JOHN LOFTUS: THE BELARUS SECRET

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 18, 2007
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: January 22, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM On the Agenda
DATE January 22, 1983 6:00 AM CITY Boston
SUBJECT John Loftus: The Belarus Secret
JENNIFER JORDAN: You're On the Agenda.
On the Agenda originates from Boston, Massachusetts
and it also reaches people throughout New England and upstate
New York with issues of concern, alarm and interest.
Today On the Agenda we have John Loftus, author of "The
Belarus Secret," a newly released book which looks painstakingly
into the path of Nazi war criminals from the Byelorussia region
of the USSR; came to the United States of America with the sanct-
ion and protection of the State Department.
Mr. Loftus is here to take us through that history On
the Agenda. Join us.
Mr. Loftus, welcome to On the Agenda today.
Let's start with definitions. Where and what is Byelo-
JOHN LOFTUS: It's a little known country. It's in the
eastern provinces of Poland, in the western provinces of the old
Russian Empire. And it's officially an independent nation with a
seat in the UN. But it's really little more than a Soviet puppet
state. All of its foreign policy is conducted by Moscow.
JORDAN: Within the citizens of Byelorussia, and some-
thing that with a Nazi takeover -- where were they and how did
they fit in -- were they like all the Russian peasantry, or all
the Russian citizenship?
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
LOFTUS: They were a little different Byelorussia was
one of the most conquered nations on earth. It lay across the
principal invasion route for anyone traveling from Europe to
Moscow; everyone from Napoleon to the Crusaders passed through
their country.
And as a result they took a very laissez-faire attitude
toward occupiers. They'll be here for a while, then someone else
will come in. So they were pretty much used to the idea of some-
one taking part of their homeland.
Byelorussia was also unique in another way. In the
13th Century it was the border area where most of the Jews
fleeing Western Europe were dumped. It was called the Settlement
of the Pales, one of the most densely populated Jewish areas in
the world.
The Jews that arrived in Byelorussia brought with them a
great many skills from Western Europe and so they really took
over the shops and the trades. There developed a great deal of
hostility between the Orthodox Byelorussia peasants and the
predominantly urban Jewish population. Some towns in Byelorussia
were 90 percent Jewish.
Over the years the anti-Semitism grew and continued to
grow. And so by the time that World War II came around, most
of the population were quite eager to see hard times fall upon
their Jewish neighbors.
In the beginning when the Nazis and their collaborators
moved the Jews into the ghetto, that meant that all their homes
and businesses were available for the Christian population. It
was a gigantic windfall.
When the Jews tried to escape from the ghetto the
peasants were given a kilo of sugar for every Jew they captured.
According to the SS polls of the population, 80 percent
of the Byelorussia population sided with the Germans during
World War II and not with the Soviet Union.
So the -- the old saying, it takes a hundred people to
kill a Jew; ninety-nine to shrug their shoulders and one to pull
the trigger. I think that was probably true in Byelorussia.
JORDAN: But we -- you said recently that the population
was strongly Jewish. Now I'm sure this is an age-old question
will go down in the history books, but why did they put up with
it if they were stronger in merchantry [sic] and stronger in
industry, and stronger in the creative and productive forces?
LOFTUS: Because they were still only ten percent of
the total national population. And because they were so con-
centrated in the urban areas, they had no contacts, no relation-
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
ship with the peasants, who had primarily an agricultural
economy.
And some of the Byelorussian Jews would collect taxes
for the absentee Polish landlords. So the only contact the
peasantry had was with the tax collector. And anti-Semitism
became a popular cause long before Hitler's armies invaded
Byelorussia.
JORDAN: All right. So then you see the Nazi army
moving in through Byelorussia and the Byelorussian Christianity
soldiers [?] taking sides and at the sides of the Nazis.
Where and when did we start seeing the real pogram start
with Byelorussia and the -- and, well, the Holocaust of
Byelorussia that's accounted in your book?
LOFTUS: It started quite early. Even before the invas-
ions. The Nazis had recruited teams of Byelorussian intel-
ligentsia to go in with the SS and assist them with to occupation
and control of the homeland.
When these teams arrived they were installed as mayors
and police chiefs. And they secretly drew up lists of their
neighbors to be executed by the SS. Anyone who was a potential
opponent of Nazi rule. Polish intelligentsia, Catholic clergy,
Jewish intelligentsia.
