Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“No one had the faintest idea what’s down there,” Loftus would later write.

The documents in the vaults would remain secret and unorganized until President Obama’s 2009 directive to streamline the declassification process of 400 million pages. As a result, government agencies have sent—and continue to send—millions of secret and top-secret pages to the National Archives for declassification review.

Allan Ryan had already replaced Walter Rockler as OSI director when Loftus handed in the first draft of the “Belarus Project”—a report containing a list of forty suspected Belorussian Nazi collaborators living in the United States. Ryan greeted it with a great deal of enthusiasm and told Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti that the report was the “single most important matter in which OSI was engaged.” Civiletti, who had successfully argued the government’s Supreme Court appeal against Feodor Fedorenko, authorized an expansion of the Belarus investigation. More researchers were added.

The deeper Loftus dug, the more he discovered that files were missing, deliberately misplaced, or sanitized by a secret Special Operations Division (SOD) stationed at the U.S. intelligence center in Fort Meade, Maryland, about twenty miles from Washington. Based on what he learned from interviews with SOD staff, Loftus claimed that Nazi files were hidden from the GAO and OSI investigators on orders from the Justice Department itself. One example was a note attached to a U.S. Army intelligence file on Emanuel Jasiuk, a Belorussian Nazi collaborator whom the CIA had recruited after the war. It read: “Defense material NOT cleared for review by GAO. DO NOT disclose to GAO until notified to do so…. General Counsel, Washington, D.C.”

If such orders were issued, who at Justice had issued them, and why? Loftus asked Ryan and Ryan’s superior, Richard Sullivan, for permission to follow the trail. Permission was denied.

There was more to the decision to limit the Belarus investigation than met the eye. In the course of his research, Loftus had stumbled on a top-secret CIA program involving assassins, saboteurs, guerillas, and propagandists, most of whom were former Nazi collaborators. The program was aimed at Belarus’s next-door neighbor, Ukraine, and its discovery was nitro in a jar. When Loftus first learned of it in 1980, the Ukrainian operation was still alive and thriving with New York City as its base. It was the biggest and most successful CIA espionage program of the entire Cold War. The departments of State and Justice and the CIA guarded the identity of its chief Ukrainian asset like an atomic secret.

Loftus learned the asset’s real name.

Based on his continuing research, Loftus expanded his original list of confirmed and suspected Belorussian Nazi collaborators. He concluded that they were part of an ambitious State Department plan to recruit and illegally sneak into America the potential leaders of future independent states and to use them as domestic and international Cold War operatives.

Loftus learned that many of the Belorussians he was looking for were either living in South River, New Jersey, or buried in the cemetery of South River’s St. Euphrosynia Orthodox Church. Loftus and several coworkers, accompanied by a New Jersey state trooper for protection, visited the small graveyard one night in 1981. The cemetery’s iron gate was chained and locked. They climbed over the wall.

Flashlight in hand, Loftus walked through rows of tombstones, jotting down the names engraved on them. He would later compare them to the names on his master list. Dominating the graveyard was a stone pillar atop a mound. Etched on its base were the words GLORY TO THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE OF BYELORUSSIA. Affixed to the column was a picture of Radaslau Astrouski (Polish spelling Radoslaw Ostrowsky), the former president of Belorussia’s Nazi puppet government, former puppet mayor of Minsk, an independence guerilla fighter, a national hero, and one of the highest-ranking known Nazi collaborators to hit the shores of America.

Ostrowsky had been living in South River and working for the State Department since 1956, according to Loftus. He died in 1979, the year OSI was established. Surrounding Ostrowsky’s final resting place behind the church where he had worshipped for more than twenty years, as if to pay homage and keep him company, were the graves of the Nazi collaborators who had been under his command as the puppet president of Belorussia.

They were “mayors, governors, and other officials,” Loftus later wrote, “men who had ruled the Nazi puppet state of Byelorussia; who had guided the Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing squads—across a good part of Eastern Europe; who had assisted in the mass murder of thousands of Jews.”

The 1948 Displaced Persons Act defined “quislings”—those who served as puppets of an occupying enemy force—as Nazi collaborators. As such, they were ineligible for a U.S. visa. In so ruling, the United States was following the lead of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, which defined as war criminals those who had collaborated with the Nazis by “participating in a common design.” The 1952 immigration law, which replaced the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, however, ruled that quislings were eligible for U.S. visas.

John Loftus made his allegations and spun out his theories in The Belarus Secret, a book he wrote after leaving OSI and published in 1982. According to Loftus, Nazi planners screened leaders in the Belorussian government-in-exile living in Western Europe and selected twenty, two-man teams to administer the major cities of Belorussia. Each team member had earned his loyalty stripe by working with an Einsatzgruppe. The Germans appointed Radoslaw Ostrowsky mayor of Minsk and puppet president of Belorussia. As a reward for his collaboration, the SS promised to make him mayor of Moscow one day soon.

Ostrowsky and his fellow Belorussian collaborators were so successful that by the time the German army retreated west in 1944, eight hundred thousand Belorussian Jews—90 percent of the country’s Jewish population—had been murdered. The number did not include the thousands of other Jews who were transported to Minsk for execution. Anti-German Belorussians would eventually take credit for saving the lives of approximately eighty thousand Jews who survived the Nazi extermination program by hiding them in barns and forests.

How these Belorussian collaborators ended up living as free men in South River, New Jersey, according to Loftus, is a Cold War tale of State Department, military, CIA, and FBI duplicity, lawbreaking, obstruction of justice, perjury, and cynical disregard for human life. Although the Nazi collaborators entered the United States in a variety of ways, Loftus noted a discernible pattern. To illustrate that pattern, he cited the case of Emanuel Jasiuk.

The Nazis recruited Belorussian Emanuel Jasiuk, along with Ostrowsky, in Warsaw in June 1941, just a few weeks before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. They made Jasiuk the mayor of Kletsk, a medium-size town with a large Jewish population near Belorussia’s border with Poland. As a Nazi puppet mayor, Jasiuk also had jurisdiction over the territory surrounding Kletsk. His job was twofold. He would provide Einsatzgruppe B with the names of communists, communist sympathizers, and Polish intellectuals and troublemakers for execution. (Once part of Poland, western Belorussia had a large Polish population.) And he would organize the local police to help identify, round up, rob, and murder the Jews in his jurisdiction.

Under Jasiuk’s supervision, the Kletsk police uprooted an estimated four thousand Jewish men, women and children and imprisoned them in a ghetto in the center of the town. The police then supervised the digging of a long trench behind a local church within walking distance of the ghetto. When the ditch was completed, Jasiuk ordered his men to march the Jews—men first, followed by women and children—to the trench where German soldiers and Belorussian volunteers shot them. Four thousand in one eight-hour day. Five hundred an hour.