Plausible Denial
Dossiers

Operation Bloodstone

1948-04-30

The 1948 United States State Department-led, NSC-coordinated programme to recruit Eastern European émigrés — including former Nazi collaborators, members of wartime fascist movements in occupied territories, and Vlasovite veterans — for psychological warfare, covert action, and clandestine operations against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-bloc states, run principally through Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination.

Background

Operation Bloodstone was authorised by the State-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee (SANACC) on 30 April 1948 through SANACC 395/2/1, on the basis of a State Department initiative led principally by George F. Kennan, Director of the Policy Planning Staff, and his deputies. The programme was approved as part of the broader US response to the apparent consolidation of Soviet political control across Eastern Europe in 1947–1948 — the Czechoslovak coup of February 1948 was a particular contemporaneous reference. The objective, as set out in the SANACC papers, was to identify, vet, and recruit anti-Soviet émigrés from the displaced-persons populations of Western Europe and the United States for use in covert psychological-warfare and agent operations against the Soviet bloc.1

The institutional vehicle for executing Bloodstone became the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), established by NSC 10/2 on 18 June 1948 under the direction of Frank G. Wisner. OPC was nominally located within the Central Intelligence Agency for administrative purposes but reported through a State-Defense-Treasury directorate; it operated with considerable institutional autonomy across the 1948–1952 period before its 1952 merger into the CIA's Directorate of Plans. Wisner had been the OSS's senior officer in Romania at the close of the war and had returned to government via the State Department's Office of Occupied Areas; he was a principal author of the Bloodstone-period covert-action expansion.2

The Operation

The recruited cohort drew on émigré populations associated with wartime anti-Soviet movements that had, in significant fractions, made varying degrees of accommodation with German occupation authorities. The principal source populations were the Ukrainian émigré movement (including the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera-faction, the OUN-B, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army veterans); the Vlasovites and former officers of General Andrei Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army (ROA), who had fought alongside the Wehrmacht; the Belarusian Central Council and associated Belarusian émigrés; the Romanian Iron Guard and the Romanian National Committee; the Hungarian Arrow Cross-adjacent populations and the Hungarian National Council; the Croatian Ustaša diaspora; the Baltic émigré formations including former Latvian and Estonian SS-Legion personnel; and a smaller complement of Caucasian émigrés including former Caucasian Wehrmacht-auxiliary unit members.3

The operational use of the recruited cohort fell into three principal categories. The first was psychological warfare and propaganda, including the editorial staffing and broadcasting of émigré-language radio operations that became the precursors to Radio Free Europe (founded 1949 with operations from Munich) and Radio Liberation (renamed Radio Liberty in 1959); the broader Crusade for Freedom mass-fundraising campaign run from 1950 by the National Committee for a Free Europe was the public-facing fundraising vehicle for these operations. The second was agent infiltration of the Soviet bloc — small-team parachute and overland infiltrations of émigré agents into Ukraine, the Baltic republics, Poland, and Czechoslovakia across 1949–1953, the great majority of which were detected, captured, or killed by Soviet and satellite-state security services, in many cases as a direct consequence of the operations' compromise by hostile intelligence (the Philby case at British SIS being the most documented vector). The third was political-warfare and coordinating activity in the United States and Western Europe, including the National Committee for a Free Europe, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, and parallel structures.4

Disclosure

Operation Bloodstone first became a matter of US public-record attention through the work of historians and journalists from approximately the late 1970s onward, drawing on Freedom of Information Act-released State Department, OPC-era CIA, and Army records. Christopher Simpson's 1988 Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War was the first systematic public-record reconstruction of Bloodstone and its institutional setting; Simpson's research drew substantially on declassified SANACC documents, NSC papers, and OPC operational records released across the 1980s.5

The 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and the resulting Interagency Working Group review produced a substantially expanded primary-source basis. The IWG's 2007 Final Report identified Bloodstone-period operational case files across the CIA, FBI, US Army, US Air Force, and US Department of State, and produced declassified records on named individuals and named émigré formations including the OUN-B, the Belarusian Central Council, the Caucasian formations, and others. CIA historian Kevin C. Ruffner's Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators (declassified 2010) addresses Bloodstone-period recruitment in detail, including specific case studies of named individuals.6

