He also created a safe courier route between Germany and Ukraine through Czechoslovakia. With the help of British intelligence officer and Soviet mole Kim Philby, the KGB eventually captured and executed up to 75 percent of the agents air-dropped into Ukraine.
Within two short years under Lebed’s grassroots leadership and with eager help from the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR), a major Ukrainian liberation group that the CIA financed, Wisner had “established a secure underground movement” in Ukraine made up mostly of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals.
Like the CIC in Rome, the CIA in Munich soon got the jitters. With Soviet kidnappings and assassinations routine, and Lebed’s Ukrainian enemies still hunting for him, “Roman Turan” was no longer safe in Europe. Wisner and the CIA smuggled Lebed and his wife and daughter into the United States in 1949, the same year a former U.S. covert agent helped Romanian war criminal Nikolae Malaxa procure a visa to the United States.
New York City became Lebed’s new base of espionage operations. He wasn’t alone. In 1951, the CIA admitted to the INS: “There are at least twenty former or active members of the Security Branch (SB) of OUN-B in the United States at the present time.”
Unaware that Lebed was a top CIA operative, INS began investigating him for visa fraud, probably based on a tip from one of Lebed’s Ukrainian political enemies. As part of its background investigation, INS interviewed Ukrainian Americans and learned what the CIC had discovered four years earlier—that Lebed was “one of the most important Bandera terrorists… [responsible] for wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jewish
Noting the CIA’s interest in Lebed, INS debriefed the agency on its findings with a warning that its star agent was a prime candidate for deportation. In response, CIA deputy director Allen Dulles made a strong case for a cover-up. The charges against Lebed were false, Dulles argued. Lebed had fought with equal zeal against the Nazis and Bolsheviks. Furthermore, Lebed and his contacts had been of “inestimable value” to the CIA and its operations, and he was “urgently needed.” Finally, Dulles argued that to deport Lebed would “severely damage national security” and “create serious repercussions among the anti-Soviet Ukrainian groups all over the world.”
Dulles wasn’t necessarily lying. The Wisner clique inside the CIA knew about Lebed’s war criminal background, but the agency as a whole probably did not. Confronted with Dulles’s cogent arguments to protect Lebed and his identity, the INS reluctantly caved in.
“We have always cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency within the permissible limits of the law,” INS commissioner Argyle Mackey told the CIA, “and have in this case suspended further investigation of what appears to be a clear-cut deportation case.” According to newly declassified documents, Mackey went on to ask the CIA to inform INS when Lebed was no longer useful.
In spite of the INS promise to drop its investigation of Lebed, the CIA was not about to take any chances. To secure his continued services, the agency played its trump card. Invoking the “one hundred rule” recently approved by Congress, it asked the attorney general to grant Lebed U.S. citizenship and to make it retroactive. Then the CIA offered to share Lebed with the FBI.
Director J. Edgar Hoover instructed a team of agents to interview Lebed as a possible FBI source and to conduct a background check on his wartime activity. The agents learned about Lebed’s alleged UPA war crimes from Ukrainian Americans. They also obtained captured German documents from the British intelligence agency MI5 that “expressed German appreciation of, and favor towards, bands of Ukrainian insurgents who apparently fought guerilla warfare against the Soviets. In one Lebed was described as the political leader of the Ukrainian Rebellion Army
The CIA put Lebed in charge of a massive psych warfare program in New York, code name QRDynamic, under a front organization called the Prolog Research and Publishing Association, with sister offices in Munich, Paris, and London. Dynamic’s objective was “to produce and infiltrate into the Soviet Union material aimed at keeping alive the Ukrainian national spirit while exploiting the vulnerabilities of the Soviet system.” Lebed—still known as P/2—and a handful of his most trusted men, including Dynamic’s vice president, Myroslav Prokop, and its operations officer, Anatol Kaminsky, hired Ukrainian authors, scholars, journalists, radio broadcasters, and poets to deluge Ukrainians on both sides of the Iron Curtain with propaganda calling for an independent Ukraine. Dynamic’s Ukrainian hires were not told they were working for the CIA.
