How the U.S. recruited fight communism

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SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1991 15 A chronicle of the protection and use of Nazi war criminals to fight the Cold War Christopher Simpson, "Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War." Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988. 398 pp. $19.95.

According to the mythology of the American media, the Cold War was a struggle between "democracy" and "communism, in which the superior values of democracy (espoused by the U.S. government) finally triumphed. Linked with the political values of democracy were the spiritual values exemplified by the Catholic Church, which maintained a brave fight against suppression in Eastern Europe.

In reality, the United States government has been concerned with furthering the interests of American capitalism rather than promoting democratic values, as is testified by its secret use of thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators—including mass murderers.

This book is the first comprehensive scholarly study of what took place. Its author, Christopher Simpson, did a tremendous amount of research, using governmental records acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, libraries all over the world, and interviews with those having to do with the government's program of using and shielding Nazi criminals.

An example of the U.S. government's Nazi agents was Baron Otto von Bolschwing, one of the CIA's highest-ranking contract employees after the war, whose job was to infiltrate spies into Hungary and Romania. Von Bolschwing had been a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, working in his "Jewish Affairs" office, which was the center of the Nazis' campaign to exterminate the Jews.

As SS operations chief in Bucharest in 1941, Von Bolschwing, according to captured German war records, "personally helped organize a coup attempt and pogrom led by the Romanian Iron Guard. ... Some victims [of the pogram] were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as 'kosher meat' with red-hot irons. "

In 1953 the CIA secretly brought Von Bolschwing to the United States, providing BOOK REVIEW him with a false record to do so. When this was discovered, the CIA admitted that it knew of his SS career but claimed that it did not know that he was a war criminal-even though the war records telling of his involvement in the Bucharest pogrom had been thoroughly combed by American experts.

Approved by top officials In fact, it was because of Von Bolschwing's connection with the Iron Guard that he was of particular use to the CIA. The experienced anti-Soviet fighters of World War Il were used to gather intelligence about the USSR and Eastern Europe; to train U.S. specialists in intelligence, propaganda, and covert warfare; to recruit emigrés for sabotage and assassinations within the USSR (most of ihem were quickly caught by Soviet counter-espionage); and for prospective guerrilla warfare following a nuclear war.

The program was secretly approved by top officials, beginning with Attorney General Tom Clark. Involved in it were State Department officials devoted to Soviet affairs who engineered Cold War strategy through several administrations, Democratic and Republican.

A source of strength of the program was General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's senior intelligence officer on the Soviet front, who made a deal with the United States authorities and subsequently (under the patronage of the United States) became the head of West German intelligence. Gehlen had amassed a great deal of intelligence from 4 million Soviet prisoners of war who were tortured and deliberately starved to death unless they revealed information and joined the "liberation army" sponsored by the Nazis.

The attitude of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, toward Gehlen seems to have been the attitude of the American higher-ups toward the Nazi criminals in general. "There are few archbishops in espionage," he said. "Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club." Without a doubi, Dulles also evenhandedly excluded Blacks, Jews, and women from his club.

Another source of strength for the program was the ties that the CIA established with

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