CIA‘s Use of Nazi Strategy on Ukrainian Right-Wing Nationalists Unabated since Cold War
Wayne MADSEN
The Central Intelligence Agency appears to be caught in a time warp. At the roots of the CIA’s and George Soros’s «resistance» movement in Ukraine lie Ukrainian fascists and pro-Nazis, the ideological forbears of the current Ukrainian right-wing fascist party Svoboda and other radical right and anti-Russian groups largely based in western Ukraine.
A CIA document from August 1950 reveals that at the onset of the Cold War, U.S. intelligence exploited Nazi intelligence and strategy employed on various Ukrainian nationalist groups during World War II. This intelligence on Ukraine was captured by the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from Nazi intelligence in the waning days of World War II. The revelation about the CIA’s use of Nazi intelligence on Ukraine is significant in light of present U.S. government support for anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalist groups, many of which are neo-Nazi and fascist in orientation.
During World War II, the Nazis supported a number of Ukrainian nationalist groups against the Soviet Union. After the war, these groups began receiving support from the CIA in an underground resistance movement against the Soviet Union, particularly in western Ukraine.
The Nazi intelligence report found in CIA archives is titled "Die national-ukrainische Widerstandssbewegung" or "Ukrainian national resistance." The CIA stamped the report CONFIDENTIAL.
Many of the Ukrainian groups listed in the Nazi-generated CIA report were part of the so-called "Captive Nations" movement centered in Washington that sought to mobilize nationalist partisans against the Soviet Union in post-World War II central and eastern Europe. Many of the ideological forbears of the current Ukrainian opposition to President Viktor Yanukovych hail from these Cold War ranks.
Among the Ukrainian groups identified by the Nazis as potential allies of the CIA was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). One of the inheritors of the OUN's political dogma is the far right-wing neo-Nazi Svoboda movement of Oleh Tyahnybok.
Tyahnybok has been a frequent guest of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, who is Jewish and an ardent Zionist who has spent an inordinate amount of time attending Holocaust remembrance events in Ukraine since taking up his post. Tyahnybok has also been mentioned along with opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko, an ex-boxer, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk as a potential member of a post-Yanukovych government that will take its orders from Washington and the European Union.
Other Ukrainian groups identified by the Nazis and embraced by the CIA include the Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or Security Service of the OUN, the Bandera Group, the Mel'nik Group, Taras Bulba (Borovets) Partisan Unit in Galicia, Ukrainian Revolutionary Army of Western Ukraine and Galicia (the Red and Black flag of which has been reintroduced by George Soros-financed groups during the current protests in Ukraine), the Hetman Movement, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (which was based in Paris), and the Ukrainian National Cossack Movement (which was based in Berlin). The leader of the pro-Nazi Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in Paris was named Levitsky, a Ukrainian Jew.
The Nazi intelligence document also points out that many Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom were to later join the ranks of the CIA, were trained in the "camps of the German army and police in Cracow, Neuhammer, Brandenburg, and Frankfurt-Oder" and were later "assigned to the east for partisan warfare."
The liaison between British intelligence and the Ukrainian Cossack Liberation Movement was known as "Markotun." The Gestapo identified Markotun as a leading Freemason.
The CIA also made use of Gestapo intelligence on Freemasonry in eastern and central Europe in order to establish links with prospective anti-Soviet and anti-Communist underground figures. The CIA discovered that during World War II and thereafter, Freemasons eluded capture by speaking to one another via a special telephone code, particularly in Romania. The CIA, according to a May 12, 1952 information report, was informed that Romanian members of the Grand Conseil Masonic Lodge were prepared to conduct sabotage against Romanian government and Soviet targets in the country.
The prime architect of CIA sabotage and other covert operations against nations of eastern and central Europe was Dr. Lev Dobriansky, a Ukrainian expatriate and the father of the co-called «Captive Nations» movement. Dobriansky and his right-wing allies, particularly those of the American Security Council of which Dobriansky was an officer, rallied right-wing Ukrainians in exile against the Soviet Union. The American Security Council had deep pockets from which to finance Ukrainian saboteurs since its members included executives of U.S. Steel, Motorola, General Electric, American Zinc, and Eversharp. Dobriansky’s and his colleagues’ propaganda was regularly heard in the 1960s on the airwaves of WMAL-AM radio in Washington, DC and its leadership maintained close links with the CIA under its director, Admiral William F. Raborn, Jr.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev mocked the activities of the Ukrainian-American exiles and their CIA and U.S. congressional patrons in 1960. Khrushchev asked, «How would America and the Americans have felt if the Parliament of Mexico had, for instance, passed a . . . resolution demanding that Texas, Arizona, and California be liberated from American slavery?»
The CIA’s close cooperation with Ukrainian and other far right political groups was a personal pet project of Richard Helms, the agency’s deputy director and director. Helms testified before Congress that among the CIA’s exile groups were «fine intelligent sources which exist and are developed» through immigrant groups from Ukraine, the Baltics, and other countries. The Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN) included a number of right-wingers on the CIA’s payroll, including ACEN chairman Vaclovas Sidzikauskas of Lithuania, vice chairman Stefan Korbonski of Poland, George M. Dimitrov of Bulgaria, Josef Lettrich of Czechoslovakia, Ferenc Nagy of Hungary, and Dr. Dobriansky, representing his native Ukraine. In addition to maintaining liaison with the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, ACEN had ties with the American Independence Party of 1968 presidential candidate George Wallace and extreme right-wing vice presidential candidate retired General Curtis LeMay. SNIP