Useful Enemies

three months, this time to spot, train, and send Circassian agents across the border into Syria.

The CIA decided to cut Soobzokov loose permanently in 1960 because of “discrepancies” in his war biography that he couldn’t clarify. That was bureaucratese for “the guy was a liar.” He continued to do odd jobs for the FBI, supplying the bureau with “valuable information on numerous” individuals of interest.

Naturally, when DeVito began sniffing around Soobzokov’s Nazi background, Washington got very nervous. The FBI and CIA were still running illegal clandestine operations in the early 1970s and they needed to make the Soobzokov investigation go away.

• • •

The Maikovskis and Soobzokov cases pushed DeVito over the edge. As a Nazi investigator, he felt trapped inside a vicious circle. The INS had blocked his every move in three Nazi collaborator cases. The agency failed to investigate itself with even a show of integrity. The FBI either looked the other way or gave the INS a cursory glance and pronounced it clean. And the Justice Department itself seemed to be working for the other side.

Disgusted and bruised, DeVito told his boss to go to hell and took early retirement. Then he and Schiano teamed up to play their trump card. Using media pressure had worked in the past, maybe it would again. They described to the New York Times, point by point, how their boss Sol Marks and his Washington shadow-superior had “hampered” their investigation into, and prosecution of, Hermine Braunsteiner.

Brushing their allegations aside like a piece of lint, Marks simply dismissed DeVito and Schiano as “romantics.” If he expected the issue to go away, he was wrong. The Times article about DeVito, Schiano, and the government’s obstruction of the Braunsteiner case became the third domino to topple in the row leading to John Demjanjuk.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Fourth Domino

Elizabeth Holtzman smelled a rat. A representative from Brooklyn and the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, she was in office only a few months when she got an anonymous phone call from a mid-level INS bureaucrat requesting a confidential meeting. The man was calling her because she was both Jewish and a member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, which monitored the workings of the INS. Not sure what to expect, Holtzman invited her administrative assistant to sit in as a witness. The year was 1973. Schiano had just quit and DeVito had just retired.

“There is a matter that is troubling me greatly,” the man said. He did not give his name and Holtzman did not ask for it. “The Immigration Service has a list of Nazi war criminals living in America, and it is doing nothing about them.”

Holtzman didn’t know what to think. The whistle-blower was clearly agitated and appeared deeply ashamed of what he considered an INS cover-up. Holtzman could almost feel his moral outrage. Of Armenian descent, the man was no stranger to ethnic cleansing. The Turks had systematically murdered more than one million of his ancestors before and during World War I.

At first blush, the allegation seemed impossible. If there was a list, as the whistle-blower said, where did it come from? Who at INS was sitting on it? Why would an enforcement agency under the aegis of the Justice Department protect the criminals it was supposed to keep out of the country? If there was a cover-up, it would have to involve the highest levels of the INS and perhaps the Justice Department itself.

“If the man was right,” Holtzman thought, “the information was explosive.”

As a junior member on the Immigration Subcommittee with about as much clout as a secretary in a basement office, Holtzman knew she would have to pick her time and place carefully if she was going to allege INS obstruction of justice. She tucked the information in the back of her mind and waited for the right moment. It would be a short wait. The subcommittee would soon be holding its annual INS oversight hearing.

Three months before the April 1974 subcommittee hearing, the New York Times had published its article about DeVito and Schiano leaving the INS and why. Their allegations confirmed what the whistle-blower had told Holtzman months before. She found Sol Marks’s rebuttal—they’re “romantics”—arrogant. She was surprised, therefore, when a much-humbled Marks confessed to the Times in a second article three weeks later that the INS indeed had a list of thirty-eight alleged Nazi collaborators living in the United States. This was essentially the Karbach list minus twenty-one names the INS had culled—either because they had died or the service said it couldn’t find them.

At the April subcommittee oversight hearing, the new INS commissioner, General Leonard Chapman, retired commandant of the Marine Corps, was just finishing his testimony about a group of Haitian refugees trying get into the United States when Holtzman requested the floor. Although she was primed to hunt bear, she put on a nice face. She had no grievance with the newly appointed Chapman. It was the INS bureaucracy she was after.

“I would like to welcome the new commissioner,” she said, “and am pleased that after four months you still seem pretty optimistic.”

Holtzman then called Chapman’s attention to the two Times articles and the INS list of thirty-eight names. “Can you tell me whether any of these… have been deported since the article appeared last December?” she asked.

Since Chapman was still learning his way around the INS, Deputy Commissioner James F. Greene, an INS old-timer, was present at the hearing to answer questions Chapman could not.

“None,” Greene said.

“Do you intend in the near future to commence deportation hearings in any case, or has any case been developed to the point at which deportation proceedings can commence in the next few months?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Greene said.

“Have any witnesses in any of these thirty-eight cases been interviewed?”

“I cannot give you specifics on the cases because they have not passed over my desk,” Greene said.

At that point, INS general counsel Charles Gordon piped up. “We are in the process of developing that information,” he said.

Holtzman was getting angrier by the minute. “What does that mean ‘in the process of developing’?”

“Whether the witnesses are still around and—”

“Have you taken statements from any witnesses in these thirty-eight cases?”

“I can’t tell you about the thirty-eight,” Gordon said.

“I am surprised that since December 1973, not a single witness has been interviewed by the service…. Can I have some assurance of a timetable?”

“I am really unable to do so,” Gordon said.

Holtzman zeroed in on DeVito and Schiano. “There were two officers mentioned in the Times article who indicated that pressure was put on them not to pursue these alleged war criminals. Have you or the service done any investigation with respect to their claims?”

Greene fielded that question. “The district director [Sol Marks] called the man in and said, ‘I want the list.’… It was taken from him.”

“When was that list taken?”

“Sometime last fall,” Greene said.

“Can you explain why, since last fall, we are sitting here today and we see no investigation of any witnesses?”

Holtzman wasn’t sure what to make of the Gordon-Greene game of dodgeball. Were they trying to cover their backsides or did they not even know what the hell was going on in their own agency? Or both? She now understood why Schiano and DeVito had cleared out their desks in disgust. Gordon and Greene were smothering the hearing room under a blanket of words.

Convinced that if she wanted honest answers she’d have to dig, Holtzman asked to see the thirty-eight case files. It was a long shot, outside the realm of proper procedure for a junior congresswoman. To her surprise, and before Gordon or Greene could object, INS commissioner Chapman told her the files would be ready for her in the INS New York office.