[Disarmo] CIA in Ukraine Has Been for Decades - Fwd: [stopnato] Digest Number 5092

[Jure Ellero LT <glry at ngi.it>]

Oggetto: [stopnato] Digest Number 5092
Data: 11 Aug 2014 07:47:34 -0000
Mittente: stopnato at yahoogroups.com

CIA Intervention in Ukraine Has Been Taking Place for Decades
    From: ANTIC.org-SNN

 CIA Intervention in Ukraine Has Been Taking Place for Decades
    Posted by: "ANTIC.org-SNN" antic.miroslav at gmail.com minimaks
    Date: Sun Aug 10, 2014 11:45 am ((PDT))



http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/08/09/cia-intervention-in-ukraine-has-been-taking-place-for-decades/




CIA Intervention in Ukraine Has Been Taking Place for Decades




Glory to Ukraine! A massive pro-EU rally in Kiev, November 24, 2013. 
What role did the CIA have amping up the demonstrations?


“The most powerful form of lie is the omission…” — George Orwell


Of all the aspects of the current crisis over the NATO/Russia standoff 
in Ukraine, the determined intervention into Ukrainian political affairs 
by the United States has been the least reported, at least until 
recently. While new reports have appeared concerning CIA Director John 
Brennan’s 
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/04/14/just_stopping_by> 
mid-April trip to Kiev, and CIA/FBI 
<http://news.yahoo.com/cia-fbi-agents-advising-ukraine-government-report-101508429.html> 
sending “dozens” of advisers to the Ukrainian security services, very 
few reports mention that U.S. intervention in Ukraine affairs goes back 
to the end of World War II. It has hardly let up since then.


The fact of such intervention is not hard to find. Indeed, it’s hard to 
know where to start in documenting all this, there is so much out there 
if one is willing to look for it. But the mainstream U.S. press, and 
their blogger shadows, are ignoring this for the most part. Some 
exceptions at the larger alternative websites include Jeffrey St. 
Clair’s  <http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/obamas-new-ukraine/> 
Counterpunch and Robert Perry’s 
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/03/a-peoples-war-in-east-ukraine/> 
Consortium News.


Even these latter outlets have almost nothing to say about the 
approximately 70 year history of U.S. intervention in Ukraine. The 
liberals and progressives avoid the subject because otherwise one would 
have to address the full reality of the intensive U.S. Cold War against 
the Soviet Union, and the covert and overt crimes and operations 
conducted by the U.S. against the USSR. Because the liberals share an 
anti-communist consensus, not far removed from Ronald Reagan’s view of 
the USSR as an “Evil Empire,” they have little to no interest in 
addressing the full history of the period.


But the current crisis in Ukraine, which pits a U.S.-backed coalition, 
which includes neo-Nazis, in Ukraine against Russian-speaking 
separatists in the eastern regions of the country, threatens to turn 
into a hot war between not just Ukraine and Russia, but between two 
nuclear-armed foes, NATO and Russia. Indeed, in the past six months, 
besides Brennan’s visit,  the 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10779115/Ukraine-crisis-Joe-Biden-tells-Kiev-US-will-support-them.html> 
U.S. Vice-President and the 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/07/us-ukraine-crisis-nato-idUSKBN0G71H720140807> 
head of NATO have all visited and consulted in Kiev with the current 
Ukrainian regime.



And now, the U.S. has 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/22/pentagon-team-dispatched-to-ukraine-amid-crisis-wi/?page=all> 
announced it is sending military “advisers” to Ukraine, as the current 
government there prosecutes a major military operation against 
separatists in the East, which human rights groups say has included 
indiscriminate shelling, killing of civilians, torture, and kidnappings 
on both sides. The bulk of indiscriminate shelling, according to Human 
Rights Watch, has 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/07/25/human-rights-watch-ukrainian-forces-are-rocketing-civilians/> 
come from the U.S.-backed government forces. Amnesty International has 
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/Impunity-reigns-for-abductions-ill-treatment-eastern-Ukraine-06-08-2014> 
documented that human rights violations and war crimes are committed by 
even a member of the Ukrainian parliament with total impunity.


Return of the Repressed: Recruiting Fascists as Anti-Soviet Allies


Back on March 28, The Nation and Foreign Policy in Focus published 
jointly an excellent 
<http://www.thenation.com/blog/179057/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret> 
article pulling up some of the relevant history, “Seven Decades of Nazi 
Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret.” The article does 
a good job showing how the right-wing, fascistic Svoboda Party in 
Ukraine has its roots in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 
[OUN], which was one of a number of East Europe parties that allied at 
various points with the Nazis, and had their own racist, ethnic, 
nationalist doctrines.


After WWII, the U.S. made a pact with many of these leaders, ostensibly 
recruiting them as allies against the Soviets in the Cold War. Indeed, 
in the early years after World War II, the U.S. and the British hired 
Ukrainian nationalists, many of them associated with fascism, to 
parachute and conduct guerrilla war in Ukraine and the USSR. When doing 
so, they turned a blind eye to many of these leaders’ war crimes, 
including participation in the Holocaust. When these links were revealed 
years later, beginning in the 1980s, the CIA and State Department worked 
assiduously to deny these links to Congress and the press.


