Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Published by the National Archives
In 1998 Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act [P.L. 105-246]
as part of a series of efforts to identify, declassify, and release federal records on the perpetration of Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to locate and punish war criminals. Under the direction of the National Archives the Interagency Working Group [IWG] opened to research over 8 million of pages of records - including recent 21st century documentation. Of particular importance to this volume are many declassified intelligence records from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army Intelligence Command, which were not fully processed and available at the time that the IWG issued its Final Report in 2007.
As a consequence, Congress [in HR 110-920] charged the National Archives
in 2009 to prepare an additional historical volume as a companion piece to
its 2005 volume U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Professors Richard Breitman
and Norman J. W. Goda note in Hitler’s Shadow that these CIA & Army records produced new “evidence of war crimes and about wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of war criminals; and documents about the postwar activities of war criminals”.
This volume of essays points to the significant impact that flowed from
Congress and the Executive Branch agencies in adopting a broader and fuller
release of previously security classified war crimes documentation. Details about records processed by the IWG and released by the National Archives are more fully described on our website iwg@nara.gov.
William Cunliffe, Office of Records Services,
National Archives and Records Administration
CHAPTER FIVE, Collaborators: Allied Intelligence and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
...
The CIA never considered entering into an alliance with Bandera to procure intelligence from Ukraine. “By nature,” read a CIA report, “[Bandera] is a political intransigent of great personal ambition, who [has] since April 1948, opposed all political organizations in the emigration which favor a representative
form of government in the Ukraine as opposed to a mono-party, OUN/Bandera regime.”
Worse, his intelligence operatives in Germany were dishonest and not secure. Debriefings of couriers from western Ukraine in 1948 confirmed that, “the thinking of Stephan Bandera and his immediate émigré supporters [has] become radically outmoded in the Ukraine.” Bandera was also a convicted assassin. By now, word had reached the CIA of Bandera’s fratricidal struggles with other Ukrainian groups during the war and in the emigration.
By 1951 Bandera turned vocally anti-American as well, since the US did not advocate an independent Ukraine.” The CIA had an agent within the Bandera group in 1951 mostly to keep an eye on Bandera.
British Intelligence (MI6), however, was interested in Bandera. MI6 first contacted Bandera through Gerhard von Mende in April 1948. An ethnic German from Riga, von Mende served in Alfred Rosenberg’s Ostministerium
during the war as head of the section for the Caucasus and Turkestan section, recruiting Soviet Muslims from central Asia for use against the USSR. In this capacity he was kept personally informed of UPA actions and capabilities.
Nothing came of initial British contacts with Bandera because, as the CIA learned later, “the political, financial, and tech requirements of the [Ukrainians] were higher than the British cared to meet.” But by 1949 MI6 began helping Bandera send his own agents into western Ukraine via airdrop. In 1950 MI6 began training these agents on the expectation that they could provide intelligence from western Ukraine.
CIA and State Department officials flatly opposed the use of Bandera. By 1950 the CIA was working with the Hrinioch-Lebed group, and had begun to run its own agents into western Ukraine to make contact with the UHVR. Bandera no longer had the UHVR’s support or even that of the OUN party leadership in Ukraine. Bandera’s agents also deliberately worked against Ukrainian agents used by the CIA. In April 1951 CIA officials tried to convince MI6 to pull support from Bandera. MI6 refused. They thought that Bandera could run his agents without British support, and MI6 were “seeking progressively to assume control of Bandera’s lines.” The British also thought that the CIA underestimated Bandera’s importance. “Bandera’s name,” they said, “still carried considerable weight in the Ukraine and … the UPA would look to him first and foremost.”
On trouve des informations sur les relations de la CIA avec les anticommunistes ukrainiens dans le chapître The United States and Mykola Lebed