So the few pograms of the first few months of the
occupation were limited to those groups who might organize
resistance. Then the wholesale killings started.
Eichmann asked that an experiment be carried out in
Byelorussia.
JORDAN: ...who Eichmann is?
LOFTUS: Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the final solu-
tion for the Third Reich. He was the one who was to devise a
plan for getting rid of Europe's unwanted Jewish population. He
thought of deportation; of sending them to Palestine. Eventually
he hit upon the idea of simply sending them out to the Byelo-
russian pale where they could be worked to death or starved
to death and no one would care.
Now, in October, 1941, Stanislas Stankovich, who had
been appointed by the SS as mayor of the little town of Borasau
[?] was given orders to carry out the first experiment on mass
murder.
He was told by the SS to have his police force murder
every Jewish man, woman and child in the county. His police
shuttled the Jewish population out in trucks to large pits that
on the road leading out to the airport. The Jews were placed
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
in layers, laid down in pits and then they were shot through
with machine guns, so they could save ammunition by shooting
through two rows of bodies at once. A layer of dirt was shuffled
over them, and the next layer of Jews were made to climb down
into the graves.
The worst part of the atrocities weren't discovered
until after the war, when Western doctors and Soviet physicians
were doing autopsies in the graves. They could find no bullet
wounds on the infants. Apparently they figured that the children
were too small to climb out of the graves, they were simply
buried alive.
Between 6,500 and 7,000 Jews were executed in Borasau
in a single day.
The atrocities so revolted some German intelligence
officers who witnessed it that they later turned up at the
Nuremberg war crimes prosecution as witnesses for the prosecu-
tion. Stanislas Stankovich was denounced at Nuremberg, placed
on their wanted lists. He was denounced in the United Nations.
He was even mentioned in the Floor of Congress as an example of
the sort of person who should never be allowed into America.
At the very time, in 1948, that our congressmen were
holding Stankovich up as a black example, American intelligence
had put him in charge of a refugee camp in West Germany, and
put him on the American payroll.
Despite the fact that he was rejected six times for
a visa, as a war criminal, as a communist collaborator, as a
Nazi collaborator, he was brought to this country and given
a good job with Radio Liberty and he died here a citizen of
the United States just before we could bring him to trial.
JORDAN: Your book, "The Belarus Secret" deals with
the -- these Nazi war criminals and the Byelorussian Nazi war
criminals coming in and living rather a nice life in New Jersey
specifically. All I can say is, how and why? Where did this
begin that our government started sanctioning these people and
bringing them in and allowing them -- and not only allowing
them -- giving them a free ticket?
LOFTUS: Well, it wasn't our government. Both
President Truman and Roosevelt specifically prohibited bringing
in Nazi collaborators or war criminals. There was a minority
group in the State Department that thought that Dewey would
get elected president in '48 and they took things on their own.
They were warning war criminals to go into hiding so they
couldn't be subject to extradition to the Soviets. And these
people sincerely believed that the Soviet Union was going to
invade West Germany in 1948. And so they were desperate for
any form of intelligence behind the Iron Curtain. Well, the
Byelorussian collaborators promptly said that they had been
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
-- had a great deal of experience in spying behind the Iron
Curtain, since they'd done it for the SS. And they were more
than willing to continue doing it for the British. And the
British have actually turned these groups over to the Americans.
JORDAN: Are the Americans in doing this, or the State
Department in allowing them to come in, in effect turning its
back a second time by sanctioning these -- the criminals of
those crimes?
LOFTUS: Yeah, I think a lot of people during the Cold
War felt that, well, World War II is over, the Nazis are defeated
nothing we can do will bring the Jews back, let's use whatever we
can to find the real enemy, the communists.
LOFTUS: Unfortunately, they broke all the rules of the
intelligence profession.
You see, Congress had passed a law, saying if you want
to bring in people with loathesome backgrounds who are ineligible
for American citizenship, you can do so under a special law,
provided the Attorney General and the head of the CIA agrees.
Well, the State Department didn't want the CIA to know what they
were doing. And so they smuggled these people in without
background checks. If they had done the background checks -- if
they had let CIA do the research, they would have discovered
that these people -- many of them -- were working on both sides
of the fence. They had been spying for the communists before,
during and after the war.