Almost all of these men were rounded up and shot. When the Soviets 
offered an amnesty to members of the Ukrainian Insurgents Army (UPA) in 
January 1950, 8,000 anti-Soviet guerrillas still fighting within Ukraine 
turned in their arms. The U.S./CIA operation to use Ukraine as a base 
for war against Russia and the bulk of the Soviet Union ran out of 
steam. (See Stephen Dorril’s MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her 
Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, The Free Press, 2000, pp. 242-243.)


It has taken many years, and the dedicated work of people like 
<http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/1705143/LEBED%2C%20MYKOLA_0043.pdf> 
John Loftus, former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, Linda Hunt, 
Christopher Simpson, Tom Bower, and many, many others who fought 
governmental inertia and lies to get out the truth. Much of that truth 
still needs to get out, but slowly, surely, it is trying to find its way 
into the public’s consciousness, as this Daily Beast 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-cold-war-cia-interrogators-learned-from-the-nazis.html> 
article on Operation Paperclip taken from Annie Jacobsen’s new book on 
the same subject demonstrates so well.


One important article, 
<http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/conasoncatchnazi86.pdf> by 
Joe Conason in the Village Voice in 1986, examined the role OUN leader 
Mykola Lebed played for U.S. intelligence. I’m going to take up the 
controversy about the VV in the near future, looking at how the CIA 
continued to operate to protect its Ukrainian intelligence assets, even 
into the early years of the Clinton administration (and likely beyond). 
Such protection included 
<http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/1705143/LEBED%2C%20MYKOLA_0071.pdf> 
lying to politicians, 
<http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/1705143/LEBED%2C%20MYKOLA_0058.pdf> 
consulting with those under investigation for war crimes how best to 
deal with the political fallout, and in general falsifying history to 
protect their covert anti-Soviet program.


Yet can the truth stand up to the daily drumbeat of lies and 
anti-Russian propaganda coming at a feverish pace out of the White 
House? The U.S. has stepped up its overt intervention in Ukraine, and it 
would do well for everyone to know as much as possible the lead-up to 
this moment, as the pending NATO/US/Russia confrontation could threaten 
the very world we live in, that we all live in. The U.S. is clearly 
ratcheting up the political and military pressure against both Russia 
and China, and more than even what is happening in the Middle East, it 
is this renewed aggressive stance towards those two countries that will 
dominate the news and our lives in the coming decade.


U.S. National Archives Documents U.S. Collaboration with Fascist 
Ukrainian Nationalists


In a remarkable book published by the United States National Archives a 
few years ago, historians Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda have 
examined recent declassified documents and put together an initial 
history of Army and CIA collaboration with some of the most important 
Ukrainian fascist leaders after World War II. 
<http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf> Hitler’s 
Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (PDF) 
attempts to document “the Allied protection or use of Nazi war 
criminals; and documents about the postwar political activities of war 
criminals.”


Hitler’s Shadow was preceded by the 2005 publication, 
<http://www.amazon.com/U-S-Intelligence-Nazis-Richard-Breitman/dp/0521617944/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407626242&sr=1-1&keywords=U.S.+Intelligence+and+the+Nazis+Richard+Breitman%2C+Norman+J.+W.+Goda%2C+Timothy+Naftali%2C+Robert+Wolfe> 
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, a Cambridge University Press book based 
on the earliest examination of new documents released as part of the 
1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. While the history of Ukrainian 
nationalism shows that nationalist movements were squeezed between the 
policies — and sometimes invasions — of foreign states, the book makes 
clear that today’s EuroMaidan heroes of yesteryear were in fact trained 
by the Gestapo and took part in the Holocaust.


Chapter Five of Hitler’s Shadow, “Collaborators: Allied Intelligence and 
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” examines recently 
declassified documents in regards to how US intelligence agencies 
recruited, paid, protected and used war criminals who collaborated with 
the Nazis. In particular, it looks at the careers Stepan Bandera and 
Mykola Lebed, two WWII “heroes” of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.


These Ukrainian fascists — Lebed turned “democratic” once in U.S. hands 
after the war — had their careers 
<http://www.academia.edu/2481420/_The_Return_of_the_Ukrainian_Far_Right_The_Case_of_VO_Svoboda_in_Ruth_Wodak_and_John_E._Richardson_eds._Analyzing_Fascist_Discourse_European_Fascism_in_Talk_and_Text_London_and_New_York_Routledge_2013_228-255> 
rehabilitated by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko. When 
Putin points to the pro-fascist tendencies and Nazis within Ukraine, he 
is referring at least to this kind of evidence.


However, Putin cannot really address the full history of the U.S. and 
CIA campaign because 1) the crimes of the Stalin government is not 
something the Russians like to talk about, and 2) the long history of 
U.S intervention in Ukraine is tied up with the decades-long Cold War 
against Soviet communism. Putin and his allies are antagonistic to 
Communism, and ambivalent, at best, about the Soviet period (even if 
many of them were in fact former Communists or Soviet officials themselves).


