To make a point, Maikovskis marched the Audrini men to nearby Rezekne and ordered the entire town to gather in the square to watch. He lined up the men in two rows of ten each. The front knelt, the rear stood. Then he gave the order to shoot. The bullets passed through the heads of those on their knees into the stomachs of those standing behind them.
Back in Audrini, an Einsatzgruppe death squad took the women and children into the forest and executed them. Then they burned the village to the ground. For his efficiency and dedication, the SS awarded Maikovskis the German Order of Merit and the German Cross.
Maikovskis entered the United States in 1951, swearing on his visa application that he had spent the war years as a civilian bookkeeper for the Latvian state highway commission. He settled in Mineola, Long Island, where he worked as a carpenter for fifteen years. When he wasn’t sawing wood, he tended his garden, went to Mass every morning, and served as an officer in Latvian American organizations until 1965, when the Soviet Union made a formal request to the United States for his extradition, on behalf of Latvia, to stand trial for war crimes. When the State Department refused to give up Maikovskis, the
DeVito knew none of this when, a few months after he had met Karbach for lunch, a whistle-blower came to him with a file folder and some old black-and-white film footage featuring Maikovskis as a Latvian cop. The evidence in the file was so convincing that DeVito immediately ran a check to see what, if anything, the INS had on the Nazi collaborator. He found a reference to an investigative file in the INS New York office, but the file was missing.
DeVito began to call around to other INS offices. He eventually found the missing folder in Detroit. Why the hell did a New York investigative file end up in the Detroit office when Maikovskis lived in New York state and had no apparent connection to Michigan? The answer was buried in the file itself—an internal INS memo from the assistant director of investigations in Washington to Sid Fass, the Maikovskis investigator, ordering Fass to drop the case. Fass was so upset with the deep-six order that he made sure the incriminating memo got into the file before the file was hidden in Michigan.
If the INS wanted to play games, DeVito was ready. He baited a trap. First, he notified his superior, Sol Marks, that he was poking into the Maikovskis case based on new and compelling information. After making a copy for himself, he put the Maikovskis file from Detroit in the same drawer where earlier he had placed the Braunsteiner papers, then locked the drawer with the same combination lock. The next time he checked, the file was gone. And it stayed gone for more than two months, until the
All of a sudden, Maikovskis was back under investigation, and Marks gave the case to DeVito, “the famous Nazi investigator” who had nailed Braunsteiner. At the same time, Marks blitzed DeVito with a caseload of alleged communist subversives, each marked “priority.” The only case in the pile on DeVito’s desk that
What DeVito didn’t know in 1973, but probably suspected, was that the CIA had recruited Boleslavs Maikovskis as a soldier in its psychological war against communism. He was the vice president of the American Latvian Association, a leader in the Committee for a Free Latvia, and a member of the International Peasant Union. All three groups were anticommunist, and the latter two were secretly bankrolled by the CIA.
His leadership in the Latvian international community placed Maikovskis in a unique position to spy on his fellow Latvians for communist sympathizers, hunt for subversive plots, strengthen anticommunism in the patriotic groups, and promote a Latvian government-in-exile. And as a member of the international Hawks of the Daugava River, the Daugavas Vanagi, or Vanagis for short, his outreach was exponential. An anti-Soviet organization with a reputation of assassinating Latvian communist sympathizers in Europe after the war, the Vanagis had fifty-five chapters in the United States established to assist Latvian orphans and widows. In short, Boleslavs Maikovskis was a CIA case handler’s dream.
In November 1965, a Riga court tried Maikovskis and four others Latvians in absentia and sentenced them to death. The United States declined to extradite Maikovskis. Of course the CIA wanted to protect Maikovskis. Through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RL), the agency had illegally laundered up to a billion dollars, which it funneled to the Latvian organizations Maikovskis spied on as well as to scores of other anticommunist emigre groups. Deportation hearings on Maikovskis might accidently expose the CIA’s illegal use of funds and place it under the microscope of a congressional investigation. The United States was at war. What choice did Langley have but to shield Maikovskis?
The subject of DeVito’s other whistle-blower case was Tscherim Soobzokov, a Russian from Circassia, a mountainous region of the Soviet Union between the Black and Caspian seas. Like Maikovskis, Soobzokov was a lieutenant in a Circassian unit of the Waffen SS (armed SS), which he helped organize to fight the Red Army. The Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the Waffen SS was inimical and barred its members from the United States.
After the war, Soobzokov made his way to the United States and was living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he worked as Passaic County’s chief purchasing inspector. He soon became a leader in Circassian American organizations.
Reuben Fier, a retired New York City cop-turned-investigator for the Social Security Administration, stumbled on Soobzokov’s Nazi background while checking a complaint that Soobzokov was bribing someone in the SSA to accept forged birth certificates of fellow Circassians, making them eligible for Social Security benefits.
For the next three years, Fier used all his cop savvy and government clearances to compile a fat dossier on Soobzokov. Armed with enough information to have the Nazi collaborator stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported, Fier approached the New Jersey INS office. It treated him to a bum’s rush. When he read about DeVito’s work on the Braunsteiner case, Fier offered him the dossier.
After reading Fier’s file, DeVito pronounced Soobzokov a slam dunk. Since the man lived outside his New York jurisdiction, DeVito gave the file to the New Jersey office, investigator to investigator. When he called a few weeks later to check on the status of the case, he was greeted with “What file?” There was a dossier filed under S, all right, but it was empty.
What DeVito didn’t know in 1973, but probably suspected, was that the CIA had also recruited Tscherim Soobzokov. They first noticed him in Amman, Jordan, where he finally settled after the war. For him, Jordan was a logical choice. It was the home of a deeply rooted Circassian Muslim community of eighteen thousand that dated back to the late 1800s.
The CIA noted several characteristics about Soobzokov that made him a good prospect. He was bitterly anticommunist, a leader in the Circassian community (both feared and respected), and nearly destitute, with little hope of ever finding a well-paying job. The CIA also noted that he liked to show Jordanian Arabs his Einsatzgruppe ID card and brag about how many Jews he had killed, according to recently released CIA files.
Soobzokov was eager to work for the CIA, especially since it assured him that it didn’t care if he had a war crimes history or had committed “moral lapses.” Most important, the agency suggested that U.S. citizenship was always possible after his tour of duty. As part of its vetting process, the CIA put Soobzokov through a series of polygraph tests in its Beirut safe house to find out what he did during the war and how it could best use him as a clandestine operative.
After the vetting, the CIA gave Soobzokov the code name Nostril and trained him as a “spotter” in Operation Redsox, a joint American and British espionage operation. The agency housed, fed, clothed, and paid him. His job was to look for communist sympathizers among his fellow Circassians and to identify those who were so anticommunist—or desperate for money—that they would be willing to sneak back into their home country and perform dirty tricks for the CIA as assassins and saboteurs. Soobzokov himself went on at least one spy mission to the Soviet Union.
When his two-year contract was up, the CIA disbanded Redsox in Jordan, cut Soobzokov loose, and arranged for him to emigrate to America. It settled him in New Jersey, which had a small Circassian community, and before long his house became the meeting place for local and international Circassian leaders.
The CIA reemployed Soobzokov briefly and recommended his services to the FBI. The agencies sent him to the national intelligence center at Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, for specialized training as a “Hot War Agent.” He studied clandestine field craft and leadership. After graduation, the CIA sent him back to Jordan for
