WFORMATION BULLETIN

Number 25

$3.00

Special: Nazis, the Va can, and CIA

Editorial
This issue of CAIB focuses on the fascist connection, in particular the U.S. role in helping hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of prominent Nazis avoid retribution at the end of World War
II. The CIA (originally the OSS) and the U.S. military, along
with the Vatican, were instrumental in exfiltrating war criminals not just to Latin America, but to the United States as well.
As the Reagan administration attempts to rewrite history, it
is worthwhile to examine carefully the wartime and postwar
machinations of the extreme Right. The President goes to Bitburg claiming it is time to forgive and forget, when in reality
he is merely cutting a crude political deal with the reactionary
West German government for its approval of Star Wars by giving his absolution to the SS.
Harboring War Criminals
As we demonstrate in the pages of this issue, war criminals
like Josef Mengele, Walter Rauff, and Klaus Barbie did not
simply vanish at the end of the war or gracefully retire. Most of
them spent several years in the direct employ of the U.S. intelligence agencies and, when necessary, were set up in business

in Latin America or the U.S. The Kameradenwerkthe Nazi

old boy networkremained active over the years, vigorous
enough to have planned and carried out the 1980 coup in
Bolivia, for example, and to have held high places in
Pinochet's government in Chile. And they are major figures in
the international arms and drug trades as welltraffic which
the U.S. tries to blame on the socialist countries.
Hundreds of Nazis have been set up in scientific institutions
in this country. Ironically, it now appears that Star Wars is
merely an extension of the Nazis' wartime rocket research.
Much of the U.S. space program was designed by them. When
the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations learned that the scientist responsible for the Apollo-11 moon trip,
Arthur L.H. Rudolph, was a war criminal who exploited slave
laborers to their deaths in his Nazi rocket factory, he was allowed to depart the U.S. voluntarily with no prosecution and
no public announcement until he was safely back in West Germany.
Rudolph was only one of thousands of fascist scientists, doctors, technicians, and, above all, intelligence operatives, as-

Table of Contents
Editorial

26

2 Nazi Doctors in U.S.

Allen Dulles and the SS.

By Peter Dale Scott

Knights of Malta Examined

By Francoise Hervet

27

Klaus Barbie's Bolivian Coup

By Kai Hermann

15

The Greek Civil War

By Eleni Fourtouni

39

21

The Real Eleni

By Nikos Raptis

41

23

Supplying the Contras

By Fred Clarkson

56

A Sophisticated Torture
By Robert Cohen
The Real Treason
By William Preston, Jr.

Interview With Nuremberg Lawyer 24

About the Cover: Left photo: Greek women hanged at Volos, 1943, by Nazi occupiers and their Greek fascist collaborators.
Credit: Spyros Meletzis. These women partisans are only a few of tens of thousands butchered during the German occupation (19411944) and the civil war (1944-1949) which followed the liberation of Greece. The Greek collaborators not only went unpunished,
they commenced a five-year reign of terrorworking first with the British and then the Americansto exterminate the Greek Left.
These were the people Eleni Gatzoyiannis supported and served as an informer, for which she was tried, convicted, and executed.
Right photo: President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl, May 5, 1985, accompanied by General Matthew B. Ridgway (right) and
West German General Johannes Steinhoff (left), at Bitburg military cemetary where SS members are buried. Credit: Associated
Press. ,
CovertAction Information Bulletin, Number 25, Winter 1986; published by Covert Action Publications, Inc., a District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation; Post
Office Box 50272, Washington, DC 20004, (202) 737-5317; and c/o Sheridan Square Publications, Inc., 145 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012, (212) 2541061. Typography by Your Type, New York, NY; printing by Faculty Press, Brooklyn, NY. Staff: Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Louis Wolf, and B. Lynne Barbee.
Indexed in the Alternative Press Index. ISSN 0275-309X.

2 CovertAction

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

similated after World War II. Only slowly, and with painstaking research, does the nformation surface.
MKULTRA, CBW, and Torture
All of the most ghoulish scientific experimentation by the
Axis medical establishment was eagerly gathered up by the
U.S. What came of it, and of its practitioners, is a matter of
speculation, though we do know that the CIA's mind control
programs like MKULTRA, torture training through their Office of Public Safety, and massive research in and use of chemical and biological warfare (begun in Operation NKNAOMI)
were the backbone of CIA and Pentagon covert activities over
the last 40 years. Torture, crude and sophisticated, was exported to client states in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, and CBW was directly employed against Vietnam,
Cuba, and it appears, now, Nicaragua. Recent events indicate
that the doors of the Georgetown car barn (where OPS trained
torturers from foreign police forces until 1974, when the program was banned by Congress) are being opened again. In the
1985 foreign aid bill the current Congress lifted the ban on
such training at a time when, for example, death squad murders in El Salvador have doubled this year.
Torture, the policy of so many American allies, is getting
better press under Reagan. Newsweek magazine of June 7,
1982 kicked off the campaign, carrying a column entitled
"The Case for Torture," by CCNY philosophy professor
Michael Levin, who argued that torture is "not merely permissible, but morally mandatory" to save lives threatened by terrorists. And on November 13, 1985, the New York Times reported that "liberal- Senator Patrick J. Leahy (Dem.-Vt.) confessed to an audience that he did not care for lie detectors. "I
personally like thumbscrews. They work far, far better."
The Knights of Malta
For nine hundred years the Knights of Malta have built up a
military and intelligence organization designed to protect the
established order and the privileges of the ruling classes
throughout the world, yet most people are unaware of their
existence. Little is known of their role in the Third Reich or,
along with the Vatican and the CIA, in the protection of Nazis
after the War, or today in the wars in Central America. The article in this issue begins what must be a long and complicated
analysis of this organization and others like it

azi flag waves in the Andes after 1980 Bolivian coup.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Eleni and the Greek Civil War

There is no better example of the power of disinformation
than the hoopla which surrounded Nicholas Gage's book, Eleni
(a cover story in the New York Times Magazine last spring) and
the recent movie based on it. First the Nazis, then the British,
and then the Americanseach with their fascist Greek collaboratorswere responsible from the 1940s through the
1970s for the brutal deaths of tens of thousands of Greeks, decimating the ranks of the progressive forces. Yet Gage would
have us believe that it was the communists who were evil and
the fascists who were good. We hope the analyses presented
here help rectify the 40-year-old lie Gage has resurrected.
The World Anti-Communist Leage
While General John K. Singlaub makes the rounds of television talk shows touting the Nicaraguan contras and hyping
WACL's mercenary adventures in Central America, the origins of his group are pointedly ignored. Many of the WACL's
leaders have deep ties not merely to Rev. Moon's myrmidons
but also to Nazis and Nazi collaborators, who hobnob with
high administration figures.
The Overt Covert Wars
Friends jokingly advise us to change our name. Covert action has become so overt as to make the term an anachronism.
The President, having manipulated Congress into repealing the
Clark Amendment, has now gone over their heads by Executive Order to fund a covert war against the government of Angola. As with Nicaragua, debate over this "secret" war will be
finessed by shifting the focus of discussion from its legality or
morality to its level of financing.

Computer Researchers:
This magazine is typeset by computer, and all material
is prepared using the WordStar word processing program. For computer researchers who may find it useful,
we will provide floppy disks with the text of all articles
in this issue, in Wordstar, in either the CP/M or the
MS-DOSss format, for $20.00. We hope that in the future CAIB will be available as a data base.

CovertAction 3

How Allen Dulles and the SS

Preserved Each Other
By Peter Dale Scott *
Dr. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death," the experimenter
and executioner of the German concentration camp at Auschwitz, is perhaps the most notorious of all the unconvicted
Nazi war criminals. The exhumation in early 1985 in Brazil of
a body which international forensic experts subsequently
judged to be that of Mengele has momentarily quieted the demands that he be found and brought to trial. The supporting
evidence and testimony was persuasive enough to silence many
initial skeptics. Nevertheless other wanted Nazi criminals have
been erroneously but persuasively reported dead. Adolf
Eichmann, for example, had been declared dead in Austria in
1947, "on the testimony of one Karl Lukas, who swore that he
had been present when Eichmann died in Prague on April 28,

1945."' And when in the same year a doctor wrote that she
wished to testify against Mengele, the response of Telford
Taylor, U.S. Chief of Counsel for War Crimes at Nuremberg,
was "to advise our records show Dr. Mengerle [sic] is dead as
of October 1946."2 (At the time of General Taylor's letter,
U.S. Army Counterintelligence knew both of Mengele's survival and even his location, in the small Bavarian village of Autenried.3)
Four years before the emergence of the latest Mengele death
report, a biography of Martin Bormann noted how the issuance
of false death reports, substantiated in some cases by the planting of skeletons, was the standard modus operandi of the postwar Kameradenwerk in South America to which Mengele, and
allegedly Bormann, belonged.' Indeed the very abundance of
such skeletons was enough, not only to weaken their credibility, but to confirm that a powerful and ruthless organization
was protecting the wanted criminals. In the case of Bormann
himself,

ciated Press.

The [Israeli intelligence organization] Mossad was to point

out that they have been witnesses over the years to the exhumation of six skeletons, two in Berlin and four in South
America, purported to be that of Martin Bormann.5

This photograph was used by Josef Mengele in 1956 when

he applied for an identity card in Argentina in his own
name. It is the most recent authenticated photograph of the
"Angel of Death" of Auschwitz.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat with a Ph.D. in political science, and Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is
the author of The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina
War (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), The Assassinations, Dallas and
Beyond: A Guide to Cover-Ups and Investigations (New York: Vintage,
1976), and Crime and Cover-Up (Berkeley: Westworks, 1977). This article is
from a larger work in progress.

4 CovertAction

It is worth recalling that Mengele was reported dead in 1968,

after the search for him had been fueled by revelations in the
Eichmann trial. Then as now the major source for the report
was a respected Brazilian policeman (Erich Erdstein in 1968)
who "specialized in narcotics smugglers."' Erdstein subsequently published a vivid eyewitness account of Mengele's
brief capture, release, subsequent recapture, and death by gunfire on a barge at his own hands.
When a respected Brazilian policeman with a record of important narcotics arrests describes Mengele's death in vivid detail, it is hard to disbelieve him. But after a second respected
Brazilian policeman with a similar record has supplied a different, wholly incompatible account of Mengele's death, then the
credibility of such sources has to be reassessed. Even if the
second report proves to be correct, the earlier report remains as
evidence that a well-organized conspiracy existed to protect
Mengele, like Bormann, with disinformation.
1. Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New
York: Avon, 1975), p. 345.
2. U.S. National Archives, Record Group 165, 250.401, Sect. XIX; letter of
19 January 1948 from Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, OCCWC, OMGUS.
3. U.S. National Archives, Record Group 319, CIC File No V-2399, XE
012547 D20D216; Washington Post, March 15, 1985, p. A10.
4. Paul Manning, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart,
1981), p. 183.
5. Ibid.
6. Erich Erdstein with Barbara Bean, Inside the Fourth Reich (London: Robert
Hale, 1978), pp. 199-201, 217-218.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

The story of Mengele's death is in this respect a small synecdoche of the story of Mengele's life. To begin to understand it,
one must be prepared to disbelieve authorities that would normally be credible, and to explore alternative hypotheses that
would normally be dismissed as sheer paranoid fantasy and delusion.
The Mengele Kameraden and U.S. Intelligence
By July 1945 Josef Mengele had been captured and identified at an allied prisoner-of-war camp. Forty years later an
eyewitness told a congressional committee how guards knew
Mengele's name, and also the general nature of his crimes as
doctor, experimenter, and executioner at Auschwitz.' Also in
1985 the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles released
documents obtained from the U.S. Army under the Freedom of
Information Act, according to which Mengele "may have been
arrested by U.S. authorities in Austria in 1947 and subsequently released. ' Yet like so many of his fellow members
of the SS, the bureaucrats of death in the Nazi behemoth,
Mengele was somehow allowed to disappear, to reemerge ten
years later in Latin America.
Twenty years ago only a few would have believed that the
victorious allies in the so-called "good war" could have deliberately allowed a sadistic mass murderer like Josef Mengele to
go free. From the revelations since the Eichmann trial, however, it has become only too obvious that the OSS, the wartime
precursor of today's CIA, arranged for numbers of wanted
criminals to "escape" from camps, and when necessary supplied them with new identities to protect them from justice.
Murderers, far from being exempted from such protection,
seem to have been among those most likely to obtain it.
This is particularly true of those Schutzstaffel (SS: elite
guard) veterans whose careers have been most closely linked to

Walter Rauff, inventor of the portable gas chamber. After

the war, Rauff worked for the Gehlen Org and later in
Chile for Pinochet as torture expert.

The "Butcher of Lyon" in the plaza of La Paz.

7 . Washington Post, February 15, '1985, p. A4.
8. The Nation,
March 2, 1985, p. 231:

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Mengele's in Latin America: Klaus Barbie, the butcher of

Lyon, in Bolivia; Walter Rauff, supervisor of the SS mobile
gas chambers, in Chile; and Friederich Schwend, yet another
wanted murderer, in Peru. Like Mengele, all three of these
men developed links with neo-fascist elements in the military
or interior ministries of their new countries, or both. All collaborated in repressive operations against the Left, particularly
at the time of the CIA-assisted overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Barbie and Schwend, at least, have acted in
this capacity through arms deals with the German firm Merex
AG, a proprietary firm of the German Bundesnachrichtdienst
(BND: federal intelligence service), itself a descendant of the
Gehlen intelligence network which in 1945 passed from the
leadership of the Nazi SS to that of American intelligence, and
eventually the CIA.
We shall see that after World War II, while the CIA and the
Gehlen Organization (usually referred to as the "Gehlen Org")
were being slowly organized on the U.S. payroll, both Barbie
and Schwend worked for U.S. Army Counterintelligence
(CIC); and at this time Schwend was working on setting up the
secret SS escape routes to Latin America by which both men
would eventually reestablish themselves. It has been charged
that Rauff played an even more prominent role in setting up the
CovertAction 5

Such an OSS-SS deal does not appear to have been approved

at the time at any higher level. Indeed as late as December
1945 the U.S. War Department refused U.S. intelligence officers permission to collaborate with even the Gehlen Organization, whose prewar origins lay not in the Nazi SS but the eventually decapitated Abwehr or German military intelligence.9
More importantly, Roosevelt had already tabled, as too controversial, the memo from OSS chief William J. Donovan (which
Dulles had drafted), for converting the wartime OSS into a permanent CIA.'
In dealing with the SS, Dulles and Donovan knew that this
risky operation could easily backfire against the OSS, whose
organizational future had already been challenged by J. Edgar
Hoover and traditionalists in U.S. military intelligence. But
they also knew that, just as the OSS was the best hope for the
survival of the SS cadres, so in a sense these cadres were their
highest trump card in the impending contest for the OSS's own
institutional survival. What ultimately persuaded Truman in
1947 to authorize an operational CIA was in fact partly the
need to find an institutional home for the postwar Gehlen Org.
In 1948 Dulles, by now a civilian, helped write the memo persuading Truman to take on the Gehlen Org, on Gehlen's own
terms. One of these was that Gehlen could continue to work

escape route, while also on the U.S. payroll, and that he did so
with an immunity granted to him by Allen Dulles of the OSS,
after the SS-OSS secret (and sometimes unauthorized) negotiations in north Italy in which, unquestionably, both Dulles and
Rauff participated.
The primary purpose of these secret talks was to secure a
separate Nazi and fascist surrender in north Italy, and at least
partly to prevent a de facto seizure of power by Italian communist partisans behind the Nazi lines. But even the intense
fixation which the OSS and the SS shared about reducing the
inevitable communist role in postwar Europe does not appear
to diplomatic historians to explain the zealous intensity with
which Dulles, at times in direct contravention of written orders, pursued negotiations for a surrender which in fact preceded that of V-E Day by just six days.
We shall study the same excessive zeal with which future
CIA personnel protected the convicted war criminal Barbie and
concealed him from the French authorities who knew very well
that U.S. intelligence was hiding him from them. A recent
U.S. Justice Department report on the U.S. handling of the
Barbie case is clearly an essay in damage limitation, designed
to blame low-level people in U.S. Army Counterintelligence
while suppressing the rather obvious connections to the Gehlen
Org and its then employers, the CIA. The role of Schwend
(and almost certainly Rauff) in exfiltrating whole cadres of
wanted SS criminals, while on the U.S. payroll, only confirms
recent speculations that the SS networks were being preserved
for postwar anticommunist activities, as the result of an arrangement negotiated with Dulles and his OSS superiors.
6 CovertAction

NationalArchives.

The ubiquitous Reinhard Gehlen served Hitler, Dulles, and

Adenauer in succession.

Allen Welsh Dulles, mastermind of Operation Sunshine,

brought Nazis into U.S. spy service.
9. Tom Bower, Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons (London: Granada, 1984),
p. 136.
10. R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1972), p. 363; E. H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1971), pp.
132-135.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

with his old OSS liaison Frank Wisner (chosen by Dulles)

rather than Army Intelligence."
Could Mengelenot even a political policeman (like Rauff
and Barbie), but a doctor with a penchant for lethal experiments on human guinea pigscould even Mengele have been
saved as a result of a secret deal between Dulles and the SS?
Such a hypothesis would once have been almost unthinkable.
But we have since been told that his colleague in the Auschwitz
human experiments, Walter Schreiber, was shielded by the
Americans from a Polish conviction in absentia, so that he
could help guide the postwar researches of the U.S. Air Force
in bacteriological warfare. In 1952, Schreiber was helped by
American officials to reestablish himself, via Argentina, in
Paraguay.' That is the year that Mengele himself appeared in
Argentina, moving to Paraguay two years later.
In 1981 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists revealed that
Mengele's equivalent in Japan, Dr. Shiro Ishii, as well as his
assistants, had been granted immunity by the United States in
exchange for exclusive access to- their researches in chemical
and bacteriological warfare. This despite the fact that Americans had been among the more than 3,000 prisoners of war and
civilians killed in the course of their treatment as human guinea
pigs. A Soviet war crimes trial in 1949, based on these experiments, was denounced at the time by the United States as a
simple exercise in propaganda:3
That. Mengele's escape and immunity were arranged by the
United States, like those of Schreiber and so many others, will
seem more probable once we have studied the incredible postwar careers of Barbie, Schwend, and Rauff. But before doing
so we must glance forward to the ways in which Mengele's
postwar career has overlapped with those of these other SS
murderers, whom we now know to have benefited from U.S.
protection.
Mengele and the Kameradenwerk
Despite the books, articles, and TV programs about
Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, less is known
for certain about his postwar activities than those of any comparable war criminal." Apart from his extended residence in
Paraguay, where he gained citizenship in 1957 and was
stripped of it in 1979, little has been documented. But in one of
the best books to appear about the postwar network of Rauff,
Schwend, and Mengele, the so-called Kameradenwerk, the
career of Mengele is closely implicated.
The book is The Bormann Brotherhood by William Stevenson, himself a wartime intelligence operative with access to intelligence sources, including the records of Donovan and their
mutual friend, Sir William Stephenson of the British SOE. According to Stevenson, Mengele had worked in a restricted military zone of Paraguay with the wartime Croatian dictator Ante
Pavelie, whose Croatian Catholic connections undoubtedly (as
we shall see) played central roles in the escapes of Rauff,
11. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 10, p. 135; Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept

the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 24,
32.
12. International Herald Tribune, February 21, 1983; Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1983, p. 23n.
13. Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1983, p. 24; Seiichi Morimura, Akuma no
Hoshaku (Tokyo: 1981). Ishii had embarked on his experiments after a visit to
prewar Nazi Germany.
14. Cf. Miklos Myizli, Medecin a Auschwitz (Paris: Julliard, 1961); "The
Hunt for Dr. Mengele," Granada Television, August I, 1980; Bulletin d'Information sur l'Intervention Clandestine, March-April 1983, p. 13.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Schwend, and Barbie. '3 Pavelid had initially made contact with
the Latin American Nazi Kameradenwerk through Rauff.16
With respect to Mengele's finances, Stevenson mentions the
Kameradenwerk representative in Ecuador,
Alfons Sassen, the representative of the Brotherhood
[Kameradenwerk] business enterprise known as "Estrella."
It is said too that Sassen is financed by Dr. Josef Mengele,
who controls now such funds as remain liquid from the sale
of European loot. '7

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This is important, since such postwar SS funds had earlier been
administered by Friederich Schwend, who had used them (apparently with U.S. connivance and support) for the exfiltration
of himself and other top SS members. Schwend apparently
ceased to play this role after he, and a band of Croatians under
his control, were exposed in a 1972 Peruvian murder scandal in
which Mengele was a suspect:8 (Sassen, a Dutch SS officer
and a convicted war criminal, is chiefly remembered for his extended record of Eichmann's revelations to him in 1957, which
formed a major exhibit in the Eichmann trial.19)
15. William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 228.
16. Ibid., p. 227.
17. Ibid., pp. 404-405.
18. Farago, op. cit., n. 1, p. 220.
19. Ibid., pp. 372-377.

