Ratlines:The CIA &The Nazis

The mention of the CIA commonly brings to mind images of James Bond spy trillers and images of cold war warriors fighting the evils of communism. But more times than not the reality of CIA plots are images of the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Examples abound of the absurd actions of the CIA and its forerunner the OSS. During WWII the OSS became wrongly convinced that the Japanese were deathly terrified of bats. Thus to help the war effort Donovan of the OSS decided to test dropping bats out of aircraft over the southwestern deserts before risking planes over Japan. The only fly in this ointment was that the poor little critters froze almost instantly upon release in the stratosphere and shattered like fine china upon hitting the ground. After offing a few million bats over the skies of the southwestern desert the plan was dropped.¹

Harvey's hole in Berlin is another example of some rather shortsighted thinking by our intelligence agencies. In 1954 under the direction of Bill Harvey a 1476-foot tunnel into East Berlin was dug to install a phone tap on a Russian communication center. After almost a year the Russians discovered the tap allegedly while repairing a cable. What was not mentioned was the American spies had became too accustomed to their comforts that they turned off the air conditioning to the tunnel during the chilly midseason. Thus the tunnel was marked on the surface by a telltale strip of bare ground over its entire length through an otherwise snow-covered landscape.²

One final example of the CIA bungling will suffice before moving on. On March 11, 1961 Kennedy held a meeting with his assorted advisors concerning what has became known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. (The CIA has recently announced that the CIA was entirely responsible for the mistakes made.) ⁹ Here is a glimpse at only one of the many mistakes made. The original invasion was set some 100 miles east of the Bay of Pigs. After Kennedy demanded a site that would be more conductive to a quite nighttime landing the CIA turned to the Bay of Pigs. The original landing site picked for what was supposed to be a secret night landing was the equivalent of downtown Los Angles. Over flights of the area had revealed dark forms just under the surface in the shallows of the bay. CIA experts determined those dark forms to be seaweed.⁸ Call it rotten luck, a bad guess, a freak of nature or just damn stupidity unfortunately those dark forms turned out to be coral reefs. Reefs that could rip the bottom out of small landing craft or leave it high and dry for any gunners on shore like a sitting duck.

As this was being written another bungling episode in the history of the CIA took place. The incident came during the bombing of Serbia over the Kosovo crisis. The mistake came in the targeting of the Chinese Embassy. President Clinton was quick to apologize to the Chinese and in the effort to find the cause of the error; the CIA stepped forward and admitted the error was theirs. The problem was the maps had never been updated in four years. Maybe we should just rely on the Rand McNally Road Atlas, huh. Later we found out that there was much more to this than just the lack of an updated map. A lower CIA employee had warned repeatedly of the possible misidentification of that target site but was ignored. But this brings us to another question. Does the CIA at times seek to embarrass a president not to their liking? The reader should be aware of the CIA policy of passing on to higher policy making officials documents that are less than credible. During a November 1995 Senate Select Committee it was revealed that CIA officials had passed on more than 35 reports without disclosing the information had come from known Soviet double agents. Between 1986 and 1994 the CIA had passed on at least 95 reports based on information from double agents without revealing the source or the accuracy of the information.¹³⁶

To understand how the CIA has evolved into a menace to freedom worldwide one needs to look at the very beginnings of the intelligence service in this country starting in the period following WWI and the cast of characters. Where and when did the CIA evolve into a monster diametrically opposed to the ideals of a democracy and who were involved? The simple answer is Allen Dulles; evidence abounds that he was a traitor. But as with all simple answers there is a much more that lays hidden. In the following pages the role of Wall Street bankers and big oil along with their servant Dulles will be shown to have been behind the subversion of many countries and the importation of Nazi war criminals. Dulles and the U.S. intelligence community were actively involved in helping Nazi war criminals escape from Europe; they were assisted with help from both Britain and the Vatican.

Obviously Dulles needed help in carrying out a continuing cover up and could not have acted alone. During the war several individuals from the State Department subverted the wishes and orders from FDR. Elbridge Durbrow and R. Borden Reams were two people from FDR's State Department who deliberately mislead FDR and withheld information from him. Reams withheld the first reports from a spy inside of Germany and occupied Poland of the atrocities being committed against the Jewish people.¹⁴ As this was being written a report surfaced that the first notification of high government officials of the Nazi euthanasia was a cable from Vice Counsel Paul H. Dutko dated October 16, 1940.¹⁰² It is uncertain if this cable ever reached FDR just as the later information was kept from him. It is doubtful that even if it had reached Roosevelt that he could have done anymore than condemn the actions with the rampant isolationists and the anti-Jewish senitment that was prevalent throughout the country and in congress. Their actions and the actions of others mainly inside the State Department went beyond a simple disagreement over policy into acts of subversion.

Recent evidence confirmed by Clark Clifford has shown that Truman was unaware of the CIA importation of the Nazis war criminals.³ Generally the cover up during the Truman administration was the work of James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time. The reader should note here that Forrestal, a conservative Democrat could barely cover up for his Jewish bigotry and worked behind Truman's back to block the creation of the state of Israel and had strong ties to the oil business. Before coming to Washington Forrestal was a vice president of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, a firm that invested heavily in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.¹¹³ Another who was certainly involved and well aware of the status of the various war criminals that were allowed to emigrate was J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover protected himself in several ways, one he removed all damning files from FBI headquarters to the New York and Washington field offices, likewise he removed the FBI from the background checks.¹⁵

Others were involved in the cover up at the time as well. In 1945 the navy captured documents from the Nazi oil cartel, Kontinentale Ol A. G. Konti headed by former Reichsbank officer Karl Blessing. A young naval officer was assigned to review those Konti documents. Allen Dulles had personally vouched for Blessing's as an anti-Nazi. If Blessing would have went down as a war criminal and a Nazi, Dulles and his clients would go down as traitors. Dulles personally asked the young naval officer to keep quiet about those documents in exchange for financing the young man's first congressional race, thus was launched the political career of Richard Nixon.⁴

Prescott Bush is largely credited with helping Nixon getting started in politics as an early backer and in his selection for vice presidential candidate in 1952. This is the same Prescott Bush that ran a corporation that was seized by the United States government during WWII as being nothing more than a den of Nazi spies. Nor could Prescott Bush plead innocence of the Nazis in the business as he sought out help from the Dulles brothers in concealing the Nazi involvement in this business from the U.S. government. The astute reader should recall that during Watergate, Nixon threaten to fire everyone at the CIA except George Bush after the CIA refused to cover up for him. Did Nixon make the exception of Bush as a payback to Prescott or was Nixon fearful that Bush could expose his past? That leaves a neat little package with immense implications for the reader or another investigative reporter to explore.

This was far from the end of Nixon's aiding former Nazis. The example of Nicolae Malaxa will serve as an example here. Malaxa was the supplier of arms to the Iron Guard in Rumania and a business partner of Goring. He was later convicted of war crimes in Rumania immediately following the war. In 1948 he formally applied for permanent US residency. He then faced a blizzard of legal challenges over his admission. In 1951 Nixon introduced a bill in the senate that would have granted him resident status. The bill failed. Later in 1951 Malaxa formed a shell corporation named Western Tube in Nixon's home town, in the same location that shared a mailing address for Nixon's former law firm. The firm applied for a certificate of necessity to get top wartime priority for its material and personnel. Nixon personally supported granting residency to Malaxa on the grounds that he was indispensable to Western Tube. Yet Western Tube never produce a single product in its history. Others that aided Malaxa in his legal battles include John Foster Dulles, and former undersecretary of State Adolph Berle.⁴⁴ In a later chapter we will once again turn to how Nixon was instrumental in setting up Ethnic Heritage groups within the Republican Party that were controlled by ex Nazis to use in elections. Over the years following WWII many others have been involved in the Nazi cover up including John and Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, William Casey, George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

 A large number  of  Nazis were admitted under Operation Paperclip in an effort to recruit German rocket scientists. But some like Walter Dornberger first had to have their records sanitized. Dornberger was a major general at Peenemunde and had been sentenced to death by hanging for war crimes before being admitted to the US. England warned the US not to admit him as he was already conniving to start another war.⁵ He later rose to a vice president of Bell Helicopters. A visible spot in the nation to be sure but even more visible after Bell announced their V22 helicopter surprising close nomenclature for someone who had been involved in the V2 program.

But first we need to take a look at the beginnings of the US intelligence services and the men that developed it before looking at the many atrocities that the CIA has committed over the years. In addition we need a firm background into the geopolitical scene following WWI particularly the role of the British intelligence community and its close association even today with its American counterpart. Further we must keep in mind that all we know about covert actions has been censored. Even Loftus's book had to be submitted to the CIA/NSA for censorship.⁶ Secondly unless that information is painstaking backed by government documents that are still classified some of it could indeed be disinformation rather than factual. Thus we have to rely only on information that is approved by the very agencies that we are trying to expose.

There is a wealth of good information available on the CIA-Nazi connection both in the library and on the Internet. Unfortunately there is also a lot of disinformation and the just plain nutty. In a web search one cannot help but run across Nazi-CIA-UFOs or a Nazi link in the JFK assassination. This writer has deliberately refrained from using the loosely linked or tenuous connection of Nazis involved in the assassination and of other loosely linked connections and dismissed the nutty outright. Rather this writer has stayed with reputable sources and facts that are widely acknowledged and beyond dispute. This writer feels much of this material is deliberate disinformation and is part of an ongoing effort to discredit anyone reporting on the connection. Nor should the reader dismiss all reports or articles that the CIA or the intelligence community has labeled inaccurate. Many of these have been labeled inaccurate only after they can find some factual discrepancy often of some obscure point. Then in a logical fallacy they claim the entire work to be inaccurate. An excellent example of that would be in the Dark Alliance story appearing in the San Jose Mercury followed by the mad dog attack from CIA assets in the mainstream media. The reader should be aware that the CIA has admitted that it was aware of the drug smuggling drugs in the Iran/Contra/Cocaine scandal. The report was released on Ocotober 8, the same day that the House voted to impeach President Clinton. Such timing of the release insured that the report would not be widely covered by the media.

