by Don Pelton

Two recent books, Scott Horton‘s “Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine” and Stephen Kinzer‘s “Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine,” taken together make an incontrovertible case that the United States has been using Ukraine and its WWII Nazi veterans as a means to destabilize and subvert the Soviet Union since the late 1940s, and later, after the dissolution of the USSR, to attack Russia using the same players. This attack, this provocation, one of the CIA’s first projects, has been ongoing for the last 75 years. In other words, the history of the proxy war between the U.S. and Russia is a long one, beginning many decades before the recent illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The video (below) of Stephen Kinzer summarizing his research in a speech at The Watson School of International and Public Affairs, is well worth your time. Kinzer explains how you cannot truly understand the war in Ukraine if you have not acquainted yourself with this history.

Here are a few paragraphs that I’ve transcribed from his talk:

” … this new book ends when the war begins. So, it’s not about the war or anything that has happened since February 24th of 2022. And … it doesn’t seek to justify to minimize the agency of Ukrainians or the responsibility of the Russians for launching the invasion. … So what happened on that day, February 24th, 2022, was clear. It was an armed aggression against Ukraine. It was illegal under international law. It was a violation of Russia’s treaty obligations and it has led to horrific conflict. So that picture that you see of what happened on that one day could actually be seen not as the whole story, but as the culminating frame in a very long movie that actually takes 75 years.

The US has been working to turn Ukraine against Moscow for 75 years now. If you understand all this, it doesn’t necessarily lead you to a conclusion about the justice of the war. My book is all factual. Everything is coming from somewhere. There’s 40 pages of footnotes in the back. So the only thing new in my book is that I’ve put these events together… Now once you understand that the United States spent 75 years promoting its project in Ukraine, you can still conclude that actually this was a good thing to do that particularly since Ukraine became independent … that our work has been to defend a country that’s an incipient democracy against a country that might want to turn it into a quasi colony that responds to autocrats in the Kremlin. It’s perfectly possible to accept the reality of everything that happened over 75 years and still come to that conclusion. I don’t mean this book as delegitimization of what Ukraine is doing and what the United States has done to support Ukraine. I’m just telling you what happened. So I’m not trying to shape opinions about the current war, but I am asserting that if you don’t understand the whole story, your views on the justice of the war and the nature of the war are incomplete and perhaps ignorant.

So what did happen over those 75 years? Let me give a a brief travelog through the chronology. First of all, of course, the United States was on the side of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It wasn’t very long after the war ended, and some would argue even before the war ended, that the United States decided that our new enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, even though they had been our allies in the war. When the CIA was founded in 1947, its first chief of covert operations, Frank Wisner, decided, probably quite correctly, that if you wanted to make trouble inside the Soviet Union, Ukraine was definitely the place to do it. It’s a place that has been moving its borders over hundreds of years. A lot of it is very oriented toward Western Europe. And the history of Russian oppression in Ukraine is such that you can certainly understand why there’s raw material for rebellion against Moscow. So Wisner focused on using Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. It was his idea. He saw Ukraine as the vulnerable underbelly. or to put it another way … the place where there was already a critical mass of people ready to fight against communist rule. So he set out to build himself a network of anti-Soviet Ukrainians, but he had a big problem and that was we didn’t know any of them. They had been our enemy up until quite recently. We didn’t know any anti-Soviet people. We were pro-Soviet, so we had to find some way to tap into this great network of anti-Soviet Ukrainians. Well, fortunately, soon after the war ended, a Nazi general named Reinhard Galen turned himself into American troops and identified himself as the officer who had been in charge of Hitler’s entire intelligence apparatus in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. So he had run the entire Nazi project in Ukraine and had vast files of every organizer, every fighter, every subversive, every anti-Russia activist. And he made a deal with the United States. Really, it was a marriage made in covert action heaven. The Americans agreed with Galen that we will not hang you. We’re not sending you to Nuremberg. In fact, instead of hanging you, we’re going to hire you.