The agent-infiltration record is particularly extensively documented. The OPC operations into Ukraine across 1949–1954 — coordinated with the British SIS, in cooperation with surviving OUN-B and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) elements operating in the western Ukrainian SSR — were substantially compromised by Soviet penetration and produced minimal successful product against very high operational casualty rates. The compromise of the operations through Kim Philby's position as SIS liaison in Washington (1949–1951) is documented in Soviet archival sources released after 1991 and in subsequent Western reconstructions. The Albanian operations of the same period (the Valuable / BGFIEND project), although a parallel rather than a Bloodstone operation, follow the same pattern.7

Legacy

Operation Bloodstone is institutionally smaller and operationally less productive than the parallel programmes of the period — the Gehlen Organization on the military-intelligence side, Operation Paperclip on the scientific-and-technical side — but it is the most directly programmatic of them in its express recruitment of personnel from the wartime collaborator populations. The SANACC 395 papers and the NSC 10/2 charter set out a deliberate institutional logic for the recruitment that does not appear in the same explicit form in the Rusty/Gehlen or Paperclip records.8

Bloodstone's documented contribution to the broader post-war recruitment pattern lies in three particular features. First, it institutionalised the use of émigré covert action as a principal element of US covert action against the Soviet bloc; the institutional successors of Bloodstone-period operations — most prominently Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — operated under various legal-and-funding frameworks across the entire Cold War period, with continuing successor entities to the present. Second, it admitted to US-funded operations specific named individuals whose wartime records included direct participation in the Holocaust or in collaborator-state atrocities; specific examples are documented in the IWG-period declassifications. Third, it produced an extended pattern of contestation between OPC's covert-action priorities and the Office of Special Investigations, the FBI, and successor immigration-enforcement bodies that, from 1979 onward, sought the denaturalisation and deportation of named individuals who had entered the United States via Bloodstone-period channels.9

The contemporary legacy is principally documentary and academic. The Bloodstone-era operational pattern — the use of émigré formations whose wartime conduct included participation in occupation atrocities — has been substantively addressed in the academic literature on US Cold War covert action. The institutional reckoning with the named-individual cases continued into the 2000s and 2010s through the OSI and its successor (the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the Department of Justice's Criminal Division). The principal political legacy is the existence of the public record of the programme as a documented case of post-war Western recruitment of wartime collaborators on a programmatic basis.10

This dossier runs in parallel with Operation Rusty and the Gehlen Organization (military-intelligence recruitment) and Operation Paperclip (scientific-and-technical recruitment), and provides the institutional context for the Klaus Barbie case and other named-individual protection cases of the period. The agency-level entry most directly engaged is the Central Intelligence Agency, through its Office of Policy Coordination predecessor; the country-level context is on the page for the United States.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. SANACC 395/2/1, "Utilisation of Refugees from the Soviet Union in U.S. National Interest," 30 April 1948; State-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee records, declassified at the National Archives, RG 353; related State Department records at NARA RG 59; George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Little, Brown, 1967).
  2. NSC 10/2, "Office of Special Projects," 18 June 1948; Anne Karalekas, History of the Central Intelligence Agency (Aegean Park Press, 1976; originally prepared as a study for the Church Committee).
  3. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), chs. 5–8; Kevin C. Ruffner, Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators (CIA History Staff), declassified 2010.
  4. A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2010); Sig Mickelson, America's Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Praeger, 1983); Simpson, Blowback, chs. 9–10.
  5. Simpson, Blowback; Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (St. Martin's Press, 1991), on the wider institutional context.
  6. Final Report to the United States Congress, Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, April 2007; Ruffner, Eagle and Swastika.
  7. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999); Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service (Free Press, 2000), on the Albanian operation; Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Crown, 2014).
  8. Sarah-Jane Corke, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945–53 (Routledge, 2008); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008).
  9. Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); United States Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations (and successor Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section), Annual Reports, 1979–2010.
  10. Per Anders Rudling, "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths," Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies No. 2107, 2011; Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door.