The remainder of this chapter will first not only develop the connections between the CIA and the Nazis already alluded to but to the connections between the CIA and Wall Street as the CIA has evolved into a tool of corporate America more than a tool to protect American democracy. Since the theme of this book concerns fascism the focus will emphasize the Nazi connections. An emphasis will be placed on how the CIA/Nazi connections have affected not only foreign policy but domestic policy as well. Including a brief look at how the CIA has subverted democracy in America using illegal wiretaps, censorship and campaigns to stomp out any group that may be to the left side of the political spectrum. Following that a brief survey into past CIA interventions and the corporate American connections will be presented.

Loftus divides this century and its relationships to the Jews into three phases; the first phase begins with the end of WWI and ends with the start of WWII. He characterizes the motivating factor of Jewish relations as bigotry. But nether the less this was the time period in which our intelligence agencies were born out of. Loftus attributes this phase as being dominated by three men Jack Philby, a British spy, Allen Dulles and Ibn Saud. All three were known to harbor an intense hatred for Jews. Philby is perhaps better known as an oil explorer and the man behind the scenes that placed Ibn Saud on the throne of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud was the leader of the extremist Wahhabi sect of the Moslems and the Arab leader who united the Arabian Peninsula.⁷

The following quote from a CIA report to President Truman in 1948 removes any doubt of the hatred or anti-Semitic feelings of the CIA towards the Jews.

"Formation of a Jewish state in Palestine will enable the USSR to intensify its efforts to expand Soviet influence in the Near East. And to perpetuate a chaotic condition there.

In any event, the flow of men and munitions to Palestine from the Soviet bloc can be expected to increase substantially." ⁵³

Labeling a group as communist or susceptible to communism was used as a major means to discredit that group or to otherwise demonize the group. This is one of the many records that have been just recently declassified and reflect the CIA concern of Soviet influence over the newly created state of Israel. The flow of arms reflects the ban of arm shipments to the Jewish guerillas imposed by the western bloc. In his memoirs Truman wrote he overruled the State Department's Middle East experts and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the issue.

Philby and Saud both betrayed Britain to the economic masters of the region even today, the American oil companies. Dulles was the American who helped them when he was stationed in Turkey during the 1920s while he was coordinating intelligence on the Mideast. These three men are responsible for laying down the foundations of the region, the common historic myths of the region and instigators of war. Philby and Saud both were allied with the Nazis. Philby functioned to get contracts awarded to American oil companies. His first success was with Standard Oil of California. In many ways Philby can be regard as the godfather of Aramco. One trait he shared with a number of oil executives particularly from Standard Oil of New Jersey and Texaco was an ardent support for fascism and racism. Remnants of the anti-Semitic views of Texaco has surfaced as late as the 1990s. Although most of the media focused on the black racism present at Texaco, there was also additional anti-Semitic behavior at Texaco.¹⁰

The relationship between Phibly and Allen Dulles was unique; in essence Philby was rehabbing Dulles for the British. Dullles first attempt at spying came in Bern during WWI. After it became apparent to the British that someone had passed the codes to the Central Powers in WWI the British tracked it to Dulles's mistress. He had given her the codes for sexual favors. The British grabbed both Dulles and his mistress and in an effort to save his miserable skin and his career Dulles agreed to help the British. Some attribute him with torpedoing Wilson's peace proposals at Versailles. There is no question about Dulles toeing the British line in the Mideast and Central Europe.

John Foster Dulles likewise had troubles following him from WWI. Foster fought a desperate battle in order that Kaiser Wilhelm II assets would not be seized by the Alien Property Custodian board. German bribes ran all the way to the attorney general, Harry Daugherty. In the defense of Daugherty his counsel pointed out that there was an even bigger crook behind him, that being John Foster Dulles, who was known to seek out bribes during the negotiations.²¹

In Washington as the chief of the State Department's Near East desk, Dulles wrote to the Bristol America's ambassador to Turkey over the genocide of Armenians during WWI.

"Confidentially the State Department is in a bind. Our task would be simple if the reports of the atrocities could be declared untrue or even exaggerated but the evidence is irrefutable. The Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities."¹²

Here is perhaps the first direct proof in this century that the US foreign policy was based solely on economic issues benefiting corporate America.

In 1923 at the request of J.P. Morgan, John Foster Dulles worked out a scheme as legal counsel to the Dawes committee in which U.S. banks would lend Germany the money to pay France and Britain and they in turn would pay their war loans from the U.S. bank. This financial merry go round was not much more than a shell game but it kept the money circulating. The 20s were inviting times for the wealthy. With the emerging auto market and the accompanying oil industry great pools of capital were available for investment. Many of the investments that were offered up were more on the seedy side rather than sound. In 1926 Dulles resigned his position with the State Department and went into private practice at Sullivan & Chromwell law firm where his brother John Foster also worked.

The following quote from Newsweek.Com illustrates the relationship of the Dulles brothers to the Nazis and their treasonous behavior towards the US.

The fresh look at wartime culpability may extend to other American icons. In 1940 one of the nation's most prestigious law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, joined together with the Wallenberg family of Sweden--famed for producing Raoul, a Holocaust martyr who saved Jews in Budapest--to represent Nazi German interests, says Abe Weissbrodt, a former Treasury Department lawyer who prosecuted the case in 1946. The scam? Sullivan & Cromwell drafted a voting trust agreement making the Wallenbergs' Enskilda Bank a dummy owner of the U.S. subsidiary of Bosch, a German engine-parts maker, so the Nazis could retain control. The papers were drawn up by John Foster Dulles, a Germanophile who later became secretary of State and whose name today graces Washington's international airport. (The scheme worked during the war, but in 1948 Bosch was finally auctioned to a U.S. buyer.) "t;The record is compelling in terms of warranting questions about Dulles's motives and his own allegiances," says historian Masurovsky. "One might say about him what Treasury said about Chase and J.P. Morgan, that they had allegiance to their own corporate interests and not to their country."⁶⁸

 Dulles derived much of his profits and his clients' profits from investments in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s Dulles set about creating an incredible interlocking financial network between Nazi corporations, American Oil and Saudi Arabia. Here Allen had help from his brother Foster. Perhaps the best-known deal arranged by Dulles was between I.G. Farben and Standard Oil of New Jersey. What is generally not known Farben was the second largest shareholder in standard Oil of New Jersey, second to only John D. Rockefeller himself.¹¹ Another Rockefeller controlled corporation that Dulles worked to protect was the Rockefeller corporation United Fruit, both United Fruit and Standard Oil of New Jersey continued to trade with the Nazis after the out break of war.

Many of Rockefeller's dealings with the Nazis were through Rockefeller controlled shell corporations centered in Latin America. The dealings were facilitated by Nelson Rockefeller's appointment to the post of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, by Forrestal in 1940. This was the position of the top spy in Latin America, the post was suggested to Forrestal by Rockefeller himself. Rockefeller had proposed to Harry Hopkins that England and Hitler fight each other to the death, regardless of which side won, the U.S. had to be ready to pick up the pieces to increase corporate America's economic influence. In essence Rockefeller's only concern was to safeguard corporate America interests. His definition of totalitarian was limited to the USSR. Once Nelson Rockefeller accepted the position he informed his staff that their job was to use the war to take over Latin American markets. Rockefeller also used his position to see to it, that the Nazis got anything they wanted in South America such as refueling bases while forcing the British to pay cash. Additionally he effectively blackmailed Britain by the threat of withholding or blocking the shipment of raw materials and food to Britain. Rockefeller's chief aim was to drive the British out of Latin America and monopolize the markets for himself. In each country he set up coordinating committees composed of reactionary executives from Standard Oil of New Jersey, United Fruit and General Electric.⁴¹

Rockefeller never bothered with helping the war effort, by 1945 a third of the countries in South America had not bothered to declare war on the Nazis. Further a pro-Nazi bloc of countries led by Peron of Argentina was actively involved in helping hide escaping war criminals. Peron was a friend of none other than Allen Dulles.

Dulles and their firm were not the only investors in Germany at this time. Many of the top corporations in the U.S. initiated direct investments on their own among these are GM, ITT, Ford, and GE. Likewise other Wall Street firms specialized in German investments such as Dillon Reed & Co. who favored loans to the Deutsche Bank, Siemens and Frick's interests Key players at Dillon included James Forrestal, William Draper, Paul Nitze, Ferdinand Eberstadt and C. Douglas Dillon all of whom later served in the government. Brown Brothers & Harriman was another such firm and of course Harriman later served in the government as well. This was the firm in which Bert Walker; George Bush's grandfather and father were associated with. Bush's grandfather was instrumental in setting up a deal to take over Hamburg-America Line a Nazi front company used for espionage. Prescott Bush hired Allen Dulles to hide his assets invested in Germany from authorities. In 1942 Prescott Bush was charged with running Nazi front groups and those assets were siezed.¹³

In just this little snippet of history we have nine individuals (counting the Dulles brothers) all associated with Wall Street firms serving the wealthy, who later went on to serve later in the government. Forrestal was mentioned earlier in the context of promoting policies opposing the views of Truman. We need to look closer at the past Directors of the CIA to fully establish the connection between Wall Street and the CIA. Four of the past Directors including Wild Bill Donovan as head of the OSS there have been Wall Street lawyers, Donovan, Dulles, Colby and Casey. These four have been at the head of the CIA for a total of twenty-one years out of the fifty two-year history of the CIA or almost half the time. The remaining Directors have all came from the elite class as defined by Domhoff in an earlier chapter. Clearly we have established a revolving door between the wartime government and Wall Street as well as establishing the same revolving door between Wall Street and the CIA.

The question of how extensive the work of Dulles was in acting, as a middleman in setting up deals between the rich and the Nazis cannot be answered with any great certainty. However, a document prepared by Pruessen for the State Department totals over a billion dollars.¹⁶ Remember that is only deals in which Dulles was personally involved in and that it is a floor value, there may be additional deals that Pruessen failed to uncover. Likewise, Commerce Department records shows that investments in Germany increased 48.5% from 1929 to 1940.¹⁷ Additionally many US firms bought direct interest in German firms and in turn plowed the profits back into the Aryanization (seizing of Jewish firms) or arms production. Among those firms are International Harvester, Ford, GM, Standard Oil of New Jersey and du Pont.

