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His
name was Klaus Barbie; they called him ‘Butcher of Lyon.’ As
GESTAPO chief in the city of Lyon during the Nazi occupation, Barbie
delighted in torture of Jews and French Resisters—many thousands—before
executing them or sending them to death camps.[1] But he escaped justice. How? The US Justice Department, on 16
August 1983, convened a press conference to answer that question. Barbie escaped because he was hidden
from French policemen by the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC).
Potentially
explosive stuff. But according to chief US investigator Allan Ryan this was a
one-time error, committed in good faith. The CIC didn’t know of Barbie’s war
crimes. No other war criminals were smuggled and recruited by the US
government. And there was no conspiracy: those responsible were just a few
CIC personnel, acting on their own; other government agencies were not
involved. “The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in particular, was given a clean bill of
health in the Barbie case and, by implication, in other incidents in which
the agency is alleged to have had traffic with fugitive war criminals.”[2] The
media hurried to agree. “United Press International, for
example, headlined PROBER: BARBIE THE EXCEPTION, NOT RULE, and quoted [Allan]
Ryan as indicating that the Justice Department’s search had ‘uncovered no
evidence that there was any other former Nazi that the US had shielded from
justice.’ ABC TV’s Nightline program
featured Ryan on its broadcast that evening. Ryan said that the United States
had ‘innocently recruited Barbie, unaware of his role in France... [and that]
the Barbie case was not typical.’ Under Ted Koppel’s questioning, Ryan
expanded on the theme. It was ‘very likely there were no other Nazi officials
who were relied upon as Klaus Barbie was... [and] this closes the record.’ ”[3]
This closes the record! As Shakespeare said, “Perhaps the
lady doth protest too much...” So let us ask: Was there a special reason for
all this to happen in 1983? There
was. In
January of 1983 Bolivia had arrested Barbie and extradited him to France for
trial. When his US ties came to light, the US government rushed to
investigate itself and, by August, ‘closed the record.’ Conclusion: it was
just Barbie. The
conclusion was false. As the Washington
Post explained five years later: “It is
no longer necessary—or possible—to deny the fact: the U.S. government
systematically and deliberately recruited active Nazis by the thousands, rescued them, hired them and relied upon them...”[4] The Post was commenting on “the archival
sleuthing of [historian] Christopher Simpson,” whose book—Blowback: The First Full Account of
America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and
Foreign Policy—contextualizes a mountain of “documents... declassified under
the Freedom of Information Act.”
Amazingly,
the Post was pulling its punches, for
Simpson in fact documented (at least...) tens
of thousands of recruited Nazis—not “thousands.” But “thousands” is
plenty. And the Washington Post is
a major media outlet. So a huge scandal developed and everybody found
out—right? Wrong. Most people
learned that only one Nazi—Klaus
Barbie—had been recruited. Why? Because the US government’s self-exoneration
had gotten top billing on the Washington
Post’s page A1—the front page—whereas Simpson’s refutation of Ryan was
now buried in a book review on page
X11. Almost nobody saw it. And Ted Koppel from Nightline did not invite Simpson for a prime-time TV interview as
he did Allan Ryan. The
rest of the mainstream media behaved similarly. As US
law forces the release of more records, the documented number of Nazis
employed by US intelligence grows and grows, but the media keep burying the
story. For example, on 12 December 2010 the New York Times wrote: “...American
counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi
collaborators to an even greater
extent than had been previously disclosed... according to thousands of newly declassified documents.”[5] More
Nazis? What is it now? Hundreds of
thousands? Is this on the front
page? Try page A36. And
what were all these Nazis for? Some,
including quite a few who “participated in the worst atrocities committed by
the Nazi regime,” became part of the ‘Gehlen Organization’ in Pullach (suburb
of Munich). It was headed by Reinhard Gehlen, previously “Hitler’s most
senior military intelligence officer on the eastern front,” whose wartime
information owed much to the torture of millions
of Soviet prisoners of war (many were slowly starved to death). It was Gehlen
who managed the entire Nazi recruitment process for the US.[5a] How
important was the ‘Gehlen Org’? In 1946 the tiny OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—the supposed ‘precursor’ to the CIA—was thoroughly purged of alleged ‘communists’ (identified by their strong criticism of fascists).[5b] Following that, in 1947, the CIA was born. So it is misleading to say that a preexisting ‘US Intelligence’ absorbed Nazis; rather, recruitment of Nazis essentially built the postwar US Intelligence infrastructure. In fact, “during the first years of the CIA... Gehlen’s reports and analysis were sometimes simply retyped into CIA stationary and presented to President Truman without further comment...”[6] Some
recruited Nazis were imported into the US and employed in intelligence and
propaganda, while others were integrated into the US Army (many into the
Special Forces or ‘Green Berets’). Still others were organized by the CIA, on
US soil, as ‘governments in exile’ for countries behind the Iron Curtain, and
provided with a large budget to lobby the US Congress for ‘anti-Communist’
foreign policy.[7] “The
Gehlen Organization,” we are told, “became the responsibility of the CIA,
which continued the relationship until 1956.”[8]
But the relationship hardly ended. What happened is this: in 1956, following
US instructions to its client state, “Gehlen’s organization bec ame the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency.”[9]
It was established right there in Pullach, in the former Führer Headquarters. Naturally, the BND spied on Germans, too.
