Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (Forbidden Bookshelf) by Christopher Simpson

Author:Christopher Simpson [Simpson, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781497623088
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-06-10T05:00:00+00:00

Esthonian [sic]

100%

Latvian

100%

Lithuanian

100%

Ukrainian

–100%

Yugoslav

–100%

Poles

–100%

Jews (Poles)

+ 50%

Jews (Hungarian, Romanian, etc.)

+ 50%

Russian

?

Stateless

?

Italians

?

The first known group of Lodge Act recruits arrived by a military airlift at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in October 1951. Most were Ukrainians and Poles, but virtually every Eastern European nationality was represented. After an initial orientation at the camp the army shipped these recruits, like most of those who followed, to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for eight to sixteen weeks of basic training. Others were sent directly to a special army intelligence Language Qualification Unit at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Following basic training, the recruits were dispersed across the United States and Europe. Substantial numbers were posted to the Defense Language School in Monterey, California; others to the unique Armed Forces Demonstration Unit at Fort Monroe, Virginia, where defectors from Eastern Europe taught Red Army tactics to U.S. strike force teams.

According to declassified orders now found in the National Archives, about 25 percent of the enlistees were channeled into a variety of especially confidential assignments, including slots as atomic, chemical, and biological warfare specialists. Others became translators of captured secret documents and instructors for U.S. intelligence analysts.31

Many of the remainder of the Lodge Act recruits underwent special guerrilla training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and became the nucleus of the present-day Green Berets. Indeed, the famous green beret itself is in part a legacy of the European military fatigues that so many of America’s first Special Forces recruits had worn during their service prior to their arrival in this country. The commander of the program at Fort Bragg, interestingly enough, was Colonel Aaron Bank, an army paramilitary expert who only a few months previously had directed the CIC units responsible for running Klaus Barbie, Mykola Lebed, and similar intelligence assets in Germany.32

Colonel Charles M. Simpson, the unofficial historian of the Green Berets and a thirty-year army veteran, leaves little question about the training of army and CIA volunteers placed under Colonel Bank’s care at Fort Bragg. The instruction, Simpson writes, began with selection of sites for clandestine airdrops of agents behind enemy lines, then went on to “raids and ambushes [and] guerrilla organization.” Particular attention was placed, he says, on “kidnap and assassination operations.”33

Unfortunately for the army, Lodge Act recruiting went more slowly than expected, and only 211 men (out of 5,272 applicants) had passed screening and actually enlisted by August 1952. Special Forces recruiters responded by easing the language and literacy requirements and by streamlining many of the security checks that had previously slowed the processing of volunteers.

Army Adjutant General Major General Edward Witsell ruled that the civilian immigration laws that barred ex-Nazis and collaborators from obtaining U.S. citizenship would not apply to the army’s Lodge Act recruits. “[I]dividuals enlisted under these regulations are not subject to exclusion from the United States under the provisions of the Internal Security Act or under the Immigration and Nationality Act …,” Witsell ordered, taking responsibility for screening émigrés out of the hands of civilian authorities altogether. True, “members … of any totalitarian party” were

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