Before moving on this writer feels that, the billion dollars that Dulles help to invest in Germany needs to be put into context. Today at a single B2 bomber runs over a billion dollars a copy in the 1930s a billion dollars was real money as shown in the table below.

Now from the table we can see that the billion plus dollars Dulles helped to invest in Germany was considerable money. For example, it equaled or exceeded the total private investment in 1932. In fact only in one year during the 1930s would it have been less than ten percent of the domestic private investments. In fact in the 12 years shown if this money had been invested in a single year would have amounted to 25% of the domestic investment on average. Even if the money Dulles had help invest in Germany was spread over the entire decade of the 1930s evenly it would have added one percent to the domestic investment if invested in the US a considerable boom in the time of the Great Depression. And remember this was just the known investments that Dulles had help broker, it is a floor value. Looking at the table above it is clear that these investments could only help deepen and prolong the depression in the US. Or to put it onto another perspective, in 1940 the Nazi war machine's budget was about five billion marks, in effect the amount of money Dulles had invested would have been enough for almost an entire year for the Nazi war machine.¹⁹ In effect the rich of this country built a great deal of the Nazi war machine for Hitler.

The reader must now indulge this writer some. Up to this point we have established a minimum dollar amount of money that Dulles helped to invest in Germany. Additionally it has been shown that there was at least two other Wall Street firms that competed with Dulles for clients to make similar investments in Germany. Further the leading corporations and banks were making direct investments in Germany has been established as well. It also has been established that these Wall Street firms had a revolving door with the State Department and very shortly the revolving door between Wall Street and the CIA will be more firmly established leaving no doubt of its existence. In many cases it was hard to tell where Wall Street stopped and the State Department began in those days, today its impossible to tell as the distinction has became even more blurred. In a later chapter the Reagan administration's Bechtel's State Department and the Coor's Department of Interior will be exposed.

Only a historical revisionist would deny that a considerable number of these Wall Streeters worked covertly or in a deliberate attempt to deceive and kill the policies of both FDR and Truman. The reader is urged to read the sources detailed in the footnotes to confirm this as a book of this scope cannot give full justice to the extent of such deception and influence in setting national policies. Likewise it is well known the trouble FDR had in securing government contracts with corporate America for wartime production. People could be drafted for the war effort but capital was exempt from the draft. In fact more wartime shortages in munitions were do solely to foot dragging or refusal to sign contracts by corporate America than to union strikes. Other production was lost due to corporate policies of refusing to hire blacks until FDR issued a directive requiring firms engaged in war time production to hire blacks. This refusal or reluctance on the part of corporate America to support the war effort led to FDR's hiring of dollar a year men, the rich leaders of industry and Wall Streeters.

By the time the war arrived many of these American companies had been doing business with the Nazis since 1932. They had seen how the Nazi economic system of syndicalism worked and how to manipulate it to their advantage. The American corporations that had invested in Germany were forbidden by law to participate in the Aryanization program and to use of slave labor, few if any obeyed the law. Now these industrialists were in places of power within the US government and could effect policies that would benefit their firms.

At the end of the war the Nuremberg trials were for the most part a travesty of justice. The author is not condemning Nuremberg for the convictions, instead he is condemning it for its extremely limited scope, far too many war criminals escaped justice many with the direct help of the US intelligence and military. Outside of a few top Nazis that were found guilty, most of the war criminals escaped justice. The Trials caught more lowly soldiers than it did top Nazi officials. It would be a major task to list all of the major war criminals that escaped justice. Rather some of the major war criminals that escaped justice will be sprinkled throughout the remainder of the chapter to illustrate the various links between the different groups and the active subversion of justice by US officials. The examples chosen will dispel any notion that officials were not aware of their past war crimes. Originally a second trial at Nuremberg was scheduled to focus on those that financed and lead German industry. The second trial was dubbed the industrialists' trial at the time and was regarded as of equal importance with the first trial. But the second trial was canceled after the US bowed out. Additionally the trial of Flick who was found innocent of all charges except one, the court ruled that corporate leaders could not be held accountable for slavery and looting unless the prosecution could proved that he order each and every crime.²⁰ Was this second trial canceled because the defendants could have exposed Dulles and his American clients? It will be shown later that Dulles had dealings with the top Nazi officials and industrialists while he was stationed in Bern.

Here is the point for the reader to ponder. Did these industrialists and Wall Streets subvertly adopt the Nazi's form of syndicalism? In case the reader is a bit worried that the writer has sat in the sun for too long and is a tad bit sun happy, this writer is not the first person to raise this question. In fact one source is very disturbing in that he was part of the dollar a year men and vice chairmen of the War Production Board and president of GE, Charles Wilson. In late 1943 he made a notable speech warning against fascist thinking among the higher ranks of big industry. ⁴⁵ By 1943 war production peaked and declined there after, the dollar a year men in charge of production and the military conspired to prevent small contractors whose contracts had been canceled from engaging in civilian production. In effect big business wanted to freeze the marketing of any consumer items until they were free to produce the same items, thus freezing the small businesses out. The reader will have to ask himself did corporate America put a happy face on a Nazi and gained control of the government and economy? The analogy is much too close to be dismissed out of hand.

The previous two chapters revealed in some detail the support for fascism among various elements of American society including members of Congress and even members of the Roosevelt administration as by the time war broke out many New Dealers had been replaced with dollar a year men. Additionally congress was becoming increasingly conservative, as the Republicans had doubled their membership in both the House and the Senate by 1943 from their low point in 75th Congress of the years 1937-1939. Although the Democratic Party still held a considerable margin many of these members were southern conservatives or Dixiecrats that were more likely to side with the Republicans. The reader should also recall from the previous chapter that in 1942 du Pont, an ardent Nazi support launched his fascist free enterprise campaign.

In fact a date can be placed on the adoption of fascism by the elite leaders of American business, January 1944. As by this time war production was steadily decreasing and along with that decrease, a decrease in the profits of corporate America. It was this month that the same Charles Wilson proposed the wedding of corporate America to the military. Wilson suggested that every large corporation appoint a liaison man with the armed forces with a commission of a colonel in the reserve. Experts from his proposed weeding follow below.

"First of all such a [preparedness] program must be the responsibility of the federal government. It must be initiated and administrated by the executive branch--by the President as Commander in Chief and by the War and Navy Departments. Of equal importance is the fact that this must be, once and for all, a continuing program and not the creature of an emergency. In fact one of its objects will be to eliminate emergencies so far as possible. The role of Congress is limited to voting the needed funds...

Industry's role in this program is to respond and cooperate.... in the execution of the part allotted to it; industry must not be hampered by political witch-hunts, or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe tagged with a merchants of death label."¹³⁹

Such words render the elegant debates of Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson and others of the founding fathers and set forth in the constitution to provide Congress with an absolute choke-reign on the military power and spending mute. Further the words of Wilson hints at corporate America's role in starting the Cold War which was soon to follow. But even more ominous is the fact that before Eisenhower's troops stormed the beaches of Omaha and Normady, the war against fascism was lost on the home front. As Wilson's words embraced the very heart of fascism and the power that ruled Germany, the military-industrial alliance of Nazi Germany.

With the end of the war eminent the top military brass eagerly adopted such a wedding and expansion of the military as it was job security for them.A successful military-industrial complex requires a large military to expend the munitions. With the top brass of the military facing the loss of their ranks at the end of the war, the campaign to establish the first peacetime draft was on. The establishment of a peacetime draft would require a huge propaganda blitz by both the military and industrial sides. And once again the elegant words of the founding fathers of the danger of a large miltiary making policy rather than following civilain authority were renedered mute. Thus by the time the1948 peacetime draft came before congress, General Douglas MacArthur had established a public relations office consisting of 135 military men and additional 40 civilain personnel. The Chief of Staff had 44 military men and 113 civilians assigned to public relations, the European Theater had 107 military men and 30 civilians in its public relations office. By 1950 the Department of Defense had 1,800 persons assigned to public relations with a budget of over $12 million. Looking at those figures does anyone still remember the words of Hamilton expressing fears of a large military determining policy? The full extent of the military determining policy and coordinating its efforts with right wing groups and fundamentalist religious groups will be taken up in a later chapter on the 1950s.

Truman's first peacetime budget called for a reduction of army officers to 115,000 and of enlisted men to 800,000. The brass found ways to protect itself. The ratio of officers to enlisted men had been established at one to ten but the Pentagon insisted on reduction to only 147,000 or a ratio of one to six.¹⁴⁰ No better example of the brass protecting their positions can be found than the out break of the Korean war just two years after the passing of the first peacetime draft. At the onset of the Korean War the military found itself in a mad scamble callign up National Guard units and Reservists. Despite the peacetime draft as of July 1, 1949 there was a 1,650,000 officers and enlisted men in the military service backed up by an additional 900,000 civilians in the Defense Department. Yet the military could only field 12 combat divisions tglobally otaling less than 200,000.¹⁴¹ This figure includes those divisions stationed in Europe and elsewhere. Now does anyone still believe that the military budget was not bloated?

Additional support for such a theory can be found in the post war period. In 1952 at the urging of outgoing President Harry Truman, never a friend to big business the International Petroleum Cartel was facing a massive antitrust suit by the Justice department. The suit charged the major oil companies rightfully so of dividing the world's oil markets among themselves, limiting competition and monopolizing the production and distribution of the world's energy source. The cartelization had its beginnings some twenty odd years before in 1928 with the signing of the Achnacarry Agreement. The Achnacarry document established spheres of influence for the various oil corporations as well as establishing the peacekeeping machinery between the various signers.

The suit never got off the ground as it faced a host of opposition. Various foreign governments notably Saudi Arabia, England, Holland and France applied tremendous political pressures. Additionally the Justice Department faced an organized opposition from other cabinet level departments namely the State, Defense, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many of the documents needed to make the case were classified as Secret or top Secret and the necessary security clearance was withheld from the Justice Department's prosecutors. The untold story behind such subversion of justice was the State Department and the CIA was infested with oil millionaires who were the superiors to the midlevel public servants. In developing its oil expertise the CIA listened closely to what the oil companies had to say on policy. CIA personnel were routinely assigned to oil company "schools" where they were trained for their assignments in oil producing countries. Besides the sharing of intelligence with the oil companies the CIA also relied upon them to furnish cover slots for its agents. Additionally a revolving door between the executive positions of the oil companies and positions with the government in the State Department and the CIA existed. With the door in the State Department dating back at least into the 1920s if not before.

