Source, The Scotsman online.


Free – to be exploited by the West


Published Date: 30 December 2008
By Arthur Max and Randy Herschaft in Bad Arolsen
IN THE locked attic of a German archive is a dusty file that harks back to a long forgotten chapter of the Cold War – a humanitarian endeavour that, it now emerges, also had a secret side.

Marked "Escapee Program", it contains a list of thousands of names of people who, through cunning, bravery and luck, slipped through the Iron Curtain that divided Europe after the Second World War and found freedom in the West.

US President Harry Truman's administration launched the effort in 1952 to resettle refugees from Eastern Europe, treating them as heroes.

Recently declassified documents show that, from the start, the project went beyond giving them new lives and sought to use them for intelligence and propaganda. Some were offered money to be smuggled back to their home countries to gather information on Soviet military defences and public attitudes.

The file in the attic of the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, near Kassel, adds a previously unknown element to this Cold War episode: For years, a humanitarian group dedicated to family reunification ran background checks on escapees at the request of the US.

Reporters recently gained entry to the attic, where even employees rarely venture. Cardboard boxes of old letters were stacked on the floor, and binders of uncatalogued files lined floor-to-ceiling shelves. The Escapee Program box sat among them.

Each name on the list gave a reference to a case file and is among the 17.5 million persons in the archive's publicly accessible index of people killed or persecuted by the Nazis. The files give personal details, names of relatives, movements and jobs. Their number is not known, but the ITS handled more than 7,400 cases in the first year alone.

There is no suggestion that any escapee was denied refuge if he refused a request to go back across the Iron Curtain. Miloslav K, for instance, says he refused an offer of money to return to Czechoslovakia, but was still able to go to the US and is now quietly retired in New York.

He says after threading his way on foot across the Czechoslovak border in December 1953, he wound up in a refugee camp where he was debriefed about life under the communists and about a military airstrip near his home. He was offered 1,000 marks to go back and gather intelligence.

"I risked my life at least three times" to escape, he recalled telling the US recruiting agent. "Do you think for 1,000 marks I will risk my life again?"

One scheme devised by the CIA for covert actions was Operation Redsox, launched in the early 1950s to infiltrate escapees back into the Communist bloc to encourage resistance.

Most of the teams were captured. According to a CIA history, 75 per cent of the 85 Redsox agents "disappeared from sight and failed in their missions".

The Escapee Program failed to produce the quality intelligence the spymasters wanted, and reflected disarray in the intelligence community, says Sarah-Jane Corke, author of the 2008 book US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, the CIA and Secret Warfare.

Information was often unreliable, cooked up to impress interrogators and secure resettlement, she said. "As the Escapee Program was building up, American covert operations in Eastern Europe were unravelling," Ms Corke says.

One escapee was Jiri Wertheimer who, with a friend, stole a Piper sports plane from the Prague Communist Youth Flying Club and skittered across the frontier, evading pursuing Czech Air Force Messerschmitts and gunfire from Soviet guards.

Communist Czechoslovakia "was a dictatorship. You had to keep your mouth shut, otherwise you could be arrested for not following the party line," Mr Wertheimer, now 80, said. "We didn't want to spend our lives in this kind of system."

After landing in a German potato field, Mr Wertheimer said, he went through several interrogations by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of Britain, France and West Germany.

He did not resent the questioning, which was to be expected. "There was nothing brutal about it," he said. "It's never a pleasant thing, even though it may be conducted in a very polite and respectful way."

Mr Wertheimer, an engineer, worked for Boeing for 33 years and now lives near Seattle.

Miloslav K, who did not want his full name used, left Czechoslovakia because of humiliations suffered at Soviet hands. A retired printer, now 86, he relished retelling the story of his 120-mile journey to the US-occupied zone of Germany. He spent seven days moving through forests and villages, begging food and shelter. He remembers each farmer, shopkeeper, train conductor and Russian soldier he met.

The border was a 30-foot-wide strip of rough road constantly patrolled by soldiers. Miloslav hid behind a boulder in the woods for hours. Two armed Russian soldiers with a dog came, stayed, and finally left.

Then he saw his chance. Speaking in English that faltered as he relived the excitement, he gave this account: "Now is the time. Now is the time. Now is the running. I was running directly to the spot." He saw a ditch, jumped across, then sprinted along the road.

"I turned. Behind me was running the German shepherd. Directly at me. It was going at the face. Lucky I had this little briefcase. I put it in front of my face. He jumped and hit the briefcase. He hit it with full speed."

The dog fled, pursued by soldiers who did not see Miloslav racing the other way. "I believe it was a miracle," he said.

Miloslav said he was interviewed on the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which was partly financed by the CIA. But having turned down an offer to go back, he never encouraged people to flee.

"I knew how dangerous it was," he said. "If they caught somebody, he was sent to the uranium mine or they killed him."