the Romanian Iron Guard student organization before the attempted coup in January 1941, but he disclaimed “responsibility” for any atrocities against Romanian Jews.
End of FBI investigation.
For Elizabeth Holtzman, the greatest insult to the memory of Trifa’s victims was the lengthy interview the bishop gave in Romanian to Radio Free Europe in 1980 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America. The interview was approved by Paul Henze, director of RFE and a former CIA agent, and it was beamed from Munich into communist Romania.
The Trifa broadcast made an already angry Holtzman spitting-mad. To have a Nazi war criminal represent the United States of America in the very country where he committed war crimes was not only insensitive and cynical. It insulted thousands of Trifa’s Jewish victims and mocked the value of their lives. “It is outrageous,” she told the
Holtzman wrote a blistering letter to President Jimmy Carter demanding RFE director Henze’s head on a White House platter. In response, Henze made bad worse. After admitting in a private meeting of the RFE supervisory board that the forty-five-minute Trifa interview was a mistake, he called Holtzman’s reaction to it “silly.” Someone leaked the minutes of the meeting to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson’s successor as Washington gadfly. Feathers soon began to fly all over town.
The heat of Holtzman’s anger reached Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had worked with Henze at RFE in Munich in the 1960s. Brzezinski reprimanded his friend—not for airing the broadcast, but for involving the White House in the flap. He then attacked Holtzman. “She is blowing this up into an enormous issue, practically painting Henze as a Nazi—McCarthyism of the left.”
To Holtzman, it was an enormous issue. Radio Free Europe had been founded and secretly funded by the CIA in the years after the war. That the agency was still using its airwaves in 1980 was a safe bet, and the Trifa broadcast served to illustrate RFE’s brazen pattern of hiring a string of Nazi collaborators and paying them with U.S. tax dollars, above and under the table. In the end, Paul Henze was not fired. Two whistle-blowers from RFE’s Romanian Broadcast Division who leaked word of the Trifa broadcast to Holtzman weren’t so lucky.
Having received the FBI’s support for more than twenty years, Bishop Trifa was a great fan of J. Edgar Hoover. In the name of his church, Trifa wrote the director: “The clergy and laity of the Romanian Orthodox parishes in the United States are unanimously inspired and grateful to you for your outstanding preservation of our democratic system and your efforts to keep out of our country subversives and subversive activities.”
While Hoover and the FBI were busy protecting Trifa, the CIA was shielding his old Nazi friend, SS captain Otto von Bolschwing. The baron had turned out to be as much of a chameleon as Nicolae Malaxa. When he realized the Reich’s days were numbered, he offered his services to the U.S. Army, provided valuable inside information about German troop movements and military strength, and led reconnaissance patrols, personally capturing over twenty high-ranking Nazis and fifty-five lesser officers, according to recently declassified CIA files. Most important, he supplied critical details about Germany’s secret weapon, the V-2 rocket, and its closely guarded location. The army found him “virtually indispensable.”
After the war Bolschwing joined the Gehlen Organization, code name Zipper, a U.S. spy network run by former German intelligence officer Reinhard Gehlen. (There will be more about the Gehlen Organization in part four.) In 1950, the CIA hired Bolschwing, first in Salzburg, Austria, then in Vienna under code names Unrest, Usage, and Grossbahn. He traveled on CIA missions in Western Europe as U.S. Army Captain Albert A. Eisner.
The CIA was both cautious and somewhat ambivalent about Otto von Bolschwing. It found him a shady, self-seeking, and egotistical adventurer and lover of intrigue with shifting loyalties, according to the declassified files. On the other hand, it deemed him extremely intelligent and experienced in espionage, with a wide circle of well-connected friends and sources. His understanding of Balkan politics was superb, and he had excellent Romanian Iron Guard contacts.
The CIA concluded that Bolschwing was “a valuable man we must control.” Over the next three years, Bolschwing would run spy nets of Romanian Iron Guardists and members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, another anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi group of thugs whom the Displaced Persons Commission defined as inimical to the United States. He undertook secret missions to Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
By 1953, everybody in the intelligence world, from the French to the Soviets, knew that “Grossbahn” was a CIA agent whose real name was Otto Albrecht Alfred von Bolschwing. Not only was he no longer useful to the United States, but he was a security risk because he could be kidnapped and tortured for information. It was time to help Bolschwing realize his dream—to become a citizen of the United States of America.
While preparing Bolschwing’s biography for the INS, which included Bolschwing’s membership in the Nazi Party and the SD, the CIA uncovered a deeply buried secret. Bolschwing had once worked on the staff of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust and one of the most sought-after former Nazis in hiding. It was like digging up unexploded ordnance in the backyard.
The CIA hid the Eichmann connection from the INS and cautioned Bolschwing that, once settled in America, he should not contact anyone in the CIA unless it was a dire emergency. Nor should he apply for a sensitive civilian job or U.S. government job that would require a security check. Above all, he should zip his lips. If the media ever learned about the Eichmann connection, there would be such a storm of protest that the government would have to deport him.
Over the objections of the INS, the Department of State granted Otto von Bolschwing, his wife, and their two children U.S. visas. Bolschwing was so grateful that upon arrival in the United States, he wrote a note to his CIA contact from the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York: “I wish to express my thanks for the excellent arrangements with immigration authorities.”
Like Artukovic, Bolschwing settled in sunny California, where he lived quietly for six years working as an international executive for the Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical company, until the Israelis captured his former boss, Adolf Eichmann, in Argentina in 1960. Worried that its former ace agent might be investigated and called as a witness in the Eichmann trial or, God forbid, be indicted along with Eichmann, the CIA warned the baron to prepare a defense. Luckily for Bolschwing, Israeli prosecutors showed no interest in him. They hanged Eichmann in 1962. Bolschwing lived undetected for nearly twenty more years, until his name surfaced during a Trifa investigation in 1980.
Once the INS found Andrija Artukovic living illegally in California in 1948 without a visa, the Justice Department, State Department, and FBI buried his case for more than a year, until someone leaked the news to Yugoslavia that the Ustasha leader was living the good life in California under the protection of the U.S. government.
Right after the war, Yugoslavia had asked the United States to keep its eyes open for Artukovic, who was number two on its most-wanted-war-criminal list, just below his boss, Ante Pavelic, who like Eichmann was living in Argentina. To say Yugoslavia was miffed to learn that Washington was hiding Artukovic would be the polite way of putting it. Yugoslavia requested Artukovic’s immediate extradition. It even gave the State Department his home address.
The United States ignored the request for more than a decade.
In response to the brush-off, Yugoslavia eventually fed the “Nazi-hiding-in-California” story to columnist Drew Pearson. Hoover was not pleased when he learned—probably through a wiretap—that Pearson was about to publish a nationally syndicated column on Artukovic. Besides summarizing the war crime facts in the Nazi collaborator’s case, Pearson would be calling on President John F. Kennedy to scrutinize other war criminals living in the United States. That call to action threatened the bureau’s string of war criminal informants in emigre communities. After alerting Kennedy about the article, Hoover advised the president not to answer any questions about Artukovic during an upcoming press conference, hoping that the Pearson story would fade into yesterday’s news.
It didn’t.
Yugoslavia responded to the latest U.S. stall with intense media pressure in the form of an eighty-three-page publication titled
“If you can’t kill a Serb or a Jew, you are the enemy of the state.”
