Useful Enemies

espionage operations and to ensure at least some accountability, the NSC took Kennan’s suggestion and created the Office of Special Projects. A covert activity umbrella organization, its name would soon be changed to the nondescript Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to disguise its true purpose.

The creation of OPC ignited a spirited and protracted turf war. Ever distrustful of the military establishment, the State Department wanted both control over OPC’s covert operations and deniability in case they were revealed. As Kennan saw it, political warfare activity was “an instrument of U.S. policy and [he] hoped to man the controls.” Although he favored placing OPC in the CIA for cover, Kennan wanted it to “operate independently,” with the State Department pulling the strings. The CIA would have none of it.

In the end, State, Defense, and the CIA reached what would turn out to be an unworkable compromise. OPC would belong to the CIA, whose director would be responsible for ensuring that OPC’s covert activities “were consistent with U.S. foreign and military policy.” The CIA director would be guided by representatives from the departments of State and Defense. Secretary of State George C. Marshall appointed Kennan to be the State Department’s representative on the OPC panel and Kennan would soon become deeply involved in Project Umpire, an early OPC psych war operation in Germany.

August 1948. The Joint Chiefs of Staff called for the creation of a Guerilla Warfare School and a Guerilla Warfare Corps. Trained by the U.S. Army and the CIA and composed mostly of Eastern Europeans, the corps would conduct covert operations for the CIA with guidance from the military. The original proposal for the guerilla school and corps came from the Department of State.

March 1950. The NSC authorized the FBI and the CIA to work together to exploit the knowledge, experience, and talents of the Eastern European refugees living in the United States and to protect them from retaliation by the Soviets. To avoid future legal challenges in the use of war criminals, the NSC charged the Justice Department with finding ways within and around the law to bring them to America.

Finally, the NSC commissioned the Department of State to appoint OPC’s director. It was only fair. OPC was State’s baby. At the recommendation of George Kennan, Marshall chose Kennan’s Sunday night drinking buddy, Frank Wisner.

None of the declassified documents from 1947–50 that created Cold War policies and strategies prohibit the use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the three broad U.S. covert programs—psychological, political, and guerilla warfare. The closest any document came to addressing the issue is a delicately worded statement in a May 1948 top-secret SANACC report: “In the case of those who are excludible under the law, the Attorney General should authorize temporary entry under [his] discretionary authority.”

The fact that the NSC and the White House did not exclude former Nazis and Nazi collaborators from its proposed covert programs was an endorsement to use them. There is a legal precedent to support this argument. The U.S. Supreme Court based its 1981 decision in the Feodor Fedorenko case on policy formulation by nonexclusion. The High Court argued in that case that Congress could have stipulated that assistance to the enemy had to be voluntary to warrant exclusion from the United States, but it deliberately chose not to. Therefore, Congress established a policy to exclude both those who voluntarily and involuntarily assisted the enemy. Conversely, the NSC and the White House could have stipulated that former Nazis and Nazi collaborators should be barred from participation in U.S. covert activity programs, but they deliberately chose not to. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that the intention of the NSC and the White House was to include former Nazis and Nazi collaborators in covert programs if they were useful enemies.

The endorsement of using war criminals in U.S. covert operations by nonexclusion should come as no surprise. Military intelligence was already employing them extensively in Europe and would continue to do so until the mid-1950s (see epilogue to part 4). And the two men most responsible for formulating the Cold War policies (George Kennan) and their execution (Frank Wisner) had no scruples about using war criminals as propagandists, espionage agents, and guerillas. Wisner had already hired Iron Guardists in Romania during and after the war. And Kennan had opposed the Allied denazification plan after the war. If the Allies imprisoned Nazi leaders, he reasoned, they would be denying Germany the brains it needed to rebuild itself into a strong and viable anticommunist force in Western Europe. Furthermore, Kennan voiced no objections to the “extralegal character” of OPC’s ambitious covert plans.

Working under leadership that favored the use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators and without a policy banning their use, CIA station chiefs and case officers and agents did not hesitate to hire them. In a 1950 report advocating concealment of the Nazi backgrounds of CIA recruits, Peter Sichel, the agency’s top man in Berlin, told the head of the CIA in Germany: “Membership in the SS, or the SD, or the Volksdeutsche [German intelligence] no longer is regarded as a strike against any personality.” In fact, SS, SD, and Abwehr experience was viewed as an asset, not a liability.

“We would have slept with the devil to obtain information on communists,” a former CIA agent confessed to a GAO investigator.

By the early 1950s, with Kennan back at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the containment policy had morphed into liberation policy. Top-secret NSC directive No. 86 provided the initial impetus for a concerted propaganda campaign to encourage the citizens of Soviet bloc nations to rebel against the Soviets and to defect to the West. OPC espionage programs soon began to multiply like paramecia in a petri dish. By 1952, Wisner, “who had a new idea every ten minutes,” was running hundreds of covert projects simultaneously under a mind-boggling number of code names. OPC was managing seventeen overseas stations and employing twenty times more people than it had in 1949. As Burton Hersh put it in his book Old Boys: “Wisner pragmatically overloaded the books with paramilitary and political action projects, often at the expense of analysis or disinterested intelligence gathering.”

In 1952, OPC merged with the CIA’s Office of Special Operations to form the Office of Clandestine Services, with Wisner at the helm. All espionage activity was finally under one roof at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and would remain there.

• • •

If John Loftus erred by naming the Department of State as the ultimate bad guy in crafting and supporting America’s open-door policy for Nazi war criminals, it was because he failed to clearly distinguish between the policy designer, the policy authorizer, the policy implementer, and the policy facilitator.

The policy designer was indeed the State Department and George Kennan, who, according to his official biographer, “was so influential that the government had agreed to almost everything he had recommended.” The policy authorizer was the NSC, with the approval of President Truman. The policy implementer was the CIA, through OPC and Frank Wisner, with some oversight by the departments of State and Defense, which were also policy facilitators. The State Department did conduct some limited covert operations on its own (BLOODSTONE and the Grumbach Organization) and in collaboration with the Department of Defense (Project Solarium).

BLOODSTONE

As the first major planned, coordinated, and serious U.S. covert program, Bloodstone was the fuse that ignited the Cold War. Begun in 1948, it had three objectives, each of which required extensive use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators: 1) recruit European scholars and experts to collect and analyze intelligence on the Soviet Union; 2) recruit displaced persons and emigres to help train Americans in foreign languages, propaganda techniques, and intelligence gathering; and 3) screen and recruit DPs and emigres for clandestine warfare that included extraction of political defectors from the Soviet Union and its satellites, sabotage, and assassination. To guide Bloodstone, the NSC and SANACC created a board of representatives from the departments of Justice, State, and War. Sitting on the panel was Robert C. Alexander, a high-level bureaucrat in the State Department’s visa office. His job was to see to it that Bloodstone recruits received visas, one way or another.

Bloodstone’s experts would serve as consultants to the State Department and OPC and as scholars-in- residence at major universities such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins. The propagandists, trained by State and the CIA, would disseminate misinformation about communism, keep the dreams of independent homelands alive, encourage a dozen or so governments-in-exile, and win the trust of Europeans trapped behind the Iron Curtain. The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe (RFE), and Radio Liberation/Liberty (RL) would become their homes.