Eventually the suit was downgraded from criminal conspiracy suit to a mere civil suit. Interesting enough the lead Justice Department's prosecutor has stated that Truman eventually reached the decision not on the advice of the Security Council but on the advice of General Omar Bradley that national security called for the suit to be dismissed. Truman would certainly have been aware of the Standard Oil of New Jersey blackmailing FDR just prior to the D-Day invasion with a price hike or a possible cut off in supplies. This was at the height of Truman's containment policy and he could ill afford a disruption in oil supplies. And at the time the Department of Interior had stated the US. Did not have enough reserves to provide for maneuverability in the opening months if war should break out beyond the Korean peninsula.

During the Korean war one general manager in Syria bragged at his home office that he was complying with all Syrian regulations by drilling the number of wells they demanded but making sure he just wasn't drilling them where oil would be found. Syria as the other oil producing countries wanted to maximize their production but was hindered by the monopolistic policies of the major oil companies.¹³⁸

The end result of the ill-fated suit placed the oil companies above the law and the public. The very policy of the oil companies was being implemented by their men inside the CIA, the State Department and various other federal bureaucracies. By using the shield of national security the oil companies were free to manipulate the courts for the advantage of a few elite, the very essence of fascism was now complete in this country. The writer would like to suggest to the reader that he ask himself how many other companies have done the same since 1952. Indeed the reader will end up with a very long list.

Granted this American form of fascist syndicalism is more informal than the formal Nazi model but in effect it yields the same end result. Nor is this writer alone in this assessment of fascism in America in the late 1900s, Gross describes it as friendly fascism or fascism without the black shirts. ¹²⁹ He sees fascism taking a new form of despotism in the form of corporate rule. If the reader cannot answer in the affirmative, perhaps he can explain what was behind the cryptic warning of the military industrial complex by Eisenhower less than fifteen years from the end of the war. Eisenhower was anything but an alarmist, if he had any faults it was that he tended to ignore problems and delay action hoping that the problem would sort itself out for the best. Likewise as president Einsenhower leaned on his experience during the war, the interstate highway system was just one such product of that from his familiarity to the autoban. He also seen his orders counter acted during the occupation or de-Nazification period and the Nazi war criminals being released and put into positions of power in post war local governments and industry, much to his dismay by all accounts. Was he seeing the same close cooperation between the military and industrialists in 1959 that lead to the Nazi State?

As early as march 1946 Eisenhower was aware of the National Security Agency's (NSA) Project Shamrock. Shamrock was a project in which the NSA obtained the cooperation from the three major cable corporations in which to read all cables coming into the US and leaving the US.¹⁰¹ Eventually Shamrock evolved into a much larger eavesdropping operation including domestic spying on the SDS and other leftist elements as well as drug dealers. Thus Eisenhower was aware of the NSA an ultra secret agency that in many ways was like the Gestapo and free to spy on American citizens.¹¹² The only thing we can be certain of is that he regarded the military-industrial complex as a serious threat to freedom. In a later chapter we will detail the similarity between the Nazi economy and the Republican agenda of the 1980-1990s. The similarities are as striking, as they are haunting.

Perhaps Eisenhower did leave a clue as to his meaning of the military-industrial complex. In his military industrial speech Eisenhower recognized that for the first time the US had a permanent defense industry. One part of this permanent industry was the creation of the CIA and NSA. In fact the intelligence industry was a big part of the build up and notice how Eisenhower carefully mentions the cost of military security in the speech (underlined) as it follows below.

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."¹²⁰

Did Eisenhower see the intelligence community as agents of repression much like the Gestapo? It would seem that he was extremely distrustful of the expense of military security by singling it out in the speech.

The reader may indeed disagree with this writer that a small cabal of the rich elite dressed up fascism with a happy face and adopted it as US policy following WWII. Some may even argue that the conservative leadership and agenda changed in the 1960s with the emergence of what is called neo-conservatism. The agenda of the conservatives of today is nothing less than a complete revoking of the New Deal. In fact its no different than the agenda of the plotters lead by Irenee du Pont to overthrow FDR in 1934 and impose a fascist government of businessmen. There is no question of du Pont being pro-Hitler, he followed the rise and career of Hitler closely. At a speech before the American Chemical Society in 1926 he advocated creating a race of supermen by the injection of drugs. Nor is there any questioning of his business deals with the Nazis. Enterprises owned by du Pont had extensive dealings with the Nazis including General Motors. Irenee du Pont used GM money to back the Black Legion and the fascist American Liberty League.¹³⁰

There was rampant support for fascism among corporate America during the 1930s. Of this there is little doubt. As the following quote from the William Dodd, US Ambasador to Germany in 1937.

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. . . .

Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there."

Another industrialist that was closely aligned with du Pont and involved in the plot against FDR and also hindered the war effort was Andrew Mellon the head of Alcoa. George Seldes had this to say about Alcoa:

"If America loses the war it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America" Secretary of Interior Harold Ickles, June 26,1941. By its cartel agreement with I.G. Farben controlled by Hitler, Alcoa sabotaged the aluminum program of the US air force. The Truman Committee heard testimony that Alcoa's representative, A.H. Bunker a dollar a year head of the aluminum section of the OPM prevented work on our $600,000,000 aluminum expansion program. Congressman Pierce of Oregon said in May 1941: "To date 137 days or 371/2% of a year's production has been wasted in the effort to protect Alcoa's monopolistic position. This delay translated into planes means 10,000 fighters or 1,665 bombers."

This of course is the answer to the boys on Guadalcanal and in Tunisia and not absenteeism, the 48 hour week or wage increases to meet the cost of living." ¹³¹

Today the Republicans controlled by a faction of fascists are still calling for the elimination of one of the most successful government programs ever, Social Security and enacting of the same agenda of Irenee du Pont.. The right wingers since the Reagan years have passed huge tax bonanzas for the rich and corporate America a policy followed by the Nazis. The Republicans have also passed a huge excess of corporate welfare until the amount of corporate welfare now exceeds social welfare by at least a factor of ten. In short the Republican Party today will settle for nothing less than corporate rule. Such an extreme form of capitalism or corporatism is at the heart of fascism..

But for this writer this time period is the answer to a question that has plagued the writer like an open festering wound. The question arose in the early 1980s in the period of darkness otherwise known as the Reagan administration. In response to the Republicans debating on the floor of congress of declaring ketchup as a vegetable and therefore a hot dog with ketchup smeared on it constituted a balance meal, this writer began asking the question of "where did it all go wrong." This writer began looking systematically at the Nixon administration, the JFK assassination, McCarthyism and rejected them all. No it was during the war that a wholesale change from liberal enlightenment to repression occurred first in the business community, then spreading to the general public and eventually into public policy. It was not a clear and straight transformation the change took several diversions before the 1980s.

But it was during this period that the US adopted a policy of nationalism and a phobia of communism, both traits of fascism. This was also the time that the root of the extreme corporatism that the Republicans of today embrace and advocate. Extreme corporatism is just another name for fascism. It was the emergence of fascism in this time period that has lead to many of the inequities of today. This writer believes that the failure of the US to adopt a national health care policy like the rest of the industrial world can be traced to this very time period. In fact Harry Truman first proposed such a measure during this time period. Of course the right wingers of the time attacked it with a vengeance labeling it as socialism or even communism.

The writer will also grant the reader that given the enormity of WWII that it wold affect the future for a long period afterwards. But that doesn't account for the wholesale change in the domestic opinions or politics. Phobias such as the extreme fear of communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s are rarely adopted by an entire population without first propagandizing the population. In short national phobias are learned behavior. And in this case it was not the elected leaders of the country teaching the lesson. But even more importantly this is time period in which a permanent defense industry was established. And just as the military-industrial complex formed the very heart of the Nazi war machine, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower saw allowed the fascist to establish a power base within the US.

The writer will concede that these changes so far have not produced full-blown fascism in the US. Some prefer the terms such as proto-fascism or neo-Nazi, but that doesn't change the fact that once the happy face is stripped off, one is still left with a stark raving mad Nazi. Presently all that is needed is a strong figurehead from the right wing for full-blown fascism to emerge in the US. The remainder of this chapter will look at how the CIA brought known Nazis and war criminals into the US and the effect that this has had on US policy and will lend support to support this hypothesis.

But even more serious did the dollar a year-men and the military conspire to manufacture a war? The war in question would have been the Cold War. Russia was our ally and the defeat of the Nazis can be largely credited to the Russians at Stalingrad. Through lend lease over the objections of the conservative element in this country we provided much of the needed munitions for Stalin to fight with. Up until the later stages of the war around the 1943-44 period the conservative element had been held in check. But at sometime during this time frame they broke free to run amok. Perhaps, the best dating of this can be placed with the appearance of the free enterprise hype from du Pont. But here are the facts. In 1943 Donald Nelson a former chairman of the war production board returned from a trip to Russia with a plan for post war trade with Russia. In the agreement the US would supply Russia with manufactured goods while Russia provided the US manufactures with the raw material.⁴⁷ Records from the time clearly shows that the Soviets were unable to continue to wage war. Detente would be delayed for another twenty years and even then it would be attacked viciously by right wing elements in America. But by the end of the war the official mood towards Russia was one of open hostility. Could the military and the dollar a year-men covertly manufactured a needless war that consumed the next forty years and pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust? That question will be left for the chapter on the 1950s.

Both Dulles brothers benefited immensely in the years 1939-1941 before the entry of the US into the war. Allen restructured the Giesche conglomerate 50% owned by Anaconda Copper from both Hitler's and the US. In 1940 a three way deal between German buyers such as I.G. Farben represented by Allen, the German and Spanish bankers represented by John Foster and Saudi oil interest represented by Phibly to ship oil through Spain to Nazi Germany. The principle supplier was Caltex a union of Socal and Texaco arranged by none other than John Forestal in 1936.²² This deal was at the heart of the Truman Committee's investigation leading to the blackmail threat of a cut off of oil supplies to the US. At least three other intelligence officers believe that it was Allen Dulles personally behind the threat. Collaborating evidence including the direct participation of the American oil company involved exists.