Like the dilemma of the U.S. liberals mentioned above, to fully embrace 
a history of U.S. Cold War intervention against the Soviet Union would 
mean assessing what the role of the Soviet Union was, and in this, Putin 
and his anti-Soviet allies within Russia (like the oligarchs in Ukraine 
and other former Soviet states), who got rich off the corpse of the USSR 
de-nationalization, are not interested in dredging up Cold War history. 
They all shared an animus against the Communists that matched that of 
the CIA.


Breitman and Goda 
<http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf> describe how 
the CIA’s Ukrainian operation, codenamed “Aerodynamic,” worked (this is 
taken from a National Archives government document and the extensive 
quote is not subject to copyright restrictions):


AERODYNAMIC’s first phase involved infiltration into Ukraine and then 
ex-filtration of CIA-trained Ukrainian agents. By January 1950 the CIA’s 
arm for the collection of secret intelligence (Office of Special 
Operations, OSO) and its arm for covert operations (Office of Policy 
Coordination, OPC) participated. Operations in that year revealed “a 
well established and secure underground movement” in the Ukraine that 
was even “larger and more fully developed than previous reports had 
indicated.” Washington was especially pleased with the high level of UPA 
training in the Ukraine and its potential for further guerrilla actions, 
and with “the extraordinary news that… active resistance to the Soviet 
regime was spreading steadily eastward, out of the former Polish, Greek 
Catholic provinces.”97


The CIA decided to expand its operations for “the support, development, 
and exploitation of the Ukrainian underground movement for resistance 
and intelligence purposes.” “In view of the extent and activity of the 
resistance movement in the Ukraine,” said OPC Chief Frank Wisner, “we 
consider this to be a top priority project.”98 The CIA learned of UPA 
activities in various Ukrainian districts; the Soviet commitment of 
police troops to destroy the UPA; the UPA’s resonance with Ukrainians; 
and the UPA’s potential to expand to 100,000 fighters in wartime. The 
work was not without hazards. Individual members of teams from 1949 to 
1953 were captured and killed. By 1954 Lebed’s group lost all contact 
with UHVR. By that time the Soviets subdued both the UHVR and UPA, and 
the CIA ended the aggressive phase of AERODYNAMIC.99


Beginning in 1953 AERODYNAMIC began to operate through a Ukrainian study 
group under Lebed’s leadership in New York under CIA auspices, which 
collected Ukrainian literature and history and produced Ukrainian 
nationalist newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and books for 
distribution in the Ukraine. In 1956 this group was formally 
incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing 
Association [CIA cryptonym: QRPOOL]. It allowed the CIA to funnel funds 
as ostensible private donations without taxable footprints.100 To avoid 
nosey New York State authorities, the CIA turned Prolog into a 
for-profit enterprise called Prolog Research Corporation, which 
ostensibly received private contracts. Under Hrinioch, Prolog maintained 
a Munich office named the Ukrainische-Gesellschaft für Auslandsstudien, 
EV. Most publications were created here.101


…. Beginning in 1955, leaflets were dropped over the Ukraine by air and 
radio broadcasts titled Nova Ukraina were aired in Athens for Ukrainian 
consumption. These activities gave way to systematic mailing campaigns 
to Ukraine through Ukrainian contacts in Poland and émigré contacts in 
Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere. The 
newspaper Suchasna Ukrainia (Ukraine Today), information bulletins, a 
Ukrainian language journal for intellectuals called Suchasnist (The 
Present), and other publications were sent to libraries, cultural 
institutions, administrative offices and private individuals in Ukraine. 
These activities encouraged Ukrainian nationalism, strengthened 
Ukrainian resistance, and provided an alternative to Soviet media.103


In 1957 alone, with CIA support, Prolog broadcast 1,200 radio programs 
totaling 70 hours per month and distributed 200,000 newspapers and 5,000 
pamphlets. In the years following, Prolog distributed books by Ukrainian 
writers and poets. One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of 
nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and … there is 
an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.” The distribution of 
literature in the Soviet Ukraine continued to the end of the Cold War.104


Prolog also garnered intelligence after Soviet travel restrictions eased 
somewhat in the late 1950s. It supported the travel of émigré Ukrainian 
students and scholars to academic conferences, international youth 
festivals, musical and dance performances, the Rome Olympics and the 
like, where they could speak with residents of the Soviet Ukraine in 
order to learn about living conditions there as well as the mood of 
Ukrainians toward the Soviet regime. Prolog’s leaders and agents 
debriefed travelers on their return and shared information with the CIA. 
In 1966 alone Prolog personnel had contacts with 227 Soviet citizens. 
[pp. 88-89]


This is the first in a series of articles examining the history of U.S. 
and CIA intervention in Ukraine, from World War II to today.


Photo by  <https://secure.flickr.com/photos/mac_ivan/11038345916> Ivan 
Bandura under Creative Commons license






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