Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

As if that weren’t bad enough, Angelilli did not find John Demjanjuk’s testimony to be convincing even in the best light. Demjanjuk had admitted that he had served in Vlasov’s army, an organization defined as inimical to the United States. He had also conceded that he lied in his visa application about where he had been during the war years, and that he had received and subsequently removed the blood-type tattoo from his left arm.

Angelilli went on to deny Demjanjuk relief as an asylee under the Refugee Act of 1980 because he had failed to prove that the Soviets treated all POWs as deserters, or that those who were found to be deserters had all been executed.

Angelilli concluded: “It is… ordered that the respondent’s application for asylum… be and is hereby denied. It is further ordered that the application for suspension of deportation… be and is hereby denied.”

As harsh as the rulings were, Angelilli offered John Demjanjuk a kind and merciful—some would argue too kind and too merciful—way out of the United States. He ruled: “It is further ordered that in lieu of an order of deportation respondent be granted voluntary departure without expense to the Government on or before 30 days from the date of this decision or any extension as may be granted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. [Otherwise] respondent shall be deported from the United States to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Russia).”

The choice to leave the United States voluntarily was a realistic one. Canada had accepted other alleged former Nazi collaborators who had been ordered or were about to be ordered to leave America. More likely than not, Canada would have accepted Demjanjuk as well. But he chose not to leave the country voluntarily.

Before the United States could send him back to the Soviet Union, the State of Israel requested his extradition to stand trial there as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. On January 27, 1986, nine years after OSI filed its initial complaint against him, John Demjanjuk was escorted in handcuffs by U.S. marshals from a federal penitentiary in Springfield, Missouri, where he had been waiting for the outcome of his last failed appeal, to JFK International Airport in New York and onto El Al flight 004 to Tel Aviv.

Like the Soviet Union, Israel had the death penalty.

John Loftus blew a whistle on 60 Minutes. In “The Nazi Connection,” a May 1982 segment of the CBS News show, Loftus, a former OSI prosecutor who had never prosecuted a Nazi case, accused the State Department of smuggling more than three hundred Belorussian Nazi collaborators into the United States, helping them become U.S. citizens, using them as spies, training them as guerilla fighters, and hiring them as propagandists for CIA front organizations like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation, which became Radio Liberty in 1956.

The group included the entire Nazi puppet government of Belorussia (modern Belarus), Loftus told 60 Minutes, from its president to its chiefs of police. Loftus went on to accuse the U.S. government of hiding sensitive Nazi files from Congress, GAO investigators, INS, and the courts. He told 60 Minutes that he had found the missing files buried in U.S. Army vaults and that many had tabs that said, “Do not disclose to GAO unless authorized.”

Loftus accused the Justice Department of ordering the tabs.

The 60 Minutes story made headlines across the country and Washington was swift to react. Loftus’s former boss, Allan Ryan, wrote a letter to CBS assuring the nation that the Justice Department was continuing its investigation of alleged Belorussian Nazi collaborators and that charges would be brought against them, if warranted. Two weeks after its original broadcast, 60 Minutes aired excerpts from Ryan’s letter in which he called Loftus’s allegation irresponsible.

“Mr. Loftus persistently made such claims while he was employed by this office,” Ryan wrote, “but he was unable to document them satisfactorily and eventually left the office. The investigation has continued quite thoroughly without him.”

An outraged House Judiciary Committee, which reviewed some of Loftus’s classified documents, which he had copied illegally, asked the GAO to have a second look at America’s use and protection of former Nazi collaborators. Once again, the committee posed a carefully worded question to the GAO: Were there any government programs to help Nazi war criminals and Nazi collaborators emigrate to the United States and to conceal their backgrounds? Three years later, in 1985, the GAO issued its second report.

After stating that the FBI and the CIA had delivered all the files it had asked for, the GAO said that it found no specific programs to help former Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrate to the United States other than the two already known—Operation Paperclip, which brought nearly one thousand German and Austrian scientists to America, some of whom may have been members of the Nazi Party and lesser war criminals; and the CIA program (established under Section Eight of the CIA Act of 1949) to bring to America each year up to one hundred former Nazis and Nazi collaborators—war criminals or not—as long as they were of either intelligence or scientific value.

For a second time, the FBI and the CIA had duped the GAO, according to Loftus. They hid incriminating files on the 114 alleged Nazi collaborators whom the GAO had singled out by name for scrutiny. The resulting GAO report was little more than a tease. Because of its tiny sample, GAO said, it could not determine the scope of American use and protection of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Neither could it extrapolate the number of war criminals involved. Then, after praising the government agencies for delivering the files it had requested, the GAO covered itself by saying that “intelligence agencies often assigned projects with innocuous names which do not reflect the projects’ purposes and, therefore, GAO cannot assure that it requested all relevant project files.”

Among the relevant project files the GAO didn’t get were those with innocent-sounding names like Aerodynamic, Bloodstone, Circle, Hagberry, Headache, Odeum, Ohio, QRPlumb, Redcap, Redsox, Rusty, Tobacco, and Zipper, to name a few.

Although the GAO went on to summarize in some detail twelve cases of American use and support of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators, it did not identify the twelve by name.{In response to an FOIA request by the author for the names of the twelve former Nazis and Nazi collaborators described in its report, the GAO responded that the names were no longer available. It said they were part of the accompanying its report and, by internal regulation, all documentation is destroyed after five years. An FOIA request for a copy of Loftus’s first Belarus report is still pending.} Liberal congressmen like Barney Frank of Massachusetts were more than miffed. Calling the GAO report “totally inadequate,” Frank went on to say during a congressional hearing on the report, “I have never been more disappointed in a GAO work than I am today.” And former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman was characteristically blunt: “The action of U.S. intelligence agencies and officers documented in the GAO report—working with suspected war criminals and mass murderers, following a morally bankrupt policy, and deliberately deceiving other government agencies—took place without public disclosure.”

John Loftus had created a public relations nightmare, and he quickly became a Washington pariah.

For eighteen months, while Loftus was still at OSI, he had sifted through reports about Belorussia and Belorussians, hunting for who, what, when, where, why, how, and how many. Some of the documents he found were written in Cyrillic Russian and had never been translated. Most were stored in underground vaults like the ones he found in the U.S. archives complex in Suitland, Maryland, just outside Washington. Each vault was crammed floor to ceiling with classified files.