When Gehlen retired in 1968, another Nazi
general, Gerhard Wessel, took the helm of the thoroughly Nazi ‘Gehlen
Org’/BND.[9a]
Now there’s a story for the front page (never seen there
[10]): the
US power elite returned the Nazis to power in Germany. Not just
there. CIA clandestine operations dressed up fascists in ‘Christian
Democratic’ suit-and-tie and returned them to power elsewhere in Europe.[11] Recruiting
Nazis and fascists—to say nothing of returning them to power—is an outrage
against the liberal/democratic political grammar that Westerners established
in 1848 (Part 2). The US power elite implicitly—and
nervously—recognized this when it pretended it had just been Barbie (and by
mistake!).
Now
imagine that you edit a newspaper. Which is the juicier scandal? The US
government’s confession about Barbie, or
the vast Nazi recruitment program that this confession was meant to cover up?
The second. But the media repeated government disinformation about Barbie and
buried the larger scandal in the back pages. And it wasn’t the first time:
the media powerbrokers, as Simpson shows in Blowback, knew about
the Nazi recruitment program from the
start and kept silent.[12] But
why? Simpson’s own work explains why. A few
years after Blowback he published Science of Coercion: Communication Research
and Psychological Warfare, which documents that the CIA and the
Department of Defense—simultaneous with the postwar Nazi recruitment
program—built the entire academic infrastructure that produces media workers.
The point was to establish a comprehensive psychological warfare regime with
which to seize control of the mainstream media and manipulate US citizens (Part 1).
Simpson teaches at a school of communication (American University), so this
makes him a whistleblower.
The
manner in which the Washington Post and
the New York Times buried the news
of Nazi recruitment in the back pages is evidence for the CIA’s media
program’s success. The
same may be said for what Katherine Graham, Washington Post publisher, said in a speech to the CIA in 1988, right as she was busy protecting
the agency from Christopher Simpson’s revelations: “There are some things the
general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t.”[13] Ditto
for how the New York Times (and Foreign Affairs[14]) apologized for the Nazi recruitment policy in reviewing
Simpson’s Blowback. Said the NYT: “We
can forgive Mr. Simpson some heat in denouncing ‘the extent of the corruption
of American ideals that has taken place in the name of fighting communism.’
But he damages his own case by blurring the distinction between the means and
the end.”[15] Notice:
protecting democracy against a possible communist takeover in the long term
(the alleged “end”) justified immediately
recruiting anti-democratic Nazi mass murderers (“the means”), so Simpson’s
outrage (his “heat”) is out of line. But the Times is magnanimous: it forgives.