CovertAction 7

Stevenson elsewhere names this Estrella company as the

subsidiary of a financial consortium controlled from Bolivia by
Schwend's business partner Klaus Barbie." In the early 1960s
Barbie did in fact
set up a company called Estrella, ostensibly dealing in quinquina bark. Although no records exist in the public registry
in La Paz, at least one Bolivian arms dealer still remembers
it as a weapons trading company.'
It appears that Barbie and Estrella did export quinquina bark as
agents for the German drug firm Boehringer, which grew rich
on quinine contracts to the U.S. Army during the Vietnam

war. 22

But the primary business of Barbie and Schwend was arms

trafficking,
carried on through two German-based firms, Merex and
Gemetex. The two Nazis acted as agents, negotiating purchases not only on behalf of the Bolivian and Peruvian governments but, through their friendship with the Nazi Hans
Rudel, sales to Paraguay and Chile and, through Otto Skorzeny in Spain, further deals in Madrid."
Merex AG, itself set up in 1963, was an arms company owned
and controlled by the Gehlen BND, while Skorzeny was one of
the top go-betweens in the postwar deals between Gehlen, the
SS, and the CIA."
Barbie's arms deals, concerted in this way with western intelligence, were politically influential as well as economically
lucrative. They involved him, according to French sources, in
the drug trafficking business of Auguste Joseph Ricord, a Corsican Nazi collaborator who like Mengele was established with
high-level connections in Paraguay. It was apparently the
Nixon administration's determination to break the Ricord ring
which first made the CIA begin reporting on Mengele's own
involvement in the drug traffic.
The U.S. Protection of Klaus Barbie
Like his fellow-escapee Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, Mengele
was an old man who began to lose some of his political immunity in Latin America. But the well-placed networks which over
the years enabled him to cross frontiers without detection are
still in place, still politically influential throughout the continent. It remains important to understand that network more
clearly in order to neutralize as far as possible its evident support in Washington itself.
A brief glance at the postwar career of Klaus Barbie shows
how relatively small a role in his prosperity was played by
postwar Nazi cabals such as the well publicized ODESSA or
"Die Spinne." Condemned to death by the French for genocidal murders in Lyon, Barbie was concealed and protected for
20. Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15, p. 276.
21. Magnus Linklater, et al., The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1984), p.
228.
22. Ibid., p. 237.
23. Ibid., pp. 237-238.
24. Der Spiegel, December 11, 1976, p. 20; George Thayer, The War Business: The International Trade in Armaments (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1969), p. 116; Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 181 (Merex-Gehlen); Glenn Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler's Commando (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981)
(Skorzeny).

8 CovertAction

four years in Germany by the U. S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which was using him as an informant to
spy onironicallythe French." After the Communists were
dropped from General De Gaulle's cabinet, the Nazi Barbie
was reassigned to spy on the "America Houses" set up by the
U.S. State Department, which were, according to Barbie's
American handler, "stocked with all kinds of leftwing literature!'" Barbie's reports may thus have helped fuel the attack
on this program five years later by Joe McCarthy, whose
charges against the State Department were based on documents
leaked to him by a source in Army Intelligence."
As a mere policeman and persecutor of Jews, Barbie was not
a candidate for the headquarters staff of the revamped Gehlen
Organization, which was being transformed with CIA money
and oversight into West Germany's postwar intelligence
agency, the BND. Barbie's future would thus be less comfortable than that of his fellow CIC informant Emil Augsburg, who
had worked directly under Eichmann on the SS "final solution
to the Jewish problem." Despite postwar stories that Augsburg
had been saved from punishment by ODESSA and the Vatican,
we now know that Augsburg went "at once" from Barbie's
CIC unit into the Gehlen Org, to staff the offensive "Special
Forces" against the Soviet Union being promoted by the CIA's
Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner." Augsburg was teamed with
Dr. Franz Alfred Six, whose twenty-six-year sentence for ordering the executions of hundreds of Jews at Smolensk was
commuted to time served by John J. McCloy, the U.S. High
Commissioner of Germany (HICOG)."
Barbie's Escape and the Ryan Cover-Up
But HICOG was eventually unable to stall the more and
more strident French demands for delivery of Barbie as a convicted war criminal.' In 1951 the CIC provided Barbie with a
package of false documents, funds, and references for his new
identity, as "Klaus Altmann," and sent him to Genoa down an
underground railway, the infamous "Rat Line," which the
Austrian CIC had been operating for four years.'
Barbie was received in Genoa by the Croatian priest Dr.
Krunoslav Draganovie, an adviser to the wartime Croatian dictatorship of Ante Pavelie. Draganovia was an admitted member of the wartime Ustase terrorist organization which Pavelie
had used to carry out a genocidal extermination of the Orthodox Serbs in his puppet Catholic dictatorship. Through his
Vatican and Latin American connections, Draganovio had exfiltrated a number of wanted Ustase war criminals, including
25. Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, p. 163: "Underlying this move was the obsessive
CIC idea that French security services were not merely a rival but so penetrated
with Communists that they could be treated as a department of Soviet intelligence.
26. Ibid., p. 167.
27. Fred J. Cook, The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe
McCarthy (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 140, 411-424; see also
Hank Messick, John Edgar Hoover: A Critical Examination of the Director
and of the Continuing Alliance Between Crime, Busin'ess, and Politics (New
York: David McKay, 1972).
28. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 10, pp. 242-243; Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 166167. See also, "From the OSS to the CIA," in Nikolai Yakovlev, CIA Target:
The USSR (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), pp. 64-118.
29. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 10, p. 242; Farago, op. cit., ri. 1, p. 371; John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 1. Wisner had previously asked McCloy's predecessor, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, to intercede on behalf of Six at Nuremberg.
30. Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 179-180.
31. Ibid., pp. 183-192. According to an internal CIC document, the 430th
(Austrian) CIC was about to terminate its interest in the Rat Line, expecting
that "the CIA will assume responsibility for evacuations."

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

almost certainly Pave11.6 himself. CIC knew all this, yet found
Draganovi6, whom they considered to be himself a war criminal, useful.
A 1983 Justice Department investigation of the Barbie case
by Allan A. Ryan treats the U.S. Army's exfiltration of Barbie, handled at the time as a-high-priority intelligence matter,
as the solution to a disposal problem, a means of making a potential embarrassment vanish." Ryan's report is critical of
CIC's decisions and gross lies in this period, but manages,
with a skill that perhaps only lawyers are capable of, to exculpate the cover-up in other branches of the U.S. government, as
the innocent transmittal of CIC's misrepresentations. Ryan is
particularly concerned to dispel the impression, which he admits was shared by several of Barbie's CIC handlers, that the
CIC ever had any interest in Barbie."
Ryan's documentation, however, shows evidence of a conscious, coordinated cover-up of the Barbie case, at a much
higher level of the U.S. government than the benighted CIC.
Ryan himself notes instances when senior officials in HICOG,
in internal memos, contradicted their own assurances of an active search for Barbie (p. 123n); and revealed the existence of
what he calls "unofficial information" or back channels refuting their assurances (p. 101). Even more striking is the widespread bureaucratic habit, at high levels of EUCOM (the U.S.
military command in Europe), HICOG, and the Paris U.S.
Embassy, of translating statements from the press or internal
memos about "Barbie" into misleading inter-agency communications about a non-existent "Barbier."' Observers of
the FBI and CIA will recognize this behavior, which can be
used to withhold files about "Barbier" when pressed under the
Freedom of Information Act to disclose files on Barbie."
Ryan further notes the disappearance of many documents,
including all those in the Barbie file at the time of his exfiltration, before the file was microfilmed several weeks later (p.
149). This does not deter him from the lawyerly conclusion (p.
158) that Barbie did not have a relationship with any other
U.S. government agency at this time, on the ground that
There is no evidence in Barbie's CIC dossier that he worked
at any time for any agency other than CIC. This investiga32. United States Department of Justice Criminal Division, Klaus Barbie and
the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United
States by Allan A. Ryan (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1983)
(hereinafter "Ryan"), p. 146; cf , Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 180-181, 192193.
33. Ryan, op. cit., n. 32, pp. 157-168. In fact the Ryan report exonerates not
just HICOG and the CIA, but Barbie himself. After a trip to La Paz, Ryan reported that Barbie "does not appear to have been involved in drug trafficking"
(p. 168); and that "Bolivian government officials were unable to provide
documentation or firSt-hand evidence of Barbie's alleged involvement in
weapons sales involving the United States" (p. 189). Ryan does not mention
Barbie's reported dealings with Auguste Joseph Ricord of Paraguay whose
"Corsican" drug ring was "linked to networks of former Nazis in Europe and
Latin America" (Alain Jaubert, Dossier D . . comme drogue (Paris: Alain
Moreau, 1973), p. 296). Nor does he deal with reports that Barbie was importing into Bolivia Ingram submachine guns (Bower, op. cit., n. 9, p. 191),
weapons manufactured in the U.S. and distributed by influential Cuban exiles
working for the late Mitch WerBell III, an American pro-Nazi sympathizer
once indicted for (but acquitted of) involvement in a drugs-for-arms deal (Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, (Boston: South End, 1980), pp. 8, 164).
34. Examples at Ryan, op. cit., n. 32, pp. 95, 100, 108, 111, 112 (twice),
113, 117, 122.
35. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the CIA told the FBI it had no
CIAgenerated material on Lee Harvey Oswald in its files. This was true in the
sense that all such documents had referred to a mythical "Lee Henry Oswald." Cf. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up (Berkeley: Westworks,
1977), p. 12.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

SS leader Franz Six worked with Barbie and Gehlen.

tion has established that, had the situation been otherwise,
the CIC dossier would have reflected it.
The weakness in this logic is also apparent at the words "any
agency," where he ought to have written "any U.S. agency."
Ryan's report, here and throughout, significantly fails to address the possibility that the U.S. was reestablishing Barbie/
Altmann in Latin America as a future asset of the rapidly growing Gehlen Org, then still funded entirely by the United States.
Ryan's avoidance of this hypothesis is so disingenuous in itself as to corroborate it.
Apart from CIA, there is no other agency, with the possible
exception of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) [the
earliest name of the CIA component authorized to carry out
covert activities', that would have had any connection with
Barbie's activities. This investigation has yielded no hint or
suggestion, let alone evidence however fragmentary, that
OPC had any knowledge of or involvement with Klaus Barbie, the Merk net, or other activities described in this report.
In evaluating this statement, we have to remember that
OPC, under its aggressive chief Frank Wisner, was funding
and recruiting for the Gehlen Org. That the CIC's Merk net of
which. Barbie was part had established contact with the Gehlen
Org, which had tried to recruit Kurt Merk as its chief of counterintelligence operations.36 That by March 1948 CIC had established liaison with the CIA in Europe, because of the latter's
interest in the Merk net.' (This was three months before the
creation of OPC in June 1948, but the interest of Dulles and
Wisner in Gehlen went back to 1945.)38 That Emil Augsburg,
36. Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, p. 145.
37. Ryan, op. cit., n. 32, p. 159.
38. Powers, op. cit., n. 11, pp. 24, 31.

CovertAction 9

Credit: UPI; Bettmann Archive.

nections. George Neagoy, the Austrian CIC agent who secured

Barbie' s false documentation and would personally deliver him
through Austria to Father Draganovid in Genoa, was himself
about to enter the CIA." At HICOG the preparation of misleading reassurances to the French was being handled by John
Bross, a veteran of OSS paramilitary operations who in April
1951 would join the Eastern Europe Division of OPC (working
closely with the Gehlen Org)."
A resolution of what "other agency" picked up Barbie in
1951 would be of great help in understanding the postwar career of Josef Mengele. For there is no doubt at all that in Latin
America, Barbie became part of an international intelligence
network working directly with proprietaries of Gehlen's BND,
and little doubt that Mengele was intimately connected to this
network also.

Allan A. Ryan, author of whitewash report on Barbie-U.S.

ties.
another member of the CIC's Merk net, had been "dropped"
like Barbie, and at once recruited by the Gehlen Org.39 That
CIC, in securing false documentation in the name of Altmann
for Barbie, told the local CIC office to explain that
subject is of extreme interest to Uncle Sugar intelligence and
is traveling on highly sensitive task. Also that CIC is taking
current action in behalf of another Uncle Sugar agoncy."
Ryan's studied avoidance of the possibility that Barbie was
detached to the Gehlen Org is the more eloquent when we recall that this charge was made in detailed fashion by William
Stevenson. in The Bormann Brotherhood, by far the most authoritative treatment of the Barbie case in any American book
before the Ryan report:
Klaus Barbie . . . was a man adroit enough to get on the
American payroll of the West German intelligence agency
when it was run by General Gehlen. . . . Killers had escaped by selling their talents to the intelligence agencies of
East and West. Klaus Barbie had worked for an import-export agency at Schillestrasse [sic] 38, in Augsburg. Such
fronts are the favored fronts of spy rings. This one had been
operated by the Gehlen Org."
Ryan's documents confirm that in 1947 Barbie was working at
38 Schillerstrasse, Kempten (rather than Augsburg). Ryan
notes that a search for him there two years later "proved fruitless." Ryan later translates this predictable fruitlessness of the
belated inquiry into the undocumented statement that "Barbie
had never been 'on Schillerstrasse' " (p. 114n). This is not a
persuasive rebuttal of Stevenson's claim.
Finally, one can hardly ignore the fact that the protection and
exfiltration of Barbie were handled, at the top and at the bottom of the U.S. hierarchy, by men with OSS/OPC/CIA con39. Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, p. 167.
40. Ryan, op. cit., n. 32, pp. 151-152.
41. Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15, pp. 181, 198. As we shall see, there is no doubt
that Barbie worked with Gehlen's BND and, indirectly, with the CIA, when in
Bolivia.

10 CovertAction

The Barbie Kameradenwerk in Latin America

The unlikely possibility implied by Ryan, that Barbie with
his store of embarrassing secrets was left to start a new future
on his own, has been refuted by Barbie himself. Though Ryan
asserts that Barbie was the only Nazi to be exfiltrated by CIC
down the Rat Line, Barbie himself recalls that the other occupants of his Genoa hotel "were all Nazi fugitivesamong them
Eichmann himself.' According to Barbie, Draganovid told
him his reasons
were purely humanitarian. He helped both Catholics and
Protestants, but mostly they were SS officers, about two
hundred in all. Anti-communists. He said to me, 'We've got
to keep a sort of reserve on which we can draw in the future.' I think that was the Vatican's motive as well."
Indeed the Vatican did have a program underway for the exfiltration of anti-communists. This was the work of Bishop
Alois Hudal of the Collegium Teutonicum, a priest close both
to Pius XII and the future Paul VI as well as a public admirer of
the Third Reich. After an interview in Rome with former Gestapo Chief Heinrich Miller, Hudal had begun the work of supplying Vatican documentation for such prominent fugitives as
Miiller, Eichmann, and perhaps Martin Bormann.' It was
Hudal who gave Father Draganovid the necessary introductions
to the International Red Cross and other "officials who, for a
bribe, could smooth the fugitive's path!"47
Between them, Hudal and Draganovid helped hundreds of
Nazis to escape, and perhaps thousands of Croatian Ustase.
Chief of these was the former Croatian dictator Ante Pavelia.
According to William Stevenson,
Pavelfc had since withdrawn into an armed camp in
Paraguay shared with German settlers in their restricted military zone northeast of Asuncion. There he worked with Dr.
Josef Mengele, the death camp experimenter, and [Walter]
Rauff . . . who. designed and built mass gassing chambers
for Auschwitz!
42. Ryan, op. cit., n. 32, p. 145.
43. Ibid., pp. 104, 113; Powers, op. cit., n. 11, pp. 24, 40-41. Bross's draft
letter of May 5, 1950 to the U.S. Paris Embassy was so at odds with what
HICOG knew from "unofficial information" that it was never sent (Ryan, oP.
cit., n. 32, pp. 104-105).
44. Bower, op. cit., n. 9, p. 180.
45. Ibid., pp. 180-181.
46. Farago, op. cit., n. 1, pp. 204-213.
47. Bower, op. cit., n. 9, p. 179.
48. Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15, p. 227.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

The most prominent Nazis known to have escaped by this

route established a network in Latin America, often in alliance
with Croatian cohorts, somewhat as follows: Bolivia: Klaus
Barbie (with Croatians); Peru: Friederich Schwend (with Croatians); Chile: Walter Rauff (with Croatians); Ecuador: Alfons
Sassen; Argentina: Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and
Heinrich Miiller. This network, the so-called Kameradenwerk,
has maintained close political, social, and business ties. By
most accounts Josef Mengele was its leading representative in
Paraguay .49
Operation Bernhard, Schwend, and the U.S. Army
Two American books, by authors with wartime intelligence
careers, have conditioned us to accept the debatable hypothesis
that Martin Bormann, Hitler's Deputy and head of the Nazi
party bureaucracy, was the central organizing figure in this
network." On surer ground, they point to the role of the extensive postwar assets collected or plundered by the SS and Bormann. This came from three sources: the proceeds from the SS
forgery of British pound notes ("Operation Bernhard"), the
looting of Jews and other Nazi victims, and; most significantly, the corporate contributions to a special fund set up to
guarantee the survival of German multinationals abroad after
the impending collapse of Hitler.' Soon after the war, OSS
found the extensive documentation of a meeting in Strasbourg
on August 10, 1944 to establish this fund, between representatives of the SS, Party, and firms like Krupp, I.G. Farben, and
Messerschmidt.'
But as the Cold War encouraged the U.S. to see the German
corporate presence in Latin America in a more friendly light,
the role of these firms in providing new careers for war criminals abroad was ignored. In fact, it was the key to the postwar
status of the Kameraden. Otto Skorzeny (acquitted of his criminal charges by the intervention of western intelligence) became a sales representative of Krupp. Hans Ulrich Rudel
(never charged, but an unrepentant Nazi ideologue in the postwar era) became a sales representative of Siemens. Walter
Rauff (designer of the gas ovens at Auschwitz) found his first
employment in Latin America with a subsidiary of LG. Farben
(an employer of slave labor at Auschwitz). Franz Paul Stangl,
chief of the Treblinka extermination camp, found postwar employment in Latin America with Volkswagen, as did Eichmann
with Mercedes-Benz. And so on.'
But U.S. intelligence may have played a more direct role in
the exfiltration of Nazis with the proceeds of Operation Bernhard, the SS forgery of British pound notes. Here again western intelligence knew enough about Operation Bernhard to protect the postwar pound, by the British government's timely
issue of new notes and recall of the old. But by this time much
of the SS profits, an estimated $300 million worth, had been
converted to genuine currency. Most of this money has never
been traced.
The man in charge of laundering the forged banknotes was
Friederich Schwend, who in 1945-1946, in north Italy, became
49. Ibid., pp. 227-228, 276-279.
50. Farago, op. eft:, n. 1; Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15; In the Linklater account
of the Kameradenwerk, the story of Bormann's escape to Latin America is
treated as a piece of clever disinformation by Schwend, not as a reality; cf.
Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 137, 241.
51. Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15, pp. 82-85, 188-196; Farago, op. cit., n. 1, pp.
250-254.
52. Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15, pp. 82-83.
53. Farago, op. cit., n. 1, pp. 370 (Skorzeny), 187 (Rudel), 305 (Rauff), 427
(Stangl), 289 (Eichmann).

