Read Online America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History by John Loftus - Free Book Online
Authors: John Loftus
Tags: General Fiction
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“soft on communism.”
In the 1960s there came a change in the attitudes of the American public toward foreign policy and covert action. The war in Vietnam, which carried Cold War thinking to its logical end, was deemed too costly in blood and money. Covert action was discredited by the failure of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs expedition, the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the overthrow of the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. It was not the time to disclose the embarrassing details about the smuggled Nazi collaborators. Bureaucracies bury their embarrassments in the files.
So the cover-up continued long after there was any legitimate need for it. OPC veterans hoped that the records of the errors of the past would remain undisturbed in the vaults of the various intelligence agencies. As they retired they took with them the cryptonyms needed to unlock these secrets.
There were, of course, those for whom the cover-up never ended. During the 1960s Military Intelligence found it necessary to lie to the Immigration Service on several occasions when asked for information from its files, in order to conceal complicity in the smuggling operation. Within the CIA several old OPC hands still loyal to their Nazi protégés frustrated congressional and OSI requests for information in 1979. Exculpatory documents were again inserted in CIA records, and incriminating SS files were once more removed from the National Archives. The FBI refused to provide OSI with the complete dossiers on its Byelorussian informants, such as Anton Adamovitch of Radio Liberty. Only heavily censored summaries that did not reflect the full Nazi background of those under investigation were supplied. Perhaps the sanitizing process continued because of bureaucratic inertia. Without knowing why they were doing it – like Japanese soldiers holding out on Pacific islands long after the end of World War II – the SOD clerks continued to delete any information from the files pertaining to intelligence operatives connected with Wisner’s OPC.
Not all the blame for the cover-up belongs to the Cold War intelligence community. The congressmen who were in charge of overseeing intelligence programs at that time must share the responsibility because of their failure to perform the duties assigned them. As long ago as 1956, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, a member of one of the CIA oversight committees, stated:
It is not a reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have, unless I believed it to be my responsibility to have it because it might involve the lives of American citizens. 204
I asked two former members of OPC and two retired CIA officials if it were true that no one ever told Congress about the Nazi connection or the details of Wisner’s secret war. They replied that they learned about the Nazis only from contacts in their individual overseas operations, and none of them had ever known of the Nazis in America. They doubted that Wisner or Dulles informed Congress, but most seemed fairly certain that Congress never asked, because members rarely asked about any “operational details.” If Nixon and Rockefeller were given briefings on the Nazis, it was done privately and not through regular channels. One very senior official interviewed recently did recall that C. D. Jackson of Eisenhower’s White House staff was squeezed off the Twenty Committee because he favored psychological warfare rather than the more popular paramilitary and political action programs, which his successors, Nixon and Rockefeller, authorized with enthusiasm.
We talked at length about the traditional methods of security compartmentalization, which keeps all but a handful of officials from knowing the complete picture of an intelligence operation. I asked if
In the 1960s there came a change in the attitudes of the American public toward foreign policy and covert action. The war in Vietnam, which carried Cold War thinking to its logical end, was deemed too costly in blood and money. Covert action was discredited by the failure of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs expedition, the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the overthrow of the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. It was not the time to disclose the embarrassing details about the smuggled Nazi collaborators. Bureaucracies bury their embarrassments in the files.
So the cover-up continued long after there was any legitimate need for it. OPC veterans hoped that the records of the errors of the past would remain undisturbed in the vaults of the various intelligence agencies. As they retired they took with them the cryptonyms needed to unlock these secrets.
There were, of course, those for whom the cover-up never ended. During the 1960s Military Intelligence found it necessary to lie to the Immigration Service on several occasions when asked for information from its files, in order to conceal complicity in the smuggling operation. Within the CIA several old OPC hands still loyal to their Nazi protégés frustrated congressional and OSI requests for information in 1979. Exculpatory documents were again inserted in CIA records, and incriminating SS files were once more removed from the National Archives. The FBI refused to provide OSI with the complete dossiers on its Byelorussian informants, such as Anton Adamovitch of Radio Liberty. Only heavily censored summaries that did not reflect the full Nazi background of those under investigation were supplied. Perhaps the sanitizing process continued because of bureaucratic inertia. Without knowing why they were doing it – like Japanese soldiers holding out on Pacific islands long after the end of World War II – the SOD clerks continued to delete any information from the files pertaining to intelligence operatives connected with Wisner’s OPC.
Not all the blame for the cover-up belongs to the Cold War intelligence community. The congressmen who were in charge of overseeing intelligence programs at that time must share the responsibility because of their failure to perform the duties assigned them. As long ago as 1956, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, a member of one of the CIA oversight committees, stated:
It is not a reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have, unless I believed it to be my responsibility to have it because it might involve the lives of American citizens. 204
I asked two former members of OPC and two retired CIA officials if it were true that no one ever told Congress about the Nazi connection or the details of Wisner’s secret war. They replied that they learned about the Nazis only from contacts in their individual overseas operations, and none of them had ever known of the Nazis in America. They doubted that Wisner or Dulles informed Congress, but most seemed fairly certain that Congress never asked, because members rarely asked about any “operational details.” If Nixon and Rockefeller were given briefings on the Nazis, it was done privately and not through regular channels. One very senior official interviewed recently did recall that C. D. Jackson of Eisenhower’s White House staff was squeezed off the Twenty Committee because he favored psychological warfare rather than the more popular paramilitary and political action programs, which his successors, Nixon and Rockefeller, authorized with enthusiasm.
We talked at length about the traditional methods of security compartmentalization, which keeps all but a handful of officials from knowing the complete picture of an intelligence operation. I asked if
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