The Soviet Union was delighted to have the Americans and
British recruit these war criminals, because they were the one
group of people that Soviet military intelligence had penetrated
during the World War II. This was the center of the Soviet
partism warfare area. They had spies at every level of the
collaborators. So when we brought the collaborators here, we
brought the Soviet agents among them as well.
JORDAN: Can you expect to defend freedom, which is
evidently why we bring these people in and have them work in
anti-communist, anti-Soviet nature -- but can we expect to
defend the freedom of our country and other countries by def-
ending the rights of these blatant killers?
LOFTUS: Well, intelligence is a very, very tough
profession. And I think that as with the German rocket
scientists, sometimes you have to make hard decisions, that no
matter how loathesome a person is, that maybe his interest to the
national security outweighs that.
Now those are really tough decisions to make.
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01O7OR00000540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
LOFTUS: Well, when it goes by the book, Congress is
involved in it, the president is involved in it, the heads of the
intelligence services. These are pretty reasonable people who
feel the same revulsion that you and I do towards them, so when
they finally approve to bring someone in under the lawful program
it's usually because they have a very, very good reason.
That's not what I'm talking about here. What happened
in this case, is that it was illegal immigration. That the
official channels in government knew nothing about them. And
because it was illegal it had to be covered up. The CIA could
not be let in on what was happening. And that caused numerous
disasters.
During the 1950's when the CIA took over at least in
name the State Department operations, they were supposed to be
running parachute drops behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA didn't
know that the agents they were using were people that had been
identified five and ten years previously as communist agents.
We lost virtually our entire intelligence network behind
the Iron Curtain as a result of these penetrations. The CIA
finally forced the OPC unit to drop using the emigre groups.
They were an unmitigated disaster.
For 30 years the CIA has been blamed for these covert
operations. Wrong agency.
I saw a very, very classified document which the head of
the CIA addressed to the Army War College and indicated that he
strongly protested against these operations but had been ordered
to cooperate.
JORDAN: The agency responsible is?
LOFTUS: Well, the State Department. But, you see,
under the Eisenhower administration apparently these programs
received sanction at higher levels; someone with enough authority
to order the CIA to cooperate.
Eisenhower had three special assistants that ran these
operations. They were sort of to protect him in case anything
went wrong. And they were C.D. Jackson, Nelson Rockefeller,
and Richard Nixon.
Now you can imagine by 1960, when the last OPC
operation, the Bay of Pigs has been lined up, and all the other
ones have been disasters, and the Nazi groups have been dropped
because of communist penetration, and even the head of the
British service that sold us these Nazi groups, Kim Philby, is
getting ready to defect to Moscow.
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
Richard Nixon may not have wanted all this to come out
at that time. It would have been embarrassing to his political
career, to say the least. I think that's why the coverup lasted
so long.
So many of the people that were involved with these
State Department operations back in the 40's and the early 50's
later went on to develop very, very prominent political careers.
It was not the sort of thing they wanted to surface.
You are On the Agenda. My name is Jennifer Jordan and
we're talking with John Loftus, author of "The Belarus Secret,"
which deals with Nazi war criminals and their happily ever after
life in America, with the State Department's sanction.
Mr. Loftus, how did you get involved and how did you
get your hands on these documents?
LOFTUS: Well, I was a trial attorney, criminal division
and was getting ready to come back to Boston, had always planned
to come back to private practice. And I saw a note that a new
unit, the Office of Special Investigations had been formed to
centralize efforts to hunt Nazi war criminals. Well, I spoke a
little German, I had the right intelligence background, so I
thought I'd go over for a few months and ended up staying more
than two years.
Like all of the attorneys I was given a regional group
of cases to work with; my region happened to be Byelorussia.
But going through all the files I noticed that there
were striking inconsistencies. The FBI, for example, was pre-
tending not to know information in one case that it had already
learned two years previously in another case. And it happened
too often to be a coincidence.
So I very carefully made up a list of possibilities
to explain how these inconsistencies...
JORDAN: What kind of inconsistencies did you find?
I mean, just to give us an idea?
LOFTUS: Documents out of sequence. Leads would come up.
Army counterintelligence would write to the FBI and say this man,
Emmanuel Jaziek [?]is a suspected war criminal. He emigrated
illegally to this country. We want you to investigate. Well,
when the FBI went to visit Jaziek, it wasn't to investigate him
for his Nazi background, it was to recruit him. The FBI already
knew that the Byelorussians were being funded by the State
Department fund group.
