Useful Enemies

The man trying to warn the Sprogis family triggered a pipe bomb. He suffered severe burns and his right leg had to be amputated. “Listen, carefully,” an anonymous caller told Newsday the next day. “Jewish Defense League. Nazi war criminal. Bomb. Never again.”

A month later, Alex Odeh, the West Coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was assassinated by a pipe bomb planted outside his office door in Santa Ana, California. The night before his assassination, Odeh had appeared on television defending Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.

During a press conference shortly after the Odeh murder, the FBI announced that the bombings of Soobzokov, Sprogis, and Odeh were related, and it attributed the terrorist acts to the JDL. The announcement provoked an angry response from Irv Rubin, who had succeeded Rabbi Kahane as JDL leader.

“It’s absolutely absurd, obscene, and outrageous that the FBI would release to the media a statement saying there may be a link between the death of Odeh and the league,” Rubin said. “It’s now time to put up or shut up. Instead of making libelous and slanderous statements, the FBI should make an arrest.” Rubin himself had been acquitted of solicitation-to-murder charges after he allegedly offered to pay anyone who killed or maimed American Nazi Party members in Chicago.

There were no FBI arrests. After more than ten years of forensic examination of the bombs and bomb fragments, bomb parts manufacturers, fingerprint analyses, phone call and car rental traces, and hundreds of interviews, the FBI closed its parcel bomb and pipe bomb investigations. The bureau was unable to find enough evidence to file charges against any members of the JDL, which every major U.S.Jewish organization condemned.

The JDL got a bitter taste of its own medicine when its founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was shot at close range in the neck and chest in 1990 while delivering a speech to Zionists in a Manhattan hotel near Grand Central Terminal. He died at Bellevue Hospital an hour later. The shooter was an Arab-American man. In 1994 a JDL member went on a shooting binge inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the birthplace of Abraham. The cave is sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. After the gunman killed thirty Muslim worshippers, Kahane’s Kach Party was declared a criminal organization and outlawed in Israel.

In 1992, Irv Rubin slit his throat with a razor blade while waiting in prison for his attempted-murder trial to begin. He had been charged with planting bombs at a Los Angeles mosque and at the office of California congressman Darrell Issa, a Lebanese American Christian.

The JDL still exists but the FBI no longer considers it a terrorist organization.

PART TWO Facing the Judge

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO A Hornet’s Nest in Cleveland

If the Walus and Fedorenko losses rattled OSI as it waited for the opening rap of the gavel in United States of America v. John Demjanjuk, it didn’t show. Neither did OSI allow those earlier losses to slow its dizzying momentum. For one thing, Walus and Fedorenko were not OSI cases. The unit didn’t exist when the two were tried. For another thing, OSI had twenty-one other cases besides Demjanjuk either awaiting trial, already in the courtroom, or under appeal. By comparison, in the thirty-six years between the end of World War II and 1981, when the Supreme Court stripped Fedorenko of his U.S. citizenship, the Justice Department had tried only one case—Hermine Braunsteiner.

All but four of OSI’s twenty-one active cases involved Eastern Europeans: One Estonian, four Lithuanians, six Latvians, and six Ukrainians. They lived in communities across the country ranging from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Petersburg, and Miami on the East Coast; Sacramento and Los Angeles on the West Coast; and Chicago and Cleveland in the Midwest.

With Congress, the Department of Justice, Demjanjuk sympathizers, and the Jewish community closely watching from the sidelines, OSI was caught in a squeeze. A failure to convict John Demjanjuk could mean a “short life span” for OSI. But a conviction might only prove that the United States had become the willing dupe of Moscow and the KGB. Given the high stakes, defendants and their lawyers and sympathizers subjected OSI to “unrelenting attack.”

Emigres from Soviet-bloc countries had reason to be both frightened and concerned. Beginning with the surfacing of Demjanjuk’s name in 1975, the KGB had been targeting them through a disinformation program directed at OSI. Herbert Romerstein, former chief of the U.S. Information Agency’s Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation, attempted to put that Soviet program in perspective in an article published in the Ukrainian Quarterly in 2004.

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As Romerstein explained, the Soviet Union had a public relations problem in 1975 when the first article about Demjanjuk appeared in a communist newspaper. Moscow wanted the West to see the USSR as a peaceful state, eager to punish those who committed crimes against humanity. But Moscow couldn’t escape the fact that it was at the same time persecuting Ukrainians and Jews who protested against Soviet repression, and it was refusing to allow Jews to freely emigrate to the West. Even more troubling to Moscow was a growing movement, both in the Soviet Union and in North America: Ukrainians and Jews uniting to show the world that the USSR was still a brutal, totalitarian state.

Watching from the secure shores of America and Canada, emigre communities with emotional, historical, and family ties to their home countries saw the sudden Soviet willingness to help America find, prosecute, and deport or extradite alleged Nazi collaborators as a diversion to draw attention away from its own historical and current crimes against humanity.

The Soviet Politburo saw America’s sudden interest in Nazi collaborators as an opportunity and quickly seized it. It ordered the KGB to blitz the West with phony documents like Michael Hanusiak’s Ukrainian list and propaganda like Lest We Forget, Hanusiak’s expose on alleged Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis that featured more than 150 pages of reports and photos.

A Soviet propaganda brochure aimed at the West clearly spelled out the KGB storyline. The fragile but growing bond between Ukrainians and Jews was, it said, “a wicked marriage… a sinister alliance between Zionists and Ukrainian bourgeois… a malignant partnership of the Magen David [Star of David] and the nationalist trident [Ukrainian national emblem] fostered by the CIA.”

The United States was the KGB’s primary Cold War target because of its large Baltic and Ukrainian population. Its objectives in the United States were carefully formulated: Destroy the bond between Jews and Ukrainians, depict emigre communities as nests of Nazi collaborators, and discredit the Ukrainian nationalism movement. One way to accomplish those objectives was to help OSI collect “evidence” against its growing list of alleged Nazi collaborators.

One KGB technique to trick American prosecutors was to manufacture witnesses. In 1980, the year George Parker wrote his OSI ethics memo about prosecuting the Demjanjuk case, Colonel V. Medvedev, a high-ranking KGB official, published an article in Sbornik KGB, a secret internal magazine. He noted that OSI was eager to try anyone who had collaborated with the Nazis, regardless of nationality and no matter how long it took. Medvedev observed that the KGB had quickly learned how to please U.S. prosecutors—give them witnesses. “Practice shows,” Medvedev wrote, “that concrete evidence from [a] witness thoroughly interrogated on a high professional level appears to be very important proof in Nazi… cases.”

To accomplish its goal of conning OSI, the KGB either “coached” witnesses or “fixed” the sworn statements of witnesses to make the subject look like a Nazi collaborator.

An anonymous Soviet official, at the risk of his life, confirmed Medvedev’s admission. He told an American