How about
a medical analogy? Imagine the New York
Times applauding your ‘cancer-fighting’ doctor, who injects you with a
bacterium that kills you faster. “Now the cancer will not kill you,” beams
the proud doctor. Are you outraged? Fear not: the New York Times forgives you. And who was behind this subjugation of the media? The Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller networks provided the initiative, plus the intellectual, financial, and political muscle (Part 1), colluding with the CIA and the Pentagon. This
is significant. Recall that before
the war, these same protagonists had nurtured, led, and financed the eugenics
movement that later became German Nazism (Part
5). After the war, the
same US power-elite promoters of Nazism were obviously still in power, for
they strangled the media even as multitudes of Nazis were being recruited to
US Intelligence. I see
a pattern. This pattern motivates me to produce a particular model of US
power elite purposes for what happened in
between—that is, a model of World War II. Up
next, I match my own model against the received view of the war, or, as I
like to call it, the ‘Establishment model.’
[1] Historian
Guyora Binder writes: “Born near Germany’s French border, and of partly French
extraction, Barbie lost his father to the lingering effects of a World War I
wound in 1933. The following year, Barbie graduated from high school. Finding
himself penniless and without prospect of employment, Barbie became involved
with the Nazi movement and in 1935, was accepted into the SS. ‘Any idiot
couldn’t join the SS,’ Barbie has insisted. ‘I had to study law and
philosophy.’ Barbie became a lieutenant in the intelligence section of the SD
in 1940. He was posted to occupied Holland where he participated in roundups
of Jews for deportation and execution. Because of his fluency in French,
Barbie was moved to occupied France in 1942; towards the end of the year he became
head of the Gestapo in Lyons, the center of Resistance activity in the South.
His chief responsibilities were the suppression of the Resistance, communists
and Jews. Historians estimate that more than 4,000 people were executed on
his orders during the last two years of the Occupation. In addition, the
records of a local magistrate indicate that the Gestapo deported 7,591 people
from Lyons to the death camps; but ‘shot or deported, there’s no difference,’
Barbie reportedly philosophized. It is not known how many of these
approximately 12,000 victims were Jewish. Barbie’s reputation as the ‘Butcher
of Lyons’ rested also on his routine practice of torturing suspected
Resistance members and Jews in an effort to uncover other members of both
groups.” SOURCE: Binder, G. (1989). Representing Nazism: Advocacy and
identity at the trial of Klaus Barbie. The
Yale Law Journal, 98(7), 1321-1383. [2] Simpson, C. (1988). Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. (p.xii) [3] Blowback (pp.xii-xiii) [4] Uncle Sam's Nazi's, The Washington Post, April 24, 1988, Sunday,
Final Edition, BOOK WORLD; PAGE X11, 905 words, Peter Grose, REVIEW [5] “Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis”; The New York Times; December 12,
2010; PAGE A36; By SAM ROBERTS [5a] Christopher Simpson writes that “at least a half dozen -- and probably more -- of his first staff of fifty officers were former SS or SD men, including SS Obersturmführer Hans Sommer (who had set seven Paris synagogues to the torch in October 1941)…” In the year 2005, historian Timothy Naftali explains that “newly released information from the CIA and the Army,” as a consequence of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, “make it possible to assess the extent of Gehlen’s recruitment of former officers of the SD [the intelligence service of the SS] and Gestapo. It turns out that it was widespread. At least one hundred of Gehlen’s officers and agents had served with the SD or the Gestapo, and the number may in fact be significantly higher. …some of those hired had participated in the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.” SOURCES: Simpson,
C. (1988). Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the
Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. (pp.40, 44-45) Naftali,
T. 2005. “Reinhard Gehlen and the United States,” in US Intelligence and the
Nazis. Edited by R. Breitman, N. J. W. Goda, T. Naftali, and R. Wolfe, pp.
375-418. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p.377) [5b] Blowback (pp.57-59) [7] Blowback (pp.138-42, 199-245) [8] “CIA Intends to Release Records on Cold War Spymaster”; Interagency Working Group (IWG); The National Archives; October 5, 2000 [9] “the
West German intelligence organization established by General Reinhard
Gehlen... was initially under the control of the U. S. Army and was taken
over in 1949 by the CIA. Later Gehlen's organization became the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany's foreign intelligence agency.” SOURCE: “April, 2001 Historical Analysis of 20 Name Files from CIA Records”; Interagency Working Group (IWG); The National Archives ;By Dr. Richard Breitman, Professor of History, American University, IWG Director of Historical Research. [9a] The New York Times—though never on the
front page—on occasion reported interesting details about General Gerhard
Wessel, the former Nazi. For instance, Wessel was “West German representative
on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]” (a). And consider what the NewYork Times wrote in Wessel’s
obituary: “Gerhard Wessel, a spy for Nazi
Germany who went on to head West Germany’s espionage agency, died on July 28
at his home in Pullach, a suburb of Munich. He was 88. ...He is regarded as the founder of
West Germany’s counterintelligence service, which he headed for seven years.