Dynamic’s Munich office published a steady stream of books and articles through the Ukrainian Society for Studies Abroad; beamed thousands of Nova Ukraina radio broadcasts each year into Ukraine from Athens and Munich; dropped millions of leaflets on the Ukrainian countryside; and published its own newspaper,
Working out of his New York publishing company office, Lebed traveled around the United States and Canada preaching the Gospel of Independent Ukraine, attempted to unite the Ukrainian emigre communities behind him, and undertook information gathering and dissemination missions to Europe. He retired from Prolog in 1975, the same year in which Hanusiak sent his Ukrainian list containing Iwan Demjanjuk’s name to Senator Jacob Javits and Elizabeth Holtzman was badgering Henry Kissinger to seek help from West Germany, Austria, Israel, Poland, and the Soviet Union for archival documents on former Nazis and Nazi collaborators.
Ten years later, in 1985, a bureaucrat at the State Department or the Justice Department goofed. He inadvertently handed over a top-secret Lebed file to GAO investigators. Without mentioning Lebed by name, the subsequent GAO report to Congress did summarize his Nazi collaboration, war crimes, and CIA connection.
Under pressure from Holtzman, Peter Rodino, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threatened to hold public hearings on the unnamed Nazis and Nazi collaborators listed in the GAO report. At the same time, the CIA heard rumors that OSI was investigating Lebed’s wartime activity.
The CIA panicked. If the GAO report, which already had been made public, was not officially “corrected,” if Rodino held hearings, and if OSI aggressively pursued its investigation of the former Banderist leader, Lebed’s name was bound to be made public and Operation QRPlumb and its subgroup QRDynamic would be compromised. The CIA couldn’t risk it. As the agency put it in a secret synopsis of Plumb operations: “QRPLUMB is one of the oldest, and most effective CA [covert action] operations targeted on the Soviet Union and is the only project conducting CA operations inside the Soviet Ukraine.”
The CIA went to the plate and struck out. The GAO refused to amend its report. Then the CIA hit two home runs. It was told by OSI director Neal Sher that “his office does not have a file on Mr. Lebed and, at the moment, has no basis for initiating an investigation of him. If such investigation is warranted in the future, he will inform the Agency of his action…. He recommended that we inform our Congressional oversight committee and Congressman Rodino of the case and our security concerns, especially since he had indications that Congressman Rodino was under pressure from certain quarters to hold hearings on the GAO report.”
Rodino caved in to CIA pressure and canceled the hearings on the twelve nameless Nazi collaborators in the GAO report. The Lebed issue made a media splash, left no ripples, and quietly disappeared.
In the end, Lebed admitted he was a terrorist. He told OSI investigators that he had been “indirectly involved in the planning of the political assassination” of Polish interior minister Pieracki before the war, but he denied that he had ever collaborated with the Germans. And he refused to answer further OSI questions about his activity as a Banderist because “he was protecting live persons.”
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the CIA dissolved Plumb and severed its ties to Prolog with a final payout of $1.75 million that would, according to QRPlumb CIA files, “provide for a more natural, and thus, less risky—from a security standpoint—transition to private support. Upon receipt of the termination payment, the relationship between the CIA and the project will end.”
Lebed died a free man in 1998. To most Ukrainians, he is still a national hero who risked his life to fight for an independent homeland. As one Ukrainian historian put it, the allegations of war crimes against Lebed and other Ukrainian freedom fighters were nothing more than “typical KGB-sponsored disinformation about the Ukrainian struggle.”
The Lebed story is a case study of how the CIA recruited a major war criminal and why it protected him. At the same time it raises a troubling question. INS commissioner Mackey told the CIA that Lebed was a clear-cut deportation case and that the service had “always cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
How many other clear-cut Nazi deportation cases did INS try to bury at the request of the CIA? Andrija
