Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

It was a devilishly simple scheme probably suggested by the Department of Justice, which the NSC had commissioned to work on the visa issues. Wallet in hand, the CIA would approach a private refugee organization such as the Committee for a Free Latvia. It would tell committee leaders the kinds of émigrés it wanted, emphasizing former Vlasov army soldiers, Waffen SS volunteers, and freedom fighters, all of whom already had some military training and experience. When the committee presented the CIA with a list of candidates, agents would screen them and select the most promising. The refugee organization committee, which more often than not had former Nazi collaborators as members, would then sponsor each selected émigré for a U.S. visa and the CIA wallet would open wide.

Convinced that World War III could begin as early as 1952, the military, for planning purposes, designated July 1 of that year as the date of the Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Over a ten-year period (1950–60), the CIA poured at least $100 million into the NSC-sponsored recruitment programs, according to Simpson. The precise number of guerillas trained at Camp King and in the United States is not known because many documents dealing with the guerilla army are still classified, if not destroyed. Authors like Christopher Simpson and Evan Thomas place the number at five thousand.

In addition to the guerilla army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA envisioned a small, flexible, and highly trained guerilla corps, which it renamed Special Forces. (They were the prototype for the Green Berets.) Once trained, the corps would become the “organizers, fomenters, and operational nuclei of guerilla units.”

Guerilla corps volunteers were rigorously screened and tested in Germany. In the beginning, most failed the required English Knowledge Evaluation Test. In June 1951, for example, the European Command lamented the fact that only 8 percent of the 1,004 applicants who took the exam passed. Army evaluators then recommended that, if an applicant passed all other screening tests and evaluations, he should be enlisted and given special English classes.

After the initial screening in Germany, the enlistees were shipped to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, for further evaluation. Of vital importance to the military and CIA were their language skills, training in police work, experience in guerilla and resistance warfare, skill in signal corps operations and clandestine radio communication, and their willingness to be air-dropped behind enemy lines.

Camp Kilmer used a standard form to assist evaluating each enlistee. The entry for Liber Pokorny, for example, said: RA 10-812-811… speaks, reads, and writes Slovak, Czech, German, and Russian… desires airborne training… Gestapo background… did not participate in guerilla warfare or resistance movements… radio operator… former member of the Czech army.

The volunteers selected to be guerillas would be trained at established army schools, supplemented by courses at navy and air force schools, the National War College, and the State Department.

The JCS was clear on who would employ the newly trained guerillas. “The primary interest in guerilla warfare during peacetime,” the Joint Chiefs said, “should be that of the Central Intelligence Agency and during wartime… the National Military Establishment.”

Once trained, the guerillas would be deployed to rescue VIP fugitives and defectors from behind the Iron Curtain, kidnap high-ranking communists, sabotage industries and communications, assassinate double agents and communist political leaders, and train and lead indigenous armies of freedom fighters in the Soviet Union and its satellites.

It is unknown how many guerillas the military and the CIA ultimately trained and deployed and how many were former Nazi collaborators. A series of declassified, top-secret records from the Camp Kilmer processing center list the names of 279 men screened and selected for service in Special Forces units. Fifteen percent of those voluntarily reported that they had former police affiliations.

Well into the 1950s, the CIA kept Special Forces assassination teams on call at U.S. air bases around the world, according to Simpson. And they were good. According to one high-level military officer, “Some of these guys were the best commercial hit men you have ever heard of.”

George Kennan went on to become U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. He would later say that proposing covert action was the biggest mistake he ever made. “It didn’t work out at all the way I had conceived it,” he admitted in 1975. “We had thought that [covert action] would be used when and if an occasion arose when it might be needed. There might be years when we wouldn’t have to do anything like this.”

For Frank Wisner, the conclusions were even gloomier. The failed Hungarian revolution probably contributed to his depression, because most of the insurgents killed in that 1956 uprising had been trained in Operation Redsox, Wisner’s pride and joy. He had promised the insurgents that the United States would provide help if they stood up to the communist regime. “Help” never arrived and Wisner never fully recovered from feelings of failure and guilt.

Two years after the Hungarian fiasco, Wisner was committed to a mental institution with manic-depressive psychosis. He killed himself with a shotgun in 1965.

On February 28, 1986, El Al flight 004 landed in a remote corner of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. Waiting on the tarmac to welcome John Demjanjuk to Israel after his eleven-hour flight was Alex Ish-Shalom, chief of the special investigation team assigned to the Demjanjuk case.

Dressed in a brown suit, open-neck shirt, and dark-rimmed glasses, and appearing calm and alert, Demjanjuk picked his way down the plane’s portable staircase. When he reached the tarmac, Ish-Shalom read Demjanjuk his rights. A U.S. marshal unlocked his handcuffs. An Israeli policeman recuffed him.

Demjanjuk asked a marshal who had accompanied him on the flight if he could “kiss the ground of the Holy Land.” The marshal said no. Then he turned to Ish-Shalom and told the police investigator something that Demjanjuk had said at a reflective moment during the trip.

“They don’t understand,” Demjanjuk had complained to the marshal. “There was a war on.” Prosecutors and judges would later interpret Demjanjuk’s remark as an indirect admission of guilt.

Demjanjuk walked a few yards down the runway, past reporters screaming questions, and stepped into a Brinks armored car. Escorted by a string of police cars, the rented Brinks took him to Ayalon Prison, a maximum-security penitentiary in Ramla, ten minutes from the airport. It was the prison where Adolf Eichmann was held and where he was executed by hanging in 1962 for his role as architect of the Final Solution. Eichmann was the last Nazi to be tried, and the only criminal to be executed, in Israel.

For Demjanjuk’s own safety, Ayalon isolated him from the general prison population of five hundred in a cheerful yellow-walled but windowless cell, twelve feet by twelve feet. Three guards watched over him during the day, two at night. A closed-circuit TV camera recorded his every move, except when he exercised in a private, concrete-walled courtyard.

Outside the prison fences, most Israelis supported the Demjanjuk trial but without a show of enthusiasm. “A dust of indifference has settled over Israel,” as one writer put it. “A creeping oblivion.” Or as another Israeli observed, “Enough! We know it already.” Demjanjuk had nothing to add.