Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Jasiuk and other Nazi collaborators fled with the German army just before the Soviets reoccupied Kletsk in July 1944, the same month the Red Army liberated Chelm and took possession of Trawniki. Working for the Nazi regime in Berlin, Jasiuk organized the Waffen SS Belarus Brigade, made up of Belorussian volunteers, many of whom were fellow war criminals.

As a gifted organizer with contacts throughout the Belorussian community living in DP camps, Jasiuk was of great potential value to the United States when the war ended in Europe. He could help America solve its daunting espionage problems and realize its “impossible dream” to recruit, train, arm, and unleash against the Soviet Union—when needed—a mighty guerilla army of Eastern Europeans passionate about liberating their home countries. Guerillas would be trained in secret military camps in the United States and West Germany and would be ready and waiting for Washington’s call to arms.

Frank Wisner wasted no time. A former State Department employee who had joined the newly created CIA, Wisner immediately set up shop in Germany to recruit potential guerilla army organizers. He hired Emanuel Jasiuk and others to organize and unite the Belorussians in the DP camps, especially former members of the Waffen SS Belarus Brigade. With unrestricted travel papers from the State Department, Jasiuk moved with ease from one camp to another dressed in a U.S. Air Force uniform. He quickly set up a CIA-funded Belorussian spy network, united the old Belarus Brigade, and helped Wisner spirit future national leaders and warriors to America.

After Wisner completed his work in Germany, he returned to Washington, where he became chief of the CIA’s new department of clandestine operations. Wisner wanted Jasiuk to continue working for him in the United States, but that posed a problem. As a quisling Nazi collaborator and war criminal, Jasiuk was not eligible at that time for a U.S. visa.

Wisner found an easy fix.

During Jasiuk’s expedited visa hearing in Germany, two State Department officials vouched for him and argued that he should be granted a fast-track visa because he was providing invaluable services “of a highly confidential nature.” The State Department officials went on to corroborate Jasiuk’s fictitious cover story that he had worked as a slave laborer on a farm in Bavaria during the war.

CIC investigators responsible for screening visa applications didn’t buy the alibi and dug deeper. They learned that Jasiuk was “the central figure in a Nazi underground railroad” that helped Belorussian war criminals find a home in the United States. When CIC informed the State Department that it was going to arrest Jasiuk, Washington ordered the corps to drop its investigation. It did, but not before leaving an incriminating file behind. John Loftus claimed he had found the file and freely quoted from it.

Jasiuk went to work for Wisner and the CIA in South River, New Jersey, in 1951. He soon became head of the South River Chapter of the Belorussian Central Council, the equivalent of the country’s government-in-exile. His credentials, identifying him as an official representative of “the Belorussian Democratic Republic in the United States of America,” were signed by Ostrowsky, the former quisling president of Nazi-occupied Belorussia and the then president of the Belorussian government-in-exile.

Jasiuk’s job was to continue to recruit Belorussians for the CIA’s planned guerilla army and to heal the rift between the two fractious Belorussian communities of South River and Brooklyn. To fund Jasiuk’s operations, Wisner laundered money through Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty/Radio Liberation, and CIA-funded émigré research institutes.

Jasiuk wrote to both Truman and General Eisenhower that he would supply troops to invade the Soviet Union when America was ready to launch an attack. That was music to the ears of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief sent agents to visit Jasiuk, who was then working for the Thomas Electronics Corporation in Passaic, New Jersey. Their mission was not to arrest Jasiuk, but to recruit him into Hoover’s ever-growing domestic spy network. In exchange for information, the FBI would label all complaints about Jasiuk being a Nazi collaborator and a war criminal as “false claims,” one of several word tricks the FBI used to protect its friends and informants.

Washington viciously attacked The Belarus Secret. Because Loftus had signed a confidentiality agreement as a condition for reviewing classified CIA documents, he had to submit his book to the agency for publication approval. The agency heavily censored the manuscript, Loftus says, cutting any references to the role the Vatican played in smuggling former Nazis out of Europe as well as the names of every Nazi collaborator still alive —especially the director of the CIA’s top-secret espionage program, QRPlumb.

The CIA took Loftus’s frontal assault on its integrity and credibility very seriously. It denied his allegation that the agency either censored parts of The Belarus Secret because they contained classified information or that it recommended changes in the text. It also denied that it had hidden files from the GAO and OSI or had allowed any other government agency to do so. The CIA did admit, however, that it had “sanitized” nine of the files Loftus requested.

Suspicious by nature, the CIA didn’t trust Loftus, and for good reasons. Midway through his Belarus investigation, the agency noted, Loftus began requesting information on subjects not relevant to OSI’s mission, which was to find alleged Nazi collaborators living in the United States, to build cases against them, to charge them with visa fraud, and to expel them. Instead, Loftus was asking for files on subjects like NTS (an anti-communist émigré organization of Russians known as Solidarists), Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe, all of which the CIA had funded at one time or another. Furthermore, the agency argued that Loftus’s requests were unreasonable. It had 3,500 separate files on RL and RFE alone.

The CIA concluded that Loftus was on a fishing expedition in CIA waters, motivated by a “personal agenda.” Although it was worried that Loftus might go public and jeopardize some of its ongoing projects, the CIA chose not to attack him publicly.

The Justice Department was equally spooked by what Loftus knew. It threatened him with disbarment if he revealed the name of any living Nazi collaborator, and with prison if he revealed the contents of classified documents. For the record, OSI debunked everything Loftus wrote. In its 2006 draft internal history, The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, OSI devoted an entire chapter to trying to prove that John Loftus’s work was distorted and factually incorrect. At the same time, it devoted only one sentence to George Parker, without even mentioning his highly critical doubt memo about the prosecution of John Demjanjuk. Knuckles bared, OSI accused Loftus of sensationalism, faulty research, exaggerated claims, historical errors, and speculative conclusions based on incomplete and inaccurate sources. And OSI implied that Loftus had abused his top-security clearances by collecting data for a book on government time, instead of investigating alleged Belorussian Nazi collaborators still alive in America, not sleeping in a cemetery behind a church in South River, New Jersey.

OSI historian David Marwell, for example, called The Belarus Secret, published by Alfred A. Knopf, the worst kind of amateur history. “It is bad history because it is poorly written, poorly researched, and poorly documented,” he said in a memo to his boss, Allan Ryan. “It is fraudulent history because it mangles facts, distorts events, and misrepresents major themes.”