While
Then, one day in the early 1970s, Bishop Moldovan whispered in Kremer’s ear that the balding and bespectacled Archbishop Valerian was none other than the Viorel Trifa he was looking for. Kremer wasted no time. He wrote to President Nixon demanding an immediate investigation of Trifa, unaware that Nixon was tied to the bishop through Malaxa. INS deputy commissioner James Greene—the same Greene who tried to snow Holtzman during the congressional oversight hearing—answered Kremer’s letter. “These charges were exhaustively examined and extensively investigated by this Service over a period of years,” Greene wrote. “The conclusion was reached that grounds for deportation proceedings—or that he was excludible at the time of his entry—had not been established.”
Kremer then fed the story to the
Elizabeth Holtzman was more than troubled by what she learned from Trifa’s INS file. If the bishop admitted he was a card-carrying leader in the Iron Guard—a highly documented Nazi bedfellow like the Ustasha—why wasn’t he deported? As DeVito would have said, it was a slam-dunk case. The guy had lied on his visa application.
Was someone protecting Bishop Trifa as well? Who and why?
When she closed the Artukovic and Trifa files in 1974, Holtzman probably suspected that the “who” was the FBI and the CIA. The “why” was mired in Cold War politics.
CHAPTER NINE
J. Edgar Hoover certainly wasn’t asleep at the helm during the Romanian American episcopate battle. As soon as his agents reported that Father Moldovan had gone to Romania to be consecrated bishop by the Red Patriarch and that Trifa opposed him, Hoover opened an espionage investigation of both men.
From the start, Hoover knew that Trifa was an alleged Nazi collaborator, Iron Guard leader, signer of the manifesto calling for the deaths of civilians, and instigator of the pogrom that butchered who knew how many Jews. His agents even provided the names of Canadian Jewish eyewitnesses to Trifa’s war crimes. Hoover wasn’t interested in any of this. The job of the FBI wasn’t to investigate immigration fraud, unless requested by the INS or the Justice Department. Neither was it the bureau’s job to hunt war criminals hiding in America, unless they were a threat to national security. Cold War focused, all Hoover wanted to know was whether Trifa and Moldovan were communists, communist sympathizers, or anticommunists.
After two years of FBI interviews with Romanians in the United States and Canada, Hoover concluded that neither Trifa nor Moldovan posed a threat. Nor did he recommend a deportation investigation of Trifa for immigration fraud to either the INS or the Justice Department. For a very good reason.
Hoover and Bishop Trifa were on the same side. Both wanted the same thing—to keep communist Romania from gaining control over the U.S. Romanian Orthodox Church. For that reason, Hoover applauded Trifa’s plan to install anticommunist former Iron Guard priests as pastors of his parishes, according to recently declassified FBI documents. If Trifa were deported, Hoover would lose an important watchdog in the Romanian community and an eyeball inside the American cell of Iron Guardists.
To Hoover, Trifa was more than just an anticommunist Doberman with a keen sense of smell. FBI field agents advised their FBI chief that the bishop could furnish “invaluable information” about American Iron Guardists and the political orientation of new Romanian immigrants. Trifa also had Iron Guard contacts abroad, especially in Argentina, home of a large contingent of Guardists dreaming of the liberation of Romania.
When Elizabeth Holtzman and the media began sniffing down Trifa’s war crimes trail, the FBI quickly moved to protect him. Since he lived in Michigan, his FBI file was kept in the bureau’s Detroit office. Before INS investigators and prosecutors could ask for it, the Detroit office shredded the papers. That allowed the bureau to later say with a straight face: “Trifa is not, nor has he been an asset of the Bureau. He has provided information and the same has been accepted.” Without paper proof, who could allege otherwise?
Instead of investigating Valerian Trifa, the FBI began dogging the bishop’s nemesis, Charles Kremer, according to Kremer’s bureau file obtained under my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The investigation began in January 1967, when Kremer wrote to President Lyndon Johnson—as he did later to President Nixon—asking him to order the INS to open an investigation of Bishop Trifa for war crimes, which Kremer described in his letter.
Mr. President, since this man has been able to get away with the murder of thousands of Jews, since he has been accorded the honor of becoming a bishop here in the United States, and since he has become friends of so many influential people who know nothing of his past, I fear the day that I shall see him a welcome guest in your presence… I have a complete file with undisputed evidence and corroboration of every statement I have made…. I am eagerly awaiting your reply and am grateful for your interest in this matter.
The White House immediately sent the request to the FBI. It asked the bureau to investigate Charles Kremer.
For the FBI, Kremer’s accusations against Trifa were old news. “There have been numerous allegations against Bishop Trifa indicating that he may have been associated with the Romanian Iron Guard, a profascist group, when he was in Romania in the early 1940s,” the FBI immediately reported back to the White House. “It has also been alleged he may have participated in atrocities against the followers of the Jewish religion.” The FBI went on to say that the allegations were nothing more than an internal smear campaign orchestrated by Bishop Trifa’s Orthodox Church enemies.
The FBI then opened a ten-year investigation of Kremer, the primary purpose of which was to determine whether he was a communist or a communist agent. The secondary purpose was to learn why Kremer was so determined to see Bishop Trifa deported. The bureau had a jump-start on its probe. It already knew a lot about Kremer and had once considered developing him as a confidential source, but ultimately decided against it.
“The NYO, after careful consideration of the personality of Dr. Kremer,” the New York FBI office reported to headquarters, “concluded he does not appear to possess the qualities desired in a Confidential Source or a Security Informant.” That was bureaucratese for “He’s too independent and, therefore, not trustworthy.”
Using its string of Romanian sources already in place, the FBI followed Kremer’s every move—whom he visited and what they told him; whom he contacted at the Romanian embassy in Washington; what he said in speeches and the television shows he appeared on; which Romanian-sponsored concerts and ballets he attended; when he went to Romania and why; and whom he visited on his trips there. The FBI became suspicious when Kremer began lobbying Congress to grant most-favored-nation trading status to Romania and making plans to produce a Romanian cultural hour on a New York radio station “to be covertly sponsored” by the Romanian Tourist Office and the Romanian embassy Commercial Office, both in New York.
Ten years later, the FBI concluded that Kremer was not a threat to the security of the United States. On the contrary, he was a dedicated anticommunist interested in helping to reunite Romanian Jewish families and win concessions from the Romanian communist government favorable to Romanian Jews. Despite its findings, the FBI put Kremer’s obsession to expose and deport Bishop Trifa in the worst possible light. “Dr. Kremer has two compelling motivations,” the FBI concluded: “to be or feel important, and to harass Bishop Valerian Trifa.”
The FBI also investigated the bishop. In an interview with bureau agents, Trifa admitted being the head of