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Hans Ulrich Rudel.

an important link in setting up the SS escape route to the Vatican." Farago narrates in detail how Heinrich Muller was driven in Schwend's chauffeured Mercedes from Merano, north
Italy,, to Rome, where he was deposited at a Croatian seminary
and made his historic contact with Bishop Hudal." From documents found in Schwend's possession in 1972, he reports that
the bulk of the money the bishop [Hudal] needed was placed
at his disposal by . . . a financier named Friederich
"Freddy" Merser, partner of Friederich Schwend in Operation Bernard. The money came from the hoard Schwend had
amassed in Swiss accounts . . . by the exchange of counterfeit pounds for hard currency."
What you will not learn from Farago's and Stevenson's accounts is that in 1945-1946, when Schwend was playing this
crucial role in setting up the Rat Line, Schwend was working
for American intelligence:
U.S. documents reveal that after passing into the hands of
the 44th CIC Detachment he was used as an informant by
American intelligence agencies in Austria, the Austrian
Tyrol, and Meran, north Italy."
54. Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, 236; Stevenson, op. cit., n. 15, pp. 192-195.
55. Farago, op. cit., n. 1, p. 201:
56. Ibid., p. 220.
57. Linklater, op. cit., n. 21, p. 236. Needless to say, Ryan ignores this fact in
reaching his conclusion that "This investigation has yielded no evidence that
the 430th CIC [formerly the 44th or Austrian CIC] had used the rat line as a
means of escape for suspected Nazi war criminals" (Ryan, op. cit., n. 32, pp.
209-210).

COvertAction 11

Dulles and Wolff: The OSS/SS Secret Deal

These long suppressed details about the postwar U.S. sponsorship of the wanted war criminals Barbie and Schwend confirm the recent accusations of John Loftus that the SS Kameraden were exfiltrated as a result of Operation Sunrise, the secret
agreement, shortly before V-E Day, between Allen Dulles of
OSS Bern and SS General Karl Wolff. As recorded in Dulles's
and other establishment accounts, Operation Sunrise concerned the surrender of German troops to Italy, to prevent the
needless destruction of civilian property and help forestall a
takeover of north Italy by the Communist partisans in the
area." More recently revisionist historians have focused on the
degree to which Dulles and Wolff, the principal negotiators,
exceeded their authorization to negotiate and in so doing
created a major political rift between Stalin and Churchill."
Inasmuch as the armistice in north Italy only preceded that in
the rest of Europe by one week, Operation Sunrise may have
had less impact on the outcome of the war than on the survival
of the cadres of the SS. One of the principal SS participants in
the negotiations was Milan Gestapo Chief Walter Rauff, soon
to be a fugitive through the Kameradenwerk:'
According to Loftus, a promise by Dulles of amnesty for SS
negotiators led him (Dulles) to exploit his connections at the
Vatican to smuggle war criminals to South America. Rauff
was set up one month after the armistice in Genoa, where,
under cover of a Vatican-run refugee relief organization, he
reportedly sent off some 5000 Gestapo and`SS agents over a
four-year period. Among them was Klaus Barbie.'
Dulles, Rauff, and the Genoa Escape Route
On April 27, 1945, after being visited by Dulles's OSS
agent Emilio Daddario in Milan, Rauff surrendered to Army
CIC. According to recently declassified American intelligence
documents seen by Loftus,
He told Army CIC that he had made "arrangements" for his
surrender "in order to avoid further bloodshed in Milan".
. . . The arrangements could be confirmed "by Hussman
[sicMax Husmann, a Swiss participant in Sunrise] and
Mr. Dulles, allied agents in Switzerland.""
Later Rauff told his interrogators how
he himself had been the go-between in negotiating the secret
58. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10, pp. 114-121.
59. Bradley F. Smith and Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise (New York:
Basic Books, 1979), pp. 101-146; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New
York: Random House, 1968), pp. 375-385.
60. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10, pp. 117, 119.
61. Jerry Meldon, The Jewish Advocate, September 20, 1984, citing John Loftus, Boston Globe, May 28, 1984. It should be noted that Rauff himself probably left Genoa by 1949, more than a year before Barbie arrived in March 1951.
1_,oftus's charge of Dulles's amnesty and its consequences is remarkably at
odds with Bradley Smith's contention that "German and Italian Fascist prisoners of war . . . received no special benefits from Sunrise" (p. 185). Rauff was
subsequently allowed to "escape" and reestablish himself with Vatican assistance, which would seem to corroborate Loftus rather than Smith. In his introduction, Smith notes how CIA officials were "more than willing" to release to
him "the only group of OSS field intelligence dispatches which has ever been
declassified by the CIA" (p. 4). This willingness may have been self-serving;
as we shall see, Dulles was actively falsifying the reports of his unauthorized
contacts.
62. Loftus, Boston Globe, May 28, 1984. R. Harris Smith (op. cit., n. 10, p.
119) notes Daddario's visit to Rauff in Gestapo headquarters but does not explain its purpose.

12 CovertAction

surrender of the SS armies in Italy. He described [how he]

went to Lugano in March 1945, to arrange the release of allied prisoners in Rauff's custody as a sign of good faith. In
return for the surrender of all SS forces, Dulles promised
that none of the negotiators would ever be prosecuted as war
criminals."
Loftus then confirms the claim of Beata Klarsfeld that Rauff
began to work for Dulles, and to exfiltrate Nazis through Catholic 'monasteries, while on the OSS payroll.
Despite the [U.S.] Army interrogators' pleas that Rauff "is
considered a menace if ever set free, and failing actual elimination, is recommended for life-long internment," Dulles
kept his bargain and Rauff was released. According to usually reliable intelligence sources, Dulles then employed
Rauff on anti-communist operations in Italy, which was
Rauff's specialty under the Nazis. Dulles asked the Vatican
to continue his wartime arrangement of using Catholic
monasteries and convents to hide OSS agents. After the war,
Dulles explained, these safe houses were still needed to
smuggle out anti-communist refugees. The Vatican's involvement with Dulles's program was minimal. The church
provided food, shelter, and identity cards, as it did to all refugees. It was Dulles's contacts, not the Vatican, who handled the smuggling of Nazis. According to top secret State
Department documents, the Italian police provided the false
passports for allied agents; the visas came from the Argentine consulate in the allied intelligence unit based at Trieste;
and the embarkation paperwork Was handled by a U.S. State
Department officer in Genoa. Genoa, incidentally, was
Rauff's area of jurisdiction. All of them worked for Dulles,
who set up the unwitting Vatican to be the scapegoat if it
were ever discovered that Dulles's anti-communist refugees
were really SS intelligence agents. To be sure, there were a
few priests, and even one bishop, who smuggled a few of
their own Nazi countrymen through Italy [this must allude to
the Croatians], but that was at extremely low levels of the
Vatican, and was quietly squelched after the exposure in the
Italian press in 1948. The higher-level connection between
the Vatican and Dulles is still classified by the government.'
Loftus's remarkable charges against Dulles are corroborated
by scraps of the public record. In his semi-authorized history of
the OSS, R. Harris Smith notes that the leading Italian go-between in the negotiations, the industrialist, baron, and Papal
Chamberlain Luigi Parrelli, was in 1948
63. Ibid. The reference is to a meeting of March 3, 1945 which, in Allen Dulles's memoir was with two SS representatives, Eugen Dollmann and Guido
Zimmer. Loftus concludes "that Dulles lied in his memoirs on one point: The
SS colonel was Walter Rauff, not `Dollman[n].' " Dollmann's own autobiography is significantly unhelpful in resolving the issue. The book ends early on
that same morning at the Italian-Swiss crossing point to Lugano, with the
Swiss go-between waving "on the other side of the frontier." Citing an early
Italian account of the "pretentious" hat he wore on that important day,
Dollmann concludes enigmatically by saying, "I cannot remember, but it is
quite possible . . . Cur non?why not?" (Eugen Dollmann, The Interpreter:
Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1967), pp. 345-34:6.) Dollmann clearly did
play an important part in the early stages of Operation Sunrise. One year earlier he had helped negotiate the German evacuation of Rome which led to
Wolff's first and only audience with the Pope (Dollmann, pp. 298-303). It
seems possible however that on March 3 Dollmann did not accompany the SS
party beyond the border; alternatively, that both Rauff and Dollmann accompanied Zimmer to Lugano.
64. Ibid.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

reportedly involved in a CIA operation to prevent a leftist

victory in the Italian general elections. It was also rumored
that he had concocted a plan to transport ex-Nazis from Germany to Paraguay.65
As a Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
(SMOM), which issued its own diplomatic passports, Parrelli
was a member of an international Catholic network well
equipped to handle exfiltration. (See article on SMOM in this
issue.) The leading Bavarian Knight of Malta, Baron Erwein
von Aretin, was said to have arranged travel "for no small
number of-ex-Nazis" after the war."
And Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Pope Paul VI),
the OSS contact at the Vatican, did indeed become the, patron
of Bishop Hudal's exfiltration efforts:
Montini had under his supervision the Vatican bureau that
issued the refugee travel documents and the Caritas Internationalis, the Church's international welfare organization,
which was at this time (and for some years after the war) one
of the main charitable institutions aiding the fugitive Nazis."
Like Parrelli, Montini was later deeply involved in the CIA's
first major postwar covert operation, the efforts to block a
communist victory in the 1948 Italian election.

Gehlen networks in eastern and central Europe (which by 1945

were under the control of Skorzeny and the SS), and the OSS
itself, which by 1945 was facing increasingly public attack inspired by U.S. military intelligence and the FBI.
It is interesting that Gehlen knew of Karl Wolff's contacts
with Dulles as early as January 1945, the month in which they
were initiated.' From this same period he began to consolidate
his networks for survival after Hitler's downfall, which is to
say he already expected to reach a modus vivendi with the
Americans.' In April 1945, one month before the war ended,
Dulles asked Frank Wisner to begin talks with Gehlen, who
was not taken into U.S. custody until May 20.72 On the Gehlen
side, a plan "to gain contact with the Americans" was approved on April 4, and continued without interruption even
after Hitler-dismissed Gehlen on April 9."
Curiously, the- Operation Sunrise contacts between Wolff
and Dulles became most intense in the second half of April
1945, even though at that time both Wolff and Dulles knew
they had no authority to negotiate a surrender. On April 17
Wolff visited Berlin (where Gehlen and his headquarters were
still located), to be told by Hitler personally that he should
"temporize in his talks with Dulles because it was still too
early to consider a surrender, or even serious negotiation.""

The Common Interests of the OSS and the SS

We cannot in this article review the intricate contacts established throughout the war between the Nazis and the Papacy,
the Papacy and the United States, and the U.S. and Germany.' However, the common denominator in such informal contacts became the postwar future of Europe, and possible joint measures to exclude the Soviet Union from it. This
was especially true after Churchill and Roosevelt had proclaimed the policy of unconditional surrender at Casablanca, a
policy which not only dismayed Allen Dulles but threatened
the propriety of his continued contacts with members of the
German opposition.69 Yet even after the failure of the July
1944 plot against Hitler, the OSS continued its increasingly
questionable liaisons, now chiefly with representatives of SS
leaders Himmler and Schellenberg.
One motive for these contacts was clearly to limit the postwar influence in Western Europe of Soviet power, Communist
resistance forces, and the civilian communist parties. Another
however appears to have been to prevent the postwar breakup
of German and U.S. intelligence assets, most particularly the
65. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10,
114.
66. Guenther Reinhardt, Crime Without Punishment (New York: New American Library, 1953), p. 280; cf. Wisner Library Bulletin, 1958. In the last
months of the war, Dulles's OSS network in Switzerland was enlarged to include William J. Casey, today CIA Director and perhaps America's most famous Knight of Malta, and Russell D'Oench, a cousin of the U.S. SMOM officer J. Peter Grace. D'Oench is said to have helped set up the CIA-Gehlen
Org operation after the war, before retiring in 1949. Two of the highest honors
bestowed by the Italian branch of SMOM were awarded in 1946 to James Angleton, who had not yet taken up his new responsibilities as chief of the Vatican
desk of the CIA, and in 1948 to Reinhard Gehlen (Jonathan Marshall, "Brief
Notes on the Political Importance of Secret Societies," ParapoliticsIUSA 2.1,
March 1, 1983, Appendix, p. 18).
67. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n 10, p. 84; Farago, op. cit., n. 1, p. 211.
68. Wolff had secured a personal audience with Pope Pius XII back in May
1944 (Smith and Agarossi, op. cit., n. 59, pp. 65-66). For a resume of wartime
peace feelers between Germans and Americans, cf. Jonathan Marshall, "Bankers and the Search for a Separate Peace During World War II" (unpublished
Master's thesis, Cornell University, 1981).
69. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10, p. 214.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

SS officer Otto Skorzeny, at time of arrest, later a key link

in the Kameradenwerk.
70. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 10, p. 102.
71. Ibid., p. 103.
72. Powers, op. cit., n. 11, p. 24.
73. Heinz H6hne and Heimann Zolling, The General Was a Spy: The Truth
About General Gehlen and His Spy Ring (New York: Bantam, 1972), pp. 6263.
.
74. Smith and Agarossi, op. cit., n. 59, p. 132. Gehlen and his headquarters
left separately two days later for Bavaria, soon to be part of the U.S. Zone of
Occupation (Hahne, op. cit., n. 73, p. 63).

CovertAction 13

On the same day Dulles returned to his Berne headquarters

from the OSS European Theater headquarters in Paris, to receive, on April 21, an April 17 order from the Combined
Chiefs of Staff "to liquidate Operation Sunrise by, cutting off
all contact with Karl Wolff. ""
Undaunted by such restrictions, both men continued to
negotiate. Accompanied for the first time by a German army
representative (Col. von Schweinitz), Wolff came to Switzerland counting on
his "personal reputation with the Anglo-Americans" to extract guarantees from Dulles that the "idealistic" and "decent" men of the army, party, and SS would be able to play
"an active part in the reconstruction.'"
Dulles on his part misrepresented von Schweinitz's explicitly
limited instructions as a "full power" to negotiate. Later, after
Wolff had returned to Italy and found himself facing capture by
Allied partisans, Dulles allowed an OSS team to participate
(together with two SS men!) in the successful rescue and exfiltration of Wolff to Switzerland."
The historian Bradley Smith calls this "frenzied pursuit of
Sunrise" by Dulles "a mere reflex action," and failure to
realize that Allied victory was imminent in any case." In fact,
Dulles and Donovan had to mislead their superiors, if their
plans for the postwar use of the SS were to succeed. As R. Harris Smith, a former CIA officer, reports, dead-pan:
Only Wolff's sudden and unexpected offer to sign an unconditional surrender on April 22 convinced the State Department to reverse its earlier order and to allow SUNRISE to
proceed."
But'no such offer had been made by Wolff; it was merely an illusion from Dulles's unjustified commentaries, which "ran
roughshod over the minimal rules of caution and good
sense.' '"
The OSS policy of rescuing key fascist leaders appears,
moreover, to have been systematic. The next day, on April 28,
Dulles's aide Daddario risked his life in Milan to save the fascist Marshal Rodolfo Graziani from vengeful Socialist partisans.' On April 29, in Rome, OSS officer James Jesus Angleton would similarly rescue Prince Valerio Borghese, by disguising him as a U.S. Army officer." After the war Graziani
and Borghese became leaders of the neo-fascist MSI Party,
while their wartime cadres were apparently helped to new anticommunist careers with the support of the Vatican, and ultimately, the United States.83 In the months after the war, Angleton helped other fascists and Nazis to "escape" from prison
camps, supplying them when necessary with new identities."
75. Smith and Agarossi, op. cit., n. 59, p. 132.
76. Ibid., p. 138.
77. Ibid., pp. 141-144.
78. Ibid., p. 145.
79. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10, p. 233.
80. Smith and Agarossi, op. cit., n. 59, pp. 141-142.
81. R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10, p. 119.
82. Frederic Laurent, L'Orchestre Noir (Paris: Editions Stock, 1978) , p. 43.
83. Ibid., pp. 35, 38, 44. Laurent reproduces a March 1945 document from
Mussolini's Interior Ministry, describing details of postwar Vatican protection, shelter, false documentation, etc., for its Secret Police. He links this
speculatively to the arrangements made for the postwar ODESSA exfiltration
of Nazis (pp. 34-35).
84. David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row,

14 CovertAction

There seems no question that by April 1945 the OSS was recruiting Nazis and fascists to help mobilize against postwar
communism. As a recent historian has observed:
The history of OSS, which is indistinguishable from the secret political history of the war, is marked by a preoccupation with Communism almost as intense as its commitment
to victory against Germany.85
At least some of the SS men who in the last weeks of the war
negotiated with the OSS were treated thereafter as allies.
Wilhelm Hoettl, for example, who had transmitted an offer
from SS Deputy Head Kaltenbrunner, worked after the war,
like his former subordinate Schwend, as an informant, for the
CIC in Austria."
Walter Rauff, who had negotiated in Milan with Dulles's
aide Daddario, was also spared, despite having directed the
mobile gas chambers in Nazi-occupied Russia. By his own account, which has been reported as fact in the U.S. press, Rauff
"escaped" after his arrest, by U.S. troops, to move with Vatican help first to Vatican City and then to Syria." British and
French sources agree however that Rauff, by as early as June
1945, had established himself in Genoa. There, with the aid of
Cardinal Sid, Bishop of Genoa, Rauff organized a transit camp
where as many as 5,000 fleeing Nazis were sheltered before
their departure to Argentina, Syria, or Egypt." The French
Nazi hunter Beata Klarsfeld agreed that, like his Karneradenwerk ally Schwend, Rauff too was working with U.S. intelligence before escaping to Chile."
This seems probable, inasmuch as Schwend was working for
the Austrian CIC while setting up the Merano station of what
became known as the Rat Line. At some point, moreover, certainly by the early 1950s, the CIA and the Gehlen Org were
working together to move Gehlen agents (headed by Skorzeny)
to Egypt.' Long before these officially authorized movements,
Donovan and Dulles must have seen that, with a global net
work of its men already in place, the Gehlen Org would-be an
even more impressive asset in their case for a postwar CIA.
Through their connections with the Gehlen Organization,
Skorzeny, Rauff, Barbie, and Schwend all became in effect instruments of CIA intelligence and covert action policies. In so
doing, they contributed significantly to the establishment of
fascist style oppression in the new countries to which they had
movedin Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru.
One legacy of this oppression is the system of Death Squads
now operative in Central America. Another has been the involvement of men like Barbie and their political clients in the
highly organized Latin American drug traffic.
1980), p. 19.
85. Powers, op. cit., n. 11, p. 25.
86. Smith and Agarossi, op. ch., is 59, p. 62; Linklater, op. cit., is 21, p
135. Wolff, to his surprise, was eventually tried twice as a war criminal. In
1949 he was acquitted, thanks largely to affidavits from Dulles and Lemnitzer,
and testimony from Dulles's aide von Schulze-Gaevernitz. Gaevemitz's renewed testimony failed to save Wolff in a new trial by a West German court in
1964, in the wake of Eichmann's revelations (Smith and Agarossi, op. cit., n
59, pp. 189-190; R. Harris Smith, op. cit., n. 10, p. 121n). Since 1973 Wolff
has been free and in touch with other ex-Nazis, including Barbie.
87. Washington Post, May 15, 1984, p. B8; cf. Farago, op. cit., n. 1, pp. 224225.
88. Laurent, op. cit., n. 82, pp. 30-31; Latin America Weekly Report, February 11, 1983, p. 3.
89. Latin America Weekly Report, February 11, 1983, p. 3.
90. Stevenson, op. cit., IL 15, pp. 151-154.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

The Real Treason

By William Preston, Jr. *
For some fifteen years a secret, conspiratorial alliance between various American corporations and their Nazi collaborators betrayed and subverted U.S. national interests in the
campaign to win World War II. This link between a "fraternity" of top business executives and the country's deadliest
wartime enemy, the Third Reich, this collaboration between
capitalism and fascism, has been suppressed by the politically
powerful, for their own political purposes. Yet the magnitude
of the crime and the damage it did, harm that included injuring
and killing allied and American fighting men and women, were
not approximated in any other case of disloyalty for which the
government has exacted retribution. Quite the reverse. The
political system preferred staging trials, for example, for conspiracy to advocate speech (behavior twice removed even from
the overt act of speaking) rather than settling scores with the
treasonous powerful who served the cause of money and corporate self-interest.
Even more strangely, this country cannot face up to the corporate betrayal today, continuing to deny the realities of its
Nazi connection while indulging in orgies of hysteria over anything remotely related to communism. During the past year,
two comparable historical studies have, in fact, suggested once
* William Preston, Jr., is a Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and President of the Fund for
Open Information and Accountability, Inc. (F.O.I.A., Inc.). This is an excerpt
from his article, "The Real Candidates for 'The Crime of the Century,' " in
the journal of F.O.I.A., Inc., Our Right to Know (Spring 1984), pp. 3-4.