This brings us up to the war years and the formal beginnings of the US intelligence agency with the formation of the OSS. In reality the first intelligence agency was the short-lived Office of the Coordinator of Information formed (OCI) in 1941, the OSS came a year later in 1942. Both were headed by Wild Bill Donovan. Without a doubt the three most influential in the OSS and the later CIA were Donovan, Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner all had came from former Wall Street law partnerships. As director of the OCI

Donovan recruited several of his former law partners, among these were Otto Doering, James Murphy and Ned Buxton. Thus from the very beginning we see that the intelligence agencies of the US were awashed with Wall Street lawyers, an odd combination for a spy agency. It should be mentioned here that John McCone the fifth Director of the CIA was a subordinate of Forestal during the war. Forestal has already been mentioned in subverting the policies of Truman, this may indeed be a case of guilt by association but it remains worth noting. Likewise McCone was president of Becthel a corporation that was essentially the State Department under Reagan. Becthel was also one of Dulles's long-standing allies and by 1952 had extensive political contacts at the highest level. These contacts were not accidental, they came through John Simpson a director of the Schroder Bank and close friend of Allen Dulles.⁴⁶

FDR's ok of Dulles as the head of the New York OCI was a setup. Roosevelt knew that Dulles's clients included most of the camouflaged Nazi-American interests. Britain had been given permission to conduct illegal wiretaps in New York to uncover Nazi interests. The wiretaps being illegal could not be used in an American court but the information could be used in England to stem the flow of money and munitions to the Nazis. British agents have been strongly implicated in the deaths of a few Americans that were dealing with the Nazis, Dulles office was one of the offices that the British had bugged. In fact there was a wire-tapping office one floor beneath Dulles new office. Following the war Roosevelt planned on using this information to help prosecute Dulles. Two unforeseen events occurred to scuttle FDRs plan, one someone tipped Dulles off. The leak is commonly attributed to Vice President Henry Wallace and this was the motivation for dumping him from the ticket in 1944. Secondly the death of Roosevelt killed the plan entirely, as Truman was never informed over it. Dulles likewise was not Roosevelt's only target, many other wealthy Wall Street investors were also targets reportedly also including Joseph Kennedy. Former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg confirmed Dulles was being set up before his death.²³

It is also known at the end of the war Allen Dulles was investigated by the combined U.S.- British Combined Chiefs of Staff for his dereliction of duty and refusal to follow orders. But the military records have disappeared.²⁴ In this case Dulles was trying to broker a surrender and a grant of amnesty to the highest ranking SS officer in Italy, Karl Wolff in the spring of 1945. Dulles had been ordered to break of the talks with Wolff but continued on ignoring orders even to the point of rescuing Wolff from Italian partisans. Wolff eventually went free despite the fact that he was Himmler's chief of staff, had arranged contracts for slave labor and was the chief Nazi sponsor behind Treblinka. This is but one example of the travesty of justice at Nuremberg that the writer was referring to earlier. According to information released in 2000 by the CIA, Wolff was heavily involved in deporting Italian Jews to Auschwitz.¹⁴²

Dulles effectiveness as a spy located in Bern was rather shabby at best. As shown by the following quote from a cable from Washington to Dulles in January 1944.

"We think it is essential that you be informed at once that almost the entire material supplied disagrees with reports we have received originating with other sources, and parts of it were months old. There has been degeneration of your information which is now given a lower rating than any other source. This seems to indicate a need for using the greatest care in checking all your sources.. The Bern estimate of German forces is most inaccurate and misleading. It contains grievous errors regarding locations and also includes reports of non-existent divisions. Only 30 of the divisions reported west are correctly identified the remaining divisions reported are either incorrectly located or do not exist. In more than 50 instances, the classification of divisions by type is wrong." ²⁵

Following the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad in 1943 many of the Nazi businessmen realized they were on the losing side and decided to move their money out of Germany before the end of the war. Allen Dulles was instrumental in helping them move their assets to Argentina through Switzerland at first. Dulles had ties to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) through his connection with the Schroder Bank, a Nazi Bank. Recently the BIS has confirmed a 4 billion dollar purchase of gold from the Nazis during WWII. The amount here is tiny relative to the nine billion francs on the eve of the North Africa invasion, that the collaborationists were seeking from a dollar exchange.²⁹ After the Nazis informed him that the Allies had broken the Swiss codes, Dulles shifted moving their gold through the Central Bank of Belgium and some through Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. Operation Safehaven records confirm that both Dulles and his aid, Gero von Gaevernitz were under investigation for laundering the assets of the Nazi Bank of Hungary to Switzerland while disguised as a series of movie companies.²⁶ The invasion of Normandy on D-Day stemmed any further efforts through these countries leaving a large gold horde still in Germany.

Following D-Day Dulles rerouted his money laundering through Italy with the help of the father son team of Hugh Angleton and son James and the Vatican. The older Angleton may have served as a courier between the Vatican and Nazi Germany. Financial donations from the Vatican to Hitler has been firmly established.²⁷ The Vatican was part of Dulles's network to smuggle gold out of Nazi Germany before the wars end. Additionally the Vatican has been tied to the smuggling of gold out of Yugoslavia.²⁸ As this was being written a newly declassified document surfaced suggesting that the Vatican hid 200 million Swiss Francs stolen from Jews, Serbs and Gypsies.⁶⁷ The younger Angleton is credited with covering up the criminal investigation of his father who may have been directly responsible for the smuggling of gold out of Germany as well as the investigation of Dulles. James Angleton was instrumental in recruiting Gehen and other known Nazis for the CIA following the end of the war. Later he had a central role in supporting the Document Disposal Unit (DDU) inside the state department.³⁰ The DDU was controlled by Allen Dulles and its apparent primary goal was to cover up Dulles's war time crimes as well as those of his clients.

At the end of the war Dulles had several worries. He had to cover up his own dealings with the Nazis and that of both his American and German clients as well as smuggling any remaining assets out of Germany. He adopted a mindset that no American businessman was ever going to be convicted for treason for helping the Nazis. Records show that at the end of the war the American Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) had two large Civilian Internment Centers code named Ashcan and Dustbin. The CIC had identified a large number of Americans that had remained in Germany and aided the Nazis. The evidence was overwhelming for charging them with treason. Much of the evidence was directly from captured German records and indisputable. Suddenly on orders from the Department of Justice they were released. Those within the department that spoke out were fired the one attorney that help bury the treason cases was later promoted.³¹

The proof of such a cover up concerning the Nazis industrialists exists yet today. It appears in the Forbes list of the richest men in the world. Near the top of that list are several multibillionaires that were part of the Nazi's inner circle. One such example would be Karl Flick Jr. who still appears on the 1997 list; another name is that of Bosch.³² Obviously in a cover-up of such magnitude Dulles had to have had help from the other allies. The British cover-up was even greater than that of the Americans, too many royals were involved with the Nazis and too many British corporations would have to be seized. The French was even worst than the British as many were involved with collaborating with the Nazis during the occupation.³³

Dulles conned Wild Bill Donovan into serving on the board of World Commerce Corporation, a company that was to help rebuild Germany as a buttress to communism along with Dulles and Sir William Stephenson from British intelligence. He had assured Donovan that there were a large number of wealthy investors in Argentina.³⁴ Those investors were former Nazis smuggled out of Europe with the help of Dulles s ratlines and their source of wealth was the loot the Nazis had stolen from their victims. The economic rebirth of West Germany in the 1950s was built in a large part with the stolen assets of the victims of the Third Reich.

The writer is not being an alarmist or trying to spin a conspiracy theory here. It is now past fifty years since the end of the war but the news of today still cares an abundance of articles concerning war criminals and the money stolen from the Jewish people. Congress has passed a bill to release all information on war criminals, but some agencies notably the State Department, the CIA and Department of Defense are still raising objects on the grounds of national security.³⁵ Undoubtedly the release of some classified files is going to cause much embarrassment to not only government agencies but to American corporations and their leadership. What follows is a hodgepodge of synopsis of news articles appearing in the late 1990s.

Billions of German Marks from German taxpayers have been spent for "victims" pensions. These pensions are paid to nazi war criminals. Estimates range as high as 50,000 receive such pensions. One notable recipient of such pensions was Wilhelm Mohnke a Hitler confident and commandant of the Furher bunker. He also had a role in the execution of 72 POWs during the Battle of the Buldge. Germany has only reluctantly agreed to halt such payments.³⁶

The prosecution of Aleksondras Lileikis as a war criminal by the government of Lithuania³⁷

Kazys Ciurinskas a retired Indiana contractor who served as a member of the 2^nd Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion a mobile Nazi killing unit faces deportation for lying on his immigration papers about his involvement with the nazis during WWII. Kazys's battalion in October 1941 murdered over 10,000 people in Byelorussia.³⁸

Five U.S. banks: Chase, J.P. Morgan, Guarnaty Trust Co, Bank of the City of New York and American Express all turned over the accounts of Jewish customers to the Nazis during the occupation of France.³⁹

In an article appearing in Newsweek, dealing with the return of the heirless assets the cooperation of American corporations with the Nazis is exposed. Recently declassified documents show that at least 300 American firms continued to do business with the Nazis during the war.⁴⁰

The keyword in that Newsweek article is "during." In other words these American firms were actively providing munitions and war material for Hitler to kill to American soldiers with. Does the reader still think corporate America has his best interest at heart? The second point the reader needs to focus on is the number of at least 300, previously the American public has been led to believe that only a handful of American corporations did business with the Nazis. Now it has been determined that was false and the real number is at least a factor of ten larger. The article concludes with a partial listing of the value of looted art, life insurance policies, property claims, bank accounts and the suits initiated against firms that employed slave labor.

