Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The endorsement of using war criminals in U.S. covert operations by nonexclusion should come as no surprise. Military intelligence was already employing them extensively in Europe and would continue to do so until the mid-1950s (see epilogue to part 4). And the two men most responsible for formulating the Cold War policies (George Kennan) and their execution (Frank Wisner) had no scruples about using war criminals as propagandists, espionage agents, and guerillas. Wisner had already hired Iron Guardists in Romania during and after the war. And Kennan had opposed the Allied denazification plan after the war. If the Allies imprisoned Nazi leaders, he reasoned, they would be denying Germany the brains it needed to rebuild itself into a strong and viable anticommunist force in Western Europe. Furthermore, Kennan voiced no objections to the “extralegal character” of OPC’s ambitious covert plans.

Working under leadership that favored the use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators and without a policy banning their use, CIA station chiefs and case officers and agents did not hesitate to hire them. In a 1950 report advocating concealment of the Nazi backgrounds of CIA recruits, Peter Sichel, the agency’s top man in Berlin, told the head of the CIA in Germany: “Membership in the SS, or the SD, or the Volksdeutsche [German intelligence] no longer is regarded as a strike against any personality.” In fact, SS, SD, and Abwehr experience was viewed as an asset, not a liability.

“We would have slept with the devil to obtain information on communists,” a former CIA agent confessed to a GAO investigator.

By the early 1950s, with Kennan back at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the containment policy had morphed into liberation policy. Top-secret NSC directive No. 86 provided the initial impetus for a concerted propaganda campaign to encourage the citizens of Soviet bloc nations to rebel against the Soviets and to defect to the West. OPC espionage programs soon began to multiply like paramecia in a petri dish. By 1952, Wisner, “who had a new idea every ten minutes,” was running hundreds of covert projects simultaneously under a mind-boggling number of code names. OPC was managing seventeen overseas stations and employing twenty times more people than it had in 1949. As Burton Hersh put it in his book Old Boys: “Wisner pragmatically overloaded the books with paramilitary and political action projects, often at the expense of analysis or disinterested intelligence gathering.”

In 1952, OPC merged with the CIA’s Office of Special Operations to form the Office of Clandestine Services, with Wisner at the helm. All espionage activity was finally under one roof at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and would remain there.

If John Loftus erred by naming the Department of State as the ultimate bad guy in crafting and supporting America’s open-door policy for Nazi war criminals, it was because he failed to clearly distinguish between the policy designer, the policy authorizer, the policy implementer, and the policy facilitator.

The policy designer was indeed the State Department and George Kennan, who, according to his official biographer, “was so influential that the government had agreed to almost everything he had recommended.” The policy authorizer was the NSC, with the approval of President Truman. The policy implementer was the CIA, through OPC and Frank Wisner, with some oversight by the departments of State and Defense, which were also policy facilitators. The State Department did conduct some limited covert operations on its own (BLOODSTONE and the Grumbach Organization) and in collaboration with the Department of Defense (Project Solarium).

As the first major planned, coordinated, and serious U.S. covert program, Bloodstone was the fuse that ignited the Cold War. Begun in 1948, it had three objectives, each of which required extensive use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators: 1) recruit European scholars and experts to collect and analyze intelligence on the Soviet Union; 2) recruit displaced persons and émigrés to help train Americans in foreign languages, propaganda techniques, and intelligence gathering; and 3) screen and recruit DPs and émigrés for clandestine warfare that included extraction of political defectors from the Soviet Union and its satellites, sabotage, and assassination. To guide Bloodstone, the NSC and SANACC created a board of representatives from the departments of Justice, State, and War. Sitting on the panel was Robert C. Alexander, a high-level bureaucrat in the State Department’s visa office. His job was to see to it that Bloodstone recruits received visas, one way or another.

Bloodstone’s experts would serve as consultants to the State Department and OPC and as scholars-in-residence at major universities such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins. The propagandists, trained by State and the CIA, would disseminate misinformation about communism, keep the dreams of independent homelands alive, encourage a dozen or so governments-in-exile, and win the trust of Europeans trapped behind the Iron Curtain. The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe (RFE), and Radio Liberation/Liberty (RL) would become their homes.

Funded, equipped, and managed by the CIA, RFE beamed broadcasts to Russia; RL broadcast to the Soviet satellite countries. Cofounded by Wisner, the two stations would become, as he fondly put it, his “mighty Wurlitzer” organ on which he could play any political tune he wanted.

Wisner secured $5 million from the U.S. Treasury as Bloodstone seed money. With it, he recruited an initial 250 Nazi collaborators from communist-bloc countries, gave them a soundproof recording booth and a microphone, and put them to work for VOA, RFE, and RL, according to Christopher Simpson, who first exposed Bloodstone in his book Blowback. At the same time, the three stations became conduits for covert payments to national and international émigré organizations and research institutes, and to governments-in-exile.

Bloodstone experts, scholars, and propagandists were not Einsatzkommandos or fascist ethnic cleansers in blood-splattered boots. “They were the cream of Nazi collaborators,” Simpson observed, “the leaders, the intelligence specialists and scholars who had put their skills to work for the Nazi cause.” To illustrate his point, Simpson singled out two experts on the Soviet Union—Nikolai Poppe, a Russian Volksdeutsche, and Gustav Hilger, a German. Both men “played leading roles in Nazi Germany,” according to CIA historian Kevin Conley Ruffner.

Nikolai Poppe was the world’s greatest authority on Soviet Siberia and Outer Mongolia. During the war, he served as a translator for the Nazis in both of those German-occupied countries. Although Einsatzkommandos were busy killing Soviet Jews, Poppe steadfastly denied that he helped them in any way.

When the Germans retreated, they took Poppe with them and put him to work as a researcher at the Wannsee Institute in Berlin and at the German East Asian Institute in Czechoslovakia. The think tanks did research on “the Jewish problem.”

Both the Soviets and OPC lusted after Poppe. Moscow wanted so badly to try and to execute Poppe as a traitor and war criminal that it attempted to kidnap him. And the CIA put out an APB on him. The agency eventually found him hiding in the British zone of postwar Germany and contemplating suicide. Poppe was afraid that the Soviets might snatch his daughter or his semi-invalid wife and blackmail him into returning to Russia. Suicide would solve the problem. His two sons had managed to make it to England, where they were living safely under aliases. That Poppe was wanted by the Soviets made him even more desirable to the Americans.