Project Paperclip
Subjects Civilian Personnel Spaces to Clq.
Accommodate the PAPERCLIP and
PROJECT 63 Programs.
St.r,\39.
1. The Department of Defense has two classified projects,
deemed of utmost importance, that result in the employment
and exploitation of foreign scientists by the Department:
a. The first, PAPERCLIP, provides a means of obtaining services of foreign specialists for specific assignments within the technical services of the Departments
of Army, Navy, and Air Force. The primary functionof
this program-is the utilization of the individual, the
denial aspect being a highly desirable, although secondary feature.. Such specialists sign a ;ear's contract
for7a specifie_atsignmant_'prier.-to leaving their place
of residence:I,'

-b. PROJECT.. 63 is. primarily a denial program with

utilization aaa desirable feature. The aim of this
program is to secure employment in the United States
of certain preeminent German and Austrian specialists,
thus- denytng,thetr services to potential enemies. Such
specialists sign a.-six-month Department of Defense contract which guarantees them an income until permanent
employment is arranged with Department of Defense

agencies or industry within the United States.

Project Overcast, later renamed Project Paperclip, was

the top-secret program set up in 1945 by the War Department to locate, recruit, and exfiltrate to the United States
hundreds of Nazi scientists, specialists in rocketry, biological warfare, aviation medicine, wind tunnels, and the like.
This declassified document is dated June 2, 1953 and
signed by Air Force Chief of Staff (and former Director of
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

again how unequal the "alternate malignity" of factions can

be, especially when it involves people in "embarrassingly high
places." Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton's book on Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg, The Rosenberg Files: A Search for Truth
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), became an instant ideological best seller, arousing critical acclaim and impassioned controversy along the entire political spectrum. At
the same time, Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy: An
Exposure of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949 (New
York: Delacorte, 1983) sank from view almost without leaving
an oil slick, so swift was its dispatch from public notice. Yet
the evidence Higham discovered through the Freedom of Information Act was fuller and more exact than the treacherous and
still incomplete materials assembled by Radosh and Milton.
Higham had obviously published the wrong book about the
wrong people at the wrong time. The political imperatives of
anti-communism and the Cold War still demanded radical
rather than corporate scapegoats.
According to Higham, the subversive business elite, the
group he calls "the Fraternity," had long-standing ideological
and economic reasons for their wartime collaboration with the
Nazi enemy. Anti-Semitism, sympathy for Hitler, distastes for
the Roosevelt New Deal and its supposed Jewish-communist
components blended with major financial, industrial, and technological alliances between German and American enterprises.
During the 1930s members of the Fraternity supported the
Black Legion, a Klan type fascist organization based in Michigan; financed the American Liberty League's hate campaign
Central Intelligence) Hoyt S. Vandenberg. It indicates that
at least 820 Nazis were brought to the U.S. under Paperclip,
seen as "a means of obtaining the services of foreign
specialists" for the U.S. military. (Reliable accounts indicate they numbered in excess of 900.) Another parallel program was "Project 63," to bring "certain preeminent German and Austrian specialists" to the U.S., with the primary
intent of denying their services to potential enemies. Vandenberg acknowledged however that their "utilization
[was] a desirable feature."
Many of these hundreds of Nazis, including SS and SA
officers, were provably guilty of war crimes and prosecutable before the Nuremberg Tribunal. To get them out of Germany and into the United States the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, responsible to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for
the administration of Paperclip, shamelessly set about altering, hiding, and destroying the evidence of their recruits' atrocities. Security- reports researched and written by U.S.
military intelligence were located and changed. When some
State Department officials discovered the changes, further
Changes were made and lies were told.
An extremely valuable account of the exfiltration program by freelance journalist Linda Hunt, who spent 18
months using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the
relevant files, appears in the April 1985 Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists.
CovertAction 23

against FDR; plotted a "bizarre conspiracy" to replace

Roosevelt with General Smedley D. Butler; and initiated redbaiting propaganda that anticipated the House Un-American
Activities Committee's worst excesses.
Had this been all, no criminal sanctions would have been
forthcoming, however odious and vile the practices. But a
much more dangerous set of activities developed during the
late years of the decade and continued throughout the war.
These included: sharing patents; the secret shipment of oil and
aircraft production data, photographs, and blueprints of military and naval bases, and enough material on weapons to give
the Germans a "clear picture of American armaments" as well
as of the Alaskan and Northwest defense system; sending oil to
Spain and Vichy France that was reshipped to the Nazis; refueling German tankers and U-boats; supplying tetraethyl lead
(an essential for aviation gasoline) to Germany and Japan;
manufacturing in subsidiary companies abroad an array of
communications and electronic equipment that aided the German development of artillery fuses, rocket bombs, and radio
technology; maintaining crucial radio links to enemy nations in
Latin America for intelligence transmissions; supplying funds
to the Axis via southern hemisphere sales to proclaimed list
(i.e., banned) firms; making and repairing trucks for the German occupation army in France; supplying ball bearings by
transshipment from South America; and cooperating closely in

financial matters through the Chase Bank in Paris and The

Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.
All this and more took place in a business-as-usual atmosphere that sought to conserve and strengthen the corporations'
own world-wide marketing preeminence and postwar position
in the defeated nations. It reflected not only the prewar
economic arrangements, but the continued intimacy among
elites now temporarily estranged by the vagaries of international politics but still seeing eye-to-eye on matters of corporate profit and survival.
Imagine for a moment (and without in any way assessing the
"guilt" of the Rosenbergs) a different scenario for the sharing
of technical knowledge with the nation's wartime ally. Suppose the Rosenbergs had all the influence and power of I.T.T.,
General Motors, or General Aniline and Film and were engaged in some facet of atomic production. They would have
had their representatives on various war related boards and allies in at least the State, War, and Treasury Departments. The
government would not have had to issue them a license to trade
with the enemy since Russia did not fall into that category.
Sharing certain technological developments with another nation could have been covered by the same informal approval
that Higham discovered had been granted by the State Department to I.T.T.'s Axis oriented business. As a State Department
wartime memorandum observed, "It seems that the Interim-

Interview With a Nuremberg Prosecutor

Mary M. Kaufman, a New York attorney and well known
progressive activist for half a century, was a prosecutor at
Nuremberg. CAIB asked her about U.S. reluctance to pursue some of the war crimes cases vigorously:
CAII3:Tell us first what your official position was in connection with the Nuremberg trials.
M.K.: I was one of the prosecution team of the United
States government in the case against the Board of Directors
of I.G. Farben, a huge cartel. The case was one of the
twelve major war crimes trials that the United States held
following the first one, conducted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. By the time that first trial was
over, the Allies, who had committed themselves to prosecuting all of the major war criminals, had already begun
to feel the effects of the Cold War. They decided it was not
feasible to try the rest of the major war criminals jointly
with the other Allies, so they agreed that each of the Allies
would pursue the cases of those major war criminals who
were in the jurisdictions of their respective zones of occupation. The United States had twelve such trials and that
against I.G. Farben was one of them.
I.G. Farben was charged with the crime against peace,
that is, the planning and the waging of a war of aggression;
with war crimes, using slave labor and the theft of properties as the army marched into the occupied countries; with
crimes against humanitythey built the Auschwitz concentration camp where they used slave labor very badly, resulting in the death of countless thousands of peoplethey engaged in medical experiments; they did a whole lot of very
bad things.
24 CovertAction

CAIB: Now in connection with your experiences, we

would like to ask you about the allegations that, after the initial trial of the Nazi leadership, the joint trial, the United
States did not, in many cases, fight too hard to prosecute
certain people or certain organizations. Did you run into any
examples of this pattern of less than full willingness to pursue the prosecutions?
M.K.: Oh yes. As a matter of fact, one of the very familiar stories that percolated whenever anyone talked about the
war crimes trials at Nuremberg, and appeared in the film
"Justice at Nuremberg," was about the attitudes of the
judges. There is a scene in the film when some Senators
were pressuring the judges and the prosecutors to go easy,
and when they were asked why, a Senator said, "Well, we
need these people in our war against the Soviet Union."
Now that was not just something that was in the movie; that
was something that I knew was true. Working on the prosecution of the I.G. Farben case, I knew of innumerable
similar instances. We were hampered by the State Department throughout. We did not have the kind of materials that
we needed. We did not, get the support of the State Department in our prosecutions. I will give you a few examples.
Sometime toward the end of the prosecution's case
against I.G. Farben, I learned that a group of Germans who
had been picked up during the war by the FBI, some place
off the shore of New Jersey, I think, and had been tried,
convicted, and jailed for conspiracy to commit sabotage in
the United States, had been trained by I.G. Farben. We had
an affidavit to that effect, but then I learned that the group
of saboteurs, who had been in jail in the U.S. , were being
shipped back to the German prison at Landsberg. I thought
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

tional Telephone and Telegraph Corporation . . . desires some

assurance that it will not be prosecuted for such activities. It
has been suggested that the matter be discussed informally with
the Attorney General and if he agrees the Corporation can be
advised that no prosecution is contemplated. . . . " But let us
imagine further that the Rosenberg corporation did in fact betray the national interest and disloyally aid and abet the enemy
as did Chase, Ford, Texaco, Standard Oil of New Jersey,
I.T.T., SKF (Ball Bearings), General Aniline and Film, Sterling Products, and General Motors. Would an indictment and
prosecution have followed? Undoubtedly not. As Higham
suggests, the government itself felt neutralized by the potential
for "public scandal" that might have developed in a wartime
exposure of Nazi connections. Fear for "public morale,"
"widespread strikes, or even "mutinies in the armed services," restrained a resort to political justice. Besides, imprisoning the corporate leadership would have had an adverse effect on the war effort itself.
An aftermath as ironic as the failure to prosecute concluded
this tale of disloyal deception. The same people who had collaborated with the enemy trooped into Germany at war's end,
often as top occupation advisers. There they protected their
property, saw to it that they obtained recompensation for destroyed assets, helped their Nazi friends return to industrial
power and political office, and supported the revival of Westthat that would be something wonderful for the trial, so I issued an order to have them transferred to the prison at
Nuremberg and was going to put them on as witnesses to
show I.G. Farben's direct involvement in sabotage.
But the chief of our trial team came to me and said,
ary, what the hell do you think you're doing? Who ordered those people brought here?" I said, "I did. Why?"
And he said, "You issue an order to send them right back.
The State Department is burning up the wires in protest." I
never did find out just what the State Department wanted,
but I had no alternative.
Another problem involved the authenticating of documents to be submitted in evidence. Many of those documents had been discovered by the U.S. consul in Frankfurt,
and I sent my assistant to him to have some of those documents authenticated for use in the trial. He refused. But
when my assistant asked him why, since he had been responsible for gathering all these documents in the first
place, he was now refusing to authenticate them, he said,
"Well, that was different. That was during the war, during
wartime. Now we need these people on our side. And I'll
tell you something else. If you subpoena me to try to authenticate these documents, I'm going to tell the court what
wonderful people these Board of Directors really are!"
There was another incident I knew of personally. It was
described by the chief of our trial team, Josiah P. Dubois, in
the book he wrote about I.G. Farben, The Devil's Chemist.
I . G. Farben was very, very deeply involved in the mistreatment of people at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where
they had their factory for the production of poison gas. They
did terrible things there. I.G. Farben had a Policy about
their labor, people who had been kidnapped and shipped
from the occupied countries. They tried to keep the workers
alive long enough for their replacements to arrive, so if they
knew that a certain number of replacements would be arriving in a week, they would let that number of workers starve
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

ern Europe along lines conducive to the burgeoning Cold War

antagonisms. The failure to dismantle the industrial base of the
Nazi regime, the limply enforced denazification program, and
the covert assistance to escaping war criminals seemed to confirm the persistence of the "dark purpose" the Fraternity had
initiated years before.
On the postwar home front, meanwhile, those who had labored to disrupt those sordid subversive dealings found themselves under attack as subversive. Lauchlin Currie and Harry
Dexter White, two top Treasury Department officials who had
fought to expose and condemn the Nazi benefactors, became
primary targets of the congressional investigators. Enemies of
fascism turned into agents of communism. McCarthyism completed the rout, while classification interred the dark secrets of
earlier betrayals.
Even more important, the Rosenberg case defined the new
model for treason upon which all Americans would thereafter
focus. No longer concerned with inflicting mortal injury to
public morale, quite the opposite, the government's malignity
imagined that the crime of the century had been engineered by
two inexpert technicians far from the seats of power. No one
would thereafter remember that the real crimes of this century
had been committed by those in "embarrassingly high
places," where punishment, as always, was to be "avoided at
all costs."
to death, so long as it took them a week to die.
Now those activities were carried on quite openly and
there was a lot of documentation about it; I.G. Farben kept
very detailed accounts of everything. In fact, almost everything in the case against I.G. Farben came from their own
files. In any event, the real question at the trial was not the
occurrence of these practices, which were very well known
and documented, but the degree of knowledge on the part of
the Board of Directors of I.G. Farben. This was not easily
provable without the files themselves. We discovered that
the files had been shipped to the French zone, even though
it was known that some of the French occupation officials
were very cozy with I.G. Farben directors. Some members
of the trial team had to go to the French zone to collect the
files, and when they got there they found many folders with
nothing in them. The contents had been shredded.
The team came back to Nuremberg very despondent, and
Jo Dubois was on his way to the court, next to the Nuremberg jail, when somebody said to him, "Oh, Herr Dubois,
please help me. I need some help." He turned around and
saw one of the major defendants in the case, the director
who was in charge of the Auschwitz operations. And Jo
said, "What are you doing out of prison?" He said, "The
judge let me out so I could go over some evidence. - What
he had done, in fact, was to go with an assistant to the place
where the I.G. Farben files were kept and to indicate which
files should be destroyed. Which was promptly done!
That is what the judges were like. They were not quite
like the judges in the movie. They were motivated, for one
thing, by a tremendous anti-Semitism. They were known to
be distressed by the fact that there were "too many Jews"
on the prosecution team, and they were always insisting on
very, very direct and detailed evidence when it came to allegations of activities at Auschwitz. For another, they were
busy getting their hands on German real estate and things
like that. There was a lot of honey in the pot.
CovertAction 25

Nazi Doctors in Demand

U.S. Air Force.

In September 1951, after 28 months with the Project

Paperclip medical staff in Frankfurt, Germany, Major General Walter Emil Schreiber was brought to the United States
for a six-month stint at the Air Force School of Aviation
Medicine in Texas.
As Nazi chief of medical science, "Doctor" Schreiber
was directly responsible for some of the most ghoulish medical experiments the Nazis conducted on concentration

Walter Emil Schreiber.

camp inmates. According to massive evidence revealed during the Nuremberg Trials, some of the experiments cleared
or reviewed by Schreiber included:
Supervising Dr. Karl Gebhardt, later hanged for his
crimes, who had operated on young Polish girls using gas
gangrene.
Injecting humans and mice interchangeably with
transfers from each other of deadly typhus virus, to produce
a live vaccine. Others were injected with infectious
epidemic jaundice.
Sterilizing male prisoners by surgery, X-ray, and
drugs.
Submerging victims in tanks of ice water to measure
shock levels.
Locking prisoners in low-pressure chambers to simulate flight at altitudes of up to 68,000 feet, which invariably
resulted in the collapse of their lungs.
Exposing subjects to heavy doses of incendiary phosphorus material.
With grotesque irony, Schreiber's role in Texas was consultant to the "global preventive medicine" division.
In March 1952, after Schreiber's presence in the U.S.
had been discovered by columnist Drew Pearson, his continuing work for the American military was defended by Air
Force General Robert Eaton: "Doctor Schreiber was hired
by the Air Force because of his extensive experience in the
fields of epidemiology and military preventive medicine,
coupled with his peculiar knowledge of public health and
sanitation problems in certain geographical areas. He has
collaborated in the preparation of a treatise on the
epidemiology of air travel and has been able to furnish the
Air Force with valuable information."
Apparently, due to the embarrassment and controversy
resulting from public exposure of their collaboration with

Schreiber, Project Paperclip officers generously found similar work for him in Argentina and flew him there on May
22, 1952.
Another of the hundreds of Nazi war criminals with
whom the U.S. joined forces was Major General Kurt
Blome. Some of the Nuremberg charges against him included:
Wholesale practice of euthanasia by injecting intravenous undiluted lethal phenol.
Executions of tubercular Polish prisoners.
Various uses of biological warfare, his specialty. He
admitted to U.S. Army interrogators in July 1945 that he
had conducted experiments on his victims with plague vaccine, on orders of the notorious mass murderer, Heinrich
Himmler.
Incredibly, Blome was acquitted by the Nuremberg tribunal, though the prosecutors had gathered a great deal of
evidence about his activities. Just two months after his acquittal, he was contacted by four employees of the Army
Chemical Corps at Camp Detrick for a discussion about
biological warfare. Blome cooperated and also volunteered
the names of other German biological warfare specialists.
In August 1951 he signed a "Project 63" contract as the
camp doctor at the U.S. Army occupation force European
Command Intelligence Center at Oberusal. A subsequent
Defense Department contractual document shows the following 'entry under the heading of Qualifications: "Professor of medicin [sic] with emphasis' on research of tuberculosis and cancer and biological warfare. One of the lesser known Nazi doctors, Hubertus
Strughold, a Luftwaffe member, was reportedly knowledgeable about the deadly low-pressure chamber experiments on concentration camp inmates. Though it is not
known whether he came to the U.S. as part of Paperclip or
63, he worked for the U.S. Air Force for many years and is
still living. Today at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas is the Hubertus Strughold Aeromedical Library, named after the man they fondly call "the father of
aerospace medicine."

