Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Unable to watch Romania turn into another communist satellite, Wisner quit OSS in late 1946 in complete disgust and returned to Wall Street. But baptized in the blood of Bucharest, he had become a born-again crusader with a mission to fight the evils of communism. How could he sit in a law office writing briefs while the Soviets were taking over the world?

In the summer of 1947, a year after he returned to Wall Street, Wisner went to work at the State Department. A former client of his law firm got him the job and became his boss. One of the first things Wisner did as deputy assistant secretary was to tour the displaced persons camps in Western Europe. Most DP camp visitors saw a mob of poor, frightened, squalid, and disoriented refugees. Wisner saw seven hundred thousand potential Cold War recruits. As soon as he returned to Washington, he established a study group at the State Department to prepare a policy paper on why and how to mine the mother lode of Eastern European refugees, thousands of whom had military training and experience in guerilla units, Vlasov’s army, and Waffen SS battalions.

Between 1947 and 1950, the newly created National Security Council formulated America’s open-door policy for Nazi war criminals based, for the most part, on secret and top-secret policy papers prepared by George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff and by the NSC’s interim advisory group—the State–Army–Navy–Air Force Coordinating Committee (SANACC). The chairman of SANACC was the State Department’s committee member.

December 1947. Ten months after Kennan’s Long Telegram from Moscow, the NSC fired its first salvo in the Cold War. Based on the Long Telegram, it authorized the newly formed CIA “to initiate and conduct… covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities.”

March 1948. Three months later, SANACC expanded the NSC’s December directive. It proposed that both the NSC and the CIA “promptly begin in Free Europe and Asia a systematic and combined program of screening refugees from the Soviet world” to be used for covert operations. SANACC also recommended the creation of a psychological warfare advisory group within the NSC. Edward O’Connor, who would later testify on John Demjanjuk’s behalf at the latter’s 1981 denaturalization trial, soon became chairman of the new psychological warfare group.

As a first step in America’s psych warfare effort, SANACC recommended that the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force should each be authorized to bring into the United States, with visa status, “fifty aliens… [and that] the Department of State should be authorized to bring in one hundred.” Fifty of State’s one hundred were to be deployed at the Voice of America (VOA), which had been transferred to State Department jurisdiction in 1946. SANACC chose “Bloodstone” as a code name for the covert warfare program and recommended that “the word itself be handled as Top Secret.”

June 1948. For its second Cold War salvo, the NSC charged the CIA with “conducting espionage and counter espionage operations” outside the United States using Eastern European recruits. Furthermore, the operations should be planned and executed in such a way “that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident and that, if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”

Significantly, the NSC included the following in its definition of espionage: covert propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion against hostile states, and assistance to underground resistance movements and anticommunist guerilla and liberation groups.

Also in its June 1948 policy paper, the NSC authorized the CIA to develop clandestine programs in partnership with the military so as to be ready in the event of war with the Soviet Union. To avoid overlap in espionage operations and to ensure at least some accountability, the NSC took Kennan’s suggestion and created the Office of Special Projects. A covert activity umbrella organization, its name would soon be changed to the nondescript Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to disguise its true purpose.

The creation of OPC ignited a spirited and protracted turf war. Ever distrustful of the military establishment, the State Department wanted both control over OPC’s covert operations and deniability in case they were revealed. As Kennan saw it, political warfare activity was “an instrument of U.S. policy and [he] hoped to man the controls.” Although he favored placing OPC in the CIA for cover, Kennan wanted it to “operate independently,” with the State Department pulling the strings. The CIA would have none of it.

In the end, State, Defense, and the CIA reached what would turn out to be an unworkable compromise. OPC would belong to the CIA, whose director would be responsible for ensuring that OPC’s covert activities “were consistent with U.S. foreign and military policy.” The CIA director would be guided by representatives from the departments of State and Defense. Secretary of State George C. Marshall appointed Kennan to be the State Department’s representative on the OPC panel and Kennan would soon become deeply involved in Project Umpire, an early OPC psych war operation in Germany.

August 1948. The Joint Chiefs of Staff called for the creation of a Guerilla Warfare School and a Guerilla Warfare Corps. Trained by the U.S. Army and the CIA and composed mostly of Eastern Europeans, the corps would conduct covert operations for the CIA with guidance from the military. The original proposal for the guerilla school and corps came from the Department of State.

March 1950. The NSC authorized the FBI and the CIA to work together to exploit the knowledge, experience, and talents of the Eastern European refugees living in the United States and to protect them from retaliation by the Soviets. To avoid future legal challenges in the use of war criminals, the NSC charged the Justice Department with finding ways within and around the law to bring them to America.

Finally, the NSC commissioned the Department of State to appoint OPC’s director. It was only fair. OPC was State’s baby. At the recommendation of George Kennan, Marshall chose Kennan’s Sunday night drinking buddy, Frank Wisner.

None of the declassified documents from 1947–50 that created Cold War policies and strategies prohibit the use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the three broad U.S. covert programs—psychological, political, and guerilla warfare. The closest any document came to addressing the issue is a delicately worded statement in a May 1948 top-secret SANACC report: “In the case of those who are excludible under the law, the Attorney General should authorize temporary entry under [his] discretionary authority.”

The fact that the NSC and the White House did not exclude former Nazis and Nazi collaborators from its proposed covert programs was an endorsement to use them. There is a legal precedent to support this argument. The U.S. Supreme Court based its 1981 decision in the Feodor Fedorenko case on policy formulation by nonexclusion. The High Court argued in that case that Congress could have stipulated that assistance to the enemy had to be voluntary to warrant exclusion from the United States, but it deliberately chose not to. Therefore, Congress established a policy to exclude both those who voluntarily and involuntarily assisted the enemy. Conversely, the NSC and the White House could have stipulated that former Nazis and Nazi collaborators should be barred from participation in U.S. covert activity programs, but they deliberately chose not to. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that the intention of the NSC and the White House was to include former Nazis and Nazi collaborators in covert programs if they were useful enemies.