EXHUMING THE CIA'S NAZIS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500033-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 33
• Publication Date: December 19, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500033-9
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Exhumifl
The
CIA's
Nazis
THE WASHINGTON POST
19 DECEMBER 1982
THE BELARUS SECRET. By John Lof-
tus. Edited by Nathan Miller. Knopf.
196 pp. S 13.95
By DAVID WISE
ALONG TIME AGO, I sat with Frank
G. Wisner in his law office in Wash-
ington and-then around the cornerat lunch
in a fancyM Street resauraz:tlistening to
him boast how he had, almost single-hand-
edly, overthrown the government of Guate-
mala.
I-Ie also told me how, as the CIA's man
in charge of the Guatemala. operation, he
had even arranged for the appointment of
the American ambassador, John E. Peuri-
foy, so that the agency would have the
rig: t sort of diplomat in place to preside
over the coup. After President Eisenhow-
er's election, Wisner explained, Peurifoy
had lost his political backing: "He was on
the beach and we picked him up."
For years, Frank Wisner, a husky, bald,
tough-looking man, well over six feet, had
been a top covert operator for the Central
Intelligence Agency. He was powerful. He
could, just as be claimed, overthrow a gov-
ernment or appoint a United States am-
bassador. Not your-averege, everyday sort
of luncheon partner. Wisner, in fact, bore
roughly the same paternal relationship to
Cold War covert operations.that Edward
Teller does to the hydrogen bomb.
That day long ago, Wisner also talked on
about bow he had, after 1948, beaded the
Office of Policy Coordination, a covert ac-
tion organization with an innocuous title of
his own making. He did not mention, how-
ever, that as bead of OPC he secretly
brought into the United States scores of
Nazi collaborators--some ~of the most.-
vi-cious war criminals ever to serve Adolf Hit-
ler's Thousand Year Reich-to-form the
core of a sec-et army that'W mer planned
to unleash against the SovieLUnion.. -
It remained or John Loftus, B young
former attorney for the Justice 'Depart-
ment, to uncover that story in his shocking
and disturbing book, The Belarus Secret.
And what a story it is: how, in defiance of
the law and presidential directives,
Byelorussian Nazis who had actually
served in the Belarus Brigade of the no-
torious?'affen SS
were smuggled into the United States by an in-
telligence agency. how their dossiers were laun-
dered, sometimes with the complicity of the FBI
and the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
so that they might. settle in America for obscure
and ultimately ludicrous clandestine schemes.
And how finally, when Congress and the Justice
Department began to dig into the story years
later, a mysterious coverup took place. Unseen
hands were at work. The Nazis' files could not be
found: normally efficient Pentagon computers
somehow failed to locate the incriminating
records sitting in the government's archives.
Many of the murderers imported by Frank
Wisner and the CIA lived out peaceful lives in
America, the land of the free, and are buried in a
small graveyard in South River, New Jersey, a
Byelorussian community off the New Jersey
Turnpike about 30 miles south of midtown Man-
hattan. Some of the suspected Nazis are still
alive and th-E subject of current investigations by
the Justice Department, for whom Loftus had
worked as coordinator of the Belarus project
Byelorussia, also known as White Russia, is
one of the republics of the U.S.S.R. It is about
the size of Minnesota and lies just to the east of
the Polish border. When the Nazis occupied
Byelorussia during World War II, they set up a
puppet government there under Radislaw Os-
trowsky. The loyalty test for the Byelorussian
collaborators was how enthusiastically they par-
ticipated in the slaughter of the large Jewish
population. Only those who aided the Einsatz-
gruppen, the Gestapo's mobile killing squads,
passed the test. The Byelorussian+s brought
great enthusiasm to the task. "Children were
thrown into wells and hand grenades dropped
down upon them, and Byelorussian policemen
swung infants by the heels and smashed their
heads against rocks."
One of the top Quislings was Stanislaw
Stankievich, the "Butcher of Borissow." In
1941, Stankievich, whom the Nazis had put in
charge of the town, ordered 7,000 men, women,
and children-virtually all the Jewish popula-
tion-killed. They .were forced to jump into
pits and were shot from above, one layer of
bodies covering the next.
'COAT ZYCITa
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500033-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500033-9
In the town of Kletsk, a leading collaborator,
Emanuel Jasiuk, was appointed mayor by the
Nazis. In 1942, he murdered 5,000 Jews in a
single day. Large trenches were dug and men,
women, and children herded into them. As Lof-
tus tells it:
"A small detachment of Germans and spe-
cialiv selected Bvelorussians accomplished the
actual execution. Guards were left atop the
graves until the ground stopped trembling and
the muffled cries were still. There was no
chance for anyone to crawl out."
Emanuel Jasiuk is buried in an unmarked
grave in the cemetery in South River, New Jer-
sey--dear the grave of Radislaw Ostrowsky.
Stanislaw Stankievich died peacefully in his
bed in Queens, New York, a year ago. The
honor roll of the CIA's Nazis is much longer
than that. When the CBS television program 60
Minutes interviewed Loftus last spring, they
reported that 300 Nazi collaborators were
brought to America; but the number may be
much higher, Loftus suggests.
Wisner's OPC was a hybrid; it received its
funding.from CIA but was hidden in the State
Department. At its height in 1952, Wisner had
4,000 agents in OPC in 47 stations around the
globe, and a budget of $82 million. And no one
controlled it. Eventually, in the 1950s. OPC
was absorbed into what is now CIA's Director-
ate of Operations, the agency's cloak-and-dag-
ger arm.
As Wisner conceived it, his Nazis were to
form the nucleus of an underground liberation
army that would be targeted against the gov-
ernments of Eastern Europe and roll back the.
Iron Curtain. For help, Wisner turned to Rein-
hard Gehlen, who had been Hitler's military in-
telligence expert on the Soviet Union, and
whom the CIA set up as head of West Germa-
ny's spy organization after the wab Wisner's
plan for an underground army was, as Loftus
puts it, "romantic and absurdly impractical."
For one thing, the Byelorussian and other
Eastern European emigres were riddled with
Soviet spies. When some of Wisner's warriors
were parachuted into the Soviet Union, they
were quickly captured and executed. For assist-
ance in screening out Soviet agents among the
emigres, Wisner, according to Loftus, went to,
of all people, Kim Philby, bead of Soviet affairs
for British intelligence and, as it later turned
out, a master mole for the KGB.
Yet Wisner's plans marched forward. "Mil-
lions of dollars in gold, bank notes, arms, and
equipment were smuggled into Poland" in one
ill-fated operation alone. By 1952, OPC "was
consuming more than half the CIA's annual
budget. Wisner's private army had launched an
undeclared war against the Soviet Union." By
1955, however, he was no longer operating as a
loner; that year, the National Security Council
officially, albeit secretly, authorized .the CIA
and Wisner to incite revolts against the Soviet
Union in Eastern Europe.
None of it succeeded: only the CIA's -Nazis
benefited, building comfortable new lives in
America (some got jobs with Radio Liberty, a
CIA front), their murderous pasts sanitized
courtesy of the U.S. government. By 1965,
Frank Wisner was a sick man. At his Maryland
farm one afternoon, he blew his brains out with
a 20 gauige shotgun. It was a tragic ending for a
man .who,_by his own lights, at least, thought he
was serving his country. His friends issued one
kind of eulogy. John Loftus has written an-
other.
DAVID WISEis co-author of The Invis-
ible Government and writes frequently
about intelligence and espionage:
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500033-9