Forbidden Bookshelf Presents Christopher Simpson

The Splendid Blond Beast, Blowback, and Science of Coercion

Christopher Simpson

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781504056526
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Three provocative exposés from a National Jewish Book Award–winning journalist address the CIA's recruitment of Nazis and use of psychological warfare. The Splendid Blond Beast: This groundbreaking investigation into the CIA's post–World War II liberation and recruitment of Nazi war criminals—including the pivotal role played by CIA director Allen Dulles—traces the roots not only of US government malfeasance, but of mass murder as an instrument of financial gain and state power, from the Armenian genocide during World War I to Hitler's Holocaust through the practice of genocide today. "Revelatory and shocking." — Kirkus Reviews Blowback: The true story of how US intelligence organizations employed Nazi war criminals in clandestine warfare and propaganda against the USSR, anticolonial revolutionaries, and progressive movements worldwide that were claimed to be Soviet pawns. "The story is one that needs to be told, and Blowback makes a major contribution to its telling, supplementing a thorough collation of known cases with ample new research." — The New York Times Science of Coercion: Drawing on long-classified documents from the Pentagon, the CIA, and other national security agencies, Simpson exposes secret government-funded research into psychological warfare and reveals that many of the most respected pioneers in the field of communication science were knowingly complicit as their findings were employed for the purposes of propaganda, subversion, intimidation, and counterinsurgency during the Cold War era. "An intriguing picture of the relations between state power and the intellectual community." —Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Blowback

America’s Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy

For my mother and father

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Simpson

Washington, DC

April 2014

Christopher Simpson

Member, IWG Historical Advisory Panel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not until IWG work had been underway for almost five years that the CIA informed the IWG that it was not using the standard for relevancy it had voted to endorse. It was using a different standard, which the CIA itself estimated had eliminated the “relevancy” of 95.5 percent of the Nazis and other Axis criminals on the computerized list before the search for records had even begun.⁷

Thus, the only records the CIA considered “relevant” for potential declassification under the law were those that concerned an individual who had been “actually convicted of war crimes” or related persecution, or if the CIA itself had collected information about that individual’s World War II crimes (a rare occurrence, particularly during the 1950s), or if another government agency had independently completed the research necessary to prove to the CIA’s satisfaction that the individual was a war criminal. If there was no information about an actual conviction for World War II crimes, “any documents on that person are deemed ‘outside the scope of the Act,’” wrote the CIA’s representative to the IWG, Larry Holmes.⁸

Once the policy was discovered, IWG Chair Steven Garfinkel and the IWG public members strongly protested. These “highly restrictive handicaps” called into question whether the IWG could ever perform the task that Congress had assigned to it, Garfinkel said.⁹ Holmes demurred, and shortly after retired.

During the winter of 2003–04, Garfinkel led a demarche to DCI George Tenet’s office to argue for greater agency cooperation in declassifying records, in part because it was in Tenet’s own interest to avoid the appearance of hiding information about Nazi war criminals. Tenet agreed to use his discretionary power as CIA director to conduct limited new searches and to release additional information on certain Nazi cases identified by the IWG and its historians.

Most of the material subsequently released by Tenet concerned the Gehlen Organization, the predecessor of the West German state intelligence service. While Garfinkel and the IWG deserve considerable credit for pressuring Tenet, it is nevertheless true that the release of the Gehlen-related records was actually compelled by a federal judge in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by a private citizen.¹⁰ The majority of the other materials released by Tenet consisted of little more than a form indicating that someone in the U.S. government had once requested a file trace on the subject.

For the IWG, the important thing was that the records were released at all. But for the CIA, the director’s “discretionary” release has meant that today the Agency maintains a de facto Waldheim Rule and the abusive “relevancy” restrictions on records it controls concerning Cold War—era activities of Axis criminals. This is an especially serious problem when it comes to records on Japanese and Asian collaborationist criminals whose crimes against humanity remain largely unrecognized or unknown in the West.

The CIA today continues to treat with disdain and often with outright deceit those individuals and institutional researchers who lack the resources to bring a great deal of pressure on the Agency, notwithstanding the passage of two laws designed specifically to compel disclosure of records on perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The CIA’s ongoing campaign against accountability for its activities requires that every responsible historian and journalist treat the CIA claims with great skepticism.

1. IWG Press Release, “President Appoints John Choon Yoo to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group,” May 13, 2004.

2. Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel (eds.) The Torture Papers, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

3. http://www.archives.gov/iwg/about/press-releases/index.xhtml, viewed most recently on Jan. 21, 2007.

4. For the Department’s memo, see “Search for Records Concerning Japanese War Crimes (Pursuant to P.L. 105-246) (IPS No. S200100002)” (unclassified) January 23, 2001, and the attached 4-page tab titled “Tab 6 Document Search Action Office Checklist.”

5. Similarly, a Freedom of Information Act request for these records filed almost four years ago has yet to be processed.

6. IWG Chair Steven Garfinkel to David Holmes, DCI representative to the IWG, April 30, 2002; see also (n.a.) “IWG Decisions As of February 22, 2000,” copy in author’s collection.

7. Percentage has been calculated from numbers reported in David Holmes (CIA) to Steven Garfinkel (IWG Director) September 20, 2002, “CIA Response to IWG Report Questions, September 2002,” see “CIA Relevancy Guidelines,” pp. 12-13. The CIA later reported that it had run computerized searches on the names on the Justice Department list.

8. Ibid, p.12. At that stage, work had not even begun on records concerning Japanese and Asian war criminals. The CIA’s relevancy standard reduced their entire Pacific Theater search to a few dozen names.

9. NARA/IWG press release, “CIA Intends to Release Records on Cold War Spymaster,” October 5, 2000. .

10. Garfinkel to Holmes, April 30, 2002.

Prologue

The press briefing room at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., is designed as a modern-day lions’ den, with the department’s spokesperson cast in the role of Daniel. The focus of the design is the lectern at the center of the room, which is filled with serpentine microphones and wires when a big story is about to be announced. The lions of the press are arranged along broad rising steps like the seats in an amphitheater.

On August 16, 1983, U.S. government Nazi hunter Allan Ryan strode into that briefing room to announce an unprecedented 600-page report on the activities of a certain Klaus Barbie (alias Klaus Altmann, alias Becker, alias Merten, etc.) and on that one man’s relationship to the American intelligence agencies more than thirty years ago.

“I didn’t really know how much of a bombshell this would be,” Ryan recalled later. “I was so immersed in the details of the investigation that I wasn’t quite sure what the reaction would be.”¹ When he arrived, he found more than 100 reporters crammed into the briefing room, about two dozen cameras complete with newscasters representing every major television organization in the world, hangers-on of every description, and so many microphones clipped to the lectern that they had to be rearranged before he could find a place for his notes. It was, one press corps veteran commented, the biggest crowd to turn out for a news briefing since the stormy investigations of Watergate days.

The Justice Department had printed up the 200-page Barbie study, along with about 400 pages of documentary exhibits, and distributed it on schedule at the event. Ryan made a short presentation of the study’s conclusions about fifteen minutes after the reporters had those books in their hands.

In a nutshell, the Justice Department’s study acknowledged that a U.S. intelligence agency known as the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had recruited Schutzstaffel (SS) and Gestap...