well: four American airmen, presumably intelligence operatives, landing in Hungary12

In 1955, Eastern Europeans could be found at Fort Bragg, North Carolina training with the Green Berets, learning guerrilla warfare tactics, hopefully to be used in their native lands.13

By the following year, hundreds of Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles and others were being trained by CIA paramilitary specialists at a secret installation in West Germany.

8. Germany 1950s

Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism

Within a period of 30 years and two world wars with Germany, the Soviet Union suffered more than 40 million dead and wounded, enormous devastation to its land, and its cities razed to the ground. At the close of the Second World War, the Russians were not kindly disposed toward the German people. With their own country to rebuild, they placed the reconstruction of Germany far down on their list of priorities.

The United States emerged from the war with relatively minor casualties and its territory completely unscathed. It was ready, willing and able to devote itself to its main priority in Europe: the building of an anti-Communist bulwark in the West, particularly in the strategic location of Germany.

In 1945, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson has written, official American policy was explicitly to bring home to the Germans that they could not escape the suffering they had brought upon themselves ... [and] to control [the] German economy to ... prevent any higher standard of living than in neighboring nations. 1

From the outset, Acheson added, US officials in Germany believed this plan to be unworkable .2

Acheson did not explain what lay behind this prognosis, but its correctness soon became apparent for three distinct reasons: (1) influential American business and financial leaders, some of them occupying important government positions, had too great a stake in a highly-industrialized Germany (usually dating back to before the war) to allow the country to sink to the depths that some American policy-makers advocated as punishment; (2) a revitalized West Germany was seen as an indispensable means of combatting Soviet influence in the Eastern sector of the country, if not in all of Eastern Europe. West Germany was to become the showcase of Western democracy - dramatic, living proof of the superiority of capitalism over socialism; (3) in American conservative circles, and some liberal ones as well, wherein a Soviet invasion of Western Europe remained perpetually imminent, the idea of tying West Germanys industrial hands was one which came perilously close to being soft on communism , if not worse.3

Dwight Eisenhower echoed this last sentiment when he later wrote:

Had certain officials in the Roosevelt administration had their way, Germany would have been far worse off, for there were those who advocated the flooding of the Ruhr mines, the wrecking of German factories, and the reducing of Germany from an industrial to an agricultural nation. Among others, Harry Dexter White, later named by Attorney General Brownell as one who had been heavily

involved in a Soviet espionage ring operating within our government... proposed exactly that.4

Thus it was that the de-industrialization of West Germany met the same fate as the demilitarization of the country would in the coming years, as the United States poured in massive economic assistance: $4 billion of Marshall Plan aid and an army of industrial and technical experts.

At the same time, the Soviet Union was pouring massive economic assistance out of East Germany. The Soviets dismantled and moved back home entire factories with large amounts of equipment and machinery, and thousands of miles of railroad track. When added to war reparations, the toll reached into the billions of dollars.

By the early 1950s, though social services, employment, and cultural life in East Germany were on a par or superior to that in West Germany, the Western sector had the edge in those areas of prosperity with the most sex appeal: salaries were higher, the eating was better, consumer goods more available, and the neon lights emblazoned the nights along the Kurfurstendamm.

American cold warriors, however, as if discontent with the game score or with leaving so much to chance, instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw the economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services in West Germany (with occasional help from the likes of British, intelligence and the West German police) recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals of West and East. Finding recruits for such a crusade was not difficult, for in post-war Germany, anti-communism lived on as the only respectable vestige of Naziism.

The most active of these groups, which went by the name of Fighting Group Against Inhumanity, admitted that it had received financial support from the Ford Foundation and the West Berlin government.5 Subsequently, an East Berlin news magazine published a copy of a letter from the Ford Foundation confirming a grant of $150,000 to the National Committee for a Free Europe so that it, in turn, could support the humanitarian activities of The Fighting Group Against Inhumanity. 6 The National! Committee for a Free Europe, in turn, was a CIA front organization which also ran Radio Free Europe.7

The Association of Political Refugees from the East, and the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone, were two of the other groups involved in the campaign against East Germany. The actions carried out by these operatives ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make the commies look bad . It added up to the following remarkable record:8

through explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods they damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, shops, a radio station, outdoor stands, public transportation;

derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others;

blew up road and railway bridges; placed explosives on a railway bridge of the Berlin-Moscow line but these were discovered in time-hundreds would have been killed;

used special acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments;

killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy by poisoning the wax coating of the wire used to bale the cows corn fodder;

added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools;

raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists; assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them;

set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings;

floated balloons which burst in the air, scattering thousands of propaganda pamphlets down upon East Germans;

were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans;

attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; set fire to a wooden bridge on a main motorway leading to the festival;

forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards-for example, for 60,000 pounds of meat-to cause confusion, shortages and resentment;

sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions;

gave considerable aid and comfort to East Germans who staged an uprising on 17 June 1953; during and after the uprising, the US radio station in West Berlin, RIAS (Radio In the American Sector), issued inflammatory broadcasts into East Germany appealing to the populace to resist the government; RIAS also broadcast warnings to witnesses in at least one East German criminal case being monitored by the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone that they would be added to the committees files of accused persons if they lied.

Although many hundreds of the American agents were caught and tried by East Germany, the ease with which they could pass back and forth between the two sectors and infiltrate different enterprises without any language barrier provided opportunities for the CIA unmatched anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Inevitably the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.

The West also bedeviled the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers. Eventually, this led to a severe labor and production crisis in the East, and in August 1961, to the building of the infamous Berlin

Wall.

While staging their commando attacks upon East Germany, American authorities and their German agents were apparently convinced that the Soviet Union had belligerent designs upon West Germany; perhaps a textbook case of projection. On 8 October 1952, the Minister-President of the West German state of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, disclosed that the United States had created a secret civilian army in his state for the purpose of resisting a Russian invasion.

This force of between 1,000 and 2,000 men belonged to the so-called Technical Service of the German Youth Federation, the latter characterized by the New York Times as a Right-wing youth group frequently charged with extremist activities (a reference to the terrorist tactics described above). The stalwarts of the Technical Service were hardly youths, however, for almost all appeared to be between 35 and 50 and most, said Zinn, were former officers of the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht and the S.S. [Hitlers Black-shirts] .

For more than a year they had received American training in infantry weapons and explosives and political instruction in small groups at a secluded site in the countryside and at a US military installation.

The intelligence wing of the Technical Service, the state president revealed, had drawn up lists and card indexes of persons who were to be put out of the way when the Soviet tanks began to roll. These records, which contained detailed descriptions and