Funded, equipped, and managed by the CIA, RFE beamed broadcasts to Russia; RL broadcast to the Soviet satellite countries. Cofounded by Wisner, the two stations would become, as he fondly put it, his “mighty Wurlitzer” organ on which he could play any political tune he wanted.
Wisner secured $5 million from the U.S. Treasury as Bloodstone seed money. With it, he recruited an initial 250 Nazi collaborators from communist-bloc countries, gave them a soundproof recording booth and a microphone, and put them to work for VOA, RFE, and RL, according to Christopher Simpson, who first exposed Bloodstone in his book
Bloodstone experts, scholars, and propagandists were not Einsatzkommandos or fascist ethnic cleansers in blood-splattered boots. “They were the cream of Nazi collaborators,” Simpson observed, “the leaders, the intelligence specialists and scholars who had put their skills to work for the Nazi cause.” To illustrate his point, Simpson singled out two experts on the Soviet Union—Nikolai Poppe, a Russian
Nikolai Poppe was the world’s greatest authority on Soviet Siberia and Outer Mongolia. During the war, he served as a translator for the Nazis in both of those German-occupied countries. Although Einsatzkommandos were busy killing Soviet Jews, Poppe steadfastly denied that he helped them in any way.
When the Germans retreated, they took Poppe with them and put him to work as a researcher at the Wannsee Institute in Berlin and at the German East Asian Institute in Czechoslovakia. The think tanks did research on “the Jewish problem.”
Both the Soviets and OPC lusted after Poppe. Moscow wanted so badly to try and to execute Poppe as a traitor and war criminal that it attempted to kidnap him. And the CIA put out an APB on him. The agency eventually found him hiding in the British zone of postwar Germany and contemplating suicide. Poppe was afraid that the Soviets might snatch his daughter or his semi-invalid wife and blackmail him into returning to Russia. Suicide would solve the problem. His two sons had managed to make it to England, where they were living safely under aliases. That Poppe was wanted by the Soviets made him even more desirable to the Americans.
Although U.S. officials at the State Department and OPC knew about Poppe’s Nazi collaboration, the United States asked Great Britain if it could have him. The British sighed in relief and said good riddance. Moscow had been pestering Britain to hand over Poppe under the Yalta repatriation agreement but it had refused on principle. According to recently declassified intelligence files, the CIA secretly moved Poppe from the British zone to the American zone in operation “Father Christmas,” and from there to the United States. He arrived at Westover Field, Massachusetts, on a U.S. Air Force transport in May 1949 and went to work for Bloodstone as a consultant to the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.
Gustav Hilger was a German citizen who had been born in Russia. His father was German, his mother Russian. As a former diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow, Hilger was another huge catch. His firsthand experience with both Soviet officials and anticommunist groups made Hilger OPC’s most prized trophy.
Hilger’s hands were hardly clean. During the German-Soviet war, he recruited men for the Waffen SS and helped the Wehrmacht organize Vlasov’s army. There is also evidence to suggest that he actively assisted Einsatzkommandos in rounding up Jews. After retreating to Germany with the German army, Hilger continued to work for the Nazi foreign ministry and served as personal secretary to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s foreign minister. (Ribbentrop was convicted and executed at Nuremberg.) Hilger also is credited with helping to round up Italian Jews and to arrange asylum in Germany for Hungarian soldiers implicated in the murder and deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
After the war, Hilger spied for the United States as a member of the Gehlen Org. The CIA was so impressed with his credentials that it promised U.S. citizenship for him and his family if he agreed to work for the State Department in America. With the backing of George Kennan, the CIA asked the INS to waive its required examination of Hilger at his port of entry, and requested that his case be handled “on a classified basis.” Hilger went to work as a consultant for State and the CIA. As promised, he eventually received U.S. citizenship under the CIA’s one-hundred rule exception.
“The fact that the Office of Policy Coordination wanted Nicholas
Although many of the Soviet Union experts, scholars, and propagandists employed by Bloodstone in America and in Western Europe were “gentleman” Nazis and collaborators, the same cannot be said of Bloodstone’s Eastern European covert operatives. By way of example, Simpson cites three Albanian pro-Nazi fascists admitted to the United States under the Bloodstone program—Midhat Frasheri, Xhafer Deva, and Hasan Dosti.
Frasheri was the head of Balli Kombetar, a pro-Nazi fascist group in Albania. Deva was Albania’s former quisling foreign minister. Dosti was its former quisling minister of justice. All three Nazi collaborators were directly involved in the deportation of Jews to Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. (At the time Bloodstone recruited Deva and Dosti, quislings were barred from entry into the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948.)
Bloodstone was absorbed into other CIA clandestine programs in the early 1950s. By the time OSI was formed in 1979, Hilger, Frasheri, and Deva were already dead. Poppe and Dosti were still alive, but were never prosecuted for visa fraud.
THE GUERILLA ARMY
The Lodge Act, described in chapter 3, provided the legal justification for a “guerilla army.” The act authorized the armed services to enlist up to 12,500 “aliens,” specifying that the recruits must be single men, eighteen to thirty-five years old, who were willing to serve in the U.S. Army for five years. The volunteers would have to agree to remain single until they completed basic training as “Regular Army Unassigned” privates, with commensurate pay. As an inducement to enlist, the United States guaranteed recruits permanent U.S. residency at the end of their service as long as they were honorably discharged. The volunteers who passed a series of tests administered by the U.S. Army in Germany would be trained by the army and the CIA at Camp King, West Germany, and in military schools and camps in the United States.
Barred from service in the new guerilla army were German nationals and citizens of NATO nations. This ensured that virtually all enlistees would be Eastern Europeans. Also excluded as unacceptable were anarchists, communists, convicted criminals, alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex offenders unless granted a waiver from the army’s adjutant general. There was no directive prohibiting the recruitment of
According to a 1951 top-secret, sixteen-page report, “special consideration” would be given to qualified applicants who had experience in guerilla and mountain warfare, police and security work, and military intelligence and counterintelligence. In other words, the army was looking for former Vlasov army soldiers, Waffen SS volunteers, and freedom fighters. The army estimated its guerilla requirements as: 7,400 men between September 1951 and July 1952; 6,100 men between July 1952 and July 1954; and 2,400 yearly thereafter.
By 1950, when the Lodge Act was passed, it was well-known that freedom-fighting guerillas had frequently engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, Orthodox Serbians, and Russian POWs, among others. It was also known that local police and security units in countries occupied by the Nazis were organizations that had been designated as criminal by the Nuremberg Tribunal and defined as inimical to the United States by the Displaced Persons Commission.
The army determined that there were thousands of middle and Eastern Europeans fit for guerilla army service and provided the following estimates: Estonians (5,850); Latvians (16,925); Lithuanians (12,625); Poles (209,725); and Czechoslovakians (1,025).
As envisioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the CIA, the guerilla army-in-waiting would be specially trained and ready to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack in Europe. Donning protective gear, troops would file into
