Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War — Alan Fong interviews Christopher Simpson

Alan Fong interviews Christopher Simpson, author of Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects On the Cold War. Video and summary transcript.

While many people are aware of some aspects of this, Christopher Simpson elaborates some of the details. US policymakers never gave peace a chance after the defeat of Nazi Germany, nor do they do so after the collapse of the USSR.

This is still relevant to US policy of using collaborators and proxies, including neo-Nazis in Ukraine and jihadists in MENA and Central Asia. 

This is a long-standing policy that dates from WWII.

"Blowback" is CIA jargon for unintended, harmful consequences. If this were an isolated occurrence, it would not have generated a special term to refer to it. It's the result of sleeping with the devil. This article reveals how the CIA has been the devil's bitch since the end of WWII. Truman later admitted, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, that his creating the CIA as an intelligence agency that included operations in addition to espionage was "a mistake." Here is the CIA's own historical report; refer to the end for the citation of mistake. Moreover, it was inevitable that the agency would becomes politicized, Christopher Simpson sets forth.

The takeaway? Present policy is an extension of longstanding policy, using the same modus operandi and with the same objectives.

This is a must-read to understand what is going on today behind the scenes. This is not new information. The interview is from 1988. But it could have been written with respect to what is happening in the world today. It takes the wrappers off operational realities that are hidden from public view.

The interview suggests that Blowback is a gripping book. Here is a teaser that cuts to the point.

The question is, well, we really hated Nazis, didn't we? What we hiring these guys for? Didn't we know who they were? This is how it worked. Nazis didn't kinda come into the room with a swastika on, I'm talking about after the war now, with a swastika on their sleeve; and you have some government officials saying, "Oh gee, let's hire us a bunch of Nazis [00:40:00] and go to war against the Russians." Didn't work like that. Here's how it worked: in mid 1948, there was a decision of the National Security Council, and it's known by the code number and NSC 10/2; it's just a code number. And in it, this was a secret declaration of war against the USSR, and it says, quite explicitly, that the United States will undertake guerrilla war against the Soviet Union, sabotage, covert [00:40:30] operations, economic sabotage of various types.

This was unknown to the public at the time, and in fact, the very existence of this decision would be unknown to this day, except for some of the scandals that came out of Watergate were so profound that the existence of this decision was finally pushed into the public domain. That's point number one. There was this declaration of covert warfare. Point number two is, there was a second [00:41:00] decision that happened shortly thereafter, and the code number of that is NSC 20. What that was, it's known as the Containment Doctrine; it's a description of what was the basic strategy of the Americans for dealing with the Soviets during that period.

It says a couple interesting things. First of all, it says that they wanted to avoid an all out war. They wanted to avoid a military type shooting war. What they wanted to do instead, was to contain [00:41:30] the Soviet Union, to ring it around with hostile states, and to restrict the Soviets to the maximum degree possible, and to contribute to the internal stresses and strains inside the Soviet Union; and most particularly to the ethnic stresses and strains inside the Soviet Union, which at times are quite profound. And to boil them in this pot, so to speak until, the Soviets either agreed to cooperate [00:42:00] with the American agenda for international affairs, or collapsed into an internal civil war inside their own country.

And in that context, there's a very interesting passage. It says there's a number of different émigré groups, émigré political groups who wish to return to power in the Soviet Union, any one of which, we, in other words: the Americans, would prefer to be in power than the present government; "But," they continued, " [00:42:30] We're not going to favor one of these groups over the other. We're going to support all of these groups that seek to overthrow Stalin, and support them, more or less, equally with money, political influence, contacts, guns if necessary, so forth."

That decision, in the world of 1948, had a very clear meaning. It meant that these same collaborators that had worked with Berlin during the war, the same people who had been mayors, and police chiefs, and newspaper publishers, as quislings to [00:43:00] the Nazis during the war, who had fled back to Germany with the retreating German Army at the end of the war. That's who these people were who wanted to return to power in the Soviet Union. That's who they were talking about. The names of some of these organizations are the Ukrainian OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Among the people of the Russian ethnic heritage, there's an extremist organization called the NTS, which is roughly translated as the [00:43:30] National Union of Solidarists. This is the way they like to translate it today. During the Nazi period, the translation was much closer to National Socialist Union. Also, among these groups are SS squadrons, particularly from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. These are Baltic countries, to the northern part of the Soviet Union.

[00:44:00] In our decision-making process, we didn't sit down, particularly at the high levels, we didn't sit down and frankly say what was underway. What we did is, developed a series of rationales and a kind of verbal smokescreens, really, that permitted us to sponsor these people without admitting who exactly they were....

Same old, same old today.

KPFK Archives

Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War

Alan Fong interviews Christopher Simpson

See also

Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators
Kevin Conely Ruffner
History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, April 2003

CIA's Support to Nazi War Criminal Investigations

Kevin C. Rufner

CIA.gov

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