Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“Your car!” the woman shouted, turning her face away from the house and pointing to the flames.

Soobzokov opened the front door, then the screen door. There was a ten-second delay before an explosion blew him back into the hallway and knocked the woman and her dog to the ground. When he opened the screen door, Soobzokov had tripped a wire that detonated an eight-inch-long, booby-trapped, galvanized pipe bomb filled with smokeless rifle powder. A second shorter but wider pipe bomb failed to detonate.

The woman struggled to stand and managed to drag herself home. Her dog followed. When they reached the front door, the dog lay down and died. The passerby called an ambulance for the woman, then went to check on Soobzokov. He was alive and conscious but in a state of shock. His wife, daughter, and grandson were all injured when they ran barefoot over broken window glass to help him.

A truck parked across the street quietly pulled away.

Doctors at St. Joseph’s hospital worked on Soobzokov for eight hours. They amputated his right leg above the knee and removed bomb fragments. During the operation, he suffered cardiac arrest. (He had a serious heart condition.) Doctors resuscitated him. Although he was in critical condition, they believed he would live if his damaged heart could stand the stress to his shattered body. Soobzokov’s Good Samaritan neighbor was only slightly injured.

A phone caller identifying himself as a member of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) took credit for the bombing, uttering the JDL slogan, “Never again.”

The FBI assigned the Soobzokov case to its Domestic Terrorism Unit, a task force that most Americans didn’t even know existed. As the FBI saw it, the attempt on Soobzokov’s life was just one in a string of assassination attempts that began eight years earlier, in 1977. It was just one act of terrorism in a spree that both puzzled and worried the bureau. But unless one were a Jew, an Arab, a neo-Nazi, or an alleged Nazi collaborator, the series of intimidations, assaults, murders, and attempted murders mostly passed under American radar.

It all began with the publication of Howard Blum’s Wanted! The Hunt for Nazis in America.

Wanted! told the story of INS investigator Anthony DeVito, who had discovered Soobzokov living in Paterson and working as the chief purchasing agent for Passaic County. Not only did Soobzokov not like the book, but he filed an $11 million slander suit against the publishers and distributors of the book, the author Blum, De Vito, who was featured in it, and nine other named individuals.

The lawsuit created even more adverse publicity for Soobzokov, who was also on the Karbach list published in the New York Times. He began to receive a steady stream of threatening phone calls and hate mail, some sent to his office and some to his home. Cars followed him and crept by his house late at night with their lights out.

Given the public outrage over a Nazi hiding in America, New York prosecutors opened a grand jury investigation in 1978 into Soobzokov’s alleged war crimes as a Waffen SS officer and a policeman who collaborated with the Nazis. That same year, under the prodding of Elizabeth Holtzman, the Justice Department had created OSI, which immediately assigned teams of historians, researchers, and attorneys to investigate more than five hundred cases of alleged Nazi collaborators living in the United States. One of them was Tscherim Soobzokov.

In May 1979, a grand jury failed to hand down an indictment against Soobzokov because: prosecutors had not provided eyewitnesses to his alleged war crimes; Soobzokov kept invoking the Fifth Amendment; and the CIA refused to release his file, which detailed his work for the agency in Jordan and which also contained lie detector reports detailing his wartime activity.

A few days after the federal grand jury folded without an indictment, Soobzokov returned home from work to find a package sitting on his dining room table. It was the size of a cigar box, wrapped in brown paper. Soobzokov noticed what looked like wires at two corners of the package and called the police. Explosives experts detonated the powerful and potentially deadly bomb without injury.

The next day, the Associated Press and other media outlets received the same anonymous phone call. “You better write this down because I’m only going to say this once,” the caller said, speaking rapidly. “Parcel bombs have been sent to Nazi war criminals across the United States…. This is from the International Committee Against Nazism.”

The caller wasn’t lying. Five package bombs had been mailed from a New York post office on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street. Four bombs were sent to offices of the American Nazi party in Lincoln, Nebraska; Chicago; and Alexandria, Virginia. No one was injured because either the recipients handed the packages over to the police unopened or alert postal clerks blocked their delivery.

Five deadly bombs in one day was a new record for the FBI. The bureau’s terrorism unit took the threats seriously and opened an investigation, code name ICANBOM. Agents soon learned that the International Committee Against Nazism (ICAN), an organization the bureau had never heard of, was a nonviolent group dedicated to bringing Nazi war criminals around the world to justice. The FBI concluded that the caller who took credit for the package bombs was using ICAN for cover. The real perpetrator, the FBI believed, was a virulent, armed, and dangerous cell inside the Jewish Defense League.

Founded by right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1968, the JDL started out as a neighborhood patrol group that protected Brooklyn merchants and Hasidic Jews from a surge of anti-Semitic threats, robberies, and assaults.

The JDL soon broadened its goals, according to the FBI, to include intimidating anti-Semitic enemies of Israel; harassing the Soviet Union and its satellites because of their anti-Semitic policies; and expelling all Arabs from Israel. The JDL symbol was a clenched fist inside a Star of David. Its slogan: “Every Jew a 22.”

The FBI believed that the JDL was a loosely organized paramilitary group of more than six thousand young Jews covertly trained in terrorist tactics at Camp Jedel in Sullivan County, New York. The bureau also believed that Jedel JDL recruits received instruction in karate, rifle and pistol marksmanship, and the making and planting of bombs.

Rabbi Kahane didn’t try to hide JDL’s objectives. “If we see guns being used openly by certain groups,” he said, “we will tell the police, ‘either you people stop it, or we will have to use them also.’”

In 1974, the year Elizabeth Holtzman first read the INS files in New York, Kahane left Brooklyn for Jerusalem, where he formed the Kach Party, a militant, anti-Arab group of terrorists. Hundreds of young JDL Jews from the United States followed him. The FBI believed that Kahane continued to direct violent American JDL cells from Israel.

After the 1977 publication of Blum’s book, the JDL added a new goal, according to the FBI—exposing and harassing Nazi collaborators. The bureau was so concerned about potential violence that it notified each alleged Nazi collaborator on OSI’s active investigation list about the package bombs. It asked them to report to local bureau offices any suspicious or threatening activity, from heavy-breathing phone calls in the middle of the night to hate mail, death threats, and assaults.

Six months after the five parcel bombs were mailed from New York, OSI filed charges against Soobzokov for lying on his visa application about his wartime activities. OSI was forced to drop the charges, however, when the CIA furnished a document showing that Soobzokov had disclosed his membership in the Waffen SS during his visa application interview. Although voluntary membership in the Waffen SS made an applicant automatically ineligible for a U.S. visa, the CIA had managed to get Soobzokov into the country with the understanding that he would spy on the Circassian community for the agency and the FBI.