As the successor to Reinhard Gehlen as chief of the agency -- known as the
BND, for Bundesnachrichtendienst --
he is credited with modernizing German intelligence gathering and curbing
some abuses. He hired academic analysts and
electronics experts to serve alongside agents, and ordered spies to stop
shadowing Germans inside Germany. ...In 1952, General Gehlen detached
General Wessel, then a colonel, from their tightly guarded compound in
Pullach to help organize intelligence services for the new West German Army.
He supervised counterintelligence for the army for seven years. ...In truth, he always remained an
aide to General Gehlen, as the Gehlen Organization was transferred to newly
sovereign West Germany's intelligence service in April 1956. In 1968, General
Gehlen retired and General Wessel replaced him. ...[Wessel] immediately responded to
government demands for reforms. The BND was to work only on foreign
intelligence and avoid the domestic surveillance into which General Gehlen
had allowed the agency to drift.” (b) This is a rather strange story. According to the New York Times, Wessel “immediately responded to government
demands for reforms. The BND was to work only on foreign intelligence and
avoid the domestic surveillance into which General Gehlen had allowed the
agency to drift.” And so Wessel “ordered spies to stop shadowing Germans
inside Germany.” No doubt he said he did that. But did he really? As we also see above, Wessel, who
“always remained an aide to General Gehlen,” was sent by Gehlen for a few
years to create the West German Army’s counterintelligence service. It
follows that Wessel was Gehlen’s trusted expert in counterintelligence. What is counterintelligence? The job of German counterintelligence
is to discover who is spying on Germany. How do foreign countries spy
on Germany? In part by recruiting Germans who will share privileged
information. So how does German counterintelligence combat this? Why, by
“shadowing Germans inside Germany.” Naturally, even if this is not intended
in the beginning (already a stretch…), such activities easily expand into
general spying on Germans, for entirely domestic reasons, because power
always seeks more power. And this is the sort of thing that a Nazi would
naturally do, anyway. Crucially, “the domestic surveillance into which
General Gehlen had allowed the agency to drift” was a program for which Gerhard Wessel was directly responsible. Wessel was in charge of the
“drift.” So is it plausible that Wessel, also a
Nazi, once he became the top spy, really stopped the very domestic spying
activities that had been at the center of his intelligence career? The New York Times seems to think we should take Wessel’s word on
that, because, why doubt the word of a Nazi? SOURCES: (a)
“Gehlen Is Retiring as German Intelligence Chief; Gen.
Wessel to Succeed Him in Bonn Post Next May 1 New Head Has Long Served on
NATO Committee”; The New York Times; January 16, 1968; Page 16; By DAVID
BINDER (b) “Gerhard Wessel, 88, German Espionage Chief”; The New York Times; August 3, 2002;
By DOUGLAS MARTIN [10]
The New York Times—“the newspaper of record”—always knew that those
running the West German intelligence service were Nazis, but it always chose
not to make a fuss about it. Here follow three examples of mentions of
Reinhard Gehlen being a Nazi that I was able to find in the New York Times before the 1988
publication of Christopher Simpson’s Blowback: 1)
1963. The tiniest note on page 5. “RETIREMENT SEEN FOR TOP BONN SPY;
Gehlen Seen Compromised by Soviet Penetration; Ex-Nazis in Key Spots”; The
New York Times; July 14, 1963; Page 5; By ARTHUR J. OLSEN 2)
1972. A book review (on page BR3), written by “a former American diplomat
and intelligence officer.” “The General Was a Spy; The Truth
About General Gehlen and His Spy Ring”; The New York Times; April 16, 1972;
Section BOOK REVIEW, Page BR3; By CHRISTOPHER FELIX; 3)
1980. An article in the New York Times Magazine about “The Spy
War” located—amazingly—in a section
called “Beauty & Health THE SCIENCE OF LOOKING GOOD” (on page SM11). “THE SPY WAR”; Beauty & Health
THE SCIENCE OF LOOKING GOOD; The New York Times Magazine; September 28, 1980;
Page SM11; By Edward Jay Epstein [11] Christopher
Simpson documents CIA postwar campaigns to return fascists disguised as
‘Christian democrats’ to power in Italy and Greece (in both cases
successful), repeating what was done in Germany. Historian Kai Bird documents that there was a CIA program to
influence politics in France as well. However, it is obvious that the French
Christian democrats—the MRP—didn’t benefit, even though Christian democrats
were the CIA’s favorites everywhere else. Why was France the exception? In documenting the history of the MRP, historian Carolyn
Warner provides an obvious clue. She writes that “Unlike other European
Christian democratic parties—not to mention other French parties—the MRP did
not have, or seek, former [Nazi] collaborators as activists.” The MRP
received no help from the CIA (which other French parties, bursting at the
seams with Nazi collaborators, did get).