Nazi doctors before Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal;

standing at right is Kurt Blome; to his right is Karl
Gebhardt.
l

26 CovertAction

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

of Darnel

The Sovereign
Military Order of Malta
By Francoise Hervet *
Introduction
The Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order of St. John of
Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, known also as the
Sovereign Military Order of Malta, or SMOM, is juridically,
politically, and historically unique in the world today.
Representing initially the most powerful and reactionary
segments of the European aristocracy, for nearly a thousand
years beginning with the early crusades of the Twelfth Century, it has organized, funded, and led military operations
against states and ideas deemed threatening to its power. It is
probably safe to say that the several thousand Knights of
SMOM, principally in Europe, North, Central, and South
America, comprise the largest most consistently powerful and
reactionary membership of any organization in the world
today.
Although an exclusively Catholic organization, in this century it has collaborated with, and given high awards to nonCatholic extremists in its current crusade against progressive
forces in the West, the national liberation movements, and the
socialist countries.
To be a Knight, one must not only be from wealthy, aristocratic lineage, one must also have a psychological worldview
which is attracted to the "crusader mentality" of these "warrior monks." Participating in SMOMincluding its initiation
ceremonies and feudal ritual dressmembers embrace a certain caste/class mentality; they are sociologically and psychologically predisposed to function as the "shock troops" of Catholic reaction. And this is precisely the historical role the
Knights have played in the wars against Islam, against the Protestant "heresy," and against the Soviet "Evil Empire."
The Catholic Right and the Knights of Malta, in particular
Baron Franz von Papen (see sidebar), played a critical role in
Hitler's assumption of power and the launching of the Third
Reich's Twentieth Century Crusade.
SMOM's influence in Germany survived World War II intact. On November 17, 1948 SMOM awarded one of its highest honors, the Grand Cross of Merit, to Reinhard Gehlen, the
Nazi chief of intelligence on the Soviet front. He was subsequently installed by the Americans as the first chief of West
Germany's equivalent of the CIA, the Bundesnachtrichtdienst
(BND: federal secret service), under West German Chancellor
Adenauer, a devout Catholic who had received the Magistral
Grand Cross personally from SMOM Grand Master Prince
Chigi.
* Francoise Hervet is the pseudonym of a researcher who has spent many years
investigating the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

After the appointment of Knight of Malta William Casey as

head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and another Knight,
James Buckley, as head of U.S. propaganda against Eastern
Europe at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, several historians
noted with interest President Reagan's call during the summer
of 1982 for a "crusade" against the "Evil Empire" in Eastern
Europe.
In addition to Casey, and James Buckley, its current members, or Knights, after the feudal fashion, include Lee Iacocca,
John McCone, William Buckley, Alexander Haig, Alexandre
de Marenches (the chief of French Intelligence under Giscard
d'Estaing, himself a Knight of SMOM), Otto von Hapsburg,
and various leaders of the fascist P-2 Masonic lodge in Italy.
While its organizational funding is relatively modest, its leverage is maximized by the presence of its Knights in key positions in other private and governmental structures throughout
the world.

Franz von Papen

A leading figure in Hitler's coming to power was
SMOM Franz von Papen, known as "the devil in a top
hat." A devout Catholic aristocrat from an old family of
Westphalian nobility, a former military attach and spy
against the United States in 1915, von Papen became
Chancellor in May 1932, with the support of the Nazis.
In June he ordered the dissolution of the Reichstag, calling for new elections in July, in which the Nazis
emerged as the largest party in the new Reichstag. After
a meeting with Hitler, von Papen persuaded President
von Hindenberg to offer Hitler the Chancellorship,
which he assumed on January 30, 1933. Von Papen became his Vice-Chancellor.
In April 1933 von Papen was elevated to Knight
Magistral Grand Cross of SMOM. After the murder of
Austrian Chancellor Doilfuss in Vienna in July 1934,
von Papen became Hitler's Ambassador to Austria,
and, in March 1938 stood by the Fiihrer's side at his
triumphal entry into Vienna. From 1939 until August
1944 he was the Nazi Ambassador to Turkey, and at the
Nuremberg trials he was charged with conspiracy to
wage aggressive war. He was one of several Nazi leaders
acquitted, and subsequently received a generous pension
from the first postwar Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.
CovertAction 27

The President of the American Eastern Association of

SMOM is J. Peter Grace, President of W.R. Grace Company,
who was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought
Nazi scientists to the U.S.'

The Vatican and the order of the Knights of Malta, believed

to be the smallest sovereign state in the world, have agreed
to establish full diplomatic relations, a joint statement said
today."

SMOM's Sovereign Diplomacy

As its name suggests, SMOM is both a "sovereign" and,
historically, a "military" organization. Its headquarters, occupying a square block in Rome at 68 Via Condotti, enjoys the
extra-territorial legal status granted to an embassy of a
sovereign state. The Italian police are not welcome on its territory, it issues its own stamps, and has formal diplomatic relations and exchanges ambassadors with a number of countries.
On November 13, 1951 Italian President Alcide de Gasperi
recognized the diplomatic sovereignty of SMOM, although he
held off formal exchange of diplomatic envoys.' On January
11, 1983 the New York Daily News announced that,

President Reagan's Ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, is, coincidentally, a Knight of Malta.'
On September 5, 1984 French Foreign Minister Claude
Cheysson signed .a formal protocol with SMOM for various
cooperative projects including "aid to victims of conflicts." 4
(See below on Americares.)

1. See generally, Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip (New York:

Atheneum, 1975). Grace had also served as the Chairman of the Radio Free
Europe Radio Liberty Fund, a CIA front infested with Nazi collaborators, and
of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), another CIAfunded organization. The Chairman of the W. R. Grace Executive Committee,
Felix Larkin, is also a SMOM. The Chancellor of the Order, John D. J.
Moore, was a Director of the Grace company until at least 1982 having been
with the company since 1946 managing its Peruvian operations from 19471950. From 1969-1975 Moore was the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland. See
sidebar on J. Peter Grace.
2. Roger Peyrefitte, Knights of Malta (New York: Criterion Books, 1959), at
p. 137.

Historical Antecedents
Already in existence at the time of the first Crusade in 1099,
in 1113 the Order of St. John was given its independence by
Pope Pascal II, permitted to elect its own Grand Master, and
soon the Order began military participation in the Crusades
along with with the Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights.
The Order of St. John recruited successfully among the European aristocracy and soon controlled extensive estates throughout the continent, assimilating those previously belonging to
the Knights Templar which it had helped crush during the first
two decades of the 14th Century, with the Templar leadership
burned alive as heretics.
3. See the illustrated feature story on SMOM in Town and Country, April
1984, pp. 194, ff.
4. Point de Vue, September 23, 1983.

Peter Grace and Project Paperclip

On January 16, 1980 ABC-TV broadcast a special
"News Closeup," "Escape from Justice: Nazi War Criminals in America" which discussed Grace's Role in Project
Paperclip. The transcript of the program, available from
ABC on request, states, "Project Paperclip . . . from the
end of WW II to the mid-1950's brought more than 900
German scientists to the United States. . . . Otto Ambros
. . . was a chemist and a Director of the notorious I.G. Farben Company which supplied gasoline and rubber for Hitler's war effort. Ambros . . . played a supervisory role in
the construction of Farben's plant in the Polish village of
Auschwitz. For I.G. Farben, Auschwitz concentration inmates provided a plentiful source of cheap labor. . . . The
Nuremberg prosecution charged that each day at Farben's
plant one hundred people died from sheer exhaustion... .
Otto Ambros was convicted of slavery and mass murder and
sentenced to eight years in prison. But even while on trial at
Nuremberg, Ambros was a target for U.S. recruiters from
`Project Paperclip.' His prison sentence was commuted
after only three years by American officials and he was
helped in a bid to enter the United States by . . . J. Peter
Grace, President of W. R. Grace, a major American chemical company. . . . An internal State Department document
describes how J. Peter Grace helped Otto Ambros in his efforts to enter the U.S. In a memorandum to the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Grace acknowledges that Ambros
was a war criminal. But he adds that in the years he's
known Ambros, . . `we have developed a very deep admiration, not only for his ability, but more important, for his
character in terms of truthfulness and integrity.' Today Otto
28 CovertAction

Ambros does consulting work for W. R. Grace and Company and lives here in Mannheim, Germany. In a recent
telephone interview Ambros [said] 'I'm happy to still be
working as a chemist . . . but it's funny. Now I'm helping
the Americans.' "
In June 1981, largely in response to the efforts of well
known war crimes researcher Charles Allen, Yeshiva University cancelled a $150-a-plate dinner it had organized to
honor Grace. (See also, Joe Conason and Martin A.
Rosenblatt, "The Corporate State of Grace," Village
Voice, April 12, 1983.)
When the scandal broke in West Germany over the Flick
company paying huge sums of money to various politicians
and parties, it was learned that additionally Flick had taken
improper tax waivers and used the money to pump millions
of dollars into W. R. Grace Co., becoming a major
shareholder. Friedrich Karl Flick himself sits on the Grace
Board. As the Moscow New Times reminded its readers
(No. 8 1983, citing Der Spiegel), Friedrich Karl's father,
Flick Sr., had poured money into the coffers of the Nazi
party in January 1933, and "after Goering had promised
the Ruhr magnates that the March 5 elections will be the
last elections in this decade and perhaps in this century," he
contributed another 200,000 marks; this sum was handed to
SS Reichfiihrer Himmler. Flick Sr. was subsequently sentenced at Nuremberg to seven years for using slave labor,
spoliation and being an accessory to the crimes of the SS.
To ensure a good beginning for his son, the war criminal
sent him after the war for early training with W. R. Grace.
i1
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Act dissolving the Order in England and conferring its estates upon the Crown. . . . 6

Plaque on SMOM headquarters' door proclaims sovereign

status of the building; SMOM has been called "the smallest
country in the world," but it has diplomatic relations with
more than 40 countries.

Meanwhile on the continent and in the Mediterranean the

wars against the infidels of the East continued. Since the military defense of Christendom required naval support, the Order
created a powerful fleet and patrolled the seas of the Eastern
Mediterranean fighting many naval actions.
Military operations ranged as far as Egypt and. Syria, and by
1565 under Grand Master Valette, they resisted the Turkish
siege of Malta. In 1571 SMOM's fleet participated in the defeat of the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto, and remained a
major military presence in the Mediterranean until 1789 when
Napoleon defeated the Knights and occupied the island. The
Order finally sought temporary protection under the Russian
Emperor Paul I in 1797; in 1834 Pope Leo XIII established its
headquarters in Rome.

In 1187 the Order was driven militarily from Jerusalem by

Saladin. The Knights were forced to flee successively to Acre,
Cyprus (1291), and finally Rhodes (1310) where they subdued
the local population and established a military dictatorship enjoying territorial sovereignty for the first time. In 1522 they
were defeated by Sultan Suleiman's forces of 200,000 troops
and 250 ships after a six-month siege. By .1530 under Grand
Master Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the Knights established their
headquarters on the island of Malta which had been given to
them by Charles V.
Martin Luther was born in 1483, the same year that Torquemada unleashed the fury of the Inquisition, and while the
Knights waged war against foreign heresies, they were soon
confronted by the liberalizing Reformation challenge to Catholic Orthodoxy.
In England Henry VIII's assertion of an independent national policy was complicated by his marriage to Katherine
who was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, patron of the. Knights
of Malta who in England were a militant bastion of Papal loyalty. By 1534 Pope Clement VII had excommunicated the
King and two years later Pope Paul III published a Bull deposing the King and charging the Emperor with its execution. According to King and Luke's authoritative history' of the Order
in England,
The staunchest supporters of Papal supremacy were naturally to be found among the religious Orders, and . . . the
Knights were the loyal servants of the Pope, whose claims to
universal dominion [the King] had repudiated, . . . it was
thus a sheer impossibility for the King to permit the existence in England of an Order so powerful and so highly organized unless it was prepared to renounce its loyalty to his
most determined enemy. Inevitably the Knights would become a center of disaffection and a rallying point for all the
forces of reaction. . . .
In July 1539, after two of the Knights had already chosen the
martyr's crown, the King wrote letters to the Grand Master
which practically constituted an ultimatum, demanding that
the Papal supremacy should cease to be recognized by the
Order in England. . . . But it was impossible to accept the
King's conditions. In April 1540 . . . Parliament passed an
5. Sir Edwin King and Sir Harry Luke, The Knights of St. John in the British
Realm, 2d ed. (London: St. John's Gate, 1967).

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

State room of the Grand Magistry; Grand Master Fra Prince Angelo de Mojana di Cologna, seated, flanked by
Grand Chancellor, left, and Hospitaller, right.
6. Ibid., pp. 103-105. Subsequently in England in the 19th Century, since each
monarch has the authority to create any Order it wishes, Queen Victoria chartered, alongside the Rome-based British Association of SMOM, a predominantly Anglican Order called "The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St.
John of Jerusalem" under the aegis of the British crown.
On November 26, 1963 the Venerable Order and the British Association of
SMOM signed a treaty of mutual recognition and respect which can be seen in
the Library of the Venerable Order in London. SMOM continues to regard the.
Venerable Order with somewhat amused scorn; while SMOMs are members of
the highest levels of the Venerable Order, there do not appear to be any Anglican members of the Venerable Order in the British Association of SMOM.

CovertAction 29

II. . . . [He] had received the Order of the Grand Cross of

the Knights of Malta from Pope Pius XI in 1928. He was an
ardent supporter of General Franco and, by extension, Hitler. Morgenthau first suspected him as a fascist sympathizer
in October 1936. . . [W]ith the encouragement of Schacht,
Larkin took on the Franco account and the Reichsbank account, though the Reichsbank was under the personal control of Hitler. . . .

The American Association of SMOM

In Europe SMOM' s membership had been traditionally limited to those who could prove a requisite purity of noble blood
for several generations. Nevertheless, as a concession to the
rising political, economic, and military power of the United
States, in 1927 SMOM agreed to incorporate an American National Association whose members were not obliged to prove
their genealogical pedigree.
When the American Association of SMOM was created in
1927 the founding members included Patrick Cardinal Hayes,
Edward L. Hearn, Nicholas F. Brady, Howard F. Carry, Patrick E. Crowley, James A. Farrell, James A. Fayne, Edward
N. Hurley, James J. Phelan, Morgan J. O'Brien, John J. Raskob, and John D. Ryan.
By 1941 Francis Cardinal Spellman was listed as the
"Grand Protector" and "Spiritual Advisor" of the Order, with
John J. Raskob as Treasurer. Members included John Farrell,
then President of U.S.Steel, Joseph P. Grace, and John D.
Ryan. In 1934 Raskob, inspired by the French fascist Croix de
Feu, and working closely with Morgan Bank's John Davis, had
been a principal financier in the plot to organize a fascist coup
in the U.S. The plan failed, when General Smedley Butler, who
had been set up to lead the project, denounced it
The 1941 list also included Joseph J. Larkin. According to
Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy (see review in this
issue),

The American-Italian Connection

From 1932 until 1938 Myron Charles Taylor was the Chairman of U. S. Steel. In 1939 he became the U.S. envoy to Pope
Pius XII, a post he would maintain until 1950. Meanwhile, according to Anthony Cave Brown, OSS chief William Donovan
secretly had established an intelligence connection with the
Vatican as early as 1941, when he evacuated from Lisbon to
New York the Dominican Father Felix A. Morlion, who had
founded "a European Catholic anti-Comintern" called Pro
Deo.(See sidebar.) Throughout the war Donovan financed
Morlion's Pro Deo service and in June 1944 he "went to considerable expense, time, and trouble to transport Morlion from
New York and establish him at the Holy See."'
Subsequently Morlion became a key figure in Vatican intelligence, working closely with Giovanni Battista Montini, the
future Paul VI.
According to Frederic Laurent,

Joseph J. Larkin . . . [vice-president of Chase Manhattan

Bank in charge of European affairs] kept the Chase Bank
open . . . in Nazi-occupied Paris throughout World War

7. Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Exploration of the Nae

American Money Plot, 1933-1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983), pp. 20-31:,'
8. Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan, The Last Hero (New York:
Times Books, 1982), pp. 683, 684.

01,

The Role of Felix A. Morlion

In the latter part of April 1948 the Romanian Timpul published an article, The Vatican Espionage Service," cited
in the Soviet journal New Times, No.31, 1948; at pp. 5, 6.
As reported, the article indicated that "In 1946 the Pope
entrusted the Dominican friar [Felix A.] Mot.lion, a Belgian, with the reorganization of the Vatican intelligence service and its merger with the jesuit espionage network. The
central intelligence department of the Vatican is headed by
Janssens, a general of the Jesuit Order. His deputy is Montini, the acting Vatican Secretary of State, and his assistants
are Schmider, the administrative director of the central
Jesuit espionage bureau, and Morlion, director of Centro
d'informazione pro Deo. The central intelligence department is subdivided into branches and sections dealing with
the various countries. One of the main branches is the socalled 'special division' which operates under the signboard
of the Centro d'informazione pro Deo press agency. Similar
divisions have been set up in the Centro d'informazione pro
Deo units in all parts of the world. In New York the 'special
division' is directed by Cardinal Spellman, in Innsbruck
(Austria) by Regent, the rector of a jesuit college, in Coblenz (Germany) by the Catholic priest Poelaert who is also
director of the Catholic press agency. The branch in charge
of espionage in Eastern and Southeastern Europe is supervised by Schmider and Preseren, the jesuits' chief expert on
the Slav countries and adviser to the Vatican Secretary of
State."
30 CovertAction

In August 1966, Morlion approached H.L. Hunt for

funding Vatican anti-Communist operations in Latin America. Hunt gave an interview to the British Guardian Weekly
Febtuary 27, 1969: " 'I was approached by Paolo Cardinal
Marella, who said he spoke for the Pope and asked if I
would supply members of my [20,000 member] Youth
Freedom Speakers' movement who spoke Spanish to be
sent south [to Latin America] to engage in speechmaking
and activities. I was told the Pope was thinking in terms of
11 million dollars a year support for the entire movement
against communism in Spanish-speaking countries.' .
The project was now centered in New York, at the Asiat
Speakers Bureau, with the Free Pacific Association, Inc.
on Riverside Drive [another front for the Rev. Moon's Unification Church]. A key figure in this papal concern over
Leftist threats to the Vatican's greatest stronghold was the
Rev. Felix A. Morlion, who was present at the original discussions."
Subsequently, Morlion emerged as a key figure in the
"Bulgarian Connection" hoax when the fascist Grey Wolf
Agca attempted to assassinate the Pope: It appears that
Morlion lived in Rome directly below the apartment of the
Bulgarian Antonov, and was a possible source of Agca's
description of Antonov's apartment. (See, Il Mondo, April
8, 1985; L'Espresso, May 19, 1985.)

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

All studies [of the post-WWII Nazi networks] have shown

the determining role played by the Catholic Church in the
flight of war criminals. Since April 1943, following negotiations between Pius XII and the ultra-reactionary American
archbishop Francis Spellman, the Holy See became the clandestine center of Anglo-American espionage in Italy. This
collaboration in fact had begun the previous year . . . between Earl Brennan, a veteran of the American State Department and Gian Battista Montini, at the time a bishop and
Under-Secretary of State at the Vatican. This close collaboration between the future Paul VI and the American secret
services continued after the war through the intermediary
James Angleton. . . .

Prince Valerio Borghese with SS officer, Italy, 1944.

Borghese was to be heard from again on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (See below.)

James Jesus Angleton.

With the American Grand Protector of SMOM already in
contact with the Vatican, and Allen Dulles busy negotiating
with Nazis in Switzerland, the Americans entered Rome June
4, 1944. On July 7 General Mark Clark was made a Knight
Grand Cross of SMOM.

According to British journalist Stuart Christie,

Truman's Vatican envoy Myron C. Taylor received

SMOM' s Gran Croci Al Merito Con Placca May 23, 1945.
On June 12, 1945 Admiral Ellery W. Stone was awarded
the Croci Al Merito Di Prima Classe Con Corona from the
SMOM.
On December 27, 1946 James Angleton received the
Croci Al Merito Seconda Classe from the Order, the same day
as' George Raymond Rocca. Rocca went on to become Angleton's deputy chief of Counterintelligence Division of the CIA
and was the liaison between the Warren Commission and the
CIA following the Kennedy Assassination. (See sidebar.)