And we’ll pay you a handsome sum and you can bring many of your brothers from your old Nazi days to work for us also. In exchange, Galen agreed to provide the CIA with all of his microfilmed files which he had hidden in caves in Bavaria. and those files were the basis for the US project in Ukraine. That’s the those are the people that we started contacting. And at the same time … partisans from Ukraine were still fighting the Red Army. So in May of 1945, the Nazi army surrendered, but the allies of the Nazis in Ukraine didn’t stop fighting. They went on for years promoted by the United States. Starting in 1947, the CIA began dropping Ukrainian commandos into Ukraine from a base in Germany. And they were armed and their job was set up a network that will start a guerrilla rebellion, a war against Moscow. This was the first big American project in Ukraine. So all of those just about all of those volunteers uh were immediately captured and executed by the Soviets. Nonetheless, as Alan Dulles put it, you’ve got to have a few martyrs. Some people have to die. So that was no discouragement. Wisner went on to build a very dense network inside Ukraine and it was built on the only foundation that we had which was the old Nazi intelligence apparatus.

We we essentially took over the network that Galen had spent years building during the Second World War uh and told those people that were still out fighting uh we’re going to support you and we started dropping guns to them and I even found in uh the memoir of Nikita Khrushchev a reference to this. Khrushchev, before he became head of the Soviet Union was running Ukraine. He’s Ukrainian. And he wrote in his memoir, “Behind every bush you could find a terrorist.” Those so-called terrorists were the American sponsored commandos who continued fighting for years uh in Ukraine. They had a big base of popular support. I think in parts of western Ukraine there hardly was a family that didn’t either have a member with the Ukrainian nationalists or their army the UPA, or at least supported them in some way. So you had a large base of political support and then you had this effort by the United States to foment armed revolution. By the mid 1950s it was clear that there wasn’t going to be any armed revolution in Ukraine.

The Soviets actually were pretty efficient. They poured a huge amount of troops into Ukraine to chase down those so-called terrorists and finally that movement was extinguished. But that wasn’t enough to change the American project. That project continued because the truth that Wisner recognized at the beginning never changed. And that is the reality that there’s tremendous anti-Soviet feeling in some parts of Ukraine. An anti-Russian feeling. Actually, for the traditional mainstream Ukrainian identity, hating Russia and Russians is an absolute non-negotiable piece. So, there was a big base for the American project there. The Americans also brought a number of the Ukrainians who had been active in the Second World War to work for the either the CIA in Munich, which was our base for operations in Ukraine, or to the United States. Some of these were people who had played major roles in the Holocaust. For example, the CIA’s favorite Ukrainian was a guy named Mikola Leed. He had directed troops in uh a 1943 rampage through Poland in which tens of thousands of Poles and Jews were killed. It’s the biggest mass murder campaign in modern Ukrainian history. So because of his history, his background, he wasn’t allowed into the United States. But the CIA persuaded Congress to pass a law saying that each year the CIA could bring in 100 people who would not be eligible for entry into the United States under normal immigration law. That was a code phrase for Nazis. So, Lebed who was known as one of the most proficient mass murderers in central Europe during the Second World War came to the United States under the protection of the CIA.

The CIA created a publishing house called Prologue which posited itself as independent but was actually fully financed and sponsored by the CIA. This Prologue publishing company published huge numbers of magazines, newspapers, books, pamphlets. They were distributed to the Ukrainian diaspora but also carried into Ukraine by agents, dropped from air balloons, even mailed randomly to Ukrainians whose names have been addresses, picked out of telephone directories and carried into Ukraine by by people working with the CIA. The president of that prologue publishing company, which survived for 40 years in its office at 875 West End Avenue in New York, was Lebed. And the CIA also helped create an organization called the Supreme Councilof Ukrainian Resistance in America. And Lebed was the leader. So he became one of the CIA’s favorite Ukrainians and is a person who is now greatly honored inside Ukraine along with other participants in the Holocaust like Stefan Bandera and Roman Sukovich. The recent moves just within the last few months to give new honors to those heroes of the Holocaust has completely outraged Poland. It caused a crisis in relations between Poland and Ukraine. Even Le Valencia said he had ripped the Ukrainian flag off of his jacket when he saw who the Ukrainians are right now honoring. So the Nazi background of some forces in Ukraine today is is not an accident.”

CLICK ON IMAGE (OR LINK BELOW) TO PLAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV–8ypKRs4