No doubt this is why, despite starting out very strong, the MRP subsequently
did so badly that it disappeared. Who did well? The other parties, the ones that recruited
former fascists, which they could do because most of the Vichy collaborators
were not even tried, as there were “limited amnesties [in] 1946 and 1947 and…
broader ones [in] 1951 and 1953 that left only the most serious offenders in
prison,” as explained by historian Bertram Gordon. And even when a fresh new party, the Socialists, took power in
1981, nothing had changed. Consider that François Mitterrand, the socialist
who governed France for a decade and a half, had been René Bousquet’s best
friend, as documented in Pierre Péan’s biography, written with Mitterrand’s
full cooperation (it caused a scandal). Bousquet had been head of the Vichy
police, the French regime allied with the Nazis. To get a sense for him,
consider what historians Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton write in Vichy France and the Jews: “When the Germans began their systematic deportation and
extermination of Jews in 1942, Vichy’s rival anti-Semitism offered them more
substantial help than they received anywhere else in Europe.... Having begged
the Germans for years to take back their refugees, the Vichy leaders offered
to dispatch foreign Jews from unoccupied areas—something that Bulgaria alone,
in eastern Europe, did on a similar scale.... [In this the] French Police
were indispensable. As SS-General Oberg wrote to French Police Chief [René]
Bousquet in July 1942, as the two police services solidified their agreement
to work together, ‘I am happy to confirm, moreover, that the French police
has up to now performed in a manner worthy of appreciation.’ The Germans
could never have accomplished this on their own.” —quoted in Scullion
(1998:112) SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE: Bird, K. (1998). The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William
Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography. New York: Simon and
Schuster.(p.106) Gordon, B. M. (1995). The "Vichy Syndrome" Problem
in History. French Historical Studies,
19(2), 495-518. Simpson, C. (1988). Blowback: America's Recruitment of
Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson. (pp.80-95) Scullion, R. (1998). Georges Perec, W, and the Memory of Vichy
France. SubStance, 27, No.3(Special Issue (87): The Occupation),
107-129. (p.112) Warner, C. M. (1998). Getting out the Vote with Patronage and
Threat: The French and Italian Christian Democratic Parties, 1944-1958. Journal
of Interdisciplinary History, 28(4), 553-582. (p.565) Péan, P. (1994). Une
jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934-1947. Paris: Fayard.
(pp.313-320) [12] One of the front organizations set up by the CIA to organize the fascist exiles as ‘anti-communist’ agents within the US was called the National Committee for a Free Europe. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation were CIA propaganda outfits that employed quite a few former Nazis. Notice what Simpson writes concerning this organization and the media’s awareness of its composition and purpose. “From the beginning the National Committee
for a Free Europe depended upon the voluntary silence of powerful media
personalities in the United States to cloak its true operations in secrecy.
‘Representatives of some of the nation’s most influential media giants were
involved early on as members of the corporation [NCFE],’ Mickelson notes in a
relatively frank history of its activities. This board included ‘magazine
publishers Henry Luce [of Time-Life] and DeWitte Wallace [of Readers
Digest],’ he writes, ‘but not a word of the government involvement appeared
in print or on the air.’ Luce and Wallace were not the only ones: C.D.
