Non-agression pacts: from Molotov-Ribbentrop to James Angleton

 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact has been burned into our intellectual history: here, at last, Stalin cast off the mask and Soviet Communism was revealed as a reactionary force. It has become a trope in the literature: how violent anti-Nazi communists, overnight, turned into pacifists.

However, a secret and parallel non-aggression pact was made after the war – this time, between the American military and intelligence services and various talented anti-communist Nazis. This pact was not officialized with any pomp – rather, it was the object of various “programs”, codenamed Dustbin, or Paperclip, or simply acted upon by various American intelligence agents who carried into the field America’s enduring racism and a hefty backwoods or Yale educated anti-communism.

The products of the later pact sometimes emerged in trials, and sometimes emerged in memoirs. The entire West German intelligence service began under Gehlen, a highranking Nazi Abwehr officer, pretty much where it left off in 1944, when Gehlen’s army – Hitler’s Army – was in mass retreat from Russia.

In Italy, the non-aggression pact was operationalized by the leading intelligence officer in Italy at that time, James Angleton, who had family connections in Italy who had connections to various highranking fascists. These fascists included many who, later on in Italian history, subvented neo-fascists groups, created various behind the scenes groups, and occasionally broke out into outright attempts at coups. Angleton’s friend, the “Black Prince”, Junio Valerio Borghese, famously plotted one of those coup, which failed in 1970, forcing Borghese to flee to friendly Franco’s Spain.

Another result of what one might want to call the Angleton-Borghese non-aggression pact was the American support for Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe, the effects of which have ramified over the decades. Violen Trifa, a Romanian Iron Gardist,  lead the youth wing of the Iron Gard in a merciless rebellion in Bucharest against the government in 1941. The Iron Gardists were ecstatically sadistic: Jewish prisoners were taken by the Iron Guard to the municipal  slaughterhouse. "There," White [an American correspondant] wrote, "in a fiendish parody of kosher methods of butchering, they hung many of the Jews on meat hooks and slit their throats; others they forced to kneel at chopping blocks while they [Iron Guardists] beheaded them with cleavers." Fourteen years later, after Trifa had found his way by various backroutes to America and become a bishop in the Romanian Orthodox Church and a standup anti-communist, he was invited by Richard Nixon to give the opening prayer at the U.S. Senate. Trifa’s is an extreme case – he denied for a long time being part of the Iron Guard - but the American military and intelligence forces in Germany and Austria after the war soon put into practice their own form of Ribbentrop - Molotov. And they kept their bargain with their former Nazi factotums. Walter Schreiber, who apparently gave good data from his biowar experiments on concentration camp inmates, was imported to the US and found employment with the Air Force. Unfortunately for Schreiber, the press got ahold of his past – a rare case in the fifties – and so the U.S. arranged for him to slip away to Argentina. Eventually, he ended up working for Paraguay’s fiercely anti-communist dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. A memo from the Pentagon showed the military exasperation with the pettifogging around such as Schreiber: “an organized medical movement against [Schreiber], emanating from Boston, by medical men of Jewish ancestry, I would suspect.”

 

These stories have been around since the late seventies – from John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret in 1982 to Ann Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip in 2014. The books are not, it should be noted, by academics, nor is there an academic sub-department dedicated to what happened to the Nazis, fascists and collaborators after WWII – in the popular imagination and in academic studies, what happened was the Nuremberg Trial. And, in particular, while Yale University, for instance, publishes a whole series on Communist spies in America, nobody mixes these studies with the study of the use, by an unelected American establishment, of Nazis in America, and elsewhere. This is no small blind spot – if we had a good, contextually rich sense of how the extreme right was supported after the war by its former enemies – the U.S., the U.K., France and the U.S.S.R – we would have a morally clarified image of the history of the last 75 years. We don’t have that.

 

But even from what we do have, we know that an American establishment long identified anti-communism as the guiding star of American foreign and domestic policy, much more so than democracy of “freedom”. As a result, Americans – liberals and conservatives – have a very distorted view of America’s “exceptionalism.”