Blowback Read online

  Blowback

  America’s Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Destructive

  Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy

  Christopher Simpson

  With a New Introduction by the Author on CIA Declassification of Nazi-Related Records

  For my mother and father

  Contents

  Series Introduction

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1. A Discreet Silence

  2. Slaughter on the Eastern Front

  3. “Chosen, Rare Minds”

  4. The Man at Box 1142

  5. The Eyes and Ears

  6. CROWCASS

  7. “I … Prefer to Remain Ignorant”

  8. Bloodstone

  9. “See That He Is Sent to the U.S. …”

  10. Bare Fists and Brass Knuckles

  11. Guerrillas for World War III

  12. “Any Bastard as Long as He’s Anti-Communist”

  13. Ratlines

  14. Pipelines to the United States

  15. The Politics of “Liberation”

  16. Brunner and von Bolschwing

  17. The End of “Liberation”

  Acknowledgments

  Source Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Selected Archival Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Series Introduction

  I

  We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

  Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations-church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

  Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

  II

  And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

  How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it).

  Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

  III

  The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

  These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

  Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

  The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

  Mark Crispin Miller

  Introduction

  From 1999 through 2007 I served on a historians’ advisory panel for the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The group met once or twice a year at an inexpensive hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, to discuss recommendations for declassifying tens of millions of pages of still-secret, fifty- and sixty-year-old US government records that might include information about the Holocaust and the role of Nazi and Axis war criminals in US Cold War covert operations.

  The advisory panel was a low-status group. Unlike the historians hired to explore the records themselves, the committee did not have (or declined to undergo) security clearances required by NARA and other agencies in order to view old records. With the exception of the panel’s chair, Dr. Gerhard Weinberg, the panel was sometimes treated with open contempt by the representatives from federal agencies that we were supposedly advising. Nevertheless, we were authorized to ask questions about the competence and effectiveness of the declassification review project. In that way, the little committee did succeed in helping to rattle the cages of several powerful federal bureaucracies, including the CIA.

  There was also a consolation prize offered to these advisors in addition to the hotel coffee and Danish pastries. Chief US archivist Alle
n Weinstein frequently repeated his promise that NARA would publish written critiques from the advisors as part of the official report to Congress about the mechanics of the declassification effort, which was our area of expertise.

  I wrote the critique (which now forms the contents of this book) of how federal agencies had handled their responsibilities under the relevant laws. I delivered it by the deadline. NARA first responded with a fog of delays, and then with silence.

  The report was issued a year later without the critique, and without the courtesy of a note acknowledging how and why the piece had been spiked. I eventually learned from three different sources involved in the process that Allen Weinstein had made the decision to bar its publication. That was disappointing, of course, but not especially surprising. It is worthy of note only because it is another example of how political administrations in Washington, DC, routinely suppress reports they find disagreeable. Indeed, performing that type of ideological border patrol is an unspoken but tacitly understood part of the job description for government and private-sector managers.

  In this particular instance, Dr. Weinstein was a Bush-era appointee at the archives, a noted historian, and a widely praised leader of a long string of Cold War publicity projects that pitted a bright, shiny United States against those viewed as the enemies of the moment. As archivist of the United States, he was also a principal promoter of a White House effort to appoint John Choon Yoo to the panel overseeing declassification of the CIA’s records on its work with Nazi criminals. Yes, that John Yoo, the disgraced author of the Bush administration’s legal approval for systematic beatings and other torture of Middle Eastern suspects by CIA specialists. Fortunately, cooler heads soon blocked Yoo’s appointment, as I report in this previously unpublished critique. Interestingly, this aspect of John Yoo’s abortive government service has fallen down NARA’s own memory hole. The written record of that debacle has today disappeared from NARA itself—the agency whose primary mission is to preserve a complete and accurate record of the activities of the US government.

  The once-censored critique that follows provides an appropriate new introduction to the digital publication of Blowback in Open Road Media’s Forbidden Bookshelf series.

  A few notes on context: The “IWG” mentioned in the critique stands for the Interagency Working Group, which was created in 1999 and made up of representatives from federal agencies implementing the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (NWCDA) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (JIGDA). As the critique mentions, the IWG included a bipartisan panel of prominent “public members,” some of whom clashed repeatedly with federal agencies that resisted appropriate declassification of records.

  The censored critique comes from the galleys that NARA created for use in the report. For the first time, readers today are able to read this bit of history that the archivist of the United States went out of his way to ensure would not see the light of day.

  Christopher Simpson

  Washington, DC

  April 2014

  Christopher Simpson

  Member, IWG Historical Advisory Panel

  “The CIA’s ongoing campaign against accountability for its activities requires that every responsible historian and journalist treat the CIA claims with great skepticism.”

  You’ll recall that the fundamental reason for the passage of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (NWCDA) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (JIGDA) was to open classified records concerning U.S. intelligence agencies’ and corporate collusion with Nazi and Japanese war criminals. Significant progress has been made on that score, not least of which is that no educated person can ignore the reality of this collaboration and the substantial role it played in Cold War intelligence operations.

