By:
Jeff Kaye
“The most powerful form of lie is the omission…” — George Orwell
Of all the aspects of the current crisis over the NATO/Russia
standoff in Ukraine, the determined intervention into Ukrainian
political affairs by the United States has been the least reported, at
least until recently. While new reports have appeared concerning CIA
Director John Brennan’s
mid-April trip to Kiev, and CIA/FBI
sending “dozens” of advisers
to the Ukrainian security services, very few reports mention that U.S.
intervention in Ukraine affairs goes back to the end of World War II. It
has hardly let up since then.
The fact of such intervention is not hard to find. Indeed, it’s hard
to know where to start in documenting all this, there is so much out
there if one is willing to look for it. But the mainstream U.S. press,
and their blogger shadows, are ignoring this for the most part. Some
exceptions at the larger alternative websites include Jeffrey St.
Clair’s
Counterpunch and Robert Perry’s
Consortium News.
Even these latter outlets have almost nothing to say about the
approximately 70 year history of U.S. intervention in Ukraine. The
liberals and progressives avoid the subject because otherwise one would
have to address the full reality of the intensive U.S. Cold War against
the Soviet Union, and the covert and overt crimes and operations
conducted by the U.S. against the USSR. Because the liberals share an
anti-communist consensus, not far removed from Ronald Reagan’s view of
the USSR as an “Evil Empire,” they have little to no interest in
addressing the full history of the period.
But the current crisis in Ukraine, which pits a U.S.-backed
coalition, which includes neo-Nazis, in Ukraine against Russian-speaking
separatists in the eastern regions of the country, threatens to turn
into a hot war between not just Ukraine and Russia, but between two
nuclear-armed foes, NATO and Russia. Indeed, in the past six months,
besides Brennan’s visit, the
U.S. Vice-President and the
head of NATO have all visited and consulted in Kiev with the current Ukrainian regime.
And now, the U.S. has
announced
it is sending military “advisers” to Ukraine, as the current government
there prosecutes a major military operation against separatists in the
East, which human rights groups say has included indiscriminate
shelling, killing of civilians, torture, and kidnappings on
both sides. The bulk of indiscriminate shelling, according to Human Rights Watch, has
come from the U.S.-backed government forces. Amnesty International has
documented that human rights violations and war crimes are committed by even a member of the Ukrainian parliament with total impunity.
Return of the Repressed: Recruiting Fascists as Anti-Soviet Allies
Back on March 28, The Nation and Foreign Policy in Focus published jointly an excellent
article
pulling up some of the relevant history, “Seven Decades of Nazi
Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret.” The article does a
good job showing how the right-wing, fascistic Svoboda Party in Ukraine
has its roots in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN],
which was one of a number of East Europe parties that allied at various
points with the Nazis, and had their own racist, ethnic, nationalist
doctrines.
After WWII, the U.S. made a pact with many of these leaders,
ostensibly recruiting them as allies against the Soviets in the Cold
War. Indeed, in the early years after World War II, the U.S. and the
British hired Ukrainian nationalists, many of them associated with
fascism, to parachute and conduct guerrilla war in Ukraine and the USSR.
When doing so, they turned a blind eye to many of these leaders’ war
crimes, including participation in the Holocaust. When these links were
revealed years later, beginning in the 1980s, the CIA and State
Department worked assiduously to deny these links to Congress and the
press.
Almost all of these men were rounded up and shot. When the Soviets
offered an amnesty to members of the Ukrainian Insurgents Army (UPA) in
January 1950, 8,000 anti-Soviet guerrillas still fighting within Ukraine
turned in their arms. The U.S./CIA operation to use Ukraine as a base
for war against Russia and the bulk of the Soviet Union ran out of
steam. (See Stephen Dorril’s
MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, The Free Press, 2000, pp. 242-243.)