25 April 1945 [three days before the German forces capitu-

late in Italy] Admiral Ellery Stone, U.S. Proconsul in occupied Italy, instructs James Angleton to rescue Prince Valerio Borghese from the possibility of arrest by the Resistance
Committees which had sentenced him to death for war
crimes . . . Stone is a close friend of the Borghese family.'
9. Frederic Laurent, L'Orchestre Noir (Paris: Editions Stock, 1978), at p. 29;
see also Charles Allen, "The Vatican and the Nazis" in Reform Judaism,
Spring/Summer and Fall 1983; and Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third
Reich (New York: Knopf, 1966).
10. Stuart Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy Magazine, 1984), at p.6. One member of the family, S.E. Don
Giangiacomo, Principe Borghese, had been a Bailiff Grand Cross of Honor
and Devotion of SMOM since June 4, 1932. Christie's book includes a photo
of Borghese driven by an unidentified SS officer in 1944, with the caption,
"Borghese was then [1944] head of 'XMAS' (Decima MAS), a special forces
corps of 4,000 men founded in 1941. Borghese assumed command after the
Italian armistice and XMAS was officially recognized by the Nazi High Command on September 14, 1943. Under his direction, XMAS was responsible for
the torture and mass murder of Italian partisans. Ibid., p. 7; see also Laurent,
op. cit., n. 9.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

According to declassified documents from the American Department of State, in February 1948, in anticipation of the upcoming elections scheduled for April 18, the Vatican created
organizations called Civic Committees under the leadership of
Luigi Gedda, a 45-year-old doctor from Turin who was also
the leader of the rightist Catholic Action. By March 17, 1948
Gedda became a Knight of the Grand Priory of Lombardy and
Venice. The liaison to Gedda was through an Ecclesiastical
Assistant, Mgr. Fiorenzo Angelini, a member of the National
Executive of the Civic Committees, who had become a ranking
member of the Rome Priory of SMOM also on March 17,
1948." At that time the Grand Priory was headed by Ferdinand Thun Hohenstein, Director of Ceremonies of SMOM,
11. Declassified documents of May 17, 1948 and October 11, 1948. Gedda
was listed as a member of the "Comite de Patronage" of the French neo-Nazi
Nouvelle Ecole in April 1982 along with Robert Gayre. Gedda also served on
the Advisory Board of Gayre and Pearson's Mankind Quarterly from at least
the mid 1960s until 1979.

CovertAction 31

a member of the all-powerful five-member Sovereign Council

of the Order, and nephew of a former SMOM Grand Master.
On March 22, 1948 the New York Times reported that Gedda
had appealed to American Catholics to provide financial assistance to Italian Catholics in their fight against communism. On
April 5, it was reported that "Myron C. Taylor arrived from

Madrid for what Catholic circles described as an 'important

mission' closely related to the Italian general elections. " By
April 13 the paper reported that Taylor would meet with Pius
once a week, and that based on the information recently received, the Pope was "considerably more optimistic" about
the outcome of the elections. Two days later with the Italian

The Checkered Careers

of James Angleton and Roger Pearson
Both James Jesus Angleton and George Raymond Rocca
were forced into retirement in December 1974 following
Seymour Hersh's revelations that Angleton's Division had
been involved in illegal domestic operations, known as "the
family jewels.'"
By the Winter of 1977-78 Angleton became one of two
Associate Editors of the Journal of International Relations
under General Editor Roger Pearson. The other Associate
Editor was Gen. Robert C. Richardson III; the Publisher
was John Fisher, President of the American Security Council .
Pearson is perhaps the most important neo-Nazi contact
and racist propagandist in the U.S. today and had been a
former Editor of Willis Carto's Western Destiny.
According to Replica of January 1978, when the Executive Committee of the World Anti-Communist League
(WACL) met December 10 and 11, 1977 to plan for their
upcoming conference in Washington D. C., "The main
speaker was . . . General Robert C. Richardson III who delivered a brilliant speech on the theme of USA-USSR nuclear balance . . . [and] . . . Dr. Roger Pearson [President of

Roger Pearson.
North American Regional WACL and later President and
host of WACL in 1978] also made a brilliant exposition. Replica is the journal of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL) which Jack Anderson revealed
to, be a CIA created anti-Semitic controller of neo-Nazi
death squads.'
1. See, Seymour Hersh's stories in the New York Times, December 22 and
30, 1974; and Fensterwald and Ewing, Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New
York: Zebra Books, 1977), at pp.182, 183, 186.
2. See, Jack Anderson stories of January 12, 13, 23, 26, 30 and February
9. See also, Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup (Boston:South End
Press, 1980), and the series in the New York Village Voice by Joe Conason, May 1 and 14, 1985.

32 CovertAction

Pearson was removed as head of the U.S. branch of the

World Anti-Communist League after its 1978 conference in
Washington, D.C. because his ties to the neo-Nazi international were too extreme even for WACL which then included death squads, former Nazis, and Nazi collaborators.'
In the July 1978 issue of the racist Mankind Quarterly,
the Editor-in-Chief, and Pearson's mentor, Robert Gayre,
announced that Pearson would take over publication of the
magazine. Robert Gayre had received the Grand Cross of
Merit from SMOM in 1963, having already been editor of
the Mankind Quarterly for three years. In June 1979 Pearson was listed as a member of the Comite de Patronage (the
Advisory Board) of the French neo-Nazi journal Nouvelle
Ecole.
Today Pearson continues to publish in Washington, D.C.
several journals including Mankind Quarterly; The Journal
of Social, Political and Economic Studies; and The Journal
of Indo-European Studies; he remains on the Board of Trustees of the American Foreign Policy Institute.'
According to Joseph C. Goulden, "Brigadier General
Robert C. Richardson . . . had served as deputy chief of
staff for science and technology for the U.S. Air Force Systems command; he later was a field commander of the Defense Atomic Support Agency at the supersecret Sandia
Base, New Mexico. When Richardson retired in 1967 he
became a consultant in defense affairs; one of his positions,
which he was to take in 1973, was a vice-president of Ed
Wilson's Consultant's International.'"
Gen. Richardson is today one of the key members of the
American Security Council (ASC) and the Coalition for
Peace Through Strength (CPTS) and is Executive Director
of the American Foreign Policy Institute of which Pearson,
John Fisher, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, and Gen. Daniel 0.
Graham are members of the seven member Board of Trus,
tees.
Angleton today is the Chairman of the Security and Intelligence Fund whose President is former Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow (the Chairman of the American Foreign
Policy Institute) and whose Secretary-Treasurer is Robert
C. Richardson III. Until its move in late 1984 to 1010 Vermont Avenue, N.W. in Washington, D.C., it shared offices
with the ASC and the CPTS. The letter heads of the three
organizations show extensive membership overlaps.
3. See, Paul Valentine "Fascist Specter behind the World Anti-Red
League" in the Washington Post, May 28, 1978.
4. See generally, Michael Billig, Psychology, Racism & Fascism, London:
1979; and Searchlight magazine, September 1984, no.111; both available
from Searchlight publications, 37B New Cavendish Street, London W1M
8JR. See also, Robert Gayre's entry in the British Who's Who.
5. Joseph C. Goulden, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin
P. Wilson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 47.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

military staging massive parades and as fascist gangs attacked

leftists in the streets, C. L. Sulzberger reported from Rome that
Catholic Action is armed, active, and tough.''
The State Department documents cite Angleton as
"feel[ing] quite strongly that Gedda can be effectively used to
further our interests in Italy in the political, labor and social
fields," and that the Civic Committees were to receive CIA
funds. The Pope had allegedly met with Gedda three times dur-

the month after the elections.

One of those reported to have been involved in interference
in the April 18 election was Baron Luigi Parrilli. Parrilli, son
of an Italian admiral, and who had reportedly worked for the
American firm Kelvinator before the war, was a fascist and had
extensive industrial interests in Italy. He was made a Knight of
Malta on December 7, 1942 and by early 1945 had excellent
contacts with the top Schutzstaffel (SS: elite guard) and
Sicherheitsdienst (SD: secret service) German officers in
Northern Italy. By April 1945 he became a representative of
SS General Karl Wolff to Allen Dulles and U.S. Gen. Lemnitzer during the period that the latter two were involved in private negotiations to recruit top Nazis before the end of the war.
It has been rumored that ParriIli also had "concocted a plan to
transport ex-Nazis from Germany to Paraguay."' (See article
by Peter Dale Scott in this issue.)
In 1949 SMOM published an Official General Roll of the
Grand Magistery with a preface by Pius XII which referred to
"The ancient laurels collected on the battle-fronts" of earlier
wars. As noted above, among only four recipients of the
Order's Gran Croci al Merit con Placca at the time was
Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's Chief of Intelligence on the Eastern
Front, who received the award November 17, 1948.

CI?

in g

A view through the well-fortified courtyard of the Knights

of Malta building on Rome's Via Condotti.
12 R. Harris Smith, OSS, The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), at p. 114; and
Bradley F. Smith & Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise (New York: Basic
Books, 1979). And see Peter Dale Scott's article in this issue.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

L MERIT
(PRO

PUS MER1TIS)

GRAN CROCI AL MERITO CON- FASCIA

10

4 1948

8.5, Geri. PAUL DARIUS DASSAULT

GRAN CROCI AL MERITO CON PLACCA

23
23
11
17

5
5
11
11

1945
1945
1948
1948

S. E. HAROLD ALEXANDER, Visconte dl Tunis!

S. E. MYRON C. TAYLOR
Brig. Gen. Barone JEAN de MARGUERITTES
REINHARD GEHLEN

Document shows SMOM's honor bestowed on Hitler's intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen and on U.S. Admiral Ellery W. Stone.
By this time Reinhard Gehlen's brother had already been in
Rome serving as the Secretary to Thun Hohenstein. Conveniently for Reinhard, who was negotiating with the U.S.for the
preservation of his Nazi colleagues, Thun Hohenstein was
Chairman of one of SMOM's grand magistral charities, the Institute for Associated Emigrations, and had arranged for two
thousand SMOM passports to be printed for political refugees.
Thun Hohenstein was also related to the leading German
Knights of SMOM, and at a crucial time in an internal SMOM
controversy after the war had received the active support of
Prince Frederic von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Honorary
Chairman of the Silesian Association of the Order, the head
of the Catholic Hohenzollerns, of which several members were
Knights of SMOM. The Silesian Knights, led by their Chairman Prince von Hartzfeld and Graf Henckel von Donnersmark,
maintained a refugee camp at Ulm which in 1951 alone had received 134,000 refugees from the East." Meanwhile, both the
Polish and Hungarian Associations of SMOM had also relocated safely to the West.
In 1950, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism was created. The trustees included J. Peter Grace,
Charles Edison, William Henry Chamberlain, H. J. Heinz II,
Isaac Don Levine, and Eugene Lyons. The Committee (now
known as Radio Liberty), under the guiding hand of the CIA's
Frank Wisner, funded numerous migr "research institutes"
which, according to John Loftus, were "little more than front
groups for ex-Nazi intelligence officers."'
13. See, Peyrefitte, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 172, 173, 214.
14. John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, ed. by Nathan Miller (New York: Knopf,
1982), pp. 106-107, 178.

CovertAction 33

Counterintelligence, another Knight of Malta of fascist fame,

Italian General Giovani De Lorenzo, who had been the chief of
the secret service (then known as Sifar) and in 1962 head of the
carabinieri, organized an attempted fascist coup on July 14,
1964 (the Plan Solo) and later became a deputy from the fascist
MSI party.'
Six and a half years later, on the night of December 7, 1970
Angleton's Prince Borghese gave the order for Stefano delle
Chiaie to proceed with seizure of the Interior Ministry in Rome
along with 50 fellow neo-Nazis. (See "A Killer's Career," in
this issue; and see "The Fascist Network," in CAIB, Number
22.) This plot to trigger a fascist coup was called off at the last
minute, and Borghese and his neo-Nazi protege delle Chiaie
fled to Spain where former SS Commando Skorzeny among
others was waiting. '9
The February 11, 1985 issue of Spotlight, the weekly of
Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, featured this photograph of
J. Peter Grace in the Washington, D.C. offices of Liberty
Lobby giving a cordial interview to Spotlight Managing
Editor Vincent J. Ryan.
In 1953 Catholic fanatic Clare Boothe Luce became U.S.
Ambassador to Rome, and was made a Dame of Malta in 1956.
In 1954, with the backing of Cardinal Spellman and the
machinations of General Edward G. Lansdale, the Catholic
Ngo Dinh Diem became Prime Minister of South Vietnam.
Commenting on the events in Hungary in 1956, two Soviet
journalists wrote,
. . . we spoke with Count Karoly Khuen Hedervary [who]
bears a great responsibility for the crimes the fascists had
committed in Europe [but he] was not tried as a war criminal
after 1945. . . . After Mindzenty's return to Budapest during the counter-revolutionary events, Karoly Khuen Hedervary took advantage of his being an old friend of the cardinal
to meet Mindzenty several times, during which he received
instructions for the organization [set up by the former fascist
minister of industry Geza 13ornemisza]. Hedervary served
also as the liaison man of the organization and the Duke of
Lichtenstein, who came officially to Budapest during the
October events in the capacity of the representative of the International Red Cross, but actually as the representative of
the Sovereign Military Order of Malta which had helped actively in promoting the counter-revolution in Hungary.'
By November 1961, President Kennedy' appointed John
McCone as Director of the CIA. In 1963, when it became clear
Diem could no longer stay in power in South Vietnam,
McCone oversaw his regrettably necessary assassination.
McCone is listed as a member of SMOM in the 1980 list."
With McCone heading the CIA and Angleton as his Chief of
15. A. Belokon and V. Tolstikov, The Truth About Hungary (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), pp. 58-61; Mary Bancroft in Autobiography of a Spy (New York: Wm. Mon-ow, 1983), p.260, reports that towards the end of WWII, "A contingent of White Russians, who had been
fighting in the German Army, had recently crossed the Liechtenstein frontier
and had been given asylum."
16. The President's father, Joseph Kennedy, who became a Knight of SMOM
March 13, 1945, had been withdrawn as U.S. Ambassador to London when
his sympathies for the Third Reich became known. See, e.g., Higham, op.
cit., n. 7., at p.181.

34 CovertAction

SMOM and P-2

Freemasonry generally purports to be hostile to Catholicism,
and conversely, the Vatican has at various times forbidden
Catholics to join Masonic organizations. Nevertheless, in December of 1969 an exclusive meeting was held in the Rome office of Count Umberto Ortolani, the Ambassador of the Order
of Malta to Uruguay, who has been called "the brains" behind
the fascist P-2 Masonic Lodge, which had been established in
the mid-1960s." In addition to Ortolani, the meeting included
only Licio Gelli, Roberto Calvi, and Michele Sindona.21
Gelli had fought for Franco (who was himself a Bailiff
Grand Cross of SMOM) with Mussolini's troops during the
Spanish Civil War. He was a committed fascist during WW II
and at the end of the war was wanted by the partisans for collaborating with the Nazis. After the war he developed extensive interests in Latin America where he became close friends
with the Argentinean dictator Juan Peron; he was also the
Grand Master of P-2.22
Calvi had fought on the Eastern front during the war and was
decorated by the Nazis. At the time of the 1969 meeting he was
a senior officer at Banco Ambrosiano.
Sindona had set up business in 1943 with the help of Vito
Genovese, whose Mafia contacts facilitated the American
landing on Sicily. By 1948 Sindona had received a letter of in17. McCone, from a senior post at ITT, was later to play a key role in the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973. At the time of the coup J. Peter
Grace was Chairman of the AIFLD, and a director of First National City Bank
and Kennecott Copper Co., all of which played a role in the fascist coup. (See,
Fred Hirsch and Richard Fletcher, CIA and the Labor Movement (London:
Spokesman Books, 1977), pp. 16, ff.; and NACLA Report "Amazing Grace:
The W. R. Grace Corporation" vol.X, no.3, March 1976.) W. R. Grace Company senior vice-president Anthony Navarro, who had earlier been involved in
armed fighting against the Castro government in Cuba, was recently nominated to the Advisory Committee of Radio Marti; the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Board on Radio Broadcasting to Cuba, Jorge Mas Canosa,
according to the New York Times of Aug.5, 1984, is a Cuban businessman in
Miami, who took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and was a
commentator on Radio Swan, an anti-Castro station that was operated by the
CIA.
18. See, Laurent, op. cit., n. 9; and Christie, op. cit., n. 10.
19. See, Christie, op. cit., n. 10; and Laurent, op. cit., n. 9.
20. Journal de Geneve, November 11, 1981. 21. Larry Gurwin, The Calvi Affair (London: Pan Books, 1984), p.15.
22. Gelli had chartered the plane which brought Peron back to Argentina in
1972 and was an honored guest at his inauguration; shortly thereafter Lopez
Rega, Peron's Minister of Social Welfare who ran the Argentine death squads
and who was an astrologer and mystic, joined P-2.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

troduction to Vatican intelligence operative Montini. According to Larry Gurwin's The Calvi Affair,
One of Sindona's first steps in cultivating the Vatican's
money men occurred in the late 1950s when through a
priest, he met Prince Massimo Spada, a Vatican nobleman
and the senior layman at IOR. [Massimo Spada had become
a Knight of Malta on September 21, 1944. IOR, the Istituto
per le Opere di Religione (Institute for Religious Works),
known generally as the Vatican Bank, was created in 1942
by Pius XII.] At the same time he nurtured his friendship
with Giovanni Montini, who had become cardinal-archbishop of Milan in 1954.
In 1959 Montini needed to raise a large sum of money for an
old people's home, and he turned to Sindona for help. Sindona reportedly raised $2 million in a single day. In 1960
Sindona purchased a small Milanese bank called Banca
Privata and, thanks to his Vatican friendships, it soon began
receiving deposits from IOR. Three years later Montini was
elected Pope Paul VI and Sindona's Vatican connections
were unbeatable.723
'"
The Italian journal L'Espresso of June 28, 1981 indicates
that numbers of high ranking members of the Italian military
Intelligence organizations were both SMOMs and members of
P-2. The list of dual members included General Santovito, the
former head of SISMI; Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, the head of
the general staff of the Army; and General Giovanni Allavena,
head of the intelligence service (then Sifar, which was later
split into SISDE and SISMI).
The conclusion of the affair is generally known. When, in
1983, the Vatican was finally forced to establish an "independent" commission to study the relationship between its IOR
(since 1970and stillheaded by Chicago-born Bishop Paul
Marcinkus) and the P-2/Banco Ambrosiano criminal fascists,
two of the three members selected were Hermann Abs and
Joseph Brennan.

Bishop Paul Marcinkus, still runs IOR.

Abs, who features in nearly every book on the Third Reich
and the Nuremberg trials, was Hitler's paymaster, as chairman
2 3.

Gurvvin, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 11, 12. See also, David A. Yallup, In God's
Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam, 1984).

i) .

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

of the Deutsche Bank from 1940 to 1945, and was a member of

the board of I.G. Farben. He regained the board chairmanships
of both firms after the war, even though in Yugoslavia he had
been convicted of war crimes in absentia. In 1953 he received
the Great Federal Service Cross for his services in restoring
West Germany's financial power; and in 1960 he was decorated by Franco for his "services" to fascist Spain."
The choice of Abs for the Vatican commission of inquiry
was so outrageous that at the urging of Charles Higham, the
Wiesenthal Center issued a special packet of documents clearly
showing Abs's involvement in war crimes and publicly protested to the Vatican, all to no avail.
Joseph Brennan is the Chairman of the executive committee
of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York and a Knight of
Malta.
SMOM, Americares, and Central America
Just as World Medical Relief and Refugee Relief International are fronts for Waffen-SS worshipping editors of Soldier
of Fortune magazine, so too the SMOM advertises itselfto
those who believe in the Tooth Fairyas a "charitable" organization greatly concerned for the suffering of the poor and
sick around the world.
The New York Times of August 13, 1985 reported that the
Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (NFF), one of many front groups
for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, channelled $350,000 to the Americares Foundation in Connecticut.'
Clare Boothe Luce, a Dame of SMOM, is on the Board of
Moon's Washington Times, and is a director of the NFF with
fellow SMOM, William Simon. J. Peter Grace is the Chairman
of the six member Advisory Board of Americares, which includes fellow Knight William Simon along with former CIA
Director George Bush's brother, Prescott Bush, Jr.
Americares' published "Fact Sheet" recites as specific projects:
Medical Shipments to El Salvador: Since November 1983
AMERICARES has shipped almost 700,000 pounds of
medicines and supplies valued at over $8,000,000 in 15 sea
shipments with local distribution being handled through the
Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM).
Guatemala: In response to a request for aid from the Order
of the Knights of Malta, 10 sea shipments of medical
supplies worth over $4,000,000 have been sent to the people
of Guatemala since January 1984.
Honduras: Since August 1984, three sea shipments of high
priority medical supplies worth over $1,000,000 were sent
to the people of Honduras in response to a request for aid
from the Order of the Knights of Malta. . . .
Brazil, October 1984: A shipment of vitamins worth
$156,075 were sent to Brazil, again in response to a request
from the Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM) who serve
as our consignees in Central and South America.
The "Fact Sheet" also discusses an "offshoot" of Americares called "Doctors To All Peoples" said to be "dedicated
to the eradication of leprosy in the Americas." Leprosy is the
most publicized international "charity project" of SMOM.
24. Yallup, op. cit., n. 23, p. 323; National Council of the National Front of
Democratic Germany, Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany
(Berlin: Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the
German Democratic Republic, n.d. [c. 1966]), p. 39.
25. See also, Washington Post, May 9, 1985, p. 34.