  Much more remains to be done. The Interagency Working Group (IWG) faced insider foot-dragging, constant double-talk, and occasional outright deceit from some federal agencies that were opposed to its legally mandated work. The problems intensified in the wake of the 911 crisis and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Insider resistance to the IWG reached its logical consummation when the White House appointed John Yoo as a public member of the IWG in May 2004.1 Yoo, of course, is the official directly responsible for the legal rational used by the White House to approve use of torture and torture-like practices during protracted interrogations of prisoners.2 Many people have noted the overlap between Yoo’s recommendations and the techniques used in Nazi and Axis concentration camps, as well as in Stalin-era Gulag prisons.

  Yoo’s appointment sparked a battle led by the public members of the IWG that eventually led Yoo to quietly withdraw from the project—by any standard, this was an important IWG accomplishment in Bush-era Washington. Yoo’s appointment to the IWG, and even the National Archives/IWG press release that once announced it, has since that time quietly disappeared from the National Archives’ and IWG’s Website, and from other public documents.3

  Throughout the IWG’s existence, the actual implementation of the NWCDA and JIGDA disclosure laws was carried out by, and to a large extent financed by, the same federal agencies whose records were being declassified. While the public members of the IWG attempted to work by consensus—and up to a point succeeded at it—the realities of operating a no-budget honor system involving a dozen federal agencies significantly restricted what could be accomplished, particularly when dealing with agencies that set out to restrict the IWG’s work from the outset.

  There is only space here to present a handful of examples of the power of intelligence bureaucracies to obstruct declassification in such a situation. Substantial evidence indicates that the Army’s central repository for intelligence records has intentionally destroyed its files on prominent Nazis closely associated with U.S. intelligence during the early Cold War when their names surfaced in the media. Known instances include a failed effort to destroy all files concerning Klaus Barbie, and the successful elimination of almost all records concerning the Gehlen Organization’s Heinz-Danko Herre, and about Walter Rauff, an SS executioner who cooperated with Allen Dulles in Operation Sunrise and eventually escaped to South America. (The official story is that the Army intelligence records were routinely destroyed.)

  The Department of State, for its part, provided false documentation concerning its performance under the NWCDA and JIGDA when it felt opportune to do so. From 2002 through at least 2004, the IWG’s public members and the Historical Advisory Panel (on which I served) repeatedly requested federal agencies to document what they were actually doing under the acts, rather than to simply provide periodic statements that all was well. As part of its response, the Department of State historian’s office created after-the-fact memos that claimed it had completed its agency-wide search for records of war crimes in the Asian Theater in less than 24 hours—a transparently misleading claim. Other searches required under the laws were said to have been completed in less than a week.4 When questioned about these strange memos, the Department’s representative asserted that a verbal ‘order’ had been distributed three months prior to the concocted memos, which he regarded as only a formality. The Historians’ Advisory Panel then requested copies of the paperwork and related records documenting the actual search. At this writing, there has been no substantive response from the Department.5

  It was the CIA, however, that more than any other agency systematically exploited the IWG’s structural weaknesses. At early IWG meetings the CIA’s representative, Larry Holmes, succeeded in pushing through several measures that had a long-term impact. To the best of my knowledge, neither of these measures has been acknowledged in the IWG’s report to Congress. Perhaps most damaging was the IWG’s early acceptance of what was known behind closed doors as the CIA’s “Waldheim Rule,” after the case of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Put briefly, Holmes agreed that the CIA would review for release Agency records that included information on the war crimes of a particular person. (More on this in a moment.) But any other intelligence rec
ords the Agency might have about that individual, such as his or her postwar role in politics, business or the military, or his associations with U.S. officials or with Axis war criminals, were to be automatically off limits, unless the individual was personally employed by a U.S. agency.

  Accepting this stricture eventually led to absurd consequences, such as what is presently called the “CIA’s file on Hermann Abs” in the National Archives. Abs was a major German banker deeply involved in Nazi-era looting of Jewish property, but who later won favor with the postwar West German government and the United States. In the end, the U.S. Justice Department banned Abs’ entry into this country under laws that prohibit suspected Nazi and Japanese war criminals from traveling here.

  One might reasonably expect the CIA to have a substantial dossier on Abs. Yet what the National Archives now calls the “CIA file on Hermann Abs” includes none of that, because the Agency has withheld it under the Waldheim Rule. The present dossier is made up of a handful of pages, almost all of which are an informant’s report quoting Abs saying he was not responsible for Nazi crimes.

  The scope of the Waldheim Rule was dramatically expanded by the CIA’s “relevancy standards,” the existence of which was concealed from the IWG for most of that group’s existence. At the time the IWG was established, its members (including the CIA) voted unanimously that “an individual’s membership in a Nazi criminal unit such as the SS is prima facie evidence of the relevance [under the NWCDA] of the files maintained on that individual.”6

  This agreement meant, in effect, each agency was to check its records against a computerized list of about 60,000 persons who are known to have been senior Nazi Party officials, members of the SS, identified as war crimes suspects during 1945–1947, or part of collaborationist murder squads the Nazis operated on the Eastern Front. If a match was found, that person’s records were to be considered “relevant” for review under the NWCDA and later under the JIGDA.