It has taken many years, and the dedicated work of people like
John Loftus,
former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, Linda Hunt, Christopher
Simpson, Tom Bower, and many, many others who fought governmental
inertia and lies to get out the truth. Much of that truth still needs to
get out, but slowly, surely, it is trying to find its way into the
public’s consciousness, as this Daily Beast
article on Operation Paperclip taken from Annie Jacobsen’s new book on the same subject demonstrates so well.
One important article,
by Joe Conason in the Village Voice in 1986,
examined the role OUN leader Mykola Lebed played for U.S. intelligence.
I’m going to take up the controversy about the VV in the near future,
looking at how the CIA continued to operate to protect its Ukrainian
intelligence assets, even into the early years of the Clinton
administration (and likely beyond). Such protection included
lying to politicians,
consulting with those under investigation for war crimes how best to deal with the political fallout, and in general falsifying history to protect their covert anti-Soviet program.
Yet can the truth stand up to the daily drumbeat of lies and
anti-Russian propaganda coming at a feverish pace out of the White
House? The U.S. has stepped up its overt intervention in Ukraine, and it
would do well for everyone to know as much as possible the lead-up to
this moment, as the pending NATO/US/Russia confrontation could threaten
the very world we live in, that we all live in. The U.S. is clearly
ratcheting up the political and military pressure against both Russia
and China, and more than even what is happening in the Middle East, it
is this renewed aggressive stance towards those two countries that will
dominate the news and our lives in the coming decade.
U.S. National Archives Documents U.S. Collaboration with Fascist Ukrainian Nationalists
In a remarkable book published by the United States National Archives
a few years ago, historians Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda have
examined recent declassified documents and put together an initial
history of Army and CIA collaboration with some of the most important
Ukrainian fascist leaders after World War II.
Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (PDF)
attempts to document “the Allied protection or use of Nazi war
criminals; and documents about the postwar political activities of war
criminals.”
Hitler’s Shadow was preceded by the 2005 publication,
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis,
a Cambridge University Press book based on the earliest examination of
new documents released as part of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure
Act. While the history of Ukrainian nationalism shows that nationalist
movements were squeezed between the policies — and sometimes invasions —
of foreign states, the book makes clear that today’s EuroMaidan heroes
of yesteryear were in fact trained by the Gestapo and took part in the
Holocaust.
Chapter Five of
Hitler’s Shadow, “Collaborators: Allied
Intelligence and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” examines
recently declassified documents in regards to how US intelligence
agencies recruited, paid, protected and used war criminals who
collaborated with the Nazis. In particular, it looks at the careers
Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed, two WWII “heroes” of the Ukrainian
nationalist movement.
These Ukrainian fascists — Lebed turned “democratic” once in U.S. hands after the war — had their careers
rehabilitated
by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko. When Putin points to
the pro-fascist tendencies and Nazis within Ukraine, he is referring at
least to this kind of evidence.
However, Putin cannot really address the full history of the U.S. and
CIA campaign because 1) the crimes of the Stalin government is not
something the Russians like to talk about, and 2) the long history of
U.S intervention in Ukraine is tied up with the decades-long Cold War
against Soviet communism. Putin and his allies are antagonistic to
Communism, and ambivalent, at best, about the Soviet period (even if
many of them were in fact former Communists or Soviet officials
themselves).
Like the dilemma of the U.S. liberals mentioned above, to fully
embrace a history of U.S. Cold War intervention against the Soviet Union
would mean assessing what the role of the Soviet Union was, and in
this, Putin and his anti-Soviet allies within Russia (like the oligarchs
in Ukraine and other former Soviet states), who got rich off the corpse
of the USSR de-nationalization, are not interested in dredging up Cold
War history. They all shared an animus against the Communists that
matched that of the CIA.
Breitman and Goda
describe
how the CIA’s Ukrainian operation, codenamed “Aerodynamic,” worked
(this is taken from a National Archives government document and the
extensive quote is not subject to copyright restrictions):
AERODYNAMIC’s first phase involved
infiltration into Ukraine and then ex-filtration of CIA-trained
Ukrainian agents. By January 1950 the CIA’s arm for the collection of
secret intelligence (Office of Special Operations, OSO) and its arm for
covert operations (Office of Policy Coordination, OPC) participated.