Jackson, editor in chief of Fortune magazine, came on board in 1951 as
president of the entire Radio Free Europe effort, while Reader’s Digest
senior editor Eugene Lyons headed the American Committee for the Liberation
of the Peoples of Russia Inc., a corporate parent of Radio Liberation. Still,
‘sources of financing,’ Mickelson writes, were ‘never mentioned’ in the
press. The practical effect of this arrangement was
the creation of a powerful lobby inside American media that tended to
suppress critical news concerning the CIA’s propaganda projects. This was not
simply a matter of declining to mention the fact that the agency was behind
these programs, as Mickelson implies. Actually the media falsified their
reports to the public concerning the government’s role in Radio Free Europe
and Radio Liberation for years, actively promoting the myth—which most sophisticated
editors knew perfectly well was false—that these projects were financed
though nickel-and-dime contributions from concerned citizens. Writers soon
learned that exposés concerning the NCFE and RFE/RL were simply not welcome
at mainstream publications. No corporate officers needed to issue any
memorandums to enforce this silence: with C.D. Jackson as RFE/RL’s president
and Luce himself on the group’s board of directors, for example, Time’s
and Life’s authors were no more likely to delve into the darker side
of RFE/RL than they were to attack the American flag.” SOURCE:
Simpson, C.
(1988). Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis an-d its Effects on the
Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. (pp.126-127) [13] Linda
Steiner writes in the Encyclopedia of
American Journalism: “In her autobiography, Katharine Graham described how her
husband [Philip L. Graham, who inherited the mantle of Washington Post publisher from his father-in-law, Katherine’s
father] worked overtime during the
Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of some Yale friends who had
backed the venture. But in a 1979 book called Katherine the Great, Deborah Davis went further to allege, among
other things, that [Post Executive
Editor Ben] Bradlee and Philip Graham had collaborated with the Central
Intelligence Agency, and that Philip Graham was the main contact in a CIA
project to infiltrate US media. Davis also identified—wrongly, it turns out—a
Harvard classmate of Bradlee as A CIA agent and as the Watergate reporters’
source Deep Throat. After a number of people criticize the book and Bradlee
documented thirty-nine errors, [publisher] Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
disavowed the book and shredded twenty thousand copies. A small company,
National Press in Bethesda, Maryland, republished the book, however, in 1987. After Graham died, the liberal commentator Norman Solomon
wrote in a widely republished column that the Post had mainly functioned as a ‘helpmate to the war-makers’ in
the White House, State Department, and Pentagon. He said it used classic
propaganda techniques to accomplish this: evasion, confusion, misdirection,
targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and
selective leaks. This more conservative
side of Graham emerged, for example, in a well-publicized speech she gave at
CIA headquarters in 1988: ‘We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are
some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep
its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.’ ” SOURCE: Steiner, L. (2008). Graham, Katherine. In S. L.
Vaugh (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American Journalism. New York: Routledge. Notice that Graham’s idea of how “democracy flourishes” when
power elites manage it by deciding what the masses get to know corresponds
rather exactly to Lippmann’s and Laswell’s model (Part 1). [14] In
a very short book review, Foreign
Affairs writes that, “In establishing facts [Simpson] does an impressive job—and it
is not a pretty story (although certainly a fascinating one). His broader
judgments, however, raise a few questions.” Foreign Affairs calls Simpson’s judgments “shrill” and
“indiscriminately accusatory” without offering an argument other than this:
“There was a legitimate question of national interest.” In other words, if
“the end was held to justify the most questionable of means” then we must
implicitly trust in US government officials, who are always presumed to have
good intentions. If one chooses to do otherwise (and this hardly needs to be
said explicitly) one must be doing ‘conspiracy theory’ (which everybody knows
is automatic nonsense). Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign
Relations, which was created by the same eugenic power elite we
have been discussing here SOURCE: Campbell, J. (1988). Book Review: BLOWBACK: U.S. RECRUITMENT
