Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“A list of fifty-nine names,” the Nazi hunter said. All are living openly in the United States, he explained, and there are eyewitnesses willing to testify against many of them. “We are counting on you.”

DeVito knew that if he passed Karbach’s list up the line, his boss would get orders from Washington to bury the names so deep that no one would ever find them. So he devised a three-point plan to protect the list. First, he would keep a copy in a secure place. Second, he would create an internal INS paper trail that would prevent the service from asking later, “What list?” Third, he would investigate the names on the list on his own, hoping to build strong cases against them—cases that could not be denied.

If all else failed, there was always the New York Times.

John Demjanjuk was not on the Karbach list. If anyone in his Ukrainian community in Cleveland knew of any war crimes he may have committed, no one had reported the fact to the INS, or to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, or to the World Jewish Congress. And unlike the Braunsteiner case, no alleged victim had asked Wiesenthal or Karbach to hunt for him.

Even though Demjanjuk was not on it, the Karbach list still constituted an important domino, the second to tumble in the row leading ultimately to him.

Publicity in the Braunsteiner case flushed more whistle-blowers into the sunlight. Two of them brought their Nazi collaboration cases to DeVito because, like Karbach, they knew he would take them seriously. Each had built an impressive file on a Nazi collaborator. One was Boleslavs Maikovskis. The other was Tscherim Soobzokov. Both were on the Karbach list.

During the war, Boleslavs Maikovskis was a policeman and the captain of the second precinct in Rezekne, a medium-sized town in eastern Latvia. The Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the Latvian police were inimical and barred its members from the United States.

As a Nazi collaborator, Maikovskis brutally rounded up Jewish and Christian civilians for execution by Einsatzgruppe A and burned their homes. In one purge, he delivered Jewish children from the Daugavpils ghetto to the SS to be shot and buried in a mass grave in the Pogulanka Woods.

An eyewitness at the roundup explained the role Maikovskis played. He described how Maikovskis dragged and shoved two Jewish women and two children into the group selected to die in the woods:

I saw him lead two small children out of the ghetto and he pushed them toward the whole group that was standing there. The children were grimy with black coal. They had been hiding. Maikovskis found them…. He beat them with the wooden end of the gun. They were crying, “Mama, Mama,” and the tears streamed down their dirty cheeks. And then the mother ran out from somewhere. Maikovskis pushed her. He kicked her. She fell down. She got up. He pushed her and the children to the other side where the people were standing…. They took out all the children and liquidated them.

In another action, he supervised the mass arrest and execution of the entire village of Audrini, with a population of two to three hundred, for allegedly hiding two Soviet soldiers, according to court documents and recently declassified CIA files.

To make a point, Maikovskis marched the Audrini men to nearby Rezekne and ordered the entire town to gather in the square to watch. He lined up the men in two rows of ten each. The front knelt, the rear stood. Then he gave the order to shoot. The bullets passed through the heads of those on their knees into the stomachs of those standing behind them.

Back in Audrini, an Einsatzgruppe death squad took the women and children into the forest and executed them. Then they burned the village to the ground. For his efficiency and dedication, the SS awarded Maikovskis the German Order of Merit and the German Cross.

Maikovskis entered the United States in 1951, swearing on his visa application that he had spent the war years as a civilian bookkeeper for the Latvian state highway commission. He settled in Mineola, Long Island, where he worked as a carpenter for fifteen years. When he wasn’t sawing wood, he tended his garden, went to Mass every morning, and served as an officer in Latvian American organizations until 1965, when the Soviet Union made a formal request to the United States for his extradition, on behalf of Latvia, to stand trial for war crimes. When the State Department refused to give up Maikovskis, the Times pounced on the story. To keep the media quiet, the INS opened an investigation into Maikovskis’s alleged Nazi background, then secretly slammed the file shut when publicity evaporated.

DeVito knew none of this when, a few months after he had met Karbach for lunch, a whistle-blower came to him with a file folder and some old black-and-white film footage featuring Maikovskis as a Latvian cop. The evidence in the file was so convincing that DeVito immediately ran a check to see what, if anything, the INS had on the Nazi collaborator. He found a reference to an investigative file in the INS New York office, but the file was missing.

DeVito began to call around to other INS offices. He eventually found the missing folder in Detroit. Why the hell did a New York investigative file end up in the Detroit office when Maikovskis lived in New York state and had no apparent connection to Michigan? The answer was buried in the file itself—an internal INS memo from the assistant director of investigations in Washington to Sid Fass, the Maikovskis investigator, ordering Fass to drop the case. Fass was so upset with the deep-six order that he made sure the incriminating memo got into the file before the file was hidden in Michigan.

If the INS wanted to play games, DeVito was ready. He baited a trap. First, he notified his superior, Sol Marks, that he was poking into the Maikovskis case based on new and compelling information. After making a copy for himself, he put the Maikovskis file from Detroit in the same drawer where earlier he had placed the Braunsteiner papers, then locked the drawer with the same combination lock. The next time he checked, the file was gone. And it stayed gone for more than two months, until the Times was about to run a Maikovskis exposé by Max H. Seigel. Like a good reporter, Seigel called Sol Marks for comment.

All of a sudden, Maikovskis was back under investigation, and Marks gave the case to DeVito, “the famous Nazi investigator” who had nailed Braunsteiner. At the same time, Marks blitzed DeVito with a caseload of alleged communist subversives, each marked “priority.” The only case in the pile on DeVito’s desk that wasn’t priority was Maikovskis. When DeVito opened the Maikovskis folder, the incriminating memo was missing.

What DeVito didn’t know in 1973, but probably suspected, was that the CIA had recruited Boleslavs Maikovskis as a soldier in its psychological war against communism. He was the vice president of the American Latvian Association, a leader in the Committee for a Free Latvia, and a member of the International Peasant Union. All three groups were anticommunist, and the latter two were secretly bankrolled by the CIA.

His leadership in the Latvian international community placed Maikovskis in a unique position to spy on his fellow Latvians for communist sympathizers, hunt for subversive plots, strengthen anticommunism in the patriotic groups, and promote a Latvian government-in-exile. And as a member of the international Hawks of the Daugava River, the Daugavas Vanagi, or Vanagis for short, his outreach was exponential. An anti-Soviet organization with a reputation of assassinating Latvian communist sympathizers in Europe after the war, the Vanagis had fifty-five chapters in the United States established to assist Latvian orphans and widows. In short, Boleslavs Maikovskis was a CIA case handler’s dream.