he will inform the Agency of his action…. He recommended that we inform our Congressional oversight committee and Congressman Rodino of the case and our security concerns, especially since he had indications that Congressman Rodino was under pressure from certain quarters to hold hearings on the GAO report.”

Rodino caved in to CIA pressure and canceled the hearings on the twelve nameless Nazi collaborators in the GAO report. The Lebed issue made a media splash, left no ripples, and quietly disappeared.

In the end, Lebed admitted he was a terrorist. He told OSI investigators that he had been “indirectly involved in the planning of the political assassination” of Polish interior minister Pieracki before the war, but he denied that he had ever collaborated with the Germans. And he refused to answer further OSI questions about his activity as a Banderist because “he was protecting live persons.”

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the CIA dissolved Plumb and severed its ties to Prolog with a final payout of $1.75 million that would, according to QRPlumb CIA files, “provide for a more natural, and thus, less risky—from a security standpoint—transition to private support. Upon receipt of the termination payment, the relationship between the CIA and the project will end.”

Lebed died a free man in 1998. To most Ukrainians, he is still a national hero who risked his life to fight for an independent homeland. As one Ukrainian historian put it, the allegations of war crimes against Lebed and other Ukrainian freedom fighters were nothing more than “typical KGB-sponsored disinformation about the Ukrainian struggle.”

The Lebed story is a case study of how the CIA recruited a major war criminal and why it protected him. At the same time it raises a troubling question. INS commissioner Mackey told the CIA that Lebed was a clear-cut deportation case and that the service had “always cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency.”

How many other clear-cut Nazi deportation cases did INS try to bury at the request of the CIA? Andrija Artukovic? Otto von Bolschwing? Hermine Braunsteiner? Wernher von Braun? Nicolae Malaxa? Boleslavs Maikovskis? Arthur Rudolph? Tscherim Soobzokov? Hubertus Strughold? Viorel Trifa?

Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was one of the biggest, best known, and most politically dangerous and controversial Cold War spies of the postwar era. Books have been written about him and his espionage work for the United States from 1946 to 1956. His spy network, which the United States called the Gehlen Org, worked first for the CIC under code name Rusty, then for the CIA under code name Zipper.

Gehlen moved in and out of the shadow world of smoke and mirrors, asset theft and double-agent perfidy, blackmail and assassinations, and top-secret communiqués. As a result, much of what has been written about him and his organization is riddled with gaps, weak links, and blurred connections. Newly declassified documents have filled in some holes and clarified some issues.

General Gehlen was the Reich’s chief of the Foreign Army-East (FHO), an intelligence-gathering organization with two missions. The first was to collect military information about the Soviet Union. The second was to pinpoint the location of Jews, communists, Gypsies, and other enemies of the Reich so that Einsatzkommandos, with the aid of local police and militia volunteers, could arrest, rob, and murder them. Given the critical postwar intelligence role that Gehlen played, first for the United States, then for West Germany, it is important to ask whether he was a war criminal. The answer is as murky as Gehlen’s own spy world.

Reinhard Gehlen was a soldier in the German regular army. He was not a member of the Nazi Party nor did he belong to any Nazi criminal organization such as the SS, SD, or Gestapo. Like Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, General Gehlen was a desk man. As such, it is unlikely that he got his gloves bloody rounding up and shooting the more than 1.5 million Jews, Gypsies, and communists who were executed in the forests of the Soviet Union, Gehlen’s territory of expertise. What is clear, however, is that his agents did his dirty work.

To supply Gehlen with the intelligence information he demanded, his men interrogated, then approved or supervised the torture and the starvation and/or execution of three to four million captured Soviet soldiers in POW camps like Rovno and Chelm. The number is equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles. Like the Dora Nazis who knew about and approved the use of slave laborers to excavate tunnels, Gehlen knew how his agents extracted the intelligence information they fed him. There is no evidence to suggest that he objected to their methods.

The CIC never placed Gehlen’s name on—and in fact they more likely scratched it from—the Central Registry of War Criminal and Security Suspects (CROWCASS). If General Gehlen had been tried for war crimes, however, he undoubtedly would have been as slippery as a double agent, arguing like Eichmann in Israel and Romanian Iron Guardist Bishop Valerian Trifa in America that he never killed or tortured anyone. Whether he ever pulled the trigger, personally ordered the execution of POWs, or was present when they were tortured and murdered will probably never be known. Be that as it may, the Displaced Persons Commission defined high-level intelligence officers ( Abwehrmänner ) like Gehlen inimical to the United States.

Anticipating the defeat of Germany, Gehlen, like von Braun and Lebed, feathered a warm nest for himself. He microfilmed FHO’s extensive files on the Soviet Union and buried them in the Alps in airtight, rustproof canisters. Among the documents were Soviet five-year plans; analyses of Soviet defense production capabilities; the sites of Soviet research centers and critical oil and mineral deposits; and the names of Communist Party officials.

When Gehlen surrendered to the U.S. Army just before the end of the war, he offered CIC the microfilm and his entire anti-Soviet espionage network, most of which was still in place. Frank Wisner interviewed him in Germany and the CIC debriefed him for months at Fort Hunt, Virginia, a suburban Washington POW interrogation center, code name “Box 1142.” Once again following the principle of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the interrogators never seriously investigated Gehlen for suspected war crimes. They asked “Is he useful,” not “What war crimes did he commit?”

The CIC was impressed with Gehlen’s cache of microfilm, his Soviet intelligence experience, and his pool of intelligence officers, agents, and informants. It was also desperate. The United States didn’t even know where to find the major bridges in the Soviet Union, much less have any reliable information about its new enemy’s troop strength, weapons deployment, long-range-missile capabilities, and nuclear research.