OF NAZIS AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE COLD WAR. By Christopher Simpson. New York:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, 398 pp. $19.95.; THE PAPERCLIP CONSPIRACY:
THE HUNT FOR THE NAZI SCIENTISTS. By Tom Bower. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988,
309 pp. $19.95. Foreign Affairs, 66(5), 1122-1123. [15] The
NYT review of Simpson’s book was buried deep in Section 7, Page 8. But that
is not the only revealing detail. Apparently it was important that this
review be just right, because a very big gun was recruited to write it: Serge
Schmemann. According to his Wikipedia entry, “Serge Schmemann (born April 12, 1945) is a writer and
editorial page editor of the International
Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Associated Press and was a bureau
chief and editor for the New York Times.” Schmemann has one of the most influential pens in the entire
world. He tells millions what to think. What is important. What isn’t. Schmemann is descended from Eastern Europeans. On his father’s
side he is descended from Baltic Germans who were part of the Russian Tsarist
aristocratic system, and on his mother’s side from the Tsarist gentry. Such people hated communism viscerally, and many of them, as
Simpson documents in Blowback, figured prominently among Hitler’s
collaborators as the Nazis advanced on the Eastern front. Quite a few such
collaborators were clandestinely imported into the United States, by the CIA,
shortly after World War II, as Simpson also documents. Schmemann’s parents
immigrated to the United States right around this time (1951), with a young
Schmemann in tow. This of course does not
demonstrate that Schmemann’s father was a Nazi collaborator, and I am not
making that accusation. However, it is possible
to document Schmemann’s father’s contacts with those circles. We know that he
was prominent in Radio Liberty, a fact that Schmemann shares in a family
memoir. Radio Liberty was a CIA propaganda program that, as Simpson documents
in Blowback, was chock-full of Eastern European Nazi collaborators imported to
the United States. It is interesting that the son of a prominent operator in a
CIA postwar propaganda program that employed many Nazis and collaborators
should have such a prominent position at the world’s most influential
newspaper (“the newspaper of record”). And it is telling that the New York Times should have given the
task of reviewing Simpson’s book—which exposes such CIA programs as part of a
larger scheme to recruit Nazis and collaborators to US Intelligence—to
someone with Schmemann’s family background. Also interesting is the title that NYT gave to Schmemann’s
review of Simpson’s book: “GIVE US YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR NAZI
SCIENTISTS,” as if Simpson had written a book about the famous ‘Operation
Paperclip,’ which recruited just a handful of Nazi scientists. The title is
calculated to mislead. SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE: GIVE US YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR NAZI SCIENTISTS, The New
York Times, May 8, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 7; Page 8,
Column 1; Book Review Desk, 972 words, By SERGE SCHMEMANN; Serge Schmemann is
the Bonn bureau chief for The New York Times and was previously a Times
correspondent in Moscow. Schmemman, S. (1997). Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries
of a Russian Village. New York: Vintage Books.(pp.16-18) Serge Schmemann | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (accessed 4
May 2014) |
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%20tens%20of%20thousands%20of%20Nazis.%20Can%20US%20foreign%20policy%E2%80%94mostly%20decided%20by%20US%20Intelligence%E2%80%94really%20be%20pro-Israel%20?%0A%0AHistorical%20and%20Investigative%20Research%20%E2%80%93%2017%20May%202016,%20by%20Francisco%20Gil-White%0Ahttp%3A//www.hirhome.com/political_grammar06.htm%0A%0AFew%20people%20are%20aware%20that%20the%20US%20government%20recruited%20Nazis%20after%20WWII.%20And%20most%20of%20those%20who%20are%20aware%20believe%20this%20was%20just%20a%20handful%20of%20Nazi%20scientists%20employed%20in%20rocket%20development%20(Operation%20Paperclip).%20In%20fact,%20the%20US%20government%20shielded%20from%20justice%20a%20giant%20multitude%20of%20Nazis%E2%80%94including%20many%20war%20criminals%20who%20had%20bathed%20themselves%20in%20innocent%20blood%E2%80%94and%20used%20them%20to%20create%20the%20postwar%20US%20intelligence%20infrastructure.%20This%20affected%20both%20domestic%20and%20foreign%20policy.%20The%20self-imposed%20silence%20of%20the%20Western%20media%20on%20this%20topic%20is%20diagnostic%20of%20the%20psychological%20warfare%20regime%20that%20dominates%20our%20culture.){kind=small}
