How We Sold Our Soul–Operation Bloodstone

photorandy2023

2 years ago

The Articles in the Category cover a vast range of history not only in our country but in the world as well. The category is entitled “How We Sold Our Soul”. In many cases our history has hinged on compromises being made by the powers at be. They say hind-sight is 20/20, which is why I am discussing these land mark decisions in this manner. The people that made these decisions in many cases thought they were doing the right thing. However in some instances they were made for expediency and little thought was given to the moral ramifications and the fallout that would result from them. I hope you enjoy these articles. The initial plan is to discuss 10 compromises, but as time progresses I am sure that number will increase.

Operation Bloodstone was a covert operation whereby the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sought out Nazis and collaborators living in Soviet-controlled areas, to work undercover for U.S. intelligence inside the Soviet Union, Latin America, and Canada, as well as domestically within the United States. Many of those who were hired as part of Bloodstone were high-ranking Nazi intelligence agents who had committed war crimes.

History

Operation Bloodstone was initially proposed by the U.S. State Department, and was approved by SANACC (the State, Army, Navy, Air Force Coordinating Committee) on June 10, 1948. In the initial stages of the operation, a brief paper identified these anti-Communist elements in non-Western hemisphere countries outside the Soviet orbit who “have shown extreme fortitude in the face of the Communist menace” and have “demonstrated the know-how to counter Communist propaganda and techniques to obtain control of mass movements.” Operation Bloodstone sought to tap these individuals who were “immobilized” due to lack of funds and a coordinated international movement. In July, SANACC expanded the operation to:

comprise those activities against the enemy which are conducted by Allied or friendly forces behind enemy lines … [to] include psychological warfare, subversion, sabotage, and miscellaneous operations such as assassination, target capture and rescue of Allied airmen.

By 1976, Operation Bloodstone was no longer a closely guarded secret, but an investigation revealed that two other highly classified programs were connected to it: Operation Paperclip and Alsos Mission.

In the crucial three years after 1945, however, the NSA coordinating services for organizing the rollback of communism in Europe did not exist. The State Department, therefore, took the lead in launching the season of subversive activities with Operation Bloodstone. The godfather of Bloodstone was George Kennan, with Frank Wisner, the advertising man turned legendary OSS agent in WW II, acting as lobbyist for institutional approval. As Christopher Simpson writes in Blowback, “The State Department began the first known major clandestine effort recruiting Soviet émigrés . . . . [with] Operation Bloodstone, and it became one of the department’s most important covert project from 1948 until approximately 1950, when it was superseded by similar programs under direct CIA sponsorship.”

By “Soviet émigrés,” Bloodstone did not mean recruiting your garden-variety, post-bellum Central and East European displaced, homeless, and desperate refugee. It meant specifically a valuable anti-Communist asset—one who had distinguished her/himself in significant activities against the Soviet Union. To create internal crisis within the Soviet Union and/or its satellites, Kennan, as Simpson quotes, regarded anti-Communist exiles prime catches: “At the present time there are a number of interesting and powerful Russian political groupings among the Russian exiles . . . any of which would probably be preferable to the Soviet Government, from our standpoint, as rulers of Russia.” Thus, while all groupings were given more or less equal funding, the Nazi-collaborationist Russian Liberation Army, better known as the Vlasov Army (named after the Red Army general who defected to the Nazis) enjoyed particular predilection. Made up of volunteers from German-captured Soviet prisoners of war during the war, the remnants of the post-war, émigré Vlasov army spoke the language, knew the territory, had expertise in the field of battle against the Soviets, in intelligence, population control, and sabotage activities. At its peak, the Vlasov Army had included one million adherents. Top Vlasov Army veterans, imported to the United States, could be used to train US agents in the arts of Anti-Communist subversion, as intelligence and covert operations experts, and as talent-spotters for ventures in subversion and assassination. It has to be noted at this point, as Simpson does, that, given the choice between starvation and collaboration, “about 2 million [Soviet] POWs . . . chose starvation before they would aid the Nazis.”

Nevertheless, many did. What US post-war recruiters of Vlasov Army veterans chose to ignore was their record of war crimes. As Simpson reports,

The Vlasov Army has frequently been portrayed in the West since the war as the most noble and idealistic of the Nazis’ émigré legions. . . . In reality, Vlasov’s organization [as recruited by US intelligence] consisted in large part of reassigned veterans from some of the most depraved SS and “security” units of the Nazis’ entire killing machine. . . . By 1945, about half of Vlasov’s troops had been drawn from the SS Kommando Kaminsky, which had earlier been led by the Belorussian collaborator Bronislav Kaminsky. . . . The Kaminsky militia [had] spearheaded the bloody suppression of the heroic 1944 Warsaw rebellion with such bestial violence that even German General Hans Guderian was appalled and called for their removal from the field.

Similarly, the recruitment of Ukrainian émigré collaborator organizations had a public and a secret face. The Nazis had generously funded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military branch, the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), in the years leading to the invasion of Russia in June 1941 (code name “Barbarossa”). In the first months of the invasion, as Simpson writes, “OUN police troops traveled with the German forces . . . providing intelligence, creating local quisling administrations . . . and playing an active role in the roundup and murders of Jews.” Under the command of OUN Police Minister and Gestapo-trained, Mykolas Lebed (later recruited by US intelligence), in Lvov in 1941, the population was whipped up into such a killing frenzy against Jews and Communists that “police and militia forces remained busy day and night with mass roundups of unarmed men and women, public hangings, beatings, and other abuse. Lvov’s Jews were arrested, tortured, and shot in large numbers by both OUN troops and Nazi Einsatzkommando [mobile murder squads].” In an echo of today’s US-supported Banderites in Lvov, Kiev, and in the “anti-terrorist” operations in Dombass, the 1941 pogrom in Lvov was carried out to the shouts of “Long live Adolf Hitler and Stepan Bandera.”

And yet, OUN war criminals such as Mykolas Lebed, were collectively and conveniently whitewashed as members of an army, which had acted, in the eyes of the foreign policy/intelligence establishment, as a “third force” within the Soviet Union, fighting for liberation and democracy from the Communist yoke, as Simpson remarks. At a certain point, a whole division of OUN/UPA troops, eleven hundred men and their families, were imported, no questions asked, into the United States. The influence of Ukrainian Anti-Communist émigré groups in American politics is longstanding, deep, and ongoing, as reading Simpson’s book makes perfectly clear. In general, it is not a progressive contribution, as the US-backed junta in Kiev could testify. But that’s another long story.

Conclusion

As Christopher Simpson reminds us in the opening chapter, “The most prominent feature of the Nazi political philosophy [was] extreme anticommunism and particularly fanatic hatred of the USSR.” That hatred set the world ablaze, and, yet, after the war, the Nazi administrators, chief intelligence officers, generals, police chiefs, and intellectuals of that regime of hatred and war were recruited to continue their work in the bosom of our secret National Security State, advising, influencing, and promoting our foreign policy in the Cold War. Did that policy change with the fall of the Berlin Wall? No, it intensified—still absolutist, still aggressive, still dedicated to political warfare.

Russia is still in our crosshairs.

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “Operation Bloodstone.” By Wilkipedia Editors; “Castles Made of Sand: A Century of Anglo-American Espionage and Interbention in the Middle East.” By Andre Gerolymatos; counterpunch.org, ” America’s Recruitment of Nazis-Then and Now.” By Luciana Bohne; Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy.” By Christopher Simpson;

History

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