CovertAction 35

The Washington Post of December 27, 1984 reported as follows:

A private humanitarian organization called the Americares
Foundation, working with the Order of the Knights of
Malta, has channeled more than $14 million in donated medical aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala over the
last two years. . . .
[P]art of $680,000 in aid to Honduras went to Miskito Indians linked to U.S. backed rebels fighting the leftist government in Nicaragua, according to a Knights of Malta official in Honduras.

Much of the $3.4 million in Americares' medical aid to

Guatemala has been distributed through the armed forces as
part of its resettlement program of "model villages" aimed
at defeating leftist insurgents, said the official, Guatemalan
businessman Roberto Alejos.
Alejos, co-chaiiman of the Knights of Malta in Honduras
[said], . . . the Guatemalan army delivers Americares
medicine to people in model villages, which are along the
Mexican border.
Alejos, a major sugar and coffee grower, lent his Guatemalan estates to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1960 to
train Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

0),

The

it

er" Orders of the Knights of Malta

Not only are there many existing orders of chivalry

today, generally under the aegis of a reigning, monarch or
ruling house, but there are also rival organizations each
claiming to be the rightful heirs to the same order. Nowhere
is this more true than with the Knights of Malta.
According to the Catholic Herald of August 23, 1985,
there are more than twenty organizations claiming to be the
"real" Knights of Malta. On September 9, 1985, evidently
in response to growing interest in the question, the Wall
Street Journal ran a cover story, "Looking for a Title or
Hot Controversy? See Knights of Malta. The Problem Is
Which Ones; Catholic Order Maintains Rival Groups are
Bogus." (The New York Sunday News had described the
rivalry as early as June 15, 1975.)
The legitimacy battle is often intense and steeped in the
presentation of increasingly obscure documentation. Arnaud Chaffanjon and Bertrand Galimard Flavigny's Ordres
et Contre-Ordres de Chevalerie (Paris: Mercure de France,
1982), is one of the more useful references.
Some of the rival "Orders of Malta," all with slightly
different names, in fact claim important and extremely
rightwing members. We believe that the Catholic, Romebased Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) remains
the most important, with the endorsement of the Vatican
and most of the Catholic ruling houses of Europe, and members like those discussed in the text of this article. The
British (and generally, though not exclusively Protestant)
Venerable Order, discussed in the text, is affiliated with a
number of European, Protestant Orders, such as the Johanniterorden, sometimes known as the Bailiwick of Brandenberg.
Two of the "Orders of Malta" which have received particular attention recently are what may be called the
"Shickshinny" Order and the "von Brancovan" Order.
The Shickshinny Order, officially called "The Sovereign
Order of Saint John of Jerusalem," has been headed by Col.
Thourot Pichel in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, although a
few years ago the Order was torn by serious internal rifts
between Pichel and the late Frank Capella Contributing
Editor of the John Birch Society's Review of the News.
(See, Rev. Anthony Cekada, Light on the OSJ, from the
Oyster Bay, New York The Roman Catholic, December
1981, for an article critical of the Order and discussing
some of its recent history.) It traces its legitimacy from a

dispute during the time the Order spent in Russia under Czar
Paul after it fled Malta. This Order achieved some notoriety
a few years ago when it officially recognized the claims of
controversial defector Michael Goleniewski to be Aleksei
Romanoff, heir to the Russian Imperial House of
Romanoff.
The case would be less interesting if James Angleton
were not one of the principal supporters of Goleneiwski
and some extremely rightwing members of the military intelligence community were not listed as members in a document issued by the Order in 1970. The Order listed as members of its Military Affairs Committee, under the Chairmanship of Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd, Maj. Gen. Charles A.
Willoughby, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, and Gen. Pedro A.
del Valle (who according to Stuart Christie's Stefano delle
Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy
Magazine, 1984), p. 6, invited Italian neo-Nazi Guido
Giannettini to the U.S. to conduct a seminar at the U.S.
Naval Academy at Annapolis, where del Valle was Commander. Foster & Epstein's Danger on the Right (New
York: Random House, 1964), p.79; and Janson & Eismann's The Far Right (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963),
p.154, both call del Valle an anti-Semite.)
The Honorary Grand Admiral of the Order is listed as
Admiral Sir Barry Domvile who had been jailed by the
British during WW II as a Nazi agent, and was listed as a
Contributing Editor of Willis Carto's Western Destiny,
November 1965, when Roger Pearson was the Editor. The
Associate Chief of International Intelligence listed was Herman E. Kimsey, a high-ranking CIA operative, now deceased, who had worked with the Army CIC during the
war.
The von Brancovan Order, led by someone who calls
himself Prince Robert I3assaraba von Brancovan and several
other names as well, including Prince Khimchiachvili, is officially titled -The Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order
of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta Ecumenical."
It is the order which apparently claims Frank Sinatra as a
member. It also claims to include Princes Arnaldo and
Basilio Petrucci. It appears to have a connection to Umberto
Stafanizzi who, with. Francesco Pazienza, signed the incorporation papers for something else called the "Sovereign
Order of Saint John, Knights of Malta, Inc., " which was
0
incorporated in New York State, June 22, 1983.

44.
36 CovertAction

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Asked why the Knights of Malta turned to Americares rather

than to established aid groups, such as the Red Cross, Grace
said, "The Knights have been doing this for 900 years. They
have their own cross [the Maltese cross]. . . They'd consider themselves way beyond the Red Cross." . . .
[A]t least one pro-government group, the Air Commando
Association of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., claims to have used
Knights of Malta warehouses in El Salvador. Retired general
H. C. Aderholt, head of the 1,500-member group, [said] that
the commandos delivered food and medicine to the Knights'
facilities and that together they "get good support from the
Salvadoran air force commander."
Aderholt said the association has distributed to El Salvador
$4.5 million in food and medicine provided by the Christian
Broadcasting Network and World Medical Relief. He said
liberals in Congress have tried to "tie to some sinister plan
with the CIA" [sic], which he said is incorrect.
While the Post story does mention that CIA Director William Casey is a SMOM, it fails to point out that Aderholt is the
"Unconventional Operations" Contributing Editor of Soldier
of Fortune and was a member of the "Singlaub panel" of the
Pentagon, set up to devise new counterinsurgency strategies in
the developing countries. Russ Bellant, in the Detroit Metro
Times of October 9, 1985, says Aderholt claimed that Pat

SMOM, Grace,
and Obando y Bravo
On August 1, 1985 the New York Times reported that
during a visit to New York in May, Archbishop Miguel
Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua said that he is actively directing efforts by his diocese to prevent the government
from imposing a communist system in Nicaragua. The
Archbishop said efforts included "dividing his diocese
into old and new units, including parishes, districts and
smaller groups, for leadership and religious training."
He claimed the training he established in Managua was
for ``pastoral cadres, not military cadres... " Following a meeting with Archbishop Obando, executives at
W. R. Grace arranged for the Santa Kenedy East Foundation to contribute copies of the Bible, rosary beads and
other supplies to aid the church effort, a company executive said. The foundation is headed by J. Peter Grace.
Whatever the real purpose of the "leadership training" and "pastoral cadres," it apparently seemed like
such a splendid idea to the Knights that a June 21, 1985
press release from the Erlich-Manes & Associates News
Service of Bethesda, Maryland stated that the Southern
Association of SMOM had sent a $5.5 million shipment
of "40 massive containers" to be loaded on the ship
"Freedom" to be sent to Maputo, Mozambique.
"Roughly half of the shipment will go to aid agricultural
development in northern Mozambique; and half will be
distribu ed directly to the poor through the Archbishop of
Maputo's Catholic Charities." Eugene I. Kane, a Knight
and head of the trucking company Intermodal, Inc. organized the project. Official documents of SMOM list
such "charitable" projects in many countries throughout
the world.
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network had given the

Knights of Malta $2 million for operations in Central America.
Conclusion
For many years progressive groups in the U.S. and elsewhere have been engaged in extensive research into so-called
"secular" state and private organizations such as the CIA,
NSC, the military, private corporations, and foundations.
This article highlights the operative importance of members
of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which unlike traditional corporate, governmental, and foundation entities, has
not yet adequately come under the scrutiny of progressive researchers. Curiously, European researchers have all but ig
nored the Orders of Chivalry in analyzing the structural role of
their own aristocracy in organizing support for international
reaction and fascist terror.
Research into the current role of SMOM and its individual
members is just beginning. The most serious problem is the
dearth'of documents available, due to the extreme secrecy of
the organization. Except for a few scattered references in various books, magazines, and newspapers, and a few romanticized stories about ancient glories of the Order, the necessary
amount of materials has not yet surfaced, and this account represents only a starting point for further research."
In the U.S., for example, although the 1980 membership list
was published (National Catholic Reporter, October 14,
1983), since then the Order in the U.S. has grown and been di
vided into an Eastern, Southern (based in D.C.), and Western
Association. The published 1980 list comprises primarily
members in the Northeast. Although some others are known,
complete and current lists of members in other regions is obvi
ously crucial. Lists for other countries would also be helpful.
CAIB in its Winter 1983 issue, "The CIA and Religion,"
and Spring 1985 issue, "Disconnecting the Bulgarian Connection," began to explore the operational role of specific religious, or non-secular , organizations such as Opus Dei " and the
26. Interested readers should also refer to the articles by Martin Lee on the
SMOM which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter of October 14,
1983 (the issue which included the complete 1980 U.S. membership list), and
Mother Jones of July 1983. (These two articles formed the basis for the references to SMOM in Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts The Year of Armageddon (London: Granada Publishing Ltd, 1984).)
An interesting discussion of some post-WW II SMOM history based around
an account of the 1949-53 attempts by Vatican-centered Rightists to restrict the
sovereignty of the Order is Knights of Malta by the conservative French author
Roger Peyrefitte originally published by Flammarion in 1957, and translated
into English and published in New York by Criterion Books in 1959.
King and Luke's The Knights of St. John in the British Realm, op. cit., n. 6,
is useful although it does try to elevate Queen Victoria's creation of the Venerable Order to a status equal to that of SMOM.
The Italian journal L'Espresso of June 28, 1981 carried an article by Alessandre de Feo on the SMOM-P-2 connection. The rightist French magazine
Historia had a special issue in 1980 on various Orders of Chivalry including
SMOM. Also in French is the remarkable Souvenirs et Reflections by Yves
Marsaudon; former Minister of SMOM in France who was also one of the
highest ranking members of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the country, (Paris: Editions Vitiano, 20 Rue Chauchat, 75009 Paris, 1976).
27. Francis X. Stankard, Knight of SMOM and Chief Executive Officer of the
International Division of Chase Manhattan Bank has led "Evenings of Conversation" at the Opus Dei Headquarters at the Riverside Study Center, 330
Riverside Drive, New York City. Other SMOMs at these sessions included
William Simon and Frank Shakespeare (now Ambassador to Portugal), both of
whom are Trustees of the Heritage Foundation, of which Shakespeare was
Chairman of the Board. Evenings of Conversation, a pamphlet distributed in
1984 by Riverside Study Center.
Recognition of the importance of Opus Dei at the highest levels of SMOM
had already been established in the summer of 1976 when King Juan-Carlos,

CovertAction 37

fascist Masonic lodge P-2 in western intelligence operations

and in furthering imperialism's plans.
The recent P-2 scandal in Italy and new evidence on the importance of various ancient Orders of Chivalry (in particular
himself a Knight of Malta, chose Adolfo Suarez, a member of Opus Dei, as
new chief of government following the death of Franco. (Point de Vue, January 14, 1983; Paris.) On Opus Dei see also, New Statesman, 1 March 1985,
pp.20,21; London Times, January 12, 1981; Le Monde, August 25, and September 28, 29 1982; National Catholic Reporter, September 10, and
November 12, 1982; Financial Times, November 11, 1983; New York Times
Magazine, January 8, 1984; Time magazine, June 11, 1984, p.74; New Times
(Moscow), No.13, 1982, p.27; Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1982.

SMOM) indicate that further research into these additional

non-secular "parapolitical" structures is necessary both to understand their role as independent organizations and to gain a
better understanding of factional alignments within organizations which have already come under scrutiny.
As with "secular" organizations, rivalries among these
"non-secular" organizations takes place within an environment of selective interlinking memberships which include secular structures as well. The way competing policies and loyalties of these non-secular structures influence members in their
secular roles needs considerable further research.

Well-Known Knigh
In addition to those listed in the article, the following are
some other Knights of SMOM of interest:
Francis Vincent Ortiz, Jr.: according to the 1982-83
Who's Who in America, had been, among other posts,
-dep. chief of mission Am. Embasy, Montevideo,
Uruguay, 1970-73, charg d'affairs, 1973; country director
for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, Dept. of State
1973-75, dep. exec. sec., 1975-77; Amb. to Barbados and
Grenada, spl. rep. to Antigua, Dominica, St. ChristopherNevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, from 1977; U.S.
Amb. Guatemala 1979-81, to Peru 1981-; spl. asst. for international affairs U.S. So. Command, Panama 1980-";
since November 18, 1983 he has been the U.S. Ambassador
to Argentina.
Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.: also a Knight of the Order of
St. Sylvester of which William Donovan was a member. He
is a longstanding funder of rightwing causes including Fred
Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. His wife is
a Dame of SMOM and is Publisher of the National Catholic
Register of California, whose editor, Francis X. Maier was
formerly with National Review. Maier was the first Chairman of the Catholic Center for Renewal, whose President,
Philip F. Lawler, is the Director of Studies of the Heritage
Foundation (which was chaired by Knight of SMOM Frank
Shakespeare, newly appointed Ambassador to Portugal).
Paul-Louis Weiller: Grand Cross of Merit SMOM, a
close friend of Richard Nixon, member of the Board of Directors of Renault and several other French industrial corporations, former Administrateur of Air France, whose son
married the cousin of Spanish King Juan-Carlos. (See also,
Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: William Morrow, 1978),
pp. 209-225, which suggests that Weiller was "the French
Connection.' ')
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: Munich correspondent of
William l3uckley's National Review.
Admiral James D. Watkins, Reagan's recently named
Chief of Naval Operations.
Thomas Bolan: law partner of Roy Cohn. Bolan is also
Counsel to the Human Life Foundation of which former
CIA officer and Managing Editor of National Review, Priscilla Buckley (William's sister) is a Director.
O Jeremiah Denton: U. S. Senator from Alabama, 1980present; former rear admiral, captured by the Vietnamese
while murdering people and held as a POW 1965-1973,
38 CovertAction

consultant to Pat Robertson of Christian Broadcasting Network, 1978-80.

Pete Domenici: U.S. Senator from New Mexico 1972present.
Spiros S. Skouras: President Prudential Lines 1960present, bought Grace Lines 1969.
William A. Schreyer: President Merrill Lynch 1978present; Chairman since 1981.
Walter J. Hickel: former governor of Alaska 1966-69,
Secretary of the Interior 1969-1970.
Antoine Pinay: Grand Cross of Merit, head of Government in France in 1952. He led the rightwing party CNIP
and was linked to the "Sniffing-plane" scandal, as well as a
project with Brian Crozier and American agents to make
Franz Joseph Strauss head of the German government.
Mme. Raymond Barre: Grand Cross of Merit, wife of
the rightist French politician.
Bernard Dorin: French attach to Ottawa 1957-1959;
Ambassador to Haiti 1972-1974, and Ambassador to South
Africa from 1978 until at least 1981.

Paul-Louis Weiner, the French Connection?

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Klaus Barbie: A Killer's Career

By Kai Hermann *

Kai Hermann is a free-lance writer who has worked on the

editorial staffs of the German publications Stem, Spiegel, and
Die Zeit. He spent two years investigating Klaus Barbie, including a year in Bolivia, from which he made a hurried exit
when his identity as an investigative journalist became known.
A colleague continued the on-the-scene investigation, and the
results of the work appeared in a series in Stem in May and
June, 1984. The following translation is of one of the six articles, explaining Klaus Barbie' s major role in the 1980 Bolivian coup.

The fourteen months of imprisonment had taken its toll on

Mingolla. Yes, of course he wanted to talk. He was fed up with
the fascists who had not lifted a finger to help him after his arrest. He was no longer a Nazi; he was now working for the
democrats.
Alfredo Mingolla thought we were contact people from the
Austrian information agency, working for his release, in order
to use him in an international narcotics investigation.
We asked about his education. He said that after he completed his theology degree, he went to the "agent school" in
Buenos Aires.

The first time we only saw Alfredo Mario Mingolla from

afar. It was in front of the presidential palace in La Paz. Vicepresident Jaime Paz, surrounded by his bodyguards, slowly
went across the square and approached the palace. We had gotten a hint that "something would happen."
But nothing indicated anything unusual on this morning.
The old men on the benches moved into the shade. It was cool,
but the sun was already beginning to bum the skin. The Bolivian capital La Paz is almost 4,000 meters above sea level. The
shoeshine children, the youngest barely older than four, with
large, old eyes, begged in vain to shine the men's shoes. The
pickpockets were still waiting for the tourists. Indian women
begged, steadfastly stretching their felt hats into space, and
were just as motionless as their children cowering on the
ground with dirty faces.
Then some kind of command was shouted. A man ran, attempted to escape into a side street, was overpowered and
dragged into the palace.
The man was the Argentinean intelligence agent, Lieutenant
Alfredo Mario Mingolla. He was arrested for preparing the assassination of the Bolivian Vice-president. An accomplice had
betrayed the murder plan.
That was on November 28, 1982. A good year later we were
sitting across from Alfredo Mingolla in the conference room of
the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior. The Argentinean was
fetched from a basement cell in the ministry.
* Copyright 1984 by Kai Hermann. Published with the kind permission of
the author. Translation by Marie Louise Ryback. Translation copyright
1985 by Marie Louise Ryback. A photocopy of her translation of the entire sixpart series (54 pp.) is available from Ms. Ryback, 36 Charles St., Boston, MA
02114, for $15.00, postpaid.

Number 25 (Winter 1986)

The Argentinean intelligence agent, Alfredo Mario Mingolla, in jail in Bolivia.

CovertAction 15

"Were there also American teachers?"

Mingolla: "Not any more. We had Israelis as specialists. I
was later trained by North Americans in Panama at the Escuela
de las Americas."
In what area did you specialize?"
"Infiltrating the Catholic Church. To seek out subversives in
the church, etc."
"Did you prepare the death list?"
"We should agree that I will not say anything about my personal work."
"But where have you worked?"
"Different places. Also one time in Spain. But mostly in
Argentina. Then we had to leave Argentina before the world
soccer championship 1978 because of the human rights propaganda. Most of them are in Central America. I went to
Bolivia. In 1982 I was sent to Guatemala. There I worked
primarily with the North Americans. That was the best time."
Alfredo Mingolla belonged to that mercenary unit of international assassins and torture experts who were first tested under
the leadership of the Argentinean intelligence agency during
the Pinochet putsch in Chile in 1973. They then helped organize and execute the political mass murder in Argentina before being used in other Latin American countries against the
"subversives" against guerrillas, leftist democrats, or Catholic clergymen.
Mingolla plays the role of the educated priest. He speaks
softly, talks about banalities convincingly, folds his hands,
looks the person across from him intently in the eyes. He was
the fanatical ideologue among his equals; a national socialist
priest.
We asked him who he had worked for in Bolivia.
Mingolla: "What do you mean? For everybody; Argentineans, Bolivians, CIA."
We were able to speak with Alfredo Mingolla two days later
and read the transcript of his interrogation by the police.