Clearly from these articles one can gather that once all the documents are declassified there is going to be severe embarrassment of not only some government agencies but also even more embarrassment in corporate America as hinted at by the Newsweek article. At least one article shows that a high-ranking Nazis were never brought to trial for war crimes. Or are we to believe that our military and intelligence forces didn't know who was the commandant of the Furher Bunker?

This leads directly to how Nazi War criminals ended up in the US and their effect on the post war period. By the end of the war our relationship with Russia had become antagonistic if not openly hostile. It has already been mentioned how domestic elements such as du Pont's free enterprise had came to dominate the political front. Of course communism was an anathema to this group lead by Wall Street sharks and the wealthy. Dulles was of course a member of this group and had the additional motivation to cover up his ties and financial dealing with the Nazis and the Nazis were rabid in their hatred of communism. Additionally the military wanted to reap the spoils of war and gain the technology of the Nazis scientists. Out of this phobia of hate for communism several programs were developed to take advantage of the Nazis in the opening years of the cold war.

To understand how many of the programs that were developed and their effect upon the post war period we first need to look at the Gehlen organization. A full expose on the Gehlen organization is beyond the scope of a single chapter, the reader is referred to Christopher Simpson's book, Blowback for a more complete discussion. Nor will the writer bore the reader with a countless listing of war criminals within Gehlen's organization. Rather they will be included in the overview and sprinkled throughout this chapter as they point towards other connections.

Not only was in one of the first to developed, it played a central role in all of the other programs that followed and exerted the most influence upon foreign policy than any of the others. Gehlen used the same common tactics that many of the senior Nazis employed in surrendering to the allies. In March 1945 Gehlen microfilmed the holdings on the USSR in the Nazis military intelligence section and buried them in the Austrian Alps. On May 22, 1945 he surrendered to the American counterintelligence team.

It was with these microfilms and Gehlen's underground espionage network in the USSR that Gehlen was able to broker a deal. This was a common theme among high-ranking Nazis in surrendering, they first offered the allies something of value while down playing their role in war crimes in exchange for insulation from prosecution. Gehlen was held at the interrogation center at Camp King; it was here that he first set about forming his organization. By first establishing his network inside the camp Gehlen assured himself of a central role in all intelligence dealings with the Nazis. It was this network that Gehlen established in the camp that made him a central figure in every aspect of the post war dealings with former Nazis. On the other end or the American side the central figure is George Kennan, from the State department and an early advocate of Soviet containment. Its ironic that Kennan was attacked twice by the far right in America, for his policy of containment rather than open confrontation, once in the McCarthy years and then again in the Reagan years. By the end of the summer General Sibert and Walter Bedell Smith as well as Wild Bill Donvan and Dulles were supportive of using Gehlen. Of course with Gehlen being the Nazis chief intelligence officer in the east, this was in violation of previous agreements with handing over all Nazis from the eastern front to the USSR for possible war crimes. It is known that the USSR protested the arrangement vigorously at Potsdam and could only serve to further broach our relationship with the Soviets.

At this time the US intelligence of the USSR was essentially and empty file. Not even rudimentary information of the rail or road system was known. Thus any information supplied by Gehlen was received enthusiastically. The fact that much of the information was obtained by Gehlen's role in torturing and murdering some 4 million Soviet prisoners was conveniently overlooked. Gehlen likewise had a large role in fanning the flames of the cold war. A former CIA chief analyst of Soviet military capabilities, Victor Marchetti now acknowledge that Gehlen over estimated Soviet troop strength in Eastern Europe as well as their battle readiness.⁵⁰ The lack of battle readiness of the Soviet divisions in eastern Europe should have been apparent to any observer. They were engaged in ripping up the rail lines in their sector of Germany to ship back to the USSR for constructing their own rail lines. The Russians also relied heavily on horses rather than trucks or motorized vehicles well into the 1950s an advantage in Siberia but a severe disadvantage in western Europe. The Soviets lack of even basic infrastructure was readily utilized in the cold war over flights by U2s. The pilots simply followed every rail line and its spurs to locate the Soviets ICBMs as there were few rail lines and even fewer roads.

Another associate of Gehlen, who was completely integrated within the command structure of Vlascov's Army and a major war criminal, Gustav Hilger was instrumental in the US backing of Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic government.⁵¹ The backing of the Christian Democrats by former Nazi industrialists and its effect extends to the present times. Another benefactor of this financial backing was Kohl. Kohl was adamantly opposed to compensation to the former slave laborers under the Nazis. One of his larger financial backers and a war criminal that employed slave labor was Flick.⁵⁴

Gehlen had promised that he would use no SS, SD or Gestapo officers in his organization and promptly enlisted recruits from those organizations using phony papers and false names. By 1946 Gehlen had resumed funding of Vlasov's Army, the underground Ukrainian army and other Nazi quislings. In 1947 SS officers Franx Six and Emil Augsburg took charged of the émigré work. Both were from the Amt VI group of the SS, the combined foreign intelligence apparatus of the Nazis equivalent to the CIA. Most of Amt VI's top officers were instrumental in the mass extermination of Jews. Six was a major war criminal and was favored by both Eichmann and Himmler. The following is a quote from a 1944 speech Six delivered at a conference on the Jewish question.

"The physical elimination of Eastern Jewery would deprive Jewery of its biological reserves. The Jewish question must be solved not only in Germany but also internationally"⁴⁸

Himmler was so please with Six's work that he promoted him to a newly created department of his own Amt VII. Six was eventually betrayed and tried for war crimes, found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He only served 4 years before being granted clemency by John McCloy and returned to Gehlen's organization. McCloy could hardly have been unaware of Six's background when he granted the pardon. But it does point out the CIA's active subversion to US laws concerning SS officers and war criminals. Augsburg escaped any prosecution. The work on the émigrés affairs these two war criminals did served as a shopping list for the western allies.

Vlasov's army and émigrés from other eastern European countries were the source for Frank Wisner covert actions behind the rapidly developing Iron Curtain. Wisner believed in covert actions to eliminate communism rather than the containment policy of Kennan or Truman. He recruited heavily from various émigré groups. The recruits were trained and often dropped across the borders into communist territory. In most cases Wisner's agents met a quick and fatal fate as his agents were quickly apprehended. The thought of a spy within their organization or a mole never occurred to them. Wisner was actually responsible for wasting more Nazis after the close of the war then during it. It also points out the extensive penetration of Soviets within the US intelligence system and the poor screening of the war criminals that the CIA recruited to combat communism.

The use of Vlasov's Army came to be integrated within the US plans for a nuclear war with the USSR. The roots of using former Nazis to conduct a guerrilla warfare after the dropping of sixty to seventy atomic bombs on the USSR first arouse in 1947 as advocated by Hoyt Vandenberg. Five wings of B29 bombers were committed to the émigré guerrilla army project.⁵² The Nazis were to be dropped inside the USSR after the bombs had been dropped and to gain control of strategic sites as well as control the local populace. Towards the end of 1948 General Robert McClure had won the approval of the Joint Chiefs for a full-scale guerrilla warfare to be follow a nuclear attack on the USSR.Up until 1956 this was the attack plan against the Soviets. It employed thousands of émigrés from the USSR including Vlasov's army and Waffen SS men. Recently documents discovered in the National Archives contained references to a top secret State Department plan to recruit a network of Albanian anti-Communists who had previously been denied a visa as Nazi collaborators and war criminals.⁵⁵

The astute reader should be asking himself at this point how the US hid Vlasov's army and supply such a force. For the most part the supplies were provided from the excesses of war surplus equipment and presented no real problem. Both the CIA and the military laid claim to controlling authority over this covert force of guerrillas and from time to time employed them in covert actions. Such cooperation from the émigrés was later used to sanitize their records. To hid a army of thousands in Europe the US simply hid them inside of another army of sorts in full view of everyone. They simply were hid inside the labor camps known as Labor Service companies. Approximately 40,000 displaced persons were employed in these Labor Service companies, guarding POW camps, removing bombing rubble from cities, locating grave sites and similar work. Former Nazis were officially barred from these camps. But at least as early as 1946 the Labor Services were recruiting former Nazis. As an example Voldemars Skaistlauks a Latvian SS general and his top aides were part of the Latvian labor company formed June 27 1946. Talivaldis Karklins was another top Nazi in the Latvian labor company. He was a top official of the Madonna concentration camp. His role in torture and murders at the camp was known at least as early as 1963. He immigrated to the US in 1956. Finally in 1981 the office of Special Investigations (the Nazi hunters within the Justice Department) succeeded in bringing charges against Karklins resulting in a complex legal battle. Karklins died peacefully in 1983 in Monterey, California.⁶⁶

Thus from the end of the war the personnel that would later become instrumental in the CIA was concentrating on covert actions. Truman originally saw the CIA as an informational gathering agency rather than an agency centered about covert actions. However the National Security Act of 1947 defined five roles for the CIA. The fifth role was to perform all other functions as the National Security Council directs. It was this role that was exploited by Wisner, Dulles, James Angleton, William Colby and others, who were responsible for directing the newly formed agency along these lines actually subverting the intentions of Truman and forever changing the face of the CIA.

The second success of this covert group within the CIA was the subversion of the 1948 Italian election. The first was the intervention in Greece. The CIA spent over $350 million of taxpayers dollars in its efforts to defeat the communist party of Italy. But even more worrisome, the CIA used Americans of Italian or Catholic heritage in its efforts through domestic propaganda. The CIA's charter strictly forbids domestic operations. Additional funding over the $350 million came from captured Nazi assets taken from their Jewish victims and was dispersed through the Vatican.⁴⁹ This money was dispensed to the Christian Democrats, while none of this money reached either the fascist parties or the monarchists, the remains of the fascist apparatus and the police joined the Christian Democrats as did many of the fascist clerics. In essence the wealth stolen from the victims of fascism was used to place the fascist back in power. Some of this money found its way to Monsignor Bicchierai, who used it to fund an underground squad of anti-Communists. This group was nothing more than a group of street thugs, who beat up left wing candidates, broke up political meeting and intimidated voters. In short a reincarnation of the early years of the Nazi Party.

