Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Although U.S. officials at the State Department and OPC knew about Poppe’s Nazi collaboration, the United States asked Great Britain if it could have him. The British sighed in relief and said good riddance. Moscow had been pestering Britain to hand over Poppe under the Yalta repatriation agreement but it had refused on principle. According to recently declassified intelligence files, the CIA secretly moved Poppe from the British zone to the American zone in operation “Father Christmas,” and from there to the United States. He arrived at Westover Field, Massachusetts, on a U.S. Air Force transport in May 1949 and went to work for Bloodstone as a consultant to the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.

Gustav Hilger was a German citizen who had been born in Russia. His father was German, his mother Russian. As a former diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow, Hilger was another huge catch. His firsthand experience with both Soviet officials and anticommunist groups made Hilger OPC’s most prized trophy.

Hilger’s hands were hardly clean. During the German-Soviet war, he recruited men for the Waffen SS and helped the Wehrmacht organize Vlasov’s army. There is also evidence to suggest that he actively assisted Einsatzkommandos in rounding up Jews. After retreating to Germany with the German army, Hilger continued to work for the Nazi foreign ministry and served as personal secretary to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s foreign minister. (Ribbentrop was convicted and executed at Nuremberg.) Hilger also is credited with helping to round up Italian Jews and to arrange asylum in Germany for Hungarian soldiers implicated in the murder and deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

After the war, Hilger spied for the United States as a member of the Gehlen Org. The CIA was so impressed with his credentials that it promised U.S. citizenship for him and his family if he agreed to work for the State Department in America. With the backing of George Kennan, the CIA asked the INS to waive its required examination of Hilger at his port of entry, and requested that his case be handled “on a classified basis.” Hilger went to work as a consultant for State and the CIA. As promised, he eventually received U.S. citizenship under the CIA’s one-hundred rule exception.

“The fact that the Office of Policy Coordination wanted Nicholas [sic] Poppe and Gustave [sic] Hilger as consultants and brought them to the United States for permanent residence is a significant step,” CIA historian Ruffner reasoned. “German diplomats and Russian social scientists with Nazi records, in addition to German wartime intelligence officers and agents, were now regarded as valuable assets in the struggle against the Soviet Union.”

Although many of the Soviet Union experts, scholars, and propagandists employed by Bloodstone in America and in Western Europe were “gentleman” Nazis and collaborators, the same cannot be said of Bloodstone’s Eastern European covert operatives. By way of example, Simpson cites three Albanian pro-Nazi fascists admitted to the United States under the Bloodstone program—Midhat Frasheri, Xhafer Deva, and Hasan Dosti.

Frasheri was the head of Balli Kombetar, a pro-Nazi fascist group in Albania. Deva was Albania’s former quisling foreign minister. Dosti was its former quisling minister of justice. All three Nazi collaborators were directly involved in the deportation of Jews to Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. (At the time Bloodstone recruited Deva and Dosti, quislings were barred from entry into the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948.)

Bloodstone was absorbed into other CIA clandestine programs in the early 1950s. By the time OSI was formed in 1979, Hilger, Frasheri, and Deva were already dead. Poppe and Dosti were still alive, but were never prosecuted for visa fraud.

The Lodge Act, described in chapter 3, provided the legal justification for a “guerilla army.” The act authorized the armed services to enlist up to 12,500 “aliens,” specifying that the recruits must be single men, eighteen to thirty-five years old, who were willing to serve in the U.S. Army for five years. The volunteers would have to agree to remain single until they completed basic training as “Regular Army Unassigned” privates, with commensurate pay. As an inducement to enlist, the United States guaranteed recruits permanent U.S. residency at the end of their service as long as they were honorably discharged. The volunteers who passed a series of tests administered by the U.S. Army in Germany would be trained by the army and the CIA at Camp King, West Germany, and in military schools and camps in the United States.

Barred from service in the new guerilla army were German nationals and citizens of NATO nations. This ensured that virtually all enlistees would be Eastern Europeans. Also excluded as unacceptable were anarchists, communists, convicted criminals, alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex offenders unless granted a waiver from the army’s adjutant general. There was no directive prohibiting the recruitment of non-German Nazi collaborators.

According to a 1951 top-secret, sixteen-page report, “special consideration” would be given to qualified applicants who had experience in guerilla and mountain warfare, police and security work, and military intelligence and counterintelligence. In other words, the army was looking for former Vlasov army soldiers, Waffen SS volunteers, and freedom fighters. The army estimated its guerilla requirements as: 7,400 men between September 1951 and July 1952; 6,100 men between July 1952 and July 1954; and 2,400 yearly thereafter.

By 1950, when the Lodge Act was passed, it was well-known that freedom-fighting guerillas had frequently engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, Orthodox Serbians, and Russian POWs, among others. It was also known that local police and security units in countries occupied by the Nazis were organizations that had been designated as criminal by the Nuremberg Tribunal and defined as inimical to the United States by the Displaced Persons Commission.

The army determined that there were thousands of middle and Eastern Europeans fit for guerilla army service and provided the following estimates: Estonians (5,850); Latvians (16,925); Lithuanians (12,625); Poles (209,725); and Czechoslovakians (1,025).

As envisioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the CIA, the guerilla army-in-waiting would be specially trained and ready to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack in Europe. Donning protective gear, troops would file into five B-23 bombers specifically designated for a nuclear counterattack and they would parachute behind the Iron Curtain, according to Simpson. Once on the ground, their task would be to crush any remaining communist resistance and to prevent the Red Army from regrouping.

Frank Wisner played a major role in recruiting the best and most experienced Eastern Europeans for the guerilla army, but he faced what seemed like an insurmountable problem. The best and most experienced were former Nazi collaborators. How would he sneak them into the United States for training?

Wisner wasn’t bashful. In a closed-door session with the heads of congressional committees, he asked for authorization to bring fifteen thousand émigrés of his choice into the United States. Congress laughed, then authorized the CIA to open the door for five hundred—no questions asked—over a three-year period under a little-noticed law, the Displaced Persons National Interest Case.

Not satisfied with congressional orts, Wisner took his plea directly to the White House. Based on information he supplied, the NSC issued—in addition to directive No. 86—intelligence directives No. 13 and No. 14, which were declassified in 2011 under my Freedom of Information Act request. Unobtrusively tucked in those directives was a provision authorizing the CIA to recruit guerillas through private émigré groups that helped displaced persons and defectors secure U.S. visas.