Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The United States hired Deppner, aka Egon Dietrich and Ernst Borchert, through the Gehlen Org. Precisely what he did for Rusty and Zipper is not fully known. The Dutch repeatedly asked Germany to extradite him, but Germany always refused. Finally, in 1964, almost twenty years after the war and perhaps under pressure from Holland, West Germany tried Deppner for murdering more than sixty Soviet POWs. Germany acquitted him for the same reason Austria had acquitted Robert Jan Verbelen—he had just been following orders.

Like Franz Six and Emil Augsburg, Erich Deppner died a free man, in 2005.

Based on newly declassified documents, it is possible to draw several conclusions about the Gehlen Organization. First, when the CIA took over “control” of the Gehlen Org from the CIC in 1949, shortly after Congress had approved the CIA’s new espionage charter, the agency’s employment policy was simple and clear. As historian Naftali put it: “There was no internal CIA policy against hiring Nazi war criminals.”

Second, Operation Zipper grew like a tumor as long as the CIA nourished it with cash. The Gehlen Org was so bloated that, at its peak, it was running up to four thousand agents and informants for the United States.

Third, the CIA never lost control of the Org because it never had control. And it certainly didn’t know how many Nazi war criminals it was employing through Gehlen. Nor did it care.

Fourth, the Gehlen Org was corrupt from top to bottom. Besides the usual internal power struggles and competition for talent and money, the Org was infested with double agents, double and triple dipping, Soviet moles, and fraudulent reporting. Much, if not most, of the information the Gehlen Org provided the United States was based on rumor, faulty sources, and outright lies.

Finally, under the guise of national security protection and perhaps as a final World War II irony, the Gehlen Org turned out to be a danger to U.S. national security. As a rogue espionage program, it opened a back door into U.S. intelligence operations in Europe for communist moles. And it deliberately planted or cultivated a false notion in the minds of Washington decision makers and eager spooks like Frank Wisner. That false notion cost the United States billions of dollars, created unrealistic expectations in émigré communities, and cost the lives of thousands of covert operatives and underground insurgent soldiers who believed in America.

Reinhard Gehlen had convinced the United States that Stalin was about to attack West Germany and start World War III. He spoon-fed the United States the lie because he thought—and rightly so—that the lie was what the budget-hungry Pentagon and CIA wanted to hear. The Allen Dulleses, the Frank Wisners, the J. Edgar Hoovers, and the Joe McCarthys of America were all ears.

Victor Marchetti, a former Soviet military analyst for the CIA and a vocal critic of the agency’s failed policies, summarized the value of the Org in sobering terms.

“The Gehlen organization provided nothing worthwhile in understanding or estimating Soviet military or political capability in Eastern Europe or elsewhere,” Marchetti wrote. “The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody else: the Pentagon, the White House, the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian Boogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.”

Whether or not one agrees with Marchetti’s harsh assessment, the conclusion to America’s ten-year espionage waltz with Reinhard Gehlen is as inescapable as it is damning. Under the guise of national security, and based on false assumptions and misguided Cold War pragmatism, the United States allowed itself to be duped into becoming an international employment agency for Nazi war criminals and terrorists.

Finally, as symbols of corruption and cover-up, Robert Jan Verbelen, Mykola Lebed, and Reinhard Gehlen add perspective and context to the John Demjanjuk story. By all Holocaust standards, Demjanjuk was a minor war criminal, a colorless death camp guard whom no one seems to remember. As a Trawniki man, he had no intelligence value to the United States. After the war, he didn’t work for the CIC, the CIA, the Gehlen Org, or the FBI. He tested diesel motors for the Ford Motor Company in Ohio and was not privy to embarrassing U.S. secrets.

That made John Demjanjuk a perfect diversion for the American intelligence establishment with secrets to hide, and perfect fodder for the American justice system and its courts.

John Gill went home to Chicago leaving Yoram Sheftel without a co-counsel for the Demjanjuk appeal at the Israeli Supreme Court. Sheftel was not disappointed. Since Gill didn’t know Israeli law, to keep him on the defense team would have been unfair to John Demjanjuk, who needed wily Israeli attorneys to argue his case before the High Court.

Sheftel began searching for an Israeli lawyer of stature willing to defend a convicted Nazi collaborator. And there was the rub. It was easy to find attorneys of stature, but nearly impossible to find one willing to suffer the hatred of his countrymen and to risk his life and career for a legal principle.

There was an exception. His name was Dov Eitan, and Sheftel was lucky to get him.

Eitan had been an Israeli judge for seventeen years. In 1983, Eitan was pressured to resign from the bench for engaging in politics as a judge. He had signed a left-wing petition condemning the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and calling for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops.

Now in private practice, Eitan watched much of the Demjanjuk trial on television and was deeply troubled by what he heard and saw. Judge Levin was so biased that he was “disgracing Israeli justice.” So when Sheftel invited him to join the Demjanjuk appeal, Eitan accepted, but only if Demjanjuk could convince him face-to-face that he was not Ivan the Terrible.

After interviewing Demjanjuk for hours at Ayalon Prison, Eitan concluded that Demjanjuk was never at Treblinka, and he agreed to argue in his behalf before the Supreme Court. “I want to tell you as clearly as possible,” Eitan told Demjanjuk, “you did not receive a fair trial.” Demjanjuk wept and the death threats against Eitan began. They never let up.

The Demjanjuk appeal was scheduled for early December 1988, eight months after the Levin court sentenced Demjanjuk to death. Eitan would argue the jurisdictional issues—about one-third of the case—and Sheftel would argue both the evidentiary issues and the alleged bias of Judge Levin and his court. A week before the appeal hearing, however, Sheftel got a hysterical phone call from his assistant at eight thirty in the morning. Dov Eitan was dead, she said.

Eitan had arrived at his office in the heart of downtown Jerusalem just after eight, the police reported. No one was there. He left his briefcase on his desk and apparently walked to the eighteen-story City Towers office complex one block away. He entered the building, stepped into an elevator, and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. When the light didn’t go on, he asked the only other passenger how he could get to the top. The passenger told him that this particular elevator only went to the fifteenth floor. The passenger got off at the seventh floor; Eitan exited at the fifteenth. He walked to a window, opened it, and jumped, landing on the pavement outside a dress shop. There were no eyewitnesses on the fifteenth floor. He did not leave a suicide note.