There is evidence that the CIA has been involved in almost every Italian election since WWII. Covertly funding right wing candidates and embarrassing left wing candidates. The main element in which the money seems to flow through is P2. In fact Operation Gladio is well known in Europe and continues to make headlines while its virtually unheard of in America. Gladio was aimed at preventing the rise of the communist party in Italy by supporting and controlling the Christian Democrats. Gladio evolved out of Operation Demanetize at the end of the war. A former black shirt and member of the Knights of Malta, Licio Gelli, heads P2.¹²⁷

The involvement of the Vatican and clerics in the election strikes back to the role the Vatican played in setting up ratlines following the end of the war. Again a full detail of the Vatican ratlines is beyond the scope of this chapter and the reader is referred to Loftus's book Unholy Trinity. Angleton and Dulles were intimately involved with the Vatican. The first involvement was the role of Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai as an intermediary in the surrender of Wolf and Walter Rauff in Operation Sunrise. Rauff was a major war criminal, who developed the gas truck execution program. The best evidence to date links Bicchierai to aiding Rauff's escape from Europe. These ratlines provided a crucial escape route for former war criminals. Many of the war criminals escaped to South America. In fact one South American country received so many former war criminals that it passed word to the US military intelligence that it would accept no more.⁵⁶ But other countries many in the Middle East as well as Canada, and Australia received war criminals. Many of the war criminals that arrived first in South America later entered the United States.

For the most part these war criminals files had been altered covering up their crimes in the holocaust. Often times it was with the help from various intelligence agencies that sanitized their files.

Recently a memo dated Oct. 21, 1946 from the Treasury Department has surfaced linking the Vatican directly with hiding Nazi gold. The memo quotes a reliable source in Italy as confirming that the Vatican was safeguarding approximately 200 million Swiss Francs for the Nazis. Presumably this gold was from the Nazi quislings, the Ustasha.⁶⁷

Many politicians have embarrassing links to these ratlines. Ronald Reagan helped to raise money for one of Dulles front groups that was laundering money to fascist "freedom fighters." Casey worked for another front groups, the International Rescue Committee.⁵⁹ These ratlines still appear to be functioning today. Many Nazis have found a new home in the World- Anti-Communist League headed by General John Sinlaub.

Although the first Nazi to enter the US for intelligence purposes was Gehlen, who was briefly interrogated before being sent back to Germany to set up his spy network, the floodgates did not open until 1948 with the passage of the Displaced Persons Act. Likewise von Braun and some of the first Paperclip scientists were admitted before Paperclip even existed as a formal operation. Under the Displaced Persons Act a religious or charitable group could sponsor émigrés.⁵⁶ It was by this method that Stanislaw Stankievich entered the US after his file had been sanitized. Stankievich was a war criminal and member of the Einsatzgruppe B, he was the one that gave the order to murder over 7000 Jews in Borissow.⁵⁷ Once in the US then these war criminals were then free to sponsor additional émigrés. By this method the entire Belarus Nazi quisling government came to settle around Patterson, New Jersey. The writer does not wish to imply here that all of the émigrés were war criminals or Nazi quislings. The majority of the émigrés were honest people displaced by a world at war but the war criminals were allowed in mixed with these émigrés.

The most disturbing aspect of the influx of émigré groups has been on the domestic political scene. It was already mention that Nixon thought these émigré groups controlled largely by fascists were useful in getting out the vote. He was not the first however to recognize this. Arthur Bliss Lane used the Crusade for Freedom to generate enthusiasm among the émigré groups for the Republican Party in the 1952 election.

By playing on the nation's phobia of communism the Republicans campaigned on a program of liberation rather than the containment policy of Truman and the Democrats. Republican tactics within the émigré communities was almost indistinguishable from the CIA's Crusade for Freedom. Lane's specialist in the Ukrainian community was Valdimir Petrov. Petrov was a Nazi quisling city administrator of Krasnodar. During his time as administrator the gas trucks were introduced and at least 7000 were killed in that manner.⁶⁰ There is no evidence that these émigré groups were useful in swaying the results of an election. However it does point the desperate nature and to what lengths the right wing element in the US will go to obtain and keep power. The real value of the émigrés to the Republican Party has been more within the party structure and shaping the parties philosophy but that didn't come about until after the election of Nixon as president.

Even more disturbing is the continuing support that these war criminals receive once they are exposed and subjected to deportation hearings. The case of a New York housewife by the name of Mrs. Hermine Braunstiener Ryan will be used as an example. After the war she had first immigrated to Canada in 1958 she married an American and moved to Queens, New York. In 1963 she was became a naturalized citizen, and in 1964 she was exposed as a former Nazi concentration guard. One witness at the trial described how she had whipped an inmate at Majdanek to death. Mrs. Ryan was a housewife of a tradesman who had a hard time to make ends meet by her own account. How then was she able to afford the services of the Barry law firm, one of the most expensive and experienced law firms specializing in immigration, for almost a decade from first being exposed in 1964 until the 1974 trial? Who funded the two research trips Barrry made to Australia? The funding sources are unknown yet today, but with the other incidents of interference with the prosecution that came from within the judicial system, all fingers point towards the intelligence community. The example of Mrs. Ryan illustrates two points that run common throughout deportation cases. One the defendant is receiving top level help most likely from the intelligence agencies and two invariably they involve low level officials or guards. The top echelon of the former Nazi quisling governments seems totally immune from prosecution even after being exposed with a few notable exceptions. A case in point is that of Laszio Pasztor, a convicted Nazi collaborator who was imprisoned for his role in WWII as a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross. Pastor was a diplomat for the Nazi puppet government in Hungary. His name surfaced in the Bush campaign of 1988 as a worker for Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.⁴² No attempt has been made to deport him. Earlier Pasztor was a leader of 1968 Nixon-Agnew ethnic unit in the election campaign. Since then he was the organizer for the Republican Ethnic Heritage Groups. These groups are composed of largely fascist-minded emigres.⁴³

But even more iniquitous was the numerous programs set up by various branches of the intelligence community to grant visas to Nazi war criminals. Paperclip is the most widely known and researched. However there were several other programs in addition to Paperclip. Many of these evolved out of the right wing hysteria over the evils of communism. Every intelligence agency was trying to recruit former Nazis to deprive the Soviets of their use, including those of England and France. The Soviets likewise recruited former Nazis. Granting visas to Nazis or war criminals was explicitly against the laws and prohibitions passed by congress and very clearly against the wishes of Truman. In 1949 congress passed the Hundred Person Act which allowed the CIA to bring in not more than 100 people in a year that were ineligible for visas otherwise. The Pentagon had a similar measure.

The Hundred Person Act was originally passed as a means to control former war criminals. The visa was to be only temporary and not permanent, thus if the fascist once inside the US refused to work according to the agreement he could be deported easily. In at least one case Wisner wanted to grant a Beleyorussian Nazi permanent status under the Hundred Person Act until his file in the National Archives showed him to be a communist.⁶¹ How the CIA defines no derogatory information points to the heart of the matter in the admission of the former Nazis to the US and the continuing cover up. Recently a CIA official defined "no derogatory information" as no evidence of pro Communist activities. Nazis are regarded as anti-Communism hence any evidence of Nazi activity is not derogatory. Additionally the CIA similarly uses a narrow definition of employees and agents to stymie investigators and researchers. Likewise, the FBI uses similar narrow definitions. The FBI distinguishes between informants and confidential sources, casual sources and volunteers. The FBI refuses to even release the names of confidential sources to the assistant attorney general of the Criminal Bureau. Intelligence agencies also change their filing system often. Once old file clerks retire all memory of the old file system is erased and even the agency cannot find it. For instance the CIA could not even find the Gehlen collection until it was furnished the exact cryptonym.⁶²

Preceding the Hundred Person Act by a year, Project Bloodstone began operations in 1948. Bloodstone itself can be thought of as the turning point from tactic to strategic use of former Nazis. Up until Bloodstone the use of former Nazis and their quislings was more short term or even exploitation of their knowledge. With Bloodstone the objectives were longer term and more strategic in nature. Bloodstone was rather short-lived ending in 1950 when it was superseded by other programs under direct CIA control. It was also the first crack in the flood gate allowing Nazis quislings into the US. Many of those admitted into the US under Bloodstone went on to become covert saboteurs and assassins for US intelligence agencies. Besides the usual camp guards Bloodstone was the route into the US for the top echelon of Nazi collaborators and leaders. Its primary sponsors were Frank Wisner and Robert Lovett. Wisner initially proposed that Bloodstone would allow 250 into the US, 100 of which would be assigned to the Department of State to be engaged mostly in Voice of America and 50 to be assigned to each military branch.⁶³

Bloodstone was initially approved 6/10/1948 by the State, Army, Navy, Air Force Coordinating Committee a month later the joint chiefs approved a second interlocking program expanding Bloodstone to include covert warfare, sabotage and assassinations where as originally the plan was to be devoted to filling in intelligence gaps. In June of 1948 the National Security Council delivered Truman's approval of NSC10/2 which authorized the types of clandestine operations that would be engaged. It marked a huge turning point in US-Soviet relationships. In regards to Nazis the sole purpose of Bloodstone seem to be to circumvent US immigration laws. In fact a special subcommittee of Bloodstone was created to provide false identification, cover jobs and secret police protection to immigrants.⁶⁴

Perhaps the most damning of all aspect that can be traced back to Bloodstone was the beginning of the CIA's manipulation of the free press. The National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) was a thinly disguised CIA front organization. Dulles and Wisner used their combined talents in lining up and all star board of directors, many of which where Wall Street lawyers. The NCFE depended upon the media to cloak its true mission in secrecy. Early members of this corporations were Henry Luce of Time-Life, DeWitt Wallace of the Reader's Digest, and C.D. Jackson of Fortune. The net effect of this was the creation of a powerful lobby within the free press to suppress critical news of the CIA, a lobby that still very much active today.⁶⁵ Equally disquieting is the interference in domestic affairs by an agency that is barred from all domestic activities.

