Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

In response to the brush-off, Yugoslavia eventually fed the “Nazi-hiding-in-California” story to columnist Drew Pearson. Hoover was not pleased when he learned—probably through a wiretap—that Pearson was about to publish a nationally syndicated column on Artukovic. Besides summarizing the war crime facts in the Nazi collaborator’s case, Pearson would be calling on President John F. Kennedy to scrutinize other war criminals living in the United States. That call to action threatened the bureau’s string of war criminal informants in émigré communities. After alerting Kennedy about the article, Hoover advised the president not to answer any questions about Artukovic during an upcoming press conference, hoping that the Pearson story would fade into yesterday’s news.

It didn’t.

Yugoslavia responded to the latest U.S. stall with intense media pressure in the form of an eighty-three-page publication titled This Is Artukovic. The slick, eight-by-twelve-inch magazine, written and published by a New York public relations firm, was seasoned with snippets from incriminating documents, photos of charred bodies, and excerpts from Artukovic’s speeches, among them exhortations to his Ustashi thugs:

“If you can’t kill a Serb or a Jew, you are the enemy of the state.”

“Don’t come to me unless you have killed two hundred Serbs.”

“Kill all Serbs.”

Hoover was so unhappy with This Is Artukovic , which he considered pure Cold War propaganda, that he assigned a team of bloodhounds to find out who paid for it. Hoover was betting that it was the Yugoslav Information Agency, the mouthpiece of that country’s U.S. embassy. If so, Yugoslavia would be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

FBI agents spent months contacting and interviewing every news organization and American leader who had received a copy of the booklet. They duly recorded the postmark on each envelope and filed the envelopes away in the hope that Yugoslavia had illegally used the U.S. postal service. In the end, it was huff-and-puff drama. The embassy of Yugoslavia never faced a judge, and the FBI failed to convert This Is Artukovic into a public relations windfall.

The This Is Artukovic teapot tempest demonstrated Hoover’s (and Washington’s) mind-set about former Nazis and Nazi collaborators hiding in America. While investigating the alleged illegal funding of a booklet and the alleged fraudulent use of the postal service, the FBI showed no interest in learning whether the publication’s war crimes allegations were accurate or not.

Hoover had long since made up his mind that Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito was using Artukovic for Cold War propaganda. A public execution of a much-hated Croatian would be a popular move in Serbia and would increase Tito’s shaky credibility there. Hoover advised the State Department not to take “appropriate action” against Artukovic. The FBI chief was not about to help a commie like Tito.

In the light of intense media pressure, the State Department decided otherwise. It instructed the INS to open dog-and-pony-show deportation hearings against Artukovic, angering both Croatian and non-Croatian Catholic organizations. They began lobbying Washington not to extradite Artukovic, alleging without evidence that the charges against him were blatantly counterfeit. Even Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, a leading spokesman for the Catholic Church in America, quietly lobbied against extradition, most certainly with the blessing of the Vatican. At stake was the World War II reputation of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, segments of which had openly supported and collaborated with the Nazis.

Artukovic’s Ustashi supporters in the United States set up an Andrija Artukovic Defense Fund, just as Hermine Braunsteiner’s friends had done for her. Dozens of Croatian Franciscan priests went door-to-door asking for donations, according to recently declassified FBI documents. The Justice Department turned the legal proceedings into an eight-year tug of war between Yugoslavia and the United States. Yugoslavia lost when the INS finally ruled that Andrija Artukovic was welcome to stay in the United States even though his presence was clearly unlawful.

While INS prosecutors and defense lawyers were pushing paper around Washington, Hoover was evaluating Artukovic as a confidential source. Soon after Artukovic settled in California, Hoover concluded that the Ustasha boss was “the uncrowned leader of the Croatian movement” in the United States, which was planning to establish an independent Croatia. As such, Artukovic had “considerable knowledge” about the major players in the current communist government of Yugoslavia and could provide information about Yugoslav espionage activities in the United States.

Hoover sent agents to California to pump Artukovic and to ask him to keep his ear to the ground for the footsteps of Croatian terrorists, real or imaginary. In return, Hoover would warn Artukovic about Serbian and Israeli plots to assassinate him as required by law.

Artukovic took the threat of assassination seriously. He isolated himself in his Surfside beach house. When members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) couldn’t get to him, they went after his brother John, chanting outside his home in Sherman Oaks, California:

“What do we want?

“Artukovic!

“How do we want him?

“Dead…

“Deportation now!”

The peaceful demonstrations soon grew violent when someone fired shotgun blasts through three of John’s front windows in December 1974, narrowly missing his daughter. A month later, someone placed a bomb under the car sitting in his carport. It exploded at two o’clock in the morning. The flames scorched the side of his house.

There was no doubt in Artukovic’s mind that the JDL wanted him dead and he was grateful to Hoover for literally saving his life. He wrote Hoover to express his “deep appreciation for the FBI’s interest in his safety.”

The government resisted and blocked efforts to find former Nazis like Baron von Bolschwing and Nazi collaborators like Andrija Artukovic and Bishop Valerian Trifa because it was not eager for Americans to know that, while it was trying some Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, it was paying others to spy for the United States and using them as sources and community stabilizers in the Cold War.

Former Nazis working for the United States aside, there was a more cynical and morally troubling reason for the U.S. government’s reluctance to search for, try, and deport former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. The Pentagon was sitting on a nasty secret that was bound to shock Americans if it ever leaked out. That secret began with the third name on the Karbach list that had disturbed Elizabeth Holtzman’s sleep—Hubertus Strughold—and ended in a secret army chemical research lab buried deep in the woods of Maryland.

Months before the war in Europe ended in June 1945, the Pentagon was anticipating both an opportunity and a problem. The Allies had long since concluded that Germany was years ahead of them in weapon, rocket, submarine, radar, airplane, tank, and chemical warfare development. What should be done with the estimated nine thousand German and Austrian scientists and technicians who had designed and created Hitler’s weapons of mass destruction? What should be done with their laboratories and factories, and the advanced rockets and airplanes, and tanks and subs they were bound to leave behind? What should be done with the tons of research housed in universities and laboratories or buried in mine shafts like pirate’s treasure? What should be done with the seventy thousand tons of uranium ore and radium products stored throughout Germany?