Operations in that year revealed “a well established and secure
underground movement” in the Ukraine that was even “larger and more
fully developed than previous reports had indicated.” Washington was
especially pleased with the high level of UPA training in the Ukraine
and its potential for further guerrilla actions, and with “the
extraordinary news that… active resistance to the Soviet regime was
spreading steadily eastward, out of the former Polish, Greek Catholic
provinces.”97
The CIA decided to expand its operations for “the support,
development, and exploitation of the Ukrainian underground movement for
resistance and intelligence purposes.” “In view of the extent and
activity of the resistance movement in the Ukraine,” said OPC Chief
Frank Wisner, “we consider this to be a top priority project.”98 The CIA
learned of UPA activities in various Ukrainian districts; the Soviet
commitment of police troops to destroy the UPA; the UPA’s resonance with
Ukrainians; and the UPA’s potential to expand to 100,000 fighters in
wartime. The work was not without hazards. Individual members of teams
from 1949 to 1953 were captured and killed. By 1954 Lebed’s group lost
all contact with UHVR. By that time the Soviets subdued both the UHVR
and UPA, and the CIA ended the aggressive phase of AERODYNAMIC.99
Beginning in 1953 AERODYNAMIC began to operate through a Ukrainian
study group under Lebed’s leadership in New York under CIA auspices,
which collected Ukrainian literature and history and produced Ukrainian
nationalist newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and books for
distribution in the Ukraine. In 1956 this group was formally
incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing
Association [CIA cryptonym: QRPOOL]. It allowed the CIA to funnel funds
as ostensible private donations without taxable footprints.100 To avoid
nosey New York State authorities, the CIA turned Prolog into a
for-profit enterprise called Prolog Research Corporation, which
ostensibly received private contracts. Under Hrinioch, Prolog maintained
a Munich office named the Ukrainische-Gesellschaft für
Auslandsstudien, EV. Most publications were created here.101
…. Beginning in 1955, leaflets were dropped over the Ukraine by air
and radio broadcasts titled Nova Ukraina were aired in Athens for
Ukrainian consumption. These activities gave way to systematic mailing
campaigns to Ukraine through Ukrainian contacts in Poland and émigré
contacts in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere.
The newspaper Suchasna Ukrainia (Ukraine Today), information bulletins, a
Ukrainian language journal for intellectuals called Suchasnist (The
Present), and other publications were sent to libraries, cultural
institutions, administrative offices and private individuals in Ukraine.
These activities encouraged Ukrainian nationalism, strengthened
Ukrainian resistance, and provided an alternative to Soviet media.103
In 1957 alone, with CIA support, Prolog broadcast 1,200 radio
programs totaling 70 hours per month and distributed 200,000 newspapers
and 5,000 pamphlets. In the years following, Prolog distributed books by
Ukrainian writers and poets. One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of
nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and … there is
an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.” The distribution of
literature in the Soviet Ukraine continued to the end of the Cold
War.104
Prolog also garnered intelligence after Soviet travel restrictions
eased somewhat in the late 1950s. It supported the travel of émigré
Ukrainian students and scholars to academic conferences, international
youth festivals, musical and dance performances, the Rome Olympics and
the like, where they could speak with residents of the Soviet Ukraine in
order to learn about living conditions there as well as the mood of
Ukrainians toward the Soviet regime. Prolog’s leaders and agents
debriefed travelers on their return and shared information with the CIA.
In 1966 alone Prolog personnel had contacts with 227 Soviet citizens.
[pp. 88-89]
This is the first in a series of articles examining the history of
U.S. and CIA intervention in Ukraine, from World War II to today.
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/08/09/cia-intervention-in-ukraine-has-been-taking-place-for-decades/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/15/here-s-what-the-cia-director-was-really-doing-in-kiev.html