The Argentinean lieutenant gave information about the coup

d'etat of 1980 in Bolivia. It confirmed the information about
the fascist scene from investigations by the Bolivian Ministry
of the Interior and statements by the French intelligence organization.
The 1980 Bolivian Coup
The 1980 putsch was not just one of many coups d'etat by
power-hungry generals in Bolivia. It was two years in the planning and was supposed to complete a "stable axis" in South
Americafrom Chile, through Argentina, Uruguay, and
Paraguay, to Bolivia. The coups in Chile in 1973 and in Argentina in 1976 were examples.
That is how it is stated in a plan with the code name Amapole
(poppy flower) which had already been devised in 1978 at the
initiative of the Bolivian intelligence officer Klaus Altmann,
i.e., Klaus Barbie. The political, economic, and military aspects of the planned putsch were set' forth in 145 pages. Klaus
Barbie himself prepared the military part.
The Bolivian banker, Dr. Enrique Garcia, had the responsibility of planning the economic direction of the new order"
after the putsch. U.S. institutions paid him for his work. Under
the heading "logical framework" Garcia designed an
economic order for Bolivia using Chile as an example. If one
believes the designer of the plan, there were very definite foreign promises of investmentsunder the stipulation that the
economy in no way be jeopardized by leftist parties or "subversive groups" for at least ten years. U.S. concerns accordingly promised an oil refinery, a truck assembly plant and a
Ford factory. Argentina wanted to secure the exploitation of
the ore deposits in Mutun with long term credits.
In Bolivia in 1978 another transition phase from military
dictatorship to democracy began. Elections were held and annulled by the military. Barbie assumed that within the next two
years it would come to the establishment of a powerless civil-

Klaus Barbie's Bolivian intelligence ID, showing him as Klaus Altmann Hansen.
Number 25 (Winter 1986)
16 CovertAction

Rauff's mobile gas chamber.

ian government. He speculated that in the power vacuum of the
transition period armed leftist extremist groups would again
develop. A leftist guerrilla was supposed to be the alibi for an
"Argentinean solution"the physical liquidation of the leftists in Bolivia.
Early in 1978 Klaus Barbie flew to West Germany, among
other reasons to recruit soldiers. He started with the buildup of
his terror commandos. Barbie also took up contact with the
Argentinean intelligence organization which, at the time, along
with the CIA, insured the maintenance of the old dictatorships
in various Latin American countries. The contact man to the
Argentineans was the Italian, Dr. Emilio Carbone, steady
guest at Barbie's table in the Caf La Paz.
Carbone was a member of a group supporting the Italian
neofascist terrorist, Stefano delle Chiaie. The group had come
to Chile in 1976 and had taken on special assignments for the
intelligence organization DINA. The address of the group:
Calle de la Asuncion 1173, Santiago.
On the recommendation of an old SS comrade in Chile,
Walter Rauff, the inventor of the portable gas chamber wagon
and DINA employee, Barbie had brought the Italian Carbone
to Bolivia at the end of 1976.
Carbone was more of a theoretician than a practitioner of
political assassinations. In La Paz he became secretary of the
"Black International," a fascist group.
The other Italians from delle Chiaie's group moved on in
November 1977 to Argentina, and there, under Colonel Molinari, the Secretary of State Security, were used in the "Fight
Against Subversion." Early in 1978 Barbie assigned his colleague Carbone to take up contact with the leader of the Italian
execution commandos, Stefano delle Chiaie, and to recruit him
for a mission in Bolivia.
The Argentinean intelligence organization sent a special
commando group to La Paz. Among the first Argentinean intelligence officers who worked on the plans for the overthrow
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

in Bolivia was Lieutenant Alfred Mario Mingolla. The Argentinean had the order to contact Altmann, alias Barbie.
Mingolla: "I had not heard much about Altmann; however,
before our departure we received a dossier on him. There it
stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played
an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against
communism. From the dossier it was also clear that Altmann
worked for the Americans. They listed his contact people as
well as his various trips to the U.S."
Argentinean intelligence people and German soldiers who
came to La Paz went the same route. They first reported to Dr.
Alfredo Candia, the Bolivian leader of the "World Anti-Communist League," an organization close to the CIA with headquarters in Taiwan. Candia then brought them to Schneider's
clock shop. The owner, of German descent, likes to show his
comrades a picture in which Hitler's party secretary Martin
Bormann, who had allegedly vanished in 1945, is to be seen in
a monk's habit in La Paz. Schneider checked out the new recruits and ordered them to meet with Barbie the next day at the
driving school "Indianapolis" on the Avenida Mariscal, Santa
Cruz. Barbie's secretary, Alvaro de Castro, then provided
them with a two-year visa, Interpol identification, and firearm
licenses from the Ministry of the Interior.
The Argentinean agents moved into the offices of the military intelligence agency G2, department VII for "psychological warfare." In addition, some of the Germans, such as
Joachim Fiebelkorn, became agents for the Bolivian intelligence organization.

Joachim Fiebelkorn, left, giving Nazi salute after

putsch in Bolivia. Fiebelkorn was commander of Barbie's battalion, the Fiancs of Death. After Garcia Meza
was deposed in October 1982, Barbie was deported to
France, and Fiebelkorn was delivered to West German
authorities on drug charges.
In Frankfurt, Fiebelkorn's trial, which includes
charges of torturing a girl, has been dragging on for almost two years. He is also wanted in Italy, along with
Stefano delle Chiaie, for the terrorist bombing of the
Bologna railway station in 1980, which killed 85 people.
Sources speculate that his trial may never be completed
because of his claims that his work with the cocaine generals was part of his assignment as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operative. There is also considerable speculation whether Barbie will ever go to trial in
0
France, because of his CIA ties.
CovertAction 17

Barbie wanted to launch a national socialist government

from the planned coup. The leading rightists of the Bolivian
military became members of the secret lodge "Thule." During
lodge meetings Barbie lectured underneath swastikas and by
candlelight on national socialist principles.
Barbie agreed with the terrorist leader Stefano delle Chiaie
that armed rightist-extremist groups from the whole world
should be brought together. Bolivia was to become the core of
a national socialist revolution in all of South America. The
"Black International" outfitted an ideological and paramilitary
training camp for foreign comrades in buildings belonging to
the "Summer Institute of Linguistics," a CIA-controlled institution.
Barbie's closest colleagues organized a national socialist
fighter's group, the Bolivia Joven, "Young Bolivia," modeled after the example of the SA. The co-founders were Barbie's confidant Emilio Carbone and Barbie's secretary, Alvaro
de Castro. The official leader of the Young Bolivians was the
thirty-year-old Armando Leyton, intelligence agent and disciple of national socialism.
Leyton proudly shows his membership ID with "Reichs"
eagle and swastika. He would like to meet the German neoNazi Michael Kuhnen. He says that he admires the Germans,
but qualifies this: "Some of the Germans who came to us at
that timesuch as Joachim Fiebelkorn, for examplewere
not good national socialists. In my eyes they were simply mercenaries who knew nothing about national socialist morale and
discipline. They only wanted part of the cocaine money."
Final Preparations
In the spring of 1980 Klaus Barbie and his accomplices
made the last preparations for the putsch. In the meantime, in
La Paz, a civilian cabinet had been sworn in and the tempered
middle-left coalition under Siles won new elections. The left
guerrillas, on whom Barbie had counted, did not exist. Then
the Bolivia Joven, with the support of Barbie's foreign terrorist groups, stepped into action. Bombs detonated throughout
the entire country.
In May 1980, another commando of the Argentinean intelligence organization, SIE, came to La Paz. The group, working
under orders from Lieutenant Colonel Julio Cesar Duran, was
responsible for carrying out the putsch and for "professionalizing the Bolivian security apparatus." Delegated to the group
were both italian terrorists Stefano delle Chiaie and Pierluigi
Pagliai, who was wanted, among other reasons, for murdering
a functionary of the communist youth in Italy.
The foreign agent team was later completed with two Israeli
specialists. Barbie had nothing against Israelis when they were
"military security experts."
The Bolivian military putsch of July 17, 1980 was almost
exclusively directed and organized by foreigners. The only important Bolivian players were General Luiz Garcia Meza and
Colonel Luis Arce Gomez who had been earmarked as Junta
leaders. They were considered the toughest in the right extremist officers' clique.
Nevertheless, Barbie encountered opposition from the military when he, together with the Argentineans, prepared an execution list: 185 politicians, union members, and intellectuals
were supposed to be liquidated during the putsch. High ranking
officers who, learned of the plan discovered friends and relatives among the "subversives" who were supposed to be "liquidated." Barbie and his accomplices could not put through
the "Argentinean solution."
18 CovertAction

The mysterious and elusive Italian terrorist Stefano delle

Chiaie, still at large.
A few days before the scheduled date of the putsch, Joachim
Fiebelkorn, the commander of the paramilitary troupe in Santa
Cruz, received the order from Barbie's secretary, Alvaro de
Castro, to come to La Paz with his armed battalion. Fiebelkorn
called Barbie, who then confirmed the order. Barbie's secretary Castro received the German-Bolivian commando at La Paz
airport and channeled two suitcases filled with weapons
through customs. For two days Fiebelkorn inspected the capital's strategically important points before returning once again
to Santa Cruz with his comrades.
Barbie and the commanding general of Santa Cruz,
Echeveria, argued about the competency of Fiebelkorn's action
unit, the "Fiances of Death." The general insisted on using the
Fiances in the putsch of Santa Cruz.
Only one of the paramilitary men from Santa Cruz, the infamous killer Mosca Monroi, arrived punctually in La Paz.
There, by mistake, Monroi killed, among others, the guard of a
secret U.S. transmitter.
The putsch was more precisely planned and executed than
any other putsch in Bolivia's history. The paramilitary stormed
the union hall and the party headquarters. Almost all potential
leaders of the resistance were arrested within hours, The brutality of the terrorist groups and the military frightened off the
workers and students. Only the Indians from the tin mines desperately resisted for another few days. As with any overthrow,
most of the victims were among them.
The coup of July 17, 1980 had many victors. The fascists
celebrated the national socialist takeover of power with swastika flags and the greeting, "Heil Hitler!" Those supporting a
free market system for Latin America believed that socialism
had been averted. Washington, despite reservations about such
officers as Garcia and Arce, could hope for a stable government, sympathetic to the U.S. The Argentinean military dictators had extended their sphere of influence.
The Role of the Moonies
The first official well-wisher who yisited the newly coronated president Garcia was a surprise, at least for outsiders: He
was the acting leader of the Moonies, Colonel Bo Hi Pak. The
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

representative of the sect's founder Moon announced after his

return to the U.S.: "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in
the world's highest city."
According to the legally recognized assessment of four clergymen from Hessen [a West German state], the Moon sect is a
"criminal union that espouses human psychological terror and
proclaims a fascist system." The Moon sect possesses, among
other things, munitions factories in South Korea and television
channels in South America. They regard their founder, Moon,
as "Holy Father," President Reagan as the world's "political
s a v ior . "
A representative of the Moon sect had come to Bolivia at the
end of the 1960s. On the thirteenth floor of the Jazmin building
in La Paz an Asian named Harumiko Iwasawa sat with some
Americans and no one seemed to know what they were actually
doing there.
It was not until 1983 that the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior and Bolivian journalists determined that the gentlemen
from the Moon sectas well as othershad invested about $4
million into the preparation of the coup. Membership lists of
the political Moon organization "Causa" were found. At the
top of the lists were the names of almost all the leading military
personnel who, at the same time, had been honoring the swastika in Barbie's lodge. Even junta leader Garcia had been converted to the "Moonies" for a time.
Barbie was skeptical of the sect's activities but had to accept
the Moon people as allies.
On May 31, 1981, nine months after the cocaine generals'
coup, almost the entire leadership of the Moon sect and their
Latin American political organization Causa flew to La Paz.
Before 200 invited guests in the Sheraton Hotel's "Hall of
Freedom," Moon's representative Colonel Pak and the Bolivian junta leader Garcia began by praying for U.S. President
Reagan who had been wounded in an assassination attempt.
Pak then explained, "God had chosen the Bolivian people in
the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.
The Moon organization Causa started their political missionary work throughout the entire country. Fifty thousand of the
sect's booksaccording to a Bolivian intelligence agency reportwere brought to La Paz by an American Air Force plane.
Along with ideological "enlightenment," the education of an
anti-communist "people's army" for an "armed church"
began. Around 7,000 Bolivians took part in the pre-military
training. The Israeli Embassy supported the campaign and delivered, among other things, instructional films about the fight
against the Palestinian resistance.
The leader of the Moon group in Bolivia was Thomas (Tom)
Ward. Barbie and the pale American Ward, who always
seemed to be absorbed in prayer, were often seen together.
Tom Ward was also the man who delivered a payment from
the CIA in early 1981 to the Argentinean intelligence Lieutenant Alfredo Mingolla. The $1,500 monthly salary for Mingolla
was paid in the Causa office belonging to William Selig,
Ward's representative.
Selig put less stock in pious attitudes than his boss. He was
an electronic specialist with experience in Vietnam and advised
the Bolivian intelligence organization on technical matters_
The third man in the CIA cadre of the Moonies was Paul Perry,
who had already tried to organize an "armed church" in
Brazil.
The Argentinean agent Alfredo Mingolla at first knew little
about the connection between the Nazi Barbie and the Moonie
Number 25 (Winter 1986)

Cocaine General Garcia Meza with Bo Hi Pak.

Ward. Two days after his recruitment by the CIA, says Mingolla, he met the "Old German" in the courtyard of the Bolivian General Staff. Mingolla came out of department VII of the
intelligence agency; Barbie came out of department III.
Barbie greeted his colleagueas Mingolla remembers it,
"Hello, comrade, what do I hear? Are you working for a, new
employer?" Mingolla answered with surprise, "For what, for
who, then?" Barbie: `Na, for Mr. Ward, for example. Mingolla feared reproach. "Yes. Doesn't the organization allow
that?" Barbie laughed. "It's okay. There has to be cooperation.
Mingolla says that it was first clear to him on that day that
Barbie had become a top man for the CIA. Because only top
people knew the names of the other agency employees.
The Moon man Tom Ward was Klaus Barbie's CIA contact
man only preceding and directly after the putsch of 1980. Barbie's steady CIA contact person was the munitions dealer Fernando Inchauste. He boasted that he had direct contact with
President Reagan, whom he allegedly knew during the latter's
California governor days.
Another one of Barbie's steady CIA contact people was
George Portugal, also a munitions dealer. He was Inchauste's
close co-worker and Barbie's business friend.
The third man from the "secret intelligence area" with
whom Barbie worked was Ludwig Alvez Pacheco. The first
name, "Ludwig," represents his German ancestry, something
which Alvez Pacheco boasts about. The Bolivian is also proud
of his real German passport. He received the passport, he says,
for special services rendered to West Germany.
The Intelligence Connections
With regard to the quality of Barbie's activities as an agent
for the American and West German information agencies, even
those Bolivian government members who ought to know it
best, speak about it only hesitantly.
The defense minister of the pro-western government in
Bolivia at the time, Manuel Cardenas Mallo, in an official interview, cautiously answered our questions regarding information about Barbie's work for foreign agencies.
Cardenas: "We have no documentation about it. They let
those 'disappear' before President Siles took over the government. But that Barbie worked for foreign intelligence agencies
Coi,ertAction 19

Thomas J. Ward has been with the Moonies since the

early 1970s. After the Bolivian coup he became Director
of CAUSA and rose to Vice-President in 1984. He was
active in CAUSA's indoctrination seminars for political
and military leaders in the Southern Cone in the early
1980s.
Ward successfully sued his parents for an attempted
"deprogramming" several years ago. Moon theology
calls for rejecting one's biological parents in favor of the
True Parents, Rev. and Mrs. Moon.

Paul Perry teaches CAUSA seminars with Tom

Ward.
VVilliam_ Selig is Director of Publications for the
CAUSA Institute in New York, which produces such
publications as the CAUSA Lecture Manual, the basic
teaching book used for Moon's ideological indoctrination around the world. Current indoctrination and conversion targets are American clergy and retired military
officers.
0
is believable. Many people knew that and there are many
people who can confirm that."
Was Barbie merely an informant, or did he, working for foreign agencies, influence the political development?
Cardenas: "Many people who worked with Barbie are still
in service here. You must understandit is dangerous if they
find out that foreigners had so much influence here, that they
did not just play an advisory role, but that they actually made
decisions."
20 CovertAction

Do you mean to say that the U.S.A. staged the 1980 coup?
Cardenas hesitates, then answers, "Let me say it like this
and then you can quote me: If there isn't a coup happening
today, it is only because of one reason: Because it is the first
time that the Americans are not interested in a coup."
Washington was quick to note that Garcia's and Arce's military junta, which had come to, power through the 1980 putsch,
did not really serve the interests of the U.S. The complicated
and seemingly perfect system of oppression that Barbie and his
colleagues had instigated, sank in the swamp of the cocaine
trade. The paramilitary unitsconceived by Barbie as a new
type of SSsold themselves to the cocaine barons. The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the
idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.
The reigning military set the example. They wanted the
monopoly on the cocaine trade. It is reported in the files of the
Argentinean intelligence agency that the sum of a hundred million dollars went to the foreign private bank accounts of generals and colonels. To top things off, Garcia and Arce also plundered the national bank. The Bolivian nation and the Bolivian
economy faced total bankruptcy.
Following statements from Washington indicating a cooling
in relations, sanctions against the military junta were imposed
in 1981. The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as
clandestinely as they had waived. Only the CIA trio of the
MooniesWard, Selig, and Perrystayed on for a while as
advisers to the Bolivian information agency in order to assist in
an orderly transition to a democratic form of government.
In the beginning of March 1982, the Argentinean agent Mingolla met with the Moon-CIA agent Ward in the cafeteria
"Fontana" of La Paz's Hotel Plaza.
The seminary priest Mingolla remembered that it was St.
Thomas Aquinas's name day. Mingolla's CIA involvement
had silently expired. The Argentinean asked the American
what was still going on.
Tom Ward seemed resigned. He said the government in
Argentina was finished. And the Argentineans had made a lot
of mistakes in Bolivia: Your entire position is simply too
reactionary. The whole affair with Altmann (Barbie), with the
whole Fascism and Nazism bit, that was a dead end street."
Ward ordered a drink after his first coffee. Mingolla was surprised that the bigoted ascetic had suddenly started to drink.
But even the fanatical Nazi Mingolla seemed to have turned
over a new leaf. "You can't create a new order with the old
Germans, with Hitler and all that. You have to find something
modern."
Tom Ward, under the influence of alcohol, started criticizing himself severely. "It was also stupid having Moon and
Causa here."
Mingolla was perplexed. "You're saying that? You're the
boss of the whole thing, the head missionary."
Tom Ward suggested that it is better to enjoy life a bit. Both
of them went into the disco-brothel "Jetset." When they left
the brothel, the curfew had started. There were no more taxis
on the street. Both agents went to the Sheraton and shared a
suite.
A few days later, Ward flew to the U.S.; Mingolla to
Guatemala.
Swarms of starving Indians came to La Paz. The democrats
took over the responsibility for billions in foreign debts, three
digit inflation rates, and a rigid savings policy dictated by the
World Bank. Salaries dipped below the subsistence level. A
famine had broken out in Bolivia.
Number 25 (Winter 1986)