So they were recruiting their own Byelorussian Nazis to
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
spy on what the other intelligence agencies were doing.
When we finally got a glimpse of what was happening I
asked the Justice Department for permission to investigate
further. I went directly to each of the intelligence vaults.
But I didn't go up to the top levels of the Pentagon, I went
right down to the clerks in the vaults, flashed my Justice
Department credentials, and when they checked back with their
security office, they found that I had more security clearances
than almost anyone in government. At that point they said, well,
sure, give you the files.
As the stuff started to come out most of the people in
the intelligence community were pretty revolted when they
discovered what was in the files. They were very helpful. And
often I would say, well, look, we don't want to get your agency
involved, you're only peripherally here; we want to go back and
get the agency that did it.
LOFTUS: And so don't blow the whistle on your guys.
Blow it on another agency. And so they all blew the whistle
on each other. And before it -- all of the agencies what would
happen, I had gone through each of the vaults, cross-referenced
the documents, and we knew exactly what had occurred and why.
JORDAN: Now has the government given you sanction to
publish the book?
LOFTUS: Oh, yeah. I asked -- when Stankovich died
I realized that this was crazy, that I could spend another two
and a half years building a case and the guy could drop dead
again. And besides, I was really more interested in another
section, the Public Integrity Section that was investigating
the coverup -- Congress. So I asked the Justice Department,
the CIA, the Pentagon, everybody else, if I could write a book
only about the dead Nazis, and I would submit it for review
to the intelligence community and we'd see if they'd clear it.
And so they agreed.
JORDAN: They did.
In other words, there are more living still in this
country...
JORDAN: Is that the goal of your book, to force an
action by the government to either get them out or to force the
American public to say, wait a minute, what's going on here --
do you want the dirty laundry aired a bit?
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
LOFTUS: Yeah, I think there's -- it's really too
late to do anything to the individual Nazis. There's a very
limited number of attorneys that can process these cases --
maybe all told we can do 40 to 80 cases before the last Nazi
dies in America.
LOFTUS: At least we're making the effort. We're
setting the historical precedent that people like this will
never get away with it as long as they live. They might be
next. We're always going to be pursuing them.
Most importantly, it's -- the reason I wrote the book
was to teach the American people that, as Churchill says, it
was not only wrong; it was a mistake. That using such people
is not only morally offensive but it's counterproductive to
national security.
The Soviets had a field day making propaganda against
the Americans. They would tell people, go ahead and listen to
Radio Liberty, the broadcaster there is Stanislas Stankovich,
the man who murdered your cousins. You know we played right
into their hands.
The one insuperable advantage we have over the Soviets
in foreign affairs was our good name, that people trust us,
we're a moderate, responsible country. There were about a
handful of reckless amateurs in the intelligence community took
over programs and virtually dictated foreign policy. They
engineered coups during the Cold War. They recruited secret
police organizations -- some of which make the SS look tame
by comparison.
They conducted these activities with only the most
minimal approval within the Executive Branch without Congress
knowing anything about it.
And I think it's time that the American people demanded
that Congress take area of responsibility back over.
The Constitution says that only Congress has the power
to determine eligibility for citizenship but for the last 30
years that power has been exercised secretly and abused by
various people within the intelligence community and Congress
has done nothing about it.
JORDAN: If you were to illustrate those with true
guilt to raise their hands, and to say we went beyond the powers
of government, we went beyond the powers of the justice and blah-
blah-blah, who'd be raising their hands? Is it the Nelson Rock-
efeller group and those three that you mentioned?
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7
 Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100540009-7
LOFTUS: Yeah, I think they were policy figures. People
told me that everything was approved at the White House level,
which would indicate that those three people knew.
But more directly, the guys that were directly on --
Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. Those would be the people who
more than any one were responsible for this program.
I talked to retired intelligence officials who had
worked with both men and they all come up with the same verdict:
they were warned over and over again that using these people was
reckless, there was a tremendous risk of penetration. That it
was bound to backlash sooner or later. Nevertheless they kept
on with it. They had an ideological commitment that these secret
armies behind the Iron Curtain would actually somehow manage to
defeat the largest police state in the world.
[Station technical difficulty. Loss of transmission, not
restored during this program.]
Approved For Release 2007/05/21: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100540009-7