Incidentally...
Things you learn while doing research:
The third contingent in the partnership - of the CIA’s European Theatre Operations, that is, in 1949 - was a former Wehrmacht intelligence unit, which, under the command of General Reinhard Gehlen, had been perserved intact by the American Army at the end of the war. Deployed by the OPC to spy on and conduct operations against the Soviet Union, the Gehlen organisation recruited the crews for the Anglo-American boat operations, drawing from one time German motor torpedo flotilla personnel who had served in the Baltic during the war.
Okay. Let me get this straight. I mean, of course I knew both the US and the USSR after the war nicked what German scientists they could get for themselves after the war, but an entire Wehrmacht intelligence unit? Guess what they might have been doing during the war? Especiallyin Eastern Europe?
What the OPC did was balance the degree to which the individuals they sought to recruit were tainted against the advantages their recruitment would bring in countering a Soviet Union which Wisner regarded as being as malevolent as the Nazis had been. The application of this axiom meant that few ex-Nazis had chequered enough pasts to be precluded from working for the OPC. Indeed, the 1949 Central Intelligence Act permitted émigrés who were of use to the OPC, but who might not meet with American immigration requirements, to enter the United States. (...) The case of Gustav Hilger is instructive of the choices faced by the OPC. A one time career diplomat, Hilger specialised in the recruitment of collaborators to fight alongside the Germans at the eastern front during the war. He had also been Foreign Office liaison to the SS and in this capacity had been party to the imprisonment and murder of Gypsies and Jews in Eastern Europe and Italy. For the OPC, however, the pluses outweighed the minuses and Hilger was employed to help organise underground émigré forces to be deployed in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine.
In other words, what Nuremberg Trials? Those are just for people not useful against the Communists. If, on the other hand, you’re a democratically elected leader and endangering oil access, why then action is called for:
Eisenhower took a more aggressive approach in his application of covert action in the third world. (...) The first venture of this nature to be authorised under his tenure was Operation TPAJAX, the CIA-engineered cop that resulted in the removal of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Musaddiq, from power in August 1953. The Iran coup signalled a significant departure and set an important precedent (...) CIA preventive covert action had been sanctioned to depose governing regimes before, but Musaddiq was the first democratically-elected leader to be removed through such methods. (..) The replacement of Musaddiq by a less nationalistic, more western-friendly Iranian leader who, at least in American perceptions, was less vulnerable to a communist takeover, was seen by Eisenhower as essential if the United States was to: 1) safeguard supplies of Persian oil to the West, 2) secure Iran as a country of vital strategic importance for containing communism, and 3) advance American plans to transform Iran into a modern westernised state. Initiating a coup d’état was far from the most enlightened way to serve these objectives, in that replacing Mussadiq with a dictator, however temporary the arrangement was originally planned to be, was hardly the best way to foster democracy. Moreover, Eisenhower took little account of the negative long-term effects on American-Iranian relations that the coup would have.
No kidding. I haven’t yet met an Iranian exile who isn’t profoundly bitter, still, about this, pointing out that Iran was a secular democracy before the Americans made it into a Shah-ruled dictatorship which in turn brought Khomeini and a theocracy under which they’re still suffering. At any rate, it’s really hard to take the whole party line about America’s commitment to democracy seriously if you read up on espionage history.
(All quotes from James Callanan: Covert Action in the Cold War. US Policy, Intelligence and CIA operations.)
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/697190.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The third contingent in the partnership - of the CIA’s European Theatre Operations, that is, in 1949 - was a former Wehrmacht intelligence unit, which, under the command of General Reinhard Gehlen, had been perserved intact by the American Army at the end of the war. Deployed by the OPC to spy on and conduct operations against the Soviet Union, the Gehlen organisation recruited the crews for the Anglo-American boat operations, drawing from one time German motor torpedo flotilla personnel who had served in the Baltic during the war.
Okay. Let me get this straight. I mean, of course I knew both the US and the USSR after the war nicked what German scientists they could get for themselves after the war, but an entire Wehrmacht intelligence unit? Guess what they might have been doing during the war? Especiallyin Eastern Europe?
What the OPC did was balance the degree to which the individuals they sought to recruit were tainted against the advantages their recruitment would bring in countering a Soviet Union which Wisner regarded as being as malevolent as the Nazis had been. The application of this axiom meant that few ex-Nazis had chequered enough pasts to be precluded from working for the OPC. Indeed, the 1949 Central Intelligence Act permitted émigrés who were of use to the OPC, but who might not meet with American immigration requirements, to enter the United States. (...) The case of Gustav Hilger is instructive of the choices faced by the OPC. A one time career diplomat, Hilger specialised in the recruitment of collaborators to fight alongside the Germans at the eastern front during the war. He had also been Foreign Office liaison to the SS and in this capacity had been party to the imprisonment and murder of Gypsies and Jews in Eastern Europe and Italy. For the OPC, however, the pluses outweighed the minuses and Hilger was employed to help organise underground émigré forces to be deployed in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine.
In other words, what Nuremberg Trials? Those are just for people not useful against the Communists. If, on the other hand, you’re a democratically elected leader and endangering oil access, why then action is called for:
Eisenhower took a more aggressive approach in his application of covert action in the third world. (...) The first venture of this nature to be authorised under his tenure was Operation TPAJAX, the CIA-engineered cop that resulted in the removal of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Musaddiq, from power in August 1953. The Iran coup signalled a significant departure and set an important precedent (...) CIA preventive covert action had been sanctioned to depose governing regimes before, but Musaddiq was the first democratically-elected leader to be removed through such methods. (..) The replacement of Musaddiq by a less nationalistic, more western-friendly Iranian leader who, at least in American perceptions, was less vulnerable to a communist takeover, was seen by Eisenhower as essential if the United States was to: 1) safeguard supplies of Persian oil to the West, 2) secure Iran as a country of vital strategic importance for containing communism, and 3) advance American plans to transform Iran into a modern westernised state. Initiating a coup d’état was far from the most enlightened way to serve these objectives, in that replacing Mussadiq with a dictator, however temporary the arrangement was originally planned to be, was hardly the best way to foster democracy. Moreover, Eisenhower took little account of the negative long-term effects on American-Iranian relations that the coup would have.
No kidding. I haven’t yet met an Iranian exile who isn’t profoundly bitter, still, about this, pointing out that Iran was a secular democracy before the Americans made it into a Shah-ruled dictatorship which in turn brought Khomeini and a theocracy under which they’re still suffering. At any rate, it’s really hard to take the whole party line about America’s commitment to democracy seriously if you read up on espionage history.
(All quotes from James Callanan: Covert Action in the Cold War. US Policy, Intelligence and CIA operations.)
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/697190.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.