BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (Forbidden Bookshelf) Christopher Simpson
This book is about where America went in the 1950s under Eisenhower, Nixon, the Dulles brothers, Earl Butts, McCarthy, and their witch hunting cronies. It is also about overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with puppets.
Amazingly the American public could be sold anything, even a war.
Recommended reading for those plugged into and propagandized the radical right wing news.
EXCERPTS:
According to U.S. Army intelligence records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the mainstream U.S. anti-Communist organization Common Cause—no relation to the present-day liberal organization of the same name—sponsored the NTS spokesman’s travel to the United States in 1948, then gave him a media campaign that enabled him to reach into millions of American homes during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Common Cause was a prototype of, and a sister organization to, the CIA-sponsored National Committee for a Free Europe. Its directors included many of the men—Adolf Berle, Arthur Bliss Lane, and Eugene Lyons, among others—who simultaneously led CIA-financed groups such as the NCFE and, later, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism.
The CIC was well aware that the NTS was a totalitarian and pro-Fascist organization. Instead of making this fact clear, however, U.S. intelligence promoted Boldyreff’s propaganda work in this country. “A Common Cause spokesman said that Boldyreff is ‘well known to American intelligence,’” the Boston Herald reported in its coverage of one of the NTS man’s early news conferences. “‘[He] is vouched for by high American officials,’ and cooperated with the American military government in Germany.
Perhaps in some other decade John Grombach would have hired persons from other failed regimes as agents; the continuing intrigues among anti-Castro Cubans and the former South Vietnamese police suggest that a new generation of espionage entrepreneurs in the Grombach mold is still at work. But in the early 1950s it was former Nazis and collaborators who were in the most abundant supply for such affairs. It is they who formed much of the heart of Grombach’s overseas network and they who gave him much of the ammunition he needed to participate in McCarthy’s purges.
the United States was fully committed to a broad campaign of political war against the USSR. It again affirmed that “underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups”—obviously including the various surviving collaborationist organizations from Eastern Europe—were still at the center of U.S. covert paramilitary programs. In the meantime, however, the existing threads of clandestine operations, liberation politics, and the abandonment of war crimes investigations and prosecutions were woven together into a new and more disturbing tapestry. By 1953 the CIA was willing to finance and protect not simply former Nazis and Gestapo men but even senior officers of Adolf Eichmann’s SS section Amt IV B 4, the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust.
The results of the clandestine policy have set back, not advanced, American efforts to win friends in Eastern Europe, lessen repression, and improve civil liberties in the region. The American sponsorship of Gehlen and other collaborators may have remained largely secret in the United States, but it became a long-running theme in pro-Soviet Eastern European publicity, precisely because such practices tended to discredit America. The hypocrisy of U.S. actions and the CIA’s not-so-secret encouragement of disgraced Axis collaborators tended to undermine Eastern European public understanding of Western-style norms and civil liberties, which had never been a strong tradition in the region in the first place. Furthermore, exposure of U.S.-backed campaigns of this type tended to provide satellite states with convenient and surprisingly credible outside scapegoats for the failures of their own governments, especially during the years of extreme economic problems in the immediate aftermath of the war. In many cases—Romania, Poland, and the Ukraine—clandestine campaigns by U.S. intelligence may have ended up actually strengthening the pro-Soviet regimes they were intended to subvert.
The present-day U.S. sponsorship of the Nicaraguan contras, including the well-publicized CIA training of contras in the assassination of medical workers, schoolteachers, and civilian officials, are in many respects a replay of tactics that were tested—and failed—in the Ukraine more than thirty years ago.
.JPG)