The subject of the free press is broached in more detail in another chapter. Here we will only establish the connections between the free press and the CIA's abusive connections with it and the CIA's involvement with other domestic organizations such as university and the use of private foundations as fronts. Surprisingly the war criminals in the émigré groups were exposed to some extent during the late 40s and early 50s. Returning military personnel were incensed upon finding war criminals working at US military bases. Other groups such as the Minnesota chapter of the American Chemical Society were outraged that émigrés were given preference for jobs over their members.⁸⁹ In another example of granting the Nazi scientist preference over US workers stems from the failure of the Air Force recruits to offer a single job to engineers laid off from North American Aviation instead they sent six recruiters to Germany where they recruited thirty five ex Nazis.⁹⁴ Émigrés with scientific skills not needed by the defense establishment were placed either in private business or in university positions at the urging of the CIA. It was largely due to the need to cover up these leaks and exposures that the CIA became closely associated with the press and launched a major domestic propaganda blitz.

One of the larger front groups the CIA was using domestically to manipulate the political climate inside the US was the Crusade for Freedom (CFF). The CFF main focus was on liberation of the countries in which communism held sway rather than on containment. The risk of a direct confrontation or nuclear war was ignored. The CIA made a direct contribution to the anti-Communist education through the CFF of five million dollars. To put this figure into perspective this figure exceeded the combined total of all money spent in the Truman-Dewey presidential election campaign. It fully establishes the CIA as the largest manipulator of public opinion.⁶⁹ Several other domestic groups were used as fronts for the CIA's propaganda campaign among them are the Committee for a Free Europe and Common Cause (no relationship to today's group by the same name).

The following quote over Reagan's involvement with the front group Crusade for Freedom illustrates just how pervasive and extensive these operations were.

"In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had "fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned 'an informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to 'purge' the industry of subversives."⁷⁰

Perhaps there is no better example of the propaganda placed in the press than the 1949 article appearing in Life by Wallace Caroll in manipulating the public opinion of the Nazi quislings and war criminals. They were cast in the light of freedom fighters as the following excerpt shows:

"There was no Partisan movement in their area no sabotage, and the peasants fulfilled the German requisitions of farm products on schedule. The attribution of atrocities to these troops, as well as the numerous pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic periodicals published by the Vlasov organization during the war, were forgeries which the Soviet propagandists shrewdly attributed to Vlasov's forces. These facts had been known for a long time to Russian experts of the State Department and to a small number of American officers. Caroll's conclusion was in part that America needed to embrace the former Nazi collaborators as a central tactic in a comprehensive strategy of political warfare against the Soviets."⁷¹

The use of the press for propaganda purposes fell under a broad CIA operation dubbed Mockingbird formed in the late 1940s. The full extent of Mockingbird and Operation Chaos came to the surface in the Church Committee hearings and the Rockefeller commission in the aftermath of Watergate in the mid 1970s. The Rockefeller Commission was nothing more than a whitewash. The reader should note the previous connection of Rockefeller and the wartime OSS, but Rockefeller's intelligence connection didn't end with the war. In 1954 he became the super coordinator for clandestine intelligence operations. A member to note of the Rockefeller commission for his later advocacy of censorship was Reagan.⁷² As an example of lack of concern or seriousness of the Rockefeller Commission is the behavior of Reagan. He left the first meeting early, and managed to miss three of the next four meetings in fact he was so busy political stumping that he only visited the headquarters once in the first month.¹⁰³ Operation Chaos was a CIA operation of disrupting the antiwar movement and leftist groups of the 60s and early 70s. It will be dealt with in another chapter including the FBI's sister program COINTELPRO.

Findings from the Church committee revealed that in the past the CIA had up to 400 agents posing as journalists or journalists that were cooperative with the CIA. The CIA regarded CBS, The New York Times and the Washington Post as their most useful assets within the media.⁷⁴ Other connections between the media and the CIA included Henry Luce of Time-Life, DeWitt Wallace of the Reader's Digest, Barry Birgham of the Louisville Courier-Herald and James Copely of Copley News Services. All major news outlets were involved including ABC, NBC, UPI, AP, Reuter, Hearst papers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek magazine, Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post and the Christian Science Monitor. Another connection worthy of noting here is William Casey, Reagan's Director of the CIA made a fortune in investing in Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation. ⁸³

The extent of the CIA infiltration of the media can best be illustrated by the example of CBS. Where William Paley was openly supportive of information exchanges. Sid Mickelson was reported to have received cash payments for information. Another connection between the intelligence community and CBS is Joseph Ream, a former Wall Street lawyer and once deputy director of D/DIRNSA office in the National Security Agency (NSA) who became an executive vice president at CBS upon leaving the NSA.⁷³

The full extent of the perversion of the free press is explored in more detail in a separate chapter. A brief look at the evolution of the corruption of the media and its accompanying sister secrecy here is needed. The publishing of the Pike Report by the Village Voice on February 16, 1976 revealed for the first time, the shocking extent of CIA excesses. The report revealed cost over runs of 400 percent for foreign operations and 500 percent for domestic operations, the huge propaganda network ran by the agency, and the existence of a military capacity greater than many foreign governments. CIA Director Bush moved to stem the leaks. Bush was successful in lobbying congress to limit it's oversight of the agency and in extending secrecy agreements beyond just the employees of the CIA. Bush also established the Publications Review Board, the first peacetime government censor. The Review Board gave he CIA the power to censor all speeches and writings of former agents, the Review Board must first approve all books by former agents. ⁷⁵

A dark cloud of secrecy began blanketing the country with the election of Reagan in 1980. In 1981the Interagency information Security Committee was established under the direction of Richard Willard. Reagan never the champion of civil rights was concerned with stemming leaks. The leaks were not leaks of secrets but rather leaks of damaging or embarrassing in fighting or information. The trigger for establishing Willard's group was the disclosures of David Stockman on budget matters and the failure of dummy side economics. One recommendation coming from Willard group was to prosecute leakers or whistle blowers for theft of information claiming that the government held the copyright to all documents, which is a direct violation of US copyright laws prohibiting the government ownership of any documents. The group also called for a system wide secrecy agreement.⁷⁶

With Reagan reelection Bush was appointed head of the Task Force for Combating Terrorism. With this mandate Bush set a course for further limiting congressional oversight of the CIA. The big lie here was that terrorism was declining in 1985, in fact only 7 incidents of terrorism occurred in 1985 down from a high of 29 in 1980. Perhaps the most grievous aspect of the task forces recommendations was the redefining terrorism as "political theater designed to undermine or alter government authority or behavior." In effect it was now a crime to think differently than the government. The Boston Tea Part would be described as terrorism under this definition, so would have the civil rights marches, the feminist movement and the environmental movement.⁷⁷

During the Reagan and Bush presidencies censorship rose to a truly Orwellian proportion. Items that had previously been published could be reclassified as secret and censored. Perhaps the following item will give the reader an idea of the Orwellian censorship of the CIA. A Ernest Fitzgerald was a engineer assigned to a position in position of procurement and cost control in the air force in 1966. Within a year of accepting the position he issued a scathing speech on the archaic Pentagon procurement system. He pointed out how contractors could bilk the government out of millions of dollars because they had no facts about the real cost of weapons systems. Many listeners asked him for a copy of his speech, however before he could provide them with a transcript it first had to be approved by the Office of Security Review. They ordered Fitzgerald to neither distribute or print the speech. After obtaining a copy of the reviewers comments from a security guard, Fitzgerald found that one of the things the censors objected to were his quotes from Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method.⁷⁸ Mind you this was before the security was tighten under Bush and Reagan. Can you now imagine what would be censored after the security was tighten?

One final example of how the CIA manipulates public opinion for political purposes and as well as how they are utterly a failure at intelligence is quoted below.

"When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, CIA senior analysts almost immediately stated that his efforts for peace were genuine. In fact, the CIA believed that his projected reforms, perestroika, would require the Soviet Union to trim back considerably its military expenditures, since considerable emphasis would have to be placed in consumer industries. Yet a year later in an April 1986 memo, the CIA sought to mislead the American public by characterizing the Soviet Union as a rapidly growing military machine.

This CIA report was well received by the Reagan, giving him more leverage to continue to fund the American war machine, including his pet $40 billion project of star wars. The CIA exaggerated forecast of the number of strategic nuclear warheads which the Soviet Union was planning on deploying in the following ten years. It was predicted that the Soviets would build a staggering 20,000 warheads by 1995. This was virtually impossible, since it would have required the increase in Soviet expenditures on strategic forces of 11 percent to 13 percent every year for a decade. Ultimately the Soviet Union never deployed even 12,000 warheads, and the START treaty signed in 1991 actually required the Soviets to reduce the number of nuclear warheads to 3,500.

By 1988, the CIA reported that perestroika was failing and that the Soviet Union was reverting to the old order. Then in the summer of 1991, CIA analysts stated that a coup was unlikely because the conservative element had waited too long, losing the support of the KGB."⁸⁵

In other words the CIA failed to predict the downfall of the Soviet Union. But this is not the only recent failure of the ability of the CIA to correct analyze the situation and make correct predictions. They failed to predict either India's or Pakistan's ability to build an atomic bomb.

This elaborate disinformation and security network was needed to protect the ever increasing numbers of war criminals being admitted to the US. Bloodstone started rather humbly with a yearly cap of just 250 persons, but the CIA and particularly Wisner had much larger plans. By 1950 CIA representatives asked congress for a plan to authorize special importation of up to 15,000 CIA sponsored refugees in addition to those already entering through the Displaced Persons Act. The bill that finally passed by congress allowed only 500 over a three-year period. However congress's refusal to allow for the full 15,000 was not the end of the CIA's plans. Instead the CIA expanded its authority under NSC 86, and NSCIDs 13 and 14 to employ the NSC's authorization to sponsor indirectly many of the same émigrés it had planned to import. US based refuge programs from various provinces of the USSR were eager to sponsor many of the same people Wisner wanted. Many of the war criminals from Latvia, Lithuanian, Belarus and the Ukraine entered in this manner.⁷⁹

One of the more notorious Bloodstone beneficiaries was Gustav Hilger. Hilger was a personal secretariat to Jachim von Ribbentrop and as a liaison officer directly process the reports from the SS Einsatzugruppen. He also had a significant role in the capturing and extermination of Italian Jews. Another Bloodstone recruit was Nikolai Poppe, both Poppe and Hilger played influential roles in formatting US policy towards the USSR.⁸⁰

A 1978